In her paper, Little attempts to disarm objections from the philosophy of mind to the claim of some virtue theorists that virtue is a form of knowledge. Some virtue theorists believe that the virtuous person is motivated to act simply by perceiving aspects of reality. When he sees that doing X is the courageous thing to do he is thereby motivated to do X.
Some have objected to this idea by saying that a conception such as this flies in the face of our basic understanding of the philosophy of mind. They claim that there is a clear difference between beliefs and desires and that the conception offered by the virtue theorist requires some sort of converging of these two different mental states. Either one is forced to postulate the "besire" which is one mental state having both the properties of a belief and a desire or one is forced to accept that certain beliefs entail desires. The objectors find neither of these options acceptable and thus condemn the idea of virtue as knowledge. Little, however, argues that there is nothing wrong with conceiving of mental states such as these. For example, she points out that the fact that one has any beliefs at all entails that one desires his beliefs to be true. Moreover, she discusses the sort of mental state that Humeans who have a sort of projectivist meta-ethical theory are forced to posit. For those with this sort of theory, the mental state that one forms when he forms an ethical judgment must have components of his sentiments (which he projected onto the world) and his beliefs. Thus, it seems to Little that mental states are more diverse and complex than simple beliefs and desires and that as a result one can not rule out virtue as knowledge theories on the basis of their requiring more than just beliefs and desires.
I am unsure of this as I think that a closer analysis may find that beliefs and desires are all that is needed. Take Little's example of desiring true beliefs being entailed by having beliefs. I think that she has it backwards here. To me it would seem that one wants something, then realizes that in order to achieve it he must have an idea of how the world is and so he wants to belief what is true. Then he goes about investigating his situation so as to discover what he must do to realize his original desire.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
One of Little's points is just a 'logical' one. Against the idea that someone who thinks knowledge of something like 'X is good' can only have a belief-like 'direction of fit' (i.e. beliefs are successful or not to the extent that they 'fit the world') she points out that it could also have a desire-like direction of fit (i.e. desires are successful or not to the extent that the world comes to match their content) if we notice that the desire-like content of this knowledge is NOT 'X is good' but (something like) 'bring about X'. So the Hume (really Michael Smith) claim that no state can have opposite directions of fit, while it works if we focus only on one 'content, fails because evaluative knowledge involves two different content propositions.
Post a Comment