Lady Gaga is fascinating.

[Greg Nog]

I'm happy to decamp to a thread more custom-fit but to be honest I sort of think having this conversation in a thread about Lady Gaga makes it better.

Seconded!

[Good Intentions]

The way you describe becoming interested in VE is one of the main avenues into that theory. You might appreciate this article: Michael Stocker - The Schizophrenia of Moral Theories. At this point it's probably worthwhile for me to talk about the 'aretaic turn', where philosophers (after Anscombe told them to pull their socks up) started taking a lot of interest in the psychology and philosophy of mind of moral action, rather than just viewing right action as the application of an impersonal decision procedure. The aretaic turn is much wider than VE: probably my favourite philosopher, Bernard Williams, is not a VE-guy and in fact probably has the most penetrating critique of neo-Aristotelian projects, but he was elbows deep into the type of questions you talk about. He eventually got so fed up with the way people often talk about being moral that he called it a 'peculiar institution' and came to the type of conclusion you've gestured at, that there isn't an 'ethical world', in his 'Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy'. That book is bloody difficult, but his first book, 'Morality: An Introduction to Ethics' is a fantastic once-over of the field. It starts off with a tremendous discussion of subjectivity in ethics, including the now-standard refutation of relativism, and then just spins outwards, furiously attacking various ways people have tried to cordon off the ethical world.

Slote has a very different view, developed in 'Morals from Motives', who pushes the rather hard line that only the motive behind an action matters when you decide whether it's the right thing to do or not.

I'm sure there is one, but I don't see a Virtuist angle to this position as described. Isn't that just classic deontology?

That's not really the deontological position (Kant comes the closest to that, but his main point is that there are many things we should do regardless of the consequences, and on his story there's ultimately only one good motive to have, and that is 'reverence to the moral law'), though that certainly is the lesson many people take from it. But I was far too breezy there. On Slote's view, being a certain type of person means that you have certain motives (rather, that you characteristically form and act on certain motives), and doing the right thing is having virtuous motives. There's no further story to tell past 'he was trying to be kind' or 'she had justice in mind', whereas on the deontological story you need to fill in why that is the right motive -- that it was in accord with reason, Kant would say, or according to the natural law, as Aquinas (and two prominent Thomists mentioned above, MacIntyre and Anscombe) believes. But Slote isn't convinced that there is anything standing behind being benevolent and caring.

[Good Intentions]

As for your vestigual Casablancean touches, Swanton has done a lot of work on developing a Casablancan VE, both in her book 'Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View', and in contributions like this one. (Unfortunately, getting full book chapters are harder than getting full journal articles.)

[coldforge]

Nice!

[coldforge]

I am liking this chapter so far but there is a slight whiff of the 'no true Scotsman' about it. I feel like any attempt I would make to rehabilitate Julian from accusations of immoralism would have to be at least partly founded on the fact that he was syphilitic and wildly inconsistent.

(I recognize that's really not fair; just the phrasing, you know, 'Not all will to power—just UNDISTORTED will to power' is kind of funny. I appreciate that pretty much any mainstream attempt to assimilate Casablancas into a wider philosophical context is going to consist, at least in part, of the philosophical equivalent of following him around the house and picking up the chairs that he knocks over while he rants.)

[Good Intentions]

She's not really in the game to talk about Fritz, though. He says some interesting things (not only about ethics, but also about the ancient Greeks, and Aristotle is still the most important figure in VE) and she takes them as her jumping off point.

There are questions of just how inconsistent Fritz was. The water has been muddled a lot by people dipping into his unpublished stuff a lot, but he also loved to play tricks with his audience, and make jokes at their extent. Williams for one thinks that Julian Casablancas isn't trying to advance a project as much as he is trying to get the reader to ask certain questions (he also says it would be a spectacularly bad idea for anybody else to try and write this way).

[coldforge]

make jokes at their expense, you mean, he said, only because he was speaking to someone whose first language was not english, he was pretty sure, even if they were of course wholly fluent and it was almost certainly a run of the mill slip of the tongue.

But yes—it was Freddy's Homeric ideals that made me cite my sympathies for him as a factor leading me towards virtue. In general I have a great appreciation for the concern of human excellence and—my poking-fun at the wrangling that needs to be done in order to bring his concepts onto the field for general play aside—I am quite interested to see it developed fully in a moral dimension.

