Ethics, Persuasion and Truth

zyxwvut zyx zy zyxwvu and that the idea of harming as wronging plays a secondary role in identifying those kinds of harm which may properly concern the criminal law, has significant implications for the detailed content of the criminal law - for the scope and content of the substantive laws of homicide, theft and assault, for instance, and for the law of inchoate offences (and it would have been useful to see some more detailed indication of how Feinberg thinks that such laws should be formulated): but little is offered by way of justification for this claim. The claim that interests are logically derivative from wants rules out any notion of ‘moral harm’ which does not involve the frustration of pre-existing wants - and thus, as far as the harm principle is concerned, laws aimed against ‘moral corruption’: but this claim too is inadequately defended. By including within the harm principle itself a requirement that the harm which the law aims to prevent be caused by a morally indefensible act (thus making a theory of excuses part of the very purpose of the criminal law, rather than - as many consequentialists would have it - a side-constraint on our pursuit of that purpose) Feinberg excludes strict liability offences from the criminal law - though strict liability may still figure in the law of torts and in a non-criminal category of public welfare offences: but we need a more adequate account of why the harm principle should be interpreted thus (which would involve a fuller discussion than Feinberg provides here of the relevant differences between criminal and civil law, and of why we should operate with a system of criminal law which is in part defined - as he would define it - by the kind of moral condemnation which its punishments express). My worry is not so much that these features of Feinberg’s harm principle are not justified (though I would myself quarrel with some of them), as that he does not do enough to show them to be justified: the principle as he refines it imposes a particular structure on our understanding of the criminal law and its proper purposes: but he pays inadequate attention to other possible structures and other possible interpretations of the principle. zyxwvuts zyxw K. A. DZTFF UNIVERSITY O F STIRLING Ethics, Persuasion and Truth By J . 1. C. S M A R T Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. ix i- 158 pp. €12.95 Not very long ago, the prevailing orthodoxy in meta-ethics presented a pleasingly unified structure across the major areas of philosophical thought. In ontology (moral)values were seen to be no part of the fabric of the world - from which it seemed to follow that there could be no moral truth; in philosophy of mind moral attitudes were viewed as more akin to desires than to beliefs - a position which neatly explained the 56 zy zyxw motivational force of moral conviction by appeal to the view that the presence in an agent of both desires and beliefs was necessary for action; in philosophy of language evaluative utterances were held to have an additional element of meaning over and above the purely factual providing a semantic underpinning for the claim that factual premises could not entail an evaluative conclusion. All the theories of ontology, mind and meaning on which the old orthodoxy rested have been under attack for some time and Smart can be seen as defending and restating at least some of its tenets in the light of his acceptance of two positions in philosophical logic which considerably dent the unity of that presentation: Quine’s attack on analyticity and synonymy and Davidson’s truththeoretical semantics. Those parts of the old theory to which Smart is deeply committed are: the denial of moral realism (based on a view of science as the appropriate instrument for revealing reality) and a quaint hydraulic version of the belief-desire theory of action, with moral attitudes on the desire side of the dichotomy (e.g. pp. 48-9, 101). It has rightly been remarked that the triumph of a new school of philosophy over an old lies not in the conversion of adherents of the old view by the obvious superiority of the new position, but simply in the gradual decease of members of the latter party. Whether or not the new school of moral realism is set to triumph in this manner, the impartial reader might hope for a sustained attack on the weak points of the new fashion and a spirited defence of the old orthodoxy, suitably refurbished. Sadly, this hope is largely unfulfilled. Part of the problem is that, despite Smart’s impressive acquaintance with recent literature, the book has at times a curiously old-fashioned air. It is not only that he is often engaged in serious debate with Moore, Ayer and Stevenson but also that, as the book progresses, Smart abandons his reconciliationist attempt to steer a middle course between competing theories and ends the book with a statement of his posjtion in words that might have come fresh from Stevenson’s pen, but now look sadly tired. There is, he concludes, an “inevitable subjectivity in ethics” (p. 129) for “questions of ultimate principle depend on our preferences or desires, ‘how w e feel”’ (p. 134). There can be disagreements in attitude that “cannot be resolved . . . by means of factual discussion, and attempts to resolve them will be rhetorical in nature” (p. 137). T h e other cause of one’s hopes being dashed is Smart’s lack of sympathetic insight into the position of the moral realist. Old-fashioned intuitionism is exemplified, strangely, by Moore, who has foisted on him such unscientific oddities as an “immaterial faculty of intuition” (p. 23). Having invented this unattractive position Smart has little difficulty in making it look silly. T h e new intuitionists, whom Smart candidly admits he has difficulty in understanding, fare little better. McDowell’s discussion of the way in which rule-following considerations debar the disentangling of the factual and the attitudinal ( a position to which Smart is committed) becomes, in Smart’s hands, an innocuous remark about the ‘open-texture’ of moral concepts (pp. 35-8). Similarly, he fails to grasp the force of the 57 zy zy zyxwvu zyx zyxwv zyxwvu