THICK CONCEPTS

University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
3rd-5th July, 2009

Invited Speakers:

Jonathan Dancy (Reading; Texas, Austin)
Daniel Elstein (Leeds)
Allan Gibbard (Michigan, Ann Arbor)
Chris Hookway (Sheffield)
Tom Hurka (Toronto)
Simon Kirchin (Kent)
Jerry Levinson (Maryland)
Adrian Moore (Oxford)
Michael Smith (Princeton)
Alan Thomas (Kent)
Pekka Vayrynen (Leeds)
Nick Zangwill (Durham)

Supported by The Mind Association, and The University of Kent.

Many philosophers are familiar with the distinction between thin and thick
concepts. Canonical examples of thin concepts include goodness and badness,
rightness and wrongness. There are supposedly many examples of thick
concepts, including cruelty, kindness, beauty, elegance, and curiosity. A
number of issues arise in relation to thin and thick concepts. Many might
be familiar with a key debate, namely how one should construe the
relationship between thick concepts’ supposed descriptive aspects and their
supposed evaluative aspects. Do we have here two separable elements, or are
they best characterized as essentially inseparable, resulting in a form of
evaluation that is more specific than that found in thin concepts? There
might also be some familiarity with other issues raised, for example the
question of whether either sort of concept allows one to think and judge in
ways that make evaluative knowledge (or something like it) a possibility and
stable. But there are other issues that tend not to be as well known. For
example, is there a difference in kind between thin and thick concepts or is
there only a difference of degree? If the former, how might it be made out?
Furthermore, although writers will often use thick ethical concepts as their
main examples, it is commonly acknowledged that thick concepts crop up in
many areas of everyday thought. Are there any key differences between, say,
ethical and aesthetic thick concepts, differences in how they behave as
thick concepts? Thick ethical concepts might have some degree of
normativity, but how is this aspect related to the evaluative aspect and is
it present in typical aesthetic concepts? And, in all of this, is there any
difference of note between thick language, thick concepts, and (supposed)
thick features?

There are many other relevant issues. What is notable about
most of the questions concerning thick concepts is that there is relatively
little written on them, despite the familiarity of the distinction between
the thin and the thick. There are some articles here, and some discussions
in books there. However, a few writers are beginning to investigate and
study thin and thick concepts systematically, including some of the invited
speakers. The principal aim of this conference is to bring together a
number of philosophers of international repute who are interested in thick
concepts so that they can both pursue some of the familiar debates, and
raise and discuss new questions and ideas. It is envisaged that the
discussions will be of interest to moral philosophers, aestheticians,
epistemologists, metaphysicians, and philosophers of language amongst
others.

Call for Papers:

There will be open sessions in which some non-invited speakers can present
their work. Papers dealing with any aspect of thick concepts are
encouraged. Submissions should be emailed to the conference organiser,
Simon Kirchin, at:

thickconcepts@kent.ac.uk

by Monday 2nd February 2009. Submissions should be prepared for blind
review, be a maximum of 2,000 words long, have an additional 200 word
abstract at the start, and contain lines of thought presentable in 20
minutes. The author’s name, affiliation, and email address should be sent
in a separate file. Word or PDF files are preferred. Decisions will be
made by 30th April 2009. Postgraduates in particular are encouraged to
apply, with a prize of 50 pounds available for the best postgraduate talk.
(Speakers in the open sessions will not be reimbursed for any costs
incurred.)

A conference website, with details about bookings, etc., will appear early
in 2009.

Best wishes,

Simon

Some of the topics covered are as follows:

* How to be a moral realist (03:36)
* What is metaethics? (04:38)
* What to do when your moral arguments fail to persuade (09:29)
* Can the fact that Hitler was evil help explain the Holocaust? (13:50)
* General moral principles in a world of diverse circumstances (17:04)

Enjoy :)

One-day conference, 18 July 2008, 9am – 6pm Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, UK Conference venue: Clifton Hill House, Bristol

SPEAKERS:

Michael E. Bratman (Stanford): From goal-directedness to the agent’s rational guidance

Lynne R. Baker (Umass, Amherst): Agency and the first-person perspective

Roman Altshuler (SUNY, Stony Brook): Rationalization as causation and diachronic mental holism

Matthias Haase (Basel): Rule-following and conceptual capacities

Maria Alvarez (Southampton): The causal theory of action: reasons, motivation and explanation

REGISTRATION

Registration is now open until the end of May. Please visit the conference webpage, where the registration form can be downloaded. Further information with details about the programme, travel and accommodation will be posted there soon:

http://www.bris.ac.uk/philosophy/department/events/norm2008.html

STUDENT BURSARIES

Thanks to a grant from the Analysis Trust, there are up to 10 bursaries for external graduate students available, covering up to half of the cost of the registration fee and accommodation in Clifton Hill House. The subsidies will be allocated on a first come, first served basis.

