This is no big woof, just a link to a page listing some of my blog outcroppings -- past and present:

I came across a couple of articles that gave me some hope. They were linked: the first Schismatic Stratagems, found on The Catholic Thing, linked to the second, Pressure Intensifies on Catholic Church to Change Teaching.

What, you may well ask, is the cause for hope Bob, that you find in those articles? Simply put, they report on the current attack upon -- and "push-back" against said attack -- the Catholic Church's role as the last bastion of objective truth in this world.

Insofar as that is true, then those holding for no alteration of the "language" of the Catechism regarding the "objectively disordered" character of homosexual acts are, per my title, very much on the same page as Archbishop Vigano, who I deem to be the only prophet we have at present to keep us on track with living in reality. The only alternative to living in reality is living in psychosis. I'll seek the former, if you don't mind.

Note: I wrote this paper for a course on Metaethics taught by Professor Sheri Smith of the Philosophy Department at Rhode Island College.

--snip--

From the workstation of Bob Bernstein 12/19/07

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"simple, indefinable, unanalysable"

Abstract

Moore called "good" a "non-natural" characteristic. Did he articulate a coherent sense of this notion, or, is it impossible to give any sense to a notion described as "simple, indefinable, unanalysable"? (A work in progress...)

The moral realist needs the world to be populated with normative facts whose existence is not dependent on what a human being wants to be the case on any given day. This objectivity we ordinarily associate with how science views reality. In contrast the non-cognitivist basically says, "What do I care what is in the world? I'm not in business to look at the world."

The metaethical heir to the tradition of modern science -- that begun by such as Bacon, Galileo, and Newton -- may seem to be the non-cognitivist, who maintains there is no "normativity" in the world. Hume's law prevails. The realm of what "is," from which no "ought" may be deduced, is ultimately that described by the physicist, and only by the physicist. On the one hand, the non-cognitivist accepts and endorses the picture of the universe brought by physical science, but on the other, he dismisses it as morally irrelevant. This is a decidedly unscientific "world-correcting" view of value questions. The moral realist is the true heir to the tradition of modern science. This is a "world-corrected" point of view, and it can be traced to the metaphysical realism of Plato. Ethical realism insists we create our moral outlook such that it will either: a) conform to some (loosely speaking) preexistent reality, leading to moral truth, or 2) fail to so conform, leading us to moral error. Science also stands or falls by virtue of leading to either the correct answer, or error, based on what is in the world.

Moral realism appeals to me on two grounds, one of which Darwall discusses as "direction of fit."¹ The other, for lack of a better term, I will call "sensibility." The correctness of moral claims is established by whether they conform with the moral facts we find in the world. Moral claims stand or fall according to what's in the world. But what does a moral fact "look like?" Does it look like other facts, the ones we call "natural facts" because they make up the world explored by science, and our world of common everyday experience? Are there compelling reasons -- including, but not necessarily limited to, Moore's open-question argument -- to insist that value of any kind (including aesthetic) not be identified with any of the natural "furniture" found in the world? (Or would this be making a virtue of a necessity, i.e. "Let's insist on it because we have failed to place value in the natural world in a coherent way?")

Over time I have been more and more impressed by the weight of that argument in favor of moral (and aesthetic) realism which notes that as a matter of course we perceive states of affairs in the world bearing value. This is what I am calling the evidence of "sensibility." It is very much a part of the perception of value that it is cognized as being in the world, rather than in an attitude we bring to the state of affairs. The beauty I find, say, in a Mahler song is in what Mahler left us, his composition manuscript of that song. That beauty is not a "feeling" I have, although I certainly can have many feelings while listening to the song. Similarly, when I admire an act of courage, and find moral rightness in that act, that rightness has been put into the world by the agent responsible for the act, not put into it by me, the mere spectator.

Is what I am calling "sensibility" what Darwall calls "objective purport?" I think not. What I want to highlight is that that of which we are sensible presents as being in the world, which may include my body.² The red I see belongs to the apple, not to some inner experience or sense-data of red I am supposed to be having but cannot be sensible of. Perhaps what I am underlining is that aspect or portion of objective purport which arises specifically out of sensory experience; I want to suggest that moral convictions are "like" aesthetic judgements in some ways. If I am right about the beauty of Mahler's song being in the notes, then I may also have reason to speak about the goodness of a courageous act being in the act.

Are non-natural features reducible to natural ones? Is the distinction between the two one of kind or degree of reduction? Certainly some natural features are reducible to other, perhaps "more primary" natural features. That would be the warrant for terming them "natural." If the distance "travelled," so to speak by that reduction is sufficiently great, is it the case perhaps that the natural endpoint of the reduction is lost sight of, so that the starting point now takes on the appearance of being "non-natural?" That would be what I called a "difference of degree." That said, what then would be a "difference of kind" between natural and non-natural features? Is that difference precisely what Moore is trying to get at when he says natural properties are parts of the whole which is the object, but non-natural ones are not?

