Justified by who? One's self? One's social circle? One's town, village, or city? Anything greater than that is exclusively a modern phenomena, I'm sure you'd agree.

Is there a "justified false belief" that one would immediately be able to differentiate from a "justified true belief"? How so? What is the significance of the "true" multiplier/descriptor in the context of the overall phrase/other two words?

Normally justification is presented in terms of "epistemic warrant," i.e., "good reasons to believe." This goes back to Plato who pointed out that if we just happen to hold true beliefs for inane reasons, it does not seem to be the case that we "know" such things.

A belief? Naturally this is the most base, non-enveloping conceptual descriptor to describe such, sure. Would you have any objection if your use of the word "belief" in this context were to be substituted with, say: "opinion", "judgement", "desire", "preference", or "goal". Do you find any of these substitutes more or less fitting or some even outright more accurate or completely incompatible? If so, why?

"Judgement" and "opinion" make sense to me. I am not sure about "preference" or "desire." I can certainly know my own desires, but I wouldn't equate desiring something with knowing it. It seems that knowing should come prior to desiring, for how could we desire what we do not know ("know" in the broadest sense, including sense knowledge).

So, perhaps like the difference between an ability and a skill. One or the other being more or less easy, hard, if not next to or entirely impossible, by simply following written or verbal (or physical) instruction? Perhaps "talent" rising above both the two? What are your thoughts on that?

Right, some things you cannot learn from reading or listening. Almost everyone is going to fall on a skateboard the first time. Reading about how to ride a skateboard is probably of pretty limited benefit here.

Does a man go out to his driveway and ask "Gee, I wonder what it's like to be a car?" Not likely. He turns the key, drives it, and more or less basically gets the idea. Especially if he has to maintain it. The reason I mention this example is because there are video games where you can be things you ordinarily can't: a millionaire, a gang leader, an animal, even a stray cat. Sure, it's not really, exactly the same. But surely any thinking person can "get the idea" at least in a substantial sense. Do you disagree?

The car example seems strange to me. I don't think a car is conscious so I don't think there is anything it is like to be a car.

I 100% agree that we can imagine human experiences more or less well, dependent on what experiences we have had. Perhaps we might even be able to imagine animal experiences to some degree, although this seems like it would be far less accurate.

But then we would have to wonder why this is? It's not because people and animals interact with different things or a different world. And it's not because we don't think those things can be accurately described in a way that should transcend particular sensory systems. To my mind, if suggests an essentially phenomenological component to knowledge. Because animals have different senses, different "form/information," (of whatever we'd like to call it) related to these things enters their awareness. I am also skeptical as to whether any non-human animals can understand things in a propositional manner, so that is a big difference.

Sort of like how puns arise. I want a coffee. You sell coffee. I have enough money for a coffee. I ask for one. You serve me one to my hand and the bill at the same time. I say "ouch", perhaps as a reaction to the price of the coffee. A machine would assume this is a reaction to the temperature of the coffee. Or would it? Is this what you mean?

Not quite. I wouldn't imagine a machine. I'd imagine an actual experiencing person in a room who is practicing manipulating Chinese characters correctly for years and years but never learns what they mean. He can use the characters correctly and have conversations, and he knows what the characters are like, but the content of the conversations will be absent. To signs will only refer to other signs, or to his memories of seeing the signs.

Likewise, we could imagine a dystopian future where an anti-color tyrant has everyone's eyes surgically implanted with lenses that make them only see in black and white. But, since knowing colors is useful, the high tech implant also projects symbols that let people know what color things are.

So these people can use color language just find. When they leave their autocracy and go to places where people have normal vision they talk to them just fine when using color language. And yet, when we remove the implants and they see color for the first time, it seems like they have come to know something new. Hence, language, as with other signs, is not merely about the signs themselves.

The 40 Year Old Virgin is an example. At one point, the titular protagonist describes breasts as feeling like "bags of sand." Obviously, simply correcting him and furnishing him with a more accurate tactile example is not wholly adequate.

And perhaps the limit of this would be the Chinese Room, or the person inside it, who has gained knowledge of how linguistic statements interact, but none of the phenomenological whatness intended by them. Knowledge of the signs, but not what is signified.

I like Joe Sach's translation of the category of substance as "thinghoood," although this is perhaps confusing if one thinks of it in terms of the "particles" that were the self-subsistent, fundamental things of 19th century metaphysics. Maybe "beinghood" would work better (with organisms as self-determining whole being most properly "beings"). Something is a thing to the extent that it is one, the Problem of the One and the Many being the core idea that defines the epistemology and metaphysics of the Physics. The loci of thing's intelligibility is things, their form, which is necessarily intellectual.

In this context, Descartes, Spinoza, and Deleuze's concerns over interaction just don't make sense. I have tried to trace the historical path by which Descartes ends up with his "substance," without much luck finding a good source. It seems very different from high scholasticism.

As IEP notes:

According to this third use, a substance is something that underlies the properties of an ordinary object and that must be combined with these properties for the object to exist. To avoid confusion, philosophers often substitute the word “substratum” for “substance” when it is used in this third sense. The elephant’s substratum is what remains when you set aside its shape, size, colour, and all its other properties

But how did this sea change occur? I can only suppose it has to do with nominalism, such that what makes a thing anything at all can no longer be its intelligible eidos (form), which maybe also explains how "matter" also transforms from "potency" to primarily "substrate." Of course, "matter" was always used to mean "substrate" to some degree, but the idea was that the substrate was a certain sort of substrate on account of its form (act), and things were "material" in that they had the potential for substantial change, local motion, etc. Prime matter, i.e. pure matter was nothing at all.

Obviously, the IEP quote shows how substance was being called in for the essence/existence distinction, and I suppose the univocity of being (also related to nominalism) is a relevant historical precedent here. Deleuze speaks of immanent/transcendent substance, which makes even less sense in the original context, although I suppose it has some precedent in the debates over ousia versus hypostasis for God.

My guess is, as universals became "names" some way to tie properties back to things had to be developed. The "names" come from us, but they have to have some cause in things, else we have no knowledge of them. No notion of participation or inherence could be called upon, so substrate has to expand beyond being mere potential (which would explain why substance and matter collapse towards meaning the same thing, when before they are almost opposites, a substance being what a thing is and matter its potential to be something else).

I'm not sure what limit you're thinking of, but the demand for explanation of a given use of a universal or principle is surely OK, isn't it? Perhaps what you mean is that an appeal to particulars as a way of constructing the explanation of a universal is going in the wrong direction. Given a principle, though, we can always ask that its use be explained in any given instance of its application

It's fine to ask why a particular thing might be considered healthy, or to inquire into what "health" is. What makes explanation impossible is if we are to demand that all universals in an explanation be reduced to particulars. For instance, if you ask "what makes lentils healthy," the explanation is surely going to invoke a number of other principles and universals.

It's going about things in the wrong way in that, while particulars are better known to us directly, principles are better known in themselves. We all have an idea what health is, how we might apply it across plants and animals, etc. Now, if you go outside most places you can find plenty of insects. They are better known to us in that we can go right out and observe them. But there are millions upon millions of insect species, and what it means for each to be healthy varies by species. And this is, in part, why the principle health is better known in itself.

My problems arise with the second point. I'm still not seeing how "choice-worthy" is the same kind of principle or universal as "healthy" and "good". If you'll accept some crude definitions:

healthy = conducive to optimum bodily performance or longevity
good = conducive to spiritual growth, flourishing, and compassion for others
choice-worthy = ?

If the Good is "that towards which all things strive," then it ends up implying "choice-worthy." Something is choice-worthy vis-á-vis some end if it leads to that end. I wouldn't say "good" is synonymous with "conducive to spiritual growth, flourishing, and compassion for others." A "good knife" is presumably one that cuts well, which isn't directly related to flourishing. A "good knife to give a child," might be a dull knife though. The end matters. Flourishing (happiness) is associated with the Good in that it is sought for its own sake, whereas other things (e.g. cutting things with a knife, buying a knife, driving somewhere) are all sought for the sake of something else (Chapter I of the Ethics).

Whereof you get quotes like St. Maximus' "Nothing... is evil. It is not food that is evil but gluttony, not the begetting of children but unchastity, not material things but avarice, not glory but vainglory. It is only the misuse of things that is evil, not the things themselves.”

The relation to the ultimate end determines goodness, but we also speak of goodness vis-á-vis particular, finite ends. The F-15 has been a suburb fighter airframe for instance, but whether fighter aircraft are generally a means to good ends is a different question.

So to your later question, something is choice-worthy according to some end (and the end itself can also be considered choice-worthy or not).

Sure, a Kantian or a utilitarian would agree that we ought to choose what's good, but that's almost in passing

I don't see how this is the case. Utilitarianism is about what is good for its own sake, which is what we should pursue, which is the same thing as saying it is choice-worthy. It's not just that there is no ethics where what is good is not considered desirable/choice-worthy, it's also unclear to me how one could even argue that something is "best" but ought not be sought (except as qualified by pragmatic concerns, i.e., "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.") That would be saying: "the worse is preferable (more choice-worthy) to the better," which seems like a contradiction in terms. Hence, "no one knowingly chooses the worse over the better but for weakness of will or some other constraint."

To use David Bentley Hart's example, even Milton's Satan has to say "evil be thou my good," because it would be incoherent to say "evil be thou evil to me," and then to pursue it. Even in self-harm, self-harm is considered to be an end worth pursuing.

But I agree that something isn't good because it is choice-worthy. A thing is good relative to leading to some end, and choice-worthy if that end is sought (if the end itself is good). The two converge though. If God and theosis are the "highest good" then it follows that they should be pursued above all else, and thus are most choice-worthy.

In a similar way, we might talk about things being good or bad for a plant (helping or hindering its natural ends) but a plant cannot be said to be choosing.

It's worth noting that the dominant view in cosmology is now that the Big Bang was preceded by and caused by a period of "Cosmic Inflation." Now, there is a problem of equivocation here. "Big Bang" is sometimes used to refer to a specific cosmological event, but more often in common parlance, as "the begining of the universe," a "time zero." Obviously, Cosmic Inflation is not prior to the beginning of the universe. However, certain theories in cosmology, such as Black Hole cosmology, do posit causes prior to "start" of our universe.

But the point I'd like to draw out is that the way the universe is suggests the way it came to be. The whole reason we have the Big Bang theory in the first place is because the dominant theory of an eternal universe could not explain a number of observed features of the cosmos except as "it just is."

If something is truly uncaused, happening for "no reason at all," then there would be no reason to expect it to be one way instead of any other. Yet if we take this tack, we will be left shrugging at any and all phenomena in the early universe and saying "it just is." Theorizing advances by trying to explain what we observe. For instance, there are a number of theories for why the early universe had such a phenomenally low entropy, something that seems incredibly unlikely to have occured by chance if we start with non-informative priors, such as the Principle of Indifference. There are problems with some non-informative priors, but the low entropy and other elements of the Fine Tuning Problem seem unlikely according to all of them. If one of these theories pans out, we certainly wouldn't want to rebut it with "but what is uncaused can have no explanation, so it just is."

I think we could usefully conceive of such efforts as looking at formal causality, not efficient causation. For example, if we lived in a triangular universe à la Flatland, we might come to realize that Euclid's theorems apply to our universe, to its very limits, for instance, that the angels of our universe have a certain relationship because they must have this relationship because of what our triangular cosmos is. Ontic structural realism goes in this direction and seems fairly popular in physics.

And then final cause, something brought up by religious thinkers but what secular thinkers such as Thomas Nagel also might add another level of explanation. But probably most relevant here is trying to expand our notion of efficient cause past mere temporal ordering, as Hume does. Such a vision of causation actually makes understanding any causes essentially impossible. Cause becomes mere conjunction, mere ordering. So, we might look at notions of efficient cause that are less impoverished than mere conjunction, or even mere sufficient mechanism.

The Principle of Non-Contradiction is traditionally formulated as "nothing can both be and not be, in the same way, at the same time, without qualification." But that "good" in your argument is "good from the perspective of A/B" is a qualification.

Likewise, we might say a stone buttress in a cathedral "floats" (is suspended in the air), but that it simultaneously does not "float" (being stone, it will sink in water). This would not be a contradiction on account of equivocation. Unfortunately, a focus on formal logic tends to assume these ambiguities are all handled outside the argument, because the idea is that you have disambiguated or clarified all your terms prior to formalization. For instance, a simple solution would be for "that which is said to be good by A" and "that which is said to be good by B," to be different variables (say, A and B). But obviously X can be both A and B simultaneously without any obvious difficulty.

Here is the thread I remember on Conspiracy Against the Human Race.

How is existentialism a religion? I see elements of religion in 'wokeness', and elements of the postmodern in both existentialism and wokeness, but existentialism and religion? I guess Sartre wasn't deconstructing master narratives, he was pretty into communism, for example. But then, willing to renounce it, eventually?

It's obviously not a religion in some sense. But it is very much a "worldview through which someone organizes their life and makes sense of their life, human history, etc." It is a proper "worldview" in that it encompasses the whole of human experience, and it is "religion-like" in its attempts to explain the "meaning" of human life (in this case as a sort of act of creation and overcoming). Hence, it gains strong emotional valance, and needs to be "defended."

