I’m not sure to what this was a reply.
Have others had trouble in linking replies to posts? If the link is missing, it is apparently difficult to add it after posting.
Click the “→OBanno” button in the upper right of Amadeus’ post, and it will display the post he replied to along with an option to jump to that post.
Very much so.
I take what is being objected to, by all four women, by @Tom_Storm , by me, and now by you, is the incipient notion that we might have a calculus of the Good; an algorithm to tell us what we ought do.
To me, this sounds a little like one of Mao Zedong’s “thought-reform” camps. What interests me in some of these cases is that (1) someone determines that X is morally wrong, and (2) they believe they have the right to change the minds of those who disagree.
How, for instance, do we determine that the burqa is not a respectful religious and cultural observance but institutionalised sexism? It seems to me to be the height of modernist thinking to believe that we can readily make that determination.
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Is it worth pointing out that Anscombe and Foot were different people? That they had public, substantial and ongoing disagreements?
In particular, at least for our purposes, Anscombe adopted a top-down essentialism while Foot, in Natural goodness, did the opposite.
Foot is not answerable to Anscombe.
Is this how you would ultimately sum up the teleological content in Aristotelian ethics? Do you think it’s a fair assessment?
I wonder if this point needs to be explored in more detail.
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A side… were we don’t have agreement, one option is to leave the choice to the individual.
That’s by no means a perfect response, but it might be the best we can do.
Again, there is no algorithmic solution.
@Jay @Tom_Storm @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus @Leontiskos, if I could draw your attention to anything here, it would be this:
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This thread is chock full of claims absent corroboration. There are hardly any quotes being given from Foot, Aquinas, etc. Most of what is happening is people cloaking their own views in the names of others, or projecting all of their objections into the “thought” of someone, without any care for what the individual thinkers actually said and believed. If that’s what we’re after then I don’t think there is any need at all to talk about names like Foot and Aquinas. We could just talk about what we believe and what we oppose.
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Here, I mean whatever the proponents of such deductive systems want to mean. I don’t think it matters. The point is that what we “ought” to do (however they may construe this) is supposed to be deducible, or analyzable, from the conception of what a human is, or what human nature is.
This relates to your second question:
This is very important, and I’m sorry if I didn’t set it out clearly. I’m arguing that a deductive ethics based on premises based on a definition of “what man is” is precisely not “knowledge about the world or oneself.” That kind of knowledge, the kind that would be genuinely helpful in ethics, is what can hopefully be seen in a more direct, experiential way.
Yes, yes, and yes. But the last supposition is impossible, and no one is arguing for it, least of all me. You can’t leap from “not based on a deductive structure” to “disconnected from all other forms of understanding.” That, with respect, is your tendency toward false binaries.
The following quote points at what I’m contrasting with a more “see and experience” approach to morality:
Exactly – a calculus of the Good, based on essentialist premises, is what I mean by a deduction-based system of ethics. I fault Kant for doing this too much, but he’s not alone.
Yikes! Touché. 
I’ll try to think of a better way to describe it.
No indeed, I’m not nearly expert enough in Aristotle to say such a thing. I was harking back to some arguments I’ve seen made on TPF.
That would be great.
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Who else is at fault? Can you actually give quotes where they say what you claim they believe? If not then these constant insinuations are a mild form of defamation.
By the way, Kant rejected Aristotelian teleology and essence-based thinking as pertinent to morality. He thought that sort of thinking had to do with inclination rather than duty. Aristotelians and Kantians generally mix like oil and water. So this is a good example of blaming someone for something that they did not do, and this is what happens when we fail to give quotes or substantiation for any of our claims.
That may be, but you were raising the issue of their importance. It’s important to you that we should want certain things to be the case for all of us. If how things are is a matter of systems of practices in the world , and what we want is also a matter of a system of practices, then, contra Moore, in both cases the truths arising from them are trivial compared with the processes which produce and transform the basis of their truth and destabilize the force and urgency of their logic.
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I’m still not sure what “trivial” is doing.
What one wants is not trivial, to oneself! It is of the utmost import!
But it is trivial that if I want A, then it is true that I want A.
And that we want A is not trivial, if recognising our agreement required some debilitation.
I’m missing something, but I’m not sure what.
