- Department of Philosophy,
University of Otago,
Box 56.
Dunedin,
New Zealand 9054
Charles R Pigden
University of Otago, Philosophy, Faculty Member
- Philosophy, Meta-Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Logic, History of early modern philosophy, Bertrand Russell, and 21 moreLiterature and Philosophy, G E Moore, David Hume, Philosophy Of Religion, Conspiracy Theories, Conspiracy Theories and Transparency, Philosophy Of Mathematics, Barriers to Inference, Plutocracy, Verificationism, Theory of Meaning, History of New Zealand, Social Democracy, New Zealand Studies, Richard Price, Moral Error Theory, Peter Geach, Anscombe, Elizabeth, Possible Worlds, Modality, and Ian Deardenedit
- The picture shows me partying with my daughters: Jemima, who works as a croupier in Melbourne, on the left and Abby, ... moreThe picture shows me partying with my daughters: Jemima, who works as a croupier in Melbourne, on the left and Abby, a Psych PhD, Teaching Fellow and Healthcare Researcher on the right. The photo was taken at a Philosophers' Ball some fifteen years back. My son Guy (not in this picture) is a screenwriter, actor and movie director and my wife Zena (who I met at Cambridge) is a social worker. and noted cat-breeder (Maine Coons).
Less interestingly, I am originally British, a state school boy, born in 1956. I am a graduate of King’s College Cambridge (1979) and did my doctorate (as a Commonwealth Scholar) at la Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia in the early eighties. I ran out of money in 1984 and worked for a while as a research assistant at the ANU to support myself whilst finishing my PhD. After a period of unemployment in Thatcher’s Britain (which I do not remember with pleasure) I got a post-doc at Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand in 1986 and a temporary lectureship at Massey (1987), returning to Otago and a permanent post in 1988. I have taught at Otago ever since and am now a New Zealand citizen. For fourteen years (1989-2003) I devoted a great deal of my time and energy to activism (to the considerable detriment of my career), partly on behalf of Amnesty, but mainly as a member of the New Labour Party and subsequently the Alliance, endeavouring to resist and reverse the Neo-Liberal Revolution in New Zealand. My efforts, alas, were not entirely successful (see below ‘Gedda Life’). The failures of my generation may well spell catastrophe for the world, as the Neo-Liberal and Post-Neo-Liberal governments currently in power are unlikely to do anything effective about climate change.edit
Conspiracy theories are widely deemed to be superstitious. Yet history appears to be littered with conspiracies successful and otherwise. (For this reason ‘cock-up’ theories cannot in general replace conspiracy theories since in many... more
Conspiracy theories are widely deemed to be superstitious. Yet history appears to be littered with conspiracies successful and otherwise. (For this reason ‘cock-up’ theories cannot in general replace conspiracy theories since in many cases the cock-ups are simply failed conspiracies.) Why then is it silly to suppose that historical events are sometimes due to conspiracy? The only argument known to me is due to Sir Karl Popper who criticizes what he calls ‘the conspiracy theory of society’ in The Open Society and elsewhere. His critique of the conspiracy theory is indeed sound. But it is a theory no sane person maintains. Moreover its falsehood is compatible with the prevalence of conspiracies. Nor do his arguments create any presumption against conspiracy theories of this or that. Thus the belief that it is superstitious to posit conspiracies is itself a superstition. The paper concludes with some speculations as to why this superstition is so widely believed.
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In Part 1, I contend (using Coriolanus as my mouthpiece) that Keeley and Clarke have failed to show that there is anything intellectually suspect about conspiracy theories per se. Conspiracy theorists need not commit the ‘fundamental... more
In Part 1, I contend (using Coriolanus as my mouthpiece) that Keeley and Clarke have failed to show that there is anything intellectually suspect about conspiracy theories per se. Conspiracy theorists need not commit the ‘fundamental attribution error’ there is no reason to suppose that all or most conspiracy theories constitute the cores of degenerating research programs, nor does situationism - a dubious doctrine in itself - lend any support to a systematic skepticism about conspiracy theories. In Part 2. I argue (in propria persona) that the idea that there is something suspect about conspiracy theories is one of the most dangerous and idiotic superstitions to disgrace our political culture.
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History as we know it, both through original documents and the work done by the best historians to establish the truth, is a web of conspiracies. If conspiracy theories are crazy, highly improbable, or suspect by their very nature, as... more
History as we know it, both through original documents and the work done by the best historians to establish the truth, is a web of conspiracies. If conspiracy theories are crazy, highly improbable, or suspect by their very nature, as modern superstition would have us ...
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Conspiracy theories should be neither believed nor investigated that is the conventional wisdom. I argue that it is sometimes permissible both to investigate and to believe. Hence this is a dispute in the ethics of belief. I defend... more
Conspiracy theories should be neither believed nor investigated that is the conventional wisdom. I argue that it is sometimes permissible both to investigate and to believe. Hence this is a dispute in the ethics of belief. I defend epistemic "oughts" that apply in the first ...
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Another paper in which I criticize the modern superstition – recently endorsed by Professor Quassim Cassam – that conspiracy theories AS SUCH are somehow suspect or unbelievable, and that therefore conspiracy theorists AS SUCH are... more
Another paper in which I criticize the modern superstition – recently endorsed by Professor Quassim Cassam – that conspiracy theories AS SUCH are somehow suspect or unbelievable, and that therefore conspiracy theorists AS SUCH are somehow foolish, irrational or otherwise intellectually vicious.
It is a draft version of my Foreword to Dentith, Matthew R.X. (2014) The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. References please to the published version.
It is a draft version of my Foreword to Dentith, Matthew R.X. (2014) The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. References please to the published version.
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Forthcoming in a shortened version in Coady & Lippert-Rasmussen eds Blackwell Companion to Applied Philosophy ' Are conspiracy theorists epistemically vicious? Not necessarily, not always, and maybe not even usually. But it IS... more
Forthcoming in a shortened version in Coady & Lippert-Rasmussen eds Blackwell Companion to Applied Philosophy '
Are conspiracy theorists epistemically vicious? Not necessarily, not always, and maybe not even usually. But it IS intellectually vicious to be a consistent conspiracy skeptic. The broad-band skeptic commits intellectual suicide whilst the restricted skeptic blinds herself to facts which, as an active citizen, she really needs to know. Both are vicious, though self-imposed blindness is better than epistemic suicide. As in other areas, so with conspiracy theories: the virtuous policy is to proportion belief to the evidence.
The paper contains an extended cirque of a recent paper by Quassim Cassam in in Aeon Magazine and of Sunstein and Vermeule (2008) 'Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures' .
Are conspiracy theorists epistemically vicious? Not necessarily, not always, and maybe not even usually. But it IS intellectually vicious to be a consistent conspiracy skeptic. The broad-band skeptic commits intellectual suicide whilst the restricted skeptic blinds herself to facts which, as an active citizen, she really needs to know. Both are vicious, though self-imposed blindness is better than epistemic suicide. As in other areas, so with conspiracy theories: the virtuous policy is to proportion belief to the evidence.
The paper contains an extended cirque of a recent paper by Quassim Cassam in in Aeon Magazine and of Sunstein and Vermeule (2008) 'Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures' .
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Conspiracy theories should be neither believed nor investigated - that is the conventional wisdom. I argue that it is sometimes permissible both to investigate and to believe. Hence this is a dispute in the ethics of belief. I defend... more
Conspiracy theories should be neither believed nor investigated - that is the conventional wisdom. I argue that it is sometimes permissible both to investigate and to believe. Hence this is a dispute in the ethics of belief. I defend epistemic ‘oughts’ that apply in the first instance to belief-forming strategies that are partly under our control. I argue that the policy of systematically doubting or disbelieving conspiracy theories conspiracy theories would be a political disaster and the epistemic equivalent of self-mutilation, since it leads to the conclusion that history is bunk and the nightly news unbelievable. In fact (of course) the policy is not employed systematically but is only wheeled on to do down theories that the speaker happens to dislike. I develop a deductive argument from hard-to-deny premises that if you are not a ‘conspiracy theorist’ in my anodyne sense of the word then you are an ‘idiot’ in the Greek sense of the word, that is, someone so politically purblind as to have no opinions about either history or public affairs. The conventional wisdom can only be saved (if at all) if ‘conspiracy theory’ is given a slanted definition. I discuss some slanted definitions apparently presupposed by proponents of the conventional wisdom (including, amongst others, Tony Blair) and conclude that even with these definitions the conventional wisdom comes out as deeply unwise. I finish up with a little harmless fun at the expense of David Aaronvitch whose abilities as a rhetorician and a popular historian are not perhaps matched by a corresponding capacity for logical thought.
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I argue that 'conspiracy theory' and 'conspiracy theorist' as commonly employed are 'tonkish' terms (as defined by Arthur Prior and Michael Dummett), licensing inferences from truths to falsehoods; indeed, that they are mega-tonkish... more
I argue that 'conspiracy theory' and 'conspiracy theorist' as commonly employed are 'tonkish' terms (as defined by Arthur Prior and Michael Dummett), licensing inferences from truths to falsehoods; indeed, that they are mega-tonkish terms, since their use is governed by different and competing sets of introduction and elimination rules, delivering different and inconsistent results. Thus 'conspiracy theory' and 'conspiracy theorist' do not have determinate extensions, which means that generalizations about conspiracy theories or conspiracy theorists do not have determinate truth-values. Hence conspiracy theory theory – psychological or social scientific research into conspiracy theorists and what is wrong with them – is often about as intellectually respectable as an enquiry into bastards and what makes them so mean.
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Survey talk delivered to the Cambridge Meta-Ethics group in 2011. After some brief remarks on the ambiguities in Hume's version of No-Ought-From-Is, I outline Prior's paradox and discuss the various responses, principally mine (the... more
Survey talk delivered to the Cambridge Meta-Ethics group in 2011. After some brief remarks on the ambiguities in Hume's version of No-Ought-From-Is, I outline Prior's paradox and discuss the various responses, principally mine (the New Zealand Plan) and Schurz's (the Austrian Plan). In this text I add seven appendices drawn mainly from my introduction to Hume On Is and Ought, amplifying the argument, discussing matters arising and outlining rival approaches to the problem, principally the relevantist solution, due to Ed Mares, and the Inference Barrier solution (the Scottish/Australian Plan) due to Gillian Russell and Greg Restall. I also discuss the work of Stephen Maitzen and Mark Nelson.
In this talk I emphasize the logical aspects of the issue.
Drafts of my contributions to this debate available above in 'Papers'. 'The Triviality of Hume's Law', 'Coda: Truth and Consequences' and 'Subtance, Taxonomy, Content and Consequence' emphasize the logical and meta-ethical aspects of the the issue, whilst 'Letter From a Gentleman' and 'Snare's Puzzle/Hume's Purpose' emphasize meta-ethics and the historical Hume. 'Comments on "Hume's Master Argument"' deals with all three themes. The kick-off paper is 'Logic and the Autonomy of Ethics' (1989). The last in the sequence is 'Hume on is and Ought: Logic Promises and the Duke of Wellington'.
In this talk I emphasize the logical aspects of the issue.
Drafts of my contributions to this debate available above in 'Papers'. 'The Triviality of Hume's Law', 'Coda: Truth and Consequences' and 'Subtance, Taxonomy, Content and Consequence' emphasize the logical and meta-ethical aspects of the the issue, whilst 'Letter From a Gentleman' and 'Snare's Puzzle/Hume's Purpose' emphasize meta-ethics and the historical Hume. 'Comments on "Hume's Master Argument"' deals with all three themes. The kick-off paper is 'Logic and the Autonomy of Ethics' (1989). The last in the sequence is 'Hume on is and Ought: Logic Promises and the Duke of Wellington'.
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This is the course-book for my 'Themes from Hume' paper, which is largely based on my two edited collections, 'Hume, Motivation and Virtue' (HMV) and 'Hume on Is and Ought' (HIO). It contains most of my papers on Is and Ought, the... more
This is the course-book for my 'Themes from Hume' paper, which is largely based on my two edited collections, 'Hume, Motivation and Virtue' (HMV) and 'Hume on Is and Ought' (HIO). It contains most of my papers on Is and Ought, the Slavery of Reason thesis and the Motivation Argument, including 'Directors Cut' versions of my contributions to HIO and HMV, and my first paper on these topics: 'Logic and the Basis of Ethics' . It also contains a couple of papers on G.E Moore and the Naturalistic Fallacy, and what I call the Generalised Hume Thesis (Beliefs of kind X are not the products of reason but of some non-rational causal mechanisms Y. Sometimes Hume seems to approve of going with the flow of the non-rational causal mechanisms and sometimes he does not. Has he a principled reason for his preferences?) The course-book also includes my essay on Hume and Jane Austen. Thus in the current absence of a 'Collected Papers' it is a useful compendium for anyone interested in my views on these subjects.
COURSE-BLURB
This is a paper straddling metaethics (the nature and justification of moral judgements), the history of philosophy and the philosophy of logic. It deals with three themes from the work of David Hume (1711-1776) together with "matters arising" from the Humean agenda:
The Slavery of Reason Thesis ("reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions"). What does this mean? Is the Slavery of Reason Thesis (or something like it) correct? And what (if anything) does this suggest about the nature of ethics?
The Motivation (or Influence) Argument:
Morals have an influence on the actions and affections. [Premise]
Reason alone, as we have already proved, can never have any such influence. [Premise]
Morals...cannot be derived from reason
What exactly is this argument supposed to prove? Does it succeed? If not, is there a decent argument in the neighbourhood that proves something similar? Can it be used to support non-cognitivism, the idea that moral judgements are neither true nor false?
