News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…
If much of the interest of high-quality papers lies between the lines—in the metaphorical fire that a paper lights in…
I would also recommend that potential grad students make inquiries into how far the compensation package actually goes towards cost…
It’s a mix. I’m still in the UAE with my family, and we feel safe. But some students and faculty…
In the above comment, Michel wrote: “As an aside, every once in a while I check out how the chatbots…
I could imagine LLMs having saved me a *ton* of time in graduate school–e.g., by having supplied reasonable answers to…
The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…
Here. I haven't read it yet, though will teach a seminar on it next year with Martha Nussbaum. Reactions from readers who have? Signed comments only.
I don't understand the second half of Blackburn's review. He makes two charges: 1) that Parfit hasn't explained why we care about what matters, and 2) that we shouldn't be in the business of looking for general ethical principles.
Re 1: As Blackburn presents it, Parfit's main project to refute Humeanism about reasons (a metaethical project) and to reconcile Kanianism and consequentialism (a 'first-order'-ethical project). It is not, as far as I know (not having read the book), to explain why we in fact care about what matters (a psychological project). So, contra Blackburn, Parfit's (alleged) failure to provide any such explanation is in itself no objection at all to his main project.
Re 2: I don't detect any actual arguments, although Blackburn does snidely make fun of Parfit's use of thought experiments ("with relentless, indeed obsessive, concentration he steers his principle through such urgent questions as…"), observe that one can be a moral person without deducing what to do from a general moral principle (a non sequitur, it seems to me), and assert the existence of counterexamples to Parfit's preferred principle without providing any ("principles that might in some way summarize or assist the work of practical reasoning are likely to be provisional, liable to exceptions and qualifications without end").
I have no clue what to make of the bizarre ad hominem at end of the review: "Well, outside the charmed walls of All Souls College, there actually are tragedies".
I take it that (1) is an external, not an internal criticism of Parfit. If a moral theory cannot account for what motivates people to act as they do and to care about the things that they do, then that is supposed to be a problem for the theory. This is a sound and relevant concern, and the claim is that Parfit is blind to such a concern, whereas a Humean (like Blackburn, but I take it that he would include others who don't share his specific approach) is attentive to the connection between value, care, and motivation.
I would have thought that to "account for what motivates people to act as they do and to care about the things that they do" is the purview of psychology, not of "moral theory." Now, if our best psychological theories turn out to be incompatible with anti-Humeanism about reasons, then that would be a powerful argument for Humeanism. But merely claiming that Parfit doesn't address the question of why we care about what matters (insofar as we actually do) is no argument at all for Humeanism.
I didn't read it as only an ad hominem remark, but also as a polemical way of stating that irreducible conflicts among moral interests and concerns is an empirically ascertainable fact. Of course, presumably Parfit could reply that these apparent conflicts are merely attributable to ignorance of and failure to follow the correct moral theory, namely his. Also, I took it that Blackburn was not criticizing Parfit for lacking a psychological account of what motivates us, but rather alluding to the commonly expressed complaint of noncognitivists that *no* cognitivist account can make sense of the motivational power of morality at all.
To "account for what motivates people to act as they do and to care about the things that they do" may be the task of *moral psychology*, which many recent (and historical) moral philsophers have argued is, in some sense, prior to doing moral theory.
I haven't read Parfit's book, but Blackburn's claim is not merely that "Parfit doesn't address the question of why we care about what matters", but that his account is such that he could never address this adequately. Blackburn states: "But in Parfit’s account, reasons are kept within a tight circle of evaluative terms (good, right, obligation), linked up in eternal verities whose intelligible connection with anything outside the circle, such as actual human decision-making, has to be left utterly mysterious." This is a criticism of the structure of Parfit's theory, not a lazy "oh, but he didn't talk about what I want him to talk about."
Further, it is a review of Parfit's work, not a presentation of Blackburn's views. Blackburn isn't obliged to make full-scale arguments of his own views in his critical remarks on the work of others.
