But I Can Feel and I Can Write the Word

Heritage
by Claude McKay

Now the dead past seems vividly alive,
And in this shining moment I can trace,
Down through the vista of the vanished years,
Your faun-like form, your fond elusive face.

And suddenly some secret spring's released,
And unawares a riddle is revealed,
And I can read like large, black-lettered print,
What seemed before a thing forever sealed.

I know the magic word, the graceful thought,
The song that fills me in my lucid hours,
The spirit's wine that thrills my body through,
And makes me music-drunk, are yours, all yours.

I cannot praise, for you have passed from praise,
I have no tinted thoughts to paint you true;
But I can feel and I can write the word;
The best of me is but the least of you.

Waddington, Science, and Ethics

In Chapter 14 of That Hideous Strength, Lewis has Frost refer to a philosophical discussion that broke out in the pages of Nature in 1941 and gathered together in book form the next year as Science and Ethics.

C. H. Waddington was one of the foremost biologists of his day; he gives us the term epigenetics, and developed a number of important ideas, like genetic assimilation, that are still around. He wrote an article, "The Relations Between Science and Ethics", which he submitted to Nature; the editor asked a number of other people who were notable at the time for their work on topics discussed in the article to comment on it. In it, Waddington considers a problem, that along at least four lines of inquiry, a scientific approach seemed to rule out the possibility of moral realism, i.e., ethics being grounded in the nature of the world: psychoanalysis, comparative anthropology, Marxist sociology, and logical positivism.* These four lines of thought could lead one to conclude that ethics and science have nothing to do with each other, but Waddington rejects this view:

I shall deny Carnap's argument that the typical ethical statement 'killing is evil' is merely a paraphrase of the command 'do not kill', and "does not assert anything, and cannot be proved or disproved". I shall argue that an ethical judgment is better typified by a statement such as "You are an animal of such a kind that you must consume 7 mgm. of vitamin C per diem, and should consume 100 mgm.", that is to say, by a statement which has scientific significance. (p. 10)

Later in the discussion he gives an analogy between moral behavior and feeding behavior. If you were to study feeding behavior the way many people study moral behavior (e.g., utilitarians), you might start by recognizing that people treat all sorts of things as food, and, in the attempt to give a more precise definition, might conclude that food is what satisfies hunger, just as classical utilitarians conclude that good is what gives pleasure. But this is not, in fact, how scientists study feeding behavior; they begin by tracing out the function that food performs, the role it fills, within the process of growth and development. This is complicated, but it is an objective matter capable of scientific study, and it gives you principles that account for feeding behavior regardless of the cultural differences in what and how people eat. We should, Waddington argues, look at good in a purely objective way in the context of the process of "progressive evolution" (p. 41)

It's somewhat interesting that of the four lines, only the conclusions Waddington discusses under anthropology have actually survived as in some way scientific, which I don't think anyone could possibly have expected at the time; psychoanalysis and Marxist sociology are no longer regarded as especially scientific, and logical positivism was already running into the problems that would eventually sink it as a general account of scientific methodology -- indeed, the version Waddington presents in his article was already beginning to be out of date, as it is based mostly on Carnap's Philosophy and Logical Syntax (published in English in 1936), and so does not take into account Carnap's more recent work.

(Logical positivists and and the broader family of logical empiricists have been making a comeback recently, but this is not, as it is sometimes presented, a serious revival of the -ism; in part because, contrary to the way the history is presented, and despite the importance of Popper and Quine, the primary work that showed the nonviability of logical positivism/empiricism was done by its partisans, particularly Carnap, who often anticipated the more powerful objections of the critics in his search for precision and accuracy.)

Perhaps also of note is that Waddington's notion of progressive evolution is no longer widely accepted, either. But his account very definitely requires that evolution have a discernible direction to which moral behavior can functionally contribute.

In That Hideous Strength, Mark asks Frost how, given Frost's particular insistence on objectivity, one can justify or condemn any actions at all, and Frost refers him to Waddington, even quoting Waddington's article in arguing that it makes no sense to say that the direction of evolution is bad. One can read the entire Space Trilogy, I think, as arguing that attempts to draw ethics from any kind of direction of evolution fail, since each of the three books shows a villain justifying abhorrent actions by a different form of this maneuver.

