I would like to suggest that members who guide a sessions (incl. those who did so in the past done) put their presentation/guidance-notes up on the board. This would facilitate access to them "as a whole". It would also form a collective record of what we, as a group, think of the book as we progress through it.
Richard, Ian and Simon - would you consider putting your notes up? This request applies to all past and future presenters too. Perhaps the notes could be posted via the "reply" facility to this very thread. That would keep the collection in a single thread and up to date in the bargain. Afterthoughts, comments, queries, clarifications - all can be accommodated here too (as responses).
Comments, thoughts, counter-thoughts,... welcome as always.
I am willing to copy in my 'presenter' notes, assuming the reply facility hasn't any tight size limits; not sure how much they will be read, but it should not take long to put them up and it is potentially useful. Am doubtful that these kind of notes form a record of what we as a group think of the book as we progress through it - they don't always express those kind of opinions, and when they do, not all agree. I don't think this is a problem, we just need to be clear about it.
These are my notes form our session on 2 October 2013
The Essential Midgley
Some notes on chapters 16-19
Simon Atkinson
Chapter 16
The main themes of this chapter seem to be:
- The impact of science on society and culture in general and specifically science’s role in “myth-making”. (p228-231)
- Scientists’ tendency to discuss purpose (Teleology), sometimes with references to God, which superficially appear to be beyond the scope of their discipline
Purpose-centred thinking is woven into all of our serious attempts to understand anything, and above all into those of science. .
(p232-234)
Is this really so?
- The use of misleading metaphors (communication, information) in popular scientific discourse. (p235)
Are these metaphors?
- Why science works – should it surprise us? (p236)
Is it really surprising?
Chapter 17
In this chapter Midgley homes in on evolutionary theory and some of the major distortions, as she sees them, which modern writers have inflicted on Darwin’s theory. Much of the problem, she maintains, arises from taking one aspect of the theory and using it to colour a whole world-view.
Symbolism, then, is not just a nuisance to be got rid of. It is essential. Facts will never appear to us as brute and meaningless; they will always organise themselves into some sort of story, some drama. They can distort our theories and they have distorted the theory of evolution perhaps more than any other. (p242)
Is evolution a very special case, or does the same problem occur elsewhere?
These distortions have led to the two major errors of “Social Darwinism” and “Panglossism”
Chapter 18
This chapter examines the “escalator” theory of evolution in which we always progress “up” and evolutionary ladder. Midgley discusses an overlap – or at least areas of common interest between science and religion, and then describes some extreme predictions of human initiated “evolution” amounting, she says, to creation myths. She dismisses, with help from quoting David Bohm, biochemists’ optimism in finding and redesigning mechanisms for everything. And anyway, she says, if the objective is to redesign human nature, it is not clear in what respects a redesign is needed.
Could a redesign lead to real improvements?
Is it inevitable anyway?
What about machine intelligence?
Chapter 19
Having disposed of “Panglossism” Midgley turns to “Social Darwinism”.
The components that she discusses are:-
- The impact of the struggle for survival inherent in Darwinism on the overall world-view or creation myth. (p 257-8)
- Language distortions and the movement of some words from a specific scientific context to ordinary language. In particular talk of “motives” and “selfish” create huge misunderstandings (p258-9)
- Herbert Spencer and “survival of the fittest” with its intrinsic selfishness as a social ideal
- The tendency to fatalism induced by evolutionary theory (although in some authors such as Huxley, humanity is arbitrarily excluded). (p261-2)
- The fact that organisms do co-operate (p262-3)
The animism with which leads authors like Dawkins to describe genes as “selfish”, and leads then to him describing organisms as selfish. (p264-5)
How important a problem is this?
- The contradiction involved in Dawkins stating both that
…genes exert ultimate power over behaviour and
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism because we are born selfish (p265-6)
Surely Dawkins couldn’t mean “ultimate power”?
In summary
Sociobiology is a false light because it is “reductive” in the sense of ruling out other enquiries, of imposing its own chosen model as the only norm…. To balance the austere renunciation of religious ideas and of a normal view of human standing in the biosphere, which Wilson and Dawkins denounce, they offer us a mystique of power, vicarious indeed, but evidently….. none the less exciting for that. (p268)
Midgley argues that everyone should take a moral stance (even though they may be wrong).
