@Banno Exactly that. “Ought” speak necessitates “good” speak. Asking “why we ought to prefer the better to the worse,” may put the cart before the horse, but talking ethics without saying “good” is speculating the cart can run with no horse at all.
Yes, that’s understood, but the reasoning here escapes me. That other cultures do not make a certain distinction does not render that distinction not worth making. That a culture does not differentiating mass and weight - a common enough thing - does not make the distinction irrelevant or not useful. Simialrly, English speakers have adopted umami and Schadenfreude and now differentiate dharma from karma.
See my comment here:
Perhaps no, unless they were stimulative or Searle’s “X counts as Y in context C.” But it’s unclear what “these” are, exactly.
Only if the erroneous assumptions are made about truth that there must be a something that makes a statement true; The mythical “truthmaker”, a creature not unlike the Snark. The account given elsewhere concerning truth sentences bypasses this mistake neatly. And these are at home in practice, a nice Wittgensteinian move.
@Count_Timothy_von_Icarus , @FireOlogist, you might be putting more weight on Anscombe’s argument than it will hold.
Anscombe objects to using “moral ought” in moral discourse on the grounds that it makes little sense without invoking some variation of divine command theory.
So are you two going now to invoke such a theory?
I and others have made use of the is/ought gap, the omniscience argument, the trolley/surgery distinction, the rule-following point, t-sentences, and so on, without resort to “moral ought” as a grounding notion. Indeed, at the start of the previous thread I made a point of explicitly avoiding the moral ought.
I agree with Anscombe. Moral oughts require a grand, cosmic rule-giver (Good-speak in Fireologist’s terms). For my part, positing such an entity is methodologically problematic; and results directly in a vicious regress: Why should we do as the rule give says?
The ethical considerations here are not dependent on such a moral ought.
If your argument is “You can’t define your terms therefore I win”, I think you’ve lost.
Right. I was saying the same thing in this post. I tried to boil it down at the end:
The point about Hume’s “sentiment” is that even that involves normativity. Regardless of how much one eschews “reason,” if one is doing ethics they are involved in normative judgments about what is good and bad. This is the deeper problem for @Jay and @Banno. At bottom they are objecting to normativity itself. The “intuition” (or “seeing”) idea is just a double-standard dressed up—a kind of gnosticism where one can have superior moral preferences without being accountable to others to explain or persuade with respect to those preferences. It allows one to have normativity without having normativity; to possess ethical superiority without engaging in ethical discourse.
Yep. Hume is again instructive. For Hume ethics flows from sentiment, and sentiment can be good or bad. But the kicker is that Hume thought sentiment was basically unchangeable, a product of inheritance and upbringing. So Hume views humans in the same way that an Aristotelian like Foot views animals. Some squirrels are good, some are bad, this makes a real difference in their life, and there is not a thing they can do about it. That is what the ineffability view flirts with, but this descendent of Protestant fideism will probably then reach for some type of conversion experience, as I believe Jay has recommended in the past.
Setting the “moral deductivism” strawman aside for a moment, there is someone who has raised the same basic issue in good faith. It was @Tom_Storm, in this post. He engages those he disagrees with directly, he does not engage in insinuation or strawmen, and he poses a rational objection to see if it can be met. This is a good alternative model to what we’ve seen. I finally got around to responding to him here, after reading some more Foot.
The interesting thing about Foot is that she is very cognizant of the modern prejudices against teleological essentialism. Indeed, from the perspective of an Aristotelian it feels as though she is bending over backwards to accommodate prejudicial modern attitudes, such as the idea that when Aristotle talks about the telos of a tree he is imputing intentionality to the tree. For these reasons, if @Banno and @Jay are at all serious in their objections they could simply look to Foot. As I’ve pointed out, her 2001 book Natural Goodness is freely available online.
The funny thing about statements like these is that there is really no difference between an inference and “seeing.” To infer a conclusion from premises is to “see” the inference. As I’ve pointed out numerous times before, intellection applies not only to first principles but also to inferences. I suppose one could quibble and say that not all inferences are deductions, but the broader point remains.
This supposed distinction between an inference and “seeing” is just carrying on the incoherence of @Banno’s OP, which I pointed out from the first:
If I look at X and “see” something different from X, namely Y, then Y has followed from X within my intellectual faculties or within myself. It makes no sense to say that I “see” Y after looking at X, but that Y does not follow from X. This is why the “seers” of this thread are contradicting themselves at every turn. This is all very reminiscent of gnosticism.
(@Count_Timothy_von_Icarus is making similar points, such as in this post.)
This is rather important, given that @Banno and @Jay are beholden to Kant in their notion that they possess ethical truths that are not derivable from anything in the world. They begin with different motivations but arrive at the same place, and Kant has already tilled the ground for that kind of incomprehensible knowledge.
I certainly didn’t see I was in a contest. I just don’t see the point in attempting to develop ethics with my “good” arm tied behind my back. It’s like trying to talk logic without ever saying “inference”, or trying to do chemistry without ever saying “matter”, or biology without ever saying “living”.
