There's too little philosophy on here at the moment, despite the fact that what keeps me from updating this blog is all the philosophy I'm doing out there in meat space. Here's a small something I did in the course of the programme I'm in: a summary of one of my favourite ethical articles, Christine Swanton's 'A Virtue Theoretical Account of Right Action' (Ethics 112 (October 2001): 32–52, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/322742 ).
During my time as a philosophy undergraduate at Auckland I came to understand that the normal textbook portrayals of virtue ethics are terribly insufficient. On most accounts, virtue ethics is supposed to be not about what you do but what kind of person you are. That's complete nonsense, of course. To paraphrase Mary Midgley: to do something based not on what the situation demands but merely in order to not sully your own character is far from admirable, but frivolous and narcissistic. If virtue ethics really were about being and not doing, it would make its adherents all be guilty of crass inconsiderateness. And the theory is certainly better than that. The mistake the common 'being not doing' characterisation of virtue ethics makes is that it makes the virtues to be about a person, whereas they obviously should concern people's relationship to their situations: honest people respond to questions with earnestness, to deceipt with distaste, and so on.
What I like about Swanton's paper is how clearly and powerfully it addresses that relationship between the person and the situation, and what the virtue- and vice-terms say about that situations. Swanton isn't the only virtue ethicists to get this right, of course, but I like the way she addresses it.
She tries to give us criteria for acting rightly as follows: “(1) an action is virtuous in respect V (e.g., benevolent, generous) if and only if it hits the target of (realizes the end of) virtue V (e.g., benevolence, generosity); (2) an action is right if and only if it is overall virtuous.” She presents this 'target-centred' approach as an alternative and in contrast to Rosalind Hursthouse's 'qualified agent' approach (which is what Timmons discusses), wherein we can identify right actions by considering whether a virtuous person acting in character would do them, and Michael Slote's 'motive centred' approach, where an act is right if it comes from virtuous motives. How her approach differs from the other two is that she teases apart 'acting from virtue', where you act with the same motivations, emotions and perspective as somebody with the virtue would, and 'virtuous acts', which are when you do what the virtue demands of you (hit the target of the virtue). For her the right acts are the ones that manage to do the just, honest, benevolent, etc, thing, whereas the good ones are those you do out of justice, honesty, benevolence, etc.
Even if we don't end up agreeing with Swanton, the article is interesting and worthwhile in a few ways. Most importantly, the distinction between acting from virtue and virtuous acts helps us to understand exactly what virtues are and how they're supposed to help us make the right decisions. Virtues are dispositions of character – the way somebody might characteristically respond to their circumstances – which includes what they see in a situation, how they feel about what they see, what they are motivated to do and what they aim for in those situations. Acting from virtue is to act based on all of these internal states, that is, to have that virtue during acting. However, you can do something with the same effect as someone who has a virtue without really having it: for instance, I can do something kind even if I am not by following the prompts a kind person gives me. This example of kindness would be a virtuous action, but it wouldn't be acting from virtue. A virtuous act, like the example, would be one which hits the target of the virtue: nurturing the well-being of the person I'm tending to, or however you want to put it. It is worth noting that the distinction between acting from virtue and acting virtuously isn't one of getting everything internal to yourself right versus getting everything external right, since the target of a virtue might sometimes be internal to yourself, like courage where you need to control your own fear and confidence.
The example of somebody doing the right thing by imitating somebody virtuous is an example where you act virtuously without acting from virtue. You could also act from virtue without hitting the target of the virtue. For instance, I can have all the relevant internal states but not the necessary knowledge about the circumstances to do what is appropriate, and thus my actions in such a situation won't be virtuous. This is a problem to both the qualified agent and motive centred approaches, since they concern themselves only, in some way, with acting from virtue. So, if we think that an action having the appropriate effect is important to it being a right action, we need to consider the targets of the virtues if we are to make use of them in action guidance.
Swanton's paper gives an admirably clear and comprehensive discussion of what a target-centred approach to virtue ethics is and why we should pursue it. We don't need to decide now whether the other virtue ethical approaches can take up Swanton's challenge: that would be a very involved discussion which goes somewhat further into the detail of virtue ethics than we need. For our purposes, though, it is very worthwhile to see how the virtue ethical approach is different from the others we've studied. As Swanton shows, using Pettit's distinction between promoting and honouring goods, we can see that virtue ethics isn't consequentialist, not even a target-centred version. This is because an act must hit the target of every virtue in play in a situation, thus you can't rightly do something vicious but must keep your hands clean. Swanton mentions that deontology typically doesn't distinguish between right and good acts like she does, where it is possible to do every good thing you can and still not do what is right. For a deontologist to say this would be to say that you can follow every rule and law and still miss the right action, which isn't something they could admit. There are other differences as well, but this will do us for now.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Petty Resentment Theatre - Liveblogging 'Invictus'
A film-buff friend of mine encouraged me to watch the new Clint Eastwood movie Invictus, largely to see my reaction to it. Well, here it is. I made a log of the various states of outrage I reached as I watched the movie, which I now post here .
--
Dear god, this is hammy.
For heaven's sake, they take almost ten minutes in the first scene where the black and white bodyguards rub each other up the wrong way.
--
Now they're talking about changing the sport emblem, and Madiba's refusal to do so, the way other movies talk about launching the h-bomb. For fuck's sakes.
--
Wait, and now Mandela is supposed to be wearing a South African flag pin? Dear god in heaven, why? I can understand Morgan Freeman not getting the accent right (and he doesn't -- it's quite distracting) but there's no fucking reason to give Nelson fucking Mandela ostentatious symbols of dedication to his nation. Anyway, they're really anachronistic, and have never been common in South Africa. I've certainly never seen Mandela wear one. It's a really asinine little zit on this hairy asscrack of a movie.
--
The Mandela character talking about Afrikaners: "They treasure Springbok rugby. If we take that away from them, we will lose them. We prove that we are what they feared we would be."
Actually, Afrikaners (and the white English -- anybody remember the English? Put in place racial segregation, disenfranchised and dispossessed blacks, still to this day own most of the economic capital in SA's vital industries?) feared that the blacks would rise up and kill the whites in their beds, but never mind that. I'm sure a game of football is constitutive of a healthy nation, and this movie as stirring a portrayal of nation-building, as you make it out to be.
--
Chester... Chester... Chester... yet throughout all the many (many, many) references to the Sprinboks' one player of colour, nobody dignifies Chester Williams enough to mention his surname.
--
"It means 'God Bless Africa', which you got to admit, we can use."
And with that touching evocation of pure truth, Francois Pienaar calls knowing glances to the eyes of the racists who, just five second earlier, were throwing away the song sheet to the national anthem. (It had been the anthem for over a year by then, so it would've been hard to find anybody in South Africa who didn't know what 'Nkosi Sikilel' iAfrika' meant).
--
"Are those the judicial appointments for the Free States?"
Free State. State, not States. I know you come from the Unified States of America, Clint Eastwool, but realise that these things really stand out to anybody who knows anything about the thing you're making a movie about.
--
Also, Jonah Lomu the New Zealander gets named more and gets more screen time than any Springbok other than Francois Pienaar and Chester Token.
--
Another strange thing the movie does: it has given more mention to the NZ team's pre-game traditions than it has on the South African coach, Kitch Christie, who took over a team in shambles and transformed them into a world champion team. He had an unbeaten record in his tenure, starting in 1994, through the World Cup and for some time later, until cancer forced his retirement and killed him. I'd have thought that was worth him at least getting named.
Another strange fact: Mandela's PA in the movie is black, whereas in real life it was a white woman. I wonder why they changed that, given that this train stops at every other Transformation Station on the Track to Reconciliation.
--
Oh Jesus, this is just stupid. In the build-up to the World Cup Final, a 747 did a flyby of the stadium. Everybody knew about it, it was scheduled, part of the airline's intensive PR campaign tied to the tournament, etc, etc. But the movie makes it out to be some maverick pilot who decided to buzz the game on his own prerogative, shocking everybody and putting security into a panic. (What would he be doing in the air in a 747? Is he making a pass over the stadium with a fully loaded commercial liner? Whereupon he personally prepared a supportive message on the undercarriage?). It's another example with Hollywood's abusive relationship to real-life stories: it wants to tap into the drama of actual events, but it never resists the temptation to embellish reality in the most pointlessly showy, grandstanding ways.
