W.V.O. Quine (1908-2000) On the Nature of Moral Values Lecture 13 W.V.O. Quine (1908-2000) On the Nature of Moral Values

Background Student of C.I. Lewis, Whitehead e Carnap Teacher of Davidson, Putnam Colleague of White and Nelson Goodman Firmly rooted in analytic philosophy, and yet presented his major philosophical points as pragmatists points Hardly engaged the classical pragmatists, and rather associated pragmatism with some strands in logical positivism

Methodological and epistemological holism Naturalizing epistemology and science Against two dogmas of empiricism (analytic-synthetic, reductionsim) Again myth of the museum Logical behaviorism He only wrote one piece in ethics, which however carries with it his main philosophical concerns

NMV In order to account for what goes on in our minds, we should take a look at what we do Action is a function of the combo of belief and valuation (motivated desire) We are habitual creatures who respond to stimuli according to the weighting of the situations one faces and its similarity with past and projected ones, in the light of rewards/penalties involved Learning and moral training involve the transformation of means and ends, and of means in ends (fishing and eating fish, 473)

There is no clear distinction between moral and prudential values, as they depend on the description of the situation, and moral training involve both Moral value are social: altruistic values are associated with satisfaction of others’ values without with the satisfaction it involves; cerimonial values are attached to one’s society and group without the personal satisfaction following one’s fulfilling them Many sources of values (innate, inculcation, discovered by trial and error), which overlap and get transformed by others (475)

Moral values resemble sensual and aesthetic ones, as they arouse sympathy (pleasure-sorrow), though they are more stable than them since we cherish them for their keeping society together (475-6) In language and morals uniformity is achieved by instruction, with moral rules less changeable than syntax Methodological infirmity of ethics as compared with science (477-8): moral comparisons are possible only within shared moral standards themselves (coherentism), while in science there is empirical control, even if partial

The methodological infirmity of ethics is mitigated by its use of scientific observations: we point to causal connections relating moral premises with their conclusions Against reductionism: we use causal evidence to relate valuations rather than to explain them (see that thing you also value!) –no F/V divide but non-codifiability of ethics Ultimate ends get transformed by how we approach them, and when in conflict we weight and compare the outcomes of such opposite pulls in an open-ended way

White vs. Quine As we got rid of the analytic/synthetic dualism, we should get rid of the science/morality one: in ethical contexts as well as in epistemological ones we test (piecemeal) the validity of our claims against the (entire) body of experiences, values, and norms with which we face the situation under scrutiny The empirical foothold in the ethical case is the empirical testability of ethical hypotheses rooted in our emotional/evaluative constitution (moral feelings and sentiments)

Moral beliefs (a) are deemed acceptable when they are capable of establishing connections between our sensory experience (b) and our moral feelings (c) When we have recalcitrant experience, we need modify either our feelings or our beliefs, and the other way around “The right to alter one’s logic in response to certain experiences in physical experiments is analogous to the right to alter one’s description of an act in response to one’s moral assessment of the act”

Ethical reasoning can involve moral principles and beliefs being holistically tested against sensory experience where this includes the experience of moral sentiments and feeling Because moral claims have contact with experience in the form of moral emotions, it makes sense to talk of moral beliefs as having an evidential grounding in experience like scientific claims Against prescriptive/evaluative divide: that’s outrageous is both descriptive and evaluative is uttered by a competent member (McDowell)

Moral training has to do with nurturing the appropriate feelings with reference to one’s individual and social web of beliefs/commitments The difference between “that’s a rabbit” and “that’s outrageous” is of degree and not of kind: they both need to pass the test of our entire knowledge All is corrigible in the light of further experience and further reflection on such experience Cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism