Hence the move to metaethics, and to why that doesn’t get us anywhere.
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“Ceteris paribus” indicates that exceptions are possible. If a puppy is attacking your baby then you kick it. The exception doesn’t disprove the rule.
And “pleasure is good” does not mean “pleasure must be sought in every circumstance, even if you must harm others.”
And so the move from ethics to politics. You have a negative emotional response to puppy kicking. I think cruelty a negative trait. He argues it decreases pleasure. Now, despite these ethical difference, we can together condemn the act.
This is just how practical reason works, by the way. Practical reason allows arguments with contrary conclusions:
- Pleasure is good
- Puppies are pleasant
- Kicking puppies diminishes puppies
- Diminished puppies are less pleasant
- Therefore, one should avoid kicking puppies (ceteris paribus)
-
- My baby is good
- My baby is vulnerable
- Therefore, I should protect my baby from that which attacks it (ceteris paribus)
At this point if a puppy attacks my baby I must weigh 5 against 8, which in turn means weighing the premises of the first argument against the premises of the second argument.
A “political” consensus is fine, but if you have no way to motivate someone to accept your position you will have no way to generate a consensus. You will only be able to look for ready-made consensuses. It is similar to the polling fallacy.
Yes, and this aligns, I guess with what I understand of Putman and the facts/values frame.
Yep, good so far.
Is this the Aristotelian use of ignorance?
Yep, got that too.
Yes. Okay, thanks. That’s not all that dissimilar to how I might frame it myself, except for the understanding of ignorance, which is a separate matter for now. I understand how Aristotle uses it, so I probably just need to sit with it.
That’s a very interesting frame.
If I may, is there any reason why this couldn’t be argued?
- Pleasure is good.
- Kicking puppies is fun, and therefore produces pleasure.
- Therefore, kicking puppies is good.
- Therefore, one has reason to kick puppies (ceteris paribus).
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Sure, we can even clean it up a bit:
- Pleasure is good
- Fun is pleasurable
- Kicking puppies is fun
- Therefore, one should kick puppies (ceteris paribus)
That’s a valid argument. If you accept 1-3 then 4 follows. The question then arises: do you accept 1-3?
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Good, that’s what I thought. And I’m not sure yet how I get to saying (3) should be prevented. Other than someone has a “defective” notion of what counts as good/fun. It seems pretty clear that everyone uses moral terms like “ought,” “should,” and “must.” The why seems to be the tricky part for some of us.
Well I don’t think you even accept (3), do you?
Right. Which is the basis for most critiques of post-structuralist accounts of right and wrong: the idea of intersubjective communities of practice that determine what is right/true or factual. I guess someone like Richard Rorty might argue that such conversation is all we have, and that it may well go awry, just as democracy can get things wrong. (Of course just how they are wrong seems a moot point if there’s no other criteria - which is essentially what you are saying.
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Depends on the puppy…
No, I don’t accept that. I’m just back at @AmadeusD point about why one preference becomes an “ought” rather than just a preference.
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Okay:
Good. I actually think this question of badness or moral falsity is important, and that it is where @Banno’s account most struggles. “No other criteria,” as you say. Let’s trade out puppies for something more relatable:
- Cigarettes are pleasant
- Pleasure is good
- Therefore, one should smoke cigarettes (ceteris paribus)
This argument is a bitch for the akrasiac.
The remedy is always to attack a premise or use a counter-argument that is contrary to the conclusion. The latter route is like what I outlined here.
We can try to stay with something akin to hedonism:
- Suffering is bad
- Cigarettes cause cancer
- Cancer often causes a great deal of suffering
- Therefore, one should not smoke cigarettes (ceteris paribus)
Note that this counterargument is often sufficient for those who do not hold (1) too strongly (i.e. those who are not hooked on cigarettes). That’s why the ad campaigns worked so well for some but not others. For the person who is addicted, more will be required. They may need a psychologist to help them understand other reasons and means to achieve (7), and in that case they are working in a different direction:
- Cigarettes are bad
- I want to stop smoking cigarettes
- I haven’t found a way to stop
- Therefore, I need to try new things
Note that the top-level question for adjudicating this is, “All things considered, are cigarettes good or bad?” Some might say that this question is unanswerable, and yet it seems that we have answered it in some ways. We had an opinion on the question 50 years ago, we gained new data which informs the question, and now—as a society in toto—we have a very different answer to the question. It does not seem to be wholly unanswerable, as if data and reasoning do not bear on it.
It depends a great deal on what precisely you mean by an ‘ought’. That’s what I was trying to get at in this post.
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Do you not see the abject failure of anything but Emotivism to inform this framework?
How do you view the relation between hedonism and emotivism?
I see it as one potential instantiation of emotivism. An arbitrary restricted one, though. Seems to capture far less
Emotivism considers only the emotions qua subject. Hedonism has no such restriction. That’s why my claim that, “Puppies are pleasant,” can be a realist claim within a hedonist argument. If we were to rewrite that in an emotivist vein we would have to at least prescind from object properties in favor of emotional reactions, and the emotional reactions could have no real connection to the object. It would be something like Hume’s “constant conjunction” applied to a subject’s emotional reactions.
That’s why emotivism is a weak theory, namely because emotions are malleable and manipulable. As I said above, the emotional person is easy to manipulate, but it is also true that the emotions are a fairly superficial level of the human being. Within the causal nexus of human being emotions are close to the surface. They are more effect than cause. The older name is “passions,” because they are undergone rather than chosen.
