Will Idiocentrism Survive?

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Thick and Many-legged

“Cruel” simply ignores the supposed fact / value dichotomy and cheerfully allows itself to be used sometimes for a normative purpose and sometimes as a descriptive term. (Indeed, the same is true of the term “crime”.) In the literature, such concepts are often referred to as “thick concepts”.

Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact / Value Distinction (“FV”), Harvard, 2002, p. 35.

It is as if they wanted to see ethics as a noble statue standing at the top of a single pillar. My image is rather different. My image would be a table with many legs. We all know that a table with many legs wobbles when the floor on which it stands is not even, but such a table is very hard to turn over, and that is how I see ethics.....

Hilary Putnam, Ethics Without Ontology (“EO”), Harvard, 2004, p. 28.

Reason has its use not only in the pursuit of a given set of objectives and values, but also in scrutinizing the objectives and values themselves.

Amartya Sen, Rationality and Freedom (“R&F”), p.39.

Like Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Hilary Putnam and Amartya Sen propose new directions for their disciplines, and Sen (the instigator) goes further and actually begins doing the ethically thick economics work he advocates. The sad thing is that these authors are really only saying that we should begin to repair the damage done by 70 years or more of positivist dominance. Their thesis -- that valid ethical discourse is possible and not inimical to science -- is actually revolutionary only for a few contemporary academic disciplines, and was taken for granted by most philosophers and economics before about 1930 (as it still is today by most non-experts).

Putnam's advocacy of a thick, multi-legged philosophy amounts to the rejection of several main tenets of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy: the ontological approach, scientism, and the pursuit of clarity and “rigor” at the cost of everything else. Many of Putnam's criticisms have something in common to those Rorty has been making for three decades now, except that Putnam stresses the possibility of ethical discourse rather than advocating liberal openness and anti-foundationalism. Both want philosophy to become public philosophy once more, but Rorty has actually done public philosophy (as has Sen), whereas Putnam is mostly just pointing in that direction.

For reasons much like Rorty's and Putnam's I have been so dissatisfied with analytic philosophy that I never really became a philosopher at all. In particular, I have thought that scientistic approaches to social, ethical, political, and personal questions (in philosophy and also in the social sciences) probably do at least as much harm than good. There's a good chance that someone who's spent a year studying introductory economics or analytic ethics will end up significantly more confused and wrong-headed than they had been when they started.

I would carry the thickening and polypedification of philosophy much farther than Putnam would. Philosophy needs to deal with indexicality (so-called “subjectivity”) as something other than a source of error. It has to recognize that the future is open and indeterminate and that, of necessity, all humans face an unknowable future in the process of being made. “Truth” is only about the past and the eternal and universal, but philosophy also needs to learn to deal with the future and projects. Philosophy has to fully accept not only ethics, but also practical reason governing action. Practical engagement is not a debased form of theory, but a way of making reality, and (as a kind of experimentation) an essential source of knowledge. And last of all, thick philosophy, as an essentially-contested, normative form of projective, practical, social / personal reason oriented toward the not-yet (the unknown, unformed, and nonexistent future), needs to be oriented both toward truth and toward persuasion, since the future becomes real in part through human intention.

Ethics as Practical Reason

"Ethical decision” is a special case of “practical decision.

Hilary Putnam, EO, p. 77

The distinction between practical reason and theoretical reason is key. Philosophy tends toward theoreticism – the idea that the real truths are universal theoretical truths and that intellectual progress consists of the improvement of theory. Applications to particular situations are uninteresting, either because they're routine, or because they're messy and kludgy compromises. Most philosophers have held some version of this view, but with logical positivism the ethical aspect of practical reason itself (which had previously been thought to be rationally grounded and arguable) came to be regarded as sub-rational too. A version of this belief survived in analytic philosophy, and it is this which Putnam is arguing against.

Practical reason works with concrete actualities in real time and has to account for all the details that theory brackets out in order to make the material manageable. Theorists assume that these details are of marginal importance and that the theoretical substrate is what's really real, but this is only ever more-or-less true, and in some cases it is not true at all. And often the contaminating factors are not well theorized or well understood, with the result that the best practical applications often seem intellectually shoddy to theorists. Theorists often bracket out important but as-yet-untheorized aspects of reality (e.g. friction, history, turbulence, and contingency), whereas applied scientists cannot do so and are in that sense closer to the truth.

