Ep. 363: Franz Brentano’s Moral Epistemology (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 363 is something like, are there ethical truths? And if so, how can we know them? We read Franz Brentano's lecture, the Origin of the Knowledge of right and wrong, 1889. More information about the text in the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin, who, in choosing The Twitter handle bigballs2025, is exhibiting a preference with the character of rightness.

0:40 Seth: This is Seth Paskin carrying no innate moral principles in Austin, Texas.

0:47 Wes: This is Wes Alwan trying to live intentionally in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:52 Mark: All right, all right. So we are entering a new unit. You might say we want to go back to ethics. We had had Edith Stein on our list for a while. We also had this, a related one from Max Scheler. These are both early 20th century followers of Husserl in Germany. Phenomenologists. So moral phenomenology. And it became clear that the Scheler was earlier than the Stein, and Stein refers to the Scheler. So I was like, all right, we'll do that first. Well, the. Then I started the Scheler and it referred to this lecture by Franz Brentano, who is the grandfather of phenomenology.

If Edmund Husserl is the father of phenomenology, Brentano is the grandfather. I have his fat psychology book. I think we want to do that. It's probably as important as the William James psychology book that we spent quite a bit of time on. From around the same period of time he invented the idea of intentionality, the aboutness of. I don't know if he invented it, but he's the one that everybody refers to the aboutness of mental contents, so that at least in general, you don't have a belief. And let's.

1:57 Wes: Yeah, I think he did.

1:58 Seth: He invented intentionality.

2:00 Wes: Yeah.

2:01 Seth: Wow, that's big.

2:01 Mark: I mean, it's not right. Not intentionality in the sense of this was a something I meant to do, but the aboutness of a mental state or a perception. Yes.

2:10 Wes: Yeah, this is the guy. He was influential on Husserl, on Meinong, and a bunch of other people. This is the progenitor of all the intentionality and phenomenology stuff.

2:20 Mark: But he's a descriptive psychologist like James. So he did not make the phenomenological move of let's set aside the realism versus idealism distinction and you know, let's just describe the contents of our consciousness consciously bypassing traditional metaphysical problems. He maybe didn't have that level of sophistication but he certainly, as we see in here did his, you know, had taken the requisite intro courses in ethics. So he refers a lot to Plato and Aristotle. He talks about Descartes, bringing out some details about Descartes that I didn't remember. Locke, Hume as well as many of his contemporaries including one Seth. You looked up this guy Ihering?

3:02 Seth: Ihering, yeah. So Ihering was specifically a jurist or a philosopher of law or law theorist or what have you. And I think Brentano basically says his criticism and analysis of the notion of innate moral principles is correct but he doesn't you know, ultimately finish off properly. But I looked him up and he looked pretty interesting. He'd written some very, some interesting books.

3:27 Wes: Yeah. So he's gonna, not to get into this too much but like Ihering, he's gonna reject the idea of innate moral principles up to a point but as we'll see he wants to say there is this innate. There's in one sense there's innate moral sanction. So he sounds like in this reading and I, you know, I think he was influential on moral intuitionists like G.E. moore. Ultimately this sounds like moral. What we're getting in this text is

3:50 Mark: moral intuitionism which is not a new idea. In fact I referred recently and it's sort of been on my, my list to put forward some of the British moralists. You know we've talked about Hume and Smith and their moral sentimentality which is related to what we're talking about here. But whenever you have some sort of empiricists you have some rationalists to go alongside them. So there are these guys, Samuel Clarke and John Balguy that I read at some point in this Moral intuitionism or the British moralist is this big multi volume thing that I have from one of our UT lectures and these guys thought that fittingness was a fundamental thing.

So you could just say when somebody's nice to you, beneficence, gratitude is just the fitting response to that. And we just sort of just like we know that two plus two equals four. We know these just by rational intuition. You might say I don't know if they use that word. So I'm sure there's other things even further back in the history. Brentano doesn't refer to those specifically but he is, you know, he's sympathetic to where Kant was coming from that Kant wanted to say yes, morality is absolute and it's something we figure out by reason. It is objective because.

But it is not to be given merely in just observing that people have sentiments, which is how human Smith wanted to found it. Just to say, even if it was the sentiment of, I believe, you know, this just seems fitting to me. Where does that sentiment come from? Does it come from evolution? Does it come from social mores? Is it all just us making stuff up, as Rorty would later argue? Brentano wants to say, well, there's something to that. At the end of the lecture he talks about. Yeah, actually through most of history maybe, right. If this is a philosophy of law paper responding to Ihering, a philosophy of law paper that if we want to talk about the genetic origins of law, it was not because some people were enlightened and could see rationally these moral truths.

