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Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Friday, March 11, 2011

Is modern moral philosophy still in thrall to religion?

by Massimo Pigliucci
Recently I re-read Richard Taylor’s An Introduction to Virtue Ethics, a classic published by Prometheus that I first encountered a number of years ago. It is unfortunate that one has to constantly get past the author’s obvious and not at all subtle disdain for the common lot, with constant references to how the ancient Greeks thought that real virtue and eudaimonia (the good life, but literally “being possessed by a good demon”) can by necessity only be achieved by the few. Aristotle & co. probably did think that, in which case too bad for Aristotle & co. (I mean, after all, Aristotle also believed that both women and slaves were inferior beings, but no modern author feels obliged to follow the Greek sage there). Unfortunate, because otherwise the book is indeed an excellent introduction to virtue ethics, an approach to moral philosophy that I recognize as my own — with some caveats.
But this post isn’t about virtue ethics per se, it’s about a major point underlying Taylor’s book and which strikes me as potentially fundamentally right, and yet rarely discussed in modern philosophy. Taylor compares virtue ethics to the other two major approaches to moral philosophy: utilitarianism (a la John Stuart Mill) and deontology (a la Immanuel Kant). Utilitarianism, of course, is roughly the idea that ethics has to do with maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain; deontology is the idea that reason can tell us what we ought to do from first principles, as in Kant’s categorical imperative (e.g., something is right if you can agree that it could be elevated to a universally acceptable maxim).
Taylor argues that utilitarianism and deontology — despite being wildly different in a variety of respects — share one common feature: both philosophies assume that there is such a thing as moral right and wrong, and a duty to do right and avoid wrong. But, he says, on the face of it this is nonsensical. Duty isn’t something one can have in the abstract, duty is toward a law or a lawgiver, which begs the question of what could arguably provide us with a universal moral law, or who the lawgiver could possibly be.
His answer is that both utilitarianism and deontology inherited the ideas of right, wrong and duty from Christianity, but endeavored to do without Christianity’s own answers to those questions: the law is given by God and the duty is toward Him. Taylor says that Mill, Kant and the like simply absorbed the Christian concept of morality while rejecting its logical foundation (such as it was). As a result, utilitarians and deontologists alike keep talking about the right thing to do, or the good as if those concepts still make sense once we move to a secular worldview. Utilitarians substituted pain and pleasure for wrong and right respectively, and Kant thought that pure reason can arrive at moral universals. But of course neither utilitarians nor deontologist ever give us a reason why it would be irrational to simply decline to pursue actions that increase global pleasure and diminish global pain, or why it would be irrational for someone not to find the categorical imperative particularly compelling.
The situation — again according to Taylor — is dramatically different for virtue ethics. Yes, there too we find concepts like right and wrong and duty. But, for the ancient Greeks they had completely different meanings, which made perfect sense then and now, if we are not mislead by the use of those words in a different context. For the Greeks, an action was right if it was approved by one’s society, wrong if it wasn’t, and duty was to one’s polis. And they understood perfectly well that what was right (or wrong) in Athens may or may not be right (or wrong) in Sparta. And that an Athenian had a duty to Athens, but not to Sparta, and vice versa for a Spartan.
But wait a minute. Does that mean that Taylor is saying that virtue ethics was founded on moral relativism? That would be an extraordinary claim indeed, and he does not, in fact, make it. His point is a bit more subtle. He suggests that for the ancient Greeks ethics was not (principally) about right, wrong and duty. It was about happiness, understood in the broad sense of eudaimonia, the good or fulfilling life. Aristotle in particular wrote in his Ethics about both aspects: the practical ethics of one’s duty to one’s polis, and the universal (for human beings) concept of ethics as the pursuit of the good life. And make no mistake about it: for Aristotle the first aspect was relatively trivial and understood by everyone, it was the second one that represented the real challenge for the philosopher.
For instance, the Ethics is famous for Aristotle’s list of the virtues (see Table), and his idea that the right thing to do is to steer a middle course between extreme behaviors. But this part of his work, according to Taylor, refers only to the practical ways of being a good Athenian, not to the universal pursuit of eudaimonia.

Vice of Deficiency
Virtuous Mean
Vice of Excess
Cowardice
Courage
Rashness
Insensibility
Temperance
Intemperance
Illiberality
Liberality
Prodigality
Pettiness
Munificence
Vulgarity
Humble-mindedness
High-mindedness
Vaingloriness
Want of Ambition
Right Ambition
Over-ambition
Spiritlessness
Good Temper
Irascibility
Surliness
Friendly Civility
Obsequiousness
Ironical Depreciation
Sincerity
Boastfulness
Boorishness
Wittiness
Buffoonery
Shamelessness
Modesty
Bashfulness
Callousness
Just Resentment
Spitefulness
How, then, is one to embark on the more difficult task of figuring out how to live a good life? For Aristotle eudaimonia meant the best kind of existence that a human being can achieve, which in turns means that we need to ask what it is that makes humans different from all other species, because it is the pursuit of excellence in that something that provides for a eudaimonic life.
Now, Plato - writing before Aristotle - ended up construing the good life somewhat narrowly and in a self-serving fashion. He reckoned that the thing that distinguishes humanity from the rest of the biological world is our ability to use reason, so that is what we should be pursuing as our highest goal in life. And of course nobody is better equipped than a philosopher for such an enterprise... Which reminds me of Bertrand Russell’s quip that “A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress, though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.”
But Aristotle's conception of "reason" was significantly broader, and here is where Taylor’s own update of virtue ethics begins to shine, particularly in Chapter 16 of the book, aptly entitled “Happiness.” Taylor argues that the proper way to understand virtue ethics is as the quest for the use of intelligence in the broadest possible sense, in the sense of creativity applied to all walks of life. He says: “Creative intelligence is exhibited by a dancer, by athletes, by a chess player, and indeed in virtually any activity guided by intelligence [including — but certainly not limited to — philosophy].” He continues: “The exercise of skill in a profession, or in business, or even in such things as gardening and farming, or the rearing of a beautiful family, all such things are displays of creative intelligence.”
So, what we have now is a sharp distinction between utilitarianism and deontology on the one hand and virtue ethics on the other, where the first two are (mistakenly, in Taylor’s assessment) concerned with the impossible question of what is right or wrong, and what our duties are — questions inherited from religion but that in fact make no sense outside of a religious framework. Virtue ethics, instead, focuses on the two things that really matter and to which we can find answers: the practical pursuit of a life within our polis, and the lifelong quest of eudaimonia understood as the best exercise of our creative faculties. I think I can sign up for that.

76 comments:

  1. You write, "Duty isn’t something one can have in the abstract, duty is toward a law or a lawgiver, which begs the question of what could arguably provide us with a universal moral law, or who the lawgiver could possibly be."

    Uhh, don't you mean "raises the question"?

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  2. Bob, it certainly raises the question. But in some sense it begs it because talk of duty *assumes* (or should assume) that there is someone toward whom the duty is directed, even though modern moral theories don't actually tell us who or what that someone is. But I can see why the wording could be confusing.

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  3. “The exercise of skill in a profession, or in business, or even in such things as gardening and farming, or the rearing of a beautiful family, all such things are displays of creative intelligence.”

    So if one's profession is that of assassin or torturer would being the best that you can be still be your duty and eudaimonic? And what about those poor blighters who end up with an ugly family?

    The problem that I see with lots of these philosophies that you laid out there is the problem of frames. It treats the individual more or less as an independent agent and the polis as a collection of independent agents and fails to acknowledge that people are not independent they are in fact heavily interdependent on each other and on their environment. Anyone set down naked and alone in the woods would soon come to that realization.

    With the advent of global trade and communication we now live in an era where local actions can have international consequences (not all do obviously but they can, a lot of that food in your grocery store has come a long way). The frames have gotten a lot bigger than they were in the days of the Greeks. Now you have duties not only to your immediate political/social group, but to your species and to your biosphere as well.

    Optimization of your personal talents (mental, physical and relational) should only be done within the constraint of your part in the larger world and the arc of the human story. If your talents bolster others (or are at the very least neutral to them) then you should by all means exercise them. If they are detrimental then you shouldn't.

    If happiness or pleasure alone were the ultimate goals then we could simply drug everyone or give them an implant that continuously stimulates the pleasure centers of their brains. Then everybody would be happy and full of pleasure. That would likely inhibit their optimization though.

    You are not only part of a bigger picture, but also of a long chain of pictures and unless one of these doomsday scenarios comes to pass there will be many pictures yet to come.

    Let us suppose that against all odds we achieve the goal of everyone being socially and personally optimized in an ecologically optimized world (which for the sake of argument we will say is both sustainable and complex).

    There would still be an open question though and that would be 'where the hell are we going?' To say that there is no goal would be the equivalent of a bunch of classic cars driving around in circles (perfectly of course) rather than to a destination.

    So besides your eudaimonic duties to your group, your species and your biosphere one might very well include your duty to the future and to the overall human story (or to the story of technological intelligence which may or may not include us). Granted that would involve a bit of guesswork, but since your perceptions are inherently incomplete and frequently fallible, your memory leaks like a perforated bladder and your personal biases are well established, you are doing quite a bit of guessing already.

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  4. I don't know if a duty assumes a law giver. We can just define "right" with an utilitarian definition and then also agree that is desirable to follow that path. Maybe you could argue that it is a duty that we impose ourselves, isn't that a mayor part of morality?
    You previously defined ethics in such a way that had to do with human flourishing (can't remember your exact wording). Can't we just define "good actions" as the ones that produces human flourishing and then take it from there?

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  5. Great post! I recently tried to educate myself in regards to virtue ethics by reading "Introduction to virtue ethics : insights of the ancient Greeks" by Raymond Devettere. I found it very helpful to understanding the subject. I might have to check out this book though. I do find something very appealing about virtue ethics though.

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  6. Massimo
    As I did in another recent post of yours, I must express my opinion that philosophical claims about morality are extremely problematic. Not their contents, but the fact that they are regarded as the result of some sort of "professional expertise" of moral philosophers about what is good or what ought to be done.

    As Plato's reasonings were (your words) "self serving", and Aristotle's virtues were (again as per your description) a summary of the virtues of a good Athenian as seen at the time, so are all other attempts to consult your inner self or to formulate some first principles or axioms from which moral statements are logically derived.
    In a previous post I suggested not using one's everyday experiences and whatever the philosopher regards as "morally right", but to consult the scientific account of morality. This should inform us about (1) how humans behave, what humans believe about morals, or which moral principles and norms they judge human actions by, in various times and places; (2) which of these beliefs, norms and principles are peculiar to some cultures, and which are universally upheld by the moral judgment of humans at all places and times. Thus informed, a philosopher may elaborate on some problems about morality not yet grasped by science, in an informed way.

    To this contention you, Massimo, responded in a previous post that this smelled of "scientism", and that I was forgetting that science is also full of values and prejudices. I did not respond at the time (the thread was already too long), but in fact yours is no valid argument.

