PEA Soup

Nietzschean Expressivist Semantics

One of the more serious attempts to provide an expressivist semantics for moral terms (broadly construed) is Gibbard’s.  The basic idea is that they express plans.  “I should pack” expresses my plan to pack; “You should pack” expresses a contingency plan for the (unlikely) case that I am you.  “Journal editors should move papers along faster” expresses a plan for being a journal editor.  And  so on.  Call this view the Gibbard Semantics, or GS.

It seems to me that there are other possible semantics along this line.  Consider plans for what I would have someone do, if I were in control.  For example, if I were in control of the government, I would have the government give philosophy professors large cash subsidies.  If I were in control of journal editors, I would have the editors accept all my manuscripts without revision.  Etc.  Perhaps I could express these plans somehow.  Perhaps like this:  “The government should give philosophy professors large cash subsidies; editors should accept all my manuscripts without revision.”  In the normal case, I am in control of myself, so “I should…” sentences would express normal plans.  Call this the Nietzsche Semantics for moral terms, or NS.

Expressivism and Self-Refutation

Here is a worry for (pure) expressivism.  I think it is new.  I am not sure how cogent it is, and this is probably not its most elegant formulation.  So help is welcome.  Consider

(1)    No ought-claim is true.

Construe ‘ought-claim’ to include (1) itself.  Then (1) is necessarily false:  if it is true, then it says of itself that it is false.  (You might think (1) is a pretty good statement of error theory; I will leave that as a problem for the error theorist.)   Consider now

(2)    No ought-claim ought to be accepted.

This is contingent.  It might be, for example, that one ought to do what has the best consequences and the best consequences happen when people never think about ought-claims.  If someone finds themselves accepting (2), of course, the first thing they ought to do is figure out how to abandon it.  That doesn’t affect its truth however. 

The Logic Curriculum

I am getting ready to teach logic again.  It’s been a while, because I grew discontent with the standard curriculum.  Maybe PEA Soupers can help me out.  What are we trying to achieve in a logic class?

The Early Modern Philosophy Curriculum

Many philosophy departments require a course in the history of (usually early) modern philosophy for their majors.  My impression of the way such courses are usually taught is that they focus on metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind:  the metaphysics of substances; the epistemology of empiricism versus rationalism, both of which are classically foundationalist; ideas, impressions, and other varieties of sense data in the philosophy of mind. I imagine that this curriculum was set back in the mid-twentieth century, when M&E was considered “real” philosophy.  But nowadays, it strikes me as bizarre.

Virtue Bleg

Yes, well, I realize that the genuine article is not transferable. 

I am teaching a 400-level course on virtue ethics next spring.  I’m looking for reading-list suggestions.  They need to be relatively short, readable, accessible to majors.  I’d ideally like a broad selection of ancient/modern/contemporary, East/West, religious/secular.  I’m also a fan of intro-level hand-holding kinds of texts for students, so any suggestions on that front would be welcome as well.  Thanks! 

Open Question Arguments

The “Open Question Argument” is supposed to establish something important for (meta)ethics; namely, that the property of being good (or value, or of what one ought to do, etc.) is not entailed by, and thus not identical to, any natural property like pleasure or knowledge.  It goes something like this:

For all natural properties N, settling questions about whether some A is N leaves open whether A is good.

So, goodness is not entailed by any natural property N.

One way of replying to this argument is to deny the validity of the argument, by appeal to a concept/property distinction like that between water and H2O.  Another way, with which I have some sympathy, is to say the argument is confused because there is no such thing as goodness simpliciter.  But a third way is to deny the premise, which seems easier than it’s alleged to be:

Practical Conditionals

Practical conditionals are a problem.  We all use conditionals like, “If you want a great steak, you ought to go to Manny’s Steak House.”  But suppose I do want a great steak; does it follow that I ought to go to Manny’s?  No—maybe my doctor has told me to lay off the red meat.  Then is the conditional false?  That doesn’t seem right either, if Manny’s really is the best place for a great steak.

We can put a sharper point on this problem.  Suppose your best friend’s wife is very attractive, attractive enough to put ideas in your head.  (Readers of other persuasions will have to generate their own example.)  But suppose also that you think sleeping with one’s best friend’s wife is morally repugnant.  Consider the two claims, both plausible in their own way:

(A) If you want to seduce your best friend’s wife, you ought to spend a lot of time alone with her.

(B) If you want to seduce your best friend’s wife, you ought not spend a lot of time alone with her.*

Add the premise that you want to seduce your best friend’s wife, and we have two parallel modus ponens arguments, one of which concludes that you ought, and the other that you ought not, spend a lot of time alone with her.

Doubts about Morality

Many philosophers draw a distinction between moral and non-moral reasons for action, or motives, such that questions like, “Are moral reasons always overriding?” and “Can I have reason to do what I morally ought not do?” make sense. Not all philosophers draw this distinction:  Aristotle is the most obvious example. 

My main question is whether it is a useful or important distinction.  First, what is the distinction between moral and non-moral reasons for action?  Is there some consensus on this I am unaware of?  Second, why draw this distinction?

What is a reason for action?

The following is conceivable:  the features that make an action right are not the features which one ought to attend to when reasoning about whether to perform the action.  In consequentialist lingo (I think I’m getting this correct), what’s right-making is not necessarily a blueprint for a decision procedure.  For example, it might be best, on utilitarian grounds, if everyone was a Commonsense Moralist and never even attempted to maximize general utility.  This divergence is possible whenever one’s theory of right-making is consequentialist of whatever stripe, and maybe even more often than that.

With that as background, I am wondering what a “reason for acting” is.  Most definitions of reasons that I know of say they are something like “considerations counting in favor,” so a reason for acting in a certain way (a reason for the action) is a consideration which counts in favor of acting in a certain way (the action).  My question is this:  are these “considerations” the considerations that figure in the right-making theory, or the considerations that figure in the decision procedure?

Expressivism in ethics and religion

What was later called expressivism about ethics, and what we can call Wittgensteinian approaches to religion, had their origin in the same place:  empiricist theories of meaning, which ruled out from “descriptive” discourse anything that was not empirically verifiable.  In both cases, not everybody was willing to consign the discourse to the oblivion of pure nonsense; rather, the speech acts of asserting within the discourse were reinterpreted, and attention focused on the function of ethical or religious language, rather than its truth conditions.  In ethics, this general viewpoint evolved into the work of Blackburn, Gibbard, Horgan & Timmons, et al, while in religion it had a good mid-century run as “Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion” and became ensconced in liberal Protestant theology.