[lit-ideas] FW: Re: The universal applicability of moral judgments -- what is ethics about?
- From: Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2008 21:58:05 +0000
Walter writes:
> In order to ascertain whether Eric's T claim is
> correct, we do indeed need to know what the words in the claim mean. But it is
> not my job to legislate the meanings of words for others. Eric's claim that
> there is a necessary relationship, not simply a contingent and adventitious
> relationship, between the possibility of understanding a moral judgement and
> that judgement's reference to real interactions constitutes a T claim. If Eric
> would articulate the meanings of the words in his claim, we may all examine
> whether the claim is correct.
Perhaps I am just being dense, but I think Walter is evading my point here.
The
question was whether I was making a transcendental claim when
I asserted that to understand a moral judgment one had to understand how its
words refer to real human interactions. My answer was no.
In making that answer, I took the word 'claim' to mean
'assertion which may be true or false', so I was not assuming that for
a transcendental claim to be transcendental it also had to be true.
I
did assert that for a transcendental claim to be true it must (successfully)
make a universal
assertion, i.e. one that applies to all things of the sort referred to
by the words used in the claim.
I went on to ask whether the terms of my assertion had anything remotely like
the kind of clarity required for a statement composed from them to warrant the
label 'universal'.
I might have said this: I think it would be irresponsible of me to claim that
an assertion about understanding moral judgments could possibly have the
clarity that would be required to call it 'universal'. I do not believe that
any rational intelligence could resolve that lack of clarity because I think
that the notions of 'understanding' and 'moral judgment' are intrinsically
unclear.
In my book, that is not a pejorative. A fog bank has uncertain boundaries and
an amorphous shape; any claim to be clear about the boundaries of a fog bank or
its shape would be at least disingenuous. That doesn't mean we can't
meaningfully talk about whether there is fog in the neighborhood.
> snip (Sentences deleted for later examination.)
> >
> > But I would submit that the ambition of being clear about these is forlorn.
> > People have been arguing for a long time about the nature of these things,
> > and we're unlikely to get a firm resolution on them any time soon.
>
> --------------> Eric's true report regarding historical and cultural
> disagreements on what concepts mean is irrelevant to the question of what HE
> means in making the claim that he made. Let us hear what Eric himself
> understands the words to mean and then we may be in a position to assess the
> validity of HIS claim. (If I were interested in what Sarah Pail believed
> "moral
> judgement" to mean, I'd ask her.)
>
> Sorry, but these are the principles of scholarship I am governed by. If you
> don't like them, I have others.
My point about the historical disagreement about the nature of understanding
and judgment was intended as a gesture towards what I think is the intrinsic
lack of clarity that the terms of my assertion have, not as evidence or
justification for anything.
In response to Walter's request, I think, for example, that "understand" is a
word a competent English-speaking humans might use to indicate that he or she
believed he or she was following another's story, was seeing the same landscape
of possibilities, or otherwise might have shared expectations about what else
could reasonably said about the subject, at least to some extent.
Such a concept, so understood, is intrinsically vague. One might be able to
recognize instances of understanding from it, but one would by no means be
confident one could recognize all instances.
Therefore a responsible attempt to make a universal assertion with such a
concept would require one to have a clear explanation of how to exclude the
uncertain cases, i.e. so that for each case of 'understanding' there would be
at least the possibility of there being no question as to whether the assertion
applied.
But I have no such explanation for my use of 'understand' in my assertion, so I
do not think I was making a universal assertion (whatever its form), and
therefore I do not think I was making a transcendental one either.
> --------> I see. We're back to the "possible/real" matter. Inquiry into
> conditions of possibility do not require or entail the existence of the
> discourse or competence being examined. T inquiry asks: How is P possible?
> Whether P exists or not is not a relevant question. Nor is whether a condition
> identified as necessary for the possibility of a competence or discourse
> itself
> is real. (Whether we really are free beings is not a question asked by a
> human
> being making a decision on a course of action. The facticity of human being
> requires that I choose, right here and now, between the Oban and the
> Cragganmore. Yes, life is hard; but think of the alternative.)
Actually, I think Walter doesn't see what I was getting at. I was not making
the mistake about possible/real that he attributes to me. I was saying that
for there to be a universal assertion (a pre-requisite, as I understand it, to
there being a transcendental assertion), it must be possible to assert some
form of consistency -- the words' categories must apply to something other than
a single unique instance otherwise the distinctions universal/particular and
transcendental/empirical lose their significance.
The things referred to by the terms in which one explains the conditions of the
possibility of P must be immutable in some sense, else one has not explained
the conditions of possibility, one has merely described yet another contingency.
>
> > Some may find that simply obvious; I'm not so sure.
> >
> > In any case, I am deeply skeptical that any assertion like mine, that is any
> > assertion about such human matters as rendering moral judgments, for
> > example,
> > can be made universal in the sense needed to underwrite them being
> > 'transcendental' in Walter's sense.
>
> ---------------> Again, moral judgements are not themselves transcendental. A
> moral judgement is a prescriptive claim about the obligations we have to
> ourselves and others strictly in virtue of our shared humanity as rationally
> autonomous beings. THAT moral judgements make claims to universality and
> validity is a T claim. (And here we shouldn't make mention of the fact that
> Sarah Pailin may have a different understanding of
> "morality." That's peechy-keen and honkey-dorey (sp?). She should do her own T
> analysis on what she understands morality to involve, if only to conclude with
> the T claim that no moral judgement is universally valid and applicable,
> because moral judgements just ain't like that.)
I never said moral judgments are transcendental; what I said was that putative
transcendental claims *about* moral judgments fail to meet what I believe would
or should be the prerequisites for successfully making transcendental claims.
I said this because I think that in order to say anything about moral judgments
one ends up using intractably vague terms, i.e. terms whose boundaries of
application are as uncertain as the boundaries of a fog bank. In addition, I
believe that to use such terms responsibly in a putatively universal statement
one must eliminate the uncertainties of their applicability, i.e. basically
turn them into terms with clear boundaries.
I do not believe this is possible in the case of such terms as "understand",
"moral judgment", "words" and "real human situations" and therefore I do not
believe that transcendental things can be successfully said about the things to
which those words refer, even though I do think those words can usefully be
employed in referring to those things.
Regards,
Eric Dean
Washington DC
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