The conference is sponsored by the Mind Association, BIRTHA, CONTACT Bristol, and the Analysis Trust.

If you have any questions please e-mail: markus.schlosser@bristol.ac.uk or
bryony.pierce@bristol.ac.uk

Chapter four is entitled “The Varieties of Moral Experience” and my discussion will follow the sections of this chapter in order in an effort to provide an outline of the argument and substantive points, before concluding with some reflections.

The Beginnings of Ethics
In this section, Appiah begins by noting that the chapter will concern itself with an exploration of “a social-science typology of moral emotions” (123). Our focus will be to see how what the social sciences tell us about moral emotions might “sponsor various strains” in our philosophical understanding of ethics.

For example, Appiah says:

“The more we learn about how the feelings that shape our acts aretriggered, the more we can adjust the environment to make sure they aren’t . . . Discovering what triggers these tendencies can allow us to make desirable behavior more frequent, too. In each case–as we dared to hope in the preceding two chapters–psychology can serve ethics” (124).

At first glance, this might appear like an exercise in understanding how we might manipulate others through triggers to behave in particular ways. If we can discover environments that make people act one way versus another, then we might be able to create contexts that get others to act how we like.

Perhaps information from the social sciences may help us with such a project, but this is alien to the project at hand. Instead, ethics clearly is our central focus. After all, Appiah is concerned with not simply understanding how our environment might make more likely different kinds of behaviour, but “desirable” behaviour. Whatever the social sciences teach us, there remains a very important role for ethical theorizing. However, the social sciences can help us understand how best to bring about ethical conduct and highlight the potential (over-)demandingness of our ethical positions.

The Modularity of Morals
Appiah notes that there are six fundamental kinds of response modes grounding moral sentiments. These six are as follows:

* “to (the avoidance or alleviation of) harm”
* “to fairness and reciprocity”
* “to hierarchy and respect”
* “to purity and pollution”
* “to ingroup/outgroup boundaries” and
* “to awe and elevation” (126).

While this is one suggested list, Appiah proposes a list not dissimilar:

* “compassion”
* “reciprocity”
* “hierarchy”
* “purity”
* “outsiders and saints” (129-45).

Appiah next moves onto a discussion of these responses, now called “modules” (or “evaluative responses”) (129). I will not discuss Appiah’s treatment of all five, but I will say a few words about two of them to both give a flavour of what is at issue and note a worry in passing.

The fourth module (or evaluative response) is “purity” (see 139-42). Appiah notes that the purity module is rooted in notions of both purity and pollution, and linked to “our capacity for disgust” (139). We see disgust everywhere, from the kinds of food we find horrible to sexual taboos. Thus, for example, what is a delicacy in one community may appear wholly disgusting elsewhere: the French may enjoy escargot while the thought of eating snails may make others shudder. Disgust brings out a response from us — whether it be food, sex, or something else — and a response that is evaluative in nature. I then not only shudder at the thought of eating snails, but make an evaluative judgement that eating snails is not an entertaining idea.

A problem with evaluative responses, such as disgust, is that they may simply be no more than “descriptive observations” (140). Why think that evaluative responses of disgust should figure into our account of morality? Appiah proceeds to talk about the ways in which people from different socio-economic backgrounds have reacted to so-called “harmless taboo violations” in experiments, correctly arguing that the claim “. . . and it is disgusting” is not helpful and probably a bad reason even if it might be too much to say that digust should play no role at all in our evaluative judgments.

(As an aside, I am reminded by Martha C. Nussbaum’s treatment of disgust in her Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton University Press, 2004). Here Nussbaum correctly notes that disgust can have a useful role to play in limited contexts. For example, the child has disgust for her faeces—and this is a good thing. However, for Nussbaum, when disgust plays a role in shaping the development of our laws and social institutions it can yield any number of damaging effects. Thus, considerations of disgust should be excised from the law. Appiah’s views are not as spelled out as Nussbaum’s, although the two do not yet seem to be in a relationship of any tension.)

