Speaker-Based Ethical Relativism and the Sanctity of an Ethical Community

Sep 252012
 

One of the comments on Mark Satta’s recent very hot post about universal salvation has been zooming ’round my brain, and demands, I think, a PEL episode at some point. A comment by our listener Bear stated:

My questions about Atheists wanting to redefine orthodoxies of particular belief systems, be it Christian, Buddhist, Mormon, Islam &c., demanding those within the belief system to accept certain propositions internal the belief system. For example, telling very conservative Evangelical Christians or Buddhists that they must accept and not condemn sodomy, and they must accept what greater society thinks about these things.

This is not an abstract concern, I have seen this regularly.

When does the internal beliefs of a group become public debate? How much can a society demand that a religious group abandon its beliefs and conform to the rest of society?

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Norm Schultz (Mile High Sanity Project) on Aristotle’s Ethics

Aug 012012
 

Sargeant Schultz

In preparation for our Aristotle Politics episode, I checked out a new semi-philosophy podcast called the Mile High Sanity Project, as they had an episode on Aristotle’s ethics. I say “semi-philosophy,” because the podcast is made up of three guys in different disciplines. They trade off being the lead guy on episodes, so the philosophy ones are “Norm’s Conceptual Corner,” featuring Norm Schultz, who’s got a master’s and teaches at some community colleges in Denver. So it’s essentially a one-man PEL, with some other non-philosophy guys to act as interlocutors (and they do a fine job at that). The several ethics episodes go through various issues in ethics such as divine command theory, cultural relativism, and natural law, but given that this one on virtue ethicsis the last in the series and came out in October 2011, I wouldn’t hold your breath for the subsequent promised issues on utilitarianism and other moral theories.

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Episode 59: Alasdair MacIntyre on Moral Justifications

Jul 052012
 
Alasdair MacIntyre

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:44:19 — 95.6MB)

On Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981), mostly ch. 3-7 and 14-17.

What justifies ethical claims? MacIntyre claims that no modern attempt to ground ethics has worked, and that’s because we’ve abandoned Aristotle. We see facts and values as fundamentally different: the things science discovers vs. these weird things that have nothing to do with science. In Aristotle’s teleological view, everything comes with built-in goals, so just as a plant will aim grow green and healthy, people have a definite kind of virtue towards which we do and should naturally strive. Though MacIntyre doesn’t want to bring back Aristotle’s biology, he does want to put the goal-directedness, i.e. the normativity, back into our conception of the facts of our lives.

His new take on virtue has two components: the excellence involved in any established practice, like physics, cooking, or playing guitar; and the need to live a coherent life story given your particular culture and commitments. You might have bought into the aim to be a great chess player, for instance, which requires not only intellectual virtue, but being social enough to keep the enterprise of chess in business (i.e. no murder when you lose). To get from great chess player to great person means integrating your various practices into one fulfilling life, and MacIntyre thinks that this effort is sufficient to give you objective moral standards, given your particular practices and, moreso, your cultural traditions. Unlike the existentialists, MacIntyre thinks that for an individual in a real situation, having moral standards is not a matter of some free choice or “leap,” as if morality was nothing in itself that we humans are bound to. No, morality is real, and fully justified, for an individual embedded in his culture and commitments. Just like you can’t, yourself, decide to win at chess by changing the rules, you can’t “create values” as Nietzsche might recommend by denying or re-interpreting your duties as parent, neighbor, citizen, etc.

The regular four continue the discussion started in ep. 58, giving some of MacIntyre’s dismissal of dozens of major figures in philosophy and trying our best to make sense of his proposals. Buy the book.

End song: “Indefensible,” by Mark Lint, 1998.

If you enjoy the episode, please donate at least $1:

Episode 58: What Grounds Ethical Claims? (Moore, Stevenson, MacIntyre)

Jun 202012
 
GE-Moore

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:02:09 — 111.9MB)

On G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, ch. 1 (1903); Charles Leslie Stevenson’s “The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms” (1937), and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, ch. 1-2.

Is there such a thing as moral intuition? Is “good” a simple property that we all recognize but can’t explain like yellow? G.E. Moore thinks that any attempt to define good in terms of properties like “pleasure,” “interest,” or “happiness” are doomed. Even if all pleasurable things were good, the word “good” still wouldn’t mean “pleasant;” you could always sensibly ask, “but are those pleasant things really good?” This is Moore’s “open question” argument, which expresses his objection to the “naturalistic fallacy,” i.e. deriving an “ought” from an “is.”

