Ethical theories can have various different foundations. Some are be based on a religion which teaches that good actions are rewarded after death while bad actions get you sent to the Bad Place.
Alternatively, evolutionary game theory may be invoked to explain ethical systems as being 'mechanisms' designed to solve coordination or discoordination problems and thus promote eusocial outcomes. The advantage of this approach is that it shows why 'deontological' (rule-based) theories may be preferable to 'consequentialist' theories in contexts of Knightian uncertainty or information asymmetry.
Finally, certain actions may be judged to have an aesthetic or other such 'autonomous' or 'self-subsistent' value and thus an ethical life may be said to change your inner ethos for the better.
Andrew Sepielli, writing for Aeon, holds that 'Ethics has no foundation'. Yet, if people have ethics, then surely ethics must be founded on some trait most human beings have? I suppose, Sapielli means that Ethics is not 'supervenient' on anything else. It exists in its own right. Godel famously thought 'Logic was in the world, like Zoology'. Sadly, it appears that mathematics and logic are just a collection of conditional tautologies. They don't have a magical or 'necessary' existence. Why should Ethics be autonomous if even mathematics isn't?
Sapielli argues that 'Ethical values can be both objective and knowable – torture really is wrong – yet not need any foundation outside themselves.' There are two problems here. The first is that we don't know what non-human beings think of 'ethical values'. Maybe they don't see them as we see them. Also, most people don't think torture is always wrong. There are many things we currently permit to occur which, it may be, our descendants would consider obviously and objectively wrong. As for torture, many might consider having to listen to me read out my poems is torture pure and simple. Yet, the thing is not illegal.
Many academic fields can be said to ‘study morality’. Of these, the philosophical sub-discipline of normative ethics studies morality in what is arguably the least alienated way.
Sadly, it is also the most useless way. Religion is a service industry. People pay for it. Economists tend to go in for some sort of game-theoretic approach and this too can 'pay for itself'. But, so far, normative ethics has nothing to show for itself. Still, it may be useful to the Grievance Studies brigade who can shout themselves hoarse about how evil everybody else is till they are given tenure or Soros hires them for his Foundation.
Rather than focusing on how people and societies think and talk about morality, normative ethicists try to figure out which things are, simply, morally good or bad, and why.
This sounds like an arbitrary ipse dixit procedure. At one time economists tried to figure out why water is less expensive than diamonds. This 'externalist' approach turned out to be utterly useless.
The philosophical sub-field of meta-ethics adopts, naturally, a ‘meta-’ perspective on the kinds of enquiry that normative ethicists engage in. It asks whether there are objectively correct answers to these questions about good or bad, or whether ethics is, rather, a realm of illusion or mere opinion.
Why not ask if there are objectively correct correct answers and objectively correct correct correct answers? The problem with 'meta' theories is there can be an infinite regress of meta-meta theories.
Most of my work in the past decade has been in meta-ethics. I believe that there are truths about what’s morally right and wrong.
But are they arbitrary or 'natural'? If the latter is the case how come everybody doesn't already hold that truth? Is it because of a conspiracy which involves the Illuminati and shape shifting lizards from Planet X?
I believe that some of these truths are objective or, as they say in the literature, ‘stance-independent’. That is to say, it’s not my or our disapproval that makes torture morally wrong; torture is wrong because, to put it simply, it hurts people a lot.
Being told you are obese or that you have cancer hurts a lot. Doctors who tell you such things are torturers and should be arrested and sent to jail.
I believe that these objective moral truths are knowable, and that some people are better than others are at coming to know them. You can even call them ‘moral experts’ if you wish.
Also guys wearing tinfoil hats are experts on Mind-Control rays broadcast by shape shifting lizard people.
Of course, not everyone agrees with all of that. Some are simply confused;
because of Mind-Control rays- right?
they conflate ‘objective’ with ‘culturally universal’ or ‘innate’ or ‘subsumable under a few exceptionless principles’ or some such. But many people’s misgivings about moral objectivity are more clear headed and deeper. In particular, I find that some demur because they think that, for there to be moral truths, let alone objective, knowable ones, morality would have to have a kind of ‘foundation’ that, in their view, is nowhere to be found.
Till a devil with a pitchfork drags you down to Hell. It turns out wanking really is a sin more particularly if you are watching Julie Andrews in 'Sound of Music'.