    First, if science is full of values and assumptions, so are the judgments of philosophers, with the added sin of not having been subjected to the discipline of scientific inquiry. One can hesitate before giving science the badge of "objective knowledge", but that would be more so in the case of non-scientific statements and assumptions (such as those implicit or explicit in Plato or Aristotle). Casual introspection by a middle-class philosopher somewhere in the campus of a US university, or by a slave-owning philosopher in ancient Greece, is certainly worse that a careful account of the various ways of mankind in all walks of life.

    Of course science cannot claim any "absolute" validity: it is just the best for of knowledge we could come up with after millions of years trying to find our way in this world. Its proof, like the pudding's, is in the results, and it has evolved also institutions and practices conducive to self-correction, such as peer review and the protocols of experimental and observational inquiry. My view is that no philosophical discourse on anything can do without the best knowledge available about the same matter: philosophizing about Nature requires taking natural science on board; about morality, the state of scientific knowledge about human morals; philosophizing about science also requires acquaintance with cognitive science and with the scientific study of science. There are indeed more things in the world, Massimo, than philosophy can dream of.

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  7. Given that religious morality piggybacks on the moral intuitions that come naturally to us, I highly doubt that "right", "wrong", or "duty" really come from religion per se.

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  8. As I recall from TA'ing for intro to ethics, Kant does have a rather long argument for why one would be irrational if one failed to find the CI compelling. It takes a detour through some dubious metaphysics of causation, but it is an argument nonetheless.

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  9. Historically morality precedes religion; it apparently precedes the evolution of Homo Sapiens and the genus Homo since a number of "moral" norms are observed (and enforced) by apes. So the idea that morals may be derived or "founded on" religion (seeing "morals" and "religion" as objective historical facts embodied in brain states, social norms, institutions) is baseless.
    Another completely different question is whether some philosopher has imagined a chain of reasoning conducing from religious beliefs towards moral norms. Indeed, such has been the case, attempting to show that religious is a sufficient and, for some authors, a necessary foundation of morality, to the point that (until the start of the 20th century, and sometimes even today) there exists a belief that "no God" implies "no ethical values". This historical fact (that some philosophers or theologians or lay people think in that way) is an interesting fact, worthy of empirical study and that may perhaps be integrated into a scientific theory of how human belief systems evolve and are connected. But of course the existence of such beliefs does not mean anything for the validity of either (some forms of) religion or (some forms of) morals as objective facts of life.

    So to the title question of this post: "Is modern moral philosophy still in thrall to religion?" one should say: Yes, for some residual forms of philosophy and for some philosophers, and also for many (philosophically) lay people, although the historical tendency in the latest 100 years has gone against that association. Many would accept that religion often operates (in the brains of religious people) as a form of higher justification of those people's moral precepts. However, it is often the case that the same religious beliefs give rise to differing moral judgments, and vice versa, the same moral norms may be justified by conflicting religious beliefs; and is also frequently the case people often engage in behaviors they regard as morally right (e.g. contraception) although they are not allowed by the institutions upholding their religious beliefs (e.g. catholicism).

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  10. Hector says Massimo failed to provide a valid argument. This means that Massimo's conclusion does not follow from its premises, even assuming they are true.

    However, Hector's criticism does not make this case. Instead, it argues that science and philosophy are full of values and assumptions, but that philosophy is not scrutinized by empirical inquiry. This criticism, aside from being a tu quoque fallacy, does not recognize that the objects of ethical study are values and assumptions, whereas scientific inquiry does not examine its own values and assumptions.

    Likewise, it is no critique of philosophy that it does not regularly verify its findings with empirical inquiry. Philosophy is not primarily an empirical discipline, but a rational one. The method of inquiry involves examining assumptions and assessing the reasons supporting a conclusion. Often the objects of philosophical study do not admit of empirical inquiry. However, note that in an argument to the effect that an empirical method of inquiry is superior to a rational method of inquiry is itself a matter of rational inquiry. One does not perform empirical tests on the methods of various disciplines; one reasons about them. Likewise, such a principle affirming the superiority of empirical verification itself has no empirical verification, which was the downfall of the logical positivists.

    Even the strongest, most empirically-minded ethical naturalism depends on rational argument for its foundation, and this foundation is not something science can deliver.

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  11. SJK, Taliban warriors find extremely compelling the idea (which for them is a categorical imperative derived from their profoundest beliefs and the corresponding fundamental categories of right and wrong) that a "good life" involves killing infidels and treating women as inferior beings, and they also find quite admirable for anybody to become a suicide bomber. They find those "truths" are "self-evident", as Jefferson found his own. They would warmly approve of Kant's argument.

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  12. Re: 'Duty isn’t something one can have in the abstract, duty is toward a law or a lawgiver, which begs the question of what could arguably provide us with a universal moral law, or who the lawgiver could possibly be.'

    Massimo,

    In nuce, Taylor asserts that moral normativity ex hypothesi entails a lawgiver. I suspect, however, that Taylor does not wish to assert that normativity per se entails a lawgiver. E.g., rational normativity does not readily imply the existence of a rational lawgiver. That is, that one ought to apportion one's beliefs according to the evidence or, say, that one ought to believe in the logical consequences of one's beliefs does not at all entail the existence of a divine logician who determines that one ought only to believe in that for which one has sufficient evidence or that one ought to believe in valid deductions.

    It is not clear why moral normativity entails the existence of a lawgiver and why rational normativity does not. Perhaps Taylor would like to argue that moral normativity, because it prescribes certain actions within certain scenarios, is more akin to legal normativity, which likewise obliges one to act in certain ways and which, at least plausibly, entails a lawgiver. However, though both oblige one to act in certain ways, it does not seem clear that moral normativity must be perfectly analogous to legal normativity; if you disagree, I would very much like to see the argument for that.

    In fact, I think a good argument can be that moral normativity is perfectly analogous to rational normativity in that both can be accounted for within hypothetical imperatives, to use Kant's terms:

    If one wishes to hold true beliefs, one ought not to hold inconsistent beliefs.

    If one wishes to live peaceably with one's neighbor's, one ought not to commit acts of violence against him.

    Re: Kant. If Taylor presents and dismisses Kant's ethical system in the way you have in a few lines, Massimo, then you both are guilty of doing Kant a great disservice. Kant did not premise his ethical system on a deity (in fact, he explicitly avoids doing so) and presents a very detailed, carefully constructed argument as to why rational agents possess moral duties and rights.

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  13. After my comment to SJK (on his comments at 11.19 AM) let me add something about his response to mine (at 11:52).

    I did not say that Massimo's conclusion did not follow from his premises. As SJK rightly sees, my argument is different. He reckons that "that [even if] science and philosophy are full of values and assumptions, [...] philosophy is not scrutinized by empirical inquiry. This criticism, aside from being a tu quoque fallacy, does not recognize that the objects of ethical study are values and assumptions, whereas scientific inquiry does not examine its own values and assumptions.

    My supposed "tu-quoque-like" argument is simply that one cannot accuse science of having assumptions (as if science proclaimed it didn't have them) AND then use your own assumptions as a source of truth. All human knowledge (or alleged knowledge) is imperfect, and is the result of previous trial and error in dealing with our own minds and the world around us.

    I do not object to the exercise (in which philosophers excel) of analyzing assumptions and values (or, more precisely, a propositional expression of assumptions and values held in practice by people in their lives). They can analyze such propositions, examine their internal consistency, elicit some higher-level assumption they logically imply, and some logical consequences that would follow from them. What they cannot do is telling whether such assumptions and values are "good", or that behaviors therefrom derived "ought to be" pursued or rewarded. This is a leap from "is" to "ought to be".
    SJK in fact concurs when he says that "at the objects of ethical study are values and assumptions". They are indeed. Go forth and study them. But that does not imply the ability to draw ethically binding conclusions from them. Such values and assumptions relevant to ethical study can be no other than values and assumptions held by human beings, albeit by the philosopher himself or by others. They have indeed been studied, with all the acoutrements of scientific study, by cultural anthropologists, sociologists, even economists and zoologists (no reading of Plato or introspection by a philosopher or anybody else can possibly match that scientific body of knowledge, as regards the moral values and assumptions of humankind, just as folk physics is no match for scientific Physics).

    {max # of characters. Continued separately)

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  14. (continued)

    But SJK goes farther: " it is no critique of philosophy that it does not regularly verify its findings with empirical inquiry. Philosophy is not primarily an empirical discipline, but a rational one. The method of inquiry involves examining assumptions and assessing the reasons supporting a conclusion". I thought that was Logic, not the entire field of Philosophy. It is only the explicitation of logical implications of a set of (arbitrary) axioms. In any case, that logical exercise entitles no one to draw any valid conclusion about morality, the good life, ethics or, for that matter, the art or motorcycle maintenance (not even for personal use by the person doing the logical exercise: that person would still have to make a decision about what is right or wrong, and whether those axioms were the right ones in the first place).

    "One does not perform empirical tests on the methods of various disciplines; one reasons about them." Indeed, but one reasons after having the empirical results. You can doubt the law of gravity and question the methods followed so far for its supposed empirical verification (or non-falsification), but that would not keep you from smashing your brains on the street below if you try to live up to your questioning mind by jumping off your 38th floor window. Philosophers reluctant to believe empirical proofs are rapidly weeded out by natural selection. Not only proofs in natural science: not believing your security advisor if you venture out in the Province of Helmand would also get you in trouble with the lurking Taliban. Politicians not believing in the advice of Economics experts about the relation between monetary expansion and inflation would soon find themselves in trouble (especially after the recession comes to an end). And likewise in many other realms of reality. Since we roamed the savanna in search of prey and wild fruit, and each of us since we first look around from the cradle or toddle around, we learn from experience. Unwise would be the philosopher that ignores that. You can live with unsound reasoning (many do), but not with an unsound view of reality (i.e. a view that collides with mundane empirical facts around you). Note I do not say "a false view of reality" but an "unsound" one. You can find your way in the sea by the stars, even if you're a Ptolemaic or a flat Earther. But you cannot find your way (except by fluke) if you ignore the stars out there, or if your astronomical theory does not enable you to relate the stars with your geographical position and the location of port. Your astronomical theory may still be wrong, but it is sound. You can manage with it until you find a better one.

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  15. I forgot to mention the final piece of nonsense SJK provides: "Even the strongest, most empirically-minded ethical naturalism depends on rational argument for its foundation, and this foundation is not something science can deliver".

    Thus, science does not use rational argument? What kind of argument is therefore used by empirical science?

    Besides, I do not profer any "ethical naturalism". I am not talking about ethical "doctrines". I just say: Mind you, if you're talking about human morality, you better start by studying human morality, i.e. the morality of humans. There is an extensive literature about it, coming from a diversity of disciplines.

