British Ethical Theorists 0013: Roger Crisp's demon

If you are trying to defend desirism, and you come across somebody who has a good idea of what she is doing, she is going to summon Roger Crisp's demon. This is not a demonic version of Roger Crisp. This is a demon that Crisp discovered that threatens to be the bane of "ought to desire" theories everywhere.

More specifically, you are going to tell this person that a good desire is a desire that people generally have reason to promote. This is because the desire tends to fulfill other desires. Consequently, those with the "other desires" are going to have reason to see it promoted.

After she gets done laughing hysterically and she catches her breath, she is going to say the following.

"Here, let me summon Crisp's Demon. Crisp's Demon is going to torture people mercilessly if they do not admire President Trump. (Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that President Trump is not the type of person that one would generally regard as being admirable.) To say that Donald Trump is admirable is not to say that people admire Trump. There are certainly people who admire him. However, for Trump to be admirable he would have to be somebody that deserves admiration - something that people have a reason to admire. Well, if Crisp's Demon threatens to torture people unless people admire Trump, then people have a reason to admire Trump. If they have a reason to admire Trump, then they ought to admire Trump. And if they ought to admire Trump, then Trump is somebody that people ought to admire. Right?"

By the way, this objection comes from: Crisp, Roger (2000). “Review of Jon Kupperman, Value…and What Follows.” Philosophy 75: 458–62.

Clearly, for Trump to actually be admirable, he would have to have those qualities that make him worthy of admiration. Threats against those who do not admire Trump are the wrong kinds of reasons - they do not make Trump admirable. Yet, desirism states that for Trump to be admirable, it must be the case that admiring Trump is such as to fulfill other desires - such as fulfilling the desire to avoid the pain that Crisp's Demon would inflict if we did not admire Trump. So, desirism promotes the wrong kinds of reasons.

One response is to say that, even though one might not like Crisp's Demon, this is, in fact, where many of our values come from. Crisp's Demon is named "Evolution", and Evolution simply killed people who valued certain things while he let other creatures live. Those who had an aversion to certain sensations that indicated disabling damage to the body lived, those that did not have his aversion died. Those that liked the taste of ripe fruit and fresh meat lived, and those who liked the taste of rotten food died. Those who liked to take care of their offspring had offspring that had their own offspring, those who did not are now extinct.

Evolution gave us a reward system that works the same way. Reward/praise people who tell the truth and punish/condemn those who lie, and you end up with a population that values telling the truth and has an aversion to lying. If you currently view lying as something bad - if you have an aversion to lying - it is likely because Crisp's Demon has rewarded you in the past for honesty and punished you for lying. If not you personally, then you learned it by experiencing others (some real, some fictional) being praised and rewarded for honesty and punished and condemned for lying.

A second response to this problem is that different value-laden terms answer the four questions of value differently. The four questions are: given the standard use of the term, (1) what is the standard object of evaluation, (2) what are the relevant desires in question, (3) does the standard object of evaluation fulfill or thwart those desires, and (4) does it fulfill or thwart those desires directly or indirectly?

When we talk about admiration, we are evaluating character traits. We are asking if those traits are traits, if they were made universal, would tend to fulfill desires. An admirable trait could fulfill desires directly or indirectly - that part does not matter. The most powerful influence would be the tendency of the trait, if made universal, to fulfill desires indirectly. Direct fulfillment of desires simply would be too small to count for much.

So, given that "admiration" is based on "having a trait that people generally have reasons to promote universally," the question becomes whether the demon can make a trait one that people generally have reason to promote universally. If a trait could actually be made a trait that people generally have reason to promote universally, then it could be made admirable. However, in the real world, there are a great many reasons not to promote universally Trump's bigotry, dishonesty, arrogance, foolishness, and intellectual recklessness. Imagine if everybody were like Trump.

British Ethical Theorists 0012: Ought to Desire

Introduction

Desirism is concerned centrally with what an agent ought to desire. in fact, it says that this is the central question of morality. Praise and condemnation, right and wrong, virtuous and vicious, all are to be interpreted, in one way or another, on what an agent ought to desire.

Thomas Hurka in his book British Ethical Theorists reported that the British Ethical Theorists had a lot to say on this topic.

The overall program for the BETs (according to Hurka) was to reduce moral concepts to the smallest possible number. In general, this set of philosophers tended to settle on two basic concepts: "good" and "ought". This is made explicit in W.D. Ross's famous book The Right and the Good.

However, there were some who tried to reduce this to one basic concept. This required either understanding "the right" in terms of "the good" and vica versa.

"Ought to desire" fits into the attempt to reduce "the good" to "the right". Hurka attributed this move particularly to A.C. Ewing. For Ewing, for something to be good is for it to be that which it is fitting to desire. In other words, to say that something is good is to say that one ought to take a pro-attitude towards it. So, we can eliminate "good" from our vocabulary and replace it with "ought to desire".

The difficulties that they had with this tells us things that desirism needs to take seriously.

Please note that "ought to desire" does not mean "does desire". The BETs were not defending a subjectivist theory that states that the goodness of something depends on the agent wanting it. On their account, it was quite possible that a person "does desire" something that they "ought not to desire".

However, this leaves us with a question, why is it that somebody ought to desire something? If we say that the agent ought to desire it because it is good, then we have a problem. Now, our definitions are circular. We are saying that "good" can be explained in terms of "ought to desire", and that an agent "ought to desire" something because it is good. If we are going to make "ought to desire" work, we need to get it out of this vicious loop.


Desirism and "Ought to Desire"

Desirism, of course, has a concept of "ought to desire." Furthermore, what an agent ought to desire may be different from what the agent does desire. An agent cannot search her feelings to decide what is right and what is wrong. The agent has to find moral ought in the world. Here, desirism shares something with Ewing's theories - an assumption of moral facts.

The way that desirism handles the concept of "ought to desire" is easier to explain when we focus on something that is wrong and towards which a person ought to have an aversion. Let us use as our exemplar the wrongess of lying. Within desirism, to say that lying is wrong is to say that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote, universally, an aversion to lying. Of course, it can be true at the same time that (1) people generally have many and strong reasons to promote an aversion to lying, and (2) Donald lacks an aversion to lying. So, there is no necessary connection between what an agent ought to desire and what he does desire. No person can "search his feelings" (or his attitudes) and expect to flawlessly determine what is wrong.

Furthermore, though the BETs sought to reduce everything to a basic moral term, desirism does not have a basic moral term. Desirism seeks to reduces all of morality to non-moral natural properties. The descriptive entity "desire" is the foundation for all value, and all value claims get reduced to claims about relationships between states of affairs and desires. As I wrote in The Good, "good" = "is such as to fulfill the desires in question." At the same time, "Agent ought to do X" gets translated into "there is a reason for Agent to do X" which, in turn, is understood as "there is a desire that would be served by Agent's doing X." Note that there are different types of "ought" for different types of "desires in question." There is "prima-facie ought" (a specific desire), practical "ought" (all of an agent's desires), and "moral ought" (the desires of the agent with good desires and lacking bad desires). Good desires are, of course, the desires that people generally have reason to promote universally, which means that they are the desires that tend to fulfill other desires regardless of whose they are. Everything, as I said, gets reduced to desires. That is why it is called "desirism".

Now that we have a basic idea of how the BETs and desirism think of the concept "ought to desire", let us look at what the BETs said on the subject and how they effect Desirism.


Agent Relative Ought to Desiredness

The BETs were concerned with the relative importance of values to different individuals. For example, let us assume that I promised to pay Mary $100. We would say that there is a goodness to be found in my paying Mary the money I promised to pay her. However, it would make no sense for this to be an intrinsic agent-neutral goodness. If it was, everybody would have the same obligation to make sure that I pay Mary $100 as I have. However, this implication is absurd. Consequently, the goodness of following an obligation cannot be agent neutral.

In British Ethical Theorists 0010: Intrinsic Rightness, I discussed the fact that my obligation to keep my promise to pay you $100 can have a different amount of value for me than it does for you. At least, it ought to provide me with far more motivation to pay the $100 than it provides you to make sure that I pay the $100.

Desirism handles this by including indexicals in its desires. The desire that people generally have reason to promote universally is the desire "that I keep my promises". This will motivate each person to keep their promise, but does not give any person any reason to make sure that others keep their promises. This is different from promoting a universal desire "that promises be kept" - which would motivate each agent to make sure that each promise is kept no matter whose it is. The latter version would be an unrealistic desire to promote universally. It would require that we condemn all people universally for each promise that is broken - and that simply is not practical. Consequently, we adopt the practice of punishing and condemning people only for their own unbroken promises.

From this, we also get the active/passive distinction. There is more wrong in killing somebody than there is in letting that person die. Utilitarian theories have trouble with this idea. Utilitarianism measures the value of an act from its consequences. The consequences of letting a person die are just as bad as the consequences of killing somebody. In both cases we suffer the loss of an innocent life. However, desirism focuses on desires that people generally have reason to promote universally.

Imagine living in a world where you were expected to feel just as bad about every person that has ever been killed as you may feel towards a person that you killed yourself. To create this rule, we will have to take up the practice of condemning and punishing everybody equally for every person who is killed. In fact, we would have to punish everybody as if they were guilty of murder. The reasons people have not to do this far outweigh any reasons they may have to establish such a system.


Ought to Desire, Goodness, and Order of Explanation

Another problem that the BETs addressed with respect to "ought to desire" concerns the "direction of explanation". Hurka states this common objection to the "fitting attitudes" account of "ought to desire" that Ewing (in particular) promoted as follows: "It is natural to say ‘you ought to desire x because x is good’ but not ‘x is good because you ought to desire it’, though the opposite should be true given the fitting-attitudes view."

