I wonder whether this distinction is sometimes made more complicated than it needs to be. We can find similar differences in much more ordinary cases: the responsibility of the person who gives an order to kill and the responsibility of the person who carries it out; speaking on behalf of a corporation or in one’s own name; firing someone face to face or by sending a letter; ending a relationship in person or simply disappearing.
In such cases, the difference may not lie only in a complex ethical structure, but also in a change in the mode of participation. Personal execution creates an additional burden because it brings one into a different network of relations. When I make an abstract decision, I can remain within an abstract ethical frame, defending my identity through values and reasons. But when I carry out the act bodily, especially in the case of killing, I am no longer only an abstract moral agent. I am involved as an embodied human being, and bodily, instinctive, and hierarchical relations become much more prominent.
I like this run-down, but I am a little perturbed by the potential avenues this reasoning could go down.
For instance, that same reasoning applied to a human (i.e a truly ethical consideration) seems to land in places none of us would be ok with. If it simply that a sentient being has further rights, that’s fine, but another set of considerations.
I don’t think those examples are apt. They all involved someone pro-actively causing something, in the “final cause” sense (although, granted, the person’s motivation is the actual final cause). The commander is still actively choosing, and engaging toward an outcome which would, if but for their action, would not have been in the pipeline.
The distinction is one of basic inaction vs action, rather than proximity. I think.
Sure, but this is about personal actions. The commander is the institution there, and is acting. Had they not, there would be no outcome to discuss. A person must do something for an institution to manifest its policy.
Right, but the idea that ethics involves a perception of the good is widely common. So the contrast between seeing and “deducing” seems to me be targeting a very narrow range of roughly Kantian theories.
I guess there are two things at issue here. First, even Hume doesn’t deny that deduction and rational argument plays a role in ethics. You and @Banno seem to be saying formation and conversion must be wholly affective. By contrast, Hume thinks ethics is ultimately grounded in sentiment, but that reason can be plenty involved in determining what gratifies and corresponds with sentiment. Hence, understanding that bullfighting or slavery is wrong doesn’t require any sort of bare seeing. If sentiment is against cruelty, and in favor of justice, we can proceed from ought to ought via practical reason.
Second, the idea of ethics being wholly affective and grounded in desire/the will and the idea that ethics involves a sort of perception ought to be kept separate, since there are many who affirm that latter without the former (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Saint Maximos, Yang Wangming, etc.).
Surely it is possible. Even Plato, who seems to argue in the Parmenides that no one knowingly chooses the worse does so by throwing out a very high standard for what counts as true knowledge of the Good. The point is not that people always desire what is best (for Aristotle, this is only true of the person in a state of virtue, not for the continent, incontinent, or those in a state of vice). And it’s certainly not that the desire for what is good per se is always stronger than any and all other appetites. Rather the key point is that people can desire what is good as such (a point that is honestly more clear in Plato, and later thinkers than Aristotle himself, where the presence of a strong rational appetite is a bit more debatable).
Then, for various other reasons I won’t get into here, these desires (the desires of logos, the will and intellect) are what the “lower” appetites are to be ordered to, because this is what promotes the flourishing and goodness of the whole person. Indeed, this ordering is ultimately the path to fulfilling the lower appetites most fully as well, and also a pre-requisite for self-determining freedom and for the person being a whole at all, rather than a bundle of warring appetites.
Now, someone can object that they don’t find flourishing or freedom or joy to be desirable, just as someone can object to any epistemic criteria or intellectual virtue on the grounds that they don’t simply care about knowledge or knowing how to do anything. That’s fine. Either they have some reason for that position, or they don’t. Presumably, there is within them some motivation for taking that stance, even if it is subconscious, because it’s not like contingent attitudes pop out of the aether uncaused. The point is that such a position is defective, that it is bad for us, not that people are incapable of becoming so twisted in their thinking that they prefer suffering and lies to joy and truth (although, realistically, I don’t think anyone does, at least not universally).
