Before the part of History and Illusion in Politics headed "Human rights" is a part called "Legal rights," which I found very helpful for understanding his later claims about talk of human rights being vacuous, and so on. Here are some of the main points. Geuss sees the modern notion of (subjective) rights, i.e., entitlements or things I can claim as mine, as stemming from Roman law, especially concerning property, by way of the feudal period. Property is linked with jurisdiction in feudal societies, where the lord of the manor might have police powers, for instance, and when we say that we own our own bodies this supports the idea that we have jurisdictional powers over ourselves, and hence moral claims (see p. 132):
The story of the growth of rights-discourse and the story of liberalism are two conceptually and historically diverse stories that touch each other tangentially at various points, until in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War a particular conjunction of the two establishes itself as the ideology of NATO and the United Nations and from that position begins gradually to infiltrate the rest of the world. (pp. 132-133)The idea that we own our bodies is objectionable, but I don't think it's essential to the idea of human rights. Maybe it's tied up with the origins of this idea, but those origins are obscure. In footnote 34 on p. 132, Geuss describes the history of the concept as "infinitely complex." And no strand in this complex web need be regarded as essential, I hope/think/insist.
The original and primary sense of a subjective right, then, is legal. And legal rights are meaningless if not reliably enforced. Hence the need for some mechanism of enforcement. "Failing such a system of sanctions, there is nothing but a set of diffuse individual and collective moral feelings" (p. 138).
I think this is where Geuss turns against rights-talk (wrongly, in my opinion). Moral rights are supposed to be rights, and therefore like legal rights, but they aren't supposed to be legal rights, and they don't even have the enforcement mechanism necessary to make legal rights (actual rights, we might want to say) meaningful. So moral rights are not really rights at all. They are merely moral. This is a little bit like Anscombe's objection to the moral use of 'ought,' etc., so I might be expected to be sympathetic (since I'm sympathetic to Anscombe on this). But what I think Anscombe does is to identify a possible kind of confusion, and one which I think really does exist in moral philosophy. Geuss seems to think not only that talk about moral rights might be, and perhaps sometimes or often is, incoherent, but that it (almost) necessarily is so. He is somewhat cautious in his claims, but not, perhaps, quite cautious enough.
One way to object to Anscombe is to suggest that some or all of the uses of words such as 'ought' and 'obligation' to which she objects might be uses in what Wittgenstein calls a secondary sense. (See here for how to make this kind of objection.) Wittgenstein's idea is very similar to Davidson's ideas about metaphors (see here for more on this, especially the comments by Daniel Lindquist), and since moral rights are supposed to be rights in a metaphorical sense, it seems natural to want to understand them in this kind of Wittgensteinian-Davidsonian way. Anscombe does not explore the secondary sense avenue at least partly, I suspect, because she sees so much (i.e., all) modern moral philosophy as being bad. A meaningful metaphor used to do bad things is no better than a piece of nonsense used to do bad things, so why explore the possibility that the apparent nonsense is in fact a metaphor, even if this possibility has occurred to you? I think there's something similar in Bentham's "nonsense on stilts" rant/analysis: he is as much concerned about the danger of the rights talk he is taking apart as he is about its coherence. And Geuss (at least sometimes) stops short of saying that rights talk makes no sense, and instead tries to argue that it is harmful or dangerous. Given his reference to NATO and the use of alleged human rights abuses to justify starting wars it's not hard to imagine why.
Three questions:
ReplyDelete1.
Can you say more on the relation between:
(a.) ‘She has a moral right to X’
(b.) ‘She should have a legal right to X’
You say that talk of moral rights is metaphorical, or secondary. And you do this, if I understand, as part of a criticism on a kind of “literalism” in philosophy (which I very much sympathize with). But if someone’s having a moral right simply means that she should have a legal right, then does this not give us a straightforward, non-figurative, way of talking about moral rights?
2.
Can you say more about the way you understand the relation between absolute senses secondary senses? Specifically, do you think that absolute senses are just secondary senses in the realm of ethics/aesthetic/religion? Or do you think there is a deeper logical difference?
3.
Part of what seems to me to be motivating the discussion about moral rights is a wish to formulate a humanistic form of moral thinking, independent of God. But if this is right, then isn’t there a tension between this wish to keep morality human and in our world, so to speak, and the use of terms like “rights” in an absolute sense, which typically characterizes religious, other-worldly, forms of speaking?
Thanks, Reshef.
ReplyDelete1. That someone has a moral right does not, I think, simply mean that she should have a legal right. If only because of what it would mean in practice to have every moral right, e.g. the right not to be lied to, enforceable by law. I hope there's more to the difference than that, but perhaps that's enough. This is an important question to ask, though, and I think I should try to stick to talking about metaphors rather than getting involved in much discussion of secondary sense.
2. There is no deeper logical difference that I can think of, but it sounds as though maybe you have thought of something that I haven't.
3. Maybe, but I'm not sure about this. I think of myself as defending a common practice, not engaging in a project of formulation, humanistic or otherwise. And I think the language of rights came about quite organically, not as part of a humanistic project. What I really want to be able to do is to talk about the world accurately, to tell the truth. So far I haven't found that I need to use inescapably religious language in order to do so, but that might turn out to be the case. That is to say, I don't think I have a humanistic agenda.
