Things We Pretend
Dear Philosophy Forums,
recently I have noticed a trend. People will advocate some philosophical system about morality with pretensions of being
1) foundational - in the sense that morality derives from this system
2) grounding - in the sense that morality's meaning is given through this system
3) the only sensible way to think about it
This is fine, this is a philosophy forum. Outlandish ahistorical generalizations based on intuition instead of anthropology and/or engagement with the history of ideas encapsulated in less than 500 words are par for the course. But can we please stop pretending that the way we live our lives is actually determined by the philosophical system of morality that we just invented.
For any such system of ethics, I might start asking these questions: 'how has its invention influenced your moral choices? what does it give you in terms of applied ethics?' Ethical decisions are treated as some kind of punch line or potential defeater for this field of discourse here, rather than its central purpose and organizing idea.
I will exempt @darthbarracuda from this reasonable demand since he's already satisfied it many times over.
So, ethical philosophers of thephilosophyforum, what do you actually do with your ideas and systems?
recently I have noticed a trend. People will advocate some philosophical system about morality with pretensions of being
1) foundational - in the sense that morality derives from this system
2) grounding - in the sense that morality's meaning is given through this system
3) the only sensible way to think about it
This is fine, this is a philosophy forum. Outlandish ahistorical generalizations based on intuition instead of anthropology and/or engagement with the history of ideas encapsulated in less than 500 words are par for the course. But can we please stop pretending that the way we live our lives is actually determined by the philosophical system of morality that we just invented.
For any such system of ethics, I might start asking these questions: 'how has its invention influenced your moral choices? what does it give you in terms of applied ethics?' Ethical decisions are treated as some kind of punch line or potential defeater for this field of discourse here, rather than its central purpose and organizing idea.
I will exempt @darthbarracuda from this reasonable demand since he's already satisfied it many times over.
So, ethical philosophers of thephilosophyforum, what do you actually do with your ideas and systems?
Comments (71)
Hear hear! (Y) Long live the anti-theory!
The clear implication being, anyone who makes such arguments is hypocritical.
I am hard-pressed to understand how a philosophy - any philosophy - cannot have ethical implications. Put it this way - the one major recent philosophical movement which consciously rejected the meaningfulness of ethical propositions was logical positivism, which had basically collapsed by the latter half of the 20th century. This was associated with a tendency in ethical theory called the ‘boo-hurrah’ theory of ethics; that ethical statements can be no more than expressions of feelings. I don’t know how influential that approach is, but it seems pretty empty to me.
So what, exactly, is being criticised here?
I don't think that people who have ethical systems or meta-ethical beliefs on the philosophy forum are hypocrites. What I'm criticizing is the idea that people actually use those ethical systems in their day to day lives. Do they? If they don't, do they actually believe in the system? Ethics is about doing stuff after all. Will give a couple of examples.
I'm having an argument with my partner, she thinks I've done something wrong but I don't see what it is.
Say someone on here is a really firm believer in Mackie's error theory, how do motivational internalism and the falsehood of all moral propositions help you resolve the dispute? Alternatively, say someone is an emotivist, how does the idea that expressing a moral idea is equivalent to expressing a sentiment help you understand where your partner is coming from?
On the realist side, say you're a divine command theorist, how do you use the idea that all your moral beliefs flow from a benevolent God to help you in the dispute?
On the ethical side of it, how would you use hedonistic or negative utilitarian ethics in your day to day life? How does a self professed harm minimizer behave differently from a self professed pleasure maximiser?
What I'm trying to criticize is an absence of care about ethical decisions here on the forum, people only care about them insofar as they are potential defeaters or supporters for ethical proposals or ethical systems. Ethics, then, is empty of applied content on here. Maybe this generalizes, but I don't know.
This attitude is not at all present in Epictetus, for example.
I've definitely seen you express a few moral ideas and hanging around ethics threads Wayfarer, do you believe in any philosophical system of ethics (or meta-ethics)? How do you use it?
I exempted you from it because, if I've understood your comments and some of your blog posts, you actually care about the description and structure of ethical decisions and any moral theorizing you do is based around derived properties of these structures. In my opinion this isn't 'walking on its head' like is usual here.
A few examples would be nice.
Say your friend turns up really late to a restaurant you're eating at, you can see they're a bit flustered and worried when they arrive, they are usually calm and punctual, how does spiritual enlightenment help you here?
You see a beggar in the street, they hurl abuse at you - how do you respond? What do you do? How does your ethical system influence your decision?
Two late teenagers you pass in the street are having an ironic performance of racist jokes, but what they're saying is indistinguishable from the worst racist crackpots, what do you do?