Hume's No-Ought-From-Is thesis: "[It] seems altogether inconceivable", says David Hume, "that this new relation or affirmation [ought] can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it". What did Hume mean by this? Can you deduce an ought from an is? If not, why not? And what (if anything) does this suggest about the status of moral judgements? We focus on the idea, common in the 18th century, that logic is conservative - that in a valid inference you cannot get out what you haven't put in. In a famous paper the great New Zealand logician Arthur Prior challenged No-Ought-From-Is, along with the concept of conservativeness. We discuss the responses of Pigden, Schurz, Greg Restall and Gillian Russell, who all try to vindicate different versions of No-Ought-From-Is in the face of Prior's counterexamples.
COURSE-BLURB
This is a paper straddling metaethics (the nature and justification of moral judgements), the history of philosophy and the philosophy of logic. It deals with three themes from the work of David Hume (1711-1776) together with "matters arising" from the Humean agenda:
The Slavery of Reason Thesis ("reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions"). What does this mean? Is the Slavery of Reason Thesis (or something like it) correct? And what (if anything) does this suggest about the nature of ethics?
The Motivation (or Influence) Argument:
Morals have an influence on the actions and affections. [Premise]
Reason alone, as we have already proved, can never have any such influence. [Premise]
Morals...cannot be derived from reason
What exactly is this argument supposed to prove? Does it succeed? If not, is there a decent argument in the neighbourhood that proves something similar? Can it be used to support non-cognitivism, the idea that moral judgements are neither true nor false?
Hume's No-Ought-From-Is thesis: "[It] seems altogether inconceivable", says David Hume, "that this new relation or affirmation [ought] can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it". What did Hume mean by this? Can you deduce an ought from an is? If not, why not? And what (if anything) does this suggest about the status of moral judgements? We focus on the idea, common in the 18th century, that logic is conservative - that in a valid inference you cannot get out what you haven't put in. In a famous paper the great New Zealand logician Arthur Prior challenged No-Ought-From-Is, along with the concept of conservativeness. We discuss the responses of Pigden, Schurz, Greg Restall and Gillian Russell, who all try to vindicate different versions of No-Ought-From-Is in the face of Prior's counterexamples.
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My first paper on the Is/Ought issue. The young Arthur Prior endorsed the Autonomy of Ethics, in the form of Hume’s No-Ought-From-Is (NOFI) but the later Prior developed a seemingly devastating counter-argument. I defend Prior's earlier... more
My first paper on the Is/Ought issue. The young Arthur Prior endorsed the Autonomy of Ethics, in the form of Hume’s No-Ought-From-Is (NOFI) but the later Prior developed a seemingly devastating counter-argument. I defend Prior's earlier logical thesis (albeit in a modified form) against his later self. However it is important to distinguish between three versions of the Autonomy of Ethics: Ontological, Semantic and Ontological. Ontological Autonomy is the thesis that moral judgments, to be true, must answer to a realm of sui generis non-natural PROPERTIES. Semantic autonomy insists on a realm of sui generis non-natural PREDICATES which do not mean the same as any natural counterparts. Logical Autonomy maintains that moral conclusions cannot be derived from non-moral premises.-moral premises with the aid of logic alone. Logical Autonomy does not entail Semantic Autonomy and Semantic Autonomy does not entail Ontological Autonomy. But, given some plausible assumptions Ontological Autonomy entails Semantic Autonomy and given the conservativeness of logic – the idea that in a valid argument you don’t get out what you haven’t put in – Semantic Autonomy entails Logical Autonomy. So if Logical Autonomy is false – as Prior appears to prove – then Semantic and Ontological Autonomy would appear to be false too! I develop a version of Logical Autonomy (or NOFI) and vindicate it against Prior’s counterexamples, which are also counterexamples to the conservativeness of logic as traditionally conceived. The key concept here is an idea derived in part from Quine - that of INFERENCE-RELATIVE VACUITY. I prove that you cannot derive conclusions in which the moral terms appear non-vacuously from premises from which they are absent. But this is because you cannot derive conclusions in which ANY (non-logical) terms appear non-vacuously from premises from which they are absent Thus NOFI or Logical Autonomy comes out as an instance of the conservativeness of logic. This means that the reverse entailment that I have suggested turns out to be a mistake. The falsehood of Logical Autonomy would not entail either the falsehood Semantic Autonomy or the falsehood of Ontological Autonomy, since Semantic Autonomy only entails Logical Autonomy with the aid of the conservativeness of logic of which Logical Autonomy is simply an instance. Thus NOFI or Logical Autonomy is vindicated, but it turns out to be a less world-shattering thesis than some have supposed. It provides no support for either non-cognitivism or non-naturalism.
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Survey article on Naturalism dealing with Hume's NOFI (including Prior's objections), Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy and the Barren Tautology Argument. Naturalism, as I understand it, is a form of moral realism which rejects fundamental... more
Survey article on Naturalism dealing with Hume's NOFI (including Prior's objections), Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy and the Barren Tautology Argument. Naturalism, as I understand it, is a form of moral realism which rejects fundamental moral facts or properties. Thus it is opposed to both non-cognitivism, and and the error theory but also to non-naturalism. General conclusion: as of 1991: naturalism as a program has not been refuted though none of the extant versions look particularly promising.
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Brief summary and critique of Hare's universal prescriptivism. I contend that Hare's attempt to derive a utilitarian ethic from his prescriptivist meta-ethic (given a non-fanatical set of desires) is a failure. Rather than deriving... more
Brief summary and critique of Hare's universal prescriptivism. I contend that Hare's attempt to derive a utilitarian ethic from his prescriptivist meta-ethic (given a non-fanatical set of desires) is a failure. Rather than deriving utilitarianism from prescriptivism he assumes utilitarianism in order to save prescriptivism from disaster.
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""This is a response to Stephen Maitzen’s paper. ‘Moral Conclusions from Nonmoral Premises’. Maitzen thinks that No-Ought-From-Is is false. He does not dispute the formal proofs of Schurz and myself, but he thinks they are beside the... more
""This is a response to Stephen Maitzen’s paper. ‘Moral Conclusions from Nonmoral Premises’. Maitzen thinks that No-Ought-From-Is is false. He does not dispute the formal proofs of Schurz and myself, but he thinks they are beside the point. For what the proponents of No-Ought-From-Is need to show is not that you cannot get SUBSTANTIVELY moral conclusions from FORMALLY non-moral premises but that you cannot get SUBSTANTIVELY moral conclusions from SUBSTANTIVELY non-moral premises. And he believes that he can derive substantively moral conclusions from FORMALLY moral but SUBSTANTIVELY nonmoral premises. However his argument relies on what I call ‘taxonomic essentialism’, the thesis that sentences do not change their semantic characters from context to context or from world to world. In particular, they do not change their META-ETHICAL status from context to context or world to world. If a sentence is non-moral at one world it is non-moral at all the rest. This thesis leads to contradictions (with some propositions as both moral and non-moral) and even if (as is perhaps possible) these contradictions can be avoided, it leads to further consequences that are palpably absurd. Thus It may be possible to derive substantively moral conclusions from premises
that are not substantively moral, but if it is, Maitzen has failed to prove the point.""
that are not substantively moral, but if it is, Maitzen has failed to prove the point.""
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I argue that No-Ought-From-Is (in the sense that I believe it) is a relatively trivial affair. Of course, when people try to derive substantive or non-vacuous moral conclusions from non-moral premises, they are making a mistake. But... more
I argue that No-Ought-From-Is (in the sense that I believe it) is a relatively trivial affair. Of course, when people try to derive substantive or non-vacuous moral conclusions from non-moral premises, they are making a mistake. But No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is is meta-ethically inert. It tells us nothing about the nature of the moral concepts. It neither refutes naturalism nor supports non-cognitivism. And this is not very surprising since it is merely an instance of an updated version of the conservativeness of logic (in a logically valid inference you don’t get out what you haven’t put in): so long as the expressions F are non-logical, you cannot get non-vacuous F-conclusions from non-F premises. However, the triviality of No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is is important and its non-profundity profound. No-Ought-From-Is is widely supposed to tell us something significant about the nature of the moral concepts. If, in fact, it tells us nothing, this is a point well worth shouting from the housetops. This brings me to my dispute with Gerhard Schurz who has proved a related version of No-Ought-From-Is, No-Ought-Relevant-Ought-From-Is, a proof which relaxes my assumption that ‘ought’ should not be treated as a logical constant. But if ought is not a logical expression then it does not really matter much that No-Ought-From-Is would be salvageable even if it were. Furthermore, Schurz’s proof depends on special features of the moral concepts and this might afford the basis for an abductive argument to something like non-cognitivism. As an error theorist, and therefore a cognitivist, I object. Finally I take a dim view of deontic logic. Many of its leading principles are false, bordering on the nonsensical, and even the reasonably plausible ones are subject to devastating counter-examples.
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Frank Snare had a puzzle. Noncognitivism implies No-Ought-From-Is but No- Ought-From-Is does not imply non-cognitivism. How then can we derive non-cognitivism from No-Ought-From-Is? Via an abductive argument. If we combine... more
Frank Snare had a puzzle. Noncognitivism implies No-Ought-From-Is but No- Ought-From-Is does not imply non-cognitivism. How then can we derive non-cognitivism from No-Ought-From-Is? Via an abductive argument. If we combine non-cognitivism with the conservativeness of logic (the idea that in a valid argument the conclusion is contained in the premises), this implies No-Ought-From-Is. Hence if No-Ought-From-Is is true, we can arrive at non-cognitivism via an inference to the best explanation. With prescriptivism we can make this argument more precise. I develop an account of imperative consequence that underwrites Hare’s principle that you cannot derive imperatives from indicatives. Thus if moral judgments contain an imperative component, it will be impossible to derive moral conclusions from indicative or non-moral premises. Given this account of imperative consequence, we can explain No-Ought-From-Is without appealing to anything as nebulous as the conservativeness of logic. Hence if No-Ought-From-Is is true, we have an inference to the best explanation for prescriptivism.
Both lines of argument face problems from Prior. Given Prior’s counterexamples,
No-Ought-From-Is as originally conceived is false. The version that survives is No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is. But the best explanation of this does not include non-cognitivism. With prescriptivism it is worse. For the version of No-Ought-From-Is that prescriptivism ‘explains’ – that is, the version of No-Ought-From-Is that prescriptivism implies – would exclude Prior’s counter-examples to Autonomy as
invalid. But they are not invalid. Thus Prior’s counter-examples to No-Ought-From-
Is refute prescriptivism. Thus from 1960 onwards R. M.Hare was a dead philosopher walking. But if non-cognitivism cannot be derived from No-Ought-From-Is, this suggests that it is not what Hume was trying to prove. I argue that what Hume was trying to prove is that moral truths are not demonstrable. To be demonstrable, a proposition must be either self-evident or logically derivable from self-evident propositions. By Treatise 3.1.1.27, Hume had proved to his own satisfaction that no moral propositions are self-evident. That leaves open the possibility that they are logically derivable from self-evident but NON-moral propositions. The point of No-Ought-From-Is was to exclude this possibility. If you cannot logically derive moral conclusions from non-moral premises, you cannot demonstrate the truths of morality by deriving them from self-evident but NON-moral truths.
I also discuss why Hume abandoned No-Ought-From-Is in the EPM. He had no need of it since he thought he had a proof that (with some exceptions) no nontrivial truths are demonstrable. Hence no non-trivial MORAL truths are demonstrable. No-Ought-From-Is drops out as unnecessary.
Both lines of argument face problems from Prior. Given Prior’s counterexamples,
No-Ought-From-Is as originally conceived is false. The version that survives is No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is. But the best explanation of this does not include non-cognitivism. With prescriptivism it is worse. For the version of No-Ought-From-Is that prescriptivism ‘explains’ – that is, the version of No-Ought-From-Is that prescriptivism implies – would exclude Prior’s counter-examples to Autonomy as
invalid. But they are not invalid. Thus Prior’s counter-examples to No-Ought-From-
Is refute prescriptivism. Thus from 1960 onwards R. M.Hare was a dead philosopher walking. But if non-cognitivism cannot be derived from No-Ought-From-Is, this suggests that it is not what Hume was trying to prove. I argue that what Hume was trying to prove is that moral truths are not demonstrable. To be demonstrable, a proposition must be either self-evident or logically derivable from self-evident propositions. By Treatise 3.1.1.27, Hume had proved to his own satisfaction that no moral propositions are self-evident. That leaves open the possibility that they are logically derivable from self-evident but NON-moral propositions. The point of No-Ought-From-Is was to exclude this possibility. If you cannot logically derive moral conclusions from non-moral premises, you cannot demonstrate the truths of morality by deriving them from self-evident but NON-moral truths.
I also discuss why Hume abandoned No-Ought-From-Is in the EPM. He had no need of it since he thought he had a proof that (with some exceptions) no nontrivial truths are demonstrable. Hence no non-trivial MORAL truths are demonstrable. No-Ought-From-Is drops out as unnecessary.
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This is the uncut version of my commentary on Adrian Heathcote’s interesting paper ‘Hume’s Master Argument’. Heathcote contends that No-Ought-From-Is is primarily a logical thesis, a ban on Is/Ought inferences which Hume derives from... more
This is the uncut version of my commentary on Adrian Heathcote’s interesting paper ‘Hume’s Master Argument’. Heathcote contends that No-Ought-From-Is is primarily a logical thesis, a ban on Is/Ought inferences which Hume derives from the logic of Ockham. NOFI is thus a variation on what Heathcote calls ‘Hume’s Master Argument’, which he also deploys to prove that conclusions about the future (and therefore a-temporal generalizations) cannot be derived by reason from premises about the past, and that conclusions about external objects or other minds cannot be derived by reason from premises about impressions. Heathcote raises an important question. Having (apparently) argued that our inductive inferences are not justified by reason, Hume puts them down to Custom, and seems to suggest that we OUGHT to indulge this propensity but NOt the superstitious propensities that lead to religious belief. (Query: Why is it right to indulge one non-rational propensity but not the others?) Finally Heathcote argues that just as there are valid, but not formally valid, arguments taking us from claims about inferential relations to claims about what we ought to believe, so there may be valid, but not formally valid, arguments taking us from factual claims about some situation to claims about what we ought to do.