1. I'm trying to play the devil's advocate and see whether talk of moral rights is really inherently metaphorical. I guess if I told someone that they have a moral right not to be lied to, that might strike them as metaphorical. But if I then explained--cashed in the metaphor--and said that I meant that they ought not to be lied to, I'm not sure they would still think there is a metaphor here. So my question is whether this talk of moral rights is indeed hopelessly metaphorical. Or do you think that in some sense even using "ought" in this case is metaphorical?
ReplyDelete2. My sense is that there is a difference between secondary and absolute senses, but I'm not sure what kind of difference it is. It seems to me that absolute senses are more at home in religious or religious-like forms of moral thought. As opposed to that, secondary senses may be tolerated by naturalists--at least broad-minded naturalists, at least some of the time. I realize that the way I characterize this difference seem external, and therefore inessential, but my hunch is that it is important.
So, for instance, I tend to think there is a difference Between the Kantian moral ought and what Bernard Williams calls 'practical necessity.' Kant, I think, is interested in defending an absolute conception of morality (although he may be somewhat half-hearted about that), and Williams isn't. Williams, however, is sensitive to the difference between the way desires can necessitate actions on the one hand, and the way one's whole life can make an action necessary on the other. To give expression to the latter, I think, he is making a secondary use of 'necessity.'
I'm not sure this distinction is essential to your project, however. The reason I raised this issue is that there seem to me to be two separate criticisms of the rights-talk. On the one had there is Simone Weil's type of criticism, and on the other there is the Geuss type of criticism. It seem to me that Weil is not so much complaining about the metaphorical air of this rights-talk, but rather about the tendency that she seems to think goes with such talk to naturalize morality.
1. I think a devil's advocate is just what I need here, so thanks for taking on the role. "Ought" certainly might be metaphorical. Talk about a moral law (if it doesn't come from God, at least) sounds metaphorical (or nonsensical), as does talk about things like owing a debt to society. Things that "absolutely must not" be done are mysterious in a way, since the world doesn't actually end when people do them. And I think that talk about rights can be a way to try to express the limits of what may or may not be done to people. In this case the 'may' seems to imply a law of some kind, and then we seem to back with the idea of a moral law. Even if this law comes from God, I am not sure we can escape the realm of metaphor. Because how can God be understood without metaphors (Father, Lord, etc.)? If, when using the word 'ought', we don't just mean that such-and-such an act would be a good idea, a means to some given end, then we don't seem to mean anything very literal.
ReplyDeleteOne problem here is the question of dead metaphors. Or perhaps the problem really is with dying metaphors. Arguably talk about moral rights and 'ought's belongs in this category. I don't remember what Davidson says about dying metaphors, if he says anything about them, but I believe he's been criticized for, allegedly, not having a good account to offer. And I don't know what a good account would be.
2. I agree that Geuss and Weil make very different kinds of criticism of rights talk.
Absolute senses would be more at home in religious-type forms of moral thought in the obvious sense that Wittgenstein introduces the term 'absolute sense' to refer to what he also calls an 'ethical sense', in a lecture in which he lumps ethics and religion together. But you're right that secondary senses may be tolerated by naturalists, and the distinction you suggest between Williams and Kant is interesting. I wonder whether Williams' 'practical necessity' really could not be expressed in other words though. Or perhaps the difference between him and Kant here is that his position sounds closer to something that could be said literally.
Which brings me back to the question whether the kind of talk about rights that I want to defend has to be non-literal, or untranslatable into literal language. If I talk about the necessary conditions for happiness, say, then do I mean happiness literally? I mean it in something like Mill's sense, but is that anything other than literal just because it is value-laden? I'm not sure that we can really talk about people being literally happy (or not) when we mean happy in this kind of way. In which case talk about metaphors might be out of place too.
1.
ReplyDeleteYou say you are not sure whether we can escape the realm of metaphor in this discussion of moral rights, and in my gut I’m very sympathetic to this. But how can it be shown a priori that no possible conception of the moral ought, or of rights, will ever be able to completely escape the realm of metaphor? In particular, it seems, utilitarian and Aristotelian conceptions of right could escape this realm by tying the notion of rights to the idea of minimizing the dissatisfaction of desires, and to that of realizing or perfecting our human nature. Do you think that such conceptions too necessarily trade or tread in metaphors?
About dead metaphors: I’m not sure what exactly you are trying to capture by talking here of dead metaphors. Do you want to say that talk of moral rights is metaphorical, but that people do not notice that anymore? But if so, is there still a reason for calling them metaphors? I mean, it might be claimed that dead metaphors are not really metaphors anymore—like dead people, or dead bonfires. Rorty seem to have had such a view. So is there a reason for insisting on saying that talk of moral rights is metaphorical? ( - Perhaps this is a direction in which to think: Dead metaphors can be revived: “The table’s leg just kicked me!” or “Her conscience is so dirty, she cannot see her own reflection in it anymore.” Can something similar be said about moral rights? – Can their metaphoricalness be brought back to life?)
2.
