David Cockburn

Lars Hertzberg suggests that it is obvious that “getting clear about the sense of our moral utterances is a matter of getting clear about the nature of the interchanges to which they belong”. The paper explores the significance of this through illustrations, drawn from Hertzberg’s work, of the importance of paying proper attention to two ranges of variation in such interchanges: first, to the distinctions between first, second and third person contexts of discussion and, second, to those between tenses, between, for example, discussions of what she should do and of what she should have done. Hertzberg brings out the importance of these distinctions through critical discussion of themes in Williams, Winch and Anscombe. In an extended discussion of an example of his own, Hertzberg speaks of the temptation “to think that we could, in some sense, take part in the very same discussion that Horthy may have carried out with his advisers, or with his family, or with himself, in wrestling with the issue” of what he should have done. A parallel is drawn with philosophical treatments of fatalism, where differences in the practical relations in which individuals stand to particular actions tend to be overlooked.

Lars Hertzberg suggests that it is obvious that “getting clear about the sense of our moral utterances is a matter of getting clear about the nature of the interchanges to which they belong”. The paper explores the significance of this through illustrations, drawn from Hertzberg’s work, of the importance of paying proper attention to two ranges of variation in such interchanges: first, to the distinctions between first, second and third person contexts of discussion and, second, to those between tenses, between, for example, discussions of what she should do and of what she should have done. Hertzberg brings out the importance of these distinctions through critical discussion of themes in Williams, Winch and Anscombe. In an extended discussion of an example of his own, Hertzberg speaks of the temptation “to think that we could, in some sense, take part in the very same discussion that Horthy may have carried out with his advisers, or with his family, or with himself, in wrestling with the issue” of what he should have done. A parallel is drawn with philosophical treatments of fatalism, where differences in the practical relations in which individuals stand to particular actions tend to be overlooked.

Einstein's acknowledgement of a serious debt to Hume should alert us to central philosophical—in the first instance, epistemological—aspects of his thinking. We see this in his emphasis on difficulties—initially raised by the discovery that light has a finite speed—in establishing the times of distant happenings. But common articulations in everyday language of the claims of Special Relativity, along with criticisms or corrections of our everyday thought and talk, reflect misconstruals of those. These misconstruals are grounded in two, related, philosophical preconceptions: Cartesian individualism and an aspiration to a view of reality that is free from the contingencies of our nature. When we acknowledge the social dimension of our thought and talk about time, and that what is called for is a proper acknowledgement of those contingencies (cf Wittgenstein), the reports of the physicists may appear in a different light.

There are significant numbers of well-documented cases of the following general kind. At the age of 3 or 4 a child starts to make claims about his past which clearly do not correspond to anything that has happened in his present life. He claims to remember living in a certain place, doing certain things, being with certain people, and so on. It is then found that these memory claims fit the life of a person who died shortly before the child was born. The accuracy of the memory claims is striking and there seems to be no possible normal explanation of this. The child also has certain character traits, interests and skills which correspond closely to those of the one who died; and, perhaps, a physical characteristic, such as a birthmark or wound, which closely resembles a characteristic of the earlier individual.

‘Only of a living human being and what resembles a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’. 1 ‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul’. Anyone who believes that Wittgenstein's remarks here embody important truths has quite a bit of explaining to do. What needs to be explained is why it is that enormous numbers of people, people who have never had the chance to be corrupted by reading Descartes or Dennett, are willing, with only the slightest prompting, to speak in ways which appear to conflict dramatically with Wittgenstein's thought. Many people appear to find no difficulty at all in the idea that we could ascribe thoughts, sensations, emotions and so on to things which in no way resemble or behave like a living human being—for example to disembodied ‘minds’ or ‘souls’ or disembodied brains floating in tanks. And with a little more pressing many will agree that it is never to the living human being that these states are, strictly speaking, correctly ascribed; but, rather, to one part of the living human being—the brain, for example. Now if this incredibly widespread tendency is the expression of confusion then we need an explanation of its existence. We need this partly because without it it will be difficult to undermine the tendency; and partly because we might expect that such a widespread tendency is a distortion of some truth.

In its treatment of capital punishment Amnesty International gives a central place to the suffering of the prisoner. Two quite distinct forms of suffering are relevant here. There is the psychological anguish of the person awaiting execution; and there is the physical suffering which may be involved in the execution itself. It is suggested that if we reflect clearly on this suffering we will conclude that the death penalty involves cruelty of a kind which makes it quite unacceptable. It is to be condemned on the same ground as torture is to be condemned: on the ground, that is, that it involves the infliction of an unacceptable degree of suffering.

We may think of the notion of “trust” primarily in epistemological terms or, alternatively, primarily in ethical terms. These different ways of thinking of trust are linked with different ways of picturing language, and my relation to the words of another. While an analogy with an individual continuing an arithmetical series has had a central place in discussions of language originating from Wittgenstein, Rush Rhees suggests that conversation provides a better model for thinking about language. Linking this with Knud Løgstrup’s suggestion that “In its basic sense trust is essential to every conversation”, the paper develops the idea of speech as fundamentally a form of contact between human beings. With that, the constraints on which we need to focus if we are to grasp the nature of conversation are not, as in Grice’s influential treatment, maxims whose observance will aid the pursuit of certain general human ends. The relevant constraints are, rather, limits on our goal-directed activity: limits that are fundamental to our relations with others. It is within this framework that we must understand the form of “trust” that is central to conversation.

The paper is a criticism of the idea that a notion of has a significant role to play in the attempt to understand how the experience of change is possible. Discussion of such experience must give a significant place to its public and private manifestations. How should we picture the relationship between the experience of change and its manifestations? While we cannot identify these, we need not conclude that is something distinct from any of its public or private manifestations. With that, we cannot grasp how time can be present in consciousness without reference to the fact that consciousness is located in time.

The final chapter of Peter Winch's book on Simone Weil discusses Weil's idea of supernatural virtue. Weil uses this language in connection with certain exceptional actions: actions of a kind which are for most of us, most of the time, simply impossible. She is particularly struck by cases in which someone refrains from exercising a power which they have over another: in which, for example, someone refrains from killing or enslaving an enemy who has grievously harmed him and who is now at his mercy. We could also speak of cases in which someone helps an enemy, or a stranger, at very real cost, or risk, to himself. In such cases Weil speaks of the ‘supernatural’ as being at work.