ethics?

[black magick hustla]

what are you guys' opinion on ethics as a philosophical subfield? historical materialism implies that mores are simply a function of objective socio-economic conditions, therefore, at-least within a particular language-game, goodness or badness, atleast the sense of good and bad, is not given down by gods or by a rational inquire about the world, but by historical and natural forces sometimes way beyond us.

i imagine people with phds in philosophy are smart enough to get that morals are not handed down by the gods. however, probably one of the most "profiteable" philosophical fields, i.e. one that gets a lot of grant money, is ethics. my knowledge on ethics stops in the early 20th century and i know jackshit about that field after that. before there were the benthamites, the kantians, the realists, etcetera etcetera.

but it seems evident beyond any serious consideration to me that trying to build an ethical system is based on very feeble foundations. certainly ethical statements are not scientific statements about the world. certainly, ethical statements are not true or false by virtue of their inner consistency, i.e. like mathematical statements or logical statements. so what do they rest in? how do people who, lets say, engage in buisness ethics, start from? do these systems start from certain axioms deemed as true, like math, and then they try to logical chop their way to the truth? idk, seems banal to me.

any people studying philosophy?

[ZeroNowhere]

Generally, I hold the view that meta-ethics does belong in the realm of philosophy, being as it is about how words are used in ethics. In fact, I think that it can be quite illuminating, and ethics is interesting especially as a field based around rules, but playing a very different role to other such fields, such as mathematics. And, of course, we have the typical philosophical confusions in this realm, such as debates over whether ethics are 'objective' (whatever that even means), or describe personal emotions ('Do not kill' is not a 'description of our mental state' any more than 'Where are the toilets?', and Wittgenstein had dealt with a similar view about mathematics at length in the RFM), the general silliness from philosophical incompetents (eg. a certain bloke named 'Harris'), and so on. I think that Marx also had an important point here, about how man expresses ethical propositions through religious propositions, and hence through the picture of a being above man and nature, because man is not the highest authority for man, whereas on the other hand man is no longer tied to nature's whims and thus nature does not take the place of this being as in some primitive societies. As Marx also noted in the 1844 manuscripts, with an argument quite similar to Wittgenstein in his 'Lecture on Ethics' (they use almost the exact same argument), religious propositions taken as propositions about the world are meaningless, but nonetheless they have a meaning, that is, a usage (Wittgenstein had given the example of the statement, 'The eye of God is upon you', or something similar, noting that we don't generally go on to talk about God's eyebrows, but rather the statement would have an ethical purpose). I believe that this can also be traced to Feuerbach's project of 'letting religion speak for itself'.

Otherwise, generally I take the view that ethics is a way of seeing and of acting; likewise, one may admire certain features of art, and similarly these features are to be used if one intends to make good art. It generally relates to how society should be (as the individual is, after all, the social individual). Moral propositions serve as hinge-propositions for our lives, one could say.

On the other hand, 'normative ethics' and substantive ethical propositions generally don't seem to have any place in philosophy, any more than substantive empirical propositions. 'Abortion is wrong', or the opposite, have no necessary philosophical content, and perhaps could be better compared with 1 + 1 = 2. Of course, one could discuss it philosophically, but this could tell us nothing about whether we should look at the world like this or another way, or how we should act, but merely what it means (to borrow a metaphor, we have placed the pieces but not yet moved them). I think that the confusion of the two (which generally, again, stems from an attempt to find a morality separate from and above humanity and human practice, while this is in fact incoherent; it is a picture rather than an actual description of anything) has resulted in a fair bit of confusion among philosophers. And, of course, there's the classical search for 'foundations', which leads to a general tendency towards system-building without really dealing with the meta-ethical issue.

Of course, a distinction between morality and mathematics is that, while people who state that 1 + 1 = 3 must be using the signs differently from us (according to different rules of meaning), people may intelligibly disagree about whether something is good while still not differing as regards the meaning of 'good', that is, the role which the word plays in their lives. This would generally result from the fact that morality plays a more evaluative role, one could say, and can therefore be compared to ethics in this aspect. Nonetheless, an ethical proposition, like a mathematical one, is a decision rather than a description, albeit a decision governing a different aspect of life.

I have to go now, but I'll get back to you on morality and historical materialism, which I've taken quite a few notes on. To be brief, I think that Engels is essentially correct in Anti-Duhring here.