In
philosophy
Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...
, a thick concept (sometimes: ''thick normative concept'', or ''thick evaluative concept'') is a kind of concept that both has a significant degree of descriptive content and is evaluatively loaded. Paradigmatic examples are various
virtue
Virtue ( la, virtus) is moral excellence. A virtue is a trait or quality that is deemed to be morally good and thus is valued as a foundation of principle and good moral being. In other words, it is a behavior that shows high moral standard ...
s and
vice
A vice is a practice, behaviour, or habit generally considered immoral, sinful, criminal, rude, taboo, depraved, degrading, deviant or perverted in the associated society. In more minor usage, vice can refer to a fault, a negative character tra ...
s such as ''courage'', ''cruelty'', ''truthfulness'' and ''kindness''. Courage for example, may be given a rough characterization in descriptive terms as '...opposing danger to promote a valued end'. At the same time, characterizing someone as courageous typically involves expressing a pro-attitude, or a (prima facie) good-making quality – i.e. an evaluative statement.
A middle position
Thick concepts thus seem to occupy a 'middle position' between (thin) descriptive concepts and (thin) evaluative concepts. Descriptive concepts such as ''
water
Water (chemical formula ) is an inorganic, transparent, tasteless, odorless, and nearly colorless chemical substance, which is the main constituent of Earth's hydrosphere and the fluids of all known living organisms (in which it acts as a ...
'', ''
gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile met ...
'', ''
length
Length is a measure of distance. In the International System of Quantities, length is a quantity with dimension distance. In most systems of measurement a base unit for length is chosen, from which all other units are derived. In the Interna ...
'' and ''
mass
Mass is an intrinsic property of a body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the quantity of matter in a physical body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physics. It was found that different atoms and different elementar ...
'' are commonly believed to pick out features of the world rather than provide reasons for action, whereas evaluative concepts such as ''right'' and ''good'' are commonly believed to provide reasons for action rather than picking out genuine features of the world.
This 'double feature' of thick concepts has made them the point of debate between
moral realists
A moral (from Latin ''morālis'') is a message that is conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader, or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim. A ...
and
moral expressivists. Moral realists have argued that the world-guided content and the action-guiding content cannot be usefully separated, indicating that competent use of thick concepts constitutes ethical knowledge. Expressivists, favoring an account of moral values as attitudes projected onto the world, wish to maintain a distinction between the (morally neutral) descriptive features of a thick concept and the evaluative attitudes that typically go with them.
Two accounts of thick concepts
Thick concepts seem to combine the descriptive features of natural concepts such as water with an evaluative content similar to the thin evaluative concepts such as good and right. How are we to understand this ‘combination’? Many theorists treat it as a conjunctive: a thick concept should be analyzed as a conjunction of a descriptive part and an evaluative part which, at least in principle, may be separated. A basic feature of this analysis is thus that the descriptive content of a thick concept may be given in absence of the evaluative content. Returning to the example of courage, ‘…is courageous’ could on this account be analyzed as something along the lines of ‘…opposing danger to promote a valued end’ and ‘this is (prima facie) good-making’. The evaluative part, on this view, may thus be characterized as a ‘prescriptive flag’ attached to the concept. It is, on this view, in principle possible to construct a completely descriptive concept – i.e. without evaluative force – that picked out the same features of the world.
This account of thick concepts has been criticized by other theorists, notably of moral realist persuasion. In their view, the only way to understand a thick concept is to understand the descriptive and evaluative aspects as a whole. The idea is that, for a thick concept, the evaluative aspect is profoundly involved in the practice of using it; one cannot understand a thick concept without also understanding its evaluative point.
[The rationale for calling an action 'cruel' rather than merely describing it in more neutral terms is to tune into this evaluative aspect. Cf. McDowell 1981.] Therefore, descriptive terms cannot completely fill in the ‘along the lines’ of a description such as ‘…opposing danger to promote a valued end’. These descriptions may allow the novice to see the salient features. However a hooking on to the evaluative perspective allows the person to fully understand the 'thick' concept.
Related concepts
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Relevance
Relevance is the concept of one topic being connected to another topic in a way that makes it useful to consider the second topic when considering the first. The concept of relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive sci ...
*
Meaning (semiotics)
In semiotics, the study of sign processes ( semiosis), the meaning of a sign is its place in a sign relation, in other words, the set of roles that the sign occupies within a given sign relation.
This statement holds whether ''sign'' is taken to ...
*
Emotive conjugation
In rhetoric, emotive or emotional conjugation (also known as Russell's conjugation) mimics the form of a grammatical conjugation of an irregular verb to illustrate humans' tendency to describe their own behavior more charitably than the behavior ...
References
Bibliography
Blackburn, S. (1998) ''Ruling Passions'', Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Blomberg, O. (2007) Disentangling The Thick Concept Argument, ''Sats: Nordic Journal of Philosophy'', 8(2), 63–78.
link
Dancy, J. (1995) In Defence of Thick Concepts, in French, Uehling, and Wettstein eds., ''Midwest Studies in Philosophy 20'', Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.
Dancy, J. (2004) ''Ethics without Principles'', Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Elgin, C. (2005) Williams on Truthfulness, ''The Philosophical Quarterly'' 55.
Gibbard, A. (1992) Thick Concepts and Warrant For Feelings, ''Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society'' 66 (Supplementary).
Hooker, B. and Little, M. (2000), ''Moral Particularism'', Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Little, M. (2000) Moral Generalities Revisited, in Hooker and Little 2000.
McDowell, J. (1978) Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives? ''Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume'' 52, 13–29.
McDowell, J. (1979), Virtue and Reason, ''Monist'' 62(3), 331–350.
McDowell, J. (1981), Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following, in ''Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule'', eds. S. Holtzman and C. Leich, London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 141–162.
McNaughton, D. and Rawling, P. (2000) Unprincipled Ethics, in Hooker and Little 2000, 256–275.
Williams, B. (1985) ''Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy'', Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
External links
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*{{Cite encyclopedia, last=Väyrynen, first=Pekka, title=Thick Ethical Concepts, date=2021, url=https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thick-ethical-concepts/, encyclopedia=
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''SEP'') combines an online encyclopedia of philosophy with peer-reviewed publication of original papers in philosophy, freely accessible to Internet users. It is maintained by Stanford University. Eac ...
, editor-last=Zalta, editor-first=Edward N., editor-link=Edward N. Zalta, edition=Spring 2021, publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University
Ethics