One name for applied science, as opposed to theoretical science, is “engineering” (a word which also can be stretched to describe applied sciences such as medicine, agronomy, and forestry which are not usually called by that name.) Engineering is science bent to some purpose, and these purposes can vary -- for example, a microorganism which medicine tries to kill might be the same one that enology tries to produce. It can thus be said that engineering, as goal-defined, is normative. Engineering does not contradict science, but it has additional normative criteria that science does not have – science is cholera-neutral, medicine is not. Furthermore, engineering must deal with normatively-significant actualities in their totality, even if that means using rules of thumb and guesswork when necessary, whereas science has the privilege of defining and selecting its objects according to the degree of scientific rigor that can be attained in dealing with them, and postponing the study of scientifically-less-promising objects (which Chomsky calls “mysteries” as opposed to "problems".)

Ethics discusses goals, but positivists assert that ends are rationally undiscussable and can only be taken as given. In this positivists agree with existentialists, cynics, nihilists, irrationalists, mystics, and bloody-minded political realists. For the defeatist perfectionists of positivism, rational discussion can only be scientific, logical, or mathematical – the writings of ethicists and political theorists are just hand-waving nonsense. (Hume: Consign it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.). Nonetheless, the applied sciences are just as normative as ethics is -- their goals are just assumed and out of the question, but never discussed. Only means are thought of, and with this we have the triumph of technical thinking, with goals established within the given structure of property ownership and political power. In this way philosophy relinquishes the field, leaving life under the control of power, emotion and “subjectivity”.

Crypto-normativity

I venture the judgment, however, that currently in the Western world, and especially in the United States, differences about economic policy among disinterested citizens derive predominantly from different predictions about the economic consequences of taking action – differences that in principle can be eliminated by the progress of positive economics – rather than fundamental differences about basic values, differences about which men can only fight.

Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics” in Essays in Positive Economics, Chicago, 1953, p. 5.

Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Consign it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, XII:3.

In this short, influential passage Friedman makes several distinct errors. First, he simply dismisses normative economics, which does not appear again in the chapter. (Elsewhere in the essay he makes it clear that for him normative economics is entirely a subjective source of error and bias, and not at all a source of insight.) Second, he assumes that normative differences about economic policy are unimportant, since there's a general consensus. And last, he assumes that normative disagreements cannot be discussed, but only fought about. The effect of these errors is to wire tacit value judgments into a supposedly “positive” but actually crypto-normative theory, thus producing a practical-theoretical chimera which makes some applications almost automatic and others hard even to propose at all. Putnam thinks of normative thinking as a species of practical reason to be distinguished from engineering, public administration, etc., but you could just as well to think of engineering as a species of normative (goal-oriented) thinking distinguished by its fixed and narrowed (“realistic”, “pragmatic”, or “technical”) normativity.

All of the hard sciences make a distinction between science and engineering. On the one side you have physics, chemistry, and biology. On the other side you have mechanical engineering, civil engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, medicine, agronomy, and so on. There's no real difficulty with this. Engineering accepts science, adapts it to make it usable, and applies it to a range of human goals. Engineering is science constrained by practical imperatives, not an impure or defective science, and not science distorted by normativity, and engineering will vary with the purposes desired: physics does not dictate human goals.

So whatever happened to applied economics? To my knowledge that field makes no systematic theoretical-applied distinction – it's all the same department. Putnam objects to the “engineering approach”, whereby “thin”, value-free science is first developed, with “values” (goals, ends) only added at the last stage. But with economics we really do not have clearly-distinguished theoretical and applied sciences at all. Instead we have a toxic confusion. It is first claimed that economics is valid and “a real science” precisely because it is value-free and objective. It is claimed next that, precisely because economics is value-free, objective, and scientific, it should be authoritative on policy questions. Authority has been attained by a method forbidding all discussion of goals. Specific economic goals or tacitly stipulated, and “economics engineering” is not an autonomous field and is not clearly distinguished from theoretical economics. If it were, economists could not claim the authority of science for their policy proposals, and disagreements about social goals (economic engineering) would not cause economic science to splinter into contending schools.

In true engineering fields “values” are discussible in terms of a range of goals or objectives, but by its definitions and exclusions economic theory limits possible goals to one rather small specifically economic set, on the assumption that economics is fundamental and real whereas all other possible goals are either derivative or illusory. The values or goals have been drawn up into the theory, which is presented as purely scientific and objective, thus producing an ethically-skewed theoretical science with only a narrow range of possible applications. The problem is not "the engineering approach" per se, but the fact that engineering and science are not clearly distinguished.