Stevenson agreed that “good” isn’t reducible to any natural property; saying something is good is not to express a property about it at all. Instead, moral terms are tools we use to convince other people to like things that we like. This tendency of the word “good” to elicit such a response is part of what Stevenson calls its “emotive meaning.”

MacIntyre thinks that this emotivism now pervades our current uses of ethical language. Because Moore is successful in debunking all the ethical theories that rely on natural facts (and supernatural ones too) to ground morality, we’re left with no grounding at all, and people like Moore who pretend to be using intuition to discover primal moral facts are really just expressing their own preferences. The same goes for ethical theorists whose key terms don’t hold up to scrutiny: when someone justifies an action by referring to a fiction like “greatest happiness,” “natural rights,” or “the dictates of reason,” he is just, again, expressing his preferences; these bogus theories just serve to mask what’s really going on. We’ll give MacIntyre’s positive account of how to ground morality (which is derived from Aristotle’s) in episode 59.

Read more about the topic and get the readings. Dig our new web site layout!

End song: “When I Was Yours,” by Mark Lint, 1997.

If you enjoy the episode, please donate at least $1:

Topic for #58/#59: Is vs. Ought (G.E. Moore, C.L. Stevenson, Alasdair MacIntyre)

May 172012
 

These two episodes cover some related approaches in 20th century ethics:

First, we read Chapter 1 of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica(1903), which argues against utilitarianism and other ethical philosophies by exposing the “naturalistic fallacy,” which equates “good” with some natural property like pleasure or people’s actual desires. This error, says Moore, also extends to equating good with what God wants or what we would choose upon calm reflection on social norms and our own innermost desires. It may well be that the good coincides with one of these categories, but that’s not what the word “good” means, as it’s always a sensible question to ask “but is pleasure good?” or “is God’s will good?” for any alleged equivalent. No, says, Moore, good is a basic, indefinable, non-natural quality of the world. Buy the book or read it online. You can also listen to it.

Continue reading »

Alan Watts on Buddhist and Christian Mythographies

Apr 272012
 

http://youtu.be/w0FQoypdDTk

Watch on YouTube.

I liked the meta-discussion that kicked off the second PEL naturalized Buddhism episode, specifically on what knowledge we gain by assessing the supernatural “rules” contained within “religious” Buddhism. Even after rejecting a supernaturalist stance, there’s value in reviewing the form of life revealed within Buddhism’s supernatural tenets. In that spirit, I enjoyed Boddhisatva’s Brain most for its comparison of different philosophical worldviews. Reading the book, I asked myself how Owen Flanagan’s purely philosophical Buddhism meaningfully differed from, say, the Roman Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius. But Flanagan might respond that juxtaposing a “naturalized” Buddhism against Roman Stoicism is inherently interesting for its own sake. Flanagan says that comparing Eastern and Western traditions…
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Episode 54: More Buddhism and Naturalism

Apr 062012
 
The Buddha

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:37:49 — 89.6MB)

Continuing our discussion of Owen Flanagan’s The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011).

Are the basic tenets of Buddhism compatible with a respect for science? In episode 53, Owen Flanagan outlined a science-friendly project of comparative ethics, and touched on Buddhism’s empiricist theory of knowledge and its metaphysics of impermanence. If that was the lecture, this episode is the discussion section, where the regular foursome expands upon these themes and hopefully makes some of the previous discussion more understandable to folks new to philosophy.

Folks that like hearing us free associating among anecdotes and rants about movies and discussion of our ground rules will enjoy this, whereas those impatient to hear about Buddhism are free to jump past the first 20, or even 40 minutes, at which point we get down to business and talk about karma, nirvana, emptiness, no-self, and the four noble truths. Read more about the topic and get the book.

If you enjoy the episode, please donate at least $1:

Lila Notes, Pt. 4: Pirsig Solves All Philosophical Problems in Five Pages

Feb 182012
 

Amazing!If my notes here have gotten a bit dismissive sounding, it’s largely to provide a counterweight to Dave’s discipleship. This is not to diss Dave (or Bo or other Pirsig fans posting on our board here), but my approach, and the approach I see in enthusiasts like Katie re. Foucault or Matt Evans did for Plato is yes, to try to figure how out to charitably elaborate and defend the view, but perhaps moreso to independently parse and critically appraise it: you pick it apart, test the limits, and see what remains. (Again, this is not to diss Dave, who I’m sure is seeing his role here as sharing his enthusiasm and trying to get more folks interested in Pirsig.)

