Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy"
https://www.pitt.edu/~mthompso/readings/mmp.pdf
Grayling drew my attention back to this article, when in his History of Philosophy he says she:
And on a direct reading I found her convincing. What a neat rejection of, say, Singer!
But I would reject the modus tollens reading... https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anscombe/#VirEth
Any one interested in discussing?
Grayling drew my attention back to this article, when in his History of Philosophy he says she:
...argued that both deontology and consequentialism assume a foundation for ethics in the concept of obligation, which makes no sense in the absence of a lawgiver which or who imposes it...
And on a direct reading I found her convincing. What a neat rejection of, say, Singer!
But I would reject the modus tollens reading... https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anscombe/#VirEth
Any one interested in discussing?
Comments (331)
I'd be happy to discuss the essay although it's been some time since I've read it and she makes multiple different point throughout the essay. If I remember correctly this paper had a hand in the revival of virtue ethics.
Such as...
(It's important, because you will be replacing a divine lawgiver with a necessary one...)
So to begin.
Paragraph one
Anscombe beings with three theses :
1. It's not profitable, at present, to do moral philosophy. That should be laid aside until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology.
2. The concepts of moral obligation and moral duty are atavistic - they come to us from a time when survival was of prime importance.
3. The differences between moral philosophers like Sedgwick (who I don't know) and everyone else up to the present day aren't of much importance
[commentary : When she said she had three theses, I expected them to be something different. I can't tell if they're tongue-in-cheek or not. (1) Seems to be almost behaviorist. (2) Seems to be Nietzschean (3) seems to hinge on Sedgwick, who, i don't know who is that. But it seems, more broadly, to say : the nuances of moral philosophy to this point doesn't much matter. As a whole the three theses she suggests, feels to me like she's stage-setting by rhetorically playing the role of a decadent philosopher, who doesn't really understand the purpose of moral philosophy. I don't know if that's right. Maybe she means them. Have to keep reading]
Paragraph two
Difference between Aristotle's Ethics and modern moral philosophy. Aristotle doesn't seem to focus on what the moderns focus on. What we mean by 'moral' today doesn't even seem to have a place in Aristotle.
Aristotle breaks up virtues in two ways
1. Moral
2. Intellectual
Do his intellectual virtues have a moral aspect? Tentatively, yes. A failure in intellectual virtue is blameworthy, like in government. [For example, we might blame economists for the 2008 finanical crisis, in a way that is both intellectual and moral]
But we can't 'blame' someone for any sort of failure? Is being blameworthy always a moral matter? Like, what if you just program an app wrong? Is that a moral failure?
Ok, so some failures are morally blameworthy, some are not. Does Aristotle understand this distinction?If he does, why doesn't he focus more on this distinction?
Another Aristotelian distinction:
'Involuntariness in Action'
vs
Scoundrelism
A man can be blamed for the latter. [It seems like 'scoundrelism' maybe just means 'doing stuff in bad way such that you can be blamed for it']
But if we make this distinction, does it not follow that there is a moral obligation not to make certain intellectual mistakes? Next Anscombe asks [ & I don't quite follow why] Why doesn't Aristotle discuss obligation in general versus obligation in particular?]
She then goes on to do a very post-wittgenstein british thing : If anyone modern discusses Aristotle and doesn't feel like [example from daily life], they must be very imperceptive indeed.
[commentary: I think what Anscombe is trying to say is that Aristotle confuses Intellectual and moral failings, as we understand them. He runs the two together. She's not very clear on what she means, but it has something to do with blame. Presumably we think a moral failing is blameworthy, while an intellectual one is not. I think there's a lot more to unpack here. Blame and responsibility are a big topic, and I think empirically things don't filter out quite in the scheme she wants to set up, but I get her point and whatever the case may be, it's certaintly true that what Anscombe wants to talk about when she talks about morality doesn't seem to be quite what Aristotle was talking about. Whether that's a failure of Aristotle or a confusion of Anscombe is irrelevant to that fact being true.]
Anscombe draws the conclusion that we can't look to Aristotle for elucidation of moralty as we think of it. What about other thinkers?
- Butler: He appeals to conscience. But what about things like that show 'You' where the hero thinks he's doing good, but is actually doing really bad stuff? [BROKE]
- Hume : Defines truth in a way that excludes ethical judgment. He defines passion in a way that any aim at anything suggests a passion is at play. The is/ought distinction is equally an is/owes and
an is/needs distinction (?). She says she'll return to this (which is good! I'm not sure what she's getting at to be honest.)
-Kant. Anscombe focuses on Kant's metaphor of 'legislating for oneself.' She shows how this silly - What? Is 'legislation' a one-man vote? Her approach seems to be that all legislation is parliamentary, and any idea about legislation has to be framed in a parliamentary context in order to determine whether or not it is absurd. She explains that legislation needs a power superior to the legislator. She says deontology doesn't take into account context.
If I can find time to read the article, sure. I was just replying to the snipped you quoted for now.
"if xyz is a set of facts brute relative to a description A, then xyz is a set out of a range some set among which holds if A holds; but the holding of some set among these does not necessarily entail A because exceptional circumstances can always make a difference; ... Further, though in normal cirucmstances, xyz would be a justification for A, of which instituion A is of course not itself a description." :vomit:
What about the autonomy of reason?
Anscomb says it is absurd to think that I can legislate on myself. This is a substantialist prejudice. Man's reason can legislate on his passions. For example.
Agreed. So, end the article here.
It isn't psychologically possible.
A deontological approach is required for normative ethics because conscience (an intuitive faculty) appraises circumstances, and judges personal motive, intent, and action, according to (subjective, then intersubjective) ethical knowledge.
And:
1) Moral obligations are required by conscience, imposing natural duties of performance and forbearance on the obligor(s), and creating corresponding rights to demand performance or forbearance by the obligee(s).
2) Right action is the faultless performance of moral action.
"How did this come about? The answer is in history: between Aristotle and us came Christianity, with its law conception of ethics. For Christianity derived its ethical notions from the Torah. (One might be inclined to think that a law conception of ethics could arise only among people who accepted an allegedly divine positive law; that this is not so is shown by the example of the Stoics, who also thought that whatever was involved in conformity to human virtues was required by divine law."
- page 4,5
This is Nietzschean in the sense that the author is expressing a pet perspective clothed in a partially correct historical account. My experience with Nietzsche says we should spend a little time trying to understand her point rather than unwinding the package it's coming in, except in the surrounding text she feels the need to shit on philosophical views that actually have exactly the same ground as hers. The reason they do is that Christianity absorbed all the ethical perspectives it had access to. It became an intellectual forum for them. Law-bound morality is one of the figures in the forum. Emancipation and progress are also essential features of Christianity that aren't preoccupied with obligations, but rather on the effect of sin on the sinner and the victim.
But back to law-bound morality. Yes, that's part of what morality is to us.
Quoting csalisbury
I'm reading this as sympathetic to Aristotle, as the author of approaching ethics through virtue. That is, that ethical thinking is not so very different from other forms of rationality; that there is no a distinct form of reasoning that might be called "moral reasoning". Aristotle is not confusing intellectual and moral failings, as you say, but rather that very distinction is not found in Aristotle, but is found in modern moral philosophy. SO discussing Aristotle in such moral terms is fraught; "the teeth do not come together in a bite".
Quoting David Mo
Yeah, nuh.
She's well versed in Wittgenstein, so I'm reading this as a variant on the private language argument; that is, one cannot make sense of following a private rule, because one could have no way of verifying that one was indeed following the rule. Consider the case in which you believe you are following a rule, but actually you are mis-remembering the rule...
Yeah, one might suppose that you just made up this intuition to fill the space left by the removal of a commanding divinity.
This is a key change for me, since I have elsewhere defended Moore's notion that we have a moral intuition. Anscombe's critique of that is I now think quite telling. It now seems to me that Deontology is anomalous. It is a mistake to suppose that there must be a moral rule that we ought obey; and not just that there is no such rule, but that supposition that this is the correct way to approach ethics is muddled.
Further the very same argument applies to consequentialism, and hence utilitarianism.
We ought not tackle ethics by looking for other universal rules - deontic or utilitarian - to replace divine rules, but by looking more directly at what we do, at what is virtuous.
https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/2567359/mod_resource/content/1/anscombe%20brute%20facts.pdf
I'm thinking of basic facts as those presupposed by a language game. SO that the spuds were delivered to my house is part of the language game of my purchasing the spuds.
The spuds were delivered. Brute fact. Saying "yep, you delivered the spuds, as I requested. That's a brute fact. But nothing in that brute fact entails that I now owe you money" is to utterly misunderstand what is going on.
Anscombe is arguing against there being a missing step - "Does my owing the grocer in this case consist in any facts beyond the ones mentioned? No."
Good call. I'll read it through, then circle back
If you wrote down the rule, to refer to it from time to time, would the rule lose its quality of being private? I hardly think so.
I should read Wittgenstein to verify that he is overrated and actually his only true observations are the blindingly obvious, or else they are (in the majority) plain wrong. This is a theory I should embark on showing evidence for, much like to show that and how Kant overthought himself, and nicely bound himself (meaing his philosophy) into a bunch of self-contradictions. Wittgenstein does not contradict himself, he just states the (ibid) or else he is (ibid).
But instead of personal mud-slinging would it not much better to focus on your topic? I'm in the middle of reading the article. I just got up to take a pain killer for 1. arthritic pain and 2. you. I'll be soon reporting my to you not even existing insights.
Wow.
:grin:
Even I have not received such outright blatant disrespect from the grumpy old goat, and I'm at odds with him(and myself at times) intentionally...
Nice thread my friend. Much needed thought in today's world, and definitely a subject matter that my own position has significant trouble attending to.
I'll read, but will not enter into discussion until after I know I've a good grasp on things... old dogs and new tricks.
:wink:
The author throws a light on the question: will we ever find the golden key (so to speak) that unlocks the problem (elusiveness) of what is ethical?
The author has shown how each ethicist errs in his or her philosophy. This is actually quite easily done, if one applies the "exception" or "contradicting example" mental experiment. The author takes the proof a bit further, and she asserts the logical self-contradiction of each prior ethicist with more than that: the author builds a case of logic that in general terms, not just in a specific example, destroys the case of other ethicists.
Yeah, I know. But the quality of this forum keeps dropping. There are maybe a half-dozen who actually have a proper go, like reading the article before commenting...
This part of the subject matter of ethics , is however, completely closed to us until we have an account of what type of characteristics a virtue is -- a problem not of ethics, but of conceptual analysis
This word "ought" ... could not, in the character of having that force, be inferred form anything whatever.
... in such-and-such circumstances one ought to procure the judicial condemnation of the innocent. And that is my complaint.
You spake as if you had an alternative.
Yeah, I do like how openly frustrated she is with her contemporaries. Her prose is clunky. I don't get the sense that she's constitutionally incapable of good prose (i dunno haven't read her before); it just seems like she has some holistic sense of what she wants to say, but is having trouble laying out all the nuances serially. Slightly constipated. & so you get sections like the brute fact one. I've now forged (sometimes impatiently) through the essay and think I have a vague understanding of what she's trying to say, but I'm going to go back to the step-by-step approach to see if I can make it clearer to myself. I left off at the brute fact section.
I'm going to try to put it in my own words, and I think I stand a good chance of erring, but here goes:
Almost all 'facts' are high-level ways to 'wrap up' lower level of facts. They are descriptions that add something to the concatenation of these lower-level facts. I might say 'a football game is happening'. If we break this down analytically, we might say e.g., 'there are two teams on the field, both trying to get a football into the endzone.' But all of these facts are themselves higher-level 'wrap-ups'. What are we calling a team, or a ball or and endzone? And we can do this endlessly, just as philosophers used to talk about the indefinite division of matter. For that reason, it doesn't make sense to 'cut off' this progression at some arbitrary level and say : everything above this level is illegitimately deriving an description from some set of facts which don't, in-and-of-themselves lead to it. That I owe the butcher for the meat he delivered is equally description and brute fact, depending on what level you look at it. ('The butcher is vengefully pursuing his debtors' would take [owing the butcher] as a brute fact.) As humans we occupy the level on which 'owing the butcher' is itself a kind of brute fact. It doesn't really work to push one level back [He delivered me meat] as though that were some incorruptible pure 'is-not-ought' level, and everything above it goes an unsanctioned step. The next level-back, by that logic, could have the same charges levied against it: 'He delivered meat' breaks down to [ he picked up meat, and dropped it here] and so on indefinitely.
In addition, there are certain cases where all the usual 'brute level' facts that usually imply a certain high-level description are present, but, because of extenuating circumstances, the situation is different. There's no foolproof way around it - some art is required to make sense of these border cases.
Anscombe things Hume is wrong, but that his analysis has the virtue of opening a space for this more subtle exploration.
(That may be even clunkier than Anscombe, but that's my best stab so far.)
Yes! So we perhaps agree I think on a method - read the detail with an eye on the overall argument.
I read her as rejecting law-bound morality in favour of developing virtue. SO the attack - pp. 2-3 - her antecedents is an attack on the very notion of doing ethics by examining what is good; the section you cite is arguing that "should," "needs," "ought," "must" have been taken out of their usual place in our discourse and forced into an unnatural alliance with words such as "obligation"... And again this harks back to Wittgenstein's warnings about philosophers using words in peculiar ways.
Anscombe was very Catholic, so keep the Modus Tollens reading mentioned in the OP in the back of one's mind.
What counts as a brute fact seems ot Anscombe to depend on what one is doing - think of Wittgenstein's discussion of what counts as simple. That's very different form, say, Searle, who talks in terms of a hierarchy, brute facts giving way to institutional facts. So the brute fact of a bunch of people running around on a field are insufficient to explain your football game; Searle would invoke brute facts, then individual and then group intent in his explanation. But it seems Anscombe would simply accept that there are different sorts of explanations for what is gong on.
yes, she does reject secular moral systems like utilitarianism and kantian deontology, but she is a catholic so I don't think she rejects all law-bound morality because that would include biblical morality. it's been years since i've read this essay but i remember gleaning it from it that the greeks (originators of virtue ethics) considered the project of morality in a much different sense than later thinkers like kant or mill or like how we consider it today. morality was more about cultivating the right virtue and finding, say, the golden mean between cowardice and rash action in regard to bravery. the greeks held a teleological worldview which christian thinkers would incorporate quite nicely into christian thought in the middle ages.
I always interpreted that teeth-mashing quote you mentioned earlier as just the disjointment in the way ethics was discussed between these two eras (greeks versus modern conception) but my reading could be wrong and again... it's been like a decade.
Yes, I think we're on the same page here (& I do think Anscombe is right.) To take her idea of exceptions: we can imagine something that looks exactly like a football game, only it's entirely choreographed, perhaps as part of some avant-garde performance piece about Masculinity & Sport. In that case, all the brute facts would appear to be there, yet there's still not a football game being played. I feel like there's tons to be said about exceptions like this, and why we can recognize them as exceptions, even those though the brute facts are present, but in any case, we're always already 'in' the level we're in, and our 'high-level' descriptions are as much facts as anything at a lower level.
Next step:
Owing - and so bilking - can thus be understood on a factual level. What about justice? For now all we can say is that justice is a family-resemblances sort of category. We recognize a cluster of things as being injust. We'll let that lay for now.
Now are injust men bad? That depends on whether justice is a virtue. Anscombe thinks we can't understand this without turning to motive and intent.
She takes the example of a machine that 'ought' to be oiled. I think it's fair to say that, in this case, she's talking about something like a Kantian 'hypothetical' ought. You ought to do x, if you want y. If you want the machine to run welll, you ought to oil it. This, of course, is not an 'ought' in the 'special, moral sense.'
