Prescriptive Metaethics

By and large, metaethicists have focused on descriptive questions about the nature of our moral discourse. For instance, is it in the business of stating facts, or of expressing affective states? If the former, are there such facts? If the latter, how is this reconciled with the role that moral language plays in reasoning?…

There is one clear exception. Some who are interested in error theory have shifted their attention from the descriptive question to a prescriptive/ practical one–namely, “Are we to retain moral language? And if so, how are we to treat it?” (I give the practical variant since it might be thought problematic for an error theorist to ask a question framed in terms of “should.”) The reason for this shift is that the prescriptive/practical question seems quite pressing in the case of error theory. Error theory seems to force the question. The two most prominent answers discussed by error theorists, to my (limited) knowledge, are eliminativism and moral fictionalism (of the prescriptive variety).

A Troublesome Quartet

Based on the following line of thought, it seems to me that if one is a buck-passing existence-internalist who accepts a certain thesis about motivational diversity, then she or he should give up on one of those commitments or give up thinking that anything has intrinsic value. (There are other ways to frame the matter, of course.) But I’m not yet sure that the following line of thought is unproblematic. Feedback is welcome!

P1: (Intrinsic Value) Something has intrinsic value. [In other words: Something is worthy of being valued (by anyone) for its own sake.]

P2: (Fitting Attitudes Reduction) Something’s being worthy of being valued (by anyone) for its own sake just is for it to be such that there is reason for anyone to value it for its own sake.

C1: So, there is something such that there is reason for anyone to value it for its own sake. (from P1 and P2)

P3: (Existence-Internalist Thesis) For any thing X and any agent A, there is reason for A to value X for its own sake only if a (specified) X-related motivational fact about A obtains.

P4: (Motivational Diversity) For any thing X, there is some possible agent A such that the (specified) X-related motivational fact about A does not obtain.

C2: So, for any thing X, there is some possible agent A for whom there is not reason for A to value X for its own sake. (from P3 and P4)

C3: So, it is not the case that there is something such that there is reason for anyone to value it for its own sake. (from C2)

C4: So, C1 & C3 (Contradiction)

Color-judgment expressivism?

Hey guys,  

I don’t know too much about the philosophy of color, except for what you learn from examples people use in discussions about other topics. I’ve noticed that some people, to take one example, think that we should be error theorists about color: we falsely believe that surfaces have these mind-independent color features that they don’t really have, and therefore our color-judgments attributing these properties to surfaces are all systematically erroneous.  This, if I am not mistaken, is Velleman’s view. He brings this up in a discussion about whether people’s belief in free will is some kind of systematic illusion of a similar sort.  Other people, like Gibbard, think that an error-theory about color-judgments is too extreme; we should not attribute systematic errors to the folk unless no other, friendlier theory is available.  One type of theory of a friendlier sort takes color-judgments to be judgments about dispositional properties: we judge things to be such that they tend to look a certain way to people.   But, what are some other possible views?

Here’s what I am specifically interested in knowing: do you guys know if any philosophers have given expressivist views about color judgments?  The idea would be something like this.  In saying, for example, “the sky is blue” what people are doing is expressing their mental state of seeing the sky as blue.  Now, what is their seeing it as blue supposed to mean here?  Well, perhaps I would have done better to say something like “they express their mental state of its looking a certain particular way to them”.  So, the state of judging something to have a certain color is closely tied, on this view, to the state of something looking/appearing a certain way to you.  And, if you say that the thing has the color in question, then you are expressing this state of mind, rather than reporting it.  (This, by the way, seems right: in calling something blue it seems better to say that I am expressing my state of mind of seeing it as blue than to say that I report its looking to blue to me.)

Some experimental philosophy on Happiness

Hey you all,

here’s a link to a blog post of mine on the Experimental Philosophy blog that describes experiments that I think suggest that the folk concept of happiness is a normative one:

Moral Judgments and Happiness

According to the hypothesis I am testing in my experiments, if the folk thinks that somebody is living a bad life—perhaps by being a morally bad person—then they are unlikely to, or will not, attribute happiness to this person even if they believe that she is in the kinds of mental states which we usually associate with happiness.

Most psychological research on happiness uses definitions of happiness that are wholly non-evaluative. This means that, when some psychologist judges that somebody is happy, the folk might not. That, I think, is an interesting result. Why? Because it means, I think, that when we give a philosophical account of happiness, then this will be a normative project at least in the following respect: we will have to give reasons for favoring either the normative concept of happiness used by the folk or the non-normative one used by psychologists and many philosophers. (That is, if, as I think, the kinds of experiments that I’ve been running show that the folk are using a partly normative concept of happiness. Again, see the link for descriptions of these experiments.)

sentimentalism and fit

Sentimentalism is an account about the meaning of some evaluative terms in natural language. In general, the sentimentalist about some evaluative term E proposes to analyze E in terms of the notion of fittingness of some emotion. So, for example, ‘x is shameful’ gets analyzed as ‘it is fitting to feel shame at x‘. Fittingness in turn gets analyzed in terms of the truth of the representational content of the relevant emotion. That is to say: shame at x is fitting just in case x-directed shame represents x truthfully. (And, in general, an emotion with representational content p is fitting just in case p.)

The sentimentalist analysis of ’shameful’ avoids making a mistake that other accounts of the meaning of ’shameful’ have made. Say that we propose to analyze ‘x is shameful’ as ‘x’s bearer ought to / should be ashamed of x‘. This is clearly wrong. It is possible that John should be ashamed of smoking — say Osama will blow up India unless John’s ashamed of smoking — even though his smoking is isn’t itself shameful.

This is all seems pretty much correct. Still, the following sentences sound pretty odd to me.

Identity and agency

1. Sam, is there any way to get a log-in thingy on this page rather than having to go to the wordpress home page?

2. Scarily, I woke up this morning and the first thing I thought of was something that might help me solve a problem in my dissertation. I’m wondering whether this idea can fly.

How far can I go with a distinction between “identity” and “agency”? I mean ‘identity’ in the sense of who you live your life as (not yet sure if this is the best formulation for my purposes)—intended to be something related to but not completely conceptually identified with the usual metaphysical sense of personal identity. And I mean ‘agency’ as the thing the action theorists are after. These two things have in common the possibility of describing “where the agent really is”, but I think this phrase is ambiguous and I’m exploring whether it can be disambiguated.

Reasons ascriptions

(Note: this post is in large part a reprint of a couple posts I wrote on the subject a few weeks back on my own blog.)

1. The case

I take it that most people are familiar with what Williams’ petrol case (“petrol” cuz he was British lol), so my exposition will be cursory. Wilfrid wants a gin and tonic and has good epistemic reason to believe that the glass of clear liquid on the counter is a gin and tonic. Actually, though, it’s a glass of petrol. Consider the following two sentences:

(1) Wilfrid has reason to drink what’s in the glass.

(2) Wilfrid has reason to drink the petrol.

My intuition in the case is that (1) is true while (2) is false. In the comments to my first post on this topic, Pitt grad student Shawn Standefer offered the following diagnosis: