Every once in a while, I’ll read a discussion of David Hume and think “that’s exactly right, I agree entirely. I should really make some time to read this Hume fellow.” Of course, I never do.
Which brings me to Will Baude’s ” Magnum Opus on Moral Relativism” over at Crescat Sententia (if you’re in Opera, you may have to switch to another browser to get the link to work):
Logical Positivism is a philosophy derived from the teachings of David Hume that holds, in a nutshell, that propositions are either: empirical statements about the world, tautological statements whose truth or falsity depends entirely on the definitions of the words involved, or nonsense. One consequence of this system of belief is that it holds that moral statements, while very important, are not “true” or “false” in the same empirical sense that “my apple is red” or “Sir Walter Scott wrote Waverly” are. Rather, moral statements fall into the category of “persuasive defintions.” When I say that slavery is wrong, I’m not making a testable claim. There’s no way you can go out and look at and poke some slaves looking for their wrongness or rightness; you have to bring your own sense of rightness and wrongness to the table.
I thought the quote at the bottom from A.J. Ayer – arguing that we never really argue about moral standards, but instead argue about facts – was particualrly interesting.
This may seem, at first sight, to be a very paradoxical assertion. For we certainly do engage in disputes which are ordinarily regarded as disputes about questions of value. But, in all such cases, we find, if we consider the matter closely, that the dispute is not really about a question of value, but about a question of fact….we attempt to show that he is mistaken about the facts of the case. We argue that he has misconceived the agent’s motive: or that he has misjudged the effects of the action, or its probable effects in view of the agent’s knkowledge… or else we employ more general arguments about the effects which actions of a certain type tend to produce, or the qualities which are usually manifested in their performance. We do this in the hope that we have only to get our opponent to agree with us about the nature of the empirical facts for him to adopt the same moral attitude towards them as we do. And as the people with whom we argue have generally received the same moral education as ourselves, and live in the same social order, our expectation is usually justified. But if our opponent happens to have undergone a different process of moral “conditioning” from ourselves, so that, even when he acknowledges all the facts, he still disagrees with us about the moral value of the actions under discussion, then we abandon the attempt to convince him by argument. We say that it is impossible to argue with him because he has a distorted or underdeveloped moral sense. . . in short, we find that argument is possible on moral questions only if some system of values is presupposed.
Go ahead and read the whole post..
Hume makes for very good reading (emphatically not true of thinkers from Aristotle to Kant). I could do without the line about poking some slaves. How about asking them?
The examples of slavery and Nazis are over-used in ethics. Baude didn’t need to mention slaves to get his point across. He does, however, need to clean up his description of the opposing view. In morally appraising the act of “poking a person,” the appraiser doesn’t ask whether the person (the slave, in his example) is right or wrong (or has “rightness” or “wrongness”). The appraiser asks whether the action is right or wrong. Is there a moral fact – e.g. poking is wrong, or hurting a person without their consent is wrong – that can be “read off of” the situation? That’s what a moral realist wants to know.
There is a vast landscape of ethical positions. Even noncognitivism – the view Baude defends, and which does have its roots in logical positivism – takes many forms, from the view that moral statements are merely expressions of emotion to the view that moral statements are merely recommendations for action.
Finally, one can be a noncognitivist or anti-realist about ethics without being a logical positivist – that is, without holding the traditional views on metaphysics, epistemology, and semantics.
All this pedantry is my way of saying, Ampersand, you are such an intelligent and insightful man, and I have such a big crush on you, don’t cross over to the dark side.
propositions are either: empirical statements about the world, tautological statements whose truth or falsity depends entirely on the definitions of the words involved, or nonsense.
Yeah? Prove it.
(kicking the words) I prove it thus.
Cleis, keeping in mind that I don’t have the background (or the vocabulary) to follow your previous post, can you explain to me in terms I can follow why logical positivism is “the dark side?”
I posit that the proposed Friends spin-off Joey is a priori objectively bad.
