[lit-ideas] Re: Grice and Foot on the foundations of morality
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2010 12:45:57 +0100 (BST)
Per usual, a Popn. take on this:-
--- On Sun, 10/10/10, Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Walter O. wrote:
>
> "In other words, rightness is internally related to belief.
> Nothing in
> the world decides the rightness or wrongness of a moral
> claim - only
> rational belief can do that.
Well if "rational belief" is defined as "rational _true_ belief" [akin to
'justified true belief' (JTB)] then perhaps:- but the term that does all the
vital work here is "true".
(Popper, like EM Forster, does not believe in belief and has even commented
that modern so-called 'epistemic logic' is an irrelevance based on a false JTB
theory of knowledge.)
Take slavery and assume it is and was always wrong and unethical. This would be
so then even in a society where no one believed it wrong (where, in Marxist
parlance, everyone had 'false consciousness' about slavery). Can we say these
people with 'false consciousness' have a belief that is not 'rational'? We can
say it, of course, but do we mean anything more than than their ethics are
wrong or false - so that 'rational' is really a surrogate for 'true' here? In
any further sense how are they not 'rational'? Their belief in slavery involves
no logical error nor psychological imbalance (unless we deploy question-begging
and overextended accounts of these). Their belief may be rational in the sense
it may be defended by rational arguments - yet it may be untrue, like many
other so-called rational beliefs. For the general fallibility of
knowledge-claims, and the correlate that knowledge always lacks conclusive
error-preventing 'justification', means that
what it is most rational to believe - even in the empirical sphere - may be,
and may even be shown to be, false.
In this important, fallibilist sense it is not 'rational belief' that decides
whether a moral claim is right or wrong - it is whether the claim is right or
wrong that decides whether it is right or wrong. This is the case in the
empirical and non-empirical sphere:- because 'truth' is an 'ontic' and not an
'epistemic' concept. Following Tarski, we can safely say that the statement
'The grass is green' is true, if (and only if) the grass is green. This
correspondence is 'ontic' or existence-based, not knowledge-based. That is, it
depends only on the existence of states-of-affairs that correspond with those
asserted by the statement - it does depend, at all, on whether anyone knows or
believes that the state-of-affairs exists so as to correspond with the
statement. This is why we can say, for example, that Darwin's theory of
evolution by natural selection was true before he came up with it - and so was
the statement 'Atoms exist' true long before anyone
knew or believed it.
There is an important counterpoint to this: let us say someone accepts their
fallibility and performs a searching moral inventory on all aspects of both
their personal conduct and the ethics of the society in which they live, and
'in good conscience' they arrive at the conclusion that slavery is a morally
good institution (or, to take a historically more recent example, that genocide
of some group is morally imperative). Are they _morally_ 'bad'? Or just
deluded? I think we need to distinguish a first-person/subjective from a
third-person/objective perspective to answer this: we may say that their ethics
are objectively 'bad', 'wrong' etc. while accepting that considering their
ethics from their 'subjective' perspective they have tried to act 'in good
conscience'.
This is a 'realist' rather than 'anti-realist' conception (though I suspect P
would avoid these terms like the plague here) in that it takes moral 'truth',
while of course a human construction in some sense as is the idea of 'truth'
generally, to be supra-human in that what is the 'truth' is not something that
is logically shown by what humans determine is the 'truth' (it is not
'logically shown' because all our determinations are _possibly_ or
_potentially_ mistaken).
>On this constructivist
> (anti-realist)
> conception, what makes slavery, for example, morally wrong,
> is that
> not all persons affected by a maxim of slavery could agree
> to it,
> believe it to be justifiable. The moral wrongness of
> slavery has
> nothing to do with any 'intrinsic' or 'worldly' or
> 'empirical' feature
> of human beings that fails to be recognized by a maxim of
> slavery."
The wrongness of slavery is not an 'empirical' feature of _anything_, nevermind
human beings, simply because the claim 'slavery is wrong' is not falsifiable by
mere observation. Yet the non-empirical world - the world of metaphysics and of
one its many subsets,ethical claims - is also 'real'. It is as much part of
reality as the 'empirical' realm.
Donal
Leaving it there before the blue screen comes again
Blue-sky London
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