--
Dear god, this is hammy.
For heaven's sake, they take almost ten minutes in the first scene where the black and white bodyguards rub each other up the wrong way.
--
Now they're talking about changing the sport emblem, and Madiba's refusal to do so, the way other movies talk about launching the h-bomb. For fuck's sakes.
--
Wait, and now Mandela is supposed to be wearing a South African flag pin? Dear god in heaven, why? I can understand Morgan Freeman not getting the accent right (and he doesn't -- it's quite distracting) but there's no fucking reason to give Nelson fucking Mandela ostentatious symbols of dedication to his nation. Anyway, they're really anachronistic, and have never been common in South Africa. I've certainly never seen Mandela wear one. It's a really asinine little zit on this hairy asscrack of a movie.
--
The Mandela character talking about Afrikaners: "They treasure Springbok rugby. If we take that away from them, we will lose them. We prove that we are what they feared we would be."
Actually, Afrikaners (and the white English -- anybody remember the English? Put in place racial segregation, disenfranchised and dispossessed blacks, still to this day own most of the economic capital in SA's vital industries?) feared that the blacks would rise up and kill the whites in their beds, but never mind that. I'm sure a game of football is constitutive of a healthy nation, and this movie as stirring a portrayal of nation-building, as you make it out to be.
--
Chester... Chester... Chester... yet throughout all the many (many, many) references to the Sprinboks' one player of colour, nobody dignifies Chester Williams enough to mention his surname.
--
"It means 'God Bless Africa', which you got to admit, we can use."
And with that touching evocation of pure truth, Francois Pienaar calls knowing glances to the eyes of the racists who, just five second earlier, were throwing away the song sheet to the national anthem. (It had been the anthem for over a year by then, so it would've been hard to find anybody in South Africa who didn't know what 'Nkosi Sikilel' iAfrika' meant).
--
"Are those the judicial appointments for the Free States?"
Free State. State, not States. I know you come from the Unified States of America, Clint Eastwool, but realise that these things really stand out to anybody who knows anything about the thing you're making a movie about.
--
Also, Jonah Lomu the New Zealander gets named more and gets more screen time than any Springbok other than Francois Pienaar and Chester Token.
--
Another strange thing the movie does: it has given more mention to the NZ team's pre-game traditions than it has on the South African coach, Kitch Christie, who took over a team in shambles and transformed them into a world champion team. He had an unbeaten record in his tenure, starting in 1994, through the World Cup and for some time later, until cancer forced his retirement and killed him. I'd have thought that was worth him at least getting named.
Another strange fact: Mandela's PA in the movie is black, whereas in real life it was a white woman. I wonder why they changed that, given that this train stops at every other Transformation Station on the Track to Reconciliation.
--
Oh Jesus, this is just stupid. In the build-up to the World Cup Final, a 747 did a flyby of the stadium. Everybody knew about it, it was scheduled, part of the airline's intensive PR campaign tied to the tournament, etc, etc. But the movie makes it out to be some maverick pilot who decided to buzz the game on his own prerogative, shocking everybody and putting security into a panic. (What would he be doing in the air in a 747? Is he making a pass over the stadium with a fully loaded commercial liner? Whereupon he personally prepared a supportive message on the undercarriage?). It's another example with Hollywood's abusive relationship to real-life stories: it wants to tap into the drama of actual events, but it never resists the temptation to embellish reality in the most pointlessly showy, grandstanding ways.
Petty Resentment Theatre - Final verdict on 'Invictus'
Yeah, so Invictus is a piece of shit. It likes to have lots of side-stories showing the different South African races growing into camaraderie, each more predictable and contentless than the last. Each of these act as support for the main theme of racial reconciliation, which is itself suitably shallow, signfying nothing. There's nothing here to engage with the story that's supposed to be told, we're just shown a series of images which are apparently meant to invoke all the storytelling inside of us. 'What just happened?' 'The domestic servant also got given a ticket to the big game.' 'And what now?' 'The brave knight killed the dragon with his sword.' Because the movie is in a rarefied air floating over the actual story, we are never touched by the difficulties shown and unmoved by their easy resolutions. There is a succession of inconsequential and largely made-up dramas thrown on the way, but the movie is so single-minded in its portrayal of Reconciliation that I find it incredible that anybody would be impressed by little insets that are so obviously beside the point.
