The question of social positivism
I have had considerable time to think about the issue raised at the end of the previous section now. Even just writing about it last night made me open it up to understand more what it meant.
The basic requirement, I take it, is that more argument be provided for a view I shall term social positivism: That is, at least the advocacy for a positive definition or account of society, independently of moral considerations.
Can society be described without relying on moral terms? Well, if moral terms must be such things as 'value' and 'approve', then it seems clear enough that this is impossible. But these terms have only ever been abstractions of prescription that are as generalised as they can be. Calling them 'moral' begs the question, when they could just as easily be rational, or even aesthetic.
I think I know why the supervisor thought that I was a social positivist. Originally, my thesis was elaborating on the basic claims of a theory of utilitarianism. However, that terrible argument that I had with the people at my science fiction society had taken its toll. I decided that I didn't want to bother with morality anymore. I had sometimes heard of saying that such and such an activity was immoral, but permissible, and I thought that if I could distinguish morality from permissibility, then I wanted to go with permissibility instead. Permissibility would be cashed out in terms of what one was actually prepared to enforce. These were very nebulous intuitions, and over a number of weeks, I came to realise that my best line of argument was still some kind of moral theory. I could not simply argue for it on purely practical grounds, because this would be too "disturbing". So I decided to look to the tradition of empiricism for support, and this was not entirely unsuccessful. Indeed, the empirical theory of ethics still seems to be developing along.
The whole time I talked about permissibility, my supervisor argued that it must also somehow be a theory of morality. I was hitherto totally unfamiliar with this as a background issue, so my initial reaction was that it was simply fascist. If morality could be stretched to accommodate any prescriptive theory whatsoever, then what good was it? Morality was just a word that people used to keep onside of each other for the sake of rhetoric.
A lot of the problem here was that no distinction was made whatsoever between moral form and moral content. One could argue until the cows came home about whether a theory was moral in form. But once you decided to call your theory moral, traditional moral content could then start to be smuggled into it. This annoyed me, because I thought that some of this content was material about which I was simply expected, along with other philosophers, to be hypocritical. I suppose that in that case, the solution was simply what I found myself doing in the end: Questioning the empirical validity of said dubious "content"; I found that I could do little else. And now this argument has reared its ugly head all over again with my account of society.
What happens if social non-positivism is correct? If morality is built right into society at the terminological level, then it is simply part of what we mean by society that it is in some way moral. If there is no morality, then there can also be no society, by definition.
In some ways, this view could actually work to my favour. But then again, I also argue quite extensively in chapter 5 that there are distinct limits to the things to which one may apply the term 'moral'. I specifically developed the theory of commensurability so that I could describe what the minimum requirement was for calling a theory 'moral'. However, I have since become convinced that 'commensurability' was not the correct word to use. It means 'measurability by a common standard', whereas what I meant was 'conduciveness to a non-coercive convergence of opinion'. I distinguished four different degrees of this property: triviality, agreeability, respectability and appreciability. It was difficult to come up with an umbrella term to describe all of them, but these days, I think I would use consonance. This is a back-formation from the term 'dissonance', as it is used in the psychological term 'cognitive dissonance'. Hence, I think that it is about as good a term as I am going to get to describe this concept. Those who desire more elucidation of this concept are directed to my entry called "Commensurability 1.0".
Anyway, I was therefore arguing that the minimum for moral judgements was a consonance with our own values. I forget which level of consonance I had designated as the minimum level. This, however, is a separate issue to be determined separately.
I seem to recall that my associate supervisor thought that this was strange. Surely even a Nazi moral theory could still be considered a moral theory even if it were dissonant with our own values. It would simply be that the Nazi moral theory would be incorrect. I know I would have addressed that issue somewhere in the thesis, but on the whole, the majority of my arguments were now based on a non-positivist perspective, so I didn't really change the view then.
Still, I can definitely see the problems with a non-positivist view of ethics. For one thing, it makes no distinction between normative and descriptive ethics, and begs the question in favour of a certain amount of moral content. Ipso facto, it also makes no distinction between moral form and moral content either. The only thing that seems to make it plausible is precisely that morality never does actually seem to get discussed in purely abstract terms. Some content always seems to be getting presupposed.
