I haven’t disagreed on either. I think Leon is misrepresenting my position, very loudly. Please see what I have written in response.
A very good question. Simply, because, as explained above, they are not first-order properties at all.
Considerable care is needed here. "natural property "is a somewhat dated notion, but I’ve long used the Open Question Argument and so on, so I have no objection to it. It was never defended all that clearly, being taken as roughly the properties used in physical science. Now I’m not sure we could provide a hard-and-fast definition, but we might muddle on regardless.
So a natural property is a property had by the things around us; and as such they appear to be the sort of thing dealt with by first-order logics.
Ethical properties - things like ought, should, obligatory and permissible - these are not first order properties. They have as their subject other propositions; they are second order.
If moral properties range over propositions, they differ from natural properties, with range over natural things.
I’ll post now and come back to your second point. The biscuits need cooking.
Words get in the way. Try “recognise”, asa was first suggested, instead of the phenomenologically loaded “see”, looking for a related natural property.
You recognise a tune, or a face, a fallacy, or a royal flush; and here there is no natural property in addition to the properties of the tune, face, fallacy or cards that is needed in order to explain the recognition.
And none of these is an extrapolation. That some argument is fallacious is not something in addition to the lines of the argument, but perhaps supervenes on those properties - a second-order aspect that might have gone unnoticed without suitable education or training.
Putting it this way also gets us out of the bind of “natural vs. non-natural,” which @TheEudemian was quite reasonably asking into. You can construe all the items in that list as being “non-natural” in the sense of requiring human construction upon items in the physical world. (And of course philosophers can have an interminable wrangle about the extent to which humans perform this construction on everything they encounter.) But that doesn’t make the properties of those items either natural or non-natural in the same sense. Is “contains a Jack” a natural property of “royal flush”? In the same way that “can be solid, liquid, or gas” is a natural property of “H2O”?
This is another way of making the distinction between first-order properties and the properties of royal flushes and, perhaps, ethical situations.
But mainly, we can recognize a royal flush without being able to perceptually see one. What we see is five cards. But the recognition is no less valid. So the question is, Are moral recognitions like that? I think there may be some differences, but I’ll stay within this point for now.
We still are seeing when we are recognizing. To recognize is to see again; we see something, then latter see it again, or recognize it.
I understand recognition adds features to seeing, but they are features built on the seeing.
So I don’t see (or cognize) how re-cognition resolves or sidesteps the issues with seeing; anything that follows based on “recognition” is therefore subject to any unresolved issues that looking to the world for ethical content presents.
You are still dealing with the natural world or objectified world when dealing with the content of a recognition.
Ok, this is helpful for understanding your position: you are making a distinction not between natural vs. non-natural but first-order vs. second-order properties.
So you understand where my headspace is at, I would say that a ‘natural’ property is one which is intrinsic to the object (e.g., the circularity in a food plate); whereas a ‘non-natural’ property is supervenient on the object (e.g., the value of the food plate being $10). To me, a ‘first-order’ property would be one which applies immediately to the said object; whereas a ‘nth-order’ property would apply to the previous n-1 order of properties. Hence, a first-order property would always be natural; and any property after the first order would be non-natural.
Your example of a royal flush is most notably interesting to me, because I see clearly what you are trying to convey there by noting that the cards themselves do not have any immediate property of ‘being a royal flush’; on the contrary, the ‘royal flush’ is a social construct, like money, that is supervenient on the cards in virtue of being conceived of as a specific collection. To me, this is analogous to money: the deck of cards doesn’t have a first-order (nor natural) property of ‘being worth $5’, but it nevertheless is, let’s say, worth $5.
The pickle becomes this (if I’ve understood you correctly thus far): second-order properties, being necessarily non-natural (in the sense above defined), are attributable only to the said object in virtue of the being considering it (viz., it rests solely in the reality of a social construct) and, as such, can never be objective (because it is never stance-independent). The OP seems to be acknowledging that these second-order, moral properties are grounded in something objective and that they are second-order; so, prima facie, the legitimacy of its purported objectivity naturally must be called into question. How does that work?
My best attempt at iron manning this position would be to say that despite a second-order property not itself being objective, it may nevertheless be reducible to properties that are. For example, you may say that these certain cards ‘being a royal flush’ is itself a social construct but that this social construct is referring in content to utterly first-order stuff (namely, a particular configuration of real cards). If this is what you are more or less thinking, then I would be interested to hear how exactly moral properties in this view reduce down to natural properties.
