Strake Jesuit JH Quasi-Realism AC 1 / 1

Strake Jesuit JH Quasi-Realism AC 1 / 7

Section I is the foundation. The starting point of meta-ethics is the split between detectors, those who believe humans discover truth and value, and creators, those who believe humans construct value and truth. This question, dating back to Euthyphro in Plato’s Dialogues, serves as the foundation for all philosophical thought, because the answer determines where we search for truth. Blackburn explains its importance:

The Euthyphro question splits those who believe that we discover or detect value from those who believe that we create or confer value: are we Detectors, or Creators? People pull their heroes into one side or another of the fray. It is a casus belli between Kantian constructivists, such as Christine Korsgaard, and purer Kantian spirits such as, recently, Rae Langton.1 Hume and other sentimentalists and expressivists are regularly vilified by those of a more objectivist frame of mind as standing on the wrong side of this issue. Humeans think our sentiments are responsible for our values, say critics, but just think what that implies about cases in which we have different sentiments!2 You don’t have to go far out into logical space to find scenarios in which anything goes, and this upsets people. And even when the Euthyphro question is not explicitly in the foreground of writers’ minds, it can be detected in the motivation or rationale for things that are. What fuels the chase after ‘objectivity’ or ‘rational constraint’ except a need to find something there, something to which we are bound to answer, something beyond the self-propelling forces of the will and desire? Indeed, the whole debate between so-called ‘externalists’ in the theory of value, and their ‘internalist’ opponents hinges on Euthyphronic thought experiments pla If, as I shall argue, these are misconducted and useless, a great deal of modern theory of ethics falls with them. Almost all the sacred texts of ‘normativity’ turn out to contain no more than platitudes at their hearts, and the theory of ethics has been drawn into the blindest of alleys.

Thus, the starting point for the AC analysis is what the starting point for every philosophical discussion should be, whether the truth of propositions depends upon human existence.

Section II is the analysis. Both creation and detection fail to explain truth.

Sub-point A: Let’s start with creation. It is clear that humans do not create all truth.

First, axiomatic principles are true whether we recognize them or not. Blackburn 2:

“But mathematical truth is independent of whether human beings know it or not!” — Certainly, the propositions “Human beings believe that twice two is four” and “Twice two is four” do not mean the same. The latter is a mathematical proposition; the other, if it makes sense at all, may perhaps mean[s]: human beings have arrived at the mathematical proposition. The two propositions have entirely different uses. The test for MM dependency in the philosophy of mathematics always yields a Socratic verdict, going against Euthryphro. Where p is some arbitrary mathematical truth, the truth that p does not depend on anything within the causal order, anything either human or divine. There is nothing you can vary or alter and watch the truth of p do the same, since p just sails on inviolate, and must do so, since it is necessarily true.

Second, it collapses to relativism, because different people hold different truths to be simultaneously true. Without an external objective standpoint to compare individual beliefs to, both beliefs are equally valid. There is no standard for comparison between two constructed principles other than further constructed principles, which could also be Strake Jesuit JH Quasi-Realism AC 2 / 7 contested and rejected. Individuals could construct whatever ethical principles they wanted for themselves. At that point, everything becomes permissible, because there are no constraints on constructed ethical systems.

Sub-point B. Detection fails.

First, there’s no way to know whether the external source appealed to is truly the correct one. There remains a subjective choice on whether the detection is right. Sartre:

If an angel appears to me, what is the proof that it is an angel; or, if I hear voices, who can prove that they proceed from heaven and not from hell, or from my own subconscious or some pathological condition? Who can prove that they are really addressed to me? Who, then, can prove that I am the proper person to impose, by my own choice, my conception of man upon mankind? I shall never find any proof whatever; there will be no sign to convince me of it. If a voice speaks to me, it is still I myself who must decide whether the voice is or is not that of an angel. If I regard a certain course of action as good, it is only I who choose to say that it is good and not bad.

