[lit-ideas] Re: Moral Imagination

  • From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:21:21 +0900

The direction in which this conversation has evolved is quite interesting to
me. I never took Wager's point to be that there are no moral maxims or clear
cases. Those are easy to come by. I always took him to be talking about
moral *judgment*, which comes into play when cases are hard, when, for
example, the law allows mitigating circumstances. I see an interesting
ambiguity here, between *judgement1, *deciding through philosophical
argument that a moral maxim must be universal and *judgment2*, the usual
kind, where the maxim is not in question but its application is.

John

On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 9:00 AM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

>  Donal wrote
>
>
>    I am unsure what is being denied in saying one doesn't believe in a
> moral continuum: I confess I am quite a believer in 'continuum' thinking and
> that most points can be, and even ought to be, located on some kind of
> spectrum (or even spectra) in order to put them in perspective: while I do
> not believe my dropping litter is an inevitable slippery slope to my manning
> the gas chambers, I do think we can construct a (long) continuum between one
> and the other. Admittedly, this might appear wrong by appearing to put
> littering on the same level as genocide, but it does not do that: the point
> of such a continuum (if there is much of a point) is not that everything is
> on the same level but that what is next to its neighbour is often not that
> far apart. Continuum thinking has its abuses (the 'slippery slope' fallacy
> being one) but it also has its uses (some day I may publish how these may be
> arranged in a continuum).
>
>
> Upon reflection, I'm not sure what is meant by a 'moral continuum' either,
> even though I must have at one time thought I knew. (Argument to the best
> hypothesis.) I was perhaps thinking in a hazy way about the criminal justice
> system, in which offenses are more serious the more certain elements are
> present in an act, e.g. assault, assault with a deadly weapon, racially
> motivated assault; involuntary manslaughter, manslaughter; manslaughter
> during the commission of a crime, etc. If I did mean something like this, it
> was by way of suggesting that morality should not be considered as analogous
> to it. I didn't have in mind anything like the 'slippery slope' fallacy to
> which Donal calls our attention. It's clear that we agree that this is the
> wrong model, even though evangelical preachers often invoke it.
>
> ****
>
> [Donal again] JLS's deprecatory remarks on the use of "imagination" are
> also questionable: for philosophers like Popper "imagination" is a most
> important requirement for understanding, in part because what is understood
> is not a "given" but a construction, and a theoretical one at that. Without
> "imagination", for example, how I can ever know that genocide is wrong by
> imagining what it is like to be a victim of it?
>
>
>       Robert than comments:
>
>    >If this were really true, then I could not honestly say that I know
> genocide to be wrong. It is as useless as a parent's saying to a child, 'How
> would you like it if Sally pulled *your* hair?' The child has not been
> taught any sort of 'moral lesson in this drama. No more does my shuddering
> at descriptions and depictions of life in Auschwitz make that an important
> part of my knowing that to subject human beings to such a life is wrong, was
> wrong, and will be wrong, no matter what the casuist may try to say.>
>
> This is somewhat unclear (at least to me), though I guess Robert to be
> saying that if it depended on 'imagination' to know that genocide was wrong
> (say by imagining what it was like to be a victim) then we could not
> honestly say that we know genocide to be wrong on this basis. Is this true?
>
>
> My point was that I consider it to have been 'wrong' (a word that seems far
> too thin to characterize what was done in the Nazi concentration camps),
> even though I cannot begin to imagine what it would have been like to have
> lived and suffered in one of them. Granted, Donal (via Popper?) says that
> such a feat of the imagination is a sufficient condition for being able to
> condemn the killing of millions of human beings in such barbaric ways; yet,
> to repeat, I don't believe it is even a necessary condition. I can't do it
> by means of any thought experiment, and no more can I imagine what it would
> be like to be a twelve-year-old girl dying of cancer.
>
>
>    Bear in mind my suggestion was only that 'imagination' is (or may be)
> required here, not that it is, or could be, a sufficient condition for
> something being wrong (after all, there are many things we can imagine
> without [imagining] them being wrong). The argument about the role of
> 'imagination' I was putting forward is closer to the argument that
> recognising others as persons, or as 'other minds' even, is something not
> 'given' but something we acquire and which it requires a certain imagination
> to acquire - and we might say without recognising others as persons we can
> have no real sense of right and wrong. Of course, this touches on large
> concerns, some of which I might address in another thread on P's philosophy
> of mind by outlining his account of how we _become_ selves.
>
>
> I agree that one must see others as being like us but doing so, it seems to
> me, doesn't require a special act of the imagination; we grow up (most of
> us) surrounded by human beings who, to us (or to me) form a natural class
> for which no explanation can be given. It isn't at all obvious that one must
> see others as persons, in some philosophical sense (for it's only
> philosophers who talk this way) in order to treat them as fellow humans,
> i.e., to see that others are like me in uncountably many ways and unlike me
> in uncountably many others. I have no word for what one does see when one
> comes to see others as persons, except for Kant's talk about autonomy and
> Sartre's talk about 'authenticity'—that is, such things are mentioned in
> discussing 'persons.' Yet to invoke them by way of explaining anything is to
> suggest that we find our way out of a swamp by following a will-o'-the-wisp.
>
>
> Robert Paul
>
> High Dudgeon
> Oxon
>
>


-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/

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