But can we please stop pretending that the way we live our lives is actually determined by the philosophical system of morality that we just invented. — fdrake

Hear hear! (Y) Long live the anti-theory!

can we please stop pretending that the way we live our lives is actually determined by the philosophical system of morality that we just invented. — fdrake

The clear implication being, anyone who makes such arguments is hypocritical.

I am hard-pressed to understand how a philosophy - any philosophy - cannot have ethical implications. Put it this way - the one major recent philosophical movement which consciously rejected the meaningfulness of ethical propositions was logical positivism, which had basically collapsed by the latter half of the 20th century. This was associated with a tendency in ethical theory called the ‘boo-hurrah’ theory of ethics; that ethical statements can be no more than expressions of feelings. I don’t know how influential that approach is, but it seems pretty empty to me.

So what, exactly, is being criticised here?

I don't think that people who have ethical systems or meta-ethical beliefs on the philosophy forum are hypocrites. What I'm criticizing is the idea that people actually use those ethical systems in their day to day lives. Do they? If they don't, do they actually believe in the system? Ethics is about doing stuff after all. Will give a couple of examples.

I'm having an argument with my partner, she thinks I've done something wrong but I don't see what it is.

Say someone on here is a really firm believer in Mackie's error theory, how do motivational internalism and the falsehood of all moral propositions help you resolve the dispute? Alternatively, say someone is an emotivist, how does the idea that expressing a moral idea is equivalent to expressing a sentiment help you understand where your partner is coming from?

On the realist side, say you're a divine command theorist, how do you use the idea that all your moral beliefs flow from a benevolent God to help you in the dispute?

On the ethical side of it, how would you use hedonistic or negative utilitarian ethics in your day to day life? How does a self professed harm minimizer behave differently from a self professed pleasure maximiser?

What I'm trying to criticize is an absence of care about ethical decisions here on the forum, people only care about them insofar as they are potential defeaters or supporters for ethical proposals or ethical systems. Ethics, then, is empty of applied content on here. Maybe this generalizes, but I don't know.

This attitude is not at all present in Epictetus, for example.

I've definitely seen you express a few moral ideas and hanging around ethics threads Wayfarer, do you believe in any philosophical system of ethics (or meta-ethics)? How do you use it?

I exempted you from it because, if I've understood your comments and some of your blog posts, you actually care about the description and structure of ethical decisions and any moral theorizing you do is based around derived properties of these structures. In my opinion this isn't 'walking on its head' like is usual here.

Sure I do. My ‘meta-philosophical’ project is based on the idea of there being spiritual enlightenment. It sounds cliched to express it in those terms, but the English lexicon doesn’t seem to have many alternatives. It’s not necessarily the same as mainstream theism, because it’s based on the idea of attaining insight rather than accepting a creed. But in practice it is not too dissimilar from a non-sectarian Christian ethic. And it definitely informs my behaviour, or at least my aspirations. Often there’s an obvious gap (well obvious to me at least) between that aspiration and my habitual dispositions, but I have tried to internalise the principles that seem to be required by that kind of philosophy. But then, because my motivation and orientation is personal and practical, then it might differ from someone who has an academic interest in such matters.

A few examples would be nice.

Say your friend turns up really late to a restaurant you're eating at, you can see they're a bit flustered and worried when they arrive, they are usually calm and punctual, how does spiritual enlightenment help you here?

You see a beggar in the street, they hurl abuse at you - how do you respond? What do you do? How does your ethical system influence your decision?

Two late teenagers you pass in the street are having an ironic performance of racist jokes, but what they're saying is indistinguishable from the worst racist crackpots, what do you do?

1. Ask him/her what’s up.
2. Try to remain calm.
3. Don’t get involved.

In practical terms, practicing meditation - like, sitting still for a period of time, eyes half-closed, paying attention to your breath - does help with not getting caught up in reactive patterns. It means you’re less likely to loose your temper or lash out. Another benefit is learning to be more compassionate, in the sense of developing a greater degree of empathy. Both these kinds of effects are reasonably well-supported by research. But it’s not foolproof, and one doesn’t become a sage overnight, although in my experience, there are moments of epiphany that come along through such practices.