2. Try to remain calm.
3. Don’t get involved.
In practical terms, practicing meditation - like, sitting still for a period of time, eyes half-closed, paying attention to your breath - does help with not getting caught up in reactive patterns. It means you’re less likely to loose your temper or lash out. Another benefit is learning to be more compassionate, in the sense of developing a greater degree of empathy. Both these kinds of effects are reasonably well-supported by research. But it’s not foolproof, and one doesn’t become a sage overnight, although in my experience, there are moments of epiphany that come along through such practices.
You decide.
That's because meta-ethics and normative ethics aren't applied ethics, and most people seem interested in discussing meta-ethics and normative ethics.
They're almost certainly not independent lines of inquiry though. Do you think it would be normal for someone to study normative and meta-ethics all their life and gain no insights into how to not be a jackass?
If so, surely it's a bad state of affairs.
Sure, and no. But I don't understand the relevance of this. I was simply saying that clearly posters are less interested in talking about applied ethics.
Does anyone do this? It seems to me that if what we ought to do determined what we do do, there would be no need for a moral system at all. It would just be part of the natural sciences. Of course I would like to pretend that I do what I think I ought to do, but I can't even convince myself for very long, and it is quite plain that every other bugger doesn't do what they think they ought, never mind what I think they ought.
In which case, morality is founded on shame and guilt and anger and indignation. From which we all would like to retreat as soon as ever we can to the land of theory and abstraction. @fdrake thinks we ought not to, and I agree - in theory.
If using ethical systems in your day to day life is an important part of ethical philosophy, it is a glaring omission that we speak about what structures ethical decisions without caring about what they prescribe for us to do or how they structure our thoughts about what is right, wrong and permissible. Is there much of a difference between any two normative or meta-ethical theories in terms of how their adherents would make ethical decisions? If not, they're empty ideas. About ethics while being indifferent to how to live our lives.
I have a sneaking suspicion that most of the choices we make during a day don't have any ethical dimension, they're mostly habits. Personally anyway, when I'm thinking ethically it's because I've been surprised either by either an event or information. Usually when having a disagreement with someone or my actions have hurt or inconvenienced another. I worry about what to do and when what I do isn't already governed by habits or 'ethical habits', like being there for your partner and trying to be understanding when teaching people things, for example. It's only been in these circumstances that I've found knowing anything about ethics, meta-ethics or normative ethics useful.
Another sneaking suspicion I have is that an ethical theory (be it meta-ethics or normative) that doesn't begin with an account of what it means to make an ethical decision is going to have orthogonal concerns to living ethically. Maybe in the manner of replaceability (what good is your ground when another will do just as well) or uninformativeness (what behavioural distinction would being a realist vs an anti-realist in meta-ethics bring in terms of day to day decisions?). What's cared about is being right about ethics, not about getting ethics right.
Guides means of getting to ends. Ends are given - they are values. They're not determined by philosophical systems.
Examples of how your ethical system has guided you towards certain actions concerning people?
Sorry, I don't buy this at all. I think it's perfectly acceptable for someone to discuss what "X is wrong" means (meta-ethics) and to discuss what makes something wrong (normative ethics) without then discussing which things are wrong (applied ethics).
Unless you can defend some normative ethics that entails that it is wrong to not also discuss applied ethics?
For example, I don't steal or deceive people in order to grow my business.
I am not sure if this is what you are getting at in that my ethical system, which I had to completely reverse from my upbringing, which was to discipline myself in never raising a hand to my children.
Or
Are you talking about the hard ethical rules, that are created by humans, that determine the ethical decisions of say a self driving car that is programmed with the risk ratio when assessing an imminent impact.
In isolation, yes I think this is something that's ok. In principle, no, if a meta-ethics or normative ethics gives you no heuristics or ways of thinking about ethical decisions, how could it possibly be used as anything but a philosophical abstraction? The contents of ethical discourse should be, minimally, about ethical decisions - which are right, what makes them right, how to think about ethical rightness (or its impossibility) - but not as individual elements in systems, rather there should be some link from meta-ethics to normative ethics, from normative ethics to applied ethics.
Let's take an example in Levinas, who grounds ethics in the experience of the other and the non-reducibility of the other to me. How to treat the other - how we are partially responsible for their welfare- is always a prescient question for this account of ethics (more a coupling of applied ethics, normative ethics and meta-ethics through phenomenology). Ethical decisions are found in the space the other announces to me, and their non-reducibility to me imbues a pre-theoretic responsibility to attend to them.
[quote=Anthony Beavers on Levinas] If we can accept this notion that ideas are inventions of the mind, that ideas are, when it comes down to it, only interpretations of something, and if ethics, in fact, is taken to refer to real other persons who exist apart from my interpretations, then we are up against a problem: there is no way in which ideas, on the current model, refer to independently existing other persons, and as such, ideas cannot be used to found an ethics. There can be no pure practical reason until after contact with the other is established.
