[lit-ideas] Re: "A right and an obligation"
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 7 Apr 2013 00:50:09 -0400 (EDT)
In a message dated 4/7/2013 2:24:07 A.M. UTC-02, rpaul@xxxxxxxx quotes
someone's statement:
"It may require some Griceian reformulation or symbolisation, in terms of
operators, of the deontic kind, of the volitive (conative, desiderative)
type"
and writes:
>I was just thinking that very thing!
Well, yes. For consider some of R. Paul's examples, below.
R. Paul is pulling, metaphorically, my leg, because, like Grice, he thinks
that formalisation can only obscure a problem, especially when you right
translucid prose as R. Paul and Grice do.
But yet.
R. Paul:
"I'm not clear about the relative badness of the two. Surely, no country
wants to be governed by a bad [person] (corrupt, ineffectual,
megalomaniacal sex
abuser)"
I'm not sure this is easy to symbolise, for R. Paul, like Grice, is using
'want' as a conative, volitive, operator, as applied to a collective unity
(a country). "What the country wants" as opposed to really willing or
wanting agents do.
"Want" is perhaps a strange Scandinavian word: "the floor needs sweeping",
"the floor wants sweeping". Surely the floor has no right and obligations
which are grounded, for people like Grice and Prichard ("does morality rest
on a mistake -- on interest?") in things like desires, but never _wants_.
"but you say that neither of the candidates 'seems quite right,'
which is hardly damning criticism. (A painting hung upside down, vs. one
whose frame needs just a touch to set it straight.) So, suppose that a
totally corrupt person were running against someone whose only 'flaw'
was that he had a very bad memory and sometimes had trouble recalling
what he'd just said. Here there would seem to be a difference that
mattered."
Exactly.
R. Pau goes on:
"Surely that one has a right to do something does not entail that one is
under an obligation to do it; this could hardly be a general principle.
In the American South before the War Between the States, certain people
had a right to own slaves. They did not, simply in virtue of this right,
have an obligation to own slaves. Moral worth is not coextensive with
legality. The Nuremberg laws surely reveal this."
While I applaud the use of subscripts here: 'moral right', 'legal right',
i.e. right-m, right-l, I'm not sure this solves the paradox proposed by Omar
("surely if I have a right NOT do it, I cannot be damned for failing an
obligation to do it" -- paraphrasing him.
In the case of the slave-owing agent, the use of "D" for desire may help.
"Certain people had a right to own slaves".
Again, the use of 'right' here may need a specification of context. Call
him "Jones".
Jones had a right to own slaves.
Hart, following Grice, calls this an external 'right'. There is an
external, legalistic, reading, where it makes sense to say that
Jones had a right-l to own slaves.
This is yet different from
Jones had a right-m to own slaves (where 'm' is moral). Aristotle may
disagree. But then again, it is not yet clear how this relates to 'desire'.
Baker, like Grice, think that 'ought' reduces or cashes out in 'desire' in
an iterative way.
What Jones desires may not matter, but a rational agent cannot DESIRE to
DESIRE what is morally impermissible. Grice turns this into a biconditional,
so that duty indeed cashes out in a rational agent's iterated desire that
grounds action A. It is a sort of universalisability canon for actions.
"Rained all day in this corner of Northwestern Oregon. It's OK with the
local government if I rake the fallen cherry petals in my yard; but
I won't be fined or arrested if I don't."
I think Grice discusses this in terms of 'indifference', which he relates
to 'truth-value gaps' in alethic logic. Surely, 'the king of France is not
bald', when there is no King of France, is TRUE rather than
neither-true-nor-false, as Strawson wanted. And similarly, 'the king of France
is bald' is
FALSE under the same circumstances.
Similarly, Grice hods, in "Aspects of reason", that one danger of extended
deontic formalisms is the inability to understand scenarios, as that
proposed by R. Paul above, where, things are "OK with the local government"
(or
my moral consciousness), but "I won't be fined or arrested if I don't" (nor
criticised by my moral consciousness, again).
Cheers,
Speranza
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