Beyond the substantive philosophical discussion, I find Blackburn's final reminder very helpful for the cultural understanding of the contemporary academic discussion on ethics: Parfit says that "it would be a tragedy if there is no single true morality", and Blackburn reminds him "Well, outside the charmed walls of All Souls College, there actually are tragedies".
Besides, whether there are or not moral truths, this sounds more like a metaethical issue (I think it would be pretty weird to call "metaethical tragedy" the hypothesis according to which there are no moral truths, but who knows…). In other words, Parfit seems to be mixing two different philosophical levels: a moral tragedy seems to be a moral tragedy regardless of its truth-aptness. And if he thinks otherwise, and assumes that the first-order moral/ second-order moral distinction, at the end of the day, makes no sense, then why is he "punishing" the readers with 1.400 pp. exactly divided in this classical distinction?
I argue that Parfit does not provide good reasons to abandon subjectivist (or Humean) account of normative reasons in my "Parfit's Case Against Subjectivism," out in days in Oxford Studies in Metaethics 6.
@R. Kevin Hills-
I'm not sure Blackburn is making the common cognitivism-can't-accommodate-motivational-internalism complaint. (I did initially try to read him that way.)
@Rich Booher-
I agree that Blackburn is making a complaint about the structure of Parfit's theory; I just don't see any arguments behind the complaint.
@Pau Luque-
What's strange is that Blackburn presumably *agrees* with Parfit that there is a single true morality (since his 'quasi-realism' is supposed to let him say pretty much all the metaphysically-oomphy sounding things realists like to say).
Anyway, sorry for hijacking a discussion that was supposed to be about Parfit, not about Blackburn's review.
I took Blackburn's 'tragedies' comment to be simply the following: that it would be tragic that not-P does not entail that P; the truth is not guaranteed to be pleasing to us. If the interpretation is right, then he is surely correct.
Brian, I take you to be asking for reactions to the review. Here’s mine: surprise and disappointment at Blackburn’s failure to understand Parfit’s view, the willful misinterpretations of the text, both large and small (it’s hard to imagine how anyone familiar with Parfit’s writing could read his use of the term “these people” as condescending), the simplistic objections, the mean-spirited and juvenile sneering and sarcasm in virtually every paragraph, the appeals to authority through various parades of big philosophical names whose views disagree with Parfit’s, and so on.
One could reply to Blackburn point by point but I won’t do that, beyond registering agreement with Jeremy Goodman on one obvious point. It’s not Parfit’s project to explain why moral truth matters to people. Moral truth and moral motivation are quite distinct and it’s possible to develop a defense of the one without having to give an account of the other.
This review reminds me in various respects of Hare’s bad-tempered review of Rawls’s Theory of Justice, except that many of Hare’s objections to Rawls were more plausible than anything that Blackburn says against Parfit.
For the record, I have read volume one and considerable chunks of volume 2. The only doubt I have about Peter Singer's judgment is that On What Matters has one close competitor as the most significant contribution to moral philosophy since The Methods of Ethics: Reasons and Persons.
Doesn't Parfit remark in Reasons and Persons that the truth about morality might turn out to be depressing (I think he says this in the context of discussing self-effacing moral theories)? If, similarly, it would be tragic if there were no single true morality, then this is an argument for taking great trouble (perhaps even 1400 pages) to try to find it; not an argument for there being one. But without the text in front of me I don't know which claim Parfit is making and Blackburn's review doesn't help on this point.
