A Moral Conversation

Over the summer my wife and I tend to get to spend more time together and today we took a long drive which is often the place where I get to apply some of my thoughts on how things are to real life. On the drive home we passed a building in a serious state of disrepair. It used to be a "gentleman's club" which prominently displayed its wares on it's billboard like front, until some of the more morally minded in the local community took up arms over the somewhat audacious displays. Personally I had no objection to the long limbed figures depicted in spike heels (the place called itself "High Heels" as I recall) or the other sometimes quite frank images of the "hostesses" within. But a colleague of my wife's had objected. A single mother, she is raising her boys alone and she felt it was inappropriate for them to be exposed to such images when, driving by with her, they couldn't help but notice. So she joined a petition drive to shut High Heels down and, in time, they succeeded. The result, now, is a derelict building without occupant or purpose. But no more scantily clad gals displayed to the driving public either.

I made this point to my wife and noted that I kind of missed the images. After all, at least from my perspective they were not entirely unpleasant to look at. More importantly, they were nicer to look at than the now decrepit structure that met our eyes as we drove past this afternoon. My wife snarled at me that it was inappropriate and that I shouldn't have been looking at those images either. After all, would I want my daughters or granddaughters to parade about like that? If I wouldn't, she declared, then why would I want other men's daughters to be doing that?

I said, hold on a minute. Everyone is somebody's son or daughter, aren't they and some people do things like that. Why should their being someone's daughter matter if they wanted to do it? It's a free country, after all, I added, and no one was forcing these young ladies to engage in such activities. That didn't assuage my wife's annoyance though. So I tried another tack. . . .

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Recapitulating the Moral Account

One of the criteria of a good argument or account of something, I have generally believed, is that we should be able to briefly and cogently state the case for it. If it's a good account it shouldn't get bound up in complexity, ambiguities and unclarity. We shouldn't need reams and reams of paper to say what we are talking about. Still, if the subject being accounted for were easily explained, there wouldn't be a need to say more, would there? So I'm torn between preferring simplicity and brevity, on the one hand, and acknowledging the need for complexity, occasioned by the difficulty of a longstanding issue, on the other. The possibility of giving a moral account strikes me as raising just this sort of problem.

The other day, following a link on Duncan Richter's blog, I ended up on a site discussing a moral issue. I weighed in with comments reflecting my own ongoing effort to say what moral valuing is and what reasons underlie it. One of the posters suggested I spell out my own view, since I was challenging his, and I decided to give it a go, even knowing how difficult it would be to say succinctly what I have come to think about the issue of how moral valuing works. (The full exchange can be found here: http://kazez.blogspot.com/2014/08/ethics-in-gaza.html)

In the meantime, here is a composite version of what I wrote there, representing still another iteration of the view I have been developing on this site concerning moral questions:

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Philosophy and Practicality

Updated on July 29, 2014 by Stuart W. Mirsky

Not being a member of the academic community of philosophers, and yet having an abiding interest in that community's subject matter (some elements of it, at any rate), I have often wondered about the meaningfulness of the field. This is partly a reflection of my own decision more than 40 years ago not to pursue a a graduate philosophy degree (I doubted my ability to make a mark in that particular arena and also the value of doing so). I was drawn to Wittgenstein back then, perhaps partly because he seemed to be the epitome of the anti-philosopher but, I think, even more because his strategy and approach to the business philosophers did seemed to clarify so many of my own concerns. I was caught in the web of idealism at the time, after a flirtation with logical positivism and, briefly, American pragmatism. But I was always and primarily drawn to the analytic approach of which Wittgenstein was a part even after leaving that reservation in his later years. The fact that there seemed to be no solutions to the pressing philosophical questions both kept my head spinning and suggested, to me at least, the virtual pointlessness of bothering with such questions. Yet I could not simply divest myself of them, not even after exposure to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.

I spent a number of years, after graduating, still troubling the same philosophical bones but finally gave it all up entirely and moved on. Yet, in my later years I've found myself drawn back to these kinds of concerns. Although I have improved my understanding of many of the issues and, I think, of Wittgenstein himself, it has seemed to me that there are still areas worth chewing over for those who are philosophically inclined. Of course, if Wittgenstein was right in his later years, we're all better off moving on to more practical endeavors but perhaps, when one has finished the practical part of one's life, a return to philosophy is just what's called for. And so I've engaged on and off over the years in philosophical discussions on Internet sites like this one. They have not always been satisfying but have often been edifying. . . .