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  16. In a similar vein to Thameron's comment above (or at least to the first part of it), I sense an extreme individualism in this personal quest for eudaimonia. Not that I have a problem with the pursuit of happiness, well-being, or creative intelligence, of course. But, as a criterion of morality, it just seems incomplete somehow - thus the impact of Thameron's "assassin or torturer" counter-example. And I'm not sure that I agree that the only reason that I feel that way is because I'm a by-product of Christian culture. After all, proscriptions against murder and other forms of violence are human universals - no matter how creative or self-fulfilling the violent act may be for the agent.

    Perhaps what's missing here is an explicitly universalist clause, whereby all humans (regardless of race, gender, or class) are guaranteed the right to pursue eudaimonia. I doubt that Plato or Aristotle would have gone for it, but then I also doubt that a Christian influence is a prerequisite for its endorsement.

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  17. Hector M: can you PM me at clementlawyer at gmail? I'd like to discuss your ideas. Thanks.

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  18. Daneel,

    > I don't know if a duty assumes a law giver. We can just define "right" with an utilitarian definition and then also agree that is desirable to follow that path. <

    That confuses deontology with utilitarianism, only the former is about duty. The latter, of course, shares deontology's (and Christianity's) concepts of absolute right and wrong.

    Thameron,

    > So if one's profession is that of assassin or torturer would being the best that you can be still be your duty and eudaimonic? And what about those poor blighters who end up with an ugly family? <

    Aristotle's philosophy is ver much concerned with virtue, and being an assassin or a torturer is not a virtue, so the concept of a eudaimonic life for those characters is oxymoronic. As for ending up in a "ugly" family, Aristotle did write that eudaimonia is in part the result of luck, because it is affected by circumstances.

    > It treats the individual more or less as an independent agent and the polis <

    Not at all. The majority of Aristotle's Ethics is about how to be a good citizen in one's society.

    > If happiness or pleasure alone were the ultimate goals then we could simply drug everyone <

    You are confusing pleasure with eudaimonia, they have little to do with each other.

    Hector,

    > Historically morality precedes religion <

    Taylor doesn't doubt that. He is talking specifically about a particular concept of morality, the one we inherited from the Christian tradition. Indeed, "natural" morality is much closer to Aristotelian virtue ethics.

    > the idea that morals may be derived or "founded on" religion is baseless <

    Correct, but neither Taylor nor I have argued that.

    > So to the title question of this post: "Is modern moral philosophy still in thrall to religion?" one should say: Yes, for some residual forms of philosophy and for some philosophers <

    That misses Taylor's contention - which I find intriguing, though I have to give it more thought - that *all* modern moral philosophy, except virtue ethics, is in thrall to religion, without realizing it.

    jcm, see my response to Thameron above about some of your points.

    > Perhaps what's missing here is an explicitly universalist clause <

    Depends on what you mean by "universalist." Both utilitarianism and deontology claim to be universalist, but according to Taylor, without foundation. Aristotle thought his ideas were universal because his concept of eudaimonia was based on the assumption that there are things that all humanity has in common when it comes to the good life.

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  19. Paraconsistent,

    > I think a good argument can be that moral normativity is perfectly analogous to rational normativity in that both can be accounted for within hypothetical imperatives <

    But that's precisely what Taylor (and, I must confess, increasingly I) finds hard to swallow. While one can reasonably argue that, say, to claim that 2+2=5 is wrong in a very precise and irrefutable sense of "wrong," it is much harder to pinpoint exactly in what sense one would be wrong if one declines to follow the categorical imperative.

    > you both are guilty of doing Kant a great disservice. Kant did not premise his ethical system on a deity <

    No, and neither I nor Taylor have said any such thing. Taylor's contention is that Kant inherited a way of thinking about morality (absolute rights and wrongs, duty) from religion, and wished to reformulate it in rationalistic terms. According to Taylor, he failed for the reasons given above. (Taylor does have a full chapter on Kant, and another one on utilitarianism.)

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  20. JCM believes that "proscriptions against murder and other forms of violence are human universals". No, they are not. Murder and other forms of violence are rather universally allowed, and even encouraged, when directed towards people outside your group (originally your close kin, later expanded to a wider group like your tribe or Nation-state). The legitimate exercise of violence is of the very essence of the Nation-State (as per the famous Max Weber definition of the State as any institution successfully claiming a monopoly of coercion on a given territory), and many forms of murder are accepted in many countries, from legitimate defense to the killing of war enemies and the application of capital punishment. Other forms of violence (such as imprisonment or criminals, or even the physical punishment of children at home or school) are also condoned by law or custom in many places, even in today's developed nations. If you look for really universal "thou shalt not" norms, the most likely candidates are: incestuous relations with your mother, killing your own young biological children, and some forms of cheating to the prejudice of other members of your close peer-group, such as free-riding, e.g. not sharing the proceeds of your hunt and pretending to share in the catch of others (rejection of cheating usually includes female adultery, but not usually male adultery). Another candidate is shirking your obligations in "reciprocal altruism" (e.g. you delouse me or scratch my back by I won't be bothered to delouse you or scratch your back if I can get away with it). Some other norms are more specific to humans and have not been observed in apes or other animals, probably related to habits unique to Man, such as not shirking duties at some forms of complex cooperation, e.g. collectively hunting large animals or defending the group's territory against external aggression.
    As easily seen, practically all are directly related to success in reproducing and propagating your own DNA, contained in your own body or your kin's, and most are norms common to humans and apes (and in some cases also other mammals).
    The field of the empirical study of morality and its evolution in Homo Sapiens and other related and ancestor species is really just developing. I recommend reading the works of Frans de Waal, and also Tancredi and the 3 volumes of Sinott-Amstrong (see refs below).

    Frans de Waal, 1996. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Harvard U.Press).
    Frans de Waal, 2006. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton U. Press.
    Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 2007-2008. Moral Psychology, Volume 1: The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness; Vol. 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity; Vol. 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development. The MIT Press.
    About apes, besides Frans de Waal and other works:
    Dorothy L. Cheney, 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. U. of Chicago Press.

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  21. In addition to my previously mentioned refs:

    Laurence Tancredi, 2005. Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality. Cambridge U. Press.

    All interesting reads, even if you notice differences among them, and even if you happen not to like some of their conclusions. None is "proposing a system of morality" or defending any specific ethical philosophy, nor promoting any virtues. I advise reading them as if they were books on botanics or geology, where facts matter far more than the opinions or aesthetic tastes of the authors. Once you're done you'll undoubtedly be better equipped to discuss philosophical points about morality.

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  22. Hector, I agree that social sanctions can be quite different, depending upon the context (e.g in-group vs. out-group). In my earlier comment, I had in mind "murder proscribed" and "violence, some forms of proscribed", as two items on anthropologist Donald E. Brown's list of human universals. It's been many years since I read the book, but I seem to recall that they refer to proscriptions against what each culture regards as an illegitimate use of violence (e.g. "murder", as opposed to merely "killing" or "taking human life"). In other words (according to Brown), every human culture has such proscriptions (albeit, variant ones).

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  23. Massimo, I too can sign up for "the practical pursuit of a life within our polis, and the lifelong quest of eudaimonia understood as the best exercise of our creative faculties." But:

    (a) the idea that acts of murder and torture are vicious (while readily agreeable to me) seems compatible (at least to a point) with both of these pursuits; and

    (b) who gets to decide what trait is a virtue and what trait is a vice, anyway?

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  24. jcm, as I explained before, torture and other vicious acts are NOT acceptable in virtue ethics because they undermine a person's eudaimonia.They do that because they debase one's own humanity. Vices and virtues are established from an analysis of what it means to be human.

    Look, I'm perfectly aware that this is far from an airtight system, but it seems to me to have several advantages over the others, and calling torture eudaimonic is an obvious perversion of Aristotle's ideas.

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  25. Because I'm much stronger with deontology and utilitarianism than with virtue ethics, I need a bit of clarification.

    Is the contention that to the virtue ethicist, all moral judgement's are historically contingent - not universal? And would it be a consequence of this view that because moral judgement's are contingent on the polis that moral judgement's cannot change unless the polis has pre-existing provisions for doing so?

    I'd like to mention too that the problem with religion and ethics is that religion bases its morality in revelation, faith, and the authority of inaccessible beings. Neither deontology nor utilitarian do any of that. So what if they were lifting some characteristic previously seen in religion? Religions use to provide public meeting places; should we reject public meeting places because they're "religious"?

    Probably more important to the problem at hand is the history of the enlightenment which gave birth to both utilitarianism and deontology. The enlightenment was a sustained effort to repair a universality that was no longer available to religion, because of Galileo, because of the discovery of the new world (and the discovery that civilization actually develops through time!), and because of the reformation (whose god is the right god anyway?). Deontology and utilitarianism are both attempts to to ground morality in rationality rather than in religion. That their efforts took on a universal character is hardly particularly religious. It's only in recent years that any philosophers looked for anything but universals (not withstanding some Asian philosophies). I'm also hard pressed to see how and why virtue ethics are not "absolute" in a way inaccessable to both utilitarianism or deontology.

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  26. "Vices and virtues are established from an analysis of what it means to be human." - Massimo

    This is interesting actually, and very similar to Kant's approach. Kant's approach is to analyse what it means to be human by analyzing what it is to reason, then underwriting universality by assuming that everyone has a faculty of reason that operates in the same way. Would it be right to characterize virtue ethics as a system that figures out what one should do by observing other humans, while deontology assumes a common faculty of reasoning and utilitarianism assumes a common understanding of welfare?

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  27. JCM, your "murder" may be my "legitimate killing", and vice versa.
    On the other hand, it is not only about capricious variation across cultures: certain specific norms are cross-cultural universals, and existed not only now (when cultures are in contact and copy each other) but for thousands of years, when no such contact existed. This is not by fluke: they have evolved as a trait of the species. Since they normally are functional for evolutionary purposes, in this as in other more mundane cases, scientists infer they have evolved by natural selection and are shared by all humans. They "come naturally to us" (like, for instance, the feeling that caring for your children is good, just as it is felt to be "good" for males to hit, to scare off, and possibly to kill if need be, anyone who is attempting to steal your very scarce food, or your wife).

    Massimo,
    there are quite detailed theories about how and when torture IS acceptable (they have been even made into law or usual practice in the US during the GW Bush administration, have been practiced widely in many countries, and a large number of people think they are in fact morally acceptable, e.g. for eliciting timely information about where a time bomb is located). Historically, torture has been accepted even by Christian theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, although feelings in that regard have been changing over time. I doubt a rational argument can be made that they are "not accepted in virtue ethics". Think for instance of situations in which there is a tradeoff between indulging in torture (of a suspected terrorist) and allowing mass murder (if the bomb explodes). There have also existed views that cruelty towards your enemy may be God's will (there are abundant examples in the Old Testament, e.g. in the famous case of the Amalekite holocaust, and even in pious Psalms praying God to bestow harm unto your enemies, not to mention the stoning of adulterous women --not men--, and many other instances of ancient "virtue ethics"). Virtuous Greeks made also human sacrifices to their gods, as did ancient Aztecs and others. That an average guy in the Midwest, such as your average college teacher, thinks most of this is morally despicable (although he may hesitate in the case of the terrorist suspect and the ticking bomb) does not mean that such guy's views represent some superior or unique "virtue ethics", and thus preferable to the virtue ethics of the Aztec or anybody else's.

