It might help to more clearly formulate my thoughts in assigning this reading. Please forgive me if I get a bit personal in what follows. I had thought originally that we would have read the Theaetetus before reading this material. The Theaetetus is a long dialogue which offers answers to the question "what is knowledge." None of the answers are right, however, as the discussion in the dialogue shows. Those answers, however, include what is known as "relativism." In Greek antiquity, Protagoras said "Human beings are the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not." We might reformulate this to say something like: "Whatever appears true is true." or "Whatever appears true to a person is true for that person." In order to imagine a situation where such a claim is true, we have to have a way to explain away many apparently contradictory things. How can it be that something is both X and not-X? etc.
In the end, the Theaetetus argues that all such relativist notions of knowledge are incoherent. One quick and dirty way to see the incoherence is as follows: relativism must hold as its central doctrine something like the claim that "Everything is relative." But if everything is relative, then the very statement that "Everything is relative" is itself relative, as are the meanings of all of its terms. So the very statement of relativism is itself not the same from moment to moment or from person to person. You just cannot state relativism in a coherent fashion. If you think knowledge is possible or that it exists, then you will have a hard time being a thorough-going relativist (there are some things that seem to be relative: taste being one).
We watched a film the other day, Waking Life, which was meant to bring to our minds a quandary: how do we know that the external world exists? How can we have any knowledge of it? I am personally very impressed by such arguments, and have come to the belief that there is no solid basis for any of what I think I know. For a while, I was falling into that nihilistic and horrible abyss called scepticism, in which one despairs of ever being able to know anything and of ever having any meaning in life. But then it occurred to me that faith was the answer. I am not talking about Jesus, Buddha, or Mani. I am talking about something far more personal. If nothing has any solid foundation, then NOTHING itself has no solid foundation. There is as much reason for me to believe that my life has meaning as there is for me to believe that it has NO meaning. I can choose. That liberty is frightening, but exhilarating. Even one of our diehard campus atheists, a philosopher whom I greatly admire, once told me that in the end he cannot prove that god does not exist (what would such a proof look like?). And so, my life has the meaning I GIVE TO IT. And that meaning is based on my FAITH in that meaning and nothing else.
Those sceptics who try to convince me that that eraser I am holding in my hand might not exist are met with my first throwing it at them, and then saying "but on the other hand, it might." I just find the world much more meaningful if I think the external world exists. I also find it much more meaningful if I think that I can actually read ancient Greek texts and understand what they meant, not just what they mean for me, but what they likely meant to the ancient Greeks.
How does this have to do with our course? Well, obviously, these quandaries were originally given form by the ancient Greeks, who are one focus of our course, and they are still being addressed today, another focus of our course. What is more, rationality, another focus of our course, is a tool with which we think about the world: but if there is no world to think about, what are we thinking about? I cannot pretend that we have in any way explored the many answers to that question which thinkers have proposed, but I did think that we needed to at least include an opportunity to think about such things in the framework of our course. It is a significant fact about rationality that rational thought has some content, and much of that content concerns things external to us as individuals.
Now, of all the things in the world, people nowadays are likely to think that ethics is likely to be relative in a strong way. It seems to be like taste. What one society values and thinks is right another society despises and thinks is wrong. I've even attended a museum exhibit about Aztecs who ripped hearts out of living humans and been told by the museum guides that I should not judge other societies, especially because, so the guides claimed, our society does comparable acts. Even if every society forbids murder (I don't know of any that don't, but I would not blink if you found one), still what counts as murder varies, and so saying that "Every society forbids murder" does not have a fixed meaning from society to society, and so it is relative. Nozick suggests at one point that there are in fact some ethical universals such as "Every society forbids some kinds of killing," but he points out that such universals are not helpful in trying to find an objective basis for ethics. So it seems that we are at a loss when it comes to describing and justifying an objective basis for the ethics of our society.
And even between individuals within the same society, even within the same group in a society, ethics seems to be relative.
A few preliminary things should be explained before we dive into Nozick.