Given this view towards ideas, then, anytime I take the person in my idea to be the
real person, I have closed off contact with the real person; I have cut off the connection
with the other that is necessary if ethics is to refer to real other people. This is a central
violence to the other that denies the other his/her own autonomy. Levinas calls this violence
"totalization" and it occurs whenever I limit the other to a set of rational categories,
be they racial, sexual, or otherwise. Indeed, it occurs whenever I already know what the
other is about before the other has spoken. Totalization is a denial of the other's difference,
the denial of the otherness of the other. That is, it is the inscription of the other in
the same. If ethics presupposes the real other person, then such totalization will, in itself,
be unethical. [/quote]
Anthony Beavers on Levinas, click for link
It is quite straightforward to see that ethical decisions - attendance to the other -, for Levinas, mandate a renegotiation of how you make ethical decisions whenever you do them. So to speak of ethics is to speak of my responsibility to a concrete other and their conduct, which should not be subsumed through their reducibility to whatever theoretical pretensions I have, on the contrary these pre-developed philosophical or normative structures can only be used to inform decisions about them, to enrich understanding to facilitate judgement and action, rather than to reduce the other to a model of my ethical system.
So as part of this renegotiation, we need to think how our already developed intuitions and beliefs can and should be applied to the other, even if they won't do justice to the complexities of attending to them. What people do isn't a punchline to make yourself and your personal philosophical system right.
[quote=@Agustino;122382]For example, I don't steal or deceive people in order to grow my business.[/quote]
Can you give me some derivation or heuristic that gives motivation not to steal or deceive people from your system of ethics? Rather than saying what behaviours it promotes, I'm interested in why it promotes those behaviours. How can you use your system to live a better life? Or is it simply a vouchsafe that you're right in whatever decisions you happen to make?
I'd like to draw a distinction between ethical heuristics - which are rules of thumb for treating others, like the golden rule, and ethical systems - which are ways of speaking about what ethics is, what moral language consists in etc.
You already have an applied ethical principle in 'don't hit children', but you haven't say, derived it from @Agustino's interpretation of virtue ethics (nor would you need to, in my view). What I'm asking of posters here is that if they have strong beliefs about a personally developed (or more standard, like error theory) ethical system, how do they use it to face problems in their lives? Or is it solely an intellectual abstraction?
So I suppose one can derive a meta-philosophy of sorts from the way I agonise, which seems to make more sense than trying to act out a meta-philosophy. It is focused on motivation, so you might call it emotivism, it is realist, and only marginally or indirectly consequentialist.
My adherence to my system of ethics prevents me from choosing such means to achieve my ends. Values give motivation, they are goals - why you live your life. Stealing, deception, etc. these are at most means, but they cannot be values or ends-in-themselves. My system of ethics influences me in the means I choose to achieve the values that I have. However, I think one's values are to an extent or another given.
Precisely why I have not much interest in ethical systems. The best guide as to how to act is conscience; which consists in moral imagination and intuition. It is direct and has no need of a system, although it can be helpful to present moral intuitions as maxims.
Of course, I don't always succeed in living up to my moral intuitions; and I acknowledge that is a personal failing. Then I try to do better.
Okay but how do you teach that to another, who might not be as compassionate as yourself?
Can you be more specific about how your system of values constrains the means you can use to achieve your ends?
Regarding the independence of what's good from any ethical system, maybe there's a generalized Euthyphro problem to demonstrate this. Is it good because the ethical system entails it or does the ethical system need to entail it because it's good?
You present the maxims, as Christ did, and hope that the other's moral imagination is sufficient to enable them to see the truth in them. I don't believe that any amount of rational argument (beyond simply pointing out (to children, say) that it is most reasonable (in the sense of impartially fair) to respect the interests and feelings of others) is ever going to do the job with those who are either too stupid to, or simply don't want to, be good.
That's the kind of approach I was trying to promote. But I think there's some place for ethical systems. For example, if you're speaking with someone who has much different ethical intuitions from you, appealing to their self interest in terms of their decisions' consequences for them can help bridge the gap.
Well it occurs to me that I was perhaps dealing with poor benighted utilitarians who thought me presumptuous and irrelevant in imputing motives to posters, whereas I rather thought the same of them for projecting consequences to posts. A matter of naming the darkness in which morality must operate.
Can you elaborate on the darkness? I don't understand the allusion.
I suppose being able to negotiate is a presupposition of conflict resolution.
Does my ethical system need to be something that can be written and read and does it require rigid prescription for certain situations.
I have myself a system and it is far from rigid and it prescribes nothing more to any specific situation than vigilance and thought.
A situation at first glance may appear the same as another and if it were that simple rule/guidelines could be prescribed.
Unfortunately thing aren't always that simple.
There is almost always a bigger picture and in a lot of situations that whole picture will not be able to be observed by one self.
i.e.
I am walking down the street and I'm approaching an elderly woman who due to the slope on the path is struggling with her shopping trolley. Being young and stronger than she, and having that I am in no rush to be anywhere I believe that it would only be right to help out. It causes me more pain to see her struggle than what it would to help her.
