Which is why I keep asking, are we able to do ethics anymore? Why are adherents to the is/ought gap and an ethical-world/real-world gap bothering to do ethics at all?
I think people think my question here betrays some sort of judgment on their ability to be coherent and logical and maybe even a good person - but it’s not that at all. I’m asking simply because it doesn’t make sense to me, doesn’t hang together.
The whole ethical debate divide here can also be analogized to the complaints about personal attacks: no one really cares if you are right and I am wrong, or I am right and you are wrong; we do this to see if we can ever simply say what is right and what is wrong, what is true, what is false, regardless of any of our shortcomings or personal achievements or who the speaker even is.
I don’t think some people are right around here, but I only express my thoughts not to point out personal wrongness, but to see if I am wrong to think they are wrong because what they said is right. To me, when I’m right, I’m not right, I simply know what is right. And I know people disagree with this very posture (maybe @banno ) but I don’t see how else or why else to communicate with you nerds at all. (Fellow nerds.) Let’s have a little more guts people - this is worth it. It’s okay to be wrong about this crap - it doesn’t mean you aren’t rational or not a good person. It just means someone else doesn’t see your reasoning.
I am learning from you about me, and it’s fun. Hope you can enjoy yourselves a bit more.
This is absurd. You reject being wilfully unsympathetic, and in the very next paragraph you yet again grossly misrepresent what has been claimed with
Language and understanding are socially embedded, and so is our capacity to recognise ethical import, shaped by community, education, and place in the world. You ignore the greater part of the argument in order to present it as trivial. Calling that out as “unsympathetic” is generous.
Sorry, I didn’t mean for it to come across that way. It’s a list of positions you’ve advanced on this topic in the past (the main ones, re definition, family resemblance, and rule-following in the last few days) as objections. I mentioned them because they seem to me to be inconsistent with the further claim that uses of “good” or “ought” that don’t accord with Kantianism are guilty of a fallacy of equivocation because they are not speaking to the specifically moral (i.e., Kantian) good/ought, for the reasons I explained.
This wasn’t meant to be a “grab bag of things I think Jay is wrong about,” but rather a response to the objections and clarification. Clarification, because my response to orthodox Kantianism is quite a bit different from constructivist quasi-realist Kantianism. In particular, I think Wittgenstein creates quite a few problems for the orthodox Kantian precisely because Wittgenstein is working within the Kantian inheritance, so it’s in ways more of an internal critique.
Now on areas of agreement, I think I’ve mentioned before that I quite agree that the Kantian focus on the motivations for actions (on the person) and the desirability of the good itself (or in Kantian terms, respect and dignity) is a highlight. Kant’s focus on freedom gets quite close to what I take to be Plato’s greatest insight, the idea that desire for the Good is what allows us to transcend our own finitude, to move beyond current beliefs and desires, in search of what is truly best. For Kant this cashes out as autonomy, whereas for Plato it’s quite the opposite because we are being drawn beyond ourselves by eros, toward union with the other. I would say the same for the Saint Francis example you gave, they are almost inversions; but precisely because key points are being inverted (autonomy versus communion) they are also very similar in their key intuitions. My objections to Kant then rest in how he defines freedom, his epistemology (which then becomes a metaphysics), the way the system tends towards solipsistic self-enclosure, and above all the issue you pointed out, that motivation seems a bit fraught.
But, I brought up the points on definition and Wittgenstein because these strike me as real difficulties of the coherence of the Kantian ought, because they would seem to threaten the transcendental arguments that support the system and the very character of reason that makes the Kantian ought Kantian. Whereas, without that particularly Kantian character, the general idea that the good ought to be sought for its own sake, or that the better is what we should do seems unobjectionable. Although, I also don’t know if I would frame it as “duty,” except in a loose analogous sense. The Platonic image is instead “love” and I think that’s not just aesthetically more pleasing (because who doesn’t like love more than duty) but also phenomenologically more apt for the good will, which sometimes acts arduously against the passions (more like duty) but which also sometimes is impelled by eros. Of the two though, the latter would seem to be the more ideal state.
