COMMENSAL ISSUE 95

Dear Theo,

I would like to comment on the response to my "Is/Ought"(C92/35). My thanks to Kevin Arbuthnot and Michael Nisbet for their favourable comments. However, as Roger Farnworth (C93/38, C94/25) appears to have missed my point I shall have to answer him specifically.

By "arbitrary" I do not mean "What the heck, I'll do it anyway". OED defines arbitrary as "To be decided by one's liking; dependent upon will or pleasure; at the discretion or option of anyone". When Christian theologians, from St. Augustine to Martin Luther, have written on Free Will they have entitled their books "De Libero Arbitrio". Using the word correctly, any exercise of free will is arbitrary.

Nor would I say that the decisions (arbitrary decisions in the above sense) a society takes as to what are to be its moral principles are trivial. They are among the most important decisions any society has to take. They are important not because they exercise the curiosity of the philosophically inclined but because they affect every aspect of the practical business of people living together in a society. Philosophically no "ought" statement can ever be incontrovertible. The decision to make some "ought" statements incontrovertible is a purely pragmatic one. There comes a time when society has to put philosophy to one side and get on with the business of day to day living. Once society has decided that 'X is something that people ought not to do' it is hard enough stop people from doing X without forever debating whether or not this is a decision society should have taken in the first place.

From a pragmatic point of view, it is quite understandable that society, having taken the pragmatic decision that a particular "ought" statement is to be incontrovertible, should then seek to put it outside the sphere of further debate by giving it a supposed external non-human authority and to pretend that it was never an arbitrary (in the above sense) human decision. A theistic society may convince itself that its "ought" statements were handed down to it by God on tablets of stone on Mount Sinai. (In the same way kings have justified their authority by 'divine right' rather than by their ancestors' success in murdering the opposition.) A society which values reason may prefer to think that, just as Fermat's last theorem can be solved solely by applying the rules of mathematics, so moral principles can be arrived at solely by applying the rules of logic. A society impressed by Newton's achievement in discovering the law of gravity might convince itself that moral laws, like the law of gravity, are part of the fabric of the universe 'out there' waiting to be discovered.

The only point I wanted to make in my original letter was that "ought" statements all derive ultimately from human decisions and human likes and dislikes, what Hume calls "moral sentiments". The fact that we discover what we like and dislike by trial and error does not alter the fact that our likes and dislikes are arbitrary. To many of your readers this may be obvious but I thought the point worth making as so many moral debates (abortion, euthanasia etc. ) are argued as if one side was validated by some external authority that put the matter beyond doubt and outside the area of legitimate debate. To this way of thinking my reply is that all attempts to find a moral code 'out there', immutable for all time, universal in application and independent of human decision, are myths - useful and perhaps necessary myths certainly, but myths all the same. I claim no originality for the thought. Hume said the same thing more eloquently and before him Hamlet mused "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so".

Malcolm Burn

P.S. I am keeping an open mind about the weekend at Wallingford but am reluctant to commit myself too far in advance. I do not drive so I would have to find out about public transport (bus from Oxford?). You may be interested to know that Rewley House at Oxford, which I mentioned previously, runs philosophy weekends. I have never been so I cannot tell you what they are like but I assume there is information on their web site: http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/

Malcolm : I think I may have sown confusion here ! In C94/35, Roger is arguing against my comments on his response to you in C93/38. I introduced the "what the heck" slogan and said that our ultimate moral principles are trivial. What I meant was that they aren’t derived or discovered, just chosen, however much we might value and fight for them. So, I’ll exit from this dispute as I seem to be muddying the waters. However, I’ll try to answer Roger at some point. Enough to say that I’m in substantial agreement with what you have to say, not that this will impress Roger !

Thanks for your suggestions about Rewley House - I’m sure it, and many other centres of learning, offer "Philosophy Weekends". However, the purpose of the Braziers weekend is that it is our weekend; it isn’t run by anybody other than us. Braziers provides the accommodation and the setting, but doesn’t run the course. Also, the PDG Gathering has at least a double function - to help rescue the Mensa at Braziers meeting from terminal decline now that Eric Hills isn’t around any more to lead it as well as, obviously, to provide an annual gathering for PDG (and maybe ISPE). To fulfil the former aim it has to remain at Braziers. I expect we’ll be able to do something with respect to team taxis to the nearest point of civilisation.

Theo