My intuition was correct that Jerry Fresia would understand what I was trying inadequately to express. Clearly his experience as an artist is different from mine as a philosopher but at some deeper level I think we are quite similar. There are a number of texts of course that achieve this integration and transcendence, and not at all surprisingly I find some of them in the Dialogues of Plato. But the single text that seems to me the most perfect expression of what I am trying to capture is the two and a half page preface to Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. That is a truly astonishing text, so inward, so intense, so perfectly clear and powerful, going on from image to image, metaphor to metaphor, unrelenting, without so much as the relief of an explanatory sub phrase. Kierkegaard must have been in a fugue state when he wrote it. It is I think pound for pound, word for word, the greatest piece of philosophical writing I have ever read.
As for Charles Mills’s observations about Kant, they do not
at all change my interpretation of the text but it goes without saying that
they have a powerful effect on my judgment of Kant as a human being. Kant was a
casual stone cold racist, there is no way around that fact. So in his graceful
manner was David Hume. Can we excuse them on the ground that they were writing
in the 18th century? Well, it is striking that that quite insignificant
contemporary thinker, James Beattie, who accidentally served as the vital
conduit of Hume’s critique of causal inference to Kant, was in fact not a
racist but rather quite liberated in his view of the illegitimacy of slavery.
As I have on various occasions observed, Karl Marx, the great
theorist of exploitation, was himself in a variety of ways an exploiter of
those around him.
I am glad I did not have the opportunity to meet any of
these great thinkers.
243 comments:
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In Scotland, during Hume’s own lifetime:
“In the 1760s the evils of the slave trade were began to dawn on radicals and reformers,
but in Scotland this realisation was brought forcibly home by the case, in 1764, of David Spens, a Grenadian slave. He belonged to Sir David Dalrymple of Methil in Fife, and had been brought to Scotland with his master. The day before he was to be shipped
back to Grenada and the slave plantation, a kirk minister baptised him, and he claimed
that this baptism conferred freedom on him. His case was heard in the Court of Session, and part of his lawyers’ fees were paid for by contributions from colliers and salters, who no doubt saw parallels between Spens’s plight and their own.” [Evelyn Lord , “Slavery in Scotland? Scottish colliers 1606-1799,” The Local Historian, (nov. 2007), pp. 233-242, at p. 240.]
The emanicpation of the Scottish coal miners had to wait a few more years.
Lovely. I was unaware of that case.
You raise the problem of Historical Presentism—shall we judge people of the past by the standards of their time or ours? Do we condemn Plato and Aristotle because they were slave owners? I say no. Should we condemn Heidegger because he was a Nazi? I say yes. What about Jefferson? I’m not sure. What about the other Founders who, like Plato and Aristotle, were slave owners? I say no…I think.
Am I inconsistent? I don’t feel as if I’m inconsistent, but I can’t articulate the standard that I use in making these judgments. What, after all, is the difference in this regard between Plato and Aristotle on the one hand and Heidegger on the other?
This problem of Presentism vs. Contextualism has been debated extensively by historians. Berrnard Bailyn, one of my favorite historians and a Contextualist, wrote that “it’s easier to judge retrospectively than to understand the past.” He also wrote that, “To explain contextually is, implicitly at least, to excuse.”
David, I thought the point was not that we might err in judging people of the past by present-day standards, which I'd readily admit is problematical, but that we might err in assuming that we know what these past standards were and how widely certain standards were accepted. That was, I took it to be, the point Prof. Wolff was making when he mentioned Thomas Beattie. And that was my point in bringing up the case of David Spens. "Past standards" are surely always debatable. Further, it seems more than likely to me that standards were just as widely argued over in the past as they are today.
Eric,
I read the Prof's post as describing Beattie as ahead of his time, and if he opposed slavery in Britain and its empire at that time, he certainly was. There were, of course, many people ahead of their time, but they were a minority. I think Hume's views on slavery were pretty much the views of most people in Britain at that time.
There were many ahead of their time in British North American colonies. In 1700 a judge, whose name escapes me, wrote what was the first anti-slavery epistle in the North American colonies. It made little impact, perhaps because, as a judge, he'd sent several women to their deaths in the Salem witch trials. James Otis, in 1764, in a pamphlet on the rights of the English colonies, wrote: "The colonists are by the law of nature freeborn, as indeed all men are, white or black." The Massachusetts colonial legislature, in the early 1770s, passed a measure prohibiting the slave trade in the colony, only to have the Royal Governor veto it. These were the pioneers, but the views of the broader society were very different. The Revolution changed that dramatically and, by the time it was over, slavery was a major issue and continued to be until the Civil War.
Those who opposed slavery in the 18th Century were admirable; they were also a distinct minority.
Maybe we should be a bit charitable with the sins of great minds from the past just as we generally are with the sexism and homophobia of our parents and grandparents.
Heidegger crossed the line, that's fairly sure, but otherwise, it seems that people like Hume and Marx were just men of their time in some of their ethical dealings.
We all expect, I imagine, that our grandchildren will be charitable with the sins we commit as products of the zeitgeist, with our lack of care for the environment and probably with our
lack of concern for animal rights, not to mention other issues which haven't even entered our consciousness yet.
When you addressed Eric, David, I think you may have meant me?
As to what Prof. Wolff intended by his introduction of Beattie, that’s for him to say. But (perhaps to repeat myself) when i introduced Spens I certainly intended to emphasise that some people living in the most miserable conditions in Scotland, unlike David Hume with all his learning, were not only opposed to slavery but were willing to give their mites for the cause. (I am, I’ll add, alluding to the biblical story of the widow’s mite, which strikes me as relevant. The good Samaritan also comes to mind.) Given Hume’s friendship with Adam Smith, it’s also not entirely beside the point to suggest that Smith’s observation, that “The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education,” etc. should perhaps be amended to at least leave open the possibility that education isn’t necessarily always for the better?
Anyway, it seems to me the whole matter of cultural standards in different times and places is interestingly problematical in several different ways. We’re likely aware of the blanket cliches directed at our predecessors. But as I understand it, careful scholars of those other times and places put a lot of time and effort into trying to figure out what the complex cultures of those times and places might actually have been like. I also find myself wondering just how much our claims respecting “past standards” are a reflection of the conflicts over standards of our own time and place. We surely also need to distinguish not only between the dominant and subordinate standards—in the Americas as well as in Scotland—but also query how the subordinate were kept subordinate?
It was not, of course, only societies that presented a complex mixture of standards. The same sort of complexity can be discerned in individuals. Speaking from memory, I recollect E.P. Thompson juxtaposing William Wilberforce’s opposition to slavery to his callous disregard for the way British workers were treated in late 18th and early 19th C Britain. And the great Liberal William Gladstone revealed a similar, if somewhat opposed, internal inconsistency:
“William Gladstone's views on slavery and the slave trade have received little attention from historians, although he spent much of his early years in parliament dealing with issues related to that subject. His stance on slavery echoed that of his father, who was one of the largest slave owners in the British West Indies, and on whom he was dependent for financial support. Gladstone opposed the slave trade but he wanted to improve the condition of the slaves before they were liberated. In 1833, he accepted emancipation because it was accompanied by a period of apprenticeship for the ex-slaves and by financial compensation for the planters. In the 1840s, his defence of the economic interests of the British planters was again evident in his opposition to the foreign slave trade and slave-grown sugar. By the 1850s, however, he believed that the best way to end the slave trade was by persuasion, rather than by force, and that conviction influenced his attitude to the American Civil War and to British colonial policy. As leader of the Liberal party, Gladstone, unlike many of his supporters, showed no enthusiasm for an anti-slavery crusade in Africa. His passionate commitment to liberty for oppressed peoples was seldom evident in his attitude to slavery.” (R. Quinault, Hist. J. 15 May 2009)
Given the recent discussion of Haiti in the NYT, that reference to “financial compensation for the planters” will likely strike a chord.
@james wilson as to your Smith quote ( “The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education,” etc. should perhaps be amended to at least leave open the possibility that education isn’t necessarily always for the better?":
To cut Smith some slack, one might observe that there are different sorts of education, one sort of which the miners were beneficiaries.
As an individual who has in past comments has taken the position of a moral realist, I have to dissent from much that has been written above. For anyone to claim that they have the right to “own” another human being; to given them orders to perform work for another, without compensation; to tell them where they can sleep, defecate, and eat; whom they can have sexual intercourse with, or whether they can even have sexual intercourse, is immoral, and I don’t care what the zeitgeist of the ambient culture is or how intelligent the person is; or what great philosophical, literary, or musical achievements they have provided society. To the extent that Plato or Aristotle owned slaves, and how common it was to own slaves, they were immoral. And no one should be judged regarding the worth based on their skin color; race; religion, or gender, regardless how common it is the society to do so. And those who engaged in such conduct and judgment should not be given a moral pass simply because the purportedly “could not know better.” When William Wilberforce agitated for legislation in Parliament to prohibit the slave trade, it is not as if he was the first person in history to realize the immorality of claiming the right to own other people, particularly based on a belief in racial inferiority. It was obvious to him as a moral truth, and should have been obvious to Plato and Aristotle as well. Once we realize this, we do not have to be concerned about by what criteria we can condemn Jefferson, but not Plato or Aristotle, without thereby being unfair to Jefferson.
James wilson
Indeed I did mean to reply to you and not Eric. Apologies to both of you.
I think that the "moral truth" argument is essentially the presentist argument. We see something today as a moral truth and make a judgment. But the question is whether we would have that same judgment had we been born a few centuries earlier, raised in a world where virtually all adults and authority figures in our lives did not hold what we now see as a moral truth, but held the opposite--in this situation, is it likely that we would hold the views we have today? For the vast majority of us, I don't think so.
David,
We have been through this before. It does not matter. The claim that one person has the right to own another person is morally wrong, period, regardless how many of your contemporaries believe it is perfectly OK. Lincoln said it best when he said, "Just as I would not be a slave, I would not be a slave owner." It is, in my humble opinion, not that complicated: Do not doe unto your neighbor that which you would not want your neighbor to do unto you.
s. wallerstein: not to mention other issues which haven't even entered our consciousness yet
s. wallerstein & Marc Susselman,
Can an act be immoral if someone is not aware that it is immoral?
Eric,
Yes, of course, unless the individual suffers from a cognitive deficit which prevent him from understanding the nature of his actions.
My grandfather a lot of opinions about women that today would be considered very sexist, but he had no idea that they were sexist, he had never given them any thought nor had the people he hung out with, his social circle. Yes, some feminist works existed during his day, but he was not an especially cultured person. He watched a lot of TV, read cheap novels and read the newspaper. I believe it's ridiculous to condemn him for his sexism.
s. wallerstein: Maybe we should be a bit charitable with the sins of great minds from the past just as we generally are with the sexism and homophobia of our parents and grandparents
David Palmeter: Do we condemn Plato and Aristotle because they were slave owners? I say no. Should we condemn Heidegger because he was a Nazi? I say yes. What about Jefferson? I’m not sure. What about the other Founders who, like Plato and Aristotle, were slave owners? I say no…I think.
...
I can’t articulate the standard that I use in making these judgments.
My gut sense is that a standard people routinely employ in these considerations is based on their response to the question "What would I have felt was the right thing to do if I were there?"
If/when you are asking yourself that question, whose point of view are you trying to get a sense of? The wealthy planter's? The pampered philosopher's? The Jew's, as he walks into the gas chamber? The enslaved African's, as her children are taken from her and sold away, never to be seen by her again?
Who is your ingroup?
Marc Susselman,
So it can be immoral for me to eat pork even if I do not believe that eating pork is immoral?
Eric,
That's silly. Who says eating pork is immoral? Just because it says so in Leviticus?
It would only be immoral if it would be immoral for the dead pig to eat you. I do not think it is immoral for a dead pig to eat you. It is not even feasible.
Well, s. wallserstin, I am not condemning your grandfather, I am only saying that his double standard based on gender was immoral. It was also immoral for my grandfather to have had the same double standard. No ne should be judged on aspects of their physiology over which they have no control, even if the could undergo a sex change if they wished.
Marc Susselman @8:12,
How do people know whether something is immoral? You say that eating pork is not necessarily immoral, but there are several hundred million people in the world who say it is immoral. (And several billion people have historically believed it to be immoral.)
I don't consider my grandfather to have been immoral because of his sexism (nor yours either).
He had no idea what sexism was because he had no real access to reading what feminist literature existed.
He lived what was considered to be a moral life according to how he had been brought up and to his social circle. He was a faithful husband, helped his daughter with her homework, obeyed the laws, paid his taxes, went to the synagogue and donated money to it, etc. Yes, he bought the biggest car he could, but he had no idea that big cars pollute because the idea of cars polluting was not part of what he could have been expected to know, just as he could not have been expected to know that homosexuality is not a mental disorder.
DDA, Yes, you're right. Smith did have at least a couple of views of education: an education fit for those destined by their social origins to have a large view of things and rule their society, and an education which would encourage lesser beings to accept their place (that at least is how I read W of N). He did, to be sure, have to contend with the sort of public education introduced by the Scottish Reformation in the mid-16th C designed to enable them to read the Bible. But the evidence from the parish records of births, marriages, and deaths is that even by the late 19th C many working class Scots could only sign with an "X" his/her mark. I think the miners who supported Spens were likely illiterate.
Marc,
I don’t see your opinion as “humble” or “short sided.” I see it as missing the point. It’s not simply that your contemporaries believed slavery is perfectly OK. I ask how can you be sure that you would hold a different view if you had lived in their time and place and were taught from infancy the values of that time and place? You might say that you would not have been any different and that you were wrong too. In that case, though, I don’t think you’re entitled to condemn the others for holding beliefs that you shared.
I don’t condemn Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Kant for the beliefs they had in their time. I would condemn them for holding those beliefs today.
Can an act be immoral if someone is not aware that it is immoral?
Probably not, IMO. It depends on what the correct ethical theory is. If it's (e.g.) a purely consequentialist theory, which has it that being moral is just a matter of producing the optimal outcome, irrespective of one's knowledge and intentions - or more generally, if the sole emphasis of the theory is the action itself, rather than some feature of the performer - then the answer is yes. It's hard for me to see how a yes-response could be justified otherwise. (But I'm not sure that anyone actually has embraced a theory of this sort. These would seem like rather extreme and eccentric theories.)
There apparently is such a thing as culpable ignorance, but still, my sense is that it can never be exemplified by cases of ignorance "pure and simple." I can only think of a culpably "ignorant" person as someone who (nevertheless) knowingly neglects to rectify their ignorance - i.e., because, as they must be aware "in some way" (dimly? un- or semi-consciously?), they would likely discover something disagreeable about themselves, their loved ones, their responsibilities... So it seems to me.
IMO, it would be an implausible theory that implied that we (or people normally) never in fact acted immorally, were never culpably ignorant, never chose wrongly despite our better knowledge. (Might be my Christian upbringing speaking here: "We're all sinners," etc. But it's also commonplace to observe that "nobody's perfect.") These are confusing issues, and I go back and forth on them sometimes, but I think this view generally recommends itself to common sense.
(And incidentally, re. the pork question, it would be an implausible ethical theory that implied there was nothing particularly wrong with the way our society deals with food animals.)
Eric,
The idea that eating pork is immoral is just plain silly. I don’t care how many Muslims and Jews believe otherwise. No dietary rules involve immoral behavior.
Only actions between human beings can be regarded as moral or immoral. And in this regard, the proscriptive version of the Golden Rule – do not do unto others that which you would not want to be done to you – is the preeminent moral principle. Discriminating against someone based on their skin color, race, religion, ethnicity, gender, when one would not want to be discriminated against based on one’s own skin color, race, religion, ethnicity or gender.
s. wallerstein,
Your grandfather, and my grandfather, were not immoral for just entertaining sexist views. Only if they acted on those sexist views would their actions be immoral, e.g., supporting the right of men to vote, but not women; not allowing his wife to work if she could do so without endangering the health or safety of their children; demanding that she bear children against her will. Deeds, not thoughts, are immoral
David,
With all due respect, your argument is fatuous. It would not matter whether if I lived in the ante-bellum South whether I would agree with my contemporaries that slavery is not immoral. It would have been immoral even if I thought it was perfectly OK to own slaves, and even if the ides that it was not moral never entered my head. The same is true if I lived in 150 A.D. Rome and thought it was not immoral to require that people fight to their death in order to entertain a crowd of Romans. It was immoral regardless whether I, and 500,000 Romans, thought it was not immoral, and even if I did not stand up with Sparticus and declared “I am Sparticus.” Why was it immoral? Because I would not have wanted to trade pales with the gladiators.
"trade places with the gladiators."
Marc Susselman,
You have gone on and on and on about moral truths being "objective" and "self-evident," just as a straight line's being the shortest distance between two points on a flat surface is self-evident. So how do you account for the hundreds of millions of people—Hindus, Christians, Jains, Muslims, et al—disagreeing with you about the morality of eating pork? Are they all irrational? Or are you irrational?
Marc Susselman: Deeds, not thoughts, are immoral
Not acting, in the face of injustice, is a kind of deed.
I have to say that I find the expressions of moral relativism on this blog rather disappointing. Is this the result of contemporary liberal educations, that nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so. The proscriptive version of the Golden Rule is not that complicated. Why do the commenters on this blog reject its legitimacy? Because it can not be deduced form a syllogism? Because David Hume said it was just a matter of taste and personal preferences? Is it infamy to say that David Hume was wrong? So, according the views expressed above, it would be perfectly acceptable for Vladimir Putin to say that 20,000,000 Russians say that my invasion of Ukraine, and my slaughter of thousands of Ukrainian civilians is not immoral, regardless what several million Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Frenchmen/women, British and Americans say. My people say its perfectly OK, and it is just a matter of personal opinion.
Eric,
You are conflating a proscriptive moral precept with a prescriptive moral precept. Proscriptive moral precepts apply to my own actions, without the intercession of a third party. Prescriptive moral precepts dictate how I am supposed to respond to the actions of a third party. If I own slaves, my conduct is immoral in accordance with a proscriptive moral precept that it is immoral to own other human beings. If I see another human being controlling another human being and enslaving her, and I turn away and do not intercede, yes, my turning away is an action, but is it not necessarily an immoral action. It depends on what capabilities and resources I have to intercede and prevent thee immoral actions of another. If the slave owner is well armed, and I am not, I do not have to sacrifice my life to prevent the immoral acts of a third party. Morality does not require me to engage in a futile act. If, however, there is a good probability that I could prevent the enslavement without losing my own life, then I would say, yes, you have a moral obligation to intercede, and turning your back and walking away is an immoral act.
Marc,
Your argument is that of a moral realist—regardless of what we think, there are real moral values out there independent of us. Plato was a moral realist. Odd, isn’t it, that slavery never struck him as immoral?
I’m not saying that slavery is not and was not immoral. I agree that it is and was. What I’m saying is that we have no right to condemn people for holding views that we ourselves likely would have held were we in their shoes, in their time and place. We should feel grateful that we aren’t in their shoes, that we were brought up by different people in a different, albeit highly imperfect, world and can see the error of their ways.
Marc Susselman,
By the way, have you ever read Dr. Wolff's introductory philosophy textbook, About Philosophy? I recommend you peruse the chapter on ethical theory.
If I may quote a bit of it (11th edition):
"If it is unsettling to encounter men and women within our own society whose moral codes differ markedly from our own, think how much more unsettling it is to discover whole other cultures or civilizations in which what we call virtue is despised as vice, and what we condemn as wicked is celebrated as noble. Even a study of history of the literate civilizations of the East and West provide countless examples of this sort of variation in moral beliefs. When anthropologists' experiences with nonliterate cultures are added to our stock of information, it begins to appear that there is no single rule, precept, or moral belief that has been accepted by decent men and women everywhere."
He includes a quotation from the anthropologist Ruth Benedict:
"No one civilization can possibly utilize in its mores the whole potential range of human behavior.
Every society, beginning with some inclination in one direction or another, carries its preference farther and farther, integrating itself more and more completely upon its chosen basis, and discarding those types of behaviors that are uncongenial. Most of those organizations of personality that seem to us more incontrovertibly abnormal have been used by different civilizations in the very foundations of their institutional life. Conversely, the most valued traits of our normal individuals have been looked on in differently organized cultures as aberrant. Normality, in short, within a very wide range, is culturally defined.... The very eyes with which we see the problem are conditioned by the long traditional habits of our own society.
It is a point that has been made more often in relation to ethics than in relation to psychiatry. We do not any longer make the mistake of deriving the morality of our own locality and decade directly from the inevitable constitution of human nature. We do not elevate it to the dignity of a first principle. We recognize that morality differs in every society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits. Mankind has always preferred to say, 'It is morally good,' rather than 'It is habitual,' and the fact of this preference is matter enough for a critical science of ethics. But historically the two phrases are synonymous."
(That is not to imply that Prof Wolff is takes a side in the debate, in the textbook. He is just describing points of view.)
David,
Again, I disagree with you. If an act is, and always was, immoral, then condemnation of those who engaged in such acts is appropriate, regardless whether had I lived during that time period I would have engaged in the same conduct and would not have regarded it as immoral. If I did so, I deserve ex post facto condemnation, just as Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, and, yes, Thomas Jefferson deserve condemnation for having engaged in the immoral conduct of slavery. That’s what it means to constitute an immoral act – it requires condemnation. No human being has the right to claim ownership of another human being, no matter how many thousands upon thousands of people were engaging in this conduct, and had engaged in such conduct for centuries.
Eric,
Nothing in your quotation of an excerpt from Prof. Wolff’s textbook invalidates anything which I have stated above. He is making the observation that throughout human history different cultures have had a wide variety of ethical codes which are inconsistent with one another. This is just restating Hume’s sociological and anthropological observations. So what? The fact that headhunting tribes in Borneo had a practice of engaging in human cannibalism does not mean that one cannot validly assert that capturing, roasting, and then eating one’s enemies is immoral. It is immoral because the cannibals would not want to be cannibalized themselves. To say there are no valid moral precepts because thousands of cultures have had moral precepts which were and are antagonistic to one another is a valid observation about human nature, but not a valid argument in support of moral relativism and nihilism.
In a later section of the book dealing with feminist critiques of ethical theory, Prof Wolff writes:
"Feminist ethics received a significant boost with the publication of Carol Gilligan's early work in moral psychology, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (1982). Gilligan reported that her empirical findings revealed a strong corelation between gender and response to moral situations. Men tend to be preoccupied with rights, justice, and autonomy, and in their moral thinking tend to rely on rules and seek a universal perspective...."
He includes a quotation from Alison Jaggar:
"Feminists have identified several male-biased assumptions that are not held idiosyncratically by a few isolated philosophers but that instead infect a whole tradition of thinking about moral justification. This is the liberal tradition descending from the European Enlightenment.
1. First, 'the' moral subject of this tradition appears to be generic, but in fact reflects a specific social type: he is a western male head of household, upper or middle class, and therefore probably white. The motivations and style of reasoning characteristic of this social type are ascribed to all rational moral subjects, despite the overwhelming empirical evidence that many people have different motivations and employ alternative styles of reasoning.
2. When this social type is taken as the norm, people whose thinking deviates from his are presented as deficient in moral rationality. Idealizing his mode of thinking is thus covertly authoritarian because it invalidates the moral thinking of many women as well as of male members of subordinate groups.
...
6. Despite the impartiality and universality claimed by these conceptions of moral justificaton, they are in fact self-serving and circular because they rationalize the views of the philosopher who invokes them while silencing dissenting voices.
For these reasons, the very conceptual tools that purport to guarantee moral objectivity are biased in favour of the privileged...."
A brief word on dietary laws in Islam, Judaism, Jainism, etc. I have a close friend whom I have known since our undergraduate years at Rutgers. He is a more observant Jew than I. I once had a discussion with him in which I was arguing that the rules of kashreit in Judaism were arbitrary and senseless, and did not deserve to be regarded as moral precepts. He responded to me, Marc, you don’t understand, they are not intended to serve as moral precepts in and of themselves. They are intended to teach self-discipline and to resist temptations in life. This serves a valid social purpose, because self-discipline and resisting temptation in life is important for civilized behavior. If you learn to follow arbitrary rules faithfully, even if they do not make sense, then you will be able to follow rules that are more important for social cohesion generally. I think what he said makes a lot of sense.
And here’s a joke about the Jewish prohibition against eating pork. A rabbi was returning to the United States after attending a conference in Israel and he had an overnight layover in London. He looked for, but could not find a restaurant near the hotel which served kosher food. So, he went into a restaurant and asked for a menu. On the menu was roast pig. He thought to himself, I have never tasted roast pig, so I would like to find out what it tastes like. So, he ordered the roast pig. As the roast pig was being brought to his table, with an apple in its mouth, in walked several rabbis who had also attended the conference and were staying over in London. AS they walked in and say the roast pig being delivered to their colleague’s table, in a voice of astonishment he said, “I never saw a baked apple served this way.”