Now, your objections normally seem to take the form of claiming that most goods sought by men cannot be the moral good because they would be heternomous, done for some benefit or desire, is that fair? I guess I just don’t see self-interest or desire as so troubling, and moreover as being cleanly separable from “duty.” There are forms of egoism that say that everyone is an egoist because they always act due to some motivation. This renders egoism trivial though, because the set of intentional acts is the same as the set of egoistic ones. Yet when people complain about selfishness, isn’t it normally about inordinate focus on the self, as opposed to the common good or good of others (e.g., using others as means)? Hence, desire only seems problematic if it is misaligned. Or, at a higher level, I think a desire can be understood as good, and when this is so the “good will” can follow it without contradiction or any threat to freedom. As Virgil says to Dante at the end of their travels, after the reformation of his passions: “now is your will free, erect, and whole—to act against that will would be to err: therefore
I crown and miter you lord over yourself.”
I wasn’t disagreeing with any of that though, my post only mentioned the point about the direction of fit. I gave my reasons for thinking that direction of fit is at least often intended in the same direction as beliefs (and indeed beliefs about goodness and the like seem very much like other beliefs). So, were we to accept that the direction of fit is always different for statements with practical import, it seems to me to have many follow-on consequences. That parallel argument is that this cannot be a matter of linguistic analysis or logic, without other serious follow-on consequences, because if the psychological theory is built into the structure of language is leads to all sorts of translations that get us very far from what people actually wrote.
So, as a psychological claim, I disagree with it, but as a linguistic claim, as here:
seems much more fraught for the reasons I listed. And as noted, if evaluative claims are rendered this way, which would index them, then the point about people being committed to ethical truths would be in jeopardy, because any propositional belief about how people “ought to act” would come through as an indexed preference, and so the nihilist’s denial of non-indexed first-order oughts wouldn’t be a contradiction at all. But as noted before, I think you’re right that the nihilist does risk a performative contradiction. The problem is that this reading of all “value claims” as strictly evaluative would seem to cut against that insight.
It wasn’t in response to the OP but your claim about direction of fit and its application to all values statements. So the most relevant parts:
Basically, if “x is bad” and “x ought not be done” is taken to be about preferences and indexed to the individual, it creates a mess in multiple ways. So, the claim that talk of goodness is really just preferences motivating factual claims (which are in error) seems far more plausible and charitable than the claim that all these seemingly descriptive claims were really just assertions of preferences.
The difficulty, I think, involves trying to avoid metaphysical and ethical arguments in order to secure the conclusion through linguistic analysis alone.
Ethics is not “indexed to the individual”. It’s more than individual preferences.
There’s in addition all the work done by the T-sentence and the deflationary move; ethics is an ongoing discourse with truth conditions that bottom out in communal practice, forms of life, mutual flourishing, virtues, capabilities…
Disquotation gets us truth-aptness while the grounding in practice avoids platonism.
To be very clear, the argument is not a move from natural language to a shared ethical discourse. It is a rejection of metaphysical obstruction. It is not replacing metaphysics but rejecting the metaphysical view that normative discourse is not truth-apt, freeing such discourse from the fly bottle.
But ethical statements? I’d agree that not all ethical statements are indexed to the individual. But then something like “adultery is wrong” would apply to all people. If people are committed to ethical truths by such statements, then such statements are truth-apt. Yet if those sorts of statements are truth-apt, then people can clearly be wrong about them, because if “adultery is wrong” is false, and I hold that it is true, than I am clearly in error. But then wouldn’t we want an ethics that affirms ethical truths and acts accordingly?
Whereas, if we say “adultery is wrong” only obtains for the person who values this, we’ve fallen back into indexing.
Direction of fit is normally called on to explain why ethical utterances and “beliefs” are non-cognitive. As you said, beliefs aim to fit the world, whilst desires aim to make the world conform to the desire. The common claim is that ethical thoughts/utterances are desire-like rather than belief-like (I would say they can be both though, and indeed I wouldn’t separate desire and belief this way). But once we remove the individual indexing, we are saying that the ethical thought/utterance is not about making the world conform to our attitudes, but rather about how things actually are with respect to, say, adultery. The predicate attaches to adultery, not our belief about it (the indexing move). And so this truth holds regardless of anyone’s attitudes. But that is the precisely the belief direction of fit, right? Hence, I don’t see how it can be consistent that that ethical thoughts and utterances always have the desire direction of fit and that ethical claims are universally binding independently of individual attitudes (not indexed).
