The Principles of New Ethics I

Metaethics

Wang Haiming

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429824029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

From Descartes to Spinoza, Western philosophers have attempted to propose an axiomatic systemization of ethics. However, without consensus on the contents and objects of ethics, the system remains incomplete. This fourvolume set presents a model that highlights a Chinese philosopher's insights on ethics after a 22-year study. Three essential components of ethics are examined: metaethics, normative ethics, and virtue ethics.

This volume mainly studies meta- ethics. The author not only studies the fi ve primitive concepts of ethics— "value, " "good, " "ought, " "right, " and "fact"— and reveals their relationship, but also demonstrates the solution to the classic "Hume's guillotine"— whether "ought" can be derived from "fact." His aim is to identify the methods of making excellent moral norms, leading to solutions on how to prove ethical axioms and ethical postulates.

Written by a renowned philosopher, the Chinese version of this set sold more than 60, 000 copies and has exerted tremendous infl uence on the academic scene in China. The English version will be an essential read for students and scholars of ethics and philosophy in general.

Part I

Categories of meta-ethics

1The starting concept of ethics

1.1 The concept of value: Utility theory of value

Roughly speaking, value seems to be a self-evident concept: isn’t value good or bad? Who does not know what good or bad is? Indeed, value and good or bad are the same concept. Value is good or bad: good is positive value, bad is negative value. However, as Pojman puts it, value is an extremely vague and ambiguous concept.¹ Bryan Wilsons even says that “among all concepts, there is hardly any concept as difficult to define as value.”² This difficulty, I’m afraid, first of all, is that to define value, we must use “object” and “subject”—concepts that are themselves quite complicated and have long been debated. Nevertheless, since value is something that has to do with other things, it can be considered as a relational category. When we say, for instance, that a stone is valuable and a good thing, it must be for something else. Without these other things the stone itself is nothing of value. Therefore, as a matter of relationships, value is always a question of “What has value?” and “To whom (or to what) it has value?.” The former is a question of the so-called object of value, while the latter is a question of the so-called subject of value. Therefore, to define value, we must define “object” and “subject” first.

1.1.1 Subject and object: Subjectivity is also autonomy

The subject is firstly a category of relations: only when one thing is relative to another can it be the subject, thus, without a certain relationship, as far as a thing itself is concerned, there is no subject. Is then the subject only relative to the object? Not the case. The subject is also relative to “property.” Furthermore, it can be the noumenon and bearer of the property (the thing that the property depends on and is subordinated to), that is, the “substance,” which is an extension of the etymology of “subject,” and so has the same meaning as it. The term subject originates from the Latin word subjectus, which means to put beneath, as the foundation, then is extended to mean noumenon, substance, and material carrier of certain properties. Therefore, Aristotle says: “The reason that the primary substance is most legitimately called the primary substance is because it is the foundation and subject of all other things.”³ Marx and Engels also wrote: “Substance is the subject of all changes.”⁴ The subject can also be relative to the “object,” and can still be termed the subject and narrated: “Everything that can express the object can also be used to describe the subject.”⁵ The subject can also refer to the main component as relative to the secondary component, as we say “the subject project in architecture” and “the students are the subject of the May Fourth Movement, etc.” These meanings of the subject are obviously not the definition of the subject as a category in a value science such as ethics, because the “subject” as a category of value science is the subject relative to the “object.” What exactly is then this subject that is relative to the object?

It is not difficult to see that the subject relative to the object is the agent and the initiator: the subject is the agent and the initiator while the object is the object of activity and the passive receiver. But this is not the definition of subject and object, because, reversely, not all agents and the initiators are subjects and not all the objects of activity and passive receivers are objects. For example, volcanoes have active periods, and an active volcano in the state of activity is then is an agent. When the active volcano engulfs a village, the village then becomes the object of volcanic activity, making the volcano the initiator and the village the passive receiver. However, we obviously cannot say that the volcano is the subject and the village that is engulfed by the volcano is the object. Despite the subject being the agent and the initiator, the agent and the initiator is not necessarily always the subject. Then, what kind of agent or initiator is the subject?

A subject is something that can be autonomous. It can be an autonomous initiator and agent. So-called autonomy means autonomy of selection and autonomous selection. This selection is different from Darwin’s “natural selection,” which is a kind of automatic selection that is mechanical, that has no capacity to distinguish between goodness and badness, advantage and disadvantage, and no objective, thus no capacity to make good use of advantage and avoid disadvantage. On the contrary, autonomous selection has the capacity to distinguish between goodness and badness, advantage and disadvantage, and it has objective, thus the capacity to make good use of advantage and avoid disadvantage. Therefore, saying that the subject is as an autonomous agent means that the subject is an agent that can select independently and has the capacity to distinguish between goodness and badness, advantage and disadvantage, that is, possess the objective or capacity to make good use of advantage and avoid disadvantage to maintain its own existence.

