Charles R Pigden
The picture shows me partying with my daughters: Jemima, who works as a croupier in Melbourne, on the left and Abby, a Psych PhD, Teaching Fellow and Healthcare Researcher on the right. The photo was taken at a Philosophers' Ball some fifteen years back. My son Guy (not in this picture) is a screenwriter, actor and movie director and my wife Zena (who I met at Cambridge) is a social worker. and noted cat-breeder (Maine Coons).
Less interestingly, I am originally British, a state school boy, born in 1956. I am a graduate of King’s College Cambridge (1979) and did my doctorate (as a Commonwealth Scholar) at la Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia in the early eighties. I ran out of money in 1984 and worked for a while as a research assistant at the ANU to support myself whilst finishing my PhD. After a period of unemployment in Thatcher’s Britain (which I do not remember with pleasure) I got a post-doc at Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand in 1986 and a temporary lectureship at Massey (1987), returning to Otago and a permanent post in 1988. I have taught at Otago ever since and am now a New Zealand citizen. For fourteen years (1989-2003) I devoted a great deal of my time and energy to activism (to the considerable detriment of my career), partly on behalf of Amnesty, but mainly as a member of the New Labour Party and subsequently the Alliance, endeavouring to resist and reverse the Neo-Liberal Revolution in New Zealand. My efforts, alas, were not entirely successful (see below ‘Gedda Life’). The failures of my generation may well spell catastrophe for the world, as the Neo-Liberal and Post-Neo-Liberal governments currently in power are unlikely to do anything effective about climate change.
Address: Department of Philosophy,
University of Otago,
Box 56.
Dunedin,
New Zealand 9054
Less interestingly, I am originally British, a state school boy, born in 1956. I am a graduate of King’s College Cambridge (1979) and did my doctorate (as a Commonwealth Scholar) at la Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia in the early eighties. I ran out of money in 1984 and worked for a while as a research assistant at the ANU to support myself whilst finishing my PhD. After a period of unemployment in Thatcher’s Britain (which I do not remember with pleasure) I got a post-doc at Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand in 1986 and a temporary lectureship at Massey (1987), returning to Otago and a permanent post in 1988. I have taught at Otago ever since and am now a New Zealand citizen. For fourteen years (1989-2003) I devoted a great deal of my time and energy to activism (to the considerable detriment of my career), partly on behalf of Amnesty, but mainly as a member of the New Labour Party and subsequently the Alliance, endeavouring to resist and reverse the Neo-Liberal Revolution in New Zealand. My efforts, alas, were not entirely successful (see below ‘Gedda Life’). The failures of my generation may well spell catastrophe for the world, as the Neo-Liberal and Post-Neo-Liberal governments currently in power are unlikely to do anything effective about climate change.
Address: Department of Philosophy,
University of Otago,
Box 56.
Dunedin,
New Zealand 9054
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Conspiracy Theory Papers by Charles R Pigden
It is a draft version of my Foreword to Dentith, Matthew R.X. (2014) The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. References please to the published version.
Are conspiracy theorists epistemically vicious? Not necessarily, not always, and maybe not even usually. But it IS intellectually vicious to be a consistent conspiracy skeptic. The broad-band skeptic commits intellectual suicide whilst the restricted skeptic blinds herself to facts which, as an active citizen, she really needs to know. Both are vicious, though self-imposed blindness is better than epistemic suicide. As in other areas, so with conspiracy theories: the virtuous policy is to proportion belief to the evidence.
The paper contains an extended cirque of a recent paper by Quassim Cassam in in Aeon Magazine and of Sunstein and Vermeule (2008) 'Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures' .
Is-Ought and the Naturalistic Fallacy by Charles R Pigden
In this talk I emphasize the logical aspects of the issue.
Drafts of my contributions to this debate available above in 'Papers'. 'The Triviality of Hume's Law', 'Coda: Truth and Consequences' and 'Subtance, Taxonomy, Content and Consequence' emphasize the logical and meta-ethical aspects of the the issue, whilst 'Letter From a Gentleman' and 'Snare's Puzzle/Hume's Purpose' emphasize meta-ethics and the historical Hume. 'Comments on "Hume's Master Argument"' deals with all three themes. The kick-off paper is 'Logic and the Autonomy of Ethics' (1989). The last in the sequence is 'Hume on is and Ought: Logic Promises and the Duke of Wellington'.
