You have all the right to be an antisocial person and live an isolated life. That comes from your personal right. You, however, have the right to share your life with others, which comes from your personal right again. A relationship is involved once you want to share your life with others. Therefore, you must respect the relational right if you want to keep the relationship. So, it is all up to you; that is your life, whether you want to share it or not!
@Banno , it may be better put somehow but this I believe gets to the heart of the obstacle I am having in an ethics developed with a firewall between ‘is’ and ‘ought’:
I agree. You seem to want a sort of objectivity in your ethics, but you have no other source of the objective besides stipulation.
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See the choice being made in your description?
That choice is not a part of the description.
It is apart from that description.
So
is mistaken.
I don’t want democracy in my custard. You appear to be making a category error.
Yes, @Banno is and always had; and I’ve tried many times to penetrate charitably into what they are conveying, but they always refuse to engage.
In the past, they used to describe it as an inverse correspondence between thought and reality that is nevertheless stance-independent in its metaphysical grounding. E.g., “torturing that baby for fun was wrong” is true IFF it corresponds with reality but in the opposite direction to standard correspondence like “there is a squirrel in my room” IFF there is a squirrel in my room.
This time, they seemed to be playing with Natural Goodness (which is totally fine and interesting) whereby there’s a way where a second-order property is irreducible to natural properties but yet are still grounded objectively; however, they just recanted that portion and are now saying “the statement is the subject”. I’m not sure if that’s the same as an inverse correspondence theory of moral truth or not tbh.
he/him, since you asked.
I was unable to follow your account of my account.
What I’m sympathetic with in Foot is the idea that we recognise the normatively of a situation. Hence this thread.
A few understood that, and addressed it. The’ve long since moved on, given the crowding.
Got it. Good faith charity. Thanks for your time.
See, that was something asked about above that you didn’t explain well, so I guess we’re done?
So do we agree that objectivity does not fit in with ethics? That’d be progress.
There’s not a lot to explain. One recognises the puppy kicking as reprehensible. What more do you need?
For ethics? Presumably some distinction between reality and mere appearances. For, while many might agree with you that “kicking puppies is reprehensible,” surely many would not. Particularly, in cultures where animals are still primarily used as labor, instead of kept as pets, they don’t tend to have the same standards re animal cruelty (just as people in urban areas have nothing like the same standards for the animals they eat). And likewise, you have people who see homosexuality as reprehensible, or abortion, or sacrilege, or promiscuity and fornication, or intolerance of any of the previous behaviors, etc.
Even allowing that the mere fact of having a preference on these things, or experiencing them as reprehensible or revolting commits us to the truth of their badness (which is questionable) it does not thereby become apparent which, if any, of the positions are true.
Whereas, if ethical truths are only true, or only knowable, simply due to the fact that one prefers them, then there is no distinction between appearances and reality, because whatever is felt or thought to be true just is true. This would lead to contradictions between different individuals, or the same individual at different times, so we would seem to have sort of Protagorean relativism, because ethical truths would only be true for whoever holds them to be true.
But then ethics would be worthless because no one could ever be wrong about ethical judgements. Even holding contradictory truths would only be an issue if one felt it was bad to hold to contradictory positions on those issues. Consistency is, after all, a norm.
Hence, something other than current desire, perception or opinion needs to ground ethical truths and these truths need to be knowable.
You would run into the same issue if you tried to have an epistemology that just stated that things “seem true” to each of us, and so are true for us. Or if you could only describe truth formally, but never how one knows truth, you also wouldn’t have an ethics. So, to take the Protagorean example above more formally ,making ethical truths second-order imputations whose truth is indexed to individuals would dissolve ethics, and this is why something more is needed.
Granted, without “anything else,” we could still explain cooperation, law-making, and moral debate (just as nihilists still try to explain these). It’s just that such an explanation wouldn’t be ethics, it would be descriptive sociology.
Again I find myself explaining direction of fit.
What we talk about how things are, it makes sense to differentiate between what we believe to be the case and what is the case. That’s how we can be mistaken; and what this requires is that there be a difference between what we believe and what is true; and we change our belief to match what is true. The infelicity of a mismatch between word and world requires that we change the words.
In our normative considerations, the reverse happens. We change the world so as to match our values. Put somewhat too bluntly, we cannot be mistaken as to our values. The infelicity between word and world requires that we change the world.
And yes, we do disagree as to what is of value.
Pretending that there is a something more (your italics…) that is true for all of us might make things easier, but that doesn’t make it true.