Freeman is also very unconvincing as Mandela. I find his very frequent mistakes in the accent really distracting, but I can forgive that. But perhaps the direction is at fault: Mandela never gave great speeches, whereas the movie makes him out to be someone who solves his problems through rousing oration. Don't bother looking for examples of that in the real world: there aren't any. The film does try to highlight Mandela's more noted characteristics of character and humility, but again its lack of connection with any believable and filled-out story hamstrings this effort. Because we are just given images but not story, there's nothing to add flesh to Mandela's characterisation, and we're given nothing but assurances that he's a great man. Not good enough, I'm afraid: at some stage you need to stop making promises and start delivering on them.
Matt Damon does a much better job with the accent. Too bad he's directed to play a quiet, halting, apparently insecure pretty boy. There's nothing in the character for the actor or the audience to grab hold of.
Oh yes, and as someone who has watched and played rugby all my life, I found the rugby match sequences incomprehensible and pointless. Most of the time I was busy noticing how most of the players looked like underdeveloped schoolboys rather than world-class athletes, or wondering whether the bits of play they were showing conform to the rules of the game. That is how little that sequence captured my imagination.
I liked the movie best when it quietly showed scenes from the actual South Africa: the shots of the townships, and so on. They are believable, and tell quite enough of a story on their own. I very much did not like it when these scenes were artificially augmented with cinematic themes written in letters ten feet tall. Given that it's supposed to be the telling of an actual story, and the poignancy of said story is supposed to be what drives the message home, the film's continued deviation from retelling into embellishment is not only asinine, but self-defeating.
Freeman is also very unconvincing as Mandela. I find his very frequent mistakes in the accent really distracting, but I can forgive that. But perhaps the direction is at fault: Mandela never gave great speeches, whereas the movie makes him out to be someone who solves his problems through rousing oration. Don't bother looking for examples of that in the real world: there aren't any. The film does try to highlight Mandela's more noted characteristics of character and humility, but again its lack of connection with any believable and filled-out story hamstrings this effort. Because we are just given images but not story, there's nothing to add flesh to Mandela's characterisation, and we're given nothing but assurances that he's a great man. Not good enough, I'm afraid: at some stage you need to stop making promises and start delivering on them.
Matt Damon does a much better job with the accent. Too bad he's directed to play a quiet, halting, apparently insecure pretty boy. There's nothing in the character for the actor or the audience to grab hold of.
Oh yes, and as someone who has watched and played rugby all my life, I found the rugby match sequences incomprehensible and pointless. Most of the time I was busy noticing how most of the players looked like underdeveloped schoolboys rather than world-class athletes, or wondering whether the bits of play they were showing conform to the rules of the game. That is how little that sequence captured my imagination.
I liked the movie best when it quietly showed scenes from the actual South Africa: the shots of the townships, and so on. They are believable, and tell quite enough of a story on their own. I very much did not like it when these scenes were artificially augmented with cinematic themes written in letters ten feet tall. Given that it's supposed to be the telling of an actual story, and the poignancy of said story is supposed to be what drives the message home, the film's continued deviation from retelling into embellishment is not only asinine, but self-defeating.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Metal interlude - Pig Destroyer
Even the most casual reader of this blog will have noticed that new posts have ground to a halt. It's due to the pretty demanding schedule of readings and assignments that my current course presses on me, added to the soul-sucking uncertainty and tedium of applying to graduate programmes. Since most of my philosophical attention is currently being given to my academic commitments and chewing on Bernard Williams's Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, I'll make this my first non-philosophy related post on here. I always intended to have a few of them. They might even become a majority.
My first musical post on here is on something abrasive and disturbing: grindcore, that acrid mix of metal and punk which seems, as far as anybody can make out, to be invocations to have all life eradicated from existence. I've listened to a lot of it the past few hours. I don't know how much longer I can keep this up: today I have subsisted only on vending machine coffee, a chocolate bar and grindcore. Man was not meant to live this way. There is no way which is the way man was meant to live, but if there was a purpose, this certainly wouldn't be working toward it. There is a certain perverted pleasure to be taken out of living this much in conflict with basic human interests, throwing the pointlessness of it all irreverently into the face of an uncaring world.