Question - is modern day 'ethical' instruction simply just a neoliberal /technocratic default setting for moral relativists?

Probably something close at least. But it's hardly a structured ethics, which I suppose makes sense if you think most of ethics is just emotion claims. D.C. Schindler has some good stuff on the "bourgeois metaphysics" that are often presupposed here.

Why might this neutralizing of truth claims be desirable? The point seems to be, above all, not to deny any particular truth claim outright, in the sense of taking a definitive position on the matter (“It is absolutely not the case that leaves are green, and anyone who says that they are is therefore wrong.”), but, just the opposite, to avoid taking an inflexible stand on one side of the question or the other. We want to allow a particular claim to be true, but only “as far as it goes,” and as long as this does not exclude the possibility of someone else taking a different view of the matter.13 Gianni Vattimo, the Italian philosopher-cum-politician, has advocated irony as the proper stance of citizens in the modern world: democracy works, he believes (ironically?), if we are sufficiently detached from our convictions to be capable of genuine tolerance of others,whose convictions may be different from our own.14 Such a stance is what Charles Péguy took a century ago to be the essence of modernity. According to him, to be modern means “not to believe what one believes.”15 Along these lines, we might think of the status of truth claims in terms of the so-called “right to privacy,” as analogous, that is, to private opinions. A thing is permitted to be true, as true as it wants to be, as long as that truth does not impose itself on others. Its truth is its own, as it were, and may not bear on anything beyond itself, may not transgress its particular boundaries. It is a self-contained truth,and, so contained, it is free to be perfectly “absolute.”


Let us call this a “bourgeois metaphysics." 6“Bourgeois” is an adjective meant to describe any form of existence, pattern of life, set of “values,” and so forth, that is founded on the principle of self-interest, which is posited as most basic. To speak of a “bourgeois metaphysics” is to observe that such an interest,such forms, patterns, and values, are themselves an expression of an underlying vision of the nature of reality, namely, a view that absolutizes individuals, that holds that things “mean only themselves”; it does not recognize things as belonging in some essential manner to something greater, as being members of some encompassing whole, and thus pointing beyond themselves in their being to what is other, but instead considers them first and foremost discrete realities.On the basis of such metaphysics, it is perfectly natural to make self-interest the basic reference point for meaning, the primary principle of social organization.17 In fact, given such a view of the nature of reality, nothing else would make any sense. This principle of social organization does not in the least exclude the possibility of what is called “altruism.”18 Quite to the contrary, we just articulated an expression of the “bourgeois metaphysics” precisely as a kind of concern for others: we are willing to affirm something as true only on the condition that we leave open the possibility for others to take a different position. We thus seek to give others a special respect. Toleration is, at least in our postmodern era, essential to this view of reality. In a certain respect, then, there is nothing preventing our judging that the “bourgeois metaphysics” is radically altruistic or other-centered.

Nevertheless, this judgment demands two qualifications. First, insofar as it is founded on a “bourgeois metaphysics,” it follows necessarily that any altruistic act will be equally explicable in purely self-centered terms. In this case, altruism will always be vulnerable to the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” such as we find,for example, in Friedrich Nietzsche: there can be no rational disputing the charge that what appears to be done for altruistic reasons is “really” motivated by the prospect of selfish gain.19 Second, the affirmation of the other inside of a"bourgeois metaphysics” is inevitably an affirmation of the other specifically as a self-interested individual. Altruism is not in the least an “overcoming” of egoism, but rather the multiplication of it. This is the essence of toleration: “live and let live” means, “let us agree to be self-centered individuals; we will give space to each other so that each may do and be what he likes, and will transgress our separateness only to confirm each other in our own individuality, that is, to reinforce each other’s selfishness.” One thinks here of Rilke’s famous definition of love, which may indeed have a deep meaning in itself, but not so much when it appears on a refrigerator magnet: “Love consists in the mutual guarding,bordering, and saluting of two solitudes.”20

Isn't this a false binary?

I don't think it's a binary at all. We can have more or less faith in a source, belief, person, etc. The Academic Skepticism St. Augustine is referring to made it a point to accept next to nothing, doubt was wisdom. "Doubt even your own senses." The point is that this gets you nowhere in terms of understanding.

Hey man, (assuming 'man' given the nickname) I am on the lookout for reading recommendations, so I appreciate any you toss my way. Charles Taylor is someone I've meant to read as a Canadian. I struggle with technical primary sources, and am not as well read on the classics as a result.

I'm on the lookout in particular for 'essential' primary sources that don't seem so intentionally obscure. I get that the task of processing these works is sort of the point, but time is finite. And also essential 'adjacent' texts, I loved that Sarah Bakewell book.

A Secular Age is quite accessible. It isn't really technical, although it is encyclopedic in its references. Obviously you get more out of it when you know the sources well. I know the late medieval and Reformation era better and what he is saying comes through as "familiar" and is easy to place. He spends more of the book on the 19th century, and I'm less familiar with these sources, but it's still written in such a way that it makes sense for people without any great expertise in Romanticism.

One of the more influential books on ethics I really like is Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, but that is a bit more technical, although not super technical. It provides a novel account for why ethics was relatively stable and marked by relative consensus for about 2,000 years (outside the West there also tends to be great stability and similarity as well, although he doesn't focus on this), and then, with the Enlightenment, we get radical change terminating fairly rapidly (200 years give or take) in relativism, anti-realism, and emotivism. He tries to give one explanation for this. So does Taylor. Actually, I think the two do much to support one another's theses.

And then Aristotle's Ethics is probably one of his most straightforward and engaging works. A hidden classic is Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, which was the most copied book outside the Bible for the Middle Ages, and has unfortunately largely become neglected, probably because it can't be read in a "pragmatist" direction to the same extent as parts of Aristotle. Boethius accomplished a tremendous synthesis of Aristotle, Plato, and later Neo-Platonism (including its Christian variety exemplified in St. Augustine). It has a special quality because Boethius wrote it from prison after failing to go along with corruption, and was awaiting a quite brutal execution. He had been the second most powerful man in Rome, and has lost virtually everything for trying to be just at the outset of the book.

Well, do you feel the same way about "healthy?" When we say that both lentils and eggs are "healthy" are we making the mistake of Molière's doctor? Should we always try to specify the exact way in which they produce health? And the same for running and weight lifting, which are also said to be healthy, but for different reasons, or bloodwork?

The benefit of referring to "health" is that this is the general principle that unifies lentils, running, eggs, weightlifting, etc., in that all promote health. I suppose a reductionist might deny that there is any such thing as health and insist that each be explained in terms of their specific interactions with the human body. Yet such an explanation will invariably also rely on principles, and each instantiation of a principle is different, and so the same demand can be made over and over, in a slide towards multiplicity.

For example, "milk thistle is healthy." What do we mean by healthy in this particular case? "It improves liver health?" What exactly does that entail? "It makes enzymes more efficient?" The same demand that was made of "health" can be made of "efficiency." Why not use the precise biochemical description of how this "efficiency" is achieved in this particular instance and then tie that back to liver function? But that will also invoke principles. And so on.

You could do the same thing with the principle of "lift" as applied to dragonfly wings, helicopter rotors, a delta wing plane, canards, a bi-plane, hawks, etc., since the principle is realized in different ways in each instance, the dynamics of each control surface are different, etc.

The epistemic notions at work at in the post at the bottom of: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/979851

To demand that everything be explained in terms of particulars becomes, at the limit, to make explanation impossible. Goodness is among the most general principles, and it is ends/goals by which proper beings (i.e. not just heaps) are unified and "one," (making a one from a many). This is complicated stuff, the transcendentals. This is why we often find it useful and easier to speak in terms of less general principles, such as health, etc., or to speak of goodness with qualification, e.g. "the best car here for drag racing," as opposed to "the best car without qualification" (if the options are a Ferrari and a VW Rabbit, there is an obvious fact, whereas since good is said primarily of men the goodness of an artifact like a car will tend to be filtered through the needs of a particular man, and a Rabbit might be better if you park in a city or don't want high insurance costs).

"Choiceworthy" is a particular rendering of the Greek, but I am aware of no major ethics which doesn't equate "good" with "what ought to be chosen," so I don't see the real difference here. It seems bizarre to me that someone could be a moral realist and not think we should do what is good. In virtue of what would it be "good" then?

You can see this in the English "desirable." When we speak of "desirable" outcomes in medicine, education, etc., we do not tend to mean "whatever people currently happen to desire." If this was true, dropping out of school would be a highly "desirable" outcome because kids clearly desire it. We mean what is truly worthy of desire, as in "choice-worthy," or "good." Many English uses of desirable become incoherent if it just means "what is desired." A similar association still remains with "reasonable" to a lesser extent.

...and this is the approach I described <here>. So for example, if "burning out one's eyes" is bad, and everyone knows it is bad, then any epistemology worth its salt must account for this fact. It is no good to engage in the dubious practice of trying to bootstrap an independent epistemology from the ground up and then claim that this homemade epistemology is so well built that anything which lies outside of it must fail the test of knowledge. Or in other words, we are left with the question, "Is Hume's novel epistemology more secure, or is the universal attestation that burning out one's eyes is bad more secure?" It seems clear that the latter is more secure, and that Hume et al. have the burden of proof in showing that we would be more rational to accept their idiosyncratic epistemology rather than accept the claim that burning out one's eyes is bad

100% agree, but as I tried to point out earlier it's also worth pointing out that the tradition that progresses from Hume seems to largely agree that its own epistemology (and the associated metaphysics it lets in through the back door):

A. Can achieve knowledge of almost nothing (e.g. Hume's Problem of Induction and the very many similar arguments from underdetermination from Wittgenstein, Quine, etc.)

B. That it cannot justify its own premises or know that its epistemology leads to truth (indeed, the tradition largely leans into denying truth as much more than a token after WWII).

C. The tradition also tends towards a sort of logical nihilism, since, leaving no room for intuition/noesis, they are left with an infinite space of possible "games" vis-á-vis logic and mathematics.

D. Because of points A-C, even in its less advanced (we might say not-yet-terminal) phase, the epistemology has become rather obviously self-undermining, and eventually reaches the point of being straightforwardly self-refuting.

The less advanced stages tend to try to counter these problems with an appeal to the successes and authority of "science," but this has myriad problems as well. First, because there is an extremely long gap between the emergence of the "new science" and the technological and economic divergence between the West and other developed states it tries to take credit for. Second, because places where rationalism was dominant kept pace with technological and economic development just as well. Third, because, while there are certainly scientific luminaries who embraced this epistemology, there were also plenty who rejected it, and yet this doesn't seem to have affected their capacity to be major scientific contributors.

Not doing ethics, anyway, as whether something is good or bad has nothing to do with whether that should arbitrate our actions.

If "good" is taken to mean "choice-worthy," as it often is, this seems to be incoherent. "That something is choice-worthy has nothing to do with how we should choose," is like saying "if something is has great heat, it cannot tell us if we should affirm that it is hot."

Aristotle offers up the definition that the good is that towards which all things strive (as their end/goal). I don't know how ethics is even coherent as a subject matter, even to advance anti-realism, if the "good" cannot be related to goals and ends. What would "good" mean then?




I don't think we are actually in much disagreement. I am certainly aware of the tradition that makes ethics the study of a unique "moral good." I even agree with the contention that this makes anti-realism very plausible, or even makes the subject incoherent.

However, seems to be diverging from even the post-Enlightenment tradition that I disagree with given the assertion that "if something is better it tells us nothing about whether or not we should choose it over the worse" or that ethics cannot relate to ends/goals. Maybe he can clarify what he thinks ethics is or under what conditions, if any, it could be coherent.

This was most enlightening. But I think you are being a bit demanding when you comlain that empiricists conduct their critique on some other basis that empiricism. What other basis could they have used?

Well, given the history of the movement I referred to, it seems that the movement has terminated in:

A. A denial that we can know much of anything at all (or a radical redefinition of "knowledge" that still admits that "knowledge" as classically conceived is virtually impossible).
B. A denial that empiricism can justify its own methods and assumptions.
C. Logical nihilism and deflationism vis-á-vis truth, and thus the inability to claim that its methods (or emotivism) are "really true" and not just the results of "one game among infinitely many."

To be sure, your standard "classical Victorian scientific realist" doesn't agree with the where the tradition has terminated, but then again these folks (e.g. Sam Harris) often don't tend to be emotivists because of their faith that "goodness" must reduce to some sort of objective scientific phenomena. Even so, we might question them as to how they avoid the later positivist and then post-modern slide away from the possibility of knowledge and the truth of their positions, since these conclusions have been very hard to overcome from within the Anglo-empiricists' own tradition (aside from ignoring them on the grounds that they are absurd, e.g. Harris or Pinkers' approach).

Or to sum up, if someone's epistemic starting point seems both self-refuting and useless, or leads to absurd conclusions like "contradictory propositions are equally 'true' without qualification," I think it is 100% fair to question if these starting points are sacrosanct. Indeed, reaching absurd conclusions should make us question either the argument or the premises. Key arguments were made by very smart people: Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, the positivists, Quine, etc., and have been gone over with a fine tooth comb, so I would start with the premises, which often haven't been questioned much at all.