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  28. Massimo, sorry to be a nuisance, but I actually don't mean to single out virtue ethics as particularly flawed among ethical theories. (In fact, I read Nicomachean Ethics just last year - more as a fan than as a critic.) But its holes don't strike me as any smaller than those of utilitarianism or deontology - just different.

    For example, I'm aware that a virtue theorist would decry a murderer as lacking certain virtues (like empathy and compassion). But what's the rational foundation for that? And what if evidence were to suggest that (at least for some individuals) some vices are perfectly compatible with the pursuits that you endorse above? They're just really detrimental to the eudamonia of others.

    And I guess that's my basic problem/question with virtue ethics? Where is the altruism (if only of the reciprocal kind)? Does it even exist? Or am I expected to believe that that's only my (post-)Christian programming talking?

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  29. jcm,

    Don't think of Eudaimonia as something like a subjective happiness. A better translation might be "flourishing" or "well-being". Part of the weirdness of virtue ethics is that because it's pre-modern, it's fairly difficult for us to wrap our heads around. I try to conceptualize it as as a place-holder for some distant goal which contains all that is necessary for the best life - whatever that may be. What the virtue ethicist does then, is to strive toward the cultivation of the virtues necessary to aim better toward that distant goal. Like a recovering drug addict, each day is an opportunity to become more or less virtuous, adjusting our aim with each step, marching ceaselessly throughout one's life toward the worst or the best life, toward vice or eudaimonia.

    So: altruism. It's completely compatible with virtue ethics that, for example, self-immolation might be a virtuous end to a very virtuous life. It depends on the life. What isn't compatible with virtue ethics is eudaimonia as the result of a magical gesture. A serial killer might stop a war through self-immolation, which is a good thing, but it wouldn't make him suddenly virtuous.

    This isn't grasping the whole thing, but virtue is a thing cultivated within one's self, not the status of a specific action or event - that's how consequentialism (the relevant aspect of Utilitarianism) and deontology work. So, and I'm not entirely certain about this, but I think the role of the polis is not to supply a laundry list of examples of what is and isn't virtuous, but a thing whose welfare allows us to measure our own virtue. For example, when I do something that I think the polis would benefit from, I have done something virtuous, even if they don't actually benefit. What exactly is and isn't virtuous is negotiated in realtime among the polis; that is, it evolves over time, just as virtue does within each individual.

    Honestly, I think it's about time for a great Philosopher to appear and reconcile into a grand ethical theory the differences between deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. Of course, noone will be able to understand it, but...

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  30. James, the key phrase in your comment is " the best life - whatever that may be." The problem is, for virtue ethics to be of any significance, there must be ONE best life, "whatever that may be". Otherwise, if many "best lives" were possible, what is the point? Everybody could have their own "best life" cut to measure, and what an honest philosopher can do except to try and find out which of the best lives is actually THE best one? An absurd quest, I tell you. Not one that is impossible or difficult to fulfill or to find out the answer for, but actually an absurd one. Poorly formulated muddy foggy thinking all the way down. Like the turtles in Indian cosmology.

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  31. James,

    > Is the contention that to the virtue ethicist, all moral judgement's are historically contingent - not universal? <

    No, because for Aristotle virtue ethics applies to the human universal condition.

    > I'd like to mention too that the problem with religion and ethics is that religion bases its morality in revelation, faith, and the authority of inaccessible beings. Neither deontology nor utilitarian do any of that. So what if they were lifting some characteristic previously seen in religion? <

    It's more subtle than that. Taylor's point is that deontology and utilitarianism have inherited the Christian framework without realizing that it doesn't make any sense to talk about absolute right and wrong outside of that framework.

    > Would it be right to characterize virtue ethics as a system that figures out what one should do by observing other humans, while deontology assumes a common faculty of reasoning and utilitarianism assumes a common understanding of welfare? <

    Close, but virtue ethics isn't based on simple observation of what humans do, it's the result of a philosophical analysis of what it means to be human.

    Hector,

    > there are quite detailed theories about how and when torture IS acceptable <

    That's irrelevant to virtue ethics. Aristotle would say that all those theories are wrong because torture doesn't conduce to eudaimonia, neither for the person being tortured (obviously) nor for the person doing the torturing.

    jcm,

    > I'm aware that a virtue theorist would decry a murderer as lacking certain virtues (like empathy and compassion). But what's the rational foundation for that? <

    Again, that behavior isn't conducive to eudaimonia, nobody in his right mind would argue that mudrdering people is the path to flourishing, except for psychopaths. And there is a reason we call them psychopaths.

    > They're just really detrimental to the eudamonia of others <

    For Aristotle there is no such thing as eudaimonia of others, it's a universal concept based in human nature, though there are different paths to to get at it (e.g., being excellent as a parent, as a leader, as a scientist, as an artist, etc. But not as a murderer).

    Lloyd,

    > Reason, per se, is increasingly recognized by modern brain science as perhaps being a less than worthy item for hanging your hat on. This makes things somewhat problematic for philosophers in one way yet does open new avenues of discussion as to "what can we really know?" <

    But brain science itself is based on the use of reason, data don't speak for themselves. And the limits of reason are a matternfor both cognitive science and epistemology to study.

    > That any objective reality could possibly pertain to what we regard as moral truth is actually like our once again reaching for an ideal on par with the historical God of Abraham at his/her/it's essence. Subjective reality, on the other hand, is simply a matter of individual belief or consensus <

    But there are plenty of ways between complete objectivity and complete subjectivity. Virtue ethics does not pretend to arrive at universals (I.e., independent of any human judgment or particularity), but neither is it relativistic. It is founded on our best (and changing) understanding of what is best for social beings such as us.

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  32. Hector,

    > The problem is, for virtue ethics to be of any significance, there must be ONE best life <

    No, virtue ethics is about the universal idea of flourishing, but there are different ways for people to flourish. Again, an artist does it differently from a philosopher, or from a parent, etc. The point is that there are many ways NOT to do it, like being a murderer, or torturing people.

    > Poorly formulated muddy foggy thinking all the way down. Like the turtles in Indian cosmology. <

    You might want to read a book on virtue ethics, or even better, Aristotle's Ethics, before you make that comparison. It is not warranted in the least.

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  33. Massimo, if virtue ethics is only about the general idea of "flourishing", leaving open to people the "different ways for people to flourish", the informational value of virtue ethics would be greatly diminished. From my readings of Aristotle, for instance, it is clear that it is not a general idea of flourishing that it is all about: there are many specific "virtues" identified and to be pursued.

    I do not object to those "virtues" being "virtues": I only say that there is no actual basis to believe that those are the virtues that all humans OUGHT TO pursue, each in his/her particular way. Those philosophical propositions are the result of the solitary speculations of single philosophers, albeit consulting the thoughts of other such philosophers. Not only that fails (usually) to be based and take account of the corpus of scientific knowledge about what humans actually THINK they OUGHT TO do, and the objective basis justifying those beliefs (evolutionary, economic, social, cultural, or whatever); it also jumps from what is to what ought to be in an unwarranted manner.

    In the case of Aristotle, he had an essentialist idea of Man, allowing him to construct a description of the essence of Man, therefrom deriving a set of (logical) conclusions about how Man should behave to achieve a good life. But we are centuries ahead of such essentialist thinking. Man, we now know, is an evolved ape. His "essence" is an undefined notion (it might be assimilated to its genome, or to the combination of genomic, developmental and cultural influences, but this leaves us with a variety of ways of being human, thus requiring further investigation into which, if any, are the common and permanent features of humankind. A question that can only be approached through empirical investigation in the full range of relevant domains (from chemical and biological to neuro-scientific, economic, social and cultural) throughout the ages. "Man" has made great strides in this scientific investigation of its own species (and related ones), mostly in recent decades. It is time to take all that on board.
    Otherwise the study of human morality, besides being in thrall to religion, may remain also in thrall to speculative armchair philosophy.

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  34. Massimo tells me:
    "Hector,
    > there are quite detailed theories about how and when torture IS acceptable <
    That's irrelevant to virtue ethics. Aristotle would say that all those theories are wrong because torture doesn't conduce to eudaimonia, neither for the person being tortured (obviously) nor for the person doing the torturing."

    I agree, as far as my particular beliefs are concerned. And I know our colleague Aristotle would also agree (though he may perhaps allow some truth-eliciting beating of a slave suspected of stealing at his masters' home). My point was that there are other people (not Aristotle, mind you, but lesser minds like George W. Bush and his acolytes, all human beings though) that thinks otherwise; some have gone so far as to formulate specific normatives for "legitimate" torture (as in US Army directives for "enhanced interrogation"), and most of those people were otherwise "decent" persons, mostly patriotic devout Christians, believers in the universal right to life and the pursuit of happiness, who thought they were simply putting the interests of the prospective victims before the immediate interests of the prisoner. The theory in question is, in my view, simply horrendous, but nonetheless it is a theory, with a large number of supporters (just as the theory legitimizing martyrdom through suicide bombing is widely supported in extremist Islamic circles, and the idea of burning witches or heretics was equally supported by the devout citizens of Salem (Mass.) and by the equally devout officers of the Spanish Inquisition or of Calvin's church in Geneva.
    Description of undisputed virtues is seldom attacked. Who would dissent with the idea of being prudent, moderate, and so on? Problems arise with the trade-offs, like the trade-offs between discovering the ticking bomb in time and torturing the suspected terrorist seeking his quick confession, in the spirit of the "24" TV series featuring Kieffer Sutherland. In those conditions, people like the Aristotelian St Thomas Aquinas came up with doctrines about the lesser evil and the just war, which are a bit more debatable than the general idea of striving towards the good life.
    This diversity of speculative theories by philosophers is further widened if you include the beliefs of a multitude of religious and philosophical beliefs about morality throughout the ages and around the world, from early Hominins to Plato or Confucius to Muammar Gadaffi. None is unanimously regarded as better or best of the lot. Thus one can talk about all these beliefs, but can never attain a justified conclusion about which OUGHT TO be followed.

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  35. James, thanks for the explanation, but I already understood that eudaimonia and happiness (in the modern, conventional sense of purely subjective well-being) are not synonymous. And, given Massimo's interpretation of eudaimonia as "the best exercise of our creative faculties", (subjective) happiness may be a probable outcome of that pursuit, but not a necessary one.

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  36. James asked:
    > Is the contention that to the virtue ethicist, all moral judgement's are historically contingent - not universal? <
    Massimo responded:
    >No, because for Aristotle virtue ethics applies to the human universal condition.<

    Which is correct: thus spake Aristotle. But was he right? Are there other actual (or conceivable) formulations of virtues that are at odds with Aristotle's and may also claim universal validity, or be intended to apply to the human universal condition? Are these possibly different views exclusive to philosophers, or they may also come from people in other walks of life? If so, what that diversity of views does tell us about philosophical theories of ethics?

