[lit-ideas] Re: Moral Imagination
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 08 Oct 2011 20:21:19 -0700
Donal wrote
As to the argument that a problem with a clear-cut answer is less of a
problem than one less 'black and white', it seems to me that ethics is
the field where this is most dubious. If we take it as clear cut that
genocide is morally wrong (for example, murdering people in the
interests of ensuring racial purity) that may not make it less of a
problem when we are forced to go to war to oppose such genocide. In
fact, we might say that - for practical reasons - we should focus our
ethical energies, especially in the public sphere, on the more
clear-cut evils of the world rather than those where the ethics are
much greyer. More generally, going beyond the field of ethics, it is
often important to make sure we get the supposedly clear cut correct,
for if we get the more simple and obvious case wrong we are not likely
to get right more difficult cases [the legal expression "Hard cases
make bad law" may be understood as expressing the wisdom of
starting-out from the apparently straightforward and clear cut before
addressing harder cases].
I agree with most of what Donal says here (leaving open the possibility
of, once enlightened, agreeing or disagreeing with the parts that I
don't now understand). The clear cut, the obvious, cases are those that
make morality intelligible, and they are, moreover, those against which
moral theories are measured: if a moral theory---adhering to
one---allows the innocent to be tortured, e.g., it fails and adhering to
it makes one a moral idiot, or at best a poseur when it comes to ethical
questions. How one should tell one's lover in a sensitive and
understanding way, that it can't go on, may be harder than it is to
judge that Bernard Madoff did a lot of harm to a lot of people, or that
Stalin's 'Moscow Trials' were the work of a villainous man; but this
doesn't mean that the more difficult (the more 'intricate'?) cases are
thereby 'more important.' (I don't believe that there is a sort of moral
'continuum,' although maybe if one reads comic books one will have a
comic book morality, and if one reads Henry James, e.g. The Golden Bowl,
one will have something else.
JLS's deprecatory remarks on the use of "imagination" are also
questionable: for philosophers like Popper "imagination" is a most
important requirement for understanding, in part because what is
understood is not a "given" but a construction, and a theoretical one
at that. Without "imagination", for example, how I can ever know that
genocide is wrong by imagining what it is like to be a victim of it?
If this were really true, then I could not honestly say that I know
genocide to be wrong. It is as useless as a parent's saying to a child,
'How would you like it if Sally pulled /your/ hair?' The child has not
been taught any sort of 'moral lesson in this drama. No more does my
shuddering at descriptions and depictions of life in Auschwitz make that
an important part of my knowing that to subject human beings to such a
life is wrong, was wrong, and will be wrong, no matter what the casuist
may try to say.
Robert Paul,
living a life
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