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!
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 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.
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?
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?
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.
As regular readers of this blog will no doubt have noticed, I have a continuing fascination with expressivism. It both attracts and repels me, much like a David Lynch movie. I’ve been trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that I don’t like.
Consider, in this vein, Moral Beliefism. MB is a cognitivist view: it’s the view that when you make moral utterances, you are expressing your moral beliefs. Well, what realist could want more? But listen to the following dialogue between Mob (a MOral Beliefist) and Og (the Other Guy). Mob, like many metaethicists in professional mode, helpfully glosses all her moral utterances:
Mob: Torture is wrong. Of course, when I say that, I am just expressing my moral belief that torture is wrong.
Og: What do you mean you’re “just expressing your belief”? It’s not as if this kind of thing is morally optional.
Mob: No, of course it’s not optional. Of course, when I say that, I’m just expressing my belief that my belief that torture is wrong is not optional.
Og: Dude, torture is very very bad.
Mob: I totally agree! Of course, in agreeing with you, I am just expressing my belief that torture is very very bad.
Continue reading "Expressivism and Tracking Mental States" »
Winter is a good time for a bit of navel-gazing. Blogging is an interesting medium of philosophical discourse; its virtues and vices, it seems to me at any rate, are considerably different from those of the more standard, tenure-relevant sorts of philosophical work. Posts and comments have to be relatively short, making their points quickly and clearly, even vividly. The medium doesn’t sustain narrow specialists very well. It doesn’t allow the intense, in-depth kinds of argument that so many articles and book chapters engage in. However, it also prevents the exploration of grand sweeping metaphysical worldviews. All of which prompts the question, which great philosophers of the past would have made good bloggers?
Al, Betty, Carla, Dan, and Ed accept the claim, “Utilitarianism is true.” They accept it because they have been told it by their revered professor, Dr. Black. In fact, their reverence for Dr. Black is so great that they would revise any other claim they accept before revising this one. However, there is a twist. In addition to accepting that utilitarianism is true, each student also has certain other beliefs as well:
We would ordinarily say that all the students have at least one belief (or more generally, one mental state) in common, namely the belief that utilitarianism is true. And we would say that when each asserts, “Utilitarianism is true” they all mean the same thing. But can an expressivist make sense of these ordinary intuitions?
Does moral theory drive philosophy of action? Here’s what I mean. A main question of philosophy of action is what an action is. It seems to me that the answer to this question is strongly influenced by what type of moral theory one accepts.
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