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Post by fdc on Jun 2, 2019 5:25:11 GMT
Hello, everyone! BiC is starting Bernie Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy for our reading group. Please join us if you can.
There are ten chapters in the book, of which we will read one per week. The reading schedule is as follows:
June 8th — Chapter 1: Socrates’ Question (21 pages)
June 15th — Chapter 2: The Archimedean Point (8 pages)
June 22nd — Chapter 3: Foundations: Well-Being (24 pages)
June 29th — Chapter 4: Foundations: Practical Reason (16 pages)
July 6th — Chapter 5: Styles of Ethical Theory (22 pages)
July 13th — Chapter 6: Theory and Prejudice (27 pages)
July 20th — Chapter 7: The Linguistic Turn (32 pages)
July 27th — Chapter 8: Knowledge, Science, Convergence (24 pages)
August 3rd — Chapter 9: Relativism and Reflection (18 pages)
August 10th — Chapter 10: Morality, the Peculiar Institution (23 pages)
I will be tweeting my comments, as well as posting them in this thread. I hope you join us.
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Post by EB on Jun 2, 2019 5:45:08 GMT
I think I might have to try to keep up with this one  |
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Post by kaanra on Jun 2, 2019 21:28:29 GMT
How is this reading group going to work?
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tbc22
New Member
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Post by tbc22 on Jun 3, 2019 20:43:50 GMT
I might be able to participate! Echoing kaanra's question about what might be expected of me etc. though
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aaron
Junior Member
Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh!
Posts: 58
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Post by aaron on Jun 4, 2019 12:19:16 GMT
How it works: read in accordance with the posted schedule, and post thoughts in this thread, either thoughts that arose while reading or thoughts in reaction to what others post.
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Post by fdc on Jun 6, 2019 5:49:48 GMT
The time has arrived for Williams! I want to begin with a few comments on why I wanted to read this, especially since I've already read it.
(I know I'm a little early, but you gotta read when you have time, not on the day of the discussion, so I will hear no complaints.)
My overarching concern in philosophy is with method, and specifically the prospect of philosophy to accomplish the things that it should. Williams too is concerned about this, and is generally quite skeptical. What makes his approach so unique, though, is that he is not abstracting atemporal methods that philosophers currently employ, but situating those methods in ethical environments as they are historically embodied.
There are virtues and limitations to this method, as we will see. Very briefly, I take the virtues to be that Williams addresses ethical thought in a meaningful and practicable way, instead of abstracting away from real ethical evaluations (like Kantians especially tend to do). The limitations will depend on the kind of history that's done. We know that scientific history is strictly impossible. History is always beholden to present narratives and interests. For Williams, this will have to do with historical discontinuties, as his epigraph makes clear.
Williams' concern with method manifests primarily in his emphasis on questions. It is important what questions we take ourselves to be answering when we do philosophy. Every question comes prepackaged with a conceptual scheme that limits discourse in meaningful ways. Williams will be arguing that ethics should be concerned with Socrates' question: "how should one live?" His book concerns the answers to this question, or rather how philosophers have badly answered it. It's a destructive project more than a constructive one.
He says that philosophy addresses its questions in a manner that is "general and abstract, rationally reflective, and ... known through different kinds of inquiry." Right off the bat you can see who his methodological targets are: Kantians (yay!) and egoists (boo!). Kantians take morality to be a priori and categorical. Williams, I think, is right to object to this. The Kantian object of evaluation is far too strong, and if we are going to situate ethics in human life, we shouldn't so limit ourselves. Egoists take their method to privilege the contemplative agent. They do not presume that we can ask general questions about how one should live, nor should we. Williams rejects this: he thinks *philosophical* ethics must be committed to generalisability beyond the agent. I don't think Williams is right about this. I think methodologically, we need to demonstrate that how I should live is the same as how you should live, and so on. I think we can make this argument, but we can't just assume that we can.
Williams is of course concerned with present philosophical practice. He thinks that we have gone off the tracks in some way. And in large part, this book is a diagnosis of what has gone wrong. As such, he won't be answering Socrates' question. He will be translating previous answers into the Socratic conceptual scheme, showing how they succeed or fail, not on their own, but as translations. Having set all that out, Williams moves on for the rest of the chapter to a defence of Socrates' question as the beginning of ethical philosophy. He starts by analysing what the question actually means.
