Laws of Nature as Prohibitions
Observation: Popper's thesis (p.48) is that universal laws are prohibitions, in that any positive universal statement logically equates to a negative existential statement. In order to say that every x is P, one must be saying that there is no x that is not-P, and this is what makes the universal statement falsifiable, by finding an instance of one x that is not-P.
Hypothesis: It seems to me that this is rich for an analogy with ethics, although one has to be very careful about how one words and formulates this. Suppose that moral rules are prohibitions--such as, for example, a prohibition against murder (which we could assume to be the willful and premeditated killing of a human being). First, a singular instance of murder can hardly count as a falsification of the moral rule, because the whole point of the rule in the first place is precisely that murder, if it occurs, carries with it some kind of negative consequence. A strong negative consequence would be a legal punishment, and a weak negative consequence would be a guilty conscience. But some negative consequence must befall the agent in question, at least a majority of the time. Even if the agent is able to evade the negative consequence, the rule can be said to be verified if there is a definite threat of a negative consequence emerging. In the case of the strong negative conseqence, the person may have been able to evade the law. In the case of the weak negative consequence, the person may simply be psychopathic, and hence feel no guilt or shame for his actions. But in either case, there has still been a threat of the negative consequence being there, whether it be that the police are going to try to catch the killer, or it be the person's own psychology, from which the person must suffer from some kind of abnormality to avoid.
Objection 1: The problem with your argument is that you are supposing that a moral rule entails at least the threat of a negative consequence to a person's immoral act, when this is clearly not the case. The point of the act's being immoral is not that it carries with it any explicit threat of punishment, or even necessarily that the act necessarily ought to be punished--though presumably most of the time it ought. The point is simply that the reason for the action's being immoral has nothing whatsoever to do with any consequences, deserved or actual. It is purely to do with the kind of action that has been performed. Killing a person is immoral because it is a violation of that person, a treatment of that person merely as a means to an end, and not as an end in herself, as Kant recognised. Whether it merits punishment or carries some threat of punishment is neither here nor there. I would rightly regard that as a very childish conception of morality, because the way that a child may often regard the rules of right and wrong is that the reason for obeying them is simply to stay out of trouble. But the reason for obeying rules must simply be because they are right, in themselves, independently of their consequences, real or deserving.
Reply 1: I do appreciate the point that you are making that the reason for doing the right thing is that it is right independently of its consequences, and I think that I cannot argue against that, but what would be the consequences for the analogy that I am trying to make? It seemed to me that moral laws could also be considered to be prohibitions as part of what counted towards their falsifiability. I would not have counted a singular instance of murder as a falsification of the moral law if some threat of a negative consequence were genuinely there. But this does not have to be the reason for doing the right thing in the first place; the reason for doing the right thing is a separate issue from what the right thing actually is. Even Kant thought that doing the right thing for the right reasons brought about its own reward of happiness. He simply denied that happiness was, or even could be, the reason for having done the right thing in the first place1. In other words, part of how you identify the right thing in the first place is its threat of consequences, and this is separate for the motivation for having done it at all.
Objection 2: I take your point that the threat of negative consequences for doing a thing can be part and parcel of that thing's being wrong without its thereby being the reason to abstain from doing the wrong thing. Nevertheless, it is well known that there are wicked people in the world whose conscience does not bother them when they do the wrong thing, and not necessarily because they suffer from a psychological abnormality. Nor do these people necessarily have a threat of punishment awaiting them. Think of the tyrannical dictatorship in Ethiopia, where the ruling powers must surely know that they are doing the wrong thing, yet can seemingly get away with it forever.
Reply 2: In the case of the Ethiopian dictatorship, it is not that no one is actually prepared to enforce the general ethos of freedom and dignity towards that country, but that the means of enforcement does not seem to be readily available. When one is up against a corrupt government, one will typically not interfere unless it serves one's own interests. But that there is at least a desire to retaliate in many sections of the world seems clear enough.