Pig Destroyer - Terrifyer
There are some very significant ways of counting up the scores in which it turns out that Pig Destroyer are the best band working in metal right now. They have chops, they have passion, commitment and energy, they have thrown themselves onto an artistic endeavour which, from the outside at least, is damned thankless, where their families don't likely understand what they do and wish that they'd stop. They also have a unified vision, which some few metal bands do, but, what's more, they have the focus and the insight to pull it off. Focus is something which tends to seperate the really worthwhile musicians from the also-rans. Actual, honest-to-God insight is a quality so rare that it's hard to recognise, simply from lack of examples. Pig Destroyer, for instance, are a metal band with real lyrical strength. It's not that their lyrics are effective at what they do or check all the usual boxes for the genre. It's that they write songs which contain strong, evocative, well-written texts on their core, with lyrical themes that inform the music and are born to fruition in the format. Even though nobody can make out what J.R. Hughes is screaming. Especially because nobody can make them out. When you realise what the lyrics are the surprise of what is lying beneath is a real kick to the guts -- nobody expects lyrically sophisticated metal, especially not in the harsher extremities which Pig Destroyer live and work in. But there you are: the songs are small, tight meditations on a world fucked up in ways that one can barely stand thinking about: the more you look, the more fucked up things you see. Nobody has an easy time of knowing how to react to writing like this -- people have been wringing their hands about the literature of Céline for decades now, as a case in point. But this discomfort is largely Pig Destroyer's point, and one that they forcefully drive home. It's a remarkable achievement.
My first musical post on here is on something abrasive and disturbing: grindcore, that acrid mix of metal and punk which seems, as far as anybody can make out, to be invocations to have all life eradicated from existence. I've listened to a lot of it the past few hours. I don't know how much longer I can keep this up: today I have subsisted only on vending machine coffee, a chocolate bar and grindcore. Man was not meant to live this way. There is no way which is the way man was meant to live, but if there was a purpose, this certainly wouldn't be working toward it. There is a certain perverted pleasure to be taken out of living this much in conflict with basic human interests, throwing the pointlessness of it all irreverently into the face of an uncaring world.
Pig Destroyer - Terrifyer
There are some very significant ways of counting up the scores in which it turns out that Pig Destroyer are the best band working in metal right now. They have chops, they have passion, commitment and energy, they have thrown themselves onto an artistic endeavour which, from the outside at least, is damned thankless, where their families don't likely understand what they do and wish that they'd stop. They also have a unified vision, which some few metal bands do, but, what's more, they have the focus and the insight to pull it off. Focus is something which tends to seperate the really worthwhile musicians from the also-rans. Actual, honest-to-God insight is a quality so rare that it's hard to recognise, simply from lack of examples. Pig Destroyer, for instance, are a metal band with real lyrical strength. It's not that their lyrics are effective at what they do or check all the usual boxes for the genre. It's that they write songs which contain strong, evocative, well-written texts on their core, with lyrical themes that inform the music and are born to fruition in the format. Even though nobody can make out what J.R. Hughes is screaming. Especially because nobody can make them out. When you realise what the lyrics are the surprise of what is lying beneath is a real kick to the guts -- nobody expects lyrically sophisticated metal, especially not in the harsher extremities which Pig Destroyer live and work in. But there you are: the songs are small, tight meditations on a world fucked up in ways that one can barely stand thinking about: the more you look, the more fucked up things you see. Nobody has an easy time of knowing how to react to writing like this -- people have been wringing their hands about the literature of Céline for decades now, as a case in point. But this discomfort is largely Pig Destroyer's point, and one that they forcefully drive home. It's a remarkable achievement.
Monday, September 21, 2009
The experience machine objection as a wrong order problem
This is the first of a planned series of posts wherein I try to place attacks on utilitarianism within a more general framework I'm developing, the wrong order problem: properties that could work to aggregate all our morally relevant concerns, like happiness or desire satisfaction, are too high an order of property to count as good-making features, and can instead only indicate goodness.
