Moral knowledge as practical knowledge

Social Philosophy and Policy

Volumn 18, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 236-256

  Annas, Julia ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0040030056     PISSN: 02650525     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0265052500002971     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, NY: Penguin, 1977).
2. I am aware that discussion of moral realism has moved on since Mackie, but there has been surprisingly little change on the point I wish to examine. It is often assumed that the realist options are either a kind of minimalist realism, making only the internal commitments of moral discourse (for an example of this kind of realism, see Ronald Dworkin, "Objectivity and Truth: You'd Better Believe It," Philosophy and Public Affairs 25, no. 2 [1996]: 87-139), or a more substantial realism, making metaphysical commitments external to moral discourse, and this option is readily labelled "Platonism."
3. Mackie, Ethics, 38. Mackie frequently makes disparaging references to "intuition," which he gives no account of. He assumes that we know what intuition is from "the intuitionists," but this is not a great deal of help, since theories calling themselves intuitionist have diverged widely over what they take intuition to be and what kind of items (e.g., principles, kinds of value, individual features of situations) they take to be the objects of intuition.
4. Ibid., 23-24.
5. Ibid., 40.
6. Ibid., 41.
7. This harsh verdict is reasonable in that Mackie did, after all, read Plato in the original and was not dependent on possibly misleading translations. Mackie is also insensitive to Plato's uses of argument, reading the dialogues crudely as ways of putting forward positive ideas of Plato's own. Mackie regards the arguments of the Protagoras, for example, as Plato's own attempts to put forward a positive position, and deals with the obvious resulting problems by cheerfully ascribing to Plato "a lot of sophistry" (Mackie, Ethics, 187).
8. More expansively, we cannot access them by "sensory perception or introspection or the framing and confirming of explanatory hypotheses or inference or logical construction or conceptual analysis, or any combination of these" (ibid., 39).
9. In his notes to chapter 1 of Ethics, Mackie says that his views were first written down in 1941, and cites Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic and Stevenson's Ethics and Language as helping to determine the main outlines of his position (ibid., 241). He rejects characterization as a logical positivist on the grounds that he rejects both the verifiability principle as a criterion for descriptive meaning and the idea that moral judgments lack descriptive meaning (ibid., 39-40 ). Mackie's characterization of his position as empiricist can be faulted on the ground that many positions describing themselves as empiricist start from much less restrictive assumptions. Also, although in Ethics he holds that morality has to be "made" and that we "have to decide" what moral views to "adopt" (ibid., 106) , he writes a whole book on ethics, thus insulating his practice from his theoretical view. I have made some remarks on this issue in my "Doing without Objective Values: Ancient and Modern Strategies," in Stephen Everson, ed., Ethics, vol. 4 of Companions to Ancient Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193-220, esp. 216.
10. In his notes to chapter 1 of Ethics, Mackie says that his views were first written down in 1941, and cites Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic and Stevenson's Ethics and Language as helping to determine the main outlines of his position (ibid., 241). He rejects characterization as a logical positivist on the grounds that he rejects both the verifiability principle as a criterion for descriptive meaning and the idea that moral judgments lack descriptive meaning (ibid., 39-40 ). Mackie's characterization of his position as empiricist can be faulted on the ground that many positions describing themselves as empiricist start from much less restrictive assumptions. Also, although in Ethics he holds that morality has to be "made" and that we "have to decide" what moral views to "adopt" (ibid., 106) , he writes a whole book on ethics, thus insulating his practice from his theoretical view. I have made some remarks on this issue in my "Doing without Objective Values: Ancient and Modern Strategies," in Stephen Everson, ed., Ethics, vol. 4 of Companions to Ancient Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193-220, esp. 216.
11. In his notes to chapter 1 of Ethics, Mackie says that his views were first written down in 1941, and cites Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic and Stevenson's Ethics and Language as helping to determine the main outlines of his position (ibid., 241). He rejects characterization as a logical positivist on the grounds that he rejects both the verifiability principle as a criterion for descriptive meaning and the idea that moral judgments lack descriptive meaning (ibid., 39-40 ). Mackie's characterization of his position as empiricist can be faulted on the ground that many positions describing themselves as empiricist start from much less restrictive assumptions. Also, although in Ethics he holds that morality has to be "made" and that we "have to decide" what moral views to "adopt" (ibid., 106) , he writes a whole book on ethics, thus insulating his practice from his theoretical view. I have made some remarks on this issue in my "Doing without Objective Values: Ancient and Modern Strategies," in Stephen Everson, ed., Ethics, vol. 4 of Companions to Ancient Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193-220, esp. 216.
12. In his notes to chapter 1 of Ethics, Mackie says that his views were first written down in 1941, and cites Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic and Stevenson's Ethics and Language as helping to determine the main outlines of his position (ibid., 241). He rejects characterization as a logical positivist on the grounds that he rejects both the verifiability principle as a criterion for descriptive meaning and the idea that moral judgments lack descriptive meaning (ibid., 39-40 ). Mackie's characterization of his position as empiricist can be faulted on the ground that many positions describing themselves as empiricist start from much less restrictive assumptions. Also, although in Ethics he holds that morality has to be "made" and that we "have to decide" what moral views to "adopt" (ibid., 106) , he writes a whole book on ethics, thus insulating his practice from his theoretical view. I have made some remarks on this issue in my "Doing without Objective Values: Ancient and Modern Strategies," in Stephen Everson, ed., Ethics, vol. 4 of Companions to Ancient Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193-220, esp. 216.
