Ep. 369: Philippa Foot’s Naturalistic Ethics (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys where at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 369 is something like, can we base ethics on the model of biology? And we read the first four chapters or so of Philippa Foot's 2001 book, Natural Goodness. More information about the text in the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin. Rating myself pretty, pretty good when it comes to having developed to maturity, sustained myself to date, and reproduced.

0:39 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, impractically rational in Austin, Texas.

0:43 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, depending directly on my relation to my life form in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:50 Mark: All right, we got the classic group,

0:52 Wes: the original, the natural group.

0:55 Mark: We might want to say Dylan is vacationing today. It is Memorial Day as we are recording this. And this reading makes Me memorialize Alasdair MacIntyre just died and we're again returning to some Neo Aristotelianism. I thought we were maybe going to spend some more time in so called modern philosophy back, you know, contemporaries of Hume. But Wes, your fancy has chased out ahead. And we have the next couple readings picked out in this area of modern, late 20th century, or in this case, yeah, 2001 ethics, which is a fine thing to have a bunch of episodes on. And she's basically playing in an area that we're familiar with from Aristotle, although there are other people she's reacting to. Say a little about why this book, why now.

1:44 Wes: Yeah, I don't remember why I started reading this. I just, I was looking at different 20th century classics that I thought were very readable and interesting and related to the, some of the issues that have been raised with reading Hume. And I thought that Philippa Foot was just very fun to read. Now my second reading, I have to say, reading her a second time and taking notes, I find it quite difficult. I find her slippery in a way with their arguments in a very analytic philosophy type of way. But in general, you know, I was surprised to find myself enjoying her. And then Korsgaard, you know, people I think would be categorized as analytic philosophers. I just found it very pleasurable to read and I felt like I was learning something or at least on my way to learning something about the things that are fundamentally puzzling in this area.

2:37 Seth: It's also, we just read Hume, right. And it's at least in some sense directly response to the Humean tradition.

2:45 Mark: Yes, Hume as seen through historically. We brought up our old ethical intuitionism episode. And actually that's what concluded with MacIntyre. Not as an intuitionist, but sort of as. I'm not sure I forget how we added that. But the idea that when Hume makes this is ought distinction leads to the idea that, well, moral evaluations, or really just evaluations at all are quite different than other kinds of statements of just pointing out facts. So even if I give you reasons for doing something, you could just always reject those reasons and say you're not appealing to my values.

So there's always this jump in that move, you know, with G.E. moore to well, there's a special kind of fact that we have a special moral sense that detects this sui generis kind of fact and it's a non natural fact. Right. Hume wants to base everything he's arguing in naturalism in the kind of stuff that natural science looks at. What sentiments do we find that we have? It doesn't mean they're all physical. They could be psychological facts, that's fine, but it's all within the natural realm. And so we get this idea of non naturalism that sort of G.E.

moore this was hugely influential, that there must be some special, you know, not magical, not supernatural, but just something that, you know, it's kind of like one of those anti scientism kind of arguments. There are certain things that the natural science just doesn't touch and morality is one of them. And then apparently this got further, you know, with we read Stevenson in that run, that same episode that we did Moore who just said that a moral claim is a separate kind of utterance in that it is just expressing your. It's saying yay that yay or boo.

So it's an exclamation. It is not actually saying any fact at all. It's not pointing out some, some non natural moral fact of the goodness of something. It's just saying in effect I approve of that thing. So it's a performative, it is an utterance. So it's a completely logically distinct. And this is the kind of things that Foot is now responding to. She wants to say, she wants to get back to naturalism, say no, actually there is something very. There are matters of fact that are very relevant. There's no sharp fact value distinction. And it is not a matter of merely, you know, subjectively saying I approve of this.

There is, there are moral facts and it ends up getting us, as we would predict with most of these 20th century people, back to a new version of Aristotle, that there's a telos there's an inherent goodness, the right natural goodness to certain kinds of evaluations. But it's just she is much more careful. Like we did this when we did Nietzsche originally, where, oh, you know, evaluation is not puzzling to us. We do it all the time and we might do it in the case of things that don't seem moral at all for an animal or plant. What makes it a good specimen of its type?