I was asking for thoughts on the review, but ideally I'd like substantive criticism along with reactions. Jeff McMahan is quite right that there is "sneering" and "sarcasm" in the review, but the question is whether it is warranted, and that turns on the substance. The revival of non-naturalist moral realism on this scale (a centuray after Moore) might, understandably, be viewed as an unhappy development in the field by a naturalist anti-realist. But I guess what I am really curious about is whether this criticism of Blackburn's has any warrant:
"Philosophers do say funny things, but none that I can call to mind has ever denied that we respond to facts about objects, such as the bull in the field, when we decide what to do. Nor have they doubted that if we get those facts wrong, our decisions and desires are likely to be worse. What Humeans have said is that to take the bull’s presence as a reason for sticking to the edge of the field is indeed to go beyond merely perceiving it, that it will require a particular profile of concerns, fears, and desires, and that this profile is not simply given by anything like our capacity for such things as mathematics and logic. This is the point of Hume’s famously provocative remark that reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions. What has gone wrong is that Parfit’s strategy of erecting a binary opposition between ‘object-given’ and ‘subject-given’ theories is completely ludicrous. Any sensible theorist has both elements, working in harmony. So the Titanic hits its iceberg before leaving port, although, if one may abuse the metaphor, it hits plenty more before the end of the voyage. All that Hume holds is that our passions are part of whatever mental state is revealed by our taking something as mattering to us. Far from implying that there are no reasons for anything or that nothing matters this is the only plausible account of why we think that there are reasons for things, and find that things do matter. Hume never bars himself from using the word ‘reasonable’ as a term of praise, and indeed peppers all his works with it, talking happily of reasonable precautions, demands, policies, traits and feelings."
Is this a fair objection to Parfit or not?
Speaking as a big fan of both Blackburn and Parfit, I was saddened to read this. It tries to make Parfit's tone look condescending, but this is achieved by quoting out of context and putting words in Parfit's mouth; it seems to me that Blackburn's tone towards Parfit is far more condescending.
It seems to me that there is, for example, a serious philosophical debate to be had on the question of whether Humean accounts of reasons can give a vindicating account of normativity that does not collapse into nihilism. Parfit engages in this debate in depth (far from just assuming that they cannot, as Blackburn seems to imply he does); Blackburn just ridicules a straw man of his view ('Humeans are nihilists') plus a quotation from one of Parfit's commentators (as if this implicated Parfit), without any philosophical argument. Then, having accused Parfit of operating with an unimaginative, crude version of Humeanism, he gives Parfit's own view, rationalism, precisely that treatment, setting it up as diametrically opposed to all concern with motivation, character, emotion, decision or 'actual tragedies', without any argument to show that it cannot account for these things or give them a role.
It also seems that the review exploits the fact that it is written for a general, non-philosophical audience to make Parfit look sillier than he is. For example, the thought experiments are cited as if Parfit is the only philosopher thinking about these sorts of cases. Similarly, I am sceptical about Blackburn's sweeping claim that the Humean position 'is implicit in all the fascinating work on actual decision-making that has exploded in recent years'.
Given that I'm a huge fan of both Derek Parfit's and Simon Blackburn's work, I find the whole debate awkward and difficult to comment on. But here's few thoughts:
1. It's true that Parfit thinks that subjectivists must deny that facts such as the nature of agony provide 'object-given' reasons (see OWM p. 81). So Blackburn's reading of Parfit in the first sentence seems fine.
2. Blackburn also seems right in saying that none of the Humeans actually deny this. Mark Schroeder's brilliant Humean theory of reasons is a prime example (see his Slaves of Passions). He is explicit in saying that it's the facts that give us object-given reasons. And, as Blackburn points out, if we get the facts wrong in deliberation, our decisions and desires will be worse on such views. So, this objection seems fair enough. I don't think Parfit has made the full case for Humeans having to deny what he claims they have to deny.
Also, if you are an expressivist Humean saying these things is even easier, David Sobel's brilliant paper is very good on this topic.
3. Parfit's opposition between object-given and subject-given theories has been critised more widely – for instance, by Michael Smith.
4. I also wanted to make a more general tentative diagnosis of the debate between Parfit and Blackburn. It seems that the rhetoric on both sides expresses great frustration about the arguments and views of the other side. Here's one proposal of where this frustration is coming from.
People come to do metaethics from very different backgrounds. Some, like Parfit, come from applied and normative ethics. They are often motivated by finding solid foundations for their moral views – fighting the sceptic and the nihilist. Others, like Blackburn, come to metaethics from philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and metaphysics perspective. They seek to understand normative talk and thought as part of language, thought, and the world more generally. Given how different motivations these sides have and how different literatures they are mainly immersed and brought up in, it's no wonder that communication and understanding each others' views seems to break down in places. I think this might explain some of the frustrations.
BL COMMENT: That's a very helpful set of comments, thank you.