[Good Intentions]

The main guy you're after to see what Julian Casablancasan ethics might be is Brian Leiter. Leiter isn't a virtue ethicist, and he thinks Julian Casablancas was an immoralist, but he has the most fully developed exposition Julian Casablancas's work going (and can't stop publishing it -- which is probably why he is the foremost Julian Casablancas scholar around at the moment). Leiter thinks Julian Casablancas was a 'speculative naturalist', (Leiter thinks the same of Hume) who made shrewd guesses of what the real story behind our ethical behaviour actually would turn out to be. On Leiter's account, Julian Casablancas's guess is that there are certain basic types of character, and a person's behaviour is always going to be first and foremost according to type, and the justifications for their actions (which turn out to be rationalisations, Leiter claims) will have, as a pre-determined aim, making sense of being that type of person.

I've come to wonder whether Fritz, the old mad bastard that he was, gave us enough to settle the question of what he actually believed: his style might have some virtues, but clear exposition isn't one of them. I happen to think that Leiter is wrong on almost every point (well, every interesting point), but there doesn't seem to be a way to refer to the text in such a way as to settle the question of whether Leiter, or Swanton, or Williams, or me or whoever is right. The way I handle this indeterminacy is that I've put Fritz as an object of study out of my mind. Correspondingly, I'm not nearly as knowledgeable on the contemporary study of Fritz as I am about VE, or about ethics and meta-ethics in general.

[Good Intentions]

If you want to learn more about VE, you can do a lot worse than reading the Nicomachean Ethics. It's still the locus classicus of that field (and of the study of practical reasoning). But it's a book that needs to be studied, slowly and carefully, if you want to get the most out of it. Give a go at reading the bits where Aristotle discusses single virtues in particular, like courage (Book III, chapters 6-9).

[coldforge]

As for Fritz I tend to read him either dialectically or aesthetically; that is, I find him most useful as a corrective (or purgative) in opposition to one prevailing norm or the other (and thus not necessarily as useful as a philosophical end unto himself)—this is also how I'd read his observational material, for instance, the opening of BGE where he explains that most philosophers are self-serving hacks—or as a poet and utterer of first-class aphorisms. Both of which I cherish him for dearly, but they're also the reason that while I have many Fritzean tendencies, of which I am proud, I could not myself ever be a Fritzean. I think an answer to your wondering might come in the fact that nobody is really a Fritzean—not even, as the tired corollary goes, Fritzi himself, most of the time.

In any case, anybody who's still reading, I really recommend you read the above Google Books link from Swanton. I'm at work and thus moving very slowly but it's exactly the sort of clearly written, substantive, chock-full-o-PropCon philosophy that most people of this age are not aware is still being written. One tends to experience surprise every time one picks up a work of contemporary philosophy and finds that there are no mathematical formulae in it, no deconstruction, no misappropriation of scientific terminology, and no mention of fascistoid edges. All you need to know is to have heard of the Will To Power and to be able to make a guess at what the word 'immoralist' means. When I read a passage like this:

I really do still feel a small amount of pleasant surprise that I am reading a philosopher who will be concrete enough as to actually write down a short list of things she is prepared to argue ARE virtues and things she is prepared to argue ARE vices (at least within the scope of this moral system, which I don't know if she ascribes to it but you've already got some propositional content, can you really ask for the authorial fallacy also?). Of course this is not an exception in philosophy. But it is more or less UNHEARD of in the context of the picture of philosophy that filters down to the general public. That is, you have to ask a doctoral student in order to get the good stuff, otherwise you'd think that the whole of philosophy was still Russel and Derrida, giving each other reach arounds in an eternal golden braid.

[Good Intentions]

You'd really like her 'A Virtue Ethical Account of Right Action', then, coldie. Elsewhere I've also had something to say about that paper.

[dieblucasdie]

Sorry I cannnot hear you I'm k-kinda busy

k-kinda busy

[Antero]

otherwise you'd think that the whole of philosophy was still Russel and Derrida, giving each other reach arounds in an eternal golden braid.

