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In their introduction, Betzler and Baumann set out the field of current philosophical research on practical conflicts using a similar framework. See Peter Baumann and Monika Betzler, “Introduction,” in P. Baumann and M. Betzler, eds., Practical Conflicts: New Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 1–26.
J. S. Mill, “Utilitarianism,” in M. Cowling, ed., Selected Writings of John Stuart Mill (New York, Toronto, London: Mentor Books, 1968), pp. 243–304.
This was emphasised by Bernard Williams, “Ethical Consistency” (1965), and especially “Inconsistency and Realism” (1966), in his Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 166–206, see esp. p. 205. Yet, as I elsewhere show, “Ethical Consistency” covertly assumes an objectivist dimension to ambivalence.
Of course, philosophically speaking, this is a contentious claim. The analysis to be proposed cannot leave out the question of the cognitivist and non-cognitivist status of value judgments. In the following paragraphs I argue that value judgments are both like beliefs and like desires and emotions, and that these aspects are mutually constitutive. This prepares us to abandon the expectation that the logic of judgments in their cognitivist capacity would be parallel to the logic of factual belief.
Also compare the objectivist response (where the value applied may be understood as agent-relative) “It is not really important for you” with “it is not really important to you.”
Value judgments are closely connected with factual beliefs as well, but it is part of the present account that they cannot be reduced to it.
Better to say: with opposed conduct and consciousness. I ignore the further complexity introduced by consciousness.
For accounts of ambivalence in terms of confusion, reasons for judgment, and composite judgment that involves apparent opposition, see, respectively, Ruth Barcan Marcus, “Moral Dilemmas and Consistency,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 77 (1980), pp. 121–136; Donald Davidson, “How is Weakness of the Will Possible,” in D. Davidson, ed., Essays on Actions & Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 21–42; and Philippa Foot, “Moral Realism and Moral Dilemma,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 80 (1983), pp. 379–398, section I.
At least, not simply. In typical objectivist ambivalence of value judgment, as we shall see, the judgments undermine one another, but also, in a certain sense, combine.
One finds some acknowledgement of the possibility of opposed beliefs in the work on self-deception (Gardner, Fingarette, Davidson, Pears, and more ambiguously Audi and Bach) and irrationality of belief (Gertler, and more ambiguously Gendler and Schwitzgebel); see also Sommers. However, with the exception of the accounts of Gardner and Fingarette, ambivalence between the poles is excluded. Either the opposed states cannot, for some reason or other, take account of each other (as in Davidson’s and Pears’ split theories, or in Gendler’s automatic alief); or the opposed cognitive states do not undermine each other, because they comprise, rationally or irrationally, states of distinct kinds (Audi, Bach, Gendler, Gertler, Schwitzgebel, Sommers).
Robert Audi, “Self-Deception, Action and Will,” Erkenntis, Vol. 18 (1982), pp. 133–158; Kent Bach, “An Analysis of Self-Deception,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 41 (1981), pp. 351–370; Donald Davidson, “Deception and Division,” in J. Elster, ed., The Multiple Self: Studies in Rationality and Social Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 79–92; Herbert Fingarette, “Self-Deception and the ‘Splitting of the Ego’,” in R. Wollheim and J. Hopkins, eds., Philosophical Essays on Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 212–227; Sebastian Gardner, Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. ch. 1; T. S. Gendler, “Alief and Belief,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 105 (2008), pp. 634–663; Brie Gertler, “Self-Knowledge and the Transparency of Belief,” in A. Hatzimoysis, ed., Self-Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 125–145; David Pears, “Paradoxes and Systems,” in D. Pears, ed., Motivated Irrationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 67–106; Eric Schwitzgebel, “Acting Contrary to our Professed Beliefs, or the Gulf Between Occurrent Judgment and Dispositional Belief,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 91 (2010), pp. 531–553; Fred Sommers, “Dissonant Beliefs,” Analysis, Vol. 69 (2009), pp. 267–274.
In a related form of objectivist ambivalence, instead of two opposed judgments that cast doubt on each other, one such pole combines with a pole of doubt. Thus, one can be ambivalent between judging that Jane is brave and not judging that she is brave, without one’s judging that Jane is not brave.
In what follows I use “belief” and “judgment” to emphasise judgments of fact and value judgments respectively.
I show in “Ambivalence of Value Judgment Cannot Be Deliberated Away” (The Philosophical Forum, Vol. 44 (2013), pp. 395-412) that we cannot generally explicate objectivist ambivalence of value judgment in terms of uncertainty and of deliberation that is directed towards settling it. This paper also explores the positive relations between objectivist ambivalence, deliberation and action.
Or in more general contexts, whereas it may be part of the question what the relevant generalisations are.
Against fixed concepts, against the understanding of beliefs in terms of pregiven concepts, and against the suppositions that our epistemic projects divide between conceptual and empirical pursuits. Names start with the later Wittgenstein for the first point (despite interpretations according to which Wittgensteinian concepts are fixed by context. See my “A Live Language: Concreteness, Openness, Ambivalence,” under review), with Quine and Davidson for the second point, and with Quine and Kuhn for the third.
I borrow this example from Charles Travis’s introduction to his Unshadowed Thought: Representation in Thought and Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
See Amelie Rorty, “A Plea for Ambivalence,” in P. Goldie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 19, for a related investigation.
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), ch. I, § 13.
I also suggested in the former section that the openness of values reflects the character of objectivist value judgments as judgmental engagements, but I don’t make use of this in what follows.
Neither can we suppose that there is in general a right answer to the question whether a concept is inflected in certain way under this or that engagement.
I discuss concept inflection, inflections versus attitudes and conceptual ambivalence in “A Live Language: Concreteness, Openness, Ambivalence,” (under review).
Accordingly, attitudes of concept inflection can be thought as attitudinal versions of the concepts, but also as second-order attitudes towards the concepts.
Foot 1983, op. cit. M. J. Zimmerman, “A Plea for Ambivalence,” Metaphilosophy, Vol. 24 (1993), pp. 382–389. See also Michael Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), chs. 6 & 8. In the context of virtue ethics, see M. C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays of Philosophy and Literature (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, ch. 2, e.g. pp. 65–66). More recent Aristotelian accounts also base ambivalence on the plurality of virtues or values, while giving some role to the mediation of practical reason perhaps undermines the isolation of the opposed judgments from each other. See Kristján Kristjánsson, “The Trouble with Ambivalent Emotions,” Philosophy, Vol. 85 (2010), pp. 485–510 and David Carr, “Virtue, Mixed Emotions and Moral Ambivalence,” Philosophy, Vol. 84 (2009), pp. 31–46.
See Foot 1983, op. cit., p. 396: ought; Zimmerman 1993, op. cit., p. 384: virtuousness.
When typical ambivalence involves two values, each of them can be said to be both applied and denied.
This view is nicely depicted and criticised by Stocker (e.g. ch. 8) and Nussbaum.
That is, to the extent that that she is not concerned, in her ambivalence, about what would be a reward, or what would be expecting a reward.
Williams 1973, op. cit., p. 177, see also pp. 183–184.
I cannot here argue directly against global forms of scepticism, including moral scepticism. For our needs, however, it is enough that a unitary ambivalent judgment that A is v and not v may in principle be right if other judgments may be.
In suitable contexts.
I wish to thank Charles Blattberg, Eran Dorfman, David Enoch, Ben Young and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Razinsky, H. An Outline for Ambivalence of Value Judgment. J Value Inquiry 48, 469–488 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9412-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9412-6