I’ve spent most of this week working on my defence (such as it is) of Stevenson. Part of that defence rests on a rough distinction that I think we can draw between styles of reasoning about ethics, or a way that we might categorise metaethical theories. After I drafted an initial essay, I realised that this distinction is a surprisingly large aspect of the defence, so I have been spending time trying to nail down and substantiate that distinction. I’m not sure that it’s an argument that will convince anyone else (yet), but I have been personally happy with the way that the argument is developing and think that there is something to the idea. It also amuses me that I’m suggesting that we need a metametaethics.

As I work away at this, I have been starting to read up on incommensurability in ethics. These issues have obvious connections to my primary interests. Disagreement plays a huge role in the generation of metaethical thinkers that I am interested in, and some of the work on incommensurability, etc. helps to formalise and reason about some of the intuitions that they relied upon. It doesn’t always favour them! Some of the arguments raised in the discussion around incommensurability remind me of arguments that Michele Moody-Adams, et al. make about the role interpretation plays in ethics. Not having a single, agreed-upon measure doesn’t mean that we can’t make decisions between incomparable options, or understand the decisions that other people make in situations where they need to make those choices. Moody-Adams also suggests that agreement mightn’t need to mean “being compelled to think the same thing”, and there’s real substance in that view.

These concerns do manage to feed into broader issues in moral psychology, interpretation manages to operate as a really handy bridge. Nancy Snow in Virtue as Social Intelligence, for example, criticises philosophers who want to eliminate talk of character (and hence virtue) from our ethical talk and who lean on work in social psychology that emphasises the role situations play in determining action. Her criticism relies on the possibility of offering a substantial characterisation of personality that relates it to the way we interpret situations; she argues that it’s interpretation that gives situation its causal power. We might also be able to productively relate this to some of Nussbaum’s work on emotion, I think that the eudaimonistic judgements that she sees as consitutive parts of emotion could be put into conversation with broader moral psychology in this way.

One interesting question for me is whether Stevenson can be usefully discussed alongside all this. I think that people would typically say ‘no’ here, but he never really gives us a full-account of emotions/attitudes. In a lot of ways he remains neutral on these questions. There is an implicit theory of emotions/psychology in emotivism, and it’s maybe closer to these interpretative accounts than people have tended to assume.

I’m still reading up on Australian history and have decided to make my way through the two-volume Cambridge History. Part of me is doing this a little sadly. My grandmother was a history teacher, and remained interested in the country’s history after she retired. I wish that I had become interested in the history of this country a few years ago, so that I could have spoken to her about it. It makes me feel closer to her, but it’s still slightly bittersweet.