You say you wonder whether Williams' 'practical necessity' really could not be expressed in other words. – What other words do you have in mind?
Also, you say that happiness in Mill’s sense may not be literal. Would you say the same about Aristotle’s eudaimonia? And what about the use of “happiness” in the American constitution? Actually, I now seem to have lost my grasp on the literal meaning of ‘happiness.’ Can you say something about how you understand this idea?
how can it be shown a priori that no possible conception of the moral ought, or of rights, will ever be able to completely escape the realm of metaphor?
ReplyDeleteI don't think it can be. (Unless we all see at once, as it were in a flash, that no such escape would ever do.)
it seems, utilitarian and Aristotelian conceptions of right could escape this realm by tying the notion of rights to the idea of minimizing the dissatisfaction of desires, and to that of realizing or perfecting our human nature. Do you think that such conceptions too necessarily trade or tread in metaphors?
Well, there are different kinds of utilitarianism. Bentham's kind isn't very welcoming to the idea of rights (and I don't only mean that Bentham himself wasn't a fan, although that's certainly part of it). The kind of utilitarianism that I find more plausible is more eudaimonistic or Aristotelian. And there, if we are going to be plausible, I do think that metaphors, or something like them, are necessary. I take being eudaimon to mean living a good life. If we translate it as flourishing then this has to be taken metaphorically. If we stick to living a good life, then is 'good' meant literally or metaphorically? Neither word seems right. If I had to choose I would pick 'literally,' but I don't know what that really means, what the literal meaning of 'good' is. Talk about perfecting or realizing human nature seems either beside the point (if taken naturalistically) or value-laden. Naturalism and positivism seem linked here, as do normativity and metaphor, but the connection between the former two seems much less mysterious than the connection between the latter pair.
Do you want to say that talk of moral rights is metaphorical, but that people do not notice that anymore?
It certainly used to be metaphorical. What I'm not sure about is whether it still is or not, which is why I wonder whether it might be dying rather than dead. And perhaps what it needs is to be revived. One kind of objection to rights seems (sometimes, to me) to boil down to an objection to their being merely metaphorical. To which I want to reply, "Of course they're metaphorical! So what?" But if people think this objection is serious, then their metaphorical status is in doubt. I'm not sure what to say about this.
You say you wonder whether Williams' 'practical necessity' really could not be expressed in other words. – What other words do you have in mind?
I need to go back and remind myself exactly what Williams says about this, but if practical necessity refers to "the way one's whole life can make an action necessary" then perhaps it could be translated as "inevitable, given one's history" or something like that. I doubt that's what Williams has in mind, but (without re-reading his work) I don't see much room between something like that and something more absolute. "Called for by one's life," perhaps. Which is metaphorical, but perhaps also absolute. It isn't straightforwardly relative at least, is it?
I now seem to have lost my grasp on the literal meaning of ‘happiness.’ Can you say something about how you understand this idea?
ReplyDeleteMe too! I think it's inescapably normative. Its feet are in physical events like episodes of smiling, but its head is up in the clouds of value. Hardly anyone wants to count the pleasure of the sadist as happiness, nor the pleasure to be had from drugs. Like 'goodness', I don't think that 'happiness' can really be said to have a literal meaning. If it has a literal meaning this must (it seems) be either just its meaning (which is complicated and contested) or else something like smiling. But smiling is not the ordinary meaning of happiness.
What is literal meaning? It isn't ordinary meaning, I think, but something more like non-metaphorical, scientific (is that right?) meaning. And where there is no possible metaphorical meaning, talk of literal meaning doesn't seem to work.
Let me know what you think about this: If, as you say, we cannot show a priori that talk of moral rights is metaphorical, perhaps we should make a distinction between two kinds of conceptions of moral rights: metaphorical and non-metaphorical. If someone then complains that talk of moral rights is metaphorical we can then answer: 1) first, even if it were the case, it would not be a problem; 2) second, it is not necessarily the case.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure whether or not you want to leave room for the possibility that some talk of moral rights is non-metaphorical. On the one hand, you don’t want to argue a priori that talk of moral rights is necessarily metaphorical—which seem to allow for the possibility it is not. On the other hand, you wonder whether or not the metaphor is dead or dying; and your wonder seem general—that is, you don’t wonder about a particular conception of moral rights. But it makes sense to worry about this in this general way, only if we assume that all such talk is necessarily metaphorical.
Relatedly, you talk of THE meaning of ‘happiness.’ But might it not be said that there is more than one, and that perhaps some are and some are not metaphorical? You say: “I take being eudaimon to mean living a good life. If we translate it as flourishing then this has to be taken metaphorically.”
I’d like to hear more about that. I’m not sure why you say flourishing here has to be metaphorical. Is it because it is different for a human and for a plant to flourish? But if so, why can’t the application of ‘flourish’ to humans not be just another literal, albeit different, application of the word? For Aristotle, it is part of being human to be a social, political, creature. I take it that this means that a good human life will involve friends, and community. We know all sorts of similar facts about humans that allow us, I think, to conclude that life on a lily pad in a swamp will not be a good human life, or that no human life is fully good without health, or money, or education… Can’t we reconstruct a perfectly literal notion of human flourishing based on all these facts? Granted, it will be a complicated notion—partly because unlike plants, we humans have second natures as well as first natures. But I’m not sure why we should say that this will make the notion of human flourishing metaphorical.
