[lit-ideas] Re: Hartiana
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2015 20:58:11 +0100
I am not sure which possible world Hart and JL live in, but it must be
quite different from mine. In the possible world in which I live, people
often don't do what they are legally obliged to do, and moreover they often
get away with it too. The legal consequences of non-compliance can no more
supposed to automatically follow than can compliance be automatically
supposed to obtain. Thus, in this possible world, I cannot construct a
sense in which "He was legally obliged to do such and such" would have to
be automatically interpreted as factual. But perhaps in some other possible
world it would be so taken.
O.K.
On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 5:12 PM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> In chess, there is an objective standard of winning / losing, which is
> checkmate. When a player is in checkmate, anyone (himself included) may
> verify that it is so by looking at the position. Master games are rarely
> actually played out to checkmate as the losing player will usually resign
> before that (which is considered an act of courtesy as well as
> face-saving), but they resign because they recognize that sooner or later
> they will checkmated. In blitz chess, games are also
> won /lost when one of the players runs out of the alotted time, which is
> also an objective enough standard. (Anyone can verify it by looking at the
> clock.)
>
> It is difficult to see that there are any objective standards of winning
> or losing in philosophy.
>
> O.K.
>
>
> Wittgenstein who liked to dabble in obscurity made also the famous point
> of “family”, game is family of object-like meanings and not a set of
> conditions (say sufficient conditions to be game or necessary and
> sufficient, or something in between)
>
> Hence he would point out that not any game has a winning position (look at
> solitaires or at throwing rocks into the waves as games)
>
> How interesting this is is debatable, but I am not here to praise….
>
> On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 4:36 PM, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
>> >Provided the victim managed to escape without giving his wallet, they
>> would NOT utter:
>>
>> i. I was obliged to give my wallet.
>>
>> They would restrict (i) to the actual case where the victim DID as he
>> was
>> obliged to do.>
>>
>> This "NOT" is a matter of conventional usage and perhaps even
>> "implicature" of a defeasible sort: it is not a "NOT" of a logical sort,
>> unless we try to turn the convention into some kind of analytic stipulation
>> i.e. it is not a logical error (in any serious sense) to say "I was obliged
>> to give my wallet. But found this was one of those times when I did not do
>> what I was obliged to do - as in my pocket, in addition to my wallet, I had
>> a gun ." (Only a kind of empty-headed and tendentious philosopher would
>> seek to outlaw such a sentence by stipulation.)
>>
>> This kind of usage is too weak a basis to establish that "obliged" is,
>> always or necessarily, "factive".
>>
>> But even if we were to deem that "obliged" is "factive", this does not
>> explicate wherein lies the distinction between it and "obligated": for in
>> many cases of usage to say "I *was *obligated to give my wallet" also
>> carries a "factive" implication that one complied.
>>
>> And the whole argument also fails to explicate the distinction between
>> being "obligated" in a legal and in a non-legal [e.g. moral] sense. So we
>> still have nothing that shows that Hart provided an important advance on
>> the (banal) thesis that legal obligations differ from non-legal ones in
>> that legal obligations are perforce imposed by law whereas non-legal ones
>> are not perforce imposed by law.
>>
>> JLS' "argument" from usage is the kind of "analytic" approach that gives
>> philosophy of this sort a deserved bad name.
>>
>> Donal
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Friday, 27 March 2015, 10:20, "dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <
>> dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>
>> My last post today!
>>
>> P. H. Nowell-Smith was a genial member of J. L. Austin's Saturday
>> Mornings'
>> Play Group. In his "The Logical Basis of Ethics" he is using ethics so
>> genially that he was bound to interest Hart, who was into jurisprudence,
>> rather, but which Nowell-Smith read as "legal philosophy". Nowell-Smith
>> KNEW of
>> Hart's separability thesis ('morality and legality are separable, which
>> does not mean they are separated), and he invited Hart to consider the
>> 'logical basis'. The trend became a fashion, and soon R. M. Hare got an
>> interest
>> too. With the advent of Grice and his conversational implicature talk,
>> the
>> scenarios became more sophisticated, and the Play Group had J. O. Urmson
>> to
>> provide the extra alleged counter-example. That was fun!
>>
>> Once McEvoy dismissed epistemic logic from a Popperian point of view, and
>> I
>> would think Popper would dismiss deontic logic. It fascinated R. M. Hare,
>> if not especially H. L. A. Hart. Recall that Hare was Hart's junior, and
>> that may have something to do with it. "O" is sometimes rendered by
>> "ought",
>> but it's best to render it by "obligation" (if you're feeling Roman).
>> And
>> deontic logic allows us to FORMALISE what, say, Hart's conceptual
>> analysis
>> yields about oblige-obligate.