Rationality and Social Choice

For example, orthodox doctrine in economics since about 1950 has been that 1.) there's no way to compare the utilities of different individuals, since utility is private and subjective, 2.) there's no way to devise a voting system for even a fairly small group which will make it possible to come up with a group decision which will be fair to everyone, and 3.) “economic rationality” is just the consistent pursuit of self-interest or desire, as defined by the individual. (Sen's work critiques this orthodoxy and works to develop an alternative).

All three of these principles have an ethical and political skew. For example, “economic rationality” is in theory a purely formal definition (neither a description of actual behavior nor a proposed ideal). According to this definition, a sociopath can be completely rational, whereas a seeming self-sacrificing individual must be seen either to be irrational or else secretly selfish after all. Economic rationality does not forbid generosity or fellow-feeling, but these are merely treated as consumption options. An economic actor who does not have a taste for generosity or decency will be completely rational in behaving cruelly within the bounds of law if that's what works for him. In short, this definition of rationality assumes individuals with no necessary social commitments, and while it is possible to tweak the system and patch in the possibility of individuals who follow extra-economic ethical principles, they are at best equally as rational as cold-bloodedly selfish individuals or even successful sociopaths.

Likewise, the refutation of the possibility of democratic social choice seems to prove that social or political decisions will inevitably be unfair to someone, whereas in the market each person gets what he is willing to pay for. And finally, the impossibility of making interpersonal comparisons of utilities means that it is not possible to look at any market system and say that its outcomes have been humanly bad: there's just no way to say that a swimming pool for one man produces less utility than ten thousand doses of penicillin. (Hidden within this judgment is, in fact an ethical principle, albeit a negative one: human beings have no intrinsic value except insofar as they contribute to the economy, and deserve only what they earn themselves, plus whatever gifts more-productive individuals care to give them).¹

And many additional built-in ethical blind spots of economic theory not discussed by Sen can be listed: toward family and toward women, toward local community, toward the physical environment, toward non-market forms of organization (which always look bad when analyzed as markets), and toward future generations. Traditional economic theory was a crypto-normative chimera which did not separate science and engineering and which prejudged key issues (often tacitly, by systematically ignoring them). It was not neutral and it was poorly applicable to any goal other than the advancement of market forms of organization and the near-future maximization of production, consumption, wealth-accumulation, and trade.

For many decades neoclassical economic engineering has been increasing its influence in the world of policy, and it is reshaping the world as we speak. The scientific blind spots and engineering biases I've been describing have been institutionalized and have also been developed into a toxic ideology called libertarianism. Perhaps the best economists of today have left these problems behind them. Perhaps. But as far as I can tell, the other ones still run the show. Thick, polypodous economics is still in the future.

NOTE

1. For a long time economics tended to treat the intellectual difficulties pertaining to interpersonal utility comparisons or social choice as proofs of impossibility and as reasons to abandon or denigrate all efforts to do so. This was only one of the possible responses, however. Another would have been to work diligently to solve the problem, and still another would be to come up with a temporary fudge or approximation allowing work to continue until a better answer was achievable -- a very common practice in other areas of economics. (According to Hodgson, economic theory "works principally through its auxiliary [ad hoc] assumptions" -- How Economics Forgot History, p. 254).

I suppose that many economists did try to solve these problems or to find approximations, but many did not, because they did not want answers. They did not want non-market forms of social choice, and they did not want to have to consider the human costs of inequality.

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Practice

A pragmatist statement

Applications are adaptations of pure science for some purpose.

The more applications a scientific truth has, the greater its power. Power is as important as truth.

A powerless truth with no applications should be suspected of being without scientific value.

The truths of pure sciences can be used as applications or apparatus by other pure sciences (e.g. crystallography in biology), and also for non-scientific applications.

Scientific applications of science are pure truths of one field adapted as apparatus (i.e., for a practical and in that sense impure purpose) in a different scientific field.

Thus, any pure science of any power links one group of applications (its own apparatus) with a different group of applications (its uses as apparatus by other sciences).

Practical applications of science are pure scientific truths adapted for some non-scientific purpose, e.g. in industry or medicine.

Engineering applications of science are applications of pure science to fixed and given instrumental purposes: e.g. agronomy, forestry, animal husbandry, or medicine.

Ethical applications of science (including esthetic and political applications) are pure scientific truths adapted for the open-ended and contested purposes which make up much of human life.

(It is uncertain to me whether engineering applications should be thought of as stereotyped practical applications under conditions of ethical consensus -- a subset of ethical applications, perhaps under a fixed power regime -- or whether engineering applications and ethical applications should be thought of as the two species of practical application.)

