DSH: As the cynics of ancient Greece and Rome (also known as “skeptics” and “pyrhonnists”) demonstrated, knowledge and reason is always contingent, never necessary.

Here’s a condensed version of popular old chestnut:

1. If there is a greatest prime number, then there is a natural number N that is the product of all the prime numbers.

2. If there is a natural number N that is the product of all the prime numbers, then N+1 is a natural number.

3. If N+1 is a natural number, then there is at least one prime number P that divides N+1. (By the fundamental theorem of arithmetic.)

4. If there is at least one prime number P that divides N+1, then P does not divide N. (Impossibility of dividing 1.)

5. If P does not divide N, then P is not prime. (Defn. of N)

6. If there is a greatest prime number, then there is a number P which is both prime and not prime.

7. There is no number P which is both prime and not prime.

8. Therefore, there is no greatest prime number.

It seems to me that, having this argument in hand, I know that there is no greatest prime number, on the basis of a deductive argument (by reductio).

Are you suggesting that the Pyrrhonians and Hume demonstrated (a) that “there is no greatest prime number” is true only contingently and not necessarily? Or (b) that I don’t actually have knowledge about whether there is or is not a greatest prime? Or (c) something else?

Help me out here.

On Wittgenstein and Kripke:

DSH: As Wittgenstein monumentally said, “use determines meaning.”

Actually, he didn’t say this. Here’s what he said: “43. For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word meaning it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language game.” (Boldface mine.)

DSH: Language rigidly designates what I have picked out to be highly variable; by language I can mean the same thing through different experiences. “Use determines meaning,” and Kripke’s insight, “meaning determines use.” It’s a game of language. … But I can relate experiences through my use of language, and by language “fix” the referent. Reason? We’re playing the same “language game.” Hence, essences are metaphysical nonsense. Not only do they not “exist,” but there’s nothing to “know.”

This is not what Kripke says.

Kripke specifically argues that natural kind terms such as “rose” pick out their referents on the basis of naming a kind which can be identified by an essence. He suggests that the essences can often be investigated by natural science (e.g. it is essential to roses that they are members of such-and-such a biological taxon; it is essential to gold that it is element Au). He explicitly denies (in his discussion of Wittgenstein and Strawson in Naming and Necessity) that “family resemblances” explain how names or natural kind terms work.

Kripke is rather notorious among contemporary philosophers for being a scientific essentialist. Why are you invoking him here in an attempt to argue against essentialism? Do you think that Kripke has unwittingly given an argument against essentialism in spite of himself? If so, you ought to at least note that that is what you are doing. Or are you trying to do something else? If so, what?

DSH: I concede I over-condensed G.E.Moore, and you rightly identify him and his notion of the naturalistic fallacy as more concerned with “the good” than the “is” vs. “ought” distinction. It’s good to bring this point out, although I’m not sure what it adds.

My primary point is that you are running together three different issues that are in fact separate (the alleged naturalistic fallacy, the alleged is-ought gap, and the alleged fact-value distinction). Speaking as if they are all the same thing drastically oversimplifies intellectual history — which is a problem for you, specifically, because a lot of the argumentative force throughout your remarks rests on appeals to an alleged consensus among philosophers about what has been proven, demonstrated, is plausible, etc. You need to be much more careful if you are going to try to rest on these kinds of appeals to the consensus of philosophers rather than a critical explanation of some particular argument or another.

My secondary point is that you’re mischaracterizing Moore’s view. Moore does not accept the “fact-value” distinction. He considers “X is good (as an end)” to be a statement of fact which is either true or false, depending on whether or not X has or has not got the objective property of intrinsic goodness, and he took ethics to be a theoretical science that aims at asserting all those propositions about goodness that agree with the facts and denying all those that do not. He considered this property to be “non-natural” (which he characterizes in PE 26 as meaning that it does not exist in time and is not an object of study for the natural sciences or psychology). He was rather famous for believing this in the early 20th century because many other philosophers (emotivists, prescriptivists, other objectivists who were mystified by what “non-natural” properties were, etc.) disagreed with him. In PE he spends a bit of time on the objectivity of the good; in Ethics he spends two long (and very good) chapters on it. This isn’t a matter of “over-condensation” on your part; you just stated something about his view and his arguments that is flatly false.