COURSE-BLURB
This is a paper straddling metaethics (the nature and justification of moral judgements), the history of philosophy and the philosophy of logic. It deals with three themes from the work of David Hume (1711-1776) together with "matters arising" from the Humean agenda:
The Slavery of Reason Thesis ("reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions"). What does this mean? Is the Slavery of Reason Thesis (or something like it) correct? And what (if anything) does this suggest about the nature of ethics?
The Motivation (or Influence) Argument:
Morals have an influence on the actions and affections. [Premise]
Reason alone, as we have already proved, can never have any such influence. [Premise]
Morals...cannot be derived from reason
What exactly is this argument supposed to prove? Does it succeed? If not, is there a decent argument in the neighbourhood that proves something similar? Can it be used to support non-cognitivism, the idea that moral judgements are neither true nor false?
Hume's No-Ought-From-Is thesis: "[It] seems altogether inconceivable", says David Hume, "that this new relation or affirmation [ought] can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it". What did Hume mean by this? Can you deduce an ought from an is? If not, why not? And what (if anything) does this suggest about the status of moral judgements? We focus on the idea, common in the 18th century, that logic is conservative - that in a valid inference you cannot get out what you haven't put in. In a famous paper the great New Zealand logician Arthur Prior challenged No-Ought-From-Is, along with the concept of conservativeness. We discuss the responses of Pigden, Schurz, Greg Restall and Gillian Russell, who all try to vindicate different versions of No-Ought-From-Is in the face of Prior's counterexamples.
that are not substantively moral, but if it is, Maitzen has failed to prove the point.""
Both lines of argument face problems from Prior. Given Prior’s counterexamples,
No-Ought-From-Is as originally conceived is false. The version that survives is No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is. But the best explanation of this does not include non-cognitivism. With prescriptivism it is worse. For the version of No-Ought-From-Is that prescriptivism ‘explains’ – that is, the version of No-Ought-From-Is that prescriptivism implies – would exclude Prior’s counter-examples to Autonomy as
invalid. But they are not invalid. Thus Prior’s counter-examples to No-Ought-From-
Is refute prescriptivism. Thus from 1960 onwards R. M.Hare was a dead philosopher walking. But if non-cognitivism cannot be derived from No-Ought-From-Is, this suggests that it is not what Hume was trying to prove. I argue that what Hume was trying to prove is that moral truths are not demonstrable. To be demonstrable, a proposition must be either self-evident or logically derivable from self-evident propositions. By Treatise 3.1.1.27, Hume had proved to his own satisfaction that no moral propositions are self-evident. That leaves open the possibility that they are logically derivable from self-evident but NON-moral propositions. The point of No-Ought-From-Is was to exclude this possibility. If you cannot logically derive moral conclusions from non-moral premises, you cannot demonstrate the truths of morality by deriving them from self-evident but NON-moral truths.
I also discuss why Hume abandoned No-Ought-From-Is in the EPM. He had no need of it since he thought he had a proof that (with some exceptions) no nontrivial truths are demonstrable. Hence no non-trivial MORAL truths are demonstrable. No-Ought-From-Is drops out as unnecessary.