First, he says at various points that you cannot get from "is" to "ought." This is an old maxim of philosophy originated by Hume, I believe. The idea is that the facts of the matter, i.e. how we are structured, what our world is like, can NEVER logically lead to a statement of the form, "Therefore, we OUGHT to do X." So there is no statement "This is a fact and that is a fact" that can lead to "Therefore, we OUGHT to ..." In other words, there can be no direct logical link between factual claims and normative claims. Facts cannot be the objective basis for ethics.
Now, "normative" may not be a term you throw around easily. A norm is (quoting Merriam-Webster's unabridged) "an ideal standard binding upon the members of a group and serving to guide, control, or regulate proper and acceptable behavior." When philosophers talk of normative statements, they mean that the statement in question includes an evaluation and or a prescription. By prescription is meant something that tells you what to do, that prescribes.
What Nozick is trying to do, in general, is to DEscribe ethics without using evaluative or prescriptive notions. He wants to say what ethics IS, and he will occasionally sidle up to notions of OUGHT, but tries to stay well clear of them in general. He will ultimately claim not that there definitely is an objectivity to ethics, but rather that there are strong parallels between the situation in ethics and the situation in "factual matters," and that those parallels give us grounds for hope that ethics is as amenable to something like objectivity as factual matters are.
In his effort to describe what ethics is, Nozick wants to avoid using a description that is itself ethical. By that, he means that defining ethics as "the rules of right and wrong" would use ethical terms in the very definition.
He starts from a big assumption, namely that ethics is coordination of interpersonal actions to mutual benefit (beyond what evolutionarily instilled desires of behavior achieves). That is its function. It may have other functions, but that is THE function that gives rise to ethics. He wants us to see that even some animals that have no ethics have ways fulfill this function (symbiosis), and so it is not itself an ethical function (i.e. he is describing, not prescribing, what he thinks ethics is). Even if you think ethics is something else, he may still be describing something that you think makes sense to think about.
According to this assumption, ethics is a way to coordinate our actions vis-a-vis others to successfully achieve our goals, whereas our factual beliefs are a way to coordinate our actions vis-a-vis the world to achieve our goals. What is more, in order to be ethical, one has to be self-aware: people must know that their actions are interconnected for it to be ethics.
His definition of ethics (P248) is "the most weighty principles or values concerning interpersonal relations (or relations of self and other, including self and animals, or self and environment) that mandate behavior that may be opposed to one's desires of the moment, where these principles or values are not backed solely (or predominantly) by the consideration that other people will punish you if you deviate."
Nozick spends a good deal of time exploring the nature of norms and the possibility that one ethics is "better" than another.
Nozick does propose a norm for ethics (P. 259). He proposes that the widest voluntary cooperation to mutual benefit be mandatory and prohibits involuntary interactions that are not to mutual benefit (unless these are in response to violations of cooperation to mutual benefit: i.e. punishment is OK). He also thinks it is desirable to extent the realm of people who benefit from coordination and cooperation. He calls such extensions moral progress. He is not sure, however, that moral progress is a matter of a society's finally realizing what was true all along (e.g. that slavery is not really conducive to mutual benefit, vel sim.). HE thinks that because the particularities of a given historical situation may make extending the realm suboptimal. He also thinks that moral progress can be effected by shrinking the domain of mandatory morality. What he has in mind here is the idea that it is moral progress to stop mandating religious conformity, or a certain sexuality, for example.
In his exploration of evolutionarily instilled phenomena, he suggests that we have a normativity module. This module in our DNA makes us the sort of animal that follows rules. We are predisposed to attach "oughts" to things. He also thinks that we have an evaluation module: we are predisposed to evaluate things consciously. Of course, we share pleasure and pain modules and desires, wants and preference modules with animals. But our normativity and evaluation modules seem to be more uniquely human. These four modules overlap sometimes and are interlinked in various ways: repeated evaluation of particulars might give rise to a general evaluation, which might, in concert with other such evaluations, give rise to an evaluation of evaluations. Evaluations can arise from desires, but they can also exert pressure on desires. Evaluation can be used to evaluate norms, and can lead to new norms.