I agree with Rich Booher, and disagree with Jeremy Goodman and Jeff McMahan. I won’t restate Mr. Booher’s point, which he put quite clearly, but just respond to Jeremy and Jeff.
Jeremy says (I put the whole thing in brackets in lieu of any useful html in comments):
{I would have thought that to "account for what motivates people to act as they do and to care about the things that they do" is the purview of psychology, not of "moral theory."}
And Jeff writes,
{It’s not Parfit’s project to explain why moral truth matters to people. Moral truth and moral motivation are quite distinct and it’s possible to develop a defense of the one without having to give an account of the other.}
If 'moral theory' (as Jeremy puts it) is the first order enterprise (as Simon puts it), then that’s correct. But it is much less plausible that metaethics is 'quite distinct' (as Jeff puts it) from moral psychology. The Humean tradition, of course, conceives of them as deeply integrated, but the requirement of integration is certainly not the exclusive demand of Humeans. Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, Aristotle… If morality is to be something real, it has to show up in the practical image of the world, and not just as another theoretic element.
Simon’s objection is the Humean version of Chris Korsgaard’s in “The Normative Question” (the first chapter of her *Sources of Normativity*). A satisfying metaethical theory has to show how to answer this question (which I will not attempt to formulate – it’s very easy to get it wrong, so that it appears to have a perfectly trivial answer). There is also an Aristotelian version: how can the conclusion of a practical syllogism be an action, rather than just another belief? Like Simon (and Chris K., and many others) I believe this is The Big Problem for non-naturalist realists.
So I think Jeremy and Jeff are wrong to dismiss the objection that Simon raises. On the other hand, it would not be right to say that Parfit completely ignores this objection. He addresses it in section 102. In my opinion, he does not do it justice.
I’m not in a position to judge the soundness of Parfit’s critique of Humeanism, but I’m willing to venture a judgment on the significance of his contribution to first-order ethics: his argument that Kantians, contractualists, and consequentialists are “climbing the same mountain on different sides” is a tour de force. Even though I think this argument is ultimately unsound, I’m nevertheless struck by its synthetic power, creativity, boldness, ambition, scope, and ingenuity. This is a major contribution to moral philosophy, to which I wish Blackburn had given more careful consideration in his review.
In his remarks on the first-order ethics, Blackburn writes, in what he takes to be criticism of Parfit, that:
“A well-tuned sense of shame or necessity, and with it a well-tuned sensitivity to the needs of others, go a long way before any principles loom into view. A sense of what will do and what will not, exercised on individual real, messy, human cases, and refined through education, experience, imagination, and sympathy, might never result in any urge to write everything down into a complete code. Any principles that might in some way summarize or assist the work of practical reasoning are likely to be provisional, liable to exceptions and qualifications without end, and to require interpretation and tact in their application.”
But none of the above is in conflict with the sort of consequentialism that Parfit defends in his book. Rather, it is considerations broadly along these lines that prompt Parfit to reject act consequentialism in favour of indirect forms consequentialism that are attuned to “facts about the mistakes that people would be likely to make, and facts about people’s motives, desires, and dispositions” (p. 407). Although Blackburn is right that there is no entry for ‘character’ in Parfit’s index, a reading of the book, rather than its index, reveals that Parfit maintains that indirect versions of consequentialism “overlap with those systematic forms of virtue ethics which appeal to the character-traits and other dispositions that best promote human flourishing or well-being” (p. 375).
I also agree with Alex Worsnip’s remark above about Blackburn’s treatment of the thought experiments that Parfit considers. Blackburn sarcastically writes that Parfit engages with “such urgent questions as whether we ought to send a lifeboat that can only make one trip to a rock where it can pick up five people rather than to a rock where there is only one”. We owe this particular example to Elizabeth Anscombe. It comes from her paper “Who Is Wronged?”, which was reprinted in a collection of her writings that Blackburn reviewed for the TLS in 2005. I’m puzzled as to why Blackburn didn’t see fit to mock Anscombe there, but sees fit to mock Parfit here, for addressing this question.
(Incidentally, though Blackburn maintains that Humeanism is “the view implicit in all the fascinating work on actual decision-making that has exploded in recent years, with writers such as Antonio Damasio, Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Prinz, Joshua Green, Pat Churchland, and others,” Joshua Green’s writings are much closer to the rationalist utilitarianism of Peter Singer than to anything Humean.)
@Jamie-
Of course there are many well known arguments purporting to show that moral psychology is relevant to metaethics (many of which I find quite powerful). I was only making the very local point that, as I read it, Blackburn's review rather conspicuously neither provides, nor really even gestures at, any of them.
@ Jeremy Goodman:
You claim that Blackburn completely neglects to make or allude to any arguments about the relevance of moral psychology to metaethics. Please note the following passage from his review (which I have already cited above):
"But in Parfit’s account, reasons are kept within a tight circle of evaluative terms (good, right, obligation), linked up in eternal verities whose intelligible connection with anything outside the circle, such as actual human decision-making, has to be left utterly mysterious."
Isn't his claim that Parfit neglects to show that there is an 'intelligible connection' between the concepts he devotes his attention to and moral concern and motivation a gesture towards the debates that we here are all familiar with? (To give a more detailed treatment of such a debate would surely have taxed the patience of most readers of the Financial Times. While I would concede that such a vague gesture towards these arguments would be out of place in a journal article, I believe that this is perfectly appropriate for the venue in which the article was supposed to appear.)
@Rich Booher-
First, a piece for a popular audience shouldn't rely on allusions to scholarly literature that only those with training in contemporary metaethics will pick up on. Second, as someone with some training in contemporary metaethics, I don't have a good sense of exactly what sort of objection to non-naturalist realism Blackburn is alluding to.
Roy Sorenson argues in a different context that where there is a clash between tenets of classical logic ( e.g. principle of bivalence, laws of contradiction, excluded middle etc) and tenets of a theory of meaning from the philosophy of language, we should always defer to the classical logic. This is because Sorenson argues that science and maths use classical logic and that the tenets are well established commanding a large degree of convergent argreement whilst no theory of meaning has such a pedigree. Sorenson adds that deviant logics ( eg paraconsisteny logics, intuitionism, fuzzy, many-valued etc) 'never leave the nursery' but nevertheless are often used in meaning theories. Sorenson argues that if his recommendation is adhered to the philosophical puzzle of vagueness is easily solved. However, the cost of this is an existence proof that requires believing what Sorenson calls 'a linguistic miracle'. Nevertheless, the incredulity is the price we pay for adhering to classical logic. He then devotes a considerable time trying to suggest reasons why the result strikes us as being counter-intuitive and in fact a contradiction. ( Vagueness and Contradiction 2001). I wonder if Parfit's non-naturalistic quest for a single ethic is motivated by considerations of classical principles despite the evidence of pluralism that Blackburn finds irresistable. Perhaps, like Sorenson's vagueness, the Blackburn's bad-tempered incredulity is an understandable reaction of someone uncomfortable with the possibility that seemingly well-established explanatory proofs ( based on empirical evidence) may clash with existence proofs.
Jeremy,
I don't understand why you say "Of course there are many well known arguments purporting to show that moral psychology is relevant to metaethics (many of which I find quite powerful)" and then "as someone with some training in contemporary metaethics, I don't have a good sense of exactly what sort of objection to non-naturalist realism Blackburn is alluding to" when Rich Booher's suggestion seemed pretty clearly to be that arguments for the relevance of moral psychology to metaethics present a challenge to non-naturalist realism, and that Blackburn was alluding to some such arguments (i.e., I think, the ones with which you state you are familiar.)
Maybe I'm missing something however, as someone with relatively little training in contemporary metaethics.
