If philosophy does not consist in a definite subject matter, but consists rather in a style of talking, then it does not provide knowledge, it only influences behavior. It is a rhetorical technique. I believe that this would not be philosophy. As such, I believe that philosophy has a definite subject matter, and provides knowledge about it.
I also believe that humans only have their reason and their senses, and are not provided with any additional faculties for obtaining knowledge. As such, all disagreement about a matter of knowledge can be settled with reason and the senses. If two persons disagree, then they must either have witnessed very different sensations in their experience, or at least one of them is being irrational to at least some extent. There is no third possibility, and usually the first one is excluded very quickly, which leaves the second. This is how disagreements happen in the most respected sciences.
So, philosophical ethics, if there is such a thing, must be what provides knowledge about the nature of good behavior. As with other matters of knowledge, any disagreement about it must be able to be settled with reason and the senses. Arguments about disagreements must be able to come to the point where at least one person’s belief is clearly shown to come from that person’s being irrational to at least some extent, or, if some matter of fact is relevant to the case, from their lacking some relevant sense experience.
This is the only kind of “winning an argument” that philosophy provides, the kind where your opponent is shown to be irrational. After he is shown to be irrational, your opponent may well decide that he prefers, in any event, to be irrational in this case, and that being rational is overrated anyway, and that, after all, it would be unkind of you to press him to behave rationally by accepting the conclusions that you defend, and so on. Any answer to this can only come from rhetoric; philosophy has done its job.
I believe, additionally, that philosophical argument is the only rational mode of engagement, in the sense that all other means of affecting behaviors and ideas do not work by means of reason, but work only by means of infra-rational elements in humanity, such as our emotions and instincts. I believe, further, that it cannot be rational to attempt to seek a different mode of engagement, if philosophical argument is available. It follows that any behaviors are irrational if they must lead to disengagement from philosophical argument. It is, therefore, irrational to make your good judgment suspect by arguing fallaciously, as well as to make your good faith suspect by deliberately lying within the argument, together with any other behaviors that would disrupt an argument and make it clearly unwise to continue.
From this analysis, a restriction follows about what sorts of behaviors can be defensible under philosophical ethics. However much, from the point of view of some nation’s creed, it may be right to lie, or to argue fallaciously within an argument, such a point of view cannot, nevertheless, be defended in philosophical argument. For to defend, in philosophical argument, that such behavior is right, is to make your good faith and your good judgment suspect, and therefore to endanger your participation in the only rational mode of engagement, and therefore to act irrationally, and therefore to show yourself to be irrational, and therefore to “lose the argument”, by the philosophical criterion. Once you are shown to be irrational, philosophy’s work is done.
I believe, finally, as part of my analysis of the practice of philosophical argument as it actually occurs, that it is right to break off an argument, if you cannot be sure that your opponent is seeking knowledge, such as is provided by a philosophical discipline such as philosophical ethics is supposed here to be, or by any other respected science. If it is shown that your opponent might be seeking something else above knowledge, such as entertainment, or a change in your behavior, or any ulterior motive, then there is also no certainty about his continuing to follow the practices of philosophical argument that secure it as a rational enterprise. He may lie to you, or make deliberate fallacies. He can no longer be thought of as taking part in a rational mode of engagement.
As such, it is part of the minimum doctrines defensible under philosophical ethics that, the only intrinsically valuable thing, which must be sought after above all others in all circumstances, is knowledge, or a kind of knowledge. For if you defend that anything else may always be sought above knowledge, then you put your rational engagement into doubt. And if you defend that it is sometimes, in some circumstances, a good behavior to seek something other than knowledge, then you also put your rational engagement into doubt, for your opponent cannot be sure that you are not about to believe yourself to be in such a circumstance.
Such then, is the minimum nature of philosophical ethics, as I see it. I believe that all other moral rules are deducible from these basic propositions, or that, at any rate, no moral rules are defensible philosophically that disagree with these, and there is no other basis for philosophical ethics under the conception here outlined, so that, it is by these criteria that ethics must stand or fall. All other approaches to ethics, such as intuitionism and so on, must be clearly seen to disagree with the approach to philosophical ethics that I have outlined in my first three paragraphs; if they disagree only with further points, I can only say that they hold beliefs about the general nature of philosophical argument that I think are implausible.
This approach is a kind of discourse ethics.
