Okay, that headline may not be exactly "click bait." I'm glad you're with me anyway. I believe I've mentioned in this blog at some point a book by a Plato scholar, Racanha Ramtekar, PLATO'S MORAL PSYCHOLOGY. The book drew a review from Nicholas Smith, and that review drew in turn a riposte from Ramtekar. I'll quote just a bit of the latter here. By way of background: it is a very common observation that the earlier dialogs of Plato take a very different point of view of morality and psychology than do later ones. One common contention is that Plato started off as a faithful follower of the historical Socrates, but then developed in different directions. This is sometimes called the "developmentalist" view of Plato, as opposed to he "unitarian" theory which makes the case that Plato was really consistent without. Ramtekar is neither a developmentalist nor a unitarian. She sees it as a false dichotomy. Her reviewer, Smit...
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Oxford University Press has a book out entitled Plato's Moral Psychology , written by Rachana Kamtekar, who is affiliated with Cornell University. The book came out in 2017 but seems still to be kicking up excitement in the relevant quarters of academe. It dd succeed in making a new splash out of its very old subject matter. She identifies a common understanding, among students of Plato, that there was a shift in Plato's views on moral psychology between the earlier dialogues and th e Republic . The early dialogs take an intellectualist view of motivation, so that bad actions are the consequence of error or ignorance, and virtue is teachable. But by the time he wrote the Republic (says the standard view) Plato had abandoned that intellectualism. Kamtekar believes this account mistaken. She holds instead, that for Socrates, at least as Plato retrospectively understood his views, that the good is the natural object of desire. This is not as simple as claim is that virtue ...
There's a certain type of choice that plays a big role in the thinking of a certain type of ethicist. Its a motivational conflict, in a "resistance to temptation" (R2T) context. I really want to do X. Perhaps it has been my lifelong habit to do X every morning. I only recently gave up, or tried to give up, on X. Yet the temptation to X now and then still recurs and must be resisted. At a given moment I either succumb, or I find some non-X diversion and my thoughts thankfully move elsewhere. My question for today: just how important is R2T. Is it paradigmatic, or is it a side issue? Has it been overemphasized, or the reverse?
Robert Audi is a contemporary exponent of intuitionism within the field of moral epistemology. That is, his answer to the question "how do we know what is right" involves an appeal to a quasi-sensory and non-inferential recognition one might call intuition for lack of a better term. His 2013 book MORAL PERCEPTION is one of those that puts this view forward. My understanding is that Audi specifically thinks of duties and their breach as the objects of this intuition. We intuit things like "lying is prima facie wrong." We neither infer it nor are we making a statement of subjective preference when we say such a thing. We intuit it and we are sensing something objectively true when we do so. I think there is something both importantly right and importantly wrong in this. I think that it is appropriate to ground moral judgments in intuitions, but those intuitions are of the goodness of events, not the rightness of actions. Intuitionism, that is, works better wit...
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 ...
An essay on the fundamentals of ethics. Long enough for a short book, perhaps. Pulling together things I've written on this blog and elsewhere on the subject, but not an anthology of stuff I've already written. Drawing on the history of philosophy, but not historical in focus. Organize like this? I. Is morality beyond the reach of knowledge? a) non-cognitive understandings of ethics b) a special case: the error theory c) the central case for a cognitivist understanding d) related but perhaps less central considerations here II. Is too much knowledge a threat to morality? a) stating the problem carefully b) dismissing the "faculty" of the will c) randomness and the understanding of time III. So we can know moral truths: how? a) what might serve as the foundation for ethical knowledge? Intuition! b) what we mean if we answer "intuition" c) what we don't mean, but may wrongly be th...
S. Matthew Liao has edited a new book on this subject. Amazon page here: https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199357676/wwwsmatthewli-20/ The various authors of the articles in this collection brief us on recent neurological advances on The Moral Brain, that is, on the neural correlates of moral judgments, and/or they cogitate on the philosophical significance of this work. I haven't read it and have nothing to say about it today but I think I've done my good deed by informing you of a new book on a subject that will likely interest anyone who shares my interest in a lot of the stuff I discuss in this blog. So ... read and enjoy!
I've heard it said that utilitarianism has this pragmatic benefit: it could constitute a plausible ethical consensus (even if we're all only pretending to believe it?) that could lessen the intensity of moral conflicts. In other words, it is better to argue over non-fundamental things than over fundamental things, because we're more likely to go to war over the latter than the former. Thinking this through: reaping this benefit would require us, I suppose, to give our consent to the simplest possible form of utilitarianism, because only that one can promise to turn serious substantive moral conflicts into mere mechanical computations. In the spirit of Jeremy Bentham, portrayed above, then, let us suppose that pleasure could be measured in, say "positive hedons." Pain could be treated as negative hedons. Consider whether the govt should require a vaccine. Add up all the positive hedons the policy will create (discounting for uncertainties), subt...
My personal view of the field, in ten questions. I'll work in traditional order, from Being through Knowledge, to Value. 1. Does the world consist of substances with attributes (that is, enduring things with various properties), or is that a misleading way of thinking? 2. If one accepts the substance/attributes dichotomy, what COUNTS as a substance? How many of them are there in the world? Are there an infinite number of substances, or could it all be boiled down to a smaller number? Three, as Descartes thought (mind, matter, God), or maybe just one? 3. In terms of the nature of a human being, are we each one substance with various attributes? Or are we two different substances that somehow interact? Or is a person an attribute of a trans-personal Substance? 4. If we end up with a view of the world in which humans consist of both mind and body: how DO they interact? 5. What do we mean by "truth" as a matter of common language. also, what SHOULD we take the ...
In a 1994 essay, Alan Gewirth (pictured here) admitted that Kant's argument to the categorical imperative had flaws, and he attempted a patch-up job. In a 2007 book, another philosopher Jesse Prinz, reconstructed Gewirth's reconstruction of what Kant might have meant. In Prinz' version it has an economical two premises, everything else is a conclusion. I present the Prinz version without further comment, except for one bracketed correction. P1. I am an agent. P2. If I am an agent, I accept that freedom and well-being are necessary for me. C1. Therefore, I accept that I must have freedom and well-being. (From P1 and P2.) C2. Therefore, I accept that it is impermissible to not have freedom and well-being. (From C1, because its denial is the contradiction of that premise.) C3. Therefore, I accept that it is impermissible for others to remove or interfere with my freedom and well-being. (From C2.) C4. Therefore, I accept that others ought to refrain f...
Just thinking aloud here.... Jean Jacques Rousseau became famous as an advocate of a philosophy that sounded to his contemporaries like a primitivism. (There is a good deal of dispute among scholars as to whether primitivism in the usual sense is what Rousseau actually meant, but rightly or wrongly, it is the appearance of primitivism that made him an Enlightenment star.) His first successful philosophical work was his "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences." He wrote it in response to an essay contest inspired by the Academy of Dijon, which had asked the contestants, "Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?" The wording of the question indicated that the Academy thought there were two possible answers -- (1), no, human moral character st...