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.
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