Notes

I am constantly amazed at just how complete this website is, and how many articles are on it. The Kant bio has copyright dates from 1996 to 2003, so it seems clear that Kelley Ross just keeps modifying the material based on feedback from others and his own reflection. That, of course, is exactly how I would write my own philosophy papers. I can imagine writing a single paper--perhaps even a hundred words. Then based on feedback from others, that could grow into a thousand words, then ten thousand and a hundred thousand. But, of course, one would need the necessary feedback from others, in a situation not unlike the Critters workshop. I actually submitted a "short story" to Critters once, although it was less than a thousand words. It was simply something that I had written all at once while I was away at the beach on holidays, nothing more than a hypothetical conversation that I was having with a robot. One of the reviewers said that it was just stuff that we'd al

I'm not even sure that I understand half of what I've just read about Kant. But it sounds like he was an amazing man, and according to Ross, he was the watershed of modern philosophy. To be honest, I was never studious enough at university to come to understand Kant much better than the way other people discussed him. I never really had anything against him, except that his morals seemed to possess a fair amount of rigidity and inflexibility. Yet I didn't like utilitarianism any better. The only thing that made me 'hostile' to Kant during my Masters thesis was that it seemed to me that he typified something that I was desperately rebelling against. His dualism between the empirical and the transcendental created a hopeless dualism between principle and practice. It made principle irrational and practice cynical, and ultimately had no firm foundation for its base that was not simply circular. But my only meta-theoretical motive had been that I didn't want to

I here refer to " Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) " by Kelley L. Ross. Kant's most original contribution to philosophy is his "Copernican Revolution," that, as he puts it, it is the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible. Many people have argued that Kant would come close to being the greatest philosopher of all time, and I never knew why. I was mainly familiar with his ethics, which I simply thought was utterly bizarre, and I never knew why anyone would want to believe in it. At least now I am getting a picture into what makes him great. If he indeed was the first philosopher to claim that certain concepts must originate in our minds because of the kinds of beings that we are, then I can already see that he must be given due credit. But to try to make the kinds of substantive claims that he otherwise makes about ethics and imagine that they could possibly be true a priori seems simply to be

I here refer to " Hume Shifts the Burden of Proof ", by Kelley L. Ross. In this essay, Ross argues persuasively against Hume's version of empiricism. I do not want to use a word as harsh as "crude" to describe the empiricism of Hume, although it is certainly very crude compared to the various versions of empiricism available today. However, Hume existed before the days of knowledge of proteins, vitamins, carbohydrates, minerals, electromagnetism and atomic, nuclear, and particle physics. It therefore seems charitable to call his empiricism "simple" rather than crude, if that is not too condescending. The basic problem with Hume's version of empiricism is that it is far too restrictive on the empirical validity of concepts. In order to be empirically valid, that concept must correspond to an atecedent sense impression. In the case of microbes, which one cannot see by unaided observation, but can see through the aid of a microscope, one might s

Hitherto, I have been reading the philosophical papers, in order, from the Ethics section of the Friesian website. However, in the last essay that I read, "Key Distinctions for Value Theories, and the Importance of Hume", I discovered that this was too shallow a level of analysis. In that essay, Ross argues for the inadequacy of subjectivism as an account of morality. His notion of objectivism is that morality is not just a matter of feeling, but of rational knowledge, and on that I agree with him completely. Hence, if that is how he is to define "objectivism", then I must be an objectivist, with the reservations listed in the previous two sections. However, he goes on to write that the question of how objectivism works is discussed in detail in his essay "The Foundations of Value", which is not even part of the Ethics section at all, but the Epistemology section. I have always cared greatly about the claim that ethics is objective, and have never found a

Ross goes on to quote Hume as the locus classicus for subjectivism: Nor does this reasoning only prove, that morality consists not in any relations, that are the objects of science; but if examin'd, will prove with equal certainty, that it consists not in any matter of fact, which can be discover'd by the understanding. This is the second part of our argument; and if it can be made evident, we may conclude, that morality is not an object of reason.... Take any action allow'd to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towar

I here refer to the essay "Key Distinctions for Value Theories, and the Importance of Hume", by Kelley L. Ross . I am disappointed to see in the first paragraph Kelley L. Ross buying into the crudity of the dichotomy between subjectivism and objectivism. He starts out promisingly, claiming "Most fundamental is whether morality is a matter of rational knowledge or not." It seems to me, from my various philosophical investigations up to now, that it must indeed be a matter of rational knowledge. I certainly believe in the legitimacy of moral arguments, and that there is a definite truth-value to moral propositions that we cannot voluntarily control. Unfortunately, Ross draws an unwarranted conclusion from the implication that morality is a matter of rational knowledge: "If it is [...], then our doctrine would be objectivism, which implies that morality is 'out there,' in the objects, and so is independent of personal preferences or sentiments." I

The distinctions between means and ends, and between being and doing, result in the following structure of action, from beginning to middle to end, upon which much ethical terminology, and the basic forms of ethical theory (ethics of virtues, action, and consequences), are based. Amazing! This reminds me of the time when I was reading the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article about coherentist theories of justification. I remember seeing how a clear taxonomy of epistemology could quite reasonably emerge from the regress problem. I wondered if a similar taxonomical approach could apply to ethics, and there it seemed to me that the first natural split would be between person- and act-oriented theory. The next split would be in act-oriented theory, between deontology and consequentialism. But the way that Ross has construed the dimensions of the different ethical theories here seems even more powerful. For example, one could have a matrix of four different types of ethi

I here refer to the online essay " The Morality of Laughter by F.H. Buckley ", by Kelley L. Ross. This is the second time that I have read a meaningful reference to this novel in a work that I admire. The first reference was in Eric S. Raymond's Jargon Files , where he defines the word "grok". It is a popular hacker term, and is borrowed from Heinlein's novel. The literal meaning of "grok" is "to drink", although its common meaning is "to understand", with the implication being that if one groks a subject, then one has a deep and intuitive understanding of it. The concept of grokking is extremely important in hackerdom. It is, for example, one of the things that distinguishes a merely competent programmer from a truly wizardly one. The wizardly programmer groks programming, whereas the merely competent programmer can only understand it. The reference to Stranger in this essay also employs the word "grok", which

In Kelley L. Ross's review of The Morality of Laughter , by F.H. Buckley, he notes something interesting. Kant has the same theory of laughter as my own initial conception of humour. I first thought about what humour was when I was a child, listening to jokes and wondering why the punchlines should make me laugh. What I came up with was that the punchline involved a surprise incongruity that struck the listener and made him laugh. When I was in high school, my drama teacher at the time proposed this exact same theory of humour. The joke began with the setup of an expectation in the listener, and the expectation was thwarted with the presentation of a surprise incongruity. Hence, humour shows that life is filled with incongruities. Now I have read in Ross's review that Kant has an incongruity thesis of laughter as well. He does not elaborate on what it is, but the fact that the word "incongruity" was used led me strongly to suspect that it was my own thesis as well

Another passage in my thesis related to classical Greek virtue versus Kantian/Christian virtue. Kant is generally interpreted as belonging to the Christian tradition in ethics. This is both because of the culture in which he was writing and also because his first formulation of the categorical imperative is generally considered to be a formalisation of the Golden Rule. However, one important difference between Kantian virtue and Christian virtue is that Kantian virtue is only worth practising for its own sake, independently of any reward one might receive for it. Jesus actually often refers to a reward of some sort for one's actions. He exhorts his followers to "Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you" (Luke 11:9) Granted, one will not necessarily receive any reward for virtue in this life, but one will be rewarded in an afterlife, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own so

I have just read "Prudence, Goodness and Wisdom" by Kelley L. Ross. It contains a passage that made me realise that there is a difficulty with Chapter 4 of my Masters thesis. In that chapter, I introduced a distinction between a moral theory that was intended a posteriori and one that was intended a priori . I don't think that this distinction was ever particularly well drawn, and now I don't think it should be included at all. The reason for this has to do with the original intention of the theory towards which I was working. It was intended to be a practical theory of ethics, which was able successfully to combine principle with practice. The destructive part of the project involved a criticism of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, for siding with principle at the expense of practice. In the following chapter, I compared Aristotle favourably to Kant in virtue of his viewing ethics as a practical theory. I was very happy with the way the thesis was progressing. T

I want to elaborate on my two moral conclusions drawn from the Friesian tradition in the previous section. However, in order to do that, I clearly will have to know much more about that tradition. Specifically, I need to know more about how the nature of a subject brings about rights for that subject: Since beauty, sentient beings, and rational beings are all goods-in-themselves, this indicates how morality and ethics are actually embedded in aesthetics, the theory of goods-in-themselves, and gives us a clue about the source of moral duty: that some goods-in-themselves simply involve moral duties, perhaps of different types. (Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D., "The Fallacies of Egoism and Altruism, and the Fundamental Principle of Morality") The whole notion of a good-in-itself, and the duties and rights this entails, must be spelt out more. I might have to read all the rest of the essays on ethics on this website before I feel that it has been. This will be a question in the b

