[lit-ideas] The universal applicability of moral judgments -- what is ethics about?
- From: Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 13:23:40 +0000
Thanks to Walter for the continuing discussion and for the suggestion that we
take the questions about moral judgment one at a time.
Walter asserts that: "...moral justification must be applicable to real
interactions [though we should] recognize that 'real interactions' bears no
epistemic import in the case of moral judgment. That is to say, what people
actually do is of no necessary relevance to what they ought to do."
I think the second sentence means that actual human behavior does not count as
evidence with respect to moral judgments, and I agree with that.
The first sentence, though, is a little more problematic. While real
interactions do not serve as evidence with respect to moral judgments, the
words used in moral judgments certainly refer to real interactions. In that
sense, real interactions must have *some* sort of 'epistemic import' here --
i.e. if one did not understand how the words in a moral judgment referred to
real interactions one could not be said to understand the judgment, and I take
understanding to be the minimum first epistemic step -- you can't really be
said to know something if you don't understand it.
Walter goes on to say: "...'applicability to real interactions' should not
blind us from recognizing that part of the contemporary discipline of ethics is
of a transcendental nature concerned with identifying universal and necessary
features of moral judgment and the assessment of the objectivity and
impartiality of moral deliberation."
It may be that a number of people, calling themselves contemporary philosophers
concerned with ethics, may think of what they are doing as exploring "universal
and necessary features' and assessing 'objectivity and impartiality', but just
as actual behavior is not evidence with respect to moral judgments, so the
behavior of actual people is not evidence of the intellectual merits of a
position. This just by way of blocking the argument that there must be a
transcendental and necessary aspect to moral judgments otherwise so many people
wouldn't be studying those aspects of moral judgments. I don't think Walter
would make such a dubious move, but he seems to be veering perilously close
here.
Now to the substance: if moral judgments are 'transcendental and necessary' and
can be applied to real human interactions, then it would seem to me that either
(a) the real human interactions must somehow contain, manifest, participate in
or otherwise themselves have some relationship to the transcendental and
necessary properties of the judgment which relationship has an important role
in making the judgment applicable to the real interactions or (b) the
'transcendental and necessary' aspects of moral judgments are not relevant to
their applicability to real interactions.
My questions to Walter are:
(1) Is there a third alternative I am leaving out of account?
(2) If not, then if (a) is correct, can you explain what that relationship is,
i.e. explain how it is that real human interactions exhibit the transcendental
and necessary properties of the relevant moral judgments?
(3) Alternatively, if (b) is correct, then can you give an example to
illustrate how a moral judgment can be transcendental and necessary and be
applicable to real interactions without the applicability depending on the
transcendental and necessary features of the judgment?
Finally, Walter also writes: "The concern here is with philosophical truth, not
with convincing people that they ought to abide by the results of
transcendental inquiry."
In general, I am in sympathy with this point. I do, however, want to point out
that there is a difference between convincing *others* of something and being
convinced *oneself*. It is precisely because I do not find the transcendental
inquiries about moral judgments convincing for myself that I think they are
misguided. I then work to explain to my own satisfaction why that lack of
conviction is warranted and it is the results of those efforts thus far that I
am expressing here.
Moreover, I believe that to be convinced about those transcendental inquiries
simply is to be convinced that one should abide by the results. In other
words, while again I agree that the work here is not to be judged by its
reception in the court of public opinion, I do think that the point to the
discussion is to explore whether one should abide by the results of
transcendental inquiry.
The challenge, it seems to me, is precisely that we are all, each of us,
individual people whose convictions may be swayed, one way or another, by
considerations not relevant to the merits of the transcendental inquiry. We
are, in a way, most vulnerable to such suasion precisely when considering these
things by ourselves, because it is when alone that we are all most vulnerable
to the blandishments of our preferred illusions. On the other hand, when we
are discussing these in a group we are vulnerable to the sorts of forces that
notoriously skew the judgments of the court of public opinion.
The point is that while it's appropriate to deny jurisdiction here to the court
of public opinion, we should not think that we can thereby avoid some of the
pricklier questions about what it means to be persuaded.
Regards to one and all,
Eric Dean
Washington DC
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