Others, anxious to help, try to show that there’s a firm foundation or ultimate ground for morality after all.
There may be if your soul really is immortal.
It’s my view that both sides of this conflict are off on the wrong foot. Morality is objective, but it neither requires nor admits of a foundation.
To be an object means having a foundation upon which to rest or an inertial frame within which to travel. An arbitrary assertion, it is true, may have no foundation in fact or logic. But the person making it is not simply floating in the cloud of their own Being.
It just kind of floats there, along with the evaluative realm more generally, unsupported by anything else. Parts of it can be explained by other parts, but the entirety of the web or network of good and evil is brute.
Yet that web or network will vanish when the person who holds it or the books in which it is written down vanish from existence.
Maybe you think that’s weird and even worthy of outright dismissal. I once thought the same thing. The purpose of this essay, which is based on my book Pragmatist Quietism: A Meta-Ethical System (2022), is to encourage you to start seeing this aspect of the world as I now see it.
It is an arbitrary aspect of the world. I suppose if you get paid to write about such things you have a pragmatic reason to just do it already and quietly take the money.
The first question we should ask is: what exactly is a ‘foundation’? We can get clearer on what a foundation is by querying whether a moral theory like utilitarianism might count as one. Utilitarianism says that actions are right to the extent, and only to the extent, that they promote overall wellbeing. So, is utilitarianism in the running for being a foundation for morality?
Yes. You can tart things up with a bit of evolutionary Game Theory. Moreover, Governments and Private Corporations may pay you quite well to figure out better 'mechanisms' to promote well-being.
Well, it certainly purports to explain a lot when it comes to right and wrong. Why give to the poor? Promotes wellbeing. Why not punch your neighbour in the face? Doesn’t promote wellbeing. Should the Bank of Canada raise interest rates this quarter? Not clear, because it’s not clear whether it promotes wellbeing.
Economists tend to have clear views about such things.
And so on, and so on.
Nonetheless, utilitarianism is not what I have in mind by a ‘foundation’. This is not because utilitarianism is incorrect; it is because utilitarianism is a moral theory.
I thought it was an economic theory. Sadly, it breaks down when confronted with 'Knightian Uncertainty' as well as too little or too much preference and endowment diversity. Still, the thing is useful enough.
But a foundation is not a moral theory.
Just as a foundation is not a house. Yet houses need a strong foundation.
It’s the kind of thing that’s supposed to ground, or support, or justify, moral theories, and moral claims generally, without itself being a claim within the domain of morality.
The foundation is part of the house.
Here’s another way to think about it. Suppose that a moral sceptic were to declare, along with David Hume: ‘You cannot rationally infer an “ought” from an “is”!’ Now imagine that I replied: ‘Oh yes you can! Utilitarianism is true, and so, from the fact that an action promotes overall wellbeing, you can infer that it’s what you ought to do.’
No you can't. You have to look at the 'opportunity cost'.
I suspect that our sceptic would regard this response as unsatisfactory. ‘You can’t show that Hume was wrong about “ought” and “is” by just wheeling in some further “ought”,’ she might respond. ‘To show that the move from “is” to “ought” can be rational, you would need to step outside of “ought”-discourse entirely, and provide a…a…’ ‘And provide,’ I would finish the sceptic’s sentence, ‘what I’m calling a “foundation”.’
I would call it a non-arbitrary or 'natural' assertion which everybody, had they the time and the inclination, would agree on. Sadly, 'naturality' is rare indeed.
So a moral theory doesn’t count as a foundation.
One might say it is an unsatisfactory or arbitrary foundation.
What would count? Here’s a possible candidate. One thing that philosophers of language try to do is to explain why terms and concepts refer to the things in the world that they do.
The answer has to do with coordination and discoordination games.
Many of these theories of reference invoke the relation of causal regulation – regulation of our ‘tokening’ of the concept ‘cat’ or our use of the word ‘cat’, for instance, by the comings and goings of the long-tailed housepets that like to stretch out on the windowsill.
One may call a person 'catty'. A cat-house was a term for a brothel.
Some philosophers have applied this theory of reference to moral terms and concepts, yielding a view on which a concept like ‘good’ refers to whichever property or cluster of properties causally regulates our employment of it.
There is correlation, not causation.
Anything that then had that property(-cluster) would therefore be good.