Marc,
You contend that “If an act is, and always was, immoral, then condemnation of those who engaged in such acts is appropriate, regardless whether had I lived during that time period I would have engaged in the same conduct and would not have regarded it as immoral.”
How do you determine that an act “is, and always was, immoral”?
Simply saying it again and again, louder and louder, doesn’t make it so. I agree that this doesn’t make slavery moral by your standards or mine. But what, other than our own subjective moral feelings, do we have to offer those who disagree?
I agree with David Palmeter. Good morning everyone.
Anyway, Marc, to go back to my grandfather, as is usual, his sexist views led to sexist conduct. He made constant remarks about women's physical appearance that could get him lynched in feminist circles these days. He did zero housework and I'm not sure that he could have made a cup of instant coffee for himself. Things have changed: I recall my uncle being amazed that I knew how to change a diaper.
By the way, your criterion of women working if the health and safety of the children is assured is old-fashioned and sexist. Today both parents are supposed to share equal responsibility for their children's upbringing. That's the way my sons and my nephew and niece bring up their children.
Still I don't see my grandfather as immoral because he had no idea that what he was doing was sexist and wrong. He just followed the ethical zeitgeist of his day as I do mine in fact.
David,
You keep claiming that my assertion that slavery is morally wrong is no more than a personal belief. No, it is not just my personal belief. It is demonstrably morally wrong because I would not myself wish to be a slave.
I would venture to say that Charles Mills believed that slavery was morally wrong, from an objective perspective. And, given Prof. Wolff’s high regard of Prof. Mills’ “The Racial Contract,” I would venture to say that Prof. Wolff also believes that slavery is morally, objectively wrong, i.e., immoral. How can the claim that one human being has the right to “own” another human being not be morally wrong? Indeed, I would think that given Prof. Wolff’s essay “In Defense of Anarchism,” which is based on the premise that every individual has a right to autonomy, and the right to resist efforts to restrict one’s autonomy, necessarily entails that slavery is morally wrong. I find you resistance to acknowledging this on the basis that my belief is no more than a subjective preference quite incredible.
Do you believe that Putin invasion of Ukraine was “wrong”? In what sense was it “wrong”? Just because you prefer that he had not done it? Do you condemn his massacre of thousands of civilians? Do you condemn it because it was “wrong”? In what sense was it “wrong”? Only because you have a subjective preference that he not have done it?
I am going to try to demonstrate why certain actions can be deemed morally wrong form an objective standpoint.
Mr. Jones is the coach of the Snyder High School (my alma mater in Jersey City) intermural baseball team. He is having tryouts to be on the team. There are 8 candidates: an African-American; a girl; a Sikh; a male amputee who has only one leg; a boy who weighs 300 lbs.; a boy who is blind; a Caucasian boy who is 6 foot, 5 inches; and a Caucasian boy who is also on the track team and can run the 100 yd. dash in 15 seconds.
Mr. Jones only selects the two Caucasians to be on the baseball team without any try outs.
Is what he did objectively immoral? With regard to the African-American, the girl, and the Sikh, it is absolutely immoral. He discriminated against them based on physiological/cultural differences which have no relation to whether they are good baseball players. If Mr. Jones were African-American, or female, or a Sikh and tried out for the baseball team, he would resent be excluded based on aspects of his physiology/culture which he did not choose, and which have no bearing on whether he can be a good baseball player. To claim that these decisions are not morally wrong because there is no such thing as objective morality, everything is relative and a matter of subjective preference I maintain is utter nonesence.
Rejection of the boy with an amputation; of the boy who weighs 300 pounds; and the boy who is blind could not, legitimately, be condemned as morally wrong, since these conditions would likely have an adverse effect on the team’s ability to win baseball games, and he has a legitimate objective to maximize the team’s ability to win baseball games. Will these individuals resent that they were rejected? Probably. But would their personal feeling of rejection make Mr. Jones’ decision immoral? No, it would not.
If , on the other hand, Mr. Jones was not the coach of the high school baseball team, but the coach of the high school debating team, his rejection of any of the candidates for the team based on their physical condition, race, gender, or religion would be immoral, because none these personal traits or conditions have any relationship to the ability to debate issues well.
Correction:
The rejection of the boy with the amputation without a try-out would also be immoral if he wore a prosthesis. In fact Jim Abbott was a professional baseball player, a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, who was born without a right hand.
Marc,
And Pete Gray played with one arm for the St. Louis Browns and the Class A Elmira, NY Pioneers where I saw him play. He batted with hand. In the outfield he would catch the ball with his gloved hand, toss the ball into the air, put his gloved hand under his arm stump and pull the glove off, catch the ball he tossed into the air, and throw to the appropriate spot in the infield.
I'll get back to you shortly re absolute moral values.
Marc,
Why is slavery wrong because you would not wish to be a slave? How does your wish become a universal moral absolute? Catholics, among others, have very strong beliefs against all abortion. Does this make their view a moral absolute for everyone? Catholic doctrine condemns sexual relationships before marriage. It is a mortal sin, and those who die in unforgiven mortal sin go straight to Hell for eternity. That’s a moral absolute under Catholic doctrine. Is it a universal moral absolute, applicable to all persons regardless of their beliefs?
Esp. since you (plural pronoun, meaning: everyone involved) have discussed this issue of "objective" morality here before and no one's mind was changed on that earlier occasion, I think it clear that positions are not going to be altered by further discussion of this. Which is not to say you shouldn't continue debating it if you want, just to say that no minds are going to be changed.
Btw, Gilligan's In a Different Voice and subsequent work on those lines, mentioned by Eric above quoting RPW's textbook, is only one of several different feminist perspectives. (Not that I'm esp. qualified to elaborate on that.)
Professor: one other thing. I notice that you will often say the following:
...the act of artistic creation has the following structure: First, the artist is inspired to form an idea in his or her mind, an idea of a sculpture, a painting, a poem, a sonata, an idea of beauty.
I may be misunderstanding the concept of "an idea" here but for me the inspiration comes from the "frisson" or "sensation" I mentioned earlier. A parallel example, for me, would be this: especially when I was younger, and as a heterosexual, I might be moved or briefly captured by the sight of the face of a woman passing by - unexpectedly. CLICK!
And so it might be a color relationships or some visual element that triggers that sensation within me, today - in a similar manner that the face of a woman would, unexpectedly in the past. CLICK! I'm touched or moved. And I decide to paint THAT because it evokes a feeling that I can then render somehow. So for me I wouldn't say that the process begins with an idea.
LFC,
I raised the issue of moral objectivism in response to comments above that it is inappropriate or unfair to judge the conduct of luminaries form the past because their conduct was the product of their culture and zeitgeist. Since they raised it, I felt an imperative to respond, rather than leave their view of moral relativism unrebutted. And I will continue to give pushback to moral relativism whenever it is advocated.
David, I suggest you contact Maxine Waters and tell her that slavery was not immoral; contact Stacey Abrams and tell her the same thing; or AOC; or Al Sharpton; or Whoopi Goldberg; or Justice Ketanji Jackson; or …..
To compare the Catholic stance on abortion to the question of slavery – the right to assert ownership over another human being – is absurd. Sometimes cogent analysis requires the ability to discern differences, however, subtle, between different factual scenarios. Whether an embryo of fetus has rights comparable to that of an enslaved human being is a nonsensical comparison. On the one hand, you have an entity which is part of the anatomy of another human being. In the case of slavery, you have a human being claiming the right to own another human being which is anatomically separate and distinct from the slave owner. To compare the two as equivalents is pure sophistry – regardless what Catholics may believe.
And you still have not addressed my question regarding Putin – was his massacre of Ukrainian civilians “wrong”? And if so, in what sense where they wrong if not morally wrong?
LFC: Gilligan's In a Different Voice and subsequent work on those lines, mentioned by Eric above quoting RPW's textbook, is only one of several different feminist perspectives
I thought that was obvious.
I also agree with David Palmeter in his questioning of Marc Susselman's pseudodefense of moral realism, both here and at https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2022/05/once-again-phil-green-says-it-better.html
(although I think I tend to disagree with Palmeter on quite a lot of other stuff)
Marc,
Pounding on the table is not a good substitute for a rational argument.
I'm sorry for not answering your question. It got lost in the give-and-take. The answer is yes, I believe Putin's massacre of Ukrainian civilians is wrong. Those are my subjective values which, I hope, are widely shared. But I can't prove to someone who disagrees that it is wrong in the way that I can prove that water doesn't boil at 32 degrees F.
I'm not persuaded by your comments on abortion, or appeals to authority (Maxine Waters et al.). Let's stay away from slavery for now, as we seem to agree that it is evil and disagree only on how to judge the past. Abortion is a very current issue, and proponents and opponents have very strong views. How do you prove -- not persuade, but prove -- either of them wrong?
David,
Your notion of proof and my notion of proof are entirely different. And I do not have to prove to you that slavery is objectively immoral, and that a woman has the right to have control over her body until there is a competing interest of a human being in her womb, which is not a fetus at 15 weeks, to be correct. I am correct regardless whether I have persuaded you, or anyone else.
Here's another example.
Just yesterday I was conversing with a Chilean woman friend had how Dylan changed rock. I commented that post Dylan, no one is going to write a song like "I want to hold your hand" any more.
She replied, "Although it has nothing to do with Dylan, no one could write a song beginning "she was just 17" any more either.
That is, post feminism, it's considered wrong for young adult males, as the Beatles then were, to sexually lust after 17 year old women. Were the Beatles objectively immoral to lust after a 17 year old woman in 1963 or 1964 or have moral values changed?
The Rabbis say we should observe the laws of the nations where we live.
While I'm sure there's an exception for infanticide, there is a middle ground between objectivism and subjectivism in morality: observe the customs and laws of where you live or find yourself
I think the problem with subjectivism is Aristitelian Realism.
If we agree that wherever you are participating in the discussion on Professor Wolff's bog: this is a computer, this is a desk, this is a room, this is me, this is my wife; why can't morality be like physical things or math and less like taste in art.
There are a few possibly contradictory ideas here- but a few of them might break the impasse
Marc,
Your charactarization of a feminist concern, lyrics which sexualize young women, is silly, sad and frankly deplorable.
Marc Susselman: I am correct regardless whether I have persuaded you, or anyone else.
- preoccupied with rights, justice, autonomy, & rules
Check.
- is a western male head of household, upper or middle class, and therefore probably white
Check.
- presents people whose thinking deviates from his as deficient in moral rationality
Check.
- employs conceptions of moral justificaton that are in fact self-serving and circular
Check.
- displays covertly authoritarian tendencies
Check.
;-)
Marc,
I agree that you don't have to prove your moral values to me or anyone else. Neither do I. And that's a good thing, because I can't prove them, and from what I've read so far neither can you.
I've certainly argued for some of them in the hope of persuading people to see something my way, but that is not proving it to them. I don't know how to do that, and so far you haven't shown me how. You've given examples of moral beliefs and I've agreed with you substantively. But that isn't proof that there are objective values out there in the universe.
I've had it.
So, if I cannot prove to a slave holder that his enslavement of other human beings is immoral, then whether it is immoral is up for grabs?
AS I have said in previous comments, Kurt Godel proved that there are mathematical proposition that we know are true, but whose truth we cannot prove. There is no reason to believe that this cannot also be true of moral precepts.
And s. wallerstein, no the lyrics are not immoral. To the extent that the lyrics motivate a listener physically express the lust via rape, then the act of rape is immoral.
I'll probably end up distorting or oversimplifying some things, but maybe this'll help. Here are four propositions:
(1) Aristotle had pro-slavery views.
(2) Aristotle is one of history's greatest philosophers.
(3) I would not act/vote/speak in a pro-slavery fashion.
(4) It is unclear how one would go about "proving" the "proposition" (if indeed it is a proposition susceptible of proof) Slavery is wrong.
Now, I don't think I see any substantial disagreement in this thread concerning these four propositions. We're all more-or-less on the same page.
So, where does the heated disagreement arise? I think what's happening is that Marc, in effect, is saying this: Disagreements concerning (4) come dangerously close to undermining the motives for (3). And everyone else thinks this is clearly incorrect.
(I think there's also some uncertainty as to what to make of the tension between (1) and (2). But the main disagreement at this point seems in effect to concern the other two.)
I wrote this kind of quickly, but maybe it's worth something.
Marc,
The fact that you don't consider lyrics which sexually objectivize women to be wrong and that a sizeable percentage of the feminist movement (which you can't accuse of being pro-Trump Republicans or Islamic fundamentalists) do is one more indication that morality is subjective and it depends on your point of view.
As for lyrics only being wrong when they provoke men to rape as you claim above, most feminists consider that the constant sexual objectivization they suffer when they walk out their doors to be wrong.
You're so big on the golden rule, so let's try this thought experiment. Suppose you were 16 or 17, with all the insecurities that everyone has at that age and every time you walked down the street you received lustful comments and lewd invitations from gay males who were bigger and stronger than you. Would you like that? That seems like a good enough analogy to what young women suffer.
It gets so tedious here on thread after thread. Looks like the blog should be renamed, with "Marc" somewhere in the title. Since I've no inclination to angage with said Marc, I'll plead anonymity.
For what it is worth, I think that a lot of the backing and forthing [I almost wrote "frothing"] in this thread could be avoided if we observed the basic distinction between excuse and justification.
Were Plato's and Aristotle's views about slavery unjustified, whether on an objectivist or idealized preference meta-ethical theory? Yes... because the practice was either an instance of the moral property of moral wrongness (objectivism) or would be the object of condemnation by an ideal observer who had all the facts, reasoned consistently and took up on impartial view of the practice (idealized preference subjectivism).
Were Plato and Aristotle excusable for owning slaves? That is harder to answer... we would have to know to what extent under their social conditions, they had a genuine opportunity either to intuit the fact of its wrongness (objectivism) or to access the relevant empirical facts, etc. about it (idealized preference subjectivism).
And so on down the list of past moral views that we now find abhorrent, the sexist views of grandfathers, American slaveowners, Heidegger's naziism, and so on.
I don't pretend that the distinction between the justified and the excused solves all the problems bruited in this thread, e.g the status of the proscription on eating pork... but applying it judiciously to most of these cases would yield some clarity: We would be a able to assert confidently that, e.g. slaveholders in earlier times were morally unjustified, but to leave it a somewhat open question whether they were to any extent excusable, because they could not know better, or not excusable, because they should have known better.
As Marc implied, the odd thing about Plato [he might have added Aristotle] is that he was about the strongest kind of moral realist imaginable. So, one wants to know, why couldn't he contemplate the form of the just and simply see that slavery is not an instance of it [modulo for Aristotle's immanent forms]. Didn't he follow his own advice and proceed along "the divided line" taking the philosopher from worldly matters up to the contemplation of the Good? What was wrong with him?
In any event, that's my modest proposal: apply the distinction between moral justification and excuse to the problematic cases of past practices.
Cheers.
David Z
I was the culprit who raised the example of Plato, the moral realist, and slaves. I think the answer is in your observation hat "we would have to know tho what extent under their social conditions...." A sizeable portion of the Athenian population was enslaved. That was true in the entire Mediterranean world as well as the Persian world to the East--the world as they knew it. The fact that such people as Plato and Aristotle weren't able to see the evil of slavery suggests to me that most of us today, had we lived in their time and place, wouldn't have had a different view, or know of anyone who did.
s.w.
No one's private lusts or attractions are anyone else's business, unless those attractions result in some action. Writing lyrics is an action, so while you could argue that writing those lyrics was immoral in some sense, the thoughts or attractions that gave rise to those lyrics were not in themselves immoral.
P.s. And while I understand what you're trying to do with your thought experiment, I think it happens to be quite unrealistic. How many young men (or any men, for that matter) walking down the street in broad daylight and minding their own business would be likely to receive unwanted harassment by gay men? I would suggest the answer is: very close to none. Does it ever happen? Possibly, but I wd think it's v. rare. But anyway, the relevant point is that harassing comments are actions not thoughts, so again, it's the actions in this context that are immoral or worthy of condemnation, not the thoughts. I certainly agree that men harassing women on the street, or anyone harassing anyone for that matter, is repellent and not acceptable.
LFC,
It's a thought experiment. Use your imagination.
How many trolleys actually lose their brakes and accelerate down the tracks towards a group of innocent school children?
Here's a video of a woman walking the streets in New York, not provocatively dressed and how she is harassed. It's probably worse in Dallas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XGPvbWn0A
Dregs in the brain: east of the Rhine. Moral chaos: this side of the river.—Rene Char in Hypnos
Michael @1:44pm,
Define "greatest" in "greatest philosophers."
If the philosophical subject is ethics, I cannot hold someone who had views such as Aristotle or Kant up as great.
Influential? Indisputably. Great? No way.
David,
I find your distinction between justification and excuse rather unhelpful. If an act is not morally justified, is in fact morally unjustified, it is not, in the absence of coercion, excusable. If a Nazi holds a knife at the throats of your wife and children and says, unless you shoot and kill the prisoner sitting on that chair, I will cut their throats, then, that arguably would constitute an excuse for your shooting and killing an innocent person. But the fact that slavery, or rape, is socially acceptable in certain cultures is not a legitimate excuse for engaging in either. No one coerced Plato or Aristotle, or Jefferson Davis, or John C. Calhoun, or Thomas Jefferson to own slaves. And I can imagine a Monty Python skit in which John Cleese is portraying a Viking engaged in pillaging a village, and as he is raping a woman, Eric Idle, the woman’s husband, says, You know, what you are doing is immoral, and John Cleese responds, well I have to do it, because all my Viking brethren are doing it, and if I don’t do it, they will think I am a wuss, and a Viking cant’ be seen as a wuss. (Gales of laughter) And the fact that not until 1964 was Title VII passed making it illegal to discriminate in employment based on an applicant’s race, national origin, age or gender did not mean that the fact that such discrimination had occurred routinely before 1964 for hundreds of years did not make such discrimination excusable.
A comic’s example of the logical fallacy of denying the antecedent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oseqh7SMIvo
Two comments:
To David P: My apologies for not accurately attributing the Plato comment to you.
To Marc S: I think you miss the point of my invoking the distinction between justification and excuse in the Plato/Aristotle slavery case. I take it as stipulated that they were morally wrong [and thus morally unjustified] to support Athenian slavery, for the plain reason that the institution was morally wrong, on both meta-ethical views on offer
That leaves open the question of whether their moral turpitude was excusable, either completely or somewhat. You seem to be suggesting that coercion is the only excusing (or partly excusing) condition pertinent to the case. However, that is simply not true.
To be sure, none of the standard excusing and exempting conditions apply to their case. They could not plead most of the standard ones such as conditioning, insanity, addiction, neurological fiddling with their brains and the like. However, one excusing/exempting/mitigating condition that is relevant to cases involving practices in the past that we judge to be immoral but that contemporary did not, is excusable ignorance.
Sometimes ignorance does count as mitigation of a person's blameworthiness if it is excusable. Very roughly that notion can be spelled out in terms of whether the past person could not help but be ignorant of the wrong-making facts at issue... here, facts about slavery then that made it morally wrong then.
Please realize that I am not asserting that Plato and Aristotle were in the grips of excusable ignorance. For all I know, they were perfectly capable of figuring out that Athenian slaves were essentially the same in all morally relevant respects as Athenian freemen. But is it also possible that they were so embedded in a culture that considered slaves to be fundamentally different from other people as to justify their enslavement, that they genuinely could not transcend the blinkered perceptions endemic to that culture and cast off their distorted views about what slaves were like as people.
What do you object to in this way of regarding the perpetrators of past immorality, the Athenians, the slave-holding Founding Fathers, the blinkered sexists of a past age (or a present one, for that matter)?
Stipulating the moral wrongness of what they believed and did, while leaving it an open question whether they were involuntarily ignorant of the morally wrong-making facts, and thus to some extent excusable for their immorality, does not let them off the hook... It just invites an inquiry into their cultural situation, and whether it imposed upon them an ignorance that they genuinely could not cast off.
David,
At the risk of appearing draconian and, in Eric’s words, displaying “autnoritarian tendencies,” what you are offering is an explanation for why Aristotle or Plato may not have questioned the rectitude of their owning slaves. However, an explanation does not equate to an excuse. An excuse entails blamelessness; if one has engaged in morally unjustifiable behavior, it is not excusable, although there may be an explanation that mitigates the blame. Eric may call me narrow-minded, but the practice of owning another human beings, telling them what to do day in and day out, when they can eat, where they can sleep, etc., is, on its face, so abhorrent, that it has no excuse, although it may be explainable. And this is no small instance of playing semantics. The 18-year old who killed 21 people in Uvalde, Texas, may have had an explanation for his rampage – he was the victim of child abuse; his parents were drug users who left him to fend for himself; etc., etc. None of these explanations make what he did excusable. And no explanation can excuse the owning of slaves, or raping women, or, and the list goes on and on. And if we obfuscate the distinction between explanation and excuse, then we are providing a rationalization for immoral conduct.
Howard: The Rabbis say we should observe the laws of the nations where we live.
While I'm sure there's an exception for infanticide, there is a middle ground between objectivism and subjectivism in morality: observe the customs and laws of where you live or find yourself
That certainly can work well—for those whom the law and its application treat well.
But, to take but one example, same-sex sexual intimacy in the privacy of one's home remains a capital offense in more than a dozen countries, including major US/UK/Canada allies and trading partners, such as Saudi Arabia and Nigeria (parts of northern Nigeria). In more than 60 other countries, though not punishable by death, it is punishable by imprisonment.
Even in the US, it remained illegal in many states until fairly recently, when the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Lawrence v. Texas. And even in that case, a third of the justices wanted to keep same-sex sexual intimacy illegal (or to have its legality be left to the states to decide, which is essentially the same thing in half of the states). The composition of the Court has shifted further to the right since then, and in multiple states anti-LGBT-sex statutes remain on the books and could become enforceable again should the Court overturn Lawrence.
Following local laws and customs makes a lot of sense, if we are talking about laws that prohibit littering. But on an issue such as sexual intimacy, the rabbis would not be my first choice of whom to consult for advice. Sure, many of them are very open-minded and progressive. The rest? On the whole, religious leaders exist to prop up the existing social order.
Who are the rabbis looking out for when the say we should follow the laws and customs where we live?
Oh, Marc: Please try to take a point when it is offered.
You say: "... an explanation does not equate to an excuse."
Quite right, but not to the point, because no one with any sense believes that every explanation for why a person performs an immoral action counts an excuse that mitigates his blame for the action.
You say: "...if one has engaged in morally unjustifiable behaviour, it is not excusable."
That is just false, as you yourself acknowledge in the very next line when you say: "...although there may be an explanation that mitigates the blame."
But that is precisely my point. To apply it to the case at hand: There may be (I say MAY be) an explanation for why Plato and Aristotle supported slavery that mitigates their blame. I suggest one POSSIBLE one, namely that they were in the grips of unavoidable ignorance about the facts about slaves as human beings, ignorance imposed upon them by the weight of Athenian culture. (I use these annoying all caps because I have no way to use bold face or italics to emphasize these points.)
Quite rightly, you dwell on the sheer awfulness of what the shooter in Uvalde did to those innocent kids and what slave owners do to their slaves and so on down the list of atrocities. But. Marc, no one is denying that these are atrocities. The question is whether their MIGHT be mitigating circumstances that diminish to any extent the moral responsibility of the immoral agent.
You may believe that this is a closed question in the case of the Athenian slaveholders or the Texas shooter. You may be right.
But, please, Marc, and with respect, do not frame the issue so that the question cannot even be raised, which is what I think you have been doing.
David
Eric:
On Aristotle's greatness as a moral philosopher, there are of course a vast number of commentators and theorists who could offer a thorough account and defense. I am not one of them; I just know some of the basics about ethics, and off the top of my head am able to offer a few suggestions... (I won't try to produce a definition of "greatness.")
-Aristotle produced some foundational texts in ethical theory. He didn't do so ex nihilo, but he brought a certain focus and systematic rigor to the subject-matter which set the scene for much/most/all subsequent work. He wasn't the first to write about ethical issues and concepts, but as Bertrand Russell said, he was the first to write like a professor.