Our natural way of understanding things is to say that something is good and, in virtue of its having this quality of goodness, people with properly tuned senses would desire it. In other words, they ought to desire it. We use goodness to explain "ought to desire." We do not us "ought to desire" to explain "goodness".

Desirism throws the direction of explanation out the window entirely. It does not say that agents ought to desire P because P is good. Nor do they say that P is good because it is something that agents ought to desire.

Instead, desirism states that people generally ought to desire P because desiring P is good. Note the difference here. In one case, we say that an agent ought to desire P because P is good. But the view for desirism is that we ought to desire that P because the desire that P is good. And why is it the case that the desire that P is considered good? It is because the desire that P tends to fulfill other desires. This property of the desire that P is what gives others reason to promote that desire universally by praising those who exhibit the desire and condemning those who do not.

For example, people ought to have an aversion to lying. It is not the case that they ought to have an aversion to lying because lying is bad. Nor is it the case that lying is bad because it is something that people ought to have an aversion to doing. Rather, people ought to have an aversion to lying because there are reasons to promote (universally, in this case) an aversion to lying.

Looking back to the concept of "ought to desire", this account states that Agent ought to desire that P is to be understood in terms of "there are many and strong reasons to promote a desire that P".


Conclusion

The BETs say more about "ought to desire", but this is enough for one blog posting.

It identifies a couple of important characteristic. First, we saw how desirism explains the agent-relative nature of certain duties such as keeping a promise. Desirism asks what a person with good desires and lacking bad desires would have done in the circumstances. Sometimes, the relevant circumstances would include "I made a promise." The aversion to breaking promises applies to the person who made the promise and no others.

It also pointed out an error of trying to understand "ought to desire that P" in terms of the value of P instead of in terms of the value of "desires that P". Once we realize that "ought to desire that P" asks if there are reasons for promoting a desire that P, we see that the solution is to look for reasons to promote or inhibit a desire that P.

British Ethical Theorists 0011: Admiration

There is a view in metaethics that holds that “X is good” is reducible in some way to “Agent(s) ought to have a positive attitude towards X”

I say “Agent(s)” because this thesis takes two forms. In one form, X’s value is intrinsic and independent of the agent. In these cases, all agents should have the fitting attitude towards X. In the other form, X’s value is relative to the agent in such a way that it is fitting that different agents have different attitudes towards the same object.

I discussed this in the previous post, "Intrinsic Rightness" using the example of my keeping my promise to pay you $100 (a promise that is still hypothetical, so don’t expect to see any money). My fitting attitude towards the state of paying you $100 is more demanding than anybody else’s fitting attitude.

As Thomas Hurka reported in his book British Ethical Theorists, Ewing argued that different objects demanded different fitting attitudes. Some things were “ought to be desired”, some were “ought to be admired in a non-moral sense”, and others were “ought to be admired in a moral sense”.

Hurka wrote that, “[Ewing] was unsure whether moral admiration is irreducibly distinct from other forms of admiration or differs only in its object, which is an action with volitional qualities such as devotion to a good end.”

Desirism provides an easy answer to the “Admiration” question. Admiration is a form of praise. It aims to promote the behavior being admired, not only in the agent, but in others. There is a difference between those traits that we have reason to promote universally, and those that we do not. In the first sense, we can admire the person for his honesty or generosity. Honesty and generosity are dispositions we have reason to promote universally, so this counts as moral admiration. There are other traits that we seek to promote, but not universally. One example of this would be the piano player or the gymnast, who we can admire (and praise) non-morally.

We do not tend to use the term "admiration" in its moral sense for everybody moral actions. For example, we do not admire the person who walks into a store and walks about again without shoplifting, even if a clear opportunity presented itself. We do not admire those who queue up to get on the bus (though we condemn those who cut in line). Instead, moral admiration tends to be attached to the types of actions that are generally called "supererogatory" or "above and beyond the call of duty."

Desirism defines a supererogatory act as one that people generally have reasons to promote universally but, because of human nature, simply cannot expect to get reasonably close to that level. The person who donates a kidney to a stranger, for example, has gone above and beyond the call of duty. Our world would be better off if we could promote that level of charity universally. However, no matter how strongly we praise people who perform such actions and condemn those who do not (recognizing that we would have to hold ourselves in contempt if we do not do that which we promote universally), we can never expect to succeed. Consequently, we praise the action in order to promote the dispositions, but we do not condemn its absence expecting that this would do more harm than good.

In this analysis, we are going to have to recognize a possible distinction between what we do admire and what we ought to admire. There may well be people who admire President Trump. Yet, to say that Trump is admired is not to say that he is admirable (or that he "ought to be admired"). To admire Trump is to praise and, thereby, to promote and encourage lying, intellectual recklessness, bigotry, arrogance, and a number of other traits that - as a matter of fact - people generally have many and strong reasons to discourage universally. When this is the case, we can truly say that the person admired is not admirable. That is to say, the person with the traits that people are promoting universally both has traits that people actually have no reason to make universal, and lacks traits that they do have reason to make universal.

If we take "admirable" as "having those traits that people ought to admire" or "having those traits that it would be good for people to admire" or "having those traits that it would be right for people to admire," we need to provide some account of this quality "ought to admire", "good to admire", or "right to admire". I am going to address this in my next post about what an agent ought to desire.

British Ethical Theorists 0010: Intrinsic Rightness

In Thomas Hurka's book British Ethical Theorists, Hurka has the British Ethical Theorists (BETs) presenting an impressive argument against the idea that doing one's duty is intrinsically good.

To be clear, we are talking about an argument against a particular interpretation of this intrinsic goodness, but it is an important interpretation. This is the view that promise keeping, for example, can have a type of agent-neutral intrinsic value.

It is important to note that if something has intrinsic value, then this value does not depend on its relationship to anything else. The intrinsic value of something - like its mass - is the same no matter who encounters it. The standard method that I have used to deny the existence of these types of things has been to use an "Occam's Razor" approach. I have no use for them - they do not exist. The argument that I am going to consider here says that, at least in the case of ought, they fail to make sense of our use of moral terms.

To illustrate this point, let us assume that I have promised to pay you $100 by next Tuesday. Don't get excited, this is just a thought experiment - it isn't real. Because I made this promise, I have an obligation to pay you $100. Paying you $100 would be be a good thing. My not paying you $100 would be a bad thing.

Is this goodness or badness an intrinsic value property?

Hurka presented this view in discussing a point of debate between Henry Sidgwick and G.E. Moore. Sidgwick held that obligations could be agent-relative. Egoism held that each person could pursue their own good - that each person's good was of particular value for him. Moore thought this was absurd - that if something is actually, honestly good then it has agent-neutral goodness.

It is hard to see how an object can have this kind of property ‘for me’ but not ‘for you’, or ‘from my point of view’ but not ‘from yours’. Surely it either has the property or not. Compare being square. An object cannot be square for one person but not for another; it either is square or not. (It can look square to one person but not to another, but looking square is different from being square.) The same is true of goodness if that is unanalysable, which means the only duty to promote the good must be agent-neutral. (p. 57)

However, if this were true, then my obligation to keep my promise would have this agent-neutral value that would be the same no matter who was viewing it. If it has this agent-neutral value, then my obligation to pay you $100 would correspond to Agent3's obligation to make sure that I pay you $100, which would correspond to Agent4's obligation to make sure that Agent3 made sure that I paid you $100 (because Agent 3's obligation would also represent an agent-neutral value).

However, these implications seem quite absurd.

By the power vested in us by the rules of logic, if A implies B, and B is false, then A must be false as well. If the murderer had red hair, and Agent5 does not drive a red car, then Agent5 cannot be the murderer. Applying this principle to the argument above, if obligations have agent-neutral intrinsic value, then everybody is obligated to see that they are carried out. It is absurd to hold that everybody is obligated to see an obligation carried out. Therefore, obligations do not have agent-neutral value.

This means that obligations must be agent-relative. As Hurka put it, "my keeping my promise is a greater good from my point of view than it is from other people’s." (p. 57).

Desirism has no problem with agent-relative duties. The right act is the act that a person with good desires (the desires that people generally have reason to promote universally) and lacking bad desires (desires that people generally have reason to inhibit universally) would have done in those circumstances. One of the relevant circumstances is the circumstance, "I have made a promise." If a person makes a promise, a person with good desires and lacking bad desires would keep it. However, there is no reason to promote universally a desire for everybody to keep their promise that would be nearly as motivating. This would be overkill and overburden everybody. It is best that those who made the promise take the responsibility for ensuring that it be kept.

The main point of this essay has been to dispute the claim that keeping a promise has agent-neutral intrinsic value. I hold that such things do not exist. Even if they do exist, we clearly are not talking about such a thing when we discuss obligations as we typically understand the term in English. Certainly, when I make a promise to give somebody $100, I am not thereby creating an agent-neutral good that suddenly binds everybody to the commitment of making sure I pay that $100. If that were the case, we would quite quickly loathe anybody who ever made a promise.

Metaethics 0002: C. L. Stevenson - Emotivism

In the beginning, I was told that "emotivism" is a non-cognitivist moral theory. This means that it does not allow for the possibility of moral facts. As such, I dismissed it. Any theory that implies that there are no moral facts is flawed (since there are moral facts) and must be rejected.

I have learned that this first impression is mistaken. I do not claim to be mistaken in thinking that there are no moral facts - there certainly are. My mistake is in thinking that the existence of moral facts was not compatible with emotivism. Many of the things Stevenson argued for are true. The claim that it is incompatible with the existence of moral facts is not true.

