Review of "Impassioned Belief
Essays in Philosophy
oBkReviw
s Steven Ross
Hunter College/The Graduate Center/CUNY
t's a funny thing. If you turn to virtually any issue in philosophy of mind, Cartesian dualism will loom large in the background, and rightly-but it does so in a particular way. Of course, it is a powerful and, in many ways, intuitive theory. Surely we have mental states, they are often clearly distinct from whatever intentional actions they go on to cause, and it is not obvious how we can identify consciousness, the experience of that fireplace with any purely material state or process. Fine. At the same time, everybody knows the theory cannot be right, for all sorts of reasons. But central is this: Cartesian dualism is just too stark, as it were; the framework within which we characterize what is and is not possible is just too meager. Too many features of our psychological and intentional life do not fit easily or naturally into “mind” or “body” as Descartes thought he was forced to understand these ideas. Mental states are clearly, must be, materially instantiated; they could not have their properties any other way. Certain behavior, like painting a landscape, is intrinsically intentional. And so we tend to begin our explorations into some topic in mind with Cartesian dualism in the background, but as a cautionary tale as much as anything else. It would be the odd philosopher, something of an ideologue, who would want to wind up at the end of their analysis with these categories, these rigid distinctions, wholly intact. To the contrary, we look for an analysis of mental life and intentional action that is more flexible,
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more subtle than what Descartes thought he was constrained by, an analysis not
hostage to these old, unhelpful, crude categories.
But in that branch of moral theory known as meta-ethics, it is very much
otherwise. Here the dominant, and understandably dominant, dualism in the
background is Hume’s. Hume’s dualism, as I will call it, is as brilliant, as seductive,
and as straightforward as Descartes’. There is the world of facts, which in turn
are divided into natural facts and “abstract ideas,” and we detect such facts with a
distinct faculty, “reason.” This faculty represents such facts, and as such, it
cannot be thought to cause action, or "supply a motive." Then there is the realm of
feeling, or states, inside of us. Sometimes such states arise biologically (hunger,
our love of children). And sometimes they are caused by how the external world
impinges upon us (pain from being burned, finding smells disgusting). But this
is the essential framework: facts out there, where what “facts” are is to be
understood wholly within the constraints of naturalism, and feelings inside, where
these feelings, or motives, or desires, are to be understood in terms of the state of
affairs they seek to bring about, not in terms of representing anything, and so not
capable of being termed true or false.
When we turn to morality, two sorts of arguments, one from each part of this
duality, support a certain picture of moral concepts and moral discourse. When
we look out at the world of facts, we can find, initially, no place for moral notions.
Goodness does not name a natural fact, it is not discovered through empirical
investigation—just go look and see if you can find it, one might say!—nor is it
plausibly thought of as an “abstract idea” (what expressivists today would call a
discrete metaphysical entity). Arguing from the other half of our ontology, clearly
moral qualities sometimes motivate. We sometimes act otherwise when we
discover we are about to be rude, for example, or do something simply because we
believe it is just; this cannot be denied. But motivated action cannot be caused by
a mere representation of the world. So we have two sorts of arguments, one from
each part of the world we have so divided, for the single truth: morality is
essentially about feelings, responses, which then cause certain sorts of actions.
I do not want to suggest this picture has survived whole, even for those who
essentially adhere to it. No one I think would now characterize desires, or
motivations, exactly as Hume did. Expressivists nowadays typically think of desires
as having semantic content; they are certainly not “brute states” as Hume seemed
to understand this idea. But these differences, or modifications, are I think quite
modest in comparison to the degree to which the fundamental framework, the
dualism, continues to be invoked to support some very powerful conclusions. First,
in the seemingly undeniable fact that morality motivates, we have the beginnings
of an argument for telling us what normative concepts name, what normative
properties are. And in the world of facts, as we must understand that idea if we
are to be sensible, we will find no moral properties. The world apart from our
reactions, apart from our feelings, bears no moral content at all.
It is not that these arguments strongly “influence” contemporar (...truncated)