She claims that one's moral stance is based on a mixture of feeling and reason.
She argues against “moral isolationalism” and claims one can apply one's moral stance everywhere.
Questions
Does Midgely believe that there are absolute moral principles? (If so, where do they reside?)
Or does she believe that, by feeling and reason, humans can reach towards a common set of moral principles?
Or does she believe we should all develop our own moral principles?
Or something else?
Chapter 13 Escaping From Solitude
Moore on Common Sense pg 184
Moore says we all know with certainty a long lists of “truisms” such as the fact that our own bodies exist as well as those of equally conscious other people.
Moore asks what anyone who claims to doubt these ”truisms” means by their doubt. What do they think could be true instead? Furthermore ”it is hard to see what a doubt can mean if it is impossible to express it except in terms which imply it has already been settled e.g. using the language of a many-personed world.”
Midgley, as an aside, criticizes the sceptic for treating it as a game and not co-operating in thinking out the issue.( Has she not read Plato's Socrates!)
Moore shifts the question from “Are you sure you know this?” to “What do you mean by this?” This is shifting the questioner from being a sceptic to a common sense person? The first question appears to be by a sceptic Are you sure you reallyknow this? The second question is the common sense response - What do you mean if you deny it? Explain yourself. And why are you bothering talking to me if I don't exist!
The Meaning of Meaninglessness pg 186
Questions can only make sense in a context containing clear alternatives. Is this so? Can we think of a sensible question that does not have a clear alternative?
This incredibly general kind of doubt (e.g. about the existence of other minds) is not just unreasonable – it does not make sense. To make sense of something you need to show how it could be applied. Because Moores' “truisms are so sweeping it calls on us to show how the denial of them can fit into the general landscape of our thought, and what changes would be needed to accommodate them. She is trying to show how the alternatives to the “truisms” cannot be explained i.e. are meaningless. But what about the alternative to the flat Earth? Could that be explained by early man? Was “Is the Earth flat” a meaningless question?
The burden on anyone who wants to defend the Cartesian picture is one of explanation of alternatives rather than proof of them (obviously).
There is a danger of over-extending the use of an valid explanation in a specific context for a specific purpose to other purposes not intended by the inventor (e.g. evolution, competition).
So it is with over-extending the use of the Cartesian position on knowledge (i.e. you can't be absolutely certain) by individualistic moral systems such as Existentialism and Social Darwinism. This is part of her attack on relativism in morals. But relativism doesn't depend on this over-extension in any way.
My take on this section:
The meaning of something is an explanation of it. Something is meaningless (to me) if it is without meaning or explanation. Meaning is subjective.
Something is true (within a context) if it can be relied upon. Its truth can either be proved using reliable methods of logic and other prior truths – e.g. Descartes, Russell or its alternative is absurd, contradictory or meaningless e.g. Moore, Midgley. It can also be relied upon if it has been thoroughly tested by science or experience.
Sceptics believe you can't prove (in the Descartian sense) the existence of other minds. That doesn't mean that they don't believe there are other minds. You just can't logically prove it. Midgley argues that the alternative is absurd or contradictory and therefore untrue. Both are right. They are talking past each other.
Clearing up the Concept of Knowledge pg 188
People who say “I know” are not making a report about some special state or process. They are making claims and offering to take responsibility for them.
(“They know” = “they are relying on their claims and suggesting you do too”.)
“How do you know that you know?” translates as “How can you rely on the fact that you are relying on the fact?” Makes no sense.
The work of the word “know” is to help people distinguish between the more reliable and less reliable parts of the world around them. In doing this, speakers offer their own guarantees, which are of course understood, like all human guarantees, to be fallible. Though it is our business to offer these guarantees carefully and responsibly, and therefore only offer them when we do have reason to be certain. We are not omniscient. The appearance of permanent, lifelong confidence which seems to attach to some uses of “know” is a superficial one. As Wittgenstein remarks – One always forgets the expression “I thought I knew”.
This is good stuff!
The Status of Truisms pg 200
Can Moore be saying that there really is a particular set of propositions which are infallibly known? If so, there would be a real difficulty about the fact that they seem to change. Accordingly, slapdash relativism, emphasising such cases, sometimes seems to destroy Moore's point. Yet open-minded readers still feel its force. There really does seem to be something dishonest and confused about pretending to doubt things which in fact we do not see how to doubt.
