[lit-ideas] Re: The universal applicability of moral judgments -- what is ethics about?
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 17:52:03 -0330
Eric D raises a number of central questions regarding the cogency of
transcendental (T) claims and arguments. I believe that should they be
unanswerable, T analysis/argumentation is but a tale told by an idiot. And as
such, as I see it, philosophy as an irreplaceable discipline, having no
functional alternatives or reasonable facsimiles, would go the way of the 33.3
rpm record.
One objection Eric has is that the words in a T claim and argument are
"intrinsically unclear" or "intrinsically vague." He points to cultural and
historical disagreement over the meaning of these words, such as "understand"
in his claim that a necessary condition for the possibility of understanding a
moral judgement is being able to identify the judgement's reference to real
interactions. That claim is a universal claim; it refers to all cases of
understanding moral judgements. Eric, however, denies that he makes a T claim
here since the words involved in his claim are vague, unclear, and subject to
cultural and historical disagreement. Therefore, if T claims and arguments
about
understanding moral judgements intend to identify necessary and universal
conditions for the possibility of any case of moral judgement, then his claim
ain't a T claim. I find this an interesting argument. I'm not all that clear
on how successful it is though. (My hunch is that his argument presupposes a
foundationalist metaphysical realism of the sort that the likes of Habermas and
their transcendental arguments vigorously eschew. But I'll postpone that
argument for the time beiong.)
Here are some examples of T claims with their corresponding objections as
lodged
by Eric D:
1. "You can't deliberate about just anything - only about those matters over
which you can exert some control." Objection: That's not a T claim since there
are some forms of deliberation that are different from or contradict that
understanding of "deliberation."
2. "The intelligibility of a moral judgement rests in its reference to a
possible state of affairs. A moral judgement expresses/prescribes an
obligation, and since what one ought to do refers to a possible, not actual,
state of affairs, its intelligibility rests on its reference to a possibility,
not an actuality."
Objection: On my understanding of moral judgement, that is false. And that
because on my understanding of moral judgement, reference to possibility is not
a necessary and universal condition of possibility for moral judgement. Why
should I accept your understanding of moral judgement?
3. Two guys walk into a bar:
Kovalev: You know, the limits of my language are the limits of my world.
Lafleur: Ah, Alexei! I do believe je comprehends what you mean. You're saying
that language constitutes a T'lly necessary structure for the very possibility
of a world. I've just returned from a pub in Soho where they were discussing
precisely this sort of thing. I, of course, don't understand what they're
saying, but I think I can use the words correctly.
Kovalev: Actually, I'm only saying something about MY language and MY world as
I
understand them. You and others may mean something quite different by these
words. And because of that fact, it would be irresponsible of me (morally
and/or epistemically?) to claim any kind of necessity or form of universality
to my claim. And anyway, aren't you the guy who says he doesn't wish to
legislate the meanings of words for others and then you go on and on about
morality being about our universal obligations to ourselves and each other -
obligations incurred strictly in virtue of our putatively universal capacity
for rational autonomy? You're lucky we don't give you the bum's rush right here
and now!
There's a definite pattern to all these T claims and their objections .... I
wish I could more clearly articulate what's involved ....
Walter O.
MUN
Quoting Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
> Walter writes:
>
> > In order to ascertain whether Eric's T claim is
> > correct, we do indeed need to know what the words in the claim mean. But it
> is
> > not my job to legislate the meanings of words for others. Eric's claim
> that
> > there is a necessary relationship, not simply a contingent and
> adventitious
> > relationship, between the possibility of understanding a moral judgement
> and
> > that judgement's reference to real interactions constitutes a T claim. If
> Eric
> > would articulate the meanings of the words in his claim, we may all
> examine
> > whether the claim is correct.
>
> Perhaps I am just being dense, but I think Walter is evading my point here.
>
>
> The
> question was whether I was making a transcendental claim when
> I asserted that to understand a moral judgment one had to understand how its
> words refer to real human interactions. My answer was no.
>
> In making that answer, I took the word 'claim' to mean
> 'assertion which may be true or false', so I was not assuming that for
> a transcendental claim to be transcendental it also had to be true.
>
> I
> did assert that for a transcendental claim to be true it must (successfully)
> make a universal
> assertion, i.e. one that applies to all things of the sort referred to
> by the words used in the claim.
>
>
> I went on to ask whether the terms of my assertion had anything remotely like
> the kind of clarity required for a statement composed from them to warrant
> the label 'universal'.
>
> I might have said this: I think it would be irresponsible of me to claim that
> an assertion about understanding moral judgments could possibly have the
> clarity that would be required to call it 'universal'. I do not believe that
> any rational intelligence could resolve that lack of clarity because I think
> that the notions of 'understanding' and 'moral judgment' are intrinsically
> unclear.