Burden of proof arguments don't seem to be very productive. Obviously each side prefers the burden of proof to be on the other and there's no judge to make a ruling. It is better to try to work out what the two sides agree on and frame the debate from there.

In general, I agree, but the denial of value tout court, which amounts to a denial that anything can be said to be truly good or bad for man or individual men, is a particularly implausible claim, somewhat on par with radical skepticism. I think it's fair for us to shift the burden of proof onto the radical skeptic, to ask why they don't drive into oncomming traffic, since nothing can be known about it, or why they drive on the road heading east to New York to get to New York, instead of west, despite their claims that, ultimately, nothing can be known about how to get from one place to another. The radical skeptic doesn't even act like they believe their own thesis.

So too the anti-realist. They don't act as if they have recognized that any notion of what is "good for them" reduces to irrational sentiment. Indeed, in my experience, anti-realists tend to be more politically radical than average and care a great deal about bolstering one irrational sentiment over another.

But beliefs that seem "impossible to truly believe" (i.e. for actions to correspond to stated belief) seem like they should require particular justification.

I wonder if it is possible that beauty is in the eye (and brain) of the beholder and connected to objective reality?

Yes, that would be Schindler's contention. He draws a lot of scholasticism, where the adage was "everything is received in the mode of the receiver."

.. and this is where I begin to part company with you. What little I understand about the concept of the transcendentals does not enthuse me. I've not yet understood how it helps me to understand Beauty, Goodness and Truth. I have an obstinate conviction that if they exist at all, they exist in the everyday world that I actually live in.

Well, this is the difficulty. The Doctrine of Transcendentals is among the most difficult in the classical metaphysical tradition, but also, with the Analogia Entis, its beating heart. Schindler's book is among the more accessible, but it still isn't perfect. The SEP article on it is, unfortunately, IMHO, not very good.

But the bolded is not at variance with the doctrine. What is transcendent is not absent from what it transcends, rather it goes beyond them. And when we talk about transcending, we are mostly talking about transcending the categories (although finite being as well).

I won't head down this path, except to say that I think the easiest path to understanding the Doctrine is to understand why Plato thinks (the pursuit of) the Good is properly what unifies the human being, and then understanding how Aristotle extends this connection between Goodness and unity to help deny why any thing is a thing (a discrete whole, a being) at all, and thus also a "one" a "unity."

Yep. Still failing to see how this is an ethical statement (i've cut the quote because I don't think your point requires that justification. The above stands to reason).

I don't know what to tell you. The idea that ethics is primarily the study of human well-being and flourishing, and human excellence, is not my invention, it goes back to Plato and Aristotle, but is also mirrored in Confucius and Indian thinkers. It's the core assumption of a text you can unconfusedly refer to as the Ethics in the field to this day. If "alcoholism is bad for man's well-being" it's a fact of ethical import under such a subject.

How would you define the field of ethics?



I've only read Consciousness Explained cover to cover, and in that he seemed actually somewhat circumspect, even though he does start by putting rather extreme limits on what could count as evidence in a theory of consciousness. However, I do recall that his response to Nagel re "the experience of being a bat," was something to the effect that nothing in the difference between "what it is like to be a bat versus a man" could be "theoretically interesting," which to me just suggest an impoverished notion of theory and knowledge. He was less circumspect in later talks and seemed to be pushing a notion that could possibly run afoul of Hemple's Dilemma (i.e. if something is real, it is, by definition, included in what is physical).

The difficulty is that "physical," like the "methodological naturalism" mentioned earlier in this thread, is that they can be pushed very far in different directions. Some forms of physicalism with "strong emergence" of a discrete "mental realm" can start to look like dualism (which always involved interaction, it just never explained it well). Aristotelian form (and potency) can easily be conceived of as "physical," but form is also fundamentally Intellect in many receptions of Aristotle. Things like economic recessions don't seem like they should be "non-physical" but they certainly do seem like they are incorporeal (without body), which causes problems for some forms of physicalism but not others.

Open questions like: "Is information physical?" and "if so is it "basic" on par with matter and energy, or even more basic?" also show the possibility for divergence. A physicalism where matter and energy emerge from information is very different from one where information is illusory.

I'm also reminded of an Orthodox catechumenal lecture I attended. It put the Eastern grievance with Western theology like this:

Picture God as a sort of luminous orb. Western scholasticism became an attempt to write down everything it could say about the orb, starting from "natural theology" and revelation (primarily Holy Scripture), and then deducing all the facts one could syllogize from this. This produced a lot of facts and statements.

But along comes Luther, and he says: "No, no, no, you're all wrong. You're looking at it from the wrong angle. Come stand over here. I stand here, and I've written down everything I can see, and this is the correct way to put it."

But along comes Calvin. And he says "no, you're both wrong, come stand here!" And then Zwingli shows up, and he says... etc.

The Orthodox say: "Don't even try to write anything down. Pursue the ascetical life and the sacraments, engage in praktikos, that you might go inside/become the orb, and then you shall understand."

And so it is for beauty too. This is implicit in the three stages of knowing in the Desert Fathers, which still dominates Orthodox philosophy. First there is ascetical discipline, the sacraments, and the development of virtue. Then there is knowledge of the divine through finite things, as signs and exemplars. This is different from the instrumental knowledge of finite things that Bacon prioritizes. It is not knowledge of their practical uses, but primarily knowledge of their beauty and their role in the whole. And last comes theology/theoria, theosis/deification.

There are some similarities here with non-Christian Eastern philosophy as well obviously (e.g. the Zen quote I shared earlier).

(Actually, this theme is still very strong in the West through the High Middle Ages, with St. Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, and even St. Thomas. "Knowing by becoming" was a key idea of Boethius as well. But the Orthodox tend to see this period as the "setting the stage" for later divergence. Personally, I think they set the divergence too early and are overly critical of early scholasticism, primarily because this is when the political schism between East and West becomes more acute, and they are still angry over the Sack of Constantinople (1204).)

The human good is not reducible to health, but it involves health. There certainly seem to be facts about what is good for organisms in virtue of their nature. It is not good for some fish to be placed in saltwater, just as it is not good for man to be placed in a container with inadequate oxygen levels. These statements might be taken ceteris paribus, since well-being is most properly predicated of beings, i.e., organisms, and "good" is only said secondarily of external things or the environment.

An appropriate amount of oxygen is said to be both "good" and "healthy," in virtue of how it promotes man's well-being and health respectively, for instance. If being crammed into some space with low oxygen allows a man to reach some greater goal, like skydiving from the edge of space, perhaps it is choice-worthy. This doesn't obviate the fact that there is an minimal atmospheric oxygen level that one can categorize as good or healthy vis-a-vis man in general. If this were not the case, it would imply that there is no "fact of the matter" as to whether or not oxygen affects the human good, which seems absurd.

If ethics is the study of the human good, human flourishing, or "living a good life," there will be many such facts that are relevant.

I am unsure what, though, and it's certainly not a roadmap by any means. There always remains some X factor of 'wisdom' involved in delivering medicine, and more thoroughly in attempting to live a happy life (as you've used that concept, I'll address it) viz. most often people are happiest not doing what is medically optimal. Or even expressly doing what is not medically optimal.

What's the objection here? A demand for absolute certainty and precision? There is also a sort of practical wisdom that comes into architecture, aircraft design, launching satellites, raising sheep, etc. But that doesn't mean there are facts relevant to how to do these successfully. No measurement reaches absolute precision or certainty. It might not be obvious whether a car needs a new radiator, or just a repair and for the coolant to be bled to let out air, but there is a fact of the matter. Bleeding the coolant will work to stop the coolant warning from tripping or it won't. It will also be a fact that very many things, e.g. shooting the head gasket with a rifle, won't fix the car, and can be ruled out.

Would it be non-ethical to serve alcohol? Some say so, but thats an extreme position that I think misunderstands ethics. I'm sure you'd agree, that such extreme principle is probably not teh best way to go - bu it would be a fairly logical resutl of understanding medical facts as ethical. They can be informative, and they can bear weight, I should think, on ethical reasoning but I can't see how they could arbitrate much of anything. If someone wants their leg broke, they want it broke.

I'd just repeat that well-being isn't reducible to health, but neither are they unrelated. "Good" or "healthy" is primarily said of men, and then said of things like alcohol insomuch as they promote, are signs of, symptoms of, etc. health or well-being in men. All men are different, and so we shouldn't expect to be able to formulate universal maxims, except in extreme cases. There are clearly levels of alcohol consumption that are going to virtually always be "too much," unless we think up extremely bizarre scenarios (e.g. "aliens will blow up the planet unless you can finish 15 liters of whiskey in the next hour!"). But neither is the relationship between alcohol and well-being amongst men random and unknowable. It is regular and knowable.

That "alcoholism" is not good for well-being is something that can at least be established ceteris paribus, and you might be able to go further when you consider our capacity for freedom and self-determination and how chemical dependency and addiction undermines this capacity.

I don't think so. I deliberately said that we know "just about nothing, scientifically, concerning the phenomenon of consciousness" because a) I believe it's true, and b) there's no reason we can't meet the eliminativist somewhat on their own ground.

I see. I guess the difference is that I wouldn't grant them the "scientific." On their account, the vast bulk of the social sciences might be seen as falling outside the purview of "science." Or, on your more radically empiricist accounts, the vast bulk of books published in the sciences also fail to be "scientific," on the grounds that they are "metaphysical speculation," or "naively realist."

What is this faculty, and how does it do what it does? Just giving it a name doesn't help.

I don't get this critique, because existing work goes way beyond giving it a name. The original criticism of the via antiqua was that it was too technical, too detailed, and too complex. It's a broad area, but just consider the role of signs in the communication of form (doctrina signorum). I think we might criticize C.S. Peirce or John Deely on several grounds, lack of organization, etc., but "lack of detail and explanation" hardly seems like it should be one of them. It just isn't an explanation in terms of prediction and mechanism.

And so too for explanations of form, perception, abstraction, etc. There are indeed works that try to avoid committing too much to extremely detailed expositions, and I think this is sometimes actually to their credit. Not all topics admit of the same degree of specificity. Robert Sokolowski's The Phenomenology of the Human Person is a great example. That's an expansion on Aquinas, Aristotle, Husserl, and modern cognitive science. It goes far beyond naming, it's just that it also makes no attempt to remain committed to the empiricist presuppositions of what explanation must look like. The D.C. Schindler book I referenced, while high level and focused more on the practical role of beauty, is also not short on explanation.

Moreover, we can't just say, "Well, you're asking for a scientific explanation and that's not appropriate."

I don't see why not. This would depend entirely on how "scientific explanation" is defined. If attempts to provide a metaphysics of knowledge are shot down on the grounds that "a good explanation is scientific" and that "scientific explanations" avoid metaphysics (which normally amounts to just assuming certain metaphysical stances), this seems like it could equally be deemed question begging.

And let's be clear, the emotivist is also offering an explanation. They don't deny the experience of goodness, beauty, and truth tout court. Rather, they positively claim that these specifically involve irrational processes within the human person, and do not directly involve the things judged to be beautiful, etc.

Yet if they say: "A rainbow cannot be beautiful per se, because it's just water droplets, light, and refraction," we might very well ask "how does the body, which is also mostly water, and is supposedly also nothing but chemicals and energy accomplish the feat of producing beauty, which the rainbow is incapable of in virtue of its being composed of chemicals and energy?" Or: "Why is it implausible that a human body could be beautiful, but plausible that it produces all beauty?" "Why are 'ensembles of particles' incapable of possessing beauty, but fully capable of experiencing it?" The emotivist claim is no less extraordinary from the perspective of the reductive paradigm. In some ways, it is more extraordinary, because now beauty cannot be some sort of emergent property of things' roles in their context, or some non-mathematical property of being that has been missed by our methods, but must instead be a sui generis product produced wholly within the skulls of individual men.



:up: I largely agree, although I do think it is sometimes the case that techne can involve phenomena that are not well-understood (e.g. early heat engines and heat, early radios and EM fields, etc.). Techne is in some sense the proof of episteme, and what "objectifies" it in the world (in the same way that Hegel says that institutions serve to objectify morality).

You could probably draw an analogy to the ethical and aesthetic life in terms of praxis and theoria.

I'll take this as a proxy for several of the arguments you make, and reply, "No, it isn't a fair move." I believe the eliminativist is thinking something like this: "Well, it's very unlikely, according to me, that consciousness 'exists' in the way that non-eliminativists believe it does, so I'd need a complete scientific explanation of consciousness as that kind of existing thing before I could even entertain the idea. And in the absence of such a theory, my agnosticism turns to outright denial." So the reply should be: "Open your mind. We know just about nothing, scientifically, concerning the phenomenon of consciousness. A 'compete theory' may be a long way away. In the meantime, just say you don't know -- neither do I!"

Isn't this conclusion you're suggesting, that we allow that we all know almost nothing of consciousness, or some of its most obvious contents (e.g., goodness, beauty, etc.), only reached by granting the eliminitivist his (radical) empiricist premises as inviolable? For instance, the phenomenologist thinks she can say something about consciousness. This skeptical resolution would require that, in disputes between the phenomenologist and the eliminitivist, we must presuppose that the eliminitivist's definition of what constitutes "good evidence" and epistemic warrant are correct and the phenomenologist's are somehow deficient. That is, if we are to know anything about consciousness, it must proceed according to the radical empiricist's premises.

