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Posts filed under Ethics

Philosophical progress

A couple of notes are in order about new philosophical material on the web. First, I’ve put up some new new material at Philosophy, et cetera; and second, I’ve put up some new old material at the Fair Use Repository.

First, my new new material: Richard Chappell of Philosophy, et cetera generously invited me to contribute some guest posts while he was away at a conference. Here’s the results, such as they are:

Second, there’s quite a bit of new old philosophical material now available at the Fair Use Repository. One of my initial projects for the Fair Use Repository was to increase the availability and visibility of G. E. Moore’s philosophical writing; beginning with a freely available transcription of Principia Ethica (1903) and, after half a year and several atrocious puns on G. E. Moore’s last name, moving on to two other notable works on ethics. The scriptorium has been busy since then, too; the public domain Mooreana now available to the free world now includes:

There’s also lots of new old stuff to peruse besides Moore. Here’s a quick attempt at a break-down:

  1. Bertrand Russell, The Elements of Ethics (1910) is available in full. The essay attempts to sketch out the outlines of a theoretical ethics, based on by Russell’s reading (sometimes his misreading, but what else is new?) of Principia Ethica.

  2. Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (1903): Russell’s first great labor towards a logicist account of mathematics. As of today, Preface, Chapter I: Definition of Pure Mathematics, Chapter II: Symbolic Logic, and Appendix B, Russell’s first full statement of the Theory of Types, are available in full online.

  3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, review of of Professor Coffey’s The Science of Logic (1913): the first public record of Wittgenstein’s philosophical views (and one of only three works on philosophy published in his lifetime); this is a merciless review of a logic textbook, written at the invitation of The Cambridge Review in late 1912 and published in early 1913, while Wittgenstein was still an undergraduate at Cambridge. The original (which has apparently not survived) was written in German, and then translated into English by Wittgenstein, with the help of his friend David Pinsent.

  4. T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics (1884): transcriptions of the Analytical Table of Contents (which summarizes the argument of the entire book), the Introduction, the (enormous) first chapter, and Book III Chapter I are now available online.

  5. Lewis Carroll, What the Tortoise said to Achilles (1894) and A Logical Paradox (1895): Lewis Carroll published two articles in the philosophical journal Mind on logical paradoxes (interestingly, he published them as Lewis Carroll, rather than as Charles Dodgson). One of the articles, What the Tortoise said to Achilles, is discussed vigorously to this day. The other, A Logical Paradox was a hot topic in philosophical logic for about 10 years or so after its publication; today it’s almost unknown because people took it for granted that material implication had solved the problem. (Try reading it and see if you feel any intuitive pull towards the paradox.) Still, if there are good reasons to doubt that material implication does a good job of capturing the meaning of conditional statements, there may also be good reasons to start trying to get into the puzzle again. In any case, both articles are now available online.

  6. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912): James’s elaboration and defense of radical empiricism, the doctrine of a world of pure experience. Ralph Barton Perry’s editorial Preface and James’s first essay, Does Consciousness Exist?, are available in full online.

There’s more where that from. Stay tuned!

Happenings Elsewhere

I have some material coming down the pipe that I’ve been chewing on for a while — a little bit on philosophy, some stuff on copyrights and contracts, and some stuff on the nature of law. Plus some announcements about various things of varying interest. But my aching feet are going to keep me from getting to it today. So, in the meantime, here’s some things that I’ve had going on elsewhere:

Bloviating elsewhere

  • Tonight at No Treason, I dispute Stefan’s claim that tyrants and murderers often have satisfying lives (in any sense of the word satisfying that matters), and argue (with Plato) that being a tyrant is actually the most miserable kind of life. (The point is related, somewhat, to some similar remarks I made against some utilitarian arguments over at Philosophy, et cetera.)

  • Over at Kevin Carson’s Mutualist Blog, Kevin discusses land theft against farmers in modern history, and I follow up in comments by debating with P. M. Lawrence over land ownership, homesteading, and slavery. I defend the radical notion that the Southern plantations should have been expropriated from the slave-drivers’ illegitimate control, and distributed amongst the former slaves, after Emancipation. (It should have been distributed not as reparations for slavery — although the former slaves also deserved those — but rather because freed Blacks were the rightful owners of the land that they had lived and worked on all their lives.) Lawrence objects on several fronts; I defend.