Now a brief discussion of a worry before moving on. Appiah notes a fifth, final module of “outsiders and saints” (see 142-45). Here we find that we have more positive evaluations of those who are like us versus those who are not like us. For example:

“And social scientists have done studies to confirm that victims who are familiar and resemble us are more likely to arouse our empathy” (143).

Furthermore, those we disparage may be characterized as “cockroaches or germs” (144). This is all clearly true to some extent. That is, some studies suggest that juries are more favourable to witnesses, defendants, etc. that appear to share a similar background, etc. However, things also run the other way in dramatic fashion. Perhaps we do denigrate others because of difference. We also centre our violence on those who are not different. The vast majority of violent crime is not perpetrated on those unlike us, but in a supermajority of all cases the victims will be from our socio-economic group and often be related to us. The affective bonds that may unite us against others as a group, bringing us closer together, also create a springboard from which many in our group are harmed by each other. Thus, while we may accept the “outsider” module, we may also be wary of the “insider,” too.

Multiplex Morality
Appiah notes that his list of modules may well be open to revision: perhaps there is a better way of categorizing the variety of evaluations that we make. Whatever its limitations, I believe his view of modules is very helpful. Its helpfulness is rooted in assisting reflect more deeply on particular dimensions of evaluative responses brought upon by reaction to our environment, as well as the “connections” we may draw between our responses and the moral theories we defend. Thus, Appiah notes:

“The force of these studies is to make us doubt that there’s any deep relation between our moral judgments and the explicit rationales we offer for them” (149).

Our reasons and explanations may well be moving in different directions, and more often than we may have first thought.

Double Vision
This section begins by arguing that “[v]alues guide our acts, our thoughts, and our feelings” (154). The feelings and thoughts we have provide our responses to our values. In recognizing the value of x, I seek x out. Thus, if I recognize the value of music, then I will seek out the concert hall. Or, if I recognize the value of philosophy, then I may seek out the nearest bookstore.

We think of ourselves in the following way: we ought to do something all things considered because it is a proper response to our values. Thus, we believe that others should adopt a particular response to value precisely because we recognize the value of that response. (Or, in Appiah’s example, “You prefer that people should be kind because you recognize the value of kindness (154).) These judgements about values are rooted, at least in part, in the emotional, evaluative responses we have. While we must be clear on how our emotions may lead us to unjust evaluations, we must also recognize their role in helping guide (and perhaps motivate) us to adopt just evaluations.

The Language of Morality
The chapter ends with this section where our focus is on language and moral justification. The main point is that just as we can consider experiments in ethics through studies by social scientists, we also perform ethical experimentation in the descriptions we give of moral justification. The process of selecting salient features in our moral stories and the ethical perspective we offer form a major part of our ethical project. This seems absolutely correct: what we exclude both in terms of relevant features and the perspective we offer (and do not offer) matter in drawing ethical conclusions: “Moral perception is a way of seeing, and seeing is always seeing as and seeing that. Appiah clearly highlights for us the importance of perhaps expanding our philosophical toolkits.

Concluding Remarks
In my view, Appiah defends a most helpful view. He is absolutely right to argue that social scientists can help us address normative questions. In fact, he makes the case so clearly it is striking that such work remains in its infancy. (And I took note of Appiah’s favourable mentioning of one of my philosophical heroes, Thomas Hill Green, who also took seriously scientific advances in relation to ethics.)

However, there now seems more work to be done. The case seems made that social scientists can assist ethicists and this presents us with a great opportunity. However, more must be said about getting right the relation between our evaluative responses and justifiable moral positions as the two may come apart. It now falls to us to continue this worthy project.

Date: May 10, 2008
Place: University of Paris I - Panthéon Sorbonne – ExeCo Centre Panthéon : 12, place du Panthéon, room 1, 75005 Paris, France
Contact e-mail : a.c.zielinska@gmail.com
Conference webpage: http://meliparen.blogspot.com/