While of course you want to get out of a reading every bit of richness you can (so as to make it worth your time to have read it), I’m extremely suspicious of anyone who focuses too exclusively on any one philosopher (for non-professional reasons; if you’re a Kant scholar, than of course you have some reason to get obsessed, though of course to be a good Kant scholar you’d need to really know your Hume and Leibniz and many others), whether it be Marx or Ayn Rand or Jesus or whomever. Genius is overrated… even great thinkers steal 90% of their ideas from their predecessors and contemporaries, and don’t necessary end up with the greatest versions of these ideas. The progress of ideas makes any one thinker to some extent instantly obsolete. Pirsig provides a fine model of a very smart guy thinking through things deeply to come to his own conclusions, but don’t think for a second that he invented the idea of overcoming subject-object dualism, which is one of dozen or so major themes pervading philosophical history in the 20th century (see Heidegger, for one, though arguably he was just following on to Hegel), and Pirsig’s account, taking up a whole two books of musings totaling something like 100 pages when you get rid of all the travelogue stuff, is just not going to be the most developed and comprehensive take on this however you slice it.

OK, enough with the general cautionary words to keep perspective, which no one in need of them is likely to listen to anyway. I wanted to recount here a part of Lila that struck me as a particularly stark example of casual overreach: pages 152 to 157. Here he explains how denying subject-object metaphysics solves a whole mass of traditional philosophical problems.

Continue reading »

Topic for #53/#54: Buddhism and Science with Guest Owen Flanagan

Dec 262011
 

In episode 53, the full four-man PEL crew spoke with Duke University’s Owen Flanagan, mostly about his book The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, which has a number of aims:

-To argue that supernatural beliefs can be removed (or “tamed”) from Buddhism and still leave an elaborate enterprise relevant to modern life.
-To put Buddhist conceptions of virtue and happiness in dialogue with other types of virtue ethics, particularly Aristotelianism.
-To argue that claims of the superior happiness of Buddhists are both conceptually confused (because the Buddhist conception of happiness isn’t equivalent to what you might think; it’s not just a feeling, but definitionally requires attainment of Buddhist virtue) and unsupported by neurological evidence (the popular media have taken up stories of certain very limited experiments that have shown certain neural chracteristics in one or two Buddhists, but this is far from what is required; see this article for details).

Continue reading »

Kenan Malik (via The Browser) on Morality without God (and the Euthyphro)

Nov 222011
 

In this interview with Kenan Malik (a “scientific author,” i.e. a psychology/biology guy who dabbles in philosophical issues) uses the Euthyphro to argue that presenting religion as the guardian of moral values “diminishing the importance of human agency in the creation of a moral framework.” His enemy is “false certainty” in ethics, whether because you think that basic moral precepts are given by God and beyond question or that science yields up moral truths (note that since scientific findings are by their nature defeasible, I don’t think this description is apt).

In describing Leibniz’s view (which agrees with Plato’s), Malik makes the same jump from the metaphysical to the epistemological that Matt criticized me for in our discussion (the bolding is mine):

Or, as Leibniz asked at the beginning of the 18th century, if it is the case that whatever God thinks, wants or does is good by definition, then “what cause could one have to praise him for what he does if in doing something quite different he would have done equally well?” If, on the other hand, God recognises what is good and promotes it because of its inherent goodness, then goodness must exist independently of God. But God is no longer the source of that goodness, nor do we need to look to God to discover that which is good.

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Episode 46: Plato on Ethics & Religion

Nov 162011
 
plato

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:52:05 — 102.7MB)

Discussing Plato’s “Euthyphro.”

Does morality have to be based on religion? Are good things good just because God says so, or (if there is a God) does God choose to approve of the things He does because he recognizes those things to be already good? Plato thinks the latter: if morality is to be truly non-arbitrary, then, like the laws of logic, it can’t just be a contingent matter of what the gods happen to approve of (i.e. what some particular religious text happens to say).

We’re joined by Matt Evans, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan to discuss the text, which seems to be not as directly related to modern debates regarding the Divine Command Theory as we thought going into this. Ah, well. We cover all the angles and Seth spends the last bit going on about Judaism. Oy!

Buy the bookor read it online. Read more about the topic.

End song: “False Morality” by The MayTricks, from the album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994) Read about it.

The suggested donation if you like this episode is $1. Donate via the button and you’ll get a free download of a high-bitrate mp3 of this episode’s song. After paying on the PayPal site, click the yellow “Return to the Partially Examined Life” box there, and you’ll be sent to a page with the download link. If this doesn’t happen, please email me.





Paul Boghossian (via Philosophy Bites) on Moral Relativism

Nov 082011
 


We’ve discussed Paul Boghossian and his book against relativism
a bit in our Nelson Goodman episode. See my blog post on this from last year.