Wittgenstein says that the point is not that these particular propositions have a special intrinsic quality, making them alone permanently and absolutely certain. It is that, for every individual and every society, some set of propositions at any time must occupy this base position. (A sophisticated relativist position) That set provides the background against which other things are questioned. Its various elements are not themselves incapable of being questioned. But they cannot be questioned unless some other set gains a special force and solidity, and supplies a ground adequate to support questions about them. He gives the useful analogy of a river-bed.
This analogy is designed to do justice to both of two conflicting demands, the first of which has in recent times been stressed out of all proportion to the second. The first is the need to remember that we might be wrong. The second is the need to be honest about the extent that we are, on some central points, right, and to register our claim that we are so.
The peculiar way of talking that seems to treat all beliefs as equally valid in their own culture is an artificial anthropological approach; it is essentially a way of talking about other people. The world however does not consist only of other people. Each of us is somewhere inside it. For each of us, the question of just where we stand in that world is a crucial one.
She is putting more emphasis on the advocate role rather than the judge role. Perhaps she mixes with more detached judge types and is looking for more passionately held beliefs? Personally I think there is too much passionate advocacy of conflicting causes. I'd like a bit more detached judgement.
The need to bring these two half-truths (“I may be wrong but I know I'm right”) together effectively seems to me a central one.
Philosophizing Out in the World pg 192
In every culture, intense loving attention to certain chosen problems contrasts with a startling neglect of others. Large obvious central questions can be entirely ignored. This is natural, because they are very frightening.
Who chooses these problems? Midgley? And who decides which are central? e.g. looking for a job versus worrying about the rain forests.
As defence mechanisms, most of us rely chiefly on sheer inattention but we usually supplement this by some quarrelsomeness. We distract ourselves from large issues by feuding over small ones. An obsession with controversy continually distorts our approach to our enquiries. Our tribal loyalties serve to over-simplify our dilemmas.
Here Midgley is suggesting we act as dispassionate judges rather than partisan advocates. This is in contrast to her earlier dismissal of “neutral” philosophy. I suspect she would prefer for people to agree with her advocacy without arguing! I think passionate arguments on both sides of a question illuminates the issues - then you can apply dispassionate judgment.
Intelligence is Not Enough pg 194
This attention to motive and context is not a distraction from the real work of philosophy, but an essential part of it. The meaning of words depends on how they are used and intended. We cannot split off feeling from intellect. (I agree).
It is clear that we don't use one-tenth of the intelligence we have got already. (Is it?)
My present point is that it is sense (good judgement?) we lack, rather than intellectual power. In finding and formulating the rules that underlie sense, in noting their clashes and inadequacies, and looking for ways to deal with them, we are bound to be doing philosophy. Philosophy is the formalization of an ancient art which used to called the search for wisdom.
A lot of intelligent people can be quite stupid and lacking in judgement. So can philosophers. Think of Russell. I don't think philosophy is the answer to cultivating wisdom. I think it lies in having wide and varied experience, keeping an open mind and understanding all the psychological biases we all are prone to.
Traps and Entanglements pg 195
She complains of philosophers pointing out paradoxes and inconsistencies, or finding fault with another's reasoning (Hammer and Tongs – this is a joke!), or Professor Poker on “ Is murder wrong” encouraging his first year students to critically examine and challenge conventional wisdom.
But surely this is what philosophy is for? (I agree it can descend into nit-picking and pedantry – viz. all the red type here).
I have suggested that what chiefly wastes our efforts in applying philosophical thought to those problems in the world where it is most needed is not lack of intelligence but the distorting effect of bad intellectual habits which have a strong emotional basis.
If thinking is our professional concern, then wisdom and wonder are our business; information-storage, though often useful, is just an incidental convenience. So we will do better to pursue wisdom and wonder, however haltingly and weakly. Then follows the story of the Crock of Gold.
What on earth is she talking about!
Chapter 14 The Human Heart and Other Organs
The Function of the Heart pg 198
The heart is the centre of concern, the mind is the centre of purpose or attention, and these cannot be dissociated. This does not prevent the mind from being the seat of thought, because thought in general is not just information-handling or abstract calculation but is the process of developing and articulating our perceptions and feelings.
