As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve been on something of a break from writing here for the past few weeks (due partly to travel, partly to lack of motivation, and partly to wanting to spend some quiet time away from it). I don’t know whether I’ll feel like picking up on the rate of posting in the near future; I do know that I’ll probably be taking more time off about a month from now when I head off for summer work in New York (same thing as last year: I’ll be working for the Center for Talented Youth, TA’ing two courses in Logic for extremely gifted 12-16 year olds).

I’m trying to wean myself off posting Sorry I’m not posting posts; but my purpose here is a bit different anyway. While I may not have the drive to post much right now, I do at least have the energy to copy out things that people smarter than I am once wrote. Thus, I’ve been making some substantial progress in transcribing the third chapter of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica for online reading and citation. It’s not complete yet (Chapter III is one of the longest chapters in the book), but I am mostly keeping up a pace of a section a day or more; which means that if I keep a steady pace the chapter should be complete in under three weeks. (Knock on wood.)

Chapter III contains Moore’s extended treatment of ethical hedonism — that is, the theory that pleasure is the only thing good in itself (this is how Moore defines it, anyway; he claims that some hedonists might not agree to the formulation explicitly but that they have to rest on it at least implicitly for their arguments to go through). The first part of the chapter is an addendum to his treatment of naturalistic ethics in Chapter II: he attacks arguments for hedonism based on the naturalistic fallacy, using John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism as an example. (The case is mostly pretty convincing, although I think he is unfair to Mill toward the end and doesn’t adequately discuss Mill’s notion of goods that are desired as parts of happiness.)

That’s as far as I’ve gotten in my transcription of the chapter so far; but if you want a preview of what’s to come in the next few days, Moore goes on to consider whether hedonism can be defended on grounds of ethical intuitions, once defenses based on the naturalistic fallacy have been set aside. He argues no; this involves what I think are some of the best arguments in the book and a long consideration of Sidgwick (Moore’s ideas about the proper methods of ethical philosophy owe a lot to Sidgwick’s intuitionism; but Sidgwick thought that intuitionist methods supported hedonism, and Moore thinks they decisively refute it). Finally, he wraps up with some rather brief and unfair polemics against the two ethical schools that seem most commonly to be based on hedonist arguments–Egoism and Utilitarianism.

There’s a lot to complain about in the chapter, but also a lot to love; it’s certainly something that anyone engaging in ethics or moral psychology ought to read and engage with. Read, cite, and be merry!

Further reading

• GT 2004/12/19: One Moore for the free world: Chapter I of Principia Ethica is now online
• GT 2005/02/18: Philosophy Break

A couple of notes on the subject of philosophical follow-ups, before I skip town for the weekend:

1. After a brief hiatus, the effort to transcribe G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica for the web has reached another milestone: Chapter II of PE–Moore’s discussion of Naturalistic Ethics–has now hit the web. After doing the heavy meta-ethical lifting in Chapter I, Moore goes on to apply the tools that he has developed to questions of normative ethics. The most popular naturalistic theory by far–Hedonism–is left for a detailed treatment in Chapter III (which you’ll just have to wait for); Moore uses Chapter II as a place to first set out the options, and then systematically demonstrate the fallaciousness of attempts to ground ethical theory in appeals to (1) natural propensities and (2) the outcomes of Evolution. (The latter half of the chapter spends some time knocking Herbert Spencer’s ethical theory–which is, if nothing else, remarkable in that it’s one of the few examples of Hebert Spencer being criticized for dumb things he really did say.)