It was much more people working for their self interest and their gratification and these sort of selfish motives building up into something that approximated morality. And a lot of philosophers like Hobbes or Hume or something would just say, end of story, that's how we get morality. But he wants to say, you know, that's the genetic fallacy. We actually don't. Maybe these are. Adherence to these moral truths is over determined because it is. There are these sort of evolutionary social things that are pushing us toward this, but there's also just this rational recognition that we have available to us.

And that's as I think this goes all the way back to Plato in the Republic, right? You brainwash the kids, you give them appropriate education, you lie to them, tell them the noble lie and you get them in good habits. And then they're at the kind of people who can then open themselves up to the rational intuition.

6:29 Wes: Yeah, he mentions Aristotle in that regard. We have to be habituated first. And in fact, if we're not properly habituated, then a true appreciation of the good, which is what's supposed to come after that may be very difficult or it may even be impossible. So he starts out and ends in the same way here, talking about the, you know, as you're putting it, mark, the genealogy of morality, right? The way in which just our animal instincts and impulses, our natural instincts and impulses will lead us to behave in a certain way that will look ultimately like morality.

And that includes some measure of altruism which you see even in animals, but which can be explained in either humans or animals as something that arises because it's mutually beneficial, for instance, so it doesn't arise out of love of neighbor or love of God or an appreciation for the good. It's just very, very practical. So as he says in section four, the earliest political laws supported by penal sanction were established without any feeling of right, founded upon moral insight. And so, yeah, we can explain, you know, we can give this. These causal stories of how morality develops in human beings, but that can't ever tell us why it is moral, how there is anything like objective morality.

In fact, it makes it sound like it's not objective. It makes it sound like it must. There must ultimately be no such thing as morality because we need to be able to say for any given ethical statement, right, if murder is wrong, we can't just tell a story about, oh, well, you know, through evolution and this and that. This is how we came to believe that, you know, murder is wrong, even though we do it all the time anyway. But we need some objective ground for saying that murder is wrong. So it's the same sort of problem that people, you know, that ethicists have always faced and that Kant, for instance, had his particular solution to the categorical imperative.

But I think Brentano doesn't think that imperative can work right. So we're going to get intuition, and it does sound very Platonic in a way. We're going to get moral intuition replacing that. And to me it does sound. I don't know of anyone earlier who thinks of it in just this way. I think it's quite different from people like Hume and certainly different from Kant.

8:54 Mark: I mean, it's funny how he just thinks, right? So the moral truths that we're going to discover through rationality are supposed to be obvious in the same way that the Pythagorean theorem is. So they're not innate, right? Somebody had to discover the Pythagorean theorem and sacrifice to their God, as he says. But they're supposed to be obvious. So it is things like. And he mentions some things from Aristotle at the beginning of metaphysics, everybody desires to know. So this sounds right, given that it's Aristotle. Like, it's going to be teleological.

It's going to be the internal logic of a process or faculty or even a being is such that it points in a certain direction. So if somebody. One of these fundamental moral truths is. It's not just. If one society says, we love knowledge, we just love getting knowledge. And another society says, no, we love ignorance. We wouldn't just say, well, different strokes for different folks. We wouldn't just say, it's like taste in ice cream. We would say, one is just obviously wrong. There's something and he doesn't really tell us a lot more than that. I want to say there's something about the logic of knowledge itself that pushes toward greater revelation so that this is just unquestionably a good and better than ignorance.

So it's these fundamental very obvious things that he has, several of them and then he thinks we can sort of piece them together.

10:13 Seth: Yeah. So I have an issue with using the term obvious because I think it carries with it some implications that, that might confuse what you're trying to, to get to. So what he says is he distinguishes between higher order or you know, let's call it more conceptual self evident truths like the Pythagorean theorem or the law of non contradiction. And then what he calls lower, which is to say something like a pure perceptual or sensation experience. Like. And he says, you know, there's a sense in which I can't doubt. It's self evident to me that I'm sitting in a room with candles on the table or whatever, blah blah, blah.

And that's a kind of, he specifically says self evidence as opposed to obvious. Right. Like it's self evident to me in the sense of I cannot doubt my immediate lived experience. Right. In this particular example. And what he wants to say is that. And you can't. If somebody said well how do you know that? How can you justify that? And you're like I can't, I just flat out can't. It just is, it is immediate and present and it's silly to even ask me to justify or expl that type of thing. He says with the higher order experiences or the higher order truths or whatever they're going to be called.