I reply that Hume does indeed have a Master Argument and that it does rely on logical principles but not on the logic of Ockham which had been largely forgotten by Hume’s day. Instead Hume relies on the idea widely believed in the 18th Century and taught to Hume at Edinburgh by his logic Professor Colin Drummond, that in a logically valid argument the conclusion is contained in the premises. I reconstruct Hume’s Master Argument using this principle. I draw a careful distinction between two theses: 1) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with the aid of logic alone and 2) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with aid of analytic bridge principles. Hume believed the first but not the second. What then is the role of NOFI in the larger argument of the Treatise? To show that the truths of ethics cannot be derived via logic from self-evident truths of some other kind and thus that they are not demonstrable. How can we make sense of Hume’s apparent belief that it is sometimes right to transcend reason and sometimes not? In the case of Custom, we live in a world governed by causal regularities, and, in such a world, induction is in fact a fairly reliable belief-forming mechanism. Thus a suitably qualified spectator (one aware of the kind of world we live in) would tend to approve of indulging it, even if it cannot be justified by reason. However, our superstitious propensities are (and can be known to be) unreliable, since they produce different and inconsistent results in different people. Thus it is it is wrong (something a suitably qualified spectator would disapprove of) to indulge the faculty of Superstition. I also take issue with Heathcote’s penchant for valid, but not formally valid, inferences. I supply the missing premises for Heathcote’s Is/Ought inferences and argue that they are either not true or not necessary
I reply that Hume does indeed have a Master Argument and that it does rely on logical principles but not on the logic of Ockham which had been largely forgotten by Hume’s day. Instead Hume relies on the idea widely believed in the 18th Century and taught to Hume at Edinburgh by his logic Professor Colin Drummond, that in a logically valid argument the conclusion is contained in the premises. I reconstruct Hume’s Master Argument using this principle. I draw a careful distinction between two theses: 1) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with the aid of logic alone and 2) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with aid of analytic bridge principles. Hume believed the first but not the second. What then is the role of NOFI in the larger argument of the Treatise? To show that the truths of ethics cannot be derived via logic from self-evident truths of some other kind and thus that they are not demonstrable. How can we make sense of Hume’s apparent belief that it is sometimes right to transcend reason and sometimes not? In the case of Custom, we live in a world governed by causal regularities, and, in such a world, induction is in fact a fairly reliable belief-forming mechanism. Thus a suitably qualified spectator (one aware of the kind of world we live in) would tend to approve of indulging it, even if it cannot be justified by reason. However, our superstitious propensities are (and can be known to be) unreliable, since they produce different and inconsistent results in different people. Thus it is it is wrong (something a suitably qualified spectator would disapprove of) to indulge the faculty of Superstition. I also take issue with Heathcote’s penchant for valid, but not formally valid, inferences. I supply the missing premises for Heathcote’s Is/Ought inferences and argue that they are either not true or not necessary.
It is a draft version of my Foreword to Dentith, Matthew R.X. (2014) The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. References please to the published version.
Are conspiracy theorists epistemically vicious? Not necessarily, not always, and maybe not even usually. But it IS intellectually vicious to be a consistent conspiracy skeptic. The broad-band skeptic commits intellectual suicide whilst the restricted skeptic blinds herself to facts which, as an active citizen, she really needs to know. Both are vicious, though self-imposed blindness is better than epistemic suicide. As in other areas, so with conspiracy theories: the virtuous policy is to proportion belief to the evidence.
The paper contains an extended cirque of a recent paper by Quassim Cassam in in Aeon Magazine and of Sunstein and Vermeule (2008) 'Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures' .
In this talk I emphasize the logical aspects of the issue.
Drafts of my contributions to this debate available above in 'Papers'. 'The Triviality of Hume's Law', 'Coda: Truth and Consequences' and 'Subtance, Taxonomy, Content and Consequence' emphasize the logical and meta-ethical aspects of the the issue, whilst 'Letter From a Gentleman' and 'Snare's Puzzle/Hume's Purpose' emphasize meta-ethics and the historical Hume. 'Comments on "Hume's Master Argument"' deals with all three themes. The kick-off paper is 'Logic and the Autonomy of Ethics' (1989). The last in the sequence is 'Hume on is and Ought: Logic Promises and the Duke of Wellington'.
COURSE-BLURB
This is a paper straddling metaethics (the nature and justification of moral judgements), the history of philosophy and the philosophy of logic. It deals with three themes from the work of David Hume (1711-1776) together with "matters arising" from the Humean agenda:
The Slavery of Reason Thesis ("reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions"). What does this mean? Is the Slavery of Reason Thesis (or something like it) correct? And what (if anything) does this suggest about the nature of ethics?