The term may be mistakenly applied. There is correlation but no causation.
Note that our starting point here is not a claim or theory that is, intuitively speaking, within the subject-matter of ethics.
But if that starting point was silly- it confused correlation with causation- intuitively speaking what you have is silliness.
Rather we began with a theory of reference – something belonging to the philosophy of language – that purports to explain how terms and concepts across the board are anchored in the world. One might say that, in doing so, we gave ethics a foundation.
If you arbitrarily assert that anything which is referred to as a cat, is actually a cat, then you have given Magic a foundation. By calling your boss a pussy, he will turn into a cute little feline whom you can entertain with a ball of yarn.
Here is another theoretical move that might count as an attempt at offering a foundation for ethics. Many philosophers these days are leery about accepting the existence of objects, processes or properties that are outside the ‘natural’ order. This may seem to present a problem for ethics, because the right and the good have the feel of being supernatural, like ghosts and auras, rather than natural, like clams and carbon. But a few philosophers have suggested that this is too quick. There may be, in Philippa Foot’s words, ‘natural goodness'.
There may be a Heaven and a Hell- but only for cats.
Doctors speak of a well-functioning kidney, farmers of an underdeveloped calf, and nobody takes them to be dipping into the realm of, as they say, ‘woo’. And while some philosophers have expressed suspicion about so-called ‘teleological’ features like functions and ‘final ends’, others have argued that a closer look at scientific practice reveals their explanatory value.
But a yet closer look reveals that explanations don't matter Structural Causal Models which permit tinkering so as to achieve better outcomes are at the heart of STEM subjects.
But if there is nothing problematic about goodness in the way of a heart, there should be nothing problematic about goodness in the way of a human being.
Only in the sense that there is nothing problematic about nonsense.
On this, as it’s sometimes called, ‘neo-Aristotelian’ picture, then, ethical features are part of the natural world.
But the natural world appears neo-Darwinian. Aristotle was wrong. Get over it.
What makes a semantic account like the causal theory of reference or a metaphysical view like neo-Aristotelian naturalism a candidate for being a foundation, while a theory like utilitarianism is not?
An arbitrary assertion.
They are capable of serving as foundations for ethics because, basically, they’re not ethics; they’re semantics – they’re about what words and concepts mean – or they’re metaphysics, cataloguing what sorts of things exist in the world. Utilitarianism, by contrast, is ethics, and ethics is no more capable of hoisting itself up by its own bootstraps than is anything else.
There are bootstrap models in S-Matrix theory. For all we know, the Multiverse, like Baron Munchausen, bootstrapped itself into existence.
I think ethics exists because we feel we have an inner ethos. It's nice to be nice. Doing something nasty can make you feel utterly miserable.
I think we can go a little further, though. While a theory like utilitarianism offers a direct explanation
No. It classifies actions by looking at their consequences or else by applying a rule.
– maybe a good one, maybe a bad one – of what is right or good or whatnot, our causal theory of reference does not. It offers a theory of what concepts and terms refer to, which has implications for which ethical claims are true, which in turn has implications for what’s right or good.
Not really. Take the word 'Panauti'. What does it refer to? No Philosopher of Language could answer that question. They'd have to go on Google and discover it is a Hindi or Gujarati term meaning 'ill-omened'.
But ultimately, it tells you about what things mean,
It has no such magic power. You have to look up words you don't know.
while a theory like utilitarianism tells you what’s right.
No. You still have to calculate the opportunity cost.
One indicator of the difference between the respective theories’ explanatory roles is the difference between them in terms of what we may call ‘domain generality’. Theories like ‘terms refer to the features that causally regulate their usage’ or ‘only things posited by the successful natural sciences exist’ have implications beyond ethics – into what ‘cat’ means, or about whether René Descartes’s postulated res cogitans exists — while utilitarianism is solely a theory of right and wrong, and that’s it.
Game theory is part of Utilitarianism and has a notion of coordination and discoordination games which explains how words come to have different connotations over time.
Now, if you were to go on the website formerly known as Twitter and search for ‘foundation morality’ or something similar, you’d turn up many threads about God or religion. So it’s worth asking: is God the kind of thing that people like me have in mind when we talk about a ‘foundation’? There’s much to be said on this matter, but on the face of it, no.