The difficulty with this rejoinder would be that moral properties seem an awful lot like the property of monetary value instead of like the property of ‘being a royal flush’. ‘Royal flushness’ is easily reducible to a set of natural properties because it is just a conceptual grouping of cards; but money is not reducible back down. Anything you tell me about this food plate will never inform me directly how much it is worth in dollars but once I know how to evaluate its monetary worth then the natural properties it has become relevant. If moral properties are like that in this view, then there is nothing in reality that could afford us stance-independence about it; for it would be getting imported from inter-subjectivity.
This is actually weirder than I thought when typing that out, because if n-ordering of properties is such that the nth-order property is of the n-1 order properties then it just logically follows that you could reduce any given n-order property down to the first-order properties; and since first-order properties have to be natural (in the sense of being intrinsic), then it follows all n-order properties are reducible to natural properties.
This is either (1) simply not true or (2) supervenient properties like monetary value are not n-order properties. In the case of 2, a property like monetary value can’t be reduced back down to the first-order properties so it follows that they can’t even be a second-order property. That honestly might help a bit conceptually here because then we can clearly see why ‘royal flushness’ is disanalogous to ‘monetary valuableness’: the former is a n-order property (because it’s just a conceptual collection of objects) whereas the latter is supervenient as opposed to an n-order.
It’s unclear to my why what is good or bad for things would be a second-order property, however. For instance, that it is bad for a fox to lose its leg to a trap, or a falling rock, is not a social construct in the way a royal flush or monetary value would be.
Ethics would presumably involve all levels though. It’s hard to see how one gets to “do not put mercury in school lunches” without the lower level fact that high levels of mercury are bad for children. The deontic stems from the good, nor vice versa (except under voluntarism, which inverts this relationship). But of course, man being the political animal, the human good always involves higher levels and is filtered through history, culture, social roles, individual differences, etc.
But here we face the problem of demands for the univocal predication of good, and its reduction to the “physical” under the prevailing metaphysics, and this also seems to lead to absurdities. This is, I would imagine, one of the reasons why voluntarism remains so popular, because it avoids having to confront the metaphysical issues of subject/object dualism, and the presupposition that the objective realm is valueless. I would say that it probably less important than the desire to secure voluntarism against the imposition of nature though.
Also wouldn’t the naturalist, or at least the physicalist be committed to the idea that intersubjective properties are themselves reducible to objective physical properties? So, saying something is intersubjective doesn’t seem to necessarily make it irreducibly so. I would say the dominant leanings of our era would suggest quite the opposite. Sam Harris, though he is not popular with philosophers (although he is assigned more than the man in your picture per Open Syllabus in philosophy courses, funny enough), is a popular author on these issues, and that’s exactly his point. Neuroscience is the master science of ethics.
Nothing is being “assigned” to anything in either case. That adequate watering is good for plants is part of what they are. Final causality is instrinsic to things. There is not a thing, and then some extrinsic reality, a “cosmic fact” that “assigns” what is good for it.
That’s not what Moore intends though. And if hinge propositions are only hinges if you intend “for the purposes of this ‘game’” around a stipulation, as opposed to a statement of truth, they become something quite different, and much more limited. Whereas, if statements of truth are always just stipulations, that seems even more problematic.
Right, but this just reasserts that ethics is primarily about “oughts,” a concept you yourself don’t defend, accept as mere preferences. There is no overarching moral ought, right? A thou shalt, or obligation, that is independent of what anyone currently prefers? As I recall, all you secured, on your account, is that people are committed to ethical truths (and even gustatory truths about what tastes better) whenever they prefer anything.
But “I prefer” and “you ought to” are not the same thing. And at any rate, you’ve still yet to offer any account of how ethical truths are ever known. They are irrelevant for your exposition of the negotiation of social norms. Hence, it seems to me that this is no ethics at all, just a sort of ethical nihilism, with sociology offered up as the new ethics.
So on your reading, Foot is committed to the idea that water is not good for plants simpliciter, but rather “water is good for plants” is posterior human formulations about plants?
