[lit-ideas] Re: The universal applicability of moral judgments
- From: Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 05:05:11 +0000
Thanks to Walter for his extended replies to my lengthy note. Since I enjoy
thinking and writing about this stuff, I'm going to reply to him at length too.
Those of you who don't enjoy this sort of thing are forewarned...
The core point I was making is that in my view the following make the same
assertion just with different emphases:
(1) A moral maxim is a universal assertion; applying a moral maxim to a
particular situation always requires the exercise of judgment.
(2) A moral maxim may be a useful guide to decision-making in the real world,
but it is not unequivocally true and therefore not universally true.
I say this because I think that moral maxims are, inevitably, about human
interactions. Human interactions, unlike, say, the circles and triangles of
geometry, are almost never unequivocally one thing or another. Therefore the
assertion that a moral maxim is a universal assertion (i.e. is universally
true) can amount to no more than: in all those circumstances in which the terms
of the assertion apply without qualification, the assertion is true. In
practice, I believe that ends up being no more than to say that when the
assertion is true, it is true.
Take Walter's example again: "Teachers ought to respect the autonomy of their
students." I believe this assertion is unequivocally true in all those cases
in which teachers are doing things which are best furthered by respecting the
autonomy of their students and the students are those participants whose
interests are best furthered by their autonomy having been respected. That is
circular, of course, but its circularity isn't vicious because it calls for one
who might be a teacher to consider whether in point of fact what he/she is
doing is best furthered by respecting the autonomy...
I do believe that in some cases it is worth asserting that a moral principle is
a universal truth. I just don't think that such assertions constitute the only
valid, reasonable or accurate descriptions of what moral maxims are.
Walter writes:
> 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.")
I am completely befuddled about what a study of moral judgment and principles
would be about were it not about how human beings actually interact with one
another, which, imho, makes it "applied" in the relevant sense.
Mathematics, famously, has objects of study that are not in any meaningful
sense 'about' the real world. The simplest example I know is from the century
or so between the invention of non-Euclidean geometries (was it by Reimann?)
and Einstein's application of such in his theoretical physics. During that
time non-Euclidean geometries were intellectual curiosities, not about the real
world.
But it seems to me that moral assertions have to be about the real world, i.e.
about how real humans really interact with one another, otherwise they are
entirely pointless. If they are about the real world, then it would seem to me
that they are "applied" in the usual sense of the word.
Walter goes on to say:
> 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.
Mathematical logic defines two classes of abstract structure -- the terms,
logical operators, sentences, and rules of proof which comprise the formal
"language" in which a mathematical theory can be written, at least in
principle, and the mathematical objects with their relationships, which the
theory is about. It also defines the notion of "about" -- a theory expressed
in the formal language is "about" a mathematical structure (known, in this
case, as a "model" of the theory) just in case there is a particular
mathematically definable relationship between the theory and the model. That
relationship amounts to a mathematized version of the assertion that the
provable statements in the formal language are "true" in the model. Any
mathematical structure for which such a relationship can be defined is a model
of the theory, sometimes called an 'interpretation' of the theory.
The great lengths to which mathematical logic goes to define all these
relationships is intended to guarantee that the principles of mathematics can
be expressed in a way that does not retain any residue of the notion that
mathematical principles are self-interpreting. The entire structure of a
theory has to be fully interpreted or none of it is and therefore the
interpretation can be entirely divorced from the particular expression of the
language, and in particular no 'judgment' is required in interpreting the
theory.
Absent such a comprehensive denaturing of language, though, I'm not sure just
what it means to say "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." Surely the words used to express the principle are
'properties intrinsic to the principle', and I would think the meanings of the
words have a lot to do with determining whether & how the principle should be
applied.
Walter:
> "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.
It seems to me this just substitutes a new term requiring interpretation --
"genuinely educational contexts" -- for another, "Teaching". Moreover, the
question wasn't whether the student retained his or her autonomy. In the sense
Walter is invoking here, no one ever loses his or her autonomy unless they are
comatose or dead. The question was about the teacher *respecting* that
autonomy.
Walter:
> 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.
Yes, but my point is precisely that such constraints constitute exceptions to
the universal applicability of "teachers should respect..."
Walter:
> 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."
See above.
>
>
> > 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.
What I was saying, to use the homicide example, was that discriminating among
which of the various degrees of homicide applies is a different task from
determining whether one is a teacher in the sense relevant to the maxim's
applicability. In the case of the degrees of homicide, the presumption is that
the act was in fact a homicide (i.e. a human is dead at another human's hands)
and that all homicides must fall under one of a fixed list of category
headings. The classification of the situation is given in advance (it's a
homicide) and the choices of type within the class are fixed.
In the case of the teacher maxim, the question of whether one is a teacher in
the relevant sense is, I was tacitly hypothesizing, not something given in
advance, but rather is something to be ascertained at least in part by how well
the maxim fits the situation one is in (e.g. to the extent one thinks one
should not respect a student's autonomy, one is not a teacher).
Walter:
> 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.)
I certainly don't think it's lamentable that judgment is required; I think
instead that it's forlorn to think that there can be a universally true
assertion that can be understood without the application of judgment and
therefore forlorn to think that the exercise of judgment can be relegated to
discerning whether the current circumstances are of the sort to which the maxim
applies. I understand that the fact that 'teacher' is a subset of 'human'
doesn't mean the maxim is less than universal.
Walter:
<snip>
> 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 basically agree with Walter's last sentence -- "morality is a function of our
capacity to engage in rational discourse, and this possess its own intrinsic
worth." What I disagree with is that the way to preserve that intrinsic worth
is to pay homage to moral maxims as "universal assertions".
I'm not sure I know what the moral order is, but I certainly think that any
human institution must absolutely be available to "interrogations of prudential
or strategic value or relevance," and it was the human institution of insisting
on the possibility of an unqualified moral truth expressible in human terms
which I was objecting to and calling to account.
I do not see why objecting to that is objecting to the notion that morality is
a function of our capacity to engage in rational discourse. I think rational
discourse is advanced when we attempt to engage each others' understandings
without insisting that either of us has access to, or ever will have access to,
an unqualifiable truth.
Regards to one and all,
Eric Dean
Washington DC
P.S.
Walter adds:
> --> 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.)
I'm no Kant scholar, so perhaps I am missing something important, but it seems
to me that the categorical imperative is most definitely a universal law. Kant
writes (as translated by Abbot, quoted from Gutenberg.org) "Act so that the
maxim of thy will can always at the same time hold good as a principle of
universal legislation." That seems to me pretty unequivocally a law ("Act..."
it says, in the imperative voice, like laws do). The buildup to it has been at
pains to distinguish maxims, which are infected by the empirical, from
practical laws (that word again), which are the only true laws per se and
which, to avoid the contamination of the merely empirical, are forced only to
deal with the form rather than the substance, the logic of which leads Kant
implacably to the CI as *the* one law of pure practical reason. I don't get
why Walter would say it's not a law...? CI screens maxims so that actions can
be permitted insofar as they conform to maxims which can be made universal
without contradiction -- but note, it says "ACT so that..."
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