Independence Day

Who shall write the History of the American Revolution? Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?

The most essential Documents, the debates & deliberations in Congress from 1774 to 1783 were all in secret, and are now lost forever. Mr Dickinson printed a speech which he said he made in Congress against the declaration of Independence; but it appeared to me very different from that which you and I heard. Dr Witherspoon has published speeches, which he wrote before hand and delivered Memoriter, as he did his Sermons. But these I believe are the only speeches ever committed to writing. The orators, while I was in Congress from 1774 to 1778 appeared to me very universally extemporaneous, & I have never heard of any committed to writing, before or after delivery.

John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 30 July 1815

On the subject of the history of the American revolution, you ask Who shall write it? who can write it? and who ever will be able to write it? nobody; except merely it’s external facts. all it’s councils, designs and discussions, having been conducted by Congress with closed doors, and no member, as far as I know, having even made notes of them. these, which are the life and soul of history must for ever be unknown.

Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 10 August 1815

As to the history of the Revolution, my Ideas may be peculiar, perhaps Singular. What do We mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington. The Records of thirteen Legislatures, the Pamplets, Newspapers in all the Colonies ought be consulted, during that Period, to ascertain the Steps by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the Authority of Parliament over the Colonies.

John Adam to Thomas Jefferson, 24 August 1815




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* “From John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 30 July 1815,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6497.
* “To John Adams from Thomas Jefferson, 10 August 1815,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6502.
* “From John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 24 August 1815,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6507.

Moral Permissibility and Legality

There is a saying that subtitles are more honest than titles, and that seems very much to be true of the recent 'open educational resource', Thinking Critically About Abortion: Why Most Abortions Aren't Wrong and Why All Abortion Should Be Legal. The 'thinking critically' part is mixed at best; it's a better argumentative presentation than most pro-abortion arguments, but some of the argument is thumb-on-the scale -- arguments against abortion are held to high standards, arguments for it only inconsistently so. A really obvious case is Thomson's violinist, which is just handled with a 'Most people would say you don't violate the violinist's right to life if you remove the violinist' answer in a few sentences, despite the fact that the case is widely known and that there is already a decades-long history of pro-life arguments that this claim is wrong. Perhaps that is only to be expected; it's difficult to hold arguments to a strict standard when you already find them intuitive, and easy to do it when you already find them unintuitive, even when you know that for other people what counts as intuitive might be reversed. But the authors also clearly don't understand some of the arguments they are discussing; for instance, they count as 'question-begging' arguments both for and against (women have a right to do what they want with their bodies, fetuses are babies, etc.) that are clearly not question-begging but are simply inconsistent with their own preferred starting-points. And they also do the thing, which always drives me crazy, of dividing arguments into 'everyday arguments' and 'philosopher's arguments' and treating the latter as better without any recognition of the fact that the arguments they put into these groups have distinct ends -- that, for instance, the former are often practical first-approximation arguments or personal reasons, and are usually part of a cumulative case, and that the latter are often theoretical arguments that are generally trying to avoid purely technical problems that arise in hypothetical situations or when you take a principle in a very strict form, and are usually stand-alone. You cannot assess an argument critically without regard to what its actual point is.

But what really strikes me about the argument is that which concerns the second part of the subtitle. The part of their argument that concerns the first part of the subtitle is standard material, nicely organized, but nothing that anyone familiar with the topic has not heard before. But the part of their argument that concerns the second part of the subtitle is quite astounding. I actually wasn't intending to read the work except that the summary of this part of the argument took me utterly by surprise:

Furthermore, since the right to life is not the right to someone else’s body, fetuses might not have the right to the pregnant woman’s body—which she has the right to—and so she has the right to not allow the fetus use of her body. This further justifies abortion, at least until technology allows for the removal of fetuses to other wombs. Since morally permissible actions should be legal, abortions should be legal: it is an injustice to criminalize actions that are not wrong.