Yet as noted above, I think the past century of philosophy demonstrates pretty well that, if one starts with the radical empiricists' premises, essentially nothing can be known, including the validity/choice-worthiness of those same premises. So, why exactly am I going to want to grant epistemic premises that have proven to be self-refuting?

I focus on science because the common response here is that: "these are the premises required for science." I don't think that's true though. There are many conceptualizations of the sciences that allow for the same methodology and don't need to make the radical empiricists' assumptions.

What is the faculty that allows us to see the waterfall as sublime? To ask this question is not to defer to scientism. There's nothing wrong with asking for a reasonable explanation here, as long as we don't pre-certify what sorts of entities and processes will count, as scientism does. In fact, a close reading of the Suzuki passage suggests a possible line of inquiry. Satori and enlightenment may be the highest development of the very faculty we're asking about.

On traditional accounts, the intellect, by which we are capable of abstraction and an understanding of principles (Goodness and Beauty being the most general principles). The denial of universals (nominalism), and thus of any such faculty, is of course a metaphysical position, but it is also certainly something that tends to be assumed in the Anglo-empiricist tradition (particularly by "anti-metaphysical" thinkers).

So, the reasoning goes: "We won't deal in metaphysics. We will just be properly skeptical, which means we start our work without any assumption that universals exist, that there is any 'first-philosophy,' that there is an intellect, etc." But I think it's pretty obvious that, in practice, this "initial skepticism" just amounts to assuming nominalism, etc. Moreover, the methodological tools developed are based on these assumption, so that even when realist theories are taken up by analytic/empiricist thought, they face a rather significant problem of "hostile translation" and "conceptual blindness," (e.g., this is something Klima's paper on the butchering of Aristotelian essences in some formats is good on.)

But the "traditional accounts" have hardly been dormant, and they've been continually updated according to what the sciences can tell us about our perceptual and intellectual faculties. It's just that engagement between this area of philosophy and the multiple offshoots of the Anglo-empiricist tradition is generally one-way.

I think you're overestimating the power of the "give me a predictive hypothesis" request

Perhaps, although my "apologetic" approach is based on interchanges here and similar venues, where the demand that values (aesthetic or otherwise) be shoehorned into something like a "predictive model" or "testable hypothesis" in order to be justified seems quite common. This is why I like Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape so much as an entry point, despite my disagreements with its core assumptions. Harris at least underscores how it is prima facie implausible that the sciences don't tell us anything about "what is good for man" or "what is good for horses," etc.

Yeah, I think it's a similar sort of distinction. Star Wars has a sort of magic for instance, and is generally cited as "soft sci-fi." But soft sci-fi doesn't need to involve magic, it can just involve ignoring science and including magic-like technology without any attempt at explanation.

Whereas some fantasy is largely trying to present the world as it is, just with heroic/mythic elements, e.g., the Iliad, Aeneid, Beowulf, etc. Magical realism, a sort of fantasy, uses magic to investigate the "higher/deeper realities" of our world in a somewhat similar, if more self-conscious way. Whereas Dante's Divine Comedy is a fantasy that is dramatizing the most cutting-edge philosophy and science of its time.



It's only silly if "gravity" is taken to simply mean "falling downwards." However, this is not how gravity is understood. There is a quite detailed explanation of what gravity is and how it works, even if it remains quite incomplete and the subject of much debate and research.

How high must the described order be in order to be an explanation rather than just a description?

We can think of them as two different types of demonstration:

From St. Thomas' Summa theologiae I.2.2c:

I answer that it must be said that demonstration is twofold: One which is through the cause, and is called demonstration "propter quid" [lit., 'on account of which'] and this is [to argue] from what is prior simply speaking (simpliciter). The other is through the effect, and is called a demonstration "quia" [lit., 'that']; this is [to argue] from what is prior relatively only to us (quoad nos). When an effect is better known to us than its cause, from the effect we proceed to the knowledge of the cause. And from every effect the existence of its proper cause can be demonstrated, so long as its effects are better known to us (quoad nos); because since every effect depends upon its cause, if the effect exists, the cause must pre-exist.

From Aristotle's Posterior Analytics I.13:

"Knowledge of the fact (quia demonstration) differs from knowledge of the reasoned fact (propter quid demonstrations). [...] You might prove as follows that the planets are near because they do not twinkle: let C be the planets, B not twinkling, A proximity. Then B is predicable of C; for the planets do not twinkle. But A is also predicable of B, since that which does not twinkle is near--we must take this truth as having been reached by induction or sense-perception. Therefore A is a necessary predicate of C; so that we have demonstrated that the planets are near. This syllogism, then, proves not the reasoned fact (propter quid) but only the fact (quia); since they are not near because they do not twinkle, but, because they are near, do not twinkle...."

A (major term) = close heavenly body
B (middle term) = non-twinkling heavenly body
C (minor term) = planet

Major Premise: B is A
Minor Premise: C is B
Conclusion: C is A

=

Major Premise: Non-Twinkling heavenly bodies are close heavenly bodies.
Minor Premise: Planets are non-twinkling heavenly bodies (effect).
Conclusion: Planets are close heavenly bodies (cause).

From Aristotle's Posterior Analytics I.13 (cont'd):

"The major and middle of the proof, however, may be reversed, and then the demonstration will be of the reasoned fact (propter quid). Thus: let C be the planets, B proximity, A not twinkling. Then B is an attribute of C, and A-not twinkling-of B. Consequently A is predicable of C, and the syllogism proves the reasoned fact (propter quid), since its middle term is the proximate cause...."

A (major term) = non-twinkling heavenly body
B (middle term) = close heavenly body
C (minor term) = planet

Major Premise: B is A
Minor Premise: C is B
Conclusion: C is A

=

Major Premise: Close heavenly bodies are non-twinkling heavenly bodies.
Minor Premise: Planets are close heavenly bodies (cause).
Conclusion: Planets are non-twinkling heavenly bodies (effect).

https://iteadthomam.blogspot.com/2010/05/quia-demonstrations-vs-propter-quid.html

I have a paper that explains the reasoning in more depth:

...Aristotle begins both the Physics and the Metaphysics with a review of how past thinkers have tried to explain the world and the causes at work in it (i.e,. its principles). The problem upon which past explanations had foundered was that of “the One and the Many.”

Here is the problem: initially, it seems that being must be in some way “one,” a unity. For, if there were many different “types of being,” then we would be left with the question of how these sui generis “types of being” interact. This is the same problem that plagued Cartesian “substance dualism.” Further, if these discrete “types of being” interact, then this interacting whole must itself be a “unity,” a “one.”

At the same time, the world we experience is one of tremendous multiplicity, where everything seems to be undergoing constant change. Yet for us to be able to “say anything true about anything,” there must be at least something that “stays the same” across this ceaseless change. Otherwise, our words would mean something different on each occasion, and whatever we referred to would constantly be passing out of being. If, as Heraclitus says, we “cannot step twice into the same river,” then it also seems we cannot speak of the same river twice either.1,i

It is important to stress that modern thought has not escaped this problem. The world described by contemporary science is one of tremendous diversity. It includes many types of star and galaxy, a vast number of animal species, each with their own complex biology, a “zoo” of fundamental particles, etc. At the same time, science paints a picture of a word that is unified. There are no truly isolated systems. Causation, energy, and information flow across the boundaries of all seemingly discrete “things,” such that the universe appears to be not so much a “collection of things,” but rather a single continuous process. How do we reconcile this seeming multiplicity (the Many) with the equally apparent unity of being (the One)?2,ii

Aristotle, like Plato before him, attempts to chart a via media between the Scylla of Parmenides, whose elevation of the unity of being led him deny the reality of change (and thus of all the evidence of the senses), and the Charybdis of Heraclitus, whose elevation of multiplicity seems to make it impossible to come to know anything.iii For Aristotle, this meant affirming the reality of the vast multiplicity experienced by the senses, while also affirming principles of unity that exist within this multiplicity. It is these principles which produce a “One” from the “Many.”iv

...

A. Generating Principles - Moving from Many to One

The epistemic issues raised by multiplicity and ceaseless change are addressed by Aristotle’s distinction between principles and causes. Aristotle presents this distinction early in the Physics through a criticism of Anaxagoras.1 Anaxagoras posits an infinite number of principles at work in the world. Were Anaxagoras correct, discursive knowledge would be impossible. For instance, if we wanted to know “how bows work,” we would have to come to know each individual instance of a bow shooting an arrow, since there would be no unifying principle through which all bows work. Yet we cannot come to know an infinite multitude in a finite time.2

However, an infinite (or practically infinite) number of causes does not preclude meaningful knowledge if we allow that many causes might be known through a single principle (a One), which manifests at many times and in many places (the Many). Further, such principles do seem to be knowable. For instance, the principle of lift allows us to explain many instances of flight, both as respects animals and flying machines. Moreover, a single unifying principle might be relevant to many distinct sciences, just as the principle of lift informs both our understanding of flying organisms (biology) and flying machines (engineering).

For Aristotle, what are “better known to us” are the concrete particulars experienced directly by the senses. By contrast, what are “better known in themselves” are the more general principles at work in the world.3,i Since every effect is a sign of its causes, we can move from the unmanageable multiplicity of concrete particulars to a deeper understanding of the world.ii

For instance, individual insects are what are best known to us. In most parts of the world, we can directly experience vast multitudes of them simply by stepping outside our homes. However, there are 200 million insects for each human on the planet, and perhaps 30 million insect species.4 If knowledge could only be acquired through the experience of particulars, it seems that we could only ever come to know an infinitesimally small amount of what there is to know about insects. However, the entomologist is able to understand much about insects because they understand the principles that are unequally realized in individual species and particular members of those species.iii

Some principles are more general than others. For example, one of the most consequential paradigm shifts across the sciences in the past fifty years has been the broad application of the methods of information theory, complexity studies, and cybernetics to a wide array of sciences. This has allowed scientists to explain disparate phenomena across the natural and social sciences using the same principles. For instance, the same principles can be used to explain both how heart cells synchronize and why Asian fireflies blink in unison.5 The same is true for how the body’s production of lymphocytes (a white blood cell) takes advantage of the same goal-direct “parallel terraced scan” technique developed independently by computer programmers and used by ants in foraging.6

Notably, such unifications are not reductions. Clearly, firefly behavior is not reducible to heart cell behavior or vice versa. Indeed, such unifications tend to be “top-down” explanations, focusing on similarities between systems taken as wholes, as opposed to “bottom-up” explanations that attempts to explain wholes in terms of their parts.iv

He just refers to past tradition, but I think this is a fair move because the essay is focused on ethics rather than aesthetics, and more so on following out some of the conclusions that the denial of goodness and beauty (and truth) leads to. I think the introductory section is there just to shed light on what a consequential move it is to simply presuppose emotivism and the Anglo-empiricist view of goodness, love, and beauty as wholly internal, "subjective" states related to inchoate feeling/sentiment.

I think it's worth noting though that attacks on the reality of beauty, like those on goodness and truth, tend to also largely rely on debunking arguments. This also often involves shifting the burden of proof entirely onto the other side, demanding that the existence of the contents of consciousness be demonstrated within the confines of what are generally strict "empiricist" premises if these are to be considered fully real. Whereas, one could just as well say: "if your epistemic premises make it impossible to account for goodness, beauty, and truth, or consciousness itself, then they are clearly deficient, and they are self-undermining to the extent that they cannot represent themselves as being "true" or "truly good" premises to begin with."

I know you're plenty aware of the history here. Lewis is responding more to the earlier, Victorian paradigm, already in stark decline when he is writing, which had a strong faith in "natural science" as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Such a paradigm is still popular (e.g. in some of the "New Atheists") and, through inertia, might be even remain the dominant paradigm in secular K-12 education, but it has long been abandoned by the empiricist intellectuals themselves, who moved on to positivism, and from there into deflationary views of truth, more "post-modern" directions, etc. The fact is that "truth" found itself every bit as liable to failing to "cash out" in radical empiricist terms as goodness and beauty.

But truth lives on as "prediction." A theory is "useful" a proxy for the old "truth" so long as it is predictive. Of course, prediction needs to be defined in terms of mathematics, but mathematics and logic are now themselves a great multiplicity of "systems" which can only be selected for on the grounds of "usefulness." One certainly cannot answer the question of logical nihilism using strictly empiricist restrictions on evidence for instance.

Given the empiricist premises, it would seem the goodness, beauty, and the existence of consciousness can only be "justified" if they can be "usefully predictive." I don't know what that means for beauty if it is "sought for its own sake." Yet even the all-pervasive appeals to "pragmatism" and "use" presuppose some good by which "usefulness" is measured, and that things might really be "truly more or less useful" compared to one another. However, barring any "real good," these pragmatic standards ultimately have to be defined in terms of "use" themselves, bottoming out somewhere in an unjustified assertion of usefulness.

Anyhow, I would just ask: are the empiricists' premises inviolable? They certainty aren't justified by empiricism themselves. Second, is the burden of proof shifting fair?

When the eliminitivist says, "give me a complete theory explaining consciousness or I am justified in denying it," is this a fair move? Is it fair that they demand that any such "complete theory" be given in terms of their own reductive assumptions, and explained in terms that would seem to make such an explanation impossible from the outset?