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  37. Massimo,

    Note that I did not offer a defense of a Kantian categorical imperative. Instead, I argued that rational norms, which do not imply a divine logician, are precisely analogous to moral norms, which implies that neither do they require a divine moral lawgiver. The analogy between rational and moral norms was made precise by showing how each may admit to formulation under hypothetical imperatives (which are quite different from categorical imperatives):

    If one desires x, then one ought (not) to do y, since if not-y, then most likely not-x.

    If you wish to argue that moral duties *assume* the existence of a moral lawgiver, then you must show why moral norms are more appropriately analogous to legal norms than rational norms, which, though I have not given it a read, I am confident Taylor did not do in his book and which you have yet to do.

    Re: Kant. It may be that Christianity presented to Kant significant ideas about the existence of moral norms, but it is a non sequitur to argue that *because* (1) Christianity influenced Kant and (2) Christian ethics assumes the existence of a moral lawgiver that, therefore, Kant's ethical system assumes the existence of a moral lawgiver. To insist otherwise and dismiss Kant's ethical system because of its influences borders on the genetic fallacy, especially since it seems unlikely that moral norms assume a moral lawgiver. In brief, whether or not Christianity influenced the formulation of Kant's ethical system is immaterial to the merits of his ethical system; it must be addressed on its own merits.

    P.S. I should add in ending that I am by no means a Kantian. In fact, I deny the existence of moral facts. But the claims made in your post are simply untenable

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  38. Massimo said: "nobody in his right mind would argue that mudrdering people is the path to flourishing, except for psychopaths."

    Hey, if nothing else, psychopaths are useful instruments in reductio ad absurdum arguments.

    In this case, since a psychopath is surely capable of exercising his "creative faculties" in devising novel and clever ways to murder and/or torture, that consideration alone is insufficient as a moral criterion. You might insist that such "behavior isn't conducive to eudaimonia" because it is not (according to Aristotle, Taylor, or some other virtue theorist) his "best" use of those faculties. But then "tis not contrary to reason" (to borrow from Hume) for the psychopath to interpret "best" very differently than you or I do. And surely you agree that his mental abnormality is also insufficient as a moral criterion.

    Which leaves us with what? A vote, whereby non-psychopaths (thank goodness) likely out-number psychopaths? I would settle for that contingency. But it suggests that the meaning of "eudaimonia" is quite flexible (as in socially constructed) - more so than many folks are likely to find comforting as a moral basis.

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  39. How can one identify psychopatic murderers, especially the serial ones who are also careful and systematic, and may lead a "normal" life on the side, from non-psychopatic murderers such as those engaging in "just wars" or working as executioners (or trial juries) for capital punishment, or allowing murders as "collateral damage" in the exercise of their primary job, say, as drug traffickers? Are all psychopaths identifiable by PET scans or other such medical devices? Or are psychopaths defined by, well, committing murders and other acts defined (by virtue ethics philosophers, or the often arbitrary law of the land) as crimes or as "crazy" behaviors?
    Digging deeper in the mud, I call it.

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  40. From Paraconsistent's comment: "If one desires x, then one ought (not) to do y, since if not-y, then most likely not-x."

    Such is the way rational choice theory proceeds. The "ought to" verb in that sentence should actually be "should": no moral obligation is necessarily implied. Example: "If you desire blueberries, you should devote a portion of your money to the purchase of blueberries, thereby foresaking any other use of such money". But virtue ethics is not like that. Virtue ethics is not about using adequate means to attain an end: it is also about the ends themselves: "Thou shalt desire X (blueberries)". Also, its precept to use certain means ("if you desire X you ought to do Y") is not about the efficiency of Y to achieve X, but about the righteousness of Y. Consider: "If you desire blueberries, and you can escape capture, you may consider stealing blueberries from your local fruit vendor stall". This is about the efficacy of the action recommended (stealing instead of purchasing), not about its moral quality. Judging the moral quality would require another different premiss: "Thou shalt not steal", which is NOT implied by your desire of blueberries or your ability to escape capture. Mind that one can lead a perfectly happy life if one manages to steal blueberries on a regular basis without being caught. One can ever devote oneself to the elaboration of an ethical theory whereby the good achieved by the stealing amply makes up for the loss to the fruit vendor, and is therefore justified (no one would argue, I imagine, that respect of the private property of fruit is written in stone (or genes) in human nature, since human (or hominid) nature predates private property by several million years. Any hunter-gatherer transported to a modern city will happily help himself to fruit displayed at a market fruit stall without any compunction.

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  41. Hector,

    The assertion that the employment of a separate premise is necessary in order to derive moral duties from hypothetical imperatives implies that there are moral duties (X1, X2, … Xn) such that one may assert 'Thou shalt (not) perform Xn'. That there are moral facts is certainly contentious and, I would like to argue, likely false: There is no good evidence which leads us to believe that there are moral facts. (It is possible that you are simply noting how moral agents often use, and are prone to understand, moral language, but I doubt it.)

    For me, pace Thomas Hobbes, David Gauthier, Jan Narveson, et al., moral reasoning is simply a strategic version of plain old means-end reasoning: constrained maximization of subjective preferences within a social construct. On this view, then, one may derive moral oughts from contingent prior states (agent preferences, social interaction, etc.) without much difficulty and without reliance upon ontologically dubious moral facts.

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  42. Correction: In the first paragraph, '... that there are moral duties' should read '... that there are moral facts.'

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  43. Paraconsistent,
    I'm not sure what is actually meant by "moral facts". I know some actions are regarded as morally relevant, and can be judged moral or immoral according to certain moral principles. The participants may feel they are moral or immoral, or others may. These are, or may be, undoubtedly facts.
    What I am not sure of is whether the morality of certain actions can be discovered by philosophical reasoning alone. The fact that such actions are morally evaluated one way or another is a (historical, sociological, psychological) fact, and it is also a fact that the evaluation of an action may vary across time and space and among people. It is also arguable that such feelings of morality or immorality may have been incorporated in humans (at least partially) through natural selection during the evolution of the species: individuals with or without a natural (and at least partially heritable) propensity for willfully behaving in certain ways may have enjoyed an advantage in terms of survival and reproduction, thus enabling those propensities to propagate. Other sources for moral judgments may be more variable (e.g. cultural), and the concrete morality of a given group of humans may be the result of all those influences, genetic or cultural. Those are, I'm afraid, the facts about morality that may be said to exist, and may be studied from various scientific viewpoints. What philosophers would do out of it I cannot say, but I can say that better philosophical (or more generally intellectual) understanding of human morality would result from a more complete and systematic study of such facts, as compared with informal introspection or commonsensical observations of individual thinkers, usually conditioned by their own social class or cultural background. In any case, no such philosophical reflection may end up with some "foundation" for certain moral precepts. Moral norms like any other social pattern arise from the sum total of influences affecting people, from their evolutionary past to their recent learning. They normally think something "ought to be": the fact that one or another thing is supposed (by one group or another) to have a moral value attached (i.e. that it "ought to be") is an interesting fact, a worthy field of study for science.

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  44. More on that:
    there are some observable facts that may be described as "moral norms" and "moral acts" (acts that people regard, or existing norms consider, as morally qualified, in the sense of being good or bad) as well as other ("amoral") acts such as pouring or not pouring barbecue sauce on your beefsteak.
    Regarding one act as moral (good or bad) or amoral (neither good nor bad in a moral sense) is not something attached to the action itself, but dependent on a moral code that is adhered to normally at societal or community level, although perhaps some acts may have a moral quality bestowed by individuals, not society: for instance, I may have moral qualms about poisoning vermin or killing fleas, qualms perhaps not shared by most of my fellow citizens. Purchasing and owning slaves may be allowable in some moral codes (including Aristotle's), but forbidden in others.

    Recognizing these facts does not make you a moral relativist. You may be one, or not. You may think your moral values have universal validity or otherwise. But recognizing the above facts only makes you a better observer of reality, and possibly improves your ability to understand how the world works and and how people are.

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  45. Hector,

    In a crude definition, moral facts are commonly considered by moral realists those facts which make moral propositions either true or false (in much the same manner, e.g., mathematical realists believe mathematical facts make mathematical propositions either true or false). Insofar as one is an ethical cognitivist (e.g. utilitarians, Kantians, Mooreans, moral relativists, virtue theorists, etc.), one commits oneself to the existence of moral facts.

    Moral realists would further add that moral facts no more depend upon subjective / cultural beliefs, opinions, practices, etc., than do empirical facts. DNA exists whether or not the Pintupi people countenance it, no? And the fact of DNA's existences makes propositions concerning DNA either true or false. Similarly for moral facts and moral propositions.

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  46. Hector and Paraconsistent,

    I think we should extend Paraconsistent's definition of moral facts, which is correct, to encompass what, I think, is throwing Hector off the tracks.

    A fact like, say, "most people think murder is wrong", is not a moral fact. It is a fact about the state of a population's orientation toward a moral statement - more of a behavioral fact. A moral fact, by contrast, would be true even if no one believed it. Science as it is currently construed is ill-equipped - even barred from - discovering moral facts.

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  47. I still do not understand. Moral facts are, we are told, "those facts which make moral propositions either true or false (in much the same manner, e.g., mathematical realists believe mathematical facts make mathematical propositions either true or false)".
    First, mathematical propositions. The fact that two sticks on a table, and two more sticks put on the same table, are observed to be four sticks, is not a fact that makes the proposition "2+2=4" true: that mathematical proposition is true regardless of that fact being observed or not (of course, you cannot observe two sticks and other two sticks making anything other than four sticks, but that is not the point).
    Now suppose you witness a murder. Is that fact what makes "Thou shalt not murder" a true moral proposition? Hardly. Moreover, suppose you first observe the murder, then observe the police arresting the suspect, the judge handing the verdict, the executioner hanging the culprit. Does that make the moral proposition true? Hardly, as well. You have made an empirical observation, a record of a fact, which may be explained by means of sociological, economic, juridical or whatever other theory purporting to explain the causes of such facts.
    What observed facts about murders, verdicts, gallows or jails may tell you is that certain societies consider that act as a crime, or if you wish, as immoral. But that does not causes the moral (philosophical) proposition about murder being immoral to be true, as a philosophical truth. You have only recorded the fact that at a certain place and time, such murder was considered immoral (or more precisely, a legal crime). By the same token, observing Nazis commiting a Jewish person to the lager for some racial crime does not make racism true. It only tells you that racism was rampant in Nazi Germany, without telling you whether racism was per se moral or immoral.

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  48. James,
    if science is ill equipped to "discover" (or knowing) moral facts, I suspect something fishy in the definition of such "facts". Sounds like "science is ill equipped to study miracles" or "to understand how homeopathy works" or "to evaluate the evidence about the efficacy of prayer". In my book, all facts (i.e. empirical processes, entities, events, situations) can in principle be studied by science. Possible exceptions: facts beyond the event horizon of a black hole, insofar as no Hawking radiation comes out of the black hole revealing the existence of such facts; and also facts occurring a number of light-years away that is larger than the number of years that have passed since the Big Bang (both just theoretical possibilities for the time being, not actual facts). Other than that, I cannot think of any exception, moral or not.