In this interview on the Philosophy Bites podcast, Boghossian talks about moral relativism, giving some shades of the view: e.g. you could be a relativist about manners but not really about the underlying principles girding them (“be polite!”). This accords with Smith’s version, in which the most important moral points–e.g. generosity is good–are going to be universal, but lots of cultural factors are going to go into when and how much generosity is considered appropriate in a given circumstance.

Read Wes’s post from August on the Boghossian/Stanley Fish exchange that the Philosophy Bites page refers to.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Episode 45: Moral Sense Theory: Hume and Smith

Oct 292011
 
David Hume

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:45:33 — 96.7MB)

Discussing parts of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1740) and Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

Where do we get our moral ideas? Hume and Smith both thought that we get them by reflecting on our own moral judgments and on how we and others (including imaginary, hypothesized others) in turn judge those judgments. Mark, Wes, Seth, and guest Getty Lustila, a phil grad student at Georgia State University, hash through the Scottish stoicism to lay out the differences between these two gents and whether their views constitute an actual moral theory or just a descriptive enterprise.

Read along: We read the sections from the Treatise and from Smith in D.D. Raphael’s collectionBritish Moralists (Vol. 2).

End song: “Honest Judge” by New People from the 2010 album “Impossible Things,” written and sung by Nate Pinney.

The suggested donation if you like this episode is $1. Donate via the button and you’ll get a free download of a high-bitrate mp3 of this episode’s song: After paying on the PayPal site, click the yellow “Return to the Partially Examined Life” box there, and you’ll be sent to a page with the download link. If this doesn’t happen, please email me.





Topic for #46: Plato’s Euthyphro

Oct 252011
 

Does morality depend on religion? In Plato’s early and fun (and short!) dialogue Euthyphro, Socrates questions Euthyphro (who’s on his way to go and file murder charges against his own father) about the meaning of “piety.” Is an action (like turning in your dad) pious because it’s the kind of thing that the gods love? In modern terms, are pious actions justified just because of the commands (or, more in the absence of specific commands, the attitudes) of God? Socrates argues that this isn’t the case: conceptually, “good” doesn’t depend on these commands or attitudes of God; it’s rather that God (or “the gods,” taken together re. whatever they might all agree about) desires of us the actions He does because those actions are good.

Mark and Seth are joined by Dylan and by our former U. of Texas classmate Matt Evans, currently an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, to lay out the dialogue and discuss the extent to which it actually bears on this more modern debate about the relation of morality and religion. A divine command theorist argues, contra Plato, that since God is omnipotent, there’s no sense in which morality can be metaphysically prior to his commands (or his disposition, or his nature). On the other side (which is, you should note, also a theist side, Swinburne being a good example), to avoid morality being an arbitrary matter depending on God’s whims (meaning he could have declared child torture to be good), a Platonist would argue that like the laws of logic, fundamental moral truths have to come first in some sense: God only commands right actions because He recognizes them to be right; they don’t magically become right just because he says so.

Is this just a dispute internal to religion? No. If Plato is right, then this means we can legitimately theorize about moral truths independent of reference to God; we don’t even have to assume there is (or isn’t) a God. Theists and atheists are thus able to have a productive ethical discourse based on a common ground, and religious people who claim that atheists aren’t or can’t be moral are stymied good and hard.

Buy the book (this translation by G.M.A. Grube is the one Matt recommended)or read a free translation online.

Seth recommends the Wikipedia entry on the Euthyphro dilemma. Some of the last part of our discussion focused on the place of the dilemma in Judaism. For a good, Swinburne-esque discussion, listen to this Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot interview with David McNaughton.

Topic for #45: Moral Sense Theory: Hume and Smith

Sep 272011
 

Here’s the recorded episode.

In Ep. 41, we discussed David Hume’s ethics both providing a challenge for any naturalist (meaning one compatible with a modern scientific world-view) ethics–you can’t deduce “ought” from “is”–and as providing an approach to moral psychology. In this discussion, we grappled with selections from Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1740) and Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

Both Hume and Smith thought that we understand morality by reflecting on our own reactions to events and comparing these with other people’s. For Hume, we naturally approve of qualities like beneficence and utility (and not just as a gut reaction, but in our reflective moments), and ethics is a public enterprise by which we compare these sentiments with those expressed by others and come up with a code, where some elements, like this appreciation of niceness, are just “natural” and obvious, and some, like justice and property, are social inventions designed to serve our needs: our self-love and our caring for our families and friends.

Continue reading »

Magnetic Morality Modulation

Aug 022011
 

This September, PBS will re-broadcast an interesting episode of NOVA ScienceNOW, which touches on some points raised in PEL’s interview with Patricia Churchland. The episode demonstrates a procedure called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), which can influence a person’s moral judgments as they are being made, simply by messing with the neural activity located within the brain’s Right TemporoParietal Junction (RTPJ):

If you find the clip interesting, you can find the published research here.