I can see I'll have to write about all of this in greater detail--in another section!
The basic requirement, I take it, is that more argument be provided for a view I shall term social positivism: That is, at least the advocacy for a positive definition or account of society, independently of moral considerations.
Can society be described without relying on moral terms? Well, if moral terms must be such things as 'value' and 'approve', then it seems clear enough that this is impossible. But these terms have only ever been abstractions of prescription that are as generalised as they can be. Calling them 'moral' begs the question, when they could just as easily be rational, or even aesthetic.
I think I know why the supervisor thought that I was a social positivist. Originally, my thesis was elaborating on the basic claims of a theory of utilitarianism. However, that terrible argument that I had with the people at my science fiction society had taken its toll. I decided that I didn't want to bother with morality anymore. I had sometimes heard of saying that such and such an activity was immoral, but permissible, and I thought that if I could distinguish morality from permissibility, then I wanted to go with permissibility instead. Permissibility would be cashed out in terms of what one was actually prepared to enforce. These were very nebulous intuitions, and over a number of weeks, I came to realise that my best line of argument was still some kind of moral theory. I could not simply argue for it on purely practical grounds, because this would be too "disturbing". So I decided to look to the tradition of empiricism for support, and this was not entirely unsuccessful. Indeed, the empirical theory of ethics still seems to be developing along.
The whole time I talked about permissibility, my supervisor argued that it must also somehow be a theory of morality. I was hitherto totally unfamiliar with this as a background issue, so my initial reaction was that it was simply fascist. If morality could be stretched to accommodate any prescriptive theory whatsoever, then what good was it? Morality was just a word that people used to keep onside of each other for the sake of rhetoric.
A lot of the problem here was that no distinction was made whatsoever between moral form and moral content. One could argue until the cows came home about whether a theory was moral in form. But once you decided to call your theory moral, traditional moral content could then start to be smuggled into it. This annoyed me, because I thought that some of this content was material about which I was simply expected, along with other philosophers, to be hypocritical. I suppose that in that case, the solution was simply what I found myself doing in the end: Questioning the empirical validity of said dubious "content"; I found that I could do little else. And now this argument has reared its ugly head all over again with my account of society.
What happens if social non-positivism is correct? If morality is built right into society at the terminological level, then it is simply part of what we mean by society that it is in some way moral. If there is no morality, then there can also be no society, by definition.
In some ways, this view could actually work to my favour. But then again, I also argue quite extensively in chapter 5 that there are distinct limits to the things to which one may apply the term 'moral'. I specifically developed the theory of commensurability so that I could describe what the minimum requirement was for calling a theory 'moral'. However, I have since become convinced that 'commensurability' was not the correct word to use. It means 'measurability by a common standard', whereas what I meant was 'conduciveness to a non-coercive convergence of opinion'. I distinguished four different degrees of this property: triviality, agreeability, respectability and appreciability. It was difficult to come up with an umbrella term to describe all of them, but these days, I think I would use consonance. This is a back-formation from the term 'dissonance', as it is used in the psychological term 'cognitive dissonance'. Hence, I think that it is about as good a term as I am going to get to describe this concept. Those who desire more elucidation of this concept are directed to my entry called "Commensurability 1.0".
Anyway, I was therefore arguing that the minimum for moral judgements was a consonance with our own values. I forget which level of consonance I had designated as the minimum level. This, however, is a separate issue to be determined separately.
I seem to recall that my associate supervisor thought that this was strange. Surely even a Nazi moral theory could still be considered a moral theory even if it were dissonant with our own values. It would simply be that the Nazi moral theory would be incorrect. I know I would have addressed that issue somewhere in the thesis, but on the whole, the majority of my arguments were now based on a non-positivist perspective, so I didn't really change the view then.
Still, I can definitely see the problems with a non-positivist view of ethics. For one thing, it makes no distinction between normative and descriptive ethics, and begs the question in favour of a certain amount of moral content. Ipso facto, it also makes no distinction between moral form and moral content either. The only thing that seems to make it plausible is precisely that morality never does actually seem to get discussed in purely abstract terms. Some content always seems to be getting presupposed.
I can see I'll have to write about all of this in greater detail--in another section!
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