Application can be a kind of experimentation, and a field of pure science can be driven by another pure science's need for apparatus. Social science can also quite validly be driven by public policy's need for tools, or by a political movement's need for tools, or by more abstract goals such as peace or social justice or prosperity, and often has been so driven.

Ethical applications are not routine, and scientists trying to develop them will continually be faced with additional non-scientific considerations. This uncertainty can only be avoided by fiat stipulations of contested questions. For example, for a long time forestry concerned itself almost entirely with maximizing the timber cut. The stereotyping of goals is done by a power regime.

The part of a scientist's training which teaches him to bracket out open-ended and contested ethical questions when doing his work often makes him ill-suited to the reintroduction of these questions when the truths are to be applied in a contested area.

In even the purest of the human sciences, instituted and socially-embodied ethical principles are  part of the data. When scientifically examined, socially-embodied ethical principles are found to be extremely slippery: erratically applied, inconsistently understood, deceptively stated, and one-sidedly affirmed for self-serving purposes. This is only to a small degree something which can be made right -- it is really in the nature of the essentially-contested ethical beast. As a result, grave real-world practical decisions are usually made upon inadequate and uncertain grounds. The millennia-long attempt to find a way make all decisions rigorously on logically-consistent, factual grounds has been only partially successful and almost certainly will never be completely so. (Indeed, we should probably hope that it never becomes completely so.)

Any attempt at finding applications of science in the greater world will have to deal with the ethical questions somehow. In particular, applications must deal with the ethical consensus already in place (with all its ambiguities), either by altering the consensus, by following it, or by a combination of the two. These adaptations required may be compared to the adaptations required for the application of the scientific truths of one field of science to different conditions holding in some other field of science, but are obviously much more extreme.

Promoting the idea that the ethical questions are undiscussible is the crime of positivism. A rigid standard of truth derived from science can be used to destroy any ethical consensus whatsoever, or to postpone ethical decision-making to infinity. After WWII a conventionalist, legal-technocratic, purportedly ethically-neutral consensus was imposed in the belief that any attempt to discuss goals inevitably lead to civil war and to nihilistic political movements of the Fascist-Communist type. This was the power regime of that time and place.

There are problems with this compromise, especially when it is accepted as an unquestionable truth or used to surreptitiously sneak particular ethical principles in (as was actually, and probably inevitably, done). Proponents of positivist ethical neutrality also ignored the degree to which scientific rigorism and scientific debunking of ethics were among the sources of political / ethical nihilism. (The positivists' dream of making all decisions strictly scientific collapsed, leaving behind only the wreckage left by their debunking of their hapless adversaries.)

A thick, experimental, practically- and ethically-driven social science is what pragmatists were always talking about. They were never talking about fudging the truth for self-serving goals. In the second half of the twentieth century various schools in various fields endeavored to destroy and supplant pragmatism, and they were reasonably successful in this task.
 

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The Philosophy of Time

The Philosophy of Time
Poidevin and MacBeath, eds.
Oxford, 1993

The Philosophy of Time seems to be intended as a summary of the state of the field for moderately advanced students, and it's a fairly recent book put out by a major publisher. It's not just a miscellaneous collection of essays, or a collection focussed on a specific subtopic. Thus, I think that it's fair to take it as a bad example of what contemporary philosophy has become.

The book takes McTaggart's century-old mystical-idealist Sarvastivadin essay on the unreality of time as a starting point, and develops various abstruse arguments in that general context. Several different authors here ask whether "time" really "flows" (as Newton says it does), and conclude that it doesn't. Likewise, it is explained that historical events do not "recede into the past" -- events only happen once and don't go anywhere after that. It is shown that time travel might be possible, but only in a world much different than ours; that while we might think that something could be in two places at once, it's impossible to imagine that something could be in two times at once; that we cannot "bring about the past"; that we can talk about "possible worlds", but not "possible individuals"; and that undetectible changeless intervals could not be part of a theory explaining observed facts. The technical proficiency of the argumentation is higher than anything I could come up with, but the questions chosen do not help the reader come to a better understanding of the McTaggart paradox: that time seems real to us even though it can be shown to be unreal.

