Thank you for following up, and sorry that I haven’t been able to respond as succinctly or clearly as I would’ve liked. I hope to write a follow up post which more clearly describes the flow of ideas from those contained in my comments to the original blog post as your comments have helped me see where my background assumption are likely do differ from others’.
I see now that it would be better to take a step back to explain at a higher level where I’m coming from. My line of reasoning follows from the ideas of the later Wittgenstein: many words have meaning defined solely by their use. These words do not have any further more precise meaning—no underlying rigid scientific, logical or analytic structure. Take for example ‘to expect’, what does it mean to “expect someone to ring your doorbell at 4pm”? The meaning is irreducibly a melange of criterion and is not well defined for edge cases e.g. for an amnesiac. There’s a lot more to say here, see for example ‘Philosophical Investigations’ paragraphs 570-625.
That said, I’m perhaps closer to Quine’s ‘The Roots of Reference’ than Wittgenstein when I emphasize the importance of figuring out how we first learn a word’s use. I believe that many—perhaps not all—words such as ‘to expect’, moral language, etc. have some core use cases which are particularly salient thanks to our neurological wirings, everyday activities, childhood interactions, etc. and these use cases can help us draw a line between situations in which a word is well defined and situations in which the meaning of a word breaks down.
Here’s a simple example, the command “Anticipate the past!” steps outside of the boundaries of ‘to anticipate’s meaning, because ‘to anticipate’ usually involves things in the future and thought/actions before the event. When it comes to moral language we have two problems, the first is to distinguish cases of sensible use of moral language from under-defined edge cases, and the second to distinguish between uses of moral language which are better rewritten in other terms. Let me clarify this second case using ‘to anticipate’: ‘anticipate’ can mean to foresee as in “He anticipated Carlsen’s move.”, but also look forward to as in “He greatly anticipated the celebration”. If we want to clarify the first use case, then it’s better to set aside the second and treat them separately. Here’s another example “Sedol anticipated his opponent’s knowledge of opening theory by playing a novel opening.” If Sedol always plays novel openings, and says this game was nothing special then that sentence is false. If Sedol usually never plays novel openings, but says “My opponent’s strength in opening theory was not on my mind”, what then? I would say the meaning of ‘to anticipate’ is simply under-defined in this case.
Although I can’t have done justice to Quine and Wittgenstein let’s pretend I have, and I’ll return to your specific comments.
It sounds like you see the genealogy of moral terms as involving a melange of all of these, which seems to leave the door quite open as to what moral terms actually mean.
I disagree, there is no other actual meaning beyond the sequence of uses we learn for these words. Perhaps in the future we will discover that moral language has some natural scientific basis as happened with water, but moral language strikes me as far more similar to expectation than water.
It does sound though, from your reply, that you do think that moral language exclusively concerns experiences
Just as with ‘to anticipate’ where sometimes you can anticipate without explicitly thinking of the consequence so to for people using moral language. They often do not explicitly think of these experiences, but their use of the words is still rooted in the relevant experiences (in a fuzzy way). Of course, some other uses of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are better seen as something entirely different e.g. ‘right’ as used to refer to following a samurai’s code of honor. This is an important point, so I’ve elaborated on it in my other reply.
I can observe that there is such-and-such level of inequality in the distribution of income in a society.
If this observation is rooted in experience i.e. extrapolating from your experience seeing people in a system with certain levels of inequality then sure. Of course since this extrapolation depends on the experiences, you should not be confident in extrapolating the right/wrongness of something solely based on a certain GINI coefficient.
But I’m not sure why we should expect any substantive normative answers to be implied by the meaning of moral language.
I do not claim that my framework supports the sort of normativity many philosophers (perhaps you too) are interested in. I do not believe talk of normative force is coherent, but I’d prefer to not go into that here. My claim is simply that my framework lets us coherently answer some questions I’m interested in. Put in different terms, I’d like to focus discussion on my argument ‘by its own lights’.
Thanks for your reply. I’m actually very sympathetic to Wittgenstein’s account of language: before I decided to move to an area with higher potential impact, I had been accepted to study for a PhD on the implications of Wittgensteinian meta-philosophy for ethics. (I wouldn’t use the term metaphilosophy in this context of course, since I was largely focused on the view expressed in PI 119 that “…we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.”)