Anscombe thinks this special moral sense happens when Law enters the picture. Now, this hypothetical ought gets linked up with an Absolute Law and becomes an 'obligation' that one is 'bound' by. And this happens through Abrahamic religion
[ Aside: she focuses on christianity but I think this is historically and theologically incorrect. She does mention the Torah, but seems not to take into account what I think is a rather glaring fact: Paul, the author of Christianity, systematically replaces law with grace. She does sort of address this, but describes it as a protestant development. Though, maybe, in an ultimate historical sense, she's right that Paul's subtle theological developments in Romans etc were bulldozed over by the church fathers and only reemerged through Luther. Maybe.]
So a standard analysis would be something like:
...with the second premise justified by some universal law about paying one's debts or seeking the greater happiness of the butcher or whatever.
Anscombe would have us avoid this by our comprehending what is implicit in the transaction involving the delivery from the butcher, perhaps together with an appreciation of the virtue of integrity.
And actually I think that at the least a sufficiently interesting approach to be worthy of discussion. It bypasses a part of ethics that seems - well - almost autistic; lacking in a theory of mind.
That's the modus tollens reading. While you may be right - she is obtuse enough to have argued in favour of law-bound morality by on the face of it arguing against it - I think we need to get the modus ponens reading right before we give this more consideration.
I think so, only I'd flip the first two. 'If the butcher delivered the meat then you ought pay for the meat' seems to be the major premise. And it seems like the major premise, in some way, 'carries' the whole background 'form of life' that brings us to the 'higher level'. 'The butcher delivered meat' can only get to 'you ought pay for the meat' by jumping up a level, and the major premise contains that. (and of course it's not always the case that if he delivers the meat, you ought pay him. Maybe it's thanksgiving & the butcher is your uncle, and butcher-uncles, at thanksgiving, deliver without obligating you to pay. The major premise is sort of like a crude way of representing a higher level in a lower-level, and so doesn't always work exactly.)
I don't much care about Paul's soul, though.
Have to agree with you there- Paul was a real piece of work. On a prolonged bible kick though, & can't help myself with the religious digressions - no point in learning all this stuff if I can't peacock it a little.
I'm struck by the similarity to an argument I have used elsewhere. You take your car to a mechanic to have a clunking noise in the engine looked at, and being of a sceptical disposition the mechanic proceeds to explain that there need be no link between the phenomenology of the clunk you seem to hear and the mooted existence of a problem in your engine. You go to another mechanic who has a better understanding of what it is you want.
just to clarify, if by "law-bound morality" we're referencing that kind of "thou shalt not" morality which has its roots in the old testament then she is definitely not rejecting that. i'm familiar with her theological work and she is definitely not rejecting that. she probably only rejects their secular manifestations.
Half way through... no more time.
Very, very, interesting take though... through page seven.
I like it. Why continue to categorize modern moral thinking in terms of - remnants and vestiges leftover from - archaic conceptions?
Then you would go along with the modus tollens reading...?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anscombe/#VirEth
Edit: now archived at https://plato.stanford.edu/Archives/win2021/entries/anscombe/
Cheers. I'm only here because hospital and enforced rest. Next week I get to go Do The Things again.
My advice, which I live and breath: Take the drugs.
no, i go by the majority, straight-forward view described in the stanford article you linked. this is going to me my last post before i go to bed, by the way.
i suspect that religious, law-bound morality and virtue ethics are actually compatible to an extent; they occupy different territory. law-bound religious morality dictates in absolute rules, while virtue theory only seeks to mold people into decent individuals with good moral character. i think anscombe is trying to promote virtue ethics and its development and can do so without it impugning her own religious views.
on the other hand, one can not be a utilitarian or a kantian and a religious christian.... not a serious one, at least.
I like that. Maybe the first mechanic was almost touching on something - only he hamfistedly applied a by-the-numbers version of the teachings of a disciple of a disciple of a legitimate master mechanic, for whom the theoretical stuff was just his reflections after mastering the pragmatic aspects, and practicing for a long time. Though, as someone who needs to get your car fixed, all that matters is who gets what's actually going on, right now. And whoever can do that, probably is closer to the car-guru, then the disciple of his disciple.
Indeed, he might be right. Hence Quoting BitconnectCarlos
At the least they do not contradict, one the other. But if we can fix the car without the metaphysics, then that's what I'd choose.
Anyway, I say this only because I'd like to warn against coming at this paper by placing it into an immediate 'virtue ethics' box: its argument is largely negative, a kind of attempt at ground-clearing, although the way it goes about this is by establishing a minimally 'positive' account of what kind of thing 'moral oughts' are, and the role they play. I'd even say it might be best to bracket any talk of virtue whatsoever unless directly sanctioned by the passages in the paper itself.
I think it might even be fair to say that in some of her other work, Anscombe saw herself as supplying at least part of what she claims is needed in order to properly account for ethics. Especially this bit:
"That an unjust man is a bad man would require a positive account of justice as a "virtue." This part of the subject-matter of ethics is, however, completely closed to us until we have an account of what type of characteristic a virtue is - a problem, not of ethics, but of conceptual analysis - and how it relates to the actions in which it is instanced ... For this we certainly need an account at least of what a human action is at all, and how its description as "doing such-and such" is affected by its motive and by the intention or intentions in it; and for this an account of such concepts is required" - her book Intention can be read as an attempt to provide exactly such an account, or at least part of it.
What seems to have happened, according to Anscombe, is that we've carried forth a whole ethical machinery involving obligation, while jettisoning the idea of divine legislation which contextualizes and grounds it.
Let's consider flourishing : It's simply a fact that a plant needs x to flourish. But what we're really after is something like the idea of a good, such that that idea bears on our actions. This doesn't apply to plants. When it comes to us, the idea of what we need influences what we want. But this is ccomplicated. When we bring in 'wanting' [we can just say 'desire' here, no?], we can want stuff even if it goes against our needs. And this 'want' brings us to a next step. We can admit things like 'owing' as facts. And we can admit things like need in relation to flourishing. But there still remains, left over, our 'wanting' [desiring]. The moral 'ought' still remains outside all of this.
Anscombe describes this ought as having a 'mesmeric' force, even though divorced from its religious origins.
It's not unlike the kabbalistic idea of 'reshimu':
'The reshimu is compared to the fragrance of the wine which remains in the glass after having been poured out of it.'
It contains a hint of what used to sustain it, though what sustained it has since evaporated.
Yes. I think that those parts you've just quoted and others seem to be a clear indication that she is after a fact-based methodological approach, and is fond of somehow incorporating virtues or something virtue-like into this new approach. I'm only on page seven, and I very well may be misreading her, but that's the overall impression I'm getting so far.
That's fair. I think this paper does a good job of laying much of the groundwork for what that account would look like, but I agree that that does not appear to be her aim.
(1) Quick survey (and dismissal) of the majority of prevailing moral theories.
(2) Discussion of Hume, and the relation between 'is' and 'owes'.
(3) Historical digression on law conceptions on ethics.
(4) Return to Hume, and and the relation between 'is' and 'needs'.
(5) Conceding that Hume was right in a way, but he mistook the force of his own argument: it doesn't vitiate ethics (pace Hume), nor does require that we need to bridge a gap from is to ought because that's not how 'is' and 'oughts' work! (this is what 'modern moral philosophy' ties to do).
(6) With the above in place, lets vivisect 'modern moral philosophy'.
That's much the way I've taken it as well. She clearly suggests dropping the notion of morally ought, altogether... on page seven, and fourteen as well(in favor of just "ought").
You added this part after I responded, but I want to respond to this too. I've only read the essay once through so far, and my first read-through of any paper, or at least papers for the forum, is often rushed because I want to get to talking and commenting.
That said, my sense regarding her focus on intention, at least in this essay (I haven't read 'Intention' so I welcome correction here) is that she wants to move the scope of ethics from a removed image of actions in a matrix of action and consequence, already seen by the actor in a removed, calculating way - to action as it occurs in life. Again, I think this fits the space-clearing view. (If you want a contemporary example, you can set Anscombe against Effective Altruism). Of course any neat division is too neat. Actual ethical action usually has wrapped up in it both immediate intention and some sense of how things will ripple out. She's trying to counterballast a tendency to take one half of that and elevate it. &, to that end, she has some good psychological insights about how rationalization of bad actions often involves taking a broader perspective. I'll have to come back to that though, because I don't think I've digested this enough to fully approach those arguments.
Yes. That is a pillar, of sorts, for this paper... or so it seems to me.
Yeah that's fair. I won't puruse this too far but I agree that providing more of the bits she says that should be provided doesn't necessarily block a fly-out-of-the bottle approach.
This brings us to the major villain, Sedgwick (a perfect member of an unsung class of philosophical figures: the forgotten, remembered only through being ripped by a Big Name. There's always hope, though, through some unanticipated Revival )
I'll leave it there. This is where the argument gets especially thickety and its too late for me to follow.
What I got out of the article is not that Andscombe seeks and points at a direction of where and how moral philosophy should inquire and advance. That is the essence that the foregoing contributors have opined, and they pointed at how Andscombe uses historical and dynamically developing theories of ethics as, so-to-speak, fighting-dogs that bite and destroy each other. Each time a dog survives the malee, they opine that perhaps Anscombe appoints that particular (but only temporarily) victorious dog to be the leader in the direction of further enquiry of what morality is. These contributors to this thread have a consensus of sorts, that Anscombe has a hope, and a rational hope at that, to sometime find the real moral basis of ethics.
I read that she just throws her hands in the air, so to speak, and declares a state of being completely at a loss seeing or intuiting any direction out of our dilemma about the self-contradicting nature of morality, and expresses despair how our present systems are frought with contradictions that can be practically damaging, not only theoretically..
There is a difference. Hope that has no straw; this is how I read her essay. Others here who have also contributed read it with the impression that she has some sort of an idea how we ought to proceed. I deny she hints at having some idea how to discover the basic fundamental ways to create a road map to find a true theory of morality and ethics/ She bemoans, indeed, the complete chaos ruling moral considerations, as at the present state our best efforts at moral judgment still can send an innocent person into a punishing conviction.
Please don't misconstrue that I read her essay as that of a nihilist. She is not a nihilist; she desparately wants a moral system, she yearns for one, one that is true, and unassailable; she wants one, and she is grieving the fact that humanity still hasn't found one.
In my humble opinion, people, some I guess, consider reason/rationality as having an equal, if not more, obligatory force as any deity imaginable.
Anscombe's argument has nothing to do with private languages. It is only a presuasive use of the word "legislate". See p. 11. She uses a single sentence: It is absurd.
Sorry for the brevity. I'm traveling
Reject as being right, or reject as being reflective of Anscombe's intent? I'd agree on the former, but not the latter.
It's always intrigued me that there was ever any debate about the matter. I mean, didn't anyone just ask her? "Did you mean to revive Catholic moral authority or did you mean to initiate a revival of virtue ethics?" - seems like the sort of thing that should have cropped up in conversation since, but apparently not.
Another surprising thing in this article is the brevity with which each previous moral theory is dismissed. Barely a paragraph each. This would be less surprising if each were dismissed for the same reason, but, apart from the overall theme - lacking an external law - each is given its own tailored P45. Not something that's generally acceptable at any level, and yet this paper started modern virtue ethics. It's as if she pointed out that fairies don't exist and half the world's folklorists simply hang up their gloves and say "we never thought of that".
So. My problem with the detail starts at 'brute facts'. It seems to me from the opening that Anscombe is looking to a more psychological understanding of morality. So we could see what is 'unjust as a fact about the psychological state of justice (rather than the legal one). But if that's the case, then we just have morality brought into Naturalism, which I'm fine with - but then this weird argument about brute facts, as if there were something further to say, other than the standard argument for Naturalism, and I just don't get what she's trying to do with it. Is it her personal defense of naturalism, or some other point which I've missed completely?
My impression was that maybe the original user of the word "legislate" meant to say that there is in each person at least two, and maybe more inner voices that argue with each other when it comes to moral choices, and the upshot of their argument is reflected by the behaviour of the person that obeys the votes these inner voices cast.
This is not to be confused with a schizophrenic psychotic state, in which people hear voices. Instead, it is a process of thought, where a person debates what he should do: similarly to when he finds a wallet, he contemplates whether he should return it to the owner intact, or take out some or all of the cash first and then return it, or not return it at all. In cartoons the debate is sometimes depicted by a white angelic self of the person sitting on his right shoudler, and a dark, satanic self sitting on his left, and the two suggesting inspiring thoughts to him why he should do one or the other of several equally available possible actions. This is what the original quote "legislation" could have referred to. Possibly.
I think Anscombe's criticism of Hume's stand is that if you take the non-causation principle to its completion on all aspects, then it destroys the power of rational reason, and that leads to not Naturalism, but to nihilism, inasmuch as you can't rationally say "this causes that" (X causes Y) because you can't prove this, in the absence of deterministic causation. By deterministic causation I mean that you KNOW that there is a causation process, not just a simple coincidence of events. Therefore, according to Hume, who believes in no possibility of certainly seeing causation in processes,when this causation is inherently absent, then one can argue as well that "This causes not that, but something else", (X causes not Y, but it causes Z) just as comfortably. The article expressed it as "for Hume, "is becomes ought" is just as likely as "is becomes must" or "is becomes needs" etc." This is not a direct, verbatim quote.
Is conscience an inherent human faculty?
Quoting Banno
If there are no universal or divine rules pertaining to human actions, then: Moral Relativism (which is untenable, because it provides no common basis for discussing ethics).
Notions of virtue and vice are subsumed in Deontology. The operation of conscience (self-judgment) develops:
1) Virtues through self-commendation, or
2) Vices through self-condemnation.
Possibly. I've just noticed that @Banno gave a link to Anscombe's paper on brute facts which I must have missed when scanning through the thread so far. I'll give that a read first and see if it explains things any better.
Yes, that is the argument she is rejecting,
I'm not sure why you have said this. After all, it's not that Anscombe is rejecting the conclusion of this argument; she's not just saying that the argument is invalid. Rather she is saying that the argument is nonsense; that it doesn't gain any purchase in the first place.
And given that, a critique of Anscombe must do more than just repeat the argument she rejects.
Did you know that Quentin Tarantino made up the scripture Samuel Jackson quotes in Pulp Fiction? Fumes of the Bible:
Ezekiel 25:17.“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know My name is the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon thee.”
The person who wrote the bible, also created the idea of good and evil? I don't think so.
Some things cannot be translated to word, such as my vision of the now, which I can sum up partially as, in my room, with a phone and a TV - the walls are white - if I look closely, space looks pixellated.
Seemingly this is a good descriptor, but the reality of the matter is far more complex.
So when adjurning what is moral; what is good and what is evil, it's not so simply worded.
You would have to understand a wordless frame of reference.
I'm staring at(here's where I hail that frame of reference), what's too complex to word, and there is many right and wrong options, and where a world of options is concerned there are good and evil options.
I can turn the TV on via the on button - a right option. I can turn the TV on via the volume button - a wrong option. In relation to the world, if I turn the TV on it would waste a lot of energy and thus, be evil, and if I keep it off, it will be good. There're special alternatives. However, if you think, listing all good and all evil would take as much effort as my former example. It's far too complex for words.
So I refer to 'the green line' method. I draw on a blackboard, a green line to represent all good, and though, it's highly innacurate, it proves morality(but only to those with a wordless frame of reference).
Yep. Is your criticism that she wrote an article instead of a book?
And she is exactly right.
Notice that she here makes reference to the argument she gives elsewhere regarding "is" and "owes". There's more than one paragraph contra the is-ought divide, but here she succinctly shows the error in Hume.
Again, she is exactly right. The most inane climate denialist will legislate to herself an open mind.
What?
It's obviously a joke, but it went over my head.
Hm, which passages do you have in mind that give warrant to this reading?
It's not a criticism.