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  49. A moral fact, by contrast, would be true even if no one believed it.

    Which reminds me of that old saw: "If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?" To which I say: No, because sound is more than a vibration of air - it's also a type of interaction between an observer and his/her environment.

    Similarly, the idea that an event can be moral or immoral in a disembodied scenario (i.e. without someone to experience & evaluate it as such) strikes me as a confused misapplication of moral language.

    But now we're talking meta-ethics, to which normative ethics (like virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and deontology) is distinct, such that, for example, it's logically compatible to be both a non-cognitivist (meta-ethics) and a utilitarian (normative ethics).

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  50. Please, may someone indulge me by offering an example of a "moral fact"? One that is "true" in a "universal" way, if possible? An explanation why that example would instantiate a true universal moral fact, and also how and why we can be sure of that, would also be welcome, for the enlightenment of the ignorant, like me.

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  51. Hector, I made this point a few times in separate threads: moral truths are conditional truths. They take the form: IF we wish to facilitate human flourishing / maximize pleasure / minimize pain etc. THEN x, y, z follows. One can always reject the conditional, though most of us would consider him a sociopath or a selfish bastard.

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  52. Hector,

    I'm not arguing for moral facts, I'm merely reiterating what is referred to when someone says "moral facts". Whether or not you think there actually are moral facts is irrelevant to the matter of what it is that the term "moral facts" refers.

    jcm,

    I know, normative ethics and meta-ethics have been confused throughout much of the commentary here. I've just been trying to find agreement with regard to what is meant by a moral fact. Do you agree with my, and Paraconsistent's definition of "moral fact"?

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  53. Massimo,
    I surmise that kind of conditionals are conceptually and empirically empty. Of course they are trivially "true" in a linguistic sense, and also as mere logical propositions, once you DEFINE the terms in such a way that it makes the proposition true. For instance, if you define "flourishing" in a way that logically includes or requires X, then "If you wish to flourish, then you must do X" becomes automatically "true" (by definition). You may vary the definition of "flourishing" at will, including or excluding whatever X or Z your whim dictates, and all the corresponding "moral truths" will be true by definition.
    The appeal to popular consensus, as in "if you don't, we shall all regard you as a moral imbecile" begs the question "who are 'we'?" and is also not sufficient proof of the "truth" of such proposition in other than the trivial way described before.

    Imagine a concrete situation in which someone throws at you a statement belonging to the class of statements you describe; the speaker in this hypothetical example is a respected member of the Shura council of elders in a Pashtun community in South-western Afghanistan; and he tells you: "If you want to achieve the supreme good and fulfill your purpose in life, you ought to become a suicide bomber and destroy as many infidel lives as possible; if you disagree and shirk this moral obligation, most of us will deride you as a coward, a sociopath and a selfish bastard, and for all practical purposes you will be an apostate, deserving death by stoning". Would that be a moral truth? Why not? Just because the speaker is an elder in a Pashtun village, perhaps a Koranic sage well versed in the ancestral moral code of the Pashtun people (the "Pashtunwali"), and not a learned philosopher in a Western university? If not that, why then?

    Rubbish, I say, with all due respect.

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  54. Late for the discussion again. I can get on board with virtue ethics as a useful way for an individual to make low-level ethical decisions in their life without having to always sit down and perform a utility calculation. After all, most of the moral decisions one makes day-to-day involve things like whether to give up one's seat on the bus, or how hard to work at your job, which are much more amenable to virtue-ethical thinking than to some sort of explicitly consequentialist thought.

    I fear, however, that without acknowledging some manner of utility principle as the final arbiter of what is right, VE is ultimately status-quo enforcing and self-serving.

    The sad fact is that humans are capable of doing extremely immoral things without having severe personality flaws, and since VE centres around personal characteristics, it's overlooking a lot. I am not convinced, for example, that there was anything unusually bad about slaveholders as people; in fact, I bet some of them would score higher on Aristotle's virtues than I would. But they failed to think clearly about the consequences of their way of life. Oops.

    Yeah yeah, sure, slavery doesn't promote eudaimonia, but we all know that the slaveholders will just rationalize a reason why it does (after all, they're good people, and good people don't do bad things, so slavery must not be bad).

    This philosophy, insofar as it's freestanding rather than supplemental, puts way too little emphasis on instrumental rationality. You push it around, but it doesn't push you around. In practice, it seems to just rubber-stamp whatever your society thinks the good life is.

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  55. Hector,

    Re: Mathematical realism.

    The following is largely a clarificatory remark. Mathematical realists (Kurt Godel, e.g., and most mathematicians and logicians with whom I am acquainted) hold, e.g., that the Polignac's conjecture (for any natural number there exist two prime numbers the difference of which equal that natural number) is either true or false because, to put it crudely, there exists a mathematical reality, independent of one's perception, which makes the conjecture either true or false. There are others, mathematical intuitionists, (e.g., Arend Heyting, Andrey Kolmogorov, and many other mathematicians and logicians [myself included]) who deny the existence of a mathematical reality and instead assert that mathematical propositions are true or false if and only if they are proven true or false via a constructive proof procedure. A consequence of this view is that intuitionists deny that Polignac's conjecture is either true or false (i.e. intuitionists do not consider the law of excluded middle a valid inference when employed in infinite series).

    In brief, mathematical intuitionists would deny that a mathematical proposition has a truth value independent of a constructive proof procedure (roughly, the 'observed' part in your sentence). The point in bringing up mathematical realism was to engender the initial plausibility of the existence of moral facts. Both mathematical facts and moral facts are non-empirical, that is to say, just as mathematical facts do not admit to scientific scrutiny or revisability, neither do moral facts. The means by which one comes to knowledge of mathematical facts is mathematical reasoning; the means by which one comes to knowledge of moral facts is moral reasoning, etc., etc.; you see the similarities.

    Re: Facts.

    There are many facts about which science has nothing to say. Take logic: it is a fact that modus ponens a, a → b, ├ b is a valid inference. Take mathematics: it is a fact that if a > b and b > c then a > c is always true. Take geometry: it is a fact that the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle sum to 180 degrees, and, it is a fact that all Riemannian manifolds may be imbedded in a Euclidean space. I could multiply examples endlessly.

    At first blush it seems plausible that moral facts, which, like the above, are determined via abstract reasoning, also do not admit of scientific verification. Be warned: Do not make the error and infer that, since science can provide information on how humans developed a sense of morality or how the brain functions when dealing with moral matters, science can determine or reveal moral facts, since science can give us similar information regarding logic and mathematics, yet one is apt not to infer that science can determine or reveal logical and mathematical facts.

    I have mainly been critical in my comments to you, but I am probably more sympathetic to the spirit of your concerns than you may suspect. However, formulating the worries correctly takes care and a serious concern with what is is being criticized and with potential responses.

    Re: jcm

    Two things.

    First, if you find fault with the statement 'A moral fact, by contrast, would be true even if no one believed it,' then you must find fault with all statements of fact. E.g., you must also argue that, without a perceiving subject, it is not the case that hydrogen fuses into helium, which is an awkward position since good evidence suggests that is exactly what happened long before a perceiving subject entered the game. Unless you wish to lapse into a naïve solipsism, you should provide some sort of reason why moral facts are less real than empirical facts when moral agents are not there to perceive moral facts.

    Second, thank you for the clarification on the meta-ethical / applied ethical distinction.

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  56. Hmm, I get to spend a day and a half with my daughter, and the comments thread becomes overwhelming. Oh well, I'll respond to some of the latest and work my way back, but apologies as usual for picking only on some points and providing only partial commentary. Hey, it's a free service. And I might get to do a bit more later today.

    Ian,

    > The sad fact is that humans are capable of doing extremely immoral things without having severe personality flaws, and since VE centres around personal characteristics, it's overlooking a lot <

    I disagree. Aristotle meant his list of virtues as a human universal, and as I pointed out above, the virtues are meant to provide for certain behaviors of the individual *in society*, so one doesn't need to over-emphasize the personal aspect of virtue ethics.

    > slavery doesn't promote eudaimonia, but we all know that the slaveholders will just rationalize a reason why it does <

    But that is, as you say, a rationalization, so it's besides the point. I can easily imagine nightmare scenarios arising from rationalizations of utilitarianism, deontology, or pretty much anything else.

    Hector,

    > I surmise that kind of conditionals are conceptually and empirically empty. Of course they are trivially "true" in a linguistic sense, and also as mere logical propositions <

    Well, you can surmise all you want, but you are dismissing in one swoop not just philosophy (which is based on logical reasoning) but also logic itself, as well as math. Suit yourself, but there is nothing trivial in what I wrote.

    > You may vary the definition of "flourishing" at will, including or excluding whatever X or Z your whim dictates, and all the corresponding "moral truths" will be true by definition <

    You must have missed the point earlier when I said that flourishing for Aristotle is a very specific condition that reflects human nature and the creativity of human beings qua social animals. That's empirical content, which provides the axioms to the IF ... THEN exercise.

    > If you want to achieve the supreme good and fulfill your purpose in life, you ought to become a suicide bomber and destroy as many infidel lives as possible <

    Said human being simply doesn't understand what eudaimonia is, and he would do well to read Aristotle.

    > Rubbish, I say, with all due respect <

    I rarely detect respect in your comments, but that may just be me.

    > How can one identify psychopatic murderers, especially the serial ones who are also careful and systematic, and may lead a "normal" life on the side, from non-psychopatic murderers such as those engaging in "just wars" or working as executioners (or trial juries) for capital punishment? <

    First, this isn't an ethical problem, at best it's a matter of epistemology (how do we know things). Second, are you serious? I can easily provide you with a good list of the second category of psychopaths, even in recent memory in this country.

    jcm,

    > since a psychopath is surely capable of exercising his "creative faculties" in devising novel and clever ways to murder and/or torture, that consideration alone is insufficient as a moral criterion <

    Correct, and Aristotle would agree. Virtue ethics doesn't simply say "go ahead, dude, be creative at whatever you feel like being creative."

    > "tis not contrary to reason" (to borrow from Hume) for the psychopath to interpret "best" very differently than you or I do. <

    Actually, it is, which is where utilitarianism and deontology are different from virtue ethics. The latter starts with an analysis of human nature itself, and the psychopath simply fails at his logical analysis of what follows from the premises.

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  57. Paraconsistent,

    > I argued that rational norms, which do not imply a divine logician, are precisely analogous to moral norms, which implies that neither do they require a divine moral lawgiver. <

    I understand, that's what Kant does too. But Taylor claims - and I do not think his claim can be easily dismissed - that rational norms have no force precisely because there is no lawgiver, they are norms in a vacuum, so to speak.

