Simon Blackburn in Ruling Passions seems to think you have an additional problem inherent to such response-dependent evaluative models. If we are to say that it is true that X is bad if and only if we are correct in judging X to be bad, then the bad guy (non-cog, fictionalist or whatever) can counter both sides of the equation at once with the same objection he was originally planning to point at just the one, irrespective at this stage of what that objection might be. This raises the question of what purpose the response dependency really fulfils?CIN wrote: ↑Wed Aug 16, 2023 7:40 pm D. Support for step 1: the meaning of '(intrinsically) good' and '(intrinsically) bad'
What does it mean to describe something as bad? Consider some cases:
D1. A maths teacher says to a student 'this is a bad answer'. The reason the teacher says this is that the answer is incorrect.
D2. Someone cuts into a potato and says 'this potato is bad'. The reason they say this is that the potato is black inside.
D3. Someone says 'bad dog' to their dog. The reason they say this is that the dog has stolen their dinner.
In each case, an object is described as bad because it has some property or other. The property is different in each case (being incorrect, being black inside, being a thief).
A possible inference here is that 'bad' means something different in each case. Since there are thousands, if not millions, of properties whose possession could be the reason why something is described as bad, this would imply that 'bad' has thousands if not millions of different meanings. (This was actually suggested to me a while ago by someone in another forum. He claimed that, for example, when we say 'a good bridge', 'good' means something like 'gets you from A to B and doesn't wobble'. I think he was mistaking the reasons why we might call a bridge 'good' for the meaning of the word 'good'.)
The view that 'bad' means something different for each object we apply it to is implausible, for two reasons:
1. It offends against the principle of parsimony; 'bad' looks like a simple word, and a theory that gives it a simple meaning is to be preferred to one that gives it a huge number of different meanings.
2. On this view, if someone points to an object with which I am completely unfamiliar and asserts 'that's bad', then since I don't know what the object is and therefore what properties it must have for it to be called 'bad', I can have no idea at all what the speaker's sentence means. Yet clearly the speaker has communicated something to me by calling the object 'bad'. He seems to be doing something like disapproving of the object, or classifying it negatively in some way. I may not be quite sure exactly what he means, but I don't get no idea at all of what he means, as I would if he'd pointed to the object and said something incomprehensible, e.g. 'that's gefluntish'. So the theory that 'bad' means something different for every object can't be right.
What is this something that the speaker is managing to communicate to me?
A reasonable first guess, following R.M.Hare, is that in all of the above cases, the speaker is discommending the object, even though the properties that lead him or her to do so are different in each case. However, I think we can do better than Hare. To begin with, in each of the three cases above, the speaker appears to be attributing the property of badness to the object, and not merely, as Hare would have us believe, expressing their own attitude to it. So rather than saying that the speaker is simply discommending the object, it's more plausible to hold that what they are really saying is that it is fitting to discommend the object, or that the object deserves discommendation, and at the same time they are discommending the object by implication.
But now, what about this:
D4. A patient says 'the pain in my leg is bad'. The reason he or she says this is that the pain is very unpleasant.
The patient can hardly be discommending the pain. A list of synonyms for 'discommend' would include such words as blame, censure, disparage, condemn, denigrate.... These words refer to damaging the reputation of something. But when a patient says that his pain is bad, he isn't trying to damage the pain's reputation. So not all ascriptions of badness can be to do with discommendation.
We can improve on Hare with help from A.C.Ewing:
'We may... define "good" as "fitting object of a pro attitude"... it will [then] be easy enough to analyse bad as "fitting object of an anti attitude", this term covering dislike, disapproval, avoidance, etc.' (The Definition of Good, pp. 152 and 168)
The term would also cover discommendation. So, from Ewing, we get this thesis:
'bad' means 'fitting object of an anti attitude', where 'anti attitude' covers all negative responses, including dislike, disapproval, avoidance, discommendation, censure....
Ewing's idea has given rise to fitting attitude theories, which propose to define 'good' and 'bad' in terms of our attitudes. I think Ewing is nearly right, but I think he got it the wrong way round: 'fitting object of a pro attitude' implies that the attitude logically comes first and the object is fitted to it, whereas I think the object logically must come first. I therefore prefer 'response' to 'attitude', because it seems to me that in evaluating objects, we are dealing with what is essentially a stimulus-response situation: the object is the stimulus, and our evaluation of it is the response.
This is my solution:
- when used evaluatively, 'intrinsically good' means 'such that a pro-response is actually fitting, and a neutral or anti-response is not'
- when used evaluatively, 'intrinsically bad' means 'such that an anti-response is actually fitting, and a neutral or pro-response is not.'
(As regards 'instrumentally good' and 'instrumentally bad', I think step 1 is self-explanatory.)
So, to defend the suggestion that there are type 1 EFs, I need to show that there are (in the natural world, since I hold that this is the only place where anything actual could be found) actual cases of some relation that can justifiably be considered a fittingness relation between some object and either a pro- or anti-response. If there are, then it will be a fact that such an object is good or bad.
Here's a blurry photo of a page that says something along those lines.
- blackburn_1.JPG (64.48 KiB) Viewed 370 times