claim that we can fully explain some human actions by reference to beliefs alone (pp. 57-8). H e seizes on McDowell’s admission that, in such cases, a desire may be consequentially ascribed to the agent as a concession that there is a desire present and hence that the belief-desire thesis is correct. H e totally misses the point that there need be no psychologically distinct, independently intelligible desire present - the agent’s having the desire just is his being motivated by that particular set of beliefs. How, then, does his acceptance of Quine and Davidson influence his views on meta-ethics? In two main ways. Firstly, traditional accounts of the naturalistic fallacy have rested heavily on the notion of analyticity; hence Smart must be wary. In Chapter 2 he suggests, promisingly enough, that it is better to approach the issue via the notion of radical translation. His conclusion is that there is something right about naturalism, emotivism and prescriptivism; for our ascription, to the native, of the view that he ought to do A will be sensitive to the beliefs w e ascribe to him about the nature of A , to his apparent desire to do A and to his assent to a sentence translated as ‘Do A’. It would be hard to dissent from such an anodyne conclusion, but Smart fails to take account of the way in which further consideration of the theory of radical translation might have undermined his claim that evaluative disagreement may survive even if there is complete factual agreement (p. 30). As Smart correctly points out, the enterprise is holistic and hence “subsequent success or failure to translate ethical sentences will of course react back on what (the translator) has done hitherto, so that he or she may have to modify the previously constructed part of the translation manual” (p. 32). Would not the situation which Smart envisages as a possibility - the ascription of very different ethical attitudes to two people or tribes to whom the same factual beliefs had already been ascribed - cast doubt on the success of the translation? Holism requires that ethical and factual beliefs be sensitive to each other. Secondly, in Chapter 6, Smart faces the difficulty of defending the view that ethics is not factual even though ethical statements fit the Tarski truth paradigm. Strictly speaking, Smart admits that sometimes an ethical statement can be (solely?) factual (for this is a matter for him of pragmatics, not semantics) but he takes it that, in ethics, we are concerned not “with finding out what the world is like”, but with “trying to decide what to do” (p. 98). Smart’s solution is to tie belief to the factual and desire to the ethical. It follows that “some sentences with a Tarski semantics of truth . . . will be ‘factual’ and some will not be so” (p. 98). Smart does not explain how the claim that there are truths (namely ethical ones) that cannot be believed counts as a solution rather than as a statement of the problem. Surely the impact of Davidsonian semantics on the old orthodoxy cannot be this minimal. There are many good discussions in this book. Chapters 4 and 5 contain interesting material on the semantics of ‘ought’ and ‘good’. T h e former, which develops work by Vermazen, is especially suggestive. Chapter 7 contains a clear, though well-worn, defence of compatibilism. zy 58 zyxwvu In Chapter 3 Smart faces u p to the difficulty that emotivism has in explaining the point of moral discourse. Why should the expression of my attitude be thought likely to influence my hearer? T h e sensible way to achieve that end is, surely, to make “factual remarks relevant to the direction of his desires” (p. 48). But this is, in Smart’s view, what we achieve by an ‘ought’ statement: ‘“You ought to do it’ hints at practically relevant factual knowledge.” (p. 54) Moral language is thus theoretically, but not practically, eliminable. I have two pragmatic criticisms of the book. Firstly, it is not always clear at what level of readership it is aimed. A reader who needs to be given an outline of Hare’s theory (pp. 8-9) is hardly likely to grasp truth-theoretical semantics in two pages (pp. 12-14). Secondly, the clarity of discussion is often marred by too frequent allusions to the views of others; no theory can be expressed but we must be reminded of A’s modifications, B s objections and C’s replies. Though this book undoubtedly contains some good discussions and many worthwhile points its failure to grasp the point of much recent criticism makes the whole considerably less than the sum of its parts. zyxwvuts zy UNIVERSITY OF KEELE DAVID M c N A U G H T O N Ethics, Faith and Reason By KICHARD TAYLOR Prentice-Hall, 1985. 122 pp. €13.45 This book is written with conviction and a clear sense of mission: the conviction that ‘modern moral philosophers’ have for too long exercised themselves about questions of moral obligation and duty due to the influence of religious belief which has undermined the profound value and insight of the moral philosophers of classical antiquity; the mission is to persuade such philosophers that they should turn their attention back to the classical conception of virtue and the kinds of issue prevalent in the writings of the ancient classical moralists - centrally questions of the nature of human virtue, viewed as a skill, human goodness, human happiness. Modern philosophers should embrace the “Ethics of aspiration” rather than the “Ethics of duty”, the latter being an “empty” concept (ch. 12) once divorced from the notion of a divine command and the trappings of religious faith which is itself irrational and its influence pernicious. T h e most valuable feature of this book is the way in which the author can see the wood in spite of the trees. In particular the way in which he traces two strands in Greek ethical thought, the “natural” and the “conventional”, contrasted in the thought of Socrates on the one hand and that represented by Gorgias in the Gorp‘m on the other, and the culmination of these two strands in Aristotle. Of particular value in this part of the book is the discussion of Callicles’ position in the Gorgim (ch. 7). Again the author is to be commended for his clear exposition of the zyxw zyxw 59