Furthering Philippa Foot

Ethics
221

Here is Foot contra @Banno, very similar to what we have been saying. My bolding:

To identify the common characteristic of the apparently some­what diverse moral philosophies that I have just grouped together, and also to do justice to them, it will be good to start by asking how the whole non-cognitivist business began. One finds its deepest roots in David Hume. But more immediately, Ayer and Stevenson’s emotivism, like Hare’s prescriptivism, came into being as a result of the ‘linguistic turn’, popularized by logical positivism but developing far beyond it. For with ‘linguistic philosophy’ came the idea of explaining the singularity of moral judgement in terms of a special use of language, called ‘evaluation’ but more akin to exclamation and command than to anything one would normally mean by that term. With this idea it seemed possible, at last, to say clearly what G. E. Moore had meant, or should have meant, when he insisted that goodness was a special kind of ‘non-natural’ property.[2] In the development of emotivism and prescriptivism the idea of a special (‘non-natural’) property was replaced by that of a special and essen­tially practical use of language. And this, it seemed, was a great dis­covery. The language of evaluation was ‘emotive’. It expressed a speaker’s feelings and attitudes, as well as inducing similar feelings and attitudes in others. Those who had these ‘attitudes’ ‘favoured’ the things they called ‘good’: the idea of an attitude being linked to a tendency to act. Such also was Ayer’s doctrine; and a little later Hare tied ‘evaluation’ even more closely to individual action, in his theory of universalized imperatives by which a speaker exhorted others and, in the acceptance of a first-person imperative, committed himself to choose what he called ‘good’. So ‘prescriptivism’—a distinctive version of the doctrine that I have in my sights—was added to the emotivism with which it had started out.

[…]

I shall come back to [Hare’s] definition later on. First, I should say something more general about the theories I am attacking. It is char­acteristic of those I have mentioned and others inspired by them to suggest that the making of any sincere moral judgement requires the presence of individual feeling, attitude, or intention, and thus goes beyond ‘description’ or ‘assertion of fact’. It was recognized, of course, that the language contains many terms like ‘courage’ or ‘jus­tice’ designed for description as well as moral judgement, but it was said that their ‘descriptive’ content could not reach all the way to moral evaluation; the speaker’s feelings or commitments to action would have to be added if evaluation were to be on the scene. Hence the apparently unquestionable distinction between ‘descriptive’ and ‘evaluative’ language, more or less taken for granted in much of contemporary ethics.

Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, 6-7 (introduction)

On taking a shit
222

…Meaning was thus to be explained in terms of a speaker’s attitude, intentions, or state of mind. And this opened up a gap between moral judgements and assertions, with the idea that truth conditions give, and may exhaust, the meaning of the latter but not the former. Thus it seemed that fact, complementary to assertion, had been distin­guished from value, complementary to the expression of feeling, atti­tude, or commitment to action. Propositions about matters of fact were assertable if their truth conditions were fulfilled, but moral judgements, through conditions of utterance, were essentially linked to an individual speaker’s subjective state.

It is this kind of thing that seems to me all wrong, and to which I referred in the lecture ‘Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?’ on which this chapter is based. So what, then, is the mistake? It is the mistake of so construing what is ‘special’ about moral judgement that the grounds of a moral judgement do not reach all the way to it. Whatever ‘grounds’ may have been given, someone may be unready, indeed unable, to make the moral judgement, because he has not got the attitude or feeling, is not in the ‘conative’ state of mind, is not ready to take the decision to act: whatever it is that the theory says is required. It is this gap between ground and moral judgement that I am denying. In my view there are no such condi­tions on moral judgement and therefore no such gap.

Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, 8-9 (introduction)

Here is the essay she is referring to: “Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake”? (1995)

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I thought that Phillipa Foots assertion was it was good for people to be moral.

Not that some acts are self evidentially immoral like kicking a puppy or amputing a foxes leg.

This brings her close to Aristotle who says that humans are rational and social without endorsing Aristotles metaphysical claim that we are by nature moral.

Aristotle claims we are moral because of our nature. Foot says we are moral because it is good for us like it is good for a plant to have water

224

As I understand it, in her middle period Foot agreed with your first two sentences, but in her late period she changed her view, affirming that it is rational to be moral. The quotes in those two posts are giving the outline of that shift by capturing the view that she eventually came to see more clearly as erroneous. She was always suspicious and critical of such views, but she eventually came to identify a root error in the descriptive/evaluative distinction that they upheld.

