[lit-ideas] Re: Grice and Foot on the foundations of morality
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2010 11:00:11 +0100 (BST)
Thank you for this John and good to see there are others who feel free to post
from memory.
Comments on what they recall:-
>This paper is in opposition to views like RM Hare’s, which say that moral
>judgments are such because of their formal features, e.g. they endorse or
>command; they have no fixed content.>
If I say "You ought not to murder him just because you hate him" and then say
"You ought not to wear that pink with that mauve" the statements may share
"formal features" but the second is hardly a moral judgment but an aesthetic
one. So "formal features" may not distinguish moral from non-moral judgments.
At the same time this would not mean we can identify the difference by way of
some "fixed content." [Some people (fashionistas?) would take the 'pink-mauve'
issue to be moral and perhaps even more morally imperative than the issue of
'murder'].
>“Morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives” (a paper she later partly
>recanted) argued that there are two senses in which moral judgments might be
>said to be “categorical.” First, we apply them to people without regard for
>their motivations or desires. That is, we don’t take someone’s lack of desire
>to tell the truth to render “you ought not to lie” inapplicable or incorrect.
>Second, (true) moral claims guarantee reason for complying. That is, if it is
>true of you that you ought to F, then you have reason to F. Foot argues that
>moral claims are categorical in the first sense but not the second. That is,
>we apply them without regard for motivation or desire, but they are not
>thereby reason-giving independent of motivation or desire. Her famous example
>involves club rules or rules of etiquette: a failure to reply in the third
>person to an invitation addressed in the third person is rude whether or not
>you care about avoiding
rudeness. But this by itself does not show that you have reason to avoid
rudeness. So too with morality.>
The first point may be correct but the second point as stated seems to rest on
a lack of discrimination between the 'objective' and 'subjective' or 'third-'
and 'first-person' perspective on what is "reasoning-giving":- I [first-person,
subjective] _may not_ recognise any reason to do what I [third-person,
objective] ought to do if I have no corresponding "motivation or desire", but
that would not mean there is no reason for me to do what I ought in an
objective sense.
>She wrote a lot of great stuff– these are just personal favorites. And she
>gave us the trolley problem!>
Since Robert may be wanting every schoolchild to get the history of ideas right
here, I thought the trolley problem was first stated by Judy Garland in 'Meet
Me In St. Louis'. In any case, the habit of moral philosophers of using
hypothetical examples when there are many more acute real-world ones, such as
the Catholic priest tasked to choose 500 victims for a Nazi reprisal after an
attack by the Italian underground, is to me somewhat objectionable as it tends
to remove ethics from its roots - which is not abstract speculation but
specific moral problems, in all their potential complexity.
Donal
--- On Thu, 7/10/10, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Thought you might be interested in this response to Philippa Foot's death.
John
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
