[lit-ideas] Re: Grice and Foot on the foundations of morality
- From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2010 16:49:55 -0230
Plse see specific replies below:
Quoting Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> 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".
W: Yes, you got it. And the claim is that "true" or more appropriately in the
moral domain "rightness" is a matter of agreement or belief attained under
conditions of discourse. Is there a problem here?
>
> (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.)
W: Anyone claiming that she does "not believe in belief" is engaged in a
performative self-contradiction and may rightly be excluded from rational
discourse pending proper educational interventions.
>
> Take slavery and assume it is and was always wrong and unethical.
The discussion here concerns the justifiablity of that assumption, and the
epistemic conditions under which that assumption's claim to moral rightness is
cogent. Donal appears to beg the question here.
>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'?
W: Yes, we can say that the belief is not rational because one should recognize
that persons affected, potentially or actually, by that judgement could not
agree to it. In the moral domain, rational judgements concerning others
respects their autonomy and dignity as ends in themselves.
> 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.
W: See my earlier reply to Phil on these matters.
>
> 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.
W: As Rod Serling used to say: "I fear we are travelling here in a very small
circle .. . with no liquour bar in sight. The next stop .... still no bar!"
> 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.
W: Very eloquently put. I would disagree with none of the above. But we are
talking about moral rightness not empirical truth. The issue before us is that
moral justification and rightness is epistemically a matter of agreement under
discursive conditions of symmetry and reciprocity.
> 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'.
W: No argument from me here on the distinction. But the moral fact remains that
the maxim is morally impermissible. (I'm not clear on the idea that people are
"morally bad." What does it mean?)
>
> 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).
W: Not too sure on what Donal is saying here. Perhaps she could try again?
Donal's quote of WO:
> >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."
To wit Donal replies:
> 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.
W: Pro tonto (wasn't there a horse called that?) I agree with Donal. Is it that
Donal believes I should disagree?
>
> Donal
> Leaving it there before the blue screen comes again
> Blue-sky London
>
Never mind John Wayne movies. In fear of the large bouncing white balloon that
emerges upon every one of his escape attempts,
Walter O.
The Prisoner
MUN
>
>
>
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