This strikes me as odd, and might be clinically indicative. It could be right only if one supposed that only the word-to-world direction of fit was truth apt.
That you are supposing ethical utterances are desire-like (world-to-word) ⊢ ethical utterances are non-cognitive (not truth-apt) would go a long way to explaining why you are not following the line of thought.
That’s not a part of the direction of fit; it’s an additional assumption, one shown to be problematic by the t-schema and the variation on Moore’s paradox.
Your previous move involved the truth-aptness of indexicals.
So let’s be clear that being truth-apt is orthogonal to direction of fit.
Restated: How ethical thoughts and utterances that must have the same direction of fit as desires, can be made consistent with ethical claims that are universally binding independently of individual attitudes (not indexed). Is that still it?
It’s part of your description and it’s part of the arguments that use direction of fit in analytic philosophy?
Can you explain why all the points addressed don’t apply and the truth re my preferences is true for everyone, but also not fit to the world despite being true regardless of what anyone thinks of feels?
Second, if they are true for everyone, it would seem people can be wrong about values. For, if “adultery is wrong” is true, and not indexed, then all who disagree are simply in error.
That’s what non-cognitivism claims, precisely because of the difficulties I mentioned.
So, quasi-realism builds an entire apparatus to deal with this issue, but at the end of the day you are still indexing to the community. McDowell and others reject any strong direction of fit dichotomy, so that you can blend belief and desire. Then you have the approach of using the standard of an idealized “perfectly rational agent with complete information” and how they would want the world fit to their desires. This is still indexing, just indexing to a superior mind. All these solutions exist because of the issues listed above, the inconsistency between indexing for thoughts and utterances, but not for commitments or truths.
Go back to your syllogism, it’s “if charity is valuable.” That’s a hypothetical. If “charity is valuable” (not hypothetical) has the opposite of direction, as indexed psychological preference, then you cannot slip between the two without equivocation.
The same goes with Russell’s account. Given its assumptions, it explains why you can’t deduce an ought from an is, on the grounds that the is model can be expanded into many different, and contradictory ought models, none of which are strictly entailed by the descriptive base (although this is a result of what is excluded from the descriptive base and how the formalism is set up).
However, to use your example, if the description of Foot’s tram problem can be expanded into multiple valid ought models, then on what possible basis do we say one expansion is “true” and another is “false”? And if all are true, we seem to be allowing “ethical truths” at the cost of a vast constellation of contradictions.
If the expansion is determined by individual psychology or cultural norms, then we have indexed ethics to the observer or community.
If we say one model expansion is rationally mandatory, we have to explain why it is mandatory without smuggling in a belief-fit ethical fact. That’s what the various work arounds try to do, but even they don’t give up indexing, they just try to justify a particular species of indexing as correct or superior. Because, prima facie, you can not have a fit going from a mind’s desires to the world while denying any particular desires or any mind to desire them. The mind side of the equation is blank. But if states of affairs don’t contain ethical import because that is solely in the mind/will, then the ethical import cannot come from anywhere else.
Edit: @Jay might find this interesting because constructivist Kantianism does just this. It indexes moral judgements to the idealized perfectly rational mind with perfect information. But note that this also places substantive moral content withing “rationality.” I also think it brings out a Euthyphro dilemma implicit in Kant, because now the standard of the good will seems to lie outside of and prior to acts of self-legislation, or at least this is more explicit when there is some formal model of them that acts as a measure of morality.
OK, apology accepted. And same here, if I’ve come across too one-sidedly critical.
That would be more Kant’s objection, and I think there’s something to it, but my own objection is more prosaic.
I’ve tried to point out, in a number of contexts, that English sanctions two uses of “good” that are not at all the same, though they can overlap. There’s “good” in the sense of “adequate to the purpose” or “exemplary” or “satisfying a function” or a variety of other glosses: “This is a good knife.” Then there’s “good” in the sense of “morally correct,” “something I ought to do,” again with many other possible formulations: “It is good to be kind.”
My objection to a strictly virtue-ethical interpretation of morality is that it seems to claim that only the first use of “good” can be, at bottom, correct. If the second is used at all, it has to be translated into some version of the first. That doesn’t seem accurate to me, especially when it’s coupled with a view of “human good” that makes a “good human” resemble a “good knife” – an item with certain purpose-driven characteristics.