I just grabbed the summary that popped up looking for the paper for a quote. It seems completely standard as a reading though. She doesn’t use that exact phrase but she is clearly rejecting Hume, nor would I consider her take “generous” (if that is taken to mean agreeing with his premises and method, since she refers to them both as sophistry multiple times). That Hume is a brilliant diagnostician given his premises were widely accepted already, and so didn’t need to be supported, I think is a well justified conclusion on her part however (and I would say the same for Nietzche). But she makes precisely the point I was making in the other thread early on:
Hume defines “truth” in such a way as to exclude ethical judgments
from it, and professes that he has proved that they are so excluded.
He also implicitly defines “passion” in such a way that aiming at
anything is having a passion. His objection to passing from “is” to
“ought” would apply equally to passing from “is” to “owes” or from
“is” to “needs.”
And later, the she points out vacuity of the sui generis “moral ought” bereft of the context that originally rendered it intelligible:
It is as if the notion “criminal” were to remain when criminal law
and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten. A Hume
discovering this situation might conclude that there was a
special sentiment, expressed by “criminal,” which alone gave the
word its sense.
Now, IIRC Anscombe is at this point agnostic on a concrete explication of the virtues, which is why the extreme edge case comes up. But this strikes me as decidedly non-Humean. For Hume, we can never observe a case and determine injustice, because virtue and vice are never themselves observed, they are always extrinsic imputations. And this doesn’t just flow from his “ought” framing, but from the same epistemic and metaphysical assumptions that render causes unknowable.
OK, as long as there’s no implication that seeing or recognizing what is good will automatically make someone desire it. And if your larger point is that “desire” must be understood to include far more than what you’re calling (thought I wouldn’t) the lower appetites, then I also agree.
I suppose this is a possible position, though I had something different in mind. I was picturing the person who says, “Yes, I understand what cruelty is, and why it’s bad to be cruel, but as I don’t care about being good, I exempt myself from the ethical claim.” If that seems too outlandish, it could be a specific ethical claim in a specific situation, not one about ethics in general. “I don’t care about being good or bad in relation to this cow, so I will torture and eat her.”
This is interesting. Kantian ethics is highly “deductive” in the sense I’m using the word. He makes little or no appeal to a desire for the good, or to virtues like compassion and generosity. But I think this characterizes a great deal of ethics, including any system that claims to derive an ought from an is. If we begin with a picture of “what man is” or should be or was designed to be, and then claim that reflection upon this ideal will show us what is moral, and what we ought to do, I would call that a “deductive” ethical system, in the sense that it’s at bottom a (flawed) conceptual analysis, not an adjuration to look and, by living a certain way, come to understand.
I think I could make the same case for consequentialism but I won’t try, for now.
My suggestion, in a previous thread, was twofold. A sociopath might see an act as cruel and yet not see it as bad, leading me to suppose that we mark those who cannot see that cruelty is bad as somehow lacking. And the move from “A is bad” to “One ought not A” is a social move; the ethical “ought” concerns others, and so is somewhat a communal institution.
Hmm. Here’s one way to put it: Both Anscombe and Foot (of that period) held that there are moral truths but they are “unprovable” (so to speak), and therefore they fall on the non-classical side of the dichotomy I presented here. They might say things like, “This is what it is for man to be good, and there could be someone who is perfectly rational and yet denies this.” This is why their views were so unstable. Take Anscombe in that essay:
Now I am not able to do the philosophy involved—and I think that no one in the present situation of English philosophy can do the philosophy involved—but it is clear that a good man is a just man;
(Anscombe, Modern Moral Philosophy, 16)
Foot will do the same thing in an even stronger way, as I pointed out here.
Here is a helpful quote from Simpson that will touch on many of the things that you are interested in:
Nevertheless if Phillips’ and Mounce’s argument fails, their objection does not. If by “pure facts” is meant something non-evaluative then no moral term is purely factual and it would be false to say it was. Moral terms involve assessment with respect to a standard and if there is no standard referred to the term is not being used morally. The question, as already stated in the previous chapter, concerns not the reference to standards but the status of them, whether they are set up by nature or not. It is not at all clear whether Foot realises this, and, therefore, not at all clear whether she wants to equate ‘values’ with ‘facts’ in the value-free sense of ‘fact’ used by Hare, Stevenson, Phillips and Mounce. It is thus not clear either whether she realises that one must challenge as much the sense of ‘fact’ used by non-naturalists as their sense of ‘value’, though she is aware that the way these words are defined by them, namely in terms of each other, begs the question (1978: 100). It is this lack of clarity in her position which serves to provide some excuse for the way Hare distorts naturalism when he tries to refute it; for the distorted naturalism that results is the sort of naturalism towards which some of his opponents are inclined.