All that said, it seems we disagree in quite a few places.
DM:
It sounds like you see the genealogy of moral terms as involving a melange of all of these, which seems to leave the door quite open as to what moral terms actually mean.
JP:
I disagree, there is no other actual meaning beyond the sequence of uses we learn for these words.
I don’t think our use of language is limited to the kinds of cases through which we initially learn the use of particular terms. For example, we learn the use of numbers through exceptionally simple cases “If I have one banana and then another banana, I have two bananas” and then later get trained in things like multiplication etc., but then we clearly go on to use mathematical language in much more complex and creative ways, which include extending the language in radical ways. It would be a mistake to conclude that we can’t do these things because they go beyond the uses we initially learn and note that Wittgenstein doesn’t say this either in his later work in the philosophy of mathematics. I agree it’s a common Wittgensteinian move to say that our use of language breaks down when we extend it inappropriately past ordinary usage- but if you look at Wittgenstein’s treatment of mathematics it certainly does not tell mathematicians to stop doing the very complex mathematical speculation which is far removed from the ways in which we are initially trained in mathematics. Indeed, I think it’s anti-Wittgensteinian to attempt to interfere with or police the way people ordinarily use language in this way. Of course, the Wittgensteinian can call into question certain ways of thinking (e.g. that our ordinary mathematical practice implies Platonism), although we need to do careful philosophical work to highlight potential problems with specific ways of thinking. Fwiw, it seems to me like your conclusions stray into telling ordinary moral language users that they can’t use moral language (or think about moral considerations) that they otherwise do or would, though of course it would require more discussion of your precise position to determine this.
But that aside, it still seems to me to be the case that how we actually ordinarily use moral language is left quite open by your account of how we learn moral language, since you say it includes a mix of “reactions [which] include approval, preferences and beliefs.” That seems compatible, to me, with us coming to use moral language in a wide variety of ways. Of course, you could argue for a more specific genealogy of how we come to use moral language, explaining why we come to only (or at least primarily) use it to convey certain specific attitudes of (dis)approval or preferences or beliefs about preferences.
It seems like your own account of how we learn language involves us extending the use of moral language too: from first learning that bad things are disapproved (e.g. our parents disapprove of us burning ourselves in fires), then we “extend our use of moral language beyond the[se] simple cases” to introduce preferences, and (at some point) beliefs. So if you allow that much, it doesn’t seem clear why we should think that our uses of moral language are still properly limited to the kinds of uses which are (ex hypothesi) part of our initial training. It seems quite conceivable to me that we initially learn moral language in something like the way you describe, but then collectively move on to almost any number of more complex uses such as considering what we would collectively endorse in such and such scenarios. And once we go that far (which I think we should in order to adequately account for how we see people actually using moral language) I don’t think we’re in a position where we can rule out as impossible baroque speculations about population ethics etc.
I had been accepted to study for a PhD on the implications of Wittgensteinian meta-philosophy for ethics.
Well, I for one, would’ve liked to have read the thesis! Wonderful, I suppose then most of my background talk was redundant. When it comes to mathematics, I found the arguments in Kripke’s ‘Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language’ quite convincing. I would love to see someone do an in depth translation applying everything Kripke says about arithmetic to total utilitarianism. I think this would be quite useful, and perhaps work well with my ideas here.
Yes, I agree that what I’ve been doing looks a lot like language policing, so let me clarify. Rather than claiming talk of population ethics etc. is invalid or incoherent, it would be more accurate to say I see it as apparently baseless and that I do not fully understand the connection with our other uses of moral language. When others choose to extend their moral language to population ethics, their language is likely coherent within their community. Probably, they have found a group within which they share similar inductive bias which endows their novel uses of moral language with reference. However, insofar as they expect me to follow along with this extension (indeed insofar as they expect their conclusions about population ethics to have force for non-population-ethicists) they must explain how their extension of moral language follows from our shared ostensive basis for moral language and our shared inductive biases. My arguments have attempted to show that our shared ostensive basis for moral language does not straight-forwardly support talk of population ethics, because such talk does not share the same basis in negatively/positively valenced emotions.