It’s also specifically important to recognize that Moore’s discussion in PE Chapter I is focused on an issue of definition and not of inference because both the characterization of the fallacy that Moore offers and the argument that he gives for its fallaciousness depend on a particular view of language and definition (specifically, the idea that all terms are either simple or complex, with simple terms admitting of no definition and complex terms being definable entirely in terms of simple terms) that has been widely criticizedin Analytic philosophy since 1903 (Wittgenstein was one of the first to criticize it; see the remarks on the Theatetus in PI 46 et seq). Unless you intend for your comments to turn on an extremely controversial view of language now regarded by many philosophers as outmoded and wildly oversimplified, you’re better off sticking to Hume’s authority and not Moore’s.

DSH: (2) Moore was vitriolic in his contempt for the natural law, for simplicity’s sake = Suarez’s account, but I agree it wasn’t his locus. (See, Chap. IV of PE).

I don’t know where you’re finding this in Chapter IV, which deals with what Moore calls “Metaphysical Ethics” and explicitly distinguishes from “Naturalistic Ethics” (with which he deals in Chapter II and Chapter III). In PE 74-76 he accuses Kant of confusedly treating moral laws as if they were (1) analogous to “natural laws” (which Moore consistently uses to mean a universal truth about what in fact happens in nature) and (2) analogous to laws in the legal sense of command. The closest he comes to any discussion of natural law theory (vitriolic, contemptuous, or otherwise) is his discussion of Stoic ethics (along with a mention of Rousseau) in PE 27). But his objection here has nothing to do with a fact-value distinction; it has to do with a spat over the meaning of the term “natural” (and one in which I think Moore is actually rather obviously being unfair to the target of his criticism).

DSH: I concede I have no use for Moore’s or Murdock’s locus on the “good” for the same reason I can’t get my arms around “justifiable.” What in the world can “good” possibly identify that’s ethically meaningful?

Well, Moore’s answer would be that it identifies goodness, and there’s an end on’t. His suggestion is that you either grasp the concept or you don’t, and if you don’t, there isn’t anything he can to do explain it to you, other than to keep pointing to cases and hoping that you begin to cotton on to it.

Whether Moore is right about this or not, the important question for you is, why would you invoke Moore’s authority if you think that he is fundamentally wrong? Why mention the naturalistic fallacy if its explicit concern (the meaning of the term “good”) is something that you have no use for and doubt the meaningfulness of?

DSH: Important: Don’t confuse Strauss’s “natural rights” for “natural law.”

The notion of “natural rights” is not limited to Strauss or Straussians. (Strauss actually is primarily concerned with tracing the idea of “natural right,” singular, which he identifies with the tradition of “natural law.”) The phrase “natural rights” was used extensively before Strauss hit the English-speaking intellectual scene; for a few aleatory examples of pre-Straussian and non-Straussian usages, see Sam Adams (1772), New Hampshire state constitution (1783), T. H. Huxley (1890), H.L.A. Hart’s “Are There Any Natural Rights?” Philosophical Review 64 (1955), etc. Jefferson’s claim of “inalienable” or “inherent and inalienable” rights with which we are endowed by virtue of our equal creation is generally taken to have been considered straightforwardly synonymous with a doctrine of “natural rights” (as mentioned by Adams et al.) in the milieu in which Jefferson was writing.

DSH: Which raises the issue of “natural law.” The Stoics, Aquinas, Suarez, Locke, et alia, all had slightly different versions of it.

Very different, actually; Locke’s view, in particular, represents a radical departure.

DSH: But it’s news to me that Aristotle subscribed to the “natural law.”

I don’t think I claimed that he did. What I said is that he claims to ground ethics in (a particular sort of) natural facts, which is a different claim (a very different one, actually). The most famous text in regard to this claim is probably NE I.7, where Aristotle suggests that eudaimonia, and thus a characterization of the good, is to be found by considering the characteristic function of a human being. For a good overview of how this connects with the notions of ends and nature, in Aristotle’s ethical, political, and physical writing, see e.g. SEP on “Presuppositions of Aristotle’s Politics”, and follow the citations from there.