Well, is it doing what it's supposed to do? Is it pursuing its natural goals? Is it a strong and vigorous. And Nietzsche looked at that and said, well, that's what we should do for humans. What are we? We're will to power? How well are we enacting that? How well are we being that kind of thing? And, and so that's basically the kind of thing that Foot is going on. But she actually is going to respond to objections in a way that Nietzsche just, you know, states his view and is very artistic about it. Foot is actually in the middle of professional philosophers arguing about these things.

So that's very valuable in itself.

6:18 Wes: Yeah. She starts out by responding to what she thinks of as a neo-Humean tradition in expressivism or prescriptivism, Mark, as you just described it, which involves an appeal to this idea that. And it's broadly a part of non cognitivism, which is to say our moral evaluations are not facts. We don't cognize them, but they're not like beliefs about facts. But I think the way she ends with her kind of description of non cognitivists, she ends with prescriptivism. So it's not that just when we make a moral evaluation, we're saying I don't like this. We're kind of saying you shouldn't like this either. Although the word should. Right. Becomes problematic there.

7:04 Mark: But we're, I am recommending this to you.

7:07 Wes: We're trying to. Yeah, I want to make you have my feeling, let's put it that way. You can see the complexity of this because the minute you say I think you should feel that way, you kind of get back into the problem. So I think this. Right. And Hume understood this because Hume tries to make it very clear that he's not just reducing morality to your own particular sentiment about something. You might not like someone and they might be thwarting your interests and. But that doesn't rise to the level of immorality. Your sentiment has to be connected to this impartial point of view or this kind of third person point of view that you inhabit, I would argue.

7:47 Mark: CHEERING and booing is itself in. It's never just like, I approve of this. No, it is. This is awesome. It is. It is. It's very oppressive to be booed.

7:58 Seth: It's very.

7:59 Mark: It is in.

8:00 Wes: Arguably, you could say if you are cheering a team on, you are encouraging others to do the same, let's say. Or you're trying to piss off the opposition. You're going against the people who are cheering for the other. The other team. But in any case, this. You know that non. Cognitivism and expressivism, prescriptivism in particular, they take the expression or endorsement of feelings or attitudes as crucial. They take some internal psychological state of people as crucial to explaining morality. And we could see, you know, we can see a connection because those sorts of things do reflect tendencies to act.

And for someone like Hume, action must ultimately be connected to feeling. But Foot is going to try and flesh out a different theory where we can actually respond to reasons. We can have reasons to act that are not reducible to feelings. We can think of action as occurring just based upon beliefs about the way things are, in particular, about whether life forms are performing their functions properly, let's say. So, for instance, we can say things like, the tree's roots are good because, you know, for an oak tree, its roots go deep and it anchors it in the soil and gets it the nutrients they need.

And if they're not that way, then they're defective or they're unhealthy. And the same thing for heart. You know, your heart is for pumping blood through your body and keeping you alive and sending oxygen to your red blood cells. And if it's not doing those things, it's a bad heart. And those sorts of. Are they factual? Is she slipping in illicit, evaluative language there? We can argue about that. But those sorts of what she wants to see as factual judgments can form the basis of ethical judgments. She thinks.

9:55 Seth: Yeah, I'm not sure if we've explicitly laid out the context there a little bit, but I feel like there's a little more color, particularly to, like, the oak tree example. So she says of the oak tree, we can say it's a good oak tree if it has thick and deep roots as opposed to shallow and small roots. Okay. Why is that a criterion for being good when it comes to being an oak tree? Well, because oaks are not like reeds. Oaks are stiff and thick, and they don't bend the wind. So if the tree is going to survive a windstorm or, you know, have some kind of longevity or whatever, it Needs to have strong roots.

Okay, so it's not that the having of roots is good. It's that having of roots means that it has the strength to withstand storms. And having the strength to withstand storms means longevity or resilience to potential ending of existence, life. So really what we have to do is we have to follow the chain of reason or the chain of causes or linkage of whatever that gets you from the criterion that we say is good, which is really a shorthand for saying this criterion will help this thing live a long time, become the best tree that it can be, or the best rabbit, or the best lion or whatever, and presumably reproduce and perhaps some other things, or perhaps you can roll those up into a higher order thing.

