Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

"By running up all the different virtues to this one species of propriety, Epicurus indulged a propensity, which is natural to all men, but which philosophers in particular are apt to cultivate with a peculiar fondness, as the great means of displaying their ingenuity, the propensity to account for all appearances from as few principles as possible. And he, no doubt, indulged the propensity still further, when he referred all the primary objects of natural desire and aversion to the pleasures and pains of the body." This is from THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS. The one "species of propriety" of Epicurus is temperance, the ability to refrain from the pursuit of particular pleasures out of a reasonable concern that they will cause harm later. For example, temperance is the ability to refrain from drinking so as to avoid a hangover. That, to Epicurus, WAS virtue. Smith is here criticizing the drive toward monism. After all, his book's title says "sentim...

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...

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...

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,...