I think the way this sort of thing would have to work is to think about the more general types of actions that these fall under. Kant pointed out that lying is a type of talking, but it's clear that it has to be a deviant type. If all (or most) talking was lying, then talking would no longer be able to serve its purpose, and lying wouldn't either. It is essential for lying to work that most other speakers are telling the truth, or at least for the audience to have the reasonable belief that this is true. Kant famously came to the conclusion that all lying is therefore always wrong, including the standard anachronistic example of lying to the Nazis about the fact that you have Anne Frank hidden in your attic. Of course, on the version of this picture that I'm talking about, goodness and badness come in degrees, so it's possible to claim that there's something wrong with lying to the Nazis in this case, but there would be far more wrong in telling the truth (if we could fill in some other norms that come from more general action types).
We can do a similar thing to say why cheating is generally wrong, and breaking promises (if that's the way to understand what a philanderer is doing). The abuse case, and responding to the Nazi objection about lying, would depend on some sort of analysis of the general notion of what it is to be a rational agent, and I don't really see how it's going to work yet. I'm more convinced in the belief case than in the action case, and so I'm more certain that we can use this sort of method to give an objective account of the norms of epistemology than the norms of ethics. But I think it might be able to work.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: the is-ought gap
Date: 2010-10-26 02:08 am (UTC)We can do a similar thing to say why cheating is generally wrong, and breaking promises (if that's the way to understand what a philanderer is doing). The abuse case, and responding to the Nazi objection about lying, would depend on some sort of analysis of the general notion of what it is to be a rational agent, and I don't really see how it's going to work yet. I'm more convinced in the belief case than in the action case, and so I'm more certain that we can use this sort of method to give an objective account of the norms of epistemology than the norms of ethics. But I think it might be able to work.