In a variant of the hoary old ‘ungrounded morality’ question, Barry Arrington has a post up at Uncommon Descent which ponders how a ‘materialist’ could in all conscience take a position as clinical ethicist, if he does not believe that there is an ultimate ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer. I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of clinical ethics. In contrast to daily usage, ethics here is not a synonym for morality.
I can understand how a theist who believes in the objective reality of ethical norms could apply for such a position in good faith. By definition he believes certain actions are really wrong and other actions are really right, and therefore he often has something meaningful to say.
My question is how could a materialist apply for such a position in good faith? After all, for the materialist there is really no satisfactory answer to Arthur Leff’s “grand sez who” question that we have discussed on these pages before. See here for Philip Johnson’s informative take on the issue.
After all, when pushed to the wall to ground his ethical opinions in anything other than his personal opinion, the materialist ethicist has nothing to say. Why should I pay someone $68,584 to say there is no real ultimate ethical difference between one moral response and another because they must both lead ultimately to the same place – nothingness.
I am not being facetious here. I really do want to know why someone would pay someone to give them the “right answer” when that person asserts that the word “right” is ultimately meaningless.
(The last question is an odd one. You would pay someone to give you the “right answer” so long as they believe that there is such a thing?)
Of course you don’t have to go far into medical ethics before you get to genuine ethical thickets. The interests of a mother versus those of the foetus she carries; the unfortunate fact that there aren’t the resources to give every treatment to everyone; the thorny issues of voluntary euthanasia or ‘do not resuscitate’ decisions; issues raised by fertility treatments; cases such as the recent removal from hospital of Aysha King; the role of a patient’s own beliefs. There aren’t many right answers, when you get beyond the obvious things that you don’t need to pay someone to set guidelines for.
It is a bizarre argument to regard moral relativism as a bar to this job. A moral absolutist may believe that blood transfusion is wrong, that faith in the lord is the way to get better, that embryos should never be formed outside a uterus, or some other such faith-based notion. And they have to persuade others of different, or no, faith that this decision is indeed what objective morality dictates, and whatever their own views on morality they must accept that. So I don’t agree that the ‘grounding’ of an atheist’s personal moral principles has any bearing on their candidacy.
There are so many things that Barry Arrington doesn’t understand and wants explained to him that it would take a full-time job to cater to his ignorance. Sorry, I already have a full-time job.
I wonder about hiring an “ethicist” who is an anti-vaxxer, or who thinks that the germ theory is obviously wrong. How about an IDiot?
To be fair, I think that the IDiot would be the least objectionable of the three, but the lack of intellectual honesty typical of that position (at least among the more educated–as you’d want your ethicist to be) surely has to be a mark against hiring such an ethicist. Not fatal or any such thing, just a reason to wonder how well compartmentalized that lack of clear and/or honest thought really is.
Glen Davidson
Likewise. Consider this pro bono.
As usual, Arrington conflates the absolute/relative distinction with the objective/subjective distinction. (To see why this is an error, it suffices to notice that scientific theories do not fail to bear on objective reality by virtue of not being absolute.)
He then conflates the absolutism/relativism distinction with the theism/atheism distinction and then conflates atheism with “materialism”, which means whatever the theistic realist needs it to mean.
A further wrinkle is the conflation of subjectivism-cum-relativism with emotivism.
If one accepts all of these massive conflations, it follows that atheists must be a emotivists about morality. But of course Arrington gives us no reasons to accept any of these conflations, let alone all of them.
The conflation can also be put in terms of a conflation between moral cognitivism and moral realism, and with their contraries moral non-cognitivism and moral anti-realism. It is simply not clear if he thinks that atheism entails moral anti-realism (e.g. Mackie) or moral non-cognitivism (e.g. Stevenson).
Moreover, he gives no argument as to why a difference in meta-ethical views would have any bearing on one’s ability to advise on normative ethics and on applied ethics.
