Notes

I read all of Book I yesterday and all of Book II today. That leaves Book III, where Cicero deals with the apparent conflict between duty and expediency. I think he actually makes a good case in Book II that duty and expediency are not in conflict most of the time, and from what I have read elsewhere, he will here try to establish that they only ever appear to be in conflict because of some things that merely appear good but are not. It sounds reasonable to me already. Where does this leave you and your theory? I guess that I am interested in the concept of social viability and its relation to ethics. Issues such as cultural memes that get transmitted from generation to generation will come to play here, and so will the degree to which certain institutions last over time. Moral beliefs--as opposed to moral realities, to the extent that those can be different things--will certainly constitute a species of cultural memes. In that respect, I guess I am interested in the degree to

For instance, in the First Punic War, when Regulus was taken prisoner by the Carthaginians, he was sent to Rome on parole to negotiate an exchange of prisoners; he came and, in the first place, it was he that made the motion in the Senate that the prisoners should not be restored; and in the second place, when his relatives and friends would have kept him back, he chose to return to a death by torture rather than prove false to his promise, though given to an enemy. Now that is unbelievable! It goes to show on the one hand how principled his standpoint truly is, and on the other hand, it is also impressive that this standard should be considered so viable. On the one hand, he can provide two specific examples of it that are actual, not hypothetical--of which this is the first. On the other hand, he also seems to believe he can expect such conduct from his son as well, in giving him the advice. If anything, it makes me wonder what it was about the Roman culture that was so special

He warns him, therefore, to be careful not to go into battle; for, he says, the man who is not legally a soldier has no right to be fighting the foe. My God! He's describing the rules of armed conflict, as we were taught them in the army reserve, in terms of what you owe to people who surrender in wartime, and who is a legal combatant and who is not. Here and elsewhere, as I have quoted, it strongly seems to me that his morality and our morality are really not so different. And if not, then Emanuel Smikun's positing of timeless moral imperatives in social functioning suddenly becomes a lot more plausible. I think that part of the problem here is that philosophy has in general not cared about real moral reasoning. As I have argued previously, it is too wrapped up in arbitrary formalisms, which I may call philosopher's games. It is proud to try to force moral reasoning to fit the Procrustean bed of these horrible games and denigrates real moral reasoning as "banal".

Although philosophy offers many problems, both important and useful, that have been fully and carefully discussed by philosophers, those teachings which have been handed down on the subject of moral duties seem to have the widest practical application. That is why I chose to study ethics! Because I thought that it would be the most practical philosophical subject that I could take. Imagine my surprise to discover that it was totally impractical because of moral hypocrisy. But the basic problem in this regard seems to be, now as it was then, the conflict between duty and expediency. The dictionary of philosophy stated that this work of Cicero was a classic attempt to solve the problem, but did not elaborate on what his basic argument was. I am therefore reading the work to ascertain whether it is worth including in my book or not. For no phase of life, whether public or private, whether in business or in the home, whether one is working on what concerns oneself alone or dealin

For while the orations exhibit a more vigorous style, yet the unimpassioned, restrained style of my philosophical productions is also worth cultivating. Now I know exactly what I am! I always thought that it was a defect in my writing that I "put my point very strongly", which my supervisor was always trying to stop me from doing, and it was very aggravating, but it is simply that I have the writing of an orator, not a philosopher! I hated the boring, anemic academic style, which was one of the reasons that I hated reading philosophy so much; it put me to sleep. I remember reading all of Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy for my Masters thesis because my associate supervisor recommended it. But I was so God-awfully bored by the whole thing that when I completed it, I did not even know what I had read. However, whenever my associate supervisor did point out something or other that Williams said, I would always go back to the book and find a releva

Aha! Sir Isaiah Berlin is the important philosopher who said that there may be more than one right answer to a moral question, as well as who claimed that social science pertains more to the humanities than to the physical sciences. It is absurd to suggest, as the external reviewer did, that Peter Winch was the one who did "pioneering" work in this field. I could just as easily criticised him for failing to make any reference to the landmark work of Isaiah Berlin here, who seems to have performed far more sweeping a job of it. It just goes to show what my supervisor said, that there are so many philosophers and works now that it is simply ludicrous to expect that someone could cover them all. The external reviewer's preoccupation with Winch revealed a parochial bias only, not an objective requirement for something for me to include in my thesis. Winch does not have an entry in almost any of the philosophical dictionaries at which I have looked, including the one that I ow

