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

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 369, part 2. We've been discussing Philippa Foot's book Natural Goodness, and we've given a lot of overview. I think want to dive more more into the actual text and giving quotes and things and not just taking our word for the fact that some of this is confusing. So I think we're still in chapter one here, just about 11 pages in.

0:32 Wes: So I think the next she's going to say that, you know, as we've said, goodness has to be built into practical rationality from the ground up. And she'll make the claim on pages 14 to 15 that no one can act with full practical rationality in pursuit of a bad end, even if they do it really well, right? Even if it's done quote unquote, rationally, like I said with the knife, being good at robbing someone, for instance, and pulling all that off perfectly. So morality, and this is where she says she agrees with Kant, morality is concerned specifically with goodness of the will.

But she wants to ground that in essential features of a specifically human life. And that's what's going to lead us to this analogy with plants and animals, where we can talk about rationality or the will as a characteristic of human beings that we can treat on analogy to Say roots in a plant and we can say whether it's functioning properly or not on that analogy.

1:38 Mark: Right. So even though Kant takes as his, his first step that only morality, all always has to come from a good will, that the goodwill is the defining character, I think we should take goodwill here in more of an Aristotelian sense, a well functioning will. What does that mean for a human being? She does eventually get in chapter five and further, you know, into bringing forward the kind of arguments that we should be all for getting into more of the meat of doing moral theorizing as opposed to metaethics, which I think is what our focus is here, that if you are able to resist temptation, if you're focused according to.

Right. She asked these questions like what would. For Aristotle, a good will would be one that is well informed. It can make decisions because you understand to be a successful human, you have to have the lay of the land. So it's not just like I intend to do the right thing. That's what it seemed like for Kant, this is a much broader notion than that.

2:38 Wes: And specifically she's relating it to the life, what she calls the life of our species, so that, for instance, cooperative institutions such as promise keeping, the life of our species depends on it. Now, that might seem like an odd thing to say because you can think of a version of human social life in which there is no such thing as promise keeping. Right. The nasty, brutish and short existence of a state of nature. But the idea here is that actually wouldn't be fully human. And so there's some sense in which we would critically cease to be what we are. We would cease to be human unless we have these cooperative institutions and more specifically, unless we have a certain kind of will or will which is structured in a certain way.

3:28 Seth: Yeah, I think it's worth just a short digression for the listener who may not take the time to read the text, which I doubt very many do. She refers several times and is quite heavily influenced by Elizabeth Anscombe, an Elizabeth Anscombe paper on promise keeping. And there's a kind of a central question in that paper, which I totally get why it's so important to her. Namely, first of all, as Wes said, the ability to get people to do things for you without having any sway over them is absolutely critical to the functioning of our society. Like it's if you couldn't ask somebody to commit to do something for you and trust that they would eventually do it, as opposed to blackmailing them or holding a gun to their Head or whatever.

But like it's just part of what it is for human society to function as. We have to trust that people will do things that they say they're going to do. And then you know, Anscombe's like, that's really weird. And how does that actually work? Like how do we even. What is the force, so to speak, by which people do what they promise to do when you know they could just as easily not do it. And that has made a big impression on foot because she's like, yeah, you know, promise keeping is in a sense, it's like a moral force. But it's like she's saying it's a consideration maybe that we, some people consider moral, maybe not.

Like it's not strictly speaking, like it's just that morality functions in much the same way that it's something that's absolutely critical to the way that we, for our society to exist. And yet it's just almost like it's a complete mystery about how it actually functions. And so she wants to understand and of course, you know, as we say she's going to come down on the side of like, well, people keep their promises because they're good people, not because they're, it's their duty or they're afraid of this or whatever, you know, like that kind of thing.

But I think that's something just to hold in the back of your head. It's like what a complete mystery it is every time you get in the fucking car and you drive. You are trusting hundreds of strangers to keep promises like stop at red lights and do things like that. And it's just a major shock that every day isn't just a massive chaos and that people dying and getting hurt everywhere.

