Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I've heard that GE Moore once said that whenever he wrote anything down, he saw that it was either false or true but only if qualified. But then when he wrote the qualification down, he would see that the same was true of THAT. Much of PRINCIPIA ETHICA reads like what would eventually be produced by someone who has that sort of writer's block. A, but only when B, except that B is not strictly always necessary, in circumstances such as C, but there might be some ambiguity in that statement of C, so .... And I feel simpatico. As I've mentioned before, Moore is the great philosopher whose death comes closest to coinciding with my own birth. I was born at a moment when Moore only had six days to live. This story about his unquenchable self-qualifications rather strengthens the case that I am he, despite the brief overlap when we must have shared a soul, ebbing from one body and flowing into the other.

Let us pick up our thread about logical deduction. Our humble example of ‘trash day before laundry day’ may help us see that even our greatest (apparent) certainties have a probabilistic element to them. Consider our first premise. It probably is not the case that the trash collectors ALWAYS arrive on a Friday. There may have been one or more times since I’ve lived here when blizzard or wildcat strike or other disturbance in The Force has brought it about that the Friday collection didn’t happen. There must be some chance, however slight, that this Friday was one of those exceptional Fridays, so the collection I’m remembering didn’t happen until Saturday. Which means (if the other premises hold up) that today is actually Sunday. I better get busy on my laundry before my clothes get any more ripe! At any rate, let's bring this in contact with my theory of the right. The right is dependent upon the good, and the good is intuitively known. I am wIlling to embrace a ...

How old was Bertrand Russell in 1922? Not ALL that old, surely, because he had a lot of life left in him. The reason I ask (no reason to rush and look it up yourself, dear reader, I will do that for you shortly) is that Russell delivered a lecture in March 1922 that began with a rather supercilious reference to his age. The lecture, with the title, "Is there an Absolute Good?," answers the title question with a resounding "no." Furthermore, the "no" is true even if one interprets "absolute" so that it means something rather less demanding that it sounds. Russell meant to say that  there is no objective good. Important subject, but not why I'm writing this post. It is inspired by the opening of the lecture, which is this:   When the generation to which I belong were young, Moore persuaded us all that there is an absolute good. Most of us drew the inference that  we  were absolutely good, but this is not an essential part of Moore...

To: David Roberts I appreciate your recent two pieces on Vox concerning "rich jerks," which led you to a discussion of philosophical ethics, especially deontology versus teleology. Allow me to add my own thoughts. At the bottom, I'll say a few words about sources but, for now, I'll ignore my sources to allow for a conversational flow akin to your own. In meta-ethical terms, if I understand you, you seem to identify jerkiness with deontology, so non-jerkiness requires teleology. The classic example of means-regardless-of-ends deontology is of our alleged obligation to tell the truth even to a murderer about a potential victim in hiding. That particular example of supposed goodness would certainly seem jerky to the sorry fellow in hiding. You also seem to identify teleology (non-jerkiness) with utilitarianism. Of course there is nothing inevitable about that. I'd like to bend your ear on that point for a few minutes.   The gist of my pers...

Another candidate. As some of you may remember, I've been wondering aloud for some time whether there are any prominent ethical/meta-ethical philosophers active today who fit each of four labels in those fields that seem to me to go together rather naturally. Maybe Susan Haack would qualify. I recently reviewed a work of hers on the philosophy of the law of evidence, and in the process I expounded on her epistemology, "foundherentism." The idea is that learning about the world is like filling in a crossword puzzle. There is the foundational matter of satisfying the clues that come in from your senses (from outside the grid of the puzzle) and there is the coherentist matter of maintaining consistency within the grid, because of course the words cross each other. What occurred to me only after my review was published was that it is in principle possible that certain crossword puzzles will have more than one perfectly correct answer. Indeed, this is sometimes done....

I've posted in various places lately an inquiry about contemporary ethical and meta-ethical inquiry. I'll post it again here. Do my readers know of any scholar (preferably someone with academic cred, though not necessarily in a philosophy department) whose published positions enable us to describe him with each of the following four adjectives? Cognitivist, intuitionist, consequentialist, pluralist. It seems like a natural combination. As a cognitivist, our scholar would hold to a meta-ethics in which right and wrong, good and bad, are genuinely subjects for knowledge (not merely, say, for expressions of emotion). As an intuitionist, he/she would believe that there exists some immediate , non-inferential, grasp of some datum at the base of our reasonings on the subject. I have in mind especially Moore's notion that the good is in some sense like the color yellow, a perception that neurologically normal folk can take for granted, so that we don't reason about w...

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" o...

I believe I've made a breakthrough in my development of a personal moral philosophy. It involves the acknowledgement that one of my favorite essays of William James, the fellow for whom this blog is named, is at best seriously flawed. A crucial piece is missing. Further, I have decided that the best available supplier of that missing piece may be a philosopher who was a contemporary of James, but hardly a friend or pragmatist colleague. The philosopher G.E. Moore. Well, I suppose we can consider this part of what is implied in the word "Refreshed" in the title of this blog. In The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life , James writes that various "marks and measures of goodness" have been brought forth by philosophers, without any of them giving rise to consensus. "Thus, to be a mean between two extremes; to be recognized by a special intuitive faculty; to make the agent happy for the moment; to make others as well as him happy in the long run;...