@Thomas,
Thomas wrote:
mickalos wrote:You have missed my point. The "premise" of my post was that ethics is inherently normative. The point of the economics aside was to contrast moral philosophy, a prescriptive discipline, with a descriptive social science, economics.
And my point is that this is mistaken. Economics implies the norm that the right course of action is the one that gives as many people as possible as much of what they value as possible. Without this prescriptive norm, coming straight from the moral-philosophy roots of economics, the science's descriptive part would be pointless.
Contemporary economics isn't concerned with what is right. Consumer theory starts with the assumption that consumers will try to maximise a utility function subject to a budget constraint, while the theory of the firm starts with the assumption that firms will try to maximise profits subject to cost and demand constraints. Note, economic theory does not say that consumers
should try to maximise utility, or that firms
should try to maximise profits, merely that they do; economists then go on to construct predictive models based on these assumptions, and those models have worked rather well. Economics is an empirical science.
Quote:mickalos wrote:That X is valued certainly follows immediately from people value X, but not "X is valuable".
Why not? Suppose you had said, "that X is seen certainly follows immediately from people seeing X, but not 'X is visible'". I suppose we agree that this would be nonsense. How is your statement about X being valuable not nonsense in the very same way?
Because being able to see something has no moral, normative dimension. Being visible and being capable of being seen simply mean the same thing. To say "If x can be seen then x is visible" is simply to say if P then P, it is a tautology. Being valued and being valuable (in the moral sense), however, do not mean the same thing, any more so than thinking something is important means that something is actually important.
Now, in the importance example, you could take an anti-platonic-realist line and say: nothing is intrinsically important, what makes a matter important is that people consider it to be so. Clearly, we lose the platonic sense of objectivity here, but that doesn't mean that it isn't true that something is important (there is a fact of the matter), merely that it is contingently true based on actual practice. Note that this is not an argument about how we are to decide what matters are important, but an argument about what is constitutive of importance. It is even less an argument about the meaning of the sentence "People think this is important".
The same pragmatic anti-platonist line can be taken in ethics: no action is intrinsically right or wrong, what makes an act right is that people consider it to be right. However, there is no reason to think that people only consider actions that increase happiness to be right. Though, maybe they actually do, but even if in actual fact they do, there is no reason that they
should.
Quote:mickalos wrote:Not if it is to have any normative force, anyway; i.e. that people ought to value it.
Okay, perhaps ice cream was a bad example, because I didn't mean to imply any norm that people
ought to value ice cream. Perhaps the don't-kill norm I talked about earlier is a better example. In my view, the norm that "it is wrong to kill for no reason" is an objective statement in the same sense as "stones, when let go of, drop downward, not upward". As a utilitarian, I would give a reason for this norm: "It is wrong to kill for no reason because people value their lives more than they value the joy of killing, absent an overriding reason." Even if you understand the word "value" to reflect a mere preference, without any normative undertones, I think my statement presents a perfectly valid argument for not killing. Don't you?
(1) People value their lives more than they value the joy of killing, or they have an overriding reason
(c)if people have no overriding reason, then it is wrong to kill people
Clearly, the conclusion does not follow from the premises. The argument is invalid. This has nothing to do with utilitarianism, but with logic. A valid argument would be:
(1) People value their lives more than they value the joy of killing, or they have an overriding reason
(c)if people have no overriding reason, then people value their lives more than they value their lives more than they value the joy of killing.
This isn't a matter of opinion, it can be proved in formal logic, and it is fairly intuitively obvious. You need an extra premise akin to Mill's principle of utility:
(2) Any action, x, which is detrimental to something that people value is wrong
Now, it is hard to doubt that attaining value (utility if you prefer) is the ultimate goal of action; if Mill's infamous proof shows anything, it certainly shows that there is a good argument for that. However, that is not a proof that an action that results in a loss of value for a people or a person is morally wrong, i.e. that such an action ought not be performed. It certainly means that people won't want to do it, but if morality is to be a constraint on action at all, then it has to tell us that we can't do some things that we want to do.