  • At Project for the New Anarchist Century, I object to Jeremy Sapienza making shit up about the civil rights movement and Rosa Parks in particular. We go on to debate the historical significance of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

  • At Alas, A Blog, I object to several commentators saying, over and over again, that society causes any number of conditions that make rape and other forms of violence against women, as if society were some looming presence outside of us. In fact it just is us. And refusing to recognize this snuffs out any questions we might have about just who, among the men and women that make up society, does most of the things that constitute a rape culture. (Here’s a hint: it is not, for the most part, women.)

Howard Dully and My Lobotomy on NPR

Meanwhile, NPR recently broadcast a riveting and heartbreaking audio documentary, My Lobotomy by Howard Dully. At age 12, diagnosed with nothing worse than being a difficult child, Dully was one of the youngest victims of Walter Freeman’s ice-pick lobotomy. It turns out that the complaints were nothing but a pack of lies, but even if they weren’t, the senseless mutilation of his brain would have still have been an atrocity. In any case, Dully somehow survived with his faculties mostly intact, and is able — unlike so many of Freeman’s other victims — to search for answers about his suffering and to tell his own story. Dully also talked about his experiences some more on Thursday’s Talk of the Nation. It’s not stuff you can enjoy listening too, really, but it is stuff that you should listen to. And listening to it is not a burden; while not pleasant, the tale is compelling, chilling, and, sadly, real.

Further reading

The Naturalistic Fallacy, Illustrated

You might wonder why I put in so much time over the past few months transcribing G. E. Moore’s ethical works for use on the web. Well, I did it because it was needed. Consder the following page, clipped from the most recent Dell catalogue:

ad copy: Dimension(tm) 2400 and Dimension 3000: The definition of value.

Someone at Dell clearly needs to be sent a copy of Moore’s Open Question Argument: what more explicit example of the Naturalistic Fallacy could you find?

Insert silly pun on G. E. Moore’s last name here: Principia Ethica and Ethics are available in full online

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but other projects (some of them tangentially related, others not) delayed the happy announcement for a while: not only one, but two of G. E. Moore’s chief works on Ethics are available online, in full, for your reading and citing pleasure. As you may have already known (cf. GT 2005-07-11, GT 2005-06-28, GT 2005-06-01, GT 2005-02-18, GT 2004-12-19), I spent eight months off and on (mostly off) plugging away at a full transcription of Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903). I polished off Chapter VI: The Ideal back in August, meaning that the Fair Use Repository‘s copy of PE is now complete.

What you may not have known is that I also took some of the free time that I had at the end of the CTY session to knock out a complete transcription of Moore’s 1912 follow-up to PE, which he gave the inventive title of Ethics. (The hat tip for the idea goes to Roderick Long and Kelly Jolley, who mentioned the book to me and also expressed their pious hopes that an anonymous somebody-or-another might just happen to put the book online.)

Ethics is rarely read today, probably much more rarely than should be the case. Not because of its earth-shaking influence: no responsible history of contemporary philosophy could be written without a discussion of Principia Ethica; but it’s unlikely that even a history of the major developments in Analytic philosophy during the 1910s would take much notice of Ethics. (In fact, even folks writing specifically about Moore’s ethics mainly seem interested in Ethics only insofar as it illuminates, qualifies, or modifies his positions in PE.) And the scholarly neglect may very well be perfectly just. Ethics is neither as influential or as ambitious a book as Principia Ethica, and if your chief interest is telling the story of how early Analytic philosophy developed and how it bears on contemporary philosophy, Ethics is not going to be the most pressing item on your agenda. That’s all true, but of course it would only prove that you oughtn’t bother reading it if the only good books were influential books. The fact is indeed that Ethics is a much quieter book than Principia Ethica is; but that means only that it is quietly brilliant, where PE is obviously brilliant.