Right. Sorry. Years in grad school really have made me unintelligible.
Logical positivism (or just positivism) was a philosophical movement, centered largely in Britain, that flourished from roughly the 1920s to the 1950s. Positivism’s central doctrines include claims about truth, the structure of reality, knowledge, religion, language, and ethics. It’s a big program. Some of positivism’s central claims – such as the view that all knowledge rests on irrefutable, self-evident, basic things that we all know – have been widely discredited. (Of course, that in itself is no reason not to believe them.)
One of my points is that a moral theory, by itself, does not a logical positivist make. Positivists were committed to lots of other theories as well.
But, what did logical positivists think about ethics? They believed that moral statements, such as “poking people with a sharp stick is wrong,” are not strictly speaking true or false. Rather, on the positivist view, the statement “poking people with a sharp stick is wrong” is analogous to the statement “vanilla ice cream is yucky” – both are just statements of the speaker’s attitude toward poking, or vanilla ice cream.
The positivists’ moral view is called noncognitivism, for reasons I won’t go into. Noncognitivism is a respected moral theory today, although the theory has become more sophisticated and nuanced since the time of the positivists.
Contrast noncognitivism with moral realism, the view that moral statements are statements about matters of fact, and they can be true or false. Thus if I say, “no person should be coerced into harming herself,” I (speaking as the realist) am saying that that’s true. It’s not just my attitude toward uncoerced harm. It’s true. It’s wrong to coerce people into harming themselves.
I disagree with the positivists about ethics, since I believe that there are true moral statements. I think they were wrong and short-sighted to dismiss practical moral questions. Their legacy in philosophy has been harmful; at the least, they inhibited progress in ethics for decades.
So then, a positivist would say that Amp’s cartoons speaking out against, say, crazy pro-lifers blowing up abortion clinics is simply Amp’s own opinion and that blowing people up in the name of religious fanaticism isn’t actually right or wrong? Although I suppose that potivism, if I’m correct in my assessment above, probably grew at least partially as a reaction to said religious fanaticism.
Still, such a position (that there is no “right” and “wrong” just “cultural views”) somewhat invalidates the whole of ethics in one fell swoop. It also allows for stupid arguements like, “It’s okay for him to beat his wife because he was raised that that was an acceptable way to treat women.”
Am I understanding the positivist perspective properly?
Oh why not. Here comes Baude to “clean up his description.” Apologies, by the way, for using slavery analogies, it’s just that people so often use them to attack the semi-relativist that I thought it would be best to respond before anybody else brought them up. Rather than do anything coherent I’ll just respond to some bit and pieces here:
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Sure, one can, but why would one want to? It seems to me that ethical antirealism is a sort of side consequence of logical positivism, which is itself a wonderful and glorious thing.
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Oho! Clever. As you probably know, one can’t prove the verifiability principle using logical positivism. Some people think this impugns LP. I don’t. You can’t prove Mill’s “harm principle” using utilitarianism, you can’t prove the Bible is the word of God by using the Bible, and so on. The verifiability principle is what we call a “persuasive definition.” The Logical Positivist attempts to show you why any proposition that isn’t either tautological (which is to say a definition of sorts) or else a statement about the world is useless. Which we can discuss if you’re interested.
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Not at all. This is the danger of half-moral-relativism. The noncognitivist/relativist doesn’t say “It’s okay for him to beat his wife.” He thinks beating people is yucky and is therefore impermissible. But he acknowledges that other people disagree.
For example, I’m a Libertarian. I therefore don’t think it’s okay to put people in jail for marijuana possession. Some people disagree. There’s nothing **illogical** about this position, they just have different moralities (based on religion, or self-actualization, or whatever) than I do.
But here’s the kicker. Just because somebody else’s position is logically consistent doesn’t mean you have to respect it. In other words, if the moral relativist/noncognitivist is true to his beliefs, then thre’s nothing wrong with going out and stopping all the things he thinks are terrible– be they murder, theft, or chocolate ice cream. It’s just a recognition that ethics-as-logic is, well, a field that deserves every setback it gets.