DSH: Other than Finnis, Grisez, Boyle, and George, what other philosopher, American or Continental, accepts natural law? Roger Scruton, a likely candidate, certainly doesn’t. A few Thomists, perhaps (e.g., Maritain). Otherwise the slate is clean. I admit that teleology is useful, when applied to production of human artefacts. But other than Aristotleans and Thomists, who seriously applies “natural” teleology to ethics?

Putting it this way is rather like saying, “Other than Kantians, who seriously suggests that the universalizability of a moral principle is an important criterion of rightness?” “Aristotelians and Thomists” include many important and well-respected writers on moral philosophy. Some prominent recent examples include Philippa Foot (cf. Natural Goodness), G.E.M. Anscombe (cf. “On Promising and its Justice”), Michael Thompson (cf. “The Representation of Life”), etc. (Note also that although each of these writers is explicitly interested in reviving ideas that they identify with Aristotle, they are not primarily identified as “Aristotelians” or “Thomists.” (They are more influenced by Frege and Wittgenstein than by the Thomist tradition, for one.)

A prominent example popular amongst libertarians, if not widely read elsewhere, would be Lysander Spooner (cf. “Natural Law, or the Science of Justice,” “Letter to Bayard,” etc.), who is not particularly indebted to either the Philosopher or to St. Thomas.

Of course, even if nobody at all in contemporary philosophy advocated the idea, it might still very well be true. But I don’t think that you have the right to appeal to philosophical consensus here, anyway.

DSH: Re: Wittgenstein, see David Stern (reviewed on Amazon.com). Personally, I find most LW incoherent. Even the “themes” he’s credited with are not powerhouse issues for me. The Humanities, conversely, adore him (after the Frankfurt School and Derrida).

So do a number of prominent Analytic philosophers (Putnam, Armstrong, Hacker, Cavell, Conant, Diamond, Foot, Kripke, etc.). Anyway, you’re entitled to your opinion of L.W., but if you find him incoherent and do not care about the things that he’s publicly identified with, why bring him up at all? You’re the one who invoked his authority, not I. The problem is that he clearly does not say what you suggest he says.

DSH: Re: the “self-evident” postulates of Jefferson, see my review of Thomas Reid’s philosophy on Amazon.com. Jefferson’s “self evidence” is an appeal to authority; if there’s an “argument” in the classical sense, I couldn’t find it.

You’re missing the point. Jefferson does not intend to give an argument, from authority or otherwise. If you hold a truth to be self-evident then you are holding that it needs no argument of any kind, because it recommends itself just as it is. (For useful discussion, see also Moore, in PE 86.) Maybe you think they’re not self-evident; maybe you think Jefferson needs to give some further argument that they are self-evident, or at least some explanation. But then that’s a different sort of complaint. (How are we supposed to identify the claims that are self-evident and distinguish them from the ones that aren’t? Well, I don’t know, but Jefferson wasn’t intending to write a declaration on epistemology anyway, so I’m not sure he can be faulted for not discussing the topic.)

DSH,

I can’t say that I’m convinced by your philosophical overview.

1. First, the is-ought problem, the fact-value distinction, and the naturalistic fallacy. You refer to all of these topics as if they were three different ways of speaking of the same thing. In fact they’re not: they are three distinct topics. Moore, for one, would be very surprised to hear that he endorses the fact-value distinction; in fact he takes for granted that there are objective moral facts and characterizes ethics as a theoretical science aiming at giving true general propositions about the things that are good and the nature of goodness as such (PE 1-5). For a painstaking argument, see Chapter III and Chapter IV of Moore’s sequel Ethics (1912), on “The Objectivity of Moral Judgments.” Importantly, you should note that Moore would object just as much to those non-cognitivists who analyzed “X is good” as merely expressing an attitude towards X rather than making a factual assertion; since the analysis into other concepts such as “commendation” treads on the conceptual simplicity that he thinks “good” has, and the claim that judgments of good assert nothing is explicitly denied in PE 13.