Continue reading »

Moral Psychology vs. Normativity

Jul 262011
 

moral quandryGiven that Churchland focuses on the causal story (physiological, evolutionary, psychological, cultural) for where we get our moral sense, does that mean that the causal story is all there is to it, i.e. that by understanding the causal theory, you understand morality itself?

Certainly Kant thought not: the causal story is only relevant for him in figuring out how to teach people morality and the like, after the essence of morality has already been determined through a priori reasoning.

At the other extreme, you might think that we have these sentiments, and sometimes they agree, so in that sense there’s something “objective” about rightness, in that it’s intersubjectively verifiable, but really, it’s just a shared fiction (like the value of money).

Certainly Churchland’s view is closer to the latter than the former, but the vigor with which she took to discussion of actual ethical/social problems means that she’s not an error theorist about ethics.

This for me was the gap in Churchland’s book, and why I built Hume into the conversation. Scholars have the same trouble interpreting Hume in this respect as I’m running into here. Let me just quickly throw out my own view as I’m trying to formulate it:

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Episode 41: Pat Churchland on the Neurobiology of Morality (Plus Hume’s Ethics)

Jul 182011
 
Pat Churchland

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:44:57 — 96.1MB)

We spoke with Patricia Churchland after reading her new book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality. We also discussed David Hume’s ethics as foundational to her work, reading his Treatise on Human Nature (1739), Book III, Part I and his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Section V, Parts I and II.

What does the physiology of the brain have to do with ethics? What bearing do facts have on values? Churchland thinks that while Hume is (famously) correct in saying that you can’t deduce “ought” from “is,” the fact that we have moral sentiments is certainly relevant to figuring out what our ethical positions should be, and it’s her main goal to figure out what the mechanisms behind those moral sentiments are: What brain parts and processes are involved? How and when did these evolve? How did cultural factors come into play, building on top of our biological capacity to care for others?

Pat spoke with Mark and Dylan Casey here about topics ranging from the war on drugs to the rationale of punishment to Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape. Read some more initial thoughts (and some substantial discussion in readers’ comments) here.

To read along with us, buy Pat’s book.

End song: “Bring You Down” from the 1994 album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down by The MayTricks.

Topic for #41: Pat Churchland on the Neurobiology of Morality (Plus Hume’s Ethics)

Jun 272011
 

With special Guest Pat Churchland herself!

What does the physiology of the brain have to do with ethics? We were contacted by Pat Churchland’s publisher and invited to speak with her about her new book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality.

She was good enough to chat with us (Mark and Dylan) for a full, regular length show yesterday, and not only about her own book, but also about one of her major influences, David Hume, who pioneered a “naturalistic” approach to ethics: we look not for normative laws to provide commands for our behavior, but at the moral sense we already have, and how this plays as a practical matter into the challenges we face in making laws, deciding on punishments, and just getting along in a society.

Churchland’s addition to this project is reporting on and synthesizing the broad swath of current scientific findings on what exactly this moral sense is: how is it realized in the brain and our endocrine system? What mental operations make moral assessments and rule-following possible? Much of her book is taken up with reporting on animal physiology and behavior, so we can see where on the evolutionary path we picked up the abilities to expand the circle of self-regard to include kin and associates, to represent others’ intentions and beliefs to predict their behavior, and to understand and follow social norms.

Continue reading »

Topic for #41: Pat Churchland on the Neurobiology of Morality (Plus Hume’s Ethics)

Jun 272011
 

With special Guest Pat Churchland herself!

What does the physiology of the brain have to do with ethics? We were contacted by Pat Churchland’s publisher and invited to speak with her about her new book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality.

She was good enough to chat with us (Mark and Dylan) for a full, regular length show yesterday, and not only about her own book, but also about one of her major influences, David Hume, who pioneered a “naturalistic” approach to ethics: we look not for normative laws to provide commands for our behavior, but at the moral sense we already have, and how this plays as a practical matter into the challenges we face in making laws, deciding on punishments, and just getting along in a society.

Churchland’s addition to this project is reporting on and synthesizing the broad swath of current scientific findings on what exactly this moral sense is: how is it realized in the brain and our endocrine system? What mental operations make moral assessments and rule-following possible? Much of her book is taken up with reporting on animal physiology and behavior, so we can see where on the evolutionary path we picked up the abilities to expand the circle of self-regard to include kin and associates, to represent others’ intentions and beliefs to predict their behavior, and to understand and follow social norms.

Continue reading »

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