[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 01:13:13 +0100 (BST)
--- 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
------------------------------------------------------------------
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:
