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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Brandom's Ethical Strategy

Updated on June 3, 2014 by Stuart W. Mirsky

Updated on June 5, 2014 by Stuart W. Mirsky

Continuing with Robert Brandom's Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas, the ethical strategy which he adopts in the second half of the book builds on the classical notion of the good life as in what is most conducive to human flourishing, what is good for human beings as human beings. Brandom adopts this conception of ethical valuing and grounds it in his more basic claim that epistemic capacity stands on normative activity, i.e., that knowing that is a species of knowing how. Taking this from the Kantian conception of knowledge as a function of human capacities, of the conceptual structures we have, and the latter as instances of how we relate to statements (recognizing their inferential dimension in terms of what they authorize and obligate us as language speakers to do), he goes on to suggest that this normativity runs all the way down. He makes the further distinction between sentience and sapience, arguing that sapience, which is what we have, rests on but qualitatively changes the underlying sentience.

Sentience, he suggests, is the state of having sensations, sensory information, feelings -- of being aware. Sapience is the state of having the capacity to conceptualize and so think about the things we experience as sentient creatures. At least in the case of creatures like ourselves, he argues, sapience, which he describes as fundamentally normative (a matter of learning and following rule-sets) rests on the sentience we have but radically alters its nature. . . .

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The Logic of Action

I've been reading Robert Brandom recently after stumbling across a lengthy talk he gave in the UK which is available on-line. He's pretty ponderous and seems to prefer lengthy elaboration and abstruse words where simpler ones, on the face of it at least, might do. That said, his ideas caught my attention. He was presenting a paper at Cambridge, the home of Analytical Philosophy, which dealt, in part, with the links between the American pragmatists and that philosophical school. In the course of that, he linked the pragmatists backwards to Hegel and Kant and forward to Heidegger and Wittgenstein. In sum, he argues that there is a tradition in philosophy, which the American pragmatists, C. S Peirce in particular, exemplified in an especially clear way, that sees the kinds of knowledge we count as "knowing that" as a subspecies, in fact a function of, "knowing how." This, he argues, is the key element in pragmatism of whatever form and can be seen in Wittgenstein's own emphasis on the rule-based nature of language and the things we can say within it as well as in the emphasis, shared with Heidegger, on language use as a form of being in the world itself.

In the book I'm currently reading, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas, Brandom focuses on Kant's shift from the descriptive to the normative paradigm in discussing epistemological matters. What we can know, on this view, is a function of what we can say, what we are equipped to say, and, for Kant, this depends on the ways our thinking works. Brandom proposes that Hegel's improvement over Kant's picture was to introduce the idea of intersubjectivity, of knowing as doing within the context of a community, the interplay of separate subjects in joint enterprises which have a history and so involve participation not only with one's contemporary fellow subjects but with those who came before us and will come after .

I am not competent to assess his views on Hegel's contributions (I always found Hegel opaque, to say the least) or even to assess his take on Kant. But I am fascinated by his argument that the ordinary discursive ways we have of speaking about things, the descriptive language we use to delineate and affirm or deny facts in the world, which expresses our intentionality (knowing about things), can be traced to knowing how to speak and operate in the world. Here he seems to be saying that, behind the logic we ordinarily recognize re: making assertions (with their true and false relations), there is also a logic, a much deeper logic, of behavior itself, i.e., one of authority (as in granting rights, to claims and claimants, to demand or expect certain outcomes) and of obligation (accepting the responsibility to act in the ways expected). This is the logic of recognizing implications by acting on them. It's a logic of reciprocal relations.

For Brandom having a language is the key to having concepts and having concepts is what differentiates us from other sentient creatures. That is, we are not merely sentient, as he puts it, but sapient. We have the ability to think about things, to be intentional in ways that other creatures do not. But concepts, he argues, are not stand alone ideas . . . .

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The Moral and the Mental

One of the issues that has come into focus for me while exploring the best way of accounting for (and so of explaining) how moral valuing works is the importance, in all this, of a robust picture of the self. That is, the elements we associate with subjectivity, with being a subject, seem to be critical in any account of moral valuing, not only because valuing itself implies the presence of a subject but because what is of particular interest in the moral game is the value placed on the self, i.e., the acting subject. Thus there is a need to presume the reality of the self in a way that sometimes seems to imply "entity." But, of course, given the insights of many modern philosophers, especially Wittgenstein, we don't want to do that for selves aren't things, aren't existents that parallel the bodies which have them!

The species of valuing which we call "moral" considers the quality of agents' acts and that quality can only be assessed if the acts in question are seen in their entirety and not in piecemeal fashion (which is how acts gain value for us when we are valuing the things they can obtain, achieve or produce for us). To make a moral judgment about an act, we have to go beyond the derivative value accorded the act as means to end. We have to consider the act as a whole. So what's involved in seeing an act in its entirety? Well, to the extent an act consists of certain physical events brought about by an agent, and, in a more extended sense, in certain outcomes those events achieve for the agent, it also consists of what the agent intends, i.e., what the agent undertakes the act in order to accomplish. And intentions, whatever else we may want to say of them, are mental phenomena. They happen in the minds of agents, in the thoughts, beliefs, wishes and inclinations which agents have and which underlie, in a generative sense, the acts performed. . . .

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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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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 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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