[lit-ideas] Re: The meaning of life

  • From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:16:53 -0800 (PST)

--- On Sat, 12/13/08, wokshevs@xxxxxx <wokshevs@xxxxxx> wrote:

Roger Sullivan - is he still with us, or was it some other list? - in his
excellent *Immanuel Kant's Moral Theory,* (p.161) writes with reference to
the
practical reasoning involved in concluding something about the moral
acceptability of a maxim: 

"[W]e may find that a person's intentions are too
specific to be formulated as a maxim that can be tested for its suitability to
function as a possible law for everyone. (To insist on an untestable maxim
would surely be a sign of bad faith.) What is needed is maxims of conduct that
have sufficient generality. Onora (Nell) O'Neill calls these our
'underlying'
or 'fundamental' intentions because 'to a considerable extent
[they] express
the larger and longer term goals, policies and aspirations of a life. They
therefore lie under our more specific 'surface' intentions ... 
[M]axims to be
tested by the CI must be formulated as genuine candidates for practical laws.
This means that a maxim must be general in form, containing no references to
any
particular individuals or circumstances but only to general kinds of
actions that all agents, including agents having generally described positions
or roles, may (or may not) or must (or must not) do in certain generally
described kinds of situations."

*Thanks, this was a useful (and timely) clarification. Surely if the demand for
the universalizability of maxim were to have any sense at all, the maxim would
have to be expressed in quite general terms, omitting the specifics that relate
to any particular moral judgement derived from the maxim. The problem with this
is that it takes the context out. For those of us who believe that moral
judgements are to a high degree context-dependent, it could be difficult to
accept that they should be subsumed under a general rule "containing no 
references to
any
particular individuals or circumstances". Some of us might believe that 
precisely the same action
is moral in a certain set of circumstances but not moral in another, or even
that it is moral in relation to a specific person but another. For example, one
might feel that one has a moral obligation to help a specific person, say a
relative or friend, while one might not think that one has the same obligation
towards a stranger. 


A final point I can address here now is the Kantian idea that "morality is
grounded in rationality." If you scroll down to Robert's last
paragraph below, 
you will find a number of empirical factors to which we all attribute the
origins of the moral sense within ourselves. Neither I nor Kant deny this. What
we deny is that such facts about human beings have any final epistemic
authority
in the justification of moral judgement. (Strawson has a fine essay on these
empirical factors, I forget the title now.) And such facts do not invalidate
the claim that moral judgement is transcendentally conditioned for its
possibility by the autonomy and dignity of the capacity for giving reasons.


*For my part - I'm not sure about R.P.  - I wasn't arguing with the
suggestion that rationality is an important component of moral judgements, but I
have doubts on whether universalizability - or more exactly, a will to 
universalize - is a proper criterion for evaluating the rationality/morality of 
an action. 
Here there are two problems: on one hand, it seems unreasonable to expect that, 
if the constraints of the actual world do not allow an action to be 
universalized, I should not therefore be morally entitled to take the action. 
It is not practically possible for everyone to devote themselves to the study 
of philosophy (or liberal arts generally) however much I may will it to be so, 
but that doesn't seem like a good reason for me to refrain from studying it 
should I have an opportunity. 
The other problem is the subjective component of the categorical imperative: 
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it
should become a universal law." Let's take, for example, adultery; it
is quite possible to imagine that everyone commits adultery, and it is possible 
for
someone who does it to will that this should become a universal rule, but this 
will hardly resolve the question of whether adultery is moral. That is, the 
fact that I might subjectively will my maxim to become a universal law does not 
make it so.

O.K.







      

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