-Thinking about ethics is (normally) part of the human condition. It means (at least in part) trying to get clear on "the right" and "the good." There are a few basic styles of approach to this task. Some styles, emphasizing rightness, try to yield truth and clarity as to what we should do when faced with certain ordinary or challenging circumstances; in their extreme forms, they resemble decision-procedures which say little if anything about the character and lived experience of the persons applying them. Other styles seem to proceed from the denial that such decision-procedures constitute the bulk (much less entirety) of ethics - and Aristotle offers a paradigm case of this style, mapping it out conceptually in a way that many other first-rate theorists regard as original, persuasive, and pretty comprehensive.
(For this reason, I want to guess (maybe wrongly) that it even helped pave the way for a sort of "feminist" (?) ethics like the one you mentioned, which I take to be a care- and relationships-driven style of ethics which offers a corrective to the abstract, "decision-procedure" style.)
-Chances are, as with Kantian ethics, Aristotelian ethics itself offers a key to understanding the wrongness of (e.g.) slavery. But Aristotle evidently lacked the clarity, compassion, and/or courage to acknowledge and apply this. This is a stain on his reputation. But it isn't clear to me that we aren't entitled to say, "Aristotle was a great moral philosopher apart from his views on slavery (among other things)." If this is correct, then Aristotle failed, perhaps willfully, to realize that some of his own particular views were incompatible with the overall thrust of his philosophy. But it's impressive, and even a cause for gratitude, to consider how the latter has shaped our conversation - such I think is the common verdict of people who study his work.
"Mongol General : Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good, but what is best in life?
Mongol : The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.
Mongol General : Wrong! Conan! What is best in life?
Conan : To crush your enemies. See them driven before you. And to hear the lamentations of their women.
Mongol General : That is good! That is good."
The past is another country.
The various forms of slavery that economies capable of generating a surplus devised just might have been an improvement in how we deal with inconvenient people. Most of this discussion involves a world with not all that many humans who, like us, were (are) still figuring things out just as their (our) ancestors figured out that properly chipped rocks could be useful and our cousins figured out that a properly used stick could yield tasty termites.
The Prophets figured there must be a better way and Ashoka said "enough." (Actually got my arms around the pillar.)
In a slave society no one is actually free. Actually effective laws on human reproduction are likely incompatible with a free society. Choices.
(Note how the South made use of the chink in the 13th amendment)
I think David Zimmerman's comments here, esp the one @5:18 p.m., are very much to the point and very well-taken.
By the way, David, if you want to use italics or bold here, it's easy. For italics, just surround the words or word with and , or for bold do the same using and . (You have to remember the backward slash -- otherwise the bolding or italics will not turn off.)
Ooops, that did not come out as I intended.
Let me try again. You have to use these symbols:
Just surround the word or words in question with them, as appropriate.
Ok, it still did not work.
So just look at the bottom of the comment box and you'll see the relevant HTML tags for bold and italics.
Thanks, LFC... I'll give it a try... but o have not had much luck with the HTML bar in the past.
Rats!
But... Cheers.
p.s. Or go to any basic html tutorial online.
But there's also nothing wrong w/ capitals -- gets the pt across equally well.
As LFC was saying, to use a bold format, for example, you need to place a tag immediately before the text and immediately after the text:
Precede the text to be bolded with a 3-character "HTML tag" that is an opening angle bracket then a letter "b" then a closing angle bracket.
Follow the text to be bolded with a 4-character HTML tag that is an opening angle bracket, then a forward slash, then a letter "b", then a closing angle bracket.
For italics, use a letter "i" instead of a letter "b".
See here for examples.
Ironically, Hume referred to Beattie as “that bigoted silly Fellow, Beattie.”
David,
You have written above, in response to my insistence that an explanation is not an excuse:
“no one with any sense believes that every explanation for why a person performs an immoral action counts an excuse that mitigates his blame for the action.
“You say: "...if one has engaged in morally unjustifiable behaviour, it is not excusable."
“That is just false, as you yourself acknowledge in the very next line when you say: "...although there may be an explanation that mitigates the blame."
Your first sentence presumes that the people who have been commenting on this blog regarding this issue believe that there is even such a thing as “an immoral act.” Eric does not believe it; s. wallerstein does not believe it. They maintain that there is no such thing as an objectively “immoral act.” What I claim is immoral is nothing more than an expression of my personal preference, and personal preferences fluctuate depending on the culture in which you were raised, and the time period in which you lived. According to Eric and s. wallerstein, slavery is not objectively immoral, nor is rape. I am just expressing my personal repulsion, but those who have engaged in this conduct in the past had their own preferences, and also their own explanations, and therefore they can be excused for their conduct, because it was not immoral. Therefore, if there no objectively immoral acts, then you do not even have to confront the question of whether the actor has an explanation or an excuse for having committed the immoral act, because there are no immoral acts.
Moreover, there is a difference between stating that there may be mitigating circumstances which explain why Plato or Aristotle committed the immoral act of owning slaves, and equating the mitigating circumstances to an excuse. There is no excuse for Plato or Aristotle having owned slaves. The fact that in Athens there was a distinction between patricians and plebians, and it was regarded as perfectly acceptable for a patrician to own slaves may be an explanation for why Plato and Aristotle thought it was OK to own slaves, the mitigating factors do not constitute an excuse which justifies their having owned slaves.
You want to make it appear like I am just quibbling over semantics. I am not. The question of whether there are objectively immoral acts, and whether their commission can be excused, regardless of culture, and regardless of the century in which they were committed, can be excused, is a serious question, not just some semantical quibble. Most of the people who have written above – David Palmeter;p LFC; Eric; s. wallerstein – maintain that there is not such thing as an objectively immoral act, only preferences which change with location and time. I adamantly reject this, for which Eric accuse me of being an authoritarian fascist. And I regard this as a very sad state of affairs. None of those who have taken this position have a cogent explanation for why they can then criticize Putin for invading Ukraine, because their criticism reduces to nothing more than their personal preference, and Putin has done noting immoral. He can simply say, well, your are entitled to your opinion, and I and my fellow Russians are entitled to ours. So go f…cl yourselves.
Post-script:
Eric, s. wallerstien, Jerry Fresia, and others have fulminated in comments in post after post about the evils of capitalism because it is based on the exploitation of others, which is fundamentally “unfair” So what” What’s wrong with being “unfair” and exploiting others? Are they making a moral judgment, or simply expressing their personal preference that they don’t like conduct which is “unfair.” And if the is all that their criticisms of capitalism, and encomiums of Marxism, amount to, who cares? Their condemnations of capitalism have no more intellectual value than the ice cream they prefer to eat, or that they like corn, but dislike broccoli. Their position that I am spouting authoritarian nonsense by maintaining that there are objectively immoral acts gives the lie to their own condemnation of capitalism as constituting the exploitation of others. Why should the corporate executives at Esso, Ford, GM, Amazon, etc., etc., care that Eric, s. wallerstein, Jerry Fresia, and yes, Prof. Wolff, care that they believe that capitalism constitutes the exploitation of others if all they are doing is expressing their personal preferences of what they lkee and dislike, rather than making claims about what is objectively immoral. They have their personal preferences, and the corporate executives have theirs – big deal.
I submit that one cannot consistently and rationally embrace both moral relativism and condemnation of another’s conduct, if all one is doing is expressing one’s personal preference, the equivalent of liking chocolate ice cream over vanilla ice cream. Yet all of the individuals who have argued in support of moral relativism and criticized my views regarding moral objectivism, routinely engage in such condemnations and criticism on this blog of he conduct of others – of Trump; of the Republicans; of the anti-abortionists; of McConnell; of Jeff Bezos, and the list goes on and on, and they do not even appreciate the hypocrisy of what they are doing. If they were intellectually honest, they would acknowledge that all they are doing is expressing their personal preferences, and personal preferences are just that, and have no moral weight whatsoever, and if they have no moral weight, they have no meritorious basis for claiming to persuade.
Marc
You believe that there are only two categories: objective moral facts, on the one hand, and personal preferences on the other.
I happen to think there's a third category, one that might be called considered moral judgments. That means that when I say "slavery is wrong," it's not equivalent to expressing a preference for one kind of cereal over another.
If this category of "considered moral judgments" did not exist, there would be no point in making moral arguments, arguments that often start from shared premises but then go on to deal with more specific issues. Yet philosophers and political theorists make such arguments all the time. If you're right about there being only two categories, then there wouldn't be all that much for moral philosophers to do. And yet there's an entire field that does what your position implies is meaningless or unnecessary, namely make arguments about considered moral judgments.
P.s. the interesting discussions don't concern things like slavery, which most people readily agree is wrong, but matters about which there is disagreement. Your stance implies that there is no place for genuine moral argument or genuine disagreement -- about anything. Which I just find weird.
P.p.s. It's also *possible* that that there are "objective" moral principles but that they don't exhaust the moral realm, so to speak, which is a possibility that your position rules out bc you think there's no difference between a moral judgment (unless expressed in "objective" terms) and a personal preference.
LFC,
I’m sorry, but what you have written is intellectually incoherent. What is a “considered moral judgment”/ What does the word “considered” add to the concept of a “moral judgment”? And what is a “moral judgment” if not the assertion that certain conduct is immoral, that is, objectively immoral. Otherwise, what you have written is gobbly-gook, an excuse to avoid the conclusion that one cannot make moral judgments without conceding that there are objectively immoral acts.
Post-scrpt:
What does it mean to make a “considered moral judgment”? Is it an assertion that there are such things as moral and immoral acts, but I do not know for sure what they are, but, upon consideration I believe that action x may be an immoral act, but I am not certain, it may be no more than an expression of my personal preference. Well, then we are back where we began.
LFC,
You state I claim there is, no difference between a moral judgment (unless expressed in "objective" terms) and a personal preference.” This is patently false, I am claiming just the opposite, that there are objectively moral judgments which are not just the expression of one’s personal preference. There are certain bedrock moral precepts which I maintain are objectively valid: claiming the right to own another human being is objectively immoral; forcing a female to engage in sexual intercourse is objectively immoral. And yes, I maintain that when one states, “What Mr. Jones did was wrong,” you are either asserting that what Mr. Jones did was objectively immoral, or you are expressly a personal preference. So, when I say “Mr. Jones was wrong for robbing the bank, when he had no legitimate basis for doing so, since he does not need the money to buy food for himself or his children, or to clothe them, or to shelter them” I am making a moral judgment. If, on the other hand, I make the same assertion, but without the qualifications, then I am expressing a personal preference. Are there potential valid moral judgments that we have not discovered yet? Yes, possibly. For example, as advances in biological science are discovered, or artificial intelligence advances, we may confront unique factual scenarios which require moral analysis we have not previously encountered.
A good deal of what is being discussed in this thread was the subject of A. J. Ayer’s, “Language, Truth and Logic,” in which he sided with the moral relativists and rejected moral objectivism. It has been a long time since I read the book, but suffice it to say I do not agree with his position.
Marc - You misread that last line w the "unless" in it, but never mind. I understand what you're claiming. I simply disagree with it.
I happen to think it's morally wrong that 200 or so billionaires have more wealth than 60 percent of the world's population combined. I view that as a moral judgment, not simply a personal preference. It's not however an "objective" moral judgment bc there is no "objective" fact about what the morally "correct" distribution of wealth is. But it's a moral judgment, not simply a personal preference, because it proceeds from reflection on moral principles.
A considered moral judgment is a judgment that depends on and proceeds from thought and reflection. "I like strawberry ice cream better than vanilla" is a personal preference that does not require thought. Your inability to recognize the difference between a judgment and a preference suggests that you think that human beings are incapable of reflection on moral issues.
That famous article by Thompson on abortion that you've apparently read makes, as I understand it, a moral argument (I've seen the argument described at second hand, don't think I've read the piece). If, as you seem to think, humans are incapable of moral reflection, why would she have bothered to make a moral argument about abortion and why would _Philosophy and Public Affairs_ have published it?
You don't seem to understand that there is such a thing as moral disagreement, which, for someone who was a philosophy major and went to grad school in philosophy before becoming a lawyer, is surprising.
God is dead.
Sartre in his essay, Existentialism is a Humanism, gives the example of the young man who has to choose between caring for his sick mother and joining the Resistance and concludes that there is no objective moral formula which can tell the young man which decision to better.
He has to chose and to accept the consequences of his choice.
Those who believe that there is an objective moral answer want to avoid that heavy responsiblity according to Sartre and thus, are in bad faith, in Sartre's terminology.
Life would be easier if there were an objective morality, but there isn't and we have to live with that, just as we live with God being dead and we are responsible for deciding how we live.
LFC,
You do not appreciate the basic, fundamental, logical fallacy of what you are writing. There can be no moral judgments, considered or otherwise, which do not amount to expressions of personal preference unless there are objective moral principles. Otherwise, the considered moral judgment is still a judgment about something which is subjective, i.e., a personal preference.
Regarding the essay defending the right to an abortion by Prof. Thomson (not “Thompson”) her entire argument is predicated on the moral principle that a woman, like any other human being, has a right to control her own body. That is an objective moral statement. All of the rest of her argument derives from that objective moral premise. And you should not be mouthing off about a subject about which you have obviously not done any reading, I have done a lot of reading on the subject, both as a philosophy graduate student and as an attorney. And, frankly, I am surprised that a person who claims to be well read and an authority on international affairs does not appreciate the speciousness of his own position. I suggest you read G. E. Moore’s “Principia Ethica,” and then read A. J. Ayer’s “Language, Truth and Logic.” When you have finished reading both books, get back to me.
s. wallerstein,
Your comment may have a degree of poetic appeal, but as for intellectual content, it is nill.
This will be my last comment on this thread. I should think I have made my point. If not, so be it. I suspect that Prof. Wolff is beginning to get irritated with me at this point, which is beyond the point of moderation.
This isn't really moral disagreement, I think, more like metaethical disagreement.
I don't know about A.J. Ayer specifically, but it wasn't unusual for people in the Logical Positivist movement to be politically engaged and involved in what we'd consider admirable causes. I think the rejection of moral realism was far more a matter of their orientation as theorists than their personalities and preoccupations as human beings. This point seems somewhat lost on Marc - judging by past comments, he'd sooner say that a politically engaged LP must have been a "hypocrite" (which sounds like a condemnation of character), not merely someone who subscribes to a metaethics which looks awfully challenging to defend in philosophical argument.
I haven't made up my mind on this, but I think the rejection of moral realism has some very powerful and easily understandable motives; it's not really a matter of "Hey, anything goes!" or of one's being misled by a "liberal education" or whatever. For one, there's the fact of intractable moral disagreement - Democrat vs. Republican, etc. - everyone knows what it's like to be possessed of some sound and compelling moral arguments which, no matter how clearly and forcefully articulated, can only end up shrugged off by one's ideological opponents, who to all appearances are "otherwise sane." There's also the aura of metaphysical "queerness" (George Mavrodes's term) accompanying the notion of "objective value" - how to find a place for it in a universe of mindless physical particles and brute sensory qualities, etc. So something's fishy, it seems - but it also seems that we have some mundane (if vague and patchy) psychological accounts at hand which can make the situation more intelligible philosophically - e.g., "Morality is just our socially-historically conditioned, emotion-laden preferences 'projected' onto a value-neutral universe," or whatnot.
Marc, I think you have some unhealthy online habits - I'm in a similar boat, and it kind of sucks! Wish I had a better handle on it.
s. wallerstein
I think your reference to Existentialism as a Humanism if very much on point. So far as I know, no one has ever been able to come up with an objective truth that solves the young man's dilemma.
Or think of Sophie's Choice--the Nazis will allow one of her two children to live but not both, and if she doesn't choose one of them, both will be killed. What's the objective moral truth that will tell her what she should do?
As a side bar: it's interesting how this thread has morphed from Presentism and Contextualism in history.
For those who scorn Sartre, here's a Leiter poll of the greatest 20th century philosophers and while Sartre is not in the top ten, he's on the list.
https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/lets-settle-this-once-and-for-all-who-really-was-the-greatest-philosopher-of-the-20thcentury.html
Marc - Yes, Thomson, not Thompson. My mistake there. As for the rest, we'll agree to disagree on much of it.
Michael - Your comments are always thoughtful. I don't think you have to apologize for your "online habits."
I've never claimed any technical expertise in philosophy. Was not a philosophy major, took only one course officially in the philosophy dept as a freshman, disliked it. (And btw -- in answer to Marc now -- I really have no intention of reading either Principia Ethica or Language, Truth, and Logic. Sorry.)
To Marc:
This comment will come in two instalments:
We are probably at the point of severely diminishing returns, but I’ll try to make a few points before also retreating from this particular stage.
One:
Your principal beef may really be with S. Wallerstein and others who deny that there are objective moral facts, as understood by moral realists. My point about the possible mitigation/excuse of immoral agents such as Athenian slaveholders is neutral on what sort of meta-ethics is correct.
That said, however, I do think that you are confused about certain meta-ethical issues. You say: "There can be no moral judgments, considered or otherwise, which do not amount to expressions of personal preference unless there are objective moral principles.”
That is just not true, Marc, because it leaves out of the picture a meta-ethics that construes moral judgments as the expression
of rationally constrained pro- or con-attitudes, which are purified by confrontation with relevant empirical facts, and the imposition of consistency and impartiality requirements. Perhaps that is what some of the contributors to this thread mean by “considered moral judgments,” I don’t know. But an idealized-attitude subjectivism would be a good way to construe their idea.
In any event, there is a huge difference between saying “I dislike chocolate ice cream” and saying “I believe that if all my attitudes were purified by a confrontation with the empirical facts and constrained by the demands of consistency and impartiality, then I would have a negative attitude toward slavery.” The latter makes a claim to authority that the former does not. Granted, one way to explain the authority in question is to opt for moral realism, but another, admittedly less robust, way is to opt for an idealized-attitude meta-ethics. In your many comments expressing avid support for moral realism, you never acknowledge this alternative, reductivist, way a construing the claim to authority that moral judgments clearly do carry with them.
To be continued.....
To Marc -- second instalment
Two:
You still have not taken the pertinent point about unavoidable ignorance as an excusing/blame-mitgating condition.
You say: "...there is a difference between stating that there may be mitigating circumstances which explain why Plato or Aristotle committed the immoral act of owning slaves, and equating the mitigating circumstances to an excuse.”
But, this is just a terminological mistake, for a “mitigating circumstance” just is an “excuse.” In this context, the terms are synonyms.
So, the question remains: Did Plato and Aristotle support the institution of slavery in part because they were ignorant of empirical facts about the equality of slaves and freemen in all the respects that matter (intelligence, capacity for virtue, and so on)? And if they were, was their ignorance unavoidable in the sense that they had no genuine access to those facts?
Please realize that to raise this question is not to answer it. In the end, it may be immensely implausible that Athenian nobles could not have figured out that their slaves were essentially their empirical equals in all the ways that matter. After all, many slaves were prisoners taken in battle, who the Athenians surely knew had been worthy warriors of a decidedly un-slavish nature.
It must be admitted mitigation/excuse by appeal to the immoral agent’s unavoidable ignorance must always be viewed with skepticism, for that appeal is often mired in the agent’s gross self-deception about what knowledge is available to him and what is not. Defenders of slavery, for example, have very good self-interested economic reasons to defend the institution that has done so well by them. Some wise person (H. L. Mencken?) once said (I think) of tobacco executives “Beware the man who is ignorant of facts he is paid not to know.” And so it is here.
Three:
Let me end, Marc, by saying that I do not think that you have any reason, given your most fervent commitments, to disagree with either of the points I make above, certainly not the one about the mitigating/excusing force of truly unavoidable ignorance not based on self-serving self-deception.
As for our meta-ethical disagreement… I grant that it is harder to find common ground. I suspect that you find the very idea of a non-realist but idealized-attitude subjectivism about morality barely worth the fuss. But if so, I urge you to give it a fuller hearing. (Richard Brandt was around U of Mich when you were in Ann Arbor. His "A Theory of the Good and the Right" is a “state of the art” version of that kind of meta-ethics.)
On a less conciliatory note, I ask...have you considered what would happen if it were to turn out that powerful anti-realist arguments are valid and sound? The only alternatives left to you would be a version of idealized- attitude subjectivism about values and norms or… shudder… the admission that moral judgments, construed along realist lines, are all false, because there are no moral facts.
Wanting moral realism to be true is not the same thing as its being true.
Cheers, David
Thanks, LFC. :)
Marc, you might find a kindred spirit in Derek Parfit. He finds the metaethical debate to be an extremely high-stakes debate. (I don't think I agree with that, and I wouldn't expect a lot of agreement in the discussions here, either.) He says it would be a "tragedy" if moral realism weren't true. He's a moral realist - I think he's a non-naturalist cognitivist, which sounds a lot like Moore - and he's also an atheist.
Maybe check out On What Matters. It feels endless - three volumes, and I only managed the first few chapters of Volume 1. But I think Volume 1 is the "main" one; the other two consist of commentary and dialogue with other ethicists.
(I did however finish Reasons and Persons a while back, though my focus wavered toward the end. I don't think you'd agree with Parfit's views on personal identity, but they're fascinating. IIRC, he thinks each human person is comparable to a "country" or "society," of which each individual member is just a momentary slice of a larger "space-time worm" - though of course he wouldn't put it that way. Accordingly, our responsibilities for our "future selves" and duties to our "past selves" are comparable to our moral relations to distant others in the present.)
'Kant was a casual stone cold racist, there is no way around that fact.'
And that's a bad thing, just your opinion.
Marc Susselman said:
'Regarding the essay defending the right to an abortion by Prof. Thomson (not “Thompson”) her entire argument is predicated on the moral principle that a woman, like any other human being, has a right to control her own body. That is an objective moral statement.'
Well, if this 'right' is a 'moral' right, maybe. Or I mean to emphasize that moral rights, they are justified by whatever they are justified by (cute answer: they are justified by moral standards), but also, whatever they are justified is stuff which is not necessarily codified in law.
'I’m sorry, but what you have written is intellectually incoherent.'
And that's a bad thing?
David Z.
As far as I can tell, I'm the only person who used the phrase "considered moral judgments" in this thread. I think I was borrowing or adapting it from Rawls, who uses the phrase "considered judgments" (e.g. in TJ , 1st ed., p. 20). Anyway, I appreciate your explaining more fully what that (probably) means or at least one good way to interpret it.
To LFC:
You are most welcome, Sir. I just hope that I am not being too pedantic by launching into these discourses on meta-ethics
You are quite correct about the source of the phrase "considered moral judgment" in R's T of J.
To LFC again... and the other folks here who are interested in meta-ethics:
I might add -- in the context of our conversation about meta-ethics with Marc S, S Wallerstein and others-- that Rawls was probably not any kind of moral realist, since he characterizes his own view as a kind of "moral constructivism."
He also floats the idea that he would endorse a generalized version of his theory of justice as "Rightness as Fairness," the view that moral rightness in general is constituted by or constructed from the choices that idealized subjects would make in an "original position" from behind the "veil of ignorance."
Of course that would not mollify Marc S, whose commitment to moral realism remains steadfast. So, let me respond here to his latest foray into meta-ethics in the other thread that is still going.
Marc, you persist in the view that idealized attitude conceptions of the good and the right are little better than the bare expression of preference.
You say: "There is a vast difference between 'an attitude, conviction or belief which is purified by confrontation with relevant facts etc. … ' and an objectively moral precept, because an 'attitude,' however it is arrived at, and whatever fancy language you ensconce it in, is just that – an attitude, a personal preference that you share with many others for which you offer an explanation."
I agree that there is an important difference between these meta-ethical views, in that objective, attitude independent, moral facts -- if they existed-- would provide a firmer foundation for morality than a set of idealized attitudes.
However, attitudes purified by confrontation with the facts, etc. are not mere attitudes... they are rational attitudes, by virtue of being answerable to well-founded conditions of rationality. If moral realism is not viable, which it may not be, then the idealized attitude conception of moral judgment may be all that is left, if we are not to fall into a nihilistic fictionalism about morality.
I still think that you have not taken seriously enough the possibility that moral realism is a false view of morality, that the notion of an objective moral fact is philosophically unsustainable. Again, wanting moral realism to be true is not the same thing as establishing that it is true.
Rather than trying to rehearse the standard arguments against moral realism here, may I suggest that you read the first chapter of J.L. Mackie's little book "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong," in which he sets out powerful anti-realist arguments. If he is correct, then you face a dilemma: either opt for an idealized attitude meta-ethics, which is admittedly deflationary, but still provides moral judgments with a rational basis, or fall back into a moral nihilism, which denies any rational status at all to moral judgments.
Cheers to all you practitioners of the art of meta-ethics.
Thank you, David Zimmerman, for taking the time to outline patiently the basic principles of metaethics here. It's been very enlightening.
I believe that people sometimes confuse their justifiable righteous indignation with moral objectivity.