Is this just an aversion to the word “ought”? Or the whole concept of “good in the world” has to go, while we make ethical rules?
This question can be posed of any ethical law in any ethical system. And I don’t see how anyone would ever begin to answer it without saying “good” once. And “why should” is a version of “why ought” so why would you expect anyone else on earth could possibly answer this question for you?
You haven’t responded to what I said. You said ethics concerns dealings with other people. I said that’s a recipe for a lot of things that don’t become ethics, so we have some missing ingredient(s)? I’m thinking its a teaspoon of good with just a hint of truth about the world - then maybe in the oven on 350 for 30 minutes, and you might start to smell something ethical.
I’m not trying to win - I’m trying to understand how you close the loop. It seems you either have to take back “concerns dealing with other people” and start over saying what the domain of ethics is, or you have to add something to it to focus more on what makes the ethical, ethical. Right?
Exactly. Seems unavoidable.
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Well surely truths are different from falsehoods in a way that is explicable. What is the explanation?
And that didn’t really address the question: ethical truths are known how exactly? And why are they “truths?”
Earlier in reply to Joshs’ point:
the assumption that the aim of knowledge is its answerability to the world… still drives his arguments,
You wrote: “Indeed, as it should be.”
But presumably this is not true for ethical truths since complete knowledge of the world does not grant us knowledge of them? Yet you were also talking about ethics there, hence my confusion.
Anyhow, if you are saying you cannot define any ethical “ought” because it is “incoherent” then what is the point of invoking an “is/ought gap?”
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The metaphysical premise that the world is valuesless and purposeless (and so that value and purpose must be some sort of extrinsic imposition).
On the Searle criterion, “I have hands” is not a hinge proposition either.
But I don’t know how sweeping axioms about values of that sort could fail to be philosophically stimulative.
As noted earlier:
You didn’t answer these questions directly, but it seems that, on your account, the set of truths about the world does not contain ethical truths, that they are extrinsic. But such a position is precisely the sort of hinge value systems rest on. For, since on your own account, absolutely nothing about the world could reveal this, since what we are discussing is extrinsic to knowledge about the world, it’s hard to see how such a belief wouldn’t be a presupposition, a hinge.
I see where you’re going here, but I’m not sure the distinction can be valid for you. You’re contrasting “definition” with “knowledge of man and the world.” From my point of view, they are certainly different, but can they be, from yours? Isn’t the required “knowledge” supposed to be about something that is constitutive of, or “natural” to, human beings? That, by my lights, would be a definition if it claims that humans, and only humans, have that something.
If that’s not what you have in mind, then we agree, at least about starting ethics with definitions of a human being. Perhaps you could say more about the non-definitional knowledge you have in mind. A tall order, I know! All of us on TPF so often end up asking questions in pursuit of some specific point that could only be properly answered at book length.
Sorry, in which case? I’ve lost the antecedent.
If someone did try to ground morality in definitions, they might end up with the Huckleberry Finn paradox. It has been explained to Huckleberry that black people aren’t human. After spending time with Joe, he realizes that what he was told is wrong.
If definitions have to come from a language community, how do we account for Huckleberry’s realization? Isn’t it meaningless for an individual to change the definition of a word?
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I could go through all the uses of definition, but I’m not sure if that would be helpful. Would all scientific knowledge thus be “definitional” on this view? And knowledge about how to dress wounds, preform surgery, teach children to read music, or of human history and the the history of thought? I would think not, right? So then knowledge doesn’t need to be “definitional” or if it is, “definitional” seems to cover almost all sorts of knowledge.
In the case where someone possesses moral knowledge and can communicate it, how do they gain this knowledge and communicate it? Why is this knowledge not “definitional” and how does its acquisition vary from all other sorts of knowledge?
Well, prima facie, if you want to uniquely specify anything, you must be able to identify something that specifies it.
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These three replies are helpful in spotlighting the issue. Quite simply, specifying something is not the same thing as defining it. Consider family resemblances: We can specify what makes something part of a category without finding any one thing that everyone in that category must possess. (I suspect something like this applies to human beings.)
So scientific knowledge, and knowledge about various skills, would not be definitional. What’s key here is that a definition applies to a word, whereas knowledge more broadly applies to non-linguistic items. To insist on a definition is to claim that there is a single right way of using the word (in that context). That works for many items, and does not work for many more.
Again, to keep the point in view, we’re talking about a method that says, “Here is how to define the term ‘man’, and based on this definition, here is how we can identify who is human and who is not, and here is what must follow ethically.” I find this unsubtle, and would be happy to learn that this is not an Aristotelian or Scholastic approach. I quite well understand that the first step, providing the definition, is meant to grow out of some world-knowledge, but as I’ve said, apart from noting that we use “human” to identify H sapiens, I don’t see how it’s possible.