I reply that Hume does indeed have a Master Argument and that it does rely on logical principles but not on the logic of Ockham which had been largely forgotten by Hume’s day. Instead Hume relies on the idea widely believed in the 18th Century and taught to Hume at Edinburgh by his logic Professor Colin Drummond, that in a logically valid argument the conclusion is contained in the premises. I reconstruct Hume’s Master Argument using this principle. I draw a careful distinction between two theses: 1) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with the aid of logic alone and 2) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with aid of analytic bridge principles. Hume believed the first but not the second. What then is the role of NOFI in the larger argument of the Treatise? To show that the truths of ethics cannot be derived via logic from self-evident truths of some other kind and thus that they are not demonstrable. How can we make sense of Hume’s apparent belief that it is sometimes right to transcend reason and sometimes not? In the case of Custom, we live in a world governed by causal regularities, and, in such a world, induction is in fact a fairly reliable belief-forming mechanism. Thus a suitably qualified spectator (one aware of the kind of world we live in) would tend to approve of indulging it, even if it cannot be justified by reason. However, our superstitious propensities are (and can be known to be) unreliable, since they produce different and inconsistent results in different people. Thus it is it is wrong (something a suitably qualified spectator would disapprove of) to indulge the faculty of Superstition. I also take issue with Heathcote’s penchant for valid, but not formally valid, inferences. I supply the missing premises for Heathcote’s Is/Ought inferences and argue that they are either not true or not necessary
I reply that Hume does indeed have a Master Argument and that it does rely on logical principles but not on the logic of Ockham which had been largely forgotten by Hume’s day. Instead Hume relies on the idea widely believed in the 18th Century and taught to Hume at Edinburgh by his logic Professor Colin Drummond, that in a logically valid argument the conclusion is contained in the premises. I reconstruct Hume’s Master Argument using this principle. I draw a careful distinction between two theses: 1) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with the aid of logic alone and 2) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with aid of analytic bridge principles. Hume believed the first but not the second. What then is the role of NOFI in the larger argument of the Treatise? To show that the truths of ethics cannot be derived via logic from self-evident truths of some other kind and thus that they are not demonstrable. How can we make sense of Hume’s apparent belief that it is sometimes right to transcend reason and sometimes not? In the case of Custom, we live in a world governed by causal regularities, and, in such a world, induction is in fact a fairly reliable belief-forming mechanism. Thus a suitably qualified spectator (one aware of the kind of world we live in) would tend to approve of indulging it, even if it cannot be justified by reason. However, our superstitious propensities are (and can be known to be) unreliable, since they produce different and inconsistent results in different people. Thus it is it is wrong (something a suitably qualified spectator would disapprove of) to indulge the faculty of Superstition. I also take issue with Heathcote’s penchant for valid, but not formally valid, inferences. I supply the missing premises for Heathcote’s Is/Ought inferences and argue that they are either not true or not necessary
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This is a commentary on Adrian Heathcote’s interesting paper ‘Hume’s Master Argument’. Heathcote contends that No-Ought-From-Is is primarily a logical thesis, a ban on Is/Ought inferences which Hume derives from the logic of Ockham.... more
This is a commentary on Adrian Heathcote’s interesting paper ‘Hume’s Master Argument’. Heathcote contends that No-Ought-From-Is is primarily a logical thesis, a ban on Is/Ought inferences which Hume derives from the logic of Ockham. NOFI is thus a variation on what Heathcote calls ‘Hume’s Master Argument’, which he also deploys to prove that conclusions about the future (and therefore a-temporal generalizations) cannot be derived by reason from premises about the past, and that conclusions about external objects or other minds cannot be derived by reason from premises about impressions. Heathcote raises an important question. Having (apparently) argued that our inductive inferences are not justified by reason, Hume puts them down to Custom, and seems to suggest that we OUGHT to indulge this propensity but NOt the superstitious propensities that lead to religious belief. (Query: Why is it right to indulge one non-rational propensity but not the others?) Finally Heathcote argues that just as there are valid, but not formally valid, arguments taking us from claims about inferential relations to claims about what we ought to believe, so there may be valid, but not formally valid, arguments taking us from factual claims about some situation to claims about what we ought to do.
I reply that Hume does indeed have a Master Argument and that it does rely on logical principles but not on the logic of Ockham which had been largely forgotten by Hume’s day. Instead Hume relies on the idea widely believed in the 18th Century and taught to Hume at Edinburgh by his logic Professor Colin Drummond, that in a logically valid argument the conclusion is contained in the premises. I reconstruct Hume’s Master Argument using this principle. I draw a careful distinction between two theses: 1) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with the aid of logic alone and 2) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with aid of analytic bridge principles. Hume believed the first but not the second. What then is the role of NOFI in the larger argument of the Treatise? To show that the truths of ethics cannot be derived via logic from self-evident truths of some other kind and thus that they are not demonstrable. How can we make sense of Hume’s apparent belief that it is sometimes right to transcend reason and sometimes not? In the case of Custom, we live in a world governed by causal regularities, and, in such a world, induction is in fact a fairly reliable belief-forming mechanism. Thus a suitably qualified spectator (one aware of the kind of world we live in) would tend to approve of indulging it, even if it cannot be justified by reason. However, our superstitious propensities are (and can be known to be) unreliable, since they produce different and inconsistent results in different people. Thus it is it is wrong (something a suitably qualified spectator would disapprove of) to indulge the faculty of Superstition. I also take issue with Heathcote’s penchant for valid, but not formally valid, inferences. I supply the missing premises for Heathcote’s Is/Ought inferences and argue that they are either not true or not necessary.
I reply that Hume does indeed have a Master Argument and that it does rely on logical principles but not on the logic of Ockham which had been largely forgotten by Hume’s day. Instead Hume relies on the idea widely believed in the 18th Century and taught to Hume at Edinburgh by his logic Professor Colin Drummond, that in a logically valid argument the conclusion is contained in the premises. I reconstruct Hume’s Master Argument using this principle. I draw a careful distinction between two theses: 1) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with the aid of logic alone and 2) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with aid of analytic bridge principles. Hume believed the first but not the second. What then is the role of NOFI in the larger argument of the Treatise? To show that the truths of ethics cannot be derived via logic from self-evident truths of some other kind and thus that they are not demonstrable. How can we make sense of Hume’s apparent belief that it is sometimes right to transcend reason and sometimes not? In the case of Custom, we live in a world governed by causal regularities, and, in such a world, induction is in fact a fairly reliable belief-forming mechanism. Thus a suitably qualified spectator (one aware of the kind of world we live in) would tend to approve of indulging it, even if it cannot be justified by reason. However, our superstitious propensities are (and can be known to be) unreliable, since they produce different and inconsistent results in different people. Thus it is it is wrong (something a suitably qualified spectator would disapprove of) to indulge the faculty of Superstition. I also take issue with Heathcote’s penchant for valid, but not formally valid, inferences. I supply the missing premises for Heathcote’s Is/Ought inferences and argue that they are either not true or not necessary.
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I maintain as against Annette Baier and David Owen (1) That in his celebrated Is/Ought passage, Hume employs ‘deduction’ in the strict sense, according to which if a conclusion B is justly or evidently deduced from a set of premises... more
I maintain as against Annette Baier and David Owen
(1) That in his celebrated Is/Ought passage, Hume employs ‘deduction’ in the strict sense, according to which if a conclusion B is justly or evidently deduced from a set of premises A, A cannot be true and B false, or B false and the premises
(2) That Hume was following the common custom of his times which sometimes employed ‘deduction’ in a strict sense to denote inferences in which the premises cannot be true and the conclusion false, since, in the words of Dr Watts’ Logick, ‘the premises, according to the reason of things, do really contain the conclusion that is deduced from them’;.
(3) That Mr Hume did indeed mean to suggest that deductions from is to ought were ‘altogether inconceivable’ since if ought represents a new relation or affirmation, it cannot, in the strict sense, be justly deduced from premises which do not really contain it
(4) That in a large and liberal (or perhaps loose and promiscuous) sense Hume does indeed deduce oughts and ought nots from observations concerning human affairs, but that the deductions in question are not general inferences, but explanations, since in another sense of ‘deduce’, common in the Eighteenth Century, to deduce B from A is to trace B back to A or to explain B in terms of A ;
(5) That a small attention to the context of Hume’s remarks and to the logical notions on which they are based would indeed subvert those vulgar systems of philosophy which exaggerate the distinction between fact and value; for just because it is ‘altogether inconceivable’ that the new relation or affirmation ought should be a deduction from others that are entirely different from it, it does not follow that the facts represented by is and is not are at bottom any different from the values represented by ought and ought not.
However, in this version of the paper there is more about the various senses of 'deduction' employed in the 18th Century; more about 18th Century logic, more about deductive arguments in both Hume and his contemporaries (often with contingent and sometimes false premises); more Gibbon, more Reid and more from Hume's History as well as an analysis of EHU 8.2 as a dilemmatic disproof of God's existence. Much more fun , in short for the dedicated Humean or early modernist.
(1) That in his celebrated Is/Ought passage, Hume employs ‘deduction’ in the strict sense, according to which if a conclusion B is justly or evidently deduced from a set of premises A, A cannot be true and B false, or B false and the premises
(2) That Hume was following the common custom of his times which sometimes employed ‘deduction’ in a strict sense to denote inferences in which the premises cannot be true and the conclusion false, since, in the words of Dr Watts’ Logick, ‘the premises, according to the reason of things, do really contain the conclusion that is deduced from them’;.
(3) That Mr Hume did indeed mean to suggest that deductions from is to ought were ‘altogether inconceivable’ since if ought represents a new relation or affirmation, it cannot, in the strict sense, be justly deduced from premises which do not really contain it
(4) That in a large and liberal (or perhaps loose and promiscuous) sense Hume does indeed deduce oughts and ought nots from observations concerning human affairs, but that the deductions in question are not general inferences, but explanations, since in another sense of ‘deduce’, common in the Eighteenth Century, to deduce B from A is to trace B back to A or to explain B in terms of A ;
(5) That a small attention to the context of Hume’s remarks and to the logical notions on which they are based would indeed subvert those vulgar systems of philosophy which exaggerate the distinction between fact and value; for just because it is ‘altogether inconceivable’ that the new relation or affirmation ought should be a deduction from others that are entirely different from it, it does not follow that the facts represented by is and is not are at bottom any different from the values represented by ought and ought not.
However, in this version of the paper there is more about the various senses of 'deduction' employed in the 18th Century; more about 18th Century logic, more about deductive arguments in both Hume and his contemporaries (often with contingent and sometimes false premises); more Gibbon, more Reid and more from Hume's History as well as an analysis of EHU 8.2 as a dilemmatic disproof of God's existence. Much more fun , in short for the dedicated Humean or early modernist.
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"A Letter from a Gentleman in Dunedin To a Lady in the Country ( the late Professor Baier) With Remarks on the Meaning of Deduction in the celebrated Mr Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, 3.3.1, and in the discourse of the Eighteenth... more
"A Letter from a Gentleman in Dunedin To a Lady in the Country ( the late Professor Baier) With Remarks on the Meaning of Deduction in the celebrated Mr Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, 3.3.1, and in the discourse of the Eighteenth Century in general. Wherein the various senses of deduction deriv'd from the Best Authors are carefully distinguish'd., and the Consequences for the Study of Ethicks are deduced.
I argue
1) That in his celebrated Is/Ought passage, Hume employs ‘deduction’ in the strict sense, according to which if a conclusion B is justly or evidently deduced from a set of premises A, A cannot be true and B false, or B false and the premises A true.
2) That Hume was following the common custom of his times which sometimes employed ‘deduction’ in a strict sense to denote inferences in which, in the words of Dr Watts’ Logick, ‘the premises, according to the reason of things, do really contain the conclusion that is deduced from them’; that although Hume sometimes uses ‘demonstrative argument’ as a synonym for ‘deduction’, like most of his contemporaries, he generally reserves the word ‘demonstration’ for deductive inferences in which the premises are both necessary and self-evident.
3) That Mr Hume did indeed mean to suggest that deductions from IS to OUGHT were ‘altogether inconceivable’ since if ought represents a new relation or affirmation, it cannot, in the strict sense, be justly deduced from premises which do not really contain it.
4) That in a large and liberal (or perhaps loose and promiscuous) sense Hume does deduce oughts and ought nots from observations concerning human affairs, but that the deductions in question are generally not inferences, but explanations, since in another sense of ‘deduce’, common in the Eighteenth Century, to deduce B from A is to trace B back to A or to explain B in terms of A;
5) That a small attention to the context of Hume’s remarks and to the logical notions on which they are based would subvert those vulgar systems of philosophy which exaggerate the distinction between fact and value; for just because it is ‘altogether inconceivable’ that the new relation or affirmation OUGHT should be a deduction from others that are entirely different from it, it does not follow that the facts represented by IS and IS NOT are at bottom any different from the values represented by OUGHT and OUGHT NOT.
"
I argue
1) That in his celebrated Is/Ought passage, Hume employs ‘deduction’ in the strict sense, according to which if a conclusion B is justly or evidently deduced from a set of premises A, A cannot be true and B false, or B false and the premises A true.