5:50 Wes: To me anyway, and beyond that it goes even deeper because it's not just that it would be inconvenient or even deadly, but it's just we need that environment the way plants need water. You know, we would cease to be fully human outside of an environment. This promise keeping environment. If you think of all the implications, the social implications of the promise keeping not existing, we couldn't be the species that we are in the absence of it.

6:21 Mark: There's an example that she brings up a few times about promise keeping that I found Rich. This somebody's traveling in Africa or something and has this native guide and is an academic is researching his people, the, the guide's people. But they have this belief that if you take a picture of me then it will steal my soul or something to that effect. And so There's a point at which the guide is asleep, and the guide, he could just easily take his picture. The guide would never know. But he has promised this guide not to do it, and he does not do it.

And so the question is, if we just needed promise keeping for the purposes of utility, because society needs, as you were just describing, Seth needs this to get along well, in this particular case, it would not harm the institutional promise keeping at all, and it would not annoy anyone. The guy would not even know it. So there was, you know, what are the other considerations? Well, I made a pro, you know, I want to treat this person with integrity. I don't want to violate this trust that if I was walking around, you know, having violated their directives, this would make the relationship more difficult.

But Foot actually raises the idea of like, but this person is also an academic, and there's a certain excellence and obligations that come out of being an academic. And actually maybe, you know, you don't have to just go along with what everybody asks you or if they make you make promises that don't make sense or something. So I think Foot actually leaves it open. Should you have done this? But I think it's a really good question. You know, I think this whole promise keeping discussion is very much. Hume had a similar thing that if you think it's based just on utility, then shouldn't you violate it whenever it would be of greater utility to violate it?

And even Hume seems to say no.

8:07 Wes: You know, I think in the end she comes down on against the taking of the photograph because, and this is around pages 46 or really 47, she gets into this. And the reason why she brings up this anthropologist argument is she wants to reject the idea that her position can somehow be reduced to utilitarianism. And as you pointed out, Mark, there's no negative utilitarian consequences to actually taking the picture. And it wouldn't, you know, it's not like it would undermine the institution of promise keeping if one wanted to get that abstract. And this is after she's, you know, she's brought up the objection that, well, maybe, you know, this is a love of truth is a virtue, and this would contribute to anthropological knowledge.

So why couldn't he take the picture anyway? And she'll say, promise keeping is special. Why is it special? Page 51, quote. In giving a promise, one makes use of a special kind of tool invented by humans for the better conduct of their lives, creating an obligation that, although not absolute, contains in its nature an obligation that harmlessness does not Annul so that we can't simply get out of promises by saying it's not going to hurt anyone. And then she compares it to this whole idea of the Aristotelian categoricals related to life cycles, right?

So you can say oaks have certain types of roots or mammals take care of their young or make these generalizations about what generalizations about what proper members of the species actually do and then compare individuals against that standard. And what you can say about human beings, this is still on page 51, is that humans establish rules of conduct and recognize rights. This is now, you know, she realizes that she's gotten, strictly speaking, beyond something that we might say call life cycle related, because human beings biologically aren't going to perish or stop reproducing if they don't have rules of conduct and recognize rights.

But the thing that's going to vanish again to make this point, is the particular social configuration that we have as a species. We would still be biologically the same, but we, in a way, we wouldn't be the same species. So there's this social element to it. The other idea that she appeals to earlier in this argument is just that the goodness of the disposition itself is important, right. So in the particular, in the case of the anthropologist, if he takes that picture, he undermines the disposition itself to be a promise keeper.

10:42 Seth: So this example, and I'm glad you brought it up, Mark, because I think it actually does kind of crystallize. Like it's one of those trolley problem type situations where it really does crystallize.

10:54 Mark: We didn't say foot invented the trolley problem. We should have said that in the first five minutes.

10:59 Seth: Yes, yes, but it's sort of, I think I mentioned in Slack before we came on that I like had questions and I'm trying, I'm struggling with this after the first part. Wes has made me think that I have no understanding of the text or the issues. But she's given us the example of the oak tree, which we point out, and she also talks about the wolves and you know, and now we're on to human beings. So a big part of her argument is she's saying, you know, I want to say that statements about moral goodness in human beings or goodness in human beings, I guess, are similar in form and structure to statements about goodness in vegetation, flora and fauna.

