âHowever, I believe itâs a mistake to think that the descriptive and the normative can never overlap. Imagine that you are a scientist taking an inventory of all the various qualities present in conscious human experience. Youâve written down the qualities of experiencing various colors, sounds, and smells. But there are two distinct experiential qualities that you canât quite figure out how to describe. In the end, you realize that the only way to describe the one is to say that itâs âgoodâ or âpositiveâ, and that you can only describe the other by saying itâs âbadâ or ânegativeâ. That is, you have to mention the normativity of the experiences in order to describe them accurately. The qualities of these experiences are simultaneously normative and descriptive.â
I canât imagine being satisfied with such a theory of consciousness. It seems like there will always be another question about how to explain âgoodâ and âbadâ or the appearance of them. Stopping here and invoking normative properties that arenât further explained physically is giving up, a lot like invoking the supernatural or gods to explain natural phenomena.
Intrinsic good and intrinsic bad as properties necessary to describe pleasure and suffering also seem incompatible with functionalism and illusionism, which both seem basically true to me. Are any popular theories of consciousness compatible with this?
normative properties that arenât further explained physically
Youâve misunderstood Rawlette here. Her viewâanalytic hedonismâholds that normative properties are analytically reducible to pleasure and suffering. So her suggestion here is not that we need metaphysically primitive normative properties to explain the experience. Quite the opposite! Itâs rather (as I understand it) that the normativity âcomes along for freeâ (so to speak) with the familiar felt nature of the experience.
âIn the end, you realize that the only way to describe the one is to say that itâs âgoodâ or âpositiveâ, and that you can only describe the other by saying itâs âbadâ or ânegativeâ. â
Was this not a motivating example for her view? Or just proposed as an example where the descriptive and normative may overlap?
Does she have a specific descriptive definition of pleasure sheâs working with that doesnât directly use normative terms but from which she can derive its normative goodness? (I donât expect a persuasive solution to the is-ought problem; at some point you need to assume a normative fact to obtain any further ones, and I think we could prove this formally.)
It might be tough to make a lot of progress on these things until weâre allowed to start poking people in the brain and asking them about it. My sense is that the current science and philosophy of the emotions (and adjacent topics) is not well developed at all. Perhaps once we have a better grasp of those things maybe we can start to think more usefully about metaethics (though maybe not).
From the first essay:
âHowever, I believe itâs a mistake to think that the descriptive and the normative can never overlap. Imagine that you are a scientist taking an inventory of all the various qualities present in conscious human experience. Youâve written down the qualities of experiencing various colors, sounds, and smells. But there are two distinct experiential qualities that you canât quite figure out how to describe. In the end, you realize that the only way to describe the one is to say that itâs âgoodâ or âpositiveâ, and that you can only describe the other by saying itâs âbadâ or ânegativeâ. That is, you have to mention the normativity of the experiences in order to describe them accurately. The qualities of these experiences are simultaneously normative and descriptive.â
I canât imagine being satisfied with such a theory of consciousness. It seems like there will always be another question about how to explain âgoodâ and âbadâ or the appearance of them. Stopping here and invoking normative properties that arenât further explained physically is giving up, a lot like invoking the supernatural or gods to explain natural phenomena.
Intrinsic good and intrinsic bad as properties necessary to describe pleasure and suffering also seem incompatible with functionalism and illusionism, which both seem basically true to me. Are any popular theories of consciousness compatible with this?
Youâve misunderstood Rawlette here. Her viewâanalytic hedonismâholds that normative properties are analytically reducible to pleasure and suffering. So her suggestion here is not that we need metaphysically primitive normative properties to explain the experience. Quite the opposite! Itâs rather (as I understand it) that the normativity âcomes along for freeâ (so to speak) with the familiar felt nature of the experience.
Iâm not sure how to interpret this, then:
âIn the end, you realize that the only way to describe the one is to say that itâs âgoodâ or âpositiveâ, and that you can only describe the other by saying itâs âbadâ or ânegativeâ. â
Was this not a motivating example for her view? Or just proposed as an example where the descriptive and normative may overlap?
Does she have a specific descriptive definition of pleasure sheâs working with that doesnât directly use normative terms but from which she can derive its normative goodness? (I donât expect a persuasive solution to the is-ought problem; at some point you need to assume a normative fact to obtain any further ones, and I think we could prove this formally.)
It might be tough to make a lot of progress on these things until weâre allowed to start poking people in the brain and asking them about it. My sense is that the current science and philosophy of the emotions (and adjacent topics) is not well developed at all. Perhaps once we have a better grasp of those things maybe we can start to think more usefully about metaethics (though maybe not).