the Russellian Platonist wants to know!

Preliminary remarks

Following G.E. Moore in his Principia Ethica I think we cannot analyze the fundamental moral predicate ‘good’ and its abstraction ‘goodness’ into any necessary and sufficient parts. This is to say that goodness or the good is something simple and therefore not reducible to anything else. So what of ethical theories? Is not the attempt of any and all ethical theories (deontology, utilitarianism, etc.) a matter of discovering what makes things like actions and intentions ‘good’? Well that depends. If these theories attempt to reduce the predicate ‘good’ to anything other than itself, whether it be actions or intentions or what have you, then all ethical theories are a failure, simply because simple things can never be reduced to anything else. But if ethical theories are not about reduction, but rather showing the principles that explain why the predicate obtains in some instances and absent in others, then ethics (construed as such an endeavor) is certainly a worthy enterprise.

Maybe an illustration might help. The fact that goodness is a simple quality and unanalyzable explains the disagreement between ethical theorists. When such theorists engage in a debate about their theories one will say that such and such things are what bring about goodness, and the other will disagree and say other such and suchs bring about an instance of the predicate good. The only thing that makes sense of this phenomenon is that the subject matter the debate is taking place over is one and same thing; if they’re not arguing over the same subject, then it’s simply impossible that their arguing at all. As it turns out all ethical theories presuppose the subject to which a certain theory is attempting to give an account; all ethical theories unanimously agree that there is such a thing as goodness, or else none of them are attempting to explain the very same thing. When a deontologist says it’s action that are good or bad, or a utilitarian says it’s the outcome of an action that is good, both are acting as complete non skeptics about whether or not good exists, they just disagree which things the predicate is true of. Hopefully this makes sense…

So on my Moorean view goodness is a simple mind independent quality of some things and not others. Some things cause an instance of goodness, some things are indifferent to goodness, and other things cause the goodness to abstain when it would have otherwise obtained (these things are typically called ‘evil’).

the Russellian Platonist

A Russellian Platonist is one who believes that the world is comprised of whatever it happens to be comprised of, nothing more, nothing less. (I call it this view ‘Russellian’ because the early Bertrand Russell ((before he was corrupted by a man named Wittgenstein)) held something close to the view I’m about to explicate). A Russellian Platonist believes there such things as predicates. She thinks that two specially/temporally separated objects can contain the very same thing; she thinks both the shade of white on one page of her book is the same shade of white on the next, even when she cuts the book in half, separating the book into two distinct objects. She thinks for materialism to be true all things must be spatially or temporally located and no single object can be in two places at once. Since she believes that the white on the first half of the torn book is the very same white found on the pages of the other torn half she thinks a certain thing can be in two places at once (namely the white on the separate pages), she thinks that such an observation confounds the prospects of materialist doctrine (that no object can be in two places at once) and so she’s no materialist.

She also thinks that there has been some profoundly interesting things discovered in modern neurology, but despite all of the discovers she’s never seen the pain she feels when someone pricks her with a pin; she’s seen the CAT scans, understands the biochemical reactions going on in her brain, she’s knows what part of her brain they happen in, but yet she’s never seen what she feels, nothing looks like her pain. She thinks that maybe the issue of pain is complicated because after all it’s intimately associated with physical factors like pinpricks and banging funny bones. But there’s less mushy cases like when she feels depressed about a friend dying or happy about her other friend’s birthday. She knows the neurological factors in those cases, but still she’s never ever seen her experiences of depression and happiness in her text books. She even ran a google image search of the words ‘happiness' and ‘depression’, and when she does she sees things associated with such experiences, but she never sees her actual inner experience; she never sees the things she feels.

A Russellian Platonist also believes that numbers are located no where, that two plus two equaling four would still be true even if the physical world never existed, so she believes that there are certain necessary propositions that are timeless and hardly physical. She also believes there a priori propositions, synthetic or otherwise, are true about the world but not located anywhere, and further more she knows she knows them, and she knows she didn’t learn them strictly through sense experiences, so she knows her mind is of the sort that can experience things that escape physical description and know things that don’t depend on the (physical) world’s existence to be true.

In summary a Russellian Platonist is a dualist about the world. She believes that the universe is a mix of physical and non physical things, both fundamental to her experiences in one way or another and both are equally real.

She also happens to think that when she does good things, like help the poor or sacrifice her time against her initial will for a longtime friend she is doing what she ought, and that such a state of affairs betrays any physical description she has heard, so she thinks there are certain moral facts lingering around the universe and can cause certain things be or not be the case when certain things are done or not done. So a Russellian Platonist believes the predicate good is true of the universe. But unlike in mathematics and logic when having a conversation about the predicate good she cannot help think that such conversation about goodness is usually a conversation about humanity, and not say flying bats or baseballs- unless of course the bats and baseballs in questions were flung at a human by another human with ill intention to cause undue harm. So like her experience of pain and happiness, the predicate good is what happens to a mind, and if it goes beyond that it’s because the predicate good was instantiated by something beyond itself, like celebrating her friend’s birthday.

But a Russellian Platonist is no theist. She’s been unmoved by the best of theistic arguments and she has yet to have sensus divinitas encounter with the Divine. She overheard L S discussing a curious question concerning the necessary nexus between God and the predicate good, and she became extremely interested to hear about how the predicate good shares a special nexus to the Divine which no other class of objects in existence has. She knows that if God did happen to exist that all things would depend on Him, but she’s curious to know what specifically the connection between God and good have that would not also be true of any other object.

So L, please explain to the Russellian Platonist why she must believe God to exist for her to believe the things she does about goodness. I know you gave an argument towards the end of your latest post on this subject, but I’d appreciate it if you could tailor it down a bit more to appeal to our Russellian Platonist’s liking.