An odd letter of recommendation which, nonetheless, seems to have done the trick: Hart got the job. https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2024/01/blast-from-the-past-isaiah-berlins-letter-of-recommendation-for-hla-hart.html Brian Leiter writes about how important Hart became, and how ironic it is that Berlin was so condescending about his merits, since it is Berlin who is now fading into history. I disagree with Leiter's snark at Berlin's expense here. Berlin is a philosopher of considerable importance, IMHO. Hart (pictured) was the leading legal positivist of his generation. I suppose it is surprising Berlin didn't work up more enthusiasm for him but, after all, I don't have a high opinion of legal positivism. Still, a nice stand-out piece of history. Yesterday I included something random about low-brow pop culture in this blog. Consider this an equally random bit of flotsam about the high-brow stuff.
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In the comments section of a post I wrote many moons ago, I've been engaging in some back and forth with a reader, Marvin Edwards. Our discussion involved determinism and indeterminism in human action. I'm going to highlight the discussion here, because I think I put an important point quite well and am tired of patting myself on the back in private. "Christopher, if I am alone in a room with a bowl of a pples, and I'm feeling hungry, and I decide to go ahead and eat an apple, then I am the meaningful and relevant cause of the apple being eaten. Do any of the authors you mention suggest that it was 'some thing' other than me that caused the apple to be eaten?" Each of the four authors I had mentioned [James, Popper, Berlin, Kane] would agree with the following observations about eating apples. First, self-preservation is the deepest instinct, so of course we aren't free to get hungry or not to get hungry. In that sense, the matter is determin...
"The brute fact about the universe is that it is not fully expressible, it is not fully exhaustible, it is not at rest, it is in motion; this is the basic datum, and this is what we discover when we discover that the self is something of which we are aware only in effort. Effort is action, action is movement, movement is unfinishable -- perpetual movement. That is the fundamental romantic image, which I am trying to convey, as best I can, in words -- which ex hypothesi cannot convey it." So says Isaiah Berlin, in The Roots of Romanticism, especially with reference to Fichte, a portrait of whom I've included here.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's role in the creation of romanticism has been exaggerated in some circles, says Isaiah Berlin. In making this case, he says that there isn't as sharp a break between the canonical Enlightenment figures on the one hand and Rousseau on the other as is sometimes thought, at least if we look to actual content. "If we consider what it is that Rousseau actually said, as opposed to the manner in which he said it -- and the manner and the life are what are important -- we find that it is the purest milk of the rationalist world....Rousseau's actual doctrine is not all that different from that of the Encyclopaedists. He disliked them personally, because temperamentally he was a kind of dervish from the desert. He was paranoiac, savage, and gloomy in some respects ... he did not have much in common with the people at Holbach's rather irreverent table or at the elegant receptions with Voltaire held at Ferney. But this was to a certain degree a per...
Now ... why, in the face of such arguments as that I quoted yesterday, am I an incompatibilist? Here's why: the argument simply misses the point. What William James, and Isaiah Berlin, and more recently Robert Kane (the author of the volume pictured above) have been saying is that moral judgments with regard to action X (whatever it is) will come to seem meaningless unless we presume that there was a genuine possibility that X would not occur. Take that woman in the restaurant. We see her look at the menu, we see her order a meal, and presume as empiricists that she has just made a choice. Is this a choice to which moral judgments apply? The naive but appealing answer is, "yes," or at least, "it might be." If you believe in animal rights you will think her decision morally better if she ordered tofu than if she ordered pork. Aside from that, consider the possibility that she has a medical condition (we need not specify/stipulate further) and she has ju...
As I believe I've mentioned in this blog before, I contend that there are four components that must go into an complete and accurate ethical (and metaethical) philosophy, but to my dismay, few if any contemporary philosophers combine them. Such a successful ethics would be cognitivist, intuitionist, teleological, and pluralist. That is: it would see right and wrong, good and bad, as issues open to knowledge, not mere taste; it would allow room for intuition (a direct apprehension analogous to but not in fact sensory perception) at the base of this cognition; it would see the right as the way to get to the good; it would allow for more than one goodness, and perhaps then more than one right, too. I believe that Isaiah Berlin combined all these features But he's been dead for 20 years, and his period of "flourishing" requires that one go back somewhat further than that. A figure of more recent vintage? The Indian philosopher Amartya Sen, who is still with us, ...
The title of this blog entry is the title of a 2015 book by Marc O. DeGirolami, which takes an Isaiah Berlin-inspired approach to the issues of interpretation raised by the religion clauses of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Berlin famously critiqued the hedgehog-like view that, in his words, "there must exist a path which leads clear thinkers to the correct answers to these questions." The tragedy of life is that there is no such path, that good clashes not only with evil but with itself; good clashes with good, and some goods will of necessity be lost. Any effort to avoid this tragedy through a Grand Scheme produces a far greater tragedy, planners who try to force humanity to fit their scheme, at any cost necessary. DeGirolami, in much the same spirit, criticizes the "monists" who have a grand scheme in the world of first amendment litigation or, more so, scholarship. Among the first-amendment hedgehogs whom he critiques, the writing duo of C...
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'm told that Derek Parfit is an influential and important contemporary philosopher with an interest in both ethics and meta-ethics. He was born in 1942 and is still very much with us, so he qualifies as within the range of people who might satisfy my four-part test, announced here last month. His latest work, ON WHAT MATTERS, was published in this millennium (2011), though apparently drafts of key parts had circulated for years before that. So far as I can tell from quick googling and other superficial stuff, Parfit is a cognitivist, and is at least in part a teleologist, maybe even an intuitionist. The plank he seems most likely to reject of my four is pluralism. He seems to believe that all views worthy of consideration in ethical philosophy are reconciliable, as in his view are deontology, teleology, contractarianism. Thus, he doesn't have the sense of inevitable loss, something-valuable-must-be-lost, I find and value in James' writings and Berlin's. THAT i...
To resume discussion of the question I raised yesterday: is any living thinker with academic cred a cognitivist and intuitionist in meta-ethics, as well as a teleologist and pluralist in substantive ethics. I did receive one answer from my various postings of this question that deserves further inquiry: Amartya Sen (1933-). I looked into it a bit further. Sen is the author of COMMODITIES AND CAPABILITIES (1985); ETHICS AND ECONOMICS (1987); DEVELOPMENT AS FREEDOM (1999). In the first of these books, Sen looked at empirical evidence on gross national product per capita in various countries, and asked whether it correlates with other sensible-seeming measures of the well being of a country: life expectancy and infant mortality. Brazil and Mexico, he found, had more than SEVEN TIMES the per capita production of Sri Lanka, India, or China. But does that extra money buy them happiness? Sri Lanka does better than any of the other countries just listed by longevity and child mort...
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...
From ethics to meta-ethics. Ethics is the branch of philosophy that asks how we should act, what we should consider to be good or bad/evil, meta-ethics is the branch of philosophy that asks about that activity. So "how should I act?" is an ethical inquiry, and "what does it mean to ask how I should act?" is a meta-ethical activity. I've outlined in recent posts here what I consider a breakthrough in my own understanding of ethics. Here I'd simply like to apply some meta-ethical labels to the view that results. As I've noted, a good name for this type of view given traditional taxonomies would be"teleological intuitionism." What does that mean? It means that the view is intuitionist in that it relies upon an inferred human capacity [or "faculty" if you like] for the direct recognition of intrinsic goodness. It is teleological in that there is an end, the increase of the amount of intrinsic goodness in the world,...