Our thought is the more or less coherent form into which our perceptions and feelings constantly organise themselves. And the compromise between various strong conflicting feelings express itself in our heart or character.
I am not denying that there can be discrepancies and conflicts between thought and feeling, or between feeling and action. There can. But they have to be exceptional. In general, feelings, to be effective, must take shape as thoughts, and thought, to be effective, must be powered by suitable feelings. (Is this so?)
Disentangling the intellectual from the emotional aspects is performing a piece of abstraction, one that needs enormously more care than theorisers usually give it.
The Divorce Between Feeling and Reason pg 201
British moral philosophy has occupied itself with a dispute about whether morality is a matter of reason or feeling. (She quotes Hume). It is both.
The metaphor of foundation is disastrous. A building can only sit on one foundation so it looks as if we have to make a drastic choice. But we don't.
Hume's question only makes sense if it is treated as one of emphasis.
My own view is that the foundation of morality is feeling (based on genetics and culture) and we then post-rationalise it using reason to convince ourselves and others (and also to get it institutionalised into laws.)
The Divorce Between Nature and Will pg 202
Our ideas of freedom and nature have been developed in different contexts and are not shaped to fit each other. What is missing is the background map of the whole self, within which both the natural desires and the shaping will, which develops to organise them, can find a context.
She goes on to lament the contribution of academic specialisation to the splitting process.
The fear of determinism arises largely from people's habit of treating all causes as enemies rather than friends, deprivations rather than gifts. Gifts are enabling causes; it is hard to see how we could manage without them. What on earth is she on about!
Overall in this section she is trying to counter attempts to isolate moral judgement from the rest of our nature.
The Fragmenting of the Moral Personality pg 205
If, as Moore argues, moral judgements are really exempt from argument, then whatever faculty makes the judgements is split off from all intelligible relation to the rest of the character. The point at which this split occurs varies according to which faculty we use to do the judging.
Some philosophers have suggested that these judgements are matters of feeling. (This is emotivism). They often entangle this with relativism, which is (approximately) the somewhat puzzling view that duties bind only in particular cultures. A loose and shifting combination of relativism with emotivism gives rise to the way of thinking which I have called moral isolationism, and have discussed in the next chapter “On Trying Out One's New Sword”.
She gives a caricature of relativism and splits relativism from absolutism in a way that she decries in other areas. If genetics drives some moral principles these will tend to be universal (absolutism) whereas cultural drivers will produce more local moral principles (relativism). Morality covers both kinds.
This mixture looks like a high-minded and flexible kind of immoralism. I argue that it is in fact a fraudulent mess. Clashes and confusions cannot be dealt with only by feeling; they need thought, and no culture can be thought about in isolation from its fellows. Liberal principles depend on serious moral judgements, articulated and endorsed, not just by emotion but by the personality as a whole.
She then describes a number of other philosophical proposals including prescriptivism and games-playing.
Naturalism and Reductivism pg 209
Philosophers were trying to avoid the danger of distorting and degrading morality by resting it on the wrong kind of arguments, and particularly on arguments taken from the natural sciences, i.e. naturalism. The clearest case of this distortion is crude “evolutionary ethics” or Social Darwinism. You are an ethical naturalist if you say that “good” simply means “evolved – a more evolved society is better than a less evolved one. Or if you say that the fittest – that is the most successful – individuals ought to prevail because evolution demands it
This the Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged) neo-con position. Midgely doesn't agree with it. Neither do I.
Midgley says “Evolutionary ethics is an outstanding conceptual pigs' breakfast, a classic show-piece of non-thought”.
Midgley applies the bombastic approach that she decries in Moore. Social Darwinism needs a better rebuttal than this.
But the real danger to the autonomy of morals is not naturalism but crude reductivism. It is reductivism that wrecks many attempts to find a “scientific basis or foundation for morality” where basis or foundation means something like an explanation or justification.
She describes three kinds of reductivism. One is based by analogy on the foundations of mathematics using axioms and logic but our emotional constitution is not revealed by logic. She also describes psychological and physical reductivism. The problem with these is the use of the word “really” to describe what is going on. It is legitimate to claim explanatory power for certain reductions but not to claim exclusive status.