The emotivist is normally doing something very similar. "Show me the empiricist explanation of beauty, ideally reducing it to mathematics or prediction, or it is illusory." Yet if beauty, truth, and goodness are "illusory" they certainly aren't illusory in the way a stick appears bent in water, and it seems fair turn around and demand an account of how such an "illusion" occurs.

The interminable debates between eliminativists/behaviorists and panpsychists are perhaps instructive here, in that their empiricists presuppositions seem to make the debate irresolvable, despite both positions being prima facie absurd. "Show you are 'conscious' and that everything you do cannot be reduced to empirical observations of behavior (but also the only evidence we will allow is empirical observations of behavior)," says the eliminativist. The pansychists says, "what do you mean its 'implausible' that each half of your skull is its own mind, or that a room with five people is its own mind? Just look at the empirical data, tell me where it shows any delineation between discrete private minds! The idea that 'our thoughts are our own,' is just superstition that relies on beetle boxes!"

I suppose the topic of beauty is also deeply tied to views of nature. D.T. Suzuki writes:

There is something rejuvenating in the possession of Zen. The spring flowers look prettier, and the mountain stream runs cooler and more transparent. The subjective revolution that brings about this state of things cannot be called abnormal. When life becomes more enjoyable and its expanse broadens to include the universe itself, there must be something in satori [the potential for enlightenment] that is quite precious and well-worth striving after.

Wordsworth writes in Expostulation and Reply

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Dante claims of nature at the beginning of the Paradiso that:

The glory of the One Who moves all things
penetrates all the universe, reflecting
in one part more and in another less.

These are all "empirical reports" in the broadest sense, in that they deal with sensuous experience. And they're clearly relevant to conceptions of beauty and nature. Yet the debunking arguments tend to demand that passages like these be translated into "predictive hypotheses" or mathematics to "demonstrate a real beauty."

Yet any strong notion of "truth" itself is subject to such debunking, given the empiricist starting premises. The empiricist premises are also what allow Hume's Problem of Induction to be a real problem (he was not the first person to think of the ramifications of underdetermination, just the first to do so in a context where presupposing nominalism, a deflated notion of cause, and a denial of any human capacity for real abstraction or noesis could fly under the radar as implicit assumptions). Yet with this, and related arguments, hardly anything can be said to be "known." Given this context, it can hardly be a particularly strong argument against beauty that it cannot be "known" according to the empiricists criteria, this problem ends up being true for virtually everything and anything. Using these same criteria, we might very well argue that the difference between a dedicated eliminitivist, a panpsychist, a positivist, a post-modern, etc. is itself just emotion.

Anyhow, one recent treatment of the aesthetical question I like is D.C. Schindler's Love and the Postmodern Predicament

Schindler first diagnoses why our modern condition is so poisonous. “[E]ncountering reality is a basic part of the meaning of human existence.” And, moreover, “there is something fundamentally good about this encounter with the world.” “Modern culture,” however, “is largely a conspiracy to protect us from the real.” Our “encounter” with reality, with everyday life, is increasingly mediated by technology, buffered by layers and layers of devices, screens, “social” media, and various other contrivances. Schindler writes that “the energies of the modern world are largely devoted to keeping reality at bay, monitoring any encounter with what is genuinely other than ourselves, and protecting us from possible consequences, intended or otherwise.”

In response to this, Schindler proposes his creative retrieval of the transcendentals. In the transcendentals—beauty, goodness, and truth—man participates in and, in a real sense, “becomes what he knows.” Schindler maintains that rejecting the notion that the cosmos is true, good, and beautiful, “in its very being,” we are actually committing a gravely dehumanizing move. We are cutting ourselves off from the ability to experience reality at its deepest level. This means that the study and understanding of the transcendentals is not some abstraction, disconnected from everyday life. Rather, a proper understanding of the transcendentals allows one the deepest and most concrete access to the real...

Beauty

Schindler first tackles the transcendental of beauty. This is contrary to the order most frequently employed by the tradition. There are both philosophical and practical reasons for this, however. With respect to the latter, Schindler notes that if “our primary . . . access to reality comes through the windows or doors of our senses” this means that the “way we interpret beauty bears in a literally foundational way on our relationship to reality simply.”

Schindler rejects the notion that beauty is just in the eye of the beholder, that is has no connection to objective reality. Rather, “beauty is an encounter between the human soul and reality, which takes place in the ‘meeting ground,’ so to speak, of appearance.” And beauty is a privileged ground of encounter because it “involves our spirit and so our sense of transcendence, our sense of being elevated to something beyond ourselves—and at the very same time it appeals to our flesh, and so our most basic, natural instincts and drives.” By placing beauty first, one establishes the proper conditions for the “flourishing” of goodness and truth.

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2019/05/08/the-intelligibility-of-reality-and-the-priority-to-love/

Or a longer, in-depth review: https://lonergan.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/LoveModernpredicamentSummary.pdf

If it's helpful, Wittgenstein actually commented on Gödel's work (and Gödel commented very briefly on Wittgenstein's commentary). We've discussed it here before a few times. You might already be aware, but IIRC it was in some ancillary papers, so it is easy to miss.

I think "before" the big bang there is no time dimension. Therefore there is no cause. It is an incausal spontaneous beginning of something. One might assume a god or any other metaphysical entity may have started it, but I guess that's not logical as this idea would re-introduce a time dimension. So the next question is: Since when does logic exist? I would say logic is a timeless principle. Logic isn't linked with any empirical principle. For example, the logical axiom "a statement is either true or false, never both" is valid in general, independent of space and time. Conclusion: The statement "there is no time before the big bang, yet there is a cause before" is a false statement.

This would of course rely on a definition of causation as necessarily being temporal. Most of the arguments for God as "First Cause" deny such a deflationary account of causation, and charge that it is conflating generation and creation.

I have used this quote on this topic before, but I'll share it again because I think it is a good one.

Creare [creation] can never be used to indicate the generation of things from or by what is itself a contingent [temporal] finite being.Creation is the “act” whereby a thing has being; generation is what determines it, at any instant(including the instant of first creation), as this-or-that. As the Nicene Creed makes clear, all things are created by God: whatever is, insofar as it is, “participates” in self-subsistent being, or it would not be. As Aquinas puts it, “a created thing is called created because it is a being, not because it is this being. . . God is the cause, not of some particular kind of being, but of the whole universal being.” On the other hand, the changing and ephemeral identities of things are governed by the processes of nature, and in this sense, almost everything is subject to generation and corruption.

One might say: insofar as the metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy things exist, they “depend” directly on the Empyrean; insofar as they exist as this-or-that, most things also depend on nature (particularly on the spheres, beginning from the Primo Mobile).23 All things are therefore created, and most of them are also made. This does not imply that some things (such as the spheres or angels) were created first and then “made” others. It only means that some things are ontologically dependent on others: there is a hierarchy of being in the order of nature (distinction), in which some things cannot exist as what they are unless a whole series of other things exist as what they are. These other things may be said to
be logically prior or “prior in nature,” but they are not “prior in duration” or in time: nothing stands between any thing and the ground of its being. It is in this sense that Aquinas says, “The corporeal forms that bodies had when first produced came immediately from God”; as he explains, this simply means that “in the first production of corporeal creatures no transmutation from potentiality to act can have taken place.” In other words, there was no becoming.

This in no way implies that at the moment of first creation the hierarchy of ontological dependence inherent in the distinction of being did not exist, or that in the first production of things God “had to do something special,” which “later” the spheres did. The moment of first creation is only conceptually, but not essentially, different from any other: the only difference is that before that moment there was nothing. Indeed, for Aquinas the created world could very well have always existed, with little consequence for the Christian understanding of creation; we only know that the world is not eternal because Scripture tells us so. The “act” of creation (the radical dependence of all things on the ground of their being at every instant they exist) logically implies, but must not be identified with, the hierarchical dependencies of determinate form within spatiotemporal being.24

Christian Moevs - The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy - Introduction: Non-Duality and Self-Knowledge - pg. 119-120

The point, as I have said, is that that home (the Empyrean [God]) is nowhere at all. It does not exist in space or time; thus neither does the spatiotemporal world it “contains.” The Empyrean is the subject of all experience, it is what does the experiencing. As pure awareness or conscious being, its relation to creation, that is, to everything that can be described or talked about, may be metaphorically conceived in one of two ways: It may be imagined as an infinite reality containing the entire universe of every possible object of experience (this cosmological picture is the framework of the Paradiso) or it may be conceived as a point with no extension in either space or time, which projects the world of space and time around itself, as a light paints a halo onto mist. In the Primo Mobile, the ninth sphere, which is the nexus between the Empyrean and the world of multiplicity, between the subject of experience and every possible object of experience, Dante takes both these tacks.

pg. 6

God is First Cause as final cause, as in Aristotle, but also as efficient cause. However, efficient cause does not imply "temporally prior," for there is nothing temporally prior to the creation of time itself. This is a communication of existence, not a mechanical "moving" of what exists prior.

This gets at a common concern among fantasy writers and fans. Does a writer go with a "hard magic system" or a "soft magic system." A "hard magic system" is one where there are definite rules to magic, e.g. a strict cause/effect relationship.

The complaint against "hard magic" is that it reduces magic to something that isn't magic. For magic to be "magic" it has to be sort of inexplicable. It becomes a sort of "interesting physics." Whereas people often enjoy "hard magic" particularly because it lets them think about magic in more concrete terms.

Personally, I think a "hard magic" can work quite well, so long as the author just keeps it vague.

Yes. But that value neautrality has moral implications. So it might well lead people to think that describing animals that are screaming in pain as "vocalizing" is more objective because morally neutral. But being morally neutral about that fact has moral implications, because it implies indifference.

That wasn't actually my post, but I'll still respond: The Oxford Very Short Introductions are sort of hit or miss, but the one on "Objectivity" is quite good. One of the points the author makes is that it is far from obvious that the most accurate and true way to describe something like the Holocaust or American slavery would be to "pump out all considerations of subjectivity." Similarly, is the reality and truth of World War II most fully and accurately covered in a "map of all the particles involved, their positions, trajectories, and velocities?" Even ignoring the dubious reductionist premises that would support such a claim, it would seem that even if consciousness were merely "epiphenomenal" (a position I think is very difficult to defend), such a description would still miss very much indeed. The premises that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," and that "objectivity and truth exclude value" are ones I think we have good reason to be skeptical of at any rate.

If the truth is properly absolute, then it is not simply "the objective." The absolute, to be truly absolute, must encompass both reality and appearances, for appearances are part of reality, they are "really" appearances. The absolute includes all perspectives, not a privileged perspective. Absolute good then, must include and be present in all relative good, or even what merely appears to be good (a point Plato makes, and whereof St. Thomas says that all good things, or even what only seems good, is good through the Good, for him, the Triune God).

Yes. It does seem to be a fact that human beings evaluate (attribute values to) certain objective facts. But they do select which facts to attribute moral values to, and so distinguish within the domain in ways that are not defined within the domain.

I am a big believer in human's potential for freedom as self-determination. However, I do also think that it is tricky to speak of us "selecting" value, if this is to imply that this is wholly a matter of choice, or that goodness is primarily always "in us" (in our selections) and not "in things." This would be to agree with Protagoras, that "man is the measure of all things," at least where value is concerned. But I would maintain that it is bad for a fox to have a limb torn off by a trap regardless of what people think.

Likewise, that being burned alive is, in general, bad for man, is not a value judgement me "come to decide upon." It is a value enforced on us anytime we stick our hand in a flame. We might be strong of will, like Gaius Mucius Cordus, and stick our hand in a fire and let it burn as a means of securing some greater good, but this doesn't negate the way in which "what man is" and "what things are" (e.g. fire) play a determinant role in values. And if "being like God" is the limit of conceivable goodness, then this limit case is not something man chooses.

This question reminds me of a quote I really like and I'll tag because it is a response to emotivism:

In their second chapter [of their grammar textbook for young children] Gaius and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it 'sublime' and the other 'pretty'; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius comment as follows: 'When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall... Actually ... he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word "Sublime", or shortly, I have sublime feelings' Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: 'This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.'

Before considering the issues really raised by this momentous little paragraph (designed, you will remember, for 'the upper forms of schools') we must eliminate one mere confusion into which Gaius and Titius have fallen. Even on their own view—on any conceivable view—the man who says This is sublime cannot mean I have sublime feelings. Even if it were granted that such qualities as sublimity were simply and solely projected into things from our own emotions, yet the emotions which prompt the projection are the correlatives, and therefore almost the opposites, of the qualities projected. The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration. If This is sublime is to be reduced at all to a statement about the speaker's feelings, the proper translation would be I have humble feelings. If the view held by Gaius and Titius were consistently applied it would lead to obvious absurdities. It would force them to maintain that You are contemptible means I have contemptible feelings', in fact that Your feelings are contemptible means My feelings are contemptible...

...until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt. The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more 'just' or 'ordinate' or 'appropriate 'to it than others. And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same. The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions. But for this claim there would be nothing to agree or disagree about.