Objection 3: But there must be a desire to 'retaliate' against any number of things that a person might do without those things actually being wrong. It seems to me that what you are saying is that the right thing is what tends to get rewarded and the wrong thing is what tends to get punished, but there seems no reason a priori to believe this. Furthermore, you must also ask yourself whether the wrong thing is wrong because it is punished, or whether it is punished because it is wrong. It seems clear enough that the wrong thing must be punished because it is wrong; it is not wrong because it gets punished. So if the empirical theory of ethics identifies wrong things as wrong because they tend to get punished, then it does not actually identify the reason why the wrong things are wrong, because they cannot be wrong simply because they are punished. On the other hand, if one has to know whether or not to punish a particular action, one has to know whether that action is in fact wrong. In order to know whether an action is wrong, one must know the reason why that action is wrong. One cannot identify the wrong action just because it tends to get punished because that is not the reason why it is wrong. Hence, the empirical theory of ethics will provide no guide as to which actions to reward and which to punish. If it only identifies actions by whether they are punished to begin with, then it cannot identify the reasons for punishing them and one must suppose other, extra-theoretical assumptions about right and wrong in order to make these judgements.
Reply 3: Ah, but it is not necessary that the theory provide any guidance as to which action to reward or which action to punish for the analogy with Popperian science to hold. For Popper rightly says that there is no valid law of induction, hence no way that one might legitimately derive a hypothesis from an observation. There is only the ability, once the theory has been formulated, to test that theory with observations to see whether it is false. That is why, for any given statement or theory, it can be determined whether this statement is scientific by whether it is falsifiable by some hypothetical observation. Similarly, the analogy of which I was thinking above was that if a moral rule implies a prohibition of one kind or another, then one might falsify the existence of this rule by demonstrating the lack of tendency that there is in the world to punish transgressions. In other words, analogously with Popper, the theory does not have to provide positive moral content. All it needs to do is specify the means by which such content should be falsified.
Question 1: I understand where you are coming from now with respect to your analogy with Popperian science, and recognise that the theory does not then provide positive moral content. Nevertheless, this is already a very different notion of falsification than what you provided earlier in your blog entries, making for a grand total of three different notions of moral falsification so far:
Are all these meant to be used at once???
I shall attempt to answer that question in another section...
1The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, Preface.
Hypothesis: It seems to me that this is rich for an analogy with ethics, although one has to be very careful about how one words and formulates this. Suppose that moral rules are prohibitions--such as, for example, a prohibition against murder (which we could assume to be the willful and premeditated killing of a human being). First, a singular instance of murder can hardly count as a falsification of the moral rule, because the whole point of the rule in the first place is precisely that murder, if it occurs, carries with it some kind of negative consequence. A strong negative consequence would be a legal punishment, and a weak negative consequence would be a guilty conscience. But some negative consequence must befall the agent in question, at least a majority of the time. Even if the agent is able to evade the negative consequence, the rule can be said to be verified if there is a definite threat of a negative consequence emerging. In the case of the strong negative conseqence, the person may have been able to evade the law. In the case of the weak negative consequence, the person may simply be psychopathic, and hence feel no guilt or shame for his actions. But in either case, there has still been a threat of the negative consequence being there, whether it be that the police are going to try to catch the killer, or it be the person's own psychology, from which the person must suffer from some kind of abnormality to avoid.
Objection 1: The problem with your argument is that you are supposing that a moral rule entails at least the threat of a negative consequence to a person's immoral act, when this is clearly not the case. The point of the act's being immoral is not that it carries with it any explicit threat of punishment, or even necessarily that the act necessarily ought to be punished--though presumably most of the time it ought. The point is simply that the reason for the action's being immoral has nothing whatsoever to do with any consequences, deserved or actual. It is purely to do with the kind of action that has been performed. Killing a person is immoral because it is a violation of that person, a treatment of that person merely as a means to an end, and not as an end in herself, as Kant recognised. Whether it merits punishment or carries some threat of punishment is neither here nor there. I would rightly regard that as a very childish conception of morality, because the way that a child may often regard the rules of right and wrong is that the reason for obeying them is simply to stay out of trouble. But the reason for obeying rules must simply be because they are right, in themselves, independently of their consequences, real or deserving.
