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Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Are law schools like Hawaii?
... Or other island ecosystems where weird species thrive, isolated from predators that would otherwise exterminate them?
The thought occurs to me because I have encountered repeatedly in the law reviews the statement that it is a fallacy to derive an 'ought' sentence from an 'is' sentence -- citing (who else) David Hume. There is a post-Hume literature out there on the relationship between "is" and "ought" statements, and the notion that one can adequately establish that facts and norms are independent of each other by citing Hume's famous passage from the Treatise is almost as odd as the notion that one could establish that the universe is filled with ether by citing Isaac Newton.
But my perplexity vanishes when I realize that I live in an isolated eco-system where the invasive species of modern philosophy has made but modest inroads. So the local fauna can subsist on David Hume, blithely unaffected by contemporary literature (see, e.g., Hilary Putnam) suggesting that the alleged gulf between 'is' and 'ought' statements is nonsense. It is like dwelling on the Big Island before the mongoose arrived, surrounded by fat, happy Nene Geese waddling about, free from the anxiety of the faster, sharper predators dwelling a few hundred yards away across the campus.
Being a fat, happy Nene Goose myself, I am relieved and gratified by this idyllic existence. But surely our days are numbered?
Posted by Rick Hills on May 27, 2008 at 12:40 PM | Permalink
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Comments
Could you offer us a few cites to the contemporary literature on that point? Thanks in advance.
Posted by: curious | May 27, 2008 2:35:04 PM
Succumbing here to "[my] tiresome habit of crafting each blog comment into a relentlessly dull bibliography that does little more than try to invoke authority in the place of arguments," I'll offer a few cites on the fact/value distinction and then of course Rick can add his own material:
Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Kupperman, Joel. Value...And What Follows. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Lynch, Michael P. Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
Mulhall, Stephen. ‘Misplacing Freedom, Displacing the Imagination: Cavell and Murdoch on the Fact/Value Distinction,’ in Anthony O’Hear, ed. Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 255-277.
Murdoch, Iris. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Penguin, 1993.
Nozick, Robert. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Putnam, Hilary (James Conant, ed.). Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Rescher, Nicholas. Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Sen, Amartya. On Ethics and Economics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1988.
While their entire book is relevant to this topic with regard to economics, see in particular the appendix, "How Could Ethics Matter to Economics?" in Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson, Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006 ed.
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | May 27, 2008 3:12:11 PM
I should have also mentioned that Larry Solum has a helpful "Fact and Value" entry in his wonderful Legal Theory Lexicon: http://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2008/02/legal-theory--2.html
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | May 27, 2008 3:41:35 PM
Surely you realize that the entirety of academia is one big Hawaii - where else can one engage, all too seriously, in such esoteric, and ultimately ridiculous discussions? And get paid for it?
Seriously - as someone who left academia because the social skills were underveloped and the egos were overinflated, this is a perfect example of why! Bubble!
Posted by: academic-turned-lawyer | May 27, 2008 9:28:31 PM
Prof. Hills,
Unfortunately, I think the days of the Nene Geese are indeed numbered, and I think the problem may simply be one of time, combined with the structure of traditional education. Hume is part of the canon - by the time you're in law school, you've probably read a little Hume, a little Kant, etc., etc. Who you probably haven't read is Hilary Putnam. Because unless you focused on a particular area of philosophy in your studies, you probably didn't get to much contemporary philosophy, and if you did, it was likely a limited set.
The great part about the classics is that they're relevant in many fields (My own experience with Hume, for example, is more informed by how his theories of motivation relate to empirical evidence about the structure of the human brain. These studies, I must admit, never got me to Hilary Putnam, though I'm open to the idea that they should have). But the time has long since passed when a single person could write a "Treatise on Human Nature" and not be laughed at for his presumption. Today, I imagine it's hard enough keeping up on the relevant literature in your speciality, let alone outside it. My view of academia (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is that it seems to be more a hub-and-spoke system of knowledge than a spiderweb. And even if it is a spiderweb, no person has the ability to master anything more than a small section of it.
However, I might be reading your complaint too broadly. To take your example of Isaac Newton, I did pretty well in college physics, but I don't know much more than the very basics about relativity or quantum mechanics. However, my physics professors were sure to note that Einstein existed, and so I don't go spouting Newton as the final authority on the matter. If the problem is simply that professors do not tell their undergraduates that Hume is not the final word on the is-ought problem, then that is a smaller issue, and one that is correctable.
Posted by: Matt | May 28, 2008 2:08:04 AM
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