To disagree with "This is pretty" if those words simply described the lady's feelings, would be absurd: if she had said "I feel sick" Coleridge would hardly have replied "No; I feel quite well." When Shelley, having compared the human sensibility to an Aeolian lyre, goes on to add that it differs from a lyre in having a power of 'internal adjustment' whereby it can 'accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them', 9 he is assuming the same belief. 'Can you be righteous', asks Traherne, 'unless you be just in rendering to things their due esteem? All things were made to be yours and you were made to prize them according to their value.'

C.S. Lewis - The Abolition of Man

Another thing that occurred to me is that the case for emotivism often relies heavily on debunking arguments rather than positive arguments. That is, rather than show that emotivism must be true,emotivist arguments tend to proceed by attempting to show that no value judgement can be correct. Sometimes such arguments can be quite nuanced. Sometimes they seem quite facile, e.g. the claim that there can be no such thing as a "good artifact" simply because people sometimes want an artifact for something other than its intended purpose, or that catching a gazelle cannot be "good for a lion" because it is "bad for the gazelle."

I think a very common assumption at work in such debunking arguments (the nuanced and the simple) is that "goodness" must be predicated univocally and not analogically—that for goodness to exist at all, it must exist according to some sort of fixed scale of magnitude.

But I think it's obvious that "good can be said in many ways." In the same way, we might say that "tuna is healthy" because it is a food that promotes human health (an analogy of attribution, where health is most properly predicated of the living human, and the "healthyness" of related things is parasitic on this health). "Healthy bloodwork" works in the same way. Bloodwork is not healthy per se, it is a symptom of health. Yet clearly, the prepared tuna, being dead, is not healthy as respects the health of the tuna. We cannot use the terms "healthy" or "good" univocally, yet neither does that mean that each use of "good" is entirely equivocal.

My apologies, as you can see, I removed a large portion of my post because I had written it on my phone in a very broken up manner and I realized the whole part about evolution, etc., wasn't even responding to your position. This is the problem when you can only see the last two paragraphs you wrote :rofl:, I guess my mind just kept going in one direction.

I don't have time for a detailed response now, but I just wanted to comment on two things:

It's probably due to the way I put things, but, no, I don't actually even care much about what "real science" is supposed to be. What facts need above all is a modicum of precision, and that's something that words like "bad" almost never allow. What I'm saying is that the scientific facts tell you nothing that your fussy-wussy intuition doesn't also tell you, so there's little point in appealing to the facts. It doesn't really matter how much damage a boot at a certain velocity can do. You can appeal to facts, but you gain nothing by appealing to science here.

I agree with this one some things. I don't think this is always true though. Just for example, health is at least part of the human good and living a good life. I think that part is obvious. What promotes good health is often not that obvious, and we rely on the medical sciences, neuroscience, biology, etc. to inform our opinions here. Isaac Newton's consumption of mercury to boost his health is probably a fine example; it wasn't obvious what a an absolutely terrible idea this was, even to a genius like Newton. Other examples, like the existence of externalities in economics, or the pernicious effects of price floors and price ceilings abound. Having basic access to food is part of the human good and early price ceiling schemes, e.g. during the French Revolution, led directly to massive food scarcity, having the opposite of the intended effect.

I'm honestly quite confused right now. A car that doesn't move is a bad car, but if we didn't want the car to be a car then it could be something else, which it always is - beyond the judging. I think what I'm going for is insconsistence-despite-continuity or something? If I ever figure this out and have the time (not likely today or tommorrow - depending on your timezone maybe even the day after tommorrow) I'll be back - unless someone else says it better (which has preamted quite a lot of posts from me).

Yes, there is context dependence. St. Thomas uses the example of walking. Walking is generally good for health. Walking is not good for the health of a man with with a broken leg. Lentils are generally healthy. They are not healthy if you are allergic to lentils.

A good car runs, as you say. This context sensitivity doesn't make ethics impossible. It only makes it impossible to reduce to a moral calculus. This is why, IMHO, the ethics of the Enlightenment and afterwards are deeply flawed. They demand that, for there to be any ethics at all, it must be formulated in universal maxims, or that goodness be univocal, such that we can have a "moral calculus" whereby we assign some discrete amount of "goodness points" to different acts or things.

Indeed, the focus on acts is also part of the problem. People are primarily good or free, not acts. Just as there is never motion with nothing (no thing) moving, human acts are parasitic for their existence on men. Hence, while it is sometimes useful to speak of the freedom or goodness of acts, desires, appetites, etc., I think it is better to speak of men, lives, and societies.

Use determines use, paradoxical it may seem.

Sure, but it cannot be "use all the way down," unless the human use of language spawns for the aether uncaused. For example, presumably, if ants didn't exist, human languages wouldn't have a word for ants. Ants' existence is a cause of the word "ants." Ants have existed much longer than human languages though. Their existence is prior to our having a use for a term denoting them. The term is useful because ants exist. It seems plausible then that the term's meaning can be tied to ants themselves, rather than language being a hermetically sealed circle of use referring only to use.

Likewise, while different human languages organize the color spectrum differently, they all organize it in roughly the same way. No human culture has ever come up with names for the colors in the ultraviolet spectrum that are visible to insects, but not to the human eye. I think this is an obvious case where biology is prior to usefulness. If we had birds' or insects' photoreceptors, we would find different patterns of language useful. Wittgenstein gets at this vaguely with the notion of a "form of life," but I think we could certainly expand on that a great deal more, as a means of showing how human biology determines use and usefulness.

First, it might sound simple (i.e., that you're reducing meaning to something simple) saying that use is meaning, but Wittgenstein spent quite a bit of time explaining it. It's not reductionist

I wasn't thinking of Wittgenstein in particular there. A lot of people have worked with the idea of meaning as use, some in quite reductionist terms, some less so.

I am fairly certain that in PI Wittgenstein says specifically that meaning is often, but not always, use.

Second, nothing I've read in that long post does anything to dispel the idea that meaning is primarily derived from use

But what determines use? Wouldn't the causes of use and usefulness play an important role in explaining language too?

For instance, the way we use words, the reason we find it useful to use them in certain ways, is dependent on the properties of what the words refer to. Across disparate languages that are developed in relative isolation, the use of terms for certain natural phenomena will be similar because the things the terms describe are similar. Hence, meaning can be traced back, in at least some cases, to reference. Otherwise, our use of "dog" would have nothing to do with dogs, which doesn't seem right. But if the usefulness and use of "dog" is determined to some large degree by dogs, then use is going to be in some sense downstream of being.

Meaning is, of course, not always reference either.

Second, I had forgot Grayling's full example. People can use "QED" and the like consistently, in the correct way, and not know their meaning. However, consider "kalb." It means dog in Arabic. You now know what kalb means. However, if you don't know Arabic, you don't know how to use it in a sentence.

Some of it shows that people can start using words differently from their intended purpose, but even if this happens, the new use will drive the new meaning. Use is not absolute; it changes, and new uses are formed. Sometimes incorrect uses morph into new language games and that incorrect use becomes accepted as just another use within a certain part of a culture.

If people can use terms correctly enough to get by in conversations without actually knowing what the terms mean, then it seems obvious than one can know how to use terms without knowing their meaning. Yet if meaning were nothing but use, knowing how to use a term correctly should be identical with knowing what it means.

Or for a similar example, you can think of people who can get through assisting in a Latin mass but have hardly any idea what the words they are saying mean (because they don't know Latin). They are using the terms correctly, yet the meaning of the Latin used in the mass is clearly not just "what one says when doing a mass."

I would say that use is an important factor that is constitutive in meaning, but by no means the only factor.

I'm a sociologist by formal training, though I never went down that path professionally and it's now a few decades in the past, but I'm quite familiar with the value discussion, and the funny thing is that my personal position on this topic is that value free science is an unreachable ideal that nevertheless may have some function when you strive for it, though you have to stay vigilant and not pat yourself on the back for being all-out unbiased (you're not). Writing this post was a little weird in that respect; I was trying to put on an emotivist hat while wondering to what degree I am one. As I said before, I'm not that familiar with emotivism.

I think it's worth separating out the goal of avoiding bias (attaining objectivity) and the idea that "real/proper" science involves excluding value and goal-directedness from the considerations of science. The latter obviously is not a norm of the social sciences (else concepts like "utility" in economics would be total nonstarters) nor is it a norm in the life sciences. The demand that the goal-directedness of life, or consciousness (which is value-laden) be somehow "outside the realm of 'real' science," seems philosophically loaded to me, perhaps in a problematic way for our discussion if it presupposes moral anti-realism

Do you think one has to adopt a position like eliminitive materialism or epiphenomenalism in order to being doing proper objective science? Or is it allowable for consciousness and intentionality (and thus value judgements) to be part of an explanation of natural phenomena, without these being presumed to be fully reducible to "mindless mechanism?"

"Methodological naturalism," is one of those very fuzzy terms that means very different things to different people, but I think it is very fair to say that it is often used as a way to say "this preferred metaphysics must be treated as 'scientific.'" I think the overwhelming majority of life scientists would accept the label, but they obviously have differing views about teleonomy, reductionism, and the role of consciousness in explanations of biology.

And the value judgement "bad" in "stomping babies is bad for them," is used to fudge over the actual facts - and this works partly because of the ethos inherent in medicine.

IDK, if I am reading this correctly, then it seems like the presupposition that "real facts don't include value" is doing the heavy lifting here. It seems like you're saying that an explanation from the medical sciences (involving value) is "fudging over the (real) facts" and is not "real science" precisely because "real facts cannot involve values in this way." Do I have that right?

If so, isn't that just assuming the very thing is question? I don't think it works to support emotivism by starting with the premise that "real facts" don't involve value without begging the question. Not only that, but such a presupposition would mean that an opponent can never offer any empirical data to the contrary, since to be a real empirical fact simply is to exclude reference to values. Hence, to be compelling, I think a defense of emotivism would need to find a way to disallow medical science, psychology , parts of neuroscience, etc. as "real science" on some grounds other than "they include value."

I'd agree that we don't really need to appeal to science here though, I just used it as an example arbiter of empirically accessible facts. Nor do we need to look at the sociology of science. Things like "it is bad to have your hand slammed in a car door," or "it is bad for a fox to have its leg ripped off by a trap," etc. seem obvious enough. "There are no facts about what is good or bad for people," is something that even people who express this belief do not seem to actually believe with any conviction (sort of like radical skepticism). They do not act as if they believe it is true (IMO, because it is too implausible to actually commit to).

Does emotivism say whatever we choose is right? Surely they're aware of conflicting emotions? In some ways, "right" seems like a magic spell to quiet that inner war. We want decision making to be easier than it is.

How can one be wrong when making a judgement about something which has no truth value, where there is no fact in play? For instance, how can one "buy a bad car," if cars are never really good or bad? One can certainly say "boohoo to my past purchasing decisions," but you cannot have been wrong about a goodness that doesn't exist.

A.C. Grayling challenges the strict reduction of meaning to use with examples like "e.g." and "QED," where people might very well use them properly without knowing what they mean. However, I think a more serious objection might be the plot of A Canticle for Leibowitz.

As Alasdair MacIntyer describes the general plot:

Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists. Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all that they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment; instruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred. Nonetheless all these fragments are reembodied in a set of practices which go under the revived names of physics, chemistry and biology. Adults argue with each other about the respective merits of relativity theory, evolutionary theory and phlogiston theory, although they possess only a very partial knowledge of each. Children learn by heart the surviving portions of the periodic table and recite as incantations some of the theorems of Euclid. Nobody, or almost nobody, realizes that what they are doing is not natural science in any proper sense at all. For everything that they do and say conforms to certain canons of consistency and coherence and those contexts which would be needed to make sense of what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably.

In such a culture men would use expressions such as ‘neutrino’, ‘mass’, ‘specific gravity’, ‘atomic weight’ in systematic and often interrelated ways which would resemble in lesser or greater degrees the ways in which such expressions had been used in earlier times before scientific knowledge had been so largely lost. But many of the beliefs presupposed by the use of these expressions would have been lost and there would appear to be an element of arbitrariness and even of choice in their application which would appear very surprising to us. What would appear to be rival and competing premises for which no further argument could be given would abound. Subjectivist theories of science would appear and would be criticized by those who held that the notion of truth embodied in what they took to be science was incompatible with subjectivism.

This imaginary possible world is very like one that some science fiction writers have constructed. We may describe it as a world in which the language of natural science, or parts of it at least, continues to be used but is in a grave state of disorder. We may notice that if in this imaginary world analytical philosophy were to flourish, it would never reveal the fact of this disorder. For the techniques of analytical philosophy are essentially descriptive and descriptive of the language of the present at that. The analytical philosopher would be able to elucidate the conceptual structures of what was taken to be scientific thinking and discourse in the imaginary world in precisely the way that he elucidates the conceptual structures of natural science as it is.

Nor again would phenomenology or existentialism be able to discern anything wrong. All the structures of intentionality would be what they are now. The task of supplying an epistemological basis for these false simulacra of natural science would not differ in phenomenological terms from the task as it is presently envisaged. A Husserl or a Merleau-Ponty would be as deceived as a Strawson or a Quine/

We could well imagine a world like A Canticle for Leibowitz or Warhammer 40,000's "technopriests." Yet we could also imagine a world where science is rediscovered. But if this occurred, would we want to say the words of the scientific lexicon changed with this disaster and then changed back to their original meaning with the rediscovery of science?