There's a similar sense of self evidence. But if somebody said well how do you explain that? How could you justify it? You can or you should be able to give them an explanation. And he says if you can't, then it's not a self evident truth, it's just a belief. But if you can rationally explain why the Pythagorean theorem is self evident to you, then you're good to go. So there's a kind of justificatory aspect to what he's, he's saying, well, in

12:03 Wes: some cases I think there's justification. So. And he brings up the Pythagorean theorem in section five because he wants to say, right, so he's distinguishing innateness in the sense of given by nature. Right? So there are innate impulses and sentiments which he calls prejudices that are given to us by nature. But that doesn't tell us whether they're true or false. It doesn't tell us whether they have natural sanction and validity. So that's one point. There's a lot that's innate that isn't necessarily true. On the other hand, there's a lot that's true which is not innate like the Pythagorean theorem.

We don't just innately know that coming out of the womb. Oh yeah, A squared plus B squared equals C squared. We have to prove it. It's something we discover. So he'll say there are lots of things that have universal validity for all thinking beings like the Pythagorean theorem, but they're not innate in that sense. And the other aspect of you were talking about, seth is at 26 where he's thinking about judgments. He wants to compare self evident judgments which he compares to the law of non contradiction. So basic logical axioms, so we might think right, modus ponens or some basic logical axiom like law of non contradiction.

That is something that's innate. But it's not a theorem that we can prove like the Pythagorean theorem. That is something and we can't say much about why we believe it. So if someone comes to us and says, oh I don't like this ethical intuitionism, it's completely ungrounded. You just say something seems right and so it is right. Well that's the way logic works as well. We can't say why. You know, we can give a nice argument like Aristotle does for the law of non contradiction, but that's not a deductive argument, that's more of a way of fleshing out the intuition and the metaphysical, you know, the dire metaphysical consequences of rejecting it.

So and that's where incorrigibility comes up or you might call it apperception, right? This very Cartesian idea, right? We can question our lived experience in terms of the content of consciousness, but we can't question the fact that we are having that conscious experience. We may be having an illusion or a delusion and we may be right to say yeah, this might be the way things are. Any given perceptual experience at any given time, but we can't deny that we're having that perceptual experience. So that's the second comparison incorrigibility we have.

So we have two now comparisons or benchmarks for, or standards for how we think, might think this moral intuitionism could work.

14:37 Mark: Let me just read a quote here. This from, from that section 26 on page 17. So the, the right. The context, as we, I think we've said, is he wants to ground our knowledge of moral truths. He wants to compare it to our knowledge of truths in general, other kinds of truths. And we'll have more to say about this because the moral truths have to do with like, not that this is appropriate to believe, but this is appropriate to love, appropriate to affirm, appropriate to choose. So there is a movement there. But yeah, let's. If we can settle the. I think his strategy is if he could settle the epistemological, the general epistemological question, then moral epistemology will follow from that.

So not everything which we affirm is on this account true. Our judgments are frequently quite blind. Many a prejudice which we drank in, as it were, with our mother's milk presents to us the appearance of an irrefutable principle to other equally blind judgments. All men have by nature a kind of instinctive in impulsion, as for example, entrusting blindly to the so called external impression or to a recent remembrance. Right? So Thomas Reid that we just read said, yes, these are instinctual and they're, they're as high as you could get. But Brentano wants to say, no, these are the, what you were calling Seth the lower.

They're merely. We don't have the proper kind of defense of them. What is so recognized may often be true, but it may equally well be false since the affirming judgment contains nothing which gives to it the character of rightness. Such, however, is the case in certain other judgments which in contradistinction to these blind judgments, may be termed obvious self evident judgments. So obvious and self evident are both in quotes. So I don't know if he likes either of those terms really, as for example, the principle of contradiction and every so called inner perception, which informs me that I'm now experiencing sensations of sound or color or think and will this or that.

So basically all the stuff that Descartes says you can't doubt gets counted as the higher.

16:29 Wes: So you're not meaning to say there that I have to trust every experience to sound. You know that, right? We can be deluded about that. But again, it's incorrigibility. It's just that I'm having that experience.

16:38 Mark: Yeah, exactly.

16:39 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, you can think about this in terms of epistemic norms, which I guess becomes much more important later on in analytic philosophy. But there is a, there are questions of rightness when it comes to what we ought to believe. So if There is a cup sitting on the table in front of me. And someone says, if you see a cup sitting on the table in front of you, you ought to affirm that proposition that there's a cup sitting on the table in front of me. And I might say, well, no, I don't function by the principle that I acknowledge is true.

