Breakthrough, continued

G.E. Moore died in October 1958, just days after my own birth. That's a neat little irrelevant connection with which to return to my discussion of Moore's approach to ethics and how its embrace feels like a philosophical breakthrough for me.

Moore's approach, in a few words, is to understand good as a direct observable though non-natural property of events and experiences, a property not reducible to anything else.

A quick qualification of that. Goods come in two classes, as we intuitively experience them, intrinsic and instrumental. We pursue instrumental goods so that we may secure and increase the intrinsic goods. A crude example: we eat nutritional foods so that we may survive so that sometimes we may savor dessert. So it is strictly intrinsic good that is the simple irreducible property.

This suggests, to revert to the Jamesian terminology I quoted yesterday, that with regard to intrinsic goods we have a "special intuitive faculty" of recognizing good when we see it, and that we must take as the intrinsic goods simply those on which neurologically healthy adult humans, the presumed possessors of this faculty, agree. Then we can apply reason to the further questions raised by the various instrumental goods, to test whether and how far they will allow us enjoy the desserts of life.

Moore says that the list if intrinsic goods is a short one. To paraphrase him a bit: the pleasures of social relations, the enjoyment of the beautiful in art, the appreciation of the sublime in nature, these are the ultimate goods in life, the intrinsic goods. The right is derived from the good, that is, actions that increase opportunities for these goods, without overcompensating losses, are right.

Here we can bring in the historical element that Moore rather neglects and that James rightly emphasizes. Over time, the human race, as a pragmatic development, has discovered that certain rules and roles contribute to this goal of increasing the intrinsic good in the world. Roles and rules have developed. Working within these roles, following these rules, has come to be called “right.”

Right in an objective sense and right in a way that we do not have to see ourselves as commanded to understand, in order to understand.

Now: note that to Moore, each of the good things on our short list is good through being appreciated and enjoyed. Sublime natural vistas are sublime because of their impact on humans. But that doesn't reduce his view to utilitarianism, because good is not pleasure. Good is the non-natural quality that shows itself in these particular instances, which each happen to be, on the whole, pleasant. Since his ethics doesn't have us pursuing pleasure per se, the troubles that arise when we try to include the pleasure of, say, a sadist or a pathological serial killer in the hedonic calculus don't arise. There is no hedonic calculus.

Suppose there were a proposal to create a series of explosions that would produce a gradual slope where there is now a sharp falling off, so there would be no waterfall at Niagara, just a course of rapids. Presumably the people proposing these explosions would have some goal in mind that they would achieve that would (in their view) be worth it. Yet the contemplation of Niagara is one of the great desserts of life -- hence the viability of the tourist industry there.

What I think, following my Moore/James hybridization, is this: rational folk ought to be able to agree that the contemplation of that place is a sublime perception, and such perceptions are good. Accordingly, we ought to be able to agree that any such course of action as that hypothesized above would have real costs, moral costs. Whether the moral costs would be "worth it" is, as I'm sure you would say, something we can't know in the abstract. But I submit we can know this: the moral costs would be real, and a failure to even take them into account would be ... well ... immoral.

Next week I'll have a bit more to say about this view of ethics (teleological intuitionism, to give it a label) and about its relationship to what one might call "desire satisfactionism."

I have other obsessions with which I will be dealing here over the next couple of days/entries. But I will return to these matters next week.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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