Tom Swann Joyce Morality Schmorality
Joyce - Morality, schmorality
why is it bad to be bad? - why does being morally bad have a deleterious effect on self-interest?
against semantic noncognitivist, against pragmatic noncognitivist, against realist
possibility of global error theorist. or about all normative phenomena >>>How possible? there are no reasons for anything - even this view?<<<
moral error theorist thinks we can make sense of actions harming or advancing our own welfare, and so in this sense can continue to talk of prudential oughts.
so it will be prudentially good to be good or bad, because nothing is good or bad.
fictionalist reading. treats moral terms merely as determinants of extensions
but what falls in the extensions? intractable disagreement is prevalent.
Bloomfield’s argument. shows at best that there is something self-damaging about pleonexia. Joyce thyinks most wrong-doers don’t think what they are doing is evil. regret it. not always selfishly motivated.
ill founded expectation to be able to go from the extreme case to ordinary wrongdoing a little bit of wrong doing wont necessarily frustrate your interests. a little bit of compartmentalisation is ok.
argument from self-injury shows at best that there is a fault thinks “I deserve more because I am me”. but this is incoherent, bloomfield thinks
an argument demonstrating the irrationality of wrongdoers is something that Simon Blackburn has described as the “holy grail of moral philosophy”
not obvious how being irrational is to harm oneself
“That someone who cheats slightly on his taxes, or is needlessly discourteous to the taxi driver, is suffering from schizophrenia, that he must endure the anxieties of dissimulation, that he is missing the ’the joy of seeing things as they actually are”that he is leaning towards any of these wretched states even slightly’are, at best, optimistic claims in need of empirical support.
Of course there is a kind of satisfaction that comes from a job done with moral integrity; but there is also a satisfaction that comes from getting away with something. Of the people who have experienced both, of course there are some who prefer the first kind of pleasure; but there are also, I’ll wager, some who prefer the second kind. "
“Do true beliefs always bring this joy?”
Humean!<<<
just the joy of knowing how one compares? Bloomfield’s opponent only needs to deny this occurs to anyone in any situations.
“Embracing a moral error theory rationally eliminates from one’s serious practical deliberations certain kinds of justification: One can no longer, for example, refrain from doing something because one believes that it is morally forbidden. But it implies nothing about what actions one should actually perform (or refrain from performing).”
Richard Garner puts it: ‘The amoralist need not be an immoral, heartless, selfish jerk who denies the obvious’ (1994: 279).)
On the contrary, for most people, in most ordinary situations, it is fair to assume that a proper sensitivity to such non-moral considerations is likely to favor acting in accordance with (what most people think of as) moral requirements.
footnote 9: “We mustn’t be distracted by the fact that such emotions as love and generosity are often called ‘moral emotions.’ If they warrant this label it is in virtue of the fact that they are considered morally praiseworthy, but it is clear that one can have these emotions without making any moral judgment.”
not sure that this is right, if we look at the etymology<<<
“What the error theorist does not do is epistemically endorse any morality. I say ‘epistemically endorse’ so as to exclude certain pragmatic ways in which a morality might be ‘endorsed,’ such as approving of its practical output (agreeing that one ought not break promises, ought not steal, etc.), or acknowledging that the institutions of morality are instrumentally beneficial.”
Error theorist might be because there is no answer to the question “how ought one to live?”, where ‘one’ is the general plural.
to give an answer is to endorse a morality? error theorist will deny this amounts to an “epistemic endorsement of morality”.
imagine an atheist facing the charge that insofar as he thinks there is a way we ought to live then he is actually a theist.
“the moral error theorist also thinks that to endorse any moral system requires subscribing to some substantive (and, presumably, ‘metaphysical,’ in some broad sense of the word) theses, and it is in virtue of her disbelief in these theses that she is a moral error theorist.”
fine with prudential normativity, but this cannot be the moral.
error theorist precisely because the concept is so confused?
footnote13: Witters 1965 on moral language as nonsense, similies for something we can’t seem to state. yet he also wants to hold on to it.
“let us say that in prudential normativity the self-harm is primary’it is what makes the action imprudent.”
Nazis were “horrendous” but not their actions not morally wrong, or right or permissable. the suggestion that an SS guard involved in the camps does wrong only in so far as he harms himself is “appalling”.
appalling to what? our grasp of the concept?<<<
B can be an adequate contender for A discourse if it can be used in the same way.
“Thus we are not forced to the radical position that every pre-Einsteinian assertion of two events occurring simultaneously is false. By comparison, when we discovered that there are no diabolical supernatural forces in the universe, we had no further use for the concept witch.”