Second, detection can only give us answers within a given conceptual scheme. It is impossible to justify the foundational principles of our logical scheme. Juhl and Loomis:

External questions, on the other hand, are more problematic. These are the kinds of questions that philosophers might be tempted to ask. They are questions like ‘Are there numbers?’ or ‘Are there really numbers?’ If we were to respond with, ‘Of course, didn’t you just note that there are prime numbers greater than a hundred?’ we would seem to be missing the point of the question. For the philosopher might be taken to be asking whether anything, such as an abstract entity, corresponds to the language used in talking about numbers. Are there really entities like the number 100, or are they merely products of our ways of talking, akin to Santa Claus or Sherlock Holmes? Carnap considered such external questions to be confused. For him, asking whether there are really numbers is tantamount to asking whether the linguistic framework that governs number talk is ‘true’ or ‘correct.’ But such questions are not theoretical questions. To answer such questions we would need some framework, some rules to guide us and to tell us what might count as an answer. For example, we need some rules of evidence and justification specifying what is to count as evidence in answering them. We need rules for determining what kind of question is being asked; whether it is empirical, logical, or something else. And we need rules of inference telling us what we can infer from the evidence we acquire. All such rules are provided by a linguistic framework, and would be expressed as the analytic truths, and consequences of such truths, within that framework. But the philosophical questions in the last paragraph are not intended to be questions in a framework (in which case they’d have clear answers), but rather questions about a framework. Yet as such, we are left without any clear explanation of what such questions mean or how we are to answer them. Therefore, Carnap proposed,

Section III is the answer.

In order to rid ourselves of the failed projects of construction and detection, the idea of what we mean when we make ethical statements must change. Instead, we should regard Strake Jesuit JH Quasi-Realism AC 3 / 7 the commitments as “expressive rather than descriptive”1. To further explain the theory, Blackburn 4 quotes Ayer in saying:

The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. Thus if I say to someone, “you acted wrongly in stealing that money”, I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, “you stole that money”. In adding that this action is wrong I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it. It is as if I had said “you stole that money,” in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks.

Understanding morality as expressive gets out of the problems presented in the Euthyphro dilemma. Moreover, cognitive claims do not deny the truth of expressivism, because the descriptive nature of ethics remains. Expressions are an additional function of normative language outside of their descriptive function. Blackburn 5:

The point of expressive theories is to avoid the metaphysical and epistemological problems which realist theories of ethics, and of the other commitments in the list, are supposed to bring with them. Again it is important to remember the overall motivation. This is to explain the practice of moralizing, using causal language, and so on, in terms only of our exposure to thinner reality – a world which contains only some lesser states of affairs, to which we respond and in which we have to conduct our lives. Unless this is borne in the mind, it is easy to charge expressive theories with irrelevant mistakes. For instance, it is frequently pointed out that a term may occur in an utterance which both is a description of how things are, and expresses an attitude. If I say that there is a bull in the next field I may be threatening you, or warning you, or expressing timidity, or challenging you to cross, or doing any of a range of other things, and expressing any of a range of subtle attitudes and emotions. But none of these doings has any bearing on the meaning or content of my remark, which is true or false in a determinate range of circumstances, and is a paradigm of a saying with a truth-condition. If I say that someone is a Kraut, or blotto, I may express an attitude of contempt towards Germans, or of wry amusement at drunkenness, but I also say something true or false about their nationality or sobriety. In the bull example of the attitudes expressed are incidental to the conventional meaning of the remark. In these other examples they attach to the vocabulary as a matter of convention. You should not use those terms unless you sympathize with those attitudes. But in each case it would by wrong to infer that no description is given from the fact that an attitude is also expressed. Similarly, critics have pointed out, it is wrong to infer that there is no strict and literal content, capable of truth and falsity, in the remark that X causes Y, or X knows the truth about Y, or X ought to be doing Y from the fact that when these things are said, attitudes are expressed. This “speech-act fallacy” has been widely accepted as the root mistake of expressive theories. However, the fallacy need not be committed (and I rather doubt if it ever was). There are two reasons why not. First of all, an expressive theory should not infer that the attitude gives the role of the saying, simply from the fact that it is expressed when the saying is made. So long as the attitude may give the role, the argument for saying that it does is the superior explanation of the commitments which we then arrive at. There is no inference of the form ‘this attitude is expressed, so these remarks have no truth-conditions’, but only ‘this attitude is expressed; if we see the remark as having no truth-conditions the philosophy improves; so let us see the remark as expressive rather than descriptive. There is no fallacy there. And there is a second point. Remembering the anti-realist motivation, we can see that it does not matter at all if an utterance is descriptive as well as expressive, provided that its distinctive meaning - the aspect which separates it from any underlying B-descriptions – is realism about values to point[s] out that the word ‘Kraut’ has a descriptive element. That is quite acceptable. It is the extra import making the term evaluative as well as descriptive, which must be given an expressive role. It is only if that involves an

1 Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language by Simon Blackburn. Oxford UP. March 1984. Strake Jesuit JH Quasi-Realism AC 4 / 7

extra truth-condition that expressive anti-realism about values is impugned. But perhaps there is no good reason for supposing that it does: the natural thing to say about such terms is that the extra ingredient is emotive, expressive.