But only on the face of it. Look a little deeper and it may turn out that an interest in Ethics arises out of an earlier loss of Faith or a psychological need which in past times was catered to by religion.
If someone were to claim that an action is morally wrong if and only if God forbids it, I’d take this as an ordinary moral theory on a par with the claim that an action is morally wrong if and only if it fails to promote wellbeing.
Why? In the former case, there is Scripture we can turn to check that the person is correct. In the latter case we have to do a tedious Cost Benefit analysis.
If utilitarianism isn’t the sort of thing that’s even eligible to be a foundation, then neither is this simple version of divine command theory.
Both are arbitrary. But Theists are fine with an arbitrary God who really did create the Universe.
Now, to be sure, there are ways of beefing up divine command theory so that it might properly be regarded as a stab at a foundation – bringing in the metaphysics of ‘God’s nature’, for example. (It should be said: there are parallel ways of beefing up other normative ethical theories, too.) The only point I wish to make now is that ‘God commands X’ no more takes us ‘outside of ethics’ than ‘X maximises overall wellbeing’.
Both do take us out of ethics. Religion has eschatology. Utilitarianism has Economics.
The moral relevance of each one is up for dispute,
If God exists then he knows about that crafty wank you had while watching 'Sound of Music'. That is highly relevant because God strictly forbids gazing at Nuns with lustful eyes.
and that dispute would take place in the arena of regular old first-order moral thinking, with the rest of the normative-ethical gladiators.
Not if the four horsemen of the Apocalypse show up on the High Street.
So why is it so often thought that morality requires a foundation?
Because Society would benefit if we came to see some things as immoral while accepting that we were wrongheaded bigots to oppose certain other things. One approach is to show that God doesn't want us to be beastly to homosexuals. Another is to show that everybody is better off if homosexuals are able to lead happy and productive lives.
It may seem difficult to explain a way of thinking that strikes one as so obviously correct. I, however, do not think it is correct, let alone obviously correct, and so let me try my hand. Basically, I suspect that many people think morality needs a foundation because they in some way or other assimilate the enquiry that gets called ‘normative ethics’ to ordinary factual enquiry, in which there do indeed seem to be foundations/explanations for the most argued-over claims.
If we are arguing over things which affect us, it is right and proper to look deeper into our motivations. I may be opposed to homosexual marriage because I fear this will undermine heterosexual marriage. That is my real concern. You may reassure me by pointing out that divorce rates have fallen in countries where Gay Marriage is legal. Alternatively, I may be bigoted against Gay people because none of them want to sleep with me. That is my real concern. You point out that currently Gay people escape having mother-in-laws who will scold them for not earning enough money. Why should heterosexuals alone have to suffer?
Whether or not you accept highfalutin philosophical positions like the principle of sufficient reason, my guess is that that you would look askance at someone who said that it’s going to snow tomorrow but then claimed that there was no explanation for that – that it’s just a brute fact.
Not if the person said 'I have had this mystical power ever since I was struck by lightening'.
But if that claim strains credulity, then the view in which ethics as a whole ‘just floats there’, as I put it, untethered from anything that might serve to explain it, is apt to strike you as downright absurd.
Unless, this dude is right and there are some gifted people who can judge goodness and badness thanks to some mysterious sixth sense they alone possess.
Correlatively, the fundamental reason why I don’t think that morality requires a foundation is that I deny that the relevant sorts of ethical disputes are akin to ordinary factual disputes.
Because they don't affect anybody. This is just a parlour game for a few academics teaching worthless shite.
They have features that make it easy to be fooled into thinking otherwise, but in fact they’re crucially different.
Crucial to whom?
More specifically, disputes that get called ‘normative ethics’ are most like disputes that many people have labelled ‘merely verbal’ or ‘non-substantive’. A classic example comes from William James’s book Pragmatism (1907). A man is chasing a squirrel around a tree. Is the man thereby going around the squirrel? One disputant says ‘no’, because the man is always behind the squirrel. Another says ‘yes’, because the man is first north of the squirrel, then west, then, south, then east of it.
Not if the squirrel is much faster. The man is always behind it. He goes around the tree not around the squirrel.
The people in this dispute have different beliefs, to be sure; their conflict is not a conflict of desires or emotions. Still, there’s a clear sense in which they’re not really representing the world in different ways.