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Brandom on Analytic Philosophy and Wittgenstein

Updated on July 24, 2014 by Stuart W. Mirsky

Have just sort of finished reading Robert Brandom's Between Saying and Doing and I have to admit he's got my head spinning. I had to skip a lot so I guess at some point I'll have to go back to it. The earlier book of his that I read (Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas which I commented on here in my essays "The Logic of Action" and "Brandom's Ethical Strategy") was dense and abstruse and so challenging but I found it intriguing for the notions he put forward and explored about how meaning is pragmatically grounded and can be explained as navigating a network of inferences ("inferentialism") in which any statement can be seen to have meaning insofar as it can be taken as a conclusion from other statements and can, itself, imply conclusions when it is conjoined with other premises and which involves distinctions of compatibility and incompatibility the recognition of which permits reasoning to conclusions to proceed. (Conclusions, themselves, are exemplified by, and recognized through, the actions one is disposed to take based on the statements one is considering.) On this view, meaning for Brandom becomes the practice of discursively connecting statements in an inferentialist web such that the meaning of any term or statement arises from the extent of the web in which it is embedded and the capacities we have (both inherited and learned) to make our way through and around it.

Of course this interests me because I was kind of getting at the same thing with two of my own essays on this site: "Can Machines Get It?" and "A Horse of a Different Color" in which I proposed that getting the meanings of terms and symbols amounts to making an array of associative connections between different mental pictures we have gathered over our lives and that sharing understanding between two or more speakers is then a matter of achieving a certain critical mass of commonality in the groups of "pictures" held by each speaker, without any requirement for a one-to-one correspondence between actual, particular mental pictures. Thus meaning becomes a matter of the occurrence of general templates (or prototype patterns of association) on a kind of macro scale of memories (remembered experiences). This works in much the same way as Brandom's proposed inferential webs which language speakers must navigate in order to find meanings in sounds though my emphasis was on the psychological phenomena of mental pictures rather than on the practical capacities behind and arising from making the "right" linguistic connections. Yet, the result would, in large part, look the same.

So I was naturally looking for more of the same with his book, Between Saying and Doing. And, of course, I wanted to get a better handle on the guy's ideas. But I suspect I chose the wrong book to continue with this time! Nevertheless, there's stuff in it worth commenting on, to the extent that my meager grasp of his theses enables that.

In a nutshell he presents this book as a way of making his case that analytic philosophy is flawed but not fatally so. . . .

For Brandom, Wittgenstein finds a place in a pragmatic tradition tracing back to the American pragmatists and from them back to Hegel and Kant. In some ways this is a very ambitious claim but Brandom, despite the remarkable opacity of his approach, makes a good case for this view.

In this post I won't go into great detail (because I probably can't) but I want to at least reflect on some of Brandom's thoughts on the Wittgensteinian solution which he in part embraces and in part rejects. . . .

Here is Brandom on Wittgenstein vis a vis the analytical project in the last section of his book, Between Saying and Doing (beginning on page 210):

One constant in Wittgenstein's thought, early and late, is his denial of methodologically monistic scientism. "Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences," he says in the Tractatus [Proposition 4.111], and this view seems to be part of what lies behind the theoretical quietism of the later work. In fact, I think Wittgenstein thinks that if systematic philosophical theorizing were possible, it would mean that philosophy is an empirical science. Since it is not, philosophers must eschew theorizing, restricting themselves instead to light, local descriptions of discursive practices, where such descriptions might provide helpful reminders in freeing ourselves from the sorts of misunderstandings and puzzlements that arise precisely from the theories implicit in inherited pictures of what is going on when we think and talk. Whether or not Wittgenstein himself reasoned this way, I take it that it is common for his admirers to see him as presenting us with a forced choice: either embrace scientism about philosophy of the methodologically monistic sort -- that is, take philosophy to be an emprical, scientific discipline -- or give up the idea of systematic philosophical theorizing once and for all.

I think this is a false choice. . . .

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Logic and Moral Discourse (revised)

A while back I put up on this site what my take on resolving the moral question is. After examining a number of different solutions, from intuitionism to ethical naturalism (Foot, Anscombe, and Brandom -- the last of whom presents a proposal which seems to be a hybrid of Aristotelian naturalistic "virtue ethics" and Kantian rationalism) and then on to Searle's speech-act based answer to the emotivist denial and the prescriptivist solution, as well as a Kantian style argument for the power of rational thinking to drive moral judgment, I tried to cover all the bases by looking at some additional approaches. These also included considering a Wittgensteinian solution (based on Wittgenstein's later work) which finds moral standards in our "forms of life" (Beardsmore) as well as the "sentimentalism" argument of Jesse Prinz (which elaborates a logic of sentiment in terms of the logic of description) and the evolutionary-biological thesis of James Q. Wilson (which seats moral judgments in certain species-specific capacities identifiable as human). Considering all the options, I concluded that none are quite right though all seem to have something to commend them. I offered my own tentative explanation here under the post entitled Realizational Ethics in which I tried to lay out a step by step account (not quite an argument!) that would lay bare the moral valuing mechanism and show why it works.