There is also the problem of vagueness. Sometimes people pretend to an expertise they don't have, and sometimes they genuinely overestimate their own level of understanding. When this happens, they can often use terms correctly. Indeed, the pretender might stick very closely to sources of authority on purpose in order to safeguard against misuse. Sometimes you can get very far into a conversation, particularly online where people can simply copy and paste from sources, before it becomes clear that an interlocutor, while using words correctly, does not understand their content.

Robert Sokolowski's The Phenomenology of the Human Person is pretty good on this:

Sometimes we use words and think we use them correctly, but in fact we do not understand what they mean. Husserl describes this phenomenon as the vague use of words.14 We may be familiar with the word tree, and we may be acquainted with trees, but we may still fail to understand both the word and the tree (these are not two understandings but one). We do use the word tree, and seem therefore to target the tree, but what we go on to say about it shows that the intelligibility of the tree has not appeared to us; the tree is present to us, but the intelligibility of trees remains absent. The name is used by association, not with logical insight, and other people, those who do understand trees, will see that we use the word but do not know what we are talking about. It is true that we would probably need to recognize at least the shape of the tree, and so we would need to grasp at least that much of the tree’s intelligibility and to know at least that property; without that much of an inkling of what it is, we probably could not use the name at all. But if we are speaking vaguely, we would know practically nothing more of its essentials. We might, for example, expect it to bleed if someone cut it, or we might expect it to reproduce by generating little trees inside itself (these are far-fetched possibilities, but they help make the point).

Because we have the word and the thing but not the intelligibility, our speech about the tree is unstable. We may in fact say something true about trees, but this happens more by accident than by knowledge. We may have heard people say things about trees and might repeat what they say; or we might just take a chance and manage to say something true; but as we continue to speak about trees, the inadequacy of our knowledge becomes obvious to anyone who knows anything about trees. The specific intelligibility of trees is absent to us. It is not that we are altogether ignorant of trees; we are indeed trying to think and speak about them, and we are using what seem to us to be the appropriate names and predicates that belong to this thing, but we use the words vaguely, without thinking and without insight into what the thing is. This intelligibility is not there for us; this specific understandability– not just any one at all, but the one belonging to trees– is absent to our minds.15

My example of the intelligibility of trees is, as I have conceded, rather far-fetched. It is hard to imagine anyone with any intelligence and even a minimal acquaintance with trees being so entirely devoid of insight into what trees are. But it is much easier to imagine that people use words like democracy, politics, freedom, and happiness, or even atom or electricity, in a vague way.16 The phenomenon often occurs when academics pretend to know something about quantum mechanics or Godel’s Theorem. Such vague usage sometimes embarrasses the user. Often enough we want to impress others with our “knowledge”; we want to “fake it” for some reason or other. Wesay a few things and may, by accident, seem to have gotten them right, but then, as we try to hold forth further, our inadequacy to the thing, the absence of the thing’s intelligibility to our minds, shows up more and more. This inadequacy shows up most vividly in the vagueness of our syntactic articulation of the thing, but it is also present in our very naming of the thing, in our use of a vocabulary. It is not just the syntax that has been vaguely executed; the name has been vaguely used as well. The content as well as the form of our speech is inadequate. We do not possess the eidos of the thing in question.

Such an absence of intelligibility is a public phenomenon. It occurs in the same public domain as the judgments we make for and before one another, and it is dependent on the vocabulary that we have as a resource. A speaker can be profoundly confused about democracy precisely because there is a word, democracy, floating around in his linguistic environment, being used by many people. He enters into conversation with them and, very likely, his use of this term and others related to it will be vague at the start. If he is insightful and willing to take in the way things are, his use of the word and others associated with it will become more distinct and clear, but if he lacks insight or does not want to learn, his usage may remain confused for the rest of his life. The intelligibility behind the term democracy, the intelligibility in democracy, will remain absent to him even as he seems to make it present

That's a lot of quotes! Well, the OP was short on content, I figured I'd add a bit!

:up:

Yes, there is a great deal of uncertainty here, in part because man, as a social and cultural animal, always has his good filtered through social and historical context. Often, the people we might expect to be the happiest: celebrities, sports stars, wealthy heirs, etc., are, by their own admission, completely miserable. And often, what we think will make us happy fails to do so, or things we greatly fear and strive to avoid lead to our happiness.

I think this is actually the knock-down argument against strict forms of emotivism. If statements about the human good and human flourishing were just statements of current emotion, then it should be impossible for us to ever be wrong about such non-factual declarations. They would be "true for us" so long as they accurately reflect our emotions. Yet I think the experience of regret, of "being wrong about what is good for us," is a ubiquitous human experience we grapple with throughout our lives (the "extra shots of tequila" late in the party just being a common short-term example here). The idea that "I am always right about what is good for me or others," or that there is no right or wrong here, seems very implausible, although it is certainly aided by positing an "ethical good" distinct from all other goods (I think this is because such an "ethical good" is incoherent, since it is divorced from our lives).

Now, if an "emotivist" replies: "that is no issue, because I allow that we can be wrong about how our acts will shape our future emotional states," I think they are actually no longer an emotivist. They are something more like a utilitarian. They think that different "emotional states" are preferable to others and that the good reduces to promoting "good states" and reducing the risk of "bad ones." I think this latter view is overly reductive, but it's better than emotivism.

What you call "the good life" (which is as good a term as any)

Well, given the original topic of this thread, I think it's worth noting that the reception of Aristotle in later antiquity, Stoicism, Platonism, Christianity, and much Islamic thought tended to instead center on the idea that the real goal of ethics is to "become like onto God" (as much as is possible for man).

Perhaps this end does more to answer the emotivists' likely question of "but why is happiness or flourishing good?" Yet, I think this sort of consideration is not what one starts with in ethics. Ethics is better thought of as the study of human flourishing or happiness. Consideration of the summum bonum, if it exists, must come later, as an end and not the starting point (and certainly not something that all goods are reduced to). If the summum bonum did not involve happiness, it is hard to see why it is the summum bonum. For instance, Hegel puts freedom above happiness, but he can do so because someone who is truly free will also obviously choose what makes them happy, so the latter goal is inclusive of the former (and indeed acts to assure its attainment).

We have discussed Ligotti here a few times before. A really interesting book on the emergence of a sense of a "lack of meaning," which is in many ways a distinctly modern phenomenon, is Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (also one of the big Candian philosophers). I think he does a good job showing how this concern grows out of reconceptualizations of nature, more than religion (although the two are deeply related).

Of course, the "valuelessness and meaninglessness" of the universe has itself become a sort of dogma, guarded with the ferocity of early modern Catholic defenses Aristotle's physics in some cases. When existentialism becomes a sort of religion, it becomes important to safeguard the absurdity of the world, since we cannot be triumphant overcomers of absurdity if the world is not absurd (and would in fact, simply be deluded about the fundamental nature of the world).

In earlier ethics, both the dominant pagan philosophy of late-antiquity and ancient through medieval Christendom, the goal of ethics, and of philosophy itself was often framed more as "becoming like God." I think this framing explains why even thinkers who did not believe in the immortality of individual souls nonetheless did not seem to face a "crisis of meaning" (its absence). Robert M. Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present is pretty good on that idea.

This is the air we breathe, and I assume a lot of people here on TPF are aware of, adjacent to or even profoundly affected by this woke capture of many institutions. This goes far beyond education. Morality via algorithim, delivered via screen.

The hyper politicization of ethics is indeed a huge problem. In my education, which I don't think is unusual, ethical education largely consisted of drilling the obedience required of students, and then jumping right to political ethics (also framed in the, then far less dominant, broadly "woke" frame). My personal position would be that you need to deal with the basics of individual ethics before delving into the ethics of politics, particularly contentious issues. Students today get essentially no direct education in ethics, and then are asked to jump right into political questions.

I always think about William James and the 'Will to Believe" on subjects such as this.

I was just thinking about James, because his essay seems to accord with a lot of Orthodox apologetics I've been reading. A key point raised by James is that our access to evidence in support of our beliefs is often contingent on our (perhaps conditional) acceptance of some beliefs prior to the consideration of evidence that supports them. I think this point is in line with the credo: credo ut intelligam, “I believe that I may understand,” advanced by St. Augustine and St. Anselm (from Isiah 7:9)

This credo is usually invoked in the context of religious beliefs. However, in our increasingly skeptical and conspiratorial era, it is worth noting that it actually applies equally to all areas of knowledge. We can doubt anything. We can always ask of any belief: “but what if I am somehow wrong?” or of any statement “but what if it is a lie?”

Yet, if we approach the world in this way, it does not seem that we will be able to learn much of anything. For instance, if we doubt every word in our physics textbook, if we cannot get past a suspicion that the entire field is an elaborate hoax, etc. we shall never learn physics. Likewise, we cannot hope to learn to speak Spanish if we doubt the accuracy of every Spanish speaker as they attempt to instruct us. It is only after we have understood a topic that we can have an informed opinion about it. For example, even if it were really true that some key element in modern physics is mistaken, we can hardly expect to be able to identify this problem, or to find a solution to it, while remaining ignorant of the subject because we have refused to learn about it due to our concerns over accepting error.

But this would apply to religion as well. One doesn't just read and assent or withhold assent. If the (at least traditional) Christians are right, our nous is darkened, and our reasoning will remain clouded until we are healed (which involves ascetic discipline, prayer, sacraments, and a redirecting of the appetites and passions). The Platonists, Stoics, and Buddhists make similar points. I had written about this in a more specifically Christian context awhile back, but I think it applies to a wide variety of things. One doesn't really discover if "meditation" or "mindfulness" or "prayer" "works" by reading about it an assenting, but only after pursuing them.

I think this is important because ethics (and aesthetics) is very much a doing, and not something that seems to reduce to affirming or not affirming propositional beliefs.

lol, that reminds me, after I listened to the audiobook of Saint Gregory of Nyssa 's "The Life of Moses," (excellent quality BTW) the YouTube algorithm, in its infinite wisdom, decided that I was a prime target for ads by Messianic Jews that were obviously aimed at trying to convert other Jews to Messianic Judaism with the line: "nothing is more Jewish than Jesus!"

I'm going to go out on a limb though and say that 95+% of the audience listening to St. Gregory are Christians, and probably moreso traditional Christians, not Jews, but I could be wrong. Maybe it just sandwiched the key words: "Moses" and "Christ."

I was thinking of Job's interlocutors, the Disciples' questions at the opening of John 9 as to whether a man was born blind because he sinned or his parents, etc. The idea that good fortune is a reward and bad fortune a punishment shows up in the wisdom literature and the Psalms quite a bit too.

I would agree with you that it isn't a major theme promoted by Scripture. Indeed, Scripture often seems to argue directly against this view. I am just saying that, because Scripture feels the need to address this view, it must have been at least somewhat common.

And that only makes sense, it's hardly like American Protestants invented something totally new with the prosperity gospel. The idea that people's standing depends on their goodness has been common across a lot of cultures throughout history.

Goodness is a general principle, so we shouldn't expect that it can be reduced to health. But nor is health, or facts about what promotes or hinders health, unrelated to the "good of man" or "living a good life" (the proper study of ethics IMO, nor "moral goodness" as something discrete). Facts about health do not fail to have any ethical valance.

That "some facts about the human good fall under the preview of established empirical sciences," would also not imply, "all facts about ethics reduce to facts about established empirical sciences."

At any rate, I think this distinction is only threatening to what I'm saying if one already assumes the premise: "ethical good is a sui generis sort of goodness discrete from other goods sought by man." I'd rather say that health, psychological health, etc., are principles, facets of the good life.

I think health is a good analogy because there are very many components and causes of health, and we would hardly want to reduce health itself to any one of them. Health is not just avoiding heavy metal poisoning, but certainly the effects of ingesting heavy metals (facts) bear of health. So too health and the good life.

First, that stomping babies is bad for them is not a scientific fact; it's probably a medical one. Science is to some degree at least supposed to be as value neutral as possible, but it does need its cues, as for what to do. Medicine, as a social institution, is meant to heal people, so that sets a context that sort of defines good and bad; as in health is good. This is taken from a greater social context: you ought to act in such a way that you stay healthy. And so on. So, yes, I do think it's true that "stomping babies is a fact of medicinal science" if you follow the traces of social values.

Is medicine not a science? What about botany, zoology, or biology more generally, which have notions of health, harm, goal-directedness, function, etc. that all involve value? What about all the social sciences? Psychology, economics, criminology, political science, etc.? These often deal with values rather explicitly.

IMHO, the demand that "real science" be "valueless science" will tend to lead towards a No True Scotsman fallacy as to what constitutes a "real science," if the emotivist goes down that route (i.e., presupposing that if a science involves value, it is not really a science). Then again, maybe they have to take this path, since a strict emotivist would also have to claim that all the value claims of these sciences are "just emotional appeals," which also doesn't seem like a good conclusion.

I would say that science tries to remain objective, not necessarily "free of value." That truth is preferable to falsify, that sounds arguments are better than appeals to emotion, that the pursuit of truth is more desirable than falsifying your data to meet your aims, etc. are all statements of value that science cannot live without.