There is a long-standing and enticing tradition of considering happiness as the most valuable good that a human life can attain. It can hardly be denied that a life containing happiness seems better than one without. There have been no shortage of people who try to build an ethical viewpoint from this foundation in one way or the other. One popular and influential approach is to consider happiness to be the only good, from which everything else draws its value, and therefore what we should do is to maximise the amount of happiness in the world. This is hedonism in a straight-forward and non-perjorative sense.
Against hedonism, Robert Nozick asks us to consider the possibility of an 'experience machine', to which a person could be connected and then live through exact and entirely convincing replicas of whatever experience they like. The question is whether these ersatz experiences, which perfectly recreate all the sensations you would have had if it really happened, make somebody as well-off as the real counterparts would. They would if hedonism is true. If that is the case, the experience machine would be a key to a perfect life, seeing as how you could undergo any experience you like, believing all the time that these things are really happening to you. But, as Nozick presses us to admit, plugging up to such a machine for life would be uncomfortably close to suicide: the pleasures might be real, but the events they relate to aren't, and by plugging into the experience machine you give up engaging with the world.
The problem that the experience machine objection latches on to is that happiness stands in the wrong relationship to the facts of someone's life to be identical with well-being. A judgement of how well someone's life is going is a judgement on the state of affairs that person finds themselves in. But happiness isn't a part of that state of affairs, it's what I call a *reflective stance* towards it, and like any reflection you can have towards something, it can be misled, as the experience machine tries to show. The problem is that any reflective stance property, like 'brings happiness', is a higher order property of what is being judged, the condition of someone's life, that is, it's the wrong order of property to count as what is being judged. There is a relationship between the two, but it's not an identity relationship. This means that we should consider reflective stance properties like happiness as part of the epistemology of good-making features, rather than the ontology. That is, happiness indicates a good life, it's not what makes a life good life. This doesn't mean we should discount happiness – it can be a good indication, perhaps even a perfect one (but were that the case, there must be something wrong with the experience machine case) – but it means that we must look for the good-making features elsewhere.
There is a long-standing and enticing tradition of considering happiness as the most valuable good that a human life can attain. It can hardly be denied that a life containing happiness seems better than one without. There have been no shortage of people who try to build an ethical viewpoint from this foundation in one way or the other. One popular and influential approach is to consider happiness to be the only good, from which everything else draws its value, and therefore what we should do is to maximise the amount of happiness in the world. This is hedonism in a straight-forward and non-perjorative sense.
Against hedonism, Robert Nozick asks us to consider the possibility of an 'experience machine', to which a person could be connected and then live through exact and entirely convincing replicas of whatever experience they like. The question is whether these ersatz experiences, which perfectly recreate all the sensations you would have had if it really happened, make somebody as well-off as the real counterparts would. They would if hedonism is true. If that is the case, the experience machine would be a key to a perfect life, seeing as how you could undergo any experience you like, believing all the time that these things are really happening to you. But, as Nozick presses us to admit, plugging up to such a machine for life would be uncomfortably close to suicide: the pleasures might be real, but the events they relate to aren't, and by plugging into the experience machine you give up engaging with the world.
The problem that the experience machine objection latches on to is that happiness stands in the wrong relationship to the facts of someone's life to be identical with well-being. A judgement of how well someone's life is going is a judgement on the state of affairs that person finds themselves in. But happiness isn't a part of that state of affairs, it's what I call a *reflective stance* towards it, and like any reflection you can have towards something, it can be misled, as the experience machine tries to show. The problem is that any reflective stance property, like 'brings happiness', is a higher order property of what is being judged, the condition of someone's life, that is, it's the wrong order of property to count as what is being judged. There is a relationship between the two, but it's not an identity relationship. This means that we should consider reflective stance properties like happiness as part of the epistemology of good-making features, rather than the ontology. That is, happiness indicates a good life, it's not what makes a life good life. This doesn't mean we should discount happiness – it can be a good indication, perhaps even a perfect one (but were that the case, there must be something wrong with the experience machine case) – but it means that we must look for the good-making features elsewhere.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
The start of my European adventure
I made my last post from Hong Kong, and this comes from Frankfurt, as I keep coming ever closer to Utrecht and the start of my study in Europe. My arrival at the Erasmus Mundus Masters of Applied Ethics programme has already been delayed by almost three weeks, as I have been subject to a number of delays. I even had a last round of drama at Auckland airport as I tried to depart. But all of that draws to an end, and I am ever so close to getting down to the real business. Somebody joked that I should use my (copious) time travelling from Auckland to Utrecht to write a book about all the trials that beset me as I tried to get here, instead I wrote a technical minded-little piece on meta-ethics (the previous post) and read Bernard Williams's Morality, An Introduction to Ethics twice. This gives you some indication of what type of person I am, a request somebody else made of me and my blog.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
The Euthyphro problem as a wrong order problem
Lately I have given a lot of thought to and become tremendously impressed by the Euthyphro problem, presented by Plato in the dialogue of that name, which makes life distinctly uncomfortable for a particular kind of moral view. The Euthyphro problem drives us to distinguish what makes something good from how we know that it is good. I want to suggest that this points to a general problem, to do with what type of property could count as a good-making feature. I think problems of the Euthyphro form give reasons to believe that many higher order properties of the targets of a moral theory. I have in mind what I call 'reflective stance properties', like attitudes toward something, some function you have in mind for something, and so on. I want to suggest that they can only indicate goodness, not be good-making features, and the Euthyphro problem is a paradigmatic example.