Williams focuses specifically on Socrates' question as impersonal and as it takes its primary object of evaluation to be a life. The former is only controversial to egoists. The latter is controversial to pretty much everyone. I'm hence going to focus on the latter. "How should one live?" is to be contrasted immediately with "What should one do?" Williams quite rightly objects that the second question is far too specific. When we ask what we should do, we always take for granted when and where we are asking. Philosophers are of course very good at conjuring up these kinds of contexts (trolley cases, for example). But what we are interested in is not what happens on moral twin earth or any other fanciful example. We are interested in everyday behaviour, with everyday lives. Williams recognises that the implication of this might be problematic (and it is). To consider a life is to consider the totality of one's actions as a whole. But in general, most people aren't really concerned with their life when they are old, and even less after they die. I'm unsure if we should try to find some middle ground here, or if we even can. Williams says nothing about this, seemingly biting that bullet and moving on. This could be a problem later on.
Williams notes that some philosophers will contend that Socrates' question is ambiguous between moral and non-moral senses of the term "should." This he says is the legacy of the "morality system," which is a narrow project within ethics. Much of his book will be an attack on the morality system, which is reflected in the first chapter. Despite saying that he will defer a discussion of it until later (chapters five and six), he spends nearly the whole rest of the chapter addressing it.
After he finally gets bored with the morality system, he talks more generally about modern moral theory. He taxonomises its theories and says something about the motivations for ethical theorising. One of these is the project of analysis, which predictably goes . . . uh . . . really well. Another is metaethics, and especially ethical reductionism. This not only doesn't go well: for Williams, it's not even clear why we should be doing this. (He in fact thinks that we shouldn't be doing ethical theory at all, let alone metatheory.)
Williams moves on from this to concerns about rationality and reasons, and one challenge to this in akrasia. This might pose a problem, but as Williams notes, it's not a problem for *him*. Socrates' question is neutral about all that. And this underscores something really important about Socrates' question. It may be neutral about reasons and rationality per se, but it demands some degree of reflection. What this reflection can accomplish is the subject of the book. But anyone who knows anything about Williams knows that when he puts reflection into practice, he gives no *results*. That is, he doesn't answer questions, Socrates' question or otherwise. Should he? Must he? I think he must, but we will wait for his rebuttal.
Before that, I must note something important about his emphasis on reflection. Williams will be concerned to explain the historical origins of the morality system, which he does not like. He will do so by highlighting a historical discontinuity. That is, Williams will claim that the conditions changed between pre-modern and modern times with respect to our institutions and ethical lives, and this difference accounts for why we are so beholden to morality as opposed to ethics more broadly. This amounts to the claim that modern institutions are thoroughly and unavoidably reflective whereas this kind of reflectivity was rare in Greece and elsewhere before the modern period. However, this simply isn't true. The Athenians especially were well aware that reflection was necessary for governance. And moreover, Socratic philosophy was explicitly derived from democratic norms: elenchus was a legal term, for example. So Williams' later appeal to this discontinuity will be problematic, even if institutions later lost the reflectivity that the Athenians employed. But this might actually work out in Williams' favour, for he is concerned with the distinctive ways philosophy can use reflection. Knowing how Philosophy in Athens did so despite the pervasive culture of reflectivity can certainly help his case.
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Post by morallawwithin on Jun 6, 2019 6:21:53 GMT
Read the first chapter! Overall Williams is a great writer, the books is exciting and engaging so far, and he has some great stuff to say. I love the way Williams sets up the issue to be explored, namely through the titular question.
I very much enjoyed Williams' discussion of virtue and what sorts of descriptions we put actions under when talking about that stuff. While I already appreciated the distinction between the the goal of one's action and (that is, their intention) and the disposition which has one act in such a manner in the first place (what is described in terms of virtue), I was very interested by Williams' note that a virtuous person does not necessarily apply the virtues themselves when she deliberates, and indeed that the same supposedly applies to the person who is attempting to become more virtuous. This all fits well with Kant on virtue and whatnot, but I honestly have no idea how one should go about developing virtue--I can't wait to hear more on what Williams thinks about this.
Apologies, but I must do a bit of Kant-defending on the subject of psychological hedonism. So, there's a sense in which one can call Kant a psychological hedonist with respect to non-moral action. Williams is correct to say that psychological hedonism is basically always either false or trivial depending on how you construe it. For Kant, it's basically trivial--at the beginning of the second Critique when he's talking about this stuff, Kant isn't trying to make some grand empirical claim about how all humans behave, he was just drawing conceptual distinctions which allowed him to derive the categorical imperative. Basically, what Kant thought was that whenever one has an inclination for an end i.e. to realize a state of affairs, the representation of that state of affairs is associated with pleasure for that agent. It does not follow that agents maximize pleasure (barring moral considerations); for the representation of a state of affairs in which my pleasure is maximized may not be associated with pleasure for me.* More importantly, it does not follow from this that agents act for the pursuit of pleasure i.e. that pleasure is the goal of one's action. Rather, the goal is to realize the end itself (which may in itself have nothing to do with my pleasure), but for me to have this end as a goal in the first place I have to have an inclination for that end, which co-occurs with the fact that the representation of that end is associated with pleasure for me. So while pleasure plays a role in motivation, it is not the object to be achieved when one acts. Kant does not deny that people can e.g. have immediate inclinations to help others that aren't just covert desires for pleasure.