You say you don’t see room between "inevitable, given one's history" and something more absolute. This goes back to the question whether there is some difference between secondary- and absolute-senses, and I’m not sure I know how to draw the distinction. But I wonder what you think: don’t the words “given one’s life” have a relativizing-like function? Certainly, it is a special kind of relativization: a relativization to a totality, which is not relativization at all. But still, it seems to me, it is at least a gesture at relativization. At any rate, it seems to me that we would ordinarily not be left with a sense of mystery if someone said “my whole life forces me to…”—awe perhaps, but not mystery.
I’m not sure the difference here is important for your purposes.
Let me try to reply to your various questions in reverse order (and thanks, by the way).
ReplyDeleteI agree that something one has to do given one's history is relative in a way that something one simply has to do is not, but I was thinking of Wittgenstein's distinction between the relative as means to an end and the absolute as something like an end in itself, or at least not a means to an end. Williams' practical necessity is not relative in the means-to-an-end sense. And I'm not sure that anything is absolute in a way that would distinguish it from the relativity of this kind of necessity. For example, I think of torture, murder, and rape as things that one absolutely must not do. But the prohibition seems to apply only to human beings (and similar beings, perhaps). So it matters who or what the agent is. And in this sense there is always going to be some agent relativity, it seems to me.
The reason I said that flourishing had to be metaphorical was only the silly reason that I take literally flourishing to mean having flowers sprouting from one's body, like Daisy-Head Mayzie. But in response to this silly point you raise a good question: can we construct a perfectly literal notion of human flourishing (or living a good life) on the basis of various facts about human beings? I think the answer is No, but I'm not sure what to say beyond this. There is a kind of objectivity implied by the idea of literalness that just seems incompatible with an evaluative concept like goodness. Leaving aside the complexities of human life and focusing on a simple example, a good hammer is one that works well when it comes to driving in nails, but it still sounds like nonsense to describe such a hammer as literally good. So even if we could work out the details of what a good human life would be in a similar sense, if we knew all the ingredients needed for a successful or full human life, I still wouldn't want to say that such a life was literally good. (Because using the word 'literally' here implies a contrast with some metaphorical meaning of 'good,' and I have no idea what that might be.)
What I would like to do is to identify features of this kind, though, along the lines of the goods identified by Aristotle or the central capabilities listed by Martha Nussbaum and say that people have a right to these things (i.e. to whatever ends up being on the list, or at least the most important components of such a list). Here the idea of a right (and this is really the only kind of right I am interested in, even if there might be other kinds, or other senses of the word) is metaphorical, I think. There isn't actually a law protecting people in these regards, and if there ought to be such a law then I'm tempted to say that is because people have these rights, not that their having these rights consists in the desirability of such laws. There is, in other words, a sense in which people must not violate these rights, a sense in which it is necessary that they not do so. And this is an absolute sense.
I'm sure that words like 'must not' are what I want and need here, but I'm less sure that the word 'rights' is what I need to say what I mean. Perhaps some other form of words would be as good or even better. In that sense I'm not certain that I need a metaphorical sense of 'rights' to say what I mean, and so Wittgensteinian thinking about absolute sense and secondary sense might be beside the point. On the other hand, I really do think that I am talking about an absolute kind of necessity. This is not means-end reasoning, at least not exclusively (neither is it completely irrelevant that torture, etc. have very bad consequences, but I'm not thinking in a consequentialist way).
P.S. (the following made my previous comment too long to publish, but it was originally part of the same comment):
ReplyDeleteI hope this makes some sense, and apologize if what I said before was unclear or has been abandoned (or contradicted) here. I'm in the process of thinking this stuff through and don't have a clear set of coherent thoughts to set out. But I feel as though I'm progressing toward something along those lines.
I think you put your finger on an important issue of how to make the distinction between the relative and the absolute. I’m not sure how to make it myself, but I’m inclined towards a different way of making it than the means-to-an-end/end-in-itself way. I’m inclined to say that relative judgment is relative to some standard and absolute judgment is a judgment without a standard. (Maybe that’s part of the mystery of such judgments.) Perhaps the means-to-an-end/end-in-itself distinction can be a species of that, but I’m not sure.
ReplyDeleteSo, to take your example, there is a standard for good hammers: they drive nails into walls well. As opposed to that, an absolutely good hammer would be good in a way similar to the way a Christian would say that “The Last Supper” was good: not because of the quality of the food, or the company… It would simply be Good. It would be natural for it to become an object of worship; and it would be natural for people to look at it in a way that resembles the way people look at art objects.
To give another example: some people here in Auburn put signs in their yards saying “Christ is Alive.” I tend to think this use of “alive” is absolute—standardless. It is not that the point of saying this is to say that Christ is very sick but is probably going to make it, or that contrary to some belief according to which Christ is an inanimate object, or an algae, we have now good reason to believe that it is alive. But it is also not as if there is another way to explain in exactly what sense—according to what standard—Christ is judged here to be alive.