We'll say. And she says, and it's not just formal structure in which they're the same, but there is just in the same way that we can associate a species norm, an aristotelian categorical for different species of plants and animals, we can do something similar with human beings. And she says, well, wait a second. The objection is going to be, aren't human beings different? Right. Isn't consciousness somehow, doesn't something make us different? Right? And so we're different because we don't have a species norm. And then there's the difference of that.

We can ask the question, why? Why? So should we do that?

12:25 Wes: Can I interject an example here, please? It might be a defect if we can't have children, since that's part of the capacity of our species. But if we choose not to have children, that's a human thing. That's not necessarily a defect. We make those types of choices. So this is one example where we're different from the animals, right?

12:45 Seth: In essence, as I put it in my notes, we can opt out of the species norms. In many cases, when you talk about the species norm and the excellence of the oak, you can do it without reference to any other oaks. You just say, what makes a single oak excellent is X, Y and Z. And then when you talk about animals, or at least like pack animals, you know, it's like, okay, well, the excellence of the wolf, or the goodness of the wolf is somehow predicated on the way that the wolf interacts with other wolves. In the case of human beings, the goodness of the human being is 100%, not 100%, but is very much a function of its interaction with other human beings.

And so when you think about wolf to wolf from her perspective, from the perspective of this naturalistic view of the world, right? All wolves have essentially the same telos. They're monotonous, or it's a monolithic type of character that a wolf, what makes a. A good wolf has those monotonous wolves.

13:51 Mark: I hate listening.

13:52 Seth: Sorry, I kept, I, I. Monolithic, Monolithic, monolithic. I kept struggling with. Anyway, when it comes to human beings, if you think about the moral world of human beings as being a function between its individual human beings, we are not monolithic. We're heterogeneous or not monogeneous. I don't know what the right term is, but we're heterogeneous, right? And so if you were to talk about a human being in a single sense, like the excellence of the human being as a weightlifter or a spear fisher or a chess player, then the analogy to the animals makes a lot more sense or it seems a lot more formally mapped. But when you start talking about the excellence, there's. If the species norm of the Human being is not norm.

14:40 Wes: Well, it's the species norm is that we make choices, right? It's something about our will. But then that opens up all this diversity. I think I'm just rephrasing. What you're saying is it's this weird thing where our species norm is sort of not norm. It allows us to transcend species norm. It just is a feature of our species to have this enormous variety of norms, or at least to be able to choose. Maybe I'm putting it the wrong way, but you know what I mean, the will sort of opens things up. So saying something about the roots, okay, good roots are this way, bad roots are that way. Once I start talking about the will, I'm getting into much different territory.

15:21 Mark: So around page 43, she's talking about. She brings up these prisoners dilemma scenarios that the sort of like the wolves have to cooperate. There are lots of things to maximize our goodness. We have to do things not just where we are contributing, but we are reciprocally contributing. So playing our part in a system is part. Including could be a special role. She even talks about genius, and it might be. You know, this is an interesting sort of inversion on Nietzsche. Nietzsche is all just like, the genius needs to break out from the herd. But she actually emphasized it could be that part of our social responsibility is to recognize when somebody else is in a special role, is a genius, and support them to do that.

That that could be your contribution to that. I don't know if Nietzsche specifically says, oh, yeah, and the rest of you should all gather around the genius, though. He's only talking to the geniuses.

16:15 Wes: So if you'd like to do that, go to partiallyexaminelife.com.

16:22 Mark: REDIRECTTOGENIUSES if they introduce that URL redirect

16:26 Wes: to an entirely different website where there are geniuses. Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. So she does want to stay on that same page. There are these fundamental capacities we have that if we were without them, we'd be in trouble. And so there are, you know, there are lots of things we can point to that are universal, right? Mental capacities required to speak, to use language, for instance. But it's there. It's right after that she makes the transition into morality. And then that gets us into the thorny issue of the will. And I think maybe that's our segue to chapter four if we want to go there, because then we can get into this issue of practical rationality.