Just think, why is it that the volcano that engulfs a village is not a subject, but bandits who ransack a village are a subject? Isn’t this because the bandits have autonomous capacities and the volcano does not? Isn’t this because bandits are autonomous agents and the volcano is not an autonomous agent? Isn’t this because bandits have the capacity to distinguish between goodness and badness, advantage and disadvantage, and the volcano has no such capacity? Isn’t this because bandits have objectives and can therefore make good use of advantage and avoid disadvantage to maintain their own existence, while the volcano has no such capacity? Therefore, autonomy is the feature of the subject as subject, and is so-called subjectivity: on the one hand it expresses “the ability of distinguishing between goodness and badness, advantage and disadvantage,” and on the other hand it expresses “the capacity to seek advantage and avoid disadvantage to maintain the subject’s own existence.” Therefore, the subject that is relative to the object still has all the connotations of the substance and noumenon, because as the autonomous agent it undoubtedly belongs to the category of substance and noumenon. However, there is a separate kind of relationship of belonging between the subject and the substance and noumenon: the substance and noumenon are the material bearer of all properties, while the subject is only the material bearer of the “autonomous” properties, as well as the material bearer of the property concerning its “capacity to distinguish between goodness and badness, advantage and disadvantage” and its “selective capacity to seek advantage and to avoid disadvantages to maintain its own existence.”

With the definition of the subject, the definition of the object is settled. The so-called object is obviously the object of activity of the subject, namely, the object of activity of the autonomous agent and the object the agent of autonomous activity is directed to. This is also the meaning from the etymology of “object.” The object originates from Latin objicio, which means “throw or put to, towards, in front of or before,” and is extended to mean the object of activity of the agent and the object of activity of the subject. Thus the category of object is more extensive and simpler than that of the subject, as everything—the sun, the moon, the planets, mountains, lakes, birds, animals, humans, society, thoughts, ideas, substance, property, etc.—can all be the objects of the activity of subject, and therefore can all be objects: the object can be either a substance or a property. Even the subject itself can be the object of the activity of the subject, and therefore can be both the subject and the object at the same time, because a subject’s own activities can also be directed to itself, such as self-knowledge and self-transformation—the self of the knower and the self of one that transforms is the subject, while the self of the object of knowledge and transformation is the object.

1.1.2 Value: The utility of the object to the need of the subject

Given the basic meanings of the subject and the object—the subject is an independent agent that can distinguish between goodness and badness, advantage and disadvantage, the object is the object that the activity of the subject is directed to—the reason why the subject’s activity is directed to the object obviously is that the object possesses a certain property that has effect on the subject, thus cause the activity of the subject directed to it, in its pursuit of things that are good and avoidance of things that are bad. However, what is the exact meaning of good and bad?

Li Deshun says: “The combination of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is a fundamental expression of both positive and negative possibilities of general ‘values’.”⁶ He is right: the combination of good and bad constitutes the so-called concept of value. In its broadest sense, value is undoubtedly an interaction and relationship between subject and object.⁷ Value is not, however, the relationship of the subject to the object or the effect of the subject on the object, but rather the relationship of the object to the subject or the effect of the object on the subject, just as Ralph Barton Perry states: “Value can be defined as the relationship between the object and the evaluation of subject.”⁸

However, value is not the effect or relationship of the object to everything of the subject: Which parts of the subject then does the object have an effect on or relationship to? Perry’s famous “theory of interest” provides a very incisive answer to this, as he put it: “It can be admitted that the value of the object lies in its relationship to interest”⁹ and that because of this “value can be defined as a function of interest.”¹⁰ Perry’s concept of interest has a broad extension, as he said: “Interest is a series of events that are determined by the expectations of the results,”¹¹ “it includes desire, will or objective”¹² and “and it ought to also be a category for terms such as ‘like-dislike, love-hate, hope-fear, desire-avoidance’.”¹³ Defining value in terms of interest, Perry concludes that for the present perspective value must ultimately be seen as a function of will or like.¹⁴

It can be seen that the essence of Perry’s “interest” are various forms of transformations of “needs” in a subject’s consciousness, to be more exact, are “needs” and their ideological forms, such as desire, will, objective, interest, and like. Therefore, we can further say that value is the utility of the object to the subject’s needs (and its various transformational forms in consciousness such as desires, purposes, and interests). For it is self-evident that when the object can satisfy the needs of the subject it is good or is thought have positive value; when it obstructs the satisfaction of the needs of the subject it is called bad or is thought have negative value; when the object is irrelevant to the needs of the subject, it is neither good nor bad, hence is valueless. The goodness or badness of the object for the subject is undoubtedly a certain effect of the object on the needs of the subject, which is the so-called utility: utility obviously belongs to the category of effect, and it is an effect on needs. Therefore, Makiguchi Saburo says: “Value can be defined as the relationship between [a] human life and [an] object, which [is] no [different] from the terms ‘utility’ and ‘effectiveness’ used by economists.”¹⁵

Thus, value, in short, is the utility of the object to the needs of the subject (which can take various forms of transformation in the subject’s consciousness such as desire, purpose, interest). This can also be seen from the etymology of “value,” which, as Marx pointed out, comes from the Sanskrit of “Wer” (meaning cover, protect) and “Wal” (meaning cover and reinforce), Latin “vallo” (meaning to surround with embankment, reinforce, and protect) and “valeo” (meaning powerful, robust, healthy), and it is extended to mean “useful.” Therefore Marx said,

Bailey and others have pointed out that the words ‘value, valeur’ used together represent a kind of property of things. Indeed, they were originally nothing more than to indicate an object’s value in its use to humans, to indicate the usefulness of objects or properties for the pleas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Endorsement
• Preface
• Introduction to The Principles of New Ethics
• Introduction to this volume
• Part I Categories of meta-ethics
• Part II The meta-ethical proof
• Appendix: Contents of The Principles of Ethics
• Index