But would I be right to blindly force what I think would be the right thing onto her.
In many cases I'm sure the elderly lady would be grateful for assistance.
I would certainly approach with intentions to help but would exercise vigilance. Paying close attention to how she responds to my aproach. There could be many reason why she would not like me to help.
She may have preconceptions of what my intentions are due to the way I appear. If she believes my intention could be of a sinister nature my approach would not be welcomed.
She may be going through an emotional time where she is down on herself because she is struggling with life and feel like a burden on everyone else. My approach would only add to her pain.
She may have experienced abuse in a similar situation previously.
Her culture or religious beliefs may prohibit her from engagements with me being that I am a stranger or of a foreign nature.
The list could go on and on.
I would cautiously approach the woman with a desire to help her but I would pay very close attention to how she reacts to my approach. I would do my best to interpret her reactions and possible reasons for them and then decide what I believe would be the best way to proceed. Upon proceeding I would then exercise the same evaluations and actions continuously.
I find that most situations I encounter in life could consist of countless variables and having a rigid system will not suffice.
This is not to say I don't have a system.
I have my morals and what would they be if I was not to utilise them. I conduct myself in a ways that aligns with my morals. My conduct strongly encompasses vigilance and understanding of the infinite variables that situations can hold.
For this reason I think written rules or a rigid system would be unethical.
I do think that I use my "system" constantly in life.
I also believe that Philosophy for me would be a fruitless exercise if it were not to be used as means of guiding my life. Guiding my life would be difficult without morals/ethics ensuring continuity of actions benefiting choose direction.
Hence why I am skeptical and also unimpressed with the grandiose claims people make about their principle-based ethics on behalf of themselves. Moral theory is unsystematic and messy, and this is indeed a problem, but it's no good trying to remedy the problem by introducing ad hoc generalizations that are imperialistic precisely because they are insufficient.
(Y)
Quoting darthbarracuda
The problem is when you are in conflict with someone over principles. To your mind (and perhaps to many others who share your point of view), a moral situation is clearly X, Y, Z, but to someone else who you are having conflict with, the moral situation is A, B,C. No one is going back to Kant's deontology or Mill's utilitiarianism to work it out. Rather, people will go back to their own principles. Who is right? It only resolves when either one party capitulates and accepts situation in defeat, both capitulate a little and there is a compromise, or an outside mediator dictates who is correct. That is how the real world works. That is where morality lies. Much of it works on ignoring those with different values, hashing it out with them, or having a mediator of sorts. Normative ethics as a useful tool perhaps only works as a heuristic for those in the legal system. If a judge has a "rule" on how to apply a case, he may refer to an ethical theory of some kind to judge a rule (what creates the best utility in X tort situation perhaps).
However, there is something to be said for virtue theory if it is not overblown into VIRTUE THEORY (with capital letters). In other words, virtue as some reified thing that is good in itself is not really the value of virtue theory. Rather, that when dealing with each other in the chaos of real world situations of conflict, different personality-types, etc. that there is a groundwork for common decency and fairness in how we treat each other. For if one party thinks its okay to manipulate, and bully, and other thinks this is an unacceptable way to go about business, there is a problem. If both parties think it is wrong to act this way, then if someone does act this way, perhaps there can be a mutual agreement as to which party was not acting appropriately in that case.
Er, not really, I'm sorry. I call it darkness because it isn't clear. It seems necessary that there should be such a darkness, or blind-spot or whatever. If you come across someone who lacks (in their own imagining) that hesitancy and radical doubt, then they tend towards fanaticism. Is it St Paul... "For now we see through a glass, darkly..."?
There's a certain unreality to 'what I ought to do'. I have to imagine what a person of good will would do, because my will is not as good as I will it to be, and then try and act as if I had good will. If I actually had good will, all this would be unnecessary and I could just act naturally. We can easily disagree about what this imaginary person of good will would do in any situation, according to how we theorise good will, and/or the situation.
What's your stance on other intellectual endeavors, such as science - must they all have immediate practical consequences? I suppose an alchemist that wants to get rich by transmuting base metals into gold would be OK in your book, but a chemistry professor who has no intention of putting his studies of chemistry into actual practice is a fool and a charlatan. And of course, philosophy of science would be doubly sterile - a pointless inquiry into a pointless study.
Or did I get your completely wrong?
I think something like this. All ethical inquiry consists in reasoning about what to do. This includes what it means to do something right (is this thing I do ok? is it good?), what justifications are adequate ethical motivation (consequences, duties...), or abstract properties of ethical behaviour (is it rational, emotive...). If the way someone thinks about the abstract properties or adequate justifications has no influence on how they live their lives - what might be called practical applications - then the system of abstract properties and demarcation between adequate and inadequate justifications is entirely abstracted from attempts to live a good life.