I'm pointing out the sense in which this piece is more than just a technical criticism of the current state of moral philosophy. It's a dismissal of the very practice of moral philosophy thus far. These people are not merely wrong on technical ground. If that were the case then Anscombe is either an unrivalled genius or she's missed responding technically to the thousands and thousands of pages which have been written about each of these theories, each of which clearly disagrees with her in more complex ways that she addresses. No, she's dismissing the entire endeavour. No need to get into the technicality. Like dismissing the need for a Window 7 handbook, it doesn't matter about it's technicalities, Windows 7 has gone so the handbook's no longer needed.
Quoting StreetlightX
She says at the beginning that we need a more adequate philosophy of psychology, but it's not really that, it's her treatment of how we get 'owes' to be a fact. Her explanation here is confusing to me so I could easily have this wrong, but all I get out of it (both here and in 'Brute Facts') is that 'owes' refers just to a circumstance which most people would use 'owes' to identify. What criteria they are using is not yet fixed, but simply held by tradition. I owe the grocer for the potatoes (after he has delivered them) simply because that it the state of affairs most people would consider had arisen as a result of that prior fact. Even though some instances where we would use some label 'owes' can have their history/tradition elucidated by reference to other more brute facts/institutions (justifying that A is done by reference to xyz) but such a relationship between A and xyz is held in normal circumstances by tradition.
Also, we only have a speculative, pragmatic description of 'owes', fringe cases are up for debate and (local) consensus wins.
Investigating what this tradition/consensus is is a matter of induction, either from experience or scientific investigation (samples, statistical analysis etc). Investigating what traditions hold and in what circumstances is a matter of psychology.
This is what I got out of her article, too. And I completely agree with the notion.
My addition to your comment would be that as Anscombe points at the chaos on ethics, I point at the undefined nature of ethics, and the fact that no consensus of what "ethical" or "moral" behaviour actually is exists. To continue your metaphor, everyone is busy writing Windows 7 handbooks, but Windows 7 is not only possibly considered obsolete, it never even existed.
Really? The example she gives is of a person being convicted for an uncommitted crime. If the only way to get justice for a murder is to arrange a conviction of tax evasion (which didn't happen), that might strike some as a violation of the justice system, but not justice itself.
If we're supposed to be getting technical about "unjust" such that it specifically means adhering to proper judicial procedures, then that eliminates "unjust" as a substitute for "immoral."
And based in that, the end of the essay doesnt make sense.
I'm getting that the author thinks ethics is a challenge for the godless, especially where the godless embraces law-bound morality.
She thinks maybe philosophers should accept that. I agree.
Is your ethical outlook law-bound? Do you accept that this is problematic for an atheist?
Or do you suspend worrying about it since it works for you without any philosophical infrastructure?
Broad theme; why does "modern moral philosophy" concern itself so widely with the troubled notion of "morally ought"?
(1) There's a historical account about Christianity and divine law theory in ethics. Ethical principles framed in terms of "I ought to do X" make sense because they draw upon a narrative background of "Thou shalt X". A broadly Aristotelian view of ethics (virtue ethics) is gestured towards as an alternative.
(2) (a) Using Hume's is ought gap to pan for gold. A few times in the paper, a (caricature) of other moral philosophers' views have Hume's is-ought gap applied to them. The purpose of this is twofold; it buttresses the interpretation of "moral language" in (1) being consistent with divine law, as "I ought to do X" takes on a special (philosophical-juridical/divine) sense - this component is repudiative; if you buy this special sense, you've got the is ought gap to deal with, and Anscombe tries to describe precisely how the gap manifests once this special sense is bought. (b) The manifestations of the gap are then addressed, by rejecting the special sense and descending from the special sense of "morally ought" to psychological proclivity and worldly action; which Anscombe analyses through a mixture of appeal to ordinary language use and a gesture (of possibility) towards the virtue ethics referenced in (1). The second component simultaneously tries to dissolve the problem posed by the is-ought gap by rejecting how it frames moral judgements and "fills it in" with appeals to context; how stuff works and everyday word functions of "just" and so on.
The second argument thrust is more technical, and appeals to a relation of facts to descriptions; collections of facts can be brute relative to a description. This is is the idea which is proposed to dissolve the is-ought problem and give a connection between psychological proclivity and worldly activity in Anscombe's new conception of moral philosophy.
Hume's is ought problem can be stated as: truths are either relations of ideas (logic) or matters of fact (observation) [Hume's fork], an argument that goes from a statement of fact to an "I ought to do X" statement requires a justification for going from the statement of fact to the ought claim; but "ought" claims are neither observations nor deductive relations, and so always require an unjustified, separate premise on this basis.
"brute relative to description" looks to be "brute relative to a context". As much as @Banno will protest to using the word "meaning", a rough characterisation of when a fact X is brute relative to a description Y is when the meaning of Y requires the truth of X in normal circumstances. EG, when the cashier tells you "That will be 3 shillings guv'" at the grocery when purchasing your shopping, "I must pay 3 shillings" is brute relative to "That will be 3 shillings guv" in the context of buying shopping in normal circumstances because "I must pay 3 shillings" is true in this circumstance. The separation of "ought" from "is" is replaced by the proximity of "owing" and "I must pay the cashier". Adequate understanding of what's going on allegedly dissolves the need for the "hidden premise" highlighted in the is-ought gap.
The overall pressure this places on the is-ought gap is that certain facts must be assumed in order to do something in a context successfully. These facts can include moral language, like "owe" and "needs". The every day character of these moral items places a pressure on the prequisite crystalline perfection of divine law that Anscombe characterises "modern moral philosophy" as tasting of., We already have a basis from which to do moral philosophy; everyday life. Moral analysis begins in our socially saturated world not in the miracle of stone tablets or abstract principles.
As A points out, social norms obviously aren't the basis of morality (considering what those norms are apt to be.)
Law-bound morality is attractive because it seems to hold out the hope that morality can come down to language use. I'm totally cool with that, but I'm pretty sure that's nihilism.
The paper doesn't appeal to social norms to vouchsafe what is moral or immoral (it goes against this use of moral and immoral explicitly). The paper uses social circumstances to ground ethical consideration in life (again), not in rules - be they abstract or social codes. It's trying to shift the territory of moral philosophy, not redraw the map.
I read this list as.
Summary: we can defeasibily evaluate what context a statement is made in and what this evaluated structure requires for the statement to be true.
We can describe the contexts that would make the statement "I owe the grocer 3 shillings" true, but not exhaustively and completely.
""The grocer provided me with goods" (for which I owe him 3 shillings)" - I could be provided with goods by other means than by the grocer, so "provided by goods" simpliciter is not part of the context of "I owe the grocer 3 shillings" but "The grocer provided me with goods now in the shop" would be.
"The grocer provided me with goods" (for which I owe him 3 shillings) is not a description of what that requires to mean what it does. We don't have to read Adam Smith to buy groceries.
Leveraging defeater examples to circumscribe the context. "I owe the grocer 3 shillings" would not be true if the groceries were North Korean Gettier identical plastic grocery copies and I was being conned.
You can justify a claim by appealing to the context it's made in; as in, "this context is commensurate with the claim's usual function".
Some type of type/token distinction thing? If A entails B, and we justify A with XYZ, we can only justify B with XYZ when we can be assured that XYZ is of an appropriate type. "I owe the grocer 3 shillings" => "I owe the grocer x dollars", but what if the grocer doesn't accept dollars? Would need to add "the grocer accepts dollars" to xyz for the implication to hold true in the context. A logical entailment of statements in XYZ does not entail that if the premise is conformable to standards XYZ then the conclusion is conformable to standards XYZ.
You just repeated what I said.
I was going through the ways we could approach moral philosophy starting from analysis of what we do.
If you can't see the distinction between appealing to social norms to set out what "moral and immoral" means vs analysing social situations to re-evaluate what the topic of moral philosophy should be I'd suggest you read the paper more closely.
We both pointed out that A rejects using norms. You didnt read what I wrote.
Quoting fdrake
That would be an interesting topic. I'll see if I can find someone to discuss it with.
More words, more thoroughly, then.
No, actually. You should read. You did exactly the same thing in a recent discussion about Quine. You fed back to me exactly what I had just said.
In Anscombe's article you quoted I see no reference to Wittgentein or to private languages. The author dispenses the self-legislating power of the Self in four lines: p. 11, 2nd column, lines 15-19. "That legislation(...)is not legislation".
This is not an argument. In my previous comment I gave an example that disproves this assertion.
.
But why should you read? It has to do with respect, of which there is mutually little in this situation.
But that's unfortunate. Wasted potential. There are no obligations, but I'm trying to conjure them because that's how we relate to one another. It's where synergy comes from: it's something in the essence of human.
Found somebody to discuss it with. Yay!
Yes, ethics and morals are entirely matters of tradition/ consensus, and it is not possible to examine those from some "higher" perspective in order to judge whether they are "justified" or not. So forget psychology; it will only ever tell us what people do, not what they ought to do.
Isn't it possible to have an ethical outlook that is not law-bound, and yet still hasa philosophical infrastructure?
Isn't that what virtue ethics is?
(Italics because I am borrowing your mode of expression, with which I am not entirely comfortable.)
I do explain my actions in terms of kindness and integrity rather than in terms of the greatest happiness and categorical imperatives.
When it comes to wrong-doing, there are people who mainly think of it in terms of condemnation and punishment. They need law-bound morality as a springboard.
Virtue ethics is better for people who want to understand the sinner and think of morality more as a road we all tread. We fall down. We get back up having learned something. We fall down again, and so on.
So I'd say you can tell if you're really a virtue ethicist if you think forgiveness (the result of understanding the sinner) is more important than condemnation. Would you agree?
She was one of Wittgenstein's favourite students, and a close friend. She certainly would have a good grasp of the arguments now grouped together under the label private language. These, of course, are a species of a more general argument regarding privately following rules.
She says
It seems to me not at all unreasonable to suppose that she would reject legislation to oneself for much the same reason as she would reject making a law to oneself.
I agree with - or think I do - everything you said right up until the bit I bolded. The unbolded seems authorized by the text; the bolded seems far more extrapolative and ambigious in its textual warrant. The very question of induction is nowhere raised for instance, and I suspect for good reason.
The paper does speak of 'institutions' but gives no direction on how - except for conceptual analysis - to individuate traditions.
I have to say though, I don't quite understand the role that 'psychology' has to play in the paper. The places where Anscombe invokes it seem arbitrary to me - I can't gork why she does it when she does. The closest I can get is when she talks of the 'mesmeric' effect of moral oughts, and perhaps a psychology needed to understand that effect. Anyone have any further ideas?
Just that second sentence, where she wants an "adequate philosophy of psychology"... a philosophy of psychology is not a psychology; and adequate for... doing morality?
I don't see that psychologists would be better placed than, say, deontologists, to tell us what we ought do. They might be able to tell us how to use CBT to reduce feelings of existential angst; or to rid us of feelings of remorse when we behave poorly.
I don't think that for Anscombe "...owes..." comes for any induction or consensus. It's more that if one admits to receiving the spuds after having asked for them, one has misunderstood the nature of the transaction if one then insists that one is not in dept to the grocer.
I'm intrigued by that idea, having previously thought of such interactions in terms of group intention, after the analysis Searle provides in his The Construction of Social Reality. Roughly, whereas Searle would have us sharing institutional facts that place us in a state of obligation, Anscombe seems to think that it follows more directly from understanding the nature of the transaction - and here I am advisedly avoiding using the term language game.
SO the difference would be that between understanding and agreeing to join in the group enterprise of creating the institution of paying for one's spuds, and just understanding a simple transaction from the point of view of the grocer - he thought you would pay for the spuds.
Edit: Better, the meaning of the transaction was that if the grocer provides the spuds then you will pay for them; that there is no further analysis needed. Quoting Banno
Further, there's a sense in which justice is not about being moral. Consider that in order to be forgiving, one must forgo what is just.
I'm not sure what you mean.
Makes sense.
Yeah, like, why do we need a philosophy of psychology to do moral philosophy? She just kind lays that out there, and I don't understand why.
This seems right to me.
Yep. Although in Asian horror movies justice is like a force of nature. It's the reason the gang rapers hammer a nail into the back of the dead girl's neck: to keep her vengeful spirit from killing everybody in the village including the imported Indonesian shaman.
Thoughts of good health sent your way my friend.
:smile:
Yep. Thought and belief anyone?
:wink:
Kidding. Hope you are well. I need to finish my reading...
I think that's what Anscombe is saying here though. 'Ought' doesn't make any sense without laws. Something just is 'unjust' because of the definition of 'just' which is provided by society's use of the word. Something simply is 'bilking' because tradition means you 'owe' the grocer as a result of his having delivered some potatoes. There is no 'ought' in that sense. Hence the sociological investigation is all there is (apart from our own group, of course, which we already know about, being language-users within it ourselves).
Yeah, I should have made that more clear. The bolded bit is my opinion on what follows from Anscombe and constitutes pretty much a wild guess as to why she's mentioning psychology, which I agree, is not spelled out in the text at all. I just think it follows because the 'normal circumstances' she refers to under which these 'moral' type of brute facts come about are an empirical matter, I mean, they either are or are not the case, and yet they are crucial to those facts. A is not resultant fro xyz as a matter of logic. It results fro xyz "in normal circumstances". The actual sociological circumstances dictate the possibility (if not the actual means) by which A results from xyz.
Quoting Banno
Yes, but the 'nature of the transaction' is a sociological fact, not a logical one.
Quoting Banno
The first part is a sociological fact, the second a psychological one.
Quoting Banno
But there is. In 'Brute Facts' Anscombe is quite clear that this meaning is not an absolute one. There is an uncountable (un-listable) set of circumstances under which that is not the meaning of the transaction - the spuds were provided as part of a film, the spuds were a gift, the spuds were given out under charity...etc.
Without an understanding of the actual sociological and psychological circumstances we do not have the 'meaning' of the transaction at all.
Quoting Banno
You massively overestimate the quality of data that theory of mind provides us. There's bags of evidence on this, but I won't go into it now if it's too off-topic. Suffice to say your faith in the ability of theory of mind to provide us with mutual understanding of intent is misplaced.
Here too Sartre is interesting: the important thing is not that God does not exist. Although God exists one must decide which command is divine. Therefore one is alone with his freedom.
Page two paragraph four (sorry, can't cut and paste at the moment).
Yeah, nuh.
Following Wittgenstein, I don't think that this counts as further analysis; because the criteria are not listable - she mentions family resemblance, I recall. So yes, the meaning is not absolute - I agree; and no, further analysis, such as Searle might attempt in listing the necessary and sufficient conditions for such a transaction, is not doable.
Does anyone have a better PDF? Uncopyable and unsearchable, it's like I was an undergrad again...
Yep. Kant gets owned.
Yeah, seconded. It's really annoying - I though it was just me.
Quoting Banno
She says (and I would quote if I wasn't too lazy to write it out), that the list is not completable. That's different and doesn't in any way preclude a attempt to describe some of it.
I'll link to one when I get home tonight.
So, what role does she leave to dissidents?
Do you know An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen?
I'm pretty sure it doesn't say. I agree with what @Banno has already hinted at, that Anscombe assumed a good deal of Wittgenstein in the paper without specifically referencing him (I think the publication dates of this paper and Philosophical Investigations are pretty close - both early fifties, but perhaps some experts here could confirm that). Either way the importance of culture and tradition in determining meaning, and the absence of any transcendent determinant is taken as read.
So no, no place for dissidents speaking the 'truth' about what is just. If it's not what the word is used for, they're not dissidents, they just haven't learnt to read properly.
Quoting David Mo
True. But absolutely anyone can prevent the moral subject from calling that evaluation 'justice'. Their prevention goes like this - "eh!"
The reference to Wittgenstein seems to me unjustified. At what specific point?
I still believe that the purpose of the article is to get God through. I don't like.
“Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy, 33 (1958)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953.
Edit: Just added the bolding, to be sure folk realise of whom we speak.
She was also, I believe, a student of his, as in, she was thought by him, face to face. As well as one of his literary executors after his death.
Or do you believe in the unity of the moral subject?
It's not the autonomy that's in question. It's what is 'moral'. The references to Wittgenstein are - for me - suffused through the whole thing. The way she looks to the use, embedded in a culture, of the terms she's examining is exactly like the later Wittgenstein looking at language use.
Quoting David Mo
Maybe - for Kant. The point Anscombe is making here is that it doesn't matter a fig what Kant wants to call 'moral'. It's what the people who use it call it that matters. People who use 'ought' are (whether they admit it or not) referring to some external law - on pain of incoherence. People who refer to 'bilking' are referring to the customary rules of transaction. People referring to 'justice' are referring to the customary rules of justice, etc...
Cheers. I thought that was the case. I knew she was responsible for my copy of Philosophical Investigations and so must have had some close ties, but I didn't know she was actually taught by him.
It shows in the approach though, I think.
It should not be necessary to defend a Wittgensteinian reading of her essay.
I'd been introduced to the article as an undergrad, and hadn't been too impressed with it then. But I now have a much better grasp of Wittgenstein, so I suppose that's why my opinion has changed.
1) Much empirical investigation (Science) has been conducted in the various fields of Psychology (especially since 1958), but logical investigation (Philosophy) has not kept pace (probably due to the complexity of the task). There are dozens of fields of academic study and/or professional practice which are relevant to developing a Scientifically-informed Philosophy of Mind, Social Philosophy, and Moral Philosophy.
2) The human mind is foundational to human social dynamics, including the development of ethical models and ethical behaviour.
The linguistic turn in Moral Philosophy is a crutch.
Moral Philosophy needs to be informed by a coherent Moral Psychology.
Searchable and copyable PDF, as promised.
I'd love to read Anscombe's 'Under a Description' after this if we're not all to exhausted by her when we're done with this. Or 'The First Person'.
(whatever the relative brute-ness construction does) seems to be proposed as a logical mechanism for grounding (whatever the new conception Anscombe has about moral philosophy) in (some conception of the psychology of morals and human nature).
Allegorically, plants need water and sunlight because of what plants are. If moral philosophy was done by plants, maybe a Hume plant would have written that: "Whenever I have occasioned to find a treatise regarding our affairs, I have observed a transition from the usual copulations of propositions like "is a water requiring organism" and "does not survive without water" to "ought to absorb water " and "ought not station themselves in an arid landscape" which express a new affirmation of a different sort. Wherefrom this new type of affirmations are deduced from their precedents despite this difference in character I cannot conceive".
Such a plant could be alleged to engender a discourse about plant morality that concerned the operation of the word "ought" severed from the context of how plants behave and develop; more concerned with an abstract rule of application of these words to statements of fact regarding plant behaviour and development. Anscombe would want the plants to talk about how they need water because of their metabolic requirements than about a moral logic operating on statements of facts concerning plants.
So part of the appeal to moral psychology is to explain why such a move appears to make sense; and Anscombe finds this in divine law and legalist accounts of moral obligation, in historical context. But, Anscombe suggests, such motivating contexts have long since lost their ability to furnish our understanding of morality, and that moral philosophers simply have not kept up with the times. More specifically, legalistic/contractual and divine law conceptions of morality stymie the formation of any conception of morality which is tethered to real life rather than dead metaphors; and moral philosophy in the criticised senses has replaced these dead metaphors with philosophical principles that function to fill void left by this death.
This death is felt in the context of philosophical discourse by words like "ought" and concepts of "moral obligation" having a bizarre centralising character, a "mesmeric force", which stops these words from functioning as they do in every day moral decisions/actions/evaluations and thereby renders them irrelevant to practical concern and severed from any context that would render them intelligible.
Edit: This is quite Wittgensteinian, philosophical "analysis" of morality has actually shifted the context in which (such notions of) morality made sense. "Language on holiday" kind of thing.
The other part of the appeal to moral psychology in the essay appears to be to gesture towards analysing human needs and wants and human character with reference to our social practices. The cue for their analysis should be taken from how we talk and act and feel and want.
The problem with virtue ethics is the appearance of infinite regress. Plato introduced "the good", which Aristotle described as "that for the sake of which" an action is carried out, what he called the "end", and we call the "purpose" of an act. Aristotle set out to put an end to the infinite regress. Notice the use of the word "end". The problem is that whenever we assign a purpose or "end" to an act, that purpose is justified by a further purpose, and so on, creating the possibility of infinite regress. So Aristotle posited happiness as the end which justifies all ends. Ultimately, he suggested all things are done for the sake of one's happiness. But "happiness" is just an arbitrary designation based in a principle of self-sufficiency, it's not properly supported.
What emerges from Aristotle, and is followed in Christian ethics is a distinction between the real good, and the apparent good. All goods (anything for the sake of which an action is carried out), must be justified as real goods rather than merely apparent goods. So to take the example of what a person "owes", the purveyor of goods is only owed if the goods supplied are true, not spoiled, not something other than what was requested, etc., as there are many reasons why one might reject the burden of debt. The burden of debt is dependent on the reality of the goods. The reality of the goods is justified by reference to further principles and the infinite regress rears its ugly head. In Christianity there is an assumed end to the infinite regress, as God provides the real good, and the means for reconciling the apparent good with the real good. You might say that God objectifies the good, but in reality the Euthyphro conundrum kicks in, and the real good is enveloped in a vicious circle of thought. This is expressed in Aristotle's ethics and metaphysics. The highest virtue is described as a thinking, thinking on thinking. This type of thinking (contemplation of the true good) suspends decision making, incapacitating one from acting. This portrays virtue ethics as turning back on itself. By recognizing the irrational nature of the infinite regress, and upholding the effort to end the infinite regress, the most virtuous act becomes the act which suspends action.
But since the "ought" is downplayed, can't we think of happiness as goal we learn about through experience? The price of that wisdom is the experience of dis-ease that arises from ignorance.
We would identify the background machinery of this as nature.
Nice.
So Moore had supposed that "ethical knowledge rests on a capacity for an intuitive grasp of fundamental ethical truths for which we can give no reason". We could not then introduce arguments into our discussion, but must take moral disagreements as moot - beetles in boxes. Anscombe is showing the fly that there is still room for discussion as to the virtue of various psychological theories.
Giving them some sort of priority, on the other hand, certainly takes up considerable energy. Hare and Socrates concluded that weakness of the will was impossible, re-describing folk's actions so as to rule it out; and introducing the notion of a subconscious in the process - we are supposedly not aware of what we really want. Davidson argued for a difference between what I want now and what I want, all things considered.
But the move form deontology to virtue brings a change of view that bypasses this discussion. In the place of an absolute judgement we find the virtue of continence, and in the place of guilt at our weakness we can set pride in our growing moral wisdom.
It's apparent from discussion elsewhere that infinity holds a terror for you that I, and I think most others, do not share.
Arguably Aristotle sort to promote, say, courage because it presented a path to eudaimonia; but I don't see why we could not simply accept courage as worthy in itself.
One can step over the pit of regress.
It's not a terror at all, it's a respect for the reality of it. Infinite regress is an unintelligibility which is repugnant to a rational mind. A healthy philosophical mind, with the desire to know and understand, will not accept the proposition that some things are unintelligible, because that proposition is contrary to the philosophical desire to know. A mind which accepts that a thing be described in terms of unintelligibility is not a healthy mind. And an unhealthy mind puts a scourge on virtue.
Quoting Banno
It is unreasonable to simply accept a proposition as true, without a reason for accepting it. You might call this the justification. The reason why this proposition is true is that if we accept as true, any such propositions without any justification, we will be deceived and taken advantage of by those with an ulterior motive.
Quoting Banno
What you describe is not stepping over the pit of regress, but actually turning away from it, as if in fear of it.
Rubbish.
It's irrational (like believing in God).
Rather, it's outside of rationality - like "I prefer vanilla".
To hold a belief without any reason is to hold it irrationally. Surely there's some reason you prefer vanilla?
What could possibly count as a reason here?
Because chocolate stains your tie? I suppose you might prefer it for no reason at all, like a person might prefer being a Catholic for no reason at all?
I believe the cat is sat on the mat. My reason for such a belief is nil.
It's not irrational or unreasonable - it's just an errornous statement.
To continue to hold that belief, is pure stupidity.
Banno is right by saying it's outside of rationality.
With all due respect, there may be no reason, but there may be a cause. Which is as good as a reason.
However, "I like vanilla" is not a proposition. It is a statement of status quo. I propose that it is reasonable to expect philosophers to recognize a proposition, and it is a status quo that you failed at it, @Banno. The original proposition, which you called "rubbish" was about accepting propositions as true only if they are reasonable.
"Irrational" is commonly used to mean "without reason" whether it's modifying an action or the way a belief is held.
Yeah, it is. Unless you want to indulge in special pleading - arguing that it can't be a proposition because it doesn't do what you expect propositions to do.
My beef is with Meta's tedious assertion that every accepted proposition has a justification.
But fuck him. This discussion is derailing an otherwise interesting thread.
Doesn't 'held' imply there is already a reason?
I believe in God. Is just a statement.
I hold a belief in God, surely refers to some sort of held weight.
I think it's a semantical error resulting in a red herring.
A belief without any reason is irrational belief.
A held belief, without any reason, is not irrationally held. It's an irrational held belief. (This statement is errornous I know, but hopefully it shows you the semantical error).
Thank you for further proving your inaccurate knowledge of English and of meaning in general.
proposition: "a statement or assertion that expresses a judgment or opinion."
It is not your judgment that you like vanilla. It is not your opinion. An opinion is a statement which is uncertain. You are certain, because it's your preference. A judgment it is not, because you did not decide for someone else or about someone else. You did not estimater. (As in "I judge the distance to be 2 Km.) you just stated a status quo.
If you want to argue that it is one or both of the two of judgment or opinion, then you further prove your inaccurate knowledge of English and of meaning in general.
-------------------
You, Banno, just are a self-effacing, bloated, narcissist. <- THIS was an opinion.
Why not just say that courage is worthy of cultivation - and if you disagree, that's not a fact about courage, but a fact about you.
Why invoke eudaemonia?
To sell self help books.
To learn to cultivate yourself and others.
To leverage that understanding for political criticism and intervention.
Quality, this chat.
That one I could go with.
Virtue ethics strikes me as providing a much richer environment for teaching than, say, deontology. Compare punishing someone for breaking the rules with cultivating kindness, courage and resilience.
Check the circumference of your ego, my friend. If it reaches somewhere between 13 to 16 billion light years in its radius, you just about got it right.
This takes us outside the text.
A common criticism (IIRC) is that virtue ethics provides no rules that engender moral behaviour. I quite like this; as if being moral or living well wasn't (1) very contextual and (2) leant on other sources of knowledge (3) a perpetual process of (interpersonal/skill set) growth (and mitigation of decay). There's no "special domain of problems" associated with virtue ethics; its problems are just those life happens to throw up.
Edit: well, that's intended idea, there are of course philosophical problems, virtue in the face of randomness (moral luck) etc.
This immerses back in the text:
The analysis of "relative brute facts", the appeal to both social institutions and natural properties when considering what it means to do an injustice ("bilking") and a latent "naturalisation of the connection of need to ought" (scare quotes because it's not in the text) speaks to the contextual nature of ethics in (my interpretation of) Anscombe's vision of it. Allying virtue ethics with conceptual analysis rather than vouchsafing the origin of prescriptive morality (warrant and nature of ought claims) makes it more of a tool or an elaboration on life. In one breath it's empty of (allegedly more standard) philosophical problems, but that's because its domain is as broad as human action and leverages all that goes into it.
Well, the point of virtue ethics was to avoid rules, so...
I agree; that's where she is going - ethics as conceptual analysis. Neat.
(I agree) What do you think the objects of it are, then? EG: People and properties?
Showing the fly the way out of the bottle.
Dog barks at kid and approaches, dog is all waggy and friendly. Kid is scared, kid's never been near a dog before. "Don't worry, they're just excited to see you, be calm and slowly put your hand out." Kid does it, has dog pats. "Well done, you were courageous". An important learning experience, why?
"Some questions can't be answered and that will have to do."
Not good - nowhere near bedrock here.
Learning how to cultivate it is not. "Never do for a patient what they can do for themselves" was discovered.
The addendum to that is that something would be unjust in a cross-cultural sense if all (or the vast majority) of people intuitively felt it was unjust.
The following is her second theses, and it strikes me as intriguing...
What if it were the case that it is not psychologically possible to dispense with those linguistic devices; the accepted uses of those terms?
Is Anscombe in search of a theory of mind which results in just that?
Is this a moral ought?
Anscombe raises the problem of abandoning the classic heteronomous morality: the theist. And he explicitly rejects the autonomous ethics for excelence: the Kantian one.
The issue is not that people say it's moral, but what philosophers say it's moral. The Anglo-Saxons and Aristotle.
Quoting creativesoul
Of course she is; she's a Thomist (Natural Law).
Object (perceived particular)-Subject (cognised particular), Is (fact)-Ought (value), and Being (character)-Doing (act) are convenient epistemological distinctions which are ontological unities.
Because it is enough for someone to say "no" for the rule to be called into question.
For lo, it is written in The Jungle Book, that Mowgli shall learn the courage of the tiger, the loyalty of the wolf, the cunning of the snake, the sociality of the monkey, and the strength of the bear, and shall become king of the jungle with the virtues of all.
I don't see why we could not equally accept cowardice as a virtue. We could call it 'discretion', the virtue of the stick insect. Is not a virtue simply a characteristic that works in terms of survival? a way of life?
I think you have passed too quickly on to virtue, and neglected what I think is fundamental to the psychology - conflict, between ought and want, or good and evil, or personal and social, or...
One takes wanting for granted as a motive, but it is a curious affair. The physics of it is strange because the cause seems to come after the event. I want ice cream because it pleases me, but the pleasure seems to be projected backwards in time to become the motive force that gets me to go to the ice cream parlour. Of course a little reflection inclines one to say that it is not the great taste of the ice cream that one has not had that impels one to the parlour, but the memory and image of the great taste one has had yesterday and last week.
And as soon as one sees that one is motivated always by images of consequences and never by consequences themselves, one starts to see things somewhat differently in ethics too.
There is also subjective morality; I think my organism is doing a good job with my existence but that may not be good for others.
Should we banish morality? No. We'll destablize.
Quoting unenlightened
Agreed.
1) Conscience may be overruled by competing incentives (e.g., desires, passions, etc.) resulting in a decision to select an immoral course of action.
2) Want = unnecessary desire, a propositional attitude having World-to-Mind Direction of Fit (World-to-Fit-Mind), or world actualisation intent.
Well, I thought I'd add my two cents worth to your thread. As expected, you've deemed it not worth two cents. You owe me nothing though, because I offered it freely, and gifted it, as a virtue act. Virtue does not impose debt. I'm sure you are acquainted with the Christian use of the word "love". There is nothing owed for an act of love.
However, the fact that you think we can simply "step over" the infinite regress involved in justifying particular virtues, by suggesting that virtues do not need to be justified, is an indication of the pathetic state of modern moral philosophy.
Quoting Banno
I hope you can see, that in order for the saying "courage is worthy of cultivation", to be accepted, we need a description of what constitutes "courage". And this description must cast the described thing, which is to be called "courage", in a positive light. That way it is acceptable as something which is worthy as cultivation. This is why Aristotle produced 'the doctrine of the mean', as a way of showing how to give the named virtue a positive description, making it something worthy of cultivation. Notice that not only is the courageous person not cowardly, but is also not rash. Otherwise "courage" might be conceived as rashness and therefore not something worthy of cultivation. So his technique, which may or may not be adequate (notice that "mean" has now developed bad, vicious, connotations) was to place the virtue between two extremes each being a vise.
