In comments starting here Reshef asks some questions and I sometimes get close to responding relevantly and then sometimes don't. After which he offers a kind of summary of what he's been trying to get at:
I’ve been trying to look through the eyes of the unhappy, or of the happy for that matters. Through their eyes human nature is morally significant. They are responding morally to it. The happiness/unhappiness is their response.I want here to get clearer about what I have been saying (what I said in that old paper still seems right to me) and what Reshef is saying. I say "It is not that just anything can be given a moral application" and "It would be a mistake to claim that just anything could be brought into a moral relation with our lives." This certainly sounds like a denial by me that anything whatever could have a morally significant place in one's life. But that isn't what I mean. What I mean is that, although a very wide range of things (including both physical objects, ideas, and sentences) can be morally significant, as can be shown by various examples, these examples do not show that absolutely anything whatsoever could be morally significant. Perhaps it can be, but (as far as my investigation goes) that remains to be seen.
What I fear, again, is that if we say that not anything could be brought into a moral relation with our lives, we will deny ourselves access to these happy/unhappy points of view: to these moral reactions (also reactions to human nature). I’m not saying that the happy or the unhappy is right. I’m not so much asking this question. And I agree that not everyone will agree. I agree that not on every view of what moral thinking consists in human nature can be a moral issue. I am just worried of a kind of meta-ethics that does not leave room for views, or attitude to life (because I'm not sure we should call happiness or unhappiness “views”), in which human nature is or can become a moral issue.
Reshef seems to be saying that someone might have an ethical view, or attitude, according to which everything one cares about is morally significant, precisely because one cares about it. And this (the thing cared about) might be anything at all.
This is a view that I find hard to get in focus, but I don't think I'm ruling it out as a possibility at all. I'm just not endorsing or adopting it.
Am I perhaps trying to do meta-ethics without ethics, and is that a tenable distinction? And what about the points made by Cora Diamond that I quoted here? Not to mention the paper by Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen that I mentioned here. There are reasons to think that I might need to change my tune and not just stick with what I wrote twenty years ago. But at the moment it still seems OK to me.
"What I mean is that, although a very wide range of things (including both physical objects, ideas, and sentences) can be morally significant, as can be shown by various examples, these examples do not show that absolutely anything whatsoever could be morally significant. Perhaps it can be, but (as far as my investigation goes) that remains to be seen."
ReplyDeletePerhaps the issue is not so much about whether anything can be seen from a moral perspective (arguably there are situations in which anything we can think of can), but why there is such a perspective at all, i.e., what does it mean to see something in moral terms?
In that case this is really about the perspective we deploy in "viewing" something that invokes a moral dimension, not the thing in question.
What sort of perspective then might it be? Well, there's good reason to say it would be the perspective involved in making oneself better, a better person or self (which is a very religious approach isn't it?). In other words a spiritual aspect seems to enter the picture.
As to what would that entail, wouldn't it, on our perfectly ordinary use of "moral," have to do with our relation to others within our reach, that is to how we think about and treat them?
But is that all we mean by "moral"? If the latter term refers to how we act in community, in a world of others, is that the whole of it? What of self improvement itself, making ourselves better in the absence of others? Can actions taken by an individual in complete isolation (whether physically established or simply by withdrawal from the company of others) not also have a moral aspect? Or is that something else? Stokhof (in that article you linked us to a while back) argues, somewhat persuasively I think, that the Tractarian Wittgenstein thought being moral (or ethical, to use his preferred terminology and to maintain the distinction Stokhof makes there) belongs in a different realm than the social. It is, per Stokhof to to step outside the frame of reference in which contingent facts (including facts about others and their actions) matter and enter a realm of "feeling absolutely safe" because one has changed one's self-identification. Whatever happens is merely part of the contingent world and cannot touch us.
Stokhof argues that for that Wittgenstein, to be ethical is to align or realign oneself with a different sense of being and that this can be expressed in our behavior in the world but is not conditioned by it. In other words, Stokhoff asserts that Wittgenstein, in that period, saw ethics as spiritually grounded in the changed self we come to see ourselves as when we shake off the bonds that lock us into a world of contingencies.
In this sense, anything can be moral because everything must be. It's a function of our viewpoint, not anything in the world itself. But then this seems to miss the mark when we consider our actual moral choices and how we come to make and argue for them. Here facts matter. And being moral, in the sense that they do, depends on the reality of those facts.
Perhaps the answer to the conundrum is that there is a spiritual dimension to what we mean by "moral," nor can we invoke the term at all without paying some attention to it? For anything in the world of contingent facts, being moral is a condition of the person's self-understanding, not of the thing itself.
Yes, what it means to see something in moral terms is certainly a relevant question. And different answers to that question might lead to different ideas about what is moral and what can be moral.
ReplyDeleteI’m not sure I understand. One of the sentences you wrote in that paper is, as you quote:
ReplyDelete1) "It would be a mistake to claim that just anything could be brought into a moral relation with our lives."
One natural reading of this is:
(1a) ‘It is not true that just anything could be brought into a moral relation with our lives.’
This may be taken to imply:
(1aa) ‘There are some things that cannot be brought into a moral relation with our lives.’
Another reading of 1) is:
(1b) ‘It would be imprudent to bring just anything into a moral relation with our lives.’
Another reading:
(1c) ‘It would be immoral to bring just anything into a moral relation with our lives.’