What I've been trying to do in the thread is coax out people who have advocated architectonic thought about the abstract properties of ethical behaviour or adequate justifications and attempt to get them to derive specific 'oughts' or ways of conducting themselves from the systems. So far I've received little to no effort in 'derivations' from what people think ethics should consist in to what they should do.
A scientific idea does have practical consequences, insofar is it must be realised through research and provide a vantage for viewing other scientific ideas and generating other scientific problems.
I don't think your 'system' is one of the ones I'm trying to tar in this thread. It seems like a bunch of generalizations from difficult scenarios you've been in, so isn't a top-down imposition, it's a bottom-up exploration.
That makes sense. Do you think being ethical is possible without this sense of doubt? I've met a few people who were convinced that they had good will and were ethically right regardless of what they did - they weren't sociopaths, just people who strongly identified with their own sense of right and wrong... The arbiter of right and wrong being their decisions.
Also reminded of Sam Vimes from Discworld. He was a good man because he fought the darkness he wanted to enact. In opposition to Carrot, who was good by virtue of narrative force.
I hesitate to say it is impossible, but self righteous conviction most often looks naive and ugly to me:
[quote= Oliver Cromwell]I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.[/quote] And yet the man himself is the epitome of self-righteous conviction, and I quote him...
But Cromwell is perhaps more like Lord Vetinari - a good man because he owned the darkness
Well, thinking about what to do would be practicing ethics (of course, not all decisions are ethical decisions, but I am assuming we are talking specifically about the latter here.) The rest would indeed be what constitutes ethical inquiry.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, and?... You imply (and say explicitly in elsewhere) that there is something wrong with that. I am trying to understand why you think so. Why is it wrong to pursue an inquiry into ethics for reasons other than helping yourself make the right choices? For example, out of the love of wisdom (you know, philosophy)?
I am speaking, by the way, as someone who is skeptical of ethical systems. But not of meta-ethics - after all, my skepticism is itself a meta-ethical position. As is perhaps your stance here as well.
It would be strange to love wisdom without trying to let that wisdom influence your actions, no?
And what influence the study of ethics may have depends on the kind of study. Specifically, whether the study concerns the is or the ought. Only the latter provides what you are asking for, i.e. immediate guidance for ethical decisions, but the former can be a subject for ethical inquiry as well.
What's interesting is that, as much as your ire is directed against ethical systems, I can't think of any ethical inquiry other than system-building that can inform one about practical ethical decisions. As I understand it, developing ethical systems is akin to science or engineering, wherein one tries to discover or create overarching structures that bridge the gaps between particular instances of ethical knowledge and thus enable us to find answers where we don't already have them (the counterpart in science would be predicting observations where they are not already available).
If one is skeptical of such enterprise, as I am, then one is left with looking into the is of ethics. I suppose that too can influence one's ethical behavior in some cases, but the influence wouldn't be so direct and obvious.
I think you're interpreting my ire towards ethical systems as a kind of quietism towards them - that theory is irrelevant for motivating ethical decisions, considering what we should and shouldn't do. Rather I'm trying to advocate a subordination of ethical systems to ethical decisions. The subordination I'm advocating is that ethical systems should allow a user to think in concrete circumstances about what to do - they should have some heuristic import to applied ethics. If they don't have the ability to give heuristics; using 'heuristic' as 'a method of informing about choices'; then they can no longer have an impact on ethical decisions.
This is related to my claim in the OP, admonishing the idea that people 'pretend that they live their lives by an ethical system they just invented'. This gets the direction of influence wrong; subordinating ethical decisions to theoretical constructs, rather than using theoretical constructs to make ethical decisions. I'm sure that you've also met people who have in their mind a theoretical guarantee that their actions are always right - and these people are assholes. Or, rather, they always get to decide whether what they did was right or wrong, failures in character and lack of relevant experience to a specific context of decision be damned.
Hence raising questions like 'how would a cognitivist and a non-cognitivist behave differently in scenarios?' Or more precisely, what variations do their meta-ethical stances allow in their behaviour. Similarly 'how would a utilitarian and a deontologist behave differently in scenarios' - or more precisely what variations do their normative-ethical stances allow in their behaviour. If there are no differences - no applicable heuristics that can be 'derived' from the system - then they cannot inform the procedure of ethical decision. Which is supposed to be the core action of these theories.
If you'll permit me to use 'empirical evidence' in philosophical debate, look at the way people use the trolley problem to distinguish between different normative ethical frameworks. It is a model ethical decision, an ambiguous scenario with internal conflicts in intuition. The normative systems give different ways of resolving the problem - usually with respect to which horn of the ethical dilemma they admit. What is primary in the consideration of the trolley problem isn't that, say, act utilitarians and rule utilitarians may differ on its solution, rather that the ethical decision contained in the trolley problem generates ambiguities which are then codified and analysed in accordance with different normative-ethical structures.
