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Philippa Foot's Ethical Naturalism http://dx.doi.org/10.15801/je.1.101.201505.101 Philippa Foot’s Ethical Naturalism Philippa Foot’s Ethical Naturalism: A Defense Chung, Hun(PhD, Philosophy, Cornell University)* 1 Abstract The main purpose of this paper is to defend Philippa Foot’s ethical naturalism from D.Z. Phillips and H.O. Mounce’s criticisms. The paper as a whole consist of two main parts. In Part I, I will introduce and explain Foot’s ethical naturalism. In Part II, I will defend Foot’s ethical naturalism from Phillips and Mounce’s several criticisms. Key words - Philippa Foot; Ethical Naturalism; Emotivism; Non-Cognitivism; Phillips and Mounce * Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, University of Arizona (from Aug 2015) Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology PhD Candidate in Political Science, University of Rochester Main Areas: Ethics, Political Philosophy, Rational Choice Theory (viz. Decision, Game, Social Choice Theory), Philosophy of Science/Social Science, Comparative Politics 101 Journal of Ethics, Vol. 101 (May 30, 2015). INTRODUCTION: OUTLINE OF THE ENTIRE PAPER The purpose of this paper is to defend Philippa Foot’s ethical naturalism; the theoretical stance that claims that moral and certain evaluative terms are, not just externally or contingently, but also internally and logically related to appropriate facts and objects. The paper as a whole consists of two main parts: Part I: Foot’s Project: Defending Ethical Naturalism; and Part II: A Reply to Phillips and Mounce’s Reply. The main objective of the first part, which is titled “Foot’s Project: Defending Ethical Naturalism”, is to introduce and explain, in rather detail, Foot’s metaethical stance that she expressed in her early papers; “Moral Argument” and “Moral Beliefs”. The first part is, again, divided into two sections. In the first section of Part I, titled, “Non-cognitivism: The Refutation of Naturalism”, I explain the modern trends of non-cognitivism and emotivism and its main characteristics, which is expressed in the philosophical views of philosophers such as Charles Stevenson1 and R. M. Hare2. According to modern non-cognitivism, the essential nature of evaluative terms is in its practical and action-guiding function rather than its cognitive function of stating facts about the world. It can be said that Foot’s ethical naturalism was mostly a reaction against this dominant view in contemporary ethical theory. In the second section of Part I, titled, “Foot’s Project: How Moral Terms are Internally Related to Facts”, I explain how Foot reacted against the emotivist’s views and how she tried to establish what the non-cognitivist theorists virtually denied: the internal relation between value terms and facts. Foot’s main strategy was to work from analogy. That is, Foot starts out with ordinary value terms such as ‘rude’ and ‘dangerous’ and tries to show how they can be internally related to certain factual states. After showing that this kind of internal relation is possible, Foot extends the points she had made to these other evaluative terms and generalizes it to moral terms and human virtues. Foot concludes that moral goodness and human virtues are internally related to the facts about human good and flourishing. Part II, which is titled “A Reply to Phillips and Mounce’ Criticisms”, introduces several criticisms that Phillips and Mounce raise against Foot’s ethical naturalism. The main objective of Part II is to defend Foot’s view from these several attacks by 1 See Charles Stevenson, “The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms” 2 See R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals 102 Philippa Foot’s Ethical Naturalism showing where Phillips and Mounce had gone wrong. Part two is divided into three sections, which each deals with one of the specific criticisms that Phillips and Mounce raises. In the first section of Part II, titled, “Counterexamples to the internal relation to ‘Rude’”, I introduce Phillips and Mounce’s argument that the term ‘rude’ cannot be internally related to facts, and then argue back that, given that the specific context is fixed the term, ‘rude’ is always internally related to specific facts. In the second section of Part II, titled, “Counterexamples to the Necessary Badness of ‘Injury’”, I introduce Phillips and Mounce’s attempt to rebut Foot’s claim that injury is necessarily a bad thing. To this, I claim that injury is necessarily a bad thing in the sense that it always gives a person a defeasible reason to avoid it, and Phillips and Mounce did not understand Foot’s claim in a proper way. In the last section of Part II, titled, “Contestable Views of Human Good and Harm”, I introduce Phillips and Mounce’s argument that moral disagreements cannot be resolved by appealing to the facts about the human good and flourishing, since two people who agree on all of the non-evaluative