2) That Hume was following the common custom of his times which sometimes employed ‘deduction’ in a strict sense to denote inferences in which, in the words of Dr Watts’ Logick, ‘the premises, according to the reason of things, do really contain the conclusion that is deduced from them’; that although Hume sometimes uses ‘demonstrative argument’ as a synonym for ‘deduction’, like most of his contemporaries, he generally reserves the word ‘demonstration’ for deductive inferences in which the premises are both necessary and self-evident.
3) That Mr Hume did indeed mean to suggest that deductions from IS to OUGHT were ‘altogether inconceivable’ since if ought represents a new relation or affirmation, it cannot, in the strict sense, be justly deduced from premises which do not really contain it.
4) That in a large and liberal (or perhaps loose and promiscuous) sense Hume does deduce oughts and ought nots from observations concerning human affairs, but that the deductions in question are generally not inferences, but explanations, since in another sense of ‘deduce’, common in the Eighteenth Century, to deduce B from A is to trace B back to A or to explain B in terms of A;
5) That a small attention to the context of Hume’s remarks and to the logical notions on which they are based would subvert those vulgar systems of philosophy which exaggerate the distinction between fact and value; for just because it is ‘altogether inconceivable’ that the new relation or affirmation OUGHT should be a deduction from others that are entirely different from it, it does not follow that the facts represented by IS and IS NOT are at bottom any different from the values represented by OUGHT and OUGHT NOT.
"
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The collection Pigden (2010) HUME ON IS AND OUGHT contains four distinct proofs from various hands that you cannot get substantively moral conclusions from formally non-moral premises. But for the most part the proofs only work for... more
The collection Pigden (2010) HUME ON IS AND OUGHT contains four distinct proofs from various hands that you cannot get substantively moral conclusions from formally non-moral premises. But for the most part the proofs only work for semantically open languages, that is for languages that do not include a truth-predicate, applying to the expressions of that language. The reason is that if you combine a semantically closed language with classical logic, paradox results. But what if we can somehow get around this difficulty? In a series of papers Mark Nelson has argued, in effect, that if we help ourselves to the concept of truth, we can derive substantively moral conclusions from non-moral premises by logic alone. I reply that even if we grant Nelson the truth-predicate, once we restore his inferences to formal validity it turns out that his premises are either formally or substantively moral.
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This contains 1) A methodological meditation in blank verse, defending a broadly collegial vision of the history of philosophy, as applied specifically to Hume. 2) A conspectus of the debate on the role of No-Ought-From-Is within the... more
This contains
1) A methodological meditation in blank verse, defending a broadly collegial vision of the history of philosophy, as applied specifically to Hume.
2) A conspectus of the debate on the role of No-Ought-From-Is within the Treatise itself. What does Hume mean by ‘deduction’ and are the deductions from Is to Ought actually or only seemingly inconceivable? Why after having made so much of NOFI in the Treatise does Hume drop it in the EPM?
3) A summary of the debate surrounding Heathcote’s contention that NOFI is an instance of Hume’s Ockhamist ‘Master Argument’.
4) A potted history of the reception of NOFI from Reid and Bentham to Hudson.
4) A conspectus of the debate on the meta-ethical implications of NOFI, specifically targeting the idea that it implies either non-naturalism, non-cognitivism, expressivism or a fact/value split (I say ‘none of the above’).
5) A survey of four major responses to Prior’s famous counterexamples both to NOFI and to the conservativeness of logic (the thesis that in a valid argument you don’t get out what you haven’t put in). These are the New Zealand Plan (due to me) which devises and proves an amended version of NOFI (No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is), the Austrian Plan (due to Gerhard Schurz) which devises and proves another version of NOFI (No-Ought-Relevant-Ought-From-Is), the Scottish/Australian Plan (due to Gillian Russell and Greg Restall) which defends a revised version of NOFI by constructing and proving an implication barrier thesis, and the relevantist solution, (represented in this collection by Edwin Mares) which defeats Prior’s dilemma by lopping off one of its horns.
6) A summary of the debate about Stephen Maitzen’s interesting claim that though it may be impossible to derive substantively moral conclusions from FORMALLY non-moral premises, it is possible to derive substantively moral conclusions from SUBSTANTIVELY non-moral premises, thus rendering the formal proofs of his opponents redundant. (I say his argument presupposes an implausible form of taxonomic essentialism.)
1) A methodological meditation in blank verse, defending a broadly collegial vision of the history of philosophy, as applied specifically to Hume.
2) A conspectus of the debate on the role of No-Ought-From-Is within the Treatise itself. What does Hume mean by ‘deduction’ and are the deductions from Is to Ought actually or only seemingly inconceivable? Why after having made so much of NOFI in the Treatise does Hume drop it in the EPM?
3) A summary of the debate surrounding Heathcote’s contention that NOFI is an instance of Hume’s Ockhamist ‘Master Argument’.
4) A potted history of the reception of NOFI from Reid and Bentham to Hudson.
4) A conspectus of the debate on the meta-ethical implications of NOFI, specifically targeting the idea that it implies either non-naturalism, non-cognitivism, expressivism or a fact/value split (I say ‘none of the above’).
5) A survey of four major responses to Prior’s famous counterexamples both to NOFI and to the conservativeness of logic (the thesis that in a valid argument you don’t get out what you haven’t put in). These are the New Zealand Plan (due to me) which devises and proves an amended version of NOFI (No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is), the Austrian Plan (due to Gerhard Schurz) which devises and proves another version of NOFI (No-Ought-Relevant-Ought-From-Is), the Scottish/Australian Plan (due to Gillian Russell and Greg Restall) which defends a revised version of NOFI by constructing and proving an implication barrier thesis, and the relevantist solution, (represented in this collection by Edwin Mares) which defeats Prior’s dilemma by lopping off one of its horns.
6) A summary of the debate about Stephen Maitzen’s interesting claim that though it may be impossible to derive substantively moral conclusions from FORMALLY non-moral premises, it is possible to derive substantively moral conclusions from SUBSTANTIVELY non-moral premises, thus rendering the formal proofs of his opponents redundant. (I say his argument presupposes an implausible form of taxonomic essentialism.)
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Hume seems to contend that you can’t get an ought from an is. Searle professed to prove otherwise, deriving a conclusion about obligations from a premise about promises. Since (as Schurz and I have shown) you can’t derive a substantive... more
Hume seems to contend that you can’t get an ought from an is. Searle professed to prove otherwise, deriving a conclusion about obligations from a premise about promises. Since (as Schurz and I have shown) you can’t derive a substantive ought from an is by logic alone, Searle is best construed as claiming that there are analytic bridge principles linking premises about promises to conclusions about obligations. But we can no more derive a moral obligation to pay up from the fact that a promise has been made than we can derive a duty to fight a duel from the fact that a challenge has been issued – just conclusions about what we ought to do according to the rules of the relevant games. Hume suggests bridge principles that would take us from the rules of the games to conclusions about duties, but these principles are false. My argument features an obstreperous earl, an anarchist philosopher and a dueling Prime Minister
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Is/Ought survey article, presupposing a little more logical sophistication that the above paper for Philosophy Now. For the Academia version I have added footnotes referencing the papers in which I argue at length for my more... more
Is/Ought survey article, presupposing a little more logical sophistication that the above paper for Philosophy Now. For the Academia version I have added footnotes referencing the papers in which I argue at length for my more contentious claims.
For papers which expand on the historical Hume and the implications of No-Ought-From-Is for contemporary Meta-Ethics, see below 'Letter from a Gentleman' and 'Snare's Puzzle/Hume's Purpose'
For papers which expand on the historical Hume and the implications of No-Ought-From-Is for contemporary Meta-Ethics, see below 'Letter from a Gentleman' and 'Snare's Puzzle/Hume's Purpose'
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A brief conspectus of my views on Hume, Is and Ought, omitting most of the complications required to answer Arthur Prior (and saying nothing about Gerhard Schurz whose ideas would be a little too complicated to explain to the intended... more
A brief conspectus of my views on Hume, Is and Ought, omitting most of the complications required to answer Arthur Prior (and saying nothing about Gerhard Schurz whose ideas would be a little too complicated to explain to the intended audience). Suitable for first or second year undergraduates or intelligent laypeople with some knowledge of philosophy but not much of formal logic.
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"This paper reconstructs Moore’s Open Question Argument and discusses its rise and fall. There are three basic objections to the OQA: Geach’s point, that Moore presupposes that ‘good’ is a predicative adjective (whereas it is in fact... more
"This paper reconstructs Moore’s Open Question Argument and discusses its rise and fall. There are three basic objections to the OQA: Geach’s point, that Moore presupposes that ‘good’ is a predicative adjective (whereas it is in fact attributive); Lewy’s point, that it leads straight to the Paradox of Analysis; and Durrant’s point that even if ‘good ‘ is not synonymous with any naturalistic predicate, goodness might be synthetically identical with a naturalistic property. As against Geach, I argue that ‘good’ has both predicative and attributive uses and that in moral contexts it is difficult to give a naturalistic account of the attributive ‘good’. To deal with Lewy, I reformulate the OQA. But the bulk of the paper is devoted to Durrant’s objection. I argue that the post-Moorean program of looking for synthetic identities between moral and naturalistic properties is either redundant or impossible. For it can only be carried through if ‘good’ expresses an empirical concept, in which case it is redundant since naturalism is true. But ‘good’ does not express an empirical concept (a point proved by the reformulated OQA). Hence synthetic naturalism is impossible. I discuss direct reference as a possible way out for the synthetic naturalist and conclude that it will not work. The OQA may be a bit battered but it works after a fashion.
Note: the first person to suggest the possibility of a synthetic identity between goodness and some natural property was not Putnam but my late Otago colleague, Bob Durrant
Note: the first person to suggest the possibility of a synthetic identity between goodness and some natural property was not Putnam but my late Otago colleague, Bob Durrant
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I have two aims in this paper. In §§2-4 I contend that Moore has two arguments (not one) for the view that that ‘good’ denotes a non-natural property not to be identified with the naturalistic properties of science and common sense (or,... more
I have two aims in this paper. In §§2-4 I contend that Moore has two arguments (not one) for the view that that ‘good’ denotes a non-natural property not to be identified with the naturalistic properties of science and common sense (or, for that matter, the more exotic properties posited by metaphysicians and theologians). The first argument, the Barren Tautology Argument (or the BTA), is derived, via Sidgwick, from a long tradition of anti-naturalist polemic. But the second argument, the Open Question Argument proper (or the OQA), seems to have been Moore’s own invention and was probably devised to deal with naturalistic theories, such as Russell’s, which are immune to the Barren Tautology Argument. The OQA is valid and not (as Frankena (1939) has alleged) question-begging. Moreover, if its premises were true, it would have disposed of the desire-to-desire theory. But as I explain in §5, from 1970 onwards, two key premises of the OQA were successively called into question, the one because philosophers came to believe in synthetic identities between properties and the other because it led to the Paradox of Analysis. By 1989 a philosopher like Lewis could put forward precisely the kind of theory that Moore professed to have refuted with a clean intellectual conscience. However, in §§6-8 I shall argue that all is not lost for the OQA. I first press an objection to the desire-to-desire theory derived from Kripke’s famous epistemic argument. On reflection this argument looks uncannily like the OQA. But the premise on which it relies is weaker than the one that betrayed Moore by leading to the Paradox of Analysis. This suggests three conclusions: 1) that the desire-to-desire theory is false; 2) that the OQA can be revived, albeit in a modified form; and 3) that the revived OQA poses a serious threat to what might be called semantic naturalism.
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Argument with Ray Monk on the Russell-l list. Ray had suggested that Russell was politically inactive during the thirties and that this was a fact which required an explanation. I argued on the contrary that there was no such fact and... more
Argument with Ray Monk on the Russell-l list. Ray had suggested that Russell was politically inactive during the thirties and that this was a fact which required an explanation. I argued on the contrary that there was no such fact and hence that no need for an explanation. There are some unkind comments about the politics of Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Bertrand Russell was a meta-ethical pioneer, the original inventor of both emotivism and the error theory. Why, having abandoned emotivism for the error theory, did he switch back to emotivism in the 1920s? Perhaps he did not relish the... more
Bertrand Russell was a meta-ethical pioneer, the original inventor of both emotivism and the error theory. Why, having abandoned emotivism for the error theory, did he switch back to emotivism in the 1920s? Perhaps he did not relish the thought that as a moralist he was a professional hypocrite. In addition, Russell's version of the error theory suffers from severe defects. He commits the naturalistic fallacy and runs afoul of his own and Moore's arguments against subjectivism. These defects could be repaired, but only by abandoning Russell's semantics.Russell preferred to revert to emotivism.
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Bertrand Russell was a meta-ethical pioneer, the original inventor of both emotivism and the error theory. Why, having abandoned emotivism for the error theory, did he switch back to emotivism in the 1920s? Perhaps he did not relish the... more
Bertrand Russell was a meta-ethical pioneer, the original inventor of both emotivism and the error theory. Why, having abandoned emotivism for the error theory, did he switch back to emotivism in the 1920s? Perhaps he did not relish the thought that as a moralist he was a professional hypocrite. In addition, Russell's version of the error theory suffers from severe defects. He commits the naturalistic fallacy and runs afoul of his own and Moore's arguments against subjectivism. These defects could be repaired, but only by abandoning Russell's semantics.Russell preferred to revert to emotivism.