Thus Williams is wrong to state that, for Kant, the difference between moral and non-moral motivation lies in that only the latter is "exempt from psychological hedonism." Indeed it should be noted that what Kant says about pleasure here applies to morality just as well; Kant admits in the second Critique that morality, too, must have the same association with pleasure if we are to act in accordance with it. The difference between moral and non-moral willing, instead, is that one's inclinations serve as the determining ground of the will only in the latter case, whereas in the former case the authority of the moral law is independent of (but nevertheless co-occurs with, in the case of a virtuous agent) an inclination to follow it.
Anyway that's a minor point and had nothing to do with the substantive point Williams was making, it's just some compulsive Kant-defending on my part. We all agree that a non-trivial form of psychological hedonism is false (even if restricted to non-moral considerations) and that not all non-moral considerations fall under one kind, namely pleasure, in any non-trivial manner.
Finally, I must admit that I don't quite understand Williams' objection to duty-talk. He seems to object to it on the basis that it reduces all ethical considerations to one kind in an unwarranted manner. But, for Kant (who seems to be in his sights re: criticism of duty), one's duty is just what one should do all-thing-considered. For better or for worse, Kant identifies morality with rationality, so that something is morally permissible if and only if it accords with the most fundamental law of practical reason. At a glance this seems to be something Williams should be okay with, given his early defenses of Socrates' question against the charge that "should" must be interpreted relative to a particular class of reasons; Williams objects to this on the basis that once these "sub-deliberations" are finished, there is still a further question as to how I should live all things considered. Kant agrees, and he simply labels the all-things-considered answer to that question 'duty'. I'll look at the section more tomorrow to see if what I'm saying here makes sense.
*I don't claim that psychological hedonism means pleasure-maximizing, or that Williams needs to care about this point, I'm just saying this to clarify Kant's position to the reader.
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dethe
New Member
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Post by dethe on Jun 8, 2019 15:27:02 GMT
The time has arrived for Williams! I want to begin with a few comments on why I wanted to read this, especially since I've already read it. Thank you for this post! Since I don't know Williams beyond having seen his interview with Brian Magee years ago, this post has helped orient me as to what his deal is. The little notes I did make when first reading this chapter started with "Covers a lot of ground, thinly". It's probably not far fetched to have at least a few papers written out of each of the paragraphs in the chapter, which is nice if you're into that kind of thing. Personally, it's like seeing a rube goldberg machine whose majority is out of view, in papers and books of a long philosophical career. It's probably a mixture of being out of philosophical shape and unfamiliarity (both on my part), which will both hopefully improve as we go along in reading this together. Nonetheless, I'd like to pick a few topics that caught my eye and see if I can round off my understanding of Williams and the topics themselves in discussion. Firstly, the unity of virtues was, and in some places is, a hotly debated topic, and in specific I'd like to see where he continues the discussion he hints at in the bottom paragraph of page 22, "According to Socrates, the virtues cannot be misused, and indeed he held something even stronger, that it is impossible for people, because they have a certain virtue, to act worse than if they did not have it. This led him, consistently, to believe that there is basically only one virtue, the power of right judgment. We need not follow him in that. More important, we should not follow him in what motivates those ideas, which is the search for something in an individual’s life that can be unqualifiedly good, good under all possible circumstances. That search has its modern expressions as well, and we shall encounter one of them in the special preoccupations of morality. "- p22 Specifically, the end of this paragraph seems like we should, instead, extremely follow Socrates in searching for whatever's unqualifiedly good under all possible circumstances, even if only to discover there is no such thing. Secondly, the discussion on the self-descriptions the virtuous person acts under had me worried at first reading, as there is a tendency to note the difference between someone who acts virtuously (third person description) and self-consciously so (1) and without the self-consciousness (2), and leave it at that, letting the impression of "priggishness" of the self-consciously virtuous person as a reason to reject cultivating virtues as an ethical practice. Instead, Williams does not reject virtues or their cultivation, which is cool and good. Neither does he conclude much in favour of it, and you can probably tell by my set-up of the matter what I think the conclusion one should come to (that to be self-conscious is not to be cp morally worse). Finally, this will come up more next week, but I found this SEP on Callicles and Thrasymachus quite great [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/callicles-thrasymachus/] which throws a lot more meat on the bones of ethical egoism as a genuine ethical skepticism, and the ideological genealogy of these claims prior to their appearance in Plato (and hopefully an unspoken context to their appearance). Anyway, looking forward to more of this, I've got work in the morning and must sleep. |
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Post by fdc on Jun 11, 2019 21:16:27 GMT
Chapter two of Williamson's Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy today!
