The second is that the concepts of obligation and duty - moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say, and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of "ought", ought be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible.
What if it were the case that it is not psychologically possible to dispense with those linguistic devices; the accepted uses of those terms? — creativesoul
Is Anscombe in search of a theory of mind which results in just that? — creativesoul
I don't see why we could not simply accept courage as worthy in itself. — Banno
But meanwhile -- is it not clear that there are several concepts that need investigating simply as part of the philosophy of psychology and, as I should recommend -- banishing ethics totally from our minds? Namely -- to begin with: "action", "intention", "pleasure", "wanting". — A
I think you have passed too quickly on to virtue, and neglected what I think is fundamental to the psychology - conflict, between ought and want, or good and evil, or personal and social, or... — unenlightened
And as soon as one sees that one is motivated always by images of consequences and never by consequences themselves, one starts to see things somewhat differently in ethics too. — unenlightened
Rubbish. — Banno
Why not just say that courage is worthy of cultivation - and if you disagree, that's not a fact about courage, but a fact about you. — Banno
Well, the point of virtue ethics was to avoid rules, so... — Banno
The problem, is that it is easier to determine the essence of a bad act than the essence of a good act. — Metaphysician Undercover
I don't see why we could not equally accept cowardice as a virtue. We could call it 'discretion', the virtue of the stick insect. — unenlightened
Allegorically, plants need water and sunlight because of what plants are. If moral philosophy was done by plants, maybe a Hume plant would have written that: "Whenever I have occasioned to find a treatise regarding our affairs, I have observed a transition from the usual copulations of propositions like "is a water requiring organism" and "does not survive without water" to "ought to absorb water " and "ought not station themselves in an arid landscape" which express a new affirmation of a different sort. Wherefrom this new type of affirmations are deduced from their precedents despite this difference in character I cannot conceive".
Such a plant could be alleged to engender a discourse about plant morality that concerned the operation of the word "ought" severed from the context of how plants behave and develop; more concerned with an abstract rule of application of these words to statements of fact regarding plant behaviour and development. Anscombe would want the plants to talk about how they need water because of their metabolic requirements than about a moral logic operating on statements of facts concerning plants.
So part of the appeal to moral psychology is to explain why such a move appears to make sense; and Anscombe finds this in divine law and legalist accounts of moral obligation, in historical context. But, Anscombe suggests, such motivating contexts have long since lost their ability to furnish our understanding of morality, and that moral philosophers simply have not kept up with the times. More specifically, legalistic/contractual and divine law conceptions of morality stymie the formation of any conception of morality which is tethered to real life rather than dead metaphors; and moral philosophy in the criticised senses has replaced these dead metaphors with philosophical principles that function to fill void left by this death. — fdrake
Once you make the backbone of morality the idea that you're culpable for any consequence of your actions that could be foreseen, you set up, perhaps despite yourself, a moral situation where people develop a system of calculating consequences in advance. What may have started as possibly reasonable (taking into account consequences) metastasizes into something like insurance companies predicting risk. It turns morality into something totally different, something approaching plausible deniability (to your conscience, but the same principle: youre your own pr guy to yourself) — csalisbury
He won't weigh the intrinsic badness of an action, but focus on the consequences. — csalisbury
then it is of the utmost moral importance for the person to calculate the possible consequences of one's action prior to acting. — Metaphysician Undercover
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