Some Positions on the Logic of Moral Goodness
St. Mary's
*inspired by an earlier
version of this approach by Professor Terry Penner, of the
What follows on this handout
is a list of 68 sentences, which are then utilized in the subsequent discussion
about what defines three approaches to the logic of moral claims: emotivism,
descriptivism, and Kantianism.
1. Call me Ishmael.
2. Kiss me, you fool.
3. Forgive us our sins.
4. Do not lie.
5. Whatever you do, don't
throw me in the briar patch.
6. How many holes does it
take to fill the Albert Hall?
7. Have you ever been stung
by a dead bee?
8. Oh, that I were home in
9. Yech, spinach!
10. You called me Ishmael.
11. The skies are not cloudy
all day.
12. 5 + 7 = 12
13. At constant voltage,
current varies inversely with resistance.
14. Rust never sleeps.
15. Elvis lives.
16. You can get killed that
way.
17. The Red Queen may come to
the party. (I don't know.)
18. The Red Queen can come to
the party. (Her parents will let her.)
19. The Red Queen can come to
the party. (She is physically able to.)
19'. The Red Queen will come
to the party.
20. The square of an even
number must be even.
20'. The square of an even
number is even.
21. The second billiard ball
must move.
21'. The second billiard ball
moved.
22. This is a good axe.
23. This is a bad doorknob.
24. I have good eyes.
25. This is a good way to
hold a nail.
26. This is a good way to
hold a nail if you want to avoid hitting your thumb.
27. Lying is not a good thing
to do.
28. Lying is not a good thing
to do if you want to have any friends.
29. Martha is a good secondbaseman.
30. Martha is a good
administrator.
31. Martha is a good friend.
32. Martha is a good mother.
33. Martha is a good woman.
34. Martha is a good person.
35. Martha is a fine human
being.
36. This is a good swamp.
37. This is good human waste.
38. This is a good corpse.
39. This is a good pasture.
40. This is good fertilizer.
41. This is a good cadaver.
42. This is a good companion
at the seaside.
43. Rubbish is good.
44. Misery is good.
45. Water is good.
46. Pleasure is good.
47. Paintings are good.
48. Martha is good.
49. Rubbish is good as
fertilizer.
50. Misery is good for one's
psyche.
51. Water is good to drink.
52. Pleasure is good for
one's psyche.
53. Paintings are good to
have.
54. Martha is good as a
person.
55. Nuclear weapons are good
for mass destruction.
56. Using napalm is a good
way to kill noncombatants.
57. Lying is a good way to
lose friends.
58. Thoughtfulness is a good
way to make friends.
59. You ought not to lie if
you want to have any friends.
60. You ought not to lie,
period.
61. Lying is wrong.
62. Lying is morally wrong.
63. You have a moral duty not
to lie.
64. You ought not to hold the
nail that way if you want to avoid hitting your thumb.
65. You ought not to hold the
nail that way, period.
66. Holding the nail that way
is wrong.
67. Holding the nail that way
is morally wrong.
68. You have a moral duty not
to hold the nail that way.
Sentences (1) through (9) are
not statements; i.e., they make no claims to truth. Such utterances can
be appropriate or inappropriate, well-considered or impetuous, profound or
foolish, but not true or false.
Sentences (10)-(15) are
non-modal factual statements. Kant calls these assertoric. These needn't refer
to facts; (15) is especially doubtful, for instance. What is significant
instead is that they claim to refer to facts. They are either true or
false, and so a fortiori are the sorts of statements that can be
true or false (even if we don't know the truth value of any given statement).
Sentences (16)-(21) are modal
factual statements, i.e., statements of possibility or necessity.
Contrast these with (19'), (20'), and (21'); these three are merely assertoric.
Modal statements tell us either what is true or what is false in some possible
world (but maybe not true in our world) or what is true or what is false in all
possible words (and accordingly also what is true in our world). In any case,
these statements are like (10)-(15) in that they are the sort of claim that is
capable of being true or false, unlike (1)-(9).
Sentences (22)-(58) are what
some people call value judgments. All but (35) use the terms "good"
or "bad" (and "fine" here is meant as nothing more than
"good"). The people who call these claims value judgments are called
non-cognitivists or emotivists (who generally trace
back their intellectual lineage to eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher
David Hume), and think that such sentences are not claims to truth. That is,
they think (22)-(58) are like (1)-(9), and not like (10)-(21'). The operative
idea here is that sentences (22)-(58) cannot be true or false, not just that
they can't be known to be true or to be false; there's nothing to be
known, emotivists want to say. According to this
account, what we are doing when we utter any of (22)-(58) is not making a claim
about the world, but rather simply expressing our values (or perhaps our
emotions). So when I call one thing good and you call it bad, we are not
disagreeing about the facts, we are merely showing that we have different
values. There would therefore be no real moral disagreements, just statements
of differing values. Emotivists think that moral
disagreements are as conceptually confused as arguing about the taste of
spinach or the beauty of a given painting.