This is why I’m inclined to think that we can construct a literal notion of human flourishing on the basis of facts about human beings. Of course, the sense of flourishing would have to be different for hammers, suppers, and humans. But still, none of those senses have to be metaphorical, and we can have at least an outline of what the good human life is (I think Aristotle is doing just that in the Nicomachean Ethics), and use that as a standard. If we can formulate a list of rights based on this conception of the good human life, then we have in fact found a way to talk of moral rights that is not absolute (at least, not absolute in my sense of absoluteness as standardlessness).
Let me say another thing that might be relevant. It seems to me that to get the idea of absolute goodness into focus, it may help to make a distinction between what is good in ALL possible circumstances, and what is good REGADLESS of the circumstances. I tend to think that the latter captures the idea of absolute goodness, but not the first. But at least, I think there is an important difference here, which gives us a reason to save the notion of absolute value for the latter kind of case. In this sense, human life is valuable: it is not just more valuable than ALL other things that have value; it is valuable REGADLESS of any comparison. That is, as Kant puts it, it is an assault on its value to even attempt to compare it: It is wrongheaded to even ask questions like “how much money would compensate for the loss of a life?”
I myself am in the process of thinking about those things in connection with Kant’s moral philosophy. For reasons you can probably guess, I put this project on hold for a while. Thanks for allowing me to keep it alive.
You're welcome, and thanks for pointing me back to the details of Wittgenstein's distinction between the trivial/relative and the ethical/absolute. You're right that it isn't quite the same as a means-to-an-end vs. end-in-itself distinction (although it's surely related).
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to talk about something like an Aristotelian conception of the good life without having a specific example in view (and even then it wouldn't be easy). I don't think of Aristotle's project as having been wholly successful, for instance, and I don't think of Foot's as having been completed. How well such a project or theory worked and where, if anywhere, it fell short would depend on the details. Still, I tend to think that either a theory like this would have to fail to do justice to ethics (to the phenomena we want to capture in an ethical theory or outline of the good life) because of being too naturalistic (or trivial in Wittgenstein's sense) or would have to incorporate some absolute elements, perhaps in disguised form. Perhaps that is part of why Aristotle did not think ethics could be a precise science. Perhaps it's also part of the need for wise perception when it comes to knowing what to do in certain circumstances. It is surely part of the virtue of justice. So I think that an adequate Aristotelian or neo-Aristotelian theory would have to accommodate such ideas as the Kantian one you mention about human life having a value beyond (i.e. of a different order than) all monetary value.
Aristotle acknowledges that there are certain things one must never do. He mentions adultery, theft, and murder. Perhaps he thinks of these as (merely) wrong in all circumstances. But one could identify murder as being different. Adultery and theft don't seem quite as bad, don't seem to violate anyone's human rights, and this might be because (or related to the fact that) they seem to be potentially justifiable in some circumstances, e.g. adultery with someone one really loves when one's spouse is cruel and unfaithful, theft in dire circumstances, etc. Murder is different. This difference could be thought of or expressed in various ways, but one way might be to say that it is absolutely bad, wrong regardless of the circumstances. And then (this is where I can imagine Wittgenstein wanting to object, but I'm not sure what form the objection would take) it seems that one could make a short list of acts that are like murder in this regard and refer to the set as "violations of fundamental human rights." From this it seems it would be easy enough to generate a list of such rights.
The spirit of list-making and legalistically formulating details of what may and may not be done is contrary to that of the "mystical perception" or whatever is involved in identifying absolute goods and bads, but if we're going to have laws at all then I don't see much alternative to this kind of compromise. Unless we take ethical considerations out of the law completely. But then I don't know how we would avoid the tyranny of the majority or justify the kind of rights that are usually thought to protect us from this tyranny. I suppose Mill tried to do that, but his essentials of human well-being strike me as either implausible/unjustifiable/indefensible or else absolute/ethical in some way (i.e. wholly or at least in part).
Can you say why you think that any adequate moral theory would be able to accommodate the notion of absolute value?
ReplyDeleteTake suicide for instance. It seems to me like a prime example for what philosophers for whom the notion of absolute value is important (like Wittgenstein, or Kant, or Weil) would think is absolutely forbidden. But I don’t see how to argue against a naturalist—Humean or Aristotelian—who would claim (perhaps in the spirit of Anscombe) that the notion of “forbidden” has gone here on holiday: that it fails to attach to (be relativized to) anything about our human life, and therefore that it is nonsense, and therefore that it does not have to be taken seriously.
I suppose I'm speaking for myself here (although in a way that Wittgenstein seems to expect to apply to everyone in the Lecture on Ethics). Here he is on the distinction between relative and absolute value (I'm quoting for my benefit, not because I think you don't know this stuff):
ReplyDeleteIf for instance I say that this is a good chair this means that the chair serves a certain predetermined purpose and the word good here has only meaning so far as this purpose has been previously fixed upon. In fact the word good in the relative sense simply means coming up to a certain predetermined standard. Thus when we say that this man is a good pianist we mean that he can play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a certain degree of dexterity. And similarly if I say that it is important for me not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold produces certain describable disturbances in my life and if I say that this is the right road I mean that it's the right road relative to a certain goal.