If I want to say that the beauty of the Mahler song is "in the notes," and nowhere else, am I not committed to saying that beauty is a) a feature of a natural object, and b) therefore a natural feature? Does Moore help us get around this, at least in the case of "good?" Or, given the perceived force of his open-question argument, in conjunction with an insistence on some kind of moral realism, was Moore forced to posit non-natural features? Is intuitionism the only home for moral realists who eschew ethical (super)naturalism? But the question remains, to be put to Moore, how are non-natural features "connected" to the objects to which they, for lack of better terms, "apply" or "belong?" Assuming there is a non-natural realm in which non-natural features may have their being, how could such features have any metaphysical intercourse of any sort whatsoever with natural objects without falling into the ontological realm of the natural? Clearly, when Moore says "good" is unanalyzable he must mean by that that "good" is not reducible to natural entities, objects or features.

Attached are a couple of paragraphs from Principia Ethica in which Moore goes into his ideas of natural objects and their properties, both natural and non-natural.³

Let's try to parse what Moore says about properties.

1. "Nature" is that which is the subject matter of the natural sciences and psychology.

2. Nature, then, includes "all that has existed, does exist, or will exist in time."

3. Natural objects, then, are those objects, and only those objects, of which it may be said that they did exist, do now exist, or are about to exist.

4. Natural properties are those properties I can imagine existing in time by themselves, apart from being a property of an object.

5. Non-natural properties, such as good, cannot be so imagined.

6. Natural properties are parts of the whole that is the object to which they belong. They are not "mere predicates which attach to it."

7. Absent all its natural properties, a natural object would not exist.

8. Natural properties are substantial, and natural objects derive whatever substance they have from those properties only.

9. Natural objects possess no "bare substance" apart from their natural properties. Perhaps these two paragraphs are part of what Moore had in mind when he said, referring to his book Ethics: "This book I myself like better than Principia Ethica, because it seems to me to be much clearer and far less full of confusions and invalid arguments."⁴

So, not only are natural properties not "mere predicates which attach to" natural objects, there is not even any "bare substance" to which they, or, presumably, any other kind of property, might attach, after the fashion of substance and accident. But non-natural properties are not, as are natural properties, part of the object to which they, for lack of a better term, "belong." Non-natural properties are not predicates, nor parts, of their objects. What are they? C.D. Broad devoted part of his contribution to The Philosophy of G. E. Moore (in the The Library of Living Philosophers series) to this question, and I have appended a couple of paragraphs of that discussion to this paper. Broad observes, "It seems impossible then to extract from Moore's writings any satisfactory account of the distinction between "natural" and "non-natural" characteristics." How odd, then, that the central notion of one the most important books of the last century was never adequately explained by its author?

A. Moore on objects and properties

"By 'nature,' then, I do mean and have meant that which is the subject-matter of the natural sciences and also of psychology. It may be said to include all that has existed, does exist, or will exist in time. If we consider whether any object is of such a nature that it may be said to exist now, to have existed, or to be about to exist, then we may know that that object is a natural object, and that nothing, of which this is not true, is a natural object. Thus, for instance, of our minds we should say that they did exist yesterday, that they do exist to-day, and probably will exist in a minute or two. We shall say that we had thoughts yesterday, which have ceased to exist now, although their effects may remain: and in so far as those thoughts did exist, they too are natural objects.

There is, indeed, no difficulty about the 'objects' themselves, in the sense in which I have just used the term. It is easy to say which of them are natural, and which (if any) are not natural. But when we begin to consider the properties of objects, then I fear the problem is more difficult. Which among the properties of natural objects are natural properties and which are not? For I do not deny that good is a property of certain natural objects: certain of them, I think, are good; and yet I have said that 'good' itself is not a natural property. Well, my test for these too also concerns their existence in time. Can we imagine "good" as existing by itself in time, and not merely as a property of some natural object? For myself, I cannot so imagine it, whereas with the greater number of properties of objects - those which I call the natural properties - their existence does seem to me to be independent of the existence of those objects. They are, in fact, rather parts of which the object is made up than mere predicates which attach to it. If they were all taken away, no object would be left, not even a bare substance: for they are in themselves substantial and give to the object all the substance that it has. But this is not so with good. If indeed good were a feeling, as some would have us believe, then it would exist in time. But that is why to call it so is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. It will always remain pertinent to ask, whether the feeling itself is good; and if so, then good cannot itself be identical with any feeling."⁵

B. Broad on Moore

"So we are eventually faced with the question: "What is meant by calling a simple characteristic natural or non-natural?

"Unfortunately we shall get very little light on this question from Moore's published works. The only place, so far as I know, in which it is explicitly discussed is Principia Ethica, 40 to 41. We are told there that a "natural object" is any object that is capable of existing in time, e.g., a stone, a mind, an explosion, an experience, etc. All natural objects have natural characteristics, and some of them have also non-natural characteristics. We are told that each natural characteristic of a natural object could be conceived as existing in time all by itself, and that every natural object is a whole whose parts are its natural characteristics. We are told that a non-natural characteristic of a natural object is one which cannot be conceived as existing in time all by itself. It can be conceived as existing only as the property of some natural object. Now it seems to me that every characteristic of a natural object answers to Moore's criterion of non-naturalness, and that no characteristic could possibly be natural in his sense. I do not believe for a moment that a penny is a whole of which brownness and roundness are parts, nor do I believe that the brownness or roundness of a penny could exist in time all by itself. Hence, if I accepted Moore's account, I should have to reckon brownness, roundness, pleasantness, etc., as non-natural characteristics. Yet he certainly counts them as natural characteristics."

(Emphases in original)

End Notes