   There is at least one big gap in Moore’s argument: like most moderns, and most Analytics in particular, he doesn’t have much sympathy for teleology, and that hobbles his discussion of what natural might mean when we appeal to natural living or natural function in ethics. Moore shows that, if you’re using natural in the sense of statistically normal for your kind, or in the sense of necessary for life, the only way to make an ethics based on what’s natural for us even remotely plausible is by committing the naturalistic fallacy. But since Moore hasn’t got any real notion of teleology, he just doesn’t consider the meaning of natural that forms the backbone of the Aristotelian tradition in ethics–where what is good for us is made out in terms of what is suited to our nature, i.e., suited to the form of life of rational animals. I don’t actually think that a carefully framed naturalistic ethics in the Aristotelian sense would be in any conflict with Moore’s ethical non-naturalism. Moore has polemical reasons for wanting to distinguish his ethical position from naturalism, but the important thing for Moore is that ethical judgments aren’t reducible to descriptions of a situation’s non-ethical properties; but the Aristotelian appeal to nature always irreducibly involves an appeal to how creatures of so-and-so kind ought to be. So the only thing to fight over so far is whether irreducibly ethical properties ought to be called natural or non-natural; but that’s an issue of more interest to lexicographers than philosophers. In any case, Moore is mostly on solid ground throughout the chapter–and everything he has to say could be directed just as effectively today against the proponents of the oxymoronic doctrine of naturalized ethics, or those who think all you need to do to get your ethics to cook up some sociobiological story about how people came to have the particular sentiments that they actually do have.

   Anyway, you really should read the whole thing. Cite and be merry!

2. I’m heading South–straight to the Mississippi River, in fact–to present my essay on Hume and the Missing Shade of Blue for the 2005 Mid-South Philosophy Conference in Memphis, Tennessee. The draft I’ll be presenting is available online; I’d love to hear any comments, questions, applause, or brickbats you might have about it. (For the super-condensed version of the argument, there’s my post on an earlier draft of the same essay from back in October.)

I’ll see y’all once I’ve returned from my brief vacation in Tennessee. Enjoy the weekend!

I already did something like this a while back, but the instructions for this one are a little different, and I’m trying to force myself to stay in the habit of posting things. This time it comes from Philobiblon:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

I don’t actually know whether the book in front of me on the table or the books piled behind me on the windowsill are closer, but I don’t want to do the trigonometric calculations, so I’ve arbitrarily decided that “in front of” is closer than “behind.” Thus, we have The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, page 123, sentence 5 (in the midst of selections from The Principles of Art by R.G. Collingwood). Actually, the fifth sentence makes no sense on its own, so here’s the surrounding context, with emphasis on the fifth sentence:

Conversely, is a poem means to the production of a certain state of mind in an audience? Suppose a poet had read his verses to an audience, hoping that they would produce a certain result; and suppose the result were different; would that in itself prove the poem a bad one? It is a difficult question; some would say yes, others no. But if poetry were obviously a craft, the answer would be a prompt and unhesitating yes. The advocate of the technical theory must do a good deal of toe-chopping before he can get his facts to fit his theory at this point.

So far, the prospects of the technical theory are not too bright. Let us proceed.

Collingwood, here as elsewhere, is mostly on the side of the angels; this is part of a longer exposition of the theory of poetry-as-craft (that is, as the means to some end–here, the end of producing some state of mind in the audience), and directing some ire in particular against economistic and psychologistic reductions of art as the technique of fulfilling certain kinds of wants that consumers have, or offering stimuli that elicit desired or desirable reactions from the subjects (that is, you and me). (Of course, this is not to say that art operates outside the laws of economics or of human psychology; it is just to say that to understand the sort of value and the sort of behaviors that are associated with artworks–that is, to apply those laws in the case of paintings, poetry, music, and the rest–you have to understand how art works for us on its own. And understanding that, Collingwood argues, is not a matter of understanding any craft.)

Anyway, that’s my passage. Do it for yourself, and be merry!

P.S.: This is still not a meme. Because there aren’t any.

