[lit-ideas] Re: Moral Imagination
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2011 09:49:40 +0100 (BST)
________________________________
From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, 9 October 2011, 4:21
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Moral Imagination
>The clear cut, the obvious,
cases are those that make morality intelligible, and they are,
moreover, those against which moral theories are measured:>
These are two excellent points, though I might qualify the first by saying only
that the clear cut is what makes morality _most_ intelligible; and we might
imagine a whole series of very finely grained choices to seem less a matter of
ethics than of, say, aesthetics or 'taste'. These clear-cut cases are our moral
bulwark (as it were) and so constitute the best tests of moral claims (which
may be rejected if they fail these tests).
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).
>Donal: 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?
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.
Donal
Salop
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