There was a fire this morning in Santiago in which a woman in her 80's with a discapacity and her grand-daughter were burned to death. I just saw in the news that fire fighters trace to the blaze to a fight between two drug-dealers who inhabited the same cité (courtyard which contains room and generally a common bathroom) and who of course escaped the fire without harm.
I was filled with indignation at the lumpen SOB's whose lack of concern for others or carelessness caused the death of two completely innocent people and I said to myself, "this is really objective evil" and "they deserve hanging", but then realized that my indignation is just my indignation, an emotion and does not mean that what the two small-time criminals did was somehow objectively evil.
I'm suspect that we all do that from time to time. Maybe some do it more than others.
David,
You write:
“attitudes purified by confrontation with the facts, etc. are not mere attitudes... they are rational attitudes, by virtue of being answerable to well-founded conditions of rationality. If moral realism is not viable, which it may not be, then the idealized attitude conception of moral judgment may be all that is left, if we are not to fall into a nihilistic fictionalism about morality.”
I submit this statement is circular, because you are assuming what you are proposing to prove. From your comments on the next thread regarding the tragic mayhem which occurred in Uvalde, it is apparent that you believe that what the gunman did in killing the 19 children was “wrong,” and “wrong” in a moral sense. So, given your definition above, what are the “well-founded conditions of rationality” which justify your attitude that what the gunman did was wrong/immoral? I submit that you cannot explain these “well-founded conditions of rationality” without eventually, at some point, simply stating that, “taking the life of a human being, particularly a young child, without any justification, where the victim has not committed any crime, and has not threatened the life of the assailant, is wrong/immoral.” This is an assertion of an objective moral precept, that you have to accept as true without proof. Regardless how many qualifiers you encase your concept of a rational attitude in, eventually you have to come round to asserting an objective moral precept that you have no further rational explanation for. That proves that moral objectivism is valid.
I have just ordered Mackie’s “Ethics: Inventing Right & Wrong” from Amzaon (Jeff Bezos’s credit I can obtain this book on ethics for a very reasonable price, so Jeff Bezos is advancing the cause of ethical thought.)
I, in turn, suggest that you re-read G. E. Moore’s essay, “The Subject Matter of Ethics” from Principia Ethica. I find Moore’s writing extremely elegant and well-reasoned and a joy to read.
By the way, I have read a summary of Prof. Brandt’s :A Theory of the Good and the Right.” It is just a rehashing of Bentham’s utilitarianism, with some empirical data from sociological studies thrown in. It still suffers from the basic flaw of utilitarianism of being unable to calculate the net greatest good for the greatest number.
s. wallerstein,
The incident you describe was caused by the gross negligence of two druggies. Gross negligence is sanctionable, but it does not rise to the level of being intentionally evil.
What is instead of having created conditions which resulted in a fire that killed the octogenarian, they had deliberately poured gasoline on her and lit it on fire. Would you then say that your indignation at what they did amounted to no more than an adverse emotion, or would you say that their intentional act was evil, and objectively immoral?
Marc:
Your response to me deserves a thoughtful reply.
Shall do my best to provide one tomorrow. Right now I am working on a book about the free will debate, and would like to finish a tough chapter. (A little self-serving, self-promotion.)
A quick comment about your opening salvo: I am not begging any questions, not arguing in a circle. However, my position does commit me to the idea that moral arguments have to end somewhere in some basic commitments of the person advancing the moral claim, and that the end-point might not yield the kind of agreement and conclusiveness that the moral realist hopes for.
I'll try to explain what I mean tomorrow.
Re Brandt-- He may not sketch his meta-ethical idealized preference theory in the law review article... he may focus more on the utilitarian theory he thinks gets generated from it. I think he is wrong to be so committed to utilitarianism, but that's another story.
BTW, you get his flavour of utilitarianism wrong--- it is not Benthamite in either its structure or its account of value. A. Brandt is not an act-utilitarian, but rather defends a complicated kind of (what he calls) ideal-rule utilitarianism (which I can explain if you have any interest in the topic] and B. He is not a value hedonist... but embraces a pluralist conception of intrinsic value.
You still haven't answered may question about what you would do if moral realism turned out not to be true. Do you think that this is impossible because it is obviously, maybe even, self-evidently true? It would be heavy burden to prove that. I wonder what you will think of Mackie's arguments.
David,
I look forward to reading Mackie's arguments, but, yes, I believe the moral precept that the claim that one human being has the right to own another human being is immoral is self-evident, regardless how many people through-out history claimed otherwise. It was certainly self-evident to James Brown. And I also believe it is objectively immoral to force a female to engage in sexual intercourse against her will. And I believe this is self-evident, regardless what some rampaging Vikings might say. So, I do not believe that the demise of moral realism as a valid ethical theory is really a concern.
Correction: John Brown. It was probably also self-evident to James Brown. the Father of Soul.
Marc,
As usual, you didn't get my point, but we march to the beat of a different drum.
I was trying to point out that when one has intense feelings of indignation, one has a tendency to see that indignation as stemming from objective moral judgments.
That is in line with the work of psychologists like Jonathan Haidt who have studied moral judgments and conclude that they come from our emotions and that we later rationalize our emotional responses.
None of that interests you, I realize.
However, my perception of you is that you are a person with intense emotional responses of indignation, often righteous indignation. However, as I said, that kind of stuff really doeesn't interest you and I even apologize for striving to get you to see things from my point of view. Enjoy your Sunday evening.
To Marc:
A quick answer. (Sure, David!):
We don't need moral realism to explain why the right to own another human being is immoral. Idealized attitude theories have the resources to explain why most (I'll come back to this qualification) human beings would take up a negative attitude to this practice if their attitudes were "purified" in the manner operating here.
Hume, an adherent of this sort of non-realist meta-ethics had a pretty good account of the matter in "The Treatise." Normal human beings are equipped with a natural capacity for what he called "sympathy," the natural tendency to respond positively to the pleasure of others and negatively to their pain. Already, this gets us to the point where many (maybe most) people would, if fully informed, consistent and impartial, respond negatively to the enslaving of one human being by another.
The rest of the motivational slack is taken up by Hume's appeal to the "artificial" virtue of justice, i.e. our capacity to realize that opting for a set of principles that everyone who is concerned to avoid the nasty problems of strategic interaction (such as the prisoner's dilemma and the free rider problem) would have good reason to accept. Such principles would likely prohibit institutions such as slavery, because those contracting into the society in the offing would in advance have no way of knowing whether they would turn out to the slaves. (Rawls's veil of ignorance achieves a similar result.) These ideas of Hume's would need a lot more explication to be convincing, but I hope that the broad contours are clear enough.
Your alternative explanation for the wide-spread commitment to, e.g. the slavery principle, is that it is self-evidently true. But the availability of an account like Hume's indicates that the realist's appeal to some kind of self-evidence, analogous to that allegedly enjoyed by the axioms of Euclidean geometry or of number theory, is just not convincing, given the less epistemically and ontologically committal rational subjectivist alternative.
Mackie's anti-realist argument from the existence of intractable moral disagreement comes into the picture here. It was a problem that plagued G.E.Moore's brand of realist moral intuitionism. (I have read Moore!) What do we say when people whose views seem responsive to all the relevant empirical facts, etc., nonetheless embrace contradictory moral beliefs, say, about the moral status of three month old human fetuses?
On the Moorean view, each one is claiming to intuit the rightness of his own position on the question of whether or nor it is morally permissible to kill such a being. How to adjudicate such a conflict? The problem is that moral realism has no account of how claims to moral self-evidence can involve misrepresentation of the moral facts that are opposed to be out there. Idealized attitude theory, by contrast, does have an explanation, albeit without any essential reference to claims about self-evidence.
Marc, please do not be offended when I say that you are not rally grasping the main features of the dialectic that divides moral realists and their anti-realist opponents.
There! I said that this would be brief.
Any questions?
s. wallerstien,
You are playing an intellectual shell game. You insist that, regardless what I might say, the derivation of all of my claims of the existence of objectively moral precepts is really, deep down, just an expression of my deep sense of indignation and repulsion with respect to certain conduct, and that I am, without my really knowing or being aware of it, and my refusal to acknowledge what is psychologically going on, simply a transference of my indignation and repulsion to a belief that the conduct which causes me indignation and repulsion is objectively morally wrong.
But I maintain that that is not at all what is going on with me mentally. I maintain that the concept that one human being has a right to claim ownership of another human being is INTELLECTUALLY INDEFENSIBLE. It has nothing to do with my sense of indignation or repulsion. You will insist that regardless how much I claim slavery is INTELLECTUALLY INDEFENSIBLE, I really am doing no more than converting my sense of indignation and repulsion into a pseudo claim of intellectual indefensibility. On what basis can you make that claim about my interior mental processes? Or of the internal mental processes of anyone else who shares my view? And how does the fact that thousands of people in the ante-bellum South believed, contrary to my moral conviction, that slavery was perfectly acceptable contradict my claim that slavery is INTELLECTUALLY INDEFENSIBLE? The fact that you, I assume, also believe that slavery is wrong, but believe that that that belief is no more than your sense of indignation and repulsion does not entail that is the only basis upon which the institution of slavery could be condemned as immoral, nor does it exclude the fact that the claim that one human being can have the right to own another human being is INTELLECUALLY INDEFENSIBLE. The point of the matter is, I have never met a slave, nor a slaveowner. But the idea that a slaveowner could claim the right to own another human being is INTELLECTUALLY INDEFENSIBLE, and this has absolutely nothing to do with any sense of indignation or repulsion regarding the concept of slavery.
The same is true regarding my example of two druggies who have deliberately doused an old woman with gasoline and set her on fire. I believe that it is INTELLECTUALLY INDEFENDSIBLE DELIBEATELY TO CAUSE ANOTHER HUMAN BEING PAIN. I believe this not simply out of a sense of indignation or repulsion at the idea of seeing an old woman burning to death. And rankly, for you to reject this belief that such conduct is INTELLECTUALLY INDEFENSIBLE and is no more than, at bottom, an expression of my indignation and repulsion at imagining seeing a woman burning to death, when I have not even conjured up the vision of such an event, takes a lot of chutzpah on your part.
David,
You state:
“The rest of the motivational slack is taken up by Hume’s appeal to the ‘artificial’ virtue of justice, i.e., our capacity to realize that opting for a set of principles that everyone who is concerned to avoid the nasty problems of strategic interaction (such as the prisoner’s dilemma and the first rider problem) would have good reason to accept. Such principles would likely [sic] prohibit institutions such as slavery, because those contracting into the society in the offing would in advance have no way of knowing whether they would turn out to [be] slaves. …These ideas of Hume’s would need a lot more explication to be convincing, but I hope that the broad contours are clear enough.”
Well, no, I do not find them convincing. Frankly, it all amounts to a pile of sophistry, for the following reasons:
1. Where does the “’articial’ value of justice” come from. Is it an expression of the personal preference of Hume, Rawls and you, and thereby subject to the same objections which s. wallestein, David Palmeter and Eric have been leveling at me. Or are they the expression of objective moral principles, the existence of which you and they reject.
2. How do you prove the validity of these “values of justice” a deficiency which the moral relativists have leveled against me? Why should you not be rquired to provide the same proof of these “values” as the moral relativists require of me?
3. Your appeal to the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Free Rider problem do not provide the logical, intellectual support for these values that you claim. Most people confronted with the Prisoner’s Dilemma do not have an answer for what the most advantageous strategy is, or get it wrong. And the Free Rider problem actually exists in real life, where free-loaders are willing to take advantage of a community’s resource without being willing to kick in their “fair” share. How can a situation which in practice exemplifies unfairness provide the intellectual ballast for what it means to be “fair”? As I have indicated in past comments, his very issue went to the Supreme Court in the case of Janus v. AFL-CIO, and the free-loaders won.
So, David, nothing you have written has persuaded me that that your analysis provides a better, more logical, more defensible alternative to moral realism, and I stand by my advocacy of it as the only legitimate basis for making ethical decisions, even if it does not provide an answer to the young Frenchman trying to decide whether he has a greater moral obligation to join the French Resistance, versus not join the French Resistanc.
Marc:
You have Hume's contractarian argument for the rationality of compliance to rules of justice wrong.
He assumes that everyone who faces a problem of strategic interaction (such as the PD) are trying to solve it, except, of course, for those tempted to be free riders. But the knowledge that such people exist creates a fear in the rest of us: are there enough potential free riders to jeopardize our attainment of mutually agreed upon goals? How to guarantee that such a thing does not happen?
There is the Hobbsean solution-- invest the authority to enforce the rules in an omnipotent sovereign. Too costly.
Better to take a two prong approach.1. Set up institutions that engender in people a desire to follow the rules of justice as an end in itself, so that most people won't even be tempted to violate them. (You are one of them... you are not even tempted to become a slave holder.) Thus, most people capable of Human sympathy and with an inclination to obey the rules( e.g. a rule forbidding slavery) as long as a sufficiently large number of other are also so inclined... will have an intrinsic motivation to obey the rules. They will come to have a sense that it is simply the right thing to do.
2. As for the rest, set up a system of detection and punishment, backed up by force.
So, Hume ends up with a group of people who want to achieve certain individual ends, such as being free of violence and coercion, and who also want to achieve a set of mutually agreed upon common ends, such as providing resources for the group to flourish. Given the mix of conflicting and concordant aims, they get together (notionally) and agree to the set of rule that would enable them to achieve their ends. They also need methods to secure sufficient compiance, thus internalization of the rules and external enforcement mechanisms.
That is the story. It may or may not work when all the details are spelled out. But it is a plausible story to tell about how people who originally are not committed to moral principles qua moral, but who do have certain ends they wish to achieve, might devise a set of rules to govern their interactions, which rationally constrain them impartially to be peaceful, cooperative, respectful of the interests of others... all commitments that would lead them to condemn an institution like slavery.
Note that nowhere does such story posit attitude independent objective moral facts about the good and the right. But it does get choosers who face the original problem of creating a peaceable community closer to achieving that goal via the commitment to a set of rules about what it is right and wrong to do.
I'll get to your remarks about the prisoners dilemma and the free rider problem in the next instalment.
To Marc...
On the role of the prisoners dilemma and the free rider problem in a contractarian-style grounding of moral principles.
To be sure, you are correct that when faced with a prisoners dilemma-type situation many people "get it wrong." They try to get their first choice, "my defecting/your complying" , so they defect. But the other "prisoner" is reasoning along the very same lines, so he defects too. So both of them end up with their third choice, mutual defection, rather than their second, mutual compliance. (The first choice of each is, of course, not jointly achievable.) Each tries to be the free rider, who gets the lightest sentence of all, but they both end up getting a high sentence rather than a lighter one.
But the fact that players in the PD tend to act irrationally, even immorally, is not to the point; it does not nullify the effectiveness of the PD in a modelling of the contractarian thinking that is intended to explain how a group of people might get themselves to commit themselves to a set of principles that we would regard as providing them with moral guides to right action .
The idea is already implicit in my remarks about the Humean contract. People with partly conflicting, partly converging interests already face PD-type problems of strategic interaction. Their (our) task is to devise a way to solve them. Coming up with a mutually agreed upon set of principles suitably enforced by internal and external sanctions, is one promising solution. The principles are what SOLVE the PD and PREVENT too much immoral free-riding. the principles are what are supposed to prevent the immorality of violating the rules (e.g. against enslaving other members of the community.
Now, Marc.... where is the "sophistry" in this approach to justifying moral principles?
David,
You have provided an informative analysis of Hume’s political theory and how he believed an ideal, rational polity could be formed. But it is not Ethics. You indicate that under this theory the citizens would conclude that slavery was undesirable. But, clearly, in the Confederate South, there was a society, many of whose members were what would be regarded as rational, thinking human beings, which reached the opposite conclusion, and viewed slavery as a perfectly moral and acceptable way of life, and that they were actually doing favor to their benighted slaves, and who were not persuaded by Hume’s, Rawls’, or your concept of the ideal polity. I am interested in Ethics, not political science. And I maintain that the institution of slavery, along with other forms of conduct, is objectively immoral, because it is objectively cognitively indefensible – irrespective of the fact that many rational people living in Dixie prior to 1865, thought otherwise.
Marc,
But the ante-bellum slaveholders were NOT rational, in the sense operating in contractarian theories... Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Rawls, Scanlon. They were massively ignorant about what kind of people slaves were, they were self-deceived about the actual facts, they were drenched in double standards, they failed the most basic tests of impartiality ("put yourself in their place" reasoning), and so on. Slavery is a paradigm case how idealized attitude and conractarian MORAL theories are supposed to work.
BTW...You don't get to dictate when a kind of theory counts as a contribution to ethics proper rather than merely (?) to political theory.
From the Index of Hume's Treatise:
1.4 Book 3: Of MORALS
1.4.1 Part 1: Of virtue and vice in general
1.4.2 Part 2: Of justice and injustice
1.4.2.1 Sections 1–2
1.4.2.2 Sections 3–6
1.4.2.3 Sections 7–12
1.4.3 Part 3: Of the other virtues and vices
1.4.3.1 Section 1
1.4.3.2 Section 2–3
1.4.3.3 Sections 4–5
1.4.3.4 Section 6
David,
It is apparent that you and I are continuing to go around in circles. The slave-holders of the South were not rational??? You have introduced what in theater terms is referred to as a deus ex machina, a mechanism in order to accommodate the results you want. Whatever conflicts with your theory of how rational people would/should behave, you just conveniently dismiss them as not being rational, and therefore their example does not contradict your ethical/political theory. In H. L. Mencken’s terms, they were acting quite rational – is it not rational for a group of people who have a monopoly on power to use their power to their own advantage, at the disadvantage of those whom they exploit/enslave? It is quite rational, but nonetheless objectively immoral.
What would you say of Putin, and the millions of Russians who support his invasion of Ukraine and the massacre of thousands of innocent Ukrainians – that none of them are rational? I suspect there are quite a few good chess players among those irrational Russians who support Putin; and professors with Ph.D.’s; and quite intelligent physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. According to your theory, in order to condemn their conduct you have to conclude none of them are rational, which is absurd. No, Putin is quite rational as a power broker who knows how to manipulate others people and other nations. He is rational, but he is also objectively immoral.
Take the mass shooting in Uvalde last week. There are a lot of rational people in this country who insist that the 2nd Amendment gives them, and everyone else in this country, the right to keep and bear weapons of mass destruction, resulting in the periodic deaths of innocent people. According to your theory, this could not happen in a rational society, and therefore the people who support this interpretation of the 2nd Amendment cannot be rational, or, following the theory of Hume, Rawls, and you, they would not interpret the 2nd Amendment in this manner. In addition, if this is what the drafters of the 2nd Amendment meant by its words (which I reject), they too could not have been rational. Yet, despite all of these people not being rational, numerous commenters on the following thread maintain that what the 18 year-old shooter did was reprehensible, deplorable, and yes, immoral. So, you have two groups of people on opposite sides of the same issue, many of whom are rational. How does Humes’, Rawls’ and your theory deal with this? I maintain that those who view the shooter’s conduct as immoral view it as objectively immoral and that – contrary to the position of s. wallerstein, David Palmeter, and Eric, their view that it is immoral is not just an expression of their indignation and repulsion at what the shooter did. They believe it is objectively immoral to take the life of an 8 year-old, 9 year-old, and 10 year-old who has not caused any harm to, or threatened the life of the shooter. And it has nothing to do with Humes’, Rawls’, or your theory of how rational people would behave in and ideal society
Regarding the titles of the chapters in Hume’s treatise, the fact that he used the word “morals” in his chapter heading does not mean that he was doing ethical analysis. He was doing a combination of sociology/anthropology/political science, but he was not doing meta-ethical analysis.
Marc,
Hasn't your definition of rationality changed?
Sometimes you say that objective morality is as rational as geometry, that just as everyone can see that the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, so too all rational people can see that slavery is immoral.
However, here in your reply to David Zimmerman, you use "rationality" in the instrumental sense, understanding how to obtain one's interests, preferences and goals. Thus, slave-owners are rational in this sense (as you use it in the second case) because they can live off the slaves without having to exert themselves and do heavy physical labor.
s. wallerstein,
Good point. You have me cornered - or do you? But the wily attorney sees a loop-hole: There are different forms and degrees of rationality, just as there are different Intelligence Quotients. Some rational people have a form of rationality which serves their selfish interest to maximize their power and wealth. Their rationality is not geared towards making valid ethical judgments, or engaging in ethical conduct, but they are nonetheless rational. How does one tell the difference between the different kinds of rationality? By their deeds, by their deeds we shall know them.
Marc,
You can see that I read and pay attention to what you write.
Marc...
For the time being, I give up.
You say that I engage in sophistry.
I say that you badly misunderstand the philosophical theories at issue here... and that you cannot, or are just too stubborn, to take a point.
OY-- and I thought that philosophers were bulldogs in argument.
Let's give it a rest for while.
Best and cheers,
David
David,
You attribute my resistance to your meta-ethical analysis to just plain stubbornness, which is a way to delegitimize why I disagree with you. Basically, I believe that any theory of ethics/political science you offer ultimately must rest on the assumption of moral judgments that you need not justify or prove, and therefore embedded in your analysis is the belief that there are, in fact, morally objective judgments. You maintain that this is not the case, but I have not seen any indication that it is not the case. From your perspective, my insistence that there are objectively moral precepts that do not require proof cannot be valid, because unless they can be proved, they are not legitimate and do not deserve to be regarded as valid. I do not believe that I am being any more stubborn than you are. We may be at loggerheads, but there are two people with different perspectives pushing at different ends of the log. And this has nothing to do with the fact that my main professional dedication is being an attorney.
Best.
Marc,
You write: “And this has nothing to do with the fact that my main professional dedication is being an attorney.”
As a lawyer myself (albeit retired for a dozen years) I find myself skeptical of your statement. When I read your posts I see a litigator at work, someone asserting and defending a position. That’s the job of a litigator who must meet any contrary argument that is made, not accede to it. That’s not the job of a philosopher who, at least in an ideal situation, sees a dialogue as a way to find truth, not as a way to defend a position.
David Palmeter,
Your assessment of what has motivated me in my discussion with David Zimmerman is erroneous. Yes, I am a litigator, and litigators, when they are doing litigation often take a positions and stand staunchly by it, come hell or high water.
But that has not been what has motivated me in my debate with David. If you read my comment in the following thread, I believe that the status of ethical judgments is a critical philosophical issue in our society, and given my background in philosophy (the sufficiency of which some may question) I have taken the issue of the legitimacy and justification for ethical judgments quite seriously, not simply as a litigator intent on winning a lawsuit.
To Marc:
Ok, I'll bite.. in two instalments
If I had limited my criticism of you simply to the charge of stubbornness, then it would have been unfair. But I gave a reason, namely that you don't quite understand the philosophical views that you criticize.
And I then tried to explain how your criticism of those views gets them wrong. That is not a mere exercise in "delegitimizing" you, it is an attempt to get at why you are wrong about so many things in the meta-ethical debates at issue.
Let me focus on one of these, your claim about the self-evidence of certain moral judgments.
You say: "From your perspective, my insistence that there are objectively moral precepts that do not require proof cannot be valid, because unless they can be proved, they are not legitimate and do not deserve to be regarded as valid."
The problems with moral objectivist claims about the self-evidence of basic moral claims have been around at least since intuitionists like GE Moore and WD Ross advanced their self-evidence claims early in the last century. One such problem has to do with the the existence of moral disagreements that are seemingly intractable. (Mackie discusses it in a useful way in the first chapter of "Ethic: Inventing Right and Wrong.")
Suppose one person says "It is a basic moral truth that doing an act of type A is prohibited, and this truth is self-evident." But suppose another person says "It is a basic moral truth that doing an A-type action is permissible [or even required], and that truth is self evident" They cannot both be correct.
Since these are claims about basic rightness and wrongness, the dispute may not be resolvable by a further appeal to what the empirical facts are, etc.. How, then, is it to be determined which of these claims of self-evidence is the correct one?
Without an answer to this challenge, intuitionists have a hard time making credible their thesis that moral judgments are about the metaphysically autonomous, non-natural properties of goodness and rightness, which we simply intuit as being instantiated in certain actions, practices and institutions.
In other words, intuitionism has no theory of how moral intuition claims of self evidence can be in error, such that it is possible to resolve disputes between people who make conflicting ones. Without such an error theory, it cannot be determined which person is correct and which one is in error.
With respect, I do not think that you take this problem with your meta-ethical position seriously enough, or really consider it at all.
I agree with you that killing innocent human infants is very, very morally wrong. The meta-ethical questions are what it means to say this, and how it is to be established that it is true.
You say that it is self evidently true because anyone who considers the matter will intuit that the practice is an instance of moral wrongness.