The Motivation (or Influence) Argument:
Morals have an influence on the actions and affections. [Premise]
Reason alone, as we have already proved, can never have any such influence. [Premise]
Morals...cannot be derived from reason
What exactly is this argument supposed to prove? Does it succeed? If not, is there a decent argument in the neighbourhood that proves something similar? Can it be used to support non-cognitivism, the idea that moral judgements are neither true nor false?
Hume's No-Ought-From-Is thesis: "[It] seems altogether inconceivable", says David Hume, "that this new relation or affirmation [ought] can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it". What did Hume mean by this? Can you deduce an ought from an is? If not, why not? And what (if anything) does this suggest about the status of moral judgements? We focus on the idea, common in the 18th century, that logic is conservative - that in a valid inference you cannot get out what you haven't put in. In a famous paper the great New Zealand logician Arthur Prior challenged No-Ought-From-Is, along with the concept of conservativeness. We discuss the responses of Pigden, Schurz, Greg Restall and Gillian Russell, who all try to vindicate different versions of No-Ought-From-Is in the face of Prior's counterexamples.
that are not substantively moral, but if it is, Maitzen has failed to prove the point.""
Both lines of argument face problems from Prior. Given Prior’s counterexamples,
No-Ought-From-Is as originally conceived is false. The version that survives is No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is. But the best explanation of this does not include non-cognitivism. With prescriptivism it is worse. For the version of No-Ought-From-Is that prescriptivism ‘explains’ – that is, the version of No-Ought-From-Is that prescriptivism implies – would exclude Prior’s counter-examples to Autonomy as
invalid. But they are not invalid. Thus Prior’s counter-examples to No-Ought-From-
Is refute prescriptivism. Thus from 1960 onwards R. M.Hare was a dead philosopher walking. But if non-cognitivism cannot be derived from No-Ought-From-Is, this suggests that it is not what Hume was trying to prove. I argue that what Hume was trying to prove is that moral truths are not demonstrable. To be demonstrable, a proposition must be either self-evident or logically derivable from self-evident propositions. By Treatise 3.1.1.27, Hume had proved to his own satisfaction that no moral propositions are self-evident. That leaves open the possibility that they are logically derivable from self-evident but NON-moral propositions. The point of No-Ought-From-Is was to exclude this possibility. If you cannot logically derive moral conclusions from non-moral premises, you cannot demonstrate the truths of morality by deriving them from self-evident but NON-moral truths.
I also discuss why Hume abandoned No-Ought-From-Is in the EPM. He had no need of it since he thought he had a proof that (with some exceptions) no nontrivial truths are demonstrable. Hence no non-trivial MORAL truths are demonstrable. No-Ought-From-Is drops out as unnecessary.
I reply that Hume does indeed have a Master Argument and that it does rely on logical principles but not on the logic of Ockham which had been largely forgotten by Hume’s day. Instead Hume relies on the idea widely believed in the 18th Century and taught to Hume at Edinburgh by his logic Professor Colin Drummond, that in a logically valid argument the conclusion is contained in the premises. I reconstruct Hume’s Master Argument using this principle. I draw a careful distinction between two theses: 1) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with the aid of logic alone and 2) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with aid of analytic bridge principles. Hume believed the first but not the second. What then is the role of NOFI in the larger argument of the Treatise? To show that the truths of ethics cannot be derived via logic from self-evident truths of some other kind and thus that they are not demonstrable. How can we make sense of Hume’s apparent belief that it is sometimes right to transcend reason and sometimes not? In the case of Custom, we live in a world governed by causal regularities, and, in such a world, induction is in fact a fairly reliable belief-forming mechanism. Thus a suitably qualified spectator (one aware of the kind of world we live in) would tend to approve of indulging it, even if it cannot be justified by reason. However, our superstitious propensities are (and can be known to be) unreliable, since they produce different and inconsistent results in different people. Thus it is it is wrong (something a suitably qualified spectator would disapprove of) to indulge the faculty of Superstition. I also take issue with Heathcote’s penchant for valid, but not formally valid, inferences. I supply the missing premises for Heathcote’s Is/Ought inferences and argue that they are either not true or not necessary
