Have you ever seen a Jackie Chan movie? In whatever situation he finds himself, he reaches around the environment to find what tools fate has provided.
That’s what real life is like. If we have a bunch of organs in a healthy person and a bunch of ailing people who need them, is there a way to save all of them? You won’t know until you look. Look hard. Call in experts. That’s how you find solutions.
It’s the same with the trolley problem. Can you save all of them? You surely won’t if you start by assuming you can’t.
Life is dynamic. Nothing is set in stone (except death and taxes.). And the outcome of your actions isn’t fully in your hands.
So suppose you save someone and they turn out to be a serial killer? How would you live with that guilt? My answer: because you acted out of love for life, and you did the best you could.
Well, yes, that’s just it. I said “stipulated” because I don’t think it’s possible to know the relevant “definition of man,” as there isn’t one, other than the label H. sapiens, which says nothing about what humans are supposed, or designed, to be. Nor do I think “natural” can be pinned down to a term of approbation. I realize that some who favor this approach believe they can start from self-evidently true premises along these lines, but for me that’s part of what’s wrong with the approach. Probably, in line with charitable reading, I should have said “if you start from a definition of ‘man’ that is asserted as true.” “Stipulated” is what I think it comes down to, but that’s my bias.
Your standard response now seems to be “It wasn’t like that in Medieval times”.
Well, no. Things have moved on. That doesn’t amount to an argument.
Suppose that we have perfect knowledge of how the world is, of what is the case.
Do we thereby know what to do?
This is a variation of the is/ought problem, intended to bring out an aspect of our understanding that might not have been clear in medieval times. If we have at hand every chain of causation, each consequence, every state of affairs, would we have the answer to what we ought do? Even given a complete description of how things are, there are alternate outcomes of our actions. The question of which we should choose remains open.
A further step: “Humans tend toward rational activity” and “We ought pursue rational activity” are not the same claim. The description does not entail the obligation.
This is a problem for teleological accounts of normatively, generally. For both your account and that provided by Foot. Teleological accounts do not explain what we ought do, they just classify certain descriptions as already normative - as int he example, “we tend to wards rational activity, therefore we ought be rational”. But this is a non sequitur.
So, two points here: saying something wasn’t noticed in medieval times is not a reason not to notice it now; and teleological accounts, even if true, do not tell us what to do.
This is similar to the argument from omniscience given above. If we knew everything there is to know about the world, would we not still have a choice as to what to do about it?
Hence the mistake, seen elsewhere in this thread, of thinking that the tram and the surgery examples are the same. This is ho is displays the failure of the utilitarian calculus.
There’s in addition Wittgenstein’s observation concerning rule following: there is a difference between setting out a rule and following it. Applying a rule requires that one recognise how the rule is to be applied. And there is that word again, from the OP: “recognise”. Having the rule is insufficient for it’s applicaiton.
The bit from Foot that is useful here is the way she draws attention to our recognising the ethical aspect of a situation, apart from the description. Pushing the man off the bridge is not the same as pulling the leaver, despite the calculation being identical.
Her teleology improves on older discussions, but it remains unclear that it shows us what to do. A description of what it is to be human does not obviously tell us what to do.
It’s not that simple. Hospitals, as large institutions to care for the sick and injured, were found in the Islamic bimaristans, developed in Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo, and similar institutions around the same time in Byzantium. Roman valetudinaria cared for soldiers and slaves. The temples of Asclepius, in Greece, were early precursors.
No, and the problem is, neither can the most sophisticated ethical knowledge, even if it’s based in lived experience. Does Foot go into this? What I should do, in any given circumstance, or with my life in general, has to include numerous non-ethical considerations. And even if we confine the question to the sphere of the ethical, we lack a way of easily discriminating between the commitments to equality vs. partiality. I’m meant to treat everyone as if we are fellow members of the human community, without partiality. But in fact I am partial, as are we all, to the beings closest to me. I think this tends to produce genuine ethical dilemmas.
And the question of who I am obliged to help, and at what cost to me, is also vexing. Singer’s drowning child, for instance, and the consequences Singer draws from this, are very troubling.
I have persisted although I find the lamguage difficult as i am new to the forum and have not studied Wittgenstien. I do admire Foot and think the OP has tried to present her later thought fairly. When I read about Foot I wonder whether she suceeds in demonstrating morality is objective or just that moral statements are not arbitrary.
Can’t politics “grow from how we interact and what we choose”?