Inside and Outside pg 212
Some moral philosophers have drawn a sharp line between motive (inside) and action (outside), between subjectivism (inside) and behaviourism (outside), mind (inside) and body (outside).
Midgley describes the problems associated with taking an extreme view on either side of this divide. A new starting point is needed. Philosophers began to look at language which has the advantage of being public. This seems to me to be a bit of a digression.
About the relation of mind and body in particular, we must pose the question in a way that avoids the suggestion of a race where two contenders – mind and body – compete for a prize, namely, the status of reality. In any decent sense of real, both are quite real.
The mind is not in the body as a pilot is in a ship, but much more as the inside of a teapot is inside the teapot. We are not compelled to say “a man is really his body”. He is the whole, of which mind and body are equally just aspects, much more like temper or size or intelligence than they are like teeth or toes.
This, as I take it, is the first message for ontologists of Wittgenstien's Philosophical Investigation. The second is the better-known point that metaphysical language must be closely examined. It really is not clear what we mean by calling such very general things real or unreal; translations must be given.
Chapter 15 On Trying Out One's New Sword on a Chance Wayfarer pg 218
Many people hold that the world is sharply divided into separate societies, sealed units, each with its own system of thought. They feel that the respect and tolerance due from one system to another forbids us ever to take up a critical position to any other culture. I shall call this position “moral isolationism”. I shall suggest that it makes no sense at all.
To show this, take the example of the Japanese custom of a Samurai trying out his new sword on a chance wayfarer. When we hear of a custom like this, we may feel that we not qualified to criticize it because we do not understand that culture.
But are people in other cultures equally unable to criticize us?
Does the isolating barrier between cultures block praise as well as blame?
What is involved in judging other cultures? Is there anything wrong with that?
If we can't judge other cultures, can we really judge our own?
In short, moral isolationalism would lay down a general ban on moral reasoning. In this vacuum, we could form no judgements on our own actions. And that would be odd.
The moral isolationist's picture of separate, unmixable cultures is quite unreal. Our own culture is a fertile jungle of different influences.
The root of moral isolationalism is the fact that anthropologists used to concentrate largely on very small and remote cultures that made neat, self-contained subjects for study.
Morally as well as physically, there is only one world, and we all have to live in it.
What does she mean by this last sentence? Does she simply mean that there are no off-limits to our moral judgements and conversations (I agree with that) or does she mean that moral principles are universal and apply everywhere? (I disagree with that).
My notes:
MARY MIDGLEY – THE ESSENTIAL MARY MIDGLEY – CH.11 WISDOM AND CONTEMPLATION
OUTLINE OF ARGUMENT
1. All human advance needs specialization, yet this specialization conflicts with individuality which we also need.
2. MM wants to focus on “the effect of specialization on those who pursue knowledge”, as this gives rise to a danger “which blocks our efforts to deal with the whole tangle.”
3. In what sense is a thing known if 500 people each know one constituent?
4. An unusable store of knowledge has been created, but the process of educating people to think about the knowledge they have will be starved.
5. Einstein: “Knowledge exists in two forms – lifeless, stored in books, and alive, in the consciousness of men”.
6. Page 156: “If Einstein was right, then our knowledge ought surely to be something alive in our consciousness. It should be working there, which means it must work as part of us...Merely holding information or handing it on like a dead fish to students cannot be enough.”
7. Academics are often aware of this problem but tend to consider it insoluble.”They often believe that the mere recent increase in the amount of knowledge inevitably involves its continual sub-division into smaller and smaller fractions distributed among more and more holders... ‘Greater riches now demand a less unified kind of safekeeping.’ “
8. If this were true, we would have moved into a condition where we cannot actually use or enjoy our wealth of knowledge. [RM comment: I do not quite follow this logic.] “As we shall see, the right use of knowledge is simply not compatible with this indefinitely continued subdivision. It involves understanding, which means treating knowledge as a whole.”
9. “But of course the wider outlook has not become impossible.” [RM comment: it seems to me two things are being argued in these lines; [1] right use of knowledge is not compatible with this subdivision which is happening; [2] but even though it is happening, the wider outlook is still possible. On the face of it, these statements seem to me to contradict each other, but the development of the argument may show this not to be the case; for example, maybe ‘outlook’ does not involve ‘use of knowledge’.]