Yes they are. One guy is saying the squirrel is much faster than the man. The other suggests otherwise. In practice, the squirrel will have to pause from time to time.
The side you take in this dispute does not determine, either directly or indirectly by way of inference, the way you think any aspect of the world looks, smells, sounds, etc; nor would taking one side or the other of this dispute guide you to act in a way that achieves your aims, whatever these aims may be and whatever your powers may be. The belief, in other words, doesn’t function in the way a representation like a map does.
Either the man is slower than the squirrel or he isn't. This may matter to some concerned party. More generally, for some mathematical purpose, the above may motivate a useful theorem or lemma.
I think the debates that tend to get called ‘normative ethical’ are a lot like this. The way that the world will look, smell, sound, etc if utilitarianism is true is just the way it will look, smell, sound, etc if utilitarianism is false.
Surely, the world changed a lot because a lot of people got behind the ideas of Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill, Sedgwick etc. Moreover, evolutionary game theory as practiced by Utilitarians like Ken Binmore has more than 'paid its way'. Binmore made ten billion for the Exchequer from the 3G spectrum auction. He has sought to 'de-Kant' Ethics. Harsanyi and Vickery too made important contributions as did Gibbard.
Taking sides for or against utilitarianism does not help us to further our ultimate goals, whatever they may happen to be, in the way that a map does. Rather, it simply changes what our ultimate goals are.
So that we can go further towards them. What's wrong with that? I have a map of the London Underground which helps me to get to my interview for a job as a janitor. I find a treasure map on the Tube and use it to get my hands on a big chest full of gold coins. I no longer need a job as a janitor.
I believe taking the side of utilitarianism did help England become a better place for most of its people. It didn't change the ultimate goal of the English people which was to live well and try to be nice to each other.
With that said, there are also some important differences between the ‘utilitarianism’ and ‘squirrel’ debates. I said that we sometimes call disputes like that about the squirrel ‘merely verbal’ or ‘non-substantive’.
The man chased a squirrel. He didn't circle around it. In the former case, we might suppose he wanted to eat the squirrel. In the latter case, he may have been a worshipper of the Squirrel God.
We also sometimes say of them something like: ‘You could say this, or you could say that. What’s the point?’ This is because not only is there no representational accuracy up for grabs in these debates – nothing of value seems to be afforded by them. They seem to be, again, pointless. Not so the majority of our debates about morality and politics. This is because such debates bear on our own and others’ motivations, as well as on praise, blame, esteem and so forth in a way that debates like ‘squirrel’ seem not to. We might say that they are significant, but not substantive. Unlike ‘squirrel’, they matter. But then unlike ordinary factual disputes, the way that they matter is not by affording accurate representation of the world.
I think some such representation is implied. It is 'background information'.
It’s these connections with motivation and emotion that fool us into assimilating disputes about utilitarianism, or the ‘trolley problem’, or distributive justice, to ordinary factual disputes.
I suppose, the author is speaking of people in his line of work. But it isn't the sort of work any economy can afford to subsidize very much.
Because they bear on what we do and how we feel, we do not reckon that we can simply ‘go either way’ on them in a willy-nilly fashion. We do not regard them as arbitrary, in other words, in the way that we regard ‘squirrel’. Nor do we think it’s acceptable to settle them by conceptual fiat, as we would settle disputes like ‘squirrel’.
Does anybody greatly care what some useless pedants find acceptable?
Here is what I mean by that. Were I to find myself embroiled in a discussion about whether the man is going around the squirrel, I would probably try to put a stop to it by saying: ‘Look, all I mean by “going around” is this…’.
Going around something means you are going faster than it is. This is not the case here. The word 'chasing' suggests trying to overtake or to come close enough to catch the thing being chased. You could add a detail- e.g. 'the man was playfully chasing the squirrel'. That paints a different picture.
By contrast, suppose we were embroiled in a dispute about whether the media would be right to mothball a story in an attempt to ensure that a disfavoured candidate is not elected. Here I would not try to settle the dispute by saying, eg, ‘Look, by “right”, all I mean is “maximises overall wellbeing”…’ I’d see such a dispute as to be settled by argument, not by stipulation.
You are welcome to stipulate what you consider advantageous or useful to you. In this case, you might say 'the media are within their rights to kill this story'.
And again, I think we can chalk up this difference to the fact that normative-ethical disputes, despite failing to afford representational significance just like ‘squirrel’, are significant in practical and affective ways that ‘squirrel’ is not.