I reply that Hume does indeed have a Master Argument and that it does rely on logical principles but not on the logic of Ockham which had been largely forgotten by Hume’s day. Instead Hume relies on the idea widely believed in the 18th Century and taught to Hume at Edinburgh by his logic Professor Colin Drummond, that in a logically valid argument the conclusion is contained in the premises. I reconstruct Hume’s Master Argument using this principle. I draw a careful distinction between two theses: 1) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with the aid of logic alone and 2) that we cannot get from non-moral premises to moral conclusions with aid of analytic bridge principles. Hume believed the first but not the second. What then is the role of NOFI in the larger argument of the Treatise? To show that the truths of ethics cannot be derived via logic from self-evident truths of some other kind and thus that they are not demonstrable. How can we make sense of Hume’s apparent belief that it is sometimes right to transcend reason and sometimes not? In the case of Custom, we live in a world governed by causal regularities, and, in such a world, induction is in fact a fairly reliable belief-forming mechanism. Thus a suitably qualified spectator (one aware of the kind of world we live in) would tend to approve of indulging it, even if it cannot be justified by reason. However, our superstitious propensities are (and can be known to be) unreliable, since they produce different and inconsistent results in different people. Thus it is it is wrong (something a suitably qualified spectator would disapprove of) to indulge the faculty of Superstition. I also take issue with Heathcote’s penchant for valid, but not formally valid, inferences. I supply the missing premises for Heathcote’s Is/Ought inferences and argue that they are either not true or not necessary.
(1) That in his celebrated Is/Ought passage, Hume employs ‘deduction’ in the strict sense, according to which if a conclusion B is justly or evidently deduced from a set of premises A, A cannot be true and B false, or B false and the premises
(2) That Hume was following the common custom of his times which sometimes employed ‘deduction’ in a strict sense to denote inferences in which the premises cannot be true and the conclusion false, since, in the words of Dr Watts’ Logick, ‘the premises, according to the reason of things, do really contain the conclusion that is deduced from them’;.
(3) That Mr Hume did indeed mean to suggest that deductions from is to ought were ‘altogether inconceivable’ since if ought represents a new relation or affirmation, it cannot, in the strict sense, be justly deduced from premises which do not really contain it
(4) That in a large and liberal (or perhaps loose and promiscuous) sense Hume does indeed deduce oughts and ought nots from observations concerning human affairs, but that the deductions in question are not general inferences, but explanations, since in another sense of ‘deduce’, common in the Eighteenth Century, to deduce B from A is to trace B back to A or to explain B in terms of A ;
(5) That a small attention to the context of Hume’s remarks and to the logical notions on which they are based would indeed subvert those vulgar systems of philosophy which exaggerate the distinction between fact and value; for just because it is ‘altogether inconceivable’ that the new relation or affirmation ought should be a deduction from others that are entirely different from it, it does not follow that the facts represented by is and is not are at bottom any different from the values represented by ought and ought not.
However, in this version of the paper there is more about the various senses of 'deduction' employed in the 18th Century; more about 18th Century logic, more about deductive arguments in both Hume and his contemporaries (often with contingent and sometimes false premises); more Gibbon, more Reid and more from Hume's History as well as an analysis of EHU 8.2 as a dilemmatic disproof of God's existence. Much more fun , in short for the dedicated Humean or early modernist.
I argue
1) That in his celebrated Is/Ought passage, Hume employs ‘deduction’ in the strict sense, according to which if a conclusion B is justly or evidently deduced from a set of premises A, A cannot be true and B false, or B false and the premises A true.
2) That Hume was following the common custom of his times which sometimes employed ‘deduction’ in a strict sense to denote inferences in which, in the words of Dr Watts’ Logick, ‘the premises, according to the reason of things, do really contain the conclusion that is deduced from them’; that although Hume sometimes uses ‘demonstrative argument’ as a synonym for ‘deduction’, like most of his contemporaries, he generally reserves the word ‘demonstration’ for deductive inferences in which the premises are both necessary and self-evident.
