[Basic] Skill of the week: Philosophy

[whswhs]

I would not have a separate skill of Philosophy (Meta-Ethics). It's too narrow a specialty. It's only one-third of ethics, after all (the other parts being descriptive ethics and normative ethics). Instead, I would consider it to fall under (Comparative), if you were looking at how Aristotle, Spinoza, Mill, and Kant compare and contrast; or (Analytic), if you are looking at the logical, conceptual, and methdological issues involved in reaching ethical conclusions (for example, "ought implies can" and what follows from it).

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I would not have a separate skill of Philosophy (Meta-Ethics). It's too narrow a specialty. It's only one-third of ethics, after all (the other parts being descriptive ethics and normative ethics). Instead, I would consider it to fall under (Comparative), if you were looking at how Aristotle, Spinoza, Mill, and Kant compare and contrast; or (Analytic), if you are looking at the logical, conceptual, and methdological issues involved in reaching ethical conclusions (for example, "ought implies can" and what follows from it).

Could Philosophy (Ethics) be a valid specialty, with Meta-Ethics an Optional Specialty of it?

[Gumby Bush]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Comparing and contrasting the different types of ethical systems is Philosophy (Meta-Ethics), right?

Comparing and contrasting ethical systems would be Normative Ethics. That is the land of trolley problems, working out how a utilitarian should deal with uncertainty or demandingness objections, what a deontologist should say about "emergency" cases, what the virtues are, and how a virtue ethicist might say to argue for them non-circularly. So, it involves arguments about what is good and what is right.

Meta Ethics would be dealing with things that are "up a level" like:
Is the good prior to the right or the right prior to the good? That is, is x right because of what is good, or are things good because of what it is right to do?
Are ethical claims truth-apt? How? If not, what are we doing when we say "X is wrong" or "y is morally bad"? (so, debates about error theory, noncognitivism, and different forms of moral realism).
If there are basic normative facts or assertable claims, what kind of generality to they admit of? Are there exceptionless moral rules? Or do we have to settle for highly context-dependent claims about what it is right to do here and now?

So, it would be more focused on arguments about the concepts of the good and the right, rather than their application.

Of course, they bleed into one another. Normative theories probably involve commitments, or at least dispositions to hold, to meta-ethical views. A consequentialist is liable to hold the good to be prior to the right. A deontologist, the reverse. But you can probably get forms of each that are surprising.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Gumby Bush

Comparing and contrasting ethical systems would be Normative Ethics. That is the land of trolley problems, working out how a utilitarian should deal with uncertainty or demandingness objections, what a deontologist should say about "emergency" cases, what the virtues are, and how a virtue ethicist might say to argue for them non-circularly. So, it involves arguments about what is good and what is right.

Whether you can argue for virtues non-circularly seems to me to be a meta-ethical question. It's not about "What are the virtues?" but about "How can we identify the virtues?" That seems like a meta-level question.

[Gumby Bush]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Whether you can argue for virtues non-circularly seems to me to be a meta-ethical question. It's not about "What are the virtues?" but about "How can we identify the virtues?" That seems like a meta-level question.

Note: it might be "How can we identify the virtues" if the worries are put as epistemological worries. It could be a grounding worry instead: "What makes something a virtue?" And the objection is that some Virtue Ethicists say that what makes something a virtue is that it contributes to flourishing, how we tell what contributes to flourishing is by looking to the virtuous agent, and how we pick out the virtuous agent is... they have the virtues? If it's an epistemological worry, I think saying it is not vicious because it involves a hermeneutic cycle might work. If it is an ontological worry that the theory has grounding going in a circle, that's a harder move to argue for (it's not turtles all the way down; it's turtles standing in a ring!).

At any rate, the fact that it's a problem local to Virtue Ethics is why I place it in Normative Ethics. A similar thing could be said about the question of whether the claims of morality are too demanding to allow for friendship, but that's mainly a problem for Utilitarians and their ilk--who do try to dodge it by claiming that any plausible ethical theory will be "too demanding" to a similar degree.

Christine Korsgaard probably doesn't have a problem about circularity. Julia Annas probably does. The point is that they are debates about the coherence of ethical systems. But yes, if things were done differently, I could see it being meta-ethical. Some factors of categorization are sociological.