Used in this way these expressions don't present any difficult or deep problems. But this is not how Ethics uses them. Supposing that I could play tennis and one of you saw me playing and said "Well, you play pretty badly" and suppose I answered "I know, I'm playing pretty badly but I don't want to play any better," all the other man could say would be "Ah, then that's all right." But suppose I had told one of you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said, "You're behaving like a beast" and then I were to say "I know I behave badly, but then I don't want to behave any better," could he then say "Ah, then that's all right"? Certainly not; he would say "Well, you ought to want to behave better." Here you have an absolute judgment of value, whereas the first instance was one of relative judgment.
The essence of this difference seems to be obviously this: Every judgment of relative value is a mere statement of facts and can therefore be put in such a form that it loses all the appearance of a judgment of value: Instead of saying "This is the right way to Granchester," I could equally well have said, "This is the right way you have to go if you want to get to Granchester in the shortest time"; "This man is a good runner" simply means that he runs a certain number of miles in a certain number of minutes, etc.
Now what I wish to contend is that, although all judgments of relative value can be shown to be mere statement of facts, no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value.
I take it from this that (just about) anyone who thinks people ought to want to behave better than someone who lies preposterously cares about value in an absolute sense. I don't think, for instance, that you have to be religious to think (or to value) like this. Nor would you have to agree with others about which things are absolutely valuable (or good or bad in an absolute sense) and which are not. If it's true, as it may well be, that philosophers for whom the notion of absolute value is important are generally against suicide then I think this is a kind of accident. Historical reasons for it might be easy enough to find (having to do with the influence of Christianity), but the connection is contingent.
(More below)
Naturalism (or perhaps a certain kind of naturalism--I think the precise meaning of the term is disputed) is a, or the, problem here, I agree. There is probably no arguing about things like this with a genuine naturalist, one who sincerely and thoroughly believes that there is nothing wrong with, say, suicide, or "post-birth abortion," or torture (in the right circumstances), or whatever it might be. I hope that no such people really exist, though, and that everyone retains some (of what I would call) humanity, to which we can appeal aesthetically (through experience or some kind of art, such as Chesterton's denunciation/analysis of suicide in Orthodoxy). You have to find intuitions that their theories don't capture. And you have to hope that they share these intuitions, and agree that they need to be captured by any adequate moral theory.
ReplyDeleteYou suggest that it is just an accident that philosophers for whom the notion of absolute value is important are generally against suicide. I wonder how anything about absolute values can be accidental. I’m not sure how to argue for this, but for some reason it seems to me that this would go against the grain of what it is to be of absolute value. Do you think, for instance, that it could have been different with lying, or murder—that it is just a historical accident that those actions are on the list of absolutely forbidden actions? – This seems implausible. But again, I’m not sure why.
ReplyDeleteThis is very interesting to think about, because there must be something that explains the difference of intuitions here: Why is there such a difference between suicide and lying? Is it a real difference, or just apparent?
Another matter I wonder about is how you think we should understand Wittgenstein’s distinction between relative and absolute evaluations. And I wonder—Wittgenstein aside—how you think we should use it. It seems that he is making a very stark dichotomy. I don’t only mean that it is either-or for him. It seems that he is not so much interested (at least in the Lecture on Ethics) in making distinctions between kinds of relative evaluations, and kinds of absolute evaluations.
One thing that I’m not sure how to think about is one claim Wittgenstein makes, which you quoted: “Every judgment of relative value is a mere statement of facts and can therefore be put in such a form that it loses all the appearance of a judgment of value.” – He gives examples, but there are other kinds of relative judgments. I take it that taste judgments, for example, are value judgments, and that they don’t carry any absolute weight. But I’m not sure that they really can be “translated” into factual language. So, for example, if someone says ‘These shoes are wrong for this dress,’ can this really be put in a way that would lose the appearance of a value judgment? Perhaps some taste judgments can be “translated” into statements of facts. Maybe, for instance, the sentence above can be translated into ‘[The speaker] dislikes this dress-shoes combination.’ But what about sentences like ‘Beethoven’s ninth is better than his second’? What statement of facts could capture the content of this sentence?
I’m not saying that there is no such statement of facts. Perhaps there are many, and perhaps until we translate the sentence into factual language, we don’t fully understand what the statement says. But there are different kinds of statements of facts, and in particular, I’m not sure it is impossible for some of them to be also, at the same time and irreducibly, evaluations. And in any case, the matter is not as obvious as Wittgenstein claims it is.
The problem is not only with taste judgments. There are evaluations that may even be regarded as moral, like ‘Education is good.’ Saying this can just mean that having knowledge is useful—which is a statement of facts. But it is not what one HAS to mean by this. Would you say that this is either a statement of facts or an absolute evaluation?