By contrast, meta-ethical subjectivists, contractualists, constructivists and the like say that the statement, when construed in a way that can be philosophically supported, makes a statement about how human beings of a certain sort (empirically informed, consistent, impartial, equipped with the normal complement of emotional capacities such as Humean sympathy, etc.) would take up a negative attitude toward it.
More coming...
Instalment Two
Intuitionists might well say at this point in the dialectic: "To quoque, subjectivist-- what if two people who satisfy all your conditions for being an ideal observer or contractor take up conflicting, albeit purified attitudes, towards a practice like infanticide? Do you have 'an error theory,' which enables you to to determine which one of them is in error?"
This is a legitimate objection to raise. And, I admit that the subjectivist does not have a decision procedure to apply when a moral dispute reaches this end point. All that she can say is that there is a basic relativism embedded in moral thought construed along subjectivist lines. It entails that when all the indisputable rational constraints (epistemological, logical, etc.) have been applied, but moral disagreement endures, then we are at the end of the justificatory line. We must relativize the truth of the basic but conflicting judgments about right and wrong to the persons or communities that embrace them.
The subjectivist should grant (emphasis, emphasis) that this is a most distressing result of its meta-ethical analysis. It would be much better if meta-ethical objectivism were true. But, yet again, wishing does not make it so.
Where does this leave us? Here is how I see it. We are at the kind of philosophical juncture in the dialectic that is all-too-familiar in philosophy: Each of the opposing positions on some issue (whether it be in meta-ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of mathematics... whatever) has its virtues but also faces serious problems. All the parties to the disputes in question can do is press their respective advantages, but also honestly acknowledge their respective burdens.
In this meta-ethical dispute, they sort out this way (as I see it):
Intuitionism:
Virtues-- It yields a robust account of the kind of authority that moral judgments seem to have, of how they seem on their face to be about properties that are "out there." (The surface grammar of moral statements is indeed objectivist.)
Burdens-- It has no error theory. It is burdened by not having an epistemological account of what "moral intuition" is or a metaphysical account of what "non-natural" properties are.
Naturalist Objectivism:
Virtues -- Same as for intuitionism, with the added advantage of not being burdened with its epistemological and metaphysical mysteries.
Burdens-- Accounting for how we are to identify the attitude independent natural properties that goodness and rightness are to be identified with or constructed from. (Spelling out this problem is a long story, which I'll skip here.) Moorean open question challenges to any particular naturalist analysis or reduction also apply. (Another long story.)
Naturalist Subjectivism:
Virtues: It yields a strong account of the authority moral judgments claim, grounded in uncontroversial standards of rational assessment. Therefore, it provides a decision procedure for adjudicating moral disputes that are not basic.
Burdens: Its grounding of that claim to authority is not as robust as that provided by intuitionism and naturalist objectivism. Moreover, when application of its decision procedure has run its course, it yields a kind of relativism, which is also a disturbing
result.
Meta-Ethical Nihilism:
Virtue: Like the two forms of objectivism, it provides an account of the surface grammar of moral judgments.
Burden: But it forces us to say that these judgments are never true, because there is nothing nor them to be true about
More coming
To Marc:
Instalment Three
Now, everybody faces a decision: How does the balance of these theoretical virtues and burdens play out?
Well, as the man (or was it a woman?) said: "You pays your money and you takes your choice!"
Or, perhaps more aptly: "Pick your poison."
I'll speak for myself. I find the "poison" that both forms of objectivism and nihilism involve, not to mention nihilism, too hard to swallow.
The mysteries of intuitionism are just that, mysteries that no naturalist philosopher should be comfortable living with.
The arbitrariness of naturalist objectivism in selecting the content of its analyses and reductions is also deeply troubling.
The nihilism of nihilism... need I say more?
The limits on subjectivist decision procedures and the relativism it invites are also troubling.
All these burdens are troubling. But, for me, the least troubling is the relativism that (admittedly) burdens subjectivism. It does limit the extent of the moral community, limiting it to the boundaries of the basic moral agreement that is to be had within the scope of the rational constraints it operates with. But it does not burden us with mysterious entities and modes of access, or with the arbitrariness of naturalistic analysis and reduction. So, that's my poison.
Marc, are you willing swallow the poison of the burdens of intuitionism?
Remember, wishing it so does not make it so.
And here endeth the lesson.
Cheers,
David Z
Sorry-- Thera are three instalments...
Mustn't miss any of my precious Lesson."
That's a great series of comments, Prof. Zimmerman - thanks for all that!
One thought:
The subjectivist should grant (emphasis, emphasis) that this [i.e. relativism] is a most distressing result of its meta-ethical analysis. It would be much better if meta-ethical objectivism were true.
Would it be? I'm not sure!
Suppose there clearly is some sort of fact or entity X which ensures the truth and objectivity of certain "obviously correct" moral propositions ("Torturing children for fun is seriously wrong," or whatever - call this one "T" for short), such that it's open to us in argument to say, "T is objectively true by virtue of X." And suppose everyone recognizes, somehow, that the addition of this phrase, "by virtue of X," does not merely have the expressive significance of raising one's voice and pounding the table.
Maybe a silly question, but: What would the meta-ethical objectivist hope to gain from this? Could it actually put an end to moral disagreement?
If we were to encounter someone who said, "T is indeed true by virtue of X - but so what? I can choose not to apply T in practice," what would the significance of that be? Would we accordingly gain the right ("truly and objectively" at that) to regard this person as morally dangerous, or amoral, or insane, or some other thing that entitles us (perhaps) to treat them differently? (Say, to treat them as someone who's forfeited their moral standing and rendered themselves a mere threat to be contained?)
I'm thinking: Don't we already do this anyway, regardless of the status of relativism and objectivism? (On relativism, we could say, we enter each "moral transaction" with certain non-negotiable (albeit contingent) basic preferences, and we assert ourselves accordingly - "within limits," but the limits themselves are dictated by basic preferences.)
It seems in short that the difference might ultimately be a verbal one. Hopefully that makes sense.
David,
I intend, if not later today, later this week, to respond to your three segments. I, obviously, disagree with your analysis, and my disagreement is substantive, and not, as David Palmeter would assert, the mere stubbornness of a litigator diehard set on winning, regardless the merits of his position. But I have some immediate issues to deal with. One of my clients passed away over the weekend, and her funeral is tomorrow, so I am not fully focused on meta-ethics. In addition, I have two legal briefs to get written in the next here days. Suffice it to say, I do not want it to appear that my immediate silence is a concession. I shall return.
To Michael:
Thank you for the kind word.
You raise several very good questions.
The first of several instalments:
Q1:
What does a moral objectivist hope to gain from the putative existence of objective moral facts? (Implicit question: Isn’t idealized preference subjectivism just as good when it comes to engaging in moral inquiry and resolving moral disputes?)
Possible answer:
If there were objective moral facts, then every moral dispute would in principle be open to resolution, if only the disputants had access to the appropriate methods of inquiry into the objective good and right — whatever those methods are— and were able to use them properly.
Possible problem:
We know, roughly, what count as reliable methods of inquiry for discovering the empirical facts, i.e. not astrology, not reading the entrails of birds, not consulting the Vatican, but good old careful empirical observation, careful devising of falsifiable and explanatorily powerful theories, openness to new discoveries, willingness to revise our theories in the face of them … i.e. “the scientific method.”
However, moral objectivists of both the intuitionist and naturalist varieties have trouble explaining what the analogous methods are for discovering objective moral truths. (Long story, but that is all I’ll say here.)
Q2:
Would the truth of moral objectivism put an end to moral disagreement?
Possible answer:
You are quite right to suggest that it would not. Let me share a few thoughts about this.
First, the truth of moral objectivism would not on its own guarantee that people would always manage to have correct beliefs about discoverable objective moral facts, any more than realism about scientific theories (i.e. the view that the true ones are about a mind-independent reality) guarantees that people would always have true beliefs about the empirical world.
That much is obvious.
TB continued
To Michael.
Second of Two:
Q3:
More challenging is your next question: How should we regard people who grant that a moral claim is true, e.g. that killing innocent infants or enslaving people is wrong, but persist in saying “So, what… I don’t need no stinking morality!” It goes without saying that such a person is dangerous and must be stopped. But what more do we say? If he is genuinely insane, i.e. suffers from a genuine mental disability, which renders him unable to arrive at correct moral conclusions, then we try to treat him and, failing that, restrain him.
But what if he suffers no such disability, but is just, we might say “built that way,” i.e. not to care about moral truths? (Your label of “amoralist” for such a person is apt.) What does the moral objectivist say about such a person that subjectivists cannot say?
Good question. The objectivist cannot say that the amoralist fails to recognize a moral fact when he sees one, because (by hypothesis) he does recognize that moral truths are moral truths, he simply (?) does not care about them as moral facts. (He might care to honour them for instrumental reasons, but that is not the point here.)
Question: Can the objectivist say anything about how we should treat the amoralist that a subjectivist cannot say? probably not, because they will both be able to say we should restrain the amoralist, much as we would a dangerous animal whose capacity or incapacity to recognize and act on moral truths is not even in question.
As for the amoralist’s moral standing: Being a subject who has most of the psychological capacities of normal human beings, especially self-awareness and most of what goes with it, the amoralist will have the moral standing that forbids us from treating him certain ways, e.g. inflicting pointless pain on him. But he certainly does have the right to sit at the same table with us. Subjectivists can say this as effectively as objectivists.
Re your final observation: I don’t think that the dispute between meta-ethical objectivists and subjectivists is a merely verbal one, any more than the dispute between scientific realists and instrumentalists is, or that between epistemological skeptics and non-skeptics. As I indicated in my response to Marc S., I think that philosophical disputes at this level are quite substantive and very hard to resolve because each of the eligible positions has its own virtues and burdens, which must be sorted out before anyone can make a principled choice among them, which is a hard thing to accomplish… which is why philosophy never ends.
To prevent this comment from suffering the same fate, I will stop here.
Thanks for the acute questions.
Cheers,
David Z
To Michel...
Typo in second instalment:
Of course, I meant to say that the amoralist does NOT have the right to sit doe at the table with us.
Yikes,,,,
Thank you once again, Prof. Zimmerman. Clear, thorough, and helpful as usual. :) Nothing to add on that topic at the moment.
But completely unrelated to all that, and thus in the spirit of the thread (which has wandered quite a ways from the OP) - and for lack of a better place to share - here are some interesting and possibly helpful words from William James. Without getting into specifics, I happen to find these in a time of self-doubt and discouragement - nothing too serious or overpowering, just..."bleh." Anyway:
The need of feeling responsible all the livelong day has been preached long enough in our New England. Long enough exclusively, at any rate,-and long enough to the female sex. What our girl-students and woman-teachers most need nowadays is not the exacerbation, but rather the toning-down of their moral tensions. Even now I fear that some one of my fair hearers may be making an undying resolve to become strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of her life. It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are doing it or not. Then, possibly, by the grace of God, you may all at once find that you are doing it, and, having learned what the trick feels like, you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled to go on.
(From "The Gospel of Relaxation" - link)
To Michael:
Excellent quote. I will really have to think about it.
Sadly, I have never been good at th kind of indirect method of achieving ends that James recommends.
David,
I maintain that there exist objective moral judgments. You, and others commenting on this blog, dispute this, claiming that what I assert are objective moral judgments are really no more than subjective judgments whose truth cannot be proved.
What is the difference between a proposition being objectively true, vs. merely a subjective personal opinion?
My online dictionary defines “objective” as follows: “expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations.”
It defines “subjective” as follows: “relating to or being experience or knowledge as conditioned by personal mental characteristics or states; modified or affected by personal views, experience , or background, a subjective account of the incident.”
What is the difference?
Consider the optical illusion which most of is have seen of the drawing of a young woman, which, if you look at it long enough, transforms into the drawing of an old hag.
When I look at the drawing and see the young woman, is the statement, “I see a young woman” true? Yes, as I have that immediate perception of a young woman, the statement is true. Is it objectively true? Yes, because that is what I am seeing. Do I have to prove that that is what I am seeing in order for my statement to be objectively true? No. How would I even begin to prove it? Does the fact that it is true for me, based on my personal perception make the statement subjective? Why would it?
Then, what I see shifts into the perception of an old hag. At this point I say, “I see a drawing of an old hag.” Is this statement true at the point that I state it. Yes. Is it objectively true. Yes. Does it render my prior statement when I was seeing a drawing of a young woman subjective? No. It was objectively true when I said it. Do I have to prove that that is what I am seeing in order for my statement to be objectively true? No. How would I even begin to prove it? Does the fact that it is true for me, based on my personal perception make the statement subjective? Why would it?
What about the drawing itself, the Ding An Sich of the optical illusion, so to speak. When it is not being perceived by me, or by anyone else, is it a drawing either of a young woman, or of an old hag? No, it is neither. It is just a series of lines on a piece of paper. Does this mean that neither of my prior statements was objectively true, but rather were subjective? No, they were each objectively true when I spoke them as I was having the respective perceptions.
(Continued)
I say slavery is objectively immoral.
I say this because it is objectively true that every human being has the right to control over their own body. Slavery is a denial of this objectively true proposition, and therefore slavery is objectively immoral.
The slave owner disagrees with me. The slaveowner says, “It is objectively true that some human beings have the right to control over their own body. I am an example of a human being who has the right to control over my own body. However, this is not objectively true of every human being. Some human beings do not have the right to control over their own bodies. Among them are my slaves. Why is it not objectively true that my slaves do not have the right to control over their bodies, whereas it is objectively true that I have the right to over my body? Because my skin is white, and theirs is black/brown, but not white.”
I respond, “On what basis do you claim that whether a human being has the right to control over their own bodies depends on the color of their skin? Can you provide me with a rational explanation for this distinction.”
I submit that the slaveowner cannot provide me with a rational explanation for the distinction. S/he may say such things like, “The color of one’s skin is an indication of the degree of one’s intelligence and culture, and the right to control of one’s body is a function of the degree of one’s intelligence and culture.”
On what basis, I ask, have you concluded that all human beings with black/brown skin have a lower degree of intelligence than human beings with white skin?
The slaveowner cannot prove this. The slaveowner’s belief that all black/brown skinned human beings are less intelligent than all human beings with white skin is subjective, and not objectively true. Therefore, the slaveowners’ claim that only white skinned people have a right to control over their own bodies, and black/brown skinned people do not, is a subjective belief.
Consequently, the proposition that all human beings have the right to control over their own bodies is an objectively true moral judgment, from which it follows that slavery, the right to claim to own another human being is objectively immoral, and therefore slavery is objectively immoral.
Do I have to convince the slaveowner that I am correct in order for the proposition that slavery is objectively immoral in order for it to be objectively immoral? No, of course not. Nothing I say to the slaveowner will convince the slaveowner that I am correct and that his conduct is immoral. But the fact that I cannot convince the slaveowner is irrelevant.
You say that I have said of an objectively true moral judgements, “that it is self evidently true because anyone who considers the matter will intuit that the practice is an instance of moral wrongness.” This is not true, and this is not what I maintain. I do not maintain that in order for slavery to be objectively immoral it has to be self-evident to the slaveowner and he has to agree with me. It is irrelevant whether it is self-evident to the slaveowner that slavery is objectively immoral in order for the proposition that slavery is objectively immoral to be true.
This is where you and I disagree. You maintain in order for me to be correct that a proposition is objectively moral or immoral, it must be self-evident to everyone, and I must be able to prove it to everyone. If I cannot do this, you say that this results in “the existence of moral disagreements that are seemingly intractable.” I don’t care. Whether it is or is not self-evident to everyone, and whether I can prove it to everyone, is not the test of whether a moral proposition is objectively true. A proposition can be objectively true without everyone agreeing that it is true. Indeed, as David Thoreau said, even if I am the only person on Earth who believes it, “any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.”
(Continued)
You say, “I agree with you that killing innocent human infants is very, very morally wrong. The meta-ethical questions are what it means to say this, and how is to be established that it is true.” But its truth is not contingent on being able to establish that it is true. To whom do we have to establish it? To the persons who deny it is true, who claim that it is not immoral to bash in the skull of a healthy newborn human being? Why should we have to prove it to them in order to prove that it is objectively true, and how could we possibly do it?
You maintain that unless we can prove the truth of a purported objectively true moral judgment, how can it be deemed to be true? I maintain it is objectively true because, like my perception of the young woman in the optical illusion, my cognitive perception is true because it is my cognitive perception. Just because it is my cognitive perception does not mean that it is subjective, any more than my perception of the young woman when I look at the optical illusion is subjective. Why do I have to prove that it is objectively true in order to qualify as a objective moral judgment, any more than I have to prove my perception of the optical illusion as that of a young woman?
And what is your alternative?
You assert that you have a methodology by which you can prove the validity of moral judgments without claiming that they are objectively true. The methodology involves making “statement[s] about how human beings of a certain sort (empirically informed, consistent, impartial, equipped with the normal complement of emotional capacities such as Humean sympathy, etc.) would take up a negative attitude toward it.” You have compared the methodology to the solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Free Rider problem. I maintain that this is all double talk and that, ultimately, you will actually be doing the same thing I am doing – stating that certain moral judgments are true simply because they are, and there is no way of proving them as being true.
I assume that you believe that each of the following propositions is true:
1. It is immoral to bash in the skull of a newborn healthy human being.
2. It is immoral for one human being to claim to have the right to own another human being.
3. I is immoral to claim the right to control another human being’s body, including that of a woman who is old enough to bear children.
4. It is immoral for one nation to invade another sovereign nation which has not declared war on, or invaded, the first nation, and to engage in the systematic an indiscriminate killing of the invaded nation’s citizens.
I maintain that each of these assertions constitutes an objective moral judgment. You reject this, at the same time that I believe you believe they are true. So, I ask you, how does your methodology prove that they are each true? How can you, based either on the Prisoner’s Dilemma or the Free Rider Problem, prove that they are each true? I frankly do not see how you can. But you are tangling the prospect of being able to do so in front of us as a basis for rejecting moral objectivism. So, rather than enticing us with the dangling prospect, show us how you would prove one of the above moral judgments by implementing your methodology.
You acknowledge that your methodology ends in moral subjectivist relativism. I find such relativism insufficient to justify condemning the above propositions as immoral, or for putting Putin on trial for war crimes. So, yes, David, I am willing to “swallow,” as you put it, the poison of burdens of intuitionism, since I do not believe, unlike you, that in order to be a valid moral judgment, I must be able to prove its validity to others, any more than Thoreau did.
(Continued)
Michael asks, if moral objectivism is correct, but you cannot prove that the objective moral judgments are true to anyone else, what good are they?
First, convincing others that the moral judgments I believe are objectively true are, in fact, objectively true is only relevant if I am seeking in a democracy to have laws passed that embody these moral judgments, which requires that I persuade the legislators that I am correct. Outside of this context, I see no need to persuade or prove to others that I am correct. In a monarchy, or a dictatorship, the laws are enacted by ukase, and reaching a consensus is not required.
Second, if I wish to actually build a consensus in a democracy in order to enact legislation consistent with what I regard as morally objective judgments, there are in fact many people who already agree with my assertion that what I claim are objectively moral judgments are in fact true, as demonstrated by the comments in the following thread relating to he murder of the 19 children in Uvalde, Texas. All the commenters who expressed anger, disgust, condemnation of the murder of those 19 children are doing so because they believe such murder is immoral, and that allowing an 18 year-old mentally ill individual to have access to a weapon of mass destruction which allowed him to take those lives is also immoral. I do not have to prove this to them. They already believe it. The challenge is finding a way that it is permissible under the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution to legislate that immorality to prevent it from happening again, and again, and again.
Similar consensus already exists with respect to other moral judgments, For example, that a woman has the right to control over her own body. I do not believe there is any legislator in Congress who would deny that this is the case. The issue becomes, what happens when the woman is pregnant and there is another potential human being in her womb, what effect does this have on her right to control her own body. I maintain that the proposition that a woman has a right to control over her own body before she is pregnant is an objectively true moral judgment, and to deny this is immoral. I do not have to persuade any legislator that this is correct. The question is, what does this entail in the event the woman is pregnant, with the respect to the status of the embryo/fetus as a human being also entitled to control over its own body, which includes the right to life.
I will leave it at that for now. I reserve the right to rebuttal.
(Continued)
On a personal note, I want to pay tribute to one of my clients who passed away over this past week-end. She was 87 years old and a Holocaust survivor. The funeral today was, as you can imagine, very emotional and very poignant. Miriam Brysk was born and grew up in Warsaw, Poland. When the Nazis invaded Poland, she was 4 years old. Her family escaped to the city of Lida, in Belarus, which was then part of Russia. When the Nazis invaded Russia in June, 1941, they created the Lida ghetto, in which all of the Jews were confined. On May 2, 1942, all of the Jews in the Lida ghetto were executed – with the exception of her family, because her father was a physician, and the Nazis conscripted him into treating Germans wounded in combat. In November, 1942, Jews in the Russian partisans rescued them from the ghetto and brought them to the nearby Lipiczany forest, where the Russian partisans were hiding from the Nazis and conducting raids on the Nazi forces. In early 1943, a partisan hospital was established in a remote part of the forest, with her father as surgical chief of staff. He provided medical care to both Jewish and non-Jewish partisans who were wounded in combat. Miriam’s hair was cut short, and she wore boys’ clothing, so that she would not be raped. She was given a revolver to carry as a birthday gift. She knew the Bielski brothers, Jewish partisans who were portrayed in the movie “Defiance.”
After the war, her family emigrated to New York in 1947. Miriam was 12 years old and had no knowledge of English or previous schooling and had a lot of catching up to do. She finished high school at 17 years of age and then attended college at New York University, where she graduated at the age of 20 with a Bachelor of Science in biology and chemistry. She then obtained a Master of Science in 1958 at the University of Michigan in Microbiology, and a Ph.D. in Biological and Biomedical Sciences from Columbia University. After obtaining her Ph.D., she became a professor at the University of Texas in three medical school departments, Dermatology, Microbiology and Biochemistry. She then became the Director of the Dermatology Research Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch, in Galveston, Texas.
She and her husband, who was also a Holocaust survivor with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, moved to Ann Arbor in 1971. She took as her remaining mission in life creating photographic collages which paid tribute to the victims of the Holocaust. Several of her works are displayed at Yad Vashem in Israel.
The funeral service was one of the most poignantly beautiful funeral services I have ever attended. Her two daughters, and two of her grandchildren, gave very moving eulogies, recalling her strong, independent spirit, her loving devotion to her family and her vitality in living, despite the travails and challenges of her youth.
To Marc:
Thank you for your long comment. I will try to address your main points, however, I must say that I am getting discouraged about our lengthy exchange because it is spinning its wheels.
At every stage, I try to be responsive to what you are trying to say about an objectively true morality, understood along the lines of a G.E. Moore style intutionism. I have tried to place that view within the context of long standing meta-ethical debates over what moral statements mean and how they are to be justified, debates in which intuitionist objectivists, naturalist objectivists, Kantian rationalists, idealized attitude subjectivists and contructivists, error theory nihilists and others face off on the the questions about meaning and justification.
But — I have to say, Marc— you never take in any of this history. You just fall back on your claim that moral judgments are objective and self-evidently true as the intuitionists claim, and that’s the end of it.
I hate to sound preachy, Marc, but I have to say, that there are certain philosophical virtues that you fail to embody. One is to consider the best possible case for the views that you oppose, and then to argue responsively against the best version, not some easily targeted strawman. Another virtue is to give a fair and thorough hearing to criticisms of your own view, rather than just batting them aside like some minor inconvenience.
But you never try to exemplify either of these virtues…. Never.
I address that point in the next two instalments.
Part 2:
To illustrate what I mean, let me try to address a few of the points you make in your latest brief for intuitionist objectivism, for that is what it is, the brief of an advocate.
You begin by saying: “I maintain that there exist objective moral judgments. You, and others commenting on this blog, dispute this, claiming that what I assert are objective moral judgments are really no more than subjective judgments whose truth cannot be proved.”
This gets you off on the wrong foot, for I am not saying that the attitudes that figure in idealized attitude meta-ethical theories are “no more than subjective attitudes, etc.” They are IDEALIZED attitudes, purified by an exposure to the the empirical facts, constraints of logical consistency, the demands of impartiality, etc.
Saying that they are merely subjective is like saying that purified water is merely water, just like fetid or polluted or noxious or toxic water, no more no less. But, sure, they are all H2O, but that is not the point of recommending that people drink only the purified kind and avoid the others.
You then raise a legitimate question: “What is the difference between a proposition being objectively true, vs. merely a subjective personal opinion?”
