Greg Detre
Friday, 10 May, 2002
Thomas Nagel: from The Possibility of Altruism
Bernard Williams: "Internal and External Reasons"
Christine Korsgaard: "Skepticism About Practical Reason"
Christine Korsgaard: "The Sources of Normativity: Lecture 3: The authority of reflection"
G. E. Moore: from Principia Ethica
J. L. Mackie: from Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Chapter One
Richard Boyd: "How to be a Moral Realist"
Peter Railton: "Moral Realism"
Simon Blackburn: "How to be an Ethical Antirealist"
Alan Gibbard: "Wise Choices, Apt Feelings"
John McDowell: "Values and Secondary Qualities"
John McDowell: "Projection and Truth in Ethics"
John Rawls: "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory"
T. M. Scanlon: "Contractualism and Utilitarianism"
values are analogous to secondary qualities, enough so for us to acknowledge their reality, as colours are mind-dependent yet real
McDowell
thinks it is important to pay attention to the �lived character of evaluative
thought or discourse�, i.e. ordinary evaluative thought has a phenomenology of
being a sensitivity to aspects of the world
It is not, as non-cognitivists would suggest, that we look at the neutral world and then experience internal feelings or reactions to the world. Actions and events in the world present themselves to us as being good or bad in themselves. Mackie thinks that this experience of the world is an illusion. However, McDowell wants to say that our moral experience can indeed provide us with moral knowledge.
How/where do we get this impression of the world as being �morally loaded�? Do we have some kind of perception of the moral? Mackie assumed that if this was the case, that such moral perception would have to be of the primary qualities of objects � which would be very mysterious
Why can't moral perception be of secondary qualities? Mackie would say that this is of no help to the moral cognitivist, because our knowledge of secondary qualities is illusory as well. There are not really any colours in the world; we just think there are because our minds make it looks as if the world is coloured. We project colour onto the world, but science tells us that colours are not really intrinsic properties of physical objects. McDowell thinks Mackie is mistaken about our knowledge of secondary qualities.
Red is a secondary quality. An object is red if it looks red under certain circumstances. Red objects may not look red under certain sorts of light, or in the dark. "Red" does not mean having certain microscopic properties, although it may be that an object is red in virtue of having such properties. Redness refers to how an object looks to us. Red objects look as if they genuinely possess the property of being red. When we look at a tomato, we do not normally think of the experience as if we are looking at a colourless object that is causing us to have red experiences. We think of the tomato as red, independently of our experience of it. McDowell wants to say our normal way of thinking is correct here: a tomato really is red, it is not just a matter of looking red.
Mackie thinks that tomatoes are not really red, although they really are round - experience of the roundness of the tomato resembles the actual roundness of the tomato (Locke). McDowell suggests that the idea that our experience of redness could resemble the actual redness of the tomato is incoherent. (The argument will be that Mackie is wrong in saying that our experience of redness fails to resemble the actual redness of the tomato, because we can't even make sense of what this would be. It is not like saying that a portrait fails to resemble the actual person depicted). To be coherent, it would require:
McDowell does not think that (ii) is possible. It would require us to conceive of redness independently of how red things look. We have no idea how else we might conceive of redness.(???)
McDowell agrees that secondary qualities are subjective in the sense that we cannot understand the concept of them without reference to our own subjective experience. But he says that they are not subjective in these sense that they are figments of our experience.
In understanding our experience, we need to focus on its content (�intentional object�). Then, if an experience is veridical, the intentional object of the experience does not resemble the thing in the world; it simply is the thing in the world �
this seems very dodgy??? surely, an intentional mental object shouldn't ever be described as being identical with what relates to in the world
This is part of a more general view that we actually manage to think about things in the world, and not just our ideas of them
McDowell does not want to give up distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities, but he cannot distinguish between them on the basis of the resemblance (or lack of it) between a quality and our idea of that quality
McDowell wants to keep hold of the view that primary qualities are distinctive in being both objective and perceptible. In order to do this, he says we need to give up a view about what it is for a quality to figure in experience. It cannot be for the experience to have a certain intrinsic feature. Colours and shapes figure in experience simply as properties that objects are represented as having, distinctively phenomenal in the one case, and not so in the other. Then colours and shapes are equally real, although colours are intrinsically phenomenal qualities.