But ultimately that's what we're talking about here. Because we don't want to say the fact that it has deep roots means that we make a jump to a normative claim.

11:46 Wes: I think you're right. She gets into what she calls Aristotelian categoricals and the. This is meant to, you know, this is the connection you're making, Seth, where we have to be able to say something about the species in order to evaluate individuals. Individuals are held against the standard of the species and in particular the self maintenance and reproductive capacity of the species. So there's species level maintenance, which is reproduction. There's individual self maintenance, which is cells dividing and. Or just staying alive. So a very Aristotelian idea in that your biological functions and organs and parts help you continue to be what you are and maybe to be more actualized as what you are than you might otherwise be.

So the whole point of roots to anchor you into the ground and also to nourish you, because without that, you cease to be an oak tree. You die. And it's not, as shall later say, that it's bad from some kind of utilitarian sense, if tree dies as opposed to living. It's not like, oh, you know, it's a bad thing for trees to die. No, it's just that we look at the individual against the background of the life cycle of its species. It's a bit mysterious whether we can legitimately retrieve normative language from that. Right. Because we know that evolution is not intelligent design, but its designs look intelligent.

And so we always have to ask ourselves the question, well, is a heart for beating? In one sense it is, but it's not for beating in the sense that it was designed to do that by someone.

13:24 Mark: Yes. And she. I felt like this was a good distinction. Wants to distinguish between Primary teleology and secondary teleology that usually explain what teleology means by talking about like a knife, it is for cutting. Well, the knife has no internal structure such that it tries to cut or it is, has a natural growth toward cutting or something like that. That's just something we use it for. And so likewise, even animals like yes, there's the way that they grow big and strong and that what makes for a good cattle to bring to market or whatever is not necessarily the same thing as what makes for the healthiest variety.

I mean what makes for a good veal is not a healthy animal at all. And but there's also this distinction between the benefit of the individual animal or plant or person and it's telos that it's not, because you mentioned reproduction, what it's supposed to do, how it's supposed to fit into its ecosystem. So she's like, if wolves survive by cooperating and so a well functioning wolf, is there something wrong with that wolf? It's a loner. I know we say lone wolves, but

14:35 Wes: she, she says no, wolves are packing free riders. She says, right, exactly. Yes, he's not helping with the hunt, but he's eating the meat.

14:44 Mark: Right. You might think that actually the most awesome wolf would be the one that is so successful that all the other wolves do the hunting and just bring him the stuff because he or she is so attractive or whatever, but no, there's something wrong with that.

14:59 Wes: Are we pretending that the alpha in a wolf pack might be female? Mark thought the days of, I don't

15:07 Mark: know, ways that wolf societies can go

15:09 Wes: gender politics were over. Yeah.

15:13 Mark: So she then takes seriously, I mean, right. Nietzsche will put say all that kind of stuff and then like, yeah, if we don't understand that our excellence is similar to that, that analogy work, then there's something wrong with us. We've gotten ripped from our roots. But she wants to really acknowledge that. Of course, introducing rational choice, I mean it's not just. Of course Aristotle does this too. Aristotle says we're social animals. So like the wolves, we do have the similar thing and we're also rational, rational creatures. So yeah, we're of course it's not just the way that we happen to grow.

The way that we happen to grow for our excellence is to be able to make rational, informed choices in a way that animals can't. But I think Foot really wants to seriously consider what that actually means. That this raises the whole set of objections against teleology which seems to center it on as you know, Nietzsche Gets this criticism perhaps legitimately a very self interested, self centered, like well that's not moral. That's not what would make somebody good morally. The best person morally is the saint. Is somebody that does everything for other people, is somebody that can set aside the common failings that we have.

But she wants to take those objections seriously, but still argue that no, actually the human goodness is the analogy between moral types of goodness and non moral types of goodness is a strong one that if somebody is. I like the response if somebody's rude to me or to at least I think this. And I kind of want to like what is wrong with you? Like who hurt you? Who made you the kind of obnoxious person that thinks that what you just did to me is a normal thing to do in a public space. And I think that's entirely in the spirit of her arguments.