These expressions allow for a representation of the sentiments of others. Our moral sentiments can represent the expressions others would make. Blackburn 6:

What we have here is the reverse side of a familiar point in aesthetics. It is generally recognized as a mistake to construe artistic expression as the externalization of the artist’s [speaker’s] own sentiments, and as somehow a failure or a betrayal if it is not. A piece of music, on such a view, successfully expresses sadness if it makes us feel sad just as the composer was when he created it as an expression of his feelings. This subjectivization of the activity is surely wrong. The composer creates music to which sadness is an appropriate response. Whether he or she is sad while doing so is beside the point. They are not insincere if they are not, any more than Bernini was insincere as he sculpted St Teresa in the throes of ecstasy, without himself being in those throes, as we can be sure he was not since otherwise the work of sculpture could not have got accomplished. Bernini needed to know what ecstasy was like, or at least what it looked like, and the composer may need sufficient empathy with sadness to know what rhythms and harmonies and progressions in music express it. But that is all that is required of them. In a parallel fashion, I want to say, someone may sincerely put a commendation or a grade or an attitude into the public domain, knowing that the appropriate response is an approval or a disapproval, a pleasure or a pain, without himself feeling the appropriate response, or feeling the response to the extent to which he feels it would be appropriate. He certainly risks a charge of insincerity, but this is not correct in many cases.

Thus, the expressive endorsement or rejection of moral permissibility of deadly force can be viewed through the eyes of another.

In the resolution, this other is the victim of domestic abuse, because:

A. They are the subject of the resolution and the agent taking the action. Their concern is most central to whether the action is permissible, because the moral utterance is meant to endorse or decry an action. Because they are the agent acting, their attitude drives the will to act, thus the most important.

B. Any other perspective falls to the same problems as a detective ethical system. Even if another agent endorses a particular moral attitude, it has no effect on the subjective acceptance of that truth by the victim. Even a perfectly valid endorsement of a contrary ethical principle leaves victims open to choose whether to accept the principle or not, because it is an external voice. It would be a meaningless abstracted statement.

C. The only other possible agent to view the resolution through that does not result in judge intervention is the abuser, which should be very obviously avoided. Endorsing attitudes of domestic abuse causes debates to become very offensive very fast, which is of an utmost concern on a topic like this. We would be forced to endorse an abuser’s attitude toward the subject they abuse.

Thus, the affirmative burden is to show that deadly force is consistent with the expression of the victim in response to domestic violence. Moreover, this is the logical conclusion of both sides of the Euthyphro question being false, because determining the truth of an Strake Jesuit JH Quasi-Realism AC 5 / 7 ethical statement is flawed. Instead, ethics should be viewed as a statement without truth- value, i.e. an expression. Even if I lose Blackburn 4 and 5, my framework is still correct.

Section IV is the contention. Through violence, the victim asserts their self-worth and frees themselves from abuse, wholeheartedly endorsing the use of deadly force.

First, abusers provoke emotional responses in the victim that cause them to fight back. The use of deadly force is an emotional response consistent with the victim’s attitudes toward abuse. Baker:

Secondly, there is no denying that the typical actions of abusive partners are genuinely provocative in their psychological impact. They arouse strong emotions of fear, terror, anger, humiliation, along with survival instincts. These emotions/ instincts are of the sort that naturally motivate rapid responsive action directed at conduct perceived as inviting or warranting such responses. Such emotions and subsequent responses may not actually be warranted, but from the respondent's perspective they are characteristically regarded as appropriate or necessary. In other words, the behaviour of battering partners not only satisfies the normative requirements of being a serious provocation, but it also fits with the idea that provocation can be a causally influential factor in the subsequent actions of the provoked person.

Thus, victims emotions deem deadly force permissible. Moreover, even if they don’t find it necessary, the permissibility question is separate. Their actions are a result of their emotions, so they deem it permissible.

Second, the attitudes the victims have toward abuse drives them to killing. Moreover, general psychological assumptions about all victims inherently miss the complexity of the circumstances that drive victims to kill. Baker 2:

Another advantage of the defence of provocation arises from the association of provocation with expressions of anger, rage, indignation or affront, and in more recent times with loss or impairment of self-control. For the moment I want to consider the first and more traditional use of provocation associated with anger. By making that plea available to women who kill their batterers, one widens the range of factors which women could cite as motivating them to take action against their abusers. It is my belief that this would be a move in the direction of acknowledg[e]ing the real-life complexity of the kinds of reasons that abused women can have for killing their partners. At the present time, the primary form of exculpation for female homicide of abusive partners is via the defence of self defence. But it is hard to credit the idea that women are always driven solely by fear or terror when they kill or risk such killing, although this is a dominant emotion in many homicides and one that is almost always operative to some degree and so almost always has some explanatory relevance. Yet it is implausible to think that self defence captures all the legitimate grounds for extenuation or exoneration which makes many of these cases undeserving of a murder verdict.