The things that are right in front of me. I'm not playing that game. So that there's an oughtness. There are norms involved in truth and falsity as well. I'm not putting this very well, but I think there's a parallel between acknowledging the rightness of certain propositions in light of what is actually in light of the facts. Right. Acknowledging truth in light of the facts and acknowledging moral truths.

17:46 Seth: Makes more sense when you actually get into how he mechanically works his way through the argument now that you're trying to explain it, Wes. Like I was like, yeah, it is hard to. But it makes more sense when he, when he cashes it out in his, his argument. So I think we'll be able to explain it better in a minute.

18:04 Mark: Yeah. So this is a 45 page lecture. You know, we kind of chose this. We knew Dylan was going to be out this time. We didn't want to embark on something like the Scheler that we might actually want to spend two episodes on. We just wanted to. This would be short and, and it's, you know, a lecture. So it's very readable. But it does get kind of thorny as it goes on. It starts very fast and. But then I kind of slowed down. In fact, when I got to the end without taking notes, I was like, wait, did I miss the part in the middle where he actually gave us his formula for the moral truths?

Because. Right. He gives these little examples like knowledge is better than ignorance, joy, as long as it's not joy in something bad. Joy is better than sorrow. These things that he thinks are truisms. And then he was off already talking about the contrast between these, you know, this enlightened knowledge of ethics and the genetic stuff that might come from other things. Yeah. And the one missing thing there is just. He has a sections on, well, how do we know? Okay, so we know a few things. Like for sure, knowledge is better than ignorance, joy is better than sorrow.

But how do we know? How do we put these all together to make some sort of overall moral principle? Because a lot of moral intuitionists, like maybe we'll do W.D. ross sometime. That was somebody that I taught. He just says there are just different Things that strike us as obligatory for us to do. But there's no rule that says sort of which one wins. If you have a duty to do one thing and a duty to do another thing and these conflict, then he sort of seems to agree with the existentialists that it's sort of up to you. Hopefully you're a wise person and can navigate those waters.

Brentano doesn't get to actually considering concrete moral situations. We're not totally sure what he means, but he seems to think that it is. There is some arithmetic available, right. So he's critical of a straight ahead utilitarian that would say you can compare these different pleasures and say, well, this pleasure is twice as much as this one. Like you just can never do that, even with the same kind. Can you really say this orgasm was twice as good as that orgasm? Let alone compare the pleasure of reading a nice novel to the pleasure of an orgasm?

Like, these are just apples and oranges all over the place.

20:09 Wes: But yet, yeah, it surprised me how much he talked about orgasms.

20:14 Mark: There's still a principle of addition available to us, us. So that, you know, one of the foundational things Aristotle does in the Nicomachean ethics right at the beginning is, yeah, we could talk about the individual flourishing, but of course more than one individual flourishing is better. So you can add, so something like the principle of utility will end up being his driving force. That it just ends up being the moral commandment would just be work toward the general good. Even if that, you know, means you have to self sacrifice. So it's something. It's maybe a little less formulaic than the utility principle, but it is that vague and it is that open.

20:50 Wes: Well, this is where we ought to work through the argument because it is. He does build up slowly to that idea of the common. The common good.

20:57 Mark: Yes.

20:58 Seth: Yeah. Which by the way, I felt came completely out of left field. But Section 35, everything just took a sharp left.

21:06 Wes: Yeah, I think that is explained. Should we start working? Just working through.

21:11 Seth: Yeah, so let's just start at the basics, right? He's giving a lecture to a bunch of legal scholars or judges or whatever and he's like, how do we explain and justify the reasons, if you will, for law? Why do we have the laws that we have and what's the relationship between laws and morality? So he says, I'm going to talk about that. And he's like, well, first thing then we got to figure out where does our moral sense come from? Where does ethical commandments, how do we understand that? And he says, well, you know, first off, I'm going to agree with this guy Ihering that they're not innate.

We're not born with hard coded rules or guides for ethical behavior. So that's not where it comes from. He says, and there's also not something that we inherit by some form of like the international law, like. So in other words, he's, he's referring back to Roman law, which this guy Ihering was a specialist in. But basically we don't have an explanation or an origin in human nature. And we don't get it from some kind of broad international societal like, it's not like it arises out of the structure of nationhood and the way international relations happens.

And he says, okay, so what about custom? What about we learn from our parents, from other people in the society? And you know, there's just things that you do that are right and things that you do, you know, that are wrong and that's explained by those habits in society. And what he says is that will explain the compulsion or it would explain why people do the things they do, but it doesn't justify those actions. It doesn't confer validity as he says. So, and this introduces the idea that if we're going to explain justifications for moral behavior or for ethical systems, we have to find a way to confer validity to it.

And validity is going to bring in the normative and the truth element to the whole thing in a certain way.