The 'representational significance' may be implied. Normally, a guy chasing something wants to get his hands on it. If he fails to do so, chances are, it is faster than him. Saying he actually went around it when the truth is he lagged behind it distorts the truth. Normative-ethical disputes do have representational significance. If the Media killed a story so as to prevent a dangerous maniac getting elected, we speak of their having put 'the public interest' over their commercial interest to gain a 'scoop' and thus boost their sales.
This all puts ‘normative-ethical’ disputes in a strange category, and makes it difficult to know what to say about them in terms of philosophical theory.
Why put them in a 'strange category' and then whine about what you have done? The fact is things like 'public interest' and 'commercial interest' are justiciable. A shareholder could sue the Media company for killing a story which would have boosted their profits. A Court might uphold their action on the grounds of a higher duty to serve the public interest.
I actually consider this an advantage, for it is manifestly not obvious what to say about truth and objectivity and knowledge when it comes to ethics!
Only in the sense that it is not obvious what to say about such things in mathematics. Are non-constructive existence proofs (e.g. using Zorn's lemma) true or objective?
This is witnessed by the fact that some super-smart philosophers think that there are objective truths about ethics, some think ethics is bullshit along the lines of alchemy, some think ethical disputes are really conflicts of desire-like attitudes in disguise, and so on.
Super-smart mathematicians and physicists sometimes dismiss entire fields of study in their discipline as 'bullshit' or 'arbitrary hand waving' etc. Is String Theory a waste of time?
Anyone who thought ethical disputes work in such a way that one theoretical interpretation is just utterly obvious and natural and easy to state would then owe us an explanation of how so many smart people could be getting it so terribly wrong at this late stage in intellectual history.
Sadly, they may insist on providing that explanation. The truth is our 'intellectual history' has barely got off the ground. Yet, for most of us, it is already far beyond our ken.
And so, acknowledging that it is by no means obvious, here is my own theoretical interpretation. The reason why ethics neither requires nor admits of a foundation outside of itself is that, like ‘squirrel’ but unlike any ordinary factual disputes, the relevant kinds of ethical dispute are non-representational or, as I prefer to put it, fail to afford ‘representational value’.
Yet, with 'squirrel' there is a way to end the dispute- viz. ask the guy chasing that little critter. Did he go around it or was it too quick for him? Similarly, with ethical questions, we can look around for a 'witness'- (and witnesses exist even in Mathematics!)- so as to get more insight into the problem. There may have been people who were faced with real life 'trolley problems'. How did they react? What went through their minds? Were their legal or professional ramifications? If I were faced with such a problem, I like to think I would calmly follow the 'rule-book'. In practice, I might panic and try to save the cute little kid even if this means sending a bunch of people my age to their death. My consolation would be that they too might have made the same choice. But I might get the sack or even end up doing jail time for manslaughter. Still, I can imagine a good film being made about me- unless, obviously, Tom Hanks, instead of Beyonce, plays me.
That is to say, one does not represent or mirror or copy the world in any robust sense that is worth caring about by coming to any conclusion rather than another pursuant to such a dispute.
I disagree. Watching a movie about a person facing a real life ethical dilemma can change our ethos. We become more thoughtful, more considerate, less sure of our own virtue and entitlement. 'There but for the Grace of God' is a sentiment which generates some degree of empathy and gratitude for our own good fortune.
But the sorts of extra-ethical considerations drawn from metaphysics, semantics and so on that people typically call upon to serve as ‘foundations’ could be relevant to ethics only by bearing on which moral beliefs, if any, were good or bad in representational respects.
Why? After all, you can have an ethics which holds all beliefs to be 'defeasible' or 'sublatable'. In this case, metaphysics could serve as a foundation for an ethical state- e.g. that of being 'jivan-mukta' or attaining 'satori'. Indeed, Hindu and Buddhist ethics have such doctrines.
They’re not ethically important in the ways that happiness, freedom, equality, dignity and other such things are.
Unless such things are delusions. Many of us discover, as we grow older, that what we thought was happiness and freedom was in fact just the product of moral and intellectual sloth.
But since representational value and disvalue aren’t on the cards when it comes to normative-ethical disputes,
only because you have forbidden them
these considerations regarding the metaphysics of moral properties, the sense and reference of moral terms and so on, are irrelevant to fundamental ethics.