10. What does live working of knowledge involve? Plato, Aristotle and Spinoza thought the aim of knowledge was contemplation itself – the aim not merely of all discovery, but of life itself.
11. Present-day scientists say little about contemplation and exalt discovery over knowledge. Edward O. Wilson (sociobiologist) says scientists know in order to discover, but also that ‘humanists’ are wise men who interpret knowledge.
12. But many humanists too have disowned even the quest for wisdom.
13. There is a real change here: the belief that professionals should be solely concerned with the technical parts of their studies. “Knowledge is increasingly divorced from wisdom.” [p.160]
14. NB Possibly something much larger is wrong with this narrowed use of the intellect than has been mentioned so far. Nicholas Maxwell has argued that the radical, wasteful misdirection of our whole academic effort is actually a central cause of the sorrows and dangers of our age:
“ ‘Problems of knowledge ...need to be rationally subordinate to intellectually more fundamental problems of living...The task...must be to create...a rich store of...possible actions, so that our capacity to act intelligently and humanely in reality is thereby enhanced.’ “ [My
italics].
15. What is necessary is not just to talk about the world but to act rightly in it (inner as well as outer action).
16. Thinking about how to live is a more basic and urgent use of the human intellect than the discovery of any fact whatsoever, and the considerations it reveals ought to guide us in our search for knowledge.
17. In fact MM thinks the current notion of aiming at knowledge is unrealistic and self-defeating – not a wrong but genuine option, but no sort of an option at all; not the name of a distinct, modern and enlightened ideal which has superseded wisdom as a goal.
18. But to understand this fully, we need to develop gradually the notion of wisdom which her approach involves. We will then see knowledge properly as having its own place in our priority system as a whole.
Richard Myers 14/5/13
MORE NOTES:
MARY MIDGLEY – THE ESSENTIAL MARY MIDGLEY – CH.12 THE WITHDRAWAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY
OUTLINE OF ARGUMENT
1. GE Moore’s first book, Principia Ethica [PE], which came out in 1903, changed the face of English-speaking moral philosophy for more than half a century, justifying the retreat of the learned from this central area of everyday human thought.
2. PE exalted what Moore saw as ordinary thought on moral matters but by treating it not really as thought at all, but as pure intuition, unrelated to the main system of other existing ideas. Moore declared that all the reasoning used to support moral judgements was empty because it was vitiated by a ‘naturalistic fallacy’. This was an irrationalist, anti-cognitive picture of morals.
3. This message was eagerly welcomed , partly because many people were exhausted by the confusion of existing moral argument. Much of the book’s force was also due to its prophetic style which dismissed virtually all previous moral argument.
4. The response of Moore’s successors is still important today. Why did it take people so long to see the weaknesses in the idea of a single, all-pervading ‘naturalistic fallacy’ or ‘gap between facts and values’?
5. The answer is in the power of two ideas influential at the time and still so today: modernness and professionalism. [RM comment: but MM adds more answers later on.] Modernness believed a single, benign change was taking place throughout all aspects of civilization. The trouble with this idea is not only that it lumps quite different changes together, but also that it cannot cope with continuing change. [p165 foot] [RM note: in the original book, MM went on next to talk about professionalism, the second of the ‘two ideas’, but this passage has been taken out.]
6. PE’s last chapter on The Ideal exalted certain values of the inner life, aesthetic and personal, over everything else in life. This was the part which reached the public and shaped people’s lives.
7. The rest of PE which furnished the ground rules for later professionalism was concerned with proving the impossibility of using any arguments to support any value-judgements whatever. It concentrated exclusively on logical rather than moral considerations.
8. Moore started from a half-truth that difficult moral arguments all run into a dark patch. His terminology concerned the failure to define good. This was so remote from the language of his victims that it was easy for a writer of his confident cast to carry his readers over the huge differences between the varying views he attacked. His successors noticed the shakiness of this idea and substituted “the idea of a logical gap between facts and values (or emotions or attitudes)or between description and prescription. In each case the appearance of uniformity was kept up by remaining very abstract.”