This is the basis on which we must decide what to do. And that discussion is called “ethics”.
Hence,
If “ethical truths” are only true for us to the extent that they reflect our current desires, they hardly seem worthy of the name.
Yes, but the point is that it also seems we cannot be mistaken as to what is good or ethical. And it would seem that we cannot be mistaken as to what is truly valuable or desirable either.
That true beliefs are to be preferred is a normative claim though, as are any appeals to good evidence, good reasoning, etc. So any attempt to claim that we should prefer such a theory, because it accurately captures the logic of moral discourse, because it is more parsimonious, etc. is self-undermining. We cannot be wrong if we don’t value those standards.
It’s also far from obvious that “x is good” is never a belief, but always something completely different. Mackie is far more charitable here by simply saying that people have such beliefs, but are in error. Your approach has to radically translate what most philosophers are saying, so that the translation might have almost nothing in common with what they intended.
Consider John Calvin on total depravity. We would have to render his beliefs about every human being thoroughly corrupted and oriented towards sin as “every human is thoroughly oriented towards actions I dislike.” That’s essentially re-writing the entire content of his thought.
To take this seriously would imply that almost all the philosophers from all the world’s traditions outside a small pocket the West in the last short period were utterly deluded about what they believed, and not only this, but that they never actually believed anything they said about the virtues, the metaphysics of goodness, teleology, the categorical imperitive, utility, etc., but instead only “valued” these. This would require a translation of almost all past ethics.
Does this pass Davidson’s principle of charity?
If a classical philosopher writes: “The good is that towards which all things strive because it fulfills their nature,” and we translate this as, “I am currently experiencing an appetite for (insert bizarre rendering here, I won’t even attempt it),” then we have utterly severed any link between their words and their cognitive state. We are no longer interpreting them, we are rewriting them.
This would be a case of massive, systematic error. For millennia, across largely independent civilizations, from the Ganges to the Tiber to the Yangtze, philosophers and people of all classes were suffering from a collective illusion about the very nature of their own thoughts, thinking they believed facts about what is good, when really they only ever desired and emoted.
Exactly what evidence supports such a radical thesis?
Ok. Well, thank you. It helps.
Agree. Perfectly clear.
Right. I could leave this as is too, but there are some possible issues. Must there be a difference between what we believe to be true and what is true? We can be mistaken, so we can be correct. Or do you mean believing what is happens in mind and what is happens in the world, so they are physically different? But it’s easy enough to leave these questions for now.
You are using the term “what is true.”
I take this to mean simply the world. When you refer to “what is true”, that conceptualizes what just is. And since we are doing ethics what actually is, the content subjected to our ethics said now now as “what is true,” means puppies and dealings wth people in the world, etc, etc… But it is clear to me you are saying basically this: we have what is true to speak of, and what is said truly.
This seems epistemological - how we adjudge belief. Belief is belief in some of the things we are said to know, and you are pointing out how we can change our belief to make what we know match “what is true”. (We’re close enough. I know it’s a dirty word but those are the bare bones for an objective truth (pay no attention to ‘truth for all’, just truth at all, just one tiny “that really is a cat” truth, saying what it says just like it is happening in the world regardless of ever speaking at all ). Your schema seems to require a placeholder that is fixed and always the same “what is true”, but I’ sure this is all abhorrent an application of your words and meaning. It’s just what you sound manor like to me.)
So now we have world, word, and mismatch. And we can change our own minds. So this more directly brings up agency - the bodies involved again, the dealings, but this time with a mismatch between my knowledge/words/belief and the world’s bodies.
Now allowing for a mismatch we have space to conform our words (“change the words”) to what we see is there in the world, or speak “what is true”.
(It seems like you are going to have a problem saying anything good is real if the good isn’t found with “what is true” but maybe “good is real” isn’t your point. I’ll keep going.)
You see, that is a monster paragraph. The blunt instrument was precise and sharp.
“In our normative considerations” (when doing ethics), “the reverse happens…(and) the infelicity between word and world requires that we change the world.”
This looks at the same thing (word, what is, true or mismatch..) from another side, or inside out. Appreciate it.
I don’t know that this move is quite as stark as ‘world changing word vs word changing world’ makes it sound, but “the infelicity between word and world requires that we change the world.” That alone seems to offer some real insight into what you are saying. Am I right on that? This observation is clear and important to what your are saying here.
That’s another massive leap, 180 degrees though (or catching something else up to the “words changing the world” paradigm). But you are saying and making reference to “what is true” too, just like @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus ! So “pretending” might be calling the kettle black.
