These two episodes cover some related approaches in 20th century ethics:
First, we read Chapter 1 of G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica
We also read C.L. Stevenson's essay "The Emotive Meaking of Ethical Terms." (1937) A student of Moore as well as Wittgenstein, Stevenson argued that Moore was right in saying that "good" is indefinable by other terms like "pleasure," but disagreed with the claim that it picked out some basic object in the world. Rather, saying something is good is an act of advocating it. "Ethical terms are instruments used in the complicated interplay and readjustment of human interests." This position gives up on moral realism altogether, and like Wittgenstein, he gives an analysis of meanings of words as involving their use: saying something is good is a lot like saying "we like it," but "good" has a subtle emotive connotation built into it such that saying that something is good recommends that you like it too. Buy a compilation with this essay in it
The narrative tying these episodes together Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory
MacIntyre sees Stevenson's position as a reasonable response to Moore's given the observation that Moore's actual method of choosing what is morally good is a matter of baseless intuition, not reproducible across cultures or time periods. MacIntyre sees historical philosophers' critiques against Kant, utilitarianism, and intuitionism of all stripes as effective, but thinks that these Enlightenment thinkers don't adequately ground their proposed alternatives. He diagnoses the problem in the history of the concepts of nature, fact, and normativity: The fact/value distinction as it evolved through Enlightenment philosophy uprooted any chance of rational grounding for ethics. However, says MacIntyre, contrary to what we've been taught, it's not a logical rule that "ought" can't follow from "is."
For instance, here's a premise: I am a doctor. A conclusion deducible from this is: I ought to do what a doctor does. The concept of doctor is teleological; it has a normative component built into it, and to try to say that the concept is analyzable into its teleological/normative and its descriptive parts is to not really understand what a doctor is.
So, both Aristotle and and modern philosophers like Hume use human nature as a foundation for ethics, but the modern view of human nature is divorced from teleology (based on what to MacIntyre is a sensible rejection of Aristotle's theories of biology), and in fact the morality that we modern folks inherited and try to prop up is not really an outgrowth of an examination of this human nature, and it has produced moral recommendations that we really can't live up to and end up being useless to us (e.g. the semi-arbitrary taboos of a given culture getting encoded as morality). For Aristotle, part of the conception of human nature is an extra-natural idea of human excellence, and MacIntyre thinks that this is the crucial element for sensible moral thinking that has been lost to history, leaving our current moral discourse very confused. Buy the book.
Oh no, the GE Moore reading has finally happened. Hopefully Mark will be able to contain himself.
It used to be something that would wrack my mind a lot, but now it just reads like a bad ethical claim, “One should not perform ethical thought because it leads to logical contradictions.” As if a society without morals has resulted in anything other than a completely absurd situation for people today.
Looking forward to this one. Given the choice of readings, I guess I won’t get a prize for predicting that you’ll quickly boil away the alternatives & end up with virtue ethics as the last theory standing – with the identity of any specific virtues held over to part 2, or maybe left as an exercise for the reader.
–R.
The wikipedia entry for After Virtue led me here: http://www.georgescialabba.net/archive/000226.php – whose grand historical sweep, refusal of nostalgia, & eventual optimism I very much appreciated.
–R.
I’m looking forward to this. I always found problems with both utilitarian and Kantian ethical systems and people have told me that virtue ethics addresses them, but I haven’t known where to start in actually reading them.
For me the epistemic axis around which Moore, Stevenson, and LW rotate seems best denominated by the latter’s turn of phrase “I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light” that no (natural and slash or) descriptive predicate could serve the functional role of normative predicates.
It’s the epitome of a non-argument. So how come *I* find it so damn persuasive? Does all my training in skepticism and my valuing of evidence and logic amount to nothing if I can’t hold myself to the same standards to which I hold everyone else? When I reject a priori any attempt to objectively ground normative claims, am I simply elevating emotion and intuition over argument, or am I rather in the position of an audience member at a magic show who can’t quite figure out *how* the trick was pulled, even though I know to a certainty *that* a trick has been pulled?