facts, can, nonetheless, have different views about what constitute the human good and flourishing itself. To this, I contend that it is not obvious whether the two people in Phillips and Mounce’s example really had agreed on all of the non- evaluative facts that were relevant. So, it might turn out that their moral disagreement was essentially due to their disagreement in facts rather than due to their disagreement in their evaluative judgments. I then propose a distinction between the objective human good and the subjective human good, and argue that whenever there is a conflict between the two views about a certain matter’s goodness the correct answer would be the answer provided by the objective human good. PART I: FOOT’S PROJECT: DEFENDING EHTICAL NATURALISM I-1. Non-Cognitivism: The Refutation of Naturalism A lot of works in contemporary ethics have been devoted to what might be called the “refutation of naturalism”. Arguing against naturalism, or more specifically, arguing against ethical naturalism, has a long history that goes way back to David 103 Journal of Ethics, Vol. 101 (May 30, 2015). Hume who tried to show the impossibility of deducing an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.3 The modern version of this stance has found its expression in the works of G. E. Moore4, who thought that if goodness cannot be a natural property, it must be a non-natural property. However, the most powerful version of contemporary anti-ethical naturalism was developed in the mid-20th century by philosophers such as R. M. Hare5, A. J. Ayer 6 and Charles Stevenson 7 . The position is now widely known as “Non- cognitivism”. According to non-cognitivism, moral judgments, and evaluative terms in general, have a very special function in our language that ordinary factual statements lack: namely, expressing one’s own feelings and attitudes about the matter in question. According to non-cognitivism, to judge that a certain behavior is morally good is simply to express one’s pro-attitude towards the behavior in question and to commend the person who has displayed such behavior. It is obvious that different people can have different attitudes towards the same subject matter: one person might enjoy heavy metal music, while another person abhors it. However, in such cases, neither of them could be said to be right or wrong. Each is simply entitled to his or her own musical tastes. According to non-cognitivism, the same thing applies to moral judgments and moral arguments in general. That is, two people who agree in all of the factual premises (about a certain behavior or a certain character trait) in a moral argument can, nonetheless, disagree in the final evaluative conclusion (that the behavior is morally good or that the character trait is a virtue) without any one of them committing a logical error. The non-cognitivist theorists contend that this never happens in a non-moral argument that deals with strictly factual matters. For example, if there is somebody who accepts all of the factual evidences that support the conclusion that the Earth is round, but denies this conclusion and rather contends that the Earth is flat, then we are justified in saying that this person is simply wrong and that this person doesn’t understand what the descriptive terms ‘round’ and ‘flat’ mean and uses them in his own peculiar way. In other words, for factual statements, it is already laid down by 3 This is not to deny that many people regard David Hume as an ethical naturalist himself. See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book III, part I, section I. 4 See G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica 5 See R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals 6 See A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic 7 See Charles Stevenson, “The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms” 104 Philippa Foot’s Ethical Naturalism the meaning of the factual terms themselves on what can and what cannot count as evidence: that is, not anything can count as evidence that can support a factual statement saying that something is round, and, when proper evidence is shown, one cannot simply deny the conclusion by saying that he/she does not think that the proposed facts should count as evidence for the conclusion simply by pointing out that he/she has different standards. To say this is to simply commit a logical or a linguistic error. However, this is not the case with moral judgments and evaluations. One person might think that a certain fact about a behavior counts as evidence that supports the evaluative conclusion that the behavior is morally good, while another person refuses to count the same fact as evidence that supports the evaluative conclusion as such, without any one of them committing a logical or a linguistic error. In other words, there is no logical or necessary connection between evaluative terms and facts.
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