Like I said, I am not particularly familiar with her view. I believe it is grounded mainly in Aristotelian teleology, and isn’t what I suggested exactly, I just don’t think it is entirely different either. Someone else is probably better at defending, or outlining her view in more detail.
I will give a critique of teleology though! I think that the biggest problem isn’t even in mistaking adaptation and conditioning for purpose, but in the failure of imagination in imagining that there is or can be only one primary purpose. Wings for flying, teeth for biting, seems more like a failure of imagination than purpose to me. Hands kind of break the teleological mold, as they just have so much range that it is easy to imagine a lot of purposes for hands. Being adapted or conditioned for something doesn’t lock you into it as its only, or even primary purpose. When the ancestors of penguins started using their wings to swim, they weren’t wrong for this. At any time, something that seems so adapted and conditioned to a particular function that it is for that function can decidedly be changed to something else, and the previous function abandoned. But, more than that, teeth are for wearing cool grills, or the use of anything is limited only by imagination, not proper or true purpose.
I say that it is somewhat similar because it does take a very basic “the thing it is implies what it ought do” approach, but what I suggest is far more general, and far more constructivist, historical, and conventional. The relevant pressure comes from society, and not extra-human authority, or nature itself.
Yes, I’ve often thought this myself. Humans have evolved as language users, for instance. What is the “primary purpose” of language? There are so many uses. If we try to tie a “primary purpose” to a use that’s clearly survival-of-the-species-driven, aren’t we begging the question, assuming the primary purpose for a species is simply to survive, and/or that the most strictly biological purpose must be primary? Worse, if we say that less-than-primary purposes are suspect, and to be avoided, then are we to give up those myriad other uses of language?
Now no one says this about language, to my knowledge, but transfer the argument to sex, for another example. With sex, you do hear that argument constantly, and annoyingly. “There’s only one primary purpose for sex, so if you use it for anything else instead, that’s a sin.” The damage done by such an attitude, I’m sure I don’t have to spell out.
I think what it is that Anscombe can’t bring herself to do precisely is what it is that generates tensions within Davidson’s own account of reasons as causes. And part of that is the principle of the nomological character of causality. This is the idea that causal relations are a matter of subsuming events under strict laws. And this principle seems to be of a piece with Davidson’s anomalous monism, or the idea that mental states/events (and actions) are token-identical with physical states/events.
Davidson explicitly credited Anscombe’s 1957 monograph Intention with reviving the view that actions are intentional under specific descriptions, and he indeed saw his own 1963 paper “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” as vindicating the everyday idea that reasons explain actions by being their causes. So, where is it that he diverges from Anscombe in that respect?
I think it is the event-event metaphysics of causation that Anscombe justifiably resists in favor of an account of rational causation. Hence, when the reason why an agent acted (by their own lights, and hence their reason for acting in this way) is appealed to in order to explain the action, then the agent herself is disclosed as intentionally causing things to happen. As Jennifer Hornsby puts it in Simple Mindedness, (to paraphrase,) when an agent intentionally brings it about that P, her action isn’t the cause of P. Rather, her action is her causing P to be the case. (Hence Thompson’s claim in Life and Action that the paradigmatic rational explanation of an intentional action isn’t an abstract reason but rather another intentional action that the first one is a means to accomplishing, by the agent’s own lights, as an exercise of her powers of practical deliberation). This is very different from appealing to “causes” construed as events happening within the agent, as it were.
Davidson’s own account runs into the problem of deviant causal chains that he himself seemed to acknowledge to be a massive headache for his theory. Consider his own famous example of a climber holding another climber by a rope. The first climber wants to rid himself of the weight and he knows that loosening his grip will do it. This desire and belief unnerve him so much that they cause his hand to tremble and loosen its grip. According to Davidson’s strict causal criteria, the belief and desire “caused” the action. But intuitively the climber did not act intentionally. It was an accident caused by nervousness.
Davidson struggled to explain how a reason could cause an action “in the right way” without falling back on teleological language. For Anscombe, this problem doesn’t even arise in the first place. That’s because she doesn’t treat the reason as a separate antecedent event pushing the body. She doesn’t have to worry about the “mechanism” missing its target. The intention is in the action structured by the agent’s practical knowledge.
The idea that actions are caused by antecedent mental events fits neatly with what Susan Hurley called the sandwich conception of the mind, or the idea that mental acts (and the formation of intentions) are events happening in the head of an individual temporally sandwiched between sensory inputs (incoming information) and behavioral outputs (bodily movements). By contrast, embodied and enactive accounts of the mind, and Thompson’s account of action, which Foot draws upon and which owes much to Anscombe, dispense with this picture entirely. They reject the idea that actions are triggered by antecedent mental events like beliefs and desires that simply happen to an agent. Instead of viewing action as the passive output of a psychological sandwich, descriptions of intentional actions disclose them as being under the continuous active control of the agent. The paradigm here is someone pushing a crate along an inclined plane rather than someone hitting a billiard ball. The action is a protracted event whereby the agent is causing (progressive aspect) the crate to slide up against friction, and of driving the action/movement towards its completion. The characterisation is irreducibly teleological.