Anyway, the LP thinks that “stealing is wrong” isn’t the kind of statement that can be true or false, unless you have a very definite idea of what “wrong” means. And even if you have some definite idea of what wrong means “against the teachings of the bible,” or “against the principle of utility maximization” there’s no way of knowing whether that definition of “Wrong” is the “true” one. Things like “wrong” and “right” are human labels. They aren’t empirical attributes the same way “red” and “squishy” are. If I think “good” means “according to the bible” and you think “good” means “according to the principles of rule-utilitarianism” there’s simply no examination the two of us can undergo to figure out who’s right. We can’t get together a bunch of things, and then crack them open to see if they’re good or not. We’re just passing one another like ships in the night.
Ciao
Will
So let me see if I followed this correctly… A logical positivist believes that a person can take any sort of moral stance that he or she wishes just so long as he or she acknowledges that people who oppose their moral position are no less “right” or “wrong” but simply approaching the moral in question from a different point of view that is no more or less valid?
PinkDreamPoppies,
I haven’t read anybody but Will on this, so I’m probably just going to confuse the issue, but that isn’t really the sense I get of the argument. I think it goes something more like (sorry this got long)…
…the Logical Postivist says that ‘valid’/’invalid’ and moral ‘right’/’wrong’ have not a lot to do with each other. This is because they believe that moral systems cannot be constructed by pure reason out of thin air. You have to start with at least some premises, and asserting the relevant premises is an integral part of a moral system. The ‘valid’/’invalid’ bit can only apply to the reasoning from the premises, not the premises themselves.
If your premises and my premises are incompatible, your having a wonderfully clean and logical argument from your premises for your moral system — even if I only have a woolly and ill thought out argument for mine — isn’t going to make that system more morally ‘right’ from my point view, anymore than if I had the beautiful argument and you and the woolly one, it would make my system more morally ‘right’ from _your_ point of view.
If we don’t share sufficiently similar moral premises then arguments based on logic about moral issues are simply futile exercises in talking past each other.
So where do these moral premises come from?
Well, all sorts of different places — quite often different ones for different people — Aunty Jane, little pink unicorns, Allah, the Bible, your mates in 8th grade, the precise neural structure of ones brain, whatever. Lots of possibilities. The one place the Logical Positivist is certain they don’t come from is via rational logical reasoning. If you think they do that’s because you’ve hidden or implied premises that you’re actually doing the reasoning from.
Therefore, on the question ‘are all moral systems equally valid?’ A logical postivist would say that this is a nonsensical and pointless question since validity and invalidity aren’t things that can apply to moral systems, only to the arguments within them; by thir very nature moral systems _have_ to assert some premises and ‘validity’ has no meaning for the premises only the arguments.
On moral questions, say ‘Is genocide wrong? Should one try to stop genocide?
Suppose the logical positivist says ‘Yes genocide is wrong. It is a moral good to try and stop genocide. If some commits to genocide I will attempt to stop them!’
You reply ‘But you have no logically valid and objective reason for you say it’s morally wrong or trying to stop me from committing this genocide! KILL THEM ALL!’
The Logical Positivist says ‘I don’t need such a reason, I just need the moral system I use to say I ought try to stop you. That subjective reason is plenty good enough.’
Then ditching further philosophical discourse as utterly pointless, they along with any others than can round up — whether Logical Positivists or not — who share a similar sense of the moral situation proceed to try to put a stop to your, in their eyes, evil scheme.
Trying to compress that as much as I can…
The Logical Positivist position is that a single Objective Moral System is quite impossible for various sound philosophical reasons. However, since you don’t need one to possess and act upon moral sentiments, this isn’t as much of a problem as everybody tries to makes it out to be.
(Applause!)
Logical positivism entails a commitment not only to views about morality, but also to views about science, knowledge, religion, and so on. I think that’s important, because if I call myself a logical positivist, then I’m implicitly committing myself to a whole package of beliefs, many of which are quite implausible and largely discredited – for example, the view that all true knowledge is gained from deductive reasoning.
