Ethics

Bertrand Russell says, in his "In Praise of Idleness", that questions of ends (as opposed to questions of means) are not amenable to rational arguments. This seems intuitive enough, yet wouldn't accepting it would spell doom for any hope of normative objectivity?

Comments

Good question! There may be several alternatives to consider. First, there may be objective normative truths (e.g. to torture the innocent is unjust) even if we are unable to arrive at what Russell would clasify as a "rational argument" on behalf of such truths. Secondly, we may have knowledge of normative truths on the basis of something other than what Russell would call "rational argument." There is a revival of late of intuitionism, which claims that we can intuit basic values. Some in the natural law camp (John Finnis) have proposed that some objective norms are self-evident (and thus can be known per se nota). A third point to consider is that even if you reject intuition or insight, there are all sorts of considerations that can come into play when considering the identity of basic goods. One can reflect on the implications of accepting such basic goods by investigating actual cases as well as hypothetical cases involving what philosophers call thought experiments. So, in a debate over whether, say, there is only one basic good, pleasure, a philosopher might argue that there must be based on hypothetical cases in which producing the most pleasure seems to involve the most outrageous wrongs and injustice. This method is by no means fool proof. A defender of hedonism might simply claim not to see the wrong and injustice, but in practice this way of reasoning does produce results. Usually a hedonist will try to show that the greatest pleasure will not involve such wrongs.

For a good look at intuitionism and views in that are similar to intuitionism, you might find the work of Robert Audi of interest!

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