Keynote Speakers: Jonathan DANCY, Sandra LAUGIER, and John SKORUPSKI

PROGRAM – Saturday, May 10.
09h00 Sandra Laugier (Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens), Ethics and Attention to Particulars
10h00 Solange Chavel (Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens), Se Passer Des Principes Dans Le Raisonnement Moral ? Sur L’usage Du Mot “Principe”
10h30 Smadar Bustan (University of Luxembourg), The Limits of an Ethics Without Principles with Levinas and Putnam
11h00 Coffee break
11h30 Nora Hämäläinen (University of Helsinki), Two Particularisms – Between Dancy and Swansea
12h00 Darragh Byrne (University of Birmingham), Moral Particularism: Epistemology or Metaphysics?
12h30 Philipp Schwind (Collegium Oecumenicum, München), Does Holism Imply Moral Oarticularism?
13h00 Lunch
14h30 John Skorupski (University of St. Andrews), Knowledge of Reasons; Self-determination and Warrantable Reasons
15h30 Anna Bergqvist (University of Reading), Particularism and Semantic Normativity
16h00 Coffee break
16h15 David Jones (Johns Hopkins University), Particularism’s Autonomy Problem?
16h45 Pekka Väyrynen (University of California, Davis), Explaining Exceptions in Ethics
17h15 Alan Thomas (University of Kent), Another Particularism: Reason, ‘Status’ and Defaults
17h45 Coffee break
18h00 Jonathan Dancy (University of Reading, University of Texas, Austin)

REGISTRATION:
The conference is open and free of charge; it does not require any prior registration.
LOCATION: Just in front of Le Panthéon, in the Legal Studies Department of University of Paris I.

Speakers and Papers
1. Carla Bagnoli (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee): Practical Reflection and Agential Authority
2. Campbell Brown (University of Edinburgh): The Composition of Reasons
3. Krister Bykvist and Jonas Olson (Jesus College and Brasenose College, University of Oxford): Expressivism and Certitude
4. William Dunaway (University of Southern California): Minimalist Semantics and the Problem of Creeping Minimalism
5. Barbara Herman (UCLA): TBA
6. Ulrike Heuer (University of Leeds): Wrongness and Reasons
7. Martin Peterson (University of Cambridge): The Asymmetry Argument
8. Wlodek Rabinowicz (Lund University): TBA
9. Mark Schroeder (University of Southern California): Holism, Weight and Undercutting
10. Alan Strudler (University of Pennsylvania): The Distinctive Wrong in Lying
11. Jonathan Way (University of Californian Santa Barbara): Defending the Wide-Scope Approach to Instrumental Reason

CONFERENCE WEBSITE
http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/ethicaltheory/
NB. BSET’s own website is currently out of action. Meantime all info on this Edinburgh conference will be at the Edinburgh website.

Pricing information and a booking form will be posted at the conference website shortly.

Conference Organiser: Elinor Mason
Conference Assistants: Ana Barandalla Ajona, Liz Ellis, Mog Stapleton Conference Editors: Elinor Mason, David McCarthy, Mike Ridge.
Please send any inquiries about the conference to the Organizer:
Elinor.Mason@ed.ac.uk

Jimmy Lenman
Professor of Philosophy, University of Sheffield President, British Society for Ethical Theory, Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield,

The Evidence of Self-Evidence
Appiah first notes that many major historical figures in philosophy such as Thomas Reid, William Whewell, Henry Sidgwick, David Ross, John Rawls, Frank Jackson, and so on, have explicitly commented on the importance of intuitions for moral theories. Appiah then identifies what he calls the ‘intuition problem,’ according to which, on the one hand, the plausibility of a moral theory depends on its ability to accommodate many of our common sense intuitions. But, on the other hand, the power of a moral theory depends on its ability to challenge other common sense intuitions (p. 77). Here Appiah offers an interesting observation that Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium – which directs us to adjust our principles to our intuitions and our intuitions to our principles until coherence is achieved – may be another name for the intuition problem rather than a solution to it (p. 78). To see this, Appiah asks us to consider the following: Suppose that there is a theory, T1, which accommodates all our intuitions about a particular matter except for the intuition INT. Next suppose that we construct – as the method of reflective equilibrium might direct us to do – a different theory, T2, that differs from T1 only as much as is necessary to accommodate INT. How should we choose between T1 and T2? According to Appiah, to decide whether to accept T1 or T2, it seems that we would still need to decide between INT and the other intuitions that we must abandon if we accept T2. If this is right, it would appear that the method of reflective equilibrium just restates the problem rather than provide a solution for it.

The Prospects for Common Sense; Trolleyology; A Scanner Darkly
In these three sections, Appiah gives a nice summary of a number of past and recent empirical studies that suggest that our moral intuitions may be quite unreliable. Appiah begins with the classic Asian Flu Case by Kahneman and Tversky, which seems to show that people’s intuitions about moral cases can vary depending on how the options are framed, even when the options are, rationally speaking, equivalent (pp. 82-85). In the same section, Appiah also presents studies by Wheatley and Haidt that seem to show that people’s moral judgments can hypnotically primed to respond to seemingly irrelevant cues (pp. 86-87).