The Euthyphro problem simply is a knockout objection against divine command theory, and can be usefully introduced as such. Divine command theory claims that everything that is ordained by the divine are by that fact things we should do, setting aside all questions of what counts as 'ordained by the divine'. As Plato remarks, there are two ways this could go: either those acts ordained by the divine are good just because they are so ordained, or they are good independently of what the divine might have to say on them. But the first options is simply crazy: how could it be that anything, anything at all the divine might say goes, and not only goes but is demanded by morality? There are simply too many things a divinity might conceivably ask of us for that to be the case. There is no shortage of people who try to find ways in which 'divine sanction' is necessarily a good-making feature, but we must conclude that this is an industry of piety rather than good judgement. It must be that divine sanction indicates goodness, rather than ordains it. Not that managing 'mere indication' is a small feat: we value a compass even if the needle tracks north rather than north the needle. Believers should do as their divinity proclaims because it is so wise and compassionate and smart and so on that it will never be mistaken. But there is a lot of ground to cover between never being mistaken and the fact of the matter being at your behest. What the Euthyphro problem does, and does with great force, is make us distinguish between moral ontology and moral epistemology: divine sanction can't make good, it can only indicate the good.
The question is: what is it about the Euthyphro problem that delivers this result? Notice that divine saction of X is an attitude towards X – this is clearer in Plato's formulation, where the target of the attack is the view that the good things are those 'loved by the gods'. The fact that some party A has an attitude towards X is a higher order property than those aspects of X that invite the attitude. That is, there is some properties P, Q etc. of X which leads to A having that attitude towards X for the reason of it having P, Q, etc. This relfective stance property R, 'being the target of some attitude of A's' (for reasons of having P, Q, etc.) , is a product of properties of X (P, Q, etc.) and is thus a higher order property than P, Q, etc. To apply this schema to the Euthyphro case: For R 'is loved by the gods' there are the properties P,Q, etc, that the gods love X for, whatever they might be, and R is of a higher order than P,Q, etc. The problem is that R isn't the good-making feature, P,Q, etc. are: R indicates their presence in some way or the other, and P,Q,etc. constrain R's application – in this case, what the gods could rightly love. R is a property of the wrong order to count as a good-making feature. This shouldn't be a surprise. 'Loved by the gods' tells us more about the gods than it does what it attaches to, and this is the same for all reflective stance properties. But discovering which items in the world are moral goods isn't a project to do with us or any other audience, it is a project to do with the goods. If such unanchored properties such as attitudes we have toward something were to be the good-making features, without any restriction, then we would find such absurdities such as intractable moral disagreement about whether or not to run around trees clockwise, as Phillippa Foot points out. And if there are such constraints on what these reflective stance properties could rightly attach to, then the wrong order problem kicks in, and these reflective stance properties aren't the good-making features, but merely indicate them.