In other words, this kind of leads into the fact that because we have a will because we make choices, whatever our species norm is, as Seth was pointing out. Well, don't we always come back to this question, why should I care? Why should I care about being good or fitting in with my species norm? Which she wants to reformulate. She wants to say, let's not think about it as whether we have a reason to be good, but whether we have a reason to, quote, aim at those things at which a good human being must aim. So that's the way we're starting off chapter four with this standard rebuttal that a human might want to give us.

17:46 Mark: Yeah, I liked that we got far enough in the text to get here because after this kind of difficult chapter one that was bringing up practical rationality, then reverting to this, doesn't everything. Can't we just recognize good as telos, just like Aristotle did? And doesn't this apply to people? You know, so those are the two chapters two and three. First on animals and plants, Natural Norms is the name of that chapter. And then transition to human beings. That was all. There were a few good points made in there, but it was a little like, this is what we're doing.

18:19 Seth: This is.

18:20 Mark: But okay, now chapter four, we're reintroducing the. What was challenging about chapter one here and taking on that difficult question that you just posed.

18:29 Wes: And then that leads her into what does it mean to be a rational animal? This is on 53 and 54. So that just means to say we can act based on reasons. And that might be confusing because there is a way, of course, in which animals do seem to act on reasons. If the cat food is in front of my cat, she has a reason to go to it and eat it because she wants it. And if I put it out of her way, you know, if she needs to figure out how to get to it because I've put it up high or something like that, she can do some kind of means, ends, reasoning. You know, we saw this with Tom and Tomasello as well. The distinction she wants to make is to say. Is to appeal to Aquinas.

19:13 Mark: Your cat. You're still talking about appeals to Aquinas.

19:15 Wes: Sorry, yeah, she does it all the time. It's a weird cat. She's species abnormal. But yeah. So Aquinas will say, well, yeah, animals have repetitive inclinations, and they do have ends, and they do use means, but they can't comprehend them under the concept of ends and means, which. And then Foot will take this kind of Wittgensteinian term. And that's not to say that there's not that there's some kind of introspectively mental thing that, that we have that allows us to comprehend ends and means in this special way. It's just that we can use language.

She wants to think about it in terms of language use. So in other words, animals and small children can't speak about what they're about to do, about what they're going to go after. They can't debate their choices in terms of pros and cons. They can't engage in these language games related to action. So that's her way of describing our unique rational capacities and how they relate to action.

20:15 Mark: Yeah, I can't believe we've gone this long without bringing up the Wittgensteinian roots of this. That folks that listen to our Anscombe article episode would know that Anscombe was very like, you know, worked directly with Wittgenstein, who called her old man. And so she's the primary influence here on Foot talks about him in a number of places as well. So yeah, we get a little of the private language argument considerations here that we. That there needs the inner stands in need of public criteria. We should ask about the surroundings in which human awareness of ends as ends could be found. Looking, of course, as speech as well as action.

20:54 Wes: Yeah. And again, this is language about, hey, this is what I'm going to do or should I do it? If I do it, this will happen, if I don't, this will happen. What are the pros, what are the cons? I can. Now we know again. Tomasello, right? Remember the squirrel on the tree? The squirrel is trying to make a decision whether to jump to the other tree or go down and up based on predator considerations. Do you guys remember this? Squirrels do this decision making thing and you can see them looking, you know, like I've seen my cat do it too. You can see them looking in one direction, looking at another.

Should I do this? Should I do this? Right. But again, with human beings, there's something significant about our ability to communicate it to others. And even if there's no one around, it's still a fantasy of some other being involved that we're communicating with. I think that's what this whole public criterion comes down to.

21:49 Seth: So there's an interesting passage on page 56. She says human beings not only have the power to reason about all sorts of things in a speculative way, but also the power to see grounds. This is italicized for acting in one way rather than another. And if told that they should do one thing rather than another, they can ask why they should. So she's talking about, so if somebody's not doing something they should be doing, when doing that thing is the only rational thing to do, then she says ipso facto, that person, the actions ipso facto defective.