225

True, and no one familiar with chess would say this. A 12:12 record against grand masters is a lot more impressive than a 28:12 record against the lowest tier of amateur. Likewise, the player who is 35:179 has more wins than the undefeated player who has just 34 wins. Being a good chess player is defined in terms intrinsic to the practice, because the practice is goal-oriented. Chess has an end. And that a certain player is more capable of achieving this end in the face of resistance is a descriptive fact.

Now, if someone says x is a better chess player than y, despite y defeating x 20 times in a row and having a far better record, etc., and they then argued that x is still better because winning is not the goal of chess, wouldn’t this be ridiculous?

Wouldn’t it also warrant the claim that the person making this statement doesn’t know anything about chess?

Surely it would. But then the fact that the person doesn’t know anything about chess is a descriptive claim about their chess knowledge. And yet if everything about chess, the “is,” fails to contain anything about what is good vis-á-vis chess playing, how could this possibly be the case?

Their judgement about who is the better player is our only evidence for their lack of knowledge. There is no separate channel by which we’re discovering their ignorance. However, if the practical claim is nothing but an attitude, with no first-order content that could be correct or incorrect about chess, then it follows that there’s no fact about chess for the “attitude” to get wrong. Thus, “this person doesn’t know anything about chess” would be unavailable as a verdict. At most we could say “this person has unusual chess preferences.” But no one would say this. And the same goes for being a good judge of sports, etc. A horrible sports scout or coach is not just “a scout/coach with odd tastes.”

Indeed, this would commit us to all sorts of absurdities, like the idea that the student who routinely botches their math computations can “not know how to do arithmetic,” but can only be said to be “bad at arithmetic” on a basis wholly extrinsic to all “is” facts about arithmetic. If “better chess player” or “better at math” behaved the way “better tasting” does this case wouldn’t strike anyone as ridiculous.

Your position would force us to commit to the notion that when a student writes “77” for “8 * 9” there is only the bare fact that they wrote “77,” which is totally detachable from the practical addition that this constitutes failure or “bad math.” Or, if failure is granted as first-order (which grants the intrinsic goal-directedness of practices, and so presumably of organisms), but not the “badness,” the badness is now related to nothing at all.

But sometimes it is good to do computation incorrectly, or to make chess blunders, because our goal is to teach others by making instructive errors. Yet here, good and bad seem obviously determined by first-order facts about intentions, precisely the linkage being denied. The result is that attitudes aren’t just second-order, but inscrutable. What’s left at this point is just the bare positing of the Humean position as axiomatic.

This is the same issue as the wounded fox. You’re choosing a descriptive base that is far too narrow, and then saying anything else must be extrinsic. That just isn’t the case, as shown above in the triangle example.

226

The place of interest in this topic is how Foot sees us as grasping the normative content of some situation. Those with an interest might read “Natural Goodness”, p.12, were it is clear that the moral man “recognize certain considerations” and that he must act well, “by his recognition of the force of particular considerations as reasons for acting”. P. 24 is similarly informative.

For Foot, virtue consists in recognising certain features of a situation as reasons for action, and acting accordingly.

A shame the thread has been driven into a pseudo-intellectual bitch session.

Cheers, that’ll do.

227

Right. To her credit Foot saw the error and reversed her position:

And isn’t [the justice/rationality problem] the fence at which I myself have repeatedly fallen, trying now this way now that of getting over—from ‘Moral Beliefs’ in 1958 to ‘Morality as a System of Hypodietical Imperatives’ in 1972?[7] All of this is true, and if I am hopeful of greater success this time round it is because I think I now see why I couldn’t have managed it before. Roughly speaking it was because I still held a more or less Humean theory of reasons for action, taking it for granted that reasons had to be based on an agent’s desires.

[…]

I have therefore, rightly, been accused by my critics of reintroducing subjectivity at the level of rationality while insisting on objectivity in the criteria of moral right and wrong.

Philippa Foot, Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?, 4

That last sentence along with her admission that, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” can never do what it pretends to do is very obvious to those who are not restricted by the modern paradigm. For example, take the idea that Foot was going to get to properly ethical truths from the foundation she set in MSHI. Hypothetical imperatives are obviously not going to generate “disinterested justice,” no matter how they are arranged. It always seemed a hopeless paper to me, and I’m glad Foot saw that in the end.

The key for Foot was to escape the modern Humean paradigm—that “Humean theory of reasons for action”—and this went hand in hand with a return to Aristotle.

