[lit-ideas] Socratic Congress
- From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 14:22:55 -0230
My session at the Congress in Ottawa went very nicely and there were some
interesting and thought-provoking questions from the audience. (Only 3 of the
40 odd people in attendance walked out prior to my summation and conclusions.)
However, a frequently made objection to my Habermasian claim that both moral
justification and moral rightness are constituted by mutual agreement under
conditions of discourse (symmetry and reciprocity) was that i.e., what makes
slavery wrong, or torturing innocents wrong, or boiling babies wrong, is not
that these respective maxims could not attain agreement under conditions of
discourse, but rather that there was something intrinsically wrong about such
maxims and actions. Moral persons, this is to say, just don't do such things.
And if they ask themselves whether they're justified in not performing such
acts, their moral dispositions are eo ipso in question due to asking "one
question too many" as Bernie Williams was wont to say.
I have yet to find a cogent account of how moral wrongness or rightness can be
"intrinsic" to a maxim or action and I continue to believe that proponents of
this idea are deluded by a kind of unsubstantiated metaphysics that both
democracy and post-metaphysical moral epistemology are justified in sternly
eschewing.
However, the ubiquitousness of this critique makes me wonder if I'm missing
something here. Anyone?
Moral anti-realism forever,
Walter O
MUN
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