But I don’t think (1b) and (1c) is what you want. I think you want something more like (tell me if I’m wrong):
(1da) ‘It would be premature to determine if anything can be brought into a moral relation with our lives.’
or:
(1db) ‘We just don’t know in advance what can and what cannot be brought into a moral relation with our lives. Whether anything in particular can or cannot remains to be seen. so it would be a mistake to say anything can be brought into a moral relation with our lives because of that.’
My response: The view I’m describing is not just that everything one cares about is morally significant, precisely because one cares about it, as you said in the post. It is also exactly, and more importantly for our discussion, that anything could be brought into a moral relation with our lives. So it seems to me like this view is in a direct contradiction to what you are saying.
Given reading (1d) of your claim, I should say that on this view, as I’m imagining it, (1d) is odd. The commitment to the idea that anything could be brought into a moral relation with our lives is not due to research or generalization. Rather, it is a moral commitment. It is something like: ‘Everything *is* important, although (and even if) I don’t always know how to see it, and may never know how to see it (may never solve this riddle). In religious terms: Everything is God’s creation (by definition) and everything God did is of importance (because God did it). My task in this life is therefore to find this importance; which means to bring it into a moral relation with my life.’ By moral commitment, I mean that it is somewhat like the claim: ‘Every human being should have rights.’ – One may believe this not because of research, or as a generalization from certain examples. Whether people in the 25th century should have rights is usually not thought of as something that remains to be seen.
The view I’m describing might be false somehow, and you, or your sentence, might be right. There might be something about us that prevents us from bringing certain things into anything we might want to call a moral relation with our lives, or there might be certain things that would resist being brought into anything we might want to call a moral relation with our lives. But if so, I feel I need more argument.
When I said that "It would be a mistake to claim that just anything could be brought into a moral relation with our lives," I don't think I meant that it would always be a mistake for anyone to say this. I meant that in the particular context I had in mind it would be a mistake for someone in my position to say this.
DeleteSo what context was that and what is/was my position? The context was a disagreement between one person who thinks that ethics is something like an area of inquiry that can be identified or delimited in some way and someone who denies this on the grounds that there is no limit to what can be ethically significant. I take this disagreement to be more about the meaning of 'ethics', hence meta-ethical, than about substantial questions of what actually is ethical and what is not. (I can see that this distinction might break down somewhere, various meta-ethical views having their own ethical implications, but I don't see that as a reason to never make a distinction of this kind.) Within the context of this debate, it seems like a mistake to me to commit to the particular ethical view that you have in mind. A mistake because it involves taking on, or bringing up, a commitment that does not have to come up in the debate. And a mistake also because, so far as this particular moral view is not at stake (none is meant to be), it's an irrelevant distraction.
Now, you might say that it's a good kind of distraction because, being true, it's more important for us to think about this ethical view than a debate within meta-ethics. You might also, of course, say that it isn't irrelevant because, true or not, it's a view that the first meta-ethical position I described fails to allow for. But the second meta-ethical view does allow for it. It just does not insist that it is true. Whether it's true is a different question, and a different kind of question, one that belongs to another debate. If I say that this is a debate we must come to later I just mean on another occasion. I don't mean later in time, as if we must get our meta-ethics right before we can proceed to ethics.
I’m not sure I understand again. You say that the context for your sentence “was a disagreement between one person who thinks that ethics is something like an area of inquiry that can be identified or delimited in some way and someone who denies this on the grounds that there is no limit to what can be ethically significant.” – But I’m not sure I fully understand what that context is. It sounds as if you want to think of it as a disagreement in meta-ethics, not in ethics. But I’m not sure this helps me to understand—not because I want to deny there is a distinction between ethics and meta-ethics. I don’t want to deny either that there might be reasons to make this distinction for particular purposes. I’m just not sure I clearly see in our discussion such a reason yet, and even if there are such reasons, I’m not sure I see how exactly making this distinction in our case will help. So I need more help.
DeleteThe view you are opposing directly, if I understand, is the view I’ve been describing—i.e. that there is no limit to what can be ethically significant; call this view #1. Your main reason for rejecting this view, if I understand, is not because you think it is false, but because or insofar as it is not a good basis for another view, namely that ethics is not an area of inquiry; call this view #2. So you ultimately want to endorse view #2, but you just don’t think that view #1 is a good basis for it. However, if I understand, you think that view #1 is not a good basis for view #2 mainly because you think view #1 is somehow mistaken, or premature, or not yet plausible. And if so, your meta-ethical discussion seems to leave little room for view #1. – Or this is my worry.
I’ve been focusing on view #1, and I’ve been interested in the implications of your discussion to this view. That is, I was not concerned with the relations between it and view #2. I did not make any claim about view #2. I’m not sure if view #1 is a good basis for view #2, although I do suspect they are related somehow. My hunch, for what it’s worth, is that the order of dependency is the reverse: that if at all, view #1 would require, #2. Or it might be possible that they only just naturally go together. But I’m not sure about that either; there are different kinds of dependency. Anyway, even if view #1 requires view #2, that obviously does not mean that view #1 is necessary for view #2. So I think I’m with you if you want to reject view #1 as a necessary basis for view #2. But the thing is that you seem to be doing more: you are rejecting view #1 on what seem to be independent grounds: You seem to be rejecting view #1 because you think it is premature: for you, if I understand, it is primarily in *this* way that it is mistaken (it suffers from prematureness), not because it lends no support to view #2. You write: “To say that anything could be moral is to invite counterexamples.” – This, to me, sounds like you take the view I’m describing to be a kind of generalization from examples: something that ‘remains to be seen.’ I’m merely suggesting another way of substantiating this view, namely as a commitment. So you are not rejecting view #1 as false, that’s true. But you do seem to write as if it is not very credible. And I think you do this because you think of the view as something that requires a certain sort of substantiation: a proof that would make the generalization at least plausible or more convincing. That is, there seems to be an assumption in what you write that the view is based on some generalization. The result of thinking of view #1 in this way, however, is that a view goes out of sight (I think an important view). – Am I totally missing your view?