Quoting Banno
Can't you see that this is futile? Just like we need rules of definition, to determine what constitutes a punishable act like "murder", or "theft", we also need rules of definition as to what constitutes a virtuous act. The real difference is that it is a far better enterprise, to determine rules concerning what is "good", and encourage people to act accordingly, then to determine rules concerning what is bad, and punish people accordingly. The former gives us guidance, encouraging us to stay away from bad behaviour while the latter gives us punishment for bad behaviour without any guidance. The problem, is that it is easier to determine the essence of a bad act than the essence of a good act.
How do we determine the essence of a bad act?
We stipulate what is the character, or nature, of a bad act. It is harmful to another, or it infringes on another's rights, something like that. A virtuous act is not simply the opposite of a bad act.
Right, so not harming anyone isn't necessarily virtuous, but a lot of virtue appears to be in what you're not doing:
"Love is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love has no fear; it does not worry; love keeps no records of wrongs; never fails."
8 doesn't complain after, 'all we were was a good performance'.
As far as the law goes, it's predicated on harm or damages.
(Not "pain" as some erroneously state; using "pain" as a measure for harm would also lead to absurdism and strict "non-aggression arguments"
For example, speaking in a public place created sound waves which "aggress" upon another's ear without consent, and cause a small amount of "pain"; or likewise, heathy activities such as exercising or playing sports cause "pain" to the self as well as the participants, but since it is a consensual activity done for enjoyment, it is not considered illegal or immoral).
For example, the same physical act done in a boxing match or a legal form of sports or recreation, if done without consent to a stranger (e.x. striking an innocent bystander) would be illegal because it's a form of assault against another without consent, and potentially causes measurable harm (e.x. a broken bone, death, etc).
Now you're being silly; cowardice is not discretion, just as courage is not foolhardiness, and everyone who is capable of thinking about it even superficially knows that.
Quoting fdrake
I both agree & disagree. In both agreeing & disagreeing, I might ultimately be agreeing, but let me smooth some creases, for my own sake. And then ask if I've missed your already smoothing the same.
At this moment (I can't remember what I said about this in past posts) I take Anscombe to be identifying both similarities and differences between people and plants. The is-needss unites men & plants. But the is-wants and is-oughts of men still drive a wedge.
We can re-vegetate these is-wants and is-oughts by imagining man in a relationship with a law-giving god, similar to the relationship of a plant to sunlight and water. In this circumstance, it's not all that different.
But Anscombe does admit a difference between wanting and needing. And it's exactly in this place where she can talk about wanting against your needs, or something retaining 'mesmeric force.' We can still want something that's now an outmoded need & that opens up a new ethical dimenstion. I don't know to what extent this plays a conscious role in Anscombe, but she's for sure identified the role of desire to rupture a life-form from a smooth intercourse with the world (as the plant has with water and sunlight, or the moral man with paying the butcher.) A plant, presumably, can't become bewitched by a 'mesmeric force' (though, thinking about it, maybe it can? But can it reflect on that force as a 'mesmeric force'?)
I believe @unenlightened has touched on some of this as well, but I haven't had a good chance to read his posts through thoroughly. Same to you. But I do think it's important that this Wandering Want erupts at this specific place in the text, right in the middle, between the two major argumentative blocks.
tldr: an 'ought' can go against need. And the 'mesmeric force' of these oughts seems to lie in exactly that. Anscombe seems not simply to deny those oughts in favor of an immanent moral field, but to cautiously give them some latitude. The obligation to, e.g., a Yahweh, might vanish, but the 'want' larva that falls out of its chrysalis is still there and pulsing - just needs to be rethought outside the law-relationship, rethought after sloughing the dead-skin 'ought' structure that characterizes both deontology and consequentialism - or something like that.
Anscombe describes Moore & his ilk - for them, 'right action' is the action that produces the best consequences. Anscombe admits there's a great deal of subtlety to many of the post-mooreans. But, in the end, it's all the same. (I want to come back to this point of the essay after finally summarizing.)
For post-mooreans, consequences always ultimately override the ethical valence of an act in-and-of-itself. This means they're offering an ethics that, in its essence, is very different than hebraic-christian morality.
Anscombe then says this, and I think this is key "The strictness of the prohibition [of e.g. murder] has as its point that you are not to be tempted by fear or hope of consequences [italics hers]. I think this is important because, going forth, she is going to contextualize ends-based morality (whether deontological or consequential) as a kind of 'temptation' allowing one to rationalize bad moral action (showing my cards: I think this is a brilliant move, and partially right)
Do you smell a rat between Mill and Moore? Anscombe does - his name is Sidgwick. She thinks he's wrong about everything and wrong in an egregiously vulgar way.
What's the heart of Sidgwick's error? Intention.
Sidgwick thinks that any intention must involve any foreseen consequences of one's actions. Anscombe thinks this is a bona fide howler. This howler rephrased : It doesn't matter that you didn't intend some outcome, if you could foresee that your action would lead to that outcome.
Anscombe uses an example to show this is no good:
Take a guy who is responsible for a little boy (gendering for ease of pronouns). It would be bad for him to withdraw his support, because he didn't want to support him anymore.In classic morality, It would also be bad for him to withdraw support because, in doing so, he would compel someone else to do something, even if that something were good.
But now take the case, where has to choose between two actions - one disgraceful, and one not. What if the latter leads him to go to prison? In that case, he wouldn't be able to offer support for the kid, either.
Anscombe says Sidgwick's doctrine makes the two cases equal. So this guy has to weigh the consequences: better to abandon my kid or to do the disgraceful thing and avoid prison? He won't weigh the intrinsic badness of an action, but focus on the consequences. If he chooses wrong, and does the bad thing, as long as did his due diligence in sussing out the objective moral calculus, he can't be held accountable (or so says Sidgwick.)
If I understand Anscombe's further turn of the screw, she's saying that this type of moral view makes the ultimate moral culpability of a person rest on how well he performed his duties in weighing consequences & acting accordingly so that moral accountability takes on a whiff of the ledger.
It's something like Goodhart's law : "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Once you make the backbone of morality the idea that you're culpable for any consequence of your actions that could be foreseen, you set up, perhaps despite yourself, a moral situation where people develop a system of calculating consequences in advance. What may have started as possibly reasonable (taking into account consequences) metastasizes into something like insurance companies predicting risk. It turns morality into something totally different, something approaching plausible deniability (to your conscience, but the same principle: youre your own pr guy to yourself)
(I really want to keep all the many moving pieces in mind, because I have a hunch that (1) Anscombe has a deceptively good argument but also (2) if we steelman Anscombe's argument,and take it seriously, it undercuts much of her own thrust (not just to dunk on Anscombe, but to show her argument takes us beyond what she is trying to do.)
I don't see how this is a problem. Human actions, by their very nature are means, they are never ends in themselves. All we have, as evidence, to judge a person's morality, is the person's actions. They keep their intentions to themselves, and if they claim to reveal them, the revelations may not be truthful. If a person is responsible for the moral character of one's own actions, regardless of one's intentions (the end cannot be used to justify the means because the end cannot be proven), then it is of the utmost moral importance for the person to calculate the possible consequences of one's action prior to acting.
This does not turn morality into "something totally different", it simply provides a realistic representation of what morality is, instead of hiding it behind some idealistic veil. We, as adult human beings, are responsible for our actions regardless of what might be our intentions. If our actions bring about unintended results, we cannot justify those actions by simply claiming it's not what I intended, and I forgot to consider all the possible consequences ("sorry mom, it was an accident").
Banno suggests we simply deem "courage" as a virtue, and get on with it, without defining what courage is. But if we allow rashness to enter into the nature of courage, such that people are encouraged to act in a reckless manner with complete disregard for possible collateral damage, then how can we say that this type of "courage" is a virtue?
Quoting csalisbury
By the way csalisbury, I think you must have misrepresented this idea, because the way you have presented it is oxymoronic. There cannot be "intrinsic badness" of any particular action because the goodness or badness of an action is a judgement based on a description of the action. A description of an action is itself a consequence of the action. So the suggestion that we might separate the "intrinsic badness" of an action, from the consequences of that action, is in fact an oxymoron.
One might describe the act as good, or one might describe the act as bad, either way the description of the act is consequent to the act. We cannot describe the act before it occurs, for the very reasons given. Prior to its occurrence it is apprehended in terms of possibilities and we cannot foresee them all. We must respect the uniqueness of every particular act, such that a prescribed general type of act cannot serve as a description of the particular act, in order to judge an act prior to its occurrence. A general type is not the description of any particular. Therefore, "this act will be x type of act" cannot serve as a description of the act. And judgement of the act requires a description of it. It is only 'type' which allows "intrinsic badness", when badness is a property believed to be essential to that type. But the particular act cannot be judged as a specific type of act without a description of the act, which can only be provided after the occurrence of the act.
We can only see the future through a glass darkly. Even if we never had to act while tired or in pain and always had hours to flowchart outcomes, there would be unknowns.
Morality is ultimately about judgement. It's about living with the consequences of our past actions. We head into the future with the innocent but potentially destructive desire to live. We cant take responsibility for that desire, only how we channelled it.
I'd go along with that. Algorithms were long held as the quintessence of rationality; but their limitations are by now obvious to even the logicians.
The best we can do is just muddle along. Hey, @unenlightened?
but, has a philosophy of psychology been established or is that like some ongoing goal?
Jumping the gun a little, I think there is a way to recapture the thing that Anscombe thinks was lost with the death of god. Maybe there's no longer obligation to a law-giving God. But the patterns of human attachment subsist. Outside of sociopathy, all humans seek to please some authority (but a better word than 'please' is needed here.) & not just any authority - an authority that is legitimate. This fuzzy idea of legitimacy (which begins in childhood) brings with it all kind of ideas of what makes someone legitimate. In other words, from the beginning, there is a blurry blend of Authority & extra-authoritative virtues. The two poles nurture one another. I don't think it's the case that the Absolute Ought vanished with God. She's right that an era of ethics orbited around that vanished god, and its ethical echoes. But that obligation to something/someone else it still alive and well - it's just distributed in another way. (Again, I'm running ahead, but - & I hope further reading of the essay bears this out - she's laying the ground for understanding what's actually going on with God/Law/Oughts in a way that retains its gold, while getting rid of the dross.)
And this is exactly why we need psychology if morality is going to be discussed in these terms. This is pseudo-scientific myth-making. I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily, but do you not see a problem at all with continuing past this point in your thoughts? Maybe it's just me, being weird about it, but I hit a point like that in my thinking and I immediately stop and say "well is it though? I mean, we can actually check that".
I agree.
Regarding ethical maturation, Jean Piaget's work was continued by Lawrence Kohlberg's work, which was continued by James Rest's work...
Piaget, Jean. 1954. The Construction of Reality in the Child (M. Cook, Trans.). New York, NY, US: Basic Books.
Kohlberg, Lawrence; Levine, Charles G.; Hewer, Alexandra. 1983. Moral Stages: A Current Formulation and a Response to Critics. Basel, NY: Karger. ISBN 3-8055-3716-6.
Rest, James R. 1979. Development in Judging Moral Issues. University of Minnesota Press.
There is something towards the end of the piece that is not articulated. If I dare to try and make it explicit, I may be wrong and I may fail, so bite my bum if you will...
Amongst the multiverse of possibilities that one might try to measure and compare as 'consequences', there is one kind that might be called 'psychological' in particular and that relates to a problem that psychology has as a scientific endeavour. And that is that the psyche is made of (or contains) psychological theory in a way that atoms are not made of atomic theory.
And she will not argue against a thought that shows 'a corrupt mind'. And what is a corrupt mind, and what mind can judge the corruption, and according to what psychological theory?
On the one hand, there are ethical theories that tend to corrupt the mind, and on the other there are minds that are corrupted enough to hold such theories. And consequentialism is such because in principle anything at all can be justified. And the reason for the philosophical failure is precisely that such theories cannot measure or account for their own consequences on the psyche that holds them.
So I justify murdering my wife because it will liberate me to do all sorts of good in the world, but cannot calculate the corruption that either the act or the calculation will have on me because the theory cannot conceive that it is itself corrupt, and the calculation cannot calculate the consequences of calculating.
This is a common, and valid, criticism of Consequentialism. However:
1) Children make decisions based on considerations of consequence (reward versus punishment) (Kohlberg, 1983).
2) Having knowledge of possible consequences entails responsibility.
3) Ignorance of possible consequences constitutes negligence.
I think that:
1) An individual's conscience operates on a Deontological basis.
2) With regard to Political Ethics, public policy formulation would best operate on a Consequentialist basis, because:
a) The ethical quantity of action affecting a social group is relatively great, warranting careful consideration of particular circumstances.
b) The problem-solving, decision-making, and planning capacity/resources of a social group are fit for purpose (appropriate to the task).
Given an ethical model, or morality (classification of human events as moral or immoral), the realisation of right (moral) action involves applying one of the following:
1) General approach (e.g., Master Rule, or Method)
2) Particular approach (e.g., Virtue)
The amount of time available for decision-making depends on the exigencies of a situation. Required response time varies along a continuum between immediate and eventual.
1) Immediate decision-making requires automatic processing.
2) Eventual decision-making permits controlled processing.
So, the exigencies of a situation determine the type of mental processing required (automatic and/or controlled), and which right action approach is most suitable. For example, the application of a:
1) Master Rule Approach is suitable for automatic processing.
2) Method Approach is suitable for a combination of automatic and controlled processing.
3) Virtue Approach is suitable for controlled processing.
Yes. The idea that moral decision-making is anything other than a fairly tangled mess of highly context-specific techniques is just wishful thinking.
I'd go even further than you though. I think time is not the only factor determining method. I think confidence in available data also plays a role, particularly between virtue (low confidence) and consequentialism (high confidence). Also position and confidence in social heirachy plays a strong role between deontology (high confidence) and consequntialism (low confidence).
I think 'moral' is just a term we apply to actions (or decisions) of a vaguely related kind. So it's not the decision-making algorithm or heuristic which defines 'moral' and therefore there's no single answer to how moral decisions are made.
All that being said, I don't think anything there excludes the possibility of moral theories being wildly wrong. The mere existence of a wide range of decision-making techniques does not in of itself mean that all the current canon of theories must be accommodated somewhere in that range.
I agree.
Not sure I follow you. If I hold a theory that it is morally good to murder my wife on the basis of the perceived consequences, then I am making two choices;
1) that the 'right' course of action in this instance is best worked out by estimating the total 'good' the action will bring about (where here 'good' is secondarily judged by imagining each outcome, so one outcome might be to satisfy a duty, another might be correspondence with a virtue, another might just be a picture associated with the idea of good)
and
2) that the result of this procedure is to murder my wife.
I don't see what's preventing me from later seeing choice (1) as immoral, by some other method (say, concluding that it is not very virtuous to be 'calculating' those sorts of things), or by using the same technique as (2) to estimate the consequences of repeating the decision at (1).
If I have a corrupt mind, I will have corrupt ethics and make corrupt calculations. This much must surely be accounted for, as one has ample evidence for its occurrence in the world. "I am an exceptionally fine fellow, and therefore anything that helps me is a good thing and anything that hinders me is a bad thing." I don't need to name names do I?
Well, that's kind of what I (and @Galuchat) have been saying, I don't think the evidence is on your side there. It's doubtful that anyone has such a thing as 'corrupt ethics' or a 'corrupt mind'. Their decision-making methods may be flawed, either by our own or by their standards. Nothing prevents a well-functioning decision-making method in one context from noticing a poor ("corrupt', if you like) decision-making method.
I'm not saying this is always going to happen, the case you alude to is clearly one such exception. I'm just saying that there's nothing in the psychological system which prevents it from reflecting on itself.