I taught medical ethics once (last spring), and meta-ethics had little to no relevance to our discussions about informed consent, neonatal cochlear implants, human enhancement, definitions of death, and so on.
Thanks, KN, for the excellent list of conflations in Arrington’s remarks. It bears repeating that it’s possible to believe values are either non-relative or objective or both, without being a theist.
This surprises me, though:
Is it really possible to do that? It seems like every normative ethical question requires determinations of, e.g. where one stands on the consequentialist/deontology divide. I recently stumbled on an interesting article by E.M. Adams, “CLASSICAL MORAL PHILOSOPHY AND METAETHICS” in which he discusses the relationship between normative ethics and meta-ethics in detail.
Possible? Perhaps not in a fully satisfying way — but certainly rough-and-ready enough for my pre-med and pre-nursing students who needed to dip their toes in the water of medical ethics.
If you do philosophy long enough and care enough about it, one sees that the distinctions between the different areas of inquiry are more or less arbitrary. Whenever I teach the abortion controversy, invariably a student objects, “but fetuses are potential persons!” Which is certainly true — in some sense. But in what sense exactly? That depends on what one means by “potential,” and thereupon hangs a great deal of modal metaphysics! As I like to put it to my students, “is a caterpillar a potential butterfly or potential bird-food?” That stops them in their tracks. While it seems right (to me) to say that the caterpillar is a potential butterfly and possible bird-food, making the distinction between potentiality and possibility isn’t obvious and working it out would require a fairly comprehensive metaphysics of life.
A few years ago, I complained to a friend that the abortion debate leads right to the metaphysics of life and needs to be solved at that level. She responded, “yes, that’s what makes you a philosopher. Your students aren’t. Remember that.”
I would also add that one can be an atheist while still accepting any or all of the following: absolutism about ethics; objectivism about ethics; moral cognitivism; moral realism.
Example: Spinoza. Yes, he was ‘technically’ a pantheist rather than an atheist, but he was an atheist in all the ways that matter, either then or now. After all, Spinoza held that there are facts about human nature that explain why some things are good for us and other things are bad for us — the things that are good enhance our power, and the things that are bad diminish our power. And therein lies the real, substantive basis of ethics. (Needless to say, Spinoza also points out that most people have false beliefs about what is good and bad for them, because they are ignorant of the true causes of their own behavior.)
Being a utilitarian is not simple or easy. I call myself a utilitarian, but I find it difficult to say what is right or wrong in many situations, because I cannot predict the future.
That seems to be the sticking point for any useful description of free will. How do you make choices when you can’t foresee the consequences?
Clarifying our view of the future would seem to be the central theme of science.
Science is a bit like a telescope in that it allows us to see the ships a few hours earlier than before.
Arrington continues his utterly inane criticism of “materialist ethics” with a new post criticizing Peter Singer.
Two conflations are at work here, both of which are fairly obvious. The first is a conflation between “materialism” (the meaning of which varies from context to context, except that it always Something Really Bad) and utilitarianism. Obviously one can be reject utilitarianism without thinking that ethics is grounded in natural law or divine commandments — both deontology and virtue ethics do precisely that. (Though deontology is, in my estimation, vulnerable to well-known Nietzschean criticisms.) Likewise one can presumably be a utilitarian and still be a theist (though no examples come to mind). Simply taking preference utilitarianism as what a “materialist” must be committed to makes no philosophical sense.
The second and even more damaging conflation rests on two different senses of “ethicist” — someone who offers ethical guidance in a clinical setting (e.g. in a hospital) and someone who specializes in normative ethics or meta-ethics in an academic setting. Since Peter Singer is the latter, the defensibility of preference utilitarianism has no direct bearing on what clinical ethicists can and should do.
(I’ll leave aside Arrington’s rant against Derrida, whom he clearly has not read with any understanding.)
This is not to say, mind you, that I endorse preference utilitarianism — I think that utilitarianism is deeply mistaken as a ethical theory, because it (i) aggregates pleasures or preferences, thereby neglecting the reality of relations amongst individuals and (ii) it turns the ethical decision-maker into a mere spectator of his or her actions, thereby neglecting the reality of agency and moral action. Though it is not wrong to say that foreseeable consequences are relevant to ethical deliberation — and Kant was mistaken to say otherwise — the utilitarian conception of that relevance does not work.
It’s also worth pointing out that Arrington misunderstands Singer’s preference utilitarianism. Singer’s key idea is that all beings with preferences deserve equal consideration. So, he argues that the preference of animals to avoid suffering deserves to considered equally with our preference to have a lot of meat in our diet, especially in the form of fast food.
There’s no question that Singer would think that the preference of the victims of the Holocaust to not be rounded up, exploited, and slaughtered outweighs the preference of the Nazis to have a phenotyically uniform society. (And yes, he does give an argument for this.)
What the emphasis on “quality of life” over “sanctity of life” does, however, is motivate Singer to say the following: once we notice that there’s nothing intrinsically special about belonging to Homo sapiens, and that’s the capacity to have preferences which is morally relevant, the same line of thought that inclines us to side with the victims and survivors of the Holocaust against the Nazis should also incline us to side with the chickens, cows, and pigs against our interest in a high-meat diet.
In other words, Singer would say, there’s a deep inconsistency in thinking that the Holocaust was morally wrong but that factory farming is morally acceptable. Arrington fails to notice that Singer thinks that both are morally unacceptable — and that he has very good arguments for this!
Would you mind fleshing out those two criticisms a little? I don’t think I understand either of them (and I might be able to use your critique in my class!)
Thanks.
These are just the criticisms I got from my undergrad philosophy professor, who was a pretty orthodox Rawlsian. He might have been stealing them from Bernard Williams, but I’m weak on Williams. I read some Williams as an undergrad and a bit as a grad student, but none since.
Basically, the utilitarian approach abstracts away from all the thickness of ethical life — it considers each individual as bearing some quantity of pleasures/pains, then sums over the totality of individuals. The actual relations between individuals – their social roles, the different kind of obligations (reciprocal and non-reciprocal) resulting from those roles, and so forth — all that gets bracketed by the idealizations introduced by the utilitarian calculus (whether as crude as Bentham’s or as sophisticated as Singer’s).
And it also requires the decision-maker to disengage him or herself from his or her projects, in order to put those projects in the calculus. So what gives existential significance to my projects — what anchors me in the world as the singular agent that I am — doesn’t enter into my ethical deliberations. As a good utilitarian, my life is of no special significance to me. It’s impartiality on steroids!
There’s a lot of criticism from that angle in Ross. I take it the rule utilitarian gang have tried to respond. I think the question of whether their approach is coherent is interesting and difficult.
One basic problem with utilitarianism seems to me to be the “…..taking each person as one” biz we find in Bentham and Mill. That can’t be supported on purely quantitative grounds, I don’t think–whether what we’re counting is pleasure or anything else.
Nineteenth-century thinkers? Still relevant?
Hmm!
Who’s playing God here? E. coli prefer being where there is optimum nutrition. Should we give them consideration rather than taking Loperamide?
I see Barry Arrington is being certain again!
Singer obviously thinks so.Utilitarianism remains one of the most popular meta-ethical views in the Anglophone world.
walto,
I thought that had all changed after Nozick, Reagan and Thatcher.
I would call that a straw man.
One could define utilitarianism that way, or one could simply say that ethics and morality are ultimately derived from instances of pleasure and pain (and more sophisticated analogs).
I would deny there is any possible calculus that would enable you to weigh quantities of pleasure and pain and derive moral or ethical actions.
I would rather say that pleasure and pain operate as selectors in the economy of actions. They shape human society and human activities without specifying them.