Ok Wayfarer, I can see the link directly to 2. Someone who practices mindfulness or meditation is probably more able to deal with that, maybe also someone who practiced a martial art. Any ethical system or 'compassion exercises' - those things which help a person cultivate virtues - would probably benefit someone's ethical decision making in general. But then - it isn't because of the specific ethical system you have, it's because you're attempting to cultivate personal virtues. In this regard, your ethical system was useless or more precisely replaceable on the specifics. So what's the point in it?

So what's the point in it? — fdrake

You decide.

What I'm trying to criticize is an absence of care about ethical decisions here on the forum, people only care about them insofar as they are potential defeaters or supporters for ethical proposals or ethical systems. Ethics, then, is empty of applied content on here. — fdrake

That's because meta-ethics and normative ethics aren't applied ethics, and most people seem interested in discussing meta-ethics and normative ethics.

They're almost certainly not independent lines of inquiry though. Do you think it would be normal for someone to study normative and meta-ethics all their life and gain no insights into how to not be a jackass?

If so, surely it's a bad state of affairs.

They're almost certainly not independent lines of inquiry though. Do you think it would be normal for someone to study normative and meta-ethics all their life and gain no insights into how to not be a jackass? — fdrake

Sure, and no. But I don't understand the relevance of this. I was simply saying that clearly posters are less interested in talking about applied ethics.

But can we please stop pretending that the way we live our lives is actually determined by the philosophical system of morality that we just invented. — fdrake

Does anyone do this? It seems to me that if what we ought to do determined what we do do, there would be no need for a moral system at all. It would just be part of the natural sciences. Of course I would like to pretend that I do what I think I ought to do, but I can't even convince myself for very long, and it is quite plain that every other bugger doesn't do what they think they ought, never mind what I think they ought.

In which case, morality is founded on shame and guilt and anger and indignation. From which we all would like to retreat as soon as ever we can to the land of theory and abstraction. @fdrake thinks we ought not to, and I agree - in theory.

If using ethical systems in your day to day life is an important part of ethical philosophy, it is a glaring omission that we speak about what structures ethical decisions without caring about what they prescribe for us to do or how they structure our thoughts about what is right, wrong and permissible. Is there much of a difference between any two normative or meta-ethical theories in terms of how their adherents would make ethical decisions? If not, they're empty ideas. About ethics while being indifferent to how to live our lives.



I have a sneaking suspicion that most of the choices we make during a day don't have any ethical dimension, they're mostly habits. Personally anyway, when I'm thinking ethically it's because I've been surprised either by either an event or information. Usually when having a disagreement with someone or my actions have hurt or inconvenienced another. I worry about what to do and when what I do isn't already governed by habits or 'ethical habits', like being there for your partner and trying to be understanding when teaching people things, for example. It's only been in these circumstances that I've found knowing anything about ethics, meta-ethics or normative ethics useful.

Another sneaking suspicion I have is that an ethical theory (be it meta-ethics or normative) that doesn't begin with an account of what it means to make an ethical decision is going to have orthogonal concerns to living ethically. Maybe in the manner of replaceability (what good is your ground when another will do just as well) or uninformativeness (what behavioural distinction would being a realist vs an anti-realist in meta-ethics bring in terms of day to day decisions?). What's cared about is being right about ethics, not about getting ethics right.

So, ethical philosophers of thephilosophyforum, what do you actually do with your ideas and systems? — fdrake

Guides means of getting to ends. Ends are given - they are values. They're not determined by philosophical systems.

Examples of how your ethical system has guided you towards certain actions concerning people?