If there is not “something…that is true for all of us” then why did you ever even reference “what is true” at all let alone with such reliance? If your reference to “what is true” doesn’t at least mean “what is true for all of us” then I don’t see the function or meaning of the word “true”, nor do see anything for my words to mismatch. “What is true” stands in for dealings with puppies in the world of all of us. It conceptualizes what is, in order to build a mismatch between word and what is true of the world at all.
So we don’t have to leap to the truth being pretense, indeed you can’t, because you relied on truth (any truth is enough) to outline the words and their mismatch. ‘Truth for all’ just means the same thing as ‘what is true’. What is true, if it is true, is what already is, there for the saying truly or believing falsely with a mismatch or without it.
But to change the world for the sake of the words, that is where we do ethics. Interesting..
So let me try to play out what you’ve shown me here.
In the world, what is true are puppies and people kicking. We speak of this by making our words conform to what is true in the world by saying “look there, puppies and kicking.”
Instead of saying “there are puppies being kicked” we can instead say “it is bad to kick puppies for fun.” When we do this, when we sort of leave the world of truth for a second and speak about what we believe is good and bad, We draw, not from the world, we draw from the the mind and its words and all bound in our minds and experience. We add to the puppies and kicking in the world the evaluation “when for fun, kicking puppies is bad and wrong and unjust”. This addition doesn’t come from the world, but from our values and various undercurrents of being in the world and situatedness.
In the case of doing ethics, in order to adjudge “kicking puppies for fun is bad” we have to change the world to conform to these words. It’s not that the words themselves matter, just the directionality from which we enter the playing field is inside values and judgments and evaluations, placed back out in the world now regardless of what the underlying or otherwise just other world called “what is true”. We see someone kicking a puppy, and we judge this wrong not because of something external like divine law or any external law directed around fixed eternal principles, but we instead place the ethics in the world, from ourselves and our values and particular evaluations, changing the world from in which there once were just puppies and kicking, but now is a world where kicking puppies is bad and wrong, and the kicking is brought to an end based on a belief turned into action, and only now, in this action have we added to truth in the world, another fact like kicking, the ethical act of stopping the kicker truly becomes the case regardless of of whether someone believes it or not, mismatches it to their words or not, and we fall into the next ethical conundrum possibly…
Are you seeing this is my best attempt here? If I’ve misrepresented you, it’s because I dont understand and only attempted to represent you in order to give you a good reason to keep clarifying this.
I have a lot of questions still. So please, I humbly ask, where am I close, and what else can you clarify?
Again, if it is how things are then tough.
Indeed, but that a belief is true is not. I bolded the difference.
Yours is a very unsympathetic interpretation - wilfully so, on the face of it. @Jay said something similar. After years of discussion, and especially after the last few threads, you must have an idea of the answer on offer, from both myself as well as Foot. Ethics involves other people. The argument in the previous thread on this very point was quite explicit. I’m not seeing much point in going over it again.
Yes, it becomes tediously repetitive.
Too long; also, you seem to be answering my reply to Tim as if it were to you, which is a bit odd. And it’s all a bit of a muddle. I think you may have come in half way through a conversation in which you were not involved.
Care to edit it, or maybe bring it down to one or two issues or questions? You seemed to find a lot to agree with in the Nihilism thread, and this relates to that fairly readily.
As things stand I’m spending a few hours each day repeating defences of stuff that is only loosely related to the topic I want to pursue. I’m needing to be a bit selective.
It’s not too long.
You should read it all.
It should stir further inspiration for ways to further clarify.
You haven’t explained enough for many of us and you keep refusing to take a little more time for the community here. Why bro?
Get back to me later but get back to me.
You are making a lot of sense but you are also not making a lot of sense. This is worth the work.
There seems an inordinate interest in my actual views on ethics, which is problematic since I do not have anything like a systematic theory of how one decides that to do in some situation, and my views change slowly depending on what I read last. But since there is so much interest, I’ll set out the way things seem to stand for me around now, in a quite compressed way, and probably dogmatically.
First is, seems to me that there is a difference between how things are and how they might be; in the first, we change our beliefs about the world in order to match the way the world is; in the second, we believe the world should be some way, and we change it in order to match. This view comes from considerations of Anscombe and Searle and such.