23:15 Wes: Yeah, I want to jump back and just be less synoptic here because I think when he says, let's just talk about this idea of innateness starting at section three, he does want to say there's something innate. So he says innateness in section three, he says it can be either mean given by nature or it can mean something that's binding in virtue of its nature. And ultimately he's going to say we're going to accept innateness in the sense of two, but reject it in terms of one. Right. Because ultimately what's innate in the sense of given by nature, that's just instinct, that's just our innate impulses.

And we're not going to explain morality in terms of innate impulses. We're not going to explain it in terms of people's obedience to culture. In section five, he wants to say that there is a moral truth that's independent of culture. It's independent of religion and politics and social authority and time and place. It's universally valid for all thinking beings, but it's not derivable from our Innate right sentiments. It's not. You can't just say, let's, you know, look at natural human empathy and say, okay, we can derive moral sanction from that.

And it's ultimately all of this is another way of saying that we can't derive moral sanction from any form of authority, whether it's the natural authority of right, just the way things are evolutionarily, or in our nature from political authority. You ought to do this, you ought to do that, therefore it's right. Or even God's authority, ultimately it turns out right. This is like a euthyphro problem. Things aren't right because God says it's so. Either they are right because they are right. And one other note here is that that even goes for something like conscience.

I think some people think that the way conscience works, that we can in some sense explain our. The psychology of moral behavior in terms of thinking that people are afraid of the pangs of conscience. But if they were, you know, if our ethical feeling were just about feeling afraid of the pangs of conscience, that would just be like being afraid of punishment from an external authority. And it wouldn't have that peculiarly ethical feeling. Right. Guilt isn't just any sort of pain and fear of feeling guilty isn't like fear of the crack of the whip.

There's some real sense in which we've internalized these sentiments so that the authority of conscience comes not from its sting, but from the fact that we recognize the rightness of the things that we might feel guilty about. And I think that's a very important point. And it goes along with Hart. I said in our pre conversation chat, you know, he's. This is very similar to Hart. See our episode on the philosophy of law where we can understand acceptance of norms as such in terms of simple obedience to an external authority, whether we think of that externalness as divine, as political, or even in some sense as psychological.

26:22 Seth: Yeah, so I appreciate you disambiguating that a little bit. The, you know, the notion there's the two senses of innate here are the difference between being innate in the human being and being innate in the external thing, the act or whatever. Because the phenomena. The phenomena, whatever, however you want to characterize it, it's like, so we don't have innate moral principles. We're not born with them where we somehow have to like meno remember them, right. That they're coded into us and that we just evolve and they. We discover them, so to speak.

26:58 Wes: But we don't naturally understand the rightness of something or know that it's right to love this and wrong to love that. But what's lovable in itself is naturally lovable. It's just that we don't naturally have that impulse necessarily.

27:12 Seth: Right. And no, but that's the point is that the concept of innate here is the thing that is lovable is innately lovable. It is something in that thing itself, not what it's good for, not how it's situated, not how it stands in relation to other things. There's something innate in the thing that is lovable or desirable or good or whatever. And that's where the innate innately slides. And because it's external to us or separate from us, and because you have this notion of intentionality that underlies this right, is that for him, ethical recognition is going to involve something other than just an emotional reaction or a conceptual thing. It's going to involve a kind of judgment because you have to recognize, you have to see the rightness in the thing which requires cultivation of judgment and various other things.

28:05 Mark: One connection I found it helpful to import G.E. moore's later formulation about moral intuitionism that whenever you're considering a possible source for the sanction of morality, like it is commanded by God, it is something all societies agree on. It is, you know, just. I just can't avoid. I have an impulse that I just can't avoid loving this thing, affirming it, choosing it, that you can still ask of that choice of that command from God, of that convention. But is that good? Is that the right command? Could we be wrong about this? And it's just.

Yes. So it's an acknowledgment that we, any of these sources, though hopefully many of them, line up and do recommend what is in fact good. Right? So the other part of that, it's not that God creates good by commanding something, but God does command the good, because God knows everything and God knows that that's good. So hopefully these things conform, but we just have no guarantee. And another thing that I was problematic for me though was thinking about Williamson. That we did recently is for Williamson, knowledge, and thus knowledge of the good would be externalist.

There's nothing about the feeling of a belief or the feeling of a sentiment that could give it the sanction in itself. Because it's always just an objective matter, whether it actually corresponds with the facts or not, whether it correspond, whether this, whether right, we want to be fallibilist about it. We want to say that this even something that I think is just obviously worthy of love, maybe I could be wrong about. But Brentano does not accept that he thinks that he does not. In fact there's a footnote about his theory of truth that says look, yes, of course it is raining is true if and only if it is in fact raining.