Moreover, if the idea of “definitional” is shedding more heat than light, I’m happy to drop it. Perhaps there is a better way to characterize an approach that begins from asserting what X is, and goes on to talk about what it is natural for it to be, designed to be or supposed to be or should be. That’s the target of my concerns, not the terminology so much.
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As @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus pointed out, your use of “definition” is equivocal and based in hostile/uncharitable translation. In it’s most basic sense, a definition is what someone knows about something. It is not a matter of necessary conditions. So if Billy thinks that a zebra is but a horse with stripes, then Billy’s definition of ‘zebra’ is ‘a horse with stripes’. The strawman at the bottom of your idea of “definitions” is the idea that some people claim that they have exhaustive knowledge of, say, zebras. That just isn’t the case, and Aristotelians are explicit about this.
You’ve said this twice now. By the way, it’s “homo sapiens,” not “H sapiens.” What do you think it means to identify humans as homo sapiens? Do you think you’ve said something tautological or non-tautological when you make such a claim?
Again, @Tom_Storm has already raised this issue, in good faith:
And I have pointed to Foot’s text:
So when Foot says that plants need water she is saying something about the definition (i.e. that which marks out the “what-it-is”) of a plant:
- Plants need water
- Therefore, access to water is part of what it is for plants to be as they should be, and to do what they should do
Foot is inevitably saying something about the essence of a plant here, and therefore she is involved in defining plants. So what is her error, on your view?
I am sorry but I can’t see any significant response to what I’ve said or what you’ve quoted. It may be me, but it seems you’ve entered a totally different thread of discussion.
This is not what Foot proposes. Her claim is that we recognise values in situations, that we see them, quite naturally, in the events around us. And it seems to me that one way or anther this is right.
But it is a very different view to that which sees values as already assigned to things by some overarching cosmic fact. Foot’s view is smaller, fragile, and more human. The lack of metaphysical profundity is one of the things that for me, makes it attractive.
And this difference is what Leon has failed to notice, in his somewhat neurotic need to paint Foot as a Thomist. But I think you see it.
It can be read as such, as I’ve set out in various places. Moore holds up a hand and say “this counts as a hand for the purposes of our discussion”. That this is a hand now becomes a hinge in the discourse, so that supposing it is not a hand is stepping outside the game.
That’s pretty much correct. Formal logic provides the model here. We have the set of terms used, the various names and predicates, and we give these an assignment, we set out what they are the names of; we could do this in a range of ways.
Nowhere amongst these are there “ought” statements, because an “ought” is not a statement about the way things are, but a statement about our attitude towards how things are.
So in a standard formal deontic logic, the operators “obligatory” and “permissible” take as their objects whole statements.
Note this well: we have the p’s and q’s that are true or false, and siting as it were above those, we have wither they are obligatory or permissible.
So indeed, that the set of truth about the world are not ethical truths is the standard approach.
None of the p’s and q’s tell us Op or Pp.
Finn recognises the contradiction in the account presented to him, and adjusts his beliefs accordingly.
Definitions area poor way to understand language use. Finn begins to use “human” to also refer to folk of colour. That’s not meaningless. Indeed, it is the point of the novel.
This is a neat example of what Foot does not do.
For Foot, and we might agree here, (1) is categorical, setting out what members of the kind “plant” need in order to flourish. It is a descriptive claim, without normative content.
The “as they should be” and the “what they should do” is normative content, and is added by Leon in (2).
Foot is not making the move that water is a part of the essence of a plant prior to and independently of our observing the plant; she is not saying that “water” is a part of a before-the-fact definition of “plant”. She is saying that given what plants do, water is a part of their flourishing.
The difference is central:
Third time I’ve made this point. The need for water is found in the logical structure of the category “plant”, not in a timeless quiddity.
Leon is misrepresenting Foot by forcing her into his preconceived, top-down account of essences; the very account she is critiquing.
I was literally quoting Foot. You should give it a try sometime. It would first require reading Foot.
I believe @Leontiskos has already demonstrated thoroughly how Foote was a moral naturalist and owed quite a bit of her later thinking to Aquinas, so I won’t linger on that point; however, I would be interested to here—assuming your claim above is true—that one can cogently and internally coherently hold that (1) moral properties are not non-natural and (2) they are irreducible to natural properties. To me, and perhaps I am misunderstanding, you seem to be claiming 1 and 2 by saying this view does not utilize a sense of moral non-naturalism and that we still cannot get an ought from an is.
Furthermore, I would be intrigued to hear an elaboration, if you would, on how we can see morality if how the world is cannot inform us whatsoever on how it ought to be: what would we be using to inform our sense of moral sight? To me, if it is a non-natural property then it lacks any means for us to sense it; and if it is natural then we can use how reality is to inform us, somehow, of how reality ought to be. You seem to be attempting a third-option here that hinges on a distinction between seeing vs. extrapolating how an event ought to go where seeing it does not entail we gathered such from the event itself. I would suspect that this is an impossible third option.
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