Emotions do interface with motivation and action - everyone admits it. But the emotional response to a stimuli can be shaped, molded, and changed. Sciences like sociology and advertising are very skilled at manipulating emotions. The person experiencing the emotions may believe that they are autonomous and that their emotions are somehow irreducible, or basic, or constitute the proper matter for an ethical theory. But in reality the propagandists—from sociology to advertising to entertainment to politics—are really the ones pulling the strings. The emotions do precisely what the puppeteer wants them to do. They are used as a means to control external actions, and the more emotional a person is, the more easily controlled they are.
This is why the great philosophical and religious traditions of humanity do not focus on the emotions per se when they consider human conduct. Instead they focus on the strings that pull the emotions. They focus on reason, habits, dispositions, temperament, viewpoints, self-control, values, etc. Once you get hold of the puppet strings the emotions fall into line. If you fail to grab hold then someone else will be holding them or they will be floating freely as the person is blown about by the random winds of emotion and circumstance.
In any case, emotivism isn’t a viable theory in the age of social science. The social scientists may promote it because it makes their job easier, but if you work your way to the top of that hierarchy you will inevitably be required to make decisions about how to shape the emotions of those who live in the society. You will inevitably have to start thinking about which emotions are good and which are bad in each circumstance, and how to form the emotional makeup of the society. You would have to do on a societal level what the great traditions have counseled doing on an individual level.
Yes, but I’m asking where it’s been established that the antecedent is true. I’d also be wary to consider this ought a moral ought. It’s not immoral to pick one’s nose, is it?
I’m questioning the connection between preferences and true ought statements. At least for the moral realist (and the moral nihilist) there is no connection; if we ought not kick puppies then we ought not kick puppies even if everyone prefers that we kick puppies.
Your comments do not suffice as an argument against moral nihilism unless you can show that the ought just is the preference, which I don’t think you’ve done.
I probably should also explain what “moral good” means in this context.
“Moral good” would be those goods relating to the moral virtues, their promotion and their failures. So, fornication is said to be “morally bad” not because of some additional property unrelated to human flourishing (individual or common) that attaches to it, some extrinsic “thou shalt notness” attaching to it, but rather because it is a failure in temperance, or more specifically chastity, to be moved by the passions (by epithumia) in ways contrary to what is understood as best (logos, the rational appetites).
Of course, these older explanations presuppose that fornication is bad. Both older Pagan and more recent attitudes might deny this. But this just goes to show how “oughts” flow from goodness, because what ought to be done depends on the goodness of an act, and debates around fornication are debates about its goodness.
With older systems, it is always important to distinguish individual judgements about what is good, and the broader framework, since the framework might be largely correct, without individual judgements being correct. And moreover, individual judgements might also vary properly according to time and place, with changes in custom and technology. A good example is copyright law, which would have been very deleterious to the spread and safeguarding of texts before the printing press, but which becomes justified later on when printing becomes cheap. Aquinas makes this point on the need for human laws to change and adapt over time.
So, the question of what exactly qualifies as gluttony, lust, avarice, etc. might by hard to answer, requiring wisdom and prudence, and it might properly vary from time to time and individual to individual. Standards of gluttony differ in a times of famine, or by individual, since individuals have different dietary needs. The more general rule though is that a habit that inclines a person towards inordinate passions that lead to actions contrary to practical reason (weakness of will) or to the obscuring or twisting of practical reason in service to the passions (false judgements about what is best) is a vice, and this is morally bad. Acts in accord with these vices, and which foster them, are thus said to be so as well.
This is why habitual drunkenness can be a vice (inordinate consumption), while wine and beer might be said to be good. Human flourishing, and the common good (which is constitutive of individual flourishing) is the measure of vice and virtue. As Saint Maximos the Confessor puts it:
“Food is not evil, but gluttony is. Childbearing is not evil, but fornication is. Money is not evil, but avarice is. Glory is not evil, but vainglory is. Indeed, there is no evil in existing things, but only in their misuse.”
So Maximos also focuses on use here, and the key difference from contemporary action-based accounts is that what is good is not grounded in whatever just so happens to be desired by men. Current desire can be inordinate or proper, or fail to be, and so the human will is not the ground of all values or oughts. This is essentially the reverse of Kant, where the self-legislating will is the measure of value, or prescriptivism, where the prescribing agent is the ultimate source of evaluative force.
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I have no idea what that means.
Can you simplify the point? I would have thought that “I take pleasure in puppies” probably expresses an emotional preference. I know people who dislike dogs and do not take pleasure in puppies. Isn’t it the case that whether you like puppies or not reflects an affective relationship to puppies?
A digression. Is there a connection between emotivism and emotional people? I wouldn’t have thought so.
I don’t think a person who holds that moral claims are just expressions of emotional reactions is saying all that much about emotion more generally. When someone says it is wrong to kick puppies, we might explain this in terms of an emotional preference, but no two people will necessarily have the same emotional reaction to the kicking of puppies. Some will cry, some will be moved to anger, some might feel sick, and some may not have much of a physical reaction at all but still think it is wrong.
I’m not exactly sure what the implications of emotivism are. If it is simply the view that our moral judgments ultimately arise from emotional reactions, that seems consistent with a wide range of different emotional experiences and not particularly informative about emotion itself.
Do you think that if someone says their response to moral questions is based on emotion, they are thereby being unreasonably emotional? Or do I have this wrong?
This is an interesting angle. I don’t think social scientists are particularly keen on emotivism because it doesn’t give them much opportunity to virtue signal. They seem to need to believe in the absolute authority of morality while simultaneously lacking any clear grounding for it. In many cases, they would prefer not to talk about how moral beliefs are formed at all.
But the other point about which emotions are good and which are bad for a society is interesting. It’s not a problem I need to resolve, but it is an interesting one to theorise about. I have nothing further to say on the matter.
This thread raises too many points for me to respond to them properly.
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