Again, if the idea is that “water is bad for plants” or “it is bad for a triceratops to be eaten by a tyrannosaurus” is dependent on (posterior to) human language/categorization then prior to man, nothing was good or bad for anything, which seems strange to me, since it seems to place man in the exact same role as the voluntarist God, imputing value to all things, and making things what they are through “stipulation” and yet this is precisely what you seem to find so offensive in your misunderstanding of Aristotle and Saint Thomas. Perhaps then the key distinction is that in this case it is we, man, who get to decide (or “the language community”) rather than God or nature?
But then, in naturalistic teleological accounts (modern, but also medieval Chinese) there is no one “deciding.” The “value” (goodness) is intrinsic to beings. Likewise, in a classical Christian or Pagan account, you have the distinction between divine primary and creaturely secondary causality. The two are not in competition. Divine causality is not an extrinsic imposition because God is not one being among many, acting from without on creatures, but rather as Saint Augustine says, “more inward to them than their innermost selves.” There is no command or imputation over and above the nature of the creature, whose very being, as ontological gift, is nothing more or less than the reception of the eternal activity of the divine energies.
Ok, these all seem to be the same error mentioned above of assuming the Aristotle or Aquinas are voluntarists, so that if the being of a creature includes “value” (they would refer to goodness and ends) it must be some sort of extrinsic imputation (seemingly in the form of a obligation, or else in the form of a “purpose” in the way an artifact like a screwdriver has a purpose). This is not the case though. To say that it is bad for rats to ingest rat poison (bad for the rats) is:
A. Pointing out something that seems to me prima facie obvious;
B. Pointing out something essential to what a rat is, since beings are known and have any activity at all in relation to the world, and the relationship between rats and rat poison is one of suffering and destruction (i.e., it is bad for rats to ingest it).
This makes sense to me. Rats are not artifacts made for some extrinsic purpose. They are not under obligations; obligations only really make sense for men, except perhaps in some sort of loose analogical sense in other animals. There are, however, things that are good and bad for rats, and natural ends (the goal-directedness of life) that are intrinsic to what they are. Ethics and politics are fundementally about the human good, and so they do involve obligation, but this is downstream of what is good for man.
All that said, you still haven’t explained how ethical knowledge is arrived at or shared on your account.
“Suddenly I had to think of him.” Say a picture of him suddenly floated before me. Did I know it was a picture of him, N.? I did not tell myself it was. What did its being of him consist in, then? Perhaps what I later said or did.
Yes, but this is not ethical or moral badness we’re talking about. I guess the gap must be unbridgeable, though I wish I could make the modern ethical view more compelling for you.
That would be another way of stating the difference. What is “good for” a human being qua human being is not the same thing as the ethical good, and obligations and prohibitions arise from the latter – but again, these are just my assertions, as against yours.
Re Aristotle and Aquinas, I’ve been at pains to make clear that I am not knowledgeable enough about either to attribute views to them on this topic. They may be what you’re calling voluntarists, or they may not, but I’ve said nothing about either. I even asked you to help me out on a point about whether Aquinas discussed how compassion is formed in humans, but you never responded.
I’ve been talking about a specific view, which you quote above, of how an ought can (or can’t) be derived from an is. No more, no less. I’ve made no “errors” in interpreting A and A. I am not characterizing their positions at all.
Yes, very good. So the hearts on each of the cards that constitute a royal flush are a so-called “natural property.” It is not a social construction to say that each of the cards bear the same shape which we call ‘heart’, and without those “natural properties” there could be no royal flush.
See:
It would be worth asking Banno where in the world he is coming up with these ideas, but taking this at face value, it implies that natural properties are somehow non-propositional. How that is supposed to work, I do not know.
Note too that moral properties “range over” things, not propositions. The act of kicking a puppy is not a “proposition” but a thing, namely an action.
Ok, this is going to get a bit complicated. Again, the trouble is that “natural property” is ill-defined.
So to be sure, there are second-order properties that we might call natural properties; temperature, the mean kinetic energy of a body, might be considered such a property. Say we have a gas, we supposedly measure the velocity and mass of every particle and average these, giving us a temperature. The temperature does not belong to any one particle, but to the body they comprise.
But that is a different type of order to a second order predicate logic.
Temperature reduces because of the relation of parts to a whole. It is no more than a statistical aggregate. Your argument would apply to such cases.
But reconsider money. No collection of facts about the coin will give its monetary value. We need in addition a statement giving that value, “Such coin counts as a dollar for the purposes of monetary exchange”. This is again a second-order property, but one that is not reducible.
The cleanest account is that of deontic logic. Op and Pp treat O (“it is obligatory that p” and “it is permissible that p”) as second order predicates, irreducible to the first order.
