Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Anscombe's history of ethics

I'm reading Jimmy Doyle's book No Morality, No Self a bit more carefully now and he seems to see Anscombe's history of ethics as having roughly three stages: virtue theory (which is based on doing whatever it takes to have a good life--"egoistic eudaimonism"), a law conception of ethics (which basically means being Jewish or Catholic, and can be combined with virtue theory), and morality (which incoherently tries to have what a law conception of ethics has but without God). So really we have two choices: Aristotelian egoism and theism. Or three, if you include moral skepticism.

I read Anscombe a little differently. She does respect Aristotle, but she also calls the concept of "human 'flourishing'" doubtful, and explains why:
For it is a bit much to swallow that a man in pain and hunger and poor and friendless is "flourishing," as Aristotle himself admitted. Further, someone might say that one at least needed to stay alive to "flourish."
Which suggests that the egoist-eudaimonist view is actually unacceptable (otherwise it would, for instance, be ethical/rational/a good idea to join the SS rather than be killed by them) unless a lot of philosophical work can be done to explain why not. Doyle takes up Anscombe's assertion that "It is clear that a good man is a just man" in order to counter this kind of thought. But I think we then move away from Aristotle. The good and unstrained (she calls the Stoic notion of flourishing "strained") options that Anscombe considers are either being Jewish or Christian (her preference, of course) or else what I have called the plain man's view, which Anscombe describes thus:
Another man, who does not follow the rather elaborate reasoning of the philosophers, simply says "I know it is in any case a disgraceful thing to say that one had better commit this unjust action."    
This is neither very Aristotelian nor very egoist.

Anscombe also rejects a number of other views along the way:

  1. "Butler exalts conscience, but appears ignorant that a man's conscience may tell him to do the vilest things."
  2. Hume: a sophist, defining words so as to get the results he wants
  3. Kant: his theory is absurd and useless
  4. Bentham and Mill: fatal failure to notice that pleasure is such a difficult concept. Mill's theory also lacks content, as does Kant's, because he doesn't stipulate how to describe actions or principles
  5. Protestantism: rejects the idea of Christ as a legislator to be obeyed
  6. Consequentialists after Mill: no good because they refuse to rule acts such as murder out of the question
  7. Following the norms of society: not likely to be any better than Butler's ethics
  8. Following one's own rules, or those of one's ancestors: Ditto. "If one is lucky it will lead to good." It might not, of course, but at least one might have some good, Socratic doubt about whether one is on the right path
  9. Following the laws of nature: unlikely to lead to feelings about harmony or balance, likely instead to result in something like a dog-eat-dog ethic
  10. Obeying some kind of universal or social contract: this would need to be worked out, would be unlikely to provide details (such as prohibiting murder), and lacks an explanation of how we come to be bound by a contract without realizing it  
  11. Following norms embodied in human virtues: possibly OK, but we are then back to Aristotle
The social contract view would be interesting to explore, but mostly Anscombe seems clearly to prefer either religious ethics or the ethics of the unphilosophical plain man, which perhaps we could call Wittgensteinian or ordinary language ethics.

Finally, just for further thought, here's some more of what she says about option #10:
Just possibly, it might be argued that the use of language which one makes in the ordinary conduct of life amounts in some sense to giving the signs of entering into various contracts. If anyone had this theory, we should want to see it worked out. I suspect that it would be largely formal...
This also might be called a kind of ordinary language ethics, although it sounds as though it would involve the development of quite a sophisticated theory. Which doesn't sound like ordinary ordinary language philosophy. I think some of Margaret Gilbert's work might be (very) roughly along these lines.

6 comments:

  1. Perhaps it's best to look to how ordinary folks make ethical judgments rather than to philosophers and theories. But then that is still a job for the philosopher, isn't it? In the end we're all ordinary.

    So how do we do it when we are just being ordinary people? Why do we look at some situations and say, oh no, that's not right, that shouldn't be done (or it should be)?

    Thinkers like Jesse Prinz want to take Hume's sentimentalism as the basic model, i.e., that ethics is all about sentiments (having them, cultivating them, deciding between them -- as in which to cultivate and which not). But then that still leaves the question of ethics (what's the right thing to do?) wide open. If we have sentiment X in situation Y, is it the right one and if not why not? Isn't that the question ethics must provide us with a means of answering?