continued:
DeleteYou are saying I’m changing the subject, that I’m making the discussion about whether view #1 is right or important, and that you were talking about something else entirely. I agree. You were indeed talking about something else. If I understand, your main concern in the paper was to see why view #2 is right. But I don’t think it is *me* who is guilty for changing the topic. I think you did it first; already in the paper. It seems to me that already in your paper, your discussion shifts from view #2, to a discussion about view #1. – I’m not sure why, and I agree with what you say now, that this is probably not necessary and may even be distracting given your purposes in the paper.
As far as the truth of view #2 is concerned, for what its worth, I think Ed’s comment focused on the right issue: the comparison between ethics and logic, and what W is doing in calling both “transcendental.” Figuring this out is the highway to explaining in what sense ethics is not a subject matter.
And there might be another way to defend view #2: If there are important views (possibly view #1) that depend on view #2, then denying view #2 would make it impossible to see something important, namely these views. This is a less direct way of arguing for view #2, but if such views exist (and I think that they do), then explaining these views would be a way of defending view #2. This way of defending view #2 would be useful in that it will reveal part of the reality of moral thinking, and thus of the importance of defending view #2 for being realistic in ethics (and meta-ethics).
This became complicated. I hope I’m making sense.
It is complicated, and I was already feeling confused, but I'll do my best to respond coherently.
DeleteThe view you are opposing directly, if I understand, is the view I’ve been describing—i.e. that there is no limit to what can be ethically significant; call this view #1.
This isn't the view that I was opposing originally (and I think that at least most of what I've said recently has been in agreement with what I said then). In the paper I was mostly opposing the view that ethics is some area of language or of life that can be defined or limited in some way. Against that I wanted to say that this is wrong because all sorts of things can have ethical significance, and I was tempted to say that anything whatsoever can do so. But then I resisted the temptation to say this, because I didn't see any reason to believe that just any sentence or just any object, for instance, could have the kind of role in someone's life that Simone Weil's sentence or the book that Conrad describes might have. I also think that not just anything could be (intelligible as) a moral principle. So what I wanted to say, and still want to say, is that, although all sorts of things can turn out to have ethical significance in surprising ways, it need not be the case that absolutely anything could do so.
You said earlier: "You are right that the examples we mentioned don't show that just anything can be morally important. But the claim I’m making is somewhat different: It is that there is room for a view in which anything can—or perhaps even, should—be morally important." I have not denied that there is room for such a view. (Or, if I ever did, I don't mean to do so now.)
You go on, in your recent comments, to say:
Your main reason for rejecting this view, if I understand, is not because you think it is false, but because or insofar as it is not a good basis for another view, namely that ethics is not an area of inquiry
I don’t think this is right. I don’t reject the view that there is no limit to what can be ethically significant. I admit that I don’t understand this view very well, but I want to allow for it, without positively endorsing it myself. And I don’t endorse it partly because I don’t understand it very well, partly because it isn’t my view (perhaps if I understood it better it would be), and partly because I don’t yet see any reason to think of it as more than just a possible view that someone might have. The view that I have been directly opposing is the view that ethics is an area of inquiry. Denying that does not require accepting the view you have been describing. (I think we agree on this.)
What you are calling view 2, as I understand it, is the idea that ethics is not an area of inquiry. You’ve suggested that I reject view 1 because it is not a good basis for view 2. But that’s not what I meant to say (nor, I think, what I said). What I said was that view 2 does not imply view 1, and that therefore it would be a mistake to think that it does. So defenders of view 2 (such as me) should not endorse view 1 unless there is some other reason to do so. Because 2 is not itself sufficient reason to believe 1.
In the second part of your recent comment you say:
It seems to me that already in your paper, your discussion shifts from view #2, to a discussion about view #1. – I’m not sure why, and I agree with what you say now, that this is probably not necessary and may even be distracting given your purposes in the paper.
This is right. But I hope I’ve explained now why I shifted from talking about view 2 to talking about view 1. The point was to explain that they are different, and that 2 does not imply 1. Perhaps that was a confusing and unnecessary thing to have said.
I think I agree with what you say. (Even though it sounds as if I shouldn’t.)
DeleteThe view that is important to you—tell me if I’m wrong—is view #2. The discussion about view #1 is just an aside. My worry was that in your defense of view #2, you accidentally trampled over view #1, or failed to make enough room for it. But I agree that view #2 does not imply view #1, or that view #1 is a necessary route to defend view #2.