Nevertheless it seems to me that there are ethical truths. The argument is fairly simple; if someone holds a view as to how things should be, then one holds that there are truths about how things should be. The argument here comes from considering T-sentences, and so is quite deflationary; along with a simple variation on Moore’s paradox: it would be at least odd to say that you value charity, but you do not think it true that charity is valuable". So ethics seems to involve truth-functionality and to be subject to logic.
It seems that there is a logical divide between statements about what is the case and statements about what ought be the case. I’ve changed my mind several times about this, but it fits in with what was said previously about the difference in direction of fit - it seems difficult to see how any set of word-to-word sentences could follow from sentences that were only word-to-world. And more recently I’ve been convinced by Gillian Russell’s much more general and formal account of the barriers to entailment brought about by modifications to models. Roughly, taking a class of models and showing that there are multiple and various expansions of that model, and since no one of these is specifically entailed by the original, there is a barrier to such entailment. This is applicable to universal, indexicals, modality, and time as well as to is/ought, and so seems quite robust.
Foot, through the Tram problem, shows us that the ethical import of a situation is recognise separately to the literal description of the situation. So pulling a leaver is ethically different to pushing someone off a bridge. The ethical import is as much a part of the situation as the tram, yet remains not about how things are, but about how we would have them be. So it involves that issue of direction of fit yet again.
From Wittgenstein and others, philosophers now understand people as socially embedded, as part of a community. Our language and so our very mode of understanding is not private. This is quite evident in ethics; since we are obliged to deal with others, there is a need to understand how we are to do so. Our ability to recognise the ethical import of a situation is also not private, but inherently communal and subject to our place in the word, our education, our interests and so on.
Our ethical considerations differ from other considerations such as mere taste in that whereas we accept that we might have differing preferences in regard to taste, we expect others to conform to our ethical opinions. We do not expect others to agree with out preference for Darjeeling tea, but we do expect them to agree with our preference for not kicking puppies.
Overwhelmingly, we can find agreement as to the facts. This observation is missed because we spend so much time quibbling about our disagreements. But consider how much we have in common for you to have made it this far into this monologue. And this agreement includes most of the features of our moral discourse. we agree overwhelmingly as to what we would have be the case, as well as to what is the case. This is simple charity at work.
That agreement is a part of what it is to understand what it is to flourish as a human, and to understood that frustrating someone’s flourishing is unacceptable. So we come at last to the political considerations of Rawls and Nussbaum, the virtues, and working together on what we are each capable of.
In the end this is a fairly comfortable and liberal view, unsurprisingly.
Anyway, there you have it, for better or worse. It is indeed an ad hoc collection of arguments and ideas, not a grand and complete system. Just a muddling through of some of the detail, with a hope for some level of coherence but certainly not completeness.
Not really. You’ve objected over and over to example arguments and sentences, such as “it is bad for men to burn,” on the grounds that these really mean “I dislike it when men are burned.”
As I’ve noted before, this is sometimes a plausible rendering of a natural language statement. Such statements can be ambiguous, or they often do double duty as both descriptive and evaluative.
But the objections hang on them needing to be parsed in just one way, either because predicates of practical import like “good” or “choice-worthy” are always second-order imputations, or now, because they always describe a direction of fit from the will/appetites to the world.
What I’m trying to show here is that this cannot be argued as a mere fact of grammar or logic, or how “such sentences are properly understood” because this is obviously not how they are intended in most of philosophy, and require absurd translations. Often, the direction of fit for statements with practical import is the same as beliefs, or does double duty. Hence, the objections raised cannot be a matter of linguistic analysis, or of people “doing terrible logic” or the like.
Plus it seems wildly inconsistent to translate: “it is bad for men to fornicate” as always being rendered “I prefer that no one fornicate” but then to claim that expressing such a statement commits one to the first-order ethical truth that “men ought not fornicate.” In the first case, we are indexing to the individual, but when deriving to the commitments that flow from the claim we are not. But if “it is bad for men to fornicate” always just means “I prefer that no one fornicate” such a commitment is never expressed. This is why most advocates of such translations deny ethical truths. Because the truth condition for the translation is clearly “x prefers y,” which I don’t think anyone claims is not wholly descriptive. The truth-condition would not be “x is that which ought not be done/good.” But then the expression doesn’t commit us to ethical truths.
Now why did the creators of such systems think this was how language needed to be interpreted? For Ayers it has to do with the verification of “values.” But, aside from the problems with the verification principle, it is far from obvious that practical import is absent from all empirical descriptions. That’s a consequence of the metaphysical assumption that the cosmos is valueless.