More can be said, and a lot more needs to, but I believe that this problem has some power and can tell us a great deal about how we should go about ethical reflection. A strong consequence is that the wrong order problem makes a nonsense of almost any utilitarianism, especially ones concerned with happiness, desire satisfaction, and so on. This I'm sure is the right result, and in the near future I will give a few examples where I cast famous objections to utilitarianism as cases of the wrong order problem. Because the wrong-order problem concerns moral goods, the objections I have in mind are to do with the aims that various forms of utilitarianism aim at: Nozick's 'experience machine' objection attacking hedonism and Sen's 'dominated housewife' example against desire satisfaction in particular. I also want to work up to Williams's subtle and devestating attack on utilitarianism for being unable to make sense of what it is for someone to have a project. The reader might anticipate how these might go, and this is right and good.
The Euthyphro problem simply is a knockout objection against divine command theory, and can be usefully introduced as such. Divine command theory claims that everything that is ordained by the divine are by that fact things we should do, setting aside all questions of what counts as 'ordained by the divine'. As Plato remarks, there are two ways this could go: either those acts ordained by the divine are good just because they are so ordained, or they are good independently of what the divine might have to say on them. But the first options is simply crazy: how could it be that anything, anything at all the divine might say goes, and not only goes but is demanded by morality? There are simply too many things a divinity might conceivably ask of us for that to be the case. There is no shortage of people who try to find ways in which 'divine sanction' is necessarily a good-making feature, but we must conclude that this is an industry of piety rather than good judgement. It must be that divine sanction indicates goodness, rather than ordains it. Not that managing 'mere indication' is a small feat: we value a compass even if the needle tracks north rather than north the needle. Believers should do as their divinity proclaims because it is so wise and compassionate and smart and so on that it will never be mistaken. But there is a lot of ground to cover between never being mistaken and the fact of the matter being at your behest. What the Euthyphro problem does, and does with great force, is make us distinguish between moral ontology and moral epistemology: divine sanction can't make good, it can only indicate the good.
The question is: what is it about the Euthyphro problem that delivers this result? Notice that divine saction of X is an attitude towards X – this is clearer in Plato's formulation, where the target of the attack is the view that the good things are those 'loved by the gods'. The fact that some party A has an attitude towards X is a higher order property than those aspects of X that invite the attitude. That is, there is some properties P, Q etc. of X which leads to A having that attitude towards X for the reason of it having P, Q, etc. This relfective stance property R, 'being the target of some attitude of A's' (for reasons of having P, Q, etc.) , is a product of properties of X (P, Q, etc.) and is thus a higher order property than P, Q, etc. To apply this schema to the Euthyphro case: For R 'is loved by the gods' there are the properties P,Q, etc, that the gods love X for, whatever they might be, and R is of a higher order than P,Q, etc. The problem is that R isn't the good-making feature, P,Q, etc. are: R indicates their presence in some way or the other, and P,Q,etc. constrain R's application – in this case, what the gods could rightly love. R is a property of the wrong order to count as a good-making feature. This shouldn't be a surprise. 'Loved by the gods' tells us more about the gods than it does what it attaches to, and this is the same for all reflective stance properties. But discovering which items in the world are moral goods isn't a project to do with us or any other audience, it is a project to do with the goods. If such unanchored properties such as attitudes we have toward something were to be the good-making features, without any restriction, then we would find such absurdities such as intractable moral disagreement about whether or not to run around trees clockwise, as Phillippa Foot points out. And if there are such constraints on what these reflective stance properties could rightly attach to, then the wrong order problem kicks in, and these reflective stance properties aren't the good-making features, but merely indicate them.
More can be said, and a lot more needs to, but I believe that this problem has some power and can tell us a great deal about how we should go about ethical reflection. A strong consequence is that the wrong order problem makes a nonsense of almost any utilitarianism, especially ones concerned with happiness, desire satisfaction, and so on. This I'm sure is the right result, and in the near future I will give a few examples where I cast famous objections to utilitarianism as cases of the wrong order problem. Because the wrong-order problem concerns moral goods, the objections I have in mind are to do with the aims that various forms of utilitarianism aim at: Nozick's 'experience machine' objection attacking hedonism and Sen's 'dominated housewife' example against desire satisfaction in particular. I also want to work up to Williams's subtle and devestating attack on utilitarianism for being unable to make sense of what it is for someone to have a project. The reader might anticipate how these might go, and this is right and good.
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