16:53 Wes: Yeah, I mean I think in this first chapter she's kind of foreshadowing where she's going with the concept of practical rationality that is not connected as non-cognitivists think to individual desires or attitudes. So this is what you know. And she'll say where non cognitivists try to account for the action guiding character of moral judgments via attitudes. Right. Just in the way that Hume did what she calls practical rationality can do that. Even though traditionally practical rationality. Right. Has been associated with hypothetical imperatives and desires.

Right. I desire this rationally. I've rationally, I know that if I'm hungry for the sandwich and it's in the fridge, I gotta go to the fridge and take the sandwich out and put it in my mouth to satisfy my hunger. That's practical rationality on the traditional account. And it only gets off the ground if you have some goal or end state that you desire. Otherwise doesn't get off the ground. But she wants to get us used to this idea that we can have reasons to act which are not simply a means to fulfilling our desires. They could be reasons to act that follow from this, you know, natural facts about goodness as she's gonna say.

So she lays out a little bit of this concept of practical rationality in the first chapter.

18:17 Seth: There's another way she puts it in the chapter when she's talking about practical rationality is she says, you know, the traditional following. Hume relies on the idea that we're self interested rational actors. And so ultimately what you're saying when you. I just want to use it slightly different language so we don't get hung up on the word desire, but that she's trying to say you can explain morality, moral choices and so on without recourse to an individual actor's self interest, I think is another way to say it in there.

18:57 Wes: There are always two elements, and this comes from Hume, desire and self interest. And they're not the same thing. And because Hume wants to say everything is related to desire, but he's against the idea that it's all simply related to self interest. He's an anti egoist, but he's into the desire theory. So we can have fundamentally other regarding sentiments, but they are. So they are plugged into our desires, but they are not necessarily self interested. Just wanted to make that clarification. That's why she includes both those categories in her account.

19:30 Mark: Yeah, I like sentiment a little better than desire because in some of our moral judgments, it doesn't translate exactly into our acting to attain that thing or acting to, you know, having any desire whatsoever regarding it. It's just that we approve of it.

19:44 Wes: The word she's using is attitude. You know, we could keep that, but I was just using desire to be a little bit more concrete for listeners. But yeah, attitude as in something. Or sentiment as in something related to desire, self interest or some other quote, unquote passion. To go back to the Humean terminology,

20:01 Mark: just to put this in the context of her corpus. So she passed away in 2010, I saw, and this is kind of her magnum opus, I believe, because she had never. She published a lot of articles going all the way back to 1959 is her first really famous one, but hadn't written a whole book before. So I think this is the attempt to sort of synthesize a lot of different things that she'd written about. She has this 1972 article, Hypothetical Imperatives, that she refers to several times, and she kind of rips on it as, oh, I was too much of a human back then.

I actually read that article and I thought it was very on point. I thought it was very illustrative. Right. The fact that we're talking about imperatives, most of this reading, natural goodness sounds like Aristotle and she's playing in the general area that Aristotle laid out. But as soon as you're talking about practical reason, of course, Kant comes to mind for me. And so that's the focus of Hypothetical Imperatives article is arguing that, like Kant was wrong, that it doesn't have to be that we just have no reasons at all that I would just.

When you do something for morality, then the only reason is just for morality's sake, for duty's sake. That that is the only legitimate reason and any other reason, any self regarding or, or just situational reason, anything that comes from the empirical world that would you would cite, well, that's impure, that's distillation of that is a merely hypothetical imperative. And I think we could see these teleological views as still basically hypothetical imperatives. Right. If you want to be a good example of your type of creature, then this is what you should do.

It's just that we don't have to ask that question. If you want to be, it is built into you. It is your nature to already want to do that, to already be responsive to reasons relevant to that. So that if certainly if somebody asks you why should I bother to be healthy? Like well, only a sick person would ask that question according to Nietzsche. But the thing that again Foot wants to take on very straight is well, there is still the question, okay, you describe what goodness is to me, why should I bother to pursue that? And it is true that the sort of specifically moral virtues get balanced against all these other considerations when we are coming up with reasons for doing something.

But just the fact that we're coming up with reasons and moral reasons can be among them. I think it means there's not this sharp distinction that Kant made between well, there's the if then reasoning, the actual practical reasoning versus well, you just have to do this, which is what morality is for him.