13. For a valuable discussion of these claims, see Tom Sorell, Scientism (London: Routledge, 1991). Scientism takes many forms; here I am concerned only with assumptions made by philosophers who give science primacy in defining our epistemological concepts. These assumptions are not shared in the wider culture, even where that culture contains other kinds of deference toward science.
14. Knowledge as understanding and knowledge as improved true belief are both prominent in ancient epistemology. As noted, Plato is mostly concerned with the former, though the latter is in question in the Meno and at the end of the Theaetetus. For a good introduction to these different strands in ancient epistemology, see Stephen Everson, ed., Epistemology, vol. 1 of Companions to Ancient Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), particularly Everson's introduction.
15. The Laches is particularly interesting in that Socrates's actual demand seems controversial: do we really show courage in resisting pleasures and temptations, as well as in resisting pains and discouraging factors? The claim that we do comes from thinking of courage as involving the idea of endurance more centrally than the idea of resisting unpleasant or dangerous circumstances. This is something on which people may reasonably disagree.
16. We should remember, however, that in the first part of the Parmenides Plato has Socrates put forward an account of Forms much as they are found in the Phaedo and the Republic, and then has the account subjected to the same kind of relentless criticism that Socrates elsewhere directs at the positions of others. Furthermore, as in these other cases, the objections are nowhere met. Plato was obviously aware of intellectual difficulties in his account of Forms, and he continued to work toward more satisfactory characterizations. What we rather misleadingly call "the theory" of Forms is a cluster of ideas which Plato engaged with in different ways at different times.
17. When Plato uses language that suggests insight or grasp, this is not as an alternative to hard and effortful thinking, but suggestive of what it is to come to understand something by thinking hard about it. Perception is a misleading metaphor for moral thinking if it is used (as it sometimes has been) to suggest that no effort is required, or that getting it right is easy and obvious. Such ideas could scarcely be further from Plato's insistence that moral thinking is hard and requires effort which many people are too lazy, or too focused on material success, to make.
18. Callicles, at Plato, Gorgias, 490e-491a.
19. The appeal to mathematics in particular goes with a greatly raised standard for what is to count as having understanding of the kind which is sought.
20. This point has been recognized in the secondary literature for some time now. See Paul Woodruff, "Plato's Early Theory of Knowledge," in Everson, ed., Epistemology, 60-84, for a very useful discussion of the many issues involved.
21. See Plato, Meno, 89e ff. and Plato, Protagoras, 319e ff. The obvious and agreed teachability of kinds of expertise comes in when these discussions center on the teachability or otherwise of virtue.
22. See Plato, Meno, 89e ff. and Plato, Protagoras, 319e ff. The obvious and agreed teachability of kinds of expertise comes in when these discussions center on the teachability or otherwise of virtue.
23. In the case of the productive skills, exercise of the skill produces a unified object whose organization reflects the expert's unified grasp of her skill and its requirements; see Plato, Gorgias, 503d-504b.
24. On this point, see ibid., 465a, 501a.
25. A common objection is that we are in fact prepared (even if the ancients were not) to call someone an expert if she can reliably come out with a certain performance, whether or not she displays articulate understanding. Thus we are (allegedly) prepared to call someone an expert gardener even if they are stubbornly unwilling to say anything about the basis of their success, and to call someone an expert who knows lots of facts about, say, ranches in the Southwest between 1880 and 1885, despite never relating this to any wider context. There is more than one response to this alleged problem. First, we might be misusing the term "expert" in using it of these people, since they lack articulate understanding of what they are doing. It might also be the case that we are assuming that the people in question do have a unified understanding of what they do, but for some reason cannot, or are unwilling to, articulate it. If we thought the gardener really unable to relate frosts to early plantings, or the history buff completely ignorant of other contemporary facts, I doubt that we would call them experts.
26. My "Virtue as a Skill," International Journal of Philosophical Studies 3, no. 2 (1995): 227-43, traces some of the implications of this idea for virtue as a concept in a theory of morality.
27. Hence, it is ineffective to object that moral knowledge cannot be thought of as a skill because the aims of local skills are obviously optional. Nor does the analogy import the claim that the object of moral thinking is already fixed, as with local skills. Clearly, living your life in a good way is not an aim which can be clearly defined in advance, unlike, say, the aims of plumbing or car repair.
28. For discussion of these various factors, see Annas, "Virtue as a Skill."
29. The inconclusive "argument from relativity" is directed at "moral codes," while the "argument from queerness" is directed at objective values.
30. Mackie, Ethics, 41.
31. Cf. note 14 above, concerning the understanding of courage.
32. "Internalism" has been used for a variety of different positions; here I take it to be the position that fully to understand a moral requirement is to be (to some degree) motivated by it. See David O. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 45 ff.
33. For discussion of respect for the idea of moral learning, see the excellent comments in Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12-16.
34. "Must everyone in turn go through metaphysics as through a childhood disease? . . . No. . . . Every child can in principle learn to apply the language of physicalism correctly from the outset. . . . A new generation educated according to unified science will not understand the difference between the 'mental' and the 'physical' sciences, or between 'philosophy of nature' and of 'culture.'" Otto Neurath, "Unified Science and Psychology," in Brian McGumness, ed., Unified Science: The Vienna Circle Monograph Series (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel, 1987), 1-23. On page 8 Neurath says, without apparent irony, that he himself has long employed "an index verborum prohibitorum" such as "norm," "categorical imperative," and "intuition." Such is the world without Mackie's "errors."