Kantian Naturalist,
I’m not particularly interested in what philosophers have said, except as a starting point.As I have said numerous times, I’m a thoroughgoing evilitionist who sees everything in the light of change over time, including morality and ethics.
I call myself a utilitarian because I cannot conceive of an ethics or morality that is not based on consequences. I could conceive of one, but can’t see why anyone would be interested in it.
The problem that I see is that in any but the most trivial cases, consequences are not foreseeable in detail.
I’m aware that there are great questions of political consequence — war, abortion, capital punishment — but I see these as trivial. People have opinions about them, but I do not see any progress being made in resolving them. After you have taken sides, there is nothing worth discussing. You aren’t going to change anyone’s mind, because these are vanilla/chocolate preferences.
What I’m interested in is what and how you teach children. And how you make public policies that actually achieve their stated goals.
I got sick of being abused at UD and am delighted to see the thread is being monitored here. I gather one or two of you have real exposure to clinical ethicists. I would like to check the assumptions I was making about the job. I assumed that the main relevant tasks (in addition to teaching, advising on policy etc) were:
1 help people understand and comply to institutional regulations and values
2 in difficult ethical situations help stakeholders come to a solution which is as mutually acceptable as possible (within the limits of 1)
As an aside – Bernard Williams was one of the lecturers when I did philosophy as an undergrad (as was Anscombe). I can’t remember much about what he said, but I do remember he was much the wittiest lecturer.
I’m with petrushka on this, myself–a consequentialist, but not a hedonist. Only hedonists are required to measure quantities of pleasure and pain. Furthermore, saying that the best action is the one the produces the most pleasure and least pain doesn’t entail that you can make that calculation, anyhow.
Re, Nozick, it’s my understanding he backed off his extremist position as he got older and wiser. In any case, his notion that rights are a side constraint to (i.e., never may be overcome by) any array of consequences, no matter how horrible seems to me obviously absurd (which, I take it, is why he strayed away from discussing that particular issue in Anarchy, State and Utopia.
I would say that talking about likely outcomes is more productive than worrying about logical consistency.
Mark Frank,
I marvel at your ability to withstand Arrington for as long as you have. I left UD about a year ago and haven’t regretted it for a minute since.
Yes and no
I think that you have presented clinical ethicists as mere arbitrators. While arbitration of ethical conflict is much of what they do, they also need to have some understanding of why we have policies built around the Declaration of Helsinki, why informed consent is central to ethical medical practice, the ethical dimensions of who is permitted access to one’s genetic data, and so on. A clinical ethicist is responsible not just for implementing biomedical policy but also, in some cases, for crafting it.
Of course this has nothing at all to do with whether or not ethics is objective or if the natural law is the only rational basis for the objectivity of ethics.
With regard to ethical theory, I’m tempted by all of the major views — I’m closest to ‘virtue ethics’, though I recognize deep insights in both deontology (persons have fundamental dignity) and consequentialism (likely consequences of one’s actions are relevant to moral assessment). However, there are also excellent criticisms of ‘standard’ ethical theory to come out of feminist ethics, environmental ethics, and critical theory (see e.g. here).
I think it’s fair to say that I haven’t yet figured out a wholly consistent ethical theory on which to hang my hat — I’ve been too busy figuring out my positions in epistemology and philosophy of mind.
I do think, however, that ethics is objective in roughly the same way that scientific theories are objective. Here’s what I have in mind.
A scientific theory is held to be objectively true (or false) to the extent that it is a more accurate model of the patterns or processes under investigations than other models. The fact that every scientific theory is destined to be replaced by a better theory does nothing to impugn the objectivity of the theory — it simply means that “objectively true” is not “absolutely true”. As a corollary, the contraries of each of these terms — “subjective” and “relative” — are also not synonyms. A deep confusion on this point is central to the ideology of the intelligent design movement. (“IDeology”. Heh.)
