[lit-ideas] Re: The universal applicability of moral judgments
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:55:58 -0330
Ripostes, parries, slapshots and backhand slices for the worthy Eric Dean
------->
Quoting Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
> While I think I understand the sense in which moral judgments can be
> characterized as universal assertions, as Walter has been emphasizing, I
> think that there's at least some cogent reason to wonder whether that might
> not just be so much the worse for moral judgments.
----------> Whether moral judgement ends up going the way of the dodo bird is
an empirical question. Social, cultural and political forces may indeed one day
spell the end of:
1)imperatives obligating us to respect each other and ourselves
strictly in virtue of our common humanity, 2) any notion of a "crime against
humanity" and 3) any notion of universal human rights.
Needless to say, Ayaan H. Ali would not be pleased. (If you haven't read her
book *Infidel*, give it a whirl. Fascinating reading from a Kantian
perspective.)
> Walter uses as an example: "Teachers ought to respect the autonomy of their
> students." I think that is as clear an example of a universal assertion, and
> a moral one at that, as one could ask for.
>
> But precisely because it's a *moral* assertion, and not, say, an assertion
> about mathematics or theoretical physics, I think one can legitimately ask
> how to apply it without thereby betraying a hopelessly benighted relativism.
> Morality is intrinsically an applied branch of knowledge, as it were.
-----------> It were not and never were. (Just to mess with RP's intuitive
sense of grammar :) There's ethics as the philosophical (normative/conceptual,
non-empirical) study of moral judgement and principles. There's meta-ethics
which studies the transcendental conditions, limits and possibilities of moral
deliberation and rightness. And then there's applied ethics - i.e., medical
ethics, jurisprudence, educational ethics, etc.) Only the latter is an applied
field necessarily. The other two may be studied as pure moral theory, akin to
pure mathematics or theoretical science. (Not all inquiry dealing with humans
is necessarily "applied.")
> A
> moral principle whose application is completely opaque wouldn't seem to
> qualify as a moral principle.
---------> Agreed. The application of a principle requires judgement. That a
principle applies here and now, and should be applied in such-and-such a
manner, is not identified by any property intrinsic to the principle itself.
However, some judgements are better than others.
> So now for an example that raises a question about the universal application
> of Walter's example. In the military, a drill sergeant's job would seem to
> qualify as "teaching", but it notably would not be thought of as "respecting
> the autonomy of their students".
>
> I think the choices at this juncture are fairly simple and clear -- either
> Walter's assertion needs to be qualified, or the notion of 'universality'
> needs to be qualified, or the drill sergeant needs to be excluded from the
> class of 'teachers'.
------> "Teaching" can occur only in genuinely educational contexts; "training"
can occur in any context of technical skill or prudence. We should also
remember that Codes of Ethics govern military personnel in their treatment of
each other as well as of the enemy. Moreover, unless one is enslaved, one's
autonomy as a soldier (and an officer) is retained. If you wipe out an entire
village of civilians, you remain morally responsible for the maxim you willed
and acted on.
> Or take another example. The college chemistry professor has her students
> doing a lab experiment with some potentially very dangerous chemicals. She
> sees one of her students about to do something that could blow up the lab and
> everyone in it. She immediately grabs his wrist and pulls it away from the
> valve he was about to open. At that moment it would appear she did not
> respect the autonomy of her student, within the meaning of Walter's putative
> maxim.
>
> Again, I think the choices are fairly simple and clear -- either the
> universal assertion needs to be qualified, the notion of universality needs
> to be qualified, or the roles the professor and student are playing in the
> lab need to be defined so their encounter no longer constitutes a potentially
> relevant example.
---------> Restrictions upon one's own freedom, or that of another, are
permissible, and often required, on moral grounds. Such constraints seek to
preserve threatened autonomy and well-being precisely by curtailing wanton or
uninformed freedom.