Only Sklar's article even touches on the most reasonable approach to this question: Boltzman's hypothesis (developed by Eddington and Reichenbach) that the "arrow of time" is operative only within the world of entropy, and not at the level of fundamental physics -- Newtonian mechanics, quantum theory, and relativity. Sklar doesn't seem too happy with his own essay, and perhaps was assigned the topic against his will. 'At this point my already very sketchy and somewhat vague paper is going to become even less the presentation of a polished, finished, account (p. 114); 'That question I hardly intend to try and answer here' (p. 109); 'I don't pretend to understand all that Eddington is saying here' (p. 116). His essay also makes reference to an undocumented consensus and to the opinions of unknown persons: To some it [the explanation of irreversible time by entropy] seems obviously true in broad outline, whatever details still need filling in. To others the very idea of such a programme is prima facie absurd' (p. 99); 'I think we can all agree that such an account is not yet available to us' (p.110); 'I do not believe that I will be taken as disrespectful if I assert here that they are, for many of us, far from conclusive' (p.110). His conclusion (p. 116) is that 'it is very clear that our ultimate view of the world will require a subtle and careful weaving together of the naturalistic reduction of science [i.e., the explanation of the arrow of time as a function of entropy] which proceeds by theoretical identification with the conceptual reduction of philosophy [i.e., what the authors of this book are doing] which proceeds by epistemic analysis. Until we have such a systematic overall account I think that the entropic theory of time order will remain in doubt'.

A less haphazard and cavalier version of Sklar's paper might have been a good starting point for an interesting and useful discussion which would have left the reader with a reasonable understanding of the state of the argument about the arrow of time. Instead, all the other philosophers meticulously avoid this possible way out, and Sklar hardly treats it fairly. Despite the meticulousness of the methodology, the arbitrary frame imposed on the topic in this book (McTaggart's paper) makes it likely that an uninitiated reader or philosopher-in-training hoping to improve his understanding of the philosophy of time will actually end up more confused than he was when he started.

Sklar demands a better philosophical (epistemic) statement of the scientific / common sense views, and seems to think that the absence of such a statement is an argument against the Boltzman-Eddington-Reichenbach view, but it seems more reasonable to conclude that philosophy, here, is an unusable tool which only does harm. Our philosophical concepts of time are systematized statements of common-sense, intuitive, and mystical views of time from various sources, and if they violate both our own common sense and our scientific understanding, perhaps they should simply be dropped. This is not to say that philosophers should not work to get their philosophizing up to speed, but just that the ball is in their court, and that the rest of us should proceed with the hybrid common-sensical / scientific view (time is irreversible, and the reason is entropy) until they've cleaned up their act. Philosophy itself seems to be the problem here.

Scientists have reached a consensus on the topic: the arrow of time is thermodynamic and not fundamental, and applies only to composite entities composed of very large numbers of atoms. This is not indentical to the common-sense view, which holds that the arrow of time is everywhere, but the two can be roughly harmonized simply by saying that comon sense is not adequate for the understanding of fundamental physics (something we already knew) and that our intuition of the passage of time is valid in the thermodynamic world of entropy, but only there.

In discussions of time it's quite common to focus attention on subjectivity, or consciousness, or The Mind, or even "emotion". (This also happens in discussions of quantum mechanics, e.g., Schroedinger's Cat). The perception of temporality is often regarded as peculiar to consciousness, either as an illusion (because there is no temporality in fundamental physics) or as a privileged access to a transcendant non-material reality. This is erroneous, however. From the scientist's point of view, temporality and the arrow of time are objectively present in the whole thermodynamic, entropic realm, not just in our consciousness of that realm. It is true that we live in the world of entropy and that our minds and our lives have their own time, but that does not mean that the world we see is a timeless one into which we are projecting our own illusory temporality. Everything that we can directly perceive, from the smallest speck of dust to the stars in heaven, is ruled by entropy and temporal in nature,.

From the point of view of metaphysics and pure science, of course, it might be said that the timeless subatomic and cosmological realities are "more real" than the transient entities ruled by entropy, but there's a catch. All living things, all consciousnesses, and all beings capable of doing science are temporal, entropic beings, and even to record observations requires a "before" and an "after". Thus fundamental physics is a weirdly hybrid science, a thoroughly time-bound activity which primarily describes the timeless, ontologically-prior fundamental entities of which the scientists and their timebound apparatus are (in the last analysis (but only then) made. How this might be does seem to be a philosophically interesting question, as are the other questions about the interfaces, contacts, and relationships between fundamental timelessness and thermodynamic temporality, but these questions seem to have been deliberately avoided by the authors of this anthology.

Why was this anthology organized around McTaggart? Why did it almost completely ignore the most interesting and most promising approach to the question? My guess is this: first, McTaggart's essay is highly amenable to the kind of virtuoso argumentation which is analytic philosophy's whole raison d'etre. It's a bravura set-piece which has been done many times before, and it gives a new generation of performers a chance to show what they're capable of. Second, McTaggart's thesis is counterintuitive enough that it allows the performers and their audience to feel that they're really doing something philosophical and deep. New Class professionals need vivid colors with which to distinguish themselves from unspecialized, unprofessional, non-expert, paradigm-starved commonsense dolts, and questioning the reality of time is a pretty good identifying mark.