3) That Mr Hume did indeed mean to suggest that deductions from IS to OUGHT were ‘altogether inconceivable’ since if ought represents a new relation or affirmation, it cannot, in the strict sense, be justly deduced from premises which do not really contain it.
4) That in a large and liberal (or perhaps loose and promiscuous) sense Hume does deduce oughts and ought nots from observations concerning human affairs, but that the deductions in question are generally not inferences, but explanations, since in another sense of ‘deduce’, common in the Eighteenth Century, to deduce B from A is to trace B back to A or to explain B in terms of A;
5) That a small attention to the context of Hume’s remarks and to the logical notions on which they are based would subvert those vulgar systems of philosophy which exaggerate the distinction between fact and value; for just because it is ‘altogether inconceivable’ that the new relation or affirmation OUGHT should be a deduction from others that are entirely different from it, it does not follow that the facts represented by IS and IS NOT are at bottom any different from the values represented by OUGHT and OUGHT NOT.
"
1) A methodological meditation in blank verse, defending a broadly collegial vision of the history of philosophy, as applied specifically to Hume.
2) A conspectus of the debate on the role of No-Ought-From-Is within the Treatise itself. What does Hume mean by ‘deduction’ and are the deductions from Is to Ought actually or only seemingly inconceivable? Why after having made so much of NOFI in the Treatise does Hume drop it in the EPM?
3) A summary of the debate surrounding Heathcote’s contention that NOFI is an instance of Hume’s Ockhamist ‘Master Argument’.
4) A potted history of the reception of NOFI from Reid and Bentham to Hudson.
4) A conspectus of the debate on the meta-ethical implications of NOFI, specifically targeting the idea that it implies either non-naturalism, non-cognitivism, expressivism or a fact/value split (I say ‘none of the above’).
5) A survey of four major responses to Prior’s famous counterexamples both to NOFI and to the conservativeness of logic (the thesis that in a valid argument you don’t get out what you haven’t put in). These are the New Zealand Plan (due to me) which devises and proves an amended version of NOFI (No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is), the Austrian Plan (due to Gerhard Schurz) which devises and proves another version of NOFI (No-Ought-Relevant-Ought-From-Is), the Scottish/Australian Plan (due to Gillian Russell and Greg Restall) which defends a revised version of NOFI by constructing and proving an implication barrier thesis, and the relevantist solution, (represented in this collection by Edwin Mares) which defeats Prior’s dilemma by lopping off one of its horns.
6) A summary of the debate about Stephen Maitzen’s interesting claim that though it may be impossible to derive substantively moral conclusions from FORMALLY non-moral premises, it is possible to derive substantively moral conclusions from SUBSTANTIVELY non-moral premises, thus rendering the formal proofs of his opponents redundant. (I say his argument presupposes an implausible form of taxonomic essentialism.)
""
For papers which expand on the historical Hume and the implications of No-Ought-From-Is for contemporary Meta-Ethics, see below 'Letter from a Gentleman' and 'Snare's Puzzle/Hume's Purpose'
Note: the first person to suggest the possibility of a synthetic identity between goodness and some natural property was not Putnam but my late Otago colleague, Bob Durrant
1) Russell’s admiring but critical response to Moore’s Principia Ethica. Russell distinguished between the Open Question Argument proper and what I call the Argument from Advocacy or later, following Russell himself, ‘the Barren Tautology Argument’ (See above, ‘Desiring to Desire’). He also challenged Moore’ analytic consequentialism with an argument usually attributed to Ross (though Moore later said print that it was Russell had who convinced him that he was wrong).
2) Russell’s pioneering versions of emotivism and the error theory. In the case of emotivism, his theory is my view markedly superior to those of his better known successors, Stevenson and Ayer. His version of the error theory is undermined by his own semantic commitments, specifically his belief in what he calls the Fundamental Principle.
3) Russell’s neo-Humean wobble from Human Society in Ethics and Politics.
It is also my opinion that moral judgments – specifically judgments about rightness – do not mean what he thinks they mean and that even if they did, there are no facts of the kind that he needs to make them true. Thus Smith’s theory goes wrong in both the ways it is possible for a naturalistic meta-ethic to go wrong. It fails as conceptual analysis, since it is mistaken about the kinds of facts required to make moral judgments true, and it fails as metaphysics since there are no such facts.