This is a short chapter, but also an important one. It concerns the metaphysical foundation of ethics, and generally how a certain breed of ethicist answers the amoralist. For Williams, there is an interesting dynamic between philosophers' motives behind this problem. If the amoralist really is a threat, he will not be motivated by philosophical argument. And if he isn't a threat, there is no use for such argument. I don't think this follows. We might consider someone not presently a threat, but we know that they are not beholden to ethical norms and so worry that they may in the future be a threat unless we convince them that they should so limit themselves. Let's see what Williamson says.
Williamson cites Plato's Gorgias as (one of) the first places where the amoralist is presented as a threat. His reading of the Gorgias is stunningly bad. I don't want to rant about Plato, but I think I must. Callicles was certainly not humbled in the Gorgias. He was brought to a point where he could not meaningfully refute Socrates, a point where he sees the logic in what Socrates says, and yet brashly refuses to follow it. Callicles, that is, is taking a stand against reason. For Plato and his Athenian audience, this is quite damning. The Athenians took reason to be the mark of a man. To renounce it is to renounce one's own dignity. In Callicles' bravado, he undermines his own manhood. This is a rhetorically brilliant move, and it's among Plato's most successful. But there is also another dimension to the Gorgias: those kinds of rhetorical moves are unavailable to Socrates. He cannot play with people's feelings as a strict dialectician. Plato is showing that sophistry debases men, but also that Socratic philosophy (as opposed to his own innovation in dialogue) can do nothing to rectify this ailment. In a sense, Plato is agreeing with Williamson. Only, Plato knows that philosophy can do more. Williamson doesn't.
In any case, back to Williamson.
I think his concern is quite right. The threat that the philosopher poses to the immoralist has no serious force in itself. No one truly cares about rationality or consistency in this abstract, distant sense. It's not meaningful. And so with this comes again the threat of skepticism. Except here, ethical skepticism is very different from other kinds of skepticism, since ethical skepticism has practical consequences and can't be simply refuted with simple existentials. Williamson adds a caution here. It is true that ethical skepticism will have practical effects. The ethical skeptic will act without concern for what is ethical. And yet, we should not pretend that skepticism is in some sense the default view, or that this is a serious worry. This means that while we can't answer the ethical skeptic in philosophical speech, we also don't try to, despite our pretensions. Rather, we use the ethical skeptic to offer insight to those already beholden to the ethical: people who want to live rightly but must know how.
Williamson follows this up with more really bad Plato interpretation, creating more false distance between himself and Plato's earlier example. Plato was writing for a discursive, reflective community who wanted to be ethical. His approach does not differ from Williamson's.
What we have at this point are concerns that answer "to whom?" and "against what?" Ethical arguments are addressed to a moral community against outsiders. But now philosophers need to answer "from where?" If we want to justify ethics from the ground up, what's the ground? For philosophy, that ground is typically taken to be something within reason. We do not presume that reason itself obligates one to be ethical: the ethical skeptic could rationally live unethically, depending upon what we mean by this. But of course, at least two traditions, the Aristotelian and the Kantian, take rationality to obligate a reasoner to living the ethical life under threat of inconsistency. These are the subjects of the next two chapters, so Williams says nothing about them here.
This chapter is short, and so there's not quite much that Williamson could say wrong. And yet, he still says quite a lot.
For my part, I'm not quite sure that his approach is quite right. He admirably avoids thorny metaethical questions, such as the is/ought problem. But he does this with a kind of slight of hand: he strings is and ought together without showing the reader what he's doing. And his means of avoiding this is by focusing on the moral community. Yet I'm unsure both what it means to be a member of the moral community or how important that really is. Can Robinson Crusoe not meaningfully ask Socrates' question? And will his answers differ in some ways from mine today, or will they be substantively similar?
