Why can't moral thought be everything it seems?

Philosophical Forum

Volumn 33, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 373-391

  Crary, Alice ^a  

^a NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949143183     PISSN: 0031806X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9191.00001     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1985). p. 135
2. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin, 1977), pp. 38-42
3. Central contributors to this "Cornell School" include Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, and David Brink. A somewhat different externalist realist position is developed by Philippa Foot in Virtues and Vices (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978). It is noteworthy that in more recent work, Foot champions a non-externalist realism more congenial to the position described in this paper
4. See esp. Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001)
5. The label "response-dependence" stems from Mark Johnston, "Dispositional Theories of Value," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 63 (1989), pp. 139-174. There is already a vast literature on response-dependent accounts
6. For a selection of discussions by some of the accounts' most outspoken champions, see Roberto Casati and Christine Tappolet (eds.), Response-Dependence: European Review of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 1998)
7. See Simon Blackburn, "Circles, Finks, Smells and Biconditionals" in James Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 7: Language and Logic (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 259-279
8. see also pp. 104-119 of Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
9. See, e.g., Philip Pettit and Frank Jackson, "Moral Functionalism and Moral Motivation," Philosophical Quarterly, 45 (1995), pp. 20-40, esp. pp. 22ff
10. and Michael Smith, "Response-Dependence Without Reduction" in Casati and Tappolet (eds.), op. cit
11. For a helpful discussion, see Blackburn, Ruling Passions, op. cit.. pp. 112-119
12. Ethics, op. cit., p. 38
13. The classic defense of such primitive noncognitivisms is given in chapter VI of A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1952), esp. pp. 102-114. I have doubts about whether Ayer is right to attribute the pertinent kind of primitive ethical outlook to some of the logical positivists, such as, e.g., Moritz Schlick, for whom he claims to speak. But I cannot discuss this topic further here
14. "Subjective and Objective," in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 196-214, p. 206
15. Williams' most detailed discussions of the narrower conception are in Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (London: Penguin, 1978)
16. Williams goes on to revise this familiar philosophical account of the conditions of objectivity. He claims that a specification of sufficient conditions of the objectivity of a judgment's content needs to mention - not merely that a person can arrive at knowledge of that content, but, moreover, that a person can arrive at objective knowledge of it. He proposes this revision because he holds the peculiar view that we can have genuine knowledge of non-objective properties. (See, e.g., "Who Needs Ethical Knowledge?" in Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers 1982-1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 203-212.) However, this idiosyncrasy of Williams' need not concern us here
17. For discussion of these different cases and some of the relevant literature, see Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, "Moral Theory and Explanatory Impotence," in Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 256-281, esp. pp. 263-266
18. The example is from Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 6-7
19. See David Wiggins, "Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism and Motivating Moral Beliefs," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 91 (1991), pp. 61-85, esp. p. 67
20. The classic contemporary discussion of how the case of mathematics disrupts the idea of a "causal criterion" is Paul Benacerraf, "Mathematical Truth" (Journal of Philosophy, vol. lxx, no. 19, 1973), pp. 661-679
21. For an influential discussion of the idea of this sort of "explanatory criterion," see Harman, op. cit., pp. 1-10
22. See TLW, pp. 55-59
23. See, e.g., TLW, pp. 101-102
24. Bernard Williams develops this line of thought in "Truth in Ethics," in B. Hooker (ed.), Truth in Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 19-34, esp. pp. 28-30
25. See David Wiggins, "Objective and Subjective in Ethics, with Two Postscripts about Truth," in ibid., pp. 35-50, esp. pp. 42-44. Wiggins' comments here are a reply to the paper of Williams' cited in the last note
26. "A Sensible Subjectivism?" in Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 185-211, and pp. 201-202
27. For a critique, see John McDowell, "Non-cognitivism and Rule-Following," in Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 198-218
28. Simon Blackburn acknowledges this demand for separability in "Through Thick and Thin," a contribution to a symposium on "Morality and Thick Concepts" (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 66, 1992), pp. 285-299
29. Blackburn's acknowledgement is particularly noteworthy because he explicitly withholds it in earlier writings. See, e.g., "Rule-Following and Moral Realism," in Steven Hotzman and Christopher Leich (eds.), Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 163-187. The latter paper is a response to the paper of McDowell's cited in the last note
30. See, e.g., R. M. Hare's analysis of the concept "courage" in Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), §10.1
31. Classic Anglo-American examples of (what I am calling) wider moral objectivisms include Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), esp. Part Three
32. Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), esp. chapters 11-15
33. John McDowell, Mind Value and Reality, op. cit, esp. Parts I and II
34. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: ARK Paperbacks, 1970)
35. and "Vision and Choice in Morality," in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 76-98
36. Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983)
37. and David Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truths, op. cit.. Noteworthy recent contributions to this body of literature include Diamond, Ethics: Shifting Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)
38. and Lovibond, Ethical Formation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)
39. I explore this possibility in detail in "Does the Study of Literature Belong within Moral Philosophy? Reflections in the Light of Ryle's Thought" (Philosophical Investigations, vol. 23, no. 4, October 2000), pp. 315-350