There still might be in a difference between us, which is related to your saying that you don’t fully understand view #1. I think—correct me if I’m wrong—that for you view #1 is not a live option. For me it is. And this may be just a difference of temperament. I keep remembering in this context Wittgenstein’s new sweater incident (described in his journals in Public and Private Occasions), in which buying a new sweater, something that would be for most people a non-moral issue, suddenly becomes one for Wittgenstein, and he is compelled to give it away. If I remember, in reflecting on what happened, Wittgenstein himself generalizes, and says something like “ANYTHING might now be commanded to me.” or something like that. – I’m probably misremembering, or mixing examples. – Anyway, if I’m right, then it seems to me Wittgenstein had something like view #1, or at least was attracted to it. – And it is possible that I’m saying that because I want to believe I’m like Wittgenstein, that is out of pridefulness.
The reason why this might be important is this: Even if we agree about view #2, we might understand it differently. And if so, the agreement might only be apparent. – I’m not sure it is. On my way of understanding view #2, it is closely related to view #1. I don’t think that it entails view #1, but the way I understand view #2, it would be natural, almost inevitable, for most of us—humans—to move from view #2 (understood the way I do) to view #1. One alternative, would be to move to a view that says that ethics is nowhere—a radical (Humean?) moral skepticism. But for most, view #1 would be more natural to move to. View #2, the way I understand it, is not a cold-intellectual view. It is already a view about the importance of things. It is saying: “This moral sensibility you have in yourself, this readiness you have in you to bring your life into moral relation with things, is open ended. It is as pervasive as logic; and it is so because like logic ethics is part of the life-force of things, transcendental to the very existence of things. Just as words stop being words (stop existing as words) once logic is taken away from them, so does your daughter stops being your daughter without ethics, and becomes just one more human, or even worse, just an organism.” – It is then not a long distance to view #1.
I’m not sure how you understand view #2, but I think your understanding is different—am I wrong? In any case, my sense that you are not leaving room for view #1 perhaps comes from a sense that your understanding of view #2 is different than mine.
The view that is important to you—tell me if I’m wrong—is view #2. The discussion about view #1 is just an aside.
DeleteCorrect.
View #1 is not really a live option for me because I still don't understand what it is. Perhaps I agree with it without realizing that I do. (The connection with logic makes me think that this might be the case, because there's a sense in which logic applies to everything (x could be any object, p any proposition) and a sense in which not everything is about logic. A talk on logic should be about inference, or something related to it, not on what you want to have for lunch, say. Lunch could easily figure in an example or two, but the choice of this example would be arbitrary.)
On Wittgenstein's sweater: as I remember it he doesn't want to part with the sweater (it's new and he likes it) but he feels that he ought to give it away. The feeling seems to be vaguely anti-attachment or anti-materialistic or anti-vanity, but he experiences it as a more-or-less arbitrary demand of conscience. And because of this arbitrariness it seems that anything could be demanded of him, including that he give up or destroy his work. And he really does not want to do that.
So there is a sense here, it seems to me, that just anything can have, or acquire, ethical significance. But there is also a sense that this is only the case if one happens to become attached to the thing in question. And so, I tend to think, the real issue here is attachment (i.e., not some arbitrary phenomenon), not whatever arbitrary thing one happens to be attached to.
(continued)
DeleteThere is a kind of Abraham and Isaac (and maybe Kierkegaard) aspect to this, I think. God might demand anything of you, which is frightening. And from a certain point of view, it is important that this might be absolutely anything. It would be impious and a gross misunderstanding of God to think that one could draw some kind of limit to what God could or might demand. Wittgenstein, or Wittgenstein in some moods, seems to think or feel like this, albeit perhaps without explicit mention of God.
On the other hand, what if God (or one's conscience or whatever) seemed to demand something evil or just absurd? In advance a pious person (conceived of as described above) would be prepared to obey any demand, without question. But once an evil or nutty demand seems to have been made, one surely might question the reasonableness of obedience. I think we get this kind of attitude too in Wittgenstein (although one might take it to be simple weakness of will on his part, or impiety, rather than reasonableness).
Personally, I think I can understand the first, pious attitude, but I cannot maintain it. I rush from it, into thinking of seemingly unintelligible demands and how I could not take them seriously as moral demands. Think, say, of Anscombe's example of putting all, and only, your green books on the roof. Or a man I read about once who removed part of the workings of the cistern in a public toilet because "God told him to do it." This behavior is insane and I cannot see it as either moral or as part of a moral code that I happen not to share.
If I were cataloging ethical views or possible ethical views, I would want to make room for the kind of view that says anything could have, or come to have, ethical significance. But if I start trying to think of examples (perhaps it's a mistake to do that?) then I start to think in terms of God's commandments or attachment or something recognizably ethical in the way that these things are, not just any and all phenomena. And then, further, I find that I can make sense of the idea that God might command certain things, or that a person might be attached to certain things, but not that he would command certain others, or that someone might be attached to just anything whatsoever. Or, at least, I want some kind of story to explain why God would command x or a person might be attached to y. And the need for this explanatory story (God commanded x as a test of someone's faith, the prisoner was attached to the pin because it was the only object in the cell) makes it seem as though not just anything can have significance in this way. That is, it could be anything, but whatever it is must, so to speak, come with an explanation attached.
You seem to be shifting the discussion to view #1. Is view #2 part of the discussion for you still? You did not directly answer my question about how you understand view #2. Did you indirectly answer it? If so, I think I missed it. – I want to keep view #2 in the discussion.