Foot, however, like Anscombe, has another line of attack against non-naturalism. She maintains that saying something is good need not have any connection with choice. The criteria of goodness for some things are established just by what they are independently of choices, as is the case with ‘good knife’. The same is true of ‘good father’, for a man who offered up his children for sacrifice could not be called by us a good father (in Hudson, 1969: 219). As the example of knife shows, this is just another recourse to a functional sense of good, and leaves her open to her critics’ retort that moral good is not functional. Foot consistently fails to develop a reply to this objection.
Nevertheless, she pursues her point in another way by saying that choosing something is not a mark that one thinks it good, and that one’s thinking something good, even in moral contexts, need not involve any disposition to choose it. Hare rightly regards this view as “not very plausible” (in Hudson, 1969: 209, 254).
(Peter Simpson, Goodness and Nature, 90)
In a general sense, if Anscombe and Foot were not haunted by Hume then there wouldn’t be all of these inconsistencies and confusions permeating their work. For both of them but in different ways, they have their their theory about what is moral or ethical on the one side, and they have their theory about what is rational on the other side, and they have no idea how to put the two things together (for they have not overcome the way Hume draws up reason vs. morals). The reason the two won’t fit together is because of Hume. Or rather, because of “Hume” (in the way he is received and viewed with respect to this juncture between practical and theoretical reason).
Nicely put. Of course if you speak to some old Spaniards they will frame it not as cruelty but as a cultural tradition celebrating the bravery of the animal. Now we may not accept this with modern eyes, but how many phenomena can be reframed as natural order or religious tradition and thus potentially exempt from certain modern perspectives: misogyny, homophobia, racism?
I guess what I’m asking is how do we identify something as a moral concern to begin with?
Probably not. It’s a start, at least if one is somewhat a Kantian, because by moving into the social world we are implicitly making ourselves fellow members of “the realm of ends,” or at any rate demanding the universalizability of ethics to include everyone, and oneself.
And here is Hare’s quote in greater context, where Foot’s position comes close to what @Jay is often arguing against you:
Here, moreover, we must guard against another, related, ambiguity in the expression ‘conditions for the use of a word’. It might mean ‘conditions for a word being said to be used correctly to express what the speaker who calls a thing “good” (for example) is wishing to convey’; or it might mean ‘conditions for a thing’s being said to be good’. This ambiguity is well illustrated on the first page of an article by Mrs Foot.[reference to Goodness and Choice] In outlining a position which she is going to attack, she asks: ‘Is a connection with the choices of the speaker ever a sufficient condition for the use of the word ‘good’, as it would be if a man could ever call certain things (let us call them A’s) good A’s simply because these were the A’s which he was thereafter ready to choose?’ She goes on to argue that it is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition; in this she deviates from Miss Anscombe, who thinks that if we call a thing good, we must attribute to it some desirability characteristic, and that ‘the primitive sign of wanting is trying to get’.[reference to Intention]
[…]
But if so, she was maintaining something that is not very plausible. For if a man consistently and deliberately chose a certain kind of pebble, we should infer that he thought that kind of pebble good for his purposes or from his point of view; if we had doubts, they would be about what on earth the purposes or the point of view could be.
Foot has good things to say about that too, according to the Metaphysical Animals account.
The issue you raise might even begin before that, depending on what the Spaniard would say if you asked them, “Yes, but is it also cruel?” If the answer is no, then we’re back to sentimental education – which is a type of “identifying moral concerns,” I would say.
This is a common criticism of Foot in her second phase. See my quote above:
What’s so interesting about Foot is that everyone knows her from her 20th century writings (i.e. before 2001). And they argue about whether she was right or wrong, whether her ideas can really hold up, etc. But then in 2001 she does an about-turn, and this provides an opportunity to adjudicate some of the arguments from Foot’s own perspective. It may well be that she thought your objection a sound one, and one which requires an answer or requires revising her philosophical approach.