So, I’d like to say that when Anscombe can’t bring herself to do as Davidson does, it’s precisely because treating reasons as “efficient causes” effectively obliterates the agent as a rational self-moving subject, turning her instead into a passive container for causal happenings.
By the way, Anscombe’s main responses to Davidson’s conception (and to other people as well) can be found in “Causality and Determination” (1971) and “Under a Description” (1979)
An interesting summation. There is much truth in this, but we might baulk at the idea of cause as only every being in terms of a rule. Davidson and Anscombe have a more nuanced notion of how a rule works, akin to and deriving from Wittgenstein’s account. So while the outline Pierre provides is roughly right, there are numerous issues with the account. Detailed work is needed if we are to embark on an exegesis. That new thread I mentioned.
I’ll save the detail for elsewhere, except to note their agreement that reasons cause actions, but that while Davidson talks of reasons as mental events, Anscombe would not call reasons events at all.
I see the attraction of teleology because it leads directly to the possibility of an objective morality grounded in purpose. What coudl be more appealing?
There probably needs to be a thread just on teleology, and not a tedious circular debate about essentialism versus anti-essentialism or nominalism.
The Aristotelian view holds that the defining characteristic of humans is reason, and the discourse in this space turns on questions of stable meanings, essences, human nature. Those ideas have been unfashionable, but that does not mean they are wrong. It’s also clear that these ideas are experiencing something of a revival, and not just among neo-Thomists. Even the oddly secular-spiritual John Vervaeke seems to be energetically marketing versions of this frame.
Aristotle’s position appears straightforward: if humans have a distinctive function, and that function is rational activity, then human flourishing (eudaimonia) consists in rational activity performed in accordance with virtue. Superficially, I would have thought that emotion is the defining feature of human beings, with reasoning frequently acting as a post hoc rationalisation of intuitions, desires, and emotional responses that arise first. But how do we know for certain? No doubt there are salient arguments to suggest that reason governs emotion or should.
Often this conversation isn’t really about virtue or morality. It’s about whether concepts such as “human nature”, “reason”, and “purpose” actually refer to something real and stable.
But the damage done by this belief is separate from whether the belief is true or not. Can we really hold an idea responsible for its abuse in the hands of zealots?
If we take the view that the telos of sex is procreation not pleasure, then same-sex relations can be seen as contrary to the natural purpose of sexuality. From this perspective, the act is judged to be against nature rather than merely against some account of God’s divine command.
One can see how the wish to discredit this view might itself be an instance of motivated reasoning. For the record, I do not hold an essentialist position.
I don’t know Anscombe well, but this is certainly the issue I see with Davidson’s account. We want reasons to operate in, precisely, the “space of reasons.” To annex this space as part what it is to “cause” something needs a strong argument. Hopefully @Banno will set up a good target for us in a new thread.
Well if we accept the premise (similar to Kant’s) that a moral act is not about the causality (and even not always about Foot’s motives), but also that it is not making a claim to certain knowledge of what is right (universally) as the moral law (“don’t lie”) due to its inherent rationality (before the act), then the judgment afterwards is a different matter. We are answerable for a moral act (without a “right” or criteria or pre-determined imperative) so we take the act on as our duty, as imperative, constituting our “character” as it were, which means I take full responsibility for it.
Now, in a moral moment, we might shirk that duty; we might act from power, or appearances, or practical necessity. Also, we might have to rely on the judgment of history to actually get a fair shake. That we act in the face of judgment does not mean we agree with the criteria of conformity, or that the criteria for judgment will be uniform (universal); sometimes we have to be Martin Luther King or Joan of Arc. We may even convince ourselves that we are right when we are not; or be wrong and there is no means of judgment (thus why god is said to judge). My point was only that Kant’s wish to be sure ahead of time tweaks the structure of a moral act, or “claim”. I agree with @Jay that it is in the realm of Kant’s approach that we act in the face of (accept the knowledge that there will be) judgment from all sides, even though we cannot be sure to meet with universal agreement (rightly or wrongly).
Before I leave fully, just to acknowledge your reply.
I see the point you seem to be making—that we act without certainty, take responsibility, and face judgement that won’t necessarily be universal or reliable.
And just to note the difference: Foot grounds moral evaluation in facts about human life and flourishing—which is why she thinks we can meaningfully call something like Nazism bad.
I guess we do need to consider the mechanism and responsibility of judgment of a moral act. If we remove motive as causality (the only thing to be judged), and cannot rely on a moral law (its rational form), we, as you say, are left with a situation. The question might oft be put: “What were you thinking?”—and this is my (Wittgenstein’s) point, that reasons come up afterwards—but I don’t think that is always answered with motives, or ends, and so is not about intention. A “situation” is not only to say we need to bring in context or particular criteria, but to say there are all sorts of types of things to consider, like, mitigating factors, excuses, justifications, commitments, etc. And, also, we are not trying to come to a certain, agreed to, universal moral “right”, nor do we simply want it reduced to moralizing (“tsk, tsk”—based on what is thought “moral”), but we may have an execution, say, where we have to protect the law, even when we agree with the cause, and we, too, have to live with that judgment.