This morning, I found another good relevant concept: aporia. Aristotle suggests that inquiry should take its starting point in a survey of aporias. During the early stages of developing my MPhil thesis, I identified a dilemma that I was facing, of which I had already experienced both horns. I could write an impractical theory that people would preach and not practise (the original version of my theory of ethics, essentially a version of utilitarianism). Alternatively, I could write an immoral theory that people would practise and not preach (something that I had called 'the theory of permissibility'). Essentially, one theory was principle-oriented and the other was practice-oriented. The reason for the dilemma was the presence in the university of a culture of hypocrisy about altruism, and specifically utilitarianism. I cannot speak about specific staff members, simply because I was not one of them, and so did not socialise with them. However, I can certainly say that the stude

This morning you have included anomie as one of the concepts that you wish to explore in your book. I agree that this does support your view. It also, however, begs the question in favour of sociological functionalism, and something needs to be said about Marx and Weber's concepts as well, if you are going to talk about anomie. For example, it seems to me that you could talk about evil and the problems of society. You could have a section on evil and alienation and evil and disenchantment as well. This would also touch upon a discussion of the relation of politics to morality that the external reviewer carped at you for not including in the MPhil thesis. I also think that the choice of alienation as a concept on which to elaborate in the book is much better than that of the alethic modality--a much harder subject to make relevant, I think! This evening, I have decided to include Karl-Otto Apel among the topics for sections in the book. His work on the necessary presuppositions o

What is a moral value, as opposed to a non-moral value? On the account given in " The Language of Values ", I think that it is simply impossible to answer this question without begging the question in favour of some moral content. All the attempts at answering this question do beg the question in favour of some moral content. Furthermore, Alan Gewirth rightly points out that to use the word "ethics" descriptively would entail us describing many so-called moral codes that seem immoral. For example, Nazis claimed to have an ethics, as did the Dobuans. How on earth are we to define 'moral' in a way that excludes certain kinds of codes of conduct without thereby begging the question in favour of our own values? To use the word 'moral' in other words, is usually to use the word in some way prescriptively. As such, it can only be used to describe codes of conduct that are in some ways commensurate with our own values. But we can distinguish between differe

Has your enthusiasm for your project dampened now? This is the first time that I have felt like my work has had a direction since I started writing this blog. I remember how laid back I used to be about writing my thesis back when I was doing my MPhil. It usually wouldn't take me more than a day or two to write the ten pages that I needed for my next meeting with my supervisor, and then I would be happy to wait the two weeks it took for my next meeting with him. I always looked forward to our discussions, because I loved watching my work evolve based on those discussions and my own reflection. It didn't matter to me that I wasn't working day and night to produce the work. I felt its progress to an extent that I was content simply to watch it grow in between the meetings and savour the very experience of my own writing in the meantime. Often this would mean re-reading and simulatneously proofreading my work, removing any typographical errors that I found along the way. W

I was just looking through the dictionary of philosophy. I was stunned to discover that my notion of relative morality is comfortably subsumed under actualism, a concept I had never heard of before tonight. I just happened to come across its entry in the dictionary, and the concept comes from an article by Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter in Philosophical Review 95 (1986). I think it behooves me to read a little of this dictionary every day, because I am really going to need to know more about philosophy to survive in this field. Reading the first ten pages of the dictionary just now has benefited me yet again, because of the entry on akrasia. One of the things that it notes is that according to certain moral theories, approving of a course of action, consists in having an intention to perform the action. For theories of this kind, weakness of will becomes an important problem. Well, based upon what I claim about real morals, I am committed to this kind of position, so weakness

I guess this comes down to issues of value theory and what constitutes values. It seems to me that the question of what values actually are is going to determine much about whatever normative theory of ethics a person may adopt. To me, values are, by definition, something on which you would act as a matter of course, simply because in being values, they are important to you. Conversely, if you did not act on them as a matter of course, then they would not be important to you, hence not your values. Hence, there are real values and pretend values. This is what will lead to the claim that a real value is indeed a more, as opposed to mere hypocrisy. Faithful to the fact that hypocrisy comes from the Greek word hupokrisis , meaning playing a part or pretending, to be a hypocrite is to profess beliefs and opinions that you do not hold. The classic method of recognising a hypocrite is to note that she is in the habit of acting against her own professed ethics. Actions speak louder than w

So how do you think you should open the book? It seems to me that you have to justify the project of an empirical theory of ethics, and that the way to do this is going at least in some way to refute the approach of Immanuel Kant. I should imagine that your best bet is to show that there is no intuition that is confirmable a priori, because intuitions are experience-dependent. This, I think, is actually going to be a better approach to take, because it means that you are not committed merely to examine the work of Kant. You can quite rightly consider the works of all the different important rationalist philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Actually, I think that my understanding of Kant has become much more sophisticated since I wrote the Masters thesis. I used simply to think that he was a rationalist philosopher, but I see now that he simply cannot be taken as one. In fact, as Dr Tom Kerns points out , Kant's work has to be understood as a synthesis of rationalism and