It does not really matter whether we say he acts irrationally or rather say acts in a way that is contrary to practical rationality. In either case, it's implied that he does not act. Well, so let's just hone in for a second on that language of grounds because it feels like she's trying to. This is her counter to the theory of moral sentiments, that what the demands of practical rationality, if you will, are that you think about, discover or concoct grounds for actions and then weigh those grounds against each other, presumably in the process of making choices about how to act.

And if you were to not use that, just act willy nilly. That's one thing. If you use all that, you discover the correct grounds, or the grounds are that you should do X and instead you do Y. Right. Then you have bad faith or something like that, or you're a bad character. But the point is she's trying not to use a language here of urging or motivation, or she doesn't want to say that you have to be compelled. And I wonder if we haven't just ended back up where we started with Hume, where Hume saying this is a very fancy way of talking about reason, but why should you be compelled to act one way versus another without some kind of sentiment?

24:05 Wes: Yeah, this is going to be your transition to something we've touched on, Mark, touched on before, which is this concept of all things considered or final shoulds. But here, this transitional point that you're stage that you're pointing to. Seth she wants to get at the idea that animals too can go for good things, but they can't understand them as such. And they can be conflicted. I described the case of my cat or the squirrel being conflicted about what to do. But they can't talk to themselves about that conflict and they can't make a decision, say, okay, this is the right thing to do, but I'm going to do the other thing.

Like human beings, can you look at the cake? It's not the right thing to eat it, but eat it anyway. So that kind of conception of Aristotelian incontinence is just not even applicable to animals, which is a really interesting way of making this distinction. We can grasp that we have a reason for acting, even if we're not going to be moved to act on that reason. And the question here at this transitional stage is, okay, well maybe, you know, even when we see a reason for acting, we always, you know, we have this further, this kind of Moorean thing where we can always ask why?

Why should I do that? And even if I see that it's good, I could ask why should I do it? And that's going to launch her into, in a way, this ends up seeming like a counter argument against her idea of natural goodness. And that's the way she ends. 56 to 57. You know, should this lead us to dismiss this idea that we, you know, coming back to this question, why should we do X? Should lead us to dismiss the idea of natural goodness in human beings? And that, that's where she says, well, no, let's explore the concept of practical rationality. I can tell you how, if we think about practical rationality properly, natural goodness is still relevant.

26:02 Mark: You're making me realize that I don't know if Moore himself addresses the issue of practical rationality, because the way that his the query goes is once you've identified the good in any theory or any given situation, as with descriptive terminology like this, action you are contemplating will help a lot of people and hurt very few people. You could still ask, but is helping lots of people and hurting people good? Just the fact that that is a sensible question. I mean, yeah, of course you want to say yes, but the fact that it's a sensible question means that it's conceptually different than whatever the description you've given.

So that it must be a sui generis category of thing that we just recognize by its very goodness. And not because we can put it in a utilitarian or any other kind of formula. But once you recognize that there is this non natural property of goodness, what makes you. Is it just defined by. Well, that is the kind that makes you recognize that you should do it. Like he still seems to face the human problem that she's trying to address here by talking about practical rationality.

27:12 Wes: Yeah, I mean, we should just, just reprise, right. The open question argument that Moore makes is he wants to say we can't identify morality with a set of. With any given natural property. Because if we did, then we could always ask the question is it good or is it? Or we could still ask the question why should we do that? But he thinks that calling it a non natural good and non natural property somehow brings that to a terminus, let's say. All right, maybe I don't think that's. That explanation is actually going to be that helpful? Helpful to listeners?

27:46 Mark: No, I think that's good, but it's the. Does he actually address? Is it interchangeable? Is that good? And should I do that? Because that's exactly the gap that she's trying to bridge here. All right, but I'll stop talking about things that we read 15 years ago.