Also, this means we shouldn’t establish prohibitions on killing, because a blanket ethical statement will never apply to the intricacies of each situation. No cases are identical. Strake Jesuit JH Quasi-Realism AC 6 / 7

Frontlines:

Second, constructions of ethics can only conclude with rules that constrain those who accept rules of agency, which is possible to reject. Ethics becomes avoidable. Enoch:

Suppose you somehow find yourself playing chess (or, if we are going to be tendentiously picky about what qualifies as actually playing chess, seemingly playing chess), but you do not care about the game and about who wins, nor do you have any reason so to care. It seems rather clear to me that you have no reason whatsoever to attempt to checkmate your opponent. And if a metanormative (or metachess) theorist then comes along, explaining to you that attempting to checkmate your opponent is constitutive of the game of chess, so that unless you engage in such attempts your activity will not be classifiable as chess playing, it seems to me you are perfectly justified in treating this information as normatively irrelevant. After all, what is it to you how your activity is best classified? If you have no reason to be playing chess, then that some aim is constitutive of playing chess gives you no reason at all, it seems to me, to pursue it, and this whether or not you are in fact playing chess. (Analogously: If you have no reason to be building a house, then that some standard is constitutive of being a house gives you no reason at all to measure up to it, and this whether or not you are in fact building a house.) If a constitutive-aim or constitutive-motives theory is going to work for agency, then, it is not sufficient to show that some aims or motives or capacities are constitutive of agency. Rather, it is also necessary to show that the “game of agency is one we have reason to play,36 that we have reasons to be agents rather than shmagents.

First, we can never fully know whether truth is independent of existence, because there is no ability to step outside of our own judgments. Blackburn 3:

There is however a wrong way to proceed, which is to invoke an alleged distinction between an ‘internal’ MM dependency claim, and an ‘external’ or ‘transcendental’ one. True, someone may say, when we give verdicts on imagined scenarios, the test goes against [creation] Euthryphro. But that is because we confine ourselves to an internal reading. But there is also an external reading, and it is here that the philosophy must lie. Externally or transcendentally, do values depend on Creation, or do we Discover them? Moore can be patronized (here, as in the case of knowledge) as having thought to answer a difficult and deep external question with a trivial internal MM dependency. But that depends on there being an external question of dependency. However it may be in the general case of idealism, in ethics, how is it to be framed? Suppose we don metaethical clothing, and ask in what we hope to be an upper-case, metathetical tone of voice ‘do Values as such depend on our Sentiments or our Wills as such?’ We still have to answer by considering examples. So, for instance, does the value of the selfless act of benevolence depend on our sentiments, or does the awfulness of unmotivated cruelty depend on our willing to avoid it, or does…? And now the claim is that we can hear these as other than requests for an MM dependency test. But we cannot. We can only run the test one more time, and we will again get the Socratic verdict. There is no external question of dependency. We might be tempted to think that there must be one. But this would only be so if expressivism was false. If it were false, we might believe in a normative or evaluative “truth condition”, a fact, or chunky ontologically heavy “truth-maker”, a real law which might indeed have its own strange pattern of comings and goings and its own dependencies, or its own magical immunity to contingent fact. But since evaluation goes on without invoking any such thing, there is no external question of dependency either. So does this mean that we cannot “stand outside” at all? As the first epigraph shows, Wittgenstein certainly did not think so, contrary to some cavalier interpretations. He thought the deep, ethnological stance does reveal something. It even reveals a claim of dependency, but a benign one. It reveals that our valuations depend in their different ways on our form or stream of life, on our activities, on our practices, or, even our feelings. It may tell us, for example, that our practice of arithmetic depends upon such-and-such contingencies in our lives, or answers such-and-such needs, or could have been abandoned or varied under such-and-such circumstances. But that never Strake Jesuit JH Quasi-Realism AC 7 / 7 gives us that ‘had things been otherwise, 2 + 2 would not have been 4’. This investigation never issues in a false dependency claim. It would only give us—and this is an ordinary enough claim, not a transcendental one—that had things been otherwise, we would not have been talking about numbers at all.