>>
>> The five normative statuses of the Traditional Scheme are:
>>
>> it is [legally] obligatory that (OB)
>> it is permissible that (PE)
>> it is impermissible that (IM)
>> it is omissible that (OM)
>> it is optional that (OP)
>>
>> The first three are familiar.
>>
>> But the fourth is widely ignored.
>>
>> The fifth has regularly been conflated with “it is a matter of
>> indifference
>> that p” (by being defined in terms of one of the first three), which is
>> not really part of the traditional scheme.
>>
>> Typically, one of the first two is taken as basic, and the others
>> defined
>> in terms of it, but any of the first four can play the same sort of
>> purported defining role.
>>
>> The most prevalent approach is to take the first as basic, and define
>> the
>> rest as follows:
>>
>> PEp ↔ ~OB~p
>> IMp ↔ OB~p
>> OMp ↔ ~OBp
>> OPp ↔ (~OBp &~OB~p).
>>
>> These assert that something is legally permissible iff (if and only if)
>> its negation is not legally obligatory.
>>
>> This is held as analytically true, but not thereby 'vacuous' and
>> 'circular'
>> (McEvoy's qualifications in a different context, vide Hart's rule of
>> recognition). something is impermissible iff its negation is obligatory,
>> omissible iff it is not obligatory, and optional iff neither it nor its
>> negation
>> is obligatory.
>>
>> Call this “The Traditional Definitional Scheme (TDS)”.
>>
>> If one began with OB alone and considered the formulas on the right of
>> the
>> equivalences above, one could easily be led to consider them as at least
>> candidate defining conditions for those on the left.
>>
>> Although not uncontestable, they are natural, and this scheme is still
>> widely employed by anyone following Hart.
>>
>> Now consider:
>>
>> If OBp then p (if it is obligatory that p, then p is true).
>> If p then PEp (if p is true, then it is permissible).
>>
>> These propositions are transparently false, for obligations can be
>> violated
>> (as Hart well knew -- hence his need to instruct his Oxonian
>> undergraduate
>> students on that with his "The concept of law") and impermissible things
>> do hold.
>>
>> Hart and Hartians are only interested in deontic logics that contain
>> classical propositional calculus (PC).
>>
>> So let's assume we add THAT as the FIRST ingredient in specifying any
>> deontic logic, so that, for example,
>>
>> OBp → ~~OBp
>>
>> can be derived in any system to be considered.
>>
>> it is obviously desirable to have
>>
>> OBp → ~PE~p
>>
>> as a THEOREM.
>>
>> After all, this well-formed formula merely expresses one half of the
>> equivalence between what would have been definiens and definiendum had we
>> chosen
>> the alternate scheme of definition in which “PE” was taken as basic
>> instead of “OB”.
>>
>> However,
>>
>> OBp → ~PE~p
>>
>> is not thus far derivable.
>>
>> For
>>
>> OBp → ~PE~p
>>
>> is definitionally equivalent to
>>
>> OBp → ~~OB~~p
>>
>> which reduces by PC to
>>
>> OBp → OB~~p
>>
>> but the latter formula is not tautological. So we cannot complete the
>> proof.
>>
>> So tautology or analyticity becomes the STANDARD for the construction of
>> the system, rather than a term of abuse!
>>
>> What we need what is perhaps the most fundamental and least
>> controversial
>> rule of inference in deontic logic, and the one characteristic of
>> “classical
>> modal logics”:
>>
>> OB-RE:
>>
>> If p ↔ q is a theorem, so is OBp ↔ OBq.
>>
>> It is now easy to prove the equivalences corresponding to the
>> alternative
>> definitional schemes.
>>
>> For example, since
>>
>> ⊢ p ↔ ~~p
>>
>> by OB-RE, we get
>>
>> ⊢ OBp ↔ OB~~p
>>
>> i.e.,
>>
>> ⊢ OBp ↔ ~~OB~~p
>>
>> which generates
>>
>> ⊢ OBp ↔ ~PE~p
>>
>> A deontic system, such as Hart's must contain a thesis asserting that a
>> logical contradiction (conventionally denoted by “⊥”) is always omissible:
>>
>> OD: ~OB⊥
>>
>> So, for example, OD implies that it is a logical truth that it is not
>> obligatory that my taxes are paid and not paid.
>>
>> A principle of a legal system like Hart's is that obligations cannot
>> conflict:
>>
>> NC:
>>
>> ~(OBp & OB~p).
>>
>> One paradox of deontic logic that has cross-references with Hart, Hare,
>> and
>> Grice is Ross's Paradox (Ross 1941) -- Ross being a member of what Hart
>> calls Scandinavian realism (O. K. may reflect on this -ism).