You suggest that it is just an accident that philosophers for whom the notion of absolute value is important are generally against suicide. I wonder how anything about absolute values can be accidental. I’m not sure how to argue for this, but for some reason it seems to me that this would go against the grain of what it is to be of absolute value. Do you think, for instance, that it could have been different with lying, or murder—that it is just a historical accident that those actions are on the list of absolutely forbidden actions? – This seems implausible. But again, I’m not sure why.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how to answer this, but I think my answer is either "Yes" or "Yes and No." I understand absolute value judgments to be value judgments that cannot be reduced to statements of fact. Many aesthetic value judgments would fall into this category therefore. (Basically all that aren't reducible to considerations of such things as pleasure or profit.) I don't see them as being absolute in the sense of being overridingly important. An absolute aesthetic judgment might be overridden by an absolute ethical judgment, for instance, or vice versa. And although Wittgenstein contrasts the absolute with the trivial, I think that some absolute value judgments might be relatively trivial, e.g. whether these shoes go with that dress.
When I talked about an accident I meant only that it would be possible to have a different judgment, one that was equally absolute, i.e. equally irreducible to facts. I don't know how that would go in the case of lying, although in cases where refusal to lie led to some disastrous consequence I can imagine condemnation of this refusal in absolute terms. In Kant's murderer example, for instance, if the murderer instantly realizes when I fail to lie that the person he is looking for is in my house and then murders her, couldn't one condemn my seemingly callous self-righteousness? Of course there would be the fact that someone had been murdered to point to, but it needn't be only my tactics that someone condemns here. Callousness and self-righteousness are not condemned only because they have bad consequences.
In the case of suicide, there are cases where integrity might seem to require it. The film "Million Dollar Baby" tries to present such a case, and there are other, real-life cases one could point to (see, e.g., "Death of a Man" by Lael Tucker Wertenbaker). The Stoic judgment that the foulest death is better than the cleanest slavery seems to me to be an absolute judgment (and the foul death in question was a suicidal act).
I don't think it's just a historical accident that people generally regard suicide, lying, and murder as bad. But what I've read about the history of suicide suggests that the idea that it is always wrong is by no means a necessary feature of every moral code. Some positively require it in certain circumstances, and for reasons that I don't think could be reduced to statements of fact. The Stoic concern with human dignity, for instance, or various conceptions of honor. The major Western religions are against suicide, and I wouldn't call that contingent. (I think a particular way of valuing human life belongs to their essence, although I'm not sure I could defend this claim.) But the influence that these religions, and Christianity in particular, have had seems contingent to me.
But what about sentences like ‘Beethoven’s ninth is better than his second’? What statement of facts could capture the content of this sentence?
ReplyDeleteI’m not saying that there is no such statement of facts. Perhaps there are many, and perhaps until we translate the sentence into factual language, we don’t fully understand what the statement says. But there are different kinds of statements of facts, and in particular, I’m not sure it is impossible for some of them to be also, at the same time and irreducibly, evaluations. And in any case, the matter is not as obvious as Wittgenstein claims it is.
The problem is not only with taste judgments. There are evaluations that may even be regarded as moral, like ‘Education is good.’ Saying this can just mean that having knowledge is useful—which is a statement of facts. But it is not what one HAS to mean by this. Would you say that this is either a statement of facts or an absolute evaluation?
I think that judgment about Beethoven's ninth is an absolute judgment in Wittgenstein's sense of judgment (unless one merely means that it is more popular, say, but that isn't what someone would normally mean in saying this).
I would be inclined to say that it is a fact that the 9th is better than the 2nd (although in fact I don't know the 2nd at all), or at least that this is the kind of thing that can be a fact. Yet it is clearly evaluative. So I agree that there are different kinds of statements of facts.
"Education is good" strikes me as another fact that is also an evaluation, and I would count it as absolute. Not in the sense that education must occur (in the way that one must not commit murder) but in the sense that the good of education, the kind of goodness it has, is not reducible to non-evaluative facts.
I don't see Wittgenstein's distinction as being between the mandatory and the optional, as one might think given his contrasting the absolute/ethical with the trivial. That might be part of it. But at least a part of it is, it seems to me, the contrast between the personal and the impersonal. The latter involves only non-evaluative facts and the use of words as they are used in science. The former involves metaphor, the expression of personal experience, and irreducible evaluation. I don't see why we couldn't talk about facts here, but perhaps such talk would be in a sense metaphorical. Or perhaps all language has a personal dimension. Perhaps it doesn't really matter that much what we say here, as long as we see the distinction Wittgenstein is making between what I would like to call the spirit of ethics and religion, on the one hand, and the spirit of science, on the other. The usefulness of the latter is quite limited, and it is important to appreciate this. Otherwise we might start to get horribly reductive about both religion and ethics. I imagine that something like this is what Wittgenstein had in mind.
I can’t think of anything I find wrong in what you say about suicide, but for some reason I still feel uneasy. Maybe there is nothing philosophical about this uneasiness. But let me try and explain it. Perhaps my question about suicide comes from a sense I have that we should at least make room for the view that absolute evaluations cannot be made as just statements of indifferent facts, or better, in what Kierkegaard would call the objective voice, but must be made in the subjective voice. I imagine someone who would say something like: ‘If you allow yourself to talk of what absolute judgments people make in difference cultures etc., you are THEREBY not really talking about absolute judgments.’ Or ‘You cannot TALK ABOUT absolute evaluations without at the same time MAKING them.’