28:03 Wes: Yeah. So, I mean, this is where she. Her exploration of practical rationality. She gets into it with thinking about saying that our shoulds or our oughts are always relative to these considerations. So I should go out because I need to deposit this money in the bank and not have an overdraft, but I should stay in because I'm sick. Those are. Shoulds are relative to such considerations. But ultimately we have to make a decision. There's not some kind of logical contradiction. And this is something I think she says, Davidson points out, because they're just relevant to these different considerations. But ultimately we can have an ultimate reason for doing one thing or another. Right. So if my temperature is 103 degrees, it would be the rational thing to stay in, even if it means I'm going to have an overdraft. And this is what she calls an all things considered should or a final should.

29:01 Seth: A consideration. There is. You're taking into account a lot of different things, as she, you know, we talked about on the first episode, that she thinks considerations about moral judgments. Right. Are of a kind of considerations about other sorts of things. So, you know, you're like, okay, my fever is 103 or 102 or something like that, and I'm probably contagious, but I don't want to pay the fee and I have to go deposit this money, you know, but if I go, I'll probably get other people sick and I might make myself worse right there. If you think about all those different considerations, me doing something that might make me get sick and not help my healing isn't really a moral.

You know, it's not necessarily speaking a moral issue. Getting other people sick could be considered, might be a negligence thing, but, you know, could be considered a moral thing. You know, having to pay a fee because my account is overdrafted is not a moral issue. And so. But her point is, the mechanism of moral reasoning is taking into account all types of grounds for acting one way or another and then ultimately settling on a ground and acting according to it.

30:25 Wes: Yeah, I mean, we're talking about the domain of practical rationality, which she ultimately wants to say morality is necessarily a part of it, but she's not using a specifically moral example. I mean, there could moral considerations could come into it. But it's helpful to have an example which isn't necessarily about morality. It's just about this ordinary everyday conflict. Because ultimately what she wants to do is she wants to make a conclusion about the nature of practical rationality, which is that once you get to a final should, in other words, once you take into consideration everything that you need to take into consideration and you come to a conclusion about what you should do, if you don't act on that, then you are quote unquote, and this is on page 59, I think, still ipso facto defective.

The word defective comes up a lot in this book, which may be a problem for some people. But there's something defective about your practical rationality. And if you're not acting on the final should, the all things considered should in the same way that there's something defective about the roots if they're not deep and sturdy and so on and so forth.

31:39 Mark: So I'm hoping that. I know Seth had that Wes read the whole book. And Seth, you expressed some interest. Chapter four ends up a little bit of a cliffhanger here. Such that I then, even though I didn't think I was going to be able to do this, did read into chapter five. And there's things that are coming to mind that maybe we can have a supporter. Only part three, where the three of us get back together and talk through a little more of this book. Just a few points I feel like we have to make in the main episode from there, she recognizes throughout how, yes, we make this distinction between the merely prudential and the moral, which probably has to do with interpersonal stuff, right?

Helping other people. But maybe we should see these. Seth, you were just saying. Well, they're actually of the same type. Maybe we should see them as different concepts, but different Wittgensteinian concepts so that they blend into each other and they're different in some ways and not different in other ways. She says on page 68, moral and prudential considerations are generally by ethical philosophers, are contrasted in a way that is alien to Plato or Aristotle. Right. It's not that. Maybe we should. Part of this return to telos, return to virtue ethics is that we should recognize that they're not.

We should stop making morality into this special little area that's carved off from everything else and that overwhelms everything else. She's absolutely going to agree that like a skillful thief, a very intelligent and strong gangster like these cannot Be good people, all things considered. But we've had this model already where you can have relative reasons for doing something. She says you could fail in multiple ways. She brings up this example a couple times of a thief that was caught because after he was stealing the goods, he sat down to watch TV in the person's house.

So this person is like faulty in two ways. One, you should not be a thief, but you should also not be a dumb thief. So there's non moral relative, so we can assign some value. You can say there is a relative reason for getting away clean with the goods. It's just that all things consider, well, you shouldn't be be in that situation at all. You should not be robbing someone in their house.