Something Stevenson Gets Right: Moral Claims Seek to Cause Influence

Moral statements are not only used to report facts, but to alter the behavior of others. He describes this fact particularly in contrast to theories that state that value claims report interests - of the form "I like X". When we make a value claim - particularly a moral claim - a part of our objective is to get other people to have the same attitude.

Their major use is not to indicate facts, but to create an influence. Instead of merely describing people's interests, they change or intensify them. They recommend an interest in an object, rather than state that interest already exists.

Desirism fully agrees with this. The moral terms "right" and "wrong" are, in part, statements of praise and condemnation. Insofar as this is true, they offer rewards and punishments in the psychological sense. The reason to offer rewards and punishments in this sense is to trigger the reward systems of others into forming motivational rules, encoded in the brain. These rules (desires and aversions) dispose agents to repeat that which is praised and avoid that which is condemned.

This story of influence is not exactly what Moore had in mind. Moore wrote about a more direct and immediate type of influence - to touch upon the hearer's sympathies, likes, and dislikes. He talks about two agents having a dispute over whether to go to a movie or a concert, each bringing up facts that touch upon the other's sentiments in such a way as to dispose them to accept the activity that the other proposed. In another case, Stevenson wrote:

A, for instance, may try to change the temperament of his opponent. He may pour out his enthusiasms in such a moving way-present the sufferings of the poor with such appeal that he will lead his opponent to see life through different eyes. He may build up, by the contagion of his feelings, an influence which will modify B's temperament, and create in him a sympathy for the poor which didn't previously exist.

There is nothing in desirism that disputes this. Stephenson may be right, as far as this analysis goes. Desirism would simply add that Stephenson has not gone as far as he should on this matter. He is ignoring the ways in which a society-wide disposition to praise those who perform certain types of actions and condemn those who do not are meant to have effects beyond or outside of the scope of immediate persuasion. The effects are larger and systematic.


Something Stephenson Gets Wrong: Motivational Judgment Internalism

One of the main things that Stephenson gets wrong is his endorsement of motivational judgment internalism. Effectively, this states that a person can only talk about relationships between objects of evaluation and their own desires. Talking about relationships between objects of evaluation and desires other than his own is, if not impossible, at least not done. Phrased as I have put it here, this motivational judgment internalism seems absurd. And I find it to be absurd. Nonetheless, it is a very popular belief.

Let me present it in a less derogatory way. Typically, when a person says that something is good it is because he is, in some way, motivated to bring it about. If he says that it is bad then he is motivated to avoid it. This is because the agent's motivation is built into the judgment that something is good or bad. A person who uses the term "good" to refer to something he is not motivated to bring about does not understand the meaning of the term - is not using the term correctly. The same is true of somebody who uses the term "bad" to refer to something he is indifferent towards. Indeed, we would consider it quite odd to hear a person say that he agrees with us with respect to our judgment, but does not agree with us in terms of motivational inclination.

One of my arguments against this has to do with the type of reasons that people accept when disputing a moral statement. If "X is wrong" implies "I am motivated to prevent X" is true, then we can prove the moral claim to be false by proving that the conclusion is false. For example, if "slavery is wrong" implies "I am motivated to put an end to slavery," then "I am not motivated to put an end to slavery" would imply "slavery is not wrong." Yet, we do not involve evidence of an agent's lack of motivation as proof that what he wants to do is permissible.

This becomes a matter for desirism since desirism holds that the moral evaluation of action concerns relationship between acts of that type and what a person with good desires and lacking bad desires will do in those circumstances. These are things that an agent can know, assert, and argue about. Yet there is no necessary connection between, "Action1 is that which a person with good desires and lacking bad desires would do," and "The person making the assertion has the relevant good desires and lacks the relevant bad desires." Consequently, there is no necessary connection between the rightness of an act and the motivational state of the agent.


Something to Discuss: The Relationship between the Descriptive and Prescriptive

Stephenson is considered a non-cognitivist. Desirism is a cognitivist moral theory - there are objectively true and false moral facts. Consequently, there must be another point of disagreement between the two somewhere.

Stephenson seems to assume that descriptive statements and emotive-causal statements are mutually exclusive. Desirism denies this - and holds that both elements can exist in the same statement. Assume that somebody picks up your computer and begins to walk away with it. You may shout at him, "Hey! That's my computer!" In tone, you condemn that person. However, the statement that you utter is a proposition capable of being true or false. It has a fact value. So, here, you have a descriptive statement and an emotive causal statement wrapped up in the same utterance. More importantly, the two features are related. If your the agent can refute the factual component, one of the implications is that he has undermined the justification for the condemnation.

We want to know how people can have a moral disagreement. This is one way. Where praise and condemnation are wrapped up in fact-bearing propositions in such a way that the truth of the proposition is a necessary condition for justifying the praise or condemnation, two agents can dispute the justification for the attitude by disputing the truth of the proposition.

The most direct way to link the two - the praise or condemnation with the factual component of the proposition - is to allow the relevant fact to be, "people generally have reasons to praise/condemn those who perform the type of act that you performed." Now, if you can disprove the factual claim, you can show that there is no reason for the praise or condemnation that the speaker had mixed into the accusation. "What you did was wrong" becomes "What you did is something that people generally have many and strong reasons to condemn." From this, "It is not the case that people generally have many and strong reasons to condemn what I did" implies "What I did was not wrong."

However, note that this analysis is at odds with the motivational judgment internalism mentioned in the previous section.


Conclusion

For the reasons mentioned here, I have gone from thinking that Stevenson's non-cognitivist emotivist theory was completely mistaken to thinking that he made a significant contribution. The non-cognitivism was wrong. However, his thesis that moral claims are used for more than to report facts was accurate. Moral claims are used to cause changes. We now know - more precisely than Stevenson did - how they cause changes. Praise offers rewards and condemnation offers punishments that act on the reward system to encode dispositions of behavior that makes it more likely that the agent will do that which was praised and avoid doing that which was condemned. Stevenson was wrong to claim that we can only use moral terms to talk about how things relate to our own motivation. He was also wrong for his failure to recognize that factual statements can have emotive-causal content whose justification depends on the factual statement being true. But he was right (or mostly right) on the reason people make moral claims.

Metaethics 0001: A.J. Ayer - Non-Cognitivism

This series of posts will concern the topic of the second course I am taking this semester - Metaethics. The text we are using is Cahn, Steven and Forcehimes, Andrew (eds), Foundations of Moral Philosophy: Metaethics, Oxford University Press, 2017. Consequently, the postings that I will be making will be based on the entries in this anthology. This text book comes with "study questions" at the end of each entry, so I will be using those in constructing these postings. However, I intend my answers to be a bit more than one would usually expect in response to such study questions as I intend to analyze and assess the answers not only in terms of whether they are correct, but whether the correct answer has any merit.

Our first assigned reading from this book is an excerpt from: A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover Publications, 1953). A.J. Ayer argued that "normative thoughts are not cognitive".

What does that mean?

This means that, if you come across somebody who says, "People should be willing to give at least 10% of their income to charity" isn't saying anything that is like a statement. It is neither true nor false. Ayer wrote, "Statements of value are . . . expressions of emotion that can neither be true nor false." He does think that we can make meaningful statements about the meanings of moral terms. In fact, that is the project Ayer is engaged in with this essay. The claim that "statements of value can be neither true or false" is a statement that can be true, but it is not a statement of value so there is no contradiction here. It is a statement about value terms but it is not an evaluation.

But when it comes to moral claims, Ayer asserts, "The exhortations to moral virtue are not propositions at all, but ejaculations or commands which are designed to provoke the reader to action of a certain sort." As such, the study of moral claims does not even belong to philosophy - since they are not "definitions or comments on definitions." Utilitarianism concerns happiness and unhappiness - which is a proper object for psychological study, but not philosophical study. Subjectivism has to do with feelings of approval and disapproval - something else for the psychologist to study. However, here, we should note, that the psychologist may study how a person feels about something - whether he approves or disapproves - but cannot answer any questions about what he SHOULD approve or disapprove of. And "should" is the term that is under investigation here. This is the term of normative thoughts. This, according to Ayer, is why utilitarianism and subjectivism cannot say anything about ethical terms. They can give a proper analysis of "is" but not of "should".

Desirism, of course, holds that moral statements are truth-bearing. A statement like "People should be willing to give at least 10% of their income to charity" can be true because "People generally have many and strong reasons to condemn and, perhaps, to punish those who do not give 10% of their income to charity" is true. So, desirism is a cognitivist theory. Ayer would say that this is a mistake.

Interestingly, Ayer states, "It is worth mentioning that ethical terms do not serve only to express feeling. They are calculated also to arouse feeling, and so to stimulate action." This is something that desirism would agree with, in a way. "Right" and "wrong" are statements of praise and condemnation that are supposed to act on the reward systems of others in such a way so as to form aversions to doing that which is called wrong and desires to do that which is called right.

So, the study questions:


According to emotivism, do those who say stealing is wrong thereby say they disapprove of stealing?

First, Ayer says that such a statement is ambiguous. It is possible to use the term "wrong" in a descriptive or an anthropological way - as when an anthropologist says that something is taken to be wrong within a particular culture or society. This use of "wrong", of course, does not say anything about the approval or disapproval. Furthermore, Ayer states that moral claims are non-cognitive, but the proposition "I disapprove of stealing" is a cognitive statement. It has a truth value - capable of being true or false. Ayer states, "sentences which contain normative ethical symbols are not equivalent to sentences which express psychological propositions, or indeed empirical propositions of any kind." But "I disapprove of stealing" is a psychological proposition. Consequently, Ayer would have trouble reducing my statement "stealing is wrong" to the statement "I disapprove of stealing."