>
> In my book, that is not a pejorative. A fog bank has uncertain boundaries
> and an amorphous shape; any claim to be clear about the boundaries of a fog
> bank or its shape would be at least disingenuous. That doesn't mean we can't
> meaningfully talk about whether there is fog in the neighborhood.
>
> > snip (Sentences deleted for later examination.)
> > >
> > > But I would submit that the ambition of being clear about these is
> forlorn.
> > > People have been arguing for a long time about the nature of these
> things,
> > > and we're unlikely to get a firm resolution on them any time soon.
> >
> > --------------> Eric's true report regarding historical and cultural
> > disagreements on what concepts mean is irrelevant to the question of what
> HE
> > means in making the claim that he made. Let us hear what Eric himself
> > understands the words to mean and then we may be in a position to assess
> the
> > validity of HIS claim. (If I were interested in what Sarah Pail believed
> "moral
> > judgement" to mean, I'd ask her.)
> >
> > Sorry, but these are the principles of scholarship I am governed by. If
> you
> > don't like them, I have others.
>
> My point about the historical disagreement about the nature of understanding
> and judgment was intended as a gesture towards what I think is the intrinsic
> lack of clarity that the terms of my assertion have, not as evidence or
> justification for anything.
>
> In response to Walter's request, I think, for example, that "understand" is a
> word a competent English-speaking humans might use to indicate that he or she
> believed he or she was following another's story, was seeing the same
> landscape of possibilities, or otherwise might have shared expectations about
> what else could reasonably said about the subject, at least to some extent.
>
> Such a concept, so understood, is intrinsically vague. One might be able to
> recognize instances of understanding from it, but one would by no means be
> confident one could recognize all instances.
>
> Therefore a responsible attempt to make a universal assertion with such a
> concept would require one to have a clear explanation of how to exclude the
> uncertain cases, i.e. so that for each case of 'understanding' there would be
> at least the possibility of there being no question as to whether the
> assertion applied.
>
> But I have no such explanation for my use of 'understand' in my assertion, so
> I do not think I was making a universal assertion (whatever its form), and
> therefore I do not think I was making a transcendental one either.
>
> > --------> I see. We're back to the "possible/real" matter. Inquiry into
> > conditions of possibility do not require or entail the existence of the
> > discourse or competence being examined. T inquiry asks: How is P possible?
> > Whether P exists or not is not a relevant question. Nor is whether a
> condition
> > identified as necessary for the possibility of a competence or discourse
> itself
> > is real. (Whether we really are free beings is not a question asked by a
> human
> > being making a decision on a course of action. The facticity of human
> being
> > requires that I choose, right here and now, between the Oban and the
> > Cragganmore. Yes, life is hard; but think of the alternative.)
>
> Actually, I think Walter doesn't see what I was getting at. I was not making
> the mistake about possible/real that he attributes to me. I was saying that
> for there to be a universal assertion (a pre-requisite, as I understand it,
> to there being a transcendental assertion), it must be possible to assert
> some form of consistency -- the words' categories must apply to something
> other than a single unique instance otherwise the distinctions
> universal/particular and transcendental/empirical lose their significance.
>
> The things referred to by the terms in which one explains the conditions of
> the possibility of P must be immutable in some sense, else one has not
> explained the conditions of possibility, one has merely described yet another
> contingency.
>
> >
> > > Some may find that simply obvious; I'm not so sure.
> > >
> > > In any case, I am deeply skeptical that any assertion like mine, that is
> any
> > > assertion about such human matters as rendering moral judgments, for
> example,
> > > can be made universal in the sense needed to underwrite them being
> > > 'transcendental' in Walter's sense.
> >
> > ---------------> Again, moral judgements are not themselves transcendental.
> A
> > moral judgement is a prescriptive claim about the obligations we have to
> > ourselves and others strictly in virtue of our shared humanity as
> rationally
> > autonomous beings. THAT moral judgements make claims to universality and
> > validity is a T claim. (And here we shouldn't make mention of the fact
> that
> > Sarah Pailin may have a different understanding of
> > "morality." That's peechy-keen and honkey-dorey (sp?). She should do her
> own T
> > analysis on what she understands morality to involve, if only to conclude
> with
> > the T claim that no moral judgement is universally valid and applicable,
> > because moral judgements just ain't like that.)
>
> I never said moral judgments are transcendental; what I said was that
> putative transcendental claims *about* moral judgments fail to meet what I
> believe would or should be the prerequisites for successfully making
> transcendental claims.
>
> I said this because I think that in order to say anything about moral
> judgments one ends up using intractably vague terms, i.e. terms whose
> boundaries of application are as uncertain as the boundaries of a fog bank.
> In addition, I believe that to use such terms responsibly in a putatively
> universal statement one must eliminate the uncertainties of their
> applicability, i.e. basically turn them into terms with clear boundaries.
>
> I do not believe this is possible in the case of such terms as "understand",
> "moral judgment", "words" and "real human