Foot: Morality As A System Of Hypothetical Imperatives
228

The hypothetical is another problematic area as well:

Consider: “if Jane wants to teach Jim to play chess, she should x.”

But then:

“if Jane wants to teach Jim to be a good chess player, she should x.”

Doesn’t lend itself easily or plausibly to a second order formulation. And:

“If Jane wants her son to be a good man, she should x.”

I have no clue how you would even start translating that. Presumably, the devoted advocate of the fact/values distinction would claim that this hypothetical deals with what Jane should do in order to make her son the type of person that she feels is “good.” But then at this point it becomes clear that it’s impossible to form even hypotheticals about a real good that isn’t indexed to attitudes, and on most conventional definitions, this qualifies as moral anti-realism (or nihilism).

Now, a Kantian might want to index second-order oughts to a stance-independent standard, but then “good man” seems to mean “man who does as he ought,” which is first-order. And the categorical imperitive is arguably simply going to be cashed out as first-order facts about what reason demands in the first place, so I don’t think they’d actually benefit from the “all statements with practical import are second order,” demand.

229

I know you want to bring this thread to a close, but just quickly:

The discussion about the fox is confusing two different uses of “bad.”

That it is bad for the fox – i.e., harmful, unpleasant, not conducive to survival etc. – to lose a leg (under non-medical circumstances) seems to me simply factual, not expressive of an attittude at all. That’s because "bad " is not being used in its moral or ethical sense.

The other use, however, would have to assert, “It is a morally bad thing for bad things to happen to foxes.” That’s entirely different. It is indeed a statement of attitude, not to be discovered in the facts about what is bad for foxes. Do we care what happens to foxes? Should we? Knowing that losing a leg is bad for the fox will not answer these questions.

230

That is very dismissive, bad faith, and evasive of the OP’s topic. You can’t define the terms and you don’t care about the most central question to a discussion of Foote.

I always go into discussions with charitable interpretations, and you always refuse to engage. I don’t think you have any ground to stand when complaining about @Leontiskos when you won’t even engage in the discussions you start.

I’m disappointed that you refuse to engage.

2 Likes
231

That’s an interesting point. It strikes me that a lot of the moves in this discussion parallel the moves that occurred in the debates following Moore’s “open question argument.” For example, @Banno’s theory of ‘good’ as a second-order property runs up against language use. It turns out that the way we use language just doesn’t accord with that theory, and this same problem cropped up a lot in the 20th century debates around Moore’s argument.

I think Simpson very astutely points out that the whole complex of problems stems from the modern mind trying to come to grips with the trascendentality of ‘good’. ‘Good’ turns out to be a term that bridges many of the islands that the modern Humean wants kept separate, and the natural way we use language is the proof of this. It’s no wonder that the univocal analytic theories come up against the analogical nature of natural language.

I do not believe anyone at all has made this claim, “It is a morally bad thing for bad things to happen to foxes.” If we follow Foot it is facts about human nature that bear on practical reason, just as facts about fox nature bear on what is good and bad for foxes. Foot’s argument about the factuality of the plant’s need for water is a stepping stone towards her arguments related to human nature.

Is Foot interested in @Jay’s “moral bad”? In a certain sense she is. For her whole life she had wrestled with the rational status of the moral virtue of justice, and this would seem to relate to our idea of immorality. Precisely in her middle period she accepted Thrasymachus’ (and Jay’s) argument from The Republic which says that it is sometimes perfectly rational to be unjust. Yet in her later period she apparently rejects that argument. I don’t know exactly why, and in any case, at this point it seems that the thread was never much about Foot in the first place. There has simply been no interest in Foot’s actual work.

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Sure, obviously judgement is needed to apply maxims to content. That isn’t what makes them morally good though. Moral goodness remains wholly formal (in terms of the act, and more importantly, the will that wills them and its motivation).

And of course Kant means autonomy in his own particular way. But this autonomy is precisely acting in according to the dictates of discursive practical reason. This is why I cannot square your aversion to the “algorithmic” or “deductive” with Kant. For instance, if stance-voluntarism is so appealing re scientific realism because we don’t have to tell people who disagree with us that they are simply irrational, why doesn’t this hold for ethics? For surely a Kantian cannot be a stance voluntarist re ethics. But then it’s hard for me to see how a Kantian could be a stance-voluntarist on scientific realism since that also relates to rational action. If scientific realism affects how we map the world, and mapping the world dictates how we act, then letting voluntarism into science lets voluntarism into our maxims (maybe another issue).