In a roughly similar fashion, an ethical system is held to be objectively good (or bad) to the extent that it is more conducive to the cultivation and flourishing of human capacities than other systems. The crucial point is that there are basic facts — of a teleological and ecological character — to which an ethical system is ultimately “answerable”. Flanagan’s “Ethics as Human Ecology” (PDF) is extremely helpful here (and I’m looking forward to his new book forthcoming from Oxford in a few months).
Kantian Naturalist,
Thanks. This is quite close to what I thought although I may not have expressed it well. By institution I didn’t meant to imply just the employer but supporting and advising bodies that create the “rules” in the most generic sense. So agreements such as the Declaration of Helsinki would be part of the rules. What I seems very unlikely is the ethicists are paid to promote their own ideas about what is right and wrong based on their belief of what is objectively right.
I struggle with answering this question without first coming to an understanding about what kind of thing an ethical system is. Is it:
* An attempt to describe what we mean by the words good and bad in a moral context.
* Advice on how to behave morally which you will find satisfactory in the long run.
* An attempt to find an ultimate justification for moral decisions which is demonstrably correct through a priori reasoning.
* An observation on what most people and societies in practice find moral
* An attempt to discover a “moral grammar” which is built-in to us at birth a bit like Chomsky’s transformational grammar.
And so on … Each of these is answered in different ways – some by psychological enquiry, some by logic, some by observing how we use words so until you decide what an ethical system is you don’t know how to decide whether a particular system is correct or not. i.e. there seems to be a need for a sort of meta-meta-ethics. I expect someone has addressed this but I don’t know who.
There are a few different questions at work here — let me beat around the neighboring bushes, as Sellars would say, and see what happens. (I’m going to expound at some length to get my own thinking clear before I teach a class on ethical relativism, so bear with me — or not.)
First, there is the question of what makes something a norm at all. I take it that a norm — anything expressed, typically, in “ought”-terms — is behavior that is not only expected but also that deviations from expectation will be sanctioned. (Here I’ll only address norms of conduct and not norms of belief). It is important to notice that any norm is inherently transgressable — the concept of a norm and the concept of a transgression are interdependent.
Second, there are many different kinds of norm of conduct — etiquette, gender norms, norms of employer-employee relations, and so on. Moral norms are a sub-set of norms of conduct,. They seem to be distinct by virtue of the following logic: someone who regards Q as a moral norm will treat the following as a valid inference:
In other words, what makes a norm a moral norm is that someone who regards it as binding on him or herself will at the same time also hold it as binding on anyone who is in relevantly similar circumstances. Gender norms, employee-employer relations, decorum, tact, and etiquette are also norms of conduct, but they aren’t regarded as binding on everyone by those who accept those norms. (In Sellarsian terms, all norms are forms of “we-intentions,” but moral norms have an “open we” — nothing implicitly restricts the scope of the “we” to whom the norm is addressed.)
Now, if we’re playing anthropologist or sociologist, we can find out what the norms are (even the moral norms) by describing how people behave, and by describing the mechanisms of sanctioning transgressions. It’s a fair bet that if people affirm a commitment to a norm, but deviations are not corrected or sanctioned, then those people aren’t really committed to that norm — even if they say (and sincerely believe) that they are.
The relation between general norms and particular judgment is complex, but we can say a few things — that a particular judgment is the application of a norm to a specific situation or event. And since there are no rules that govern the application of rules (lest we enter into the slippery slope of Wittgensteinian rule-following paradoxes), there’s always going to be an indeterminacy between norm and judgment.
But, we can also appeal to the norms to resolve differences in judgments. If I judge that X is morally acceptable, and you judge that X is morally prohibited, we can at least try to resolve this disagreement by explicating the relevant norms. It might be that we are committed to the same norms and see those norms are applying differently to the particular case, or it might be that we see the situation as soliciting the application of different norms. (But it is because we see the situation as involving moral judgment that the differences need to be resolved, because of the implicit universality of norms qua moral norms.)