'Since morally permissible actions should be legal, X should be legal' is a baffling thing to say, since it is not generally true that morally permissible actions should be legal; all that is true is that if an action is morally permissible, some other reason beside the morality of the action itself is needed for making it illegal.

Part of the problem, which you find in many discussions of ethics, is not grasping just how weak 'X is a morally permissible action' is, and with equivocating between 'X is morally permissible in every possible case' and 'X is a kind of action that is morally permissible'. Kissing strangers is a morally permissible kind of action; a society could very well exist where you kiss people you don't know in order to greet them, and there would be nothing wrong with that. But kissing strangers is not morally permissible in every possible case; you might live in a society in which it would be invasive. And moral permissibility is weak, in any case; most things we do are morally permissible, many of those are not very good or are in some way morally unsafe (tending to, although not strictly requiring, something bad).

And even when morally permissible particular actions are not of the barely-acceptable kind, there can be reasons extrinsic to the actions as to why they should not be done. Consider, for instance, the tragedy of the commons. We have a common resource, which benefits people by being common; everybody has a right to it; no individual use is detrimental in itself, but some overall combinations of individual uses are detrimental. Everything is morally permissible in itself, but, depending on what other morally permissible things people are doing, some things should not be done. Even purely practical reasons can be a foundation for law. I suspect most people would say that we could sometimes make a morally permissible action illegal if it could be a contributing cause to something we all want or need to avoid; at least, most people seem committed to such a claim given the laws they support.

I've looked and looked in the book for any developed account of why anyone should accept their principle that morally permissible actions should be legal, and I have come up with a blank. Indeed, the entire part of the argument that concerns the legality question is very weakly and minimally argued; it seems to consist entirely of two parts, 'most abortion is morally permissible' and 'if we made illegal the sort of abortion that is not morally permissible, this would have (very vaguely described) bad effects'. The legality principle seems never to be defended at all.

A side note. It's always worth asking in these cases what ethical approach is in play; one regularly finds in particular discussions of controversial topics that people are gerrymandering an approach to get the conclusion that is wanted -- that is, that people are not, in fact, being consistent in their ethics. I am baffled at what ethical view is supposed to be presupposed by their argument. They are presupposing some kind of cognitivist view (they rule out basing conclusions on feelings, attitudes, and preferences), but it doesn't seem to be any standard cognitivism. The strict way they take the legality principle seems clearly inconsistent with any kind of utilitarianism, and also with any kind of positivist theory of obligation; the way they handle questions of rights and personhood is inconsistent with Kantianism and natural law theories of obligation; virtue-ethical considerations never seem to arise. Perhaps the authors have some unified view, but it is not at all obvious from the whole collection of arguments that they give, nor is it even obvious that they are in fact sticking to a single ethical approach.

Embeddable Answered Questions

Luca Incurvati and Julian J. Schlöder have a really nice paper on what they call inferential expressivism; expressivism as an account of any kind of meaning is known to face basic logical problems, and they look at how you could build an expressivism that deals with one of these, what is usually called the Negation Frege-Geach Problem (or similar names). As I say, an interesting paper. But my attention was caught by a very minor side issue in their argument, and that is what this post is about.

They note a point, deriving from work by Timothy Smiley, about explaining negation in basic logical forms like modus tollens in terms of rejection. Instead of standard modus tollens,

if p, q
not q
therefore not p

you could use questions and answers:

a. Is it the case that if p, q? Yes!
b. Is it the case that q? No!
c. Therefore is it the case that p? No!

Or to take another case,

a. Is it the case that if not p, not q? Yes!
b. Is it the case that p? No!
c. Therefore is it the case that q? No!

Both of these are clearly valid, and work because the Yes's and No's indicate assertions and rejections or denials.

They then say ((6) and (7) are the above arguments):

But now we have a puzzle. The speech act indicators (5) that Smiley postulates are nonembeddable—if is it the case that p? No!, then... borders on incomprehensible—but as shown by (6) and (7) they can nonetheless feature in inferences. To simply reduce not p to Is it p? No! seems unsatisfactory due to the divergent embedding behaviour of these phrases (Rumfitt, 2000). But if (7b) is not reducible to the antecedent of (7a), then—following the structure of the Frege–Geach argument—how can (7) be valid?