Right? That sort of. But he, he's deflationary about it rather than the full on correspondence theory in that the proposition it is raining is correct or the belief it is raining is correct if outside the mind there is in fact something going on out there that it. There's. So he doesn't want to commit himself to full on metaphysical realism in that sense. You know, again, he's not sophisticated as Husserl of explicitly saying we're bracketing all those issues, but he wants to give what he thinks is a more innocent theory of truth just to say that if something is true then it is.

So there's just sort of a presence of something. This is getting complicated. But this is, you know, something that was in Aristotle, it's in Heidegger, it's in a lot of things.

30:34 Wes: Well, it sounds like, you know, when he gives his theory of truth he reduces the analysis of judgments to existential statements. It's a bit weird. So instead of saying X is F or saying that we're going to talk about propositions as predications, he wants to say that there are existential. We make existential statements instead with the properties attached. Right. So the rose is red becomes there exists a red rose. You can see, you know, this kind of a precursor to quantification aspects of predicate logic. But I think it's a bit weird as a metaphysical analysis.

But in any case, Mark, you know, to your point, it sounds like we need a non natural property of goodness. A la G.E. Moore so. Yeah, so what's really going on here is when we say something is good, it could be really good or not really good. Just like say something is red, it could be red, it might not be red. So we could be wrong, we could say something is good and be wrong about it just as we might say something is red and be wrong about it. And yeah, that's the innovation here, but we have kind of jumped ahead again. And yeah, the, the earlier sections here are he's kind of ruling out other forms of what he calls sanction, right for morality.

So in section eight, you know, he's going to reject the sanction as being something to do with a compulsive feeling or habit. And section nine, it's not about pleasing or displeasing powerful beings. Section 10 we can go into these in more detail if we want, but it's not a matter of education or social influence that via which we internalize a conscience. Yes, that's the genealogy, but that doesn't give us the sanction. Not compatible with obedience to a tyrant out of fear. So it really can't come from an external command. And then that's where he gets into in section 11.

Well, it's more similar to the commands that we get from logic. And so that might be an interesting section to kind of glom onto as we continue to the argument. Because that is really interesting to say that. And this is what I was trying to get at very poorly with the CUP example, but right, if we say that modus ponens, we might think of that as a command and we might think of that if A then B and A then B. Right. Some sort of logical axiom. Can we think of that as external? Can we think of that as arbitrary? Can we think of that as just something that God is dictating to us?

Or is there something more to that? And I think this is a very, very interesting example on that. Yeah, that's interesting. It's not just that we. The command, it's not just that. It's right. Oh, modus ponens is just part of our psychology. Evolution has put it into us or God says it so or something like that. Ultimately it's rightness. Right. There's something about the world or about truth, let's say it's not an empirical fact, but there's something about what's true that warrants it.

33:28 Mark: Yeah, that was a question. Is it an empirical fact is something that he wants us to have access to. He wants us to say, you know, just the fact that you already believe something doesn't make it true, of course, but yet he doesn't want to have this like Kantian sort of division between okay, well then there is the good in itself that we just know rationally has to be there. Something is the best, something is good versus the actual world we experience. Somehow the goodness has to leak in this. It just seems like the same problem Plato had that Plato wanted to say that it is in our nature to have a connection to the good.

But we can't just know that by observing the behavior of actual people because actual people are all corrupted and are not normally actually open in the proper way to the good. So yeah, we, as Brentano eventually tells us, it's these pre moral, the growth of law through wars and will to power. People exerting rules on each other and putting themselves into boxes. He actually gives something that even sounds like the genealogy of morals in terms of the tyrant oppresses everybody else and makes them get along. But then the tyrant sort of internalizes that and thinks he has some responsibilities to the people as well.

But all this is just to prepare the ground for us to be open to rational apprehension of the good.

34:50 Wes: Yeah, so that's later on where he's kind of saying that despite the fact that we don't have these natural impulses or sanctions don't come from natural impulses, societies will generally produce ethical rules that evolve convergently towards what we would get from having an enlightened understanding of the good. But just in section 11, I wanted to read from this one part. The laws of logic are naturally valid rules of judging. That is to say, we are obliged to conform to them, since conformity to these rules ensure certainty in our judgments, whereas judgments diverging from these rules are liable to error.

