Ruth Anna Putnam

Creating Facts and Values

Moral sceptics maintain that there are no objective moral values, or that there is no moral knowledge, or no moral facts, or that what looks like a statement which makes a moral judgment is not really a statement and does not have a truth-value. All of this is rather unclear because all of it is negative. It will be necessary to remove some of this unclarity because my aim in this paper is to establish a proposition which may be summarized by saying: even if there are no objective moral values in one sense, there are objective moral values in another sense, and the latter values are good enough to do some of the jobs that objective values in the first sense would have done. A useful analogy might be that of a person who has lost her hand and has been given a prosthesis. In one sense the prosthesis is not as real (because man-made) as the hand, in another sense it is just as real (both are physical objects); most importantly, the person can do with the prosthesis enough of what she could do with the hand to make do.

Dewey’s epistemology

In The Quest for Certainty , Dewey described “the main problem of modern philosophy” as follows, “How is science to be accepted and yet the realm of values to be conserved.” He suggested that a solution to the problem would be found if the separation of theory and practice, presupposed by philosophy since the days of Plato, were overcome. That task, he believed, will be accomplished when the traditional spectator theory of knowledge is replaced by a theory that regards the knower of the world as an agent in that world. Such a theory will be a theory not of knowledge as fixed and immutable but rather of knowledge as the upshot of inquiry as seen in the experimental sciences; it will, he promised, “cancel the isolation of knowledge from overt action.” Once knowledge is seen to be not only compatible with action but requiring action, it follows that the methods of inquiry that lead to knowledge in science are also the methods by which judgments of practice, and hence judgments of value, become known. Moreover, the methods of science are continuous with methods of inquiry in everyday life. Thus, somewhat surprisingly, Dewey, who sneered at an “alleged discipline of epistemology,” found himself again and again developing, presenting, and defending his instrumental theory of knowledge. The central sources are the essays he collected in Essays in Experimental Logic (now scattered in several volumes of the Middle Works of John Dewey ), The Quest for Certainty, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry and finally “Experience, Knowledge and Value” in The Philosophy of John Dewey .

Perceiving facts and values

In a memorable passage near the beginning of ‘The Moral Philosopher and The Moral Life,’ William James asks us to imagine a world in which all our dearest social utopias are realized, and then to imagine that this world is offered to us at the price of one lost soul at the farthest edge of the universe suffering eternal, intense, lonely pain. Then he asks, ‘what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain.’ I find this passage enormously interesting for a variety of reasons. We would have an impulse to grasp the utopian world, and that impulse is not inexplicable: we would be happier in such a world than we are now. The impulse is even morally defensible: James tells us later in the essay that, ‘[t]here is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest universe of good that we can see.’ (ibid., p. 158) Moreover, he acknowledges that our best ideals cannot be realized in this poor world without trampling some other ideals under foot. The realization of the values of good and sensitive people entails the frustration of the desires and goals of cruel and brutal people. Worse, institutions that are on the whole beneficial will have innocent victims; James mentions monogamous marriage as an example of such an institution. In a functioning democracy, these are frustrations that everyone must take in stride sometimes. So, should we then not grasp that utopia, that world without unemployment, without homelessness, where everyone has access to medical care, where racism and other forms of prejudice and oppression are known only from the history books, etc., etc.? Those commentators who read James as a kind of Utilitarian, must surely believe that James would advocate our grasping that ideal, that he would speak not merely of an impulse to clutch that happiness but of an obligation. But James is not a Utilitarian, and the passage under discussion occurs when James wants to distance himself from the Utilitarians. We have, he says, a capacity for quite specific emotions, capacities that cannot be explained in any simple way as the result of evolutionary selection for the survival of either the individual or the species. He does not mean the capacity for sympathy, though that too would come into play here. Sympathy enables us to vividly imagine the suffering of the lost tortured soul, to feel for it and, indeed, with it. But James means something else; he means a revulsion, an apprehension that to do a certain thing would be ‘hideous.’ To do what? To opt for the utopia? That is not what he says. To enjoy the utopia? Again, that is not what he says. There is nothing wrong with opting for or enjoying utopia if it can be had at no cost, or at a cost clearly bearable by those who are obliged to bear it, or if one is non-culpably ignorant of the price. What is hideous is ‘enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain.’