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Russell is underrated as a moral philosopher. I do not want to claim for Russell the same status as an ethical theorist that he enjoys as a logician and philosopher of mathematics. But his achievement is not to be sneezed at. To begin... more
Russell is underrated as a moral philosopher. I do not want to claim for Russell the same status as an ethical theorist that he enjoys as a logician and philosopher of mathematics. But his achievement is not to be sneezed at. To begin with, he was a pioneer of both emotivism and the error theory, the two anti-realist theories that have dominated the twentieth century debate. His writings reveal the anguish of a philosopher with a yearning for moral truth who cannot reconcile the objectivity of ethics with his philosophical conscience. Earlier on Russell was an expositor and critic of the ethical doctrines of G.E. Moore and played a major part in the Apostolic debates in which those doctrines were developed ,He was also a pupil of the great Victorian moral philosopher, Henry Sidgwick, whose writings continue to loom large in twentieth century ethics. Russell’s reactions to Sidgwick’s teachings are well worth preserving, dealing as they do with such hot topics as virtue ethics, the Is/Ought question, and the ethical implications (if any) of Darwinism. Even his revolt against Hegelianism had an ethical dimension to it and (as we shall see) his essay, ‘Seems Madam? Nay, It Is’, can be deployed against any attempt to reconcile the claims of morality and self-interest by positing a metaphysical unity of selves. He had some sharp things to say about morality considered as a social institution, and was at one time inclined to wonder whether we would be better off without it, though he later came to favour a less drastic solution. Russell’s conception of the human good (and hence the end of moral action) seems to me far more intelligible and at least as interesting as the rival conceptions of Marx and Aristotle to which so many weighty tomes have been devoted. In short, Russell had something to say about most of the questions that have exercised twentieth century ethical theory. And quite often he was one of the first to say it.
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Herewith my notes to the first section of Russell on Ethics, commenting on Russell’s pre-Principia writings on moral philosophy (5671 words). I discuss Russell’s wrestlings with the Dualism of Practical Reasoning and his attempts to deal... more
Herewith my notes to the first section of Russell on Ethics, commenting on Russell’s pre-Principia writings on moral philosophy (5671 words). I discuss Russell’s wrestlings with the Dualism of Practical Reasoning and his attempts to deal with the problem with the aid of Absolute Idealism; his attempts to develop what we would now call a meta-ethic; his debates with Moore which may well have played a part in the development of Principa Ethica, and his views on the ethical relevance Psychogony or what we would nowadays call sociobiology.
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Herewith my notes to the second section of Russell on Ethics (9780 words) exploring Russell’s contributions to what we nowadays call Meta-Ethics. These deal with: 1) Russell’s admiring but critical response to Moore’s Principia Ethica.... more
Herewith my notes to the second section of Russell on Ethics (9780 words) exploring Russell’s contributions to what we nowadays call Meta-Ethics. These deal with:
1) Russell’s admiring but critical response to Moore’s Principia Ethica. Russell distinguished between the Open Question Argument proper and what I call the Argument from Advocacy or later, following Russell himself, ‘the Barren Tautology Argument’ (See above, ‘Desiring to Desire’). He also challenged Moore’ analytic consequentialism with an argument usually attributed to Ross (though Moore later said print that it was Russell had who convinced him that he was wrong).
2) Russell’s pioneering versions of emotivism and the error theory. In the case of emotivism, his theory is my view markedly superior to those of his better known successors, Stevenson and Ayer. His version of the error theory is undermined by his own semantic commitments, specifically his belief in what he calls the Fundamental Principle.
3) Russell’s neo-Humean wobble from Human Society in Ethics and Politics.
1) Russell’s admiring but critical response to Moore’s Principia Ethica. Russell distinguished between the Open Question Argument proper and what I call the Argument from Advocacy or later, following Russell himself, ‘the Barren Tautology Argument’ (See above, ‘Desiring to Desire’). He also challenged Moore’ analytic consequentialism with an argument usually attributed to Ross (though Moore later said print that it was Russell had who convinced him that he was wrong).
2) Russell’s pioneering versions of emotivism and the error theory. In the case of emotivism, his theory is my view markedly superior to those of his better known successors, Stevenson and Ayer. His version of the error theory is undermined by his own semantic commitments, specifically his belief in what he calls the Fundamental Principle.
3) Russell’s neo-Humean wobble from Human Society in Ethics and Politics.
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Brief notes on Russell’s commitment to a Humean theory of motivation. (For critical comments see ‘If Not –Non-Cognitivism Then What?’ above.)
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This section deals with Russell’s response to the Thrasymachean (and indeed Marxist) thought that what PASSES for justice is OFTEN to the advantage of the stronger. Morality as an institution often serves as an excuse for cruelty and a... more
This section deals with Russell’s response to the Thrasymachean (and indeed Marxist) thought that what PASSES for justice is OFTEN to the advantage of the stronger. Morality as an institution often serves as an excuse for cruelty and a prop to predatory elites. For the humane moral realist that Russell was in the 1910s, these facts are distressing but of no fundamental significance since the justice which supports the stronger or justifies cruelty is obviously not real justice. However if you are a moral anti-realist (an emotivist or an error theorist) this is a bit more of a worry. If morality is often so pernicious in its effects and we can’t appeal to the TRUE morality to save the day, perhaps we would be better off without it? Russell flirted with what I call ‘humanistic amoralism’ but ultimately plumped for the idea that what we need is a NEW morality rather than NO morality. Why? I suspect that his encounter with the professed amoralism of the Bolshevik leaders had something to do with it. Russell also tries to deal with the Paradox of Enlightenment. The worst kind of power is Naked Power where the rulers rely on force (because the ruled not think that they ought to be obeyed) and when the rulers do not feel bound by traditional moral constraints (because they too are moral skeptics). Thus the critique of traditional moralities (of the kind he was committed to) can lead to the horrors of Naked Power. Russell tries to deal with this difficulty by recommending a humane form of utilitarianism in place of the traditional moralities to be slated for an Enlightened critique.
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There was something about Spinoza’s attitude to life that Russell regarded as profoundly right Kenneth Blackwell calls this his ‘ethic of impersonal self-enlargement’. According to this ideal, the best life is lived in awareness of the... more
There was something about Spinoza’s attitude to life that Russell regarded as profoundly right Kenneth Blackwell calls this his ‘ethic of impersonal self-enlargement’. According to this ideal, the best life is lived in awareness of the Other. This includes other selves (since Russell considered a purely selfish life unfulfilling, and a life without history – which involves knowledge of other selves – drab) but also the wholly other – the non-human universe of large impersonal forces, the wind, the sea, the mountains and the stars and even (if they exist) the entities of mathematics. He felt that the self is enlarged by the contemplation of the not-self and that the person whose concerns are limited to their own states of mind has confined themselves within a spiritual prison. By the same token, a philosophy that reduces reality to an emanation of the self reduces the self by denying it access to the Other. Russell of course does not argue for values (the ethic of impersonal self-enlargement) to facts (such as the truth of scientific realism) but his antipathy to pragmatism and idealism are partly due to his belief that they confine the soul in a spiritual prison of merely human concerns.
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A 27000 word survey of Russell’s ethics for the SEP. I argue that Russell was a meta-ethicist of some significance. In the course of his long philosophical career, hecanvassed most of the meta-ethical options that have dominated debate in... more
A 27000 word survey of Russell’s ethics for the SEP. I argue that Russell was a meta-ethicist of some significance. In the course of his long philosophical career, hecanvassed most of the meta-ethical options that have dominated debate in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries — naturalism, non-naturalism, emotivism and the error-theory (anticipating Stevenson and Ayer on the one hand and Mackie on the other), and even, to some extent, subjectivism and relativism. And though none of his theories quite worked out, there is much to be learned from his mistakes. Nor is this all. His ARGUMENTS as well as his THEORIES are often interesting and instructive. The ethical corollary to the argument of ‘Seems Madam? Nay, It Is,’ puts the kybosh on any attempt to resolve Sidgwick's Dualism of Practical Reason by arguing that although we are distinct beings with different interests in the world of Appearance, we are, in Reality, all one (§3). Russell's arguments against objectivism are often quite powerful, and one anticipates Gilbert Harman's influential argument that objective values can be safely dismissed since they lack explanatory power (§9.3-9.4). Russell's damning critique of Moore's analytic consequentialism led Moore to abandon the view and perhaps to give up his ‘unduly anti-reforming’ moral conservatism. Moreover Russell's INDIRECT influence on meta-ethics may have been profound since the Open Question Argument, was probably invented to deal with Russell's ideas. Finally, in the realm of normative ethics, Russell developed a sensible and humane version of consequentialism, which (despite its shaky meta-ethical foundations) is resistant, if not immune, to many of the standard criticisms, especially if combined — as Russell thought it should be combined — with a healthy dose of political skepticism. It provides a powerful tool for social and political criticism, a tool which Russell vigorously employed on a vast range of topics in his writings on practical ethics.
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Short article summarizing Russell's ethical projects and preoccupations. The fact that Russell was more of an activist than a moral philosopher does to mean that he WASN'T a moral philosopher and indeed quite a good one.
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Most analytic philosophers are atheists, but is there a deep connection between analytic philosophy and atheism? The paper argues a) that the founding fathers of analytic philosophy were mostly teenage atheists before they became... more
Most analytic philosophers are atheists, but is there a deep connection between analytic philosophy and atheism? The paper argues a) that the founding fathers of analytic philosophy were mostly teenage atheists before they became philosophers; b) that analytic philosophy was invented partly because it was realized that the God-substitute provided by the previously fashionable philosophy - Absolute Idealism – could not cut the spiritual mustard; c) that analytic philosophy developed an unhealthy obsession with meaninglessness which led to a new kind of atheism that dismissed talk of God as factually meaningless (neither true nor false) rather than meaningful but false; but d) that this new-fangled atheism (unlike the old-fashioned atheism of the founders) is false, since it relies on theories of meaning – verificationism and falsificationism – which are themselves false. The primary focus is on Bertrand Russell, though other analytic philosophers such as Ayer, Neurath and Flew are also extensively discussed.
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The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy is an excellent successor to an excellent book (Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century): It is a fine an example of the necromantic style in the history of philosophy where the object of the... more
The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy is an excellent successor to an excellent book (Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century): It is a fine an example of the necromantic style in the history of philosophy where the object of the exercise is to resurrect the mighty dead in order to get into an argument with them, either because we think them importantly right or instructively wrong. However what was a pardonable a simplification and a reasonable omission in the earlier book has now metamorphosed into a sin of omission and an oversimplification in its successor—the book lacks is an adequate discussion of the Ramified Theory of Types and Russell’s reasons for adopting it. I conclude with a brief meditation on Open Question Arguments and the threats that they pose to some of the analyses proposed by Russell and Moore themselves.
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In 1913 Russell gave up on the Moorean good. But since naturalism was not an option, that left two alternatives: the error theory and non-cognitivism. Despite a brief flirtation with the error theory Russell preferred the non-cognitivist... more
In 1913 Russell gave up on the Moorean good. But since naturalism was not an option, that left two alternatives: the error theory and non-cognitivism. Despite a brief flirtation with the error theory Russell preferred the non-cognitivist option, developing a form of emotivism according to which to say that something is good is to express the desire that everyone should desire it. But why emotivism rather than the error theory? Because emotivism sorts better with Russell’s Fundamental Principle that the “sentences we can understand must be composed of words with whose meaning we are acquainted.” I construct an argument for emotivism featuring the Fundamental Principle that closely parallels Ayer’s verificationist argument in Language, Truth, and Logic. I contend that Russell’s argument, like Ayer’s, is vulnerable to a Moorean critique. This suggests an important moral: revisionist theories of meaning such as verificationism and the Fundamental Principle are prima facie false. Any modus ponens from such a principle to a surprising semantic conclusion (such as emotivism) is trumped by a Moorean modus tollens from the negation of the surprising semantics to the negation of the revisionist principle.
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Russell on Ethics presents a coherent and comprehensive collection of Russell's ethical writings, drawing on a wide range of his publications on ethical concerns, many of which have been difficult to access by students and general... more
Russell on Ethics presents a coherent and comprehensive collection of Russell's ethical writings, drawing on a wide range of his publications on ethical concerns, many of which have been difficult to access by students and general readers. Charles Pigden provides an accessible introduction to the papers, situating them within the field of ethics as a whole and detailed annotations on the papers themselves, analysing their arguments and exploring their relevance to current concerns. Russell on Ethics represents a valuable insight into Russell as an ethicist, which will be useful to both specialist and non-specialist alike
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Michael Smith is famous for a new form of moral realism, Kantian in inspiration but naturalistic in its ontology. (See Smith (1994) The Moral Problem, henceforward MP.) Its chief selling point, apart from the fact that it is a... more
Michael Smith is famous for a new form of moral realism, Kantian in inspiration but naturalistic in its ontology. (See Smith (1994) The Moral Problem, henceforward MP.) Its chief selling point, apart from the fact that it is a naturalistic (and hence a spook-free) theory, is that it solves what Smith calls ‘the Moral Problem’. I shall argue that the problem is not a problem and that even if it were, Smith’s theory would not be the solution.
It is also my opinion that moral judgments – specifically judgments about rightness – do not mean what he thinks they mean and that even if they did, there are no facts of the kind that he needs to make them true. Thus Smith’s theory goes wrong in both the ways it is possible for a naturalistic meta-ethic to go wrong. It fails as conceptual analysis, since it is mistaken about the kinds of facts required to make moral judgments true, and it fails as metaphysics since there are no such facts.
It is also my opinion that moral judgments – specifically judgments about rightness – do not mean what he thinks they mean and that even if they did, there are no facts of the kind that he needs to make them true. Thus Smith’s theory goes wrong in both the ways it is possible for a naturalistic meta-ethic to go wrong. It fails as conceptual analysis, since it is mistaken about the kinds of facts required to make moral judgments true, and it fails as metaphysics since there are no such facts.