Put in more Wittgensteinian terms, population ethics language bears a family resemblance to our more mundane use of moral language, but it does not share the universal motivating force provided by our common emotional reactions to e.g. a hit a to the head. Of course, probably, some philosophers react viscerally and emotionally to talk of the repugnant conclusion. In that case, for them the repugnant conclusion carries some force that it does not for others. So to return to the policing question, I am not policing insofar as I agree that their language is meaningful and provides insight to their community. Claims like “Total utilitarianism better captures our population ethics intuitions than …” can be true or false. However, any move to then say “Your use of moral language should be replaced by uses which agree with our population ethics intuitions” seems baseless and perhaps could be described as an act of policing on the part of the speaker.
>When it comes to mathematics, I found the arguments in Kripke’s ‘Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language’ quite convincing. I would love to see someone do an in depth translation applying everything Kripke says about arithmetic to total utilitarianism. I think this would be quite useful, and perhaps work well with my ideas here.
That makes sense. I personally think that “Kripkenstein’s” views are quite different from Wittgenstein’s own views on mathematics.
It seems there’s a bit of a disanalogy between the case of simple addition and the case of moral language. In the case of addition we observe widespread consensus (no-one feels any inclination to start using quus for whatever reason). Conversely it seems to me that moral discourse is characterised by widespread disagreement i.e. we can sensibly disagree about whether it’s right or wrong to torture, whether it’s right or wrong for a wrongdoer to suffer, whether it’s good to experience pleasure if it’s unjustly earned and so on. This suggests to me that moral terms aren’t defined by reference to certain concrete things we agree are good.
>Yes, I agree that what I’ve been doing looks a lot like language policing, so let me clarify. Rather than claiming talk of population ethics etc. is invalid or incoherent, it would be more accurate to say I see it as apparently baseless and that I do not fully understand the connection with our other uses of moral language… insofar as they expect me to follow along with this extension (indeed insofar as they expect their conclusions about population ethics to have force for non-population-ethicists) they must explain how their extension of moral language follows from our shared ostensive basis for moral language and our shared inductive biases. My arguments have attempted to show that our shared ostensive basis for moral language does not straight-forwardly support talk of population ethics, because such talk does not share the same basis in negatively/positively valenced emotions.
OK so it sounds like the core issue here is the question of whether moral terms are defined at their core by reference to valenced emotions then, which I’ll continue discussing in the other thread.
Thank you for following up, and sorry that I haven’t been able to respond as succinctly or clearly as I would’ve liked. I hope to write a follow up post which more clearly describes the flow of ideas from those contained in my comments to the original blog post as your comments have helped me see where my background assumption are likely do differ from others’.
I see now that it would be better to take a step back to explain at a higher level where I’m coming from. My line of reasoning follows from the ideas of the later Wittgenstein: many words have meaning defined solely by their use. These words do not have any further more precise meaning—no underlying rigid scientific, logical or analytic structure. Take for example ‘to expect’, what does it mean to “expect someone to ring your doorbell at 4pm”? The meaning is irreducibly a melange of criterion and is not well defined for edge cases e.g. for an amnesiac. There’s a lot more to say here, see for example ‘Philosophical Investigations’ paragraphs 570-625.
That said, I’m perhaps closer to Quine’s ‘The Roots of Reference’ than Wittgenstein when I emphasize the importance of figuring out how we first learn a word’s use. I believe that many—perhaps not all—words such as ‘to expect’, moral language, etc. have some core use cases which are particularly salient thanks to our neurological wirings, everyday activities, childhood interactions, etc. and these use cases can help us draw a line between situations in which a word is well defined and situations in which the meaning of a word breaks down.