Next, in Trolleyology, Appiah introduces the trolley problems discussed by philosophers such as Philippa Foot, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and many others. For example, in

Original Trolley Problem: There is a runaway trolley on course to kill five people. You can save those five people by hitting a switch that will put the trolley onto a side track, where it will kill one person.

In

Footbridge Problem: Once again, there is a runaway trolley on course to kill five people. This time you are on a footbridge next to a 300-pound man. You can save those five people by pushing the 300-pound man off the bridge and onto the tracks. His body mass will stop the runaway trolley, but he will be killed in the process.

Appiah notes that our intuitive responses to these trolley problems are taken by some philosophers to be able to justify moral principles such the doctrine of double effect.

Finally, in A Scanner Darkly, Appiah presents neuroscientific findings by Joshua Greene and his colleagues that suggest that our intuitive responses to these trolley problems depend on apparently extraneous factors such as how “personal” or “impersonal” these cases appear to us (pp. 93-96).

Moral Emergencies
Here Appiah pauses to consider how a moral philosopher might respond to these studies. He notes that the original trolley problem and the footbridge problem are both cases of moral emergencies, which have the following features:

1. you have to decide what to do in a very short period of time
2. there is a clear and simple set of options
3. something of great moral significance is at stake
4. no one else is as well placed as you are to intervene.

Appiah then proposes that we can treat our intuitive judgments regarding these cases as heuristics that have gone astray, owing to the fact that these cases are cases of moral emergences. Appiah suggests though that in ordinary, non-emergency cases, heuristics can lead us in the right direction most of the time (p. 98).

Folk Psychology Unplugged
Appiah continues here to present other empirical findings. For example, he cites the studies by Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe that suggested that compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility can be elicited from the same people depending on whether the scenarios presented to these people were “affect laden” (pp. 101-104). Appiah also discusses Knobe’s studies that suggested that how people’s intuitions about whether an act was intentional seemed to depend on their appraisal of the act rather than the other way around (pp. 104-105). Appiah uses these empirical findings further to support the idea that our intuitive judgments may be some kind of heuristics.

Seeing Reason
Here Appiah considers the idea that intuitive judgments may be more than heuristics, using an analogy with color perception. Suppose that someone were to propose, as a heuristic, a “blue rule”:

If something looks blue and you have no special knowledge about your eyes or the lighting, you should believe that it’s blue.

As Appiah points out, it would seem natural to respond that this is not just a heuristic.

Now consider this rule:

If something seems intuitively wrong (or right) and you have no special knowledge that suggests your moral intuition is distorted, you shouldn’t (or should) do it.

Someone might argue that analogously, this is not a heuristics either.

According to Appiah, the problem with this argument is that our moral intuitions may be unreliable as the empirical studies have suggested. Appiah argues that in the case of perception, we can distinguish the visual properties of things and say that it is our visual awareness of these that give us reasons for perceptual judgment. But, so argues Appiah, we cannot identify the reason-for-action-giving properties of situations by pointing to any organ—and, indeed, moral psychologists are inclined to doubt that there are any such organs.

So Appiah seems to be suggesting here that unlike perceptual judgments, intuitive judgments in fact are just heuristics, because there is not a moral sense organ in the same way that there is a perceptual organ.

Explanations and Reasons
In the concluding section of this chapter, Appiah ends with a cliffhanger. He notes that it might be thought that the psychologist’s concern with naturalistic explanation which underlies the empirical findings and the philosopher’s concern with reasons are just incompatible with one another. But he proposes that they are not rival accounts; rather, they are two perspectives that do not compete in the same explanatory space, and he promises to explore this idea in the remaining chapters.

My commentaries:
1. Regarding Appiah’s argument against the method of reflective equilibrium, I don’t have a firm view regarding the validity of this method. But it seems that there is a more plausible way of understanding this method. To see this consider the following: Suppose that you begin with a theory that says to ‘do no harm.’ Call this T1. T1 accommodates many of your moral intuitions, but then you encounter the following case: Someone, X, is trying to harm you; you have done nothing wrong to X; and the only way to avoid being harmed by X is to harm X. Your intuition in this case, INT, is that you are permitted to defend yourself against X. Given this, should you stick to T1 and do no harm, even though you will then be harmed in such a case; or should you revise your theory to something like T2: ‘do no harm, except in cases of self-defense where you also have done nothing wrong’? Appiah is correct of course that to decide whether to accept T1 or T2, you would still need to decide between INT and the other intuitions that you must abandon if you accept T2. But I take it that the point of the method of reflective equilibrium is that a new intuition such as INT can compel one to revise one’s initial theory such as T1.

