After Virtue: Chapter 3 and 4

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Chapters 3 and 4 of AV

On the up side, this gets us out of the relentless discussion of Emotivism. I am not entirely sure that I understand why Chapter 3 was written. I assume that this will be used as a target to attack later, but I think that we got all the value out of this discussion in chapter II.

The argument goes:

“We have lost the ability to talk about morality, incommensurate (Ch I).”
No this has always been the case, I am an Emotivist
“OK, the Emotivist world looks like this”
OK, so what

Is MacI trying to say that this is proof that the Emotivist society is NOT something that always was? It seems like chapter 3 is a lot of overkill to make that fairly easily granted point.

I hope that he is going to use the paradigms set up in this chapter to pick out qualities of older moralities that had it together(?) or what our new goal should be (?).

Chapter 4 was pretty good. A lot tighter / faster moving. It basically gives the specific instances in Kant, Kierkergaard, and Hume of how the Enlightenment project of answering rationally “Why should I be moral” failed. He also asserts a close similarity between the Enlightenment (which asked the same question we ask, but they did it first) and today. They asked the question that we, 300 years later, still have not addressed.

Chapter 5 promises the essential flaw that guaranteed failure, but I’m still reading it.

Notes

Chapter 3: Emotivism: Social Content and Social Context

Synopsis: Do we live in an Emotivism-infected culture?

  1. Since G.E. Moore, the moral philosopher has not had the obligation to explain the social implementation of his proposition (p. 23).
  2. Emotivism’s social content obliterates the difference between social manipulation versus genuine (non-manipulative) relations.
    1. If all evaluation is preference-based, you are always manipulating someone
    2. You are always treating others as means and never as ends in themselves (ref. Kant)
  3. What would an Emotivist world look like?
    1. Manipulation of others for amusement (or manipulation for their betterment, but we can’t tell the difference) like in Portrait of a Lady
    2. A world with boredom as the enemy and the world as a market of subornable wills to be manipulated
    3. This notion tends to surface in classes with too much leisure
  4. The corporation embodies the Emotivist ethic
    1. The wealthy person searches for the prey to use (in previous section), the corporate manager is praised for ‘using.’
    2. The paragon of this idea comes from Weber
    3. Battles between competing values cannot be resolved.
    4. Difficulties are resolved by appealing to ’efficiency’ - which really serves only to strengthen the ethic that people ought be used
    5. Weber’s distinction between ‘power’ and ‘authority’ (where ‘authority serves faith, promises) is false, no authority exists but effectiveness, which only serves to strengthen power.
  5. Example: Weber’s explanation of the justification of managerial authority hinges on the manager controlling behavior and suppressing conflict - thus strengthening the authority of power.
  6. The rich aesthete and bureaucrat are characters in our social collective stage (27)
    1. Social roles are not identical to characters
    2. From characters, society gets its bearings
    3. Their actions are constrained
    4. Culture of an era can be defined by the menagerie of characters
  7. Characters are the moral representatives of their culture
    1. Characters are the masks worn by the moral philosopher.
    2. Characters embody moral beliefs
    3. Moral philosophers inform the lives of characters in a distinctive way
  8. Individuals (a collection) and roles possess moral beliefs but each does so in its own unique fashion
  9. Individuals express moral belief via their action.
  10. Roles’ beliefs do not necessarily match with the belief of the individual (a union leader may think that a union is a false concession to capitalism that is staving off the revolution)
  11. Characters fuse the possible delta between role and personality and legitimates a mode of social existence.
  12. Individuals define themselves in terms of these characters.
  13. The Therapist is another character whose power comes from his legitimation via effectiveness
  14. The self is not a collection of social modes, the self has a rich history apart therefrom
  15. The emotivist self cannot be identified with any particular moral point of view as evaluation has no criteria
    1. The Emotivist self can pass judgment on anything. It can stand back from every situation.
    2. Anyone can be amoral agent (defined as the ability to stand back), but only a few can be characters
    3. The Emotivist self can be entirely removed from its social interactions.
    4. All moral attitudes are plaything between which one can arbitrarily shift.
  16. The self exists:
    1. Distinct from social embodiments
    2. Without having a rational history of attitudes
    3. Without a social identity
  17. The ability to judge actions vanished somewhere and was celebrated as a liberation
  18. The emotivist self pairs in a culture with characters in dominant roles.
  19. Total Freedom and Total Bureaucratic direction are intolerable. - Solzhenstzyn
  20. The Emotivist self is the end result of a historical development under which the language of morality changed as well. I will chart this.