If using ethical systems in your day to day life is an important part of ethical philosophy, it is a glaring omission that we speak about what structures ethical decisions without caring about what they prescribe for us to do or how they structure our thoughts about what is right, wrong and permissible. Is there much of a difference between any two normative or meta-ethical theories in terms of how their adherents would make ethical decisions? If not, they're empty ideas. About ethics while being indifferent to how to live our lives. — fdrake

Sorry, I don't buy this at all. I think it's perfectly acceptable for someone to discuss what "X is wrong" means (meta-ethics) and to discuss what makes something wrong (normative ethics) without then discussing which things are wrong (applied ethics).

Unless you can defend some normative ethics that entails that it is wrong to not also discuss applied ethics?

Examples of how your ethical system has guided you towards certain actions towards people? — fdrake

For example, I don't steal or deceive people in order to grow my business.

Examples of how your ethical system has guided you towards certain actions towards people? — fdrake

I am not sure if this is what you are getting at in that my ethical system, which I had to completely reverse from my upbringing, which was to discipline myself in never raising a hand to my children.

Or

Are you talking about the hard ethical rules, that are created by humans, that determine the ethical decisions of say a self driving car that is programmed with the risk ratio when assessing an imminent impact.

In isolation, yes I think this is something that's ok. In principle, no, if a meta-ethics or normative ethics gives you no heuristics or ways of thinking about ethical decisions, how could it possibly be used as anything but a philosophical abstraction? The contents of ethical discourse should be, minimally, about ethical decisions - which are right, what makes them right, how to think about ethical rightness (or its impossibility) - but not as individual elements in systems, rather there should be some link from meta-ethics to normative ethics, from normative ethics to applied ethics.

Let's take an example in Levinas, who grounds ethics in the experience of the other and the non-reducibility of the other to me. How to treat the other - how we are partially responsible for their welfare- is always a prescient question for this account of ethics (more a coupling of applied ethics, normative ethics and meta-ethics through phenomenology). Ethical decisions are found in the space the other announces to me, and their non-reducibility to me imbues a pre-theoretic responsibility to attend to them.

If we can accept this notion that ideas are inventions of the mind, that ideas are, when it comes down to it, only interpretations of something, and if ethics, in fact, is taken to refer to real other persons who exist apart from my interpretations, then we are up against a problem: there is no way in which ideas, on the current model, refer to independently existing other persons, and as such, ideas cannot be used to found an ethics. There can be no pure practical reason until after contact with the other is established.
Given this view towards ideas, then, anytime I take the person in my idea to be the
real person, I have closed off contact with the real person; I have cut off the connection
with the other that is necessary if ethics is to refer to real other people. This is a central
violence to the other that denies the other his/her own autonomy. Levinas calls this violence
"totalization" and it occurs whenever I limit the other to a set of rational categories,
be they racial, sexual, or otherwise. Indeed, it occurs whenever I already know what the
other is about before the other has spoken. Totalization is a denial of the other's difference,
the denial of the otherness of the other. That is, it is the inscription of the other in
the same. If ethics presupposes the real other person, then such totalization will, in itself,
be unethical. — Anthony Beavers on Levinas

Anthony Beavers on Levinas, click for link

It is quite straightforward to see that ethical decisions - attendance to the other -, for Levinas, mandate a renegotiation of how you make ethical decisions whenever you do them. So to speak of ethics is to speak of my responsibility to a concrete other and their conduct, which should not be subsumed through their reducibility to whatever theoretical pretensions I have, on the contrary these pre-developed philosophical or normative structures can only be used to inform decisions about them, to enrich understanding to facilitate judgement and action, rather than to reduce the other to a model of my ethical system.

So as part of this renegotiation, we need to think how our already developed intuitions and beliefs can and should be applied to the other, even if they won't do justice to the complexities of attending to them. What people do isn't a punchline to make yourself and your personal philosophical system right.