22:40 Wes: Yeah. I mean just to be clear with Kant, right. To do something out of duty, it just means that it's inherent in willing itself, that certain things follow from willing itself at risk of self contradiction.

22:54 Mark: Yeah.

22:54 Wes: And so it would be irrational ultimately. Yeah. Not to do a thing because you'd be essentially contradicting yourself if you did it. Right. Like lying. The self contradiction lies in imagining society in which everyone lies. And then lying doesn't make any sense because you can't, it doesn't do you any good. So it's really all about. It's a pretty ingenious account to retrieve some role for rationality and morality.

23:20 Mark: Right.

23:20 Wes: Because all the other stuff that Hume was attacking, right. Oh, there's a principle out there and you know you're in accord with the principle or something like that is very puzzling. It's not an effective way to try to get rationality into the picture. I think if you say morality is a system of hypothetical imperatives, you just going back to Hume and maybe you don't go so far as the non-cognitivists, as the expressivists, that's debatable. But I don't think you have something much different from a Humean account, which is now. Right. Which is where she was in her hypothetical imperatives article. And now she wants to argue in the opposite direction. So do we want to finish your account in the first chapter? Just the laying the groundwork.

24:04 Mark: Sure. This was the most difficult part of it because it was reacting to all these contemporary philosophers, right, the prescriptivists that we didn't read and sort of making some subtle points. Whereas then once she, you know, it's called a fresh start. Once she brushes that away, than what she tries to build in terms of like, well, let's just talk about biology for a whole chapter and then let's say, you know, ask about how the move from animals and plants to people. Does that actually work? Where do they like? All that was very clear. But yes, sure, go ahead. We'll pursue her own ordering here to see.

24:42 Wes: Yeah, so it's on page nine to 10 and I think we've covered this pretty well that she talks about her own previous flirtation is not the right word, I guess, but because she probably held this view for a long time, but the fact that she previously held this view that to be action guiding moral judgments must be related to attitudes, which means, again, broadly speaking, desire or self interest. Now she thinks it's a mistake and then it's in, I think page 10 to 11 where we start to get some of the complexity because she wants to say that basically that practical rationality is not something that can just be independent of morality.

My desire is to achieve vengeance and therefore I'm going to go out and kill someone. That's just as good an application of practical rationality as I want to help people. So I'm going to go do another thing, right? I just have different desires. Some are good desires, some are evil desires. But practical rationality applies in each case, pages 10 to 11, she's going to introduce us to the idea that actually a goodwill is somehow going to be a condition of practical rationality itself. So even if you are good at being a thief, you know a lot about being a thief.

You know all the techniques, you know all the hypothetical imperatives. It's like the Thief's Hypothetical Imperative Guidebook. You've read it all. That doesn't mean you have good practical rationality relative to your desire to rob. Because practical rationality cannot be detached from the concept of a goodwill. And having a goodwill is foundational to practical rationality. Now this is, I think it's a bit confusing because at this point she's only going to tell us these things without really arguing for them. But yeah, here she says goodness of choice and the will is prior to and the ultimate criterion of practical rationality.

26:39 Mark: Right. I think we can give away some of the details that she eventually leads us to. That there's the sort of all things considered, what should I do? And it's not the case, as Kant would say, that the moral always wins out over every other consideration. She gives an example of I'm feeling sick, I should stay in bed. Like that's not a moral imperative, that's just a prudential imperative. But there's some thing that I promised to do. I will be breaking my word if I don't get out and do it.

27:14 Wes: Well, I wouldn't use the breaking the word example because you're importing morality into that. It's. I need to put deposit something in my.

27:21 Mark: It's. This is a variation on this she gives a little later. Yes, there's a. Considered different conflicting practical things. But yeah, she eventually argues that it can be the case that we are justified in overruling morality with non moral considerations. And that's just part of practical morality and that there's nothing wrong with that. That it's. It's one whole system that if we are that I think as Aristotle described, that it is how well we function in the world and our goodness that is being evaluated. Just like the tree's roots is the capacity of our will.

