Phil wrote, in reply to John's suggestion that the concept 'theft' might be cross-culturally shifty
What would be assumed, however, is the identification of
a moral quality that transcends historical and ethnographic, something
that would allow for the identification of theft regardless of
contingencies.
Surely, though, the earlier suggestion that there was an air of circularity about the claim that theft was always (morally) 'wrong' because the very term picks out something that is understood to be wrong, isn't entirely mistaken. Take adultery. Is 'adultery' one of those 'purely descriptive' terms (like 'first cousin'), or does it, like 'theft' (as it is claimed) carry with it a sense of opprobrium? Answers may vary; but in any case, the possibility of adultery is contingent upon there being something like the institution of marriage, the relation 'is married to,' and so on. (These too, we've learned vary between ethnic groups and between cultures.) Whether 'the concept adultery presupposes the concept of marriage,' is some sort of weird conceptual truth, I have no idea.
As for theft, surely, just as adultery 'requires' marriage, so theft requires private property, or the notion 'is owned by,' and this, private property, together with a Western capitalist understanding of it, are certainly culture bound.
It is clear that Phil has never been an ethnographer or historian. Either might begin with some notion of theft taken from his or her own place and moment. That notion provides an initial sketch or rough prototype of a topic to be investigated. The investigation could, if pursued far enough, lead in directions far removed from the original notion. The assumption that there is some moral quality that transcends the historic and ethnographic is a working hypothesis. Why not a series of "thefts," analogous to Wittgenstein's games, with family resemblances that link A to B and B to C, while A and C have nothing in common?
Well, there may be such a series but Wittgenstein never thought that because the things that we _already_ call games bore only such resemblances to each other so that not everything we call games shared some essential property, there were no clear cases among them. I'm sure that John doesn't think that Wittgenstein believed that but many people do mistakenly read him as believing that 'no single essential feature among them' somehow demonstrates that there are 'no clear cases among them.'
Robert Paul in a different time zone ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