Here’s a simple example, the command “Anticipate the past!” steps outside of the boundaries of ‘to anticipate’s meaning, because ‘to anticipate’ usually involves things in the future and thought/actions before the event. When it comes to moral language we have two problems, the first is to distinguish cases of sensible use of moral language from under-defined edge cases, and the second to distinguish between uses of moral language which are better rewritten in other terms. Let me clarify this second case using ‘to anticipate’: ‘anticipate’ can mean to foresee as in “He anticipated Carlsen’s move.”, but also look forward to as in “He greatly anticipated the celebration”. If we want to clarify the first use case, then it’s better to set aside the second and treat them separately. Here’s another example “Sedol anticipated his opponent’s knowledge of opening theory by playing a novel opening.” If Sedol always plays novel openings, and says this game was nothing special then that sentence is false. If Sedol usually never plays novel openings, but says “My opponent’s strength in opening theory was not on my mind”, what then? I would say the meaning of ‘to anticipate’ is simply under-defined in this case.
Although I can’t have done justice to Quine and Wittgenstein let’s pretend I have, and I’ll return to your specific comments.
I disagree, there is no other actual meaning beyond the sequence of uses we learn for these words. Perhaps in the future we will discover that moral language has some natural scientific basis as happened with water, but moral language strikes me as far more similar to expectation than water.
Just as with ‘to anticipate’ where sometimes you can anticipate without explicitly thinking of the consequence so to for people using moral language. They often do not explicitly think of these experiences, but their use of the words is still rooted in the relevant experiences (in a fuzzy way). Of course, some other uses of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are better seen as something entirely different e.g. ‘right’ as used to refer to following a samurai’s code of honor. This is an important point, so I’ve elaborated on it in my other reply.
If this observation is rooted in experience i.e. extrapolating from your experience seeing people in a system with certain levels of inequality then sure. Of course since this extrapolation depends on the experiences, you should not be confident in extrapolating the right/wrongness of something solely based on a certain GINI coefficient.
I do not claim that my framework supports the sort of normativity many philosophers (perhaps you too) are interested in. I do not believe talk of normative force is coherent, but I’d prefer to not go into that here. My claim is simply that my framework lets us coherently answer some questions I’m interested in. Put in different terms, I’d like to focus discussion on my argument ‘by its own lights’.
Thanks for your reply. I’m actually very sympathetic to Wittgenstein’s account of language: before I decided to move to an area with higher potential impact, I had been accepted to study for a PhD on the implications of Wittgensteinian meta-philosophy for ethics. (I wouldn’t use the term metaphilosophy in this context of course, since I was largely focused on the view expressed in PI 119 that “…we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.”)
All that said, it seems we disagree in quite a few places.
DM:
JP:
I don’t think our use of language is limited to the kinds of cases through which we initially learn the use of particular terms. For example, we learn the use of numbers through exceptionally simple cases “If I have one banana and then another banana, I have two bananas” and then later get trained in things like multiplication etc., but then we clearly go on to use mathematical language in much more complex and creative ways, which include extending the language in radical ways. It would be a mistake to conclude that we can’t do these things because they go beyond the uses we initially learn and note that Wittgenstein doesn’t say this either in his later work in the philosophy of mathematics. I agree it’s a common Wittgensteinian move to say that our use of language breaks down when we extend it inappropriately past ordinary usage- but if you look at Wittgenstein’s treatment of mathematics it certainly does not tell mathematicians to stop doing the very complex mathematical speculation which is far removed from the ways in which we are initially trained in mathematics. Indeed, I think it’s anti-Wittgensteinian to attempt to interfere with or police the way people ordinarily use language in this way. Of course, the Wittgensteinian can call into question certain ways of thinking (e.g. that our ordinary mathematical practice implies Platonism), although we need to do careful philosophical work to highlight potential problems with specific ways of thinking. Fwiw, it seems to me like your conclusions stray into telling ordinary moral language users that they can’t use moral language (or think about moral considerations) that they otherwise do or would, though of course it would require more discussion of your precise position to determine this.
But that aside, it still seems to me to be the case that how we actually ordinarily use moral language is left quite open by your account of how we learn moral language, since you say it includes a mix of “reactions [which] include approval, preferences and beliefs.” That seems compatible, to me, with us coming to use moral language in a wide variety of ways. Of course, you could argue for a more specific genealogy of how we come to use moral language, explaining why we come to only (or at least primarily) use it to convey certain specific attitudes of (dis)approval or preferences or beliefs about preferences.