But you answer it this way: “My online dictionary defines ‘objective’ as follows: ‘expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations.’ It defines ‘subjective’ as follows: ‘relating to or being experience or knowledge as conditioned by personal mental characteristics or states; modified or affected by personal views, experience, or background, a subjective account of the incident.’ What is the difference?”
On your very own account of the difference, the idealized attitudes that play the central role in subjectivist meta-ethics are objective in your very own sense….precisely because they are purified in a way that eliminates “distortion by [merely] personal feelings, prejudices or interpretations.” They are the attitudes of an ideal observer, advisor, contractor and the like. The constraints of epistemic, logical and impartial rationality are what prevents them from being “no more than subjective judgments.”
Your failure to acknowledge this crucial feature of the meta-ethical view you reject is a prime example of your failure to exemplify the first virtue I mentioned above…. You have simply straw-manned idealized attitude theories. That is not good.
Part 3:
I will offer an example of your failing to exemplify the second virtue, i.e. paying close and careful attention to objections to your own position in the next instalment.
You deploy the analogy of optical illusions about objects out there in the world, intending it to shed light on your intuitionist notion of objective moral facts that are supposed to be out there in an objective moral realm. But you have not yet earned the right to that analogy, for the simple reason that ethical intuitionism does not yet have the sort of error theory that the study of human vision does.
We know how to account for our vulnerability to visual illusions because we have well supported causal stories to tell about how subjects who are in the visual presence of objects, such as the stick in water that looks but is not bent, will under certain conditions of observation tend to see the objects as having properties that they do not have. We do not have anything remotely like that for explaining how a person who makes a moral assertion, which he claim is self-evidently true, can nonetheless be in error. I raised that problem in my catalogue of the burdens that ethical intuitionism faces, but you refuse to take it seriously.
That is about all I have to say about your last post.
It was very long….. But you just make the same assertions over and over again: There are objective moral facts. They enter into the truth conditions of self-evident moral judgments Anyone who denies this is simply displaying his bare preferences.
That won’t do, Marc, in a serious discussion of meta-ethics.
Cheers,
David
David Zimmerman,
Not only do I admire your philosophical learning, but also your patience and your dedication to teaching.
I find the exact same lack of philosophical virtues (as you put it) when I try to talk to Marc, but unlike you, I get angry and have a difficult time resisting using language better suited to a street brawl than to an intellectual debate.
And don't tell me that it's just that you have a doctorate in philosophy and I don't. From time to time I participate in a blog of another professional philosopher, who often loses his patience (maybe even faster than I do) and tells those who lack philosophical virtues to take a long walk on a short pier, as we used to say.
So cheers to your patience and dedication to teaching others.
To S Wallerstein:
Thank you for your kind words.
A propos your comment in the penultimate paragraph:
I would not think of telling you that a doctorate in philosophy is any sort of training for virtues like patience and forbearance. I am a living counterexample, having spent most of my life as a scrappy SOB. (Just ask my friends and colleagues.)
The thing is... I like Marc S.... Are you listening, Marc?
Cheers,
David Z
David Zimmerman,
I like Marc myself. He reveals so much of himself (behind the mask of the objective philospher) that I can't help´liking the child behind the mask.
There are people who have layers and layers of defense mechanism behind the mask that they try to present to others, say, Biden, but Marc isn't one of them. At times the child may be very obvious and yet very perverse, as in the case of Putin, but Marc isn't perverse.
Not only has Marc straw-manned idealized attitude theories; the straw-manning is unnecessary.
He could have said ten posts ago something like: "I understand idealized attitude theories, but I find them less persuasive than the view that there are objective, mind-independent, moral facts 'out there'. So let's just agree to disagree."
But Marc didn't do that. Instead he insisted on presenting a caricature of opposing views and implying that the adherent or presenter of other views, in this case David Z., actually agreed w him (Marc) when all was said and done. And he insisted on saying that those people who passed moral judgments without sharing his meta-ethical perspective were hypocrites (his word). And he insisted on refusing to acknowledge that there is any meaningful difference between personal preferences ("I like chocolate ice cream") and considered judgments. Or -- to put it differently and less strongly -- he refused to acknowledge that it is possible to make a non-ridiculous argument that there is such a meaningful difference. Again, he could have said something like: "I think moral positions need to be grounded in what I consider objective, self-evident moral truths, but I recognize that reasonable people could hold other views. I just find them unpersuasive for reasons 1,2,3." He didn't say that.
In short, this was not the way to carry on a productive conversation.
David,
Putting aside the patronizing aspect of your response, you have not addressed one of the main points of my comment. You accuse me of not taking seriously the meta-ethical position you espouse of “IDEALIZED attitudes, purified by an exposure to the empirical facts, constraints of logical consistency, the demands of impartiality, etc.” So, I asked you to provide an example of such an analysis, which you have compared to the analysis of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Free Rider problem, where you can demonstrate that slavery is immoral, or that bashing in the skull of a healthy newborn human being is immoral. I maintain that whatever analysis you would offer would, ultimately, rest on the equivalent of what I claim are the existence of objective moral judgments. You have not provided such an analysis, and until you do, I do not find your claims persuasive. You can provide such an analysis as a comment in this blog. If it is too long and complicated for this blog, perhaps there is a publication, or a peer reviewed article you have written, in which you set forth such an analysis, and if so I would be willing to read it. Until you do, it appears to me that you are avoiding addressing what I regard as a serious weakness in your position.
To Marc:
I am sorry that you found my response to your long post patronizing, though, I suppose that I can understand why you did. I did chide you rather harshly.
But I am glad to see that you go on to join the issue between us in a way that might turn out to be useful:
One: You say that you will not find my claims on behalf of an idealized attitude meta-ethics persuasive until I "provide an example of such an analysis, where you [DZ] can demonstrate that slavery is immoral, or that bashing in the skull of a healthy newborn human being is immoral."
Two: You maintain that "Whatever analysis you [DZ] would offer would, ultimately, rest on the equivalent of what I [MS] claim are the existence of objective moral judgments [as understood on the intuitionist account] . You have not provided such an analysis, and until you do, I do not find your claims persuasive."
Fair enough. For reasons of space, I have not provided such an account here. However, in lectures over the years I have tried to do so for issues like slavery and abortion.
So, I will go back to my lecture notes [let my pedantry reign!] and try to cast them into a form that I can post here. This may take awhile.
To be continued.
Cheers:
David Z
To Marc:
Part One;
Let me try to provide a convincing example of how the idealized attitude conception of practical rationality can resolve disputes over practices like slavery.
I apologize for the all caps in the following text. I adapted it from a lecture in a Philosophy in Literature course I taught in 2019. The text is adapted from the overheads I used in the course. Rewriting them as in lower case would take up much of the afternoon.
Let us consider a moral judgment made in response to what goes on in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”
“BELGIAN COLONIALISM IN THE CONGO WAS HYPOCRITICAL THROUGH-AND-THROUGH. IT PARADED UNDER THE BANNER OF ‘BRINGING CIVILIZATION TO THE SAVAGES,’ BUT IN REALITY IT WAS BRUTAL, EXPLOITATIVE AND UNJUST, THE PRODUCT OF GREED, ARROGANCE, INDIFFERENCE TO, EVEN A LUST FOR, HUMAN SUFFERING. TO PUT IT MILDLY … IT WAS A DEEPLY IMMORAL SYSTEM.”
I [DZ] AM CONFIDENT IN THE TRUTH AND RATIONAL JUSTIFIABILITY OF THIS JUDGMENT.
HOWEVER, WHAT [IF ANYTHING] ENTITLES ME TO THIS CONFIDENCE? CAN MORAL STATEMENTS BE TRUE OR FALSE? IF SO, WHAT SORTS OF FACTS MAKE THEM TRUE OR FALSE [AS THE CASE MAY BE]? WHAT COUNTS AS GOOD EVIDENCE, A GOOD REASON FOR A MORAL CLAIM?
LET US CONSIDER A “DIALOGUE” BETWEEN A MORAL CRITIC AND A SUPPORTER OF BELGIAN COLONIAL SLAVERY.
CRITIC MAKES A MORAL JUDGMENT:
“THE BELGIAN COLONIAL ENTERPRISE IN THE CONGO WAS MORALLY WRONG. ONE REASON IT WAS SO ABOMINABLE IS THAT IT INVOLVED SLAVERY.”
SUPPORTER QUESTIONS THAT JUDGMENT:
“WHAT’S SO WRONG ABOUT SLAVERY?”
CRITIC ADVANCES REASONS FOR THE MORAL JUDGMENT, WHICH CITE FACTS ABOUT THE PRACTICE OF SLAVERY
“AT LEAST TWO THINGS: IT IS CRUEL IN THAT IT INFLICTS HORRIBLE PAIN UPON INNOCENT PEOPLE, AND IT VIOLATES THEIR DIGNITY BY TREATING THEM AGAINST THEIR FREE CONSENT.”
SUPPORTER DISPUTES THE FACTUAL CLAIMS THAT ENTER INTO THE CRITIC’S REASONS FOR HER MORAL JUDGMENT:
“NONSENSE—IT DOES NOTHING OF THE KIND. FOR ONE THING, AFRICAN SLAVES DO NOT FEEL PAIN THE WAY YOU AND I DO. FOR ANOTHER, THEY ARE LIKE CHILDREN, IN BEING INCAPABLE OF GIVING OR WITHHOLDING GENUINE CONSENT. THEY HAVE NO MORE DIGNITY TO BE VIOLATED THAN A WORK ANIMAL DOES.
Part Two
AT THIS POINT IN THE EXCHANGE, THE CRITIC MAY RESPOND IN A NUMBER OF POSSIBLE WAYS.
ONE WAY:
ARGUE FOR THE TRUTH OF THE FACTUAL CLAIMS BY ADVANCING GOOD EVIDENCE THAT THE CONGOLESE DO FEEL PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL PAIN JUST AS INTENSELY AS WHITE EUROPEANS DO, AND THAT THEY ARE FULLY CAPABLE OF AUTONOMOUS DECISION MAKING.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS TURN IN THE DIALOGUE: IT DEMONSTRATES THE RATIONAL LEVERAGE OF GETTING THE EMPIRICAL FACTS STRAIGHT.
NOTE THAT, IN DENYING THE CRITIC’S FACTUAL CLAIMS, THE SUPPORTER IMPLICITLY ACCEPTS THE MORAL PRINCIPLE THAT THE CRITIC IMPLICITLY APPEALS TO IN CRITICIZING SLAVERY, NAMELY…
“IT IS MORALLY WRONG TO INFLICT SUFFERING UPON INNOCENT PERSONS WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.”
THERE WOULD BE NO POINT IN THE CRITIC’S DISPUTING THE SUPPORTER’S FACTUAL CLAIMS UNLESS HE [THE SUPPORTER] ALREADY ACCEPTED THIS MORAL PRINCIPLE.
THE IDEA: WHY BOTHER TO DENY THAT BLACK AFRICANS CAN FEEL PAIN AND GIVE CONSENT, IF ONE DOES NOT ALREADY BELIEVE THAT THOSE FACTS WOULD COUNT AS MORAL REASONS IF THEY ACTUALLY HELD IN THIS CASE?
WHAT THIS ILLUSTRATES IS THAT SOMETIMES MORAL DISAGREEMENTS CAN BE RESOLVED BY DETERMINING WHAT THE NON-MORAL FACTS TRULY ARE, WHICH ONE SIDE OR THE OTHER INSISTS ARE MORALLY RELEVANT TO A CORRECT MORAL JUDGMENT ABOUT THE CASE. HERE, THOSE MORALLY RELEVANT FACTS ARE THAT BLACK AFRICANS DO FEEL PAIN AND CAN GIVE (AND WITHHOLD) CONSENT.
THIS IS VERY SIGNIFICANT, BECAUSE IT SHOWS THAT REASON, i.e. THE CAPACITY TO GET THE EMPIRICAL FACTS RIGHT, DOES HAVE A SIGNIFICANT ROLE TO PLAY IN MORAL DISCUSSION.
THIS SHOWS THAT A SIMPLE “BOO-HURRAH” EMOTIVIST CONCEPTION OF MORAL JUDGMENT IS WRONG. IT ALSO SHOWS THAT A SIMPLE “BARE PREFERENCE” CONCEPTION IS WRONG.
THESE CONCEPTIONS SAY THAT….
“SLAVERY IS WRONG” MEANS NOTHING MORE THAN “SLAVERY: BOO!” OR “I DON’T LIKE SLAVERY”…. JUST AS A JUDGMENT OF MERE TASTE LIKE “I DETEST BUBBLE GUM ICE CREAM” MEANS NOTHING MORE THAN “BUBBLE GUM ICE CREAM: YUCK!”
THIS SIMPLE PICTURE CANNOT BE CORRECT, BECAUSE, AT THE VERY LEAST, MORAL JUDGMENTS GO BEYOND THE EXPRESSION OF MERE EMOTION OR TASTE BY MAKING CLAIMS TO AUTHORITY, WHEREAS WITH WITH JUDGMENTS OF SIMPLE TASTE IT MAKES NO SENSE TO ASK [e.g.] “WHY DO YOU DETEST BUBBLE GUM ICE CREAM?” WHAT COULD THIS POSSIBLY MEAN? SOMETHING LIKE— “BUBBLE GUM ICE CREAM: YUCH—- WHY?”—THIS IS NONSENSICAL. BUT WITH MANY [MOST? ALL?] MORAL JUDGMENTS, IT DOES MAKE PERFECT SENSE TO ASK “WHY?” e.g.”WHY DO YOU SAY THAT SLAVERY IS MORALLY WRONG?” --WHERE THIS MEANS…
“WHAT NON-MORAL FACTS ABOUT SLAVERY MAKE IT MORALLY WRONG?”
HERE, A NON-MORAL FACT IS A FACT THAT CAN BE STATED WITHOUT MAKING ESSENTIAL REFERENCE TO MORAL RIGHT AND MORAL WRONG, e.g. ’INFLICTS PAIN’ AND “DOES SO WITHOUT THE VICTIM’S CONSENT.”
TO SAY THAT SOME NON-MORAL FACT IS MORALLY RELEVANT IS SIMPLY TO SAY THAT IT COUNTS FOR OR AGAINST THE TRUTH OF A MORAL CLAIM ABOUT RIGHT AND WRONG.
BACK TO THE BIG META-ETHICAL QUESTION: CAN ALL MORAL DISAGREEMENTS BE RATIONALLY RESOLVED BY GETTING CLEAR ON WHETHER ALL THE [CLAIMED] MORALLY RELEVANT NON-MORAL CLAIMS ABOUT THE ACTION OR PRACTICE ARE TRUE?
IF THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IS ‘”YES,” THEN THE WEAKER “FILTER” CONCEPTION OF PRACTICAL REASON DOES PROVIDE A RATIONAL METHOD FOR PURSUING ANSWERS TO MORAL QUESTIONS, NAMELY, GETTING CLEAR ON WHAT THE TRUE NON-MORAL FACTS ABOUT THE ACTION OR PRACTICE ARE. LET US SEE HOW THIS PLAYS OUT IN OUR IMAGINED “DIALOGUE” OVER THE MORALITY OF SLAVERY IN THE BELIGIAN CONGO.
Part Three to come.
Part Three:
SUPPOSE THAT THE “DIALOGUE” TAKES A DIFFERENT TURN FROM THAT NOTED ABOVE. SUPPOSE THAT SUPPORTER GRANTS THAT SLAVERY DOES INFLICT PAIN ON AFRICAN BLACKS WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.
HOWEVER, HE ALSO DENIES THAT THE TRUTH OF THESE FACTUAL CLAIMS RENDERS SLAVERY WRONG.
HE SAYS: “YOU -- CRITIC OF CONGOLESE SLAVERY—INCORRECTLY SPECIFY THE CONTENT OF THE MORAL PRINCIPLE I ACCEPT. IT IS ACTUALLY: ‘IT IS MORALLY WRONG TO INFLICT PAIN ON WHITE EUROPEANS WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.’” HE CONTINUES…“SOME INFLICTION OF PAIN WITHOUT CONSENT IS NOT MORALLY WRONG—FOR EXAMPLE, THE INFLICTION OF PAIN ON BLACK AFRICANS.”
OF COURSE, CRITIC WILL IMMEDIATELY WANT TO KNOW WHY SUPPORTER BELIEVES THAT THE INFLICTION OF PAIN WITHOUT CONSENT IS MORALLY WRONG ONLY WHERE THE VICTIMS ARE WHITE EUROPEANS, AND NEVER WHERE THEY ARE BLACK AFRICANS.
SUPPOSE SUPPORTER SIMPLY REPLIES….
“IT JUST IS… FULL STOP. I EMBRACE – AS BASIC-- THE MORAL PRINCIPLE: ‘IT IS MORALLY WRONG TO INFLICT PAIN ON WHITE EUROPEANS.’ I REJECT – AS BASIC-- THE MORAL PRINCIPLE: ‘IT IS MORALLY WRONG TO INFLICT PAIN WITHOUT CONSENT ON BLACK AFRICANS.’”
HE CONTINUES…
“THE FACTUAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING A WHITE EUROPEAN AND BEING A BLACK AFRICAN IS MORALLY BASIC… THAT IS TO SAY, IT COUNTS IN AND OF ITSELF WHEN ONE IS TRYING TO DETERMINE WHEN THE INFLICTION OF PAIN WITHOUT CONSENT IS MORALLY WRONG AND WHEN IT IS NOT.”
HE IS A “PURE MORAL RACIST,” IN THAT TO HIM, RACE MATTERS MORALLY… IN ITSELF.
BIG QUESTION: IS ANY RATIONAL CRITICISM OF SUCH A VIEW AVAILABLE? OR DOES THIS COUNT AS A RATIONALLY IRRESOLVABLE MORAL DISPUTE, BECAUSE THE TWO SIDES…
AGREE ON ALL THE NON-MORAL FACTS [i.e. ON WHO ACTUALLY FEELS PAIN AND WHO DOES NOT] BUT STILL DISAGREE IN THEIR MORAL CONCLUSIONS [i.e. ABOUT WHOSE PAIN MATTERS MORALLY]?
NOTE— I AM WILLING TO BET THAT THERE ARE VERY FEW [ANY?] PURE MORAL RACISTS. MOST [ALL?] PEOPLE WHO OFFER RACIST ARGUMENTS FOR MORAL CONCLUSIONS AT LEAST TRY TO PROVIDE SOME FURTHER REASONS WHY RACIAL DIFFERENCES MATTER— NAMELY, THAT THEY ARE CORRELATED WITH DEEPER DIFFERENCES THAT MATTER, SUCH AS INTELLIGENCE, INDUSTRIOUSNESS, VIRTUE, ETC.
CAN WE GAIN ANY FURTHER LEVERAGE WITH THE PURE RACIST BY MAKING AN APPEAL TO CONSISTENCY AND IMPARTIALITY, IN OTHER WORDS, BY CHALLENGING HIM TO PUT HIMSELF IN THE OTHER PERSON’S [THE SLAVES] SHOES?
CONSIDER ANOTHER TURN THE “DIALOGUE” MIGHT TAKE:
CRITIC CHALLENGES SUPPORTER: “HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT IF SOMEONE ENSLAVED YOU?”
SUPPORTER MIGHT RESPOND: “I WOULD NOT LIKE IT AT ALL—BUT THEN I AM A WHITE EUROPEAN—SO WHAT’S YOUR POINT?”
CRITIC: “BUT SUPPOSE THAT YOU WERE A BLACK AFRICAN AND HAD PAIN INFLICTED ON YOU WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT? --- WOULDN’T YOU MORALLY OBJECT TO THAT?”
WHAT DOES SUPPORTER SAY? MAYBE…
“SURE, I WOULD OBJECT, BUT MY OBJECTIONS WOULDN’T COUNT FOR ANYTHING, BECAUSE I WOULD BE BLACK AND BLACKS DON’T COUNT MORALLY.”
THIS PURE RACIST SURE IS WILLING TO BE CONSISTENT!
Part Four to come.
Part Four:
OR IS HE? SUPPOSE THAT CRITIC RIGS UP [SEEMINGLY] IRREFUTABLE “EVIDENCE” THAT SUPPORTER ACTUALLY IS RACIALLY BLACK AND WAS BORN IN AFRICA.
CRITIC CONFRONTS SUPPORTER WITH THIS REALLY CONVINCING EVIDENCE AND ASKS…
“DO YOU STILL SAY THAT INFLICTING PAIN WITHOUT CONSENT ON BLACK AFRICANS IS MORALLY ALRIGHT? AND DO YOU ACCEPT THE OBVOUS IMPLICATION OF THIS PRINCIPLE… NAMELY, THAT IT IS MORALLY ALRIGHT FOR US TO INFLICT PAIN ON YOU WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT BY ENSLAVING YOU IN A COLONIAL WORK CAMP?”
A REALLY CONSISTENT PURE RACIST WOULD SAY-- “YES, I CONTINUE TO AVOW MY ORIGINAL RACIST PRINCIPLE, AND I FULLY ACCEPT THE MORAL RIGHTNESS OF ITS IMPLICATIONS…. THOUGH, NATURALLY, I DO NOT EXPECT TO LIKE BEING A SLAVE.”
THIS WOULD BE A REMARKABLE RESPONSE. ONE THING THAT SHOWS IS THAT THE THOUGHT-EXPERIMENT OF “PUTTING THE SHOE ON THE OTHER FOOT” IS A GOOD TEST OF WHETHER A PERSON REALLY DOES ACCEPT THE PRINCIPLE HE SAYS HE DOES. THIS CAN BE A POWERFUL TOOL FOR RATIONALLY RESOLVING MORAL DISPUTES WHERE IT LOOKS AS THOUGH THE PARTIES AGREE ON ALL THE MORALLY RELEVANT NON-MORAL FACTS.
WHAT THIS THOUGHT EXPERIMENT ADDS TO GETTING THE FACTS STRAIGHT IS THE IDEA OF REASONING CONSISTENTLY AND IMPARTIALLY.
THE GENERAL IDEA OF RATIONAL CONSISTENCY INVOLVES AVOIDING THE SIMULTANEOUS ACCEPTANCE OF LOGICALLY CONTRADICTORY ATTITUDES, SUCH AS ‘P’ AND ‘not-P.”
ITS APPLICATION TO THE PRESENT CASE: SUPPORTER IS BEING LOGICALLY INCONSISTENT IF HE ENDS UP ACCEPTING THE FOLLOWING PAIR OF BELIEFS…
· “IT IS MORALLY PERMISSIBLE TO ENSLAVE ANYONE WHO IS A BLACK AFRICAN,” BUT….
· “IT IS NOT MORALLY PERMISSIBLE TO ENSLAVE ME, EVEN IF I SHOULD TURN OUT TO BE
A BLACK AFRICAN.”
THE “SHOE ON THE OTHER FOOT” THOUGHT-EXPERIMENT GETS SOME SUPPORTERS TO SEE THAT THEY DO NOT REALLY ACCEPT THE QUITE GENERAL PRINCIPLE THAT “IT IS MORALLY ALRIGHT TO ENSLAVE BLACK AFRICANS.”
THEIR OWN REFUSAL TO BE ENSLAVED, IF THEY SHOULD TURN OUT TO BE BLACK AFRICANS, COMMITS THEM TO THE CONCLUSION THAT NO BLACK AFRICAN SHOULD BE ENSLAVED.
TO MAINTAIN THEIR ORIGINAL DEFENSE OF BLACK ENSLAVEMENT WHILE REFUSING TO BE ENSLAVED IF THEY SHOULD TURN OUT TO BE BLACK REVALS AN INCONSISTENCY IN THEIR BELIEF SYSTEM.
THUS, WE HAVE A SECOND RATIONAL CONSTRAINT ON GOOD MORAL REASONING—AVOID INCONSISTENCY AND IMPARTIALITY.
ADD THIS TO THE FIRST ONE THAT ENJOINS—“GET THE NON-MORAL FACTS RIGHT”— AND THE “FILTER” CONCEPTION OF PRACTICAL RATIONALITY PROVIDES A POWERFUL TOOL FOR RESOLVING MORAL DISPUTES, EVEN THOUGH IT DOES NOT HOLD THAT THERE ARE ATTITUDE-INDEPENDENT MORAL FACTS OF THE SORT ADVOCATED BY THE “MIRROR” CONCEPTION OF MORAL REALISTS AND INTUITIONISTS.
Part Five to come.
Part Five:
HERE IS THE BIG, BIG META-ETHICAL QUESTION: ARE THESE TWO RATIONAL CONSTRAINTS ENOUGH TO RESOLVE ALL MORAL DISAGREEMENTS?
