> This philosophy flowed from Ayer’s 1936 work Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer had argued that only statements that could be verified were meaningful. Ethical statements have no objective truth, and are thus simply subjective. This can lead to what has been termed the “Boo-Hurrah” theory of ethics, known more technically as emotivism. According to this view, my ethical positions are nothing to do with any objective criteria; rather they are expressions of my own emotional attitude, merely my “tastes.” Ultimately, if I say something is “good” or “right” morally, it is because I like it, and if something is “wrong” or “evil” it is because I don’t.
What seems often strange to me is how "X is subjective" seems to be equated with "X does not exist". This leads to strange conclusions like the one in the article but also to modern fallacies like the "homo oeconomicus", who only operates on objective information.
This all feels like taking the famous "spherical cow" model from physics but then proclaiming that cows are in fact spherical - because only with that assumption, we could make meaningful predictions - therefore all observations to the contrary are meaningless.
Wouldn't a better question be why a person or a group of persons has a particular subjective experience? Also, what subjective experiences are shared between all or almost all of us?
These thoughts struck me as well in one form or another.
> “If philosophy was unable to identify evil, then there was a major problem with philosophy”
Why is it imperative that philosophy is able to identify "evil", and to what extent?
Is identifying something as "evil" subjectively somehow not good enough for me to condemn it or act upon it?
> Why is it imperative that philosophy is able to identify "evil", and to what extent?
There are many branches of philosophy and it is perfectly fine for a philosopher to study other topics. Ethics, or moral philosophy is a branch which “involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior”. If you set out to practice this particular branch you will be asked what is your opinion on behaviours commonly refered as “evil”. That is “evil” don’t have to be a technical term in your moral philosophy, but it will be one of the edge cases it will be evaluated on. So it is not imperative that philosophy identify “evil” but if someone sets out to talk right and wrong and their system of thinking results in sillyness in practical cases then that system is not worth much.
> Is identifying something as "evil" subjectively somehow not good enough for me to condemn it or act upon it?
Maybe. It can make collective action hard. Lets say there is a group of people who spends their time finding people with freckles. They then torture them and murder them. It is kind of their hobby. And someone else says “this is terrible and we must stop them”. They alone are weak and powerless, can only stop the “hobbyist” if enough people agrees to do something (like for example setting up a police force and outlawing murder) If then and then a moral philosopher drifts by and says “my dude, you should chill out. You think murdering people with freckles is bad, they think it is not. You should work on accepting other people more.” That kind of talk, if taken seriously, will not result in collective action and in effect will let the murders continue. And then we can scratch our head and think if it was the right outcome.
Because evil is a fundamental (abstract) concept enmeshed in the moral, spiritual, and religious domains of life. If philosophy is anything it is the study of deeply interwoven fundamental abstract concepts. Because the problem (what is it? why does it exist in the first place? if there is a god and god is good why would/could there be evil at all – etc.) of evil is felt to be of such significance it would be noteworthy that philosophy did not have the tools to take it apart and inspect it from all angles. It would indicate not that our conception of evil was flawed but that there was something majorly lacking with the discipline of philosophy.
That'd be my take on it.
The same would go for any fundamental abstract concept.
I think this is the corner of “categorization” philosophies. Items and topics are categorized and valued/labeled in certain boxes or intersections in heavy handed way. Those philosophies get stuck in their own trappings where complexity gets to great, that is why I love more organic philosophers like Gilles Deleuze.
Morality is both emotional and rational, it is part of the psychological make up. And indeed you are right that philosophy as wielded in a pure linguistic structure won’t get you very far, I mean they might yield interesting insights, but they are limited by their own rules often.
Reflecting further upon that, might that aspiration for philosophy ultimately stem from a yearning to be freed from the burden of making subjective moral judgements?
A yearning for a one-size-fits-all kind of morale that can be universally applied?
Interesting to read about how admission rules were structured 70 years ago. Gives a bit of a different context when people complain about 50/50 quotas or affirmative action today.
> The four profited from the opening of Oxbridge to female students during the war. Winning a place was a torturous process in the late 1930s: Oxford’s entry rules expressly stipulated a ratio of four men to each woman, meaning only 250 places were available. Applicants were also required to have two or three languages, including Latin and Greek, subjects often unavailable to girls.
> This blindness to feminist ethics is revealing. In part it is a function of the era in which they worked, but not completely; they all lived through various waves of feminism. And yet the ethical battles they were involved in—even when about abortion—were, it seems, purely intellectual ones. One can imagine contemporary feminists seeing some maddening abstraction in their work, as they themselves did in the Oxford ethicists. Questions about female embodiment and intersectionality, so crucial to current feminist thinking, are absent from their “gender-neutral” work—and from this book.
Always lovely to read a retrospective of talented women that chastises them for not having been feminist enough.
I've read a few Murdoch novels and recommend them. As I read them, I did not find myself yearning for a discussion of "female embodiment and intersectionality" but your mileage may vary.
"One can imagine [feminists] seeing..." is a mention of imagined critique, a position that the author is carefully not taking. That's nowhere near "chastising."
It reads to me like strong chastisement. Not just that sentence fragment you quote, but 3 whole paragraphs (the 3 before the last paragraph) are devoted to that theme. And similarly to when on HN people say loftily that something someone else wrote "is very revealing", what it reveals is never mentioned. I think it's like saying "Of course it's bad" i.e. "It's not what I'm used to." You don't have to get into why it's bad, just say it's very revealing. Possibly Schopenhauer covered that in his Stratagems, sounds like it.
On a more positive note, I've read quite a lot of all four of these women, mostly decades ago. Still have books by all of them. I didn't realize the size of their contribution, particularly Anscombe's in reviving (academic) virtue ethics.
How interesting. As I read it, those paragraphs are quite neutral -- the author seems to be contrasting without any overt judgement. I can imagine a reader similarly taking offence at a perceived celebration of the noted absence of modern feminism in the women's works. But personally, I strive to read an author's words, not their mind.
At one time, presenting differing viewpoints was considered a hallmark of good journalism. I'm not wont to wist for a bygone era; perhaps I am getting old after all.
> This blindness to feminist ethics is revealing. In part it is a function of the era in which they worked, but not completely; they all lived through various waves of feminism. And yet the ethical battles they were involved in—even when about abortion—were, it seems, purely intellectual ones. One can imagine contemporary feminists seeing some maddening abstraction in their work, as they themselves did in the Oxford ethicists. Questions about female embodiment and intersectionality, so crucial to current feminist thinking, are absent from their “gender-neutral” work—and from this book.
This sounds like a blurb a medieval priest would put in when talking about how Virgil’s Aeneid did not talk about Jesus and the Incarnation.
Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar—it's predictable and therefore boring.
Relatedly, please don't pick the most provocative bit in an article and then copy it into the thread so you can complain about it. That's not the path of curious conversation, and this site is for the latter.
What seems often strange to me is how "X is subjective" seems to be equated with "X does not exist". This leads to strange conclusions like the one in the article but also to modern fallacies like the "homo oeconomicus", who only operates on objective information.
This all feels like taking the famous "spherical cow" model from physics but then proclaiming that cows are in fact spherical - because only with that assumption, we could make meaningful predictions - therefore all observations to the contrary are meaningless.
Wouldn't a better question be why a person or a group of persons has a particular subjective experience? Also, what subjective experiences are shared between all or almost all of us?