Indeed, Ayer states, "The orthodox subjectivist does not deny, as we do, that the setences of the moralizer express genuine proppositions. All he denies is that they express propositions of a unique non-empirical character. His own view is that they express propositions about the speaker's feelings. If this were so, ethical judgments clearly would be capable of being true or false. They would be true if the speaker had the relevant feelings and false if he had not."


According to Ayer, why are moral judgments unanalyzable?

Ayer argues in the form of a dilemma. Either moral absolutism is true, or moral naturalism is true.

We must reject moral absolutism because we have no way to resolve moral disagreements. If "slavery is wrong" is a moral absolute, then there must be some way to resolve conflicts between different views. There is no way to resolve conflicts, so we must reject absolutism. Ayer considers the option that our moral intuitions give us knowledge of the moral facts. However, different people have different moral intuitions and we still have no way to verify the intuitions - to show which are correct. Because we cannot resolve these disputes, we must reject absolutism.

We must reject moral naturalism because empirical claims are merely descriptive, rather than descriptive. These are the claims of psychology, which tells us what a person feels or what makes him happy, but cannot answer "should" or normative questions.

Because we must reject both absolutism and naturalism, according to Ayer, we must admit "that the fundamental ethical concepts are unanalyzable, inasmuch as there is no criterion by which one can test the validity of the judgments in which they occur." (Though, I think, Ayer does not literally mean 'validity' but 'truth').


According to Ayer, is argument over moral issues possible?

The term "argument" is ambiguous. In fact, people get into arguments over moral issues all of the time (and Ayer admits this). What Ayer denies is that the moral disputes are resolvable. When one person says that something is wrong and another says that it is not wrong it is as if one person sneezed and another person coughed. There is no "dispute" between them whereby they can resolve whether either the sneeze or the cough was incorrect. When people have these disputes, they are often over matters of fact. Did the agent actually make a promise? Was there collusion? Did the payments violate campaign finance law? Of course, these types of questions can be resolved. However, when the dispute boils down to the actual value claim, "Our judgment that it is so is itself a judgment of value, and accordingly outside the scope of argument. It is because argument fails us when we come to deal with pure questions of value, as distinct from questions of fact, that we finally resort to mere abuse."

Of course, desirism holds that this "abuse" is condemnation - which is the proper form of conduct to use to generate - through its activation of the reward system - a disposition to form correct patterns of behavior (promote good desires).


Assessment

One of the observations that Ayer admits to is the fact that we seem to treat moral statements as genuine propositions capable of having a truth value. When we say that slavery is wrong, we mean by this "slavery is wrong" is true. We are not just sneezing or coughing at slavery. We hold that those who hold a different view are mistaken. We could be wrong about this. However, a principle of charity suggests that, all else being equal, a cognitivist theory that makes the sense of these observations is better than a theory that dismisses them. The theory that fits the observations best is the theory that holds that moral claims can be objectively true or false. Against this, Ayer challenges critics to simply provide examples of how moral arguments can be resolved. This cannot be done in a short paragraph. However, I will assert without proof that understanding moral disputes as disputes over what people generally have many and strong reasons to praise or condemn goes a long way to answering Ayer's challenge.

British Ethical Theorists 0009: Acting for the Right Reasons

Thomas Hurka reported in his book British Ethical Theorists that the British Ethical Theorists (BETs) believed that rightness is independent of motives.

There is a sense in which this is true. The rightness of an act is independent of the motives that an agent had at the moment of action. This is because the right act is the act that a person with good desires and lacking bad desires would have performed in those circumstances. Whether this is true of an agent is independent of the motives the agent actually had. Any thesis that requires that a right action be done from a particular motive is mistaken.

However, the BETs made a mistake that is common even today. They make an unwarranted inference from “the rightness of an act is independent of the agent’s motive in performing that act” to “rightness is independent of motive.” This does not follow.

Desirism holds that the rightness of an act depends on the motives (reasons) that other people have for praising or condemning those who perform acts like that in circumstances like those. While this makes the rightness of an act dependent on motives, it also makes the rightness of the act It allows us to It is This is true in the way - rightness is independent of the agent’s motives.

Hurka reported that H.A. Prichard and W.D. Ross "gave two arguments why rightness is independent of motives." (p. 46)

Doing The Right Thing Because it is Right

The first argument was, "directed against the view that a right act must be done from a motive of duty or a desire to do it because it is right." (p. 46) On this, Pritchard and Ross were right. Let us assume that it is true that it is not only the case that Agent1 ought to do Act1, but that she ought to do Act1 because it is right.

So, Agent1 is standing there wanting to do the right thing. Because she is wanting to do the right thing, once she finds out what it is, she will perform that action. Her desire to do the right thing, plus her belief that Act1 is right, brings her to do Act1. However, if “Act1 does not become the right action until it is done from the right motive, then how does she determine that it is the right action. It will not become the right action until it is done for the right motive, and it cannot be done for the right motive until the agent knows that it is the right action.

Desirism, as already stated, allows Agent1 to determine whether the action is right or wrong independent of her own motives. She can then perform the action because (she believes) that it is right so long as she has a desire to do the right thing. But the action remains the right action no matter what her reason is for performing it.

Acting from the Right Motive

Hurka reported that Pritchard and Ross had a second argument for their position. However, I will show below that it did not support their position very well.

On this argument, “acting from the right move” requires making a conjunction true. This conjunction is “doing the right thing” and “having the right motive”. In order to make a conjunction true, the agent has to be able to make both conjuncts true. Of course, an agent has the power to make “do the right thing” true. However, the agent does not have the power to make “having the right motive” true. Because of the power of “ought implies can”, if the agent cannot make one of the conjuncts true, then it is not the case that the agent ought to make the conjunction true.

This objection fails because “can” is not limited to what is immediately under an agent’s direct control. You cannot disprove the claim that I ought to lose a few pounds by showing that I cannot will, at this very moment, to be a few pounds lights. Similarly, you cannot disprove the claim that I ought to learn French before heading to France on a long vacation by showing that I cannot command myself in a moment to speak French.

The “oughts” in this case refer to adopting a program that will eventually come to make it the case that I am a few pounds lighter or can speak French. Similarly, the “ought” of “having the right motive” would not violate “ought implies can” if it is within the agent’s power to adopt a program to adopt a particular motive. Another way of describing this is that the agent ought to cultivate a particular virtue (good motive) or ought to conquer a particular vice (bad motive).

There is a set of activities where it is extremely easy to make the conjunction mentioned above true. Assume that I ought to smoke cigarettes out of a craving for nicotine, or take opiods out of a strong desire to take the drug. Here, we have a simple course of action that would allow me to make both conjuncts true – that I am smoking a cigarette or taking opioids, and that I am doing so because of a particular motive. All I have to do is start taking the drug and its addictive nature will cause me to come to take the drug because of my addiction.

In the case of cultivating a virtue, the program I adopt may not be so straight forward. First, if I resolve to act like I have a virtue – to imitate the behavior of a virtuous person (for whatever reason I may do so), this may generate the habits that are associated with having that character. I can learn to be a speaker of French by imitating a French speaker – choosing the correct verb tense by a careful application of the rules I have memorized and translating what I hear into English – until it becomes habitual and I speak (and understand) French without effort. If I were to adopt these types of programs with respect to the virtues I can come to a case where I tell the truth because of my honesty or keep my promises because of my trustworthiness.

Conclusion

As I mentioned above, I do not believe that a person has any duties to peform any actions for a particular motive. There are cases where, if a person does not have the motive, then he should not perform the action. But this is philosophy, and we are supposed to aim at believing things for the right reasons. The problem of circularity when it comes to doing the right action because it is right provides a good reason to reject that principle. However, the argument that we cannot have an obligation to act from a particular motive must be rejected because we cannot will our motives is not such a good reason. We do have the power to will our motives – it just takes a bit of effort, like losing weight or learning a foreign language (which, themselves, may be things we ought to do).

British Ethical Theorists 0008: The Ought vs. The Good

What is the relationship between what an agent ought to do and what is good?

I have already reported on Thomas Hurka's thesis that the British Ethical Theorists (BETs) he discusses in his book British Ethical Theorists were conceptual minimalists. devotes a section to the moral language of those British Ethical Theorists (BETs).

Ultimately, these theorists spent most of their time discussing two basic, core terms: ""Ought" and "Good". Some of these BETs thought there was only one basic term. For example, Moore, at least in his book Principia Ethica, said that what a person ought to do is bring about the most good. W.D. Ross in his famous book The Right and The Good argued that these two basic concepts were both exactly that - basic - and it was not possible to reduce one to the other. In a third type of case, A.C. Ewing defined "good" in terms of "that which you ought to bring about" or "that which it is fitting for you to bring about."

Hurka noted that, for the BETs, "good" referred to just about anything, but "right" (or "what one ought to do") tended to refer to actions or things under voluntary control. Something can be "good" or "bad" even though we lack the ability to influence it. For example, last year's "good" or "bad" harvest. However, when we use the term "ought", at least in the moral sense, we are talking about something that is within an agent's power. If you ought to repay a debt, this implies that you are able to repay the debt. In fact, there is a famous principle in moral philosophy saying "ought" implies "can" (and, consequently, "cannot" implies "it is not the case that one ought")

Desirism defines "ought" in terms of "good". Good is that which is such as to fulfill the desires in question. "Ought" refers to actions that one can perform to create states of affairs that fulfill the desires in question. It holds that "right" and "wrong" are, in part, statements of praise and condemnation. Their function is to act on the reward system of the brain to encode certain behaviors. This is the way in which "right" and "wrong" are concerned with voluntary actions. "Voluntary" here does not require any type of special free will. It only implies that the action is a consequence of the agent's desires. Thus, changing the desires will be an effective way of changing the actions. "Right" and "wrong" through their actions on the reward system aim to alter the desires - to produce motives to do that which is called right and to avoid that which is called wrong.