    Prinz and others, like Simon Blackburn, want to construct an account that pivots on how we develop and manage our feelings in order to find room for rational choice there because moral or ethical judgment is finally a question of choice and that choice must be rational or else it cannot be moral. That is, it must be about more than acting on the feelings we have at any given moment. It must be about navigating amongst our feelings, choosing the right ones (as act motivators) and discarding the wrong ones.

    Thinkers like Michael Huemer seek to revive moral intuitionism, which G. E. Moore made popular for a time, but intuitions are intensely personal and if we have different ones we cannot expect to arrive at the same moral conclusions -- or to impose our intuitions on others and still take the decisions they are moved to make thereafter as rationally based.

    Aristotelian virtue ethics has merit but in the end it depends on our conception of the best sort of life and clearly that changes from age to age, person to person as Anscombe seemed to note. More, lauding some types of life as examples of human flourishing seems to be at odds with what humans actually need (is the religious ascetic, happy in his or her impoverished life, flourishing?).

    What then? Perhaps a turn to the spiritual really can make sense -- only without the baggage accompanying any particular tradition or dogma.

    If the moral is grounded in the spiritual, it matters what the latter term means -- and the extent to which we have the ability to dissociate it from any narrow, culturally determined moral point of view.

    It seems to me this and only this can be the real project of any philosophical effort with regard to ethics. Any moral philosopher who would make progress in developing an elucidatory account of ethics has to go back to basics and work with what he or she finds there and a spiritually directed account seems to me to have the best prospects for success.

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  2. If the moral is grounded in the spiritual, it matters what the latter term means

    Agreed

    Any moral philosopher who would make progress in developing an elucidatory account of ethics has to go back to basics and work with what he or she finds there

    This sounds right, but is this the only goal for philosophers working in ethics? I'm mostly interested in trying to make sense of life and in working out (not calculating) what to do or not do. I don't see that a (presumably general) account of ethics is necessary for either of these projects. Anscombe is concerned with something like a general account of ethics, but mostly because she wants to point out (what she sees as) the terrible mistakes of most of her contemporaries. And she doesn't seem to think, despite her concern, that it's actually possible to give a general account of ethics. Unless by that we mean something like the teachings of the Catholic Church.

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    Replies
    1. But is ethics about calculating? I would say that is what we do when figuring how to get some thing we're after. Will I get there by this road or that?

      Ethics, at least as I have come to see it (the practice, not the study of it), is about learning to be a certain way in relation to others in our world and recognizing that we have reasons to do so. It's not so much about calculation but about self development, altering the way we think about our selves and others.

      I don't see how we do that via consequentialism and there's no rational basis for embracing some rules formulated by others to get there if we don't already embrace them. The philosophical question is why do those rules look moral or ethical to us? Why do they appear to be the sort of stuff we think we ought to do?

      To me that's where philosophers come in. Not to lay out rules or theories but to explain why some rules have moral clout with us and others don't, i.e., to clarify the underlying thinking that enables us to see a moral dimension to our lives.

      Philosophers are no better than anyone else at ethics but they should be better at explaining its mechanisms. I think Anscombe saw the point of the first but I'm not sure she saw the possibility or value of the second.

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    2. I don't know. Explaining mechanisms sounds more like psychology to me.

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    3. Only if it's empirical, a matter of studying what we do by observation and data gathering. If it's conceptual, as in analyzing the way we think and speak about moral choices and judgments by looking at the language and uses we apply, I'd say no, in that case it's philosophical. Otherwise what's a philosopher to do?

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    4. Philosophy vs. psychology? The second studies "mechanisms" in terms of what and how people do what they do by collecting data about actual activities and formulating theories that have predictive value. X percent of people react in Y way in situations like Z so doing Z things can be expected to produce certain expected results regarding Y reactions. Or the human brain does a,b and c when confronted by situations like Z so manipulating the brain (by drugs or designed inputs) should get more of a, less of b, etc.

      Philosophy, on the other hand, looks at the concepts themselves, at what it means to speak and think about, or act in, a moral way. We don't survey populations to compile and analyze data about how different groups or types of people are prone to react to answer that sort of question. We ask why we believe we should think or act in certain ways when we do, and why we think we have good reason for those beliefs or not. Are their good reasons or are we fooling ourselves or others?

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