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"In ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ Anscombe argues that the moral ‘ought’ should be abandoned as the senseless survivor from a defunct conceptual scheme. I argue 1) That even if the moral ‘ought’ derives its meaning from a Divine Law... more
"In ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ Anscombe argues that the moral ‘ought’ should be abandoned as the senseless survivor from a defunct conceptual scheme. I argue
1) That even if the moral ‘ought’ derives its meaning from a Divine Law conception of ethics it does not follow that it cannot sensibly survive the Death of God.
2) That anyway Anscombe is mistaken since ancestors of the emphatic moral ‘ought’ predate the system of Christian Divine Law from which the moral ‘ought’ supposedly derives its meaning (Cicero in particular subscribed to something like the modern conception of a duty which seems to be a generalization of the duties attendant on particular roles).
3) That if the moral ‘ought’ derived its meaning from embodying Gods’ commands then the two should have been equated in the minds of true believers. This was not the case.
4) That Anscombe is absurdly wrong in supposing that Protestant moralists had abandoned a Divine Law conception of ethics.
5) That the virtue-based ought-free Aristotelian alternative suggested by Anscombe is unworkable since the basic idea is that it pays in terms of human flourishing to be good (which means inter alia being just). Since it is pretty obvious that there are plenty of good people who don’t flourish and flourishing people who are not good, the neo-Aristotelian program has gradually undergone a degenerating problem-shift: either the pay-off is deferred to the hereafter or being good is incorporated into the pay-off.
6) That there is a certain amount of sophistry in selling the neo-Aristotelian virtues. Since the unjust person is simply somebody who is NOT systematically just, you cannot prove that it pays to be just by arguing that it is a mistake to be systematically UNjust. So too for many of the other virtues.
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1) That even if the moral ‘ought’ derives its meaning from a Divine Law conception of ethics it does not follow that it cannot sensibly survive the Death of God.
2) That anyway Anscombe is mistaken since ancestors of the emphatic moral ‘ought’ predate the system of Christian Divine Law from which the moral ‘ought’ supposedly derives its meaning (Cicero in particular subscribed to something like the modern conception of a duty which seems to be a generalization of the duties attendant on particular roles).
3) That if the moral ‘ought’ derived its meaning from embodying Gods’ commands then the two should have been equated in the minds of true believers. This was not the case.
4) That Anscombe is absurdly wrong in supposing that Protestant moralists had abandoned a Divine Law conception of ethics.
5) That the virtue-based ought-free Aristotelian alternative suggested by Anscombe is unworkable since the basic idea is that it pays in terms of human flourishing to be good (which means inter alia being just). Since it is pretty obvious that there are plenty of good people who don’t flourish and flourishing people who are not good, the neo-Aristotelian program has gradually undergone a degenerating problem-shift: either the pay-off is deferred to the hereafter or being good is incorporated into the pay-off.
6) That there is a certain amount of sophistry in selling the neo-Aristotelian virtues. Since the unjust person is simply somebody who is NOT systematically just, you cannot prove that it pays to be just by arguing that it is a mistake to be systematically UNjust. So too for many of the other virtues.
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In his celebrated 'Good and Evil' (l956) Professor Geach argues as against the non-naturalists that ‘good’ is attributive and that the predicative 'good', as used by Moore, is senseless.. 'Good' when properly used is attributive. 'There... more
In his celebrated 'Good and Evil' (l956) Professor Geach argues as against the non-naturalists that ‘good’ is attributive and that the predicative 'good', as used by Moore, is senseless.. 'Good' when properly used is attributive. 'There is no such thing as being just good or bad, [that is, no predicative 'good'] there is only being a good or bad so and so'. On the other hand, Geach insists, as against non-cognitivists, that good-judgments are entirely 'descriptive'. By a consideration of what it is to be an A, we can determine what it is to be a good A, even where the ‘A’ in question is ‘human being’. These battles are fought on behalf of naturalism, indeed, of an up-to-date Aristotelianism. Geach plans to 'pass' from the 'purely descriptive' man to good/bad man, and from human act to good/bad human act.
I argue:
(l) That the predicative 'good' does have a genuine sense and that it is a mistake to suppose that ‘good’ is a purely attributive adjective. This does not entail that the predicative good (as used by Moore) denotes a non-natural property, but his mistake, if any is metaphysical or ontological not conceptual.
(2) That the attributive 'good' cannot be used to generate a naturalistic ethic. It is difficult to extract a set of biologically based requirements out of human nature that are a) reasonably specific; b) rationally binding or at least highly persuasive; and c) morally credible.
On the way I protest against Geach’s tendency to try to win arguments by affecting not to understand things.
My views to some extent anticipate those of Kraut in *Against Absolute Goodness*.
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I argue:
(l) That the predicative 'good' does have a genuine sense and that it is a mistake to suppose that ‘good’ is a purely attributive adjective. This does not entail that the predicative good (as used by Moore) denotes a non-natural property, but his mistake, if any is metaphysical or ontological not conceptual.
(2) That the attributive 'good' cannot be used to generate a naturalistic ethic. It is difficult to extract a set of biologically based requirements out of human nature that are a) reasonably specific; b) rationally binding or at least highly persuasive; and c) morally credible.
On the way I protest against Geach’s tendency to try to win arguments by affecting not to understand things.
My views to some extent anticipate those of Kraut in *Against Absolute Goodness*.
"
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That Dostoevsky's Stavrogin is an amoralist is not an original thought. What is perhaps original is my suggestion that he is not simply an amoralist gnawed by guilt, but an amoralist facing a terrible choice. Either he continues in the... more
That Dostoevsky's Stavrogin is an amoralist is not an original thought. What is perhaps original is my suggestion that he is not simply an amoralist gnawed by guilt, but an amoralist facing a terrible choice. Either he continues in the aching void of amoralism (having overcome every obstacle to his will including his faint and failing conscience) or he recovers purpose and meaning by entering into the moral vision. But to admit that good and evil are real requires facing up to his own evil (since he has committed the crime of crimes) and taking on an intolerable burden of guilt which can only be expiated by a penance he is not prepared to undertake. In the end he prefers the meaninglessness of amoralism to recovering meaning via guilt and expiation. But the meaningless life become unliveable and he kills himself. The big issue is whether the fate of the fictional Stavrogin carries any implications for what it would be like to be a real-life amoralist, somebody totally unmotivated by considerations of right and wrong. Maybe, maybe not.
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l. There is an antinomy in Hare's thought between Ought-Implies-Can and No-Indicatives-from-Imperatives. It cannot be resolved by drawing a distinction between implication and entailment. 2. Luther resolved this antinomy in the l6th... more
l. There is an antinomy in Hare's thought between Ought-Implies-Can and No-Indicatives-from-Imperatives. It cannot be resolved by drawing a distinction between implication and entailment. 2. Luther resolved this antinomy in the l6th century, but to understand his solution, we need to understand his problem. He thought the necessity of Divine foreknowledge removed contingency from human acts, thus making it impossible for sinners to do otherwise than sin. 3. Erasmus objected (on behalf of Free Will) that this violates Ought-Implies-Can which he supported with Hare-style ordinary language arguments. 4. Luther a) pointed out the antinomy and b) resolved it by undermining the prescriptivist arguments for Ought-Implies-Can. 5. We can reinforce Luther's argument with an example due to David Lewis. 6. Whatever its merits as a moral principle, Ought-Implies-Can is not a logical truth and should not be included in deontic logics. Most deontic logics, and maybe the discipline itself, should therefore be abandoned. 7. Could it be that Ought-Conversationally-Implies-Can? Yes - in some contexts. But a) even if these contexts are central to the evolution of Ought, the implication is not built into the semantics of the word; b) nor is the parallel implication built into the semantics of orders; and c) in some cases Ought conversationally implies Can, only because Ought-Implies-Can is a background moral belief. d) Points a) and b) suggest a criticism of prescriptivism - that Oughts do not entail imperatives but that the relation is one of conversational implicature. 8. If Ought-Implies-Can is treated as a moral principle, Erasmus' argument for Free Will can be revived (given his Christian assumptions). But it does not 'prove' Pelagianism as Luther supposed. A semi-Pelagian alternative is available
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Milgram’s experiments, subjects were induced to inflict what they believed to be electric shocks in obedience to a man in a white coat. This suggests that many of us can be persuaded to torture, and perhaps kill, another person simply on... more
Milgram’s experiments, subjects were induced to inflict what they believed to be electric shocks in obedience to a man in a white coat. This suggests that many of us can be persuaded to torture, and perhaps kill, another person simply on the say-so of an authority figure. But the experiments have been attacked on methodological, moral and methodologico-moral grounds. Patten argues that the subjects probably were not taken in by the charade; Bok argues that lies should not be used in research; and Patten insists that any excuse for Milgram’s conduct can be adapted on behalf of his subjects. (Either he was wrong to conduct the experiments or they do not establish the phenomenon of immoral obedience). We argue a) that the subjects were indeed taken in b) that there are good historical reasons for regarding the experiments as ecologically valid, c) that lies (though usually wrong) were in this case legitimate, d) that there were excuses available to Milgram which were not available to his subjects and e) that even if he was wrong to conduct the experiments this does not mean that he failed to establish immoral obedience. So far from ‘disrespecting’ his subjects, Milgram enhanced their autonomy as rational agents. We concede however that it might (now) be right to prohibit what it was (then) right to do.
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"Hume is widely regarded as the grandfather of emotivism and indeed of non-cognitivism in general. For the chief argument for emotivism - the Argument from Motivation - is derived from him. In my opinion Hume was not an emotivist or... more
"Hume is widely regarded as the grandfather of emotivism and indeed of non-cognitivism in general. For the chief argument for emotivism - the Argument from Motivation - is derived from him. In my opinion Hume was not an emotivist or proto-emotivist but a moral realist in the modern ‘response-dependent’ style. But my interest in this paper is not the historical Hume but the Hume of legend since the legendary Hume is one of the most influential philosophers of the present age. According to Michael Smith ‘the Moral Problem’ – the central issue in meta-ethics - is that the premises of Hume’s argument appear to be true though the non-cognitivist conclusion appears to be false. Since the argument seems to be valid, something has got to give. Smith struggles to solve the problem by holding on to something like the premises of the argument whilst trying to fend off the conclusion. In my view this is a wasted effort. Hume was not arguing for non-cognitivsm in the first place, and the arguments for non-cognitivism that can be extracted from his writings are no good. Either the premises are false or the inferences are invalid. And this is despite the fact that Hume was substantially right about reason and the passions. Thus ‘the Moral Problem’ is not a problem, and the legendary Hume does not deserve his influence.
An important theme in this paper is the concept of a DTAD or a dispositions to acquire desires. These play an important role in motivation but unlike desires (with which they are sometimes confused ) they are NOT propositional attitudes. "
An important theme in this paper is the concept of a DTAD or a dispositions to acquire desires. These play an important role in motivation but unlike desires (with which they are sometimes confused ) they are NOT propositional attitudes. "
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This includes a methodological meditation (in blank verse) on the history of philosophy as a contribution to philosophy (rather than as a contribution to history) plus a conspectus of the issues surrounding Hume, the Motivation Argument... more
This includes a methodological meditation (in blank verse) on the history of philosophy as a contribution to philosophy (rather than as a contribution to history) plus a conspectus of the issues surrounding Hume, the Motivation Argument and the Slavery of Reason Thesis. However I am posting it here mainly because it contains a novel restatement of the Argument from Queerness. Big Thesis: the Slavery of Reason Thesis (via the Motivation Argument) provides no support for non-cognitivism or emotivism, but there is a plausible version of the Slavery of Reason Thesis that provides some support for the Error Theory. As in other papers I stress the importance of DTADs, dispositions to acquire desires as well as desires conceived as propositional attitudes.
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Was Nietzsche a nihilist? Yes, because, like J. L. Mackie, he was an error-theorist about morality, including the elitist morality to which he himself subscribed. But he was variously a diagnostician, an opponent and a survivor of certain... more
Was Nietzsche a nihilist? Yes, because, like J. L. Mackie, he was an error-theorist about morality, including the elitist morality to which he himself subscribed. But he was variously a diagnostician, an opponent and a survivor of certain other kinds of nihilism. Schacht argues that Nietzsche cannot have been an error theorist, since meta-ethical nihilism is inconsistent with the moral commitment that Nietzsche displayed. Schacht’s exegetical argument parallels the substantive argument (advocated in recent years by Wright and Blackburn) that Mackie’s error theory can’t be true because if it were, we would have to give up morality or give up moralizing. I answer this argument with a little bit of help from Nietzsche. I then pose a problem, the Doppelganger Problem, for the meta-ethical nihilism that I attribute to Mackie and Nietzsche. (If A is a moral proposition then not-A is a moral proposition: hence not all moral propositions can be false.) I solve the problem by reformulating the error theory and also deal with a variant of the problem, the Reinforced Doppelganger, glancing at a famous paper of Ronald Dworkin’s. Thus, whatever its demerits, the error theory, is not self refuting, nor does it require us to give up morality.