In summary, since right and wrong are statements of praise and condemnation, since praise and condemnation are used to act on the reward system to encode rules of behavior, and since rules of behavior influence action, right and wrong applies to actions that can be so influenced.

Ought To Feel

There is a use of "ought" that seems to contradict part of what was said above. It is the claim that a person "ought to feel" a certain way. As Hurka wrote, "English usage certainly allows remarks such as, 'you ought to care more for others'". Yet, we cannot choose at a particular moment to feel one way or the other. I cannot simply decide to be sad that my neighbor lost his job or happy that a co-worker is expecting a child. Yet, we claim that we "ought" to feel a certain way. How can these things be squared?

It is true that we cannot "will" a certain feeling at a given moment. However, recall that "right" and "wrong" are statements of praise and condemnation that are to act on the reward system so as to encode certain rules of behavior. These rules of behavior, in some cases, take the form of attitudes. The praise and condemnation may not be able to bring about the desired attitude immediately upon application. But they can bring about a shift towards a certain goal. It makes perfectly good sense to say that the goal is what the agent "ought" to feel. It is not what the agent "ought" to feel because the agent can choose it at the moment, but it is what the agent "ought" to feel in the sense that praise and condemnation can help to bring it about through repeated cultural application that agents tend to come to feel that way.

We also say, for example, "I ought to lose about 10 pounds." In saying this, I am not saying that I can choose at this moment to weigh 10 pounds less. I am saying that I can choose a course of action that, over time, will result in my weighing 10 pounds less. I ought to choose to go that route. We do not need to limit our "ought" statements to objectives that we can realize at the snap of a finger, but can use it to refer to all states that we can choose to bring about, even if they take a great deal of effort over time.

I can explain this in more detail by drawing upon a distinction that William Alston (1985, 1988) used in his analysis of epistemic justification. We clearly do not have the ability to choose our beliefs in most cases. As I sit here and write this, I cannot simply choose to believe that there is or is not a glass of Diet Dr. Pepper on my desk - not in the way that I can choose to take or not take a drink out of that glass. Like the BETs with respect to desires, Alston denied that we have a capacity of direct voluntary control over our beliefs. He asked, “Can you, at this moment, start to believe that the U. S. is still a colony of Great Britain, just by deciding to do so?” (Alston, 1988, p. 263).

However, Alston did say that we have a capacity for what he called “indirect voluntary influence” of our beliefs. He looked at the way in which our voluntary action has an influence on what we believe. Alston wrote, “I have voluntary control over whether, and how long, I consider the matter, look for relevant evidence or reasons, reflect on a particular argument, seek input from other people, search my memory for analogous cases, and so on.” (Alston, 1988, p. 279) With respect to the BETs, they failed to recognize that we have control over the amount of effort we put into cultivating a particular character trait or disposition.

Furthermore, when it comes to dispositions, the BETs also failed to consider the degree to which our dispositions are under the control of others - specifically, under the control of cultural conditioning, or the methods by which this conditioning takes place. The voluntary nature of many of one's sentiments have to do, not with what the agent herself has a reason to choose or develop, but the traits that others have reason to cause the agent to have.

For these reasons, where "ought to feel" may, at first glance, appear to contradict the case that "ought" pertains to that which is under voluntary control, it really does not. "Ought to feel" is as much under our voluntary control as "ought to weigh" or "ought to learn". We may not be able to bring about the state - either in ourselves or others - with the snap of our fingers. But, with some effort and some time and the correct application of the proper tools, it is under our control.

British Ethical Theorists 0007: Moral Language

If you have a moral theory that requires that a person get a PhD in philosophy and learn a technical moral language before they can decide whether it is morally wrong to rob a convenience store, you have a very poor moral theory.

Morality is something that a vast majority of the population - even the least educated - indeed, everybody except young children and the most severely mentally impaired adults - should be able to participate in. In this way, morality is like language. If your theory of language does not have a way for people to communicate unless they have advanced knowledge of the elements of your theory, you have a poor theory of language. Your theory of language has to allow for a pair of five-year-olds playing on the living-room floor to be able to communicate, even though neither of them knows anything about your theory.

In fact, even animals can engage in moral behavior. That is to say, they "praise" members of the colony who do things that they like and "condemn" those who do things that are aggravating or (potentially) harmful. They certainly do not have a moral theory. I mentioned this in the previous post on Eliminating the Categorical Imperative, where I objected that animals can certainly eat, drink, have sex, and avoid pain and discomfort without appealing to some sort of "imperative" in deciding what to do.

I bring this up because Thomas Hurka, in his book, British Ethical Theorists, devotes a section to the moral language of those British Ethical Theorists (BETs).

Hurka reports that many of these BETs thought that our conventional moral language - the language of people making moral judgments in their everyday lives - was mistaken and needed to be improved. However, whenever a theorist makes this move, one needs to ask whether there is any sense to getting the subject population to actually adopt it. In the case of redefining the term "planet", the subject population is "professional astronomers" and one can propagate a new rule through the actions of the International Astronomical Union. However, when the practice is one of all native-English speakers and there is no authoritative body that can decide on a change, this requirement is much harder to meet. We would have to be able to introduce a change that 97% of the adult population can adopt.

Hurka writes, "Our language was developed in pre-philosophical times by people with non-philosophical interests. Why should the distinctions it draws always line up with those most needed in philosophy?" (p. 41)

But why think that the distinctions "most needed in philosophy" is at all important when it comes to morality? What is important in a moral system are distinctions "most needed by ordinary people living ordinary lives." A moral language consisting of distinctions most needed in philosophy would be great for a community made up entirely of philosophers. They could no doubt put that set of distinctions to good use. However, those distinctions will likely not be of much use to a society made up of truck drivers, elementary school teachers, engineers, doctors, artists, and soldiers. They are also likely to be useless to parents who have to provide their children with moral education starting quite early in the child's development such that those children can grow up and function well in that society of truck drivers, engineers, and soldiers.

This does not imply that it is a mistake to study morality and even to use a specialized language to do so - where this concerns an academic situation where morality (as practiced by that 97%) is the focus of that study. The study of digestion involves a great deal of technical language. Fortunately, nobody needs to learn this language in order to biologically process the food that they eat. People are quite adept at eating and digesting without having a PhD in biology to tell them how it is done. This merely recognizes an important distinction between a philosophical investigation of morality as an object of study and the practice of morality.

As an example, Hurka discusses the "illocutionary force of commending or prescribing." R.M. Hare, a mid twentieth-century British ethicist, argued that the purpose of moral language is to commend. I think he was right in saying this - at least in part. On this view, to call an action "right" is to praise the person who performed it and to call it "wrong" is to condemn that person. I hold the further view - which Hare did not hold (so far as I know) that this commendation or condemnation is used to act on the reward centers of the brain to encode behavior rules. Those rules, in turn, will motivate the agent to repeat the behavior that was praised or form an aversion to performing the behavior that was condemned. Fortunately, nobody needs to know the definition of the phrase "illocutionary force" to say, in an angry tone, "Hey! Watch where you're going!" Like with digestion, a person can express moral indignation without having a theory of expressing moral indignation.

From here, academics can have a meaningful discussion about how morality works and, in particular, how it works when it works well. Hare argued that, since moral terms are used to commend action, this means that it is a part of the meaning of moral terms. Because commendations do not have a truth value, this, for Hare, meant that moral claims do not have a truth value. However, we can know that this was mistaken. Hurka points to W.D. Ross as providing a response to this. "Ross recognized that we can perform a speech act by using a sentence whose meaning contains no specific reference to that force." (p. 41). Indeed we can. I can shout at you and say, "YOU ARE STANDING ON MY FOOT!" in a tone that makes the condemnation of your action quite apparent. Yet, the statement that you are standing on my foot has a truth value. Furthermore, if you can prove that the factual claim is false you can, at the same time, prove that the condemnation was unjustified. So, we can have a situation where, even though moral claims are "emotive" in a sense, they are also, at the same time, either true or false. We do not have to choose between moral claims being either emotive or having a truth value. We can have both.

This has been an example where a technical moral language is used correctly - to talk about morality in the same way that biologists use a technical language to talk about digestion.

If we want an example of where moral theory can go wrong we can look at Hurka's praise of Henry Sidgwick for using a single sense of the term "ought" for both practical and moral considerations rather than drawing a distinction between practical "ought" and moral "ought". Hurka bragged that the simplicity of the conceptual minimalism of the BETs such as Sidgwick "encouraged them to develop these richer substantive views." (p. 43). But this is not a proper criteria for simplicity. You might get a great deal of creative philosophy if you tried to reduce all matter to just four elements rather than the 100+ elements that we know of today. However, this is not a very wise move if you cannot properly explain, predict, and understand the events that chemists are concerned with by using just those four elements. If you need more, then you add more.

In fact, we need the two conceptions of "ought" - the moral ought and the practical ought.

I distinguish the practical "ought" from the moral "ought" in the following way.

Practical "ought" evaluates possible actions in terms of being "such as to fulfill the desires of the agent" either in itself or in its effects (or both).

Moral "ought" evaluates possible actions in terms of being "such as to fulfill the desires of an agent with good desires and lacking bad desires." A good desire, in turn, is one that tends to fulfill other desires, while a bad desire tends to thwart other desires. Consequently, a good desire is one that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote universally (in everybody) and a bad desire is one that people generally have reasons to inhibit universally.

