Just substitute “delicious” for “good/right/virtuous”, “disgusting” for “bad/wrong/vicious” and “tastes” for “morals”. That demolishes any pretentions of deriving an ought from an is. Rand failed to derive ought from is. Rothbard failed, too. Morals evolved just as language did and for similar reasons. Language facilitates coordination of complex actions and so do moral norms. Language is not objective - the meaning of “blue” is not a physical fact like the action of gravity. Morals, likewise, are not objective. This should be uncontroversial.
I’ll admit the full quote complicates the picture somewhat, but I do not think it seriously affects Veatch’s point. Notice that Hume says he can only recognize the goodness or badness of something by the way he feels and he has to deliberately turn inward to examine that feeling. This fits with Veatch’s characterization of the proofreader’s mentality such that Hume has so trained himself that he cannot recognize virtue and vice when he sees it.
You say that Hume’s feelings, apart from reason and the nature of the thing in question, do constitute a recognition of virtue and vice but I think Veatch would deny that it does. For Hume, it is merely a recognition about how he feels about something, not about what that something actually is, and it is only due to one’s feelings that we can call anything virtuous or vicious. It’s just emotivist “Yaying” and “Booing” borrowing the trappings of moral language.
Your error here is in thinking that the status of something being moral or immoral rests upon the psychological/emotional evaluation of an agent. This is not required for agent-relativity of value. Something can be both agent-relative and objective. It’s a common mistake to identify agent-neutrality with objectivity and agent-relativity with radical ethical subjectivism.
Language is an agent-neutral institution. In the english language, the definition of blue is a series of light waves at a certain bandwidth, so it is in fact a physical fact. It would be incorrect to point at the grass and say ‘There, that is blue’ and this would apply to anyone who tries to do it. They would not have a functioning definition of blue according to the english language. Plus with things like ‘delicious’ / ‘disgusting’ you are either trying to entail something more through the back door like ‘delicious’ is an implied good or you are making useless emotivism statements like ‘sunshine…hooray!’
Right. He doesn’t recognize it when he sees it. He has to examine his emotions instead and then just say “virtue” or “vice” depending on whether the emotion is positive or negative.
Has Hume made similar comments about beauty?
Btw, don’t confuse moral objectivism with moral universalism, with agent-neutral value, with ethical impersonalism, with deontology. Or agent-relativity with radical subjectivism.
To answer one of AJ (?)'s challenges: People can be correct or mistaken in their evaluation of something as moral or immoral. The status of something as moral or immoral does not depend solely on whether a given agent recognizes it as such.
To Adam Knott: Austrian methodological subjectivism does not necessarily entail ethical subjectivism. You can’t just assume it. Mises pretty much did.
His argument is incredibly weak, to be honest. The first sentence proves nothing. It’s just a rhetorical flourish. The three that follow are mere unsupported assertions. Morality being a product of evolution is not in itself an issue. Then he goes on to conflate objectivity with agent-neutrality and a particular brand of realism that Aristotelians do not accept.
I have a question. Agent-neutrality is not dependent on the individual in question but apply to all irregardless [ perhaps a crude definition ] What can be objective yet agent-relative? And what can be subjective yet agent-neutral?
I’m don’t think there is anything can be both subjective and agent-neutral. There’s a total disconnect there between the agent and the object. Agent-neutrality holds that value is independent of any valuer; the value of the object is in the thing itself irrespective of any relation it has to anything else. Ethical subjectivism holds that value is purely dependent upon a valuer’s mental states; value has nothing to do with facts about the object valued and the agent doing the valuing. Agent-relative objectivity is the correct middle ground between these two false extremes. Value is a relation between the object valued and the agent, but it depends upon the natures of both.
To give a very mundane example: Food is not a value in and of itself apart from any valuer. Insofar as it is a value, it is something that is of value to someone. But this does not mean that food is of value to you merely because you happen to desire it. It is something that you need to survive and even to live well.
I hope this helps. I can’t spend much time on this discussion. My wife and I are having our first baby on Saturday!
I think my response to Laughing Man might help. These forum discussions are really no substitute for reading Liberty and Nature and other works by Rasmussen and Den Uyl though..
It seems there are two conceptions of “value” one could use in this discussion.
Value as how beneficial something is to someone
Value as how esteemed something is by someone
For conception 1, the necessity (or even the possibility) of a “valuer” agent doesn’t seem to make much sense. Take something that is beneficial, but, to keep the two conceptions of value distinct, is unknown to he whom it benefits: like the mitochondria of a caveman. It is true that the benefit of the mitochondria depends on its relation to the caveman, so it is, in that sense relative. And the benefit to the caveman depends on the agency of the caveman, because “beneficial” means “conducive to purpose”, and purpose presupposes agency. But would you really call a caveman a “valuer” of his mitochondria? I don’t think it would make sense to; while agency is necessary for benefit to exist, the mitochondria itself is not an object of the caveman’s agency. He is merely a passive beneficiary of the mitochondria’s workings. If anything, the value of mitochondria is patient-relative, not agent-.
Value, under conception 2, conversely, is agent-relative (but not objective). Take something that is esteemed, but, to keep the two conceptions of value distinct, is not in reality beneficial to he who esteems it: like a rain dance. Now in this case, the rain dance is an object of the dancer’s agency: he esteems, chooses, and does the dance. It may not be ultimately conducive to his purpose (it will not in fact produce rain), but he thinks it will be conducive to his purposes, which is the only thing that matters regarding its relation to him as an agent. And regarding objectiveness, it may be objectively observed “from the outside” that an agent esteems something, but the esteeming itself is, by definition, subjective.
So it seems to me that value cannot be conceived as both agent-relative and objective without jumbling the two conceptions together. To take your food example, first you seem to be talking about conception 2 (esteeming)…
Food is not a value in and of itself apart from any valuer. Insofar as it is a value, it is something that is of value to someone.
Then you seem to switch to conception 1 (benefit)…
But this does not mean that food is of value to you merely because you happen to desire it. It is something that you need to survive and even to live well.
Of course, people subjectively esteem things because they expect it to benefit them. And perhaps they expect it to benefit them because they’ve seen that similar things have objectively benefited them in the past. So incidents of the two conceptions of value can be causally connected. Nonetheless, they are distinct phenomena.
Although, I’m very interested in hearing your take on this, I understand you must be super-busy with preparations for the forthcoming new little Plauche.
GAP’s explanation of agent-relativity/agent-neutrality above is applicable here; what Rand meant by “objectivism” is agent-relative objectivity; she saw agent-neutral objectivity as being “intrisicism”, and just as much an error as radical subjectivism. Whereas Austrian subjectivism is methodological; it doesn’t necessarily say anything about whether ethics is objective or subjective (although Long makes the case in Chapter 9 of Wittgenstein that economic subjectivism entails ethical objectivism). Hence, objectivism in the Randian sense doesn’t conflict with “subjectivism” in the Austrian sense (wouldn’t it be so much easier if we all just used the same terminology? [:)])