The argument, in other words, is that "not p" cannot be reduced to "Is it p? No!" because these two have different logical behaviors: I can say, "If not p" but I cannot say, "If is it p? No!"

I find this argument extremely unconvincing. People do not in fact go around saying "If not p" unless they have been trained to do so by logicians; it's not a common way of speaking English, but an arbitrary convention invented by logicians for convenience. (While English does sometimes allow similar constructions, e.g., "Not all that glitters is gold" or "Not all who wander are lost", these are rare, and the construction would merely confuse people for most propositions, e.g., "Not some people are going to the movies today" or "Not if this is true, that is true". (Although, of course, we could say in colloquial English, "Some people are going to the movies today -- Not!") And if we are going to allow logicians to get away with bizarre barbarisms like that in the one case, it's unclear why they can't get away with it in the question case.

Moreover, English does actually have a way to handle this kind of situation. Sometimes in English, you are arguing in questions. It would be odd syntactically to put your question in the antecedent of a conditional, but it can be understood to be there. We do this all the time. Suppose I say:

Is it the case that Daniel bought milk? If no, then I want to stop by the store.

(We would often say 'not', but 'no' would not be very unusual.) What is the logical antecedent of the conditional statement? It's not merely 'no'; the consequent does not follow from negation in general. It's 'no' as an answer to the question. It's just that English takes the question to be understood. We could very well represent it as,

If [Is it the case that Daniel bought milk?] No, then I want to stop by the store.

You wouldn't say that explicitly in colloquial English as a matter of custom; but it has to be understood or it doesn't mean anything. The same can be said for when the consequent is just 'yes' or 'no', as well. We wouldn't usually do it for both the antecedent and the consequent simultaneously, but that seems obviously because, since the questions are merely understood, it quickly becomes confusing which answer goes with which question. But nothing about it is impossible, given the right set up.

So, in short, there seems no real puzzle here. If we are embedding as logicians embed, it's not more of a solecism than 'not p' is. If we are embedding as English speakers embed, once one recognizes that 'yes' and 'no' often have understood questions it becomes clear that English can in fact embed simple versions of this. If "Is it the case that p? No!" differs from "Not p", it's not due to any purely logical embedding behavior; they just seem to differ practically.

In yes-or-no questions, in fact, 'yes' and 'no' don't seem to be any different than assigning truth values to propositions. The real parallel is to

It is true that if p, q
It is false that q
Therefore it is false that p.

Music on My Mind

Hidden Citizens, "Paint It Black". This is one of those songs that has become popular for covers recently. I actually still like the original Stones version best; the contrast of the upbeat sound with the melancholy lyrics gives it just the right desperately manic smiling-while-falling-to-pieces mood to convey the point of the song, which is a sort of rebellion against the fact that the world goes on even in the face of death. But this makes a good in-the-background version.

Thousands--Ten Thousands More

Martyrs and Confessors
by John Holland

"Your princes distinguished themselves by the greatness and the success of their exploits: they conquered empires, overwhelmed nations, and subdued the ferocity of the wildest barbarians; but they had no success in their endeavours against our poor fishermen and labourers, simple and illiterate people, women and children. Their war against our religion nourished the immortal plant—from every branch they lopped off, a thousand sprouts arose."—Theoderet to the Persecutors of the Christians.

The powers of Hell are loosed: the Church must pass
Through Persecution's tenfold heated fires;
Consumed, devour'd, or trodden down like grass,
With hero-nerve, each martyr'd saint expires.
Thousands—ten thousands—seal'd their faith with blood;
A noble army—crown'd with glory now:
Thousands—ten thousands more—unflinching stood,
Till wearied the red hands that dealt the blow:
Thousands—ten thousands—fled the scenes of woe,
And bore the name of Christ to farthest lands,
Where Kings were seen in that great name to bow,
While shaking from their souls barbarian bands;
While Christian temples rose on hallow'd sites,
Where idol-altars once were serv'd with horrid rites.