The issue, so far as it is an issue, is what being an “essentialist” entails. Foot has her own take.
Yes, Categoricals were used by Michael Thompson, and so by Foot. There’s some logic here to be worked through, in how they relate to institutional facts, how they relate to Searle’s “X counts as Y in context C.” You perhaps would that being a wolf is already present in the wolf, in so far as it matches the essence of “wolf”; “the ontological reality of the organism is prior.” Were I would say that this counts as a wolf because of what it does and how.
Hume spotted two barriers to entailment, that we can’t get from an is to an ought, and the problem of induction, deriving a universal from a particular, that manifests itself in explaining causation. There are other barriers to entailment, temporal, modal, indexical. There has been quite a bit more work done in this area. I’m particularly impressed by Gillian Russell’s recent model-theoretical work that begins a general theory of barriers to entailment.
This is not anthropology, it is logic.
One essentialist move is to attempt to bridge the is/ought gap by supposing that the essence already contains both the is and the ought. This is the move you would make, but not the move that Foot makes.
Another essentialist move is deflationary, and much more interesting. This has the essence as found in the logical structure of the category itself, the normativity as internal to the practice of “describing” living things as the kinds of things they are. This is the approach Foot takes.
Scare quote around “describing” because this is were the “form of life” enters the discussion; and here we might use “form of life” for the wolf as well as, but independently of, humans.
This is the difference that Leon entirely misses.
Now for my part, I’m not convinced by either, but Foot’s account comes much closer to my Wittgensteinian prejudices than does the top-down alternative.
Is the wolf’s form of life found in practice, or presupposed by it? Foot needs the former. Tim wants the latter. But the latter quickly results in the regress Wittgenstein pointed out in his discussion of rule-following. It inevitably dissolves into practice.
What exactly do you mean by “moral” and “ought” here? We’ve just gotten out of a thread where multiple people allowed that it is impossible to define and unintelligible, so I feel I have to ask, although IIRC in the past you also said this was unanswerable?
Second, if no amount of knowledge about the world or oneself, no amount of understanding, can ever show us what is “moral” then what exactly does “looking” or “seeing” get us? That is, if actual looking and seeing (sans scare quotes), along with inquiring and understanding, etc. can never get us to what is “moral” what does this special sense of “look” add over and above what can be known through all other means? What is being “seen” in “seeing?” Is it the truth about reality?
Can the moral ever be known? Communicated? If it can be known, wouldn’t it need to be a sui generis sort of knowledge if it is disconnected from all other forms of understanding?
Interesting, this sort of gets to my questions above. Like I said, I am only familiar with either’s late and most famous work, so there is probably a lot I am missing. I have never been particularly impressed with Neo-Aristotleian attempts to fix the issues Anscombe points out however, because the “neo” element seems to commit them to exactly these sorts of problems. Now, to be fair, I am mostly familiar with these approaches in the realm of applied character education, but there at least, it seems that the human good is invariably grounded in the (current) desires of the self, which makes it impossible to give any account of the proper ordering of the appetites, except perhaps as a sort of recommendation in terms of “what most people enjoy.” That might be less true further afield. In applied spaces, it’s also the case that the Ethics is normally cited in isolation from the rest of Aristotle’s corpus, and I think this is telling.
I am not very familiar with Foot’s late work either. When Anscombe talks about the incapacity of “the present situation of English philosophy,” she is almost certainly implying that older approaches were better. She obviously goes on to move much deeper into Aristotle and Aquinas. I only recently learned that Foot followed in her footsteps.
But that move was necessary in large part because their early work was laboring under modern, Humean assumptions.
Is it a demonstration? Wittgenstein shows how it can be otherwise. Picture Moore holding up his hand and stating “This counts as a hand for the purposes of our discourse”. There can be no doubt here. It is inherent in the practice.
Truth is trivial, in that none of the inflationary theories of truth can be made to work. Most relevant to us is that ethical statements cannot be truth-functional in virtue of corresponding to how things are. They are truth-apt in virtue of what we want.
@VerticalOntology, While it is right to draw a distinction between the ethics of abstractly inflicting damage and doing so in person, that does not seem to be the one Foot is pointing out. In both the switch-pulling and the fat-man-pushing, one is involved quite directly.