[lit-ideas] Re: Grice and Foot on the foundations of morality
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2010 12:59:40 +0900
Thought you might be interested in this response to Philippa Foot's
death<http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/philippa-foot-has-died/>
.
John
On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 9:13 AM, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>
> --- On Wed, 6/10/10, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> >As Foot nowhere said what was reported above the criticism of it is a
> fortiori not a criticism of a philosophical view held by her. Whether anyone
> else believes it, I don't know.>
>
> JLS (not the band) comments "Again, one would need to trace one's argument
> back to Foot's actual words, not her obituarist." It would seem the
> obituarist believed it was her view. It was the reported view I was
> criticising (obviously). If she were alive it might be proper to clarify
> this and, in the light of Robert Paul's remark, retract any possible
> suggestion it was her actual view, if it was not.
>
> >The 'Naturalistic Fallacy,' in ethics was presented in G. E. Moore's
> Principia Ethica, in 1903. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives an
> account of it, of which this is part.>
>
> It is not necessary to identify the 'naturalistic fallacy' with Moore's
> views any more than it is necessary to identify the right account of
> 'dialectical materialism' with Marx, or of utilitarianism with Bentham, or
> of 'empiricism' with Locke, or of 'falsificationism' with Popper, or of 'the
> private language argument' with Wittgenstein.
>
> In broad terms the 'naturalistic fallacy' is about whether an 'ought' can
> be derived from an 'is' or whether a standard of evaluation can be deduced
> from a set of facts. As such, it predates Moore in the form of 'Hume's Fork'
> and in Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason' etc. It was a central
> contention of P's _TOS&IE_ that forms of the fallacy lie at the heart of
> many political theories, including those of Plato, Hegel and Marx. Any view
> that seeks not merely to partially explain but to fully reductively explain
> 'morality' in factual terms, is arguably perpetrating the fallacy.
>
> The argument Popper uses in the addendum of the _TOS_, under the heading
> 'The Dualism of Facts and Standards' [afair], was presented in summary in my
> previous post and differs from Moore's argument, not least because it
> crucially does not rely on any definitional argument. As suggested by the
> entry Robert quotes, "The merits of [Moore's definitional] argument are
> questionable..." That is, the view that the dualism of facts and standards
> can be established, by showing its negation cannot be true by definition, is
> weak - as this would not show the dualism was true by definition either:- in
> truth the 'dualism' here is unavoidably a metaphysical/untestable claim.
>
> It is therefore possible to reject Popper's argument - for example, on the
> basis that, while it might seem that the open-ended ability to ask of any
> given 'fact' "Is it good?" shows we can always open up a critical gap
> between facts and standards, it is delusion to think our answer to the
> question "Is it good?" is other than factually determined and so the
> apparent 'gap' is a delusion also.
>
> Taking this issue further, for Popper, would involve examining the notions
> of 'determinism' [which is the focus of his "The Open Universe: An Argument
> For Indeterminism"] and 'reductive explanation'. An interesting logical
> point Popper makes about 'reductive explanation' is that a confusion
> underpins much support for 'reductive explanation':- a confusion between a
> scientific reduction which increases falsifiability/testability by, say,
> accounting for 'facts' previously requiring more than one theory by way of
> only one theory of wider scope and thus testability, and a 'metaphysical
> reduction' which lessens falsifiability by denying the existence of a class
> of entities [such as 'mental events' that are not merely 'physical events';
> or 'moral claims' that are not merely explicable in 'factual terms'] where
> any class of such entities are potential falsifiers of the view that denies
> their existence.
>
> Another important point he makes is that while there have been some
> partially successful reductions there have not been any completely
> successful ones: Russell failed in his attempt to completely reduce maths to
> logic, and while there have been some successful partial reductions in
> science it remains the case that chemistry is not completely reducible to
> physics nor biology to chemistry. This incompleteness of 'reductive
> explanation' is linked to the fact that distinct and 'higher-level' problems
> emerge as we progress from logic to maths and as we progress from
> considering the physics of the world to its chemistry, then biology, then
> psychology, then sociology etc.
>
> Donal
>
>
>
>
>
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--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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