I guess when you go to a magic show, you expect/want/deserve to see some tricks. It’s the reason why you’re there, after all. To have each trick explained in full detail – how it worked, where the mis-direction drew your attention elsewhere – would be disappointing and “against the rules”.
Last night I watched Take the Lead, the Antonio Banderas movie where he plays a dance teacher who tries to teach ballroom dancing to kids at an inner-city school. It’s actually pretty good. The reason why it’s good – and the reason why I mention it – it that it completely satisfies our genre expectations. You’ve seen the same movie many times (the inspiring outsider, the kids who achieve despite the odds, etc etc etc) – and all the same things happen this time too. That’s why it works.
So, I think that meta-ethical disputes are a lot like disparate genre expectations. I buy a ticket expecting to see an action movie, and instead I see something that obeys the rules of the romantic comedy. It may be a great romantic comedy, and maybe I even enjoy it – but it’s not what I wanted. It doesn’t follow the rules. It might be great, but it’s wrong.
Genre here is a metaphor for telos. Like the genre expectations of the audience, the telos gives me the set of background assumptions that I’m judging the whole enterprise against. Add in just the right teleology, and you can get any kind of “ought” from any kind of “is”. Just like stuff can happen by magic in Harry Potter (as long as the author doesn’t break the collectively-imposed rules of how the magic should work, of course).
Tacitly, the participants in any one of the various language-games that are intersecting when we have ethical disagreements share the same teleological background-assumptions. But, because we use what appears for much of the time to be a common language, we can be playing different games at the same time. Different language-games have different assumptions & different telelogies. Subtle divergences make for subtle, limited-scope differences in conclusions. Wild differences make for brutal incomprehension.
–R.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply Rinky, but I don’t think I’ve been as explicit as perhaps would have been warranted.
By comparing moral realists to common prestidigitators I wasn’t discussing “genre expectations” so much as I was claiming that I am in the epistemic position of being justified in believing this fellow hasn’t sawed a lady in half [read, “supplied an objective foundation for moral realism], even though I may from time to time be at a loss to explain precisely how the illusion was manufactured in any particular case [read, “showing how a genuinely moral prescription has not been derived from a descriptive claim”].
I agree that one can make objective, non-spooky claims about what does or does not conduce to fulfilling any arbitrarily given telos. My antirealism consists in the denial that there could, even in principle, be a non-arbitrarily given telos. My worry in my first post above, as related to the readings for the next episode, is that apparently the strength of my conviction outstrips my epistemic warrant. I don’t accept the argumentum ad “flash of light” in any other area, so shouldn’t I be doubting my antirealism here too?
Staircaseghost, IMVHO we have two different vocabularies going on at once here.
First vocabulary: objective foundation, justified in believing, epistemic warrant
Second vocabulary: strength of conviction, flash of light, telos
Claims made in one vocabulary may not translate adequately into the other – nor is one of them prior to the other. Two different sets of rules. Of course, we often like to mix them together to get a pleasing result.
So, short answer: if it works, go with it.
–R.
I’m not sure if the topic has been raised before or is completely off point, but how would a non-anthrocentric ethics derived from OOO bypass the is/ought distinction, or to flip it around, how would the is/ought dismantle or make impossible a “flat ethics” that adds non human objects to the count of relevent ethical actors?
I’ve been out of the loop for a while. Sorry if this is a confused, nonsensical, and/or completely left field question.
Say more about OOO, Ethan.
Aristotle’s ethics would theoretically allow in non-human actors in that they too have teleology, but since they don’t have reason, they don’t make choices, and “ethics” wouldn’t be exactly the venue for talking about their excellence.
Likewise, Moore’s intuitionism wouldn’t rule out animals recognizing excellence (“Quality?”), though, again, cool contemplation seems to be the key for any intuitionist in separating out ethical goodness from merely what one desires at that moment.
Oy, I can’t even make sense of what originally motivated that convoluted question.
I’m going to break from that and just say instead that it would be great to have (in the distant future of course) a podcast on Object Oriented Ontology, especially from the point of view of non OOO-ers, and particularly Wes given his Kantian bent.