Review of "Impassioned Belief

Essays in Philosophy, Jan 2015

By Steven Ross, Published on 01/27/15

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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, - I 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)


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Steven Ross. Review of "Impassioned Belief, Essays in Philosophy, 2015, Volume 16, Issue 1,