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This paper deals with what I take to be one woman’s literary response to a philosophical problem. The woman is Jane Austen, the problem is the rationality of Hume’s ‘sensible knave’, and Austen’s response is to deepen the problem. Despite... more
This paper deals with what I take to be one woman’s literary response to a philosophical problem. The woman is Jane Austen, the problem is the rationality of Hume’s ‘sensible knave’, and Austen’s response is to deepen the problem. Despite his enthusiasm for virtue, Hume reluctantly concedes in the EPM that injustice can be a rational strategy for ‘sensible knaves’, intelligent but selfish agents who feel no aversion towards thoughts of villainy or baseness. Austen agrees, but adds that ABSENT CONSIDERATIONS OF A FUTURE STATE, other vices besides injustice can be rationally indulged with tolerable prospects of worldly happiness. Austen’s creation Mr Elliot in Persuasion is just such an agent – sensible and knavish but not technically ‘unjust’. Despite and partly because of his vices – ingratitude, avarice and duplicity – he manages to be both successful and reasonably happy. There are plenty of other reasonably happy knaves in Jane Austen, some of whom are not particularly sensible. This is not to say that either Austen or Hume is in favor of knavery It is just that they both think that only those with the right sensibility can be argued out of it.
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This paper criticizes an influential argument from Thomas Nagel’s THE POSSIBILTIY OF ALTRUISM, an argument that plays a foundational role in the philosophies of (at least) Philippa Foot, John McDowell and Jonathan Dancy. Nagel purports... more
This paper criticizes an influential argument from Thomas Nagel’s THE POSSIBILTIY OF ALTRUISM, an argument that plays a foundational role in the philosophies of (at least) Philippa Foot, John McDowell and Jonathan Dancy. Nagel purports to prove that a person can be can be motivated to perform X by the belief that X is likely to bring about Y, without a causally active or biffy desire for Y. If Cullity and Gaut are to be believed (ETHICS AND PRACTICAL REASONING) this is widely regarded within the practical reasoning industry as an established fact. My thesis is a simple one. Nagel’s argument is an abject failure and the philosophies that are founded on it are built upon sand. There is a little bit of rather amateurish X-Phi at the end, but I don’t want readers to get too excited about this as it is essentially icing on the cake. This paper is not primarily an exercise in Experimental Philosophy but in Baby Logic, and it’s central thesis is a logical one, namely that Nagel fails to prove his point.
For more on these issues see my 'Introduction' to Pigden ed. (2009) Hume on Motivation and Virtue, below.
For more on these issues see my 'Introduction' to Pigden ed. (2009) Hume on Motivation and Virtue, below.
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In the Republic Thrasymachus argues that ‘justice is the advantage of the stronger’, that is, that the laws and conventions governing a society support the interests of the rulers or the ruling class. Hence acting justly – obeying those... more
In the Republic Thrasymachus argues that ‘justice is the advantage of the stronger’, that is, that the laws and conventions governing a society support the interests of the rulers or the ruling class. Hence acting justly – obeying those laws and customs of one's society in one's dealings with other people – is not necessarily, not usually or maybe not even ever in an agent’s best interests. This is a problem for Plato who wants to prove that it necessarily pays to be just (though as the Republic unfolds, he turns out to have a rather rarefied conception of self-interest as well as a rather rarefied conception of justice). So his spokesman, Socrates, leads Thrasymachus into a trap. Suppose (as surely happens from time to time) the rulers make a mistake and enact laws (or foster customs) that are not in their best interests. In that case justice won’t be to ‘the advantage of the stronger’ and their subjects’ acting justly won’t be in the rulers’ best interests. Clitophon offers Thrasymachus a lifeline. Perhaps justice is what the stronger think is in their interests. But Thrasymachus won’t have a bar of it. If a ruler makes a law or issues an order that is not in his interests he thereby ceases to be a real ruler. So justice is always to the advantage of the stronger, since if it isn’t, the stronger cease to be strong. This is both decidedly silly and gets him into a lot of dialectical trouble. I suggest on Thrasymachus’ behalf a Darwinian response which entails that justice is usually or at least often to ‘the advantage of the stronger’. This in turn in entails that it does not necessarily pay to be just, which negates Plato’s desired conclusion. Indeed, for many people it pays better to be relativisitically unjust, that is not to have a settled commitment obeying the norms of one’s society. My reconstructed Thrasymachus will be less of a proto-fascist and more of a radical democrat than Plato’s Thrasymachus appears to have been.
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Article on Lakatos coauthored with Alan Musgrave and currently available on the SEP. I am responsible for the introduction and for §§ 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 3.2, 3.3, 3.6, 3.7 and 4, and Alan is the chief author of §§ 3.1 and 3.4. Sections... more
Article on Lakatos coauthored with Alan Musgrave and currently available on the SEP. I am responsible for the introduction and for §§ 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 3.2, 3.3, 3.6, 3.7 and 4, and Alan is the chief author of §§ 3.1 and 3.4. Sections 1.3, 3.3 and 3.5 represent joint work. As an intended Encyclopedia entry, a large part of the paper is devoted to a critical exposition of Lakatos’s big ideas in the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science, but we also address his Hungarian career and the relationship between the Stalinist revolutionary that he once was and the methodologist of science that he subsequently became. How much of the Hungarian young Hegelian persisted in the post-Popperian philosopher? How much was the philosophy (and indeed the politics) of the later Lakatos a reaction against his earlier self? Did Lakatos remain a closet disciple of Lukács, despite denouncing him in 1947 for his ‘Weimarism’ (that is, his rather relaxed agenda for implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat)? We conclude with Feyerabend’s criticisms of Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programmes, to which, as their correspondence makes clear, Lakatos himself had no answer. Please note: Alan does not agree with me about Lakatos’s paraconsistent proclivities.
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Grice and Strawson's 'In Defense of a Dogma is admired even by revisionist Quineans such as Putnam (1962) who should know better. The analytic/synthetic distinction they defend is distinct from that which Putnam successfully... more
Grice and Strawson's 'In Defense of a Dogma is admired even by revisionist Quineans such as Putnam (1962) who should know better. The analytic/synthetic distinction they defend is distinct from that which Putnam successfully rehabilitates. Theirs is the post-positivist distinction bounding a grossly enlarged analytic. It is not, as they claim, the sanctified product of a long philosophic tradition, but the cast-off of a defunct philosophy - logical positivism. The fact that the distinction can be communally drawn does not show that it is based on a real difference. Subcategories that can be grouped together by enumeration will do the trick. Quine's polemical tactic (against which Grice and Strawson protest) of questioning the intelligibility of the distinction is indeed objectionable, but his argument can be revived once it is realized that 'analytic' et al. are theoretic terms, and there is no extant theory to make sense of them. Grice and Strawson's paradigm of logical impossibility is, in fact, possible. Their attempt to define synonymy in Quinean terms is a failure, nor can they retain analyticity along with the Quinean thesis of universal revisability. The dogma, in short, is indefensible.
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According to the truthmaker theory that we favour, all contingent truths are made true by existing facts or states of affairs. But if that is so, then it appears that we must accept the existence of the negative facts that are required to... more
According to the truthmaker theory that we favour, all contingent truths are made true by existing facts or states of affairs. But if that is so, then it appears that we must accept the existence of the negative facts that are required to make negative truths (such as "There is no hippopotamus in the room.") true. We deny the existence of negative facts, show how negative truths are made true by positive facts, point out where the (reluctant) advocates of negative facts (Russell, Armstrong, et. al.) went wrong, and demonstrate the superiority of our solution to the alternatives.
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Can an explanation of a set of beliefs cast doubt on the things believed? In particular, can an evolutionary explanation of religious beliefs call the contents of those beliefs into question? Yes - under certain circumstances. I... more
Can an explanation of a set of beliefs cast doubt on the things believed? In particular, can an evolutionary explanation of religious beliefs call the contents of those beliefs into question? Yes - under certain circumstances. I distinguish between natural histories of beliefs and genealogies. A natural history of a set of beliefs is an explanation that puts them down to naturalistic causes. (I try to give an account of natural explanations which favors a certain kind of ‘methodological atheism’ without begging any crucial questions against theists.) A genealogy is an explanation which somehow subverts the claims believed, usually by putting down the beliefs to unreliable causal mechanisms. Some genealogies are natural histories, such as Aquinas’s explanation of the prevalence of Islam and Gibbon’s explanation of the prevalence of Christianity. But not all genealogies are natural histories and not all natural histories are genealogies: witness the Primitive Christians’ explanation of the prevalence of Paganism which relies crucially on supernatural agencies and Hume’s explanation of our moral beliefs which defines moral truth in terms of the idealized outputs of our natural belief-forming mechanisms. However both believers and non-believers postulate a natural propensity of to devotion on the part of human beings a ‘sensus divinitatis’ which often results in false positives and is therefore unreliable. Thus the evolutionary explanation of this propensity does not add much to the skeptical case against religion. I conclude by arguing, as against Plantinga that since on his own showing our sensus divinitatis often malfunctions under optimum conditions, its unreliability constitutes a defeater for the claim that Christian beliefs are properly basic.
I am honored to be cited by Greg Dawes and Jonathan Jong in their excellent joint paper 'Defeating the Christian's Claims to Warrant'.
I am honored to be cited by Greg Dawes and Jonathan Jong in their excellent joint paper 'Defeating the Christian's Claims to Warrant'.
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The Quine/Putnam indispensability argument is regarded by many as the chief argument for the existence of platonic objects. We argue that this argument cannot establish what its proponents intend. The form of our argument is simple.... more
The Quine/Putnam indispensability argument is regarded by many as the chief argument for the existence of platonic objects. We argue that this argument cannot establish what its proponents intend. The form of our argument is simple. Suppose indispensability to science is the only good reason for believing in the existence of platonic objects. Either the dispensability of mathematical objects to science can be demonstrated and, hence, there is no good reason for believing in the existence of platonic objects, or their dispensability cannot be demonstrated and, hence, there is no good reason for believing in the existence of mathematical objects which are genuinely platonic. Therefore, indispensability, whether true or false, does not support platonism.
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The major selling point of David Lewis’s realism about possible worlds is that the ideological benefits (in Quine’s sense) exceed the ontological costs. By positing concrete possibilia Lewis is able to explain away necessity and... more
The major selling point of David Lewis’s realism about possible worlds is that the ideological benefits (in Quine’s sense) exceed the ontological costs. By positing concrete possibilia Lewis is able to explain away necessity and possibility, reducing them to the extensional goings on in in a plurality of other (but equally real) universes. We should keep a-hold of possible worlds for fear of meeting something worse, namely primitive modalities. We develop the concept of a spread world, a world - or rather a world description – such that once it is admitted as real, it spreads through logical space excluding alternatives. Some spread worlds such as the Shelleyworld or the Plantingaworld are MODERATELY exclusive, excluding all worlds that lack a certain feature (godlessness in the case of the Shelleyworld or God in the case of the Plantingaworld). Others such as the Lutherworld are HIGHLY exclusive, ruling out all worlds but one. But all are a threat to s plenitude and some are a threat to consistency. Our basic claim is that it is difficult for Lewis to exclude spread worlds without the aid of a modal primitive, thus forfeiting the chief advantage of his theory. There is, perhaps, a way out. He can deny that there is a world corresponding to every coherent description (thus avoiding inconsistency) without specifying WHICH coherent descriptions don’t describe worlds (thus avoiding a modal primitive). But this makes him a bit like the sleazy set theorist who avoids Russell’s paradox by denying the unrestricted comprehension axiom whilst refusing to say which formulae define sets and which don’t. Nonetheless, we cannot claim the knockout polemical victory that we had originally hoped for, thus confirming Lewis’s maxim that knock-out polemical victories are rare to non-existent in philosophy.
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This paper is a critique of coercive theories of meaning, that is, theories (or criteria) of meaning designed to do down ones opponents by representing their views as meaningless or unintelligible. Many philosophers from Hobbes through... more
This paper is a critique of coercive theories of meaning, that is, theories (or criteria) of meaning designed to do down ones opponents by representing their views as meaningless or unintelligible. Many philosophers from Hobbes through Berkeley and Hume to the pragmatists, the logical positivists and (above all) Wittgenstein have devised such theories and criteria in order to discredit their opponents. I argue 1) that such theories and criteria are morally obnoxious, a) because they smack of the totalitarian linguistic tactics of the Party in Orwell’s 1984 and b) because they dehumanize the opposition by portraying them as mere spouters of gibberish; 2) that they are profoundly illiberal since if true, they would undermine Mill’s arguments for free speech; 3) that such theories are prone to self-contradiction, pragmatic and otherwise; 4) that they often turn against their creators including what they were meant to exclude and excluding what they were meant to include; 5) that such theories are susceptible to a modus tollens pioneered by Richard Price in his Review Concerning the Principle Questions of Morals(1758); and 6) that such theories are prima facie false since they fail to ‘predict’ the data that is it their business to explain (or, in the case of criteria, fail to capture the concept that they allegedly represent). The butcher’s bill is quite considerable: some of Hobbes, a fair bit of Locke, half of Berkeley, large chunks of Hume, Russell's Theory of Types, verificationism in its positivist and Dummettian variants, much of pragmatism and most of Wittgenstein - all these have to be sacrificed if we are to save our souls as philosophic liberals.
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1. Quote/Unquote Philosophers like other people often have a weakness for quiz-shows. And like the crew in the Hunting of the Snark, they are all of them fond of quotations 1 . So I begin with a quotation and a question. The quotation... more
1. Quote/Unquote Philosophers like other people often have a weakness for quiz-shows. And like the crew in the Hunting of the Snark, they are all of them fond of quotations 1 . So I begin with a quotation and a question. The quotation comes from a famous o indeed a ‘superstar’ o text. But which text? Which famous writer indicted these lines? The purpose of the universal jargon was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of logical empiricism, but to make other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when the universal jargon had been adopted for all and the metaphysically infected terminology forgotten, a metaphysical thought o that is a thought diverging from what logical empiricism regarded as genuinely thinkable o should be literally unthinkable, at least in so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a log...