DeleteYou write: “[…] if God (or one's conscience or whatever) seemed to demand something evil or just absurd? In advance a pious person (conceived of as described above) would be prepared to obey any demand, without question. But once an evil or nutty demand seems to have been made, one surely might question the reasonableness of obedience. I think we get this kind of attitude too in Wittgenstein (although one might take it to be simple weakness of will on his part, or impiety, rather than reasonableness).” You also say: “I want some kind of story to explain why God would command x […]” – Where do you find this in Wittgenstein? – I agree that this is a critical point. On the Euthyphro dilemma, Wittgenstein seemed to be on the side of those who thought that what God commands is good, rather than on the side that says God wants what is good, because it’s good. You seem to be saying that he sometimes said something different. Is this how to understand what you are saying?
You say: “Personally, I think I can understand the first, pious attitude, but I cannot maintain it.” – There is a sense in which one would need to be a saint to be able to maintain this pious attitude—for instance, not to care at all about money or reputation. So your not being able to maintain it is probably quite common. It doesn’t count against the attitude. And there is also a sense in which we are not able to maintain it *by definition*, because it goes together with this pious attitude that it would require divine grace for us to maintain it. And thus, it is never really “we” who maintain it; it is maintained, if at all, by God. – You write as if you expect to be able to maintain it. You demand reasonableness. Part of what I’m saying is that such expectation would defeat the purpose; an expectation like that, I think, would not fully allow us to see the view.
I want to go back to view #2. I think you are right that view #1 is not necessary for view #2. I said it was not a long distance from view #2 to #1, but I don’t think view #1 is the only way to go (even if it was Wittgenstein’s). View #1 takes view #2 in a religious-Platonist direction. There are also Aristotelian ways to go.
I didn't say anything more about how I understand view #2, no. I'm not sure how much more I have to say, at least for now.
DeleteOn what Wittgenstein said about God's demands, what I had in mind was the sweater story that I think neither of us can remember perfectly. As I remember it, he feels required to give up his sweater but also feels unable or unwilling to accept this requirement (or at least feels that he might rebel if required to give up his work). As I said, this could be taken as a confession of failure to do willingly what is right. But it could also be regarded as a rejection of the idea that obeying the demand would be the right thing to do. I would have to check the text, and it might be ambiguous, but this is what I was talking about.
your not being able to maintain it is probably quite common. It doesn’t count against the attitude
Correct. I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
You write as if you expect to be able to maintain it. You demand reasonableness.
I was just saying that I can't, or even just don't, maintain it. I don't have an explanation of why that is. Perhaps it's because I'm so thoroughly reasonable, and perhaps that's a bad thing. It isn't because, demanding reasonableness, I reject it as silly.
The sweater incident is on pp. 185-93 of the Public and Private Occasions. If you can read it as a rejection of the idea that obeying the demand would be the right thing to do, I want to hear it. He ultimately talks about surrendering, and he views the fight here as only a fight against himself. I want to say that such a demand—i.e. to give the sweater away—would not have presented itself to a reasonable mind, except perhaps upon conversion.
DeleteSometimes it seems to me that if there is one place in which I think you and me are different with regard to Wittgenstein-on-ethics is that it seems to me you want to read him as reasonable, and I as anything but.
But the more I think of it, I think you were right to say that there is a diversion here: not exactly because we are talking about view #1, but because I was assuming a certain reading of this view. I think there can be “reasonable” (Aristotelian) readings of view #2, but also of view #1, and I now want to admit that I’ve been wrongly assuming there can’t (probably because I’m so attracted personally to the “unreasonable” reading).
So I apologize for confusing the discussion. I wish I could go back and re-introduce view #1 in its reasonable guise, and start the discussion again. (That is, I am still not easy with what you say in that paper, even if we don’t understand view #1 as the kind of “unreasonable” view I assumed it was.) Too late for that. Thanks for being patient with me.
It seems likely that some form of this discussion will happen again some time. Especially if I do start going through the Lecture on Ethics. But I don't know when that will be.
DeleteDuncan writes: The view that I have been directly opposing is the view that ethics is an area of inquiry.
ReplyDeleteI see that point but not why it would matter. Ethics is surely an area of inquiry because there are an abundance of thinkers who have inquired about it, particularly in philosophical terms. So whether we ratify the value of their efforts or not, they are still at it . . . we are still at it.
Ethical judgments are for everyone, inquirer into Ethics or not, of course, but "Ethics," insofar as what we mean by that term is something like 'what is the basis for the judgments we make about what to do when we find ourselves making such judgments?' certainly seems to be a legitimate area of study from a psychological, sociological and philosophical perspective.
But are any of these Ethics in the sense Duncan or Reshef have in mind?
Psychologists presumably study how we come to such judgments as creatures with a psychology (a mental life that includes having awareness of others and ourselves) and sociologists, perhaps, mainly concern themselves with how human creatures, living in groups, make distinctions about their behaviors in order to relate with others in their groups. But what do philosophers do in this arena?
As Duncan noted elsewhere, nowadays we recognize three categories or branches of ethical concern in philosophy:
1) Metaethics (the study of the cognitive significance of ethical judgments);
2) Normative ethics (what kinds of judgments shall we choose in order to be ethical -- recognize ourselves as such); and
3) Applied ethics (what are the right judgments to make of an ethical type in particular cases?).