What’s so nice about Ethics is how clearly it exhibits Moore’s approach to ethics, and to philosophy as a whole: his extremely careful approach to philosophy, his precision, and most of all his apparently inexhaustible intellectual patience. There are some wonderful things that PE has and Ethics lacks–most noticeably, it lacks anything corresponding to PE‘s sustained discussion of the Naturalistic Fallacy, which Moore had made the center of his argument back in 1902. But what it lacks in treatments of specific topics, it more than makes up for in its method. Especially remarkable highlights are Chapter III and Chapter IV on The Objectivity of Moral Judgments, which contains what Kelly rightly described as one of the most subtle and suggestive treatments of relativism in the literature, and which are remarkable not because of some flashy or brilliant technical apparatus that Moore unleashed on the intellectual landscape, but rather just because he takes it so damn slow and draws out, in ordinary language and with an extraordinary amount of care and intellectual good faith, just what the relativist might want to say and just how it systematically fails to capture what we’re actually doing when we think about, talk about, or act on moral principles. The stuff is simply brilliant.

Ethics makes the third complete work of G. E. Moore which has been made available through the Fair Use Repository. (Besides Principia Ethica, there is also Moore’s 1903 review of an English translation of Franz Brentano’s The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong.) Since finishing up with Ethics, my two main projects for the Repository have been (1) transcribing some new works–at the moment, T. H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics (which is cited in passing in Principia Ethica, and was quite influential on English moral philosophy at the turn of the century, but is now almost impossible to find outside of academic libraries), and several articles from fin-de-siecle issues of Mind–and (2) improving the script that slices and dices data for the works in the Repository — so that, for example, it can represent the structure of a book like the Prolegomena to Ethics. Expect to see more soon–and in the meantime, read and enjoy!

Pet Peeves

There’s quite the debate raging over at Catallarchy, in reply to comments condemning Harry Truman as a terrorist as bad, or worse, than Osama bin Laden:

My view is the direct opposite of what they teach in government run schools. They teach that Truman’s action [the use of atomic weapons] was a heroic choice that saved many American lives. With a similar line of reasoning, a friend of mine argued that the massacre of civilians during war may be justified if the reward is high enough. He hesitated to make a judgment in the particular instance of Harry Truman’s wartime actions, claiming that the good of saving American troops at least partially offset the bad of incinerating Japanese homes and families.

Many other men have used logic similar to Truman’s supporters to justify attacking civilian targets to further national objectives. However, I don’t think my American friends would hesitate to condemn their actions because they don’t bat for the home team.

For example, the name Osama bin Laden has taken its place among Hitler and Satan in the pantheon of evil. The reason? He thinks freeing the Arab world from Western imperial influences is important enough to sacrifice civilian lives. We might call him the Harry Truman of the Middle East.

As most Americans condemn bin Laden for putting civilians in harm’s way, so too do I condemn Truman. If bin Laden is a terrorist, then so is Truman. In fact, Truman’s actions are more indefensible because eventual victory was available through conventional military means. For bin Laden, direct military action, against the most feared armed force in all of history, is out of the question.

Americans have a perverse and dangerous view of their place in the world. Until we realize that our civilians are not worth more than other country’s civilians and that our leaders do not operate within a sacred halo that allows them to turn ugly sins into holy acts, America will continue to be a source of great suffering.

Now, I think that Jacob is right on here, and that the shameless apology for mass murder, as long as it happens under the Stars and Stripes, may very well be the most sickening feature in all of American education. But the fish I want to fry today is meta-ethical, not political, so if you want to argue about the massacres at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, etc., feel free to do so, but the point I want to call attention to is actually off to one side of the debate. Here’s a comment in the thread from Dave, howling in protest (emphasis added):

Jacob’s post is about moral relativism gone out of control. Maybe next this libertarian will compare Timothy McVeigh to Murray Rothbard because both harbored anti-government feelings. Look at the passive posture he wants the United States to assume. …

And blah, blah, blah.