Weaving Seamless Webs

On a hot sleepy summer day an old truck rattles along a dusty road. A turnip falls off the truck, the truck does not stop. Perhaps the old man who drives the truck does not know that the turnip fell off, or perhaps he does not care. He values his time or his ease more than he values the turnip. We, who know not only that turnips are nourishing but that many people go hungry, may say that the man ought to have stopped to pick up the turnip. According to the prevailing view, the turnip fell off the truck regardless of whether anyone knows that it fell off. According to the prevailing view, turnips are nourishing regardless of whether anyone knows that they are nourishing; but that turnips are nourishing is a fact relative to us. Strictly speaking, turnips are nourishing for omnivores. According to the prevailing view, these hard facts (absolute and relative) are to be distinguished from values, i.e. really valuings. Turnips have value only if human beings value them, only if they choose to eat them or to feed them to their domestic animals; the mans not caring is wrong only if we care about people going hungry. All this is vague, it is a mere gesturing in the direction of the fact/value distinction, or the science/morality distinction, or the description/prescription distinction. It is not necessary for me to be clearer than this, for my aim in this paper is to defend the view that nonmoral facts and moral facts are so intimately interwoven that the distinctions alluded to will bear hardly any philosophical weight at all; in particular, they will not support moral scepticism.

Why Not Moral Realism? 1

Abstract This paper argues for the view that moral realism is irrelevant to ethics. It recalls Aristotle’s claim that the Platonic Form of the Good is irrelevant because it is not the sort of thing we can desire or pursue. Moore’s account of ethics in relation to conduct and of the Ideal is woefully inadequate as a morality to live by. Peter Railton’s moral realism also involves a very weak first‐order moral theory. These failures are due, I claim, to the fact that Plato, Moore and Railton regard morality as a science; it is not a science, it is an art.

On Empirical Knowledge

Tom Lehrer has a song which begins “Whatever Happened to Hubert?”. I should like to change that to “whatever happened to empirical knowledge?”. By empirical knowledge I mean, to borrow phrases of David Hume, knowledge of matters of fact based on experience. Hume, as you know, declared that all knowledge of matters of fact is based on experience, and I am inclined to believe that almost all philosophers hold the converse, namely that all knowledge based on experience is knowledge of matters of fact. Yet a perusal of the recent literature leads one to wonder whether either of these generalizations can be maintained, and whether there is indeed any interesting empirical knowledge. Where by interesting empirical knowledge I mean what Hume called knowledge of matters of fact “beyond the present testimony of our senses, or the records of our memory”.1 Let me hasten to assure you, however, that despite these references to Hume my concern is not with scepticism.

Patterns of Use of Science in Ethics

It is commonly recognised that the question of the relation of science to ethics has been a troubled one, especially in the 20th century. There is an interesting history to the question. Scientists have occasionally attempted to legislate for ethics. They thought to determine morality from their biological results — for example, their conclusions about human evolution. Or else, they offered lists of instincts or needs out of which they expected a conception of the good to be constructed. They framed concepts of mental health to serve as a basis for morals, or attempted to apply to moral inquiry the latest model from the latest science. Philosophers reacted with emphasis, often with impatience. They attempted to establish and maintain a concept of moral autonomy which would free them from an incipiently authoritarian science as it had freed them from an authoritarian religion. Sometimes they fell instead into the clutches of an authoritarian linguistics, and they confused autonomy with isolation. Many philosophers felt that the whole question had really been settled when G. E. Moore worked out the idea of the naturalistic fallacy in his Principia Ethica at the beginning of the century, and separated the moral sphere from the natural sphere; in one form or another, it has won assent in the analytic world. In more popular vein, and among perhaps most scientists, it has seemed enough to say ‘Science can give us only means, not ends.’