Do we do the thing that, you know, a wise person in this situation with a lot of relevant experience would choose to do. And that, that ultimately is not that. She's just saying that's what we should call moral. Because she recognizes like there's a tradition of separating moral and prudential. But she wants to. Her ultimate vision is going to be to shove those together. So it's very un-Kantian. Even though you've been describing in a very Kantian way in many respects.

28:29 Seth: Yeah.

28:29 Wes: I think another way to foreshadow this, where she gets us by the end of chapter four, is to say that I think we're going to think of practical rationality as one among the virtues, which is to say one among the kinds of capacities that are analogous to roots and plants, such that there's a natural fact about what practical rationality looks like. If it's healthy versus unhealthy, let's just use that language. Or if it's, you know, it's functioning well enough. So not functioning well. And that includes. Yeah, both These, it includes considerations relative to self interest, it includes considerations relative to desire to other interest.

But it also just includes certain considerations just by virtue of the nature of the kinds of beings that we are. We're the kinds of beings who make promises, for instance. That's part of our practical rationality to take that sort of thing into account. We'll get into that in more detail but I just thought if we're foreshadowing. Yeah. Where she's going. But it is, I think it's helpful to foreshadow here because it is this, this first chapter I think is quite confusing. You know, before we start getting the fuller account of what she's on to.

29:50 Mark: I'm not sure if we've explicitly talked about. So page nine she's saying, right, the really good thing about Hume as opposed to Kant is this the pre. Well maybe it's concubine is the practicality requirement. So the whole reason she's doing is that there needs to be a built in motive to recognizing something is good to doing it. That merely saying there is a fittingness to the gratitude and beneficence that doesn't actually tell us well you should actually go do that. It doesn't give us the motivation to do that. But if we are engaged in practical reasoning, well that's all about coming up with reasons to do stuff.

30:31 Wes: Yeah. And I think this is something we forget about. You know, over the years I think, you know, we've of course used the word practical to refer to the side of philosophy that deals with ethics and theoretical. Right to deal with metaphysics and epistemology and philosophy of science, things like that. But it, I think we forget that practical. Yeah. What does practical mean? It doesn't mean what we mean in everyday life which is that it would be impractical to do this and practical to do that. It, it means, and you know, Hume is sort of the ancestor for all this.

It means that we're talking about action guiding reasons. We're talking about reasons that can lead us not just to believe things as on the theoretical side, but reasons that can actually lead us to do things. And Hume's claim is reasons to do things must ultimately boil down to something with an attitudinal or conative state. We're not going to be moved simply by facts, by beliefs about facts. And again this is what the thing that she's going to challenge.

31:39 Mark: Her reasons are never in themselves self motivating. We have to want the thing that the reason. But she says like you could still say I want to do the reasonable thing. But you're just restating it in terms of I recognize the reason and it motivates me. It's not about I'm reacting to my want. Yes, you seem to really like that aspect of Hume. What do you think of her tossing that away?

32:01 Seth: Well, I guess given that she's trying to expand the notion of the types of reasons that can be considered in a moral judgment. So first of all you can take into consideration things which are not simply self interest like the greater good or whatever. And then you can also, you know, she wants to be able to say you can do something that you don't want to do. You can be motivated in a certain sense against the self interested reason or something like that. And so she's trying I think to give account of maybe more complex or you know, corner, not even corner cases like, because I do get the sense that she just thinks that the notion that morality is all and only about practical reason with respect to self interested beliefs, it's just too narrow and it can't really explain. It's not just that it's wrong, it just, it can't even explain all the phenomena.

33:08 Wes: Well, but Hume is against that point of view as well, right? So Hume argues against this concept itself. Interest is what ultimately guides action because we have lots of other interested sentiments. But also Hume will also say we do things that we don't want to do in some larger sense because so we force ourselves to do things that are in the near term unpleasant, but we do that because we have an idea about some anticipated larger state of pleasure or state of well being or something like that. So Hume can explain doing things you don't want to do.

He can explain doing things that are not in your self interest and still do it with this attitudinal theory or theory of sentiment that Foot wants to discard here. So it's not strictly about performing that chore which Hume has already done. It's about saying that we can have reasons for action that look more like reasons for belief. We can have reasons for action that aren't derivative or in other words that function without inducing attitudes in us desires or whatever that then push us, right. Like to do something like it's not enough to have a belief, but the belief has to somehow interface with us in such a way that it pushes or pulls us in a certain direction, which is where desire or some other attitude comes in.