Which is? As I noted earlier, people keep bringing up this distinction but are unwilling or admittedly unable to to define it. But in a thread that mentions Anscombe off the bat, this seems relevant, since the thesis she is most famous for is that this “moral good” is incoherent outside of the voluntarist divine command framing.
I can see the case for the distinction. Hence, not all virtues would be moral virtues. I cannot see how the “moral good” is unrelated to the human good though. Or if it is so unrelated, how is it known or communicated? What exactly is known when one knows moral goodness? These were my original questions.
Right, and this is why I am trying to point out the difference, because it’s essential to understanding the other paradigm. The stuff about definitions and compassions seemed ancillary. Actually, I did write a post on it, but I lost it, but it seemed off-topic. There are many different types of definitions, and the “game” family resemblance would fall under nominal definitions, but, while a fascinating topic, it is very in the weeds. Likewise, the stuff on the virtues (compassion) probably wouldn’t elucidate much when placed outside the meta-ethical and metaphysical framework for this discussion. But if you’re interested, the most relevant virtue is mercy, which is subordinate to charity, which has its own section in the Summa (second part of the second part). But then justice and greatness of soul also seem relevant, and that is part of why the post would be off-topic, the mapping to modern usages of compassion isn’t perfect. And to be honest, Thomas is dry here, except in his Biblical commentaries (which are also dry as far as Biblical commentaries go lol).
I don’t think that’s really fair. I’ve at the very least, tried to explain the framing to the best of my ability, many times now. And we’ve had this same discussion before, the objection that the human good is not “moral good,” but a refusal to say what “moral good” is. But I can hardly say whether or not I agree to that characterization, or the extent to which I would modify it or not, if I have no clue what this “moral good” is.
Now, I know what other posters in the thread on moral nihilism think it is, which is “incoherent.” That’s why they are anti-realists; and I agree here. And I am familiar with the general view Anscombe is attacking, where “moral good” is a “thou shaltness” or something like a legal obligation (except not based on any law or social relations, and which is “mind independent”), which is itself not desirable, but ought to be followed precisely because it is obligatory. But I’d agree with her that this doesn’t make much sense. I don’t even think it made much sense in the Divine Command context, but at least there you could cash it out as prudential self-interest, because God would punish you for violating the law or reward you for following it (and at any rate, theologies leaning hard in that direction normally avoid this by denying creaturely freedom, making the issue moot).
A nice try. I’m pleased that you are attempting to understand, but there is considerable conceptual variation. The core problem, perhaps, is that “natural property” remains a loose term. It seems to me that your “iron manning” misses far too much by changing the key terms. I would not use “natural properties”, nor “intrinsic properties”, nor “objective properties”, and so on.
The formal logic might be the best bridge.
Can we agree that Deontic operators range over statements, and not over individuals? If so, we might move on.
Again with the radical “either/or” binaries. Who said moral good is unrelated to human good? Of course the two are related, but a) they are not the same thing, and b) the basis for calling something morally good is not that it fosters human good.
Much too strong, Tim. I’ve never refused (though I may sometimes have lost patience), and I can’t believe you have no clue. Surely you know that my position is basically Kantian. Doing good for myself, for that reason, would not be an ethical motivation. That’s why “human good” can’t be where ethics starts.
Now there are a dozen problems with Kantian doctrine, some of them serious, but I think his focus on the good will (a very technical term for him) as the source of moral goodness is essentially correct. And that good will (this is me now, not Kant) has to be formed in certain ways that I’ve characterized as a “sentimental education.” (Kant was very weak on this point; Christianity, as I understand and affirm it, is not.)
Having said all that, can we call off the duel? My heart sinks at the prospect of further discussion about such a complicated and important subject when I feel that you’re mainly interested in trying to prove me wrong. That makes for an unpleasant conversation. I don’t mind disputing a conclusion when there’s basic agreement on premises – a lot of good philosophy gets done that way – but to try the “gladiatorial approach” at the level of premises or first principles has never interested me.
My heart sinks at the prospect of further discussion about such a complicated and important subject when I feel that you’re mainly interested in trying to prove me wrong. That makes for an unpleasant conversation. I don’t mind disputing a conclusion when there’s basic agreement on premises – a lot of good philosophy gets done that way – but to try the “gladiatorial approach” at the level of premises or first principles has never interested me.