33:52 Wes: Yeah, the way this chapter ends, and I guess I've said this before, but I'll try to go into a little bit more detail this time, there's something about goodness which is inherently a part of practical rationality. So we can't just say that we're acting rationally if we do something wrong right relative to some illicit end, even if we pull it off perfectly. So the way this chapter ends, she wants to reject the idea that desires and or interests are what give practical rationality their connection to action. She calls it seductive. But she thinks we can have reasons for action that don't involve desires.

And so how do we do that? And this is where we get to around page 62 and it's a little confusing, but she appeals to this idea that practical rationality would cease to be quote unquote important. She uses this word and she's quoting someone else, but it would cease to be important if it were indifferent to the nastiness, to use her word of an agent's purposes. So goodness in a way is a necessary condition of practical rationality. I think at this stage it's a little bit, I call this slippery or it's still a bit hard for me to understand. But one way of thinking about it, you might say, well, someone can always ask this question, well, why should I do it?

You say, it's good for me, or it's relative to my species norm, but still, why, why should I do it anyway? I don't want to do it. But one can. You can always turn that question around. You can always, you know, if someone says I'm doing it because I desire to do it, one can always say, well, why should a desire to do something be a reason for doing something? Or why should it be the final reason for doing something? I'm thinking out loud. I don't know if that's actually helpful, but there seems to be a bit of the flavor of that way this chapter ends.

So in any case, she wants to say there's an intrinsic link between our recognition of facts about human beings and our reasons for acting. We can know certain things about human beings generally and then have a reason to act based on that knowledge, not just based on what we want to do.

36:15 Mark: Right. And what's going to make us good at this is phronesis is that practical wisdom from Aristotle that we have to navigate these competing concerns. And the other point which I just because I mentioned this earlier from chapter five that I want to throw in is the. That the ones that are traditionally she attributes this to Mill, but that says morality is only about intersubjective stuff. It's only about treating other people nice duties toward yourself. It might be stupid, self destructive, but we can't say it's immoral. And if you're making that distinction, it's not the case that the moral duties should always win out.

If you're a wise person, if you have good phronesis, you are going to balance these things against each other. And, and so. Right. This is where she gives the variation of that situation of I'm sick, should I overdraw my bank account by staying in and caring for my sickness or should I go to the bank and put money in it? And you know, those are both non moral things, but it could be and you sort of added some moral content. Seth. What? You know, if I go out I might infect other people. There's. Or maybe the thing that I have to do is not just care for my own bank account but is to fulfill a promise, do something that I.

It's just not the case as we would all recognize if we sit down and you know that we think that recognizing a moral duty in one situation but not in another means that the moral one always wins. And it's not just a matter of like well I'm choosing to be immoral in this case. No, it's a perfectly legitimate thing to serve your prudential interests, not make yourself sicker even at the expense of moral considerations in some cases. And that's just the nature of phronesis that we can't in advance necessarily spell out what all those considerations are that this is going to be a virtue ethics and not a, you know, a rule based ethics.

You could give rules of thumb for how to navigate these situations but ultimately, you know, it's just a matter to Reflect with our various sentiments on them. What do we think is too much, too little?

38:16 Seth: So I said, you know, when we were getting ready, that I do want to hear more about her positive account. And there are some questions I have that this cliffhanger of chapter four leads me to, since I haven't read her answers. But I think there's a need to hear more before I can be convinced that there's a straight analogy between human beings, animals and plants, where the approach makes the same sense. I do get her point about virtue or character having to underlie all the things. But I wonder if, as Wes said, that the fact that human beings can make choices somehow disrupts.

Maybe it just complicates. Maybe it doesn't disrupt the model. Maybe it just complicates it because basically, in the same circumstance, because if you think about it, the situation, the conditions are really important for making the judgment about whether something is good or not. And there are we in human beings, at least, we talk about degrees. It's not simply black and white that something is good or bad. There can be bad, good and great, that sort of thing. So it feels to me like if it's character dependent, then in a given situation, a given set of circumstances, and you have actor A and actor B in the scene, the morally, the good thing to do might be X.