PROBABLY NOT BECAUSE IT IS POSSIBLE THAT WHEN ALL THE “FILTRATION” OF ATTITUDES HAS BEEN CARRIED OUT THE ORIGINAL MORAL DISAGREEMENT WILL ENDURE.
THIS WOULD REQUIRE SOME KIND OF “RELATIVIZATION” OF MORAL STATEMENTS TO THE INDIVIDUALS OR GROUPS WHOSE FILTERED ATTITUDES ASSENT TO THEM. THAT IS AN ADMITTEDLY TROUBLING IMPLICATION OF IDEALIZED ATTITUDE [“FILTER”] META-ETHICAL VIEWS.
HOWEVER, IF THE STRONGER CONCEPTIONS OF THE KIND OF RATIONALITY AVAILABLE IN THE MORAL REALM, ESPOUSED BY MORAL REALISTS AND INTUITIONISTS, ARE NOT VIABLE, THEN THE “FILTER” VIEW WOULD BE THE BEST REMAINING META-ETHICAL ALTERNATIVE.
THE REASON IS THAT ABSENT OF ANY CONCEPTION OF MORAL RATIONALITY, WHETHER STRONGER OR WEAKER, ALL THAT WOULD BE LEFT WOULD BE THE EXTREME NIHILIST CONCLUSION THAT NO MORAL STATEMENTS ARE TRUE, BECAUSE THERE ARE NO STRONGLY OBJECTIVE MORAL FACTS FOR THEM TO BE ABOUT. BUT THAT WOULD BE VERY EXTREME INDEED.THAT WOULD PROVIDE A STRONG MOTIVE TO EMBRACE THE “FILTER” VIEW. AFTER ALL, IT DID PRETTY WELL IN THE “DIALOGUE’ OVER THE MORALITY OF SLAVERY, WHERE ITS EMPLOYMENT BY THE CRITIC TOOK HER A LONG WAY TOWARD GETTING THE SUPPORTER FINALLY TO GRANT THAT HE SHOULD NO LONGER INSIST THAT SLAVERY IS A MORALLY ACCEPTABLE PRACTICE.
TO BE SURE THE SPECTRE OF MORAL RELATIVISM STILL HAUNTS THE DIALECTIC. BUT NOTE THAT IT MAY BE CLOSER TO US THAT WE EVER SUSPECTED, RIGHT IN MANY DEPARTMENTS OF PHILOSOPHY, FOR EXAMPLE. SOME MORAL PHILOSOPHERS ARE UTILITARIANS OF ONE STRIPE OR ANOTHER. OTHERS ARE DEONTOLOGISTS. THESE NORMATIVE VIEWS CLASH IN THE EXAMPLES FAMILIAR FROM INTRODUCTORY ETHICS COURSES. HOWEVER, THERE IS NO PARTICULAR REASON TO THINK THAT THE PROPONENTS OF ONE OR THE OTHER OF THEM FAILS TO GRASP MORALLY RELEVANT FACTS OR FAILS THE DEMANDS OF CONSISTENCY AND IMPARTIALITY. NO. UTILITARIANS AND DEONTOLGISTS SIMPLY (?!) HAVE CONFLICTING MORAL INTUITIONS ABOUT WHAT THE BASIS OF JUDGMMENTS OF RIGHT AND WRONG ARE. IN SHORT, THERE IS A MORAL RELATIVISM VERY CLOSE TO HOME THAT THE FRIENDS OF STRONG OBJECTIVITY MAY HAVE A HARD TIME ACCOUNTING FOR.
I shall have to leave the issue there, but I do hope, Marc, that my imaginary “dialogue” about slavery in the Belgian Congo satisfies your request for a convincing example of how an idealized [“filter”] view of practical rationality can resolve deep disputes over the morality of practices like slavery, even if it cannot in the end guarantee that there will not be a residual moral relativism when all its resources are exhausted.
Cheers,
David Z
David,
After the extensive lecture that you gave me about being, essentially, myopic regarding the weakness of my position and not fully considering the meta-ethical position of my critics, and that all I am doing is setting up strawmen, I have to say I am shocked at the analysis you offer above. It is full of holes and numerous straw men of its own.
First, I did not ask you to prove that slavery of dark-skinned people was immoral. I asked you to prove that slavery, per se, regardless the race, skin color, religion, gender of the enslaved victims is. Granted, the form of slavery which Americans are familiar with is the enslavement of Africans primarily in the ante-bellum South. But that is not the only form of slavery that has existed throughout history. There have in fact been forms of slavery of Caucasians by other Caucasians, e.g., during the Roman Empire.
In fact, you have done exactly what I asserted you would do. You have resorted to a moral principle which is, in fact, implicitly a claim to moral objectivism, without even acknowledging it. In the first part of your comment, you assert, without proof, “It [slavery] is cruel in that it inflicts horrible pain upon innocent people and it violates their dignity by treating them against their free consent.” You do not offer any proof for this, because you state in Part Two: “There would be no point in the critic’s disputing the supporter’s factual claims unless he [the supporter] already accepted this moral principle.” This is clearly a straw man. You already have the slaveowner accepting the moral principle which you do not try to prove, thereby making you exercise in rational analysis to follow that much easier. By having your slaveowner accept the moral principle that it is cruel to inflict pain upon innocent people and it violates their dignity, you then can proceed to argue that the salve owner, having already accepted this moral principle, is being inconsistent when he tries to justify enslaving black people based on alleged factual considerations that s/he cannot prove – i.e., that racial differences matter because they are “correlated with deeper differences that matter, such as intelligence, industriousness, virtue.” From here it is a simple task to simply show that these alleged empirical facts cannot be supported empirically. You then proceed to invoke the “putting the shoe on the other foot” test, which is just a colloquial version of the proscriptive form of the Golden Rule. Here, again, you have introduced a straw man, because you then force the slaveowner to confront the possibility about how he would feel were he Black and someone tried to enslave him. But this only matters if the slaveowner accepts the validity of your “putting the shoe on the other foot” test. What is your proof for the validity of this test? You offer none.
Your entire analysis, which you claim is supposed to demonstrate that my arbitrary insistence on the existence of objectively moral precepts is indefensible in fact ultimately based on having your slaveowner accept such principles without proof, i.e., that it is immoral to inflict pain on innocent people and to control them without their consent. When he accepts this principle, but justifies the slavery of Black people based on purported empirical differences between Whites and Blacks, you demonstrate that such differences are not valid or verifiable. And then you invoke the shoe on the other foot argument, and have the slaveowner accept its validity without proof. Your entire argument is permeated with strawmen, a deficiency which you accused me of engaging in.
(Continued)
How would your argument work with a Roman general who is Caucasian, and who has hundreds of Caucasian slaves whom he captured in battle, like Vercingetorix, whom Julius Caesar brought to Rome in a cage, and kept in the cage for six years, inflicting pain and humiliation on him daily, before he was publicly executed by being beheaded. You say to Julius Caesar (in Latin, of course), “Julius, what you are doing to Vercingetorix, and the hundreds of other prisoners of war whom you have enslaved, is morally wrong and indefensible.” He asks, “Why” You say, “Because you are inflicting gratuitous pain on another human being, who is innocent of any wrongdoing.” Julius replies, “Well, first, he is not innocent, because he rebelled against Roman rule. And, besides, even if he were innocent, I see nothing wrong in inflicting pain and suffering on other human beings.” You say, “But Julius, how would you feel if the shoe were on the other foot and it was Vercingetorix inflicting pain on you? You wouldn’t like that would you, which proves that inflicting pain on other human beings is morally wrong.” Julius responds, “David, you’re right, I would not like it if Vercingetorix was doing to me what I am doing to him. So what? What is morally wrong about that? I don’t agree with your alleged moral principle that it is morally wrong to do to Vercingetorix, or anyone else fort that matter, what I would not want them to do to me. What is your proof for this purported moral principle?” What do you say to that?
You have done EXACTLY what I claimed you would do. You have predicated your analysis on the existence of moral principles which you have your purported wrongdoers accept as true, and then proceed to prove that their conduct is immoral because they try to justify their conduct by relying on purported facts which you can demonstrate are false and/or specious, which then forces the wrongdoer to resort to self-contradiction in order preserve his position that his conduct is not morally wrong. But your analysis is built on sand, because you do not prove, and make no effort to prove, that the moral precepts you have your strawmen accept without proof are valid – the very moral precepts which I maintain are objective moral precepts without proof, and for which you accuse of being intractable and lacking in the “philosophical virtues” that you purportedly embody. I repeat the claim that I have stated in prior comments, that this is the height of hypocrisy, because you are seeking to palm off on me s. wallerstein, and LFC, and David Palmeter, an analysis in which is embedded acceptance of the very moral precepts which I maintain are objective moral precepts, without acknowledging that this is indeed what you are doing, in fact denying that you are doing this at the same time that your are indeed doing it. You are no better than the Wizard of Oz, hiding behind a screen of purported rational analysis, using strawmen to hold up the screen.
If you offer a response to my comment, please refrain from insulting me with your patronization. I am not an idiot, and, contrary to s. wallerstein’s condescension, I am not a child either.
To Marc:
I give up, Marc.
You have entirely missed the point of my post.
I am simply not going to wade into the weeds of your misunderstanding.
Cheers,
David Z
No, David, I did not miss the point of your post. You have set up strawmen by having your accept as correct moral precepts what I am claiming are objective moral judgments, so that you can avoid having to prove them, and then prove that your adversary, having accepted the moral precept as the premise for the argument, proceed to demonstrate that he then contradicts himself. Your argument, as I stated in a prior comment, is circular, because your are purporting to prove what you have your adversary conceded to be valid. And your dismissal of my argument as "missing the point" is pure sophistry.
This is how it always works.
I never said that Marc is a child. I said that you can see the child behind the mask.
If you're into psychology, you can do that with most people. I'm sure that people can do that with me if they're interested although many people aren't particularly interested in getting to know me or in getting to know anyone.
That's what David Zimmerman calls "straw-manning" and that's what I've called (lacking David Zimmerman's technical vocabulary) "distorting what I write".
s. wallerstein,
You are so disingenuous. Saying that you "see the child behind the mask" is stating that the mask is a false front to hide the actual child behind the mask. Why can't you be honest about what you have written, and stop accusing me of distorting your words.
We all have masks. The word "person" comes from a Latin word meaning "mask". Some people have more layers of masks than others.
Marc
I'm only speaking for myself here obviously, not David Z, though I've read his posts.
As I read David, he's not trying to get you to concede that your embrace of objective moral principles is "indefensible." Rather, he's trying to get you to see that imposing requirements of consistency and consonance w facts can resolve some - not all, but some - moral disagreements. His dialogue about slavery does show this.
A key part of David's exposition for me is the part where he says that if x says "I hate bubble gum ice cream" there's really no point in asking x why, but if x says "slavery is wrong," there is a point in asking x why. That in itself is enough to show that moral judgments are different from bare preferences.
Speaking for myself, I do not think I cd convince a "pure" , consistent supporter of slavery (or racism) that their views are wrong. But one of David's points, again as I read him, is that there aren't all that many "pure," consistent supporters of slavery or racism.
I don't have to hand a lot of the technical vocab and I don't know if I'm interpreting David's posts in accord w his intentions, but that's how I read some of the pts he's making.
And the last pt he made has to do w what cd be called the fall-back position. It's helpful to have an option that lets one engage in moral argument w someone, rather than just saying "either you accept objective moral principles or you don't, take it or leave it."
LFC,
I am sorry, but David is avoiding the question which gave rise to this entire thread, which began with the assertion that there are no valid objective moral precepts, because, as Hume maintained, what people regard as moral and immoral has varied from culture to culture, and over time. I argued that this is irrelevant, that there are objective moral precepts that are true, and are true without having to be proved. I maintain that it is immoral for a person to claim they have the right to own another human being, regardless the respective race, skin color, religion, age, or gender of the purported slaveowner and the slave. It is irrelevant whether today there are in fact pure racist individuals who claim that owning a person based on his/her skin color is not immoral. There may not be such people today. So what? There have been such people, and, moreover, there were people who professed the right to own others regardless their race, skin, color, religion, etc. I maintain that this was immoral whenever it occurred, in whatever culture it occurred in.
All David has proved is that if a person who claims the right to own Africans as slaves concedes that it is wrong or immoral to cause innocent people to suffer pain and to be able to control them without their consent, he can use empirical facts and their desire to be logically consistent to prove that their claim that it is not immoral to own Africans as slaves is in fact immoral, given their concession that it is immoral to cause people pain, or to have the right to control them without their consent. But he has predicated his entire argument on the premise that the slaveowner already believes that it is immoral to cause pain to others, or to control them against their consent, as long as the slaves are not White. This is easy, once he has the slaveowner concede what I maintain is an objective moral judgment, which does not have to be proved – that it is immoral to cause pain to an innocent person, or to control a person against their consent, assuming, for example, that the individual has not committed a crime justifying their being controlled without their consent. And what your call a “fall back” position is nothing more than a circular argument.
I maintain that David’s analysis, is circular, because he on the one hand denies that my conviction that there are objective moral judgments is valid, and that he has an alternative which can prove that certain conduct is invalid without accepting my conviction. But then he proceeds to have his strawman accept as valid the very precept which I maintain is an objective moral precept. And I maintain that you, s. wallerstein, David Palmeter are engaging in this same circularity every time you make a normative statement about certain social conditions, or about certain politicians as being immoral and corrupt. For example, you recently asserted that you believe it is immoral for (I am paraphrasing) for a handful of billionaires to possess far more wealth than the vast majority of people living in the U.S. Why? I maintain that you cannot take this positions without at some point asserting that something is objectively morally wrong, rather than just subjectively morally wrong simply because you don’t like it. Who cares if you don’t like it? To avoid this, you might say that it is fundamentally unfair for this state of affairs to exist. Why, why is being unfair immoral? Ultimately you are gong to have to say it something is immoral just because it is objectively immoral, and I don’t have to prove it to anyone. Otherwise, you are just asserting your subjective preference, which you have acknowledged is not a valid basis upon which to judge something as immoral. Why should I, or Jeff Bezos, or Warren Buffett, or … care what you don’t like and what you would prefer? Yet commenter after commenter on this blog continue to make such moral judgments, at the same time that they deny that there are any objective moral judgments.
Maybe we folks who don't believe in objective morality should stop calling things "immoral" and start to use other more descriptive words.
Slavery is cruel and no decent person is comfortable with cruelty towards others.
I recall reading Orwell at age 17 and how he "converted" me to socialism or at least to a strong form of social democracy through his masterful use of the word "decent". He talked about how the British working class then lived and that no decent person could be comfortable with that when so many in Britain lived in luxury.
There are people who are not decent, but talking about morality and immorality is not going to convert them one way or another.
The words "moral" and immoral" are abstract and cold; "decency" means more to me at least as does "cruelty". Cruelty turns me off: it's not because I believe it's "immoral"; I suppose I could write a genealogy of my dislike of cruelty, starting with my childhood, with being bullied, with my relation with my parents, with working with victims of torture during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, etc. That's me: I don't need any
system of morality to make me reject cruelty.
s. wallersten,
In the unlikely event that Putin is haled into the International Court of Justice and charged with crimes against humanity for his having ordered the massacre of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, you should offer as your testimony that Putin should be condemned and punished for his conduct because he is not a “decent” person and his cruelty “turned me off.” I am sure the Court would find you testimony as compelling and a cogent basis for Putin’s conviction.
Marc,
If Putin is accused in the International Court of Justice, it's going to be for violating international law, not for being "immoral" whatever that is.
I can say a lot of things about Putin: he's probably a sociopath, ambitious, not trustworthy, tyrannical, authoritarian, cruel, etc.
If you want to call him "immoral", fine. I don't need that word to understand Putin and I'm going to give it to you.
If you look through my previous comments in this blog, I doubt that you'll find that I use the word "immoral", but from now on I'm going to consciously avoid using it. It's yours, enjoy it.
s. wallerstein,
That's the point. You do not use the word "immoral," but the criticisms you make in your numerous comments about social conditions, economic conditions, unscrupulous politicians, etc. reek of the accusation, you just avoid using the word.
s. wallerstein,
FYI, from “War Crimes and Immoral Actions in War”:
“War crimes are grave violations of the legal principles of jus in bello, the principles governing the conduct of war, for which individual combatants may be punished. In international humanitarian law, these principles are found in the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions. They have subsequently been absorbed, though with some modifications, into international criminal law.
“As in domestic criminal law, the ideal in the law of war is that all and only those acts that harm their victims and are seriously morally wrong should be criminal, and thus punishable. The law ought, within certain limits, to deter by threat of punishment all acts that are morally impermissible and inflict wrongful harm. Yet it ought not to punish people for acting in ways that are morally permissible. Ideally, therefore, the category of war crimes should include all forms of morally wrong action in war that inflict serious harms on their victims.”
The word “morally” appears four times in the above passage.
I like how s.w. thinks on this. It sort of reminds me of what an inversion of Moore's "open question" arguments would look like.
Consider this description -
"The killer acted in a way calculated to cause pain, death, and traumatic grief, none of which (of course) would have been chosen by the victim and the victim's loved ones. The killer was motivated by a personal issue that to all appearances could have been addressed without violence. It is (of course) generally understood that such behavior is contrary to the conditions, including the legal conditions, that make community life possible."
Now, the question would be: What would we communicate by adding the words "And the killer acted immorally" - or, if we happened to omit them, what would be the significance what we were leaving out? I think this in effect is s.w.'s question, and it's a good one.
Michael,
The last sentence of your hypothetical states, “It is (of course) generally understood that such behavior is contrary to the conditions, including the legal conditions, that make community life possible."
On what basis is the qualification “of course” included? Why is its being “contrary to the conditions, including the legal conditions, that make community life possible” objectionable? Putin and his Russian military forces are routinely engaging in the same conduct you outline in your example on a massive basis. He and his military do not agree that what they are doing is wrong because their conduct is “contrary to the conditions … that make community life possible.” They don’t care. It is their intent to make community life in Ukraine not possible. There is a vast difference between saying that a person’s conduct is “contrary to the conditions, including the legal conditions, that make community life possible” and saying that the conduct is immoral. Putin’s conduct is immoral, not because their conduct is contrary to conditions which make community life possible, but because it is immoral to gratuitously kill innocent civilians. And using the word “immoral” is an ineluctable part of the criticism of Putin’s conduct.
Marc,
In the definition of war crimes above, the word "immoral" adds nothing except some emotional force for the true believers.
I suppose they go on to specify that war crimes include attacking civilians, executing or torturing prisoners of war, using chemical weapons, etc.
Otherwise, "immoral" says nothing to me, although I understand that to many people it's means a lot.
So I see no reason at all to label Putin as "immoral". He attacks civilians and the rest of us, who don't attack civilians, find that horrifying and frightening, above all, frightening.
s. wallerstein,
You, like David Zimmerman, keep talking in circles. Putin’s attacking and killing civilians horrifies you, and horrifies a lot of other non-Russians. So what? That is your personal reaction to what he is doing. What he is doing by killing Ukrainian civilians does not horrify most of his country-men. They think the Ukrainians deserve it. Your personal horrification is not sufficient to hale Putin into the International Court of Law and convict him of war crimes. He is subject to conviction not because what he is doing horrifies you, me, David Palmeter, LFC and millions of others, but because it is immoral. And all you keep saying is that saying that what he is doing is “immoral” adds nothing to the fact that what he is doing horrifies you. You are wrong, because the fact that what he is doing horrifies you is your subjective reaction to what he is doing. What he is doing, more importantly, is objectively immoral, and that is far more significant than that what he is doing “horrifies” you and countless others.
To Marc:
You are quite wrong when you say that in my “dialogue” between the critic and the supporter of slavery in the Belgian Congo I am arguing in a circle by simply assuming, without announcing it, that there are objective moral values in the intuitionist’s sense, which condemn slavery.
The idealized attitude theorist is entitled to his own analysis of what a moral judgment such as “slavery is morally wrong” means.
His analysis is: “An ideal observer (advisor, contractor) would condemn slavery, i.e. take up a negative attitude toward the practice, if she were fully informed about its features, were reasoning consistently, were being impartial.”
This analysis makes no essential reference to Platonic or Moorean objective values, just to the purified attitudes of the ideal observer.
So, in the “dialogue” every time one of the disputants says something like “slavery is morally wrong” or “slavery is not morally wrong” that statement is to be understood in terms of the idealize attitude analysis above.
You have to allow idealized attitude subjectivism to employ its own analysis of “ought”- statements, in its attempt to show that this approach can take us a long way toward resolving moral disputes without any assumption that there are Platonic or Moorean objective values.
You may not agree with the attempt I made in my comment about the dispute over the morality of slavery in the BC. But you have to allow me my own premises in making the argument. Whether you end up taking it to be valid and sound or not, you should try to not dictate the very terms of the meta-ethical debate with me…. Nor I the terms with you.
Side bar: I would like to know what you think about the implications of the philosophical dispute between well informed, consistent, impartial utilitarians and deontologists, which seems to endure without resolution. Evidence for the truth of a (big) pocket of moral relativism, or not? How can an appeal to Platonic or Moorean values resolve such a dispute without begging the question against one side or the other? Inquiring minds would like to know what you think.
Cheers,
David Z
Marc,
The "of course" occurred to me somewhat spontaneously, but I think its purpose is to convey something along the lines of: "I take it for granted that what I'm saying here (about the ramifications of wanton killing and such) is normally considered too obvious to require explicit statement," and, "None of this is 'really' in doubt as far as I'm concerned, but in effect I'm going to pretend otherwise, though only for the sake of philosophical discussion."
(Compare Wittgenstein's amusing comment: "I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that's a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.'")
Anyways, final thoughts...
I think justification comes to an end somewhere, and when it does come to an end, we simply find ourselves doing what we do. (When we do so "reflectively," then apparently that just means that reflection itself is one of those "things we do.")
It can be hard to live with this thought - especially when other, more powerful people appear set to do things at odds with what we want. Perhaps that's why it seems appealing to say, "What I want is right and would remain right even if I somehow ceased to want it" - the statement seems to lend more authority, more power to our position. (There's also, however, the possibility that such statements have a philosophical rationale that simply eludes me - but even if we did produce this rationale, I doubt that anyone you and I call "enemy" would seriously be troubled by it.)
But from another point of view, such expressions ("X is wrong completely independently of how I feel, what I want, who I am") seem to verge on the nonsensical - it seems a fishy operation to try to tease apart "morality" from "what we most deeply, fundamentally want" and the like. I think this is because it doesn't quite seem open to us to "negotiate" with our deep, fundamental wants - how could we "seriously" entertain the possibility of a world in which we ourselves didn't identify with our most basic animating values?
Also worth observing: It fits naturally with this point of view to suppose that the language of "objective moral truth" (in addition to its usefulness as a linguistic expedient) serves our desire for authority, legitimacy - essentially power over others, trying to get others to go along with what we want. (It sounds a bit perverse to put it that way, but I think it's literally correct, even bordering on tautologous. When aren't we trying to get what we want?)
Hm, didn't expect to find myself echoing Nietzsche this much. :) That's the best I find myself able to come up with, at any rate.
David,
In a prior comment you gave me a lecture, accusing me of failing to embody “certain philosophical virtues,” including failing “to give a fair and through hearing to criticisms of [my] view, rather than just batting them aside like some minor inconvenience.” Frankly, it is you who fail to embody this philosophical virtue. You state: “You have to allow idealized attitude subjectivism to employ its own analysis of ‘ought’ -statements, in its attempt to show that this approach can take us a long way toward resolving moral disputes without any assumption that there are Platonic or Moorean objective values.” This is nonsense, and an example of your “batting aside [criticisms] like some minor inconvenience.” Who is this idealized entity who holds these idealized attitudes, and from what did s/he derive them? All you are doing is “idealizing” the very precept which I maintain is objectively moral and asserting that I must allow you to assert it as the premise of your argument. Your entire analysis is circular, and you refuse to acknowledge it. Instead, you “bat aside” the criticism “like some minor inconvenience.” Frankly, I take umbrage at your patronizing attitude towards me, when your purported analysis is assuming as its premise what you purport to prove. All your analysis showed was that if a slaveowner claimed that it was not immoral to enslave Blacks, but agreed that it is immoral to cause pain to Whites, and claim to control them against their consent, that you could demonstrate to him the inconsistency of his position that it is not immoral to enslave Blacks. This is simple, and proves nothing significant and does not advance the debate regarding the morality or immorality of slavery one whit. It does nothing to prove the premise that you have your strawman concede, that it is immoral to enslave anybody, regardless of their race, skin color, religion, or gender, because it is immoral to cause any human being pain, and control them without their consent.