    > If one desires x, then one ought (not) to do y, since if not-y, then most likely not-x. <

    But that's not the way deontology works. For Kant reason itself provides us with moral duties, which are not instrumental, i.e. they do not take the IF ... THEN form, he is pretty clear on that.

    > it is a non sequitur to argue that *because* (1) Christianity influenced Kant and (2) Christian ethics assumes the existence of a moral lawgiver that, therefore, Kant's ethical system assumes the existence of a moral lawgiver. To insist otherwise and dismiss Kant's ethical system because of its influences borders on the genetic fallacy <

    There is no logical fallacy, since Taylor doesn't argue from the influence to the falsity of Kant's position. He argues that Kant hasn't noticed that without the divine theory *no* deontological approach makes sense, for the reason given above.

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  58. @Paraconsistent - It is troubling to learn from you that Godel was a mathematical realist. Even if he held that mathematical objects were more 'real' than physical objects. I am beginning to think where one stands on this matter is more a function of personality than anything else.

    Math, like science is discovered, and I see the question as whether the undiscovered or unobserved exists. Take all known mathematics. Add a person replete with brain. Blend. Out of this may come additional mathematics. Was the new stuff there before we added the person? Realists say "Yes". I say "No", unless this mathematics was consumable by other entities.

    By the way, I don't mean this to be at odds with your "Facts" bit, and its because it is centered around logic, which generally has the word "If" in close proximity to anything else being said.

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  59. Paraconsistent,
    clarification acce´ted. I surmise the discussion about "moral facts" (analogous to "mathematical facts") is not the same discussion as that about "moral truth" as described by Massimo in his latest comment.
    However, let me make some additional comments.
    1. Some mathematical propositions such as the one you mention about prime and nonprime numbers may admit of both empirical (counterexample) and logical proofs. Most mathematical propositions require logical proof and are immune to counterexample because no such counterexample is possibly producible.
    2. The discussion between realist and intuitionist math meta theories seems moot to me in this context. Re intuitionists: I suppose a more rigurous formulation of their contention is that you cannot KNOW a math proposition to be true until you have a constructive proof. This does not imply that the proposition was not true before the production of such proof (as if Euclides theorems were not true before Euclides). However you formulate this in philosophical terms (realism, intuitionism or whatever), I think mathematical propositions are logical implications of axioms, implicit in the axioms themselves, no matter whether someone has already figured out a proof of the implication (with some caveats about Godel's theorem, i.e. some true math props not derivable from its own axioms).
    2. The truth of a mathematical proposition might be loosely described as "a fact", in the vulgar sense of "something that is true", but this is somehow imprecise because it does not distinguish between logical implication and objective reality. I propose using "fact" to refer only to objective features such as entities, processes, events, and "true" to refer to propositions, either mathematical or others. Facts can be used to prove the truth of non math propositions, such as those in physics, biology, psychology or history; and also perhaps for math propositions referring to the non-existence of some mathematical entity or property (i.e. propositions that can be disproved by counterexamples).
    3. I am still in the dark about what is exactly meant by a "moral fact", whether the term refers to something akin to mathematical propositions (e.g. Massimo's conditional moral truths) or to some kind of description of objective features of the world (such as a sociological description of prevailing morals).

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  60. I am not yet respondinf to the substance of Massimo's latest comments,but only to this one. Massimos cites me and comments:
    "> Rubbish, I say, with all due respect <

    I rarely detect respect in your comments, but that may just be me."

    Massimo, in matters of intellectual debate I go by Bertrand Russell principle: people are to be respected, ideas are not: ideas may be trashed and ridiculed through criticism. My respect for you, Massimo, shows I expect in the time I devote to your ideas and my effort to understand (and sometimes to criticize) them. That I find some of your ideas wrong does not mean I fail to respect you as a person. And of course (in a bloggish context) some phrases should be taken as written in a light-hearted or ironic way, such as "Rubbish, I say, with all due respect".

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  61. @Massimo: Please enjoy your day with your daughter. That's so much more important than worrying about people who, say, want to rip apart your most cherished beliefs. Besides it doesn't seem that bad out.

    @Lloyd - Agreed and think that the breakdown is a function of our perceived superiority to others. We may agree that a community where parents, teachers, coaches, and other leaders command more respect than the Western 2011 norm is desirable. But one can go too far the other way and find oneself in the 50s, early 60s, where blind obedience as a value had its own deleterious effect on society.

    Where is that sweet center and how long does it last?

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  62. Hector, fair point, though I still contend that even for ideas words like rubbish should be reserved for actual rubbish, like creationism, sparing it when it comes to reasonable positions we simply disagree with.

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  63. James: I have no argument with your definition of "moral fact." I was simply stating my opinion on the matter, which leads me to...

    Paraconsistent said: if you find fault with the statement 'A moral fact, by contrast, would be true even if no one believed it,' then you must find fault with all statements of fact...

    On the contrary. I must only insist that morality requires an agent, which itself requires at least one other subject (or Subject, if you're the religious type) to serve as a judge of that agent's behavior. To deviate from this traditional understanding of "moral" creates confusion, rendering it incoherent in the minds of most people (at least within our culture).

    Logically, this understanding of "moral" conflicts with James' definition of "moral fact" and the meta-ethical view of moral realism that it represents. It basically argues: You can have "facts" in the sense of objective truths that exist even if no one believes them (as in your "hydrogen fuses into helium" example), and you can even have "moral facts" in the sense of objective truths regarding how some judge(s) view an agent's behavior. But you cannot have "moral facts" in the moral realist sense, which would allow for absurd statements about the (im)morality of non-agents (including hydrogen and helium molecules).

    You're free to disagree, of course. Like I told James, I was simply stating my opinion on the matter (even though it's somewhat off-topic).

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  64. Hector,

    > thus spake Aristotle. But was he right? Are there other actual (or conceivable) formulations of virtues that are at odds with Aristotle's and may also claim universal validity, or be intended to apply to the human universal condition? <

    I am not aware of radically different formulations of virtue ethics, though most modern philosophers sympathetic to that tradition consider themselves neo-Aristotelians. There are some similarities between Buddhism and birtue ethics, though they are only partial, and some aspects of Buddhism are closer to Stoicism (which itself did derive from virtue ethics).

    > if virtue ethics is only about the general idea of "flourishing", leaving open to people the "different ways for people to flourish", the informational value of virtue ethics would be greatly diminished <

    We need to remember that the existence of different paths to X doesn't mean that X is arbitrary, there are plenty of paths that simply do not lead to flourishing in Aristotle's sense.

    > I only say that there is no actual basis to believe that those are the virtues that all humans OUGHT TO pursue <

    Aristotle isn't bothered by that, he was aware of plenty of people who don't seek eudaimonia, but he thought they simply did not understand the essence of being human, and he pitied them.

    > Aristotle had an essentialist idea of Man <

    Yes, but what he meant was a bit broader and less rigid than it sounds. And besides, neo-Aristotelianism doesn't have to buy all the details of the great master's system. The idea is that there is something unique and different about human nature, which I think is a pretty obvious observation despite all the clamor to the contrary. (Yes, I'm aware that most differences between Homo sapiens and other primates are of degree, but sometimes the degree is so huge that it amounts to a qualitative difference, and if one disagrees than I invite him to see the next play put up by the best chimpanzee playwright he knows and see how he enjoys it.)

    > "Man" has made great strides in this scientific investigation of its own species (and related ones), mostly in recent decades. <

    I know, I'm a biologist. But please name a few great new insights that science has given us about human nature that are actually relevant to virtue ethics (or, really, any moral system). They are surprisingly hard to find.

    jcm,

    > given Massimo's interpretation of eudaimonia as "the best exercise of our creative faculties", (subjective) happiness may be a probable outcome of that pursuit, but not a necessary one. <

    That is only part of the definition, and in virtue ethics happiness is *defined* as the pursuit of eudaimonia.

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  65. Massimo said to me: Actually, it is, which is where utilitarianism and deontology are different from virtue ethics. The latter starts with an analysis of human nature itself, and the psychopath simply fails at his logical analysis of what follows from the premises.

    Yeah, I suppose I harbor some skepticism of VE's analysis of human nature, much of which echoes Ian's comment above (e.g. "it seems to just rubber-stamp whatever your society thinks the good life is").

    On the other hand, I would readily agree that any normative theory that completely ignores human nature is still-born.

    But I don't see VE as unique in this regard, and (for whatever reason) other theories (e.g. Singer's preference utilitarianism and Rawls' theory of justice) have thus far resonated more with me. And they too account for human nature.

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  66. Re: Hector

    To clarify, intuitionism does not hold that mathematical propositions *are* true or false, however our knowledge of their truth values depends on a proof procedure. Rather, proof procedures *make* mathematical propositions true or false. To assert otherwise is to assert there is a reality independent of our perception of it which makes things true or false (thus the analogy with moral realism).

    Finally, I must agree with Massimo in that one should reserve pejoratives such as 'rubbish' for actual rubbish. Moral realism, while not my cup of tea, is the predominant position amongst moral philosophers, which alone should give one cause to refrain from facile dismissals.

    Re: Massimo

    We will have to agree to disagree on this one. Thanks for the exchange.

    Re: jcm

    Whether there are epistemic agents around to determine empirical facts (hydrogen fuses to form helium) or moral agents around to determine moral facts (that it is never right to torture children), it does not at first blush seem that the two cases are different.

    Re: DaveS

    Not only was Godel a mathematical realist, but most mathematicians and logicians are as well. In mathematics, logic, science, morality, etc., realism is all the rage, and, while I am a non-realist in all those respects, it takes great care to dismiss realism.

    Re: To all (especially Hector and jcm)

    Check out the article on 'Moral Realism' on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It may help clarify some misunderstandings (if there are any, of course).

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  67. Massimo,
    your recent comments on Aristotle's ideas are mostly hermeneutic (what did Aristotle think). In that we agree. But beyond hermeneutics, what can be said today about such matters, in the light of contemporary knowledge? Since many of the statements usually cited (like the very list of virtues) are more or less widely accepted on the basis of coinciding with people's subjective feelings, this creates the impression that they are endowed with some epistemic value ("moral truths"), for which, however, little explanation or evidence is provided. People may be collectively wrong (as they have often been). I do not dispute that Aristotelian virtues are indeed virtues (according to my subjective feelings, for what they're worth) but those feelings of mine hardly bestow epistemic validity.

    Most people would agree with Aristotle's list of virtues, though some may not (some people, for instance, are fond of extremist rather than moderate positions, and may defend them in the name of ideological or conceptual purity, or moral perfection). But even if they were universally accepted, does it mean they have moral force, moral authority or moral truth (other than the apparent force or authority caused by their reflecting people's inner feelings)? After all, most people through history have felt deeply convinced of falsehoods, and many have conflicting ideas about non-trivial moral choices, even if agreeing on Aristotelian virtues; consensus on a nearly indisputable list of virtues is no real argument about the foundation of human morality.

