Oughts and Hypothetical Imperatives

[Astro Cat]

I am still alive, just pretty busy. Stopping by to say hello and that I'm sorry for missing a bunch of the discussion Leontiskos, Good_Egg, Consul, and others (sorry for "others," don't want to mention everyone in the thread!)

[Good_Egg]

Now I see that he may have been quibbling over words by charging me with excluding those cases, as with the train, where people use the word ‘ought’ but intend nothing normative by it. My response to that would be: Who cares? If a word conveys no oughtness in some specific case then it is irrelevant to our discussion, no matter what that word may be.)

I would say that the moral and non-moral senses of "ought" are highly relevant. I'd argue that to understand the difference between those two senses is to understand what morality is.

Astro Cat seems to be arguing that moral oughts are "really" disguised conditional-instrumental oughts and drawing from that linguistic proposition a somewhat negative conclusion about what morality is...

It's not as if the moral and non-moral oughts are unrelated (in the way that the past tense of "rise" coincidentally denotes a type of flower).

I'm seeing the same moral/nonmoral usage of "expect", for example. And "normative" and "normal" clearly have the same root. "Standard" can mean no more than "usual", but standards we can live up to or fall short of. All these words seem to exhibit a similar capability of being read in a moral sense, where failure to do it is bad rather than merely unusual, noteworthy or eccentric.

You think that there are morally neutral acts, but that morally neutral acts are not definitively neutral since they are at the same time potentially moral or immoral (in light of the introduction of some promise). My view is that there are no morally neutral acts in the first place, although I do admit that circumstances can alter the permissibility of acts in some cases (and this is a complicated part of Aquinas’ teaching).

If you think moral acts are those that are consistent with the purpose of humankind, then I don't see how you can avoid thinking that there may exist some pair of possible actions which are equally consistent with that purpose, and therefore equally moral. And that the act of performing or intending one of those acts in preference to the other is therefore a morally neutral act.

If Consul changes his mind about wearing the blue shorts and dons his green ones instead, that seems like an example of an act that most of the time would be morally neutral.

It may not be. A circumstance in which he has promised to wear the blue ones is only one example. If he's doing it to spite someone who doesn't like green...

[Leontiskos]

Aquinas believed in God, and therefore his notion of "inherent purpose" is tied up with God. Purpose exists in the mind.

But my understanding is that he believed that both God and purpose were knowable by reason and not dependent on religious revelation.

One of many things I'm not clear about is whether any notion of inherent purpose can survive the absence of belief in God.

That’s an old an important question, and it probably deserves its own thread (although there don’t seem to be many theists in these parts). I take it that the more general question is whether morality can survive in the absence of belief in God, and Cat referenced this a little bit when she spoke about the Euthyphro Dilemma.

For Aquinas and Aristotle both God and morality are knowable by reason apart from faith, and for neither one is moral knowledge derived from knowledge of God. Of course Aquinas held that revelation broadens our moral knowledge (and capacity), but at the same time he admits that morality can be known apart from revelation or natural theology. St. Paul also references natural knowledge of morality in Romans 2:14-15.

Now, you speak of ‘purpose’ rather than morality:

But is part of the end (in the sense of purpose rather than in the sense of conclusion) of being a human being.

The ‘end’ of a human being is its final cause, which is an Aristotelian concept. ‘Purpose’ is not a bad way to represent that, although it isn’t perfect, and could mean any number of slightly different things. In any case, social virtues such as justice surely do not presuppose knowledge of God. We are capable of understanding that it is right, as social animals, to act in accord with justice. As soon as one perceives themselves to be an integral part of a societal whole a duty regarding justice naturally arises, and this duty is irreducible to hypothetical morality.

[Astro Cat]

I’m still alive by the way, just knee deep in research and school

[LuckyR]

I’m still alive by the way, just knee deep in research and school

I suspected as much, though it's nice to get confirmation.