A+

[shai faithe]

It starts off with a tremendous discussion of subjectivity in ethics, including the now-standard refutation of relativism...

can you expound on this?

[Good Intentions]

I take it you're interested in the bit about relativism, rather than about subjectivism as a whole. Please correct me if I'm wrong: I talk about this stuff at the drop of a hat.

The following doesn't refute every version of moral relativism (the version of David Wong's is, I think, particularly interesting, and is untouched by what follows) But it refutes almost every relativist, in that the most widespread version of relativism is this one.

Here is what Williams and others call 'vulgar relativism'. Given the enormous range of moral disagreement between societies, somebody might come to believe that: (1) the only way we could understand somebody's talk of this or that being the 'right' thing to do is to understand 'right' to mean 'right for a given society', (2) 'right for a given society' is supposed to be what people in that society take to be right, and thus, (3) it is wrong for people in one society to condemn or interfere with what is done in another.

Stated this way, relativism is a mess. For one thing, it's straightforwardly inconsistent. In (1) it's said that 'right' can only be applied within societies, but the conclusion in (3) is supposed to hold across cultures. So, to use Williams's example, the argument is supposed to conclude that the British had no right to interfere with Ashanti cannibalism. But it can conclude nothing of the sort: it can only validly conclude that Ashanti can't interfere with Ashanti cannibalism. People not in the given society don't feature in the argument, so they can't suddenly be corralled into the conclusion. And any conclusion that would feature people outside the society would be blocked by (1), because it says that 'right' only holds within societies.

This conclusion is not only of no help to anyone who isn't Ashanti, but for the Ashanti themselves the advice is either vacuous or nonsense. It is vacuous if it is 'right for the Ashanti' because all Ashanti unflinchingly do so, or it is right for them to the degree of Ashanti which do so. It is nonsense because the argument must either say that all dissenters to cannibalism are not Ashanti, or that not all Ashanti think cannibalism is right. The first of these is simply false under pain of the self-sealing fallacy (the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy), the second meaning that nothing can be concluded about what even the Ashanti should do.

Williams's discussion goes a little deeper into the various (hopeless) counterarguments people might offer, and have, a diagnosis of where it goes wrong, and an analysis of the ways we've ended up where such a prominent position in the debate is such nonsense. It's only 5 pages or so, and well worth a read: the first three pages you can find on the Google Books page, and Amazon's LookInside will probably give you the rest. Or you can get this book from the library or buy the cheap-as-chips 'Routledge Classics' paperback that's in print: this book has been through umpteen editions and isn't hard to find. I read it three times in a month when I got it. I should warn you that, despite its title, it isn't an introduction or a textbook (as Williams admits)... maybe it's an introduction to the ways everybody in the field is wrong, and the very interesting things we learn from the ways people are wrong. Williams's own position was quite infuriating, that he never presented a fully fledged theory of his own, except for the view that we don't need such fully-fledged theories and that none of them are likely to work.

There are other, non-crazy versions of relativism. David Wong's pluralistic relativism goes like this: there are certain things we need morality for (coordination across the members of a society, dispute resolution, promoting welfare, and so on), but these ends are not enough to determine just one morality, or even a family of moralities. There are many different ways in which a society can come to meet these ends. There is also no way to decide between these various options. The significant differences between Wong's version and vulgar relativism are at least the following two: there's no mention of what the scope of judgements are supposed to be (i.e. whether they hold only within a society or across societies); and, there's no hint of 'anything they say, goes', since there is a very significant threshold a moral system has to cross to become worth considering -- it needs to meet the various ends. This last difference, that there is a grade that moral systems have to make before we can take it seriously, is probably the most important one. Wong's version isn't as strong (meaning it doesn't conclude as much, and this is a good thing: vulgar relativism is crazy strong), but it handles moral disagreement across societies at least as well.

[dieblucasdie]

stop callin
stop callin
I don't wanna
talk
an
y
more

[martin_van_buren]

But it can conclude nothing of the sort: it can only validly conclude that Ashanti can't interfere with Ashanti cannibalism.

[kyle]

whoa

[shai faithe]

we're beginning to cross conversational thresholds in ways that i hadn't predicted we would until at least 2014.  we're living in a ballard novel.