Reply 1: I do appreciate the point that you are making that the reason for doing the right thing is that it is right independently of its consequences, and I think that I cannot argue against that, but what would be the consequences for the analogy that I am trying to make? It seemed to me that moral laws could also be considered to be prohibitions as part of what counted towards their falsifiability. I would not have counted a singular instance of murder as a falsification of the moral law if some threat of a negative consequence were genuinely there. But this does not have to be the reason for doing the right thing in the first place; the reason for doing the right thing is a separate issue from what the right thing actually is. Even Kant thought that doing the right thing for the right reasons brought about its own reward of happiness. He simply denied that happiness was, or even could be, the reason for having done the right thing in the first place1. In other words, part of how you identify the right thing in the first place is its threat of consequences, and this is separate for the motivation for having done it at all.
Objection 2: I take your point that the threat of negative consequences for doing a thing can be part and parcel of that thing's being wrong without its thereby being the reason to abstain from doing the wrong thing. Nevertheless, it is well known that there are wicked people in the world whose conscience does not bother them when they do the wrong thing, and not necessarily because they suffer from a psychological abnormality. Nor do these people necessarily have a threat of punishment awaiting them. Think of the tyrannical dictatorship in Ethiopia, where the ruling powers must surely know that they are doing the wrong thing, yet can seemingly get away with it forever.
Reply 2: In the case of the Ethiopian dictatorship, it is not that no one is actually prepared to enforce the general ethos of freedom and dignity towards that country, but that the means of enforcement does not seem to be readily available. When one is up against a corrupt government, one will typically not interfere unless it serves one's own interests. But that there is at least a desire to retaliate in many sections of the world seems clear enough.
Objection 3: But there must be a desire to 'retaliate' against any number of things that a person might do without those things actually being wrong. It seems to me that what you are saying is that the right thing is what tends to get rewarded and the wrong thing is what tends to get punished, but there seems no reason a priori to believe this. Furthermore, you must also ask yourself whether the wrong thing is wrong because it is punished, or whether it is punished because it is wrong. It seems clear enough that the wrong thing must be punished because it is wrong; it is not wrong because it gets punished. So if the empirical theory of ethics identifies wrong things as wrong because they tend to get punished, then it does not actually identify the reason why the wrong things are wrong, because they cannot be wrong simply because they are punished. On the other hand, if one has to know whether or not to punish a particular action, one has to know whether that action is in fact wrong. In order to know whether an action is wrong, one must know the reason why that action is wrong. One cannot identify the wrong action just because it tends to get punished because that is not the reason why it is wrong. Hence, the empirical theory of ethics will provide no guide as to which actions to reward and which to punish. If it only identifies actions by whether they are punished to begin with, then it cannot identify the reasons for punishing them and one must suppose other, extra-theoretical assumptions about right and wrong in order to make these judgements.
Reply 3: Ah, but it is not necessary that the theory provide any guidance as to which action to reward or which action to punish for the analogy with Popperian science to hold. For Popper rightly says that there is no valid law of induction, hence no way that one might legitimately derive a hypothesis from an observation. There is only the ability, once the theory has been formulated, to test that theory with observations to see whether it is false. That is why, for any given statement or theory, it can be determined whether this statement is scientific by whether it is falsifiable by some hypothetical observation. Similarly, the analogy of which I was thinking above was that if a moral rule implies a prohibition of one kind or another, then one might falsify the existence of this rule by demonstrating the lack of tendency that there is in the world to punish transgressions. In other words, analogously with Popper, the theory does not have to provide positive moral content. All it needs to do is specify the means by which such content should be falsified.
Question 1: I understand where you are coming from now with respect to your analogy with Popperian science, and recognise that the theory does not then provide positive moral content. Nevertheless, this is already a very different notion of falsification than what you provided earlier in your blog entries, making for a grand total of three different notions of moral falsification so far:
- Observation of an occurrence of immorality where the theory would predict an observation of morality, or vice versa;
- Presupposition of a metaphysical claim that has been falsified by experience; and now
- Observing the general tendency of an instance of alleged immorality to go unpunished, or of an instance of morality to go punished.
Are all these meant to be used at once???
I shall attempt to answer that question in another section...
Note
1The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, Preface.
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