She's saying we can do without that sentimental structure somehow, which is really kind of baffling and I think this is one of the reasons why I got interested in this book in the Coarse Guard. I'm interested in this alternative idea which I still find quite baffling, that we can be motivated by reasons to act which are not somehow connected to our desires or attitudes, but they can be action guiding. We can say, okay, I see that this is the case, this is the way things are and therefore I should do X without it going through some psychological state that must be used to explain how a belief can put me into a state of action.

Because Hume knows, right, beliefs can put us into a state of action. He just thinks that desires have to interface with them. I see the cake. I know there's a piece of cake there, but I'm not going to go for the cake if there isn't some inherent attitude in me which is cake driven, pushes me towards the cake by itself. The belief in the cake, if there weren't a pre existing desire for things like cake, couldn't pull me towards the cake. Right? Do you get the idea here? This is what's so baffling about it. But there are certain types of beliefs and reasons she's saying that can make us do that, you know, our action guiding somehow without that internal drive.

Or maybe it's an internal drive, but it's a different type of internal drive.

36:02 Seth: Okay, I'm now questioning my entire interpretation of what I read because I'm trying to look back and see, look at my notes and say, okay, I see the part where she says, I now believe that both the self interest theory of rationality and the theory of rationality as desired fulfillment are mistaken. Moreover, there seems to be a mistake of strategy involved in trying to fit the rationality of moral action into either theory. Such a theory, such an enterprise, implying that first we come to a theory of rational action and then try as best as we can to slot in the rationality of acts of justice and charity.

36:39 Wes: You understand what that means? The theory of rational action just means that it's, it doesn't have to be justice or charity. It could be how do I rob or kid and kill someone? And rational action is just about the best way to do that. That's what's rational is the means to the ends. What's rational is to have a nice sharp blade that I can put right into someone's heart. It's practical rationality at work just to make it very, very vivid. But she doesn't like that detachment between practical rationality and morality. And then, you know, because once we say that when okay for rationality is good for all kinds of things, it's good for evil is just as much as it's good for good.

But then, so we start out with this kind of neutral theory of practical rationality, and then we have to try and say, okay, well, why would anyone have morality as a goal then? Because they could just as much use their weapon of practical rationality as evil as for good. And then we're stuck because we don't know how to say why. They would just use it for good. So we kind of have to say goodness is built in there from the ground up and as part of that tool.

37:45 Seth: Okay, so essentially what you're saying is that she's saying if you only rely on moral sentiment, then you can potentially fall into the trap you just described. And so there has to be something deeper. And that's where she says on 11. I want to say baldly that there's no criterion for practical rationality that is not derived from that of the goodness of the will. So really it's like, yeah, sentiment might play a role, but it has to be the sentiment of a good person as opposed to the sentiment of a bad person. Which means ultimately we have to look at what makes a good person and not focus on the sentiment aspect. Yeah.

38:31 Wes: And I don't think she thinks sentiment needs to be the driving force. But I think your interpretation, that's an intriguing option that you just presented, Seth,

38:39 Mark: But I've been trying to determine. I mean, you're taking at her word that she is straight against Hume, sort of on the Kantian side. And I see a lot of Hume because Hume does not fall into the trap of seeing rationality as something that the villain could use to maximize. Because Hume is also not a utilitarian. He's not a consequentialist. He says we could evaluate somebody's will. That is something we evaluate. I think Kant might have run with this element in Hume.

39:06 Wes: Well, I mean, Hume was really. He was read by many people as a utility proto utilitarian.

39:11 Mark: I mean, he uses the principle of utility. And this is something Foot is on the lookout for as well. Because, you know, what makes the trees roots strong? What makes that a virtue? Well, because it is useful in their quest to be a strong, effective version of their type.

39:31 Wes: Well, she's not, but she wants to explicitly reject that idea. It's not just that it's useful for survival. It's that we make these categorical statements about what the species is. Trees have roots and strong roots, and that they, as part of their life cycle, they maintain themselves and they reproduce. And they do this and do that. And individuals are then evaluated against that standard of the Aristotelian categorical about what the species does. And this is a really interesting point that she's making, right? Because we'll say, you know, rabbits hop, but we know that if a rabbit gets injured, it can't hop anymore.