He also appeals to the ethical as if it some radically different sort of thing. The ethical is not present in Socrates' question, and so the ethical skeptic can answer it, yet it somehow appears in certain kinds of answers to Socrates' question. Where it comes from I'm unsure. But at the very least, we know that for Williams, it arises in certain kinds of interpersonal relations, such as promising. I just don't see this as a productive approach. The ethical includes also our obligations to ourselves. Callicles is ethical. Thrasymachus is ethical. They have a theory of justice. Their theory is just very much opposed to the kind of democratic theory they claim to support, and hence is also opposed to the kind of philosophical theory Plato means to construct.
I don't know what explains Williams' approach. Though in my least charitable hours, I suspect it has to do with his defense of relativism. He doesn't want to admit that the more frightening alternatives are genuine ethical alternatives, just as a rhetorical point in his favour. But who knows what's actually going on. Maybe we'll all figure this out by the end of the book.
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Post by fdc on Jun 11, 2019 21:21:16 GMT
Oh, and to respond to Florence: "I must admit that I don't quite understand Williams' objection to duty-talk. He seems to object to it on the basis that it reduces all ethical considerations to one kind in an unwarranted manner."
Williams will be objecting to Kant, but his objection in Chapter One is just the structure of the question. If we want to ask an ethical question, we don't want to cut ourselves off from plausible alternatives before we even begin to inquire. Duty-talk does this. It takes ethics to be categorical and transcendental, which may not actually be the case. Williams certainly doesn't think so, nor do most philosophers. So if we want to productively talk to those people, we need to ask a question that invites them to the conversation. This is all Williams is doing in Chapter One.
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Post by fdc on Jun 25, 2019 21:17:40 GMT
I forgot to post Chapter 3 comments here:
This chapter concerns well-being as a foundation for ethical reasoning. It of course focuses on Aristotle. Williams begins by making a (to my eyes) good case for Thrasymachean moral theory, a kind of egoism. This position was long the enemy of classical ethical theory in Plato and Aristotle. But only in its minute details, as Williams will show. For Williams, Plato's objection to Thrasymachus centres on the motivation to be ethical. Thrasymachus takes ethics to be a foreign imposition, one which agents would rather not be subject to. Plato wants ethics to be something agents rationally embrace.
This is important for Plato. Remember, Plato's Socrates justifies his staying to be executed in the Crito by appealing to a contractual obligation that the state demands of him: that he persuade or obey it. Since he failed to persuade it (i.e. has no power over it), he must obey. We might take the Republic to be a challenge to this argument (as for example Josiah Ober does), but Williams offers us a way to reframe this development: Plato does not begin with the contract as Thrasymachus does; he seeks to vindicate it by other means. This is right. Plato's approach is unique. He is not concerned with agents as they are, their motives and abilities. These he recognises are a product of convention just as much as law is. Rather, his concern is how agents ought to be given the demands life makes of them. That is, Plato's egoistic method radically de-centres the ego. And in this way, he addresses not only those who are initially drawn to Thrasymachus' sophistical naturalism (such as myself), but also the even more egoistic frame of religious morality. Williams, I think, insufficiently appreciates what Plato is doing. He Aristotelises Plato, suggesting that Plato is after a certain kind of state of the self, eudaimonia, that grounds his ethics. That state is different than Aristotle's, of course. It is dialogical at base. BUT! But Plato is not after this at all. He's rather after a process of reasoning, of judging which sorts of acts constitute the good life for oneself. Williams' mistake is excusable: this process of reasoning corresponds to a state of being, but the state of being is not central. In other words, Plato is much more Kantian than Williams would like to admit, even though there are still many foundational differences between Plato and Kant (that make Plato far superior to the old Prussian). But then Williams' objection to Plato goes nowhere.
Williams takes Aristotle to (wrongly) be less ambitious than his teacher. He does not take philosophy to be the sole means by which people become virtuous: people are situated in a physical and social environment and made virtuous by practical reason, not theoretical reason. This is an immensely ambitious claim. Aristotle has to articulate the precise relationships that people have to others and to nature, then deduce what is ethically rational from that. Williams will rightly show that this effort fails. Williams' interpretation of Aristotle is quite good, as far as I can tell. For Aristotle, virtues are intelligent dispositions, which involve the exercise of practical judgement. He discusses the doctrine of the mean, and the unity of the virtues. So far so typical.
But Williams' interest in Aristotle goes much farther than Aristotle's own views. He is interested in how Aristotle's framework differs from modern moral theory. One of those ways is that modern moral theory doesn't effectively account for moral reactions. Aristotle does. For Aristotle, this involves situating acts within one's character. That context is important to judge which sorts of actions ought to be praised, punished, et cetera, and how we otherwise ought to react to them. Modern moral theory simply can't do this: it decontextualises acts. It's useful to note here that Williams' legacy in contemporary ethics is as a part of the resurgence of Aristotelian theory, and especially in the ethics of blaming and praising practices. Contemporary theories are now concerned about these reactions.