One of the intriguing claims that I think you make is that abstract theorising about ethics is incapable of making progress, but that social norms do. I think that you can argue this fact persuasively in the case of our society. But I would want to see you argue it in the case of non-Western societies as well, i.e. world anthropology. That would be a large task. You would first have to clarify what the current culture's norms were, and then show how those norms developed over history to come to where they are today. In the process, you would also have to show how they were falsified by observations, assuming that this is what changed them. That would be interesting, but it would require some kind of science of moral anthropology that seems to be pretty thin on the ground. A search for the strong "'moral anthropology'" reveals little. A search for "'anthropology of morals'" reveals a page about the naturalistic fallacy as, provocatively,

I note your lack of enthusiasm for rewriting the Kant and Aristotle chapters. It seems to me that the rewrites would be necessary given the chapters as they stand, so how can you justify this lack of enthusiasm? My 'enthusiasm' sometimes knows before my rational mind does. How important is a discussion of Kant and Aristotle to your empirical theory of ethics, anyway? I can understand your desire for a discussion of those philosophers while you were still wrestling with the problem of moral hypocrisy. But it appears to me that by the end of the thesis you have dug yourself out of that hole with your discovery of what you term commonsense viable morality. Essentially, it is simply the ethos that exists in the outside world, rather than the often hypocritical left-wing morality that runs rife on the university campus. I would love to be able to describe that as the primary empirical reality, purely because I can support it with integrity. The primary empirical reality and

I think that the problem in the previous section is that these farfetched examples carry no empirical validity. The only way to form reliable intuitions is through experience, and this entails that we move back in the empirical direction. In that case, then what work has been done with moral anthropology? Looking up "'moral anthropology' bibliography" on Google, I got this striking web page: The introduction to a forthcoming book by Patrick Frierson called Freedom and Anthropology in Kant's Moral Philosophy . It addresses an objection by Friedrich Schleiermacher to a work by Kant in 1798, called Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View . The objection is that the work treats anthropology as having moral import, when Kant already makes clear in his Foundations that he is committed to claiming that anthropology can have no moral import. Perhaps this, then, was what the external reviewer meant by the "rather robust empiricism to be found in the Theo

I am satisfied by this outcome for the astronaut scenario where the astronaut has the opportunity to self-destruct. But if the astronaut cannot self-destruct, but you can destroy him, then are you not then using him as a mere means to the end of your own survival? Again, some intuition of pristinity and intervention is at play here. I think that if the people on the planet were there first, then they are the ones who have the right to protect themselves from outside interference, certainly to the extent of defending their own lives against viruses. I don't really see the problem with blowing him out of the sky under such a circumstance, regrettable as that may be. But if the intuitions involved are of pristinity and intervention, then why not simply make the astronaut a member of that society? He can hardly be said to be interfering with his own society. He is still interfering in the private lives of people who were minding their own business. It seems to me that it do

What does the previous section entail for the empirical theory of ethics? Maybe it obviates the need for an empirical theory of ethics yet again. Maybe I have no need to pursue an empirical theory of ethics if a Kantian rationale will give me the results I want, without the self-sacrifice. Couldn't it have done that back in the days when you were originally arguing with those idiots from your science fiction club? I simply had no confidence that I would be any happier to practise a Kantian theory than I would a utiltiarian theory. Especially the way Kant talks about his own theory, it sounds as though it too would entail untold self-sacrifice. Now that I have written this morning's entry, however, maybe that is simply not so. That's corroboration with the Friesian website, then, so perhaps you should simply go back to reading more of those articles.

Number can still matter, however, as long as nobody in the process is being used merely as means to ends. I recall, for example, an instance during the scheduling of tutorials for a class. A system was adopted whereby the least number of people would be inconvenienced by the times chosen for a particular tutorial. Under the circumstances, this seemed like entirely the appropriate thing to do, because under the circumstances, it was impossible to schedule the tutorial without inconveniencing at least some people. If one could not help inconveniencing some people, then one was hardly using them merely as means to an end of scheduling by inconveniencing them. But one thing that one could still help, however, was how many people were being inconvenienced in the process. The greater the number of people being inconvenienced, it seemed, the worse the scheduling would be. Therefore, given the fact that inconveniencing people was not merely using them as a means to an end in this instance, one