Your relativism renders the discussion meaningless. I will not argue with it.
Morality is just as much about judging possible future actions as it is about judging actual past actions.
Quoting csalisbury
Authority puts an end to the infinite regress of "why?", which I mentioned earlier. The child continually asks "why?", and ultimately the answers are like this, "because the parents say so", "because the teachers say so", "because the Bible says so", "because the laws say so" etc..
There may be a need to inquire as to why we are often observed to submit to authority, "seek to please", but there is an even greater need to inquire as to why we are often observed to confront authority with doubt and skepticism. This confrontational attitude is the reason why there's no longer obligation to God. And the psychological aspect is not rooted in that desire to please the other. Instead, it might be rooted in a philosophical , or epistemological attitude. The submission to authority is a respect for the knowledge of the other, and the desire to know what the other knows. So even the "seek to please" attitude can be represented as part of the desire to know. If respect for the knowledge of the authority figure ceases, then there is no respect for the posed authority, consequently not authority.
What I believe is the key point to this psychological aspect, is that the breakdown in respect is a breakdown in the respect for the posed authority's knowledge, not a breakdown in respect for the person. This is how the posed authority looses authority and is no longer an authority but a poser. However, the poser may be respected as a person, without being respected as an authority. So we have a necessary distinction to be made between one's attitude toward other human beings, and one's attitude toward the knowledge of other human beings. This separation is evident when people of high moral standard have a disrespect for the law. The gap is widened, and the problem exacerbated when those who are supporting this system of knowledge insist that the knowledge itself is the authority rather than the person who poses. This only provides the people with disrespect for the law more principles of separation, to support the position that one may have high moral standards (respect for other human beings), yet great disrespect for the law.
Understanding this principle reveals the disarray and incapacity of the current socio-economical-epistemological system in relation to morality. The individual who has contempt for that system might still be a loving, caring, moral individual, because disrespect for any given system is not the same thing as disrespect for any human being. I can have great respect for you as a human being, while still not liking your way of doing things. But other individuals who adhere to the principles of the system, as if the system is the authority, cannot apprehend the person who has disrespect for the system, as anything other than immoral. Therefore the gap widens.as the supporters of the system increase efforts to present the system as a "person" to be respected (i.e. as an authority figure).
Quoting unenlightened
This is exactly the separation I refer to. The exemplified person has a corrupt mind, corrupt ethics, and makes corrupt calculations, in relation to the principles established by the system. Such allegations of "corrupt" can only be supported in relation to the principles of some system. Now figure into your calculations the fact that many people might have a similar general disrespect for that same system, which validates the designation 'corrupt", for a vast variety of reasons. The exemplified person, demonstrates nothing but flagrant disregard for this system. So the person is propped up by others as a symbol of general disrespect for the system, then sacrificed to the system, in the attempt to damage it. The real personality of that person is completely irrelevant because the person has now been thrown into the system, become a part of it as an opposition to it, and is therefore not considered as a person. This person (who is no longer a person) is a symbol of the separation between the people and the system. It's an inversion of the "scapegoat", which may have been perfected by Jesus and his disciples. There is a goodness associated with opposition to evil within a system. The people gather together all this goodness and sanctify someone (Jesus, or your exemplified person) with this goodness, and sacrifice the person to the system.
Interesting, despite 'hints' of psychologism (i.e. Protagorean / species relativism) vis-à-vis rational ethics, or moral philosophy. (Maybe these 'hints' are merely apparent and figments of my own philosophical idiosyncracies, or sensibilities. :chin:)
Quoting Isaac
Clarification: Do you mean that consequentialism has higher confidence than virtue but lower confidence than deontology? so that deontology (highest), consequentialism (median) & virtue (lowest)?
Strictly speaking, we can only judge hypotheticals. We dont know future events and so there's nothing to judge. 'Looking backward, living forward'. We enter the future ass first.
No. One scale is to do with confidence in the data, the other is confidence in ones social group. I don't intend that these two scales exhaust all possible scales either, they're just to serve as examples. All I'm saying there is that one might be more inclined to use consequentialist decision-making methods if one had a high degree of confidence in the data, like if you contemplated using live ammunition for your target practice, your formost consideration would be "what if I hit someone". Whereas if you owe the grocer five pounds, you'd be unlikely to think "there might be social repurcussions if I don't pay, let me just weigh them against the five pounds I'd gain...calculate net gain... extend hyperbolic discount rate...". No, you'd just think "dishonesty's not right, probably best just pay", if you thought anything at all.
The other scale is similar, but with duty and social groups. People tend to be more happy to use unquestioned duty to determine right actions in groups to which they are strongly attached. It's how soldiering works, for example. Those in less strong social groups tend to question duty (or rules) more and so may defer to virtue or consequences depending on the other factors.
Okay. Even better ...
I guess the Bayesian-ness here gives me less confidence with this "inclination". You may be right though.
Quoting Isaac
So duty when higher confidence in social group and (fall back on) virtue when lower confidence in social group? Intuitively makes sense.
Not sure what you mean here, could you expand a little?
Quoting 180 Proof
Yeah, always bearing in mind of course, the massive caveat that it's more complicated in the real world than the broad trends identified by psychological research.
Well indeed. So they remain unsupported.
You of course are perfectly entitled to seek to provide support or lament the lack of support. I merely point out that such considerations are off topic. Rather as one might decline to exchange recipes with a cannibal.
I agree that we enter the future ass first, because we are looking at things which we have seen and remembered, and that is past. ,However, a past event can be described, a future event cannot be described, that is the point. So we might judge the future on hypotheticals, but the past we judge on memories and descriptions. Neither one is more or less of a "judgement" than the other.
Quoting unenlightened
No they do not remain unsupported, we support them all the time, by referring to ethical principles. That's what I told Banno, and Banno suggested that we might just declare that courage is a virtue without reference to any ethics for support. But that's not reality, in reality we support those judgements with such references.
Galuchat, I am impressed how methodically you have thought this through.
My only objection to your presentation is the notion of "given ethical model". It is given either in a general approach, or in a particular approach, and both approaches involve a basic sense of morality, but neither approaches spell out what that basic sense of morality is.
Basically, you have designed a well-balanced description of what morality ought to be, or is, without touching the delicately elusive and dangerously explosive task of naming what the essence of morality is.
And whithout that, anyone can state anyting as being moral, without the need, or rather, without the possibility, of proving it, or of getting it proven wrong.
This renders the moral action more than just not scientific; it renders it undefinable and thus: ether, hot air, poof she's gone, a mirage, an illusion.
This is actually the basis of my total objection to invoking morality as the backing for an argument: it IS, it exists, but nobody can own it, nobody can put it in a frame that is true, and accepted by all parties.
What good is something, that we know exists, but we don't know anything about it? What possible use can we get out of something that is all effect and affect, but we can't poinpoint it and delineate it from the chaos of concepts humans can't define?
This is true. Very true. The saddest part is, that ethical principles are what each person who refers to them calls them. They are arbitrary, while appearing to have a certain theme (but that is only appearance.)
Ethical principles either don't exist, or we haven't discovered them yet. Therefore the referring to ethical principles is a snow job, a wool over other's eyes, it is a pungent force of argument, without any essence or logical backing.
Quoting god must be atheist
Thanks, but I didn't come up with these particular ideas, they are part of Natural Law Ethics.
Quoting god must be atheist
Correct.
The application of an approach to realise (actualise) right action is a function of Normative Ethics (the topic of this thread), whereas; "what morality is" is a function of Descriptive Ethics, which is off-topic.
I really don't understand your argument. You seem to be declaring what we do and then complaining that we're not doing it. I'm saying that Anscombe is saying that there are positions she will not engage with. If you want to engage with them, that's up to you. As a vegetarian, I am simply not interested in the nutritional value of meat.
I don't agree with this. What morality is (the essence and the very kernel of attribute or attribute-set what makes an act moral or amoral), is not defined, it's elusive, and it's undefinable. Descriptive ethics may deal with this, but only ineffectually. Morality is therefore not a FUNCTION of descriptive ethics, but a topic of it.
What's the point then? Isn't this just like saying "let's discuss morality, but I have no respect for your opinion, I just want to discuss my opinion"? Ethics is not a matter of enforcing your morality onto others. There is a necessary requirement of demonstrating to others the superiority of your principles, because people choose freely. If you deny free will, and insist that people must do as you say, you won't get far. That's why platonic dialectics is the classic example of how to discuss morality. Plato at least pretends to take into account the opinions of others.
Pretense is an important issue here. Notice in my post I mentioned the poser. You cannot simply pose as a moral authority, and expect others to submit to your will. You must act the part, and pretend that you actually are a moral authority. It is truly an act, a "pretense", for the reason that god must be atheist pointed out:
Quoting god must be atheist
The question might be asked, what is it, which persuades another to accept moral principles. If it's not the argument (rhetoric) which convinces, nor is there an inherent appeal within the principles (subject matter) being argued, then what is it? Am I missing something? Is it really just rhetoric, "a pungent force of argument"? If so, wouldn't we end up with truly arbitrary principles? I suggest you consider that there is an inherent appeal within the principles.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
MU, you're right. Unenlightened, you have the right to hold that opinion.
MU, you can see why moralist vegetarians seem like they try to push their morals on you (and me and on everyone else). Because moralistic vegetarianism is not only a question of morals, but it's also a lifestyle, and in a certain sense, it's a religion. Not a religion, because it lacks god, but a strong enough world view so that people will try to PROSELYTIZE it as if they were fervently religious about not eating meat.
There is nothing you can say to a fanatic to change his ways -- and conversely, a fanatic can say nothing to you to change your ways. But the fanatic will ALWAYS feel morally superior and therefore act more insistent.
What does that say about ultimate morality? What is it judged by?
Is the universe or world more corellate?
Well, there you go. There is no ultimo morality. It is a mirage that everyone believes in, and everyone likes to own. I spit on those people. They make me puke. Hypocrites. Liars. Stupid fucking idiots. People who can't think things through.
In other words, each person in the entire human race.
It is easiest to judge by moral ultimacy. "I judge you to be morally faulty." Or something to that effect.
You can't prove that you made the right judgment. But judgment on moral grounds needs no proof. It only needs your own conviction that you are right about it.
That's why you are an asshole. (YOU being a general you, not you personally, Qwex. Everyone is an asshole because they take their own moral judging seriously. Whereas it is a mirage, and an unfounded opinion.)
There is no such measure. If someone claims moral authority over you, kick him or her in the shingles and spit in his or her face. Unless there are witnesses around, because then you can be charged with assault in some jurisdictions.
Exactly. There is no point. I am a vegetarian; the benefits of eating meat don't apply.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think it's like saying let's not discuss morality right now."
So as to philosophers and the willing, the thesis is that we do not have a basis without religion on which to ground a discussion, and as to someone who will admit torture as being ok if there is a good profit in it or whatever, then we are not remotely talking about the same thing.
Oops. I misread you.
Theoretically, there may be an ultimate good. But that has nothing to do with morality. Good, doing good, being good, is not morality. Instead, good, doing good and being good is just that: good, being good and doing good. There is no room for morality in being good.
And being good gives no authority to nobody over nobody else.
I'm pretty sure that's what's meant by being a function of. Theories about what types of proscription are classed as 'moral' are the product of descriptive ethics, hence the term 'function' - to be a product of.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Usually the appeal of seeing someone else apply those principles and gaining some degree of success (however measured) in doing so. Thought is incredibly calorie intensive, we have a huge network of functions designed to select and imitate others, it's just massively more efficient than trying to work it out from scratch each time.
The interesting question, for me, is how people select who to imitate - but that's a completely different topic. Moral virtues and duties are usually adopted by imitation. Consequentialist moral decisions are obviously an exception, by their very nature, but the goals against which potential outcomes are measured are still virtues or duties determined by cultural inheritance.
Isaac, I did not expect this of you.
A function is not a topic of examination. A function is a response by unit to certain stimuli. Both in life, in mathematics, and in theoretics. A topic of examination is not a function. It is a study on how that function works (if the function is the particular topic of the examination).
Please don't do this to me.
Not quite. She says "that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology". Now depending on your approach, that it either a task for philosophical discussion, psychological investigation, or both. It doesn't imply we just stop talking about it, it suggests our discussions have strayed off track. It redirects.
"The function of something or someone is the useful thing that they do or are intended to do" - Collins Dictionary.
I'm pretty sure @Galuchat just meant that it is the job of descriptive ethics to produce theories as to what kinds of proscription count as 'moral'. I was just trying to help you with another possible interpretation which I think is more charitable. Where's the harm in that?
This I agree with. But he said "function", and I assumed he or she was intentionally choosing his or her words.
If you want to forgive that, go ahead. I am on the point of view that "I calls it as I sees it". If people misspoke, it's their job to correct themselves. If they can't, or are oblvious of misspeaking, AND we accept that, then we open the flood gates to communication chaos.
Is that what you advocate, @Isaac? Floods of miscommunication?
The preamble of this site emphasizes the use of proper English. It is not for a pedantic reason. It is for the reason that this is a philosophy site. If we need to keep on substituting things we think others meant in the place of what they actually said, then we create a breeding ground of miscommunication.
Enough said.
Well no, not really. The term 'function' does in fact mean the job a thing is meant to do, it's function.
So to say ""what morality is" is a function of Descriptive Ethics", is just to say that "providing answers to the question" what morality is" is one of the tasks descriptive ethics is meant to do.
"A function of X", and "one of the things X is meant to do" are synonymous.
"A function of the police is to keep civil order"
"One of the things the police are meant to do is keep civil order"
It's perfectly proper English.
Enough said (now).
@Galuchat quoted a passage from a different author, @Galuchat admitting to it later, but not attributing the words to the source when he first quoted it. This is punishable offence in academia, but here it's okay; fine. Plagiarism is not a crime, but it is frowned upon, and I just frowned.
Eh! The quote of yours I was responding to was
Quoting god must be atheist
No mention of quotes, sources or plagiarism. Just what seemed to be a complaint about the use of the term 'function'. Where's all this talk of plagiarism come from?
Actually, if you consider the quotes mean to separate the actual morality from studying morality, then you are right. I admit that.
But it is still not clear righting; "what morality is" is a noun, and a function is a verb in the infinite form.
"My function is to argue."
"The function of the police is to keep peace".
etc.
It is incorrect to say,
"my function is argument."
"The function of the police is peace."
Because of the wrong construct, I got confused, and I DISREGARDED the quotation marks. This is my mistake, and I admit to it.
On the other hand, the form of expression was not proper. It gave way to misunderstanding.
I assume 50% of the liability for the misunderstanding, for not noticing the quotes. I attribute fifty percent of the liability for the misunderstanding to the incorrect structure of the sentence by @Galuchat.
I call it a draw.
Why does one state "it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy", and then proceed to do moral philosophy? Do you apprehend the pretense? In extreme cases like this, it's called hypocrisy. Do you think that psychology has a better system for treating this illness, "pretense", than moral philosophy does? Why pretend that psychology can produce authenticity in a human being, when we all know that authenticity is the product of good moral training. Why pretend that psychology is required for a philosophy of morality?
Quoting Isaac
Would you classify imitating others as a form of pretending?
Quoting Isaac
Aren't we taught that good moral standards involve thinking things out for ourselves, and not to simply imitate others?
You are smarter than this. I won't answer the ridiculous.
Sorry, sometimes I don't see what appears obvious to others. That's why I ask for explanations. I don't think it's related to smartness, I think it's a psychological condition. Why not just address the issue instead of expressing a biased judgement of my psyche, in a way meant to insult?