The 'is' of ethics has a very natural link to how we decide to approach ethical decisions... it describes how we make them. When we make an ethical decision, we should consider what we ought to do - and this is where ethical systems are useful. Is it too much of a stretch to say they have to be useful in this regard to be ethical systems? Another way of putting this is - if they do not suggest or provide heuristics which may allow differences in ethical behaviour, normative-ethical and meta-ethical structures consist in differences that makes no difference for how we live our lives. Surely a sorry state for any ethical inquiry to be in.
I don't think my meta-ethical framework has a big effect on one's actions, but my ethical framework does. It has led to major changes in what I donate, what I eat, what I buy and what I say.
I don't see my ethical framework as foundational, or as something to be used for browbeating others. For me, ethics is personal, to be used as a guide to making important decisions. It can lead to lobbying and public advocacy, and I do some of that (not as much as I 'should', because I am weak) but that's different from being judgemental.
My dabblings in philosophy, including what I've read on this and the previous forum, have been a significant influence on my ethical stance, and thereby what I do.
I can imagine examples of how thinking in terms of consequences is different from thinking in terms of duties, but do you ever get any wisdom in how to act from your rough adherence to emotivism? If so, how?
Utilitarianism was never really meant for everyday decisions, people like Mill and Bentham explicitly say they mean it more for political entities that treat individuals as social atoms. It was a way of ensuring the maximum utility of a society, where people are most happy and more importantly have their rights protected (where rights are also grounded in their happiness).
I'm even skeptical of the role principles have in everyday moral decisions. I think most people have the very same principles - don't hurt other people, don't steal, don't lie, don't break your promises, be a nice person, etc. What makes people disagree on moral issues isn't in terms of principles but in terms of empirical, sometimes metaphysical, reality. Abortion, for instance, is not a question about the principle of harming other people, since almost everyone agrees killing other people is just wrong. Rather it's often a metaphysical debate about the status of the fetus, viz: whether or not the fetus is something that can be killed, and/or if the mother's life is more important than the babies, etc. People like myself who argue that animals have rights that should not be violated are arguing an empirical hypothesis: animals are conscious, they do suffer, and the application of a principle that we all already have (harming others) makes it wrong to manipulate animals in the way we so often do.
Despite the appearances, there is a large worldwide consensus as to what these basic moral "principles" are. Moral disagreement arises when we disagree about the application of these principles, i.e their appropriate-ness given the circumstances. Of course, there are some moral principles that do differ, often in terms of religious belief, i.e. God's will determining what is right and what is wrong, or some faux Taoism about the "way of the universe", or whatever. But this is just another form of monism and absolutism that I think corrupts a person's ability to skillfully assess a moral situation, which is of course a virtue.
I am not sure that people necessarily have the same basic everyday principles. What's funny, is it is the day-to-day interactions that are least thought about in the sphere of ethics, but the most relevant to our everyday lives. Look at Trump. There are plenty of people like him and even admire him. His principles as a manager are (to me at least) repulsive and immoral. How he leads from divisiveness and through cruel (and often misleading) ad hominems at his direct reports and people at large is wrong to the point of crossing moral boundaries. He isn't the only one though. Go to many corporate environments, those personality types are out there, stomping over people's dignity and getting away with it- abusing their power, forcing people out of jobs that otherwise could have provided a stable livelihood, etc. etc. There are plenty of daily interactions where there is a difference of opinion. Where does morality end and simple preferences for style begin? That is a really good philosophical question, but no one tries to dig deeper than the biggies (murder, theft, promise-keeping, human rights on a grand scale, etc.).
Let me try and formulate the converse then. 'I don't care about how to live ethically, I only care about what it means to live ethically'.
Somewhat imprecise but I think it suggests the right idea.
I read these passages a couple of times, and they still confuse me somewhat. In keeping with my earlier is/ought distinction, I would distinguish descriptive systems and prescriptive systems. These can be the very same systems, but their import is different. A descriptive system is subordinated to ethical judgments in the sense that preexisting judgments inform the construction of the system, and the soundness of the system is tested against ethical problems whose solutions are arrived at independently from the system (such as the trolley thought experiment). Ethical judgments always trump a descriptive system.
On the other hand, ethical judgments are subordinated to a prescriptive system, in the sense that the system dictates the judgments. And this is precisely the case where you have a theoretical guarantee that your actions are right: if you follow a prescriptive system, then actions that are in keeping with the system cannot fail to be the right actions (the only remaining uncertainty is whether the actions really do conform to the system).
In reality, I think, the split between descriptive and prescriptive systems is not so clear-cut. Those people who consciously follow some system of ethics will have chosen the system to follow at some point, and their choice would likely be informed by preexisting ethical judgments. And in practical ethical decisions they would often let intuitive judgments trump whatever principle they are supposed to follow, or they would simply neglect to invoke principles in great many practical situations. We turn to abstract principles in cases of uncertainty, and even then it is often hard to say how much the eventual decision was informed by the "head" and how much by the "heart." Or else we use ethical principles as heuristic shortcuts - so that we don't have to closely examine our conscience for every trivial decision.