Joshua Green argues that we have a priori competing moral operatons and tuitions. Foot's trolley experiments suggest to the moral psychologist that this explains why how a moral dilemma is presented alters moral intuitions. One conclusion to draw from this is to concede that there can be no single ethical code. But another response is to conclude that we are subject to epistemic blindspots, states where it is futile to investigate the matter further because knowldge is absolutely inaccessible. Parfit's position against Blackburn survives evidence not only that there are, as a matter of fact, competing ethical systems but that in principle a single one cannot ever be known. This may be how the 'object given'/'subject given' distinction is played out: perhaps there is a single moral system but it is unknowable. ( Again, the analogy is with epistemic vagueness's claim that all borderline cases are precise, but unknowably so, as argued by Tim Williamson and Roy Sorenson). An interesting feature of Sorenson's explanation as how it might be possible for such a state of affairs to occur is that there is a truth-maker gap, as opposed to a truth value gap. This is an issue that divides Williamson and Sorenson because Wiliamson but not Sorenson holds to a version of a use-theory of meaning, which is perhaps what Blackburn also adheres to. Williamson argues that we are ignorant because it is just too difficult to trace the relevant facts about relevant language users. We are overcome by the chaos of the trail (although God or a super brained alien might not be, and so Williamson is only commited to a relative ignorance). Sorenson argues that the ignorance is absolute because what it is ignorance of something that is epistemically isolated. The truth is autonomous so there is no trail of truthmakers of any kind. He rejects the principle that every truth rests on a truthmaker. Blackburn seems to dismiss this possibility, which may be because he is too wedded to a 'meaning as use' theory to consider it. But true statements in ethics may be stranger than his philosophy allows. Sorenson makes the colourful analogy: ' Gas-eating worms at the edge of deep-sea thermal vents arenot part of the photosynthetic chain of being. But these isolated creatures do not force a distincton bewteen two senses of 'organism.' 'Organism' is just more disparate than we though. Ditto for 'true statement'. ( Sorenson 2001, p 178)
Another consideration is whether the possible discovery of facts about a priori intuitions, such as Joshua Green's claim that some sort of Kantian rule-following moral intuition is instinctual, should impress the moral reasoner more than other facts. Timothy Wiliamson has argued that intuitions, a priori or not, can be misleading and should be given no priviledged status in philosophical reasoning. If Hume's passions play the role of intuitions, maybe Parfit's approach can be considered a brilliant attempt to reason without endowing Humean passions with illegitimate istatus within ethical thought.
Also, is Blackburn right to claim that Frege thought numbers originated as adjectives? I thought Frege's view was that before numbers could exist they had to be thought. I wouldn't have thought using this example as if it were an obvious point to make against Parfit misjudges the murkiness of the issue. Michael Dummett has spent a lifetime wrestling with the question of what exactly Frege did think about the nature of number and Blackburn's breezy claim seems glib rather than authoratative.
Another consideration is whether any of my considerations survive typos!
Michael,
I was thinking of arguments for expressivism, not for Humeanism. I still don't know what arguments for Humeanism Blackburn was gesturing at.
Jeremy, I was just trying to say that if you really take on board Jamie's point that (important and well-known arguments suggest) "If morality is to be something real, it has to show up in the practical image of the world" etc., I didn't think it should be too hard to imagine what sort of considerations Blackburn was trying to gesture at in the quote in question. Whether such a gesture was effective or appropriate to this context is of course debateable (evidence: we're debating it), but it doesn't seem terribly mysterious. Anyway, sorry if I misinterpreted what you said.
Hi Michael,
I don't know what it is for something "to show up in the practical image of the world." Apparently it's not enough that it to be something we care about, or that it figure in our practical deliberations, since Parfit's non-naturalist realism is perfectly compatible with normative facts playing those roles.
In a way, the Blackburn/Parfit incident seems to bear similarities to the Synthese fiasco and the question of "appropriate tone." What, exactly, are the boundaries of academic criticism? Certainly, I think it is admirable of Blackburn to put forward such an honest reaction to Parfit's book. However, as Jeff McMahan rightly suggests, the sneering and snide tone of Blackburn's review seems inappropriate. In my opinion, it is Blackburn (who comes across as mean-spirited and vindictive) rather than Parfit, who comes out of this review badly.
@Richard Marshall: your theory about classical logic seems unlikely, given Parfit's response to the logic question on PhilPapers:
http://philpapers.org/profile/10297/myview.html
Alex – I hadn't seen that! It seems pretty decisive. Thanks.
Leave a Reply to Jamie Dreier Cancel reply