COMMENSAL RESPONSES

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Dear Mr Todman,

Your letter to Prof. O'Hear has been passed to me and I was pleased to read of your interest in my article. I also read your comments with interest. Here are some replies to what you wrote.

1. I think I could deal with your mugging example, but there is no need. I can simply use another one, where the action would be morally neutral. (Smith wants a copy of Hume's Treatise: he can get one at the library, etc.)
2. But they wouldn't have called it 'piracy', just because this word entails 'morally wrong'. (In that example - unlike my murder one - it might be debatable whether that practice should be called 'piracy'.)
3. Here and elsewhere you seem to overlook the role of ceteris paribus in moral discourse. Of course you are not supposed to be frugal, keep your promise etc. come what may. But frugality might still be a virtue, from which it would follow that you ought - ceteris paribus - to be frugal.
4. True, frugality need not be a virtue in every culture, but the entailment in your 'proposition' is still valid.
5. Here and elsewhere you show that there are or may be moral differences between societies. But this isn't something that I would want (absurdly) to deny. To claim that certain 'is' descriptions entail 'murder' and that 'murder' entails 'ought not', is not to claim that the same concepts must exist in every society. On the other hand, I would claim this, separately, for certain concepts, such as promising. (Also for truth-telling and for 'ought' itself.) I enclose a copy of my old paper on promising, which might throw some light on this.
6. Well, you may be! But I have no such ambition. Or are you claiming that this is what Hume and the others were after? I doubt whether such an idea even makes sense.
7. According to my argument, someone who could not see the entailments in the cases of murder and promising would indeed be 'irrational'- or incapable of understanding the words in question. So here it would be an 'objective fact' that one ought / ought not, etc.
8. Of course I wasn't using 'voluntary' in that dictionary sense. I chose 'voluntarism' to indicate the will - denying that moral values are 'subject to the will' or, if you prefer, to our choice. If you object to this, you ought to describe a situation in which people do actually make such choices. ('Let's declare frugality to be a virtue' or whatever.)

With best wishes

O. Hanfling