No, I think what's meant by 'pretending' seems to require a concious deceit. With morality, there doesn't appear to be anything to be a deceitful version of. There's no 'true' moral judgement which copying others is only a pretense of. How others behave just is one of the drives which determine our decisions sometimes.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We might be taught it, and in this day and age, probably with good reason, but the teaching is just post hoc rationalisation of what's already going on. After all, why would we trust the teacher? Our sense of trustworthiness, rightful authority, duty... All must be in place already just to accept the teacher telling us to work it out for ourselves. Not to mention the fact we still need an objective against which to measure the options. If we do the calculations ourselves (which course of action is best) we have to already have in place what constitutes the 'best' we're aiming for, and the idea that us using our own rational capabilities to work this out is itself the best course of action.
I don't see any reason to restrict "pretending" so as it only may refer when there is conscious deceit. Actors in a play will pretend, that's what acting is, when there is no intent to deceive the audience, the intent is to entertain. In morality, one may pretend to be an authority, without the conscious intent to deceive. It is a matter of acting the part, and the poser might have the true intention, and belief in bettering the audience.
The problem with authority is that it is not something that can be enforced on the people, the people must give it to the person who will become the authority. The authority is created by the act of giving the person authority, not by imposition. This is due to the nature of free choice. So if a person wants to be an authority, that person must pretend, in order that the people might see that person as an acceptable authority, and actually make the person into an authority. In this act of pretense, it is not necessary to deem the person as deceitful, if the person is truly acting for the interest of the people. It is just like an actor in a play; the actor must act the part in order for the audience to see the intended character, and finally the audience will see the actor as the character. Because it is known and respected that it is an act, we cannot say that the actor is deceitful in doing this.
Quoting Isaac
The teacher is an actor as well, acting the part of an authority. But there is a difference here, and this is that the children do not know that it is an act of pretense. So there is a form of deceit which is inherent within learning, and learning cannot proceed without it. If the children knew that the authorities were just posing, there'd be disorder everywhere, and no education. Therefore the teacher walks a fine line of balance between encouraging the virtues of true independent, authentic, and original thought, while displaying the virtues of accepted principles.
From this perspective there cannot be a "best". "Best" implies an extreme, and as Aristotle demonstrated, virtue lies as a mean between the extremes. The balance the teacher must keep is a mean. One might say "best" is that balance, which the teacher must establish, but a balance is not constant and consistent in a changing world, so there is no static or ideal best. Changes on one side must be met with changes to the other. So the teacher is always balancing the deceitful imposition of principles, pretending to be an authority when the children do not know that it is pretense, with the honest encouragement of independence and authenticity.
They may be related to psychological concepts (as in Universal Rules) having human nature as its basis, inasmuch as:
1) Moral sentiments are a human universal (Brown, Donald E. 1991. Human Universals. New York City: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-87722-841-8).
2) Similarities between the moral codes and value systems of the World's major Book Religions and systems of Moral Philosophy indicate that morality is likely to have a basis in human nature rather than human culture. (cf., Kung, Hans; Kuschel, Karl-Josef, Eds. 1993. Declaration Toward a Global Ethic. The Declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. SCM Press, London / Continuum, New York.)
I don't know what to say really. To paraphrase A : moral philosophy is in a state because bla bla bla and all this other stuff needs to be sorted out before we can hope to make sense of it. In the meantime, I am not going to discuss any of this with Jeffery Dahmer, Adolf Hitler, or Pol Pot. I cannot justify it, but I'm not going to commit atrocities because philosophy is a mess.
Moral authority that's separate from political authority is something we created when we realized that kings aren't gods and priests are conmen. It's not a tool to manifest our potential. Its a bulwark against meaninglessness.
:clap:
Well you've really lost me now. I haven't the foggiest clue of what you're trying to say. I suppose you succeed with "I am not going to discuss any of this..." by saying something completely incoherent.
Un is giving a rough and ready account of the article that this thread is about.
I know. So if Unenlightened's account is accurate, the article suffers the problems Unenlightened has demonstrated.
But there is no problem. Moral philosophy depends on morals, not the other way round.
That's clearly not true. Moral philosophy determines what's good, what ought to be done in the future. "Morals" are judged in relation to actions which have been done in the past. And, there are no good acts carried out without first determining what is good, and then proceeding into that act. I.e. good acts are not a matter of random chance, they are chosen.
In other words, we cannot rely on the morality of the past to determine the morality of the future because this would exclude the possibility of bettering ourselves. And the purpose of moral philosophy is to better ourselves. So to say that we're too bad to practise moral philosophy is incoherent, because in reality the worse we get the more potential there is to better ourselves.
No it doesn't. That's impossible. Philosophy has to be about something. Making shit up is called 'fiction'.
Your conclusion is not supported. The premise that "making shit up is called 'fiction'", doesn't produce the conclusion that it's impossible that philosophy is this type of activity. In fact, there is much evidence that philosophy is this type of activity, 'making shit up'. All you need to do is read some philosophy to see that. And that's why philosophy is frowned upon by many in the scientific community.
Disciplines like psychology and sociology attempt to close this gap between 'making shit up' and science. That's why the validity of many principles in these so-called "sciences" is very difficult to judge, because the made up shit and the true science are woven together into a fabric which supports the discipline. But this weaving together tends to hide the distinction between the scientific principles produced from empirical observations of past events, and the made up shit, which are the principles by which the scientific principles are applied toward producing future events.
I think you're wrong, Metaphysician Undercover.
We don't decide what's good, we make an able judgement, at most.
What we are judging, surpasses judgement. Resources are still going to deplete whether we judge what's good or not. Do you see?
However, without moral philosophy, nothing is good.
Good - like truth - is an invention.
Authoritive figures, who have judged good, who only know, and are catalysts of, the universe's beneficent nature, spread good amongst communities.
Who's saying that beneficent nature is good? Benefience is benefience. Good is a man made term that's like "I agree with the benefits".
I think anyway, I might be wrong but you're definitely wrong.
I have many times pointed out here how the same people that applaud Hume's ought/is distinction object rather strongly to his will-be/has been one. And these are equally limits to reason, and thus to philosophy. But they do not limit life which makes profitable predictions and moral systems by its actions without reference to the strictures of reason. It is unreasonable to expect the future to be like the past. And it is unreasonable to expect it not to be. And especially, it is unreasonable to conclude that there will be no future.
Perhaps one might conclude, philosophically, that the future is made up, and that morality is made up. But it cannot be made up by analytic philosophy at least. Rather, as Anscombe declares it is made up by psyche, and the phenomenon is then examined by philosophy.
I think you misrepresent the potential extent of analytic philosophy. Do you agree that the made up shit, where it seeps into various forms of manifestation, from myths, religious stories, psychological theories, to physical theories about the nature and origin of life and the universe, has had an important affect on morality? This is supposed to be an empirical fact, based in observation. It's a description. Therefore the way that the made up shit is created, and used by moralists, is a valid object of analytic philosophy. The art of actually making the shit up, we might ascribe to some other form of philosophy, like dialectics. Or have you another suggestion as to how we might account for making shit up, without actually making the shit up ourselves?
Yes. And given the phenomena of such made up stuff, one can philosophise. But a philosophy that makes up the phenomena - no that's not philosophy. Again, this is the whole thrust of Anscombe's piece, that without the divine will the concept of moral oughts has no content and dissolves into an emotional (psychological) appeal, not a theory with any content. Again you are confusing the philosophy of made up shit, with made up shit philosophy.
We don't need to define, in words, what beneficent action, judgement and calculation is.
It would be better without the word morality.
Why refer to morality and not intellect?
Am I being moral or intellectual when I say the Earth benefits from Flora and Fuana?
However morality is just that, it is this intellectual beneficence stuff.
It's best left wordless as not to disrupt what we'd define it as.
To define it would be harmful, we'd all pause or error, whenever we judge if somethings are good.
It can be sensed though, this mode of activity where we judge, calculate and act goodly or evilly.
Bring it up as a concept sure, but it's surely an indefinite concept.
I agree that strictly speaking, it is not the endeavour of philosophy to make the stuff up. However, made up stuff is abundant in our society, and to judge the made up stuff as good or bad is philosophy. Therefore there is no shortage of work for the moral philosopher in our society, as there is much made up stuff to be judged. If you are implying that the philosopher ought to produce the distinction between good and bad, then you are asking the philosopher to make stuff up. But principles concerning that distinction already exist, as part of the made up stuff, so the philosopher need only refer to this.
Quoting unenlightened
For what reason does a human being need a "divine will" to judge the made up stuff as good or bad? Human beings themselves, as part of being human, have a will, and therefore a capacity for judging good and bad. It is only if someone feels the need to impose consistency, to judge another's judgement as consistent or inconsistent with a "higher" judgement, and seek to enforce compliance, that a divine will might be invoked.
This clearly does not remove the content from the concept of moral ought, because each individual must decide, in each instance of circumstances, what is the good action. This decision, "what I ought to do now" must be made regardless of whether there is a divine will. The fact that one must make such decisions is the basis of a moral theory with content.
It's only if you associate "ought" with obligation, such that a person is obliged by some external force (other human beings, the state, or God for example), that this problem might arise. However, this is inconsistent with our nature of free choice. We are not obliged to choose. Furthermore, if some "oughts" are inferred by obligation, there are still very many which are not. I can say "I ought to help my sister today", and that "ought" is based in love or something else, as I feel no obligation to do such. Therefore "ought" cannot be characterized by obligation.
That some of us are inclined to judge another's judgement of good or bad, in comparison to some further principles of good and bad, or impose such principles onto others, to validate obligation prehaps, requires making stuff up, and is therefore not actually philosophy.
History.
You don't have to agree with Anscombe, and nor do I. Her argument though is that moral oughts only make sense in that context. Rather like money only makes sense in the context of property. I'm going to stop here though for a bit, and let someone else or no one else take over.
I don't think Anscombe is that concerned about committing atrocities (in the article, I mean, not on a personal level). I think you're adding undue weight to her 'corrupt mind' phrase, which doesn’t seem to have much of an impact on the rest of the argument.
I take it to be more simply "philosophy does not have the foundations to do morality without external law".
Whether she's advising we therefore get the foundations, or whether she's advising we therefore get the external law is moot. Probably the latter considering her religion.
In terms of what that means for modern morality, the biggest problem is that we do nonetheless continue to advise, proscibe, admonish and even punish people on the grounds that they 'ought' to have done otherwise. Unless we're going to abandon everything from etiquette to Human Rights legislation, then we'd better had get a handle on what our 'oughts' ought to be.
So we either return to religious law, fight it out regardless of rational argument, or work on improving those foundations. Personally I'm for the latter, but there doesn't seem to be a great deal of support for it in philosophical circles.
Yes we do. This is going a bit off topic, but the importance is large. The generation that lived through the holocaust and WW2 is almost gone, and the same partisan populist rabble-rousing politics is returning in force. And the resistance to these dangerous trends has no philosophical ground on which to stand. As the discussion has shown, Anscombe even here in the thread has been castigated for refusing to countenance the extremes of [s]moral opportunism[/s] consequentialism.
Psychologically, the position is psychopathic, and psychopaths are more and more being voted into power. This is the physicalist's psychology, that equates morality with emotion as another form of desire. And that is me pathologising psychology, as I am wont to do.
What I think is that this is a misrepresentation of the history of moral philosophy. Many people, in the past, have wanted to justify their sense of what they think other people, or themselves, "ought" to do. And to enact this justification, might require for them, reference to a divine mind, as you seem to imply. But that is not moral philosophy, its. more like a sort of apologetics, defending the "oughts" with references to "God". It's a defense, or attempted justification, of what they've already decided. But apologetics is not philosophy, and this is just a vicious circle of justification, as others will justify "God" with reference to "oughts".
Moral philosophy, being philosophy, is aimed at finding the truth concerning moral issues. Philosophy is not an activity of rationalizing, or justifying existing bias or prejudice. As philosophers, to find the truth we must accept the evidence. And what is evident in the world is that people often know what they ought to do, yet they do otherwise. So there is more to morality then simply knowing what one ought to do. This is the dilemma which has perplexed moral philosophers for millennia, since moral philosophy's inception. This was Socrates' and Plato's dissatisfaction with the sophists who claimed to teach virtue. Teaching an individual the virtues could not ensure virtuous behaviour by that person. So creating morality within a person is a completely different thing from teaching a person how they ought to act. Therefore virtue is not a form of knowledge. And this dilemma is more properly the subject of moral philosophy, rather than the attempt at justifying any sort of "ought".
Because of this fact, that people do not do what they know they ought to do, moral philosophy cannot be based in any sort of conception of "ought". That is why moral philosophers, throughout the history of moral philosophy, have instead, turned towards this sort of question of what moves the will. The reason why the intellect cannot guide the will is understood as the force of the appetitive part of the human being, which often manifests as the force of habit. But this force itself may be overcome by will power. So if the will is separate from the intellect and not necessarily moved by the intellect, and also not necessarily moved by the appetite, it must be free.
Therefore, history, and analysis of this dilemma, has produced as a starting point for moral philosophy, the freedom of the will. The activity of the will is not moved necessarily by intelligible principles ("oughts" and other principles of action), nor is it necessarily moved by the irascible and concupiscible appetites. So this one-sided portrayal of moral philosophy which you have presented, moral philosophy being an attempt to justify a 'system of oughts' as the means of compelling good behaviour, without reference to the accepted principles of moral philosophy, which recognize that good behaviour cannot be compelled by any 'system of oughts' , but must be freely chosen, is a complete misrepresentation.
I think it's far more complicated than that, and I think there's a good argument for the "I just won't countenance that" position being to blame as much, if not more, than the consequentialists.
The 'psychopaths' we have in power right now were voted in on relatively popular support (or at least not widespread rejection). Not wanting to sound too elitist, but how many Trump supporters do you seriously think are moral relativists? I'd place my bet on 'none whstsoever'. They're social conservatives.
The problem, I think, is very much attached to the motive behind Anscombe's refusal to countenance. We all agree that, say, murder, is wrong - so instead of treating that with any degree of honest investigation, we treat it as a fact which doesn't require justification. Fine, thus far - until the charismatic figure comes along and says "you know that thing which we all know is wrong and doesn't require any justification? Well, homosexuality is one of those things. It's just wrong, and we all know it. Don't ask me to justify why it's wrong, we've all just agreed some things are wrong and don't require justification. Don't argue against me, I refuse to countenance such arguments ". Sound at all familiar?
It's a common trend to deal with grounded facts that are simply undoubtable and I'm on board with the principle, but if left without any analysis at all, all sorts of premises we definitely should be doubting get smuggled in with the bedrock.
You cannot be serious! Do you think Trump has any regard for divine law at all? Adultery, false witness, covetousness, are not merely committed but boasted of by him, just for starters. Any religious connection is a degenerate religion of convenience. I am not a great fan of all this divine law stuff myself, but you cannot blame Trumpism on religion. Absolutely the reverse.
How do you explain the strong link between support for Trump and the religious right then? Or the link more generally between religion and social conservatism. If Trump stands for entrepreneurs (by which we mean trample on anyone in the way), race-preferences and nationalistic jingoism, who is more associated with those things in America, the religious right or the secular left?
That's exactly the point I'm making. The moment you say "don't question this one, it's just a basic moral fact" you can slip in just about anything else you like under the same guise. If you've got enough charisma people will swallow it because they've been primed not to question what's right and what's wrong.
We'd have to take that to the Trump thread and I don't have the stomach for it. I do have a long-winded explanation, but it's way off topic.
Quoting Isaac
No one is saying that. Anscombe is saying that if you have a theory that says it is good in certain circumstances to pervert the course of justice, then you have a perverted ethic. You cannot usefully argue with someone who claims that black is white.
Fair enough.
Quoting unenlightened
That sounds the same as "don't question this one" to me. What's the difference? You seem to be saying nothing more than "don't question that 'the course of justice' is morally right". How does that immunise society from "don't question that homosexuality is morally wrong". If we're not questioning either, then how do we know to ignore one and attack the other?