So this is another way of talking about rightness. Right. We can say we're not bound to modus ponens because someone, a robber, comes to us and puts a gun to our head and says, you know you're going to be doing using modus ponens. Or else we're bound to it because we think of it as preserving truth values, to put it in analytic philosophy way, as we connect judgments to each other, we think that modus ponens observing it will give us outputs that are actually true. And then later on here he says it's the same for ethics. We are not concerned with the command of an external will, but rather with a natural preference similar to that in logic and the law founded on that preference.

So when he says natural preference, right, it sounds suspiciously close to reducing this to a innate impulse. But regardless of the psychology of it, it's grounded in truth, it's grounded in something about the world and are wanting to preserve a certain relationship to the world.

36:27 Mark: Yeah, there's sort of, there's an intrinsic superiority, an inner superiority which distinguishes the moral from the immoral will. This is section 12.

36:36 Wes: Yeah, inner correctness. So yeah, this is important to try to understand this because I like the idea.

36:41 Mark: I mean, it almost sounds pragmatic. The part you read from 11, that the laws of logic are valid because we want to avoid error, and that has very practical consequences. And so these moral precepts are going to be legitimate because we want to avoid moral error. But what does that mean? Can we cash that out in non moral terms? Because it's he doesn't want to just say if something hurts a lot of people then it's immoral. Like he doesn't want to reduce the moral to the non moral right. That would be actually, yeah, the thing you quoted from G.E.

moore about or you know about a non natural moral property is supposed to not just say it's not reducible to any kind of command or particular sanction, it's any other description in non moral terms. So even though, even if you say, you know, the thing that brings the greatest pleasure and the least pain or something, well, how do you know that's good? So it's a broader thing than the point that Brentano's making and I'm not sure that Brentano would go as far as more in that respect because it seems like there is something comparable to error in logic in the moral sphere that we just everybody understands and we apprehends.

Things don't work out for you. Again, I kind of, I feel like this is from Aristotle that, you know, how you know that you're hitting the golden mean is because things generally work out better. If you're too foolhardy or you're too cowardly, then you lose the battle. So the hitting the golden mean in terms of bravery means you hit the mark, you succeed at what you're aiming at. But it does seem a little circular because if the thing that we're aiming at is the general good, then this doesn't justify believing that the general good is the good.

38:21 Wes: You know, ultimately we have to, we're choosing final ends, as you'll say later on, right. This is about saying what the good is and knowing, for instance, to use his example, right. If I'm choosing between cannibalism and loving my neighbor, loving how he tastes and just loving him over there, that's the choice. How do I make that choice? And that is very confusing. I don't think we get a lot of guidance on that. We just have to be able to say, well, there's something in human beings that can be responsive to the good. We may not be born with it, but somehow we can get there and be responsive to it. But I don't think you can give ultimately you can't. Just like you can't give an argument for modus ponens. You're not going to be able to give an argument for these basic moral principles.

39:10 Mark: Why is it better to not let the world burn?

39:12 Wes: Yeah, some people would like, you're not

39:15 Mark: going to convince someone who is so distraught with the world that they just want to die. So this makes him sound. He's in the same era as Nietzsche, even though it doesn't refer to Nietzsche. And there's no evidence here that he read Nietzsche. But there's so much that I could. Seems connected.

39:29 Wes: So here's what he says in section 12. He's going to say that, right, the sanction is not a matter of aesthetics. He's ruling out all these different possibilities. So. Yep, right. The Greek called the virtuous, the to kalon, the beautiful. And that's true, the virtuous is the beautiful. But that's not our criterion. We don't figure out what's virtuous in terms of what's beautiful. And then he says, I do not deny that the aspect of virtue is more agreeable than that of moral perversity. That is, it's that it's beautiful. What I cannot concede that in this consists the only and essential superiority of ethical conduct.

It is rather an inner superiority which distinguishes the moral from the immoral will. So now we're talking about. He kind of switches back and forth between talking about ends and talking about the will. This human faculty which makes choices of ends and one end can be superior to another. But one willingness, one act of willing, it's an intentional act, to use his language, we'll get into that, can be superior to another. So there's an inner superiority which distinguishes the moral from the immoral will in the same way that it is an inner superiority which distinguishes true and self evident judgments and conclusions from prejudices and fallacies.

40:47 Mark: Yeah. Seth, what did you feel like about this move that he's made here to talking about truth rather than goodness and are they comparable in the way he's arguing?

40:56 Seth: Well, we've seen this before. I'm at a loss to try to remember who specifically we talked about this. But this feels very Greek that ultimately questions of ethical questions are epistemological questions. Right. And you know, there's a sense in which this goes back to people don't knowingly do wrong. Because he's trying to say the good, the recognition of the good involves an aesthetic component. Yes. Although that's not what confers validity. And there's, you know, he's going to go on to say there's an emotional component to it. Right. The sentiment component. But ultimately what does confer the validity? Well, what confers the validity is the recognition. He says it at the. Did you already read the last paragraph of section 12?