McDowell
says that his position does not have to reject the idea that an experience
intrinsic features, but that there are good reasons to reject the idea anyway.
He seems to be saying that the only features of an experience are its
representational features. [This view is hardest to defend for experiences that
do not seem to contain representations of anything, such as pains, itches, and
the colors you see when you press your eyeballs.]
summary so far:
Mackie thought that in fact only the Scientific Image is true, and the Manifest Image contains a great deal of illusion. McDowell argues that this picture of our relation to reality makes it hard to explain how we have any subjective or phenomenal knowledge of scientific properties. On McDowell's view, there is an essential subjectivity to our experience, but at the same time, our experience is not (intrinsically) misleading or inaccurate.
Mackie
defended his view that there is no good reason to think that objective reality
contains colors by arguing that we can explain all our experience without
supposing that colors objectively exist. This was generalized to skepticism
about any objective properties which resemble our ideas of secondary qualities.
This leaves the question for McDowell whether irreducibly subjective features can be a part of the world. His argument is not that we need these features to explain our experience, but that someone explaining our experience cannot consistently deny the existence of irreducible subjectivity. He concedes that it would be implausible to suggest that values have a causal influence on the world. Furthermore, there is a crucial disanalogy between values and secondary qualities. We see something as red if it is disposed to look red to us. We see something as good if it tends to look virtuous to us. But there is more to virtue than that: A virtue does not just cause our approval of it: it deserves our approval
McDowell elaborates this point with the example of danger. We fear something if it is dangerous. Our fear is not just caused by the dangerous thing, it is justified by it. The explanation of our color experience is different from our explanation of our fear. We want to make sense of the fear. The best way of doing this is to say that the object feared is objectively (in the sense of really, not as an opposite to subjectively) dangerous (or fearful, as McDowell says).
Similarly, we can best explain some of our other beliefs and behavior by saying that some things really have value. If we try to do without values in our explanations of our responses to the world, our explanations will be less intelligible. [Why? Presumably a lot of weight rests on the analogy with secondary qualities such as color. It is less easy to make sense of our experience if we suppose the objects in the world have no color. We can talk about what color an object really is, and of people being more or less able to tell what color it is. Similarly, it is harder to explain our behavior if we don't allow that some things are really dangerous, and of some people's ability to discern danger.]
We improve ourselves through better understanding of ourselves and the world. Just as we can talk of the real color of an object, we can talk of the real value of an action, and of the variation in different people's ability to understand that value. There will of course be disagreement about values, but that does not invalidate the argument. In a footnote, McDowell says that the contentiousness of values may be ineliminable.
McDowell is ready to concede that values depend on us as much as colors do, but insists that this does not impugn their reality. But colors, danger, and values all help to explain our experience and responses to the world. They are mind-dependent but still real.
McDowell considers how his view differs from projectivism, which says that values are not real, but that we can explain our behavior because we think that they are real. He says that projectivism relies on a thin conception of reality, with no justification for doing so (???).
Furthermore, the justification of value-responses depends on their functionality. Whether something is functional depends on a value judgment, and according to the projectivist, this is a projection of internal approval. The projectivist mechanism must contemplate itself. This tends towards a systematic theoretical approach to value. But McDowell thinks that some cases will forever remain contentious, not capturable in a theory. His approach to value allows for more of a patchwork of values.
He needs to distinguish his view from projectivism.
Projectivism says that our moral judgments are not objectively true of the world independent of us, but are rather projections of our feelings about the world.
McDowell's sensibility theory says that moral judgments are objectively true in the sense of being real, but are not independent of us. Rather, they are essentially subjective, in being from our point of view.
Neither is recommending that we abandon our ethical feelings or our ethical point of view. The difference between the two seems metaphysical, and understanding it requires inquiring into the nature of ethical truth.