However disagreements about particular moral judgments are resolved — and often they aren’t resolved — there is at least a shared grasp on what coming-to-agreement would look like. The situation is different when it comes to clashes between norms themselves, because there does not seem to be any “meta-norms” that can resolve conflicts between norms. (There can also be conflicts over whether a putative norm is a genuinely moral norm. A religious conservative might think that prescribed and prohibited gender roles and norms of sexual orientation are moral, whereas a liberal might disagree about that.)
The absence of meta-norms is perhaps the truth of relativism. (Still not sure about that, though.)
However, that does not mean that question, “but are these norms good for us?” is a bad question. It might seem to be a bad question if moral goodness is the only kind of goodness there is. If that were so, then “are these norms good for us?” could only be answered — positively or negatively — in a circular argument. However, if goodness is in some sense natural — a neo-Aristotelian view that currently flourishes (pardon the pun) with recent work by Philippa Foot and Martha Nussbaum — then we can answer the question in a non-circular fashion by asking, “are these moral norms conducive to the flourishing of human beings, the good of which is specified by the teleology of human development?”
(It is sometimes thought that Darwinists can’t consistently use the language of teleology. That is a mistake, as Millikan and Okrent (among others) have argued.)
On the other hand, if there is no way of answering the question, “but are these norms good for us?” that does not presuppose the norms themselves, then relativism is almost certainly true.
That does not mean, importantly, that “anything goes” or that we can’t make moral judgments at all — it just means that there is no further court of appeal besides the moral norms themselves, whatever those happen to be.
I think there is a pattern that is seen in many polemical blogs. Jason Rosenhouse puts it rather graphically thus:
🙂
As I see it, ethical rules, whether in medical research or in business practices, are simply attempts to manage relationships and avoid destructive conflicts. They are more politics than theology or philosophy.
As I see it, ethics is concerned with norms of conduct just as science and everyday reasoning is concerned with norms of belief. It’s just that agreement in conduct is more important than agreement in belief for beings like us, who depend on cooperation and collaboration. If we were as social as orangutans, agreement in conduct would matter as little — it would be as “academic” — as agreement in belief is.
It’s probably right that the telos or end-in-view of ethical norms is the management of relationships and the avoidance of destructive conflict, much as the telos or end-in-view of cognitive norms is understanding the fabric of reality and our place in it.
And in both cases, the implicit norms — of conduct and of thought — can be made explicit and subjected to critical assessment (in ethical theory and epistemology, respectively). Both are useful in a variety of limited ways. That is to say, philosophy can be and ought to be as ‘practical’ as ethics and politics. I have nothing against speculation, but it ought to be motivated speculation and not mere speculation.
Theology is, as I see it, very different from metaphysics, and it’s unfortunate that the two are easily conflated. Theology is arbitrarily constrained speculation; the speculation about the real and the knowable is constrained by a mere stipulation that some set of texts and practices are “holy” or “sacred” and have indefeasible authority over what can be asserted and what kinds of reasons can be put forth.
It’s not hard to see why this arbitrary restriction on the game of giving and asking for reasons strikes some people as a sin against the spirit of rational and free inquiry.
I see a potential role for philosophy in clarifying positions and exposing phony or disingenuous arguments, but I do not see how talking about vanilla/chocolate preferences can resolve them.
I suppose talking and reasoning can reveal who wins and who loses, but I don’t know of any instances where minds have changed.
What seems to happen is that over time, support shifts.
I see ethics as having a cognitive dimension as well as an affective dimension — it’s not purely affective — or put otherwise, I think that moral judgments are genuinely judgments and not expressions of preferences or emotions. Though I do think that genuine moral change requires a transformation of imagination, so that one can experience empathy with those who were previously not considered part of “the We”.
I’ve recently learned that there’s a distinction between “cognitive empathy” and “emotional empathy” (see here). Still not completely familiar with the distinction but it surely seems relevant to many of our discussions here.