In a nutshell, I proposed that moral valuing involves looking at actions in the most complete way, i.e., a way that considers them in light of the quality of the intentions that underlie them and which they express and not just instrumentally (in terms of the outcomes they bring about). Unlike Searle, I argued that intentions aren't entities (a strange choice of words for such phenomena, to say the least) but that they are just a way we have of talking about some things (and therefore distinguishing them from other kinds of things, picking this up from Dennett's notion of the "intentional stance"). Nevertheless, there is a reality to them if we recognize that what we mean when we consider intentions per se is the state of the mental life of the agent, what he or she is emotionally inclined to do. And this can be looked at referentially, no less than we do with the phenomena of the observable physical world, because it makes sense to speak of intentions and selves, and about the manifold mental features of our lives.

From there I suggested that judging actions in the most complete way is to look at them as expressing intentions which is to say expressing the mental state of the acting self as opposed to considering their worth instrumentally or in terms of whether or not they satisfy some need, desire, requirement, etc. That is, we may consider actions in any of these other ways and put a value on them based on their role in addressing these elements in our psychological lives because valuing just is an adjunct of rationality per se. You can't be rational in making choices unless you can prioritize and, to do that, you need a basis for sorting, you need a scale of significance. But actions, per se, cannot be fully and adequately evaluated unless and until we also take into account the underlying motivations, the intentions they express, and these can be understood as aspects of an agential self, the state of the agent's mental life at the moment he or she is acting . . . .

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Searle's "Solution" to the Ethics Quandary

Updated on June 8, 2014 by Stuart W. Mirsky

Updated on June 16, 2014 by Stuart W. Mirsky

Updated on June 23, 2014 by Stuart W. Mirsky

As noted previously, I've begun reading Searle's Rationalism in Action, the last of Searle's books that I have after the flood in 2012. As it happens this is also the one book of his in my possession that I hadn't yet read so its survival was fortuitous. However, the book, itself, has proved a disappointment. I know that I've gone on record in the past as thinking highly of Searle's work despite my strong disagreement with his Chinese Room Argument (which I initially found quite compelling but gradually came to see as deeply flawed). In the case of the present book and its extended argument, however, I am surprised at what I take to be some serious errors and an overall failure of the book's thesis. I want to qualify this, though, since I'm only about two thirds through it and it could, conceivably, get much better from here.

In this book Searle undertakes to explain how rationality as reasoning is thoroughly embedded in human life and how it underwrites our obligation claims as well as talk about rights and duties and, of course, moral judgments. In this he seems to be worrying the same bone that Brandom was on in his book Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas, which I just finished last weekend. But, despite the complexity and abstruseness of Brandom's exposition, I think it's fair to say that Brandom did it better. Searle mostly involves himself with elaborating a complex vocabulary for how we think and speak about things and what that entails. Unfortunately, his effort seems to largely consist of elaborating a complex jargon to rename features about language and human relations to the world we already know under other, more familiar terms. He seems to think one can improve on ordinary language by invoking an extraordinary vocabulary. . . .

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Four Naturalistic Strategies in Accounting for Ethical Claims

The intuitionist account of value claims, which G. E. Moore presented in answer to the is/ought dichotomy first flagged by David Hume, proposes that there are objective facts about what’s good, especially the good thing to do, and that they hinge on a private experience we each have of the good. Just as we know colors by seeing them, so, this thesis goes, we know good actions and objectives by recognizing them (if and when they manifest themselves to us through sensory input). That is, according to Moore, the term “good” can be understood as denoting a property of a thing, just as a term like “yellow” denotes a property which some things may have, namely the property of being the color we call “yellow.” But where yellowness is, as Moore put it, a “natural property” which we know through our direct experience of it (when we see it) goodness counts as a “non-natural property” because it’s not inherent in any of the sensory inputs we have, although there is something about the way we have those sensory inputs that prompts in us the recognition of the presence of goodness alongside the "natural" properties we observe through our sensory inputs.

That is, on this view, goodness is knowable directly through our experience just as the sight of yellow in a thing is. This makes use of the Kantian sense of “intuit,” i.e., of having knowledge of something without the intermediation of other knowledge, of something else. In other words, we don’t need a reason to reach the conclusion that something is good, if it is, because we recognize it directly (just as we recognize that yellow things are yellow).

But Moore offered no explanation of what it is to know what’s good in the way we know what’s yellow and later thinkers, like Philippa Foot, questioned the usage of “intuition” as Moore presented it. . . .

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