Ethics, Persuasion and Truth

J. J. C. Smart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000077148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Originally published in 1984, deals with meta-ethics – that is the semantics and pragmatics of ethical language. This book eschews the notions of meaning and analyticity on which meta-ethics normally depends. It discusses questions of free will and responsibility and the relations between ethics on the one hand and science and metaphysics on the other. The author regards ethics as concerned with deciding what to do and with persuading others – not with exploring a supposed realm of ethical fact.

NOTES

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1 See J. J. C. Smart, ‘An outline of a system of utilitarian ethics’, in J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge University Press, 1973).

2 This point was well put to me in discussion by Helen Nissenbaum.

3 Roger Wertheimer, The Significance of Sense (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1972).

4 W.V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), especially Chapter 2, and Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960).

5 See Hilary Putnam, ‘The analytic and the synthetic’, in Putnam’s Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Mind, Language and Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1975).

6 For an aseptic account of the analyticity of such sentences as ‘No bachelors are married’ see W.V. Quine, The Roots of Reference (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1974), pp. 78–80.

7 G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge University Press, 1903).

8 Richard Price, A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, edited by D. Daiches Raphael (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948).

9 For a discussion of many of these writers, see A.N. Prior, Logic and the Basis of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949).

10 See C.L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).

11 See R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952; revised edn 1961).

12 Roger N. Hancock, Twentieth Century Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).

13 G.J. Warnock, The Object of Morality (London: Methuen, 1971)

14 Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).

15 R.M. Hare: The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952); Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

16 See Hare, Moral Thinking, pp. 91–2. Hare says that he is happy to accept such an extension. However he teasingly says ‘vegetarians’ to refer to those who advocate the extension of our concern beyond humans to other sentient beings. For those who do not notice the teasing, I want to say that one can be concerned for the happiness of animals without being a vegetarian. One may oppose factory farming without necessarily objecting to eating free range cattle, whose presumed surplus of pleasure to pain in their lives would not exist but for the fact that they were destined to be eaten. Also Hare’s use of ‘vegetarian’ suggests concern for only terrestrial non-human sentient beings. We must surely extend our universal concern to non-terrestrial sentient beings, should we ever come into interaction with any of them, and I do not think that there would be any question of even a non-vegetarian ever wanting to eat some superior being from outer space!

17 Hare wishes to keep the formal requirement of universalizability and the putting of oneself in others’ shoes as different moves in the argument. The latter is discussed in Chaper 5 of his Moral Thinking and the former in Chapter 6. See p. 108 of Moral Thinking.

18 See Hare, Moral Thinking, pp. 55–6.

19 Hare on p. 17 of Moral Thinking talks not only of preferences but of prescriptions. We may think that the former way of talking is better: after all it may make sense to say that a battery hen has a preference for not being de-beaked, not being confined, etc., but it is hard to know what to make of saying that the hen accepts prescriptions. However Hare defends the transition to talking of prescriptions on p. 107 of Moral Thinking.

20 Moral Thinking, p. 6.

21 Moral Thinking, p. 55.

22 D.H. Monro, Empiricism and Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1967).

23 Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons and Dissertation upon the Nature of Virtue, edited by W.R. Matthews (London: Bell, 1953), Preface, para. 40.

24 On this question see Hare, Moral Thinking, pp. 112 ff.

25 Of course this is only an example from fiction, but it rings true as empirically plausible. Indeed the story was based in its fundamentals on a real case, that of Helen Walker, which was narrated in Scott’s Introduction.

26 Here I use Quine’s ‘corner quotes’. ˹p˺ does not name a letter of the alphabet as does ‘p’. A schema containing ‘˹p˺’ and ‘p’ instructs us to insert any sentence we like in place of the ‘p’ and to insert the same sentence surrounded by quotation marks in place of the ‘˹p˺’.

27 See, for example, Donald Davidson: ‘Theories of meaning and learnable languages’, in Proceedings of the 1964 International Congress for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1965), pp. 383–94; ‘Truth and meaning’, Synthese 17 (1967), pp. 304–23; ‘Semantics for natural languages’, Linguaggi nella Società e nella Tecnica (Milan: Edizioni di Communità, 1970), pp. 177–88.

28 See Davidson, ‘Truth and meaning’.

29 I am assuming here that ‘⊃’ captures the colloquial ‘If … then …’. This is of course doubtful, but as I am here concerned with ethics and the distinction between imperatives and indicatives I shall here avoid buying into a discussion of the semantics of conditionals in colloquial language.

30 H.P. Grice, ‘The causal theory of perception’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 35 (1961), pp. 121–68.

31 For a good discussion of these matters see R.M. Hare, ‘Some alleged differences between imperatives and indicatives’, Mind 76 (1967), pp. 309–26. These matters are controversial. For a discussion of various points of view see Jonathan Bennett’s review in Journal of Symbolic Logic 35 (1970), pp. 314–18, and the literature there mentioned.

32 Howard Burdick, ‘A logical form for the propositional attitudes’, Synthese 52 (1982), pp. 185–230.

33 Donald Davidson, ‘On saying that’, Synthese 19 (1968-9), pp. 130–46.

34 See G. Adrian Horridge, ‘Mechanistic teleology and explanation in neuroethology’, Bioscience 27 (1977), pp. 725–32.

CHAPTER II INTERLUDE ON THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY

1 W.K. Frankena, ‘The naturalistic fallacy’, Mind 48 (193...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• I Introduction
• II Interlude on the naturalistic fallacy
• III Why moral language?
• IV Considerations about the semantics of ‘ought’
• V Goodness
• VI Ethics, truth and fact
• VII ‘Ought’, ‘can’, free will and responsibility
• VIII Ethics, science and metaphysics
• Notes
• Index