[lit-ideas] Re: Language, Justice and Social Practices (long)

  • From: Walter Okshevsky <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 12:30:08 -0230 (NDT)

Robert seems to find more agreement between us than I am able to. My
thesis here is that language has a constitutive function with respect to
emotions  and feelings, not simply a representative function. In other
words, it's  not that we first are able to feel indignation or Angst and
then attach label/name to it. To feel indignation or Angst or morallly
bound is to  understand an entire conceptual network of relations and
inferences to other concepts. Clearly what we call these concepts,
their names are  unimportant. We can call "Anst" the feeling one has
watching a car bear down on oneself, but that doesn't make the feeling
"Angst." It's still fear. Similarly, Whatever a community calls "romantic
love," its members  wil not be able to feel that emotion independent of a
conceptual network  differentiating it from such related things as courtly
love, divine love,  agape, sexual infatuation, etc.. So, I think we
disagree on the relation  between conceptual terms housed in language and
our capacities to feel that which is connoted by the terms.

Robert also believes that people can "possess a concept without having a
name for it ..." My claim is that it is unimportant what name we ascribe
to a concept. Robert's claim is a stronger one: we can understand a
concept without having any name for it. I would think that without some
name, we would not be able to mark the conceptual differentiations
necessary for the identification and understanding of any single concept.
Our concepts encounter ourselves and the world as a whole, not singly.

RP:
>  Walter is right to point out that there could be actions and
> feelings which we now call anger, e.g., but were not earlier called
> that; but this shows not that there was anger before there was the name
> 'anger,' but that there was a complex of feelings and actions which came
> to be called 'anger,' in English?and this is not the same as saying that
> there was anger then; what follows is only that there was what we now
> call 'anger' then. Ontology recapitulates philology.

W: Not sure I'm getting all of that since I want to agree with what you
say here.  I'm thinking I need to reiterate that  without a concept of
justice, one does not and cannot feel indignant, just  as without a
certain conception of autonomy, there is no possibility for
feeling romantic love. Social psychologists have for some time now shown
that many of our feelings and physiological states are quite similar. What
we come to claim we are actually feeling depends upon the environment we
find ourselves in. (Epinephrine can produce happiness or sadness,
depending upon the cues picked up by the individual from the environment
- cues used to define the physiological responses to the drug as this
rather than that.)

RP:
>  > Similarly, is there anything in Aristotle's ethics that deals with
> our           > modern conception of morality, and, if not, could he
> have ever             > experienced or deliberated upon a moral issue or 
> problem?
>
> There's little, if anything, in Aristotle's ethics (or Ethics) that
> deals with our modern conception of morality (as has been pointed out by
> Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others), but one can imagine
> Aristotle wondering about whether to keep a promise made to Alexander,
> at the expense of someone else's life.
>
W: Yes, but I'm not able to imagine that A would include the claim that
all persons are of equal worth and we have an obligation to respect all
persons equally as premises in his deliberation. He would, no doubt, have
thought about doing the honorable thing for its own sake. (Btw, "honour"
would seem to be a conceptual requirement for feeling dishonoured, ashamed.
Another example. That we today fail to feel dishonoured or shamed within
circumstances that  would have dishonoured or shamed Aristotle and his
community, would seem to support the  constitutive view of language I'm
maintaining here.)


RP:
> I had written:
>
>  >>I think that when we say we 'know what justice is' we mean
>  >>that we can pick out acts and judgments which we think are just; and
>  >>we do this without having a knockdown, drag-out definition of what
>  >>justice is, essentially. We can easily give examples of fair and
>  >>unfair practices, without believing that fairness itself is somehow an
>  >>independently existing 'thing.'
>
> Walter replied:
>
>  > "Independently existing thing" is deliciously ambiguous. Insofar as
>  > justice requires impartiality of judgment, and requires certain other
>  > conditions of symmetry and reciprocity (i.e. Habermas), it can be
>  > legitimately said to be independent of individual and individuals'
>  > judgements. Justice, moral rightness may necessarily be epistemic          
> >
> i.e., we can't get beyond warranted assertability under ideal                 
> >
> conditions >of discourse - but that doesn't exclude the possibility           
> >
> for independence as objectivity and impartiality of judgment and      >
> deliberation. Social practices possess a (normative) reality that     >
> transcends individuals' and groups' interpretationa and judgments.
>
RP:
> I have a hard time understanding this paragraph. It seems to be saying
> that the requirement that justice be objective (unbiased?) entails that
> there is something over and above human practices, something called
> justice, and that it is only insofar as human practices conform to it
> that they are just; whereas I would say that judgments and actions are
> just if they accord, on the one hand, with legal criteria, and on the
> other with our strongest intuitions about fairness, equity, and so on,
> thus eliminating the need to reify justice. Objectivity is as
> objectivity does: here, the attempt to make objectivity and impartiality
> something universal (?Social practices possess a normative reality that
> transcends individuals? and groups? interpretations and judgments?)
> seems instead to lead to an odd sort of relativism, for if the Taliban?s
> social practices  yield a conception of justice that?s clearly different
> from yours or mine. I may have misunderstood something here.

W: I think here we are in agreement on the fundamentals. I'm happy with
the function you ascribe to criteria here. (I would say though that
establishing accordance or violation of criteria is a social practice, and
can only take the form of a social practice. No relativism follows from
this, as I see it. Although the matter of the justification of the
rightness or appropriateness of the criteria themselves is a tricky matter
indeed.)

RP:
> It is as if someone were to say that because a ball that if a ball lands
> outside the line in tennis the one who hit it out loses a point, that
> balls would be in or out and points would be won or lost, even if nobody
> ever played tennis
>
W: If I'm getting this right, then, no, I would say that the meanings of
"in" and "out" are constituted by
the rules of tennis. The rules don't simply regulate a game that could be
played in some different way.

RP:
> Walter asks if I?m still thinking about Kant on maxims, purposes, etc.?
>
> Hey, I sent you my (second) thoughts on that but you haven?t yet
> replied. I?d like to hear your thoughts.
>
W: I only got your first thoughts: September 8. You ended with: "... I'll
stop and try to think about this for awhile." So I thought you're still
thinking. Is it that on second thought, your first thoughts are now also
your second thoughts?

Walter Okshevsky
Memorial U
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