Can’t an ecosystem “grow from how we interact and what we choose”?
This formulation gives us no tools to develop or understand the specifically “ethical” as opposed to anything else, including the “unethical”.
So you (or Foot?) want to say ethics can only be legislated from inside - we develop the laws and consent to follow them, and act in accordance, all from inside the commune of interactions and choices?
This all seems like it avoids the real issue. (As when ‘meaning is found after use’ forever avoids meaning, or as when language is first born after we have already been talking, forever must avoid the meaning or usefulness of “first born”).
Isn’t the real issue of ethics always going to be about the good outside the individual that the individual orders his or her acts towards?
‘It feels wrong’ is psychology and biology.
‘It is agreed as wrong according to the community’ is politics or anthropology.
‘It is wrong’ is ethics.
(All of these involve objective and subjective aspects, but ethics is saturated in the objective, it seems to me.)
If you are interested in the broader context, I’d recommend Metaphysical animals.
As to whether Foot shows morality to be objective, you’re perhaps right that it might be more important to show the are not arbitrary. For a start, it’s not that clear what being objective amounts too, when one looks at it; but it is clear that our ethical considerations are deeply embedded in our everyday activities - or at least, ought be.
It seems worth emphasising that the is/ought barrier is one against entailment.
Hume may have drawn our attention to the barrier, but while he responded to it in terms of psychology and sentiment, few would do so now. To reject Hume’s response is not to reject the barrier.
So a critique of Hume’s psychological response does not amount to a critique of the barrier.
Indeed, since the barrier is logical, discussions of psychology or metaphysics are pretty much beside the point.
Well the post was responding to your comment about the consequences of “Thomism.” Thomas was a medieval philosopher.
And my response isn’t “it wasn’t like that in medieval times,” as I’ve used many examples from other cultures to make this same point. It’s “it isn’t that way outside of Enlightenment premises, namely the premise that the world is purposeless and valueless.”
As Anscombe writes:
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.”
Wouldn’t these sorts of core metaphysical assumptions be, on your account “hinge propositions?” So calling them old, or unfashionable as a key objection, aside from being parochial, would just seem amount to nothing more than criticizing one “game” according to the standards of another “game?” In virtue of what is the superior “game” superior such that it stands as the meta standard for all such “games?”
So what are “ethical truths” true in virtue of if “perfect knowledge of how the world is,” of “every cause and every state of affairs,” doesn’t grant us knowledge of them?
At the very least, “ethical truths” seem to be a sui generis sort of truth, and they must have a different ontological ground since they can have nothing like a truthmaker in the world.
But if complete knowledge of the world doesn’t include knowledge of ethical truths, how are such truths ever known? What faculty allows for such knowledge?
I would simply deny that ethics is about “obligation?” Who is this an obligation to? In virtue of what does it obtain? How or why is anyone “obligated” to do anything is in a specifically ethical sense?
I’d agree with Anscombe here that the idea of basing ethics on a “moral ought,” something like a legal “obligation” with no law-maker, is incoherent. These two threads have been a great example of this. We’re up to five posters now who make various objections about ethical theories because they fail to correspond to the specifically “moral ought,” and yet no one can define what they mean by “moral ought.”
I would say the deontic is posterior to the good. If someone asks why we “ought” to prefer the better to the worse, this seems to be putting the cart before the horse. That we should prefer what is truly better to what is worse is constitutive of practical reason in the same way that the desirability of truth and knowledge over falsity and error is constitutive of theoretical reason.
I cannot think of why anyone would say they can ground ethics in “definitions” either. Wouldn’t it be instead knowledge of things, namely man and the world, or at least the most relevant aspects of the world that are known in such appeals, not “definitions?”
Earlier you said the “moral” can be known and communicated. What exactly is known in this case then, and how does it relate to knowledge of man and the world?
You said “X is concerned with our dealings with others.”
Nothing about “concerned with our dealings with others” necessarily links to the ethical. You could put ‘politics’, or ‘business’ in for X and make the same exact statement.
What is peculiar to ethics?
You have to refer to more than activities “concerned with dealings with others” to distinguish “ethical” dealings.
The goodness/badness of these dealings helps a lot. Don’t you have to reference good/bad or better/worse in some way when you distinguish ethics? Ethical laws make up the mediator between the individuals and the community of individuals who each seek to order life towards good.
There is more to it than good/bad, but certainly more to it than dealings with others.