So suppose you just want to be a logical positivist about ethics? The ethical view that Skapusniak describes is held by many people who aren’t logical positivists. So I’m not sure what it means to say I’m a logical positivist about ethics if I don’t hold the whole kit and caboodle of positivist views.
Finally, I think – although I’m not sure about this – that a positivist is committed to the view that we can’t REASON about morality at all. And if we can’t reason about morality, then it’s hard to see how I could try to convince someone who disagrees with me about a moral issue. I could use force, or I could try to appeal to their moral sentiments … but I couldn’t reason with them.
Thanks, Skapusniak, that’s precisely what I meant, and said much more eloquently than I could manage. There’s no use arguing logic with people whose fundamental premises are fundamentally different than yours, but that doesn’t mean there’s no use fighting them for what you believe.
Now, Cleis, what’s so bad about the logical positivist view that all “true knowledge” is gained from “deductive reasoning”? You mention the LP’s being discredited but I think they’re less discredited than ignored. Good refutations of the LPs are few and far between, and philosophy skips merrily on in their absence.
The Logical Positivist believes that for a statement to have meaning, it must either: be true simply by virtue of the definitions of the words it contains (a category which includes all of modern logic, and all of theoretical mathematics, too), which is sometimes (a little misleadingly) called a tautology. Or: it must be a statement that could, at least in theory, be empirically falsified.
In practice what this means is that if a statement isn’t a tautology, then it somehow *makes a difference* in the real world. One classic example is when the LP argues with a religious person who says “Everything that happens is done according to God’s Will.” The LP replies, “Well, that’s great and all, but how would you know if it weren’t? I mean, either your claim is just that by definition, to “happen according to God’s Will” means “to happen” in which case it’s true but not very useful or anything, or else you must have some way of knowing whether things actually do happen according to God’s Will. If a thunderstorm struck tomorrow, how would you know whether it was a God-sent thunderstorm or not?”
Anyway, as one of the last standing Logical Positivists (Hume and Wittgenstein being dead) I’ll defend them all day.
The only point I would add is that while the premises that a moral system is based on aren’t judged as “valid” or “invalid” they can still be judged on soft scales, like “persuasive” or “reasonable,” and they often are. That is, people can be persuaded to accept moral premises like “it is good if it is good for human flourishing,” or “if it is good for the worst members of society,” or “if it promotes the cause of grapefruit,” but it takes real persuasion. You’ve got to make them believe. This, of course, is sometimes derided as “faith” and in a sense it is. But principles like “that which promotes happiness and freedom” are a lot easier to convince people of than “that which falls in line with my contested interpetation of contested religious texts.”
Hi Will,
Am I correct that positivists are foundationalists about knowledge – that is, that they believe that all knowledge must be deduced from indubitable first principles which are self-evident and in principle available to every rational being? (The classic first principle is Decartes’ “I know I am a thinking thing.”)
Unlike Descartes, however, positivists first principles are empirical – they don’t come to us from reflection but from our experiences of the world. (That is pure Hume, of course.) Is that right?
OK, I reject this picture of real knowledge as deductive from first principles, however we get those principles. I think science can give us real knowledge, for example, and much of science relies on inductive reasoning. I think that evolution is true, or much closer to true than any competing theory, and evolution is the classic example of inductive reasoning.
Heavens, evolution is a perfect example of what Positivist believe in. (With the caveat, you understand that it’s logically *possible* that evolution could turn out to be false, a conspiracy by aliens, some more complex scientific theory, or something).
Positivists believe that there *are* no universal first principles from which everything can be deduced. All knowledge has to be concluded, one way or another, from empirical observations. If you do it by creating a theory like evolution which is the most likely explanation for the phenomena of speciation we see, or by some other method, the positivist doesn’t have a really strong opinion.