Are none of these genuine areas of inquiry? That hardly seems right to me. And certainly philosophers have concerned themselves with them for centuries. Just some monumental mistake? Wittgenstein might have affirmed that view. He certainly seemed to think there isn't much to be said about the why's of ethics (in both periods of his career) but can that be right? Must we accept the ultimate subjectivity of ethics, if not to each individual then to each group of individuals? Isn't this where the philosopher enters the picture?
I'm not sure how we can suppose that ethics is not an area of inquiry, given the above. In fact, ethics seems to be several areas which we do actively pursue as human beings -- and these areas are not mutually exclusive.
I think you're emphasizing the inquiry part rather than the area part of 'area of inquiry'. I should really go back and look again at what Sabina Lovibond says, but I'm in the process of packing up my office which a) takes time, and b) makes my books hard to get at. That said, here's a rough stab at an explanation.
DeleteBotany is about plants, psychology is about thought and behavior, zoology is about animals, and so on. If no plants are involved, then whatever you're studying is not botany. Botany is an area of inquiry not only in the sense that it is something that people think and write about but also in the sense that it is about certain types of things but not others. Someone might think that ethics is like this too. But what is its domain? It might seem to be the same as that of psychology, but then (as well as the problem of how to distinguish ethics from psychology) we'd have the problem of what to do with claims that works of art, animals and other natural phenomena (can) have moral value. They can be, in a (familiar but not necessarily literal) sense, priceless.
Of course one can simply deny that such value exists. You could be a utilitarian, e.g., and say that only happiness (directly or intrinsically) and what produces happiness (indirectly or extrinsically) has positive value. But this is to take a particular, debatable stance. And the idea was not to take a stance within ethics but to define what ethics is, what area it covers.
My suggestion was that there is no area such that we can say this belongs to ethics but not that. And then various questions arise, including: a) Is everything then part of ethics, or relevant to ethics? and b) If so, does that make ethics nothing in particular and, hence, really nothing at all?
Thanks for responding Duncan:
Delete. . . what is [ethics'] domain? It might seem to be the same as that of psychology, but then (as well as the problem of how to distinguish ethics from psychology) we'd have the problem of what to do with claims that works of art, animals and other natural phenomena (can) have moral value.
I'd have to say that only actions have moral value. Of course actions are related to what they are intended to do so intentional action is what is relevant, not just events or mindless behaviors. And, more, actions are aspects of what we are, who we are, because intentions are not discrete things but instances of our thoughts, part of the flow of our mental lives, who we are. So actions are morally evaluable not as discrete phenomena but insofar as they are manifestations of the persons performing them.
The things our actions are directed at may have value to us in other ways. A pot of gold and a pot of soup each commend themselves to us in different ways, for what they can bring to our table, but what we do to secure them when we want or feel a need for them is what is morally relevant, not the soup or the gold or the pot containing them.
Well can't a book have moral value for us, say the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita or maybe the Lotus Sutra? I would have to say no though they may have moral relevance (because they contain expressions of ideas which matter to us in a moral way -- as a way of deciding between different possible actions). But there is a distinction to be made between possessing moral relevance and moral value.
I agree with your assessment to this extent though: Many things in our world have moral relevance while many do not. And this can change depending on how we see things. But, at least as I see it now, only actions, understood as intentional agential behavior, can have so-called moral value.
So maybe the question can be recast to one about relevance to valuational determinations of the moral sort rather than to whether they have value in a moral sense themselves?
I should add one more thing. I don't want to say that all actions have moral value or actions can only have moral value. I think that actions, like anything else we can objectify (distinguish in a discrete manner), can be valued in more than one way, e.g., instrumentally or aesthetically. But only actions, understood as aspects of persons (agential beings possessing a mental life), can be morally evaluable. As to what criteria any action must have to warrant ascription of moral value to it is, I would say, a different question -- one which philosophy strikes me as especially suited to address.
ReplyDeleteAnother thought: What about institutions? Can they have moral value? Might we want to say the institution of marriage is correct because it has moral value? Well then, what does the institution (that or any other) consist of but a set of practices, of acting in certain ways rather than others.
ReplyDeleteSo having such an institution as marriage might be deemed moral if we compare it to a society in which men and women never form long term bonds around the mating process (to enhance the rearing of our young) or, perhaps, compared with a society like the one Islamic State gave us where women captives were forced into slavery rather than marriage in many cases -- or where the institution of marriage was itself made into a form of slavery. But then isn't all of this about practices, too, and not some abstract notion of marriage vs., say, sexual slavery?
What about the institution of the Church? Or of so-called institutional religion itself? Might these not be accounted moral vs., say, a practice of devil worshiping or of simply disregarding the things religion takes into account (like the worth of our fellow human beings)? But again, is this not about practices, actions, too, rather than some abstract object?
I think we can make a case that moral ascriptions are only relevant to actions of a certain type in the world (not, say, to things like the seizure of a small fish by a larger one in the course of its having a meal). Thus, even if we want to say that some institutions are more moral than others, what we are really saying is that some actions (practices if seen as dispositions to act in certain ways) are morally assessable and some aren't and that the conceptual frameworks within which they are taken, the institutions which taking them exemplifies, are at most, morally relevant, too. But the actions that constitute them can be either moral or not.
I'd argue that any ascription of ethical (or moral) worth to anything other than our actions can make no sense, that it cannot even be intelligible.
I'd argue that any ascription of ethical (or moral) worth to anything other than our actions can make no sense, that it cannot even be intelligible.