9. It is natural in any thinking, when we reach a difficult point, to describe the previous, accepted part of our thinking as ‘the facts’ and see a gap between that and the questionable area we are now addressing. But this is a temporary separation for the sake of argument, not a permanent intrinsic difference. The so-called facts are never really raw data but have been already shaped by our concepts.
10. The word ‘fact’ is normally opposed not to value but to something more like ‘opinion’. G Warnock warns against letting ourselves being bullied out of the conviction which we all have that at least some questions as to what is good or bad for people are not matters of opinion (torture, starvation).
11. Further, we do not find it easy to see facts in a way which fails to fit our value-judgements.
[p 170, para. 2]
12. Strange and misleading effects in even very personal areas of life can flow from the notion of ‘facts’ as things totally detached from feelings and will. (Bertrand Russell and love.)
13. The idea of the facts sometimes varying with values does not “tip us into helpless scepticism”. It simply calls attention to the web of conceptual links between all the facets of the moral enterprise. It has been a real misfortune for our civilization that the philosophers we are discussing have separated these factors and put them in competition with each other. In an age when the world changes so fast, it is vital to attend to the relation between them. This is difficult but possible. [p 171 foot] [RM comment: there is an interesting analysis of the ‘web of conceptual links’ here.]
14. PE, for all its emphasis on logical considerations, did include a substantial value-theory expressed in the last chapter [already discussed]. Moore saw the link as being that a reader who avoided all the irrelevancies induced by the naturalistic fallacy would find themselves left with the scheme of values he exalted.
15. But his successors did not necessarily share Moore’s values. They each had their own view of morality, views which – as the world grew more and more confused from the time of the First World War – became increasingly various…What the academic successors chiefly saw..was..a way of keeping moral philosophy clear of confusing moral conflicts in the real world altogether.
16. There was an element of professional narrowness in this, but they were also moved by real moral considerations about the faults of existing doctrines, especially utilitarianism. But their attack was distorted by the need to concentrate officially on logical incompetence rather than ‘vice, folly or danger’. If this formal approach were really the only one open to philosophers, then logically “they need not concern themselves about the moral implications of what was being argued. They should be perfectly satisfied with consistent iniquity. And..it began to be assumed that moral philosophers ought to be neutral in this way about substantial moral questions. This view was clearly stated by CL Stevenson in Ethics and Language (1944). [p173 top]
17. This idea of professional neutrality in moral matters [‘emotivist ethics’] has no way of resolving value-conflicts.[p174 top]
18. The neutral approach is so strange, it puzzles us how it can have been treated as the core of moral philosophy for several decades. One reason may be a link was felt to the kind of impartiality expected of professionals such as doctors and lawyers – without seeing the limits there are to such impartiality e.g. doctors are expected to be on the side of health. Taking sides on moral questions seemed to these philosophers amateurish. Earlier moral philosophers were called ‘pre-Copernican’.
19. Another reason was that the neutral approach “sprang partly from the wish to assert the freedom of individual moral agents to make their own value-judgements boldly and honestly. This ..stance..seems to have been motivated by another unacknowledged moral aim, a distaste ..for blame and punishment.”
20. “Moore was as extreme a consequentialist in morals as Mill/Bentham…He thought it obvious that actions were valueless in themselves and that only the states they produced could have value.” “Good intentions are of little account.” “…blame in its existing sense can no longer be attached to doing wrong.”[p176 middle]
21. This gave philosophers a reason [RM: another reason?] for retreating from the business of moral judgement which was seen essentially as one of allotting blame. This was welcome to humane people who were attracted by the reforming programme of utilitarianism but put off by its emphasis on punishment and its vulgarly reductive theory of value.
22. The idea of a naturalistic fallacy could shoot down every kind of argument (apart from simple causal argument). It was anti-thought. Its destructive zeal was particularly directed against utilitarianism.
23. The naturalistic fallacy way of arguing is largely discredited among philosophers today because of its formal confusion. But it is a pressing need to understand how it came to command so much respect, because we too may be subject to influences no more cogent.
24. “In our age, the revulsion against ‘making moral judgements’ has a powerful hold both on theory and on practice. The words ‘judgmental’ and ‘moralistic’ [are] widely used as terms of abuse…” But, in complete opposition to this way of thought, “We need the natural, sincere reactions of those around us if we are to locate ourselves morally or socially at all.”