Chapter 4: The predecessor Culture and the Enlightenment Project of justifying morality

  1. The social history that created this ill state were episodes in the history of philosophy and that…
    1. It is only in the light of these moments that the present Emotivist society can be understood
    2. The reflection of society / philosophy in each other is necessary
  2. Our two divisions of social life and academic philosophy find root in a culture where philosophy was integrated with life: The Enlightenment
    1. This is primarily a German / Scottish phase
    2. Equivalence between Enlightenment and France is false
  3. The Enlightenment cultures have a relationship between the assertion of a sentence and its tokenized ‘use’ or ‘utterance’
  4. Moral, as we use it, was an entirely new invention in the Enlightenment
    1. “…the sphere in which rules of conduct which are neither (theological / legal/aesthetic) are allowed a cultural space
    2. Moral opposes theological while aesthetic opposes legal.
  5. We will run the history backwards from our incommensurate position to its first formation. We start with Kierkergaard’s Enten - Eller
  6. Enten - Eller has three central features
    1. Unique mode of presentation tied to the thesis
      1. K. cannot resolve the debate between the ethical, aesthetic, and judgment
      2. Aesthetic = Dionysian = Torrid Passion / Ethical = Appolonian = Marriage
      3. We cannot resolve agreement between the aesthetic and ethical without first principles.
      4. The position that one will choose the ethical owing to the force of the consideration of it is unconvincing
    2. Deep internal inconsistency
      1. The ethical is where principles have authority independent of the modes of the passions - whence comes this authority?
      2. We give the principles of ethical living their force by choice .. by an aesthetic action
      3. K. contradictions and we are without reasons to give the ethical primacy
      4. …Well, K. makes an appeal to God’s authority for justification of the ethical, we don’t buy that though
    3. A conservative and traditional account of the ethical
      1. The modern can choose between a plurality of ethicals
      2. Kierkergaard is secretly pining for Kant’s ethical
    4. Ultimately, Kierkergaard’s attempt to justify the ethical fails.
  7. Kant
    1. Central to his morality are two theses
      1. If the rules of morality are rational, they must be the same for all rational beings
      2. If said rules bind all, then the will to follow the rules is more important than the ability to do so
      3. Thus the goal is to find the test by which a maxim can be found to be an essential expression
    2. What is Kant’s conception of the rational test and whence comes it?
      1. It is not based on return on happiness. Our valuation of happiness is too shifting
      2. An appeal to God’s law is not tolerated. If we are trying to explain by appeal to rationality, and ultimately reach God, we must encompass His rationality, not possible
    3. Kant sees the basis of the ethical in reason, Kierkergaard saw it in choice.
      1. Practical Reason is a priori true, depending on nothing
      2. Can we consistently will that all people follow the principle?
      3. This is over-vague as it vindicates trivial maxims (Always eat shellfish on Mondays in March)
      4. Treating all as means is consistent as and passes Kant’s reason test maxim - but we come up with a world Kant did not want at all.
    4. Kant fails
  8. Hume and Diederot
    1. Kant’s focus on reason is the response to this du’s appeals to desire and the passions
    2. Their appeals produce Kantian morality’s content. If we take a long- term view and use desire (versus reason or choice) we come up with a moral society looking like Kant’s
    3. Diederot’s “Rameau” replies:
      1. Why care about the long-term if the now is sufficiently pleasant
      2. Isn’t following the rules judged as the result of one single caprice?
      3. Are we not in effect, as agents pursuing their happiness, preying upon one another
    4. How do we weigh competing desires?
    5. Hume cheated by bounding his “passions” to “the passions of reasonable men
  9. The success of Hume damns Kant and Kierkergaard and their success damn Hume
  10. Meanwhile back at the ranch, the public did not realize what they had lost.
  11. We proceeded from ethical behavior from appeals to the passions, to reason, to choice, but have did not find the firm footing for a rational justification of morality that we would have hoped for. The Enlightenment rational morality project failed.
  12. Why was this project doomed to failure from the start? Next chapter.