DeleteHere we see how ethics and meta-ethics so easily bleed into one another. What some would consider part of their ethical view, you call nonsense. Which brings out some of the difficulty of trying to do meta-ethics neutrally.
Yes, they bleed! I actually don't see how we can look at ethics from a philosophical perspective without running into metaethical questions. After all, we all do ethics everyday in our lives. You don't have to be a philosopher for that.
DeleteBut metaethics, as in why should we care about what's right or wrong or care about how can we know what is and what isn't, seems to me to be clearly a philosophical concern, at least where the answer is not something like "well God tells us to" or "this or that book prescribes it" and so forth. But finding out why we should care does seem to include why we sometimes think such answers (that God or this book prescribes it) are answers.
Anyway, I can't see how one could say anything ethical about a book or an institution anymore than we can say something ethical about a rock or a tree. What we can say is that such things can have ethical relevance.
A rock routinely used by a primitive tribe to smash in the skulls of sacrificial victims might legitimately become a source of revulsion to those who find its purpose and history revolting. But that doesn't mean the rock is, itself, ethically assessable. How could it be? What would we say of it? That it's a bad rock (and shouldn't allow anyone to use it for that purpose)? How could we hold a rock to account? Or a book or an institution? Could the institution of marriage be deemed a bad institution aside from how it is used for? (Well we might want to say that it has bad consequences for some of its participants and should be abolished for that reason, but it isn't that that is morally bad here but rather that doing the things marriage involves would count as that for some people with a certain point of view.)
From what you've written above, Duncan, I'm guessing that we must have different conceptions of the ethical and that this must be the source of our inability to find common ground on this.
I take it that you don't see (or grant) the distinction I made above, that there is a difference between being morally (or ethically) assessable and being morally (or ethically) relevant. The rock is relevant to the question of what it's used for while what it's used for is assessable in an ethical way. Moral assessability seems to me to have no traction unless it is applied to thinking individuals capable of making decisions of a certain type.
Cognitive capacity matters in moral assessment, not just re: rocks but also re: people.
I take it that you don't see (or grant) [...] that there is a difference between being morally (or ethically) assessable and being morally (or ethically) relevant.
DeleteI don't know. For one thing, I think you are bringing up new issues and questions that I just haven't thought much about, at least not recently. That's OK, but I might not have anything interesting to say in response.
It does sound silly to talk about a good or bad rock (in an ethical sense), but context could make a difference. I can imagine someone calling the rock you describe evil, and not wanting to concede that they simply meant that it had been used to do evil things. And I think a book, for instance, might be thought of as good if it is the product of hard and careful work. We can't assess the actions of a rock or a book because they don't perform actions. And it is possible to insist that ethics is all about actions. But it is also possible to deny this, and to say there is more to ethics than that.
I can imagine someone calling the rock you describe evil, and not wanting to concede that they simply meant that it had been used to do evil things.
DeleteYes but can that not just be a confusion? In a case like the rock used for repugnant purposes, aren't we just confusing our feelings of revulsion with the rock's nature as an inanimate thing?
Our repugnance at the thought of the sacrificial rock seems to be part of our ethical thought but, as Wittgenstein pointed out, even the most heinous crime will be ethically neutral without an observer. But valuing, including ethical evaluation, seems to require more than just feeling. It requires the kind of reasoning capacity that comes with language use.
We can't assess the actions of a rock or a book because they don't perform actions. And it is possible to insist that ethics is all about actions. But it is also possible to deny this, and to say there is more to ethics than that.
DeleteYes, but does saying it make it so? Can't we speak in a mistaken way?
If we want to find a domain of the ethical, where else can we look but to actions since, in the end, it is the actions of persons (creatures like us) that all our moral judgments seem to come down to? I would argue that the notion of the ethical or the moral is not coextensive with valuational thought per se, that we value in many registers which are not interchangeable even if, as you note, sometimes things bleed into one another.
The rock's value will depend on what it is to the person who picks it up. An interesting specimen? A rare gem? A record of ancient tool use? A clue to locating a valuable vein of ore? Evidence of horrific crimes? None of this will be found in the rock per se but in the context in which it is taken up, what it points its bearer to which depends on what its bearer is seeking. Nothing in the rock has value itself.
One can think of ethics as reflecting a kind of aesthetic judgment in which case artifacts as well as human behavior can seem ethically assessable. But if the one distinguishing feature of the ethical is its applicability to human behavior, then artifacts can never be judged ethically, independent of that behavior, in which case it is the behavior we are concerning ourselves with, not the artifacts. But perhaps there is no way to argue for this. Maybe we just come at this with very different notions.
. . . . a book. . . might be thought of as good if it is the product of hard and careful work.
DeleteDoing one's best is surely an ethical concept. But then it isn't the book but the writing of it that deserves the ethical valuation: the writer, not the paper and ink.
An aesthetic valuation of the book may also be in order. It may be beautifully illustrated or hand crafted by an artisan or well laid out by the graphics designer. Its content may be cogent, concise, eloquent, compelling. But all of these are valuations appropriate to books not writers. They are aesthetic judgments not moral ones.
We must have very different takes on moral valuation here since you seem to want to say that the moral is like the aesthetic, i.e., encountering it inspires in us some feeling of approval that has a moral tone or dimension.
Certainly saying something does not make it so, but calling something nonsense or confused doesn't make it nonsense or confused either. Of course, we are free to reject as nonsense whatever we like, but doing so is often making a value judgment, not simply stating a fact. (Although, of course, we are free to insist that this is precisely what we are doing. And then denying that will not be a neutral bit of meta-ethics either.)