So yes, positivists believe knowledge has to be deduced from principles (or directly observed, of course), but I’m not sure I’d call those principles “first” principles. Doesn’t evolution come from scientific observation, though?
All the positivist thinks is that knowledge isn’t knowledge unless there’s some empirical test to prove it wrong.
OK, but if “all knowledge needs to be concluded, one way or another, from empirical observations,” then that knowledge-getting process is induction, yes? Positivists should admit of induction as a reliable way to get knowledge. Yet you asked me what the problem was with positivists’ thinking that knowledge is achieved only via deductive reasoning. My answer is, deduction won’t get you evolution, for starters. So, do positivists recognize only deduction as a legitimate mode of reasoning (that was my understanding of positivism), or do they recognize induction, too?
I also thought that a fundamental tenet of positivism is verificationism – that is, knowledge isn’t knowledge unless you can amass evidence to prove it right. That’s different from what you say at the end of your most recent post.
Finally, what attracted Amp to positivism was its (meta)ethical views. Is that also your primary attraction to the view? I’ve gotten away from talking about ethics.
I’m actually going to need a refresher course in induction v. deduction as ways of getting knowledge. A valid way of getting knowledge is looking at what is implied to be true by all sorts of physical evidence, and/or hypothesizing things and submitting them to physical tests.
The verificationism tenet of positivism means– a (non-tautological) statement is *meaningless* unless there’s some *way* to amass evidence to imply its truth or falsity. It’s basically impossible to ever be 100% sure about anything (for various reasons Hume lists; it’s always *possible* that every law of the universe could change tomorrow, it’s just so unlikely we don’t really worry about it). So the more evidence you amass, the more likely your statements are to be true, that is, the more likely they are to be “true knowledge”. And if there’s no way to empirically test them at all, then they aren’t right or wrong, they’re just gibberish.
I’m afraid I don’t have a “primary attraction” to LP. I’m attracted to it because I think it’s philosophically correct, and important to have a coherent and useful sense of “meaning”. That then implies all the ethical, epistemlogical, etc. views.
Wow! A big thanks to all for giving me some education. Your posts have been wonderful and understandable. Please go on.
I always wanted a bumper sticker that said:
“HAVE YOU EMBRACED LOGICAL POSITIVISM TODAY?”
Kip, I would buy three.
Arguements are declared valid/invalid by examining their structure.
Propositions are declared true/false by examining their correspondence to the world.
Validity and truth are not the same.
Propositions can be arrived at by deduction or induction.
I would argue that deductive analysis, carried back far enough, will ultimately run into induction.
It’s been too long since I ventured into Logical Positivism. I know not where they have arrived.
TMH
*sighs* It was difficult enough for me to figure out where I fall between Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil.
Inductive means that you are putting together specific facts and from them extrapolating a general conclusion. Deductive means that you are going from a general idea and deducing (sorry) specific facts.
Evolution: induction
Math: deduction
For example, if we know that all dogs have four legs, and we know that Fido is a dog, then we know that Fido has four legs. That’s deduction. However, if we are from Mars and we don’t know what a dog is, and we find a dog and note that it has four legs, and we find 5,000 more dogs and every single one has four legs, we can begin to feel comfortable INDUCING that all dogs have four legs.
I have this little annoying brain thing where I think the two are inextricably linked, because I think that all general principles are really the result of inductive reasoning. I mean, we know that adding two positive numbers results in a larger number only because it always has, right? So, the general rule used in deduction (properties of adding, for example) is the result of some seriously irrefutable induction. :p
God, I crack myself up.
I’ve always felt there was value to logical positivism.
perhaps it’s greatest value, at least for me, is dismissing various zealots (collectively known hereafter as “street preachers”) with the simple statement: “your morality is fine for you. I have my own, and I’m quite comfortable with it. so I’m not interested in (becoming anti-abortion/vegan/pro-war). I’m quite happy as a mad scientist. thank you”
I suppose I COULD say that anyway if logical positivism never existed, but nevertheless…
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