We could have a meta-ethical issue about the nature of virtues. That would probably have us arguing over something like whether, for something to be a virtue, it needs to be a situation-independent disposition to perform related actions, which leads to arguing about how to parse "related" in that proposed (partial) analysis and whether the situationist psychological literature undermines the claim that there is such thing as virtues (Christian B. Miller argues as much, for instance). I don't actually know where that debate is happening.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Gumby Bush

At any rate, the fact that it's a problem local to Virtue Ethics is why I place it in Normative Ethics. A similar thing could be said about the question of whether the claims of morality are too demanding to allow for friendship, but that's mainly a problem for Utilitarians and their ilk--who do try to dodge it by claiming that any plausible ethical theory will be "too demanding" to a similar degree.

I don't see that it's clear that every meta-ethical question must apply equally to all schools of ethical thought. Surely in utilitarian ethics, for example, we can ask "What action in this case achieves the greatest good of the greatest number?" which seems to be normative, but we can also ask "Is there any valid way to make interpersonal utility comparisons?" or "Is the concept of utility even meaningful for a single person?" and both of those seem to be meta. But neither of them even arises for deontology (where they fall victim to Kant's statement that actions influenced by personal preference are inherently not moral) or for virtue ethics (where we don't decide what actions are virtuous by utilitarian calculations). And I'm sure we could come up with meta questions for virtue ethics or deontology that equally don't generalize.

[Gumby Bush]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't see that it's clear that every meta-ethical question must apply equally to all schools of ethical thought. Surely in utilitarian ethics, for example, we can ask "What action in this case achieves the greatest good of the greatest number?" which seems to be normative, but we can also ask "Is there any valid way to make interpersonal utility comparisons?" or "Is the concept of utility even meaningful for a single person?" and both of those seem to be meta. But neither of them even arises for deontology (where they fall victim to Kant's statement that actions influenced by personal preference are inherently not moral) or for virtue ethics (where we don't decide what actions are virtuous by utilitarian calculations). And I'm sure we could come up with meta questions for virtue ethics or deontology that equally don't generalize.

Well, there's some space between being peculiar to one and being equally applicable to all.

The issue of Thick Concepts, I take it, winds up with a role in Meta-Ethics, but probably grew out of Virtue Ethical approaches. That said, it seems like a Constructivist or Contractualist could also be interested in those issues, whereas I'm not entirely sure what a Utilitarian would do with them.

To be perfectly honest, however, I don't fully get where the lines are. I'm mostly reporting where I see the arguments happening--again, there's a sociological dimension to how these things are divided. I do know that the people who do Normative Ethics argue about these problems, the ones who do Meta-Ethics argue about those problems, and then some problems get argued about by both, and all the lines are blurry--I certainly can't give necessary and sufficient conditions that everyone would agree to, nor, I think, could anyone. There's a lot of going by similarity judgements, I think. There are rough "stuff like this goes here" guidelines, though, which is what I was attempting to gesture to. The reason Normative Ethics tends to keep the special problem arguments is that those are the people in the business of defending specific normative theories. The more general the problem, the more likely it gets picked up as a Meta-Ethical issue, but it's liable to be blurry at what point, and it is likely to depend on some Meta-Ethicist deciding he wants to make an argument about the concept.

That said...

"What action in this case achieves the greatest good of the greatest number?"

This is probably Applied Ethics if we are trying to figure out what one should do in a particular case (as in something like Singer's famous paper where he argues we should all be donating most of our wealth, or arguments for veganism). Normative if it is a thought experiment meant to argue for or against the view. Again, blurry lines: if you argue for an applied conclusion of your view, and someone comes back at you, they could either argue that you are wrong about the conclusions of the theory or that the conclusion shows the theory to be a bad one. Or maybe you would make such an argument to show how the view has plausible consequences.

More to your point, however, interpersonal comparisons of utility is more broadly applicable than utilitarianism (Contractualists might care, for one), or even meta-ethics, because the interpersonal comparisons of value issue spreads across value theory generally, even if one isn't doing ethics. You might, for instance, have a theory of individual well-being that requires interpersonal comparisons while having an ethical theory that doesn't. I'm not sure why one would, but someone probably does. You could also wonder whether we can compare how much I enjoy a dish with how much you enjoy the same dish, which might have no ethical consequences, but might have consequences for some aesthetic views.

On the other hand, how to handle ethics under uncertainty seems generally applicable, and yet tends to get handled in normative ethics--probably because different views need to give pretty different accounts.

Value Theory might be appropriate as the top-level specialization. Whether to treat Aesthetics, Ethics, etc., as one step down and have Meta-, Normative, and Applied, as specializations of Ethics, or to have them all on a par (as PhilPapers does) probably depends on one's goals for one's game.

[jason taylor]

I once wrote a story where two future lovers met by being rivals in a debating society.