Foot's Defense of Morality

Follow this link to read a previous blog post.

Nietzsche Links

First Essay

Second Essay

Third Essay

Carnap: What is the Meaning of This?!?!

Carnap's target is metaphysics.  The metaphysical is what is beyond or behind reality.  For example, 'God' refers to a metaphysical concept because divinity is thought to be beyond reality or behind our empirical experience of the world.  Carnap says that the sentences of metaphysics are not properly speaking claims.  Rather, the pseudo-statements of metaphysics only appear to make claims.  In other words, the sentences of metaphysics are meaningless (or nonsense).

Metaphysics is related to value theory because any normative theory about the way things should be or about the way things ought to be isn't making descriptive claims.  Ethics and other normative theories of value (such as aesthetics--the study of what is beautiful) make claims about how things should be.  Claims about the way things should be are thought to do logically distinct from claims about the way things are.

According to Carnap's logical, scientific approach to language, words and sentences only have meaning of those meanings can be intersubjectively verified in an empirical way.  Sentences can fail to be meaningful if the words themselves lack meaning or if the words are arranged in a way that violates the ideal rules of grammar.  For example, Carnap would say that the claim, "God is good." is meaningless because the words 'God' and 'good' do not have an empirical definition that can be observed and verified by other people.  The sentence, "Caesar is and." is meaningless because the word order violates the rules of grammar.  'Caesar' is the subject, 'is' is a copula (coupling word) used to express a relation between a subject and predicate (a predicate is what is applied to the subject), but 'and' is not a predicate.  'And' is a conjunction (joining word).  'Caesar is a prime number' has a predicate ('prime number' applied to the subject ('Caesar'), but the predicate is the wrong class of predicate to apply to a person.  Thus, the sentence is meaningless.

For the purposes of this class, we are most concerned with the distinction between normative claims and descriptive claims.  According to Carnap, normative 'claims' are actually pseudo-statements that have no meaning and hence no truth value.

A Mother's Sacrifice

Here is a story about a woman who literally got in the way of a moving vehicle to protect her children.  How would Mill evaluate the morality of her sacrifice?  What about Kant?

Utilitarianism and Justice, Other Links

Mill, as an advocate for social reforms that benefit women and the poor, thinks that questions about social justice must always be answered in terms of social utility.  In other words, questions about what makes a society just and fair are questions about who is benefited most by certain policies.  For example, slavery would only benefit a certain group of people.  The enslaved class is not able to maximize pleasure.  Because all pleasure matters equally, a policy that only considers the pleasures of some is unjust.  Social progress is made when we recognize that what may seem like a useful social institution (slavery, lack of women's suffrage, etc.) is actually oppressing certain groups of people.  Ultimately, questions about whether slavery is just are questions about whether slavery could maximize universal utility within a society.

Here are links to Basic Utilitarianism and the Proof for the Greatest Happiness Principle.

Reading Skills Activity

In this article, the author looks at 7 sentences that may sound meaningless but that are perfectly grammatical according to the rules of the English language. 

Reading this article may be a fun way to start practicing your own reading skills.  If you can make sense of each sentence in this article, then you are a good reader!

More on Kant's Ethics

This post is all about the categorical imperative!

This post is about the difference between acting from duty and acting merely in accord with duty.

This post is all about perfect and imperfect duties.

In this post, I briefly explain the kingdom of ends.