Quoting fdrake
Is it though? This is what I've been questioning. You are, again, implying that the only admissible ethical inquiry is one that can result in practical guidance. I disagree on general principles, and would like to again put this in a broader context of human endeavors. Not everything we do or think about is aimed at immediate practical ends.
The one thing on which I would agree with you is that we should not pretend. We should not pretend that a theoretical difference makes a difference in practical ethical decisions if in reality it doesn't. And we should probably be more mindful of this point when discussing ethics. But I don't think that every discussion of ethics is infected with such pretension.
Quoting fdrake
Come now, you know better than that! This is not the converse: what I said was not an either/or proposition.
One Soviet writer and intellectual who was jailed and later exiled for publishing a book of fiction abroad, once quipped: "My disagreement with the Soviet regime is purely esthetic." The first time I heard this, I thought his remark was flippant and paradoxical. Only later did I come to appreciate its truth and apply it to myself. I suspect that such "esthetic" disagreements run deeper than any articulated principles. We can argue circles around each other about policy and such, but if you are not repulsed by Trump's very demeanor, then I know that there is a moral gap between us that no principles can bridge.
Bit of imprecision there. Person believes system is right. Person believes any action entailed by the system is right. Person believes system entails particular action, then person believes action is right.
I don't think I've made an argument that the systems we're talking about have to be aimed at immediate practical ends, only that they should entail or constrain things that we do - by providing heuristics and methods of thought. The purpose of the ethical system might be to understand whether moral statements have propositional content, and whether that propositional content is true or false, but then there should be some relationship - minimally in the form of heuristics - between what a person's ethically justified in doing and how they understand ethics.
Beliefs about ethics aren't 'free floating' somewhere in a purely abstract domain, they concern concrete ethical decisions - if the systems aren't sensitive to variations in ethical decisions then they lose their core content.
More generally, the idea that there are 'purely philosophical problems' is something I don't believe, nor do I believe that 'the love of wisdom', originally founded in ethics, is done justice by the want to entertain abstractions devoid of real problems.
Ok, how would you formulate my central claim in the thread, and how would you formulate its converse? Should help us get something nice out of the discussion.
Yep. The problem here is even worse.
1) It's not just aesthetic when you're close up, it's all too real.
2) It's not just aesthetic when you're far away, he's the leader of the "free world"- a state of affairs that affects us all.
3) There are people like him all over, in many many workplaces and industries. Some people call it "the corporate edge" or having a "big personality". Anyone and everything can be justified with a few slogans. Apparently there are some people who like assholes and want them in power.
Well, I am not sure what a 'purely philosophical problem' would entail for you, but I tend to regard such problems as language problems. And like it or not, a lot of discussion in philosophy comes down to arguments about language - or so it seems to me, from my admittedly superficial amateur perspective. While I admit that working out precise language is akin to fashioning the tools of the trade for an analytical philosopher, I don't much care for such discussion myself - especially when it pretends to be substantive discussion. Still, like good therapy or surgery, a trenchant analysis of philosophical discourse can dissolve pseudo-problems and clear up confusions, and that is a good thing.
But what would constitute substantive discussion of ethics? In addition to laying out and defending the principles for living a good life, I would also include meta-ethics in that category. Although a lot of that discourse would, again, be ultimately about language, it doesn't have to be 'free-floating' if it connects to other ideas and things that matter to us.
Finally, it's probably the case that even if you don't have a well thought out system of ethics, you're moral actions probably are associated with a system of rules that you learned from family, friends, and society. So in this sense it's probably a theory in a loose sense of the word.
Hey fdrake!
I would agree with the notion that many folk promote and/or argue for some sort of ethical/moral system which they themselves do not follow. The real life examples are far too numerous to count. However, not following your own moral belief is not always unacceptable and/or objectionable. I mean, pace someone earlier, there's nothing objectionable about working to be a better person. Aspirations of better require an agent's imagining better. One can make a moral mistake and come to recognize having made one if and when s/he has moral groundwork of some sort in order to reflect upon. Being the best(most moral) person is something to aspire towards. Not everyone will meet their own standards. That is not a flaw inherent to moral belief. It is a feature thereof.
As far as the general usefulness of promoting an ethical system which cannot be possibly followed as a result of the way the world's laws are structured, I suppose that it could be the case that the law forbids and/or punishes good behaviour and rewards clearly immoral behaviour.
To directly answer the question...
I try to make my own moral thought and belief as congruent as possible to the way things are, in that it ought be at least supported by the facts and not stand in direct contradiction. I do however, make constant deliberate decisions to follow my own moral standards. That happens on a very regular basis. Charge me with wearing rose-colored glasses, but I actually think that everyone does, regardless of what they say outright after the fact and upon reflection. I mean, everyone chooses to do what they think is acceptable at the time. The reasons for it being so vary. Not all reasons for taking action are good.