2.
Appiah gives the impression that the empirical studies by Kahneman and Tversky, Joshua Greene and his colleagues, and so on, show decisively that our intuitions are unreliable in these cases. It is worthwhile mentioning though that not everyone accepts the purported lessons from these empirical findings. For example, Frances Kamm has argued that Kahneman and Tversky’s experimental data do not help to undermine the possible moral importance of the harming/not-aiding distinction (Frances Kamm, Intricate Ethics, p. 435). See also our Kamm Reading Group’s discussion of Kamm’s Chapter 14 of Intricate Ethics for this point. Or, Marc Hauser and his colleagues have challenged Greene’s distinction between the personal and the impersonal as a way of explaining the trolley problems. See, e.g., Marc Hauser, Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, R. Kang-Xing Jin and John Mikhail. A Dissociation between Moral Judgments and Justifications. Mind & Language, Vol. 22 No. 1 February 2007, pp. 1–21.

3.
I am unsure about Appiah’s argument that intuitive judgments are not analogous to perceptual judgments. His argument, to recall, is that in the case of the latter, there is a perceptual faculty, whereas in the case of the former, there is no such thing as a moral sense faculty. First, Marc Hauser, who is also a moral psychologist, may disagree with Appiah that there could not be a moral sense faculty (see Hauser’s Moral Minds). Secondly, those who believe that intuitive judgments are generally unreliable and that intuitive judgments are not useful heuristics can perhaps deny that there is a moral sense faculty. Nor am I suggesting that there couldn’t be an argument against the idea that there is such a faculty. But given that Appiah believes that intuitive judgments are useful heuristics, it seems that his position requires that there exists a faculty of this sort. Otherwise, how can one be sure that intuitive judgments can be useful heuristics? In other words, once one accepts that intuitive judgments are reliable most of the time, it seems that one has to suppose that there is a reliable mechanism by which these judgments are made reliable. If so, why couldn’t one just call this mechanism a moral sense faculty?

(more…)

One much discussed study in the situationist cannon is Darley and Batson’s ‘Good Samaritan’ study. Darley and Batson conducted a study of helping behaviour in which students at the Princeton Theological Seminary were asked to make individual presentations on the parable of the Good Samaritan. In order to get to the place where their presentations were scheduled the seminarians had to pass a research confederate of Darley and Batson. The confederate was slumped in a doorway looking distinctly in need of help. Unrushed seminarians helped the confederate 63% of the time. However, when seminarians were told beforehand that they were running slightly late for their presentation the helping rate dropped to an astonishingly low 10%. A variation in the situation, which appears insignificant, correlated with a dramatic change in behaviour amongst research subjects, and this appears inexplicable on the basis of appeals to character traits, short of positing the existence of some very unusual character traits in the majority of the population.

Appiah follows Doris in construing the situationist challenge to virtue ethics as an attack on the presupposition of globalism, which is a core conception of character that Appiah attributes to the majority of virtue ethicists, including Aristotle (E in E p.38). Globalism, according to Doris (2002, p. 22) – and Appiah follows Doris here – involves the postulation of character traits, with a high degree of cross-situational consistency, stability across time and ‘evaluative integration’. Evaluative integration occurs when the presence of certain traits probabilifies the presence of other traits. A strong form of evaluative integration is the ideal upheld in the ‘unity of the virtues thesis’. The claim that character traits typically exhibit cross-situational consistency is the component of globalism most directly challenged by situationists. Plainly the disposition to help others lacks cross-situational consistency, or at least it is not consistent across variations between hurried and unhurried situations.

Appiah accepts that if the situationist case is as evidentially well-founded as its proponents claim that it is, then globalism needs to be rejected. However, he argues that variants of virtue ethics can survive the demise of globalism, or at least he argues that virtue still matter in a world in which situationist lessons are learned. Even if we cannot hope to develop highly consistent character traits and even if we cannot hope to obtain a highly integrated character, the effort of attempting to behave in ways that exemplify virtues is one that is worth making. It makes out lives go better if we are a bit more virtuous, if we help others a bit more when we are in a hurry than we would if we were unconcerned about attempting to acquire the virtues, or so Appiah argues.