    There is also the question of the origins and extent of such allegedly universal feelings of right and wrong. This question is empirical, not merely logical.

    On extent: are they really universal? Especially if one refers not to a rather bland list of virtues, but to moral decisions in difficult situations (conflicting goals, debatable means, trade-offs, etc.).

    On origins: are these moral truths or moral feelings rooted in "human nature"? How does one know? How is such nature defined, and what are its contents? May one define it as values, impulses or instincts effectively common to all mankind? Are all such universals part of "human nature", including perhaps some not quite "virtuous", such as aggressiveness or a tendency to condone male adultery, should those traits emerge from empirical research?

    Does human moral nature vary across cultures, or within one culture? Human nature, by definition, must be broadly shared by all people. But it may differ in details, as people differ physically.

    In case it does differ in the most important aspects, why so? It is a genetic component that causes its uniformity? If morality is evolved, should all characters that (in part by chance) happened to favor human propagation be deemed moral? Is that genetic component really uniform across individuals, groups, social classes, nations, cultures, or does some variation exist in the genetic aspect of human nature, affecting what is moral for different people?

    If genetics does not bear on the moral dimension of human nature, what does? What does make morality universal, other than genetics?

    Unless current scientific knowledge (especially since Darwin) is taken explicitly on board, the evocation of Aristotle (or Spinoza or other moralists) can hardly be of more than hermeneutic or historical use. Ethicists may provide inspiration, orient our lives, suggest new research, but cannot provide "truth" except on relatively indisputable, bland or tautological propositions.

    Or so I think in my profound ignorance.

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  68. Massimo: According to the instrumentalist sense of "reason" I intended above, I stand by what I said: "tis not contrary to reason" for the psychopath to interpret "best" very differently than you or I do - in other words, for him to harbor abnormal passions and for him to pursue them rationally, nonetheless. That his reasons appear to conflict with those of moral philosophers (and non-psychopathic folks, in general) almost surely is due to his deviant passions (as in: abnormal & criminal psyche or emotional wiring), which reason can (in all likelihood) neither create nor destroy.

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  69. Oops! in my 8th paragraph the case should be negative; instead of:
    "In case it does differ in the most important aspects, why so?"
    it should be:
    "In case it does NOT differ in the most important aspects, why so?"
    Sorry for the erratum.

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  70. Massimo cites and comments on me:
    "> "Man" has made great strides in this scientific investigation of its own species (and related ones), mostly in recent decades. <

    "I know [Massimo responds], I'm a biologist. But please name a few great new insights that science has given us about human nature that are actually relevant to virtue ethics (or, really, any moral system). They are surprisingly hard to find."

    Well, I'm neither a biologist nor a philosopher by trade, but I have done some reading and methinks there are some insights from science that require moral philosophers at least to be more precise, or revise, many of their assertions. For instance, as illustrated in my previous comment, any attribution of moral value to behaviors in the name of "human nature" would require re-defining human nature in terms compatible with modern science. As it happens, evolution is not guided by any sense of things being morally good or bad, but only favorable to survival and propagation. Darwin himself tells the tale of the insect leaving its larvae inside another (previously paralised) live animal, on which the larvae feed while developing: that cruel evolutionary solution apparently caused him finally to abandon religious faith. By the same token, various aspects of human nature, as it has happened to evolve, may be rather repugnant to some of us, or difficult to reconcile with any set of higher moral values. We may feel pressed to feel horror of such tendencies, either by social pressure or some other cause, but they are there nonetheless. If human nature defines what is moral, then certain disgusting tendencies would have to be considered. Contrariwise, one may think that we naively regard as moral anything that happens to repulse us, regardless of its intrinsic value or lack thereof (e.g. we may value monogamous faithfulness just because we happened to evolve with a tendency to form long-lasting couples, unlike other mammals; we might as well value promiscuity or other sexual arrangements, and despise monogamy, if those happened to be our evolutionary circumstances. This does not deny the moral value of monogamy: it only puts it in an evolutionary perspective, and therefore discourages a view of monogamy as a virtue in itself. Even in mostly monogamous species, such as many birds, occasional or frequent adultery seems to have been favored (possibly because of its being a source of genetic variation, especially when practiced with individuals outside the kin band or group). If anything favored by selection during the evolution of Homo Sapiens (i.e. anything that happened to define our "nature") is to be regarded as a "foundation" for "moral truths", we may find ourselves incorporating quite unexpected behaviors in our list of "virtues".
    I have not done that research, and I do not doubt astute philosophers may rephrase their lists of virtues in a manner that is compatible with scientific discoveries, but it does create a valid question, or a valid field of inquiry, that cannot be ignored.

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  71. Paraconsistent: While both cases assume what you call an "epistemic agent" (as in: someone who determines the empirical facts), the latter also assumes what I call a "judge" - someone who examines the facts and takes the extra step of evaluating it as right or wrong/good or bad.

    To say that a torture event is wrong presupposes, not so much factual determination of the event (indeed, it might only be imagined), so much as subjective evaluation of that category of events (e.g. in the sense that "such an event should never occur" or "avoid causing such an event to occur in all situations" - similar to universal prescriptivism).

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  72. Another erratum in my latest comment:
    Where I wrote, about the middle of the long paragraph:
    "Contrariwise, one may think that we naively regard as moral anything that happens to repulse us"

    it should have been:

    " Contrariwise, one may think that we naively regard as IMMORAL anything that happens to repulse us".

    Sorry again.

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  73. Hector,

    > Since many of the statements usually cited (like the very list of virtues) are more or less widely accepted on the basis of coinciding with people's subjective feelings, this creates the impression that they are endowed with some epistemic value ("moral truths"), for which, however, little explanation or evidence is provided. <

    I'm not sure what you mean by "evidence" in this context. Since moral philosophy is more akin to logic or mathematics - for which "evidence" of the empirical type isn't an issue - we keep talking at cross purposes.

    > On extent: are they really universal? <

    Strictly no, because people believe all sorts of things. But people also believe all sorts of things about probability, most of which are false, so simply tallying what people believe doesn't get you anywhere.

    > On origins: are these moral truths or moral feelings rooted in "human nature"? <

    Yes, and there is plenty of research in evolutionary and cognitive science to support that contention.

    > Human nature, by definition, must be broadly shared by all people. But it may differ in details, as people differ physically. <

    Right, but that variation in physical detail wouldn't be enough to make you confuse a human being with a chimpanzee, yes?

    > Is that genetic component really uniform across individuals, groups, social classes, nations, cultures, or does some variation exist in the genetic aspect of human nature, affecting what is moral for different people? <

    Uniformity is not necessary, for reasons similar to the case of physical attributes. And of course morality is not determine (though it is certainly influenced) by our genetic makeup.

    > Unless current scientific knowledge (especially since Darwin) is taken explicitly on board, the evocation of Aristotle (or Spinoza or other moralists) can hardly be of more than hermeneutic or historical use <

    But modern moral philosophy does take into account biology both evolutionary and cognitive. One has to understand, however, that biology only goes so far, just like studying the evolution of human cognitive abilities doesn't tell you whether individual mathematical reasoning is correct or not.

    > evolution is not guided by any sense of things being morally good or bad, but only favorable to survival and propagation. <

    But evolution has provided us with a basic sense of morality, just like it has given us a basic ability for mathematical reasoning. To continue the analogy, however, it would be ridiculous for someone to suggest that mathematicians ought to take Darwin on board when trying to decide whether Fermat's theorem can be demonstrated.

    jcm,

    > I stand by what I said: "tis not contrary to reason" for the psychopath to interpret "best" very differently than you or I do <

    Right, but for a virtue ethicist the psychopath is - by definition - seriously deficient in terms of human nature, so he is not the person you want to ask about morality.

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  74. Massimo,
    I still disagree, unfortunately, and it seems we will not come to an agreement in this exchange.
    I am not convinced of the "math like" nature or moral judgments. Conditional moral judgments (such as "If you want to flourish, you ought to do things (X, Z, W)" rests on some prior judgment that X,Z or W are conducive to "flourishing", and thus the statement only says that "if you want to flourish, you ought to do things conducive to flourishing". That is trivially true, but is still relatively arbitrary (because it requires an exogenous definition of "flourishing" and a (possibly fallible) study of which things are conducive to it; in any case, it is just the statement of a logical implication, such as "If the number is 13, then the number is prime", or "If you want to flourish, you must ... flourish". The necessity or convenience to "flourish" or the use of one or another definition of flourishing are not included in the conditional statement (though they are supposed to be previously given and accepted).
    "evolution has provided us with a basic sense of morality, just like it has given us a basic ability for mathematical reasoning. To continue the analogy, however, it would be ridiculous for someone to suggest that mathematicians ought to take Darwin on board when trying to decide whether Fermat's theorem can be demonstrated", you say. But Fermat's theorem is not of the same kind as your conditional "moral truths". It describes some mathematical equation (sum of two cubes equal to a cube) and makes a factual assertion about it (they do not exist). Fermat theorem does not say "If you want the sum of two cubes to equal another cube, you ought to do X". Your moral truths appeal to human inner sense of morality, so that having to do X appears as a moral imperative to people. If one of your logical deductions were to deduce something that most people do not FEEL to be moral (such as "If you want to achieve X, at some point you should abandon your old people to the elements, to die from hypothermia", as apparently some Inuit used to do), most people will not accept that conditional "moral truth": its being a logical deduction will impress no one (except perhaps members of the specific ethnic group that had such custom). That kind of argument uses the fact that most of us are sympathetic to the conclusion to try and pass a particular conditional statement as a "moral truth".

    Again, I am not sure that judgments about human nature can do without empirical evidence about human nature. That is the "evidence" I was mentioning. Mere logical deduction is no evidence, except of logical correctness of the deduction given the axioms. Morals are not mathematics. They need some input from reality, and not just an appeal to "our" feelings or to the opinion of "most of us".

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  75. Massimo said to me: ...for a virtue ethicist the psychopath is - by definition - seriously deficient in terms of human nature, so he is not the person you want to ask about morality.

    OK, but it's possible to judge lots of individuals (e.g. virtually anyone diagnosed with one of these mental disorders) as "deficient in terms of human nature", so long as they fail to live up to someone's (or some society's) idealization of what it means to be human. (I'll skip the historical examples here.) I think that would be a very insensitive judgment, but (more to the point) such individuals might very well lead morally exemplary lives (at least as I tend to conceive of morality).

    So what do I think is a better alternative reason to judge the psychopath immoral? Because he's dangerous(!!!) A risk like that cannot be left unmanaged without someone(s) suffering unacceptable consequences. And I can't live with that (potentially, quite literally).

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  76. "The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion."

    Arthur C. Clarke

    Die Heilige Schrift ist eine besondere Form von Science-Fiction: die Extrapolation auf der Technologie der Makroökonomie. Wird sie über einen zu langen Zeitraum von Moralverkäufern missbraucht, kommt es zur größten anzunehmenden Katastrophe:

    http://www.deweles.de/willkommen.html

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