41:42 Wes: I don't think we read the very,

41:43 Seth: the very last One paragraphs.

41:45 Wes: No.

41:45 Seth: So he's talking about the superiority of one particular act of will over another opposite character. So we're going to get to the point about will in a second. But essentially you're confronted with two things you can do. One is good and one is bad. Let's just say the superiority of the good one over the other one is the superiority of the moral over the immoral. And then he says the belief in the superiority is an ethical motive. The knowledge of it is the right ethical motive and the sanction which gives to ethical law permanence and validity.

So ultimately this is an epistemological account. He also weaves in, like, why you would be motivated to do the good thing versus the wrong thing, but ultimately the reason one is good and one is bad, and the reason that you recognize that and it justifies and validates your choice in willing the good versus the bad is ultimately a knowledge relation.

42:47 Wes: Yeah, and he's going to come back to this several times. Right. He's making a pivot here. And in 13 he's going to say, well, how can we know. How can we know what is right, willing or what the good end is? And we'll say, even Kant couldn't get that right. This categorical imperative was meant to provide a solution, but is really ultimately a superficial solution according to Brentano. And then he'll make in 14 to pivot to saying, well, we need my phenomenology to figure this out. We need my descriptive psychology, my account of intentionality. And then that's what he's going to turn to. And he'll begin in 15 by describing.

43:23 Seth: Yeah, that's the. The magic section.

43:26 Wes: Yeah. This need for. Well, first of all to describe willing and its relationships to. To end. Relationship to ends.

43:33 Mark: Yeah, Let me just jump back a little. So that part you just read, Seth, at the end of 12, that's where my Williamson sense hit in like, yes, the belief in the superiority is an ethical motive. The knowledge of it is the right ethical motive. Could it be that we just don't have knowledge of it? What makes it so that we are fallibilist or not fallible? Seems to be. Is it in the realm of a mind independent reality because we could always be wrong about that. Or is it in the realm of a conceptual truth? Right. Something a priori synthetic or however we want to put it?

And I'm not sure where he comes down because all the examples he gives, like in general knowledge is better than ignorance. Well, yeah, we can know that without talking about anything. In particular. But if we want to make a decision in a particular case, like I can know it is again I gave that example from Clarke or Balguy of gratitude is the proper response, is the fitting response, is the beautiful response to beneficence when some generosity. But that doesn't mean in a particular case, you know, you observe something you think is an example of generosity and so you are grateful for it.

But what if it's not actually you don't know what their real motives are. Maybe this is a bribe, maybe this is a trick. Maybe this is he's not actually being generous at all. This is just something he had laying around and it's costing him no sacrifice whatsoever. So it seems there's always an empirical thing that makes it so I don't actually I can know the moral conceptual truths, but I can't know that this is the right action in this circumstance.

44:58 Wes: Yeah. So we do have a serious epistemological problem about how we tell right from wrong. And I'm not sure he.

45:05 Seth: Or how we tell right from right.

45:07 Wes: Yeah. One the writer.

45:09 Seth: The more right the better.

45:11 Wes: Although he does principles. You know, he gives us principles for comparing goods. Right. He's ultimately going to want to say we're not going to do utilitarian calculus us, thank God, reduce every good to the same kind of good, like pleasure, for instance, and then be able to do numerical calculations of one thing being ten times as pleasurable as another because things are going to different types of good are going to differ qualitatively. But ultimately he's still going to give us ways of comparing them through his what he calls the summative method. But before we get to that, it doesn't really tell us what our atoms of goodness are. Right. It doesn't really tell us that cannibalism isn't better than love thy neighbor. And I don't know what you can say about that, except to give again the very unsatisfying response that we intuited. But in section 15, right, he's gonna.

46:04 Mark: Well, I feel like maybe we should get to the magic of section 15 in our second half here.

46:10 Seth: Are we already there?

46:11 Mark: Yes, the time flown by has flown by. This is a very fun reading. Hope people look at it before you. If you're a Partially Examined Life supporter, you know, you don't have to have delayed gratification. You can probably. It'll be the next thing in your feed, except if you support us just through Apple, which is something we give for the convenience of Apple users who don't Want to go to our website? You'll still get it next week then, but for everybody else. Right? Right. If you want to go be in one of the categories. In any case, you get an ad free feed. So go to partiallyexaminelife.com support and again through our website or through Patreon or through Apple. Thanks so much for listening. Catch you next time.

46:46 Wes: Thank you.

46:47 Seth: Night.