This is why proper secularism is the only fair and equitable basis for ethics and social interaction. We should be guaranteed the freedom to think as we do and respect the right of anyone else to do likewise. Inflicting moral rules on society from some arbitrary invented divine authority ought to be opposed with vigour. It leads to such horrors as the Tuam mother-and-baby home. Would anyone here trust Barry Arrington to be in any position of responsibility involving ethics, medical or otherwise?
But the premises are emotional. Reasoning can expose faulty reasoning, but it cannot bootstrap the underlying preferences.
petrushka,
That’s right, and KN’s premise is no exception:
I see no way to establish that premise as objectively true.
Perhaps I should illustrate what I am thinking about with a specific example.
Let’s say we are discussing the ethical treatment of laboratory animals.
Now, If I do not believe animals have feelings, or if I do not think their feelings are important, there are no ethical decisions to make. Treatment of animals cannot be a topic of discussion, any more than the ethical treatment of hammers.
But suppose I do “care” about the feelings of animals. (That implies the belief that they have some level of consciousness and that I care about their feelings.)
So the “ethical” problem is to balance the discomfort I feel when hurting animals against the discomfort I feel when i see people suffering from disease.
You can form all kinds of rationalizations regarding this balancing act, but in the end, it is a kind of politics. Anything you do to try to make a decision seem rational is (I think) a sham. Life gives us Sophie’s choices, and we live with them. I do not see any value in pretending that one choice is right and the other wrong.
As a utilitarian, my approach is not to rationalize hard choices, but to invent ways to make them unnecessary. I think life is improved by inventing more than by choosing/
Kantian Naturalist,
Interesting beating about the bushes. A couple of comments.
Why do you place such an emphasis on norms? Surely a lot of moral activity is not based on any kind of norm or rule but simply on a moral reaction to a situation. Moral norms often seem more descriptive than prescriptive: an attempt to summarise our moral reaction to a wide range of situations. If a moral norm (do not kill) leads to situations we find unacceptable (cannot kill a terminally ill patient in agony who asks for it) it is frequently taken as a reason for modifying the rule. We test the truth of the rule against our reactions – almost like testing a scientific hypothesis. Of course the reverse sometimes happens as well. The field of activity that we call morality seems like a rather complex mixture of particular types of reaction, motives, reasons and rules which feed off each other.
Also I am not sure your criterion for a moral norm works. It seems to me all norms meet that criterion – otherwise they are not norms they are just directives to a defined list of people. It all rather depends on what is permissible as circumstances C. So you could say an etiquette norm for e-mail only applies to English speaking e-mail users but you could also say that it applies to everyone who is in the circumstance of using e-mail and the English language – in which case it becomes a moral norm using your criterion.
I think the second paragraph is somehow connected to the first – but I am too tired to work it out.
Re the “objective truth” of ethical statements, there is no absolute certainty under the sun, but that satisfaction of desire is a prima facie good must be at least almost as establishable as existence of quarks based on gauge readings. How do I know pleasure is good?–it seems good based on my emotional responses. How do I know I’m seeing my computer screen now?
Thanks for an interesting series of notes.
For anyone interested in more on Flanagan’s ideas, here is a later reference from him: Naturalizing Ethics (PDF). It includes a responses to potential criticism based on Hume’s is/ought distinction and to Moore’s Open Question argument.
There is also this (PDF) which is a response to some critics of that paper.
Right. The emotional responses (or what they apparently point to) are what is reasoned upon. But, just as with perceptual judgments, you have to start somewhere.
Mark writes,
That seems right to me. Although I’d prefer to use some other word besides “moral” there so it doesn’t look like I might be begging the question. (The norm guy [call him “Norman”] is likely to respond what makes a reaction “moral” is precisely that it reflects some norm.)