In which case 'fundamental ethics' is not just irrelevant, it is empty.
And so it would be a mistake to think, with so-called ‘error theorists’ or ‘nihilists’ about morality, that there are no such things as moral properties in the world, and so all attributions of rightness or wrongness are false.
It is only a mistake to think there are no moral properties in the world if somebody can catch hold of one such moral property and find a cheap way to mass produce it. An attribution is considered false if there is evidence against it. On the other hand, if there is a sound reason for making it, we may accept it as true for some specific purpose.
The world doesn’t have to have these little moral doodads for things to be right or wrong; there just has to be happiness and unhappiness, freedom and tyranny, and so forth.
Actually, these things don't have to exist to be useful enough in specific contexts.
It would be a mistake to think, with Elizabeth Anscombe in her influential paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (1958), that the moral ‘ought’ lacks sense, as it were, and so there is nothing that we morally ought to do.
But we are welcome to say otherwise. Indeed, this may be contractually required of us.
Whether something ‘lacks sense’ is a semantic matter, and semantics does not bear on normative ethics.
Provided it is meaningless.
It would bear on ethics only if it went towards determining the representational values of beliefs about ethics, but there are no such values at stake.
Observation determines the 'representational value' of a belief. Semantics can clarify what that belief might be. In 'Squirrel', one guy is suggesting that the man is playing with the squirrel. He isn't trying to catch and eat it. The other guy paints a picture of a nimble little critter eluding a ravenous predator. One could check the CCTV footage to find out who is in the right.
As I said at the outset, my quarrel is not only with the sceptics. Someone who attempted to wring some positive moral conclusions out of claims in semantics (eg, about the sense or reference of moral terms) or metaphysics (eg, about what would best accomplish the reduction of morality to some cluster of suitably ‘natural’ properties) is making the same sort of basic error. They are treating normative-ethical enquiry as representational, even though it is not.
Does it have a concrete model? If so, it is representational- if only implicitly. If not, why bother with it? The thing has no application to lived life.
But if neither side of a normative-ethical dispute is representing or ‘mirroring’ the world any more successfully than the other is, then why can’t we ‘go either way’, as it seems we can in ‘squirrel’?
Who says we can't? For some specific purpose, one way of looking at things is better than its opposite.
How can there be a truth of the matter, if there’s no possibility of accurate or inaccurate representation in any robust sense?
If it is useful to distinguish the truth in a particular case- e.g. did this man kill his wife or was her murderer actually a one armed man?- then we can set up a protocol bound, buck stopped, mechanism to do so. This may not be perfect, but it is better than nothing.
My basic answer is that what gives these normative-ethical debates the appearance of mattering – their conclusions’ influence on motivation and affect – also makes it the case that they actually matter.
In which case, so do my farts. Will they conclude in my shitting myself or will I simply stink up the place in a manner which motivates you to run away from me?
There’s value and significance up for grabs in these ethical disputes, then, but it’s not value that inheres in representing the world in a robust sense. It’s what I call ‘specifically ethical value’ – the value of doing the right thing for the right reason.
You may thank me for farting in the elevator. It caused you to get off at the next floor and climb the stairs. You then bumped into the beautiful woman who is now your lady wife. Indeed the reason I am so flatulent is because I secretly hope to engineer just such romances. Thus my farts have a specific ethical value.
The problem with attaching moral qualities to things in the world is that suddenly you have a philosophy which accords great ethical value to my stinky farts.
And it’s from this sort of value that I try to wring a kind of truth or correctness that’s proprietary to ethics.
Who wants to be the proprietor of my farts?
Imagine a kind of advisor who’s ideal in all non-moral respects – true beliefs about non-evaluative matters,
i.e. a database with enough information to permit a good representation of the world
perfect inferential abilities, etc. If we plug a particular moral belief into such a person, and she advises you to do all and only right actions, then that belief counts as true in this proprietarily ethical sense, even though the belief does not ‘picture’ or ‘mirror’ the world.
Because that is done by the database.
Note that my brief for ethical truth bottoms out in claims about ‘specifically ethical’ value,
which my farts possess by reason of my wishing to drive people away from me so as to have the chance of bumping into the love of their life.
and that my argument for the irrelevance of metaphysics, semantics, etc to ethics bottoms out in claims about what I called ‘representational’ value.