An alternative to emotivism
is to take sentences (22)-(58) as just as much claims to truth as are claims
(10)-(21'). The predicates "is good" and "is bad" would
then be no different in kind than "is cloudy," "lives," and
"must move." One way in which these other theorists, called descriptivists, support this position is by arguing that
whether or not something is a good F (i.e., a good thing of kind F)
depends upon what F's are for--what the function of F's
is, what their purpose is, what interests they serve. This is why, it can be
argued, sentences (36), (37), and (38) are what grammarians call "deviant
utterances." Things described as swamps, waste, and corpses answer to no
interests, so we don't talk of good swamps, good waste, or good corpses. But
things--even those very same things--described as pastures, fertilizer, or
cadavers do answer to certain interests, do have a role to play,
so that we can non-deviantly speak of good pastures,
good fertilizers, and good cadavers. Hence, (39), (40), and (41) are
non-deviant. (And it is no objection to say that there are good swamps
for someone who wants to study ecological balance. For then the "F"
in question is not "swamp," but "swamp for studying ecological
balance," and then the kind does answer to certain scientific or
educational interests.)
Notice that on descriptivism
nothing is simply good (except perhaps the highest, most
all-encompassing function, if such there be); things are either a good F,
a good G, a bad H, etc. Thus, a good friend may be a bad
mother. A good second-baseman may be a bad administrator. You can't just point
to a corpse and ask, "Good or bad?" You have to specify "Good or
bad what?" A good cadaver will be a bad companion at the seaside.
(This example from Paul Ziff, Semantic Analysis, ch.
6.)
A third way to take sentences
(22)-(58) is to take all of these as the descriptivist would take them, except
the following five: (34), (48), (54), and perhaps (33) and (35). The difference
in this third way (let's call it Kantian) lies in the distinction some find
between moral and non-moral good. The Kantian position is that of (22)-(58),
only these five claims concern a specifically moral goodness, a goodness
not reducible to functional goodness. Descriptivism has no place for this
distinctively, irreducibly moral goodness, for the descriptivist treats (34) of
a piece with the rest of (22)-(58). This Kantian view, however, is that there
are some things (viz., the actions of rational beings), about which we
can ask "Good, period or bad, period?" without there having to be an F.
Such things would include moral agents and some of their actions (helping the
needy? Good, period; lying in order to get out of a tough spot? Bad, period),
but not all actions (e.g., wearing stripes with checks). Thus the
Kantian will distinguish intrinsic value from extrinsic value, or equivalently,
inherent value from instrumental value.
We can spell out the
difference between descriptivism and Kantianism by looking at their respective
treatments of claims (59)-(68). Both can agree that (59) and (64) are normally
true, and that (67) and (68) are normally false.
Both furthermore agree that,
strictly speaking, (66), through grammatically sound, is logically incomplete;
the "if" condition is missing (e.g., "if you want to
avoid hitting your thumb" or "if you want to avoid ruining your
manicure"), even though we have no trouble mentally supplying it in actual
conversation. To say that the "if" condition is missing is to say that
the F is unspecified. So (66) needs to be completed into something like
(64).
What the Kantian and the
descriptivist would not agree about, then, would be whether (61) is incomplete
in the same way that (66) is. The Kantian thinks not; the descriptivist thinks
so. The Kantian thinks that the imperative in (61) is categorical, and so to
conditionalize it as we did with (66) would be to destroy the categorical
validity of (61) and render it merely as a hypothetical imperative. The Kantian
thinks that if morality becomes nothing more than a system of hypothetical
imperatives, where the antecedent (the "if" clause) of the
hypothetical would specify the F, would specify the interests answered
to, then there would be no principled way to prevent the "good"
referred to in claims such as (55) and (56) from being a moral goodness, as
opposed to being a non-moral, technical goodness as in (22) or (25). If all
goodness is functional goodness, that is, serves some purpose, answers to some
interest, then if I am interested in killing noncombatants, there would be no
deeper sense of "good," no nonfunctional goodness which I would be
missing. Hence the Kantian concludes that moral goodness cannot be a matter of
acting according to your wants, for wants can be despicable. In order for the
will to be good, something more universal must determine the will.
Let this suffice as an
introduction to three different approaches to the logic of moral claims, with
different implications for such other matters as moral psychology.
Send me comments: mstaber
at smcm dot edu
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