Kelley wrote:
>
>
> This debate about a "minimal logic,"...is of interest to Apel insofar as it
> refutes the skeptic's claim that it is impossible to ground moral
> principles. But it does not thereby relieve the ethical cognitivist of the
> burden of proof. ... In "argumentation as such" Apel has gained a reference
> point that is as fundamental for the analysis of unavoidable rules as the
> "i think" or "consciousness as such" is for the philosophy of reflection.
>
*****
The foregoing remarks may be summarized as follows: all ethical systems, that is all those ways of thinking which are generally accepted as such, have a basis for judgement which lies outside that which is to be judged. This results in a suspended commitment until the "facts" have been gathered and their relation to the standard for judgment clarified. The evaluation, when it comes, is a matter of conscious choice. Our problem then reduces itself to this: do we want to say of Marxism, where none of these things apply, that it either is or contains an ethical theory? One might, but then the limited sense in which claim is meant would have to be made explicit.
II
I prefer to say that Marx did not have been ethical theory. But how then to explain the approval and disapproval which he expresses in his works, [CLIP]
The logical distinction which is said to exist between facts and values is founded on the belief that it is possible to conceive of one without the other. Given a particular fact, the argument runs, one may without contradiction attach any value to it. The fact itself does not entail a specific value. Historically the view that moral beliefs are contingent has tended to go along with the view that they are also arbitrary. On this model, all judgment depends in the last instance on the independent set of values which each individual, for reasons best known to himself, brings to the situation. The ethical premiss is not only a final arbiter but a mysterious one, defying sociological and even psychological analysis. Though some recent defenders of orthodoxy have sought to muddle the distinction between fact and value with talk of its "context," "function," "real reference," "predisposition," etc., the logical line drawn in conception remains. Yet, if one cannot conceive of anything one chooses to call a fact (because it is an open ended relation) without bringing in evaluative elements (and vice versa), the very problem orthodox thinkers have set out to answer cannot be posed.*****
I'm not sure about the whole of Ollman's thought, but this rejection of ethics seems to me solid.
Carrol