DeleteI don't want to say that the moral inspires in us some feeling of approval that has a moral tone or dimension. Sorry if I gave that impression.
One of the things I was trying to get at with the example of the book is something like the idea that a child's life has value (partly) because of the investment of time and emotion that the parents have put in, or the idea that features of the natural world have value because of the years of evolution or other change it has taken to produce them, or the idea about the cake in MacArthur Park that "I don't think that I can take it, 'cos it took so long to bake it." The idea is that these things have moral value because of what went into making them. It isn't aesthetic value, and it has nothing to do with producing feelings. And the value is in the objects themselves, not only in the acts that produced them. It's a common kind of view, and one that I want to allow for.
But explaining my view further, which is clearly necessary (and this is my fault), will take a lot of work that I'm afraid I just don't have time to do right now.
". . . explaining my view further, which is clearly necessary (and this is my fault), will take a lot of work that I'm afraid I just don't have time to do right now."
DeleteThanks. I understand. I have been trying for a long time to get a clear fix on your take. This helps somewhat. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that, while not equating the moral with the aesthetic, you are, at least, analogizing them -- that the moral is like the aesthetic but different. Perhaps they differ in their targets?
But you clearly say you don't want to limit ethical judgments to actions (or persons acting with certain capacities) and this I find hard to understand. You want to ascribe some sort of moral valuation to inanimate things and, perhaps, to situations, states of affairs, institutions, etc. I don't really see how you can though, since, to the extent any of these things warrant a moral valuation from us, it all seems to me to boil down to intentional action. The rock we condemn as morally reprehensible isn't condemned for anything about it but for the use it's been put to. And that has to do with actions not mass, weight, texture, shape, color, etc. Actions are things people do.
Perhaps I'm just not seeing it but I cannot understand how an approach which grants ethical valuation to the rock in the case described can work. It doesn't seem to me to be how we use words like ethical, moral, etc. It's possible you and I use those words differently though that, in itself, cannot be a warrant for any particular use. As speakers of a shared language we're constrained not just by what we want to do with those terms but by what others do with them. Perhaps when it comes to this sort of stuff it's all in the eye of the beholder, the thoughts of the thinker. But then that seems to leave no room for identifying confusions and instances of language taking a holiday!
So does a child's life have value? Well I think we would both say yes but is where are we going to find the moral element? Certain notions about things, e.g., life or the lives of innocents or just very young innocents? To the Nazi killing some children their lives seem to have no value though to their parents and themselves they do. Why should we expect the Nazi to share their perspective instead of the one they have? If moral or ethical talk is about anything, it must be about guiding us in what we do, even guiding the Nazi about to shoot a child.
Where is this thing, this value, we want to tell the Nazi is there? What does it consist of?Don't we first have to ask what does it mean for anything to have value at all? Is value intrinsic in things or in our concepts of them or is it in us (a projection)?
Doesn't Wittgenstein make the point in the Tractatus that nothing in the world has value in itself, that, if it is anywhere, value lies outside the world?
I think that an account of the ethical has to start with an account of valuing itself, what it is in our conceptual world, how it occurs, what it implies for us and what forms does it take? And, if it takes distinct forms (say the ethical, the aesthetic, the prudential, the truthful?), how do they relate to each other? All the same at bottom or are some more basic than the others? The issues that need clarifying include:
1) the intrinsic vs. extrinsic dichotomy
2) the role of valuation in our conceptually conditioned world
3) the locus of value as a predicate ascribed to things
4) the kinds of things there are and whether they are valued in different ways or for different things based on their different natures?
Anyway, thanks for entertaining these questions, Duncan. You and I do seem to have a very different take on this. I don't know why I've been unable to bring you round (or why your view seems so alien to me) but perhaps that's just how philosophy works.
Oops, a small correction I have to make to the above. What I wrote should have read:
Delete"So does a child's life have value? Well I think we would both say yes but where are we going to find the moral element? Certain notions about things, e.g., life in general or the lives of innocents or just of very young innocents? To the Nazi killing some children their lives seem to have no value though to their parents and themselves they do. Why should we expect the Nazi to share their perspective instead of the one he has in common with other Nazis? If moral or ethical talk is about anything, it must be about guiding us in what we do, even guiding the Nazi about to shoot a child."
Anyway, thanks again Duncan, for the feedback and the conversation. As you surely know by now, the philosophical question that most engages me is the one to do with moral judgment (how we do it and why and what is it that we think counts as morally right to do).
Your question as to whether ethics is a subject caught my attention for how could it not be if we are sometimes concerned to understand what we mean when we make moral claims and what their basis can be (and whether it is a sound basis or not)? Indeed, I don't see how ethics could not be a subject ripe for philosophical exploration (as it has been since the inception of what we know as "philosophy" from the time of the ancient Greeks) given these sorts of reasonable questions we can ask.
But a view like the one I take you to be expounding continues to confound me. If ethics is something we can and do wonder about, as it seems to be, then it's fair game to ask whether or not ethical goodness is available to us by inspection of things in the world or if it represents some other sort of behavioral/cognitive phenomenon? If it is not the former then it must be the latter but then what can we say about that?
And that makes ethics a subject for philosophy, does it not?
A Taste Masking is very good thing :)
ReplyDelete