And the thing doesn't cease to be a rabbit. It's just that the rabbit species categories are normative categories. We're saying something about an evolutionary blueprint. Whatever the individuals, however, the individuals fall short. There is some evolutionary blueprint that is responsible for the structure of those individuals or for the. What the structure should have been, right?

40:35 Mark: It's not merely, though, that it's in the blueprint. It is that it contributes in a utilitarian sort of way to the project of what it is to be that creature. So she gives this example of a peacock that they, they have their. The male peacocks have their. Their big tails, and those are important for reproduction. So, like, if a male peacock does not have that kind of tail or has a really shoddy version of that tail, then we say there's something wrong with it. It does not achieve the excellence of a peacock. But also in the genetic blueprint is, like she says, a patch on the back of their head.

Maybe this is a real thing. Maybe she's making this up, I don't know. But if one particular peacock doesn't have that, it's not going to function any less well, but it is deviating from the norm. So just merely deviating from the norm is not enough. There has to be some normativity built into the teleology. And it would be hard pressed not to describe that as utility, right? It's not the benefit of the individual, it's the utility for the project of being that kind of creature.

41:38 Wes: Let me just clarify. So, because she does this explicitly later on, which is to say it's not that it's good to reproduce and stay alive and not go extinct as a species or not die as an individual. It's not, oh, that's a good thing. And therefore the things that serve it are good. It's just that is the thing that species do. And having a, you know, the right tail for that, or the right innate disposition to take care of your young or whatever other virtue or natural quality, you know, the right sorts of roots to stay alive, whatever you have that serves your life cycle is good relative to the life cycle. But we don't want to say that, oh, those are just good consequences that we want, then that's what's guiding our evaluation of the specific biological functions. It's just that's the way that species are at a life cycle level.

42:34 Mark: Right. And she plays with this idea of, well, how do we define what the good roots are? Well, if you were a tree, that would be the kind that you would want.

42:44 Wes: Well, she doesn't like that example. Right.

42:46 Mark: She thinks that's a little silly.

42:48 Wes: Right.

42:48 Mark: But I just wonder if this is already in Hume, that when Hume is talking about utility. It's not just that I'm not sure about this. Right. Is it just that we have moral sentiments that approve of a vast flourishing universe? Or is are our moral sentiments built out of us as the types of creatures that we are and the kind of world that benefits us and makes us thrive and flourish and go forward in that direction? That having a society, having property laws, having all these things he argues on the basis of utility help us. So I think you could interpret him teleologically just as easily as you could interpret him.

I don't think he's explicitly a consequentialist. That's not the way moral sentiments work. Moral sentiments are not just about, oh, we really all like good consequences and thus we approve of any actions and attitudes and types of people that will bring about those good consequences. He is not that he's very much.

43:45 Wes: Yeah, yeah. I mean he's saying, so for instance, we have an interest in justice, we have an interest in the well being and of others and the flourishing of society. And that's built right into us at the level of sentiment. And it's not just because it helps us, but. Right, yeah. Once you get into the whole concept of sentiment, I mean there's a lot of virtue ethics in Hume too. So there is a lot of crossover, I think, as you're pointing out and we could admire between these two, but I think they're different points of view, but they're not easy to disentangle. It's not actually easy to disentangle any of these views as we'll see when we get to Korsgaard. There's significant overlap, it turns out, between the Kantian Hume and Aristotelian position. You can't actually get away from the overlap.

44:28 Mark: But yes, I think for Hume, right, there's lots of. He had whole chapters on things that we admire just because they seem to benefit that individual, not because they bring greater utility to everything. So I could as a human admire the oak and its deep roots and how useful it is to that oak or how well crafted that oak is. It's not about overall utility and isn't it good that oaks exist or anything like that, like the kind of thing that she explicitly argues against. Utilitarianism, I don't think applies to you. Well, let's. Yes, we can talk about this more in part two.

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45:41 Wes: Thank you.

45:42 Seth: Thanks.