Likewise, the other core evidence, that ethical debate is interminable in a way factual debates are not, underdetermines the conclusion. First, because the inability to find consensus on ethical issues is, to some degree, a parochial issue of the post-Enlightenment West. I don’t mean to deny that ethical debate was always “settled,” but there were certainly much wider areas of overlapping consensus across traditions and within them in other epochs. Second, seemingly descriptive debates over the nature of the void, essentialism, causality, contingency, God, the immortality of the soul, the nature of truth itself, the nature of universals, etc. all have the same character, and are clearly not mere expressions of desire.
Finally, there is Hare’s observation that sentences about goodness, desirability, etc. have a prescriptive element. This is debatable in some cases, but even accepting it, it does not follow that all such statements have exclusively prescriptive content.
So, the emotivist and similar theories can certainly argue for their claims in various ways. What seems illicit to me is trying to claim such positions can be supported simply by appeals to logic and linguistic analysis. This seems particularly true if one is committed to a thoroughgoing logical pluralism, because then the question is: “why are logics that codify these positions particularly 'useful?” seems to be “because they codify the right metaphysical and ethical commitments.” But then this just shows where the debate actually lies.
I would say relevant predicates can be first or second-order and that their direction of fit can go either way, and that applying some hard rule does violence to language. It attempts to rule of most of ethics (Kant as much as Plato) on the grounds that it isn’t actually expressable.
Take it from me – it comes across as, if not hostile, then unfriendly. It makes me feel like you’ve been keeping some kind of dossier on everything you believe I’ve been wrong about, while not much caring about what I may have said that was sensible.
As I said:
Shall we?
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Yes, the moral decision can be made fully, given two basic rights, namely personal rights and relational rights. These rights are, however, reducible to the description of the world. Relational right is derived from the fact that humans are a social animal. So, it is about the world. Giving up personal rights leads to absurdity in the world, so it is about how the world is, too.
Greatly appreciate your time. It is worth it for the forum.
Yes. We agree.
The is/ought firewall. Can we say you have fixed this as a permanent feature of your view?
The devil here is in the details. But refutations of this view are bottomless pits, so I’ll just move on.
You can’t say that! That is obligation imposed from the world to the word! Did you mean to say simply “since we deal with others”? But if you didn’t mean “obliged” here, how does doing ethics even matter? Why bother if “dealings with others” is like a puppy eating a mouse, or a weed drawing minerals from the soil - all obligation free?
“Our place in the word.” This is metaphorical. What are you assuming about the world that it supports a “place in the word”? Did you mean “our place in the world?”
“Not private” is a euphemism for “in the world” or “what is true”. We can be wrong and believe something that is false, but it is only a wrong belief because it is false, and it is only false because of the way the non-private world is. Otherwise, it’s private.
So you are sneaking the world back into the ontology of ethics by saying the above.
What two things are conforming (you need “this” and “that” before you can build “conformity”), and by what medium is this conformity determined? By value, or by appearance? You can’t just say “we expect others to conform” and not explain “expectation” setting in the world, because others only exist in the world (unless we are dreaming about our community’s existence - private again).
Yes, but it is still a system, so what is the point of pointing out this system is incomplete, if not to point out that there are areas where further discussion makes sense? This begs my reply, in attempt to achieve more completeness, and the hope of final completion (if possible). Maybe you don’t want to discuss them with me (fine), but I hope you will discuss some of this further.
Tell me what you think about this: because ethics is not grounded in what is true about the world, it is as incoherent to blame a compass for pointing north all of the time as it is incoherent to be to blame a person for valuing the fun in kicking puppies. I know we can choose to blame people for how they treat puppies, but we can also blame compasses for being so stubborn, neither blame has grounding in the world.
I know you disagree with this, but I think your reasoning still collapses into this.
Lastly, either you are saying that 1) there can be no such thing as a single person in a community who recognizes that the entire rest of the community is being bad, unethical and wrong, because “what is ethical” is essentially a communal project, and without significant consent of the community, you are just talking preference and haven’t crossed the threshold into ethics; or 2) ethics is, in fact, always private, imposed upon the world like any authoritarian reconstruction of reality (words changing the world).
What you said is not just incomplete, it seems incoherent as well. I could leave it at that, with you saying “I guess it is incoherent, but I’m still working on it,” but I can’t see how you think what you said doesn’t contain some significant inconsistencies.
And again, I know it is not easy to lay out innermost beliefs and thoughts in this boiler room, so thanks for picking the ball back up like this at all. But I don’t think we’re done, and hope this continues.