Hm. What is this post for? It doesn’t explain the ideas it refers to in any detail sufficient to feel what they mean, and from what it does tell, the ideas seem pretty crazy/simplistic, paying attention to strange categories, like that philpapers survey. (The part before “Mainstream views in metaethics” section does seem to address the topic of the post, but the rest is pretty bizarre. If that was the point, it should’ve been made, I think, but it probably wasn’t.)
My posts are now going to feel naked to me whenever they lackacommentfrom you complaining that the post isn’t book-length, covering every detail of a given topic. :)
Like I said, I don’t have much interest in fitting my views into the established categories, but I wanted to give people an overview of how metaethics is usually done so they at least have some illustrations of what the subject matter is.
And if you find mainstream metaethics bizarre, well… welcome to a diseased discipline.
Since you understand how diseased the discipline of ethics is, I’m hoping the next post in the series will focus heavily on clearing up the semantic issues that have made it so diseased. I don’t think any real sense can be made of metaethics until the very nature of what someone is doing when they utter an ethical statement is covered.
We use language to do a lot of things: express emotions, make other people do stuff, signal, intimidate, get our thoughts into other people’s minds, parrot what someone else said—and often more than one of these at a time. Since we presumably are trying to get at the speaker’s intention, we really can’t know the “meaning” without asking the speaker, yet various metaethical theorists call themselves emotivists, error theorists, prescriptivists, and so on. It seems to me the choice of an meta-ethical theory boils down to a choice of what the theorists wants to presume people are trying to do when they use the word ought.
Surely no one can deny that sometimes some people do indeed intend “You ought not steal” as a command, or as a way of expressing disgust at the notion of theft, or simply as a means of intimidation. My meta-meta-ethical theory is that it all depends on what the person uttering the statement intends to accomplish by saying it. A debate between these meta-ethical theories sounds very likely to revolve around whose definition of ought is “correct”.
In short, I think the main reason ethics is so diseased as a discipline is that the theorists are trying to argue whose definition is better, rather than acknowledging that it is pretty hard for anyone to know what each person intends by their moralistic language.
Maybe the preoccupation with “statements” is part of the disease. After all, there would probably be ethics even without language or with a very different language. And after all, when investigating x, you should investigate x, not statements about x.
Though Bongo is surely right there would be moral sentiments even without language, now we are dealing with something identified: specific emotions like empathy, sense of justice, disgust, indignation, pity. Yeah those would exist without language. And yes, language has made things much more complicated, and the preoccupation with analyzing sentences makes it even even worse.
If people can realize all that without looking at the very nature of communication, that would be great, but in my experience most people feel hesitant about scrapping so many centuries of philosophy and need to see how the language makes such a mess of things before they can truly feel comfortable with it. If Bongo is ready to scrap language analysis now and drop all the silly -isms, I’m preaching to the choir.
Ethics is unique, at least to me, in that I still have no idea what the heck people are even referring to most of the time when they use moralistic language. I can’t investigate X until I know what X is even supposed to be about. Most of the time there is a fundamental failure to communicate, even regarding the definition of the field itself. And whenever there isn’t such a failure, the problem disappears and all discussants agree as if nothing.
This pretty much sums up a very large reason why I think metaethics itself is a diseased discipline. I don’t even know why this site likes to talk about “metaethics” whenever it wants to moralize, other than, perhaps, saying the prefix “meta” makes it sound more technical and “rational”, when it is really just another layer of obscurity.
I think, just like politics, this site should avoid the topic of ethics as much as possible. Most of the “science” of ethics is just post-Christian nonsense. Seriously, read Nietzsche. I don’t trust any of this talk about ethics by someone who hasn’t read, and understood, Nietzsche.
I think, just like politics, this site should avoid the topic of ethics as much as possible. Most of the “science” of ethics is just post-Christian nonsense. Seriously, read Nietzsche. I don’t trust any of this talk about ethics by someone who hasn’t read, and understood, Nietzsche.
I reject your appeal to authority or sophistication. I also suggest you are confused about what discussion of metaethics entails.
The ‘meta’ implies that the discussions of ethics can be separated entirely from normative moralizing and be engaged with as a purely epistemic challenge. This is not to say that people don’t throw their own moralizing into the conversation incessantly but that is a mix of confusion and bias on the part of the individual and not intrinsic to the subject.
It is useful to be able to describe precisely what people mean when they make ethical judgments and even what the associated words mean and how they relate to intuitions.
I’ve read Nietzsche, and I’m an ethicist of sorts, and I think Nietzsche is not a prerequisite for understanding either normative ethics or metaethics.
I should add that nobody who has read and understood the sequences should be surprised by what I’ll describe as ‘pluralistic moral reductionism.’ I’m writing this sequence because I think this basic view on standard metaethical questions hasn’t yet been articulated clearly enough for my satisfaction. And then, I want to make a bit of progress on the hard questions of ‘metaethics’ (it depends where you draw the boundary around ‘metaethics’) - but only after I’ve swept away the easy questions of metaethics.
