Virginia Held
...?City University of New York ?
When I first read Science and the Theory of Value many years ago, I was surprised and pleased to discover how much closer my own developing views were to Peter Caws' than to most of the other work in ethics I was reading. I shared what I took to be his views that:
1) Science and ethics are different but analogous. ?2) Both can make progress. Thus we should not accept comparisons suggesting that while science marches forward piling up knowledge, ethics can only offer the venting of feelings, or reportage on attitudes whether justified or not. ?3) Both science and ethics are based on experience. ?4) Ethics is distinctively normative, it is not itself science.
I shared these views then (if I have interpreted his views correctly) and still do. But I have found it amazingly difficult in the years since to convey these positions on ethics clearly and to argue for them convincingly.
When I argue that ethics is based on experience, listeners conclude that I am an ethical naturalist who thinks ethics and science are both empirical. But I am definitely not an ethical naturalist, since I think ethics is distinctively normative not descriptive. It addresses questions about what we ought to do and be, not what is in fact the case, though the latter findings are certainly relevant to our moral evaluations. But as I argue the non-naturalist case, listeners then do not see how ethics can be connected to experience, and they conclude I must be an intuitionist or rationalist about ethics. But I would not describe myself this way.
As I see it, experience is not just the sensory perception of the empiricists. It includes moral experience. And then moral theory can in a meaningful way be tested against such experience, and can be built upon it.
Moral experience is the experience of consciously choosing to act, or to refrain from acting, on...
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