The vast majority of essays on the site are written by Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. Unfortunately, he really doesn't include much argument about the rights of sentient and insentient beings. I don't care too much, as long as the theory will support two substantive moral conclusions in which I have a vested interest: We have a right to kill animals for food purposes. I in particular don't have a non-contractual obligation to save animals from factory farming processes. Both these requirements are satisfied by the view espoused therein. Requirement 1 comes close to being satisfied in "The Fallacies of Egoism and Altruism, and the Fundamental Principle of Morality": Since human beings are natural omnivores, and have over the centuries artificially bred many species (like cattle) for food or clothing, there is no intuitive or prima facie moral claim for vegetarianism. However, the essay reaches no firm conclusion on the matter. Ross holds that animals are sen

I am pleased with the two principles of animal welfare I came up with in the previous section. One thing that particularly pleases me about them both is that they seem deontological rather than consequentialist. Part of the reason for this is that eating meat seems indefensible on a consequentialist rationale. It has poor consequences for the animals in many circumstances, poor consequences for the environment and poor consequences for the health of the meat eater. Yet for all that, it just doesn't look immoral. Nor could it look immoral to the vast majority of people who do it, or else they simply wouldn't do it, and there would be as many McDonald'ses around as there are vegetarian restaurants today. This is not to suggest that we have no duty of care for animals or the environment either. But it would be nice to have a theory of ethics that did not simply dissolve into yet another banal form of altruism, a la Peter Singer. Singer's preference utilitarianism has any

Section 1.3 of the Code of Practice pretty much says it all. "The first and most important consideration for any feedlot manager is the well-being of all cattle under his control, whether on the feedlot or in transit." What follows is a set of specifications for how this well-being is to be achieved. I note further that the phrase used consistently throughout these guidelines in relation to such matters is "animal welfare". What strikes me about this is the fact that "animal rights" shows up on far more web searches. By default, therefore, this is the term that I would prefer to use. But it seems that "animal welfare" is the phrase that is used instead in actual government documents pertaining to the consideration to which it still seems to me that animals are entitled. This leads me to suspect that this is the primary phrase that I should use in web searches instead myself. It is understandable that a government organisation would prefer the

One cannot help but be moved by the misery suffered by factory farm animals as described in the previous section. Especially noteworthy is the way in which the animals' interests are not considered at all by the factory farmers. The farmers treat only the symptoms of the animals' suffering rather than the causes. Furthermore, they only do this when their own interests are at stake, not the animals'. Hence, they pre-emptively mutilate the animals to prevent them from attacking each other, hence damaging the farmers' merchandise. They also feed them medication to prevent them from dying from infections, also preventing damage to their merchandise. Yet nothing is done about animal sterotypies, simply because it does not affect the animals' marketability as food. Proper treatment of all three of the above conditions would, of course, involve removing the root cause of their suffering. This would mean placing them in a larger area where they could live more normal lives.

My previous two sections have been referring to a passage from the section " Beef cattle on the range ". Of course, not all beef cattle are raised on the range, and I think the primary moral objection that some people have to factory farming is the conditions in which animals are confined for most of their lives. For example, I chanced upon another paper yesterday doing a Google search for "morality eating meat". It is a paper by Mylan Engel, Jr., titled, "The Immorality of Eating Meat" 1 . It describes various factory farming procedures, and includes the (US) statistic that 61 percent of beef cattle are confined in factory farm feedlots 2 . So beef cattle raised on the range are in the minority to begin with, and we should really be looking at factory farm feedlots. Here is a list of the basic poor conditions under which the animals suffer 3 : They cannot move about. The surfaces on which they must stand produce chronic foot and leg injuries. Th

It's no picnic for animals out there in the wild. It seems that we do no real harm to animals if we treat them no worse than what they would suffer if they were out in the wild because we are then not making the situation any worse for them. This seems morally more important than trying to maximise the 'goodness' of the situation. I think that the intuitions of 'leave well enough alone' are probably at play here too. I think that one central fallacy of utilitarianism is this notion of 'maximising' utility. Even if I believe that the morality of actions is based on its utility, I still do not need to believe that that utility should be maximised. I might believe the Benthamic notion that pleasure and pain are the legitimate units of utility and disutility respectively and still not thereby commit myself to believing that I have a duty to maximise pleasure and minimise pain. Duty need not extend so far. I might decide that I have a duty to meet a minimum stand

