"Moral Concepts, 'Natural Facts' and Naturalism"

The second paper in Ethics in the Wake of Wittgenstein is Edward Harcourt's "Moral Concepts, 'Natural Facts' and Naturalism: Outline of a Wittgensteinian Moral Philosophy." Harcourt aims to sketch the outlines of "an investigation of the general facts of nature that underlie our possession of distinctively moral concepts" (p. 47). Before he gets going with the sketch he brings up the question whether there are any distinctively moral concepts.

In addressing this question he first describes a possible misreading of Anscombe and then points out that it is a misreading. (I'm not sure whether this is meant simply to head off a conceivable misunderstanding or whether he has some actual misreading in mind.) He then moves on to point out that "Long stretches of ordinary speech can be ethically inflected [...] without containing any specialized vocabulary" (p. 50). To illustrate the point in connection with the distinctively moral concept of kindness he gives this nice example:

"I got on the bus, realized I'd left my bus pass at home, but she paid my fare--and I'd never set eyes on her before!" (p. 50)

Harcourt accepts what he calls the "no-demarcation claim," expressed in Stephen Mulhall's words as the view that we cannot "demarcate the legitimate subject-matter of moral philosophy by identifying certain obviously moral concepts or words, and examining the ways in which they are used" (quoted on p. 50). But, despite accepting both the no-demarcation claim and the fact that we can talk about ethics without needing a special moral vocabulary, Harcourt nevertheless asserts that there are such things as distinctively moral concepts. This is because, he says, "the subject matter of moral philosophy [includes] both distinctive concepts or words and other concepts or words" (p. 51).

On p. 57 Harcourt explains the threefold theoretical point of his discussion of the bus-pass story:

1. it shows that Cora Diamond is right that we can imagine people whose moral teaching, appraisal, etc. consist of story-telling, without special moral words such as 'kindness' or 'virtue' 
2. we are not such people and do have a distinctive moral vocabulary 
3. the bus-pass episode involves a particular pattern of behavior, one that we pick out with the word 'kindness', a pattern that could occur in other episodes, which allows us to tell stories like this and say, e.g., "do likewise"

In the next, and last, three pages of the paper, Harcourt discusses some other examples. For instance, people deciding what to do might consider various options. They might prefer certain options to others because they are safer, easier, more fun, and so on. And then they might, if they haven't done so already, come up with words for safety, ease, fun, etc. And these can be understood as goods.

Thus--as with the bus-pass case, "kind", and "virtue"--we again tell a story that relates three increasing levels of sophistication in concept-use, containing, progressively "The Trojans would be furious", [one of the reasons imagined for choosing to steal Trojans' armor] the latter plus "easier" (etc.), and both the latter plus "better". The method exemplifies the Wittgensteinian method of relating problematic moral concepts to underlying facts--with the concepts getting progressively less puzzling as one relates the concept to progressively more basic concepts and (if we really try hard) to preconceptual activities. (p. 60)

This is interesting, but I have a few questions:

• Are the concepts associated with the words 'virtue' and 'better' really more puzzling than those associated with 'kind' and 'easier'? And are the concepts associated with the buss-pass case and the stealing-from-the-Trojans case really less puzzling than those associated with the words 'kind' and 'easier'? It seems to me that what is puzzling, or more puzzling than something else, depends on the person doing the thinking (the person getting puzzled) and on how their thinking goes.
• Is degree of puzzlingness inherent in concepts, so that the more abstract are more puzzling than the more concrete? Harcourt seems to assume that this is so, but the assumption seems unjustified.
• Do these types of human behavior count as the kind of very general facts of nature that Wittgenstein refers to?
• However Wittgensteinian the proposed kind of philosophy is, would it do any good? Imagine I am puzzled about the nature of virtue. Then someone tells me that it is a general term for things like kindness and courage. This is true, but will it help me? And if I am puzzled about the nature of kindness, will it help if someone tells me the bus-pass story and then says that kindness is that kind of behavior? Wittgenstein does sometimes talk as if he is advocating doing this loser-in-a-dialogue-with-Socrates kind of thing, but it isn't much like what you get in Wittgenstein's writing. And it seems very unlikely to help anyone with their puzzlement. Perhaps more, and more complicated, examples would make Harcourt's suggestion more persuasive. 
• Harcourt comes close to saying that there is a continuity from the natural (as in human nature) and the non-moral to the moral, with moral concepts more abstract than the ideas involved in more basic reasoning. But along with very easily understandable concerns about nearness, ease, fun, and safety he includes (p. 59) awfulness, as in let's do this because it will be so awful. That--the attraction to terrible things--is part of human nature, but it seems like a strikingly different kind of feature than our natural concern with safety and comfort. Which suggests that maybe questions about such things as good and evil are not best thought of as merely more abstract, or more abstract in a particular direction, than questions about human nature. Doesn't it? Perhaps I've misunderstood what he's saying.

Here is part of what Wittgenstein says about very general facts of nature in Philosophical Investigations Part II, xii:

I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize – then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him.

At least here, Wittgenstein's reason for referring to very general facts of nature seems to be in order to explain or describe a way to help someone see that having different concepts would not necessarily mean failing to realize something that we realize. He also says that "our interest does not fall back upon [...] possible causes of the formation of concepts; we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history – since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes." This seems different from Harcourt's kind of concern, although his sketch, being only a sketch, makes it hard to be sure.

What might be a case of doing what Wittgenstein describes (in the passage quoted above) in moral philosophy? Perhaps we could do something with the idea of rights. Hume, for instance, apparently thinks that the idea of property rights only makes sense in conditions of relative scarcity (and widespread self-interest):

Why call this object MINE, when upon the seizing of it by another, I need but stretch out my hand to possess myself to what is equally valuable? Justice, in that case, being totally useless, would be an idle ceremonial, and could never possibly have place in the catalogue of virtues.

So, if Hume is right, we might think that anyone who believes the idea of individual property rights is not only useful (as Hume certainly believes it to be) but absolutely correct is mistaken, and might be helped by imagining the kind of situation that Hume describes. Perhaps Humean reflections would help us understand the nature of rights, although I see no reason to believe that properly Wittgensteinian moral philosophy would come as close to utilitarianism as Hume does. Seeing that there isn't only one set of moral concepts that people absolutely must have does not mean becoming a utilitarian or a relativist or anything else.

But back to Harcourt. His essay is interesting but perhaps not as Wittgensteinian as it might be (if what we are looking for is Wittgensteinian moral philosophy).