Working from the premiss that at conception we are entirely void of all thought and belief, we learn the necessity of our holding firmly to the notion that thought and belief are accrued... moral thought and belief notwithstanding.
One's moral thought and belief are entirely adopted at first. One cannot come to question the veracity of one's own thought and belief unless one has pre-existing thought and belief and a means to isolate it. Doubting one's own thought and belief requires complex language as it happens when one considers their own mental ongoings. Considering one's own mental ongoings is thinking about one's own thought and belief. Thinking about thought and belief requires something to think about. We must first form and/or hold moral thought and belief prior to our being able to doubt it's veracity.
Thought and belief are prior to the ability to doubt what one is being taught during language acquisition. Thought and belief that is prior to the ability to doubt does not include the ability to doubt. All doubt is belief based, and it consists in/of doubting the truth of something or other. Doubting the veracity of one's own moral thought and belief requires a baseline of pre-existing moral belief. Belief grounds all reasonable doubt. What matters most can be clearly described. Reasonable belief provides reasonable doubt. Unreasonable doubt doesn't warrant much attention.
One almost entirely adopts his/her own initial worldview, and it comes replete with a code of conduct; with notions of being good/bad, admirable/detestable, harmful/helpful, etc. One initially judges his/her own actions through a moral lens that only language acquisition can initially bring.
Can what we learn about what counts as moral/immoral during this time be false? If so, what makes it so?
I do believe that one can have thoughts and beliefs prior to learning language. I argued this in my Wittgenstein threads. I'd be careful in expressing the limits of these beliefs though. No doubt that sharing a belief with others in terms of statements is a necessary feature of language.
It sounds like you're saying that we cannot express doubts without language. If this is the case, I don't think it's true. One can express doubts by one's actions, just as one can express beliefs by one's actions. The act of digging in the ground, for example, shows my belief that something is there (beliefs being states-of-mind). The act of doubting can also be observed. For example, one might have buried something in the ground (primitive man for e.g.) only to find that the object isn't where one thought it was. You may see the person quit digging, for example, look pensive, trying to figure out where the thing is buried. So the expression of doubts isn't necessary to language. It does seem to be a feature that's closely related to memory, that is, the person digging might be doubting their own recollection of where they buried a particular object.
The concepts of doubt and belief are something that requires language. However, one can show one's belief or doubt by one's actions apart from the concepts or apart from language. So at a primitive level one's beliefs are shown through actions, but as we acquire language, we not only show our beliefs by our actions, but we show them by using concepts and/or statements.
Fair rendition... Not quite right though.
I'm saying that in order to doubt, one must have pre-existing belief that grounds the doubt. As it pertains to doubting one's own moral thought and belief, one has to have it. Having moral thought and belief requires language. Being able to doubt the veracity of one's own moral thought and belief requires language.
Digging in the ground is an action that can have more than one cause. Believing that something is there is but one. Believing that something could be there is another. Believing that digging in the ground causes something to be there is yet one more.
Which one applies to the chickens?
I'm honoring the suggested care in expressing the limits of these beliefs.
So, we agree then on one count at least. Belief does not require language.
Doubt, it seems we disagree on. If doubt is belief based, and doubting one's own thought and belief requires being able to set it aside as a means to isolate it(which I hold it does), then doubting one's own thought and belief requires language, for language is the only means we have for metacognition.
What sort of doubt can one have if one has no language?
Disbelief and doubt.
What's the difference in an agent that has no language?
An observer might infer them from the actions of one whose language is not developed, such as a child having an idea that a treat under a cup, but the belief that the treat is under the cup is not a belief in the child.
I disagree that belief is conceptual. At least, not all belief is conceptual. That is... assuming that being conceptual requires consisting in/of language.
Maybe there is conceptual belief and doubt of the Cartesian kind. And maybe there is an existential belief and or doubt that is more basic than its conceptual derivative.
Being a better person is a neverending project. Thus, failing to meet one's own moral standards isn't necessarily an objectionable failing. It's part of the process.
Belief and doubt are only conceptual if you believe that they're products of language. However, it's been the case generally that beliefs (I would also add doubts) are states-of-mind, and states-of-mind are not dependent on linguistic concepts. It's not as though primitive man, before the advent of language, didn't have beliefs and/or doubts. Part of what it means to have a language is to put thoughts into words, thinking is prior to language, and prior to concepts.
When a fledgling flaps its wings for the first time the fool says "all it has to do is believe it can fly and it shall".
A shark has no need of belief when following a trail of blood finds food; it just does it.
How does one even get to a language without having beliefs prior to having a language?
Obviously there is a difference between actions that are instinctual and one's that are not. How does one know the difference - by observation.