And it seems particularly hard to square Kantianism with your position that a selfish egoist can be rational. If they aren’t acting according to universalizable laws, they are, by definition, irrational.

Anyhow, if this is your objection, it would be it be fair to say that the various goods offered up by utilitarians, teleology, etc. fail to be the right sort of good because they do not flow from universalizable laws dictated by discursive practical reason, and from a will only motivated by obedience to said laws? That makes the disagreement far more obvious. It also helps make it obvious that the moral good and good will are going to be formal and not based on any content (except in their application), so that there is no point in appealing to the metaphysics of goodness, or the fact that the properly ordered person in the classical framework also wills the Good for its own sake. On the former view, the latter cannot include the “moral good” because it isn’t exclusively formal (or at least it includes too much goodness of various sorts).

This is important because different paradigms can sound similar at a surface level. For Aquinas, the moral virtues help us act and desire in accordance with “right reason.” This sounds pretty Kantian, except that reason here is ecstatic, which almost inverts the entire paradigm. You can even say that the good man wills the good as such. But the formal object is entirely different between the two. In Kant, it is practical reason itself, which is formal and separate from its content, in Aquinas it is the Good, and so all goods (and indeed ultimately God, who is more inward to things than there innermost selves, “who art everywhere and fillest all things”) and “right reason” preferences higher goods to lower ones, and real goods to merely apparent ones.

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Sure, it isn’t meant to be a moral fact. It’s a fact about goodness. It bears in the conversation because, as @Banno has allowed, if you allow “good-for” to be a first order predicate (as you are here) you can produce arguments that get you from the “is” of facts about goodness, to practical conclusions about what is worthy of choice.

Basically, if “x is better than y” can be a fact, then moving to practical conclusions is easy.

Well, one can be concerned with what is morally bad and not accept the Kantian definition of what is morally bad. It’s not like the utilitarian has defaulted on the ethical or moral in any obvious way. Or we might want to define the specifically “moral good” in terms of the moral virtues.

One could hardly claim that Plato, Cicero, or Augustine were uninterested in morality, but they are also not going to agree to the definition of moral goodness Kant provides. This is why I find the objection that something isn’t the right kind of good (moral) on its own to be vague.

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Sure, but Foot really does think the consequentialist has defaulted on the ethical, and she begins wrestling with Kant even from her early years. For example, she eventually came to believe that her “etiquette” arguments against Kant had failed. The moral virtues had always been fairly easy for her to incorporate, with the exception of the virtue of justice.

Here is the exact quote about “disinterested justice” that I was referring to:

To be sure, in ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’ I had (rather inconsistently with my doubts about the rational status of morals) allowed considerations of self-interest an independent ‘rea­son-giving’ force. But this didn’t help with the rationality of disin­terested justice, which rationality I was, rather scandalously, inclined to restrict to those whose desires were such as to allow them to be described as lovers of justice. I have therefore, rightly, been accused by my critics of reintroducing subjectivity at the level of rationality while insisting on objectivity in the criteria of moral right and wrong.

Philippa Foot, Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?, 4

This actually goes back to the point I made to you in the thread on moral nihilism. The fact/value distinction is not the same as the is/ought distinction, and therefore overcoming the former is not the same as overcoming the latter, at least if we include things like ‘disinterested justice’ in the category of ‘ought’. Foot was aware of the complication from an early date, and this is because of the syllogism:

  1. All evaluative moves can be subsumed under the notion of self-interest
  2. Not all ‘ought’ moves can be subsumed under the notion of self-interest
  3. Therefore, not all ‘ought’ moves are reducible to evaluative moves

For Foot (2) is proved by the virtue of justice, which requires a disinterest that is not fully compatible with self-interest. Note that this virtue of justice is not restricted to Kant. Aristotle affirms it too (although just yesterday I was listening to a Kantian who quipped that Aristotle was not entitled to it).

For early Foot (and also early Anscombe) I would phrase it like this:

    1. Act X is unjust
  • 2a. Injustice is bad
  • 2b. Unjust acts are wrong
    1. Therefore, X should not be done

Whether one wants to use 2a or 2b, (2) represents the difficult premise for Foot and Anscombe.

Foot: Morality As A System Of Hypothetical Imperatives
235

I’m not sure what to add to this.

I don’t think this is true, and I haven’t seen any responses to this but somethign strikes me hard, and I think that it has through out the discussion - possibly in Leon’s comments too. Below, your statements above are shown as simple 1 and 2, vertically.