It seems to me that at least prima facie we always have a duty to promote the best consequences that we can. However, this becomes immoral when it involves treating people as means to an end only and not as ends in themselves. That is why it is immoral to kill someone even if it means that one can thereby save the lives of ten other people. How simple that sounds, and yet how completely it clarifies the understanding of a theory like utilitarianism to see its difficulties expressed so simply. And yet that cannot be the full side of the story, because that only makes it immoral to kill someone in the name of social utility. What is preventing the person who would otherwise die, from having an altruistic duty to kill himself in the name of social utility? This goes back to the astronaut scenario. I think that the astronaut does have an altruistic duty to kill himself in that situation. But the reason for that is not that it is the outcome that maximises the good consequences for th

Since the previous entry, I have hit upon a strategy. In Section 3.2 I clearly delineate how it is that I feel that moral properties supervene over natural properties, but at the end of the section the problem of universals can be raised. However, on closer examination of the problem, it seems as though it is really unnecessary for me to put in my two cents' worth about universals. Whether they are real, concepts or simply names, they will still be able to do what I want from them in this essay. However, under those circumstances, I will still want to outline exactly what I require from universals, so that it will be clear what kind of universals it is with which my theory will be consistent. Nevertheless, a question of conceptual priority will now be to consider the works of other authors who have advocated moral supervenience. If you are going to write yet another theory of supervenience, then you had better have something to contribute. That means getting to know other peopl

You are researching the significance of supervenience to the problem of universals. It seems to me that if you are going to do that, then you should ask yourself, how important is a theory of universals to your theory? Specifically, what are the necessary presuppositions that you are making about what universals are for the sake of your theory? For example, is there anything at stake for you whether a universal is a real entity or merely a word, and if so, what? Well, it seems to me that if a prescriptive agent has been universalised for the sake of a moral judgement, then this will explain people's tendency to want to engage in moral arguments. Because if the prescriptive agent has been universalised in a particular moral judgement, then it must of necessity apply to all prescriptive agents in the world, regardless of whether the universal is a concept, a word or a real entity, and this is indeed all that I require of it.

I feel very good. I paid a fee a while ago for borrowing privileges from the library of my alma mater, and I went there today specifically to check out a metaphysical anthology to assist me in my ongoing philosophical research. University has Easter holidays at present, so although the academics are still there, they are all busy working on their journal papers and so on. Nevertheless, I chanced on coming upstairs to see if my old supervisor was there, and he was. It was very good to see him, and I spent about quarter of an hour catching up with him, discussing what I had done since my MPhil, and how things were going with him as well. I mentioned why I was at the university, and he gave me a reference I could look up, which turned out also to be covered in the metaphysical anthology that I was borrowing. I was very happy that he was willing to assist me with further research, which was more than I had hoped for. He also gave me the names of two people in the department whom I could as

OK, I think that you have enough insights now to write another section of your book. You started out with a very skeptical conclusion about the ability to know what descriptive states of affairs over which ethics supervened. But now you are making a much bolder claim, about the ways in which evaluative statements may supervene over descriptive statements. The best thing to do is first to distinguish three different levels of description and prescription for terms. A level 1 term is a necessarily prescriptive term--such as "good" or "ought"--in that it must always presuppose a value judgement. A level 2 term can be either prescriptive or descriptive depending on the way in which it is used. For example, a word like "approve" is prescriptive when it is used in the first person, as in, "I approve of your helping that old lady cross the street." But when it is used in the second or third person, it becomes merely descriptive, as in "Hitler a

In many ways, my notion of an empirical theory of ethics is taking a relatively descriptive approach towards moral value. Yet in many respects, it can be argued that this approach is incorrect. This seems to be because the goal of the ethicist is not merely to describe what people do value, but to pronounce a judgement about what they ought to value. Therefore, the objection of a typical ethicist to my approach would be that it is not a work of ethics, even if it is a work of moral anthropology. Possibly all that I am writing is indeed a work of moral anthropology. But if I succeed in explaining why people do value what they value, then it seems to me that this will also constitute a contribution to ethics as well. It is simply that, in discovering the reasons and causes for why we value what we value, we will also be in a far better position to change some of our values in accordance with an awareness of this process. Hence, we will be in a better position to decide which values

There still seems to be an equivalent, under this conception of subjectivity, to the notion that somewhere thinking does make something so. We can still say that somewhere in our analysis of our values, we will reach a point of intrinsic satisfication with those values. The objection that was raised by the external reviewer would therefore apply in this situation. It is that awareness of this thesis may make people all too willing to believe far too early that they have reached this point. Of course, as my supervisor pointed out, that is hardly a strong objection. How could undesirable practical consequences show that subjectivism is false? But let's have a little fun in analysing it nevertheless, in terms of the rules of transformation that I employ in converting an evaluative statement to a descriptive statement. What the reviewer is saying is that awareness of this thesis may make people willing to a degree much in excess of what he values, to believe quickly to a degree far