I pick this out because it highlights a pet peeve of mine. The Right–thanks to the influence of the Christian Right and fundamentalist ideas about the nature of secular modernism–have been throwing around the phrase moral relativism in public debate over the past ten or twenty years, and every year that goes by they seem to get further and further from having any clue at all what it means. Here we have a particularly dramatic case in point: not only is there there is absolutely nothing in Jacob’s post which either entails or even suggests moral relativism. In point of fact, Jacob’s comments demand that moral relativism be rejected, and that moral principles be applied universally, rather than applied ad hoc depending on your relationship to the agent being judged.

It’s no sin not to know meta-ethical theory, but if you’re going to use the terms, you ought to know what they mean. Moral relativism does not mean being lax about taboos that you shouldn’t be lax about; far less does it mean drawing a mistaken comparison in ethics. Moral relativism is the doctrine that one and the same action can be both right and wrong at the same time–that is, that questions of moral value can only be answered relative to some frame of reference that can change from one judgment to the next. For example, some people have believed (wrongly) that whether an action is right or wrong depends on whether the person making the moral judgment has a feeling of approval or disapproval towards it; other people have believed (also wrongly) that whether an action is right or wrong depends on whether or not the person making the moral judgment lives in a society in which the action is generally praised, generally condemned, or generally considered neutral. (For an excellent discussion of, and critical reply to, actual moral relativism, see Chapter III of G. E. Moore’s Ethics [1912].)

Now, Dave might think that Jacob’s moral principles (for example, that deliberately slaughtering thousands or hundreds of thousands of civilians in pursuit of your goals is wrong, no matter what) are mistaken. I don’t think they are, but that’s not the point here. The point is that Jacob is insisting on principled ethical judgments (even if you think the principles are wrong) and he is not claiming anywhere, ever, that the applicability of those principles is relative to the speaker’s feelings, or culture, or relation to the person carrying out the slaughter, or relation to the victims, or anything of the sort. Quite the contrary; he’s insisting that moral principles, which he claims we insist on in bin Laden’s case, ought to be applied absolutely and for everyone. That’s an outright rejection of relativism and the excuses for atrocities that relativism so happily provides.

On the other hand, I can’t say the same for these comments:

If you don’t believe that your country’s citizens are worth more than the citizens of other countries — that is, entitled to live even if it means the death of citizens of other countries — I don’t want to be in the same foxhole with you.

But of course the comments come not from Jacob, but from the hawkish Tom, in protest of Jacob’s point. The implied conclusion — that subjects of other States shouldn’t be treated as though they have as much of a right to life as the subjects of your own State — is a textbook case of moral relativism. (Specifically, in this case, the claim that fundamental moral obligations, like the rights of innocents not to be burned alive as a sacrifice for others, can only be decided relative to the relationship between the you and the victim–if you are subjects of the same State then it is not O.K., but if you are subjects of different States, then anything up to and including dropping a fucking nuclear bomb on their heads is, apparently, acceptable.) Maybe Jacob’s principles are right and maybe they’re wrong; but he is employing principles, and insisting that they are universally binding. Tom, on the other hand, is explicitly stating that moral principles are binding relative to one group of people and mere breath relative to another. Yet it is Jacob, not Tom, who is denounced as a moral relativist; this is nothing but darkening counsel with words without knowledge.

The kind of argument that Tom uses is, of course, a method of excuse used all the time by the Right: the idea that any means at all are acceptable in warfare, because our moral obligations end at borders on a map, and so the pursuit of victory can trump any and every other moral consideration. Of course, just saying that a view is relativist is not the same thing as saying that it is false; maybe there are some good arguments for relativism. I haven’t found any, and I think there are decisive arguments against it, but it’s an open philosophical topic. But my concern here is about the proper use of terms, and about consistency; if you are going to support a bloody and unapologetic form of relativism, then you had better argue for it, and you had better not pretend that you’re opposed to it. Yet it seems that somehow the self-appointed arch-nemeses of moral relativism never do get around to condemning this sort of blatant disregard for universality in ethics–perhaps because their situation is as the Prophet has written: We have met the enemy, and they is us.

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