1 is a fact. We understand health, and it is a stipulation that no one reasonable argues with. Mental “health” for instance may have us wondering certain things… anyway.. It can be agreed that on this premise, it’s just plum truth that a child drinking mercury will have their heath deteriorate. Indeed.

2 is only true with the acceptance of certain stipulations, and doesn’t actually make a moral claim. It’s bad for their health. Whther this is, in and of itself, bad for the child hasn’t yet been touched in the statements above. That’s where the morality comes in. And i suggest there isn’t a first order statement that could bring it out.

236

I don’t wish to close the thread; I would have it return to the topic of the OP. Aas it is, yes, the logic being used is appalling.

“The fox lost its foot” is descriptive. That it is bad that the fox lost it’s foot is an evaluation that it expresses a preference for the fox not having lost it’s foot - it chooses between two situations and expresses a preference for one.

It does this by predicating over a sentence, and so is a second-order sentence.

It would not on most accounts be a moral evaluation.

Foot addressed the difference between to two directly in the article being considered in the thread https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/foot-morality-as-a-system-of-hypothetical-imperatives. The distinction is not as clear-cut as some think.

237

I’m here. If you do wish to engage charitably, you might begin by addressing the account in it’s own terms.

238

Yes, but not moral conclusions. The “better” does not refer to whether we ought to pursue x; that depends. We can say all sorts of things about what may be good for the fox, but it’s only because the word “good” does double duty in English that we’re able to be confused about how it also expresses being a moral good. Does the fox flourish? Fine. Is that good from the fox’s point of view? Charitably, yes. Is that a common use of the word “good”? Yep. Does this tell us anything about whether foxes ought to flourish or not? Of course not. We haven’t even stepped over the threshold of “what ought to be the case.”

The whole “choice-worthy” thing continues to seem to me like a red herring, or a misunderstanding. A zillion things may be choice-worthy under certain circumstances; there are many goods (in the first sense I described above) to be pursued. But that can’t get you where you want to go – that the fact of being chosen means it ought to be chosen. Not unless you define “choice-worthy” as “(morally) good,” in which case we’re back to the Euthyphro problem.

But let’s not spend much time on that. I know you see it differently.

239

OK, I misunderstood your reply about the bitch session.

Yes, but I see no reason not to allow that, from the fox’s point of view, it’s likely to be “considered” (does a fox consider?) a bad thing. It is certainly a bad thing if the goal is to survive (hypothetical imperative). But this use of “bad” is not about what ought not to happen; we can’t move from the likely harmful consequences for the fox (which ordinary language does indeed abbreviate to “bad”) to saying that therefore foxes should thrive.

Same for people. I’m perfectly able to evaluate various courses of action as good or bad for me without taking a position on whether, morally, I ought to do them. Indeed, there are times when making the ultimate self-sacrifice – one’s own life – may be what’s morally required.

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You keep altering the example to make this more plausible.

The original was “it is bad for foxes to lose their legs.” I would say 99% of the time this is uttered, bad is a first-order predication, referring to what is bad-for-foxes, not an expression of an attitude that it is regrettable that, somewhere in the world, foxes have lost limbs.

Why not? What is distinct about them?

Consider:

  1. Justice is morally good.
  2. X promotes justice.
  3. It is good for a man to be morally good.
    C. Therefore, do x.

Now, we could certainly object that there might not be a practice that always promotes justice, but lets assume 2 is plausible. Plus on your own account, formation is not only possible but desirable, so then there must be some practices that fit the bill for 2, even if they only work on average.

What are you rejecting then? Presumably 3, that it is part of the human good to be morally good? Or would it be 1, that justice is morally good?

Or would it be that it is not good to be motivated to do morally good because that is what is good-for-man, and good-for-rational creatures, and the motivation must be an appeal to universalizable laws alone?

But for the austere Kantian we have:

  1. X is morally obligatory.
  2. It is choice-worthy to do what is morally obligatory.
    C. Therefore, do x.

I suppose the objection here could be that “morally obligatory” is always indexed to someone’s attitude (making it second-order), or the same for “choice-worthy,” but it hardly seems like a Kantian can grant this, since it would entail a subjectivism they reject. A Kantian could complain that 2 is tautological if choice-worthy just means to be dictated by practical reason, but then I fail to see how that causes a problem for the purposes of the example.

So the issue in a Kantian frame isn’t about first or second-order predication, but about the nature of the morally good, and it being sui generis. You cannot get “morally good” premises anywhere but from sheer practical reason (although you can of course apply that judgement, which is why practical reason is applicable at all).