McDowell: value judgements have truth conditions, i.e. are capable of being true/false
Blackburn calls his position "quasi-realism," and he wants to say that our moral feelings are projected onto the world in a sufficiently complex way that we can justify the steps in our ordinary moral reasoning, or as McDowell expresses it, the projection "can be sufficiently robust to underwrite the presence of the trappings of realism."
Blackburn:
quasi-realism: strictly speaking, our ethical commitments do not have truth-conditions. Rather they express attitudes or sentiments.
but we we can turn our ethical attitudes towards themselves, and see whether we approve of our values. A value judgment then seems true when we approve of it, and false when we don't
we should approve of our ethical valuations when they help us to achieve social order and co-operation
a substantial notion of ethical truth requires "a conception of better and worse ways to think about ethical questions" � ??? notes on pg 218
Some might think that projectivism is the only alternative to intuitionistic realism, which says that we somehow cognize valuations into/as(???) facts that are metaphysically independent of us
But McDowell says this would be a mistake.
he allows that projectivism could work for the case of disgust
i.e. we explain our judgment that "X is disgusting" by saying that we project our feelings of disgust onto X. We can understand the concept of disgust without supposing that X is intrinsically disgusting
but in contrast, we can't even understand the concept of amusement without thinking of it as a reaction to the object of our amusement. That is to say, we can't understand the concept of the internal "feeling" without referring to something outside the person. Or to put it another way, "amusement" is not a feeling in the same way that disgust is a feeling. Presumably the feeling of disgust can be described in non-circular ways without referring to something outside the person
there is another option besides projectivism + intuitionistic realism:
Such explanations are circular, it is true, but that does not necessarily mean that they are uninformative
On McDowell's view, we explain our comical judgment
by referring to the comical properties of the object, without supposing that we
can describe those properties in mind-independent ways. It is hard to see how
we could talk about something being really funny, and the comic judgment being
true, if there were no way to rank different people's judgments of funniness in
terms of their justification. If we can rank different judgments of funniness,
then we can explain this by saying it is possible to understand what it is for
something to be really funny, and different judgments exhibit greater or less
of this understanding. (Remember that McDowell is not committed to comic
judgments actually being capable of truth-value. He is just supposing that they
are for the sake of argument.)
a no-priority view of ethics says that moral
sentiment and moral properties are mutually dependent. He would says that we
should be able to rank ethical judgments according to their rationality. We
adopt an ethical point of view and rank ethical judgments according to it. We
may or may not achieve satisfactory justifications of our judgments within this
point of view, but it is at least possible that we might.
Ethics does not have to be subjective in the sense of being illusion. Nor does it have to be objective in the sense of scientific truth. McDowell thinks that subjective and objective can form an "interlocking complex" so that reality can contain ethical truth.
McDowell doesn't want to give (epistemic???) priority, either to values or to the valuer. Projectivism seems more tilted towards the valuer.
general strategy in arguing for moral realism is to say that we can best explain some people's behavior by referring to moral reality, i.e., what is actually good or bad
main opponent he faces is someone who replies that we never need to refer to moral reality in explaining people's behavior (Ockham�s razor), and that we can always explain behavior just as well by reference to people's psychological states and non-moral facts about their environment
moral realism in which moral judgments are objective although relational, and have a truth value (cognitivism) except when indeterminate
We have moral knowledge but many of our moral beliefs are wrong. Some people may have a reason not to be moral. Moral inquiry is similar to empirical inquiry. Moral properties supervene on (are intimately tied with) natural properties, and may even be reducible (identical) to them.
Moral realists cannot accept a distinction between facts and values. If moral judgments could not be factual judgments, then there would be no moral facts
unfinished
Notes � Nagel
Notes � Moore
Notes � Blackburn
is a 'secondary property' a purely extensional property, i.e. it points out things that all seem red to us, without making any (intensional) claims about what they have in common, why they seem red to us, or what it is to be 'red'???
does McDowell call his own theory (a form of) projectivism???
he considers his view to be similar, but importantly different from, Blackburn�s, right???
but he and Wiggins are more or less in harmony, right???
if the no-priority view is that we explain our judgments by reference to other similar judgments, doesn't that amount to a sort of coherentism about value judgements