If you want to appeal to common humanity to tell the difference, I'm 100% behind you. But... If you want to appeal to common humanity without any rational investigation to back you up, then you've just left yourself open to exactly the same problem. A charismatic figure comes along and appeals to 'common humanity' mostly agreeing that races shouldn't mix (this has actually been done, not even making this up). What are you going to appeal to now?
I can cite a dozen or more studies on racial segregation which provide a good body of justification for the fact that it's not beneficial to the society it's in. But if you don't want to even question the idea that it might be, then what are you going to fling against the leader who says it is?
I don't. A system of justice is an institution that decides guilt and innocence. So if we had convinced ourselves that homosexuality was wrong then the system would declare the guilt of a homosexual. And if we changed our convictions, then it would change and declare the innocence of a homosexual.
But if we convince ourselves that the innocent can be found guilty, then whatever our opinion of homosexuality, we can find people guilty or innocent regardless. I'm shocked to find that this needs so much labour to explain - the difference seems vast and obvious. If it is good to find the innocent guilty, then it is good to find heterosexuals guilty of homosexuality. Things fall apart.
Innocent and guilty are nothing more than labels for what those in power intend to do. If I was part of a community for whom being 'guilty' of something meant nothing more than a point on my driving license then I'd care very little whether I was innocent or guilty (see how much it's going to matter to Stone).
Homosexuals should not be put in prison just because of their sexuality. Whether they're put in prison because they're guilty of breaking some law, or because they're innocent (yet imprisoned because false imprisonment of homosexuals is legal), makes not one jot of difference.
So no. The whole thing thing does not fall apart if we start imprisoning the innocent. If the innocent (in this hypothetical society) happen to be bad people for whatever reason, then it is good that they are imprisoned. The rational structure does not have precedent over the reality it creates. That really would be perverse.
Quoting Isaac
If you do not see the madness of your post, then I cannot help you. Seriously, you amply demonstrate why Anscombe will not argue. My work here is done.
Whatever. People slinking off in a huff is about as close as I ever get to a polite "I see your point", round here so, I'll take your umbridge.
Not trying to drop the bomb or anything but...
A lot of people are probably going to hell for acts like that.
It gets in the way of good.
If it makes you feel any better these types end up peg legged or uncomfortable.
Calm yourself.
Think about it, they rely on a darkness born of a social trend.
It's the smallest, meaningless dark that proves nothing about the users intellect. It's far too perverse.
I'd put them in hell, and they will end up in hell.
I could, morally, without a expression, move close to one of them and take the leg. They are that meaningless and insignificant.
I have no umbrage to offer, I simply do not know how to talk to people about innocent bad people.
Really? Innocent just means 'has committed no crime', right? So if there's a state where certain bad acts are nonetheless not illegal, you have an innocent bad person.
If you're taking innocent to mean 'committed no wrong', then your example of the guilty homosexual makes no sense, they have done nothing wrong, the law is wrong, not them.
So what am I missing in a definition of 'innocent' which makes an innocent bad person an incoherent object, yet a homosexual can be rightly labelled 'guilty' depending on the law of the land?
Hold on to that thought: - The law can be wrong. And an example of a law that was wrong was the law against homosexuality. So if the law is wrong and someone has been convicted under that law then there has been a miscarriage of justice, and an innocent has been convicted.
Quoting unenlightened
That is to say, for example, that we we might find a heterosexual guilty of homosexuality, because he is a 'bad person' in some other way or because in some other way it is good. And this would also be a miscarriage of justice.
Notice that 'justice' here is the moral term, not the legal term.
Now what Anscombe and I are saying is that though miscarriages of justice happen, of both the kinds indicated, wrong law and wrongful conviction, if there is a philosophy that says that wrong law or wrongful conviction are good things in principle if they make things better for other people, then there is nothing more to be said.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas
Right, but we seem to be back to the beginning again. Say I'm in a society fundamentally opposed to homosexuality, so much so that it is illegal. You're using innocent here in the sense of someone who has done no wrong, not someone who has broken no law, right? So I campaign to have this 'wrong law' overturned so that 'innocent' people are not convicted (innocent according to your definition). I campaign to get a law which protects their rights. I do so by showing that tolerance of sexuality is better for society.
Then this hypothetical society's version of Anscombe comes along and says "this man is not innocent, he is guilty, homosexuality is wrong, everyone knows that (and indeed in this hypothetical society everyone does 'know' that). A law protecting their rights would be a wrong law - we all know that if there is a philosophy that says that wrong law or wrongful conviction are good things in principle if they make things better for other people, then there is nothing more to be said."
End of campaign.
Only the society I just described isn't quite so hypothetical, is it?
No. She does not say that. She says that if the law is wrong then the man is innocent and it is wrong to say that he is not innocent. And you are wrong to be accusing Anscombe of saying the exact opposite of what she is in fact saying. It is exactly the idea that moral justice cannot be compromised in this way that is the point she is making. IF you are willing in principle to compromise justice and say that it is good, THEN she will have nothing to do with you. Clearly, not everyone knows that; clearly she is of the opinion that consequentialism at least opens the door to such positions. To put it as simply as possible... Injustice cannot be justified, ever. Disagree all you like, but not on the grounds that she is justifying injustice.
But we cannot have that debate about justice v injustice itself, only about whether this law or that behaviour is just or unjust.
To take an extreme, if you are suspected of having corona virus, then the government in the UK has taken emergency powers to confine you for a period in quarantine, and this is an infringement of your freedom in the interest of public health justifiable or not, we can argue. If it is justified, it is not an injustice, and if it is unjust, it cannot be justified.
How do we establish if the law is indeed wrong? That's the point. All Along you're using these terms 'just', 'injust', 'innocent'... As if they had clear universal meanings. The briefest glance at history will show they most assuredly do not.
So when you say...
Quoting unenlightened
...what's really being said is "(what I consider) injustice cannot be justified (by you)." Your version of what is unjust can very much be justified by my view of what is just. By saying that this cannot even be discussed, you're saying that some people's versions of what is just cannot be challenged by another's.
If you try to keep the terms within a person's singular viewpoint, the position breaks down. The association she makes between 'just' and 'wrong' means that no person could even think, on pain of incoherence, of doing something which is both 'unjust' and yet 'right' because she makes the terms synonymous.
Quoting unenlightened
A matter which has only come to light as a result of people considering that it merits investigation. At one time forced heterosexuality was like driving on the right side of the road "reasonable and necessary, and we know what is just." That's literally what people thought about it. The only reason anything got changed is because people questioned what was (at the time) considered so obvious and reasonable that it was beyond doubt, that even entertaining the alternative was the sign of a corrupt mind.
Quoting unenlightened
I understand that, but it's not the terms themselves which are relevant. You might as well say we can debate whether it is right to do 'right' and wrong to do 'wrong'. No one (not even the dreaded consequentialists) are suggesting that an unjust act might be 'right' and by that meaning 'justice' in the sense Anscombe is later using it. To do so would be incoherent and there are (to my knowledge) no examples of this in the canon of moral philosophy. If this is what Anscombe is concerned about, her fears are unfounded.
No, the consequentialist is saying that a situation may arise where some act against common justice (unfair punishment) may need to be done for the greater good. Well. That time is now. If we want our children's children to have a fighting chance, we must unjustly be deprived of our goods and services. No justice system in any country would make it law that a person must give up their legal property to save an as yet unborn generation. It is fundamentally unjust. Yet it is exactly what we ought to do.
We argue it out. But I am only going to argue it out with people who will accept that if the law is wrong then it needs changing, because if we don't agree that far, then the argument is fruitless. And I absolutely am not going round that roundabout again with you or anyone else.
But literally no one either here or in the entire moral philosophy canon is arguing that a law which is 'wrong' is best left unchanged. I can't think of a single person whom your caveat rules out.
There are plenty of people who believe in extra-judicial killings, enhanced interrogation, etc. They believe injustice is right. But if you read the piece with an ounce of sympathy, you will see that this is exactly why Anscombe prefers the language of particular virtues rather than universal 'good' and 'ought'. No one argues that injustice is ever just, but plenty of people argue that it might be good sometimes.
You'll have to give me an example of someone arguing that (where 'injustice' refers to the negation of the virtue, not the actual law as it happens to stand). I maintain, for the time being, that no serious moral philosopher, or even people in general, argue that.
The example you gave of extra-judicial killings are people who believe that the law is wrong. That their killings are 'just' in the sense of the virtue, they are merely extra-judicial in the sense of the written law as it happens to stand.
If we allow Anscombe to have some definition of what is 'just', in the sense of the virtue, which is so obvious it doesn't need talking about, then there is no defence at all against charismatic populists adding whatever they like to that definition and immunising themselves from debate on exactly those grounds.
I don't think we have a great deal of defence against charismatic populists as it is, I'm certainly not prepared to go along with throwing away what little we do have.
No, I don't think I will.
Especially where I mention 'good bias'.
The defined word morality has a good bias.
The defined word 'morality' is alignment to good, an evil alternative would be as sub-versive as possible.
Morality is a potentially double-edged word.
Thus I propose two definitions exist for morality, one is good and one is evil.
Truly understanding morality requires good sense of both definitions.
X - morality is good or evil alignment.
Y - morality is Z(sub-version).
Evil is the stuff you don't like about others (the Other). It's usually the same stuff you don't like about yourself, can't face about yourself, don't know about yourself, etc.
I appreciate your participation here...
:smile:
Yes, excellent stuff, Un.
That's pathetic. You make a simple assertion and you can't even back it up on request. This is what passes for philosophical discussion here, a series of bare assertions, spectacularly unsupported guesswork where science should be, a few rounds of cheerleading from the old boys club and shut down any argument you can't respond to with a cliched insinuation that you're opponent is so wrong it's not even worth your precious time showing them how. It's the same story in every other bloody thread. I give up.
Besides, he answered your question earlier:
Quoting unenlightened
This is simply argument by equivocation. It is based in an unacceptable definition of "justice". Once you assign "justice" to what is determined by "law" (the legal system), in an absolute sense, as implied by "judicial", you no longer allow justice to be defined as "law according to what is right", or "rightful law", which is the more proper definition of "justice", right rule. You have separated "right", in the sense of correct, from the meaning of "justice", to allow that the law determines what is just, regardless of whether the law is right. This allows you to say that "injustice" might be "right". But this requires an improper definition of "justice", which associates "just" with the law unconditionally, implying that what is judicial is just, instead of the proper definition of "just" which requires that the law is right or correct.
Extra-judicial punishments are sometimes bad - the law is not perfect.
I believe in the Death Sentence for some people.
I have a good question:
Is an eye for an eye, moral? Should it be 3 - 1?
If you blind someone you should be blinded yourself. Literally, it may not be immoral, but lawfully, it is.
You should not outlaw stealing with the threat of stealing, instead things can be resolved without application of the law; and forgiveness - in some cases - is implied. So, an eye for an eye must be with regard to good judgement of a case, to be a moral judicial system.
This all depends on how you view the purpose of punishment. if you think that punishment is to extract revenge, or hurt the culpable person, you might say life in solitary confinement, or daily torture is a better punishment than the death sentence. And you would make the punishment directly related to the crime. But we generally don't see punishment in this way, so we do not choose our punishments as if there is a direct relation between the named crime and the meted punishment. The punishment is applied for a purpose other than to hurt the perpetrator.
It's not private in the sense Witt used the word, but it's private enough. No one can negotiate with your demons for you.
Why does every weasel have to br brought out and publicly strangled? Can folks not work these things out for themselves?
I am certainly not beyond the possibility of equivocation, but Anscombe is a smart cookie and you ought to give her published work at least the respect of being very careful about such accusations.
You read her as rejecting rules? No, she rejects obligation.
@Metaphysician Undercover goes beyond Anscombe. Long ago he tried to convince us that the private language argument itself was mere equivocation. My impression is that this is what he thinks is happening when he fails to understand what is happening. It is his go-to criticism. He thinks that every word has a strict definition, every thing a genus and differentia.
But it ain't so.
Hence, for him, the world equivocates.
I didn't see where she rejected obligation. She just noted that such a moral outlook was grounded in divine commands and seems to persist without any grounding.
What's the difference between rule-based morality and obligation based? Isnt it the same thing?
Quoting Banno
I'm not thinking of rules in terms of "thou shalt not..." - that's imposing an obligation. A rule is rather a pattern, in this case a pattern of behaviour - like being kind.
Clearly, the problem here is that "the state" doesn't itself act. Human beings act for what they might claim is the sake of the state. But this is not the state acting, it is individual law makers, human beings acting. So it's not the state exempting itself from its own laws, it's individual human being exempting the themselves from the laws of the sate.
Quoting Banno
Actually this is contradictory. Equivocation requires that words do not have a strict definition. So if I thought that every word has a strict definition I would not be able to accuse anyone of equivocation.
It is in recognizing that the same word has distinct meaning in different contexts of usage, and in recognizing that the word is used in one way, when the author asserts, or implies that it is being used another way that one apprehends equivocation. For example, in Wittgenstein's so-called private language argument, he demonstrates what "same" means by referring to the same chair. Then he implies that when a person has a reoccurrence of a similar sensation, time after time, and calls this the "same" sensation, each use of these two uses of "same" has equivalent meaning. But they do not and so there is equivocation.
This implies that a coherent Moral Psychology entails a virtue (as opposed to deontological or consequentialist) approach to Ethics.
I would replace her list of concepts requiring investigation with (in order): "social awareness", "intersubjectivity", "empathy", "evaluation", "knowledge", "decision-making", "conscience", "introspection", "judgment", "motivation", "intention", "volition", "act", "habit", and "character".
From a psychological standpoint, starting with "character" puts the cart before the horse.
Right, I don't see how it is possible to derive a valid concept of "virtue" from a philosophy of psychology, without begging the question of the concept of virtue which psychology already assumes. The question being what makes this concept of virtue a valid concept. Psychology is already normative by its very nature. So just like the moving cart presupposes the horse, psychology presupposes a concept of virtue. That concept needs to be analyzed (by moral philosophy) to determine its validity.
I agree.
Based on what I currently know of Virtue Ethics, I would use "virtuous" to describe a type of character (those aspects of personality considered to be learned, as opposed to innate), the result of lifespan experience.
The boundary between "learned" and "innate" is not so clear, so I do not think reference to such a boundary could make a useful moral principle. Furthermore, if "virtue" could only refer to learned characteristics, then if we were to judge innate characteristics they could only be judged as vices or indifferent. If all innate characteristics are indifferent, then we cannot learn to overcome any innate tendencies to become virtuous. But if some innate tendencies are vices, then we could learn to overcome these vices to be virtuous. We could say for instance, that the innate tendency toward ire is a vice, and if we learn to overcome that tendency this would be a virtue. But why shouldn't we look at some innate characteristics and designate them as virtues?
The boundary between "learned" and "innate" is the boundary between "culture" and "nature". Cross-Cultural research attempts to differentiate the two.
I recommend starting with "social awareness" (specifically, ethical facts), not character, before moving on to moral principles.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
"learned characteristics", "innate characteristics", "innate tendencies"?
So begins the confusion of terms. I'm not interested in going there.
There is no such boundary between culture and nature, cultures are natural. You've merely suggested a faulty starting point, which needs to be rejected for that reason.
We are virtuous but this is management.
Are you saying it's better to be childish, or both childish and mature?
All good is based on some adult knowledge.
Would a philosophy of psychology touch on things like: what if people are fundamentally different in ways that don't show up on the surface. Jim's actions are guided by his vision of consequences. Jane tries to treat others the way she wants to be treated. Maybe there are a lot of ways people experience motivation.
And since that kind of difference could exist without our knowing it, we might well treat ethics empirically. Just observe what people say is right and wrong and so forth.