1) That even if the moral ‘ought’ derives its meaning from a Divine Law conception of ethics it does not follow that it cannot sensibly survive the Death of God.
2) That anyway Anscombe is mistaken since ancestors of the emphatic moral ‘ought’ predate the system of Christian Divine Law from which the moral ‘ought’ supposedly derives its meaning (Cicero in particular subscribed to something like the modern conception of a duty which seems to be a generalization of the duties attendant on particular roles).
3) That if the moral ‘ought’ derived its meaning from embodying Gods’ commands then the two should have been equated in the minds of true believers. This was not the case.
4) That Anscombe is absurdly wrong in supposing that Protestant moralists had abandoned a Divine Law conception of ethics.
5) That the virtue-based ought-free Aristotelian alternative suggested by Anscombe is unworkable since the basic idea is that it pays in terms of human flourishing to be good (which means inter alia being just). Since it is pretty obvious that there are plenty of good people who don’t flourish and flourishing people who are not good, the neo-Aristotelian program has gradually undergone a degenerating problem-shift: either the pay-off is deferred to the hereafter or being good is incorporated into the pay-off.
6) That there is a certain amount of sophistry in selling the neo-Aristotelian virtues. Since the unjust person is simply somebody who is NOT systematically just, you cannot prove that it pays to be just by arguing that it is a mistake to be systematically UNjust. So too for many of the other virtues.
"
I argue:
(l) That the predicative 'good' does have a genuine sense and that it is a mistake to suppose that ‘good’ is a purely attributive adjective. This does not entail that the predicative good (as used by Moore) denotes a non-natural property, but his mistake, if any is metaphysical or ontological not conceptual.
(2) That the attributive 'good' cannot be used to generate a naturalistic ethic. It is difficult to extract a set of biologically based requirements out of human nature that are a) reasonably specific; b) rationally binding or at least highly persuasive; and c) morally credible.
On the way I protest against Geach’s tendency to try to win arguments by affecting not to understand things.
My views to some extent anticipate those of Kraut in *Against Absolute Goodness*.
"
An important theme in this paper is the concept of a DTAD or a dispositions to acquire desires. These play an important role in motivation but unlike desires (with which they are sometimes confused ) they are NOT propositional attitudes. "
For more on these issues see my 'Introduction' to Pigden ed. (2009) Hume on Motivation and Virtue, below.
I am honored to be cited by Greg Dawes and Jonathan Jong in their excellent joint paper 'Defeating the Christian's Claims to Warrant'.
On the whole the history of New Zealand Philosphy is a ‘From Log Cabin to White House’ tale, ‘From colonial obscurity through struggle and adversity to philosophical excellence’. But there are shadows in the picture. Some departments have nearly come to grief through bureaucratic and political misadventures, and it is hard to resist the suspicion that there is often an element of hostility to philosophers on the part of both university bureaucrats and fellow-academics. I speculate as to why this is the case (we are too argumentative and don’t confine our argumentative tendencies to the cloister) but conclude with some upbeat reflections. on the future of New Zealand Philosophy.
Sadly my intervention may have backfired. I was not, as I had thought myself, a voice crying in the wilderness but the unwitting spokesman for what was probably the majority view amongst Party activists. Rather than give in to our demands the leader precipitated a split that effectively destroyed the Party. In so far as anyone represents a genuinely left-wing agenda in today’s New Zealand Parliament, it is no longer the Alliance but the Greens. I still think that the strategy I suggested was the right one. It’s a pity that it was not pursued.
I hope that the paper is of interest to students of New Zealand history, students of left-wing (or at least anti-New Right ) politics. and to people with an interest in the strategy and tactics of parliamentary coalitions.
Key words: Necromantic history, Ramified Theory of Types
To vindicate morality in the way that van Ingen seems to want, you must show not that it DOESN'T pay (in some sense) to be persistently IMMORAL but that DOES pay to be persistently MORAL. This van Ingen fails to do. "