ReplyDeletePerhaps what I have in mind here connects with the way in which it is impossible to explain a secondary use without making one. That is, I have the sense that the clarification of the grammar of absolute evaluation—and this is metaphilosophical—needs also to be of a special kind. I’m not sure I can say much more about this. I hope this makes some sense.
Also –
You say that an absolute judgment is not reducible to non-evaluative facts. How do you understand the way Wittgenstein is using the distinction between evaluative statements and factual statements? It may have seemed that he was using it to explain the grammar of absolute evaluations, which we are not clear about, by relying on what we are clear about: the distinction between factual and evaluative statements. But now it seems that this distinction is no so clear after all: that there are statements of facts that are also evaluative. So how is the appeal to this distinction helpful?
Part of the problem here is that I’m not sure how to capture the difference between evaluative- and non-evaluative-facts. If this is another way of capturing the distinction Wittgenstein is making in the Lecture, then I’m not sure I’m clear about the distinction. Another part of the problem is that it is not clear how to stop the sophisticated, non-reductionist naturalist from saying that she too can use this distinction. And it seems that if this naturalist can use it, then she has found a way to bring back moral value into the natural world: a form of description of the (natural) facts that captures what may be ethical about them.
But maybe this is not where you want to draw the distinction between your position and naturalism.
I imagine someone who would say something like: ‘If you allow yourself to talk of what absolute judgments people make in difference cultures etc., you are THEREBY not really talking about absolute judgments.’
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting idea. The explanation or definition of absolute judgments is made in terms of personal experiences of a profound ('meaningful', 'personal') and more or less ineffable kind. And particularly in connection with, above all, a sense of wonder at the world, and then, secondarily, a feeling of safety and the feeling of guilt. And Wittgenstein says that the feelings he has in mind are exactly what people have had in mind when they have said various things about God. So there is a sense in which the concept of absolute value is essentially linked with the Western religious tradition. Maybe I'm trying to stretch it too far.
But I think it can be stretched like this because there is flexibility within the metaphorical realm and within that tradition. So it might be a mistake to say that a samurai, say, makes an absolute value judgment when he makes a value judgment that is completely alien to me. But if it isn't completely alien, if I can feel its pull, even if perhaps I don't agree with it, then I'm inclined to call it a judgment of absolute value. Maybe that's wrong. After all, the absolute good is supposed to be what everyone must do or else feel guilty about. Can I say that someone is making a judgment of that kind if I think they have gotten it wrong? And does it even make sense to talk about getting such a judgment wrong, as if some process were involved other than straight perception? I need to think about this more.
Part of the problem here is that I’m not sure how to capture the difference between evaluative- and non-evaluative-facts.
Nor am I. I'm not completely sure that there are any non-evaluative facts, although there is a kind of non-evaluative attitude toward the facts that we can adopt. This is what I mean when I talk about the spirit of science. It's a kind of mindset that one puts on. When kids cut up frogs in school part of the point of the exercise might be training them to adopt this attitude, giving them practice at behaving in a detached way. It's no way to live, but it's useful sometimes. I imagine that surgeons, for instance, have to operate in a somewhat detached way. And this has become an ideal for some people, a way to see the world as it (allegedly) is, untainted by sentiment. Wittgenstein, I think, is against this ideal. So he might be implicitly challenging the evaluative/non-evaluative facts distinction in the Lecture. But I don't know.
Another part of the problem is that it is not clear how to stop the sophisticated, non-reductionist naturalist from saying that she too can use this distinction. And it seems that if this naturalist can use it, then she has found a way to bring back moral value into the natural world: a form of description of the (natural) facts that captures what may be ethical about them.
I like the sound of that kind of naturalism, but I'd have to know more before I signed up for it. What form would this description of the (natural) facts take? If it really can capture what's ethical then I see nothing to object to (from my perspective--I can imagine problems that others might have with this).
Let me ask you this: do you think that there are--or could be--forms of ethical evaluations that on the one hand do not reflect recognition of absolute values, and on the other hand cannot be traced back, or reduced, to desires and preferences in some conceptualist fashion?
ReplyDeleteDo you understand Foot and Thompson as aiming at something like that middle ground, or at something different?
Do you understand Anscombe's idea that we should stop doing ethics as an attempt to do something that will allow us to see that we need to bring back into the philosophical discussion about ethics the possibility for a recognition of absolute values?
If so, is this also the reason she recommends that we go back to Aristotle?
I don't know what Anscombe was up to with that suggestion. If she wanted to help bring in a recognition of absolute values then I don't know why she would mention Aristotle, but I don't know why she mentions him anyway. She seems quite dismissive of the notion (or his notion) of eudaimonia, which I would have thought is rather fundamental to his project. But perhaps any pre-modern thinker would do and she thought Aristotle would be most acceptable to a philosophical audience.
ReplyDeleteIt's certainly possible that she wanted to encourage something like the work of Thompson and Foot, and one way to characterize that work is as aiming for the kind of middle ground you mention. But I'm not at all sure that any sense can be made of this middle ground (in which case I probably would not characterize anybody's work as aiming for it, if only out of charity). That is, I think the answer to your first question is No.