This theory explains a category of "non-obligatory permission" where people may act on their own individual interests without making any call that those interests should be universal. Choosing a career, for example, does not involve desires that people generally have reason to promote universally. When it comes to choosing a career, people generally have reason to promote a wide variety of interests, and to allow each person to seek the career that is compatible with her interests. When people are making decisions within the realm of non-obligatory permission (e.g., choosing a profession), they need an "ought" that relates the objects of evaluation to their own desires, not one that relates it to desires that people generally have reason to promote universally.

The attempt to reform our moral language so as to eliminate one of these categories of "ought" is a mistake. It does not allow people to do with their moral language what they are in the habit of doing and what, in fact, it is practical for them to use that language to do. When somebody (e.g., Hurka) invents a theory that does not allow this then the problem is not to be found in the practices of their common people and their common language. The problem is to be found in the moral philosopher's moral theory.

British Ethical Theorists 0006: Rights and Reasons

Thomas Hurka argued in his book, British Ethical Theorists, that they were conceptual minimalists. They did not like all of these evaluative terms running around and sought to reduce them to a bare minimum. For the most part, this one one or two concepts.

We discussed their (failed) attempts to reduce hypothetical ought to categorical ought in my post, The British Ethical Theorists 4: Hypothetical and Categorical Ought". I argued that categorical ought is the ought that does not exist.

In The British Ethical Theorists 5: Practical Ought, we discussed their attempts to reduce practical ought to moral categorical ought. This, too, failed since moral categorical oughts also do not exist. However, the claim that practical and moral oughts are the same that they are oughts, and differ only in their subject matter, has more merit. I argued that moral ought relates actions to good desires and the absence of bad desires, while practical ought related actions to the agent's actual desires. This has more in common with recognizing the difference between a tiger and a lion than the difference between a tiger and a tiger-eye rock.

Rights

One concept that they considered was the concept of a right.

Generally, rights are already widely recognized as being associated with duties.

There are "liberty rights" - which do not obligate other people to do anything but obligates them, instead, not to interfere. The right to freedom of speech is a liberty right. It does not obligate others to provide the speaker with the platform or take any action to help him exercise this right. However, it does obligate others not to interfere or to prevent him from speaking.

Plus, there are claim rights. Claim rights create positive duties (as opposed to the negative duties of liberty rights). For example, if I borrow $50 from you with a promise to pay you back next Tuesday, then you have a claim-right to my $50 on Tuesday and I have a positive duty to pay you $50.

Note that both types of right can be expressed in terms of duties, and the duties can be expressed as ought statements. Actually, liberty-rights are associated with ought-not statements; other people ought not to interfere with the agent doing that which the agent has a liberty-right to do. Claim rights come with positive duties since the person on whom the claim is being made has an obligation to do that which the claim-right demands of him. Either way, we find nothing here that distinguishes moral rightness from moral obligation; that is, from the obligation to do or to refrain from action.


Reasons

According to Hurka, the BETs did not like discussion of reasons for a number of . . . well . . . reasons. Hurka himself defends the position that there are a number of problems with any type of talk using "reasons" and, if we limit our talk to "ought" instead, then we can avoid these problems and have a much clearer conversation.

One of the problems with the term "reasons" is that it is ambiguous between motivating reasons and normative reasons. The reason that the chicken crossed the road is a motivating reason, and may be quite different from the reason why the chicken ought to have crossed the road. Note that it is the normative reason that is tied to "ought", not the motivating reason. A person may have refused to fly because he has a fear of flying. This fear of flying motivates the agent to avoid flying, but it does not provide a normative reason as to why he ought to avoid flying.

Hurka wrote, "The ambiguity of 'reason' has given false support to the view that what you ought to do depends on what you desire, as if normative reasons had to be based on motivating ones." (p. 32). He also wrote, "It can be true that you ought to do some act you do not now desire even though you will do it only if you do desire it." (p. 32).

As somebody who thinks that all normative reasons have to be based on motivating ones, I do not see this as a mistake. No other types of reasons for action exist so, if motivating reasons do not provide normative reasons, then nothing does and there are no normative reasons. If a normative reason does not refer, somehow, to a motivating reason (desire) then it does not exist.

This is quite consistent with the claim that you ought to do some act you do not now desire even though you do it only if you do desire it. Though, actually, if we wanted to be even more precise, we would have to phrase it as the act that fulfills the desires you should have may not fulfill the desires you do have, even though you would not perform the act unless it did fulfill the desires you do have. After all, there is a reason why morality is concerned with actually creating good desires and inhibiting bad desires - and this is because these are the desires that will actually be motivating behavior.

On another matter, Hurka wrote that, "The term "reason' is also silent on a key issue dividing the concepts 'ought' and 'good': whether it is a necessary condition for having a reason to do x that you be able to do x." Hurka does not explain this problem, and it is not obvious. The answer according to desirism holds that a person can have a reason to create $1,000 in her possession by snapping her fingers even though she cannot do so. It only requires that the act be such as to fulfill the desires in question, which it would be. At the same time, it may be a mistake to say that you ought (in the practical-ought sense) to snap your fingers given that it will not create $1000. So, it does seem to be the case that "ought" refers to what an agent actually can do, while "has a reason" refers to things the agent cannot do. However, this does not argue for getting rid of the term "right" and limiting conversation only to "ought", because sometimes the question we have is what a person "has a reason" to do - particularly when one person is trying to do something for somebody else that he somebody else cannot do for themselves. The recipient in the gift "has a reason" to receive the gift even though she may not make it happen.

Lastly, Hurka questioned whether 'normative reason' is an independent concept. Indeed, we can ask, what is a normative reason? As I use the term, I first distinguish between "has a reason" and "there is a reason". Agent has a normative reason to do X if and only if Agent has a desire that would be served by agent doing X. Plus, there is a reason for Agent to do X if and only if there is a desire that would be served by Agent doing X. Notice, in the second case, the reason for action is non-motivating. The reason for action may motivate the person who has it to praise Agent if Agent does x and condemn Agent if Agent does not do X. But it does not motivate Agent in the slightest. So, here is at least one use for the concept of a normative reason - to distinguish between the reasons the agent has (motivating reasons) and the reasons that there are (reasons that motivate others).


Conclusion

This, then, gives us a sense of the various value-laden concepts that circulate around the term "ought". In the last few posts, I have discussed categorical ought (it does not exist), hypothetical ought (the only type that does exist), prudential ought (such as to fulfill the desires of he agent), moral ought (such as to fulfill the desires of an agent who has good desires and lacks bad desires), liberty rights (a right associated by a duty on the part of others not to interfere), claim rights (a right associated by a duty on the part of others to perform a specific action, motivational reasons (the desires that the agent has, which supports the claim that the agent has a reason to do X), and normative reasons (the desires that exist, which supports the claim that there are reasons for Agent to do X).

British Ethical Theorists 0005: Practical Ought

I am looking at the ways in which the British Ethical Theorists (BETs) of 1850-1950 sought to eliminate all concepts of "ought" except the Kantian categorical imperatives. In my previous post I argued that their attempt to eliminate hypothetical ought and have only a categorical ought was exactly backwards. We need to eliminate the categorical ought and leave only the hypothetical ought.

Another type of ought that the BETs are going to try to eliminate or explain away is the practical ought.


Practical and Moral Ought

Actually, I cannot think of any better way to explain what is at stake here than to express the distinction between moral and practical "ought" in desirism terms.

Desirism relates all objects of evaluation to desires. When we use the term "ought", we are evaluating actions. When we say that something ought to be done, we are saying that doing that thing is "such as to fulfill the desires in question."

Of course, the phrase "desires in question" is ambiguous. We can talk about a wide range of "desires in question". What this means is that we have a lot of different kinds of "ought". What all oughts have in common is that they relate some action to some set of desires. Where "ought" terms differ is on what counts as the "desires in question".

When we make "ought" claims, we usually have one of four "desires in question" in mind.

(1) A specific desire. This is the case when we say, "If you do not want to be recognized on the video when you rob the store, then you ought to wear a mask." The "desires in question" is the desire not to be seen in the video. The "ought" relates wearing a mask to fulfilling the desire in question.

(2) The current desires that the agent has. "When you go to the store, you ought to pick up a package of cigarettes." This is something that the agent ought to do in this case because "picking up a package of cigarettes" is such as to fulfill the agent's current desires.

(3) The agent's current and future desires. "You ought to give up smoking." Why? Because giving up smoking is such as to fulfill the agent's current and future desires. It may not satisfy the agent's current desires given the strength of the desire to obtain a nicotine fix. But, when we add in the future desires that will be thwarted, the weight shifts in favor of not smoking. Unfortunately, future desires cannot reach back in time to motivate current action, so an agent can know that he should give up smoking, and still find it difficult to find the current motivation to do so.

(4) The desires that people generally have reason to promote universally. This is where desirism places the moral ought. The statement that you morally ought not to murder your uncle relates the act of murdering your uncle to the desires that a person with good desires (desires that people generally have reasons to promote universally) and lacking bad desires (desires that people generally have reason to extinguish universally). It would thwart those desires, so murdering your uncle is something you morally ought not to do. Now, you may not have good desires or not be lacking in bad desires, which means that you may murder your uncle even though you morally ought not to do so.

Actually, options (1) through (3) account for different types of practical "ought". This complicates the BETs challenge of eliminating or reducing practical ought, since there is more than one ought for them to eliminate or reduce.