25. So unfamiliar is this idea today, that even readers who agree we each need to accept blame may still deny we can ever properly blame others. But blame – the expression of disapproval – has an essential function in the interpretation of many important acts – The question is often “Who is responsible? Who did something?” [p178 middle]
26. Today the proposal to abolish blame is still with us, though starting to be damaged by protests from the unfortunate officials expected to put it into practice – social workers etc. If we shrug off these protests by blaming the protesters, we are still making use of blame. Typically, people who in principle wish to abolish blame wholesale make some tacit exceptions. This is not just a chance inconsistency. Praise and blame are unavoidable forms of moral light and shadow. Without them , the world would be a uniform grey – scarcely ideal. [RM comment: this seems a bit weak.]
27. Thus the idea of a blame-free world seems not to make sense. It is the job of philosophers to explore the conceptual difficulties in understanding the task of blame and the psychological difficulties in carrying it out. It is because the work is so hard and so important that unrealistic proposals for ceasing to judge altogether are so misplaced.
28. The abolishers do not lack moral concern, but their concern is so selective, ignoring all the other vices which press on us. The idea of abolishing blame seems to depend on the value-judgement that blaming itself is a worse evil than the vices it exists to indict. [p179 foot] This judgement is not explicitly stated but implied by the general shape of discussions, by the selection of problems and by the kind of moral indignation that writers express. All this is to be seen in J Bennett’s condemnation of the 18th C Puritan theologian, J Edwards as worse than Himmler. [p180 top]
29. [p181 foot] The peculiar moral obsession of our age is a self-righteous preoccupation with putting down self-righteousness. This deflects our attention from more serious questions. ‘Anti-naturalist’ moral philosophy arose mainly out of this defensive attitude and has owed much of its appeal to it. The general effect has been destructive by avoiding hard philosophical work “on the intellectual schemes which are expressed in choice and action”. [p182 top] The sense of modesty which has made moral philosophers bow discretely out has been badly misplaced.
30. We cannot stop people thinking. Moral philosophy will be done in any case, well or badly, as people under strain try to adapt their concepts to changing circumstances. Making suggestions for new ways of treating problems is contributing to a co-operative enterprise to answer questions that already arise [not acting like the Pope]. The current demand for medical ethics etc shows how widely the need is felt. Commonsense has a part to play, after its surface confusions are sorted out. This process may require rejection of theories/methods currently approved by scholars. If so, it is imperative that this rejection should take place.
31. MM has flatly refused to accept Moore’s claim that his move was purely formal, giving the motive as the flight from blame. Whether this was in fact the motive or not, we should be clear that some motive existed; there is always reason to reject purely formal explanations for large changes in ideas. [p182 foot] “Our attempt to find better and worse ways of regarding the world and acting in it is not – as Russell thought – an irrelevant interference with our efforts to discover the truth about it. It is the whole enterprise within which those efforts are a part. We build within our moral and metaphysical assumptions.” [p183 top] [RM comment: Nietzsche would agree.]
32. “We can develop these assumptions…But…do not have to make the moral ones always give place to the ones concerned with theoretical truth. For instance, if we have a strong preference for a particular way of life, it is perfectly in order for us to look for reasons to justify that bias, and to try to convert others to it, provided we show honestly that that is what we are doing.”
33. “What constitutes bias is not acceptance of one’s own existing scheme of values, because that scheme is always relevant. It is refusal to look at anyone else’s.”
Many people are [justifiably] appalled by the huge uncriticised impetus, the indiscriminate overconfidence, the obsessive one-way channelling of energy, fired by a single vision such as particle physics, information technology or biotechnology.
Devastatingly brilliant - and to think that I toiled all this time for such a load of verbosity! Mind if I steal and present them instead of mine on Wednesday?
Agreed, we should. And thanks, Ian, for doing it on our behalf.
Folks, I just sounded out our group for its consent and got this discussion board set up so we could discuss things offline at length without wasting anyone's time! That about sums up any special role I have had in it.
But primarily it is OURS - the group's common ownership. It is open to all Philosophy 2 members, though you will still need to write to the webmaster so that he can authorise you to post stuff (takes 24 hours). Meanwhile, any Farnham U3A member can read it.