Williams takes a curious detour by way of criticising Aristotle. He suggests that Aristotle makes practical reason mostly useless because he provides an account of education where habit is central, and where philosophy begins later in life, when we are already good at reasoning. For Williams, this both fails to address the challenge of moral skepticism, but also fails to address those who most need moral education: the vicious and bad. But Williams misunderstands what Aristotle is doing here. His mistake is similar to how people get de Beauvoir wrong. Aristotle can maintain that people are usually constructed through habit while also maintaining that deliberate exercise of reason can alter the direction of one's life. Aristotle maintains that we can do this, but that a bad environment makes this much more difficult. I have no problem with Aristotle on that front, and Williams need not either.
His ultimate criticism of Aristotle is orthogonal to the efficacy of practical reason. The problem with Aristotle is a kind of dualism: that one has real interests beyond one's apparent interests. For Williams, this is politically and ethically problematic. It justifies coercion, violating individual integrity (of course, since it's Williams), and can lead to political repression. But even worse, this dualism demands justification, and receives none. Aristotle attempts such a justification by appealing to teleology. People have functionally ordered lives, and hence those functions can determine what one's real interests actually are. But Aristotle fails to spell this out clearly. But not only does he not do so clearly, he also cannot, for Williams, do this at all. Aristotle's teleological universe has been subsumed under the domain of evolutionary theory, which has jettisoned teleology as Aristotle understands it, and hence any appeal to "real" interests. Modern science overcomes nearly every major commitment Aristotle has, which then obliterates his ethical view. Aristotelianism is simply untenable.
But that is not to say that Aristotle fails. Williams likes his version of the self and the structure of his theory. He needs only to fill it out with a different content, with different foundations and assumptions—if he can.
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Post by fdc on Jun 25, 2019 21:22:33 GMT
Saddle up, everyone! We're discussing Kant. Williams week four begins now.
In Kant, there is a decisive break with previous ethical theories. Kant is unconcerned with founding ethics upon some Archimedean point in the way (Williams') Plato or Aristotle is. His concern is rather the structure of practical reason and the relations between rational beings. This is an Archimedean point of a different flavour. Kant does not require the human life to ground his ethics: rationality need not be embodied and indeed ought not to be. Ethics is not about anything so fickle: it is universally binding to all who employ the force of reason. Williams will show why he does not like Kant's morality system in this chapter. Though here, Williams offers a substitute for Kant's argument (from Gewirth), one that ends up at the same place but more simply. This is a red flag, but we'll see how well Williams does here.
Getting into Williams' argument, it already does not look particularly Kantian. I would be worried if only it didn't remind me so much of Korsgaard's argument in "Morality and Freedom" (which I so very dislike). But the resemblance stops there. Williams is basically gesturing at the kind of things rational beings want, with the purpose of going straight to freedom. Kant (and Korsgaard) gets there in a very different way, and probably a better way, even if the freedom is the same. I find Williams' reconstruction of Kant's argument immensely frustrating. It's clearly not Kantian in spirit, and bad besides. But it is important to remember what Williams is doing. He's only trying to highlight some foundations of Kant's moral system: reason, freedom, et cetera. And from those foundations, Williams wishes to pose the same problem that he always poses: why should I as a rational agent care about what is rationally required of me? In this, I am not just a rational agent: I am more than this. And the "more than this" is important.
So here we get to why Williams' Kantian argument so (frustratingly) differed from Kant: Williams began with a fairly natural view of agents as they are (embodied, complex, et cetera) while Kant starts only from rational agents as rational and no more. Why begin with the latter? We need to consider the structure of rationality. In both theoretical and practical rationality, evidence does not cause my consent: it rather becomes only a consideration. The rational person can then choose to affirm or deny on the basis of that evidence. She remains free. But this proposed isomorphism between theoretical and practical rationality is wrong. In theoretical rationality, our concern is the world. It is primarily third-personal. In practical rationality, our concern is our own actions, our own life. It is primarily first-personal. With this difference, it simply doesn't follow that the rational agent is necessarily moved to treat others as ends rather than mere means. In Korsgaardian terms, the decision procedure cannot recursively take itself as its content because one is always engaged in decision.
This strikes me as a good objection. The Kantian inference doesn't follow: practical rationality alone is not enough to ground the significant ethical claims the Kantian makes—at least not without importing Kant’s idealist metaphysics.