Practical Ought and the British Ethical Theorists

According to Thomas Hurka, as presented in his book British Ethical Theorists, the BETs only recognized a moral ought, they focused on the question of whether it is morally permissible or even morally obligatory for an agent to advance his own interests.

Henry Sidgwick linked what an agent ought to do with what it is rational for an agent to do. According to Hurka, the closest that Sidgwick got to a practical "ought" was the moral "ought" applied to the subject matter of one's own happiness. Hurka noted that Sidgwick included egoism among a set of possible moral theories - egoism being the pursuit of one's own good. This is because egoism concerned answering the question "what ought I to do," and a sensible answer is for the agent to promote his own happiness. In fact, Hurka argues, prudential and moral oughts had to be the same ought or they could not conflict. However, I am uncertain what "conflict" means in this sense. It could refer to the two oughts recommending different ends in the way that two forces can conflict (which is true). Or it could means that if one "ought" says "do X" and another says "do not-X", then there is a formal logical contradiction of a type that cannot exist in nature.

When Pritchard and Ross said that a person did not have a duty to pursue their own pleasure, they meant that they had no moral duty. They did not even mention the possibility of a rational or prudential duty to do so - since the only duties that exist are moral. Carritt, Broad, and Ewing argued that a person did have a duty to pursue his own pleasure but, consistent with the idea that there is only one kind of ought, they held that this was a moral ought and not a distinct and separate rational or prudential ought. Pritchard held that the general moral duties to promote knowledge and virtue including promoting one's own knowledge and virtue with no reason to distinguish these cases.

Because these people did not believe in a prudential "ought" but only a moral "ought" regarding oneself, they could not make sense of the question, "Why be moral?" To them, "Why be moral?" meant "Why are you obligated to do what you are obligated to do?" The very nature of morality is to discover what one ought to do, so "why ought I to do what I ought to do?" did not make much sense to them.

Imagine an agent whose prudential ought says to kill the person who is running against him for public office under conditions where he can get away with it, but where the moral ought says not to kill his opponent. Hurka himself says that there is an "unqualified ought" that answers the question of what the agent ought ultimately to do and that the goal of morality is to determine what this unqualified ought happens to be.

Desirism is going to have to deny the existence of Hurka's unqualified ought just as it denies the existence of categorical imperatives. There is simply the conflict between the practical ought and the moral ought. In fact, when these two come into conflict, the practical ought will win insofar as determining what the agent will do (at least, if we add the additional condition that the agent has all of the relevant true beliefs and no relevant false beliefs). But the whole point of morality is to create agents where the practical ought and moral ought are in alignment. What practical-ought serves the agent's interests is also what the agent moral-ought to do.

Desirism makes sense of the question, "Why should I be moral?" because an agent can ask, "Why practical-ought I to do what I moral-ought to do?" This question translates into, "How does this act that stands in a particular relationship to good desires stand in relationship to my own desires?" Of course, given this way of understanding the question, the answer may well be "nothing". That is to say, the fact that something is such as to fulfill good desires does not imply that it is such as to fulfill the desires of the agent, since the desires of the agent might not be good.

It turns out, for desirism, a good person need never ask this question. A person with good desires and lacking bad desires will practical-ought do what a person with good desires and lacking bad desires would do. It is only the agent who lacks good desires or has bad desires that will notice a break between the two oughts.

None of this denies that people can have a moral permission - or even a moral obligation - to consider her own interests. Remember that for a desire to be good, it must be a desire that people generally have reason to promote universally. People generally have reason to promote universally a permission to promote one's on interests. People generally also have reason to promote universally a variety of interests on a number of subjects. For example, we are made better off if each of us have different interests relevant to our preferred occupation. We have reason to have it be the case that some people want to be teachers, some people want to be doctors, some people want to be engineers, some people want to study the stars, some people want to be actors, and some people enjoy running a corner grocery store. This involves a desire to consider one's own interests.


Conclusion

So . . . there is a distinct practical ought and a distinct moral ought. There is a distinct "such as to fulfill the desires that the agent has" and a distinct "such as to fulfill the desires the agent should have - the desires that people generally have reason to promote universally." There is no necessary connection between them such that it is quite possible that the act that fulfills good desires fails to fulfill the desires the agent has. Consequently, there are cases where it is not the case that a person practical-ought to do what he moral-ought. However, if this is the case, we can say that this particular agent is immoral and that, if he were to do what he ought not, people generally have many and strong reasons to condemn, and perhaps to punish, people like him. A person who does what he morally ought not is not a morally good person.

British Ethical Theorists 0004: Hypothetical and Categorical Ought

Thomas Hurka argued that the British Ethical Theorists (BETs) he discussed in his book British Ethical Theorists were conceptual minimalists. They tried to reduce the basic set of evaluative terms as much as possible.

One of the ways in which the BETs sought to reach this objective is to reduce all "ought" concepts to one central concept. The concept that they liked was the categorical moral "ought" of Immanuel Kant - the "ought" that is absolutely and independent of all desires.

To make some sense of these categorical imperatives, clearly, if it is wrong for you to murder your neighbor, this wrongness does not depend in any way on you not wanting to kill your uncle. It would be wrong even if you did want to kill your uncle. So, the wrongness of killing your uncle is independent of your desires. This much seems true.

This is not going to fit at all well with desirism. Desirism holds that there is no such thing as a categorical ought. All value relates states of affairs to desires, and desires provide the only reasons for action that exist. Oughts - or reasons for action - that exist independent of desires are a fiction. So, reducing all oughts to categorical oughts is going to be problematic. How is desirism, which grounds all value on desires, going to handle the wrongness of killing your uncle?

So, it seems, desirism has a trap that it needs to find a way out of. Categorical imperatives do not exist so the wrongness of killing your uncle depends on desires, but the wrongness of killing your uncle is independent of your desires. Of course, this way of phrasing the problem reveals the decision. Something can be independent of your desires, but not independent of desires.

The ought that relates an object of evaluation to a desire is called the "hypothetical ought". It is hypothetical because it is expressed as an if-then statement such that "If the first part is true (hypothetically), then the second part is true. A hypothetical ought links the ought of an action to a desire. Hurka used the example, "If you want above all to get rich, murder your uncle." I prefer the more explicitly stated, "If you want above all to get rich, then you should murder your uncle." We are assuming for the sake of this example that if you murder your uncle, you will get rich. You have everything worked out perfectly well so that you will get the inheritance, and you have no chance of getting caught.

In one sense, desirism has something in common with the BETs. Like them, Desirism holds that only one type of ought exists. Unlike the BETs, However, where BETs claim that hypothetical imperatives are the problematic ought, desirism holds that they are all that exist and the categorical ought is fiction. In this essay, I want to look at their arguments against the hypothetical ought and show how the elimination of the categorical ought makes more sense.

Let us look at their arguments.

The BETs used two methods to try to argue against the hypothetical ought. One was to reduce them to categorical oughts. The other was to claim that they are not prescriptive - only descriptive - and so they don't actually tell people what to do.

The First Response: Hypothetical Oughts are Purely Descriptive

According to Hurka, some of the BETs held that hypothetical oughts are purely descriptive. The statement, "If you want above all to get rich, then you should murder your uncle" merely means that, "If you want above all to get rich" is true, then "You should murder your uncle" is true. This is a valid inference that says that "If A, then B" is true and "A" is true then "B" is true. More specifically, if it is true that "If you want above all to get rich, then you should murder your uncle," and also true that you want most of all to get rich, then it is true that you should murder your uncle.

However, "You should murder your uncle" is false. Hurka quoted W.D. Ross as saying:

No one really thinks that the fact that a person desires a certain end makes it obligatory on him to will the means to it; if we think the end is a bad one (or that his desiring it is bad), we think that in spite of his desiring the end he ought not to take the (Hurka, p. 29).

Hurka quotes H.A. Pritchard as saying, "I ought to do so and so" in the hypothetical sense really means, "If I do not do so and so, my purpose will not be realized." The conclusion is merely descriptive. It merely describes the fact that killing your uncle will result in your being rich. It does not actually tell you to kill your uncle. Because hypothetical imperatives are merely descriptive, only categorical imperatives actually tell you what to do.

I would respond to this by saying that the argument contains an equivocation.

"Should" - which appears in the first premise - relates the action to a set of desires. However, the desires that it relates the object of evaluation to need not be the desires of the agent.

There are two types of "should" that are relevant here. One type of "should" relates the objects of evaluation to the desires of the agent. This is the practical "should". The other type relates the object of evaluation to the desires that people generally have reasons to promote universally. This is what, according to desirism, represents the moral "should". Another way of reporting this same distinction is to say that there is a sense of "should do X" that means "you have a reason to do X", and a different sense of "should do X" that means that people generally have reasons to cause people universally to have a reason to do X."

With these two senses in mind, we can now criticize the inference above as either being unsurprising or built on a false premise.

Let us take the first version, "should" = "has a reason" or "relates the action in question to the desires of the agent". Using this sense of "should," the first premise is true. If you want above all else to be wealthy then you have a motivating reason to kill your uncle. Consequently, under the assumption that you want above all else to be wealthy, the conclusion that you have a motivating reason to kill your uncle is true - but unsurprising. If your uncle ends up being murdered, and the police discover that you have become wealthy as a result, they would say - truthfully (that is to say, they will know it to be a fact) - that you had a motive for murder. Even if you did not murder your uncle, you had a reason to do so. Of course, you also may have had (and should have had) reasons not to.