G.E. Moore is one of the most important, and the most overlooked, figures in Analytic philosophy. All too many historical surveys of early Analytic philosophy treat him as attached to Bertrand Russell‘s hip, and as soon as they have got done discussing their joint break with Absolute Idealism and offered a rather Russellian understanding of Moore’s work on Analytic method, they pretty quickly move on to talk about what’s taken to be the heavy-duty stuff: Principia Mathematica, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. All of this is too damn bad; for as valuable as the parts of Analytic method that Moore and Russell developed more or less in tandem are, there are in the end deep differences between Moore and Russell, in the motivations that led each to adopt Analytic method and the understanding of the aim and right method of philosophy that resulted for each. And I think that it is quite often (although perhaps not always) the distinctively Moorean picture that has something of lasting value to offer us today, even as very few Analytic philosophers can be found anywhere who actually adhere to most or even many of the strictures of the classical Moore-Russell program of conceptual analysis. (The reason why is, briefly, that Russell worked on analytic method from essentially Cartesian motives–his longing for certainty and his efforts to fight what he saw as an uphill battle against thoroughgoing skepticism, whether in his efforts to provide sure foundations for natural science, for everyday perceptual reports, or for mathematics. But Moore’s motives are, strange though it may sound, essentially Kantian; his work begins from the sure truth of the propositions of common sense, and does its best to carefully work out how that truth is possible. Even if the conclusions he ends up at are wrong–and they often are–the picture of philosophy he offers, unlike Russell’s, has much to say to us today–even to those who have set most of programmatic conceptual analysis to one side. It is also, I might add, perhaps the single most important uncredited influence on the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.)

In any case: Moore is left out too often when people are telling the story of early Analytic philosophy, and one of the unfortunate side effects is that there is very little of Moore’s philosophy available on the web, even though many of his most influential works have now entered the public domain. But I’m happy to announce a milestone in my own effort to undo a bit of that neglect: the first Chapter of Moore’s Principia Ethica is now completely transcribed and available online (it’s one of the inaugural projects at the Fair Use Repository; more about that, soon). The chapter–entitled The Subject-Matter of Ethics–is probably the best-known of all of Moore’s work on ethics; it contains his (in)famous Open Question Argument and discussion of the Naturalistic Fallacy; it also more-or-less single-handedly inaugurated Analytic meta-ethics. It is now freely available, in beautiful semantic XHTML, for you to read, search, cite, and reprint as you see fit.

In celebration of the occasion, I have also put up a copylefted draft of one of my own essays on Moore, Closing the Question About the Open Question Argument. It’s an attempt, first, to get clear on just how the Open Question Argument works, and, second, to assess its import for meta-ethics in light of important criticisms by Peter Geach. Although I think that Geach’s criticism is vitally important, I argue that important gaps remain in his account, which are best plugged by considerations from Christine Korsgaard’s work on normativity–and, at the end of the plugging, we will have found ourselves coming back closer to Moore’s account than we might have thought. Comments are welcome..

Enjoy!

For those of you who know me only through my online presence, you should be aware that I did not, in fact, commit suicide out of despondancy over the results of the November 5 elections. Nor have I become a reclusive monk (as much as my tastes may run in that direction). Instead, my weblog has simply been on a prolonged hiatus because of a couple months of nearly non-stop academic work and a blissful bit of reclusive relaxation for the week afterwards.

I just wanted to wish everyone a peaceful and happy holiday season, and to let you know that I shall return to posting more regularly in the very near future (whether this means before the New Year or not will depend on how long it takes me to revise certain essays of mine). In any case—talk to you again soon.

In the meantime, consider this bit of correspondance from Paul Feyerabend to his frequent partner in debates over philosophy of science and methodology:

Dear Imre,

You have powerful allies in this country: Ayn Rand (know her?) is after me. She wrote a long article against a short (three and a half pages) article of mine, and sent copies to 4,000 philosophers in order to prevent American philosophy from deteriorating further. Sample: the author (i.e. me) heralds the retrogression of philosophy to the primordial pre-philosophical rationalism of the jungle . . . But what is innocent and inexplicable in an infant or a savage becomes senile corruption when the snake oil, totem poles, and magic potions are replaced by a computer …

You must admit, she writes much better invective than you.

(from Lakatos, Imre and Paul Feyerabend, For and Against Method: Including Lakatos’s Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondance. Quoted in Gregory R. Johnson and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, "Ayn Rand in the Scholarly Literature," The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 3.1)