Other issues await a better time.
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Post by morallawwithin on Jul 4, 2019 19:30:48 GMT
Alright here's my thoughts on chapter 4. Apologies for length. Ultimately I don't think the argument is good, it rests on a formal confusion, and the chapter was well-foreshadowed by his strange misuse of the word "autonomy" at the beginning. So for the first half or so I had some choice comments but didn't see till after that his argument for Kantian-like ethics wasn't intended to be a reproduction of Kant's reasoning, so that's all fine. He nicely explained how Kantian thinking re: universalization ultimately requires the idea: "But there is another possibility: I do not regard myself as being in [the business of making rules]" (p. 62). This is nothing other than the equivalence between the first and third formulations of the Categorical Imperative. That is, the equivalence between, on the one hand, that one should only act on maxims which one can at the same time will be universal laws, and on the other hand, the constraint that one should only act in a manner consistent with being autonomous, that is, the idea that one's endorsement of a given law is grounds for its status as a law for that individual. Everything is neat so far. It's trivially true that any maxim is universalizable in the weak sense that it can conceivably be a universal law. Like, we can easily imagine a society of little robots who act like humans except they're programmed to always make the lying promise whenever they're in the relevant situation. For sure, such a situation would never come up since no one would believe the promises etc., but it's still true that it's a universal law among such a community. But the maxim isn't universalizable in that it can't be a universal law for agents, that is, the agents' endorsement of the maxim cannot be grounds for its status as a law. Ok so we might as well say everything so far is good, that Williams successfully established the equivalence between the first and third formulations of the categorical imperative. The rest of what Kant needs is (i) to show that the only possible candidate for the moral law, or equivalently the most fundamental law of practical reason, is the Categorical Imperative, and (ii) that we must indeed take ourselves to be subject to this law, i.e. subject to some norm. For the rest of the chapter Williams argues against Kant's supposed reasoning for (i). In particular Williams claims that Kant derives the moral law from an abstracted perspective which agents are not actually obligated to reason from; in particular Williams thinks that Kant has agents reason from a perspective in which they are rational agents "and no more" (p. 63) whereas in reality agents are always inhabiting contingent circumstances (the cited quote was in fact in response to a hypothetical point, not one of Kant's, but Williams basically ascribes the quoted view to Kant in the next section on p. 64, alleging that Kant helped himself to this perspective because he thought that in a deep metaphysical sense we are "rational agents and nothing more"). Even though an agent is always in some contingent circumstance, there are no such circumstances that all agents are in; nevertheless no one is really reasoning from a perspective in which they are not inhabiting some contingent circumstances. In reality, while Kant does think that the moral law is empirically unconditioned and therefore has authority which is demonstrable a priori, nothing he does supposes that agents must reason from the impossible perspective Williams ascribes to him. The conflation of such a perspective with the one that Kant actually ascribes to rational agents rests on a rather basic formal error, which I will spell out in a sec. I should first note that I responded to a similar objection, coming from Sharon Street, in the following: downwardabsolute.wordpress.com/2019/06/18/reply-to-a-question-about-street/. To summarize: it is simply a matter of logical necessity that, if any constraints on what I can permissibly do exist at all, then there is a more general constraint which is empirically unconditioned. For suppose I am wrong; suppose you need to take into account your contingent circumstances before figuring out your obligations. Say I need to know which circumstance C I'm in in order to figure out what my obligations are; let L C be strongest rule which constraints my actions given that I am in C. Then we may define the rule L to be that one which states that "For each circumstance C, if you're in C, obey L C". Then, contrary to hypothesis L is an empirically unconditioned law which merely gives the same constraints which were hypothesized to exist. As an analogy, consider this. I have certain obligations; perhaps one of them is to not lie to my friends (if you're not an error theorist and you don't like that example, replace it with something else). Let F be the actual circumstances I'm in, so that F captures all the stuff Williams cares about, e.g. the sort of culture and relationships I'm embedded in and such. That I shouldn't lie to my friends, Williams might say, is empirically conditioned; I don't get it from justifying my actions from some abstract perspective, rather I get it from justifying them from within F. We nevertheless still have an unconditioned law, namely that which tells one not to lie to one's friend if they're in circumstances F. That's a categorical imperative, in that it applies to everyone, simply because "do not lie to your friends" applies to me by virtue of my circumstances F. Take the conjunction of all one's other duties in all other circumstances, and you have an empirically unconditioned fundamental law of practical reason. Before moving on to talk about Williams directly, I will address two objections to the above. First, note that in my reasoning I am speaking from the framework Williams calls the "administrative" view of ethics, according to which practical reasoning consists in laying out rules which tell agents which available