Now, let us take the second version of "should". This version relates the object of evaluation to the desires that people generally have reason to promote universally. To explain what this means, note that people generally have reason to promote, universally, an aversion to doing those things that will result in others being in extreme pain. Each of us has a reason to want everybody else to be averse to causing pain to others, because that makes it less likely that they will cause pain to us. Under this interpretation, the first premise of the original argument is false. Even if it is true that you want most of all to be wealthy, and even though it may be true that you could become wealthy by murdering your uncle, it is not the case that killing your uncle would fulfill the desires that people generally have reason to promote universally. So, it is not the case that you should murder your uncle in this sense.

Consequently, the criticism that the inference from "You want above all to be rich," and "you could be rich if you murder your uncle" to the conclusion "you should murder your uncle" is not a problem for desirism. Properly understood, it only says, "You have a motivating reason to murder your uncle," which is obviously true. In the other sense, it says, "Murdering your uncle will fulfill the desires that people generally have reason to promote universally", which is clearly false.

The Second Response

The second way in which the BETs sought to deal with hypothetical imperatives is by reducing them to categorical imperative. That is to say, there is a categorical imperative telling people to do that which they have a reason to do. For example, using the example above whereby you can become rich if you murder your uncle, the hypothetical reduction maneuver interprets this as saying, "You should either (1) make it the case that you do not desire above all else to be rich, or (2) murder your uncle." Of course, the correct option is (1), you should make it the case that you do not want above all else to be rich.

Actually, the hypothetical reduction maneuver does not recommend any particular option. Assume that I were to place two coins on the table. One coin is heads, the other coin is tails. I then tell you to make it the case that either both coins are heads or both coins are tails. There is nothing in this requests that tells you whether you should make the one coin heads and make the other coin tails. There is nothing in the hypothetical reduction to reject the option of murdering your uncle. In fact, since it is far easier to murder your uncle than to make it the case that you do not want above all else to be wealthy, murdering your uncle seems like the most practical alternative.

No categorical imperative is, in fact, necessary. When we evolved our aversion to pain, a desire for sex, hunger, and thirst, we had no need to add to any of these things a categorical imperative to avoid pain, engage in sex, eat, and drink - not unless one thinks that the most basic animals from insects to oysters follow categorical imperatives. The aversion to pain is sufficient to motivate an agent (give an agent) a reason to avoid pain, and hunger is sufficiently motivating to cause an agent to eat. And when it is the case that an (injured) animal is suffering pain that it cannot avoid, or is hungry with no food or thirsty with nothing to drink, it is absurd to say of the animal that it is under a categorical imperative to "eat or quit being hungry".


Conclusion

The actual argument that I am using against the categorical imperative is that of Occam's Razor. We don't need categorical imperatives. Evolution explains the hypothetical imperatives. Some desires we acquired through evolution. Some desires we acquire through learning. But all values are hypothetical since they depend on the contingencies involved in either how we evolved and what we learned.

We evolved to have desires that motivate us to avoid pain, seek sex, eat, drink, seek comfortable conditions, avoid that which threatens our reproductive success, care for our offspring, form tribes, and the like. This is the only source of reasons that exist.

We also acquired a disposition to learn to like or dislike certain things, depending on our experiences. We learn to like or dislike certain kinds of food, certain people, certain ways of spending our time, and the like by experience. Both of these ways of acquiring desires is contingent and hypothetical.

We have no need to add a categorical ought to the hypothetical oughts that we know exist. Instead, we have reason to apply Occam's Razor and cut them out of our list of things that exist. All we have are hypothetical imperatives, but hypothetical imperatives can handle the issue of moral wrongness being independent of the agent's desires. It is dependent on the desires that others have reason to cause the agent to have, not the desires the agent actually has.

British Ethical Theorists 0003: Thick Evaluative Concepts and the Is-Ought Gap

The previous post brought up the fact that the British Ethical Theorists currently under discussion all seemed to think that "thick evaluative concepts" (understood as those that are both descriptive and evaluative (e.g., "liar", "bigot", "generous", "courageous") can be reduced to a small number of basic "thin" concepts such as "good" and "right".


Philippa Foot vs. R.M. Hare

The International Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on thick concepts discusses a dispute between R.M. Hare and Philippa Foot on the possibility of deriving "ought" from "is".

Foot argues that this is possible, using the concept of "rude". Basically, Foot argues, "X causes offense by indicating lack of respect" is a purely descriptive statement. This purely descriptive statement implies "X is rude". "X is rude" is an evaluative term that implies "X is bad". In fact, it implies "X ought not to be done" which, if valid, would result in an instance of deriving an "ought" from an "is". Even without this final step it derives a value from a fact.

R.M. Hare responded by means of a counter example (a standard method of showing logical invalidity). According to Hare's counterexample. "X is a German" implies "X is a kraut". "X is a kraut" is an evaluative term - a term of contempt. Clearly, being a German does not imply that one is deserving of contempt, so we have an example here of true premises and false conclusion. An inference form that generates a false conclusion from true premises is invalid. Thus, by Hare's argument, Foot's argument form is invalid.

From the point of view of desirism, one notices that Foot's example provides an instance of "thwarting the desires in question." Foot's "rude" action is "such as to thwart the desires in question" - that is, of causing offense by indicating a lack of respect. Hare's counter example uses a term, "German", that does not imply "is such as to thwart the desires in question". For an advocate of desirism, this explains why Foot's case derives an evaluation from a factual statement and Hare's does not. Foot's example is "such as to thwart the desires in question" and Hare's is not.


McDowell's Disentangling Argument

This section contains notes from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Thick Concepts. I went there because Thomas Hurka's book British Ethical Theorists discussed how the reductionism of these British Ethical Theorists answered McDowell's objections against the reducibility of thick concepts.

First, to understand McDowell's argument:

Recall that thick concepts are both descriptive and evaluative. They describe a type of object of evaluation, and they evaluate that which they describe.

This is called the "disentangling argument" because it works by disentangling or separating the descriptive component from the evaluative component. If a disinterested observer were to come across a community using one of these thick evaluative concepts, they will be able to understand the "descriptive" component and pick out its scope. However, the scope of the evaluative part of the concept is somewhat different. This is the goodness or the badness of the thing being evaluated. The disinterested observer would not be able to pick out the scope of the evaluative component. Consequently, he would not be able to pick out accurately the scope of the descriptive and evaluative component behind.

Let me try to explain it this way. Take the term, "Liar". This has a descriptive component - somebody who asserts as true what she knows to be false. The descriptive component includes novelists and under-cover police agents. The evaluative component excludes these. An outside observer can understand the descriptive component of a term like "liar" and, in a sense, know that novelists and under-cover police agents are liars. But the observer would not be able to accurately capture the scope of the term "liar" unless the observer also knows the evaluative component - which liars are bad. From this, McDowell draws the conclusions that thick evaluative concepts are irreducible - the evaluative component is only knowable to those who feel the evaluation.

According to Hurka, the British Ethical Theorists have a response to this Then, the response to McDowell's argument. They agree with McDowell that the descriptive scope is not entirely accurate. Instead, it describes the general range of the term (e.g., liar = people who assert things they know are not true). The evaluative component uses a thin evaluative term (e.g., "good") to then restrict or point out a subset of objects that the descriptive term identifies that are good or bad. Consequently, they argue, a thick term can be reduced - but the reduction is to a descriptive scope that has a particular thin-concept value. A liar is somebody who asserts things that they know are untrue where those assertions are, in some sense, bad.


Desirism and The Disentangling Argument

As I described earlier in, "The Meaning of Evaluative Terms", evaluative terms have four components: (1) the type of object evaluated using the term, (2) the desires in question, (3) whether the object of evaluation fulfills or thwarts those desires, and (4) whether it fulfills or thwarts those desires directly or indirectly.

McDowell's disentangling argument disentangles (1) from the other three components.

Desirism will agree that the scope of (1) is different from the scope of (1) through (4). There is a difference between a knife and a good knife, or between a song and a beautiful song. Let us assume that there is a culture where, in its language, instead of using the phrase "good knife" to refer to knives that have good-making qualities, it uses a single word. We may call this word "goodknife". This will not change the fact that a goodknife is just a knife that is good. It will only change the language that is used to talk about such things. Similarly, we may replace the phrase "teller of untruths for bad reasons" with the term "liar". When we disentangle "teller of untruths" from "for bad reasons", we get a scope that is more restricted then we get from "teller of untruths" alone.

Where desirism would differ from other theories is that it holds that (2) through (4) are also descriptive. It is fully reductive. This implies that McDowell is wrong about one of the premises in his argument - the premise that states that a disinterested observer cannot understand the scope of the thick term. This outside observer can know the desires in question. The outside observer can know whether (or which) of the objects of evaluation are such as to fulfill or thwart the desires in question. The outside observer can know whether (or which) of the objects of evaluation fulfill or thwart those desires directly or indirectly. Thus, the outside observer can know the full scope of the thick components. She can know the descriptive scope captured in (1) and the restrictions to that scope introduced in (2) through (4).

In fact, knowing the relationships of states of affairs and the desires of people other than ourselves is extremely important. This is how we explain and predict their behavior. This is how we predict how they will react to the things that we do - to incentives and deterrence, to promises and threats. McDowell's claim that the outside observer cannot know the scope of thick concepts implies that outside observers will not know how to please or displease, offend or honor, the members of that community.

I can know what another person likes and dislikes without liking it or disliking it myself. I may not be able to know what it is like to like or dislike something in a particular way. I do not share my wife's tastes in movies - but I can pick out a movie that she will like. Though I may be a mistake from time to time, this fact does not prove that, no matter how much I know about her, I cannot even theoretically be able to correctly identify the movies she would like.

McDowell's disentangling argument is supposed to rule out reductionist theories of thick evaluative terms. I do not see that it succeeds.