I said “strictly virtue-ethical” because I don’t at all think there needs to be some permanent opposition in these ways of looking at what is good. Virtue ethics has an important contribution to make to our ethical understanding – but only a contribution.
Not too sure about the indexing part, but the problem of the “perfect mind with perfect information” is absolutely right. If you have the fortitude to wade through any of the vast literature on “how should we understand the categorical imperative?” you find that this is a common theme. Do we have to interpret “being able to will” as meaning what an ideally rational and informed person would be able to will? It looks like Kant did mean something like this, which is a real problem for the cat imp in practice.
Now, by way of comparison, it is often said even in cases where goodness can be observed in the world that one cannot derive an explicit, definitive ought from the world precisely because the intelligibility of creatures is inexhaustible, and right action depends on context and knowledge, which can always be expanded. So, since one is not exposed to the Good, but only finite participations, choice remains underdetermined.
But I would think this isn’t really all that different from the conditions of falibalism in epistemology. The key difference is that the deontic is posterior to the good, which is ontological. And so reasoning and predication can flow on either direction of fit, or both, and be first or higher-order.
Because reason is not limited to discursive rule-following, we can also have an intellectual, rational linkage between being and desire, and a notion of proper desire. This is what Kant has to assert by definition. But he faces the same problem and so “judgement” is non-discursive and allows for the application of his ethics to any content at all. From the outset though, his critics noted that this looks suspiciously like “intellectual intuition for me, not for thee,” in that it saves the theory from irrelevance at the cost of seeming to backtrack on an axiom he had established to block his opponents on metaphysical and epistemic issues. How well that charge sticks is interminable though because it’s wrapped in so many layers of technical terminology.
I did misspeak a bit though. That’s how the more orthodox frame it, at least from what I’ve seen. The more social constructivist twist is that we avoid the problem of the prior ideal, floating free from any mind, with a set of constructed norms (often quasi-realist). But this does have the effect of indexing everything to a particular time and culture.
I have actually seen Kant read this way, as referring not to the preconditions of thought per se, but the an Averoese style universal European Enlightenment mind. I don’t get how that reading is sustained though, but it’s a possible twist. We could maybe draw on Newman and say the later, more fully rational norms are implicit in the earlier ones (this would be more Hegelian too) but then we are introducing a teleology into history Kant says we cannot know (unless we somehow ground the teleology in sheer practical reason, which seems like a stretch).
Then your entire view is just based on your own preferences; which eliminates the possibility of moral facticity. Why should anyone care that you personally find it distasteful to kick a puppy?
Banno’s reply: Now I finally see where you are coming from Fire. I totally missed it due to various stubborn biases. You are right. What I’m saying is incoherent at parts and has some gaping holes that I have heretofore refused to address. I am going to re-read all of your posts, and some others, and spend a bunch of time writing thoughtful, mutually respectful replies. Forgive me for ever dismissing anything you ever said. It will never happen again intentionally. Plus, I’m starting to realize you must be really handsome, sort of a Hemsworth type - maybe that’s just me but thought you should know before I buckle down on the ethics.
If the “we” is carefully selected, then yes, this is true. But the problem is that if the “we” is always a carefully circumscribed culturally homogenous group, then this has not risen above cultural relativism. Relying on statements about puppy-cruelty exacerbates this problem, for this is a very culturally-relative proposition.
In a nutshell, this is the problem with the views of yourself, @Jay, as well as higher level thinkers like Habermas or Rawls. Everything they say fits within a paradigm of cultural relativism. The arguments never break through that ceiling.
(And if we follow this back to the grandfather of all this type of thinking, Hobbes, we find that the goal is a kind of peace within a given society. The goal is peace and cooperation within a given culture or society, not ethical truths which transcend particular cultures or particular societies.)
As I’ve pointed out recently, the easiest way to see the problems with @Banno’s approach is to ask about ethical falsity and ethical deliberation. To say that ethics is truth-apt is to accept that ethical beliefs can be false/wrong, and it is also to accept that ethical deliberation is real, necessary, and fruitful. Despite multiple different attempts from a half-dozen different individuals, Banno seems unwilling to affirm these sorts of claims. So it’s not clear that he really does believe that ethics is truth-apt (or normative).