actions are okay and which aren't. This is in contrast to something the virtue theorist would be more sympathetic too, namely the idea that we should be focusing on character or dispositions rather than rule-following itself. I think it's fair of me to take the administrative conception for granted since that's not what Williams' critique is focusing on--rather he's focusing on a problem which remains even after we grant the administrative conception, namely from what perspective we should ask what the fundamental law of practical reason is (or, I should say, whether there is any such fundamental law). Second, here's a potential issue for Kant that I didn't address in my Street post due to length. Imagine I were learning how to golf and I asked what the most fundamental rule of golfing is. My teacher says that that's a silly question, since what you need to do varies to much that you can't say or figure out what rules you should follow until you actually see your circumstances. Now let's say I respond in the same way I responded to Street, saying I can just make a big conjunctive rule where the conjuncts are conditionals so that it covers what to do in every situation. Problem is, such a conjunction is going to be an inconceivably complicated mess, the use of which would be pragmatically infeasible. So while I may have technically shown there is a single fundamental rule of golfing of which all other norms for how to golf are special cases, there is no use in trying to derive that fundamental rule--golfing will only ever consist in reasoning about what to do after you see the special circumstances you're in. Perhaps practical reasoning is the same; and indeed there's no way to know in advance that this isn't gonna be what happens when you set out to find the CI. Now, here's something to note about this objection. It merely gives a pragmatic problem with Kant's approach, and it does not show that Kant is making any sort of false presupposition in merely asking what an empirically unconditioned law could be. When I ask such a question, you might respond by saying that strictly speaking there is an answer to it, it would just be horrible complicated and unworkable, so my work will be fruitless. But one cannot on this basis say that I am falsely assuming that an empirically unconditioned law in the first place, since as I have shown the existence of such a law is a logical necessity given the existence of empirically conditioned practical laws. So while I might be subject to criticism, this objection does not license the Street-type criticism. The above is basically the gist of my response to Williams; I'll now just quickly describe the objection as a direct response to him. Kant gets the CI in part from setting out on an a priori investigation of practical reason. Williams objects to the ' a priori' part, saying that Kant has agents reason from a perspective in which they are in no particular contingent circumstances--"what he [sic] would reasonably do if he were a rational agent and no more" (p. 63, italics his)--an impossible position indeed. Now, this point seems pedantic, but it really is the source of the problem with his objection. What Kant says is that whether a maxim is permissible does not depend on contingent circumstances, so that acting on it must be justifiable a priori, that is, justifiable without appeal to contingent circumstances. What Williams ascribes to Kant is the belief that one must justify one's maxims under the assumption that one is not in any particular contingent circumstances ("that he is a rational agent and no more"). These are completely different assumptions, because the scopes of the negations are different. Kant does not ask us to assume in our practical reasoning that the contingent circumstances to not obtain, but rather, he is saying we can't appeal to them when it comes to justifying maxims. The reason you can't appeal to them is because any contingent information you need which is relevant to how you act is already built into the maxim--a maxim, recall, is a rule of the form "Do action A in circumstances C for the end(s) E". The Categorical Imperative is empirically unconditioned because it is a rule for selecting maxims. To summarize: Williams recognizes the equivalence between the first and third formulations of the Categorical Imperative. In part, to show the CI applies to us, it suffices to show that we must take ourselves to be autonomous. Kant argued this is the only form morality/practical reason can take because anything else would be empirically conditioned; any supposed obligations whose authority does not require the autonomous endorsement of agents would presuppose a contingent inclination to obey that "obligation," so it wouldn't be categorical (at least, if we don't take the implausible intuitionist view that there are brute inexplicable obligations that are just known via some mysterious faculty). Williams objects to the idea that we can assume the moral law is so unconditioned, on the basis that demonstrating such would require us to adopt a neutral, disinterested point of view when deliberating that (I and Williams both agree) people are not in fact obligated to take. I have argued that Kant does not rely on any substantive assumption like that, and that the sense in which the moral law is unconditioned is an innocuous and demonstrable logical point. I must say that there is some sloppiness in this post due to the fact that I needed to adapt Williams' criticisms to apply to a correct reading of Kant. For example, Williams is under the impression that talk about the "noumenal self" was used by Kant to argue that the CI applies to all agents. This is false; that the CI applies to all rational agents is analytic, and the distinction between phenomena and noumena was only brought up to show that we must indeed take ourselves to be agents (using an argument which Kant ultimately took to be unnecessary). There is more to say in defense of my position but I should stop here. |
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