> My point is that I do not see how one can distinguish *moral* assertions from
> their interpretations in the way one can meaningfully distinguish
> mathematical assertions from their interpretations (vide the corpus of
> mathematical logic). Because the interpretation of moral assertions
> inevitably involve potentially endlessly qualifiable circumstance (life being
> as messy as it is), I don't think the notion of 'relevantly similar' is the
> obvious, transparent notion Walter seems to think it is.
-------> I am ignorant of the mathematical reference, though I'd be interested
in hearing about it in its relevance to the matter of the distinction between
the "meaning" of a moral claim and its "interpretations."
> The distinctions in law, plagiarism and semantics that Walter cites as
> illustration for our ability to recognize 'relevant similarity' seem to me
> far from perspicuous. The distinctions Walter cites -- between 1st degree
> murder & accidental homicide, between copying another's work and coincidental
> independent creation, and between the meanings of each word in various pairs
> of related but distinct words -- all operate within realms in which the space
> of possibilities is established in advance and the question is which of a
> pair or group of correlated attributes applies, given that one of them must
> apply (someone's dead by another's hand, so the law presumes the events fell
> under one of a list of possible headings, murder 1 and accidental homicide
> being two on that list).
-----> Eric loses me here. It's a potentially important point though, since the
claim is that the examples I give may not be completely relevant or
appropriate to the question of the application of principles. Perhaps Eric could
unpack his above comments a tad.
> But in the case of a moral maxim like "Teachers ought to respect the autonomy
> of their students" the questions of who's a teacher, who's a student, what's
> a student's autonomy and under exactly what situations should it be respected
> are all very relevant, legitimate questions about the *meaning* of the maxim.
> Unanswered, the maxim is, I submit, a bit of idle pedantry with no
> applicability in the world. But as one goes to answer those questions, the
> maxim's universality starts getting qualified.
--------> Here, Eric laments the fact that judgement is required for the cogent
and justifiable application of moral principles. There is no alternative. (Note
that the universality of a maxim needs to be differentiated from the generality
of a maxim. The class of teachers is less general than the class of human
beings; however, maxims may be specified to be universalizable across all
teachers, without risk of "qualification" in a sense that leads to relativism.)
> As a guide to thinking about action, as, in other words, a suggestion about
> where to look in resolving practical dilemmas about teaching people, Walter's
> maxim seems very useful. In fact, I make an effort to apply it myself just
> about every day. In my current job I'm 20+ years older than just about
> everyone on my staff...
>
> But to call it a universal maxim is, in my opinion, to crush that usefulness
> by demanding subservience to an order whose relevance may not be readily
> discernible. For example, I think one could make the case that the teacher
> who grabs the foolish student's wrist before he blows up the lab was in point
> of fact respecting the autonomy of the student in the circumstances -- there
> wouldn't have been a student with any autonomy to violate or respect
> otherwise. But one could also make the case that such a situation simply
> represents an exception to the maxim.
------------> Re. student's wrist, please see above. Re. Eric's first sentence
here: The moral order is not an order which is obliged to answer to
interrogations of prudential or strategic value or relevance - interogations
that cannot but unjustifiably privilege the values and rituals of some cultural
or religious tribe. Indeed, all "practical" or instrumentalist justifications of
morality are self-contradictory. All we can say is that morality is a function
of our capacity to engage in rational discourse, and this possesses itw own
intrinsic worth.
> I don't see the point of insisting on either interpretation, except as a form
> of coercion intended to preserve some order or other. And I don't see what
> insisting on the "universal applicability" of moral judgments can mean other
> than to insist on one of those styles of interpretation.
>
> Useful guides are just that, useful guides. They're not laws like the laws
> of physics or the axioms of mathematics. Kant's categorical imperative,
> imho, is a useful guide, in just this sense, not a universal law.
--> The CI is not itself a universal law. Maxims are judged, as per the CI,
regarding their possible status as universal laws. (There's no point in asking
whether the CI is itself a universal law.)
Thanks to Eric Dean for his thoughtful ripostes, parries and thrusts.
Walter O
MUN
>
> Regards to one and all,
> Eric Dean
> Washington DC
>
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