[lit-ideas] Re: The Neutrality of Meta-Ethics (Is: Anti-Humanism of Analytic Philosophy
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2007 02:07:11 EST
Thanks to R. Paul for his judicious remarks:
"I don't know what the footnote you supply is a footnote to where it
appeared. It appears unnecessarily pugnacious. Its author has some straw men
say".
Well, yes, and perhaps Judith Baker (the posthumous editor) could have left
it out. Baker writes:
"The following remarks were included as an aside in the manuscript of the
lecture". The exact point where the footnote occurs is to the text of the Paul
Carus lecture that goes:
"We would rather (she [P. Foot] suggests,
be able to think of people as volunteers
in moral service, than be forced to think of
them as the more Kantian position would
entail."
You are right about the straw man, Strawson, for he indeed did write a
treatise on Kant, but that was notably about his philosophy of perception,
rather
than morals.
But I see your point that the type of analytic philosophical 'ethical'
criticism is of the traditional pattern one finds in Plato: playing with
sufficiency and necessity of definitions. Counterarguments to utilitarianism,
or for
that matter, definitional considerations like the type of G.E.Moore (Cambridge
man
admitted) in Principia Ethica against Epicureanism, non-
naturalism, or even 'naturalistic fallacy'.
Perhaps P. H. Nowell-Smith comes closer to the standard Oxonian model when
he speaks in Ethics of having nothing to do with setting a system to guide
behavior.
R. Paul mentions:
"in response to a talk Elizabeth Anscombe gave on the BBC. Her claim was
that Oxford moral philosophy did not corrupt the youth, for it allowed them to
do whatever they wanted, and that was not the way to corrupt anybody."
Interesting. That must be of the 3rd Programme BBC Lectures, later edited by
D. F. Pears for London: Macmillan. Controversial though. For Solon, we hope,
*NOT* to be able to lead the youth to the virtuous life* but either **offer
no guidance at all** like Anscombe thinks she is being witty in doing, or is
not, for all practical purposes, too different from 'corrupting' in the sense
that she would have been made to drink the hemlock, under Solon's laws.
The feeling was that it was "so cool" to do meta-ethical analytic
philosophy, since, "Oh, no, mama -- we are not discussing what You call
ethics. The
professor could care less. We deal with formulae, like conditional commands !p
--> p v q!, and whether 'may' is epistemically precondition in 'should' --
_so_ fun."
On the other hand, while Plato was witty enough to want _that_ kind of
analytic meta-ethic procedure,
(i) The case is not so simple with Aristotle. To say that the virtuous man
must chose the mediocre mean, hardly counts as meta-ethical to me.
(ii) Less so meta-ethical to me look those 'Classical Antiquity' moral
theories alla Epicurean (Why The Garden?, and is there a way to avoid
reference to
the man by saying, The Gardeners?), Stoics, Sceptics, and Cynics, not to
mention Peripatetics and Academians and Platonist (I distinguish between the
two).
We had to wait for Ayer to realise that moral 'statements' are hardly
statements, and then for people like R. M. Hare with his Language of Morals
(published by Oxford, unlike the rather cheap _Ethics_ by Nowell-Smith, which
although undating it, was published by Penguin!) to take into serious account,
for
starters the very idea of the logical form of a moral claim (the neustic, the
phrastic, the clistic, the tropic -- and the rest of it).
Austin was different, in that, while he was indeed Prof. of Moral Philosophy
until Hare took over, he was never _prepared_ to teach moral philosophy and
liked to play with things we do with words instead. The fly in the fly bottle.
Anscombe was a disciple of Wittgenstein. Bartlett III says that the
anti-moral standpoint of Wittgenstein may be explained by his homosexuality.
Bartlett
(or is it Bartley?) says that as a homosexual, Wittgenstein would realise
that his patterns of behaviour would hardly be universalizable in the Hare or
Kantian view of the matter, and thus relativism would be the only way out to
self-justify his 'coordination of ends'. I disagree with the construal, but
see the point in it.
With Oxford types, the question of homosexuality is less obvious, and it's
more like the serious *live and let live* which is typical of a middle-class
background of educated people that we are talking about.
Cheers,
JL
Buenos Aires, Argentina
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