Regarding you aside, I have to attend to a professional commitment and will address it later on.
Marc:
The plain fact is that you do not understand what is going on in the imagined dialogue about the morality of slavery, as conducted along the lines of an idealized attitude analysis of "morally wrong."
There is no circular arguing. Your construal of that dialogue is nonsensical.
Moreover, you clearly do not understand how the debate between the Intuitionist objectivist and the idealized attitude subjectivist goes in the meta-ethics dialectic, how each position must honestly tote up its own virtue and burdens and then compare them with the virtues and burdens of the opposing views, all in a reflective effort to figure out where the meta-ethical truth lies. In an earlier post I tried to sketch the lay of that particular philosophical land, but you persist in ignoring it.
You write like a pugnacious advocate in an adversarial legal system, not like someone who is engaged in a philosophical discussion that aims at getting at the truth, not just at winning at any rhetorical cost.
I do not know why you bother to respond to me when every time you say exactly the same thing in a way that is UTTERLY unresponsive to what I have just said in the post before.
I do learn a lot from your posts about the law, especially about US constitutional law, and I do appreciate your moral passion about the current dire state of American politics and world affairs. But your forays into philosophical discussion are dispiriting, exhausting and uttering unilluminating. Philosophy is just not your bag.... any more than the law is mine. Maybe we should simply stay on our own sides of the street.
Cheers,
David Z
David,
You really are quite smug and pompous.
In your dialogue, you wrote, verbatim:
“Critic advances reasons for the moral judgment, which cite facts about the practice of slavery.
“‘At least two things: It is cruel in that it inflicts horrible pain upon innocent people and it violates their dignity by treating them against their free consent.’
“Supporter disputes the factual claims that enter into the critic’s reasons for her moral judgment:
“’Nonsense – it does nothing of the kind. For one thing, African slaves do not feel pain the way you and I do. For another, they are like children, in being incapable of giving or withholding genuine consent. They have no more diginity to be violated than a work animal does.’
“At this point in the exchange, the critic may respond in a number of possible ways.
“One way:
“Argue for the truth of the factual claims by advancing good evidence that the Congolese do feel physical and emotional pain just as intensely as White Europeans do, and that they are fully capable of autonomous decision making.
“The significance of this turn in the dialogue: It demonstrates the rational leverage of getting the empirical facts straight.
“Note that, in denying the critic’s factual claims, the supporter implicitly accepts the moral principle that the critic implicitly appeals to in criticizing slavery, namely, ‘It is morally wrong to inflict suffering upon innocent persons without their consent.’
There would be no point in the critic’s disputing the supporter’s factual claims unless he [The Supporter] ALREADY ACCEPTED THIS MORAL PRINCIPLE.
[Here lies the circularity.]
“The idea: Why bother to deny that Black Africans can feel pain and give consent, if ONE DOES NOT ALREADY BELIEVE THAT THOSE FACTTS WOULD COUNT AS MORAL REASONS IF THEY ACTUALLY HELD IN THIS CASE? [Repeating the circularity.]
“What this illustrates is that sometimes moral disagreement can be resolved by determining what the non-moral facts truly are, which one side or the other insists are morally relevant to a correct moral judgment about the case. Here, those morally relevant facts are that Black Africans do feel pain and can give (and withhold) consent.
“This is very significant, because it shows that reason, i.e., the capacity to get the empirical facts right, does have a significant role to play in moral discussion.”
All you have proved is that, if a Caucasian slaveholder concedes that it is immoral to inflict suffering on innocent persons without their consent, that, based on empirical facts and the slaveholders desire to be consistent, it follows that doing so to Black Africans is immoral. But you have not proved to the Caucasian slaveholder that doing the same to Caucasian slaves would also be immoral, hence my example of a comparable dialogue with Julius Caesar and his treatment of Gauls captured in battle. So, you are correct, strictly speaking your dialogue is not circular, because you do not purport to be proving the moral proposition that you have your slaveholder concede as true. But given this concession, proving that the enslavement of Black Africans is immoral , because it comes within the scope of the premise you have your slaveholder concede, is not proving very much – and you cannot prove it without having your slaveholder already agree that, “It is morally wrong to inflict suffering upon innocent persons without their consent,” a proposition that I maintain is objectively true.
Get off your high horse, David. You in fact lack the philosophical virtue of “giving a fair and thorough hearing to criticism of your view, rather than just batting them aside like some minor inconvenience.”
To Marc:
No, no, no...
You say:
There would be no point in the critic’s disputing the supporter’s factual claims unless he [The Supporter] ALREADY ACCEPTED THIS MORAL PRINCIPLE.
[Here lies the circularity.]"
There is no circularity because the whole dialogue is predicated on the stipulation that the idealized attitude analysis is what is operating in the exchange between critic and supporter.
That analysis says "Slavery is morally wrong" means "An idealized observer, who got the empirical facts about slavery correct, was consistent in his attitudes and was impartial would condemn slavery."
There is no reference or implication here about Platonic values.
The whole point of producing the dialogue is to illustrate that the idealized attitude conception of moral judgments has the resources to go a long way toward resolving moral disputes. Why can't you see that?
You are not even trying to understand what the idealized subjectivist view is.
David Z
To Marc:
Good heavens... your point about white slaves and Roman slaveholders could not be more irrelevant to what is going on in the dialogue.
OF COURSE, the critic of the enslavement of blacks in the Belgian Congo also believes that the enslavement of whites anywhere is also morally wrong. That presupposition is built right into his argument.
David Z
To Marc:
You say: "You in fact lack the philosophical virtue of “giving a fair and thorough hearing to criticism of your view, rather than just batting them aside like some minor inconvenience.”
Utter rubbish, Marc. I have been supremely patient with you. In the face of every one of your posts, Have carefully tried to meet your arguments... except toward the end of our exchanges, I suppose, when your repetitions started to wear me down.
DZ
Oh my God, you are such a hypocrite!
“The whole point of producing the dialogue is to illustrate that the idealized attitude conception of moral judgments has the resources to go a long way toward resolving moral disputes. Why can't you see that?”
All you are doing is substituting what you call “the idealized attitude conception of moral judgments” for what I claim is an objective moral judgment. Why do you get the right to assert that such an “idealized attitude conception of moral judgments” that slavery is morally wrong is assumed to be true by your slaveholder? This is no different than my assertion that it is a morally objective judgment. You are using additional verbiage to justify your premise, but the verbiage does not add anything to my insistence that what you call “an idealized conception” is a morally objective judgment. Why can’t you see that?????
To Marc:
You still do not understand the shape of the dialectic here between your Platonist intuitionism and my idealized attitude
subjectivism.
In setting up the dialogue about slavery in the BC, I am NOT AT ALL ASSUMING that the idealized attitude analysis of "ought"-statements is correct. I am trying to give that analysis "a run for its money," by showing that it has the resources for resolving important substantive moral disputes... and moreover that it does this just as well as the intuitionist analysis in that context.
I repeat the question: Why can't you see that that is the purpose of the dialogue?
I am not, as you charge, "substituting what [I] call 'the idealized attitude conception of moral judgments' for what [you] claim is an objective moral judgment."
I am setting up a brief philosophical investigation (in the form of the dialogue) of the implications of two competing meta-ethical analyses of moral "ought"-statements, one which you favour, the other the one which I favour.
Please, Marc, at least TRY to understand what the shape of the argument here is.
DZ
2-part post. Part 1:
Way upthread, David Z. wrote this:
"Hume, an adherent of this sort of non-realist meta-ethics had a pretty good account of the matter in "The Treatise." Normal human beings are equipped with a natural capacity for what he called "sympathy," the natural tendency to respond positively to the pleasure of others and negatively to their pain. Already, this gets us to the point where many (maybe most) people would, if fully informed, consistent and impartial, respond negatively to the enslaving of one human being by another."
The slaveholder in DZ's dialogue does not assume that slavery is morally wrong. The slaveholder does assume that ‘IT IS MORALLY WRONG TO INFLICT PAIN ON WHITE EUROPEANS WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.’
Marc seems to think that letting the slaveholder assume this is smuggling in a conclusion about the wrongness of slavery by the back door, so to speak. No, not really. The slaveholder assumes that inflicting pain on white Europeans is wrong because the slaveholder is equipped with Hume's "sympathy," but in that part of the dialogue this "sympathy" is distorted by irrational racist assumptions. If those racist assumptions are not "basic", i.e., if they are rooted in an irrational misconception that blacks don't actually feel pain, then once that factual misconception is corrected, the slaveholder will concede that slavery is wrong -- not because the slaveholder assumed that from the start, but because the slaveholder had the incorrect notion that blacks don't feel pain.
Marc is unimpressed by this result because it seems easy and, to him, trivial. So now comes the somewhat harder part. The slaveholder concedes that blacks do in fact feel pain but says that doesn't matter because blacks have no moral status. Sometimes that position can be altered by a taking-the-other's or standing-in-the-other's-shoes thought experiment: you put the slaveholder behind the equivalent of Rawls's veil of ignorance, and he may admit that if he didn't know in advance whether he wd be born a black slave or not, he wd come to the conclusion that slavery is morally wrong.
Of course, as DZ acknowledges, not every slaveholder in this dialogue will concede the wrongness of slavery. A number of them are genuinely "pure" racists who, even when in possession of all relevant facts and reasoning consistently and put behind a veil of ignorance, will still conclude that enslaving blacks is not morally wrong.
Part of the difference between Marc and DZ may be that Marc thinks that the residual number of "pure" racists at the end of the dialogue will be higher than DZ thinks. But let's say that, by the end of the dialogue, half of the slaveholders concede that slavery is wrong and half don't. That's still something.
Part 2:
In any case, there are really no circular assumptions here. The only starting assumption in the dialogue is basically a psychological (or a moral-psychological) one: the slaveholder is assumed to have a version of Humean sympathy, which is why the slaveholder believes that inflicting pain on white Europeans w/o their consent is wrong. So in that part of the dialogue the "move" is getting the slaveholder to expand his version of "sympathy" by way of (rational) argument. Sometimes that move will work, and sometimes it won't. But again, I don't see anything especially circular here.
The upshot is that sometimes the idealized-attitude theory will resolve what appear to be intractable moral disagreements, and sometimes it won't. On the other hand, an adherent of Marc's position will just say to the slaveholder: "Slavery is morally wrong, that is self-evidently true, and since you [slaveholder] can't see that, so much the worse for you." And that's that. There's no dialogue, and there's no "conversion," not even at the rate of fifty percent.
I doubt it's possible to prove that Marc's position is right or that DZ's is right. They are just two different meta-ethical positions. But DZ's position allows for the possibility of dialogue whereas Marc's seems less amenable to that, at least to me. On the other hand, DZ's position leaves some slaveholders unconvinced at the end, at which point you pretty much just have to agree to disagree. This is a troubling outcome, as DZ acknowledges, but assuming that there are "attitude-independent" moral precepts floating out there somewhere in the ether, as Marc believes, is also troubling, partly because it requires what amounts to something like a leap of faith, for lack of a better phrase. DZ's position, as I read it, does not require that.
That's roughly my non-philosopher's current take on this, for whatever it's worth.
To LFC:
Thank you for your perspicacious reading of my imagined dialogue between the critic and the supporter of slavery in the BC, as developed in terms of the idealized attitude analysis of the moral "ought."
You have the dialectic right.....
Now, how do we persuade our Philosophers Stone colleague,Marc, to take seriously what you have said in your post?
Search me..... I am at a loss.
Look, guys..... I can't really fault Marc for calling me pompous and condescending, and for asking me to climb down off my high horse. My tone in my recent responses to his posts has been less than temperate.
But, gosh... Please Marc.... do try to expend a little of your considerable energy in focussing closely on the arguments in which I try honestly to set up the debate between your Platonic intuitionism and my Humean subjectivism... all in an effort to investigate philosophically which view is the better meta-ethical account of morality.
Is that asking too much of brothers (and sisters) in the search for truth?
Cheers forever...
David Z
I fully understand the form of your dialogue, and I find it totally specious. You state: “I am setting up a brief philosophical investigation (in the form of the dialogue) of the implications of two competing meta-ethical analyses of moral "ought"-statements, one which you favour, the other the one which I favour.”
The first meta-ethical “ought” statement is what I regard as an objective moral judgment, that it is morally wrong for one human to claim the right of ownership of another human being; this derives from the objective moral judgment that it is immoral to cause suffering/pain to a human being and to claim the right to control a human being without consent. You then have your slaveowner concede that this is valid, and prove that its application to his claim that he has the right to own Black slaves is empirically falsifiable, and therefore the slaveowner cannot consistent with logic continue to maintain that he has the right to own Blacks as slaves.
What is the second “ought” statement which you favour? It appears in the following part of your dialogue:
“Suppose that critic rigs up [seemingly] irrefutable ‘evidence’ that supporter actually is racially black and was born in Africa.
“Critic confronts supporter with this really convincing evidence and asks …
“ ‘Do you still say that inflicting pain without consent on Black Africans is morally alright? And do you accept the obvious implication of this principle … namely, that it is morally alright for us to inflict pain on you without your consent by enslaving you in a colonial work camp?’
“A really consistent pure racist would say – ‘Yes, I continue to avow my original racist principle, and I fully accept the moral rightness of its implications … though naturally, I do not expect to like being a slave.’
“This would be a remarkable response. [Yes, it would be remarkable, but not impossible.] One thing that shows is the thought-experiment of ‘putting the shoe on the other foot’ is a good test of whether a person really does accept the principle he says he does. This can be a powerful tool for rationally resolving moral disputes where it looks as thought the parties agree on all the morally relevant non-moral facts”
But, as I said above, the “shoe on the other foot” test is just a colloquial version of the proscriptive version of the Golden Rule – which I have insisted is also an objective moral precept. Your claim that you favour this meta-ethical moral principle, with the implication that I do not, is false. When I proposed it as an objective moral precept in prior comments, some commenters asserted that this was just another subjective belief which I prefer, but not necessarily objectively true.
In sum, you are using two moral principles both of which I have maintained are objectively valid, as the predicates for both parts of your dialogue. You cannot prove that either is correct in and of themselves. You state of the ‘’shoe on the other foot test’ that it “can be a powerful tool for rationally resolving moral disputes.” But why is it the case that the “shoe on the other foot test” is itself rationally justifiable? You assume this, but a slaveholder could say, “Yes, I would not like to be a slave myself, but that does not make owning slaves immoral. The fact that I would not like it is irrelevant. As things stand, I have the power and am not a slave, and the fact that I would not want to be a slave myself has no bearing whatsoever on whether my owning slaves is immoral.”
(Continued)
All you are doing is taking precepts which I, and others, claim are objective moral precepts, and restyling them as an idealized attitude, and then drawing inferences from them which underscore the inconsistency of your antagonist But once you have them accept the validity of the idealized attitude precept, the rest is easy. You haven’t demonstrated that the idealized attitude precepts, which are equivalent to what I claim are objective moral precepts, are themselves valid.
In your catalogue of the similarities and differences between the major schools of meta-ethical analysis, you say of Naturalist Subjectivism: “It yields a strong account of the authority moral judgments claim, grounded in uncontroversial standards of rational assessment. Therefore, it provides a decision procedure for adjudicating moral disputes that are not basic.” This is not at all surprising, since you start with the assumption that the moral precepts are themselves true, and then make inferences of what should rationally follow from those assumptions. This does not advance meta-ethical analysis, because the heavy lifting is in demonstrating the validity of the moral precepts themselves, which you have your antagonist presume to be true.
I have just read the exchange between LFC and you. Both of you assume that the pure racist will accept the “shoe on the other foot” test. He won’t He will say what I have written above, that how I would feel if I were a slave is irrelevant. I am not the slave, and I have the power to enslave Blacks, and it does not matter that I would not like it if the shoe were on the other foot, because it isn’t.
To Marc:
You still do not have a handle on the dialectic between the two meta-ethical views.
You say: "The first meta-ethical 'ought' statement is what I regard as an objective moral judgment."
Right... it is what you REGARD as an objective "ought"-statement. That is to say, you advocate an analysis of a statement like "Slavery is morally wrong" as "Slavery instantiates the non-natural intuitable property moral wrongness.'
But that is precisely what the idealized attitude view denies, favouring the analysis "Slavery is wrong" means "An idealized observer (who is fully informed, etc.) would take up a negative attitude toward slavery."
You can't just assume that your analysis is the correct one. The whole point of the dialogue is to show that the opposing analysis does just as well as yours in resolving moral disputes for most cases.
Put another way, the point of the dialogue is to show that whichever analysis is built into the uses of "morally wrong" in the exchange between critic and supporter there is the same possibility os resolving the dispute on uncontroversial standards of rationality, i.e. epistemic and logical.
You just refuse to give the idealized attitude account of moral judgment a fair hearing.
The rest of what you say in your latest post is utterly beside the point, but I am too exhausted by your stubbornness to try to sort it out.
No "Cheers" this time.....
David Z
I give up. It is you who are being stubborn and bull-headed, desperately trying to salvage an argument which is built on sand and presumptions that IF your idealized antagonist will accept your premises, then you can prove that the slaveowner of Blacks will realize the inconsistency in his position. I give you that, but that is a big IF, and, moreover, you have only proven it for the slaveowner who justifies the enslavement of Africans. You keep stating that my reference to Roman slavery is irrelevant, but you have not demonstrated that you can prove the same inconsistency with respect to Caucasians enslaving Caucasians. What inconsistency can you point out to the Caucasian slaveowner of Caucasians (which have existed historically)? He does not enslave his victims because he does not believe they cannot feel pain, or that they are not as cultured as he, or that they have no dignity. He enslaves them because he can, and your “shoe on the other foot” test means nothing to him.
You state: “[T]he point of the dialogue is to show that whichever analysis is built into the uses of "morally wrong" in the exchange between critic and supporter there is the same possibility of resolving the dispute on uncontroversial standards of rationality, i.e. epistemic and logical.” This is nonsense. Your argument cannot carry that load.
What rational argument would you offer to Putin to persuade him that his willful massacre of Ukrainian civilians is immoral? What moral premise would you have him agree to from which you can show him the inconsistency of his position? Would you have him assume that it is immoral to kill innocent civilians? He rejects this. When you get to the “shoe on the other foot test” he will simply say, “I don’t care whether I would feel differently if I were a Ukrainian victim. I am not Ukrainian.” Where is the inconsistency if he rejects the “shoe on the other foot test”?
LFC and others on this blog have repeatedly, deplored the great wealth disparities in the United States, and in the world generally. They maintain that it is somehow “unfair.” Suppose you could get Jeff Bezos to agree that being “unfair” is immoral. What would you say to him when he says, “But I do not believe that using my personal skills and talents to accumulate massive wealth is unfair.” Where is the inconsistency is this? You may say, “But Jeff, you did not earn those skills and talents, you just happened to be born with them, and to use what you were born with, but did not earn, to accumulate more wealth than others is unfair.” “What’s unfair about it?” Bezos responds. “Well, how would you feel if the shoe were on the other foot?” “I would not feel any differently. If I were poor and someone else did what I have done, I would simply say, that’s the way of the world. And, in any case, the shoe is not on the other foot.”
I don’t see your being able to generalize your dialogue to other scenarios beyond being able to convince the Caucasian slaveowner who claims he has the right to enslave Africans to other slaveowner contexts, or other moral judgment contexts. Your approach is no more successful than my assertion that there are objective moral judgments which are valid, regardless whether or not Putin or Jeff Bezos agrees.
To Marc:
I also give up, Marc.... You just do not understand what is going on in this dialectic.
All this stuff about Putin and the Romans and their slaves and so on is utterly irrelevant. You are just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.
Let's just stop our exchange about meta-ethics. I will continue to read your posts here on US constitutional law andd learn from them, and I will continue to derive some heart and encouragement from your passionate responses to the dire state of the world. But I do not want to engage with you anymore on philosophical matters.
DZ
You know, David, you are such a hypocrite. I suspect that you have devoted your philosophical life to advancing your meta-ethical theory, and you are just frustrated that I don't agree with you. Unless you can generalize the dialogue you have offered regarding the enslavement of Africans to other contexts, it is useless. My examples regarding Putin an Bezos are not irrelevant. You lack the philosophical virtue of seriously considering your critic's viewpoint, rather than just batting it away like some minor inconvenience.
Marc,
The point isn't whether you can convince Putin to be a nicer person, but whether moral principles are objective, that is, whether a statement like torture is immoral has the same objectivity as the statement water freezes at zero degrees centigrade at sea level.
Most of us here, including David Zimmerman as I understand him, just don't believe that moral principles have any degree of objectivity. No, you can't convince Putin or Hitler or Trump or a serial killer. The world is complicated, full of conflicts. That's life and life only.
To Marc:
No philosopher worth his or her salt MERELY spends his or her life advancing his or her favoured theory. He or she tries to figure out whether that theory is WORTH defending, by considering the best arguments that have been pressed against it and trying to answer them, and by honestly considering the merits (and burdens) of competing theories. That is what I have been trying to do in my exchanges with you over the comparative merits of the intuitionist and idealized attitude analyses of moral statements.
I am not asking you to agree with me... only to try to understand the arguments I advance in support of the meta-ethical theory I favour, which you have not made any effort AT ALL to do.
I do favour the idealized attitude analysis.... but I do so for reasons that I have been thinking about for a very long time. I could be wrong to support the view I do, but It should at least get a fair hearing. You have not given it one. I have given yours a fair hearing--- in the post about the merits and burdens of competing meta-ethical views. Did you notice that your intuitionism was on the list?
As for Putin, Bezos and the Roman slaveholders: OF COURSE, a dialogue that involves them could be spelled out. It would involve the same sorts of considerations-- getting the actual empirical facts abut the case at hand, pressing the parties to be consistent and impartial-- that figure in the dialogue over slavery in the BC. Do I actually have to do it for you? Why don't you use a little imagination and figure it out for yourself?
David Z
To LFC, S Wallerstein, D Palmeter and others who are interested in meta-ethics:
I have read with interest some recent posts that urge us to given up using abstract moral terms like “right” and “wrong” and stick to more concrete ones like “honest” and “dishonest,” “kind” and “cruel,” “disloyal” and “loyal,” “brave” and “cowardly,” “truthful” and “deceptive,” and the like.
The contributors who have made this suggestion have accompanied it with self-depricating comments about their lack of philosophical expertise. But they needn’t have, since they are making an intriguing suggestion, which many celebrated philosophers in recent years have also been attracted to. The idea has even brought with it some philosophical jargon, a contrast between so-called “thin” moral concepts, the abstract ones, and “thick” moral concepts, the more concrete ones, replete with descriptive content.
Elizabeth Anscombe was perhaps the first to have made the suggestion that moral philsophy would do better to forego the thin and stick with the thick (in her essay “Modern Moral Philosophy”), but others followed, e.g. Phillipa Foot (“Virtues and Vices”) and Bernard Williams (“Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy”), to name just two.
While I do agree that including thick moral concepts gives moral discourse more
texture and realism than a diet limited to the thin ones, I cannot agree that we would do well to dispense with abstract moral terms, comparatively devoid of descriptive content, such as “right” and “wrong.” The reason is that moral discourse needs them. Why?
Consider a situation in which two thick moral considerations conflict. Suppose that a person can do the courageous thing (say, tell a friend a hurtful but necessary truth) or the kind thing (spare the friend the hurt but at the price of misleading him about himself). In a situation like this, it is natural for the person to ask: “Which of these is the morally right thing for me to do?” In other words, she cannot even raise the question that most presses her unless she has at her disposal the thin moral concept.
We might also link this to G.E. Moore’s famous open question argument. (Moore was concerned with “good” and “bad,” but we can transpose his argument into a context involving “right” and “wrong”). The person in the conflict situation might say: “ I think that I should withhold the truth from my friend because that would be the kind thing to do.” Moore’s open question is: “Sure, withholding the truth from your friend is the kind thing to do, but is it the right things to do (full stop)?”
The idea is that it is always an open question what a person ought to do in a complex situation involving many competing moral considerations (i.e. most morally charged situations), but that the open question cannot even be raised if we do not have thin moral concepts at our disposal.
As an aside: Ironically, this is one context in which I agree with one thing Marc S has said, namely, that we do need the concept of the “morally wrong.” Where I disagree with him, of course, is what the best analysis of statements about moral wrongness is. He favours the intuitionist account, I favour the idealized attitude account. But it is nice to have found one thing he and I can agree on, given the acrimoniousness of our recent exchanges.
Back to the main point: I think that situations in which thick moral considerations conflict bring out nicely how indispensible thin concepts are in our moral thinking.
Cheers,
David Z
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