I am inclined to agree with Appiah’s conclusion in this chapter, however it seems to me that he has failed to address the situationist challenge in its strong form. Situationists, or at least hard-line situationists, such as Doris and Harman, do not simply claim that globalism is wrong and that cross-situationally consistent character traits are rare, they also offer situationist explanations of human behaviour which compete with character trait based explanations of human behaviour. They claim that explanations that appeal to aspects of the situations that people find themselves in generally provide us with much better explanations of behaviour than appeals to character traits. If they are right, then trying to be a bit more virtuous than we currently are won’t help change our behaviour outside of the context of narrowly construed situations. Trying to be more honest to our work colleagues won’t make us more honest in our dealings with strangers in public or with our family at home; at best it will make us more likely to be more honest in our dealings with our work colleagues in future.

Because they construe the character traits that humans possess as mostly lacking in cross-situational consistency, hard-line situationists, such as Harman, recommend that we cease worrying about trying to become more virtuous people and that we focus our efforts on building institutions that put us in situations where we will be prompted to behave in better ways, and that we avoid situations that will prompt us to behave in worse ways.
Appiah’s suggestion that we seek a middle way between virtue ethicists and situationists is sensible advice, but he has not argued for it properly and this is perhaps because he has not appreciated the extent of the situationist challenge.

Some further evidence for the conclusion that Appiah has not appreciated the extent of the situationist challenge appears at (E in E p. 45). According to him:

A situationist might well say that, as a prudential matter, we should, in fact, praise someone who does what is right or good – what a virtuous person would do – whether or not she did it out of a virtuous disposition. After all, psychological theory also suggests that praise, which is a form of reward, is likely to reinforce the behaviour.

Now it is possible that concessive situationists would be willing go along with Appiah here, but hard-line ones will not. They will insist that there is no effective way of reinforcing behaviour that is effective across variations in situation. Praise unhurried seminarians all you like, when they exhibit helping behaviour, but you will not be able to change their behaviour when they are in the situation of being in a hurry. While Appiah may be able to find an accommodation between some versions of virtue ethics and some versions of situationism, it is not realistic to think that any version of virtue ethics that involves attempting to change our character traits can find an accommodation with variants of situationism that basically advise us to give up attributing character traits to people. Unfortunately, it is exactly these variants of situationism that Appiah is seeking to accommodate. A better way for him to deal with hard-line situationists would be to follow Sabini & Silver (2005) and others in disputing the evidential basis for hard-line situationism.

Value, Respect, and Wellbeing: Themes from the Work of Joseph Raz

Friday 9 May 2008
Time: 9.30am - 5.15pm
Venue: The Boardroom, Arthur Lewis Building, University of Manchester

Provisional Programme:
9.30 - 10.00 registration
10.00 - 11.15 session 1: Steven Wall (Bowling Green State University)
11.15 - 11.30 coffee
11.30 - 12.45 session 2: Leslie Green (University of Oxford)
12.45 - 1.30 lunch
1.30 - 2.45 session 3: Brad Hooker (University of Reading)
2.45 - 3.00 tea
3.00 - 4.15 session 4: Stephen Darwall (University of Michigan)
4.15 - 5.15 session 5: Discussion with replies by Joseph Raz (University of Oxford and Columbia University)

For further details please see:
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/politics/events/mancept/

I’m not sure how seriously to take Appiah’s genealogy. He begins with a gesture that undercuts his history, by noting how enterprises like the one in which he is engaging are motivated exercises in forgetting as much as recall: we cut the history of the enterprise to suit our current conception of it. Appiah cites Renan on history as a kind of motivated forgetting. He could have equally cited Kuhn on the Whiggish histories of science. In any case, some of what he says is uncontroversial: for much of its history, philosophy was deeply engaged with the empirical. I think, however, that Appiah overlooks the extent to which recent philosophy – and recent philosophy alone – has adopted formal structures that mirror science: the move from big ideas to far narrower and specialized questions and a corresponding move to the journal article as the unit of publication, rather than the book. This allows work to be far more rigorous and detailed, and debates to advance much more rapidly. In Kuhnian terms, philosophy – in the analytic tradition – has become puzzle-solving. And that’s a radical departure from the past. So perhaps we should come to a mixed verdict on the question to which philosophy turned its back on the science: it adopted the form of the sciences at the same time as it rejected the content. This might make reincorporating the content that much easier.