But in the exact same situation where you substitute C for B but A stays the same, the good thing to do might be Y. So in other words, character dependence is going to impact the grounds for the type of action in any given situation. Maybe that's just a complication, right? But if you're talking about wolves or elephants or anything like that, you're not going to have as much variance because you're not going to have the kind of variance in character. Like, I know that so and so's ultimate aim is to accomplish this task. And I can frustrate that by acting in this way.

And then somebody else comes along and they don't have that same aim, then all the grounds change for what the correct action in the situation is. And ultimately what that makes me question is just the whole role of rationality. Because I just don't think the human beings calculate mentally from a rational perspective all these things before. In other words, I think people act and they don't necessarily act after deliberation like this. So I think that's a question I would like to see her answer. And then I finally am not still not convinced that character isn't somehow dependent on outcomes and utility in the Sense of why do we think it's good for somebody to be charitable or this or that?

Well, because it makes for a pleasant society. It makes for a good this or makes for a good that. You can kind of like character is especially the way Aristotle conceived of it is intimately connected to the social order and not just norms, but goods like group goods, species goods, whatever, city goods, tribe goods.

41:50 Mark: I'm tempted to respond to your. I'm not sure if people act according to deliberation. Well, they should act according to deliberation. But one of the things that was nagging about me throughout this is that if virtue is defined by just not being abnormal, not falling short of the norm, then where is exactly the line, the place for excellence, for exceeding Is she just really come down as sort of an Aristotelian that like well, you might try to do this extra hard to not just not fall short, but to go past the medium. But that's probably just going to make you fall short in a different way.

Right. That would be the Aristotelian that the mean but there's still, you know, Aristotle believes that some people have really good practical rationality and most people don't. Most people are not reason responsive. So these are very familiar dynamics of how do we have something that is teleological which seems like it's merely descriptive. How does the species generally but is really normative. And again I started with MacIntyre as a figure to compare Foot to is another Aristotelian or Neo Aristotelian in the same age. And he brought in this notion of narrative and projects which I think you know, is very familiar also with Nietzsche of what once we have evoked our rationality we are not just reacting to things we're creating.

Then it seems like these, all things considered do depend a lot on the projects that we choose, the goals we choose. And is there room for some goals to be just superior to others? These are just not that there's something fundamentally wrong with her account that she hasn't addressed those and at least in what we read. But it does make me want to kludge this together with MacIntyre or somehow get a more fully formed virtue ethics here instead of just focusing on this meta ethical question, which is interesting in itself, of course. Wes, do you have any other closing thoughts?

43:53 Wes: No.

43:54 Mark: All right. Well, whether or not we do this, Part three, what's going to come out in the public feed next time is as I think Wes indicated, Christine Korsgaard's the Sources of Normativity. The next One. So she's a straight up Kantian, is that right?

44:11 Wes: Yes, but the book in a way, tries to synthesize a bunch of different points of view, including the Humean point of view and a little virtue ethics with Hobbes. With the Kantian. So Hobbes, what she calls voluntarism. So, yeah, think of it as a big gumbo. And in the end, she justifies, she has a lot of modifications to Kant and they depend on Wittgenstein. So there's an extensive thing having to do with the private language argument.

44:39 Mark: Yes. And I know we've sort of haven't yet decided whether we're just going to like with this book, sort of attacklet in one discussion or whether she have such a rich history of ethical thought that maybe sort of doing that for one episode and then doing her stuff for another episode, you know. So we'll see as we get into it. We would like to hear from you now that we've entered into a new realm. What in this area in modern ethics do you feel like, you know, something you took in a class or have read on your own or, you know, think that we're really missing some really rich, important vein. We'd love to hear your recommendations. You can email us be partiallyexaminedlife.com you can comment on the blog posts associated with this episode@PartiallyExaminedLife.com you can reach out to us through Twitter or Facebook or Instagram LinkedIn. Thanks, everybody. Good night, sky bright.

45:29 Seth: Good night.