>>
>> Consider:
>>
>> (1) It is obligatory that the letter is mailed.
>> (2) It is obligatory that the letter is mailed or the letter is burned.
>>
>> In "Practical Inferences", R. M. Hare (recall he was White's professor
>> of
>> Moral Philosophy, while Hart chaired the Oxford chair of Jurisprudence)
>> quotes H. P. Grice to the effect that the use of 'or' in (2) triggers the
>> wrong
>> conversational implicature -- and so Ross's paradox dissolves once this
>> type of cancellable implication is brought to play a role.
>>
>> One good thing that J. L. Austin's Saturday Morning Play Group that Hart
>> (being albeit Austin's senior) would occasionally attend, was J. O.
>> Urmson.
>> He was there to provide the right counter-example.
>>
>> When Grice provided his analysis of 'mean', Urmson brought in the
>> example
>> of a torture (Grice turned that into bribery): the recognition of the
>> intention on the utterer, by the addressee, cannot be 'obliged', it has
>> to be
>> based on a reason, not merely CAUSED or forced otherwise.
>>
>> It is not surprising that Urmson also provided counterexamples to Hart's
>> and Hare's legal and moral systems.
>>
>> One of Urmson's puzzles concerns Indifference versus Optionality:
>>
>> Consider:
>>
>> 1) It is optional that you attend the meeting, but not a matter of
>> indifference that you do so.
>>
>> This seems to describe something quite familiar: optional matters that
>> are
>> nonetheless not matters of indifference.
>>
>> But when deontic logicians and ethicists gave an operator label for the
>> condition
>>
>> ~OBp & ~OB~p
>>
>> it was almost invariably “It is indifferent that p”, “INp”. But then it
>> would seem to follow from the theorem
>>
>> OBp ∨ (~OBp & ~OB~p) ∨ IMp
>>
>> that
>>
>> (~OBp & ~IMp) → INp
>>
>> that is, everything that is neither obligatory nor prohibited is a
>> matter
>> of indifference. But many actions, including some heroic actions, are
>> neither obligatory nor prohibited, yet they are hardly matters of
>> indifference.
>> We might put this by saying that SDL can represent optionality, but not
>> indifference, despite the fact that the latter concept has been a
>> purported
>> target for representation since nearly its beginning.
>>
>> Not satisfied with offering that to Hare and Hart, Urmson felt there was
>> another problem: supererogation.
>>
>> Some things are beyond the call of duty or supererogatory (e.g.,
>> volunteering for a costly or risky good endeavor where others are
>> equally qualified
>> and no one person is obligated). Some deontic systems have no capacity
>> to
>> represent this concept, which calls for a substantial increase in
>> expressive
>> and logical resources. Hare and Hart were forever grateful to Urmson, as
>> was Grice.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Speranza
>>
>> Alchourron, C. Philosophical Foundations of Deontic Logic and the Logic
>> of
>> Defeasible Conditionals.” In Meyer & Wieringa.
>> ––– Detachment and Defeasibility in Deontic Logic. Studia Logica, 57.
>> Alchourron, C. and Eugenio Bulygin. Normative Systems. Vienna, New York:
>> Springer-Verlag.
>> Alchourron, C. E. and Eugenio Bulygin, In Hilpinen.
>> Alchourron, C. E. and David Makinson, In Hilpinen.
>> Baker, G. P. Defeasibility and meaning. In Hart's festschrift.
>> Baker, G. P. Alternative mind-styles, in P. G. R. I. C. E., ed.
>> Grandy/Warner.
>> Grice, H. P. Aspects of reason. Clarendon Press.
>> Grice, H. P. Desirability, probability, and mood operators.
>> Unpublication.
>> The Grice Papers. Bancroft Library.
>> Hare, R. M. Practical Inferences. London: Macmillan.
>> Hare, R. M. Some subatomic particles of logic, Mind, repr. On the
>> tropic,
>> the clistic, the neustic, and the phrastic.
>> Hart, H. L. A. The concept of law. Clarendon..
>> Hintikka, Jaakko. In Grandy/Warner, P. G. R. I. C. E. -- Philosophical
>> grounds of rationality: intentions, categories, ends. Clarendon.
>> Kamp, H. Free Choice Permission.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian
>> Society,
>> 74.
>> Nowell Smith, P. H. and E. J. Lemmon. Escapism: The Logical Basis of
>> Ethics.” Mind, 69.
>> Ross, A. Imperatives and Logic. Theoria, 7.
>> Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter. Ought Conversationally Implies Can.
>> Philosophical Review.
>> Urmson, J.O. Saints and Heroes. In Melden, Essays in Moral Philosophy.
>> Seattle: University of Washington Press.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 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:
