From thick to thin: Two moral reduction plans

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 39, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 515-535

  Elstein, Daniel Y ^a   Hurka, Thomas ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950254583     PISSN: 00455091     EISSN: 19110820     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cjp.0.0063     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. See, e.g., Christine Tappolet, 'Through Thick and Thin: Good and its Determinates, ' Dialectica 58 (2004) 207-20
2. See, e.g., Jonathan Dancy, 'In Defense of Thick Concepts, ' in Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy XX: Moral Concepts (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1996), 263-79
3. John McDowell, 'Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 52 (1978) 13-29
4. 'Virtue and Reason, ' The Monist 62 (1979) 331-50
5. and 'Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following, ' in S. H. Holtzman and C. M. Leich, eds., Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1981) 141-62
6. The acceptance of supervenience and denial of universalizability come in 'Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following, ' 144-5
7. McDowell, 'Virtue and Reason, ' 332
8. We do not of course claim that adherents of the reductive view typically accept uncodifiability; most reject it. Our claim is just that if uncodifiability applies to thin as well as thick judgments, it cuts no ice against the reductive view
9. McDowell, 'Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following, ' 144
10. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1985), 130, 141-2
11. See, e.g., Dancy, 'In Defense of Thick Concepts, ' 263-4
12. Hilary Putnam, 'The Entanglement of Fact and Value, ' in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2002) 28-45, at 34-40
13. Charles Taylor, 'Ethics and Ontology, ' Journal of Philosophy 100 (2003) 305-20, at 305-6
14. and Tappolet, 'Through Thick and Thin, ' 213-17
15. Simon Blackburn has implicitly denied it, when he argues that most proposed thick concepts are purely descriptive, with no specific evaluations built into their content. 'Frugal, ' for example, while often a term of praise, is the opposite when used of a host dispensing hospitality ('Through Thick and Thin, 'Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 66 (1992) 285-99, at 285-7). While this is a possible response to the disentanglement argument, we will follow a different tack and grant both that thick concepts have specific evaluations built into their contents and that their extensions depend on evaluations
16. C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press 1944), 206-7
17. R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1952), 121
18. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1963), 121-9
19. and Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984), 148-9
20. McDowell and Williams sometimes blur the distinction between the intended and actual extensions of a thick concept, which can make their positions seem relativist. Our formulations are meant to avoid any hint of relativism by clearly separating the claim that a speaker's intended extension for a thick term depends on his evaluative beliefs from the claim that its actual extension depends on evaluative truths. Our defense of the reductive view could be mounted with respect to either claim, but for clarity's sake we keep them separate
21. See Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1982)
22. Stephan L. Burton has proposed an analysis of thick concepts that also involves partial indeterminacy but locates it in a different place. He reads 'x is F' as 'x is good for having some instance of properties X, Y, and Z (for specific X, Y, and Z), ' where other instances of the same properties need not make what has them good ('"Thick" Concepts Revisited, ' Analysis 52 (1992) 28-32). For many terms the specified properties will have to be disjunctive, for example, 'is an equal distribution, or one proportioned to merit, or...' But Burton denies that one can specify, even in principle, any narrower property such that all and only the instances of X, Y, and Z that do make things good have that property. Whatever property one selects, even one as specific as equality, some instances of it will be good-making while others are not. Apparently influenced by McDowell's argument about uncodifiability, Burton here denies universalizability; his analyses may therefore appeal to those who likewise reject it. But we wish to retain universalizability, as Sidgwick, Hare, and others did, and therefore take a different line. We do not hold, as Burton does, that the sense of a thick term fully specifies a set of properties; it leaves them partly indeterminate. But there is always some property that fully determines the term's extension, in the sense that all and only instances of it are in the relevant way good-making
23. Scheffler, 'Morality Through Thick and Thin: A Critical Notice of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Philosophical Review 96 (1987) 411-34, at 417-18
24. Allan Gibbard, 'Thick Concepts and Warrant for Feelings, ' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 66 (1992) 267-83, at 280-1
25. Though Gibbard's analysis of 'lewd' makes it involve evaluations of the agent, it does not refer to her motivations but seems to concern only her acts and whether, motivation apart, they exceed some limits. For us this makes Gibbard's 'lewd' not a virtue-concept but one suited to the first pattern of analysis and explicable using 'wrong.'
26. Putnam, 'The Entanglement of Fact and Value, ' 38
27. The Oxford English Dictionary defines 'cruelty' as involving 'delight in or indifference to another's pain'; our refinement builds those psychological elements into the term's analysis
28. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 142
29. See Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value (New York: Oxford University Press 2001) for such a defense
30. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan 1907), 392-3
31. Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press 1907), vol. 1, 59
32. W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1930), 161
33. For an argument of this type, see Ross, The Right and the Good, 135
34. Some versions of the anti-reductive view may deny that such independent judgments of goodness are possible, since all thin judgments derive ultimately from thick ones. But these are more radical versions of the anti-reductive view than are commonly defended
35. We owe this second response to Simon Kirchin
36. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980), 1096a2