It really does make a difference. A lot of science and philosophy still seems dedicated to an ahistorical, timeless concept of unchanging eternal truths like those of mathematics, and thus incapable of understanding the reality of historical or evolutionary time. There's quite a large literature on this topic (bibliography below) from the points of view of physics, evolutionary biology, history, economics, political philosophy, history of science, and philosophy, but the authors of this book refer to none of it. In my opinion the distinction between the historical and the ahistorical is one that everyone should be aware of and know how to make, but philosophy seems to incapacitate people for doing so. The authors violate the Hippocratic maxim: Primum non nocere (" First do no harm") by leaving their readers stupider than they began.

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No More Trolley Cars
 

When I replace Brian Leiter as the Hitler of the philosophy world, one of my goals will be to eliminate jokey, ludicrous hypotheticals. I am thinking especially (but not only) of "trolley car" or "brain in a bottle" mind experiments. While I do not actually anticipate the entire elimination of all such examples, at the beginning severe measures will be required. Blood should run in the ivy gutters, and the severed heads of egregious offenders should be mounted on the philosophical archways. Once the infestation has been brought under control the temperate use of hypotheticals may again be allowed -- but only in fear and trembling , and not promiscuously like picking up some whore in a bar.

I have some understanding of the motivation for the use of these absurdities. Physicists use them a lot, and most philosophers wish that they were physicists. (It remains uncertain whether physicists would have used them as much as they did, had they foreseen the long term consequences). And of course, these examples do allow philosophers to tease out all the specific aspects of a certain problem by inventing imaginary cases which resemble real-world cases in some ways, but not in every way. The ludicrousness of the examples comes mostly from the fact that the types of restricted examples philosophers need for their arguments are not always to be found in the real world. And so on.

Nonetheless! The problem I have with this kind of discourse, above all in ethics, is that it reminds me of Oscar Wilde's Algernon chatting about his ethical responsibilities toward Aunt Agatha's cucumber sandwiches. Why should ethical discourse be thin, detached, and giggly? There are very good reasons to leave thick ethical considerations out of physics and chemistry, and it even makes sense to bracket them out sometimes when discussing economics and politics. But ethics, as a form of practical reason, seems to be inescapably and pre-eminently a thick, embedded discourse. Or to put it differently, taking the ethics (sensu latu) out is the key operation when a science is being thinned and disembedded -- but should you take the ethics out of ethics?

Does a pure, unapplied ethics even exist? Isn't ethics, as Putnam has recently said, a form of application, or a kind of practical philosophy? (Or couldn't we even say that all practical philosophy is ethical, since it is shaped by human ends?) While some generalization across cases presumably can be useful, actual ethical behavior always takes place in embedded contexts, and the particulars of the embedding are often the very things that make ethical behavior difficult. In other words, the ethical world is thick and often grave, and for that reason, Algernons who want everything thin may not be the best people to recruit into ethics:

Apparently my trepidation is shared by some in the biz:

The thought of leaving a significant personal moral decision in the hands of a moral philosopher in the analytic tradition would of course send a shudder through any professional philosopher. I myself also wouldn't be aided a great deal with the decision by a physician who has dealt with similar cases in the past, except insofar as she could provide me with additional facts about the consequences of past decisions....The people I would turn to for aid in such a decision are those friends of mine whom I regard as having a certain kind of wisdom and insight about the human condition. (Jason Stanley)

I agree with Gerald Dworkin and Jason Stanley that moral philosophers are not "better than the average person in coming to correct answers about first-order moral matters".....The point is that expertise in critically examining your deliberations, though useful, is not the same as expertise in carrying out those deliberations, which (as Jerry put it, and Jason seconded) is likely to require "sympathetic feelings, experience with the subject matter, and intuitive insight". (David Velleman)

Is a randomly picked moral philosopher better at figuring out a normative issue than the average person ,as defined above? How would we test this? If we knew the correct answers to the moral issues facing us we could do a survey. But, unless the question is very narrowly framed, we might find as much disagreement with the “correct” answers among philosophers as among average people. (Gerald Dworkin).

