[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: Sat, 9 Oct 2010 17:01:30 -0230
The naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy, of course. Even Republicans in Arizona
will concede that no moral judgement ("ought" claim) follows validly from
premises all of which are descriptive/empirical ("is" claims).
But almost every academic term, a few students in my classes will insist that
the fact that a person believes M (moral judgement) is in itself sufficient for
M to be true or right. For them, this is why morality is relative: two people
can believe respectively M and non-M and they're both right (or wrong, like,
whatever.)
I feel like there is much that is so wrong with that view. And yet, it moves in
an interesting direction from the perspective of moral epistemology. And it
actually suggests a difference - a *foundational* difference, dare we say it -
between empirical claims and moral claims despite itself.
The difference:
Empirical claims are true or false regardless of anyone's beliefs. It's the
world that "decides" truth. But if all realist construals of moral judgement
are fallacious, the only cogent alternative is the Kantian constructivism
championed by the likes of Rawls, Korsgaard, and Habermas which avers that
moral rightness claims are justifiable only if the persons who are affected by
that judgement can rationally accept the rightness of the claims. In other
words, rightness is internally related to belief. Nothing in the world decides
the rightness or wrongness of a mortal claim - only rational belief can do
that. 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.
Walter O
MUN
P.S. On the matter of "foundations" when we're not playing intellectual parlour
games:
In many Faculties and Schools of Education, one finds the area of study
designated as "Foundations of Educations." Typically, this includes the
disciplines of sociology, anthropology, history and philosophy - sometimes
psychology, and comparative education. These disciplines are "foundational" to
education in that they help us to identify the competences necessary for mature
professional judgement by reconstructing the logical and conceptual conditions
necessary for the possibility of rational judgement in these areas. The
foundations of, for example, moral judgement would include a configuration of
values, norms, skills and dispositions requisite for the making of impartial
claims to moral rightness. Nothing spooky here, I don't think.
Quoting Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
> For Popper there are no more "foundations of morality" than there are
> "foundations of science" or "foundations of metaphysics". Of course, Popper's
> epistemic critique of 'foundationalism' or 'justificationism' can be evaded
> by not taking the notion of foundation or justification too seriously i.e.
> interpreting these in a 'conjectural' way. Nevertheless, just as the
> existence and success of science can only at best be partially explained, so
> too the existence and validity of moral claims defies anything like complete
> explanation.
>
> Some further Popperian comments on extracts from the Telegraph obit:-
>
> >One of the chief critics of â??naturalistic ethicsâ?? was RM Hare, who
> attempted to show in The Language of Morals (1952) that even if moral
> arguments could not be settled in the way arguments about fact could be,
> >they need not on that account be irrational.
>
> Popper was an unrelenting opponent of the 'naturalistic fallacy', which in
> his _OSE_ is seen to be central to Platonic, Hegelian and Marxist ethics
> (corresponding, roughly, to 'right' = 'past might' (Plato), 'present might'
> (Hegel), 'future might' (Marx)). In an addendum he presents a very simple
> argument to expose the naturalistic fallacy:- this might be summed up as
> conceding that while any moral situation or problem may be expressed in
> purely factual terms, and it might seem therefore that we can reduce ethics
> to some kind of factual analysis, this is a fallacy because we can open the
> gap between facts and standards at any point simply by asking of the
> so-called 'factual terms' whether they reflect something ethically 'good' or
> 'bad', and no appeal to mere 'facts' can resolve this question.
>
> >Hare argued, however, that, in the final analysis, since there is no logical
> connection between statements of fact and statements of value, everyone has
> to choose his own moral principles and make his own decisions >on the facts
> relevant to his evaluation.
>
> I suspect Popper would agree with this but would not draw any relativistic
> conclusion from it. Compare the position of a 'test statement', like "Here is
> a white swan", in science: these are not logically proven by experience and
> so there is no "logical connection" in this sense between the experiences we
> have and the statement - in science we have to decide, after critical
> discussion which takes our experiences or observations into account, whether
> to accept the 'test statement' or not. Yet this does not mean such
> critically-controlled decision-making is merely an arbitrary or conventional
> or subjective act - it may be as rational as human reason permits. Similar
> remarks could, for Popper, be made a propos moral decision-making - though
> admittedly the falsifiable character of ethics is
> quite distinct because the role of observation and 'test statements' as
> falsifiers is not the same as in science.
>
> >In a key article, Moral Arguments (1958), Philippa Foot challenged this
> relativistic stance, suggesting that anyone who uses moral terms at all (bad,
> good and the like), whether to assert or deny a moral proposition, must abide
> by certain agreed rules for their use . The only recourse of someone who
> fails to accept the rules, she wrote, would be â??to abjure >altogether the
> use of moral termsâ??.