As to ethical matters that do not seem to be for mutual benefit (action towards fetuses, animals, future generations), Nozick suggests that they do not obviate the original function of ethics (coordination of interpersonal action for mutual benefit). But once ethics has arisen, it may acquire many functions, which might conflict. Hence there may be a need to evaluate those functions and reform ethics. The original function may be cycled out.
Nozick winds up his long and circuitous discussion of ethics with a conclusion that ethics has sufficient relevant parallels to factual beliefs that it makes sense to talk about a kind of objectivity in ethics.
In factual beliefs, he claims, objectivity is rooted in their statistical success in achieving goals in our actions. That success is rooted in what he calls a "truth property." That is, the thing which underlies and explains the success. One candidate, a popular one, for that thing is correspondence to actual facts. Ethics might themselves be true insofar as they contain that truth property, whatever it is. Or perhaps they contain some further property that is analogous to that truth property. He suggests that ethical statements are acted on for goals (mutual benefit). Insofar as they are serviceable for achieving that goal (i.e. successful in achieving the goal), they are "true." So serviceability might be that further property analogous to the truth property of factual statements.
"We may generalize the notion of the truth property of beliefs to speak of the effectiveness property of beliefs. Their effectiveness property is the property that explains their effectiveness in carrying our their function. That function is what defines the general notion of truth and marks the value of holding true beliefs." P. 286
Objectiveness, for Nozick, is comprised of 1) accessibility from different angles; 2) "it is or can be interpersonally agreed to; and (3) it holds independently of the beliefs and experiences of the observer or thinker." He identifies a fourth property of objective truth: it is invariant under all admissible transformations. This fourth property is what underlies and explains the first three.
Objectivity also involves "objectivity characteristics," which include in factual beliefs, being arrived at by a process that eliminates biases towards which way the truth might turn out, uses evidence, dispassionately evaluates that evidence, etc.
So what ethics needs to be objective is 1) a function that can be evaluated in terms of fulfilment or nonfulfilment (corresponding to the function of factual beliefs to achieve goals successfully), 2) an effectiveness property (i.e. a property that underlies and explains the success in 1)), 3) transformations shared by ethical statements under which they do not vary, 4) a reliable process for arriving at statements that exhibit 2), 5) objectivity characteristics. (partially quoted, partially paraphrased from P. 287: I do not fully understand the difference between 4 and 5)
Ethics certainly has distancing from personal biases, which corresponds to 4). Ethical decisions should be made by or as if by someone who does not know what side of the decision s/he will fall in. John Rawls speaks of a "Veil of ignorance."
Ethics also involve invariance under transformations. The Golden Rule. An action is right/wrong only if it is right/wrong for any similar person in similar circumstances. This corresponds to 3) above.
Ethics has a function (identified above: coordination of actions for mutual benefit), and effectiveness and efficiency can be evaluated. That corresponds to 1), and 2) is implied by it.
In factual truth, in order to know that something is objective, intersubjective agreement is needed on the way to seeing that something is objective truth. Hence intersubjective agreement is epistemologically prior. But the property which makes intersubjective agreement possible and explains it is invariance. Thus invariance is ontologically prior.
In ethics, intersubjective agreement is also the way to seeing that something is ethically true (reflective equilibrium is too). But that is only possible because there is an effectiveness property.
There seems to be an irreducible dissimilarity between ethical statements and factual statements. Namely, it will often be the case that following an ethical norm in a particular situation is actually counterproductive to successful achievement of the goal of ethics. Nozick thinks that factual beliefs have similar problems (e.g. if you believe you are better than you actually are, you tend to achieve more, and so believing a factual falsity might lead to higher success in achieving action goals). Thus it is not possible within the theory of factual beliefs to conclusively argue that one should be factual. And so too in ethics, it is impossible to conclusively argue that one should be ethical.