One answer - you both, and I, recognise an ethical failing in the sort of “education” that takes place in “thought-reform” camps.
Others don’t. So it’s not an absolute answer, of the sort that would be provided by an algorithm.
Btu it might be all we can have.
I suppose I should bring this back to Foot. I would say there are non-trivial truths for her wrapped up in the ethical values she believes belong to the biological flourishing of humans. They are non-trivial because they are supposedly grounded in empirical facts about creatures like us. But I think these truths are trivial because they are not grounded in biological facts but rather contingent, ungrounded social practices.
First, this may be a step too far, since it is not clear tht the facts in question are entirely empirical. Are “counts as” statements empirical? I wouldn’t day so.
Second, we have:
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Chordata
- Class: Mammalia
- Order: Carnivora
- Family: Canidae
- Genus: Canis
- Species: Canis lupus
that a given animal counts as a wolf is hardly trivial.
I think this is right. It can also be seen in the fact that Foot so often appealed to comparisons between morality and etiquette.
@Banno claimed that this was a mischaracterization, but Foot herself later came to admit that she “made a rotten job” of answering the challenge to distinguish morality from etiquette:
Anyone who thinks about it can see that for human beings thteaching and following of morality is something necessary. We can’t get on without it. And this is the nub of the proper answer to the challenge that I made in ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’, where I asked why it should be thought rational to follow morality, but not to obey duelling rules or silly rules of etiquette. In that article I myself made a rotten job of answering my own question because, still under the influence of Humean ideas of practical rationality, I thought irrelevant what is now turning out to be most relevant.[15]
[15] It was, I remember, a remark of Rosalind Hursthouse’s in a discussion that put me right about this. See also Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, especially chapters 9 and 10.
(Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, 17)
The point about Banno’s use of Wittgenstein is very similar to this. Banno wants to compare “seeing cruelty in bull fighting” to “seeing the duck in the duck-rabbit,” but he at the same time wants to deny that the difference between seeing the cruelty and not seeing the cruelty is just as trivial as the difference between seeing the duck and not seeing the duck.
If you want your thesis about Foot to be taken seriously, then provide an argument from her actual work that attempts to show that she actually holds what you say she holds. This step is not optional given your penchant for anti-essentialist polemics.
Ok, but what do you mean by the terms?
I’m still not really sure what you mean here. I suppose I should have asked if you meant “deductive” strictly in the sense of a formal deduction, or derivable in any sense. I took it to be the latter, such that knowledge of human nature cannot ever tell us what what is good for humans in the “moral/ethical realm” (however that is defined). You know, the old and still very popular “no amount of knowledge of how the world is can ever tell us about how it (and thus we) should be.” I take it you meant it in the former, strict sense though? My misreading then.
But we probably agree about “premises based on a definition man,” which is pretty far removed from knowledge, right? My question was about knowledge though, not definitions and premises. I would think that knowledge, be it of man, or of oneself, would allow one to derive, in combination with other knowledge, some ethical consequences (whether this is a formal deduction or some other sort of inference). This is not a system of deduction from first principles, though, but it does allow for derivation to some extent. Otherwise, it would seem that ethical knowledge would have to be wholly non-discursive (which would also make it unique).
(I don’t think that’s a false dichotomy; if knowledge is possible but any discursive inferences are not, then such knowledge must be wholly non-discursive)
I see what you mean, at least partially. I get the rejection of some univocal ethical calculus or algorithm, and agree on that.
I wasn’t trying to set up any binary with those questions, just asking. And did you mean “yes, yes, and no?”
At any rate, I think I just misunderstood what was meant by deducible. But then what makes the “seeing” required for ethics different than any other sort of knowledge then?
I wouldn’t think any sort of knowledge can be had from deduction alone (indeed, my personal opinion is that wholly discursive views of reason just leave us with a Chinese Room that lacks all understanding). So I guess I’m in agreement with you, but it’s unclear to me how this would make ethics distinct from any other area of inquiry. To be sure, experiential knowledge is required, but this is true for medicine, or cooking, or physics, etc.
Perhaps Tim does not see this as what is consequent on his account?
That a Thomistic teleology would provide exactly the kind of natural-kind essentialism that grounds such a calculus? Isn’t that one of the attractions of such a scheme, that it rid us of any ambiguity?