>
> Ahhh. The sweet smell of Wittgenstein in the morning. The question here is,
> as said above, whether Hare's point - or, better, rejection of the
> 'naturalistic fallacy' - leads to a "relativistic stance". For Popper, as
> indicated, it ain't necessarily so.
>
> >In her view the distinction between statements of fact and value is based on
> two false assumptions: first, that any individual may, properly, base his
> beliefs about matters of value on premises which no one else would recognise
> as valid; secondly, he may refuse to accept anotherâ??s evaluation >because
> their standards are not ones he accepts.
>
> Wittgensteinian approach, seems to me.
>
> >The first assumption is refuted, she argued, by an appeal to the basic idea
> that words, while they may not have an intrinsic meaning, do have a proper
> use: â??It is surely clear that moral virtues must be connected with human
> good or harm, and that it is quite impossible to call anything you >like good
> or harm.â??
>
> But is that "proper use" a criterion of 'good' or 'bad'? The fact this
> question even makes logical sense [it does, despite possible Wittgensteinian
> denials, otherwise you would not have understood it] opens up the gap between
> facts and standards that lies at the heart of why the 'naturalistic fallacy'
> is indeed a fallacy. Also, while I may agree _as a matter of ethics_ that
> moral virtues _are_ connected with "human good or harm", this is a reflection
> of an ethical position not of a _logical_ "must". The overextension of the
> term 'logical', and relating this term to 'sense' in some extended sense, are
> weaknesses in the Wittgensteinian approach, which is potentially quite
> misleading as to what is at stake here.
>
> >Against the second assumption, she put forward the tentative idea that a
> moral question can be argued down to a point which reveals an â??ultimate
> endâ?? beyond which it is ridiculous to inquire, as it does not make sense
> >to ask: â??Why do you hate pain?â?? or â??Why do you want to feel happy?â??
>
>
> More Wittgensteinian argumentation, and, sorry, but it _does make sense_ "to
> ask: â??Why do you hate pain?â?? or â??Why do you want to feel happy?â??" :
> this "does not make sense" argument is no stronger a case for some kind of
> moral bedrock where our "spade is turned" than the assertion that in science
> [or maths] there comes a point where questions have to stop because that is
> the point "beyond which it is ridiculous to inquire, as it does not make
> sense to ask." There is a kind of foundationalism at work here that betrays a
> mistaken theory of knowledge [among other things].
>
> >In her book Natural Goodness (2001) Philippa Foot rebutted the philosophical
> distinction between descriptive meaning (which deals with facts) and
> evaluative meaning (dealing with moral qualities). In the case of living
> things â?? plants, animals and humans â?? she argued that >evaluations simply
> state a special class of fact.
>
> This last claim is perhaps unproblematic but hardly that special:- unless we
> restrict the term 'fact' to the empirical field [where the truth of factual
> claims may be tested by observation], we may freely speak of 'ethical facts'
> e.g. "It is a fact that Dr. Shipman ought not to have killed his patients".
> But this would not show this "special class of fact" simply to be an outcrop
> on the reef of empirical facts, nor show that assertions of "ethical fact"
> were anything less than 'conjectural' in their epistemic status (particularly
> as assertions of 'empirical fact' also have this 'conjectural' character and
> they may at least be tested by observation).
>
> >Natural goodness can apply as well to physical parts of living beings as to
> their actions: to say that a tree has good roots, in her analysis, is
> logically the same as to say that a person performs a good deed. The
> underlying logic has to do with the assumption that good roots or good
> actions are those that are necessary in the lives of individuals of that
> species. Moral goodness should therefore be understood as the natural
> >flourishing of humans as living beings.
>
> Let the bollix commence. The first claim in the above paragraph is off the
> rails:- "to say that a tree has good roots, in her analysis, is logically the
> same as to say that a person performs a good deed." No. To say that ethically
> a tree ought to have "good roots" is (perhaps) logically equivalent to saying
> 'It is morally good that the tree has good roots' ['good' being used in two
> logically different senses here, the first ethical, the second 'factual'];
> and to say 'It is morally good that the tree has good roots' is to make an
> ethical claim that may be said therefore to share a 'logical sameness' with
> other ethical claims. But to say that a tree has 'good' roots in the
> non-ethical factual sense that, say, it is primed to survive a 'bad' winter
> better than a tree with 'bad' roots, is to make no ethical claim at all - and
> whatever might be said about superficial similarities in logical form between
> such a claim and the claim that someone has done
> something _ethically_ 'good', because the 'naturalistic fallacy' is indeed a
> kind of logical fallacy these two kinds of claim are not at all "logically
> the same".
>
> Dnl
> Ldn
>
>
>
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