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Research Interests: Philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy Of Language, Epistemology, Pragmatism, and 15 moreEmpiricism, Hobbes, Jargon, George Orwell, Richard Price, David Hume, Logical Positivism, John Stuart Mill, Michael Dummett, Theory of Meaning, Meaninglessness, Otto Neurath, Theory of Types, Ian Dearden, and Nonsensicalism
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The Quine/Putnam indispensability argument is regarded by many as the chief argument for the existence of platonic objects. We argue that this argument cannot establish what its proponents intend. The form of our argument is simple.... more
The Quine/Putnam indispensability argument is regarded by many as the chief argument for the existence of platonic objects. We argue that this argument cannot establish what its proponents intend. The form of our argument is simple. Suppose indispensability to science is the only good reason for believing in the existence of platonic objects. Either the dispensability of mathematical objects to science can be demonstrated and, hence, there is no good reason for believing in the existence of platonic objects, or their dispensability cannot be demonstrated and, hence, there is no good reason for believing in the existence of mathematical objects which are genuinely platonic. Therefore, indispensability, whether true or false, does not support platonism. Mathematical platonists claim that at least some of the objects
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Can an explanation of a set of beliefs cast doubt on the things believed? In particular, can an evolutionary explanation of religious beliefs call the contents of those beliefs into question? Yes - under certain circumstances. I... more
Can an explanation of a set of beliefs cast doubt on the things believed? In particular, can an evolutionary explanation of religious beliefs call the contents of those beliefs into question? Yes - under certain circumstances. I distinguish between natural histories of beliefs and genealogies. A natural history of a set of beliefs is an explanation that puts them down to naturalistic causes. (I try to give an account of natural explanations which favors a certain kind of ‘methodological atheism’ without begging any crucial questions against theists.) A genealogy is an explanation which somehow subverts the claims believed, usually by putting down the beliefs to unreliable causal mechanisms. Some genealogies are natural histories, such as Aquinas’s explanation of the prevalence of Islam and Gibbon’s explanation of the prevalence of Christianity. But not all genealogies are natural histories and not all natural histories are genealogies: witness the Primitive Christians’ explanation o...
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Grice and Strawson's 'In Defense of a Dogma' is admired even by revisionist Quineans such as Putnam (1962) who should know better. The analytic/synthetic distinction they defend is distinct from that which Putnam successfully... more
Grice and Strawson's 'In Defense of a Dogma' is admired even by revisionist Quineans such as Putnam (1962) who should know better. The analytic/synthetic distinction they defend is distinct from that which Putnam successfully rehabilitates. Theirs is the post-positivist distinction bounding a grossly enlarged analytic. It is not, as they claim, the sanctified product of a long philosophic tradition, but the cast-off of a defunct philosophy - logical positivism. The fact that the distinction can be communally drawn does not show that it is based on a real difference. Sub- categories that can be grouped together by enumeration will do the trick. Quine's polemical tactic (against which Grice and Strawson protest) of questioning the intelligibility of the distinction is indeed objectionable, but his argument can be revived once it is realized that 'analytic' et al. are theoretic terms, and there is no extant theory to make sense of them. Grice and Strawson's paradigm of logical impossibility is, in fact, possible. Their attempt to define synonymy in Quinean terms is a failure, nor can they retain analyticity along with the Quinean thesis of universal revisability. The dogma, in short, is indefensible.
Research Interests: Philosophy, Epistemology, Logical Positivism, Positivism, Grice, and 3 moreInquiry, Quine, and Impossibility
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Is the history of philosophy primarily a contribution to PHILOSOPHY or primarily a contribution to HISTORY? This paper is primarily contribution to history (specifically the history of New Zealand) but although the history of philosophy... more
Is the history of philosophy primarily a contribution to PHILOSOPHY or primarily a contribution to HISTORY? This paper is primarily contribution to history (specifically the history of New Zealand) but although the history of philosophy has been big in New Zealand, most NZ philosophers with a historical bent are primarily interested in the history of philosophy as a contribution to philosophy. My essay focuses on two questions: 1) How did New Zealand philosophy get to be so good? And why, given that is so good (a point I am at pains to establish), has it apparently had so slight a cultural impact within New Zealand itself? Did we get the wrong Anderson – the uninspiring William, who was Professor at Auckland, rather than his talented younger brother John, who had such a huge cultural influence as Professor of Philosophy at Sydney? Perhaps but that can only be part of the story since we managed to attract even bigger stars, (notably Karl Popper) as well as breeding bigger talents of our own (Prior, Baier, Bennett, Mulgan, Hursthouse, Waldron and many more). Do we export our best talent? Sometimes – but the stars that stay and the stars who arrive don’t seem to have much impact in New Zealand itself however brightly they shine in the international philosophical firmament. Is it too esoteric? Perhaps, but esoteric philosophy can still have a cultural impact, witness, Moore, Popper and the younger Anderson. Is it, like many of New Zealand’s cultural products (from romance novels to movies), primarily intended for an international audience? That’s a large part of the answer but only a part. Another part of the answer is that philosophy HAS had a cultural impact but that impact is not readily apparent. For NZ philosophers have been less keen to push their ideological barrows and more keen to produce critical thinkers, and critical thinkers don’t all think alike. The logician George Hughes was apparently a life-changing teacher not because he had a nostrum but because he taught people to think. As one of his students said ‘the only ism you believe in is the syllogism’.
On the whole the history of New Zealand Philosphy is a ‘From Log Cabin to White House’ tale, ‘From colonial obscurity through struggle and adversity to philosophical excellence’. But there are shadows in the picture. Some departments have nearly come to grief through bureaucratic and political misadventures, and it is hard to resist the suspicion that there is often an element of hostility to philosophers on the part of both university bureaucrats and fellow-academics. I speculate as to why this is the case (we are too argumentative and don’t confine our argumentative tendencies to the cloister) but conclude with some upbeat reflections. on the future of New Zealand Philosophy.
On the whole the history of New Zealand Philosphy is a ‘From Log Cabin to White House’ tale, ‘From colonial obscurity through struggle and adversity to philosophical excellence’. But there are shadows in the picture. Some departments have nearly come to grief through bureaucratic and political misadventures, and it is hard to resist the suspicion that there is often an element of hostility to philosophers on the part of both university bureaucrats and fellow-academics. I speculate as to why this is the case (we are too argumentative and don’t confine our argumentative tendencies to the cloister) but conclude with some upbeat reflections. on the future of New Zealand Philosophy.
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This document contains my contributions to an extended debate on the Russell-l list with Oliver Kamm (now a well-known columnist for the Times). Our topic was the American political scene. I argued for three theses: 1) that America is a... more
This document contains my contributions to an extended debate on the Russell-l list with Oliver Kamm (now a well-known columnist for the Times). Our topic was the American political scene. I argued for three theses: 1) that America is a corrupt democracy, that is, a democracy that conspicuously falls short of the democratic ideal, 2) that it is a de facto plutocracy, and 3) that there are strong fascistic tendencies within America's political culture. The debate dates back to 1997, but subsequent events have not disconfirmed my views. The exchange is perhaps of interest because under Kamm's questioning I was forced to clarify the the idea of a de facto plutocracy, converting the claim that the USA is a de facto plutocracy into a falsifiable (but unfalsified) thesis. The quotations from Oliver Kamm's emails are included with his kind permission.
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This paper is, as Althusser would have pompously put it, an intervention at a political conjuncture, though in this case I was endeavoring to intervene at a conjuncture in the politics of New Zealand rather than France. It is an attempt... more
This paper is, as Althusser would have pompously put it, an intervention at a political conjuncture, though in this case I was endeavoring to intervene at a conjuncture in the politics of New Zealand rather than France. It is an attempt to shift the tactics and strategy of the Alliance, the political party of which I was at that time a member. The left-wing Alliance (which had subsumed the Left-Social-Democratic New Labour Party) was in Coalition with the centrist (old) Labour Party, led by Helen Clark. The problem was that we were rapidly losing support and traction owing to the supine parliamentary tactics pursued by the party’s leader Jim Anderton, then serving as Deputy Prime Minister (a policy that I characterize as Doing Good By Stealth). In this paper I advocate a more vigorous set of parliamentary tactics in the service of a two-track strategy: by pushing a set of popular left-wing policies publicly we would either force Labour to the left to avoid losing votes or steal Labour votes thereby gradually replacing Labour as the natural choice for left-leaning voters. Labour was not (as its members liked to conceive of themselves) a set of born-again social democrats but a post-New Right party and as such unlikely to reverse the New Right Revolution absent pressure from the Left.
Sadly my intervention may have backfired. I was not, as I had thought myself, a voice crying in the wilderness but the unwitting spokesman for what was probably the majority view amongst Party activists. Rather than give in to our demands the leader precipitated a split that effectively destroyed the Party. In so far as anyone represents a genuinely left-wing agenda in today’s New Zealand Parliament, it is no longer the Alliance but the Greens. I still think that the strategy I suggested was the right one. It’s a pity that it was not pursued.
I hope that the paper is of interest to students of New Zealand history, students of left-wing (or at least anti-New Right ) politics. and to people with an interest in the strategy and tactics of parliamentary coalitions.
Sadly my intervention may have backfired. I was not, as I had thought myself, a voice crying in the wilderness but the unwitting spokesman for what was probably the majority view amongst Party activists. Rather than give in to our demands the leader precipitated a split that effectively destroyed the Party. In so far as anyone represents a genuinely left-wing agenda in today’s New Zealand Parliament, it is no longer the Alliance but the Greens. I still think that the strategy I suggested was the right one. It’s a pity that it was not pursued.
I hope that the paper is of interest to students of New Zealand history, students of left-wing (or at least anti-New Right ) politics. and to people with an interest in the strategy and tactics of parliamentary coalitions.
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This submission criticizes a mercifully unimplemented scheme for tertiary educational reform that was floated by New Zealand's National Government in the 1990s. I post it because it may be useful to people in search of intellectual... more
This submission criticizes a mercifully unimplemented scheme for tertiary educational reform that was floated by New Zealand's National Government in the 1990s. I post it because it may be useful to people in search of intellectual ammunition against similar schemes put forward by New Right governments in the UK and elsewhere. I particularly recommend pages 9-11, in which I criticize the view that 'consumer' (i.e student) choice should be the chief 'driver' for the provision of academic 'services'. If we are using this terminology it is important to realize that students are not only 'consumers' but 'products' and that what they want at the moment of choice is not necessarily what they will want to have happened at a later date.
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Research Interests: Philosophy, Ethics, Plato, Altruism, Moral Philosophy, and 3 moreRational egoism, Egoism, and Amoralism
The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy is an excellent successor to an excellent book (Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century): It is a fine an example of the necromantic style in the history of philosophy where the object... more
The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy is an excellent successor to an excellent book (Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century): It is a fine an example of the necromantic style in the history of philosophy where the object of the exercise is to resurrect the mighty dead in order to get into an argument with them, either because we think them importantly right or instructively wrong. However what was a pardonable a simplification and a reasonable omission in the earlier book has now metamorphosed into a sin of omission and an oversimplification in its successor – the book lacks is an adequate discussion of the Ramified Theory of Types and Russell’s reasons for adopting it. I conclude with a brief meditation on Open Question Arguments and the threats that they pose to some of the analyses proposed by Russell and Moore themselves.
Key words: Necromantic history, Ramified Theory of Types
Key words: Necromantic history, Ramified Theory of Types
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A review of Schurz's great work.
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An important book
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Van Ingen's aim aim is to vindicate the moral life by mounting and then meeting a powerful challenge. But he makes it so easy to be moral - it is enough to care about one other person - and so tough to be amoral - it involves being... more
Van Ingen's aim aim is to vindicate the moral life by mounting and then meeting a powerful challenge. But he makes it so easy to be moral - it is enough to care about one other person - and so tough to be amoral - it involves being absolutely selfish - that his challenge is no challenge at all. It's not much of a vindication of morality if the morality you vindicate makes Tony Soprano a moral person.
To vindicate morality in the way that van Ingen seems to want, you must show not that it DOESN'T pay (in some sense) to be persistently IMMORAL but that DOES pay to be persistently MORAL. This van Ingen fails to do. "
To vindicate morality in the way that van Ingen seems to want, you must show not that it DOESN'T pay (in some sense) to be persistently IMMORAL but that DOES pay to be persistently MORAL. This van Ingen fails to do. "
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A critique of a kind of 'moral realism' that is in fact a rather thinly disguised version of global historicist idealism.
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A rich, brilliant, fascinating but demanding book on the history and prehistory of the Vienna Circle, written with style and wit.
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I take a dim view of this absurdly overpraised book, marred as it is is by errors of fact, interpretation and method and surprisingly uniformed (as it appears to be) about Russian history. It shows what can go wrong with Skinnerite... more
I take a dim view of this absurdly overpraised book, marred as it is is by errors of fact, interpretation and method and surprisingly uniformed (as it appears to be) about Russian history. It shows what can go wrong with Skinnerite intellectual history in the hands of somebody less gifted than Skinner himself.
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The history of philosophy can be seen either as a contribution to history or a contribution to philosophy or perhaps as a bit of both. Hutchinson fail on both counts. The book is bad: bad in itself (since it quite definitely ought not to... more
The history of philosophy can be seen either as a contribution to history or a contribution to philosophy or perhaps as a bit of both. Hutchinson fail on both counts. The book is bad: bad in itself (since it quite definitely ought not to be) and bad as a companion to Principia (since it sets students a bad example of slapdash, lazy and pretentious philosophizing and would tend to put them off reading Moore). As a conscientious reviewer I ploughed through every page and I have to say that I resented every minute of my life that I wasted on the book. Don’t waste any of yours.
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Not a good book