If we are reasoning beings which can decide whether and how to act based on the ways in which we reason, then our reasons are not efficient causes propelling us forward in the same way that the 9-ball is propelled forward by the cue ball.
No. What Kant meant with the categorical imperative is to not make irrational choices. The example of lying because one is in a desperate financial situation. If we make it acceptable to promise to repay a debt knowing we couldn’t repay, eventually we couldn’t make the promise anymore because no one would believe it. In other words, this situation would self-destruct.
@Jay it’s not that everyone will act on the universal maxim, it’s that anyone could. So logically speaking, which Kant was explicit about, we would self-contradict ourselves.
I had meant to bow out of this discussion, but I feel I need to address this.
I should say that I haven’t read Kant exhaustively — only in passing — and the ‘lying’ example is one that stayed with me.
It’s still very much contested. The hard cases, especially the famous ‘Nazis at the door’ scenario, show how moral principles actually get applied.
Not within a static framework of rigid rule-following, but through the reflective work of seeing how a principle matters in action.
That’s what I had in mind with ‘logical maturity’: not a settled doctrine but a habit of noticing how reasons repeat and shape one’s practice.
From further reading, it seems that Kant doesn’t just give rules; he also acknowledges the role of ‘judgement’ — ‘the faculty of seeing whether a case falls under a rule’ — a skill that can only be practised.
The case of lying for convenience or advantage is one thing; it clearly undermines the practice of promising.
But the Nazi scenario involves a different maxim entirely: lying to protect an innocent life from unjust harm.
In any case, I’ve valued the discussion — it’s helped me see the issue more clearly.
Yes, that’s pretty much what it comes down to, without specifying a further moral discourse. That’s one of the reasons why I like to include such discourse in the background of Kant’s thought.
Right. But the avoidance of self-contradiction doesn’t carry with it a forceful “ought not,” unless you happen to care about that sort of thing.
Kant also seems to be suggesting that even one person’s acting in this self-contradictory way would begin a process which, as you say, would culminate in no one’s trusting promises anymore. This is a practical, not a logical, consequence. I have trouble imagining what the “self-destruction” would look like. Is Kant imagining a society in which no one offered a promise any more? Did he truly think such a society could come into existence? It’s not enough merely to argue that it could (logically). Kant maintains that it would (practically).
Another question is, If I begin this process, am I indeed “making it acceptable,” or only making an exception for myself? What do you think?
I think in this context it’s not necessary that you have read Kant. Yes, I know this is a contestable thing to say, but you are responding to me, where the gist of what I’m saying is what matters. You could say what I said (according to kant) is bullshit.
But here you have pinpointed one of the best objections against his idea, without having to refer to his texts. I will now respond:
And that’s the flaw to his CI. Where he denies an exception to a universal maxim, practical morality sees it as a way to injustice. That’s why it’s absurd. The murderer at the door example would require you to tell the murderer where your child is hiding.
I don’t think he really did believe that in actuality everybody would end up lying.
Like, listen, if you are writing an argument for your moral thesis, would you really wait decades for the demonstration of your thesis to actualize? Or would you now complete your theory using the validity of logic?
CI does not admit exceptions. So yes, you are making it acceptable even if only yourself.
The murderer-at-the-door-situation obligates you in two ways: not to lie (i.e. not to willingly assert falsities) and not to assist in the murder of your fellow man (as this would violate the innate humanity of the victim / the other 2 formulations of the CI). A Kantian can’t choose between either of the two obligations, but must attempt to respect both: He may thus waste time and refuse to answer, he may deceive the murderer by asserting truths that lend themselves to be misinterpreted, etc..
I do not have any of Kant’s writings on me, but I’d lastly like to highlight that the 3 formulations of the CI obligate us in different manners, and that generally, the universalisation formula is seen as most permissive (or even: lacking content).
I agree that’s likely. Probably he thought that the logical possibility was enough to bring home his point about self-contradiction.
We could look at it that way. Or we could say, putting ourselves in the place of the CI-scoffer, “I’m not telling anyone else what they ought to do. Yes, my exception makes it ‘acceptable for myself,’ but that doesn’t universalize to ‘acceptable for anyone/everyone else.’ Such universalization is precisely what I reject, in rejecting the CI.”
Yes, unfortunately the 3 formulations fail the test of scrutiny when it comes to real life situations. Kant mistakenly thought that keeping silent, for the example of the murderer at the door, ends one’s moral obligation because of lie avoidance. And as you can see with the logical requirement of the CI, it does, but only logically. Yet, our moral life involves actual events.
CI doesn’t satisfy the utilitarian morality. And it doesn’t satisfy practical reason either: the murderer is an irrational person to whom we do not owe an honest answer nor inaction. We are literally keeping silent for the murderer, not the victim of the murderer.
Kant certainly did. The CI is an ought to him.