Hm. What is this post for? It doesn’t explain the ideas it refers to in any detail sufficient to feel what they mean, and from what it does tell, the ideas seem pretty crazy/simplistic, paying attention to strange categories, like that philpapers survey. (The part before “Mainstream views in metaethics” section does seem to address the topic of the post, but the rest is pretty bizarre. If that was the point, it should’ve been made, I think, but it probably wasn’t.)
My posts are now going to feel naked to me whenever they lack a comment from you complaining that the post isn’t book-length, covering every detail of a given topic. :)
Like I said, I don’t have much interest in fitting my views into the established categories, but I wanted to give people an overview of how metaethics is usually done so they at least have some illustrations of what the subject matter is.
And if you find mainstream metaethics bizarre, well… welcome to a diseased discipline.
Since you understand how diseased the discipline of ethics is, I’m hoping the next post in the series will focus heavily on clearing up the semantic issues that have made it so diseased. I don’t think any real sense can be made of metaethics until the very nature of what someone is doing when they utter an ethical statement is covered.
We use language to do a lot of things: express emotions, make other people do stuff, signal, intimidate, get our thoughts into other people’s minds, parrot what someone else said—and often more than one of these at a time. Since we presumably are trying to get at the speaker’s intention, we really can’t know the “meaning” without asking the speaker, yet various metaethical theorists call themselves emotivists, error theorists, prescriptivists, and so on. It seems to me the choice of an meta-ethical theory boils down to a choice of what the theorists wants to presume people are trying to do when they use the word ought.
Surely no one can deny that sometimes some people do indeed intend “You ought not steal” as a command, or as a way of expressing disgust at the notion of theft, or simply as a means of intimidation. My meta-meta-ethical theory is that it all depends on what the person uttering the statement intends to accomplish by saying it. A debate between these meta-ethical theories sounds very likely to revolve around whose definition of ought is “correct”.
In short, I think the main reason ethics is so diseased as a discipline is that the theorists are trying to argue whose definition is better, rather than acknowledging that it is pretty hard for anyone to know what each person intends by their moralistic language.
My definition of “ought” is correct.
Yes, I agree with all this.
Maybe the preoccupation with “statements” is part of the disease. After all, there would probably be ethics even without language or with a very different language. And after all, when investigating x, you should investigate x, not statements about x.
But first you need to identify x. Which is a question about the meaning of a word.
Though Bongo is surely right there would be moral sentiments even without language, now we are dealing with something identified: specific emotions like empathy, sense of justice, disgust, indignation, pity. Yeah those would exist without language. And yes, language has made things much more complicated, and the preoccupation with analyzing sentences makes it even even worse.
If people can realize all that without looking at the very nature of communication, that would be great, but in my experience most people feel hesitant about scrapping so many centuries of philosophy and need to see how the language makes such a mess of things before they can truly feel comfortable with it. If Bongo is ready to scrap language analysis now and drop all the silly -isms, I’m preaching to the choir.
Ethics is unique, at least to me, in that I still have no idea what the heck people are even referring to most of the time when they use moralistic language. I can’t investigate X until I know what X is even supposed to be about. Most of the time there is a fundamental failure to communicate, even regarding the definition of the field itself. And whenever there isn’t such a failure, the problem disappears and all discussants agree as if nothing.
This pretty much sums up a very large reason why I think metaethics itself is a diseased discipline. I don’t even know why this site likes to talk about “metaethics” whenever it wants to moralize, other than, perhaps, saying the prefix “meta” makes it sound more technical and “rational”, when it is really just another layer of obscurity.
I think, just like politics, this site should avoid the topic of ethics as much as possible. Most of the “science” of ethics is just post-Christian nonsense. Seriously, read Nietzsche. I don’t trust any of this talk about ethics by someone who hasn’t read, and understood, Nietzsche.
I reject your appeal to authority or sophistication. I also suggest you are confused about what discussion of metaethics entails.
The ‘meta’ implies that the discussions of ethics can be separated entirely from normative moralizing and be engaged with as a purely epistemic challenge. This is not to say that people don’t throw their own moralizing into the conversation incessantly but that is a mix of confusion and bias on the part of the individual and not intrinsic to the subject.
It is useful to be able to describe precisely what people mean when they make ethical judgments and even what the associated words mean and how they relate to intuitions.
If the meta in metaethics meant that, I’d say it’s impossible, for roughly these reasons.
These links don’t work.
Thanks; fixed. Back to school for me on mouseover text.
I’ve read Nietzsche, and I’m an ethicist of sorts, and I think Nietzsche is not a prerequisite for understanding either normative ethics or metaethics.
I should add that nobody who has read and understood the sequences should be surprised by what I’ll describe as ‘pluralistic moral reductionism.’ I’m writing this sequence because I think this basic view on standard metaethical questions hasn’t yet been articulated clearly enough for my satisfaction. And then, I want to make a bit of progress on the hard questions of ‘metaethics’ (it depends where you draw the boundary around ‘metaethics’) - but only after I’ve swept away the easy questions of metaethics.