Searle on the Is/Ought Dichotomy

In continuing to review what's left of my library post Sandy's flood in our region, I came across a small paperback, Theories of Ethics, edited by Philippa Foot. I did remember reading this one and found, as I paged through it, plenty of handwritten notes on the book's pages. I almost never write in book margins. It just seems wrong to me. But I obviously did so at that point, probably reflecting my effort to develop an ethics theory of my own which back in the seventies I was very keen on attempting. Never quite succeeded at it, of course, and nowadays I am leery of any sort of theory development in a field like this for Wittgensteinian reasons. But back then it's apparent I had fewer inhibitions in the matter. Anyway, the book consists of a series of articles gathered, and commented on in a foreword, by Foot who was then the pre-eminent exponent of naturalism in ethics and regarded as a major thinker in the field. One of the pieces she re-printed, it turns out, was an article by our old friend John Searle, How to Derive Ought from Is. It's followed by a piece by R. M. Hare (another major ethical thinker of the time) attacking Searle's position. Hare, of course, was defending his own view that the function of commending is radically different from describing and that one achieves moral claims by combining commendatory principles, to which one chooses to subscribe, with factual assertions to yield logically sound conclusions which serve as particular moral oughts. Searle had offered a different view. . . .

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Ethics in Wittgenstein: Early and Late

There's a sharp dichotomy in Wittgenstein's later approach to ethics from what we find in his earlier work. Just as there's a recognizable break between his approach to philosophy and the kinds of claims he makes in The Tractatus and those he later presents us with via his later writings, especially Philosophical Investigations, the change in his approach to moral questions, though less visible because he is less explicit, is noticeable and important. In the Tractatus and in the wake of his immediate return to Cambridge in 1929 after more than a decade's hiatus, Wittgenstein takes a transcendental position vis a vis ethics. It's something, he asserts, that cannot be talked about but can only be felt in one's life. The Tractatus, he tells us, is really an ethical work though only a small part of it (near the end) actually addresses ethics explicitly (and, indeed, somewhat cryptically). There he tells us ethics cannot be talked about, is among those things we can only point mutely at. Later, in his address to the Heretics Society at Cambridge in '29 he says this more explicitly. Ethics involves values we hold for human behavior but there's nothing to be said about it philosophically. We would all be better off to maintain a studied silence on the matter for there is no deriving oughts from is claims, just as Hume told us. But if one could speak of ethics, write a book on the subject, it would shatter the world, he pronounces.

The later Wittgenstein seems to have kept his word on maintaining silence on the subject though ethical concerns run through his personal writings (see especially those published posthumously under the title Culture and Value). He did not contribute anything in philosophical discourse directly pertinent to the matter of ethics . . .

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MORAL REASONING: A "Wittgensteinian" Approach

Over the weekend I've done a bit of searching through what's left of my books since Hurricane Sandy swept through our community and destroyed a decades old library I had built up which my wife had insisted I keep in our basement. I found a volume published in 1969 that I had once picked up in a second hand bookstore back in the late seventies/early eighties but never had time to read (or perhaps I just lost track of it). It's called Moral Reasoning by a British philosopher I hadn't heard of before named R. W. Beardsmore. I'd obviously picked it up because of my interest, even then, in moral philosophy. Perhaps I started to read it and laid it aside but I have no recollection of doing so. Must have meant to get to it but lost track of it. Anyway, I read it today and was pleasantly surprised. Beardsmore makes an attempt to give an account of moral valuing from a Wittgensteinian perspective. And it's a good try, too.

He begins by taking on the two prominent British moral philosophers of his era, R. M. Hare and Philippa Foot, maintaining that both have the matter quite wrong. . . .

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Realizational Ethics

I have long felt that a philosophy of "isms" was a mistake. That is, I actively argued against the practice of philosophy as metaphysical speculation, the kind of thing where philosophers develop systems to explain everything (or at least everything about the world they can think of) and name their particular approach with a term ending in an "ism" (idealism, dualism, realism and the like). But I think I was wrong about the "ism" part for that isn't the issue at all. There is, after all, something to be said for naming a view, not least because, if done well, it can provide a convenient handle for naming the claim or account under discussion. And ending such a name with "ism," doesn't, in itself, imply a metaphysical thesis or claim. This has been brought home to me most recently in my ongoing attempt to tease out a coherent account of the thing we do called "moral valuing" (as in making, arguing about, justifying and recognizing our moral claims).

Since Sean began this site, I have spent a good deal of time trying to develop a coherent account of my own concerning moral claims and many of my entries here have been directed at that objective. Of course, I don't know how well I've actually done thus far. Many of the posts I've put on this site could certainly stand re-writing although, at this stage, I'm unlikely to attempt that -- not here anyway. Nevertheless, going through the exercise of composing these posts has been helpful to me, at least, and at this point I think I have reached a fairly coherent account of what I want to say (though perhaps it will not meet with wide agreement on this list -- whatever really does?). . . .