For example, I don't steal or deceive people in order to grow my business. — @Agustino

Can you give me some derivation or heuristic that gives motivation not to steal or deceive people from your system of ethics? Rather than saying what behaviours it promotes, I'm interested in why it promotes those behaviours. How can you use your system to live a better life? Or is it simply a vouchsafe that you're right in whatever decisions you happen to make?



I'd like to draw a distinction between ethical heuristics - which are rules of thumb for treating others, like the golden rule, and ethical systems - which are ways of speaking about what ethics is, what moral language consists in etc.

You already have an applied ethical principle in 'don't hit children', but you haven't say, derived it from @Agustino's interpretation of virtue ethics (nor would you need to, in my view). What I'm asking of posters here is that if they have strong beliefs about a personally developed (or more standard, like error theory) ethical system, how do they use it to face problems in their lives? Or is it solely an intellectual abstraction?

Well, I have been having some disagreements myself recently in the world of practice, which you commented on briefly. Without, hopefully, resurrecting the controversy, it seems to me that there is no satisfactory theory to be invoked that will define unequivocally whether it is right or wrong at particular moment to speak up about wrong-doing, or poor judgement or behaviour. I can say I felt an obligation to speak born of a love of the community, and a love of fairness. But then I felt an obligation to question those motives at each stage, and the question, or the obligation revolves, for me, around the simple decision to act in my own interest against others or in other's interest against my own self-image or social status, or that of others.

So I suppose one can derive a meta-philosophy of sorts from the way I agonise, which seems to make more sense than trying to act out a meta-philosophy. It is focused on motivation, so you might call it emotivism, it is realist, and only marginally or indirectly consequentialist.

Can you give me some derivation or heuristic that gives motivation not to steal or deceive people from your system of ethics? — fdrake

My adherence to my system of ethics prevents me from choosing such means to achieve my ends. Values give motivation, they are goals - why you live your life. Stealing, deception, etc. these are at most means, but they cannot be values or ends-in-themselves. My system of ethics influences me in the means I choose to achieve the values that I have. However, I think one's values are to an extent or another given.

Precisely why I have not much interest in ethical systems. The best guide as to how to act is conscience; which consists in moral imagination and intuition. It is direct and has no need of a system, although it can be helpful to present moral intuitions as maxims.

Of course, I don't always succeed in living up to my moral intuitions; and I acknowledge that is a personal failing. Then I try to do better.

The best guide as to how to act is conscience; which consists in moral imagination and intuition. It is direct and has no need of a system, although it can be helpful to present moral intuitions as maxims. — Janus

Okay but how do you teach that to another, who might not be as compassionate as yourself?

Can you be more specific about how your system of values constrains the means you can use to achieve your ends?

Regarding the independence of what's good from any ethical system, maybe there's a generalized Euthyphro problem to demonstrate this. Is it good because the ethical system entails it or does the ethical system need to entail it because it's good?

You present the maxims, as Christ did, and hope that the other's moral imagination is sufficient to enable them to see the truth in them. I don't believe that any amount of rational argument (beyond simply pointing out (to children, say) that it is most reasonable (in the sense of impartially fair) to respect the interests and feelings of others) is ever going to do the job with those who are either too stupid to, or simply don't want to, be good.

That's the kind of approach I was trying to promote. But I think there's some place for ethical systems. For example, if you're speaking with someone who has much different ethical intuitions from you, appealing to their self interest in terms of their decisions' consequences for them can help bridge the gap.

Only if they want to make a connection or to bridge the gap

But I think there's some place for ethical systems. For example, if you're speaking with someone who has much different ethical intuitions from you, appealing to their self interest in terms of their decisions' consequences for them can help bridge the gap. — fdrake

Well it occurs to me that I was perhaps dealing with poor benighted utilitarians who thought me presumptuous and irrelevant in imputing motives to posters, whereas I rather thought the same of them for projecting consequences to posts. A matter of naming the darkness in which morality must operate.

Can you elaborate on the darkness? I don't understand the allusion.



I suppose being able to negotiate is a presupposition of conflict resolution.