Whereas, IMO, if we go in the direction of "science says the universe is meaningless and valueless" we have left science for the realm of (often quite dogmatic) philosophy, and at any rate "emotivism must be true because 'science says' goodness doesn't exist," seems to be a pretty hard case to make, no?

But to return to medicine, are the value statements of medicine just statements of emotion? If we are to stick to a strick emotivism, they have to be. Yet, for my part, I hardly want to say that both sides of something like the anti-vaccine debate are just speaking about their emotions, etc.

One thing I'm not sure about is this: I don't think values/emotion is a one way road. "Value <--> Emotion" rather than "Emotion --> Value". That is because both your visceral emotions and your social-belonging derived emotions are constrained by facts: about (a) social realities, (b) biological bodies, and (c) biographic actions you've taken (even if by mistake, such as "stepping on someone's foot").

Still, I'm not sure I couldn't make it work. At the very least, I don't find that your argumentations dissuade me away from emotivism

This doesn't seem like emotivism anymore though. In this case, moral statements wouldn't just be expressions of emotion or sentiment ("boo-hoo" or "hoorah.")

That emotion is involved (even deeply) in our value statements is not the thesis of emotivism. Plato agreed with that. The emotivist thesis is that there is nothing else, no facts, to moral statements, just expressions of sentiments. But there is a common fallacy in discussions, both here and even in academia, that somehow showing that emotion is involved in value judgements, or even inextricably linked to them, somehow is solid evidence of emotivism. It isn't. If emotivism is to be a unique thesis, it's that there is nothing but emotion (no facts) related to value statements, not that emotion plays a role in moral statements.

But what's the overall theory here - when priorities change? What's the temporal aspect of morality. I don't see this as a problem for the emotivist; but I feel you have to address this if you want to say that you are "right" in this situation.

Well, let me just start by asking, can people ever be wrong about their own choices? Or are we always infallible as to our own choices as respects what is best for us, and if we later regret our choices they are only bad choices for some "future us" but not bad choices for the "us" when we decided to make them?

If we can never be wrong about what is good for us, I don't think there can be any value in philosophy or introspection. Whatever we choose is right because we currently desire to choose it (so long as we always do only what we want). But I think this is pretty clearly not always the case. A last shot of tequila isn't good for me when I drink it at 3 AM, but bad when I awake five hours later with a terrible hangover. And it isn't good and bad for different people, past me and future me.

Yet if this is the case, and someone had said to me "it would not be good for you to drink that tequila," it seems obvious that they would be right (and that I would be wrong if I insisted on drinking it).

The time valuing question is interesting. I have thought of it before. There are all sorts of interesting issues there. For one, in the case of the smoker, the young smoker is epistemically in a much worse place to judge the relative suffering of chemotherapy, having their teeth pulled, and having great difficulty breathing, whereas both the older and younger one probably have about equal epistemic status as to the suffering of having to quit smoking and to go without it (indeed, the future cancer patient has probably had to quit smoking already and lived without smoking). Smoking is an interesting case because neither I, nor any of the people I know who have quit, particularly miss it (maybe some social elements of it), but perhaps some people really do enjoy it immensely.

Yet I think the time value question is only really relevant if we're committed to a certain sort of ethics, something like utilitarianism. On this view, the person who successfully quits smoking in March and then gets hit by a bus and killed in June has perhaps simply missed out on some utils of pleasure and "lived a worse life."

On other views of ethics I think the timing issue becomes much less of a problem. In particular, while there might very well be people who make hyper-rational judgements in favor of smoking, I think I can speak for the vast majority of nicotine addicts in saying that we don't quit because it is unpleasant and we have a strong appetite for the drug, not because we think it is a wholly rational pursuit (and we might very well delude ourselves as to the relative health risks as well, this sort of thing is common after all, and well documented in psychology and medicine). Yet, if we have an ethics that prizes self-determination and our capacity to "choose what we think is truly best," regardless of hardships, and the capacity to submit the appetites and passions to the shaping of reason (of what we think is truly best; Plato's image of the charioteer of reason training the horses of the passions and appetites in the Phaedrus), then it will be a victory for us to be able to overcome our appetites in this way (even as a sort of ascetic training), even if Lady Fortuna intervenes and we get hit by a bus in June. I suppose it depends on the value that one puts on reflexive/internal freedom in ethics as opposed to pleasure/pain.

It is. I am really unsure hwo you're saying it's not, and I've full understood the rest of your comment. I agree, stomping babies is bad. Whether it's for them or not doesn't change the fact that my assent to that notion is actually what matters. "Stomping babies is medically bad for them" would be an empirical fact. And yep, that's also clearly true.

Yes, it's an empirical fact about what is good or bad for humans. Hence, an empirical fact about value. To say, "yes, but it cannot possibly be an 'ethical fact' because it is an empirical fact," is, IMHO just question begging for the emotivist. It's to set: "there are no empirical facts about value," up as a presupposition, and then when this is revealed to be implausible, to retreat to "there are no empirical facts about 'ethical value.'"

My challenge would be: what makes medical facts about the human good "non-ethical?" They certainly seem ethical to me. They seem related to the human good and human happiness, which are the subject of ethics.

I am certainly aware that, from the Enlightenment on, thinkers have indeed separated "moral good," from all other sorts of good. IMHO, this is a grave mistake that leads to emotivism. But I also don't think there are compelling arguments for this separation. It was made on largely theological grounds. Protestant voluntarist theology was uncomfortable with the idea that anything could be good or bad for things "by nature" because this would seem to constrain divine freedom (as well as Euthyphro dilemma concerns about 'God having to do what is Good, and the Good thus being above God.') Hence, it broke off "moral good," as a discrete sphere of goodness.

This isn't how ethics worked for most of history though, in or out of the West. The human good was investigated empirically, just as the good of sheep is investigated by the shepherd in this way.

Strangely, this theological division seems to remain extremely dominant precisely in atheist philosophy, although maybe that makes sense since some forms of atheism just seem like the old voluntarist theology with man swapped in for God as the sui generis source of all meaning and value in the universe.

No, not at all. You are mixing up ethical claims with empirical claims. Ethics are, patently, not medical facts. Whether or not something being medically bad is actually bad for them is the question ethics needs to deal with. And i'm taking it you have no problem with saying ok fine, everyone agrees with that though, so what's the point? The point is that nothing supports that conclusion other than the universal agreement on it. Even that isn't 100% due to neuro-weirdnesses. Facts in the world are not ethical statements. I would not have thought we could still be mixing those up.

See above. I would need to be convinced that a study of the human good cannot involve empirical facts. You seem to be taking "there are no facts about (ethical) values" as a starting point." But that seems just be assuming the very thing in question.

Medicine certainly seems to tell us something about the human good and human happiness. So does psychology. Either these deal in facts or they don't. I think it's pretty obvious that they do deal in facts.

I'd agree that an "ethical good," that is cut off from all empirical realities in inchoate. It's essentially the castration of the Good. But that's precisely why it is a terrible move for ethics.The emotivists' case is made easy for them by Enlightenment ethics, which allows for the presuppositions that ethics is not about the happiness of man, but rather about some sort of mysterious "moral good."

You can swap in best interest there. I don't think it's the case that people have infallible judgement as to what is in their own best interest. I think it's quite easy to find examples where it is obvious that people are fallible as to what is in their own best interest, even when they are "acting reasonably."

No, I would say there is a fact of the matter as to whether some particular individual would benefit from quitting smoking.

Sort of like how you might suggest that someone could benefit from yoga or pyschotherapy without believing that all people would benefit from these. Or "therapy with MDMA can be great for some people," but "probably not for the person recovering from an addiction to similar stimulants."

I do happen to believe that it's true that at least most smokers would benefit from quitting, but that's sort of beside the point, and I might be wrong anyhow.

I also endorse the Sam Harris book, he makes a strong case, and I feel my personal stance is very close to his, except that I do believe religion, (human traditions of morality, as they were developed and situated in time, ever-evolving) and even spiritual traditions such as meditation, that can be practiced in secular fashion, all bring value to the pursuit of an 'objective' morality.

The Moral Landscape?

I'm a big fan even though I disagree with its core thesis and methodology. I still think it's a helpful framing of ethics for people who have had little exposure to it, even if it tends to be too reductive.

I get the feeling that Harris hasn't engaged much with pre-modern ethical theories (he certainly demonstrates an inadequate understanding of the "Platonic Good" when he thinks it is absent from conscious experiences, rather than being present in, not only all good things, but everything that even merely appears good). However, I think his core points regarding our ability to learn about the human good, and to act on this knowledge, are well-taken (and would be even more well-taken integrated into a richer moral philosophy and philosophy of science).




What you've noted are often popular reasons people give for advocating for a return to virtue ethics. I will just note that a sort of virtue ethics has also been dominant outside the West, so there is a lot to look into there even outside the Aristotelian and Christian traditions.

The irony here is that atheist, secular historians highly doubt the Jews were ever slaves.

Indeed, and the idea that the wretched, slaves, etc. were in their place precisely because they were wicked was obviously a popular opinion amongst the ancient Jews, since so many texts feel the need to weigh in on it. But that view is almost the opposite of the view being ascribed to the Jews here.

It certainly seems more appropriate to the Gospels (far less to Islam), yet it doesn't seem particularly in line with ancient Christianity either. It seems most in line with more class conscious 19th century German Protestantism, and it seems to me that these sentiments are being backwards projected onto "the Jews."

I will give Nietzsche the benefit of the doubt here though and assume he is not primarily thinking of the fairly warrior-centric Hebrew culture of Joshua and Judges though, and more of later periods. The problem though is that Maccabees isn't that different.

I don't see how it begs any question unless we're assuming that people are infallible about what is best for them.

You're assuming that avoiding the risk of smoking-related death is in the best interest of the Smoker, and that they don't or won't see this.

No I'm not. I'm saying there is a fact of the matter about which will be truly better for them. I might very well be wrong. But you seem to be suggesting that, so long as they are being reasonable, they cannot be wrong? If 10 years later they tell me "I wish I had listened to you," is it not fair to say that I was correct in this case?

I don't get that at all. Maybe someone tells me: "I want to go to Russia right now, I'd love to see the Winter Palace."

I tell them "don't do that, you work for the State Department and they are definitely going to kidnap you, throw you in prison on trumped up charges, and hold you as a hostage."

They, knowing Russia well, have their reasons for thinking this won't happen to them. They are being 'rational' (which doesn't presuppose they aren't also deluding themselves in some way.)

But there will be a fact of the matter here. Either they will get kidnapped or they won't. If they get kidnapped, and presumably have a horrible time spending 5 years in Siberia, then I had a better idea about what was to their advantage than they did. Yet we frequently do delude ourselves. That's why people often seek advice. It's far from clear to me that individuals have special epistemic status about what is in their best interests. Maybe they are wise, maybe they aren't. Indeed, we don't let children or adolescents make all their own choices precisely because we don't think they would make choices in their own best interests, and yet I hardly think turning 18 radically alters this.

Indeed, with the smoker, I would think that it is the person who has gone through chemo and a lung transplant, or the person who has successfully quit, if anyone, who has special epistemic status vis-á-vis a the relative benefits of smoking, not the person who has yet to experience any of the downsides.

Well, first I'd just point out that most people who embrace outlandish conspiracy theories don't reject reason. They see themselves as paragons of epistemic virtue and the "sheep" as the poor reasoners.

And besides, I've known many a smoker whose attitude is, "Yes, I know it's bad for my health but I enjoy smoking enough that I'm willing to pay the price." Are they being irrational? Is the egoist being irrational when they say, more or less, the same thing?

And so long as someone is being "rational" they are infallible as to what is truly in their in own best interest? If there is a fact of the matter about whether or not smoking is truly better for the smoker than quitting (even if this reduces to "what they would have preferred to have chosen in the future") then it seems entirely possible that someone could be "rational" and wrong.

IDK, it seems like a sort of Humean anti-realism has to be assumed for this to be a real problem, i.e., that what is good for individuals ultimately comes down to inchoate current desire.

Manosphere writers and "pick-up artist" types tend to be very rationalistic in their justifications for womanizing and adopting an entirely transactional view of human relationships, what with their constant appeals to evolutionary psychology. If someone suggests to one: "you would be happier in a loving relationship, something like Aristotle's"friendship of the good," as opposed to intentionally manipulating people in predatory "friendships of utility,'" are they necessarily giving bad advice if our womanizer doesn't currently see things that way and can produce reasons for this judgement?

I don't think so at least.



Yes but the consistent rebuttal from the Stoics to the post-moderns is that this "bracketing" isn't successful without praxis. The passions just slip in through the back door and make reason their servant.

But I agree, and I don't think we would want to say that praxis removes the need for discourse or reason. Indeed, discourse can be seen as a sort of praxis. Praxis is rather an aid to reason, not a replacement.

The opening of TLP makes several clear. The ones that jumped to mind as problematic are:


"Noesis (a non-discursive, non-linguistic, reflexive grasp of truth) is impossible."
"Truth is strictly a property of propositions,"
"Judgement is only proper to discursive reason, not to simple (reflexive) understanding,"
"Everything and anything is only intelligible and true or false as respects its context in a language or some belief system," ... etc.
"It is not the case that truth is first in things, then in the senses, then in the intellect, and that human language is a sign/symptom of truth, but rather truth is a property of language games."