Moore defined the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ (at PE 10) as the fallacy of attempting to offer a definition of “good” in terms of simpler concepts (Moore held the term, when used in the sense of intrinsic value, to be a simple term that does not admit of further conceptual analysis). When using the term in diagnosing other philosophers arguments, he typically uses it to identify confusions between a synthetic statement claiming that everything that is good has some other non-moral property (which needs to be defended by argument or intuition), with an analytic statement claiming that “good” just means having that other non-moral property (which supposedly needs no further defense). Cf. PE 10: “But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not ‘other,’ but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and of it I shall now endeavour to dispose”; cf. also PE 6. Moore, of course, refuses to call the property of goodness “natural” but he does not deny that it is a matter of objective fact, or that statements to the effect of “X is good” can be judged objectively true or false. His complaint is against reductionist theories of ethics, which attempt to analyze “good” as just meaning some complex of non-moral properties.

The is-ought problem, as classically set out by David Hume, doesn’t have to do with definition at all, but rather with entailment; Hume claims it to be impossible to derive “ought” sentences from “is” sentences without an auxiliary premise using “ought.” The idea here is that ought-statements aren’t entailed by is-statements alone (the issue is not analyticity vs. syntheticity, but rather whether or not you can make the inference of the ought-statement from the is-statement apriori without any further premises). Now, Hume took this to point towards a genuine and unbridgeable gap between facts and values; but not every philosopher who recognizes the problem feels the same way. One such philosopher was Aristotle, who both believed all of ethics to be founded in natural facts and also wrote the first known expression of the “is-ought” problem in the philosophical literature, at NE 1144a.

I mention this not only as an exegetical and historical point, but also as a critical one. There’s a big difference between (1) arguing against the reducibility of good to any non-moral property, (2) arguing against the validity of any argument with entirely non-normative premises and a normative conclusion, and (3) arguing against the notion that there is any such thing as a moral fact. I think that the reasons that you offer above, aside from the appeals to philosophical authority, support at the very most (1) and perhaps (2); they don’t support (3) (and while Hume thought they did, Moore rightly denied it). This is a matter of some importance, because Aristotelian moral philosophy actually accepts the reality and importance of irreducibly moral or normative facts; the idea that there is some further (metaphysical? supernatural?) fact that undergirds and explains goodness is a Platonic, not an Aristotelian doctrine. But the idea that the factuality or objectivity of goodness is undermined by not having some further fact beyond the moral fact to undergird and explain it, is merely to flip over the Platonic coin. Aristotle (like Moore) rejects the idea that you have to choose between propping up objective goodness with further facts, or giving it up as a myth.

I think that this is rather important, actually, to understanding the status of the “natural law,” as Aristotelians understand it: as a free-standing natural fact that can be true and be recognized in its own right (a fact, or set of facts, about the way we ought to treat one another), not something that you derive from empirical observations of nature or by appeal to your mystical observation of the Forms.

1. Wittgenstein and essences. You claim straightforwardly “The notion of essences has largely been abandoned ever since Wittgenstein alighted onto ‘family resemblances.’” I take it you’re referring to Philosophical Investigations 67. But Wittgenstein doesn’t take the lesson of 67 to be “there aren’t any essences” or even “there aren’t any words that admit of strictly limited general definitions.” He thinks there are lots of words that do, and that any word can in the right conversational context (cf. PI 68). There are language-games for which the old account of linguistic simples and complexes defined in terms of them are “really valid” (cf. PI 48); it is just that there are other language games where it doesn’t help us understand what’s going on.

I don’t know who you mean when you say that the notion of essences has largely been abandoned. Certainly there are lots of philosophers who don’t put much stock in the notion, but there are lots of others who do; it’s an issue of some debate in metaphysics and philosophy of language both. One of the most notorious essentialists in contemporary philosophy (Kripke; cf. Naming and Necessity) happens to be deeply influenced by Wittgenstein in particular. Most of the anti-essentialists, in Analytic philosophy at least, are not influenced mainly by Wittgenstein, but rather by Quine or by Rorty.

