Leontiskos wrote: ↑September 25th, 2022, 11:48 amSorry Good_Egg, I’ve been rushing my last few replies. A few minutes after I logged out I better understood what you were saying. Yes, you are right in saying that I believe some uses of ‘ought’ are non-moral (such as the train use) and this is a helpful clarification. For example:
- Leontiskos: All intentional and conscious human acts are moral.
- Consul: If all human acts are moral, then all uses of the word ‘ought’ are moral, but this cannot be. See my train example.
- Leontiskos: I admit that the train example is non-moral, but your conditional is false. Not all uses of the word ‘ought’ need to be moral in order for all human acts to be moral.
My train example is merely meant to show that not all uses of "ought" are moral in the sense of expressing duty/obligation. It is
not meant to show that not all human actions are moral. However, what exactly is it for an action
to be moral? To be morally good or bad, right or wrong? To be morally non-indifferent/relevant/significant?
Leontiskos wrote: ↑September 25th, 2022, 11:48 amNow, it may be that somewhere earlier in the conversation I claimed that all ‘oughts’ are moral. If I indeed said such a thing, it was a semantic point, not a syntactic point. I would have been referring to the
concept of oughtness, not the mere string of letters “o-u-g-h-t”. In the train scenario the only relevant way that the concept of oughtness would apply would be as an indirect reference to the train company or the conductor or some such thing. Anything less than that would be a metaphorical usage where the word ‘ought’ is being used but the concept does not in fact apply. Again, if we are to do philosophy we should be talking about
things, not
words.
My train example does concern the semantics of "ought"!
To say that the train ought to have arrived at the station at 12am is not to use "ought" metaphorically. What does "ought" mean here? It expresses a non-moral and non-normative
expectation: "I/We considered it probable/certain that the train would arrive at the station at 12am (but it didn't)."
QUOTE:
"to expect =
a: to consider probable or certain
expect to be forgiven
expect that things will improve
b : to consider reasonable, due, or necessary
expected hard work from the students
c : to consider bound in duty or obligated
they expect you to pay your bills"
Source:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/expect
:QUOTE
a is non-normative and non-moral.
b is normative and non-moral (perhaps sometimes moral).
c is normative and moral.
Leontiskos wrote: ↑September 25th, 2022, 11:48 am(When Consul charged me with undermining the nuance of the semantic range of ‘ought’, I assumed he was charging me with constricting the reach of
oughtness. 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.)
Okay, let's ignore
non-normative uses of "ought" (like my train example); but then the question is still whether all
normative uses of "ought" are
moral ones
expressing duty/obligation. I think this is not the case. For instance, when I say that you ought to brush your teeth twice a day (because it's conducive to dental health), this is clearly a normative use of "ought", but is it also used
morally here, in the sense of "It is your duty to brush your teeth twice a day"?
In my view, this is a
prudential use rather than a moral one—unless one has the moral duty to maintain dental health, such that brushing one's teeth twice a day is a derivative moral duty based on the moral duty to maintain dental health.
Leontiskos wrote: ↑September 25th, 2022, 11:48 amAlthough I do not have your post in front of me, let me also attempt to address your point about circumstantial vs. non-circumstantial conceptions of moral acts. If I am not mistaken this line began when I told you that Consul holds that some species of acts are moral and some are not (this is what Becker calls a “special conception of morality”). In response you said that, on your view, there are no acts which are definitively non-moral since all could become the subject of a promise and therefore become morally obligatory. In your last post you seemed to attribute some variant of that view to me.
Since this could get complicated rather quickly, let me simply try to clarify the difference between our two views. 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). More succinctly, your claim that all acts are
potentially moral or immoral is different from my claim that all acts
are moral or immoral. Nevertheless, our aside about the proper specification of the moral act is a rather different disagreement than the one which lies between myself and Consul.
Although it seems that Consul does not have a well-worked-out theory, it is at least clear that he asserts the existence of morally neutral acts, such as fixing a bicycle (I spoke to this counterexample of his in an earlier post).
We may be talking past each other inadvertently.
What exactly does
"A is morally neutral" mean? Does it mean
"A is not morally evaluated or evaluable (= Moral terms/concepts aren't applied or applicable to A)"? Does it mean
"A is morally indifferent/insignificant"? Does it mean
"A is morally optional"?
See: Deontic Logic > Optionality vs. Indifference:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logi ... OptiVsIndi
If "everything that is neither obligatory nor prohibited is a matter of indifference," and moral indifference means moral neutrality, then there are morally neutral actions, since "many actions are neither obligatory nor prohibited."
In my understanding, an action is
morally indifferent/insignificant if and only if
it doesn't matter morally at all whether or not you do it; but, as the authors of the above-linked SEP text explain, it is a mistake to equate moral optionality with moral indifference/insignificance.
If for an action to be morally neutral is for it
to be morally non-evaluated (not to be evaluated in moral terms), then morally optional actions aren't morally neutral, since the moral concept of optionality is applied to them.
If for an action to be morally neutral is for it
to be morally optional, then there doubtless are morally neutral actions, i.e. ones which are neither obligatory nor prohibited.
If for an action to be morally neutral is for it
to be morally indifferent/insignificant—in the sense that it doesn't matter morally at all whether or not you do it—, then there seem to be morally neutral actions in this sense too. For example, does it matter morally in any way whether or not I choose to wear one of my blue shorts tomorrow?