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An Evolutionary Biological Theory of Morality

Have recently finished reading James Q. Wilson's book, The Moral Sense, which presents an anthropological/sociological account of (and case for) the role of moral judgments in human experience. He argues that morality, or moral valuing, is grounded in four basic capacities we humans have because of our natures, reflecting the kind of creatures we have evolved into over the eons. We are, he reminds us, fundamentally social creatures and this requires certain capacities which we have developed as a species. He lists these as sympathy (caring about others in some cases), fairness (preferring equitable outcomes to inequitable ones), self-control (the capacity to restrain our desires and needs in order to attain our goals) and duty (the capacity to recognize situations in which we must subordinate our needs to requirements defined by others). He argues that these four competences, which most humans share because of genetic inheritance, provide the bedrock on which our social structures are built. He then proposes that the moral claims, beliefs and judgments we make arise as a function of the various culture-specific schemas that human beings develop in the many different societal groups that humans form.

These social forms of life may all be quite different across the planet because there's lots of room for variation, both because of environmental demands and the stickiness of practices which manifest as social conventions, but, he suggests, there are also certain core similarities among most humans which form the ground on which all social phenomena and institutions stand, i.e., the four capacities/competences he identifies as the basis for social groupings. . . .

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An Inventory of Value Approaches re: Moral Questions

Have been thinking a lot recently about the range of "theories" that have been current at one time or another in the history of philosophical inquiry into moral claims and of human claims about behavioral goodness in general. While it's hard to capture everything, I have compiled what seems to me a fairly exhaustive list of different moral "theories" which include some twenty possibilities. Of course I'm sure this isn't exhaustive and there are probably many nuances I have not adequately captured. Moreover, there are some strong similarities among some of the categories which suggests room for disagreement about which qualifies as which. I've tried in what follows to sort them as cleanly as I can and to identify a few of the main thinkers associated with each (where there are such associations to be made)

In the final analysis, I think it can be helpful to look at the range of possibilities and see what fits where and who and what may have been left out:

The Scope of Moral Accounts

• Naturalistic Accounts (What we call "good" is some feature or phenomenon of the natural world.)

Ancient

The Greeks broke ground by offering a variety of explanations which sought to go beyond the priestly and social admonitions of their particular culture, including that which we mean by our uses of the word “good.” The good, they proposed, was variously:

1) Whatever counts as the fullest exercise of man’s unique capabilities . . .

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Wittgenstein's Error

The early Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus made waves in the twentieth century between the world wars, considered ethics beyond the reach of philosophical inquiry because its propositions, he held, lacked content. In Tractatus 6.42 he said “. . . there can be no ethical propositions” and followed, at 6.421, with:

. . . ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one.)

In this (aside from the invocation of the “transcendental”!) he was fully in line with the tradition in Empiricist philosophy, since Hume, that ethical propositions do not express objectively discernible claims about things in the world but serve, rather, to express our feelings about such things. And feelings about things can be neither true nor false themselves, neither right nor wrong. They just are particular states in which we happen to find ourselves. Whatever we take to be the case about the world, as we find it, cannot imply anything about how we ought to feel about it. . . .

. . . On this Humean view we can neither be blamed nor condemned for what we feel, and what we feel can neither imply anything factual about the world nor itself be taken to be implied by the way the facts present themselves to us since we may react in any number of ways to the phenomena of the world. . . . But in that case we cannot be praised or blamed for being such creatures since we are not what we are by our own choice and ethics is, finally, about judging our options, the choices we make. . . .

Wittgenstein, whose early philosophy was much influenced by this post-Humean empiricism, as expressed in the work of the early analytic philosophers at Cambridge led by Bertrand Russell, came to think a little differently however. As he goes on to say immediately after at 6.422 in the Tractatus:

The first thought in setting up an ethical law of the form “thou shalt . . . ” is: And what if I do not do it. But it is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the ordinary sense. This question as to the consequences of an action must therefore be irrelevant. At least these consequences will not be events. For there must be something right in that formulation of the question. There must be some sort of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but this must lie in the action itself. (And this is clear also that the reward must be something acceptable, and the punishment something unacceptable.)

Immediately following, at 6.423, he adds:

Of the will as the bearer of the ethical we cannot speak. And the will as a phenomenon is only of interest to psychology.

Then, at 6.43:

If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.

Wittgenstein moves here toward an account of ethical valuing which, while not rejecting the Humean analysis, endeavors to find a place for ethical concerns despite their exclusion from the realm of meaningful content. As he later suggested with regard to the Tractatus, its thrust, on his view, was not so much to show how ethical matters are excluded from our areas of concern but to show how ethics occupies a different, albeit still legitimate, position in our world. But he is not transparent about this in that work. At 6.52 he writes . . .

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