It seems like your own account of how we learn language involves us extending the use of moral language too: from first learning that bad things are disapproved (e.g. our parents disapprove of us burning ourselves in fires), then we “extend our use of moral language beyond the[se] simple cases” to introduce preferences, and (at some point) beliefs. So if you allow that much, it doesn’t seem clear why we should think that our uses of moral language are still properly limited to the kinds of uses which are (ex hypothesi) part of our initial training. It seems quite conceivable to me that we initially learn moral language in something like the way you describe, but then collectively move on to almost any number of more complex uses such as considering what we would collectively endorse in such and such scenarios. And once we go that far (which I think we should in order to adequately account for how we see people actually using moral language) I don’t think we’re in a position where we can rule out as impossible baroque speculations about population ethics etc.
Well, I for one, would’ve liked to have read the thesis! Wonderful, I suppose then most of my background talk was redundant. When it comes to mathematics, I found the arguments in Kripke’s ‘Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language’ quite convincing. I would love to see someone do an in depth translation applying everything Kripke says about arithmetic to total utilitarianism. I think this would be quite useful, and perhaps work well with my ideas here.
Yes, I agree that what I’ve been doing looks a lot like language policing, so let me clarify. Rather than claiming talk of population ethics etc. is invalid or incoherent, it would be more accurate to say I see it as apparently baseless and that I do not fully understand the connection with our other uses of moral language. When others choose to extend their moral language to population ethics, their language is likely coherent within their community. Probably, they have found a group within which they share similar inductive bias which endows their novel uses of moral language with reference. However, insofar as they expect me to follow along with this extension (indeed insofar as they expect their conclusions about population ethics to have force for non-population-ethicists) they must explain how their extension of moral language follows from our shared ostensive basis for moral language and our shared inductive biases. My arguments have attempted to show that our shared ostensive basis for moral language does not straight-forwardly support talk of population ethics, because such talk does not share the same basis in negatively/positively valenced emotions.
Put in more Wittgensteinian terms, population ethics language bears a family resemblance to our more mundane use of moral language, but it does not share the universal motivating force provided by our common emotional reactions to e.g. a hit a to the head. Of course, probably, some philosophers react viscerally and emotionally to talk of the repugnant conclusion. In that case, for them the repugnant conclusion carries some force that it does not for others. So to return to the policing question, I am not policing insofar as I agree that their language is meaningful and provides insight to their community. Claims like “Total utilitarianism better captures our population ethics intuitions than …” can be true or false. However, any move to then say “Your use of moral language should be replaced by uses which agree with our population ethics intuitions” seems baseless and perhaps could be described as an act of policing on the part of the speaker.
>When it comes to mathematics, I found the arguments in Kripke’s ‘Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language’ quite convincing. I would love to see someone do an in depth translation applying everything Kripke says about arithmetic to total utilitarianism. I think this would be quite useful, and perhaps work well with my ideas here.
That makes sense. I personally think that “Kripkenstein’s” views are quite different from Wittgenstein’s own views on mathematics.
It seems there’s a bit of a disanalogy between the case of simple addition and the case of moral language. In the case of addition we observe widespread consensus (no-one feels any inclination to start using quus for whatever reason). Conversely it seems to me that moral discourse is characterised by widespread disagreement i.e. we can sensibly disagree about whether it’s right or wrong to torture, whether it’s right or wrong for a wrongdoer to suffer, whether it’s good to experience pleasure if it’s unjustly earned and so on. This suggests to me that moral terms aren’t defined by reference to certain concrete things we agree are good.
>Yes, I agree that what I’ve been doing looks a lot like language policing, so let me clarify. Rather than claiming talk of population ethics etc. is invalid or incoherent, it would be more accurate to say I see it as apparently baseless and that I do not fully understand the connection with our other uses of moral language… insofar as they expect me to follow along with this extension (indeed insofar as they expect their conclusions about population ethics to have force for non-population-ethicists) they must explain how their extension of moral language follows from our shared ostensive basis for moral language and our shared inductive biases. My arguments have attempted to show that our shared ostensive basis for moral language does not straight-forwardly support talk of population ethics, because such talk does not share the same basis in negatively/positively valenced emotions.
OK so it sounds like the core issue here is the question of whether moral terms are defined at their core by reference to valenced emotions then, which I’ll continue discussing in the other thread.