To Redefine or to Dereify? That is the question

A kind of issue that arises again and again in philosophy is whether it makes more sense, or would have better consequences, to revise a concept or else to deny its instantiation. An example of the former is the way the notion of what a planet is has altered drastically through the ages. At one time it referred simply to the wanderers in the heavens (its literal meaning), that is, those celestial entities that moved relative to the “fixed” stars. This included not only objects that we still call planets but also the Sun and the Moon. Then Aristotle proposed that they were holes in a celestial sphere that allowed light from the empyrean to shine through. Now we conceive them as large spheres orbiting a star, and even our own Earth is numbered among them. 

An example of the latter is the ether, which was once thought to be a substance that filled space and provided the medium through which light waves traveled, just as water provides this service for ocean waves and air for sound waves. But advances in physics made the analogy obsolete, and so, rather than somehow revise the concept to fit the new ideas, ether was simply dropped from the inventory of existing things. The concept still exists (so to speak), but it is no longer thought to have any instantiation in reality. 

In this way existence is shown to be dependent on definitions or analyses. For by choosing to revise a definition or else to retain it, we can determine whether something continues or ceases to exist, respectively.[1] So when philosophers (like scientists) discuss concepts, there is sometimes the question of whether various inadequacies in their application counsel simply revising the concept or else ceasing to make use of it. For me in recent years the casus belli has been morality. Most philosophical ethicists are realists about morality, who nevertheless are forever proposing reanalyses of the concept. Indeed, it is the commitment to morality’s existence that inspires these endless refinements. 

For me the refinements are like the ever increasing number of epicycles needed to salvage the Ptolemaic universe, with the Sun at its center. Just so, by this time I see the whole effort in ethics to “save” morality as pretty much the tail wagging the dog; for isn’t the nobler aim to know what the universe is really like rather than to make it fit the Procrustean bed of a familiar concept? Thus I advocate the elimination of morality (which is actually a set of concepts, including also moral right and wrong and moral good and bad and moral responsibility and desert and so on) from our conceptual repertoire for describing how to live and how to act in the practical circumstances of life.

[1] Actually that “respectively” needs to be qualified. It apples properly to a type of thing or to a mass noun, such as a planet or ether (respectively). But when it comes to particulars of the type, the reverse is true. Thus, it was revising the definition of “planet” that made a particular planet cease to exist in our solar system, namely, Pluto.

Popular posts from this blog

Who Is more likely to be a psychopath: the rational moralist or the emotional amoralist?

  In the Afterword to the 2011 Edition of his book The Expanding Circle (Princeton University Press), Peter Singer makes the extraordinary admission that he has seen the light about the problematic nature of objective morality. Nevertheless he ends by cleaving to it, after providing an extremely weak argument, namely that even though a moral reason is not inherently motivating, we will nevertheless, at least in certain circumstance\s, find a moral reason to be compelling, that is, rational. To me this argument sounds almost (?) circular.  But what is even more salient for me is Singer’s conception of the rational as something that is quite distinct from what he calls the “emotional.” “[W]hether a belief gives us reasons to do something is a normative question, and whether it motivates us to do it is a psychological question.” “[I]f we can accept the idea of objective moral truths, we do have an alternative to reliance on everyday moral intuitions that, according to the bes...
Read more

Closing the Gaps

There are a couple of gaps of reasoning in my general account of desirism, which I have just thought of a way of closing. First let me remind my reader that desirism takes two forms: There are a psychological claim and an ethical recommendation. Thus, what might be called psychological desirism is the claim that moral judgments are caused by desires; or I could put it the other way and say that desires give rise to moral claims. So for example if someone wants or likes world peace, then, I claim, they will be prone to judge as wrong the violation of peace and as bad the perpetrator of such a violation. And, in the same vein, if we judge something or someone wrong or bad, I would assume that the actual cause of the judgment is some desire, whether we know it or not.  The second form of desirism is ethical desirism, or desirism proper, which is the recommendation that we forgo making, or at least ignore, judgments of right and wrong and good and bad (etc.) and focus entirely on the...
Read more

The Scylla and Charybdis of Moralism

Morality as I conceive it involves the existence of and belief in objective truths about right and wrong, good and bad, etc. To disambiguate we can speak of the belief in objective values as moralism and the existence of objective values as morality proper; hence moralism is the belief in morality. The nature of moralism thus defined has two interestingly opposite consequences for the ethical life and society:  1)   On the one hand, moralists tend to hold their beliefs with absolute and unshakeable conviction. (This assertion could be taken as a mere stipulation, so that it is true only analytically, in the way bachelors are unmarried. In this case “moralist” would take on a connotation or even distinct meaning from “moralist” in the stringent and simple sense of one who believes in morality. However, since I believe, as a matter of empirical fact, that moralism in the stringent sense tends to generate moralism in the robust sense, I don’t worry too much about this ambigui...
Read more