Which are encoded in the 'database' that is 'background information'.
This might strike you as begging the question against the sceptic about evaluative truth and knowledge – in other words, as assuming at the outset just what I intend to demonstrate to such a sceptic. My rejoinder: yes, I do beg the question, but this, in itself, does not put me in bad company.
This is because the fellow is not in my vicinity.
Everyone who ventures a positive claim about some subject matter – the external world, induction, mathematical knowledge, what-have-you – rather than withholding judgment entirely, must at some point confront the so-called ‘Agrippan trilemma’: either posit certain facts as unexplained, or beg the question, or accept an infinite regress. If these are problems, they’re not problems for me specifically; they’re problems for anyone who thinks things.
Nothing wrong with accepting facts for which we don't yet have an explanation. Indeed, it was only as I was writing this that I realized I am actually a flatulent Cupid who hopes to get anyone near me to run away and thus bump into the love of their life.
So I say that the true sin lies not in question-begging, but in failing to subsume aspects of the world within a more general vindicatory framework.
The problem here is 'ipse dixit' type dogmatic and arbitrary assertion. As for a 'more general vindicatory framework', why go in for it if you end up finding great moral worth in my farts?
For example, a theory of a priori knowledge that explains how knowledge of that very theory is possible might beg the question, but so long as it accounts for a priori knowledge in general – eg, of mathematics, logic and morality – and not just a priori knowledge of itself, it needn’t be problematic.
Kant's synthetic a priori judgments were refuted by Scientific evidence. Theorems are merely conditional tautologies. Unless an Occasionalist God is tricking us, we have to accept that there is no a priori knowledge. However, it may be convenient for certain purposes to believe otherwise. As Lord Coke said to the Wisest Fool in Christendom, Law is 'artificial reason'. It is arbitrary, not natural, but it can be a great defence against arbitrary actions of the Crown.
A theory of accurate mental representation of the world that explains how our beliefs in that very theory accurately represent the world also begs the question,
Not if it has such a good Structural Causal Model that it enables us to improve our representations of the world. My optician helps me see the world much more like it actually is. But we now have photoionization microscopes which directly visualize atomic structure and quantum states. Nobody is questioning the usefulness of such technological breakthroughs.
but this should not worry us insofar as it explains accurate mental representation across the board.
Those explanations don't matter. What matters is new technology which makes our lives better.
These theories earn their keep by
making money? That's the only way to do it.
making sense of what would otherwise remain mysterious,
Why is Vivek so flatulent? Oh dear. Turns out he thinks he is Cupid.
and so it should not trouble us if they end up vindicating themselves in the process.
It troubles my friends greatly that my farts end up vindicating themselves- unless, obviously, I shit myself. Still, if even one person fleeing my farts ends up bumping into the love of his life- my life won't be wholly wasted.
I propose to attain a similar sort of explanatory unity by vindicating all claims and domains that are worthy of it – not just ethics, but everything from biochemistry to sports prognostication
not to mention my farts. Too late! I just mentioned them. Also I farted. Just thought you'd like to know. The life of a flatulent Cupid can sometimes be very lonely.
– fundamentally in terms of values, be these representational, specifically ethical, or other sorts of values. It is this values-first re-imagining of enquiry for which I reserve the label ‘pragmatism’.
Whereas everybody else thinks pragmatism is about doing practical stuff which more 'than pays for itself' without getting too hung up with epistemology or ontology.
Pragmatism offers a way of making sense of ethical truth,
Though it already made sense to us as little kiddies.
objectivity and knowledge by ensconcing these within a more comprehensive world picture, but not in such a way that would count as providing a foundation for ethics in some allegedly more fundamental area of enquiry.
So, if you are building a house, feel free to put sconces all over the place. What you mustn't do is to first construct a foundation for it.
What emerges is a free-floating evaluative sphere,
filled with my farts
coupled with an account of why this is not so odd or mysterious after all.
The reason you should never construct a foundation for your house is because it should be allowed to float freely in the air. Incidentally, the Institute of Socioproctology is now offering to build you a brand new McMansion for just $ 9.99. Don't be misled by the Yelp reviews which say that we just pocket the money and don't build anything at all. The truth is the houses we built floated off somewhere probably because they are filled with my farts.
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