I think that I have found a weakness in Singer's moral reasoning. It seems to me to strike at the heart of what Singer considers to be moral thinking. In order to properly address this issue, we will have to go back to a fairly basic question of what moral thinking actually is. Singer considers on p.12 of Practical Ethics the question of what ethical thinking actually is. He rightly concludes that one cannot specify moral thinking too much without begging the question in favour of some moral content. However, one thing he considers to be universal is that moral thinking involves stepping outside of self-interest. Indeed, James Rachels claims that egoism is not a moral theory on the grounds that it is not impartial 1 . I have often myself observed that morality seems more based on empathy than anything else. From this, Singer moves to what he regards as this kind of impartiality on p.13. However, it is already very strong, because he is talking about giving equal weight to the

I did a search on "factory farming", and the top ranked site was www.factoryfarming.com--surprise, surprise! They cover factory farming processes for many different animals, but I here focus on beef , because that's my favourite meat: Many beef cattle are born and live on the range, foraging and fending for themselves for months or even years. They are not adequately protected against inclement weather, and they may die of dehydration or freeze to death. Injured, ill, or otherwise ailing animals do not receive necessary veterinary attention. One common malady afflicting beef cattle is called "cancer eye." Left untreated, the cancer eats away at the animal's eye and face, eventually producing a crater in the side of the animal's head. That already sounds pretty bleeding-heart. If they are born and live on the range, then how is this different from their being out in the wild, where there are no veterinarians either? I don't think that that o

I do not think that ethics will ever remove all its notions of hierarchy--such as, for instance, the relationship between humans and animals. It seems reasonable to suppose that animals are entitled to certain forms of consideration. But the claim that animals have all the same entitlements to consideration as human beings seems clearly controversial. In fact, this seems to be one of the major weaknesses of Peter Singer's ethics. On the one hand, it does include consideration for animal welfare, but on the other hand, it goes so far as to say that animals deserve equal consideration to human beings--and I don't see how that's ever going to be the case. For example, Singer claims that veganism is the only morally acceptable diet because the diet of meat creates unnecessary suffering. Admittedly some hippies and bleeding-heart left-wingers do actually think like that, but it hardly seems morally impinging upon me not to eat a hamburger. I am sympathetic to the basic argum

First, congratulations on what you have achieved so far. The parallels that you have drawn already between Kuhnian science and the history of ethics are indeed most striking. However, one disagreement that I have with you right now is the notion that a hierarchy in human society was in any way scrapped. We still seem clearly to have many hierarchies in place today, between richer and poorer people, more educated and less educated people, the degrees to which different people contribute to the body of research in a particular field, humans over animals, and so on. What has changed is not really the presence of a hierarchy, but the nature of that hierarchy. The old hierarchy was based on notions of the intrinsic worth of things. This proved to be difficult in assessing the worth of a human being, because it was previously assumed that the intrinsic worth of a human being had to do with such things as her social class and gender. Social class was only ever an accident of birth, and coul

I have just discovered a wonderful page by Jan Garrett at the University of West Kentucky. It is very specifically about hierarchy ethics versus enlightenment ethics . She actually uses the term "hierarchy ethics" to describe the ethics that existed before the enlightenment. She rightly and illuminatingly identifies it in the context of an entire philosophy of hierarchy. She also identifies expressions of that ethics from philosophers of the period, noting that the ethical theory began at least with Socrates and Plato, and reached its pinnacle of development in the Christian theological ethics of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. Presumably, of course, Socrates and Plato were articulating an ethos that had existed for much longer before them, however. In the hierarchical theory of ethics, absolutely everything was related in some way to a hierarchy. There was a general hierarchy of things in the universe from material elements to animals to humans to angels to God. Ther

Another anomaly that the hierarchical ethic could not explain was the Industrial Revolution. Increased opportunities for the working classes seems clearly articulated in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776: It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labor, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people. Every workman has a great quantity of his own work to dispose of beyond what he himself has occasion for; and every other workman being exactly in the same situation, he is enabled to exchange a great quantity of his own goods for a great quantity, or, what comes to the same thing, for the price of a great quantity of theirs. He supplies them abundantly with what they have occasion for, and they accommodate him as amply with what he has occasion for, and a general plenty diffuses itself through all the different ranks of the soc

I here refer to the Encarta article on the abolitionist movement . When I read the section on the Age of Enlightenment, I wondered why this philosophy should have emerged at that time. People had had thousands of years before this time to arrive at a theory that disapproved of slavery. Why should they have suddenly thought of it now? Fortunately, the article was perceptive enough to include this information as well: the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, people lived in a highly stratified society, where the rich dominated the poor and the people in the lower and middle classes were prevented from social advancement. The Industrial Revolution resulted in increased economic opportunity and power to the lower and middle classes. This began to undermine the class system. I can probably flesh this argument out a great deal further by an analysis of the structure of the Industrial Revolution next. But even at this level of analysis, it seems understandable that gi