There are three things that need to be separated that KN has attempted to do but which I am not sure everyone else has recognized:
1. When can we describe behavior as “moral”. I don’t think it is possible to give necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather to start with prototypical examples of moral behavior and give general ideas for dealing with boundaries. Treatment of other people is moral. Taste in ice cream is not. But there is a great area that might include email or any type of conversation. More specifics would be needed.
2. Providing a scientific explanation to describe how and why a certain moral behavior occurs. This would relate to distal causes like social education and evolution as well as proximate causes like emotions.
3. Providing a an approach to determine how that behavior should be judged: was it right or wrong? Science on its own cannot do that.
I screwed up the blockqutes in my last comment. If one of the moderators could clean that up, I’d be much obliged.
Thankee.
[Neil Rickert] – Done, except that I’m not sure whether I got that right.
Your link takes one to a discussion of Emotional Intelligence. That that term will be very familiar to anyone working as a manager whose company recommended certain management courses in the 80s and 90s. It’s one of those pop psychology trends that became quite lucrative for people who sell training to companies. Maslow’s hierarchy (for motivating employees) and Meyers-Briggs personality (INTJ!) classification (for team building by recognizing preferred roles) were others.
Distinguishing cognitive and affective empathy is similar to a distinction Kitcher makes. His Ethical Project is about morality as a social technology used to increase altruism, and he makes an analogous distinction between behavioral altruism and psychological altruism.
Behavioral altruism is a cognitive tactic: “I understand that person’s needs and I am going to help him or her achieve them, possibly because it will also help me.” Psychological altruism is about helping other people achieve their goals based on an intuitive/affective ability to perceive those goals; it has no ulterior purpose.
Both can be part of moral technology, but Kitcher claims psychological altruism will be more effective because it will be more accurate.
walto,
I had meant to put the “Right. The emotional responses….” paragraph prior to the quote from Mark.
Thanks again!
[Neil Rickert — That makes more sense now. I hope I finally have it the way you wanted it]
Thanks to you both for this nice taxonomy. 3 is the one I’m mostly concerned with myself, but the others are interesting too.
BruceS,
I think that is very useful distinction and I agree about the approach to 1. I see it as pinning down the meaning of words like moral and being a good Wittgensteinian that means studying the form of life that is morality and the role moral language plays in it.
What intrigues me is that I am not sure which of the problems the great ethical theories such as utilitarianism are trying to solve. They are certainly not addressing 2 – but is it 1 or 3?
Would you agree that ethics and morality deal with behaviors that are judged by others to be helpful or hurtful?
If so, how do you reconcile differences in what people consider to be moral or immoral?
I get the feeling sometimes on these threads that I an re-watching the Star Trek “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” episode. I’m an outsider watching people argue about points that I find indistinguishable.
What about behaviors that have delayed consequences or diffuse consequences? Or mixed consequences?
In real life we do things like take jobs, get married, raise kids. The daily activities involved can have grave consequences that are not easily predictable. As a utilitarian I am less concerned with whether pain hurts and more concerned with how to live. I assume that most people agree that hurting other people is bad, and are more concerned with how to live without causing unnecessary pain. If you think this can be decide from an armchair, I can only assume you have never been responsible for other peoples lives and well being.
One thing you can look at how much importance people assign to finding the right answer. Few care about someone’s choice in ice cream. But many care about some other person’s choices on abortion or slavery or murder.
Of course, there are other criteria as well; KN has provided some.
But like many things in life, it is a continuum, so you should not expect a simple yes/no answer to whether this something is a moral act.
Yes, those are all important questions. And those arguments could be used against ethical systems that were not empirical (eg forms of Kantian ethics?). But naturalistic ethical systems are definitely not a “from an armchair” a priori approach.
As an analogy, think of decision theory, say applied to the stock market. You have to make decisions under risk, making a correct decision is not simply a matter of opinion, and getting the facts is part but not all of the right way how to make a decision.
And to extend the analogy to morality, there is also a separate field of scientific of how people actually do invest, what errors they make, and why.