1. Aristotelian teleology. It’s certainly true that Galileo and Newton helped put the kibosh on the old Aristotelian system of natural ends and final causes as an explanatory framework in physics. And the long shadow that their reputation has cast has tended to make natural ends and final causes seem shabby and disreputable in any natural science. But it’s not at all clear to me that this is the way it needs to be or ought to be. There’s no reason to believe that the methods and explanatory framework that works best for physics and chemistry will also work best for all the other sciences; and in fact I think that really rubbing out teleological notions would simply mean the death of natural history and biology at large as sciences. See Michael Thompson’s The Representation of Life for a good extended discussion, or my post The ends in the world as we know it for a brief and partial discussion of one of the central issues.

Again, this is a matter of some import, which certainly deserves more argument than you’ve given it here (that is to say, it needs at least some argument…) because if teleological notions play an important role in our understanding of the “forms of life” in the natural world, then they give us an important point of reference for what sort of facts the facts of natural law — if there are any — might be.

The point here is not to suggest that you are wrong about the natural law. I happen to think that you are, but I haven’t argued it here. What I do think is that you have not supported your case nearly as strongly as you’ve presented it. The specific points you urge against the notion of natural law are not the uniform consensus of contemporary philosophy or scientific method and they need considerably more argument and attention to detail than the historical overview you’ve tried to give here.

Jonathan,

One thing that might help clear up some of the difficulties that you’re concerned with here is a clear differentiation between different things that “natural law” might be taken to mean. The way that the term is used by those who want “natural law” reasoning to be an important part of political or legal norms is substantially different from some sort of idea that “whatever is natural, in the appropriate sense, is licit, and whatever is unnatural, in the appropriate sense, is illicit.” Natural law is first and foremost a theory of the source and limits of rightful political authority; the idea is specifically that there is a natural law, prior to and independent of any statutory law, that can be discovered by the natural light of reason, that provides the basis for all legitimate authority and that dissolves all illegitimate claims to authority. (This is how you get the idea that a statute in violation of natural law is thereby null and void; if nobody can claim legitimate authority to do X, then any law that claims to do X cannot possibly be binding, any more than arbitrary commands that I happened to issue to my neighbors.) Call this the constitutional natural law.

Now, there are other senses of the word “natural law.” For example, “natural law” is sometimes used to refer to the universal or general empirical truths about nature, which we discover through observation and reasoning. But this is only “law” in an analogical sense, and thus competing claims such as “Homosexuality isn’t found anywhere in nature!” and “Homosexuality is found everywhere in nature!” have to do with “natural law” in the scientific sense, but not in the constitutional sense. Call this the scientific natural law.

Finally, claims about whether homosexuality or contraception violate or pervert the natural form of life that humans enjoy, and whether or not this entails that they are wrong, could be said to fall under a normative meaning of “natural law.” But they don’t fall under the strict constitutional meaning that I mentioned above; they have to do with what it may be right or wrong to do, not what you do or don’t have the right to claim authority to make people do. Call this the moral natural law.

So I’d suggest that folks who want to appeal to the moral natural law, but also want their appeals to have direct bearing on questions of what laws can be legitimately enforced (e.g. whether we should treat sodomy or contraception as a crime), are either just equivocating between the moral and constitutional senses of “natural law,” or else hiding a premise that moves from the claim about virtue and vice to a further claim about the legitimacy of a particular claim of authority.

It’s possible to mount an argument like this. For example, if you’re a particular kind of Catholic you might suggest that the use of contraception (for example) violates the natural law because it involves an attempt to usurp the rightful Lordship of God (and thus ought to be prohibited by statute). If someone offers an argument like this, then there are at least three possible responses: (1) you can deny that contraception attempts to usurp God’s authority; (2) you can deny, as a matter of natural law, that human rulers have the rightful authority to try to enforce God’s prerogatives on their fellow creatures; (3) you can deny that God exists, and thus that She has any authority to usurp. I’ll leave it up to the reader which, if any, is the best tack to take; the important point here is that rational conversation can continue; it doesn’t just devolve into bludgeoning each other with conflicting intuitions about the content of the natural law.

Incidentally, you mention that you don’t think the Declaration “can … be proven like 2+2=4.” I take it you mean the foundational claim that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. [etc.]” Maybe these claims and the following admit of proof, and maybe they do not; but Jefferson, at least, wouldn’t consider that a criticism. He states, after all, that they are self-evident, and thus suggests that they need no further proof, that they recommend themselves to sober reflection just as they are without prior argument.