We didn’t discover this, it just became nearly impossible to reasonably believe it.<<<
when is near enough?
Lewis’s account undermined by the fact that its relativism would undermine moral rhetoric.
what can the error theorist do with moral concepts?
eliminativism
face Quine (in a tone of disgust) characterized as engaging in ‘philosophical double talk which would repudiate an ontology while simultaneously enjoying its benefits’ (1960: 242). Joyce claims this is an ad hominen.
“Hume’s Pyrrhonian, who, it will be recalled, cannot live his skepticism because ‘nature [is] too strong for it’ ([1740] 1978: 657).”
cost-benefit analysis? but what are the options?
“The option of carrying on as if nothing has changed’of continuing to assert moral propositions and to hold moral beliefs even while maintaining moral error theoretic commitments’is surely a non-starter, for the kind of doxastic schizophrenia involved in such a life not only violates epistemic norms, but can be expected to lead to various kinds of pragmatic handicap.”
fictionalism!
“Hans Vaihinger: An ideal whose theoretical untruth or incorrectness, and therefore its falsity, is admitted, is not for that reason practically valueless and useless; for such an idea, in spite of its theoretical nullity, may have great practical importance. (1935: viii)”
“adopting a policy of employing moral language, engaging in moral deliberation, and being moved by moral emotions, but throughout it all remaining disposed to deny the truth of any moral proposition if pressed in an appropriately serious manner (e.g., when in the philosophy classroom), thus not really believing any of it (thus not violating any epistemic norms), and thus deflating a host of well-thumbed philosophical problems concerning the ontology of moral facts and our access to them.”
how can this work? how can we engage in moral deliberation without presupposing that we’re looking for truth?<<<
Joyce admits the burden of the error theorist is to make out a kinda of "attitudinal acceptance other than belief
##Objections to fictionalism.
- “the claim is that if the error theorist agrees that talking and thinking in moral terms is justified on prudential grounds, then he has provided morality with all the justification that it needs.”
cultivating altruism and love for selfish reasons.
“One can be selfishly motivated to become a less selfish person, and may succeed.”
but this doesn’t address the question?<<<
- no distinction between belief and acceptance.
to act as if something were the case without believing it. Acting, for example.
but this is to present the appropriate behaviour in a particular, namely theatrical context.
two contexts of use. the critical context (when doing metaethics).
“Context n is more critical than context m if and only if n is characterized by a tendency to scrutinize and challenge the presuppositions of m, but not vice versa.”
but there are many ways to do this? different dimensions of criticality?<<<
the fictionalist wants to find partners in innocence
acceptance without belief in: novels, acting, empathy,
first of all, I think there’s more knowing-how than knowing-that in these cases.
still, taking ‘belief’ to mean how we take the world to be in a broad sense that can allow that we take the world to be some way in all matter of practical dealings, and that we know-how to take the world to be some way in the stricter sense of making a judgement, I think these are disanalogous to what morality as a fiction would have to do. see next objeciton Joyce considers
in reading a novel one imagines things like what it would be like to be the characters, how one would respond if in their situations or if inserted into the situation. our emotions are stirred as our imaginations either pull into view in various lights different aspects of our real situation, to make a statement, or pull into action the structures of possible experience, to tell a story. but we act on this only, if at all, if such imaginings lead us to judge something about our own situation.
in acting, our non-belief acceptances motivate certain actions only because of beliefs about what we hope to achieve by doing so, by which the actions motivated are regulated. in whatever sense and to whatever extent one might enable and then let the acceptances take on a life of their own, the actor becomes the possible person they imagine.
in empathy, one imagines what it would be like to be in someone’s situation, but in the hope of knowing what it’s like for someone else, that is to gain some accurate beliefs, and moreover in order to respond from one’s own perspective, with action if called for.
MMMM… there was something I was getting at here, but it eludes me.
in the novel case, the acceptances are epiphemonenal to action. (intended to be. need not. but where not, this is via beliefs about our own situation.) acting, the acceptances are epiphenomenal to belief empathy, the acceptances are epiphenomenal to neither.
so only acting is a candidate analogy. <<<
->how can engaging in a fiction motivate one to act?
the fictionalist seems to be asking us to be motivated to do what we think we must do when we take on a way of thinking that is unjustified.
“how taking a fictive attitude towards a set of norms and values could possibly engage motivation in this way. But that is an empirical question that I don’t propose to discuss here (see Joyce 2001, 2005, 2006);”
Humean psychology, where beliefs and desires are distinct but contingently linked states.
“Whether the fictionalist stance is psychologically feasible, and whether it will supply the promised pragmatic gains, remain serious empirical uncertainties.”
think of what “just must be done”