Of course, this is not inconsistent with Appiah’s claim that the neglect of the empirical is a recent phenomenon. I do wonder whether the connection between philosophy and science in the past wasn’t more focused on mathematics than on the more contingent sciences; even Aristotle, for all his own work on the natural world, suggested that knowledge concerning the contingent was of lesser value than knowledge concerning the necessary.

A final aspect of the ground clearing enterprise: Appiah is concerned with experiments in ethics, and therefore needs to dispense with the supposed naturalistic fallacy. His strategy here is to attack the ‘fallacy’ on its own grounds: He constructs a deductive argument moving from nonmoral premises to moral conclusions. Once again, he doesn’t mean us to take the argument all that seriously: as he says, it ‘has more than a whiff of sophistry about it’. His point is this: though the argument may be sophistical, it does demonstrate that the claim that moral and nonmoral propositions are categorically different, and the further claim that one cannot be deduced from the other, are from clear, never mind clearly true. We should not be sure that we even know what these claims mean. Moreover, as Appiah goes on to show, there are certainly and uncontroversially connections between the normative and the empirical.

All of this is well-taken. However, in a book that takes science seriously, I would have expected a discussion of identity claims. The naturalistic fallacy is often taken to follow from the open question argument: for any naturalistic property or set of properties, it is supposed to be an open question whether that property or properties is identical to some normative property. A competent speaker can, without making a mistake, wonder whether the two are identical. But the open question argument is sound only if identities have to be a priori, and the identities established by science are a posteriori. A competent speaker may well wonder whether water is H2O; nevertheless, water is H2O. A posteriori identities are frequently surprising, so the intuitions of competent speakers are neither here nor there.

Dr. John Tasioulas (Oxford) has some wonderful remarks regarding Professor Griffin’s book, which he presented at Professor Griffin’s book launch on January 23, 2008, and which can be found here.

Professor Griffin’s address to the audience at the book launch, in which he shares his motivation for writing the book, can also be found here.

Having read the book, I highly recommend it to scholars and advanced students of political, moral, and legal philosophy, and anyone with an interest in human rights.

Here are some places from which you can obtain a copy: US Amazon; UK Amazon; US OUP; and UK OUP.

Description of On Human Rights from OUP:

What is a human right? How can we tell whether a proposed human right really is one? How do we establish the content of particular human rights, and how do we resolve conflicts between them? These are pressing questions for philosophers, political theorists, jurisprudents, international lawyers, and activists. James Griffin offers answers in his compelling new investigation of human rights.

The term ‘natural right’, in its modern sense of an entitlement that a person has, first appeared in the late Middle Ages. When during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the theological content of the idea was abandoned in stages, nothing was put in its place. The secularized notion that we were left with at the end of the Enlightenment is still our notion today: a right that we have simply in virtue of being human. During the twentieth century international law has contributed to settling the question which rights are human rights, but its contribution has its limits.

The notion of a human right that we have inherited suffers from no small indeterminateness of sense. The term has been left with so few criteria for determining when it is used correctly that we often have a plainly inadequate grasp on what is at issue. Griffin takes on the task of showing the way towards a determinate concept of human rights, based on their relation to the human status that we all share. He works from certain paradigm cases, such as freedom of expression and freedom of worship, to more disputed cases such as welfare right - for instance the idea of a human right to health. His goal is a substantive account of human rights - an account with enough content to tell us whether proposed rights really are rights. Griffin emphasizes the practical as well as theoretical urgency of this goal: as the United Nations recognized in 1948 with its Universal Declaration, the idea of human rights has considerable power to improve the lot of humanity around the world.

It is our job now - the job of this book - to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.

Contents
Introduction

Part I: An Account of Human Rights
I. Human Rights: The Incomplete Idea
II. First Steps in An Account of Human Rights
III. When Human Rights Conflict
IV. Whose Rights?
V. My Rights: But Whose Duties?
VI. The Metaphysics of Human Rights
VII. The Relativity and Ethnocentricity of Human Rights

Part II: Highest Level Human Rights
VIII. Autonomy
IX. Liberty
X. Welfare

Part III: Applications
XI. Discrepanices Between the Best Philosophical Account of Human Rights and the International Law of Human Rights
XII. A Right to Life, A Right to Death
XIII. Privacy
XIV. Do Human Rights Require Democracy?
XV. Group Rights