This leaves me puzzled as to the status of moral philosophy. It's not a descriptive science, because it's normative. I think that Hilary Putnam is correct when he calls ethical philosophy a kind of practical philosophy, but clearly Leiter, Dworkin, and Velleman are denying that philosophical ethics is a form of practical philosophy, or that it should be an ethical teaching. Seemingly ethical philosophy is "about ethics" but not ethics -- a critique of the language ethical actors used when trying to explain, argue, or generalize their ethical practice, or a sort of meta-practical-philosophy. However, the recognition of the relative irrelevance of what ethical philosophy does seems to amount to a recognition that ethics is untheorizable, and that the way ethical actors speak about their actions is itself merely a rough expedient and cannot adequately express the reality of ethics, so that critiques of ethical speech serve mostly to show its inadequacy, without producing usable ethical principles. (Cf. Wittgenstein's rejection of the possibility of a propositional ethics.) To me this puts philosophical ethics on very weak ground indeed, because it allows the possibility that a great ethical teacher (Gandhi, Tolstoy, Mother Theresa) might quite properly flunk a class taught by the Marquis de Sade, if Sade had done his ethicist homework and Gandhi, for example hadn't.

Ethical problems come in two kinds (which, however, are hard to separate), but philosophical ethics doesn't help much with either kind. First there are questions of principle. For example, should unmarried men and women remain chaste? Or: what obligation do the rich have to the poor? Second, there are questions of application. For example, granted the right-livelihood principle, at what point must a man quit his job even at the cost of plunging his children into destitution. Or: granting the just-war principle, at what point and to what degree is there an obligation to actively oppose a war being wrongly fought by one's own nation. I cannot see that philosophical ethics can be much help in solving either type of question. The former kind of case is normally decided by society-wide transformations of various kinds, and the second kind of problem is normally decided by individual soul-searching (or as far as that goes, thoughtless snap judgment).

The alternative to thin, hypothetical trolley-car problems would be thick, real-world problems, which could be treated on a case study basis on the model of law and medicine (see Toulmin). Using this method you can never perfectly isolate a single aspect of a question, but selected cases will be the ones which do raise interesting questions. Furthermore, ethical situations are, in reality, always thick and complex, and the case-study method (as opposed to the trolley-car method) does teach the student how to approach the thick real-world ethical situations where ethics actually does its work. find it hard to justify using implausible imaginary cases when interesting and difficult real-world cases are cheap and plentiful.

The professional second-order ethicists seem to espouse bipolar expressionist / positivist boo-hurrah irrationalism like Wittgenstein's:

The people I would turn to for aid in such a decision are those friends of mine whom I regard as having a certain kind of wisdom and insight about the human condition. (Leiter)

"Expertise in carrying out those deliberations.....is likely to require sympathetic feelings, experience with the subject matter, and intuitive insight". (Velleman, citing Dworkin)

So first-order ethics is a rationally inexpressible and undiscussible art about which philosophy can say little. Second-order ethics.... I still don't know what second-order ethics is supposed to be. Possibly it's just finger exercises for philosophers, in which case I suggest that second-order ethics be replaced by arguments about sports. For ethics, Toulmin's case study approach seems much better. As things stand, this is just one more case in which positivist rigorism and precision make discussion impossible.

So why does Algernon ethics exist at all? I have two guesses. First, philosophy is founded on fear and suspicion of the actual, the particular, the historical, and the thick. The hope is always to reduce complex, tricky things to simpler things which can be intellectually mastered, since actuality is icky. Second, in liberal individualist societies, and especially in accredited, partly state-funded educational institutions in liberal individualist societies, ethical teaching ("first order ethics") is suspect. Each individual judges his or her own ethics for himself or herself, and "telling people how to live their lives" is forbidden. In a liberal individualist world, school ethics must be about ethics; it can't be ethics itself.
 

Appendix:

If I am right that artificial examples intended to isolate specific aspects of an ethical question (and second-order ethics generally) are not very useful, why is this true?   (My answer will obviously be just a sketch.)

To begin with, ethical understanding requires, above all, the ability to understand and deal with particular historically emergent, contextually-embedded ethical situations, and unrealistically decontexted exercises are not good training for ethical practice. There is no reason to believe that these situations can be analyzed into a manageable number of "ethical atoms", and furthermore no reason to think that whatever ethical atoms there might be could be combined into predictable or intelligible wholes. That is to say, given exactly the same ethical atoms, the different ways they're combined  in two situations might be the most important thing that the ethical agent needs to understand.

Second, one of the reasons why ethical problems are difficult is that they are weighty and fraught with painful consequences. Learning to behave ethically, in large part, involves learning to deal with painful choices. Jokey trolley-car problems are are the antithesis of actual ethics.

Third, the big, real-world ethical questions are all embedded in larger political, social, historical, cultural, and religious contexts, and involved disagreements about the relative status of various kinds of good which are not illuminated by artificial examples: freedom vs. equality vs. compassion vs. order vs. solidarity, and so on. These larger questions are usually settled by revolutions and civil wars.

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Emerson's Zero-One Law
 

"Subhuti, suppose there were as many Ganges Rivers as there are grains of sand in the Ganges River. What do you think, would the grains of sand in all those Ganges Rivers be many?" Subhuti said, "Very many World Honored One.That many Ganges rivers alone would be uncountable, how much the more so the grains of sands contained in them." "Subhuti, I am speaking truthfully. Suppose a good man or good woman had filled with the Seven Kinds of Precious Gems as many Threefold Great Thousand World Systems as there are grains of sand in all those Ganges Rivers and gave them as an offering. Would that person obtain many blessings? Subhuti said, "Very many, World Honored One."

It is commonly said that in fundamental physics, since time is merely a dimension of space, certain events (e.g. time reversal, or the air suddenly rushing out of an open container to leave a vacuum) are not impossible, but merely very improbable. For example:

But the temporal asymmetry case is trickier. First of all there is the fact that a later state of even an isolated system can very well be one of lower entropy than an earlier state.

Lawrence Sklar, "Up and Down, Right and Left, "Past and Future" in The Philosophy of Time, Poidevin and MacBeath, eds., Oxford, 1993, p. 111

However, Sklar's phrase "very well" is wrong here. Except for tiny transient fluctuations, lower-entropy states are only purely formal possibilities. As Eddington says says of one version of the sudden-vacuum case:

The reason why we ignore this chance may be seen by a rather classical illustration.... If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favorable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.

Eddington, Arthur, The Nature of the Physical World, Gifford Lectures, 1928, p. 72.

The monkey-typewriter-Shakespeare probability has been calculated:

More soberingly still, a physics professor at Yale, William R. Bennett, has calculated that if a trillion monkeys typed ten random characters a second, it would still take a trillion times longer than the universe has been in existence just to produce the sentence, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Moving from calculation to experiment, The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, in existence since 2003 with a hundred monkeys typing at a vastly accelerated speed, has produced just nineteen letters from The Two Gentlemen of Verona after 42,162,500,000 billion monkey years: “Valentine. Cease to 1dor:eFLPoFRjWK78aXz."

http://goldenrulejones.com/?p=990;

see also http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/now_god_
help_thee_poor_monkey/

and http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/form_function_intention/

(It might be noted that, once the monkeys had succeeded in banging out the plays of Shakespeare or some variant edition of them (along with many cubic light years of incoherent, non-Shakespearean or pre-Shakespearean typescript), finding Shakespeare in that mess would be more or less as time-consuming as producing the Shakespeare had been in the first place. You might just as well have said that Shakespeare is all right there on the keyboard -- which is, in fact, true. In other words, the works of Shakespeare would be there only in the sense that they are a mathematically-possible combination of letters. In the same way, there's a half-billion dollars worth of gold in a cubic mile of seawater, but it would cost much more than half a billion dollars to extract it.)

Now, Kolmogorov's zero-one law goes like this:

In probability theory, Kolmogorov's zero-one law, named in honor of Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov, specifies that a certain type of event, called a tail event, will either almost surely happen or almost surely not happen; that is, the probability of such an event occurring is zero or one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov%27s_zero-one_law

Emerson's zero-one law shares the Kolmogorov law's demented binarism: everything is either impossible or inevitable. What I have done is to set the limits differently. Provisionally, Monkey-Typewriter-Shakespeare (and by extension, everything less likely than that) will be defined as impossible. (At some point it may be decided to set the limit more restrictively -- e.g., the Monkey-Typewriter-Hamlet: a trillion monkeys typing during the lifetime of a trillion universes to produce "To be or not to be".) By the Zero-One principle, then, everything else will be defined as inevitable (or MTS-inevitable). "One chance in a million billion trillion" would become just one of the ways of saying "inevitable".

Alternatively, whenever someone choosed to make a thermodynamically-impossible (but not formally impossible) conjecture -- the old "not impossible, but merely very unlikely" dodge -- they should be required to repeat the word "very" a thousand times, so that the reader has some intuition of how bogglingly unlikely it is. Boggling improbability could be even quantified in terms of Monkey-Typewriter-Shakespeare units, so people would know whether a given event were merely MTS-impossible, or (for example) MTS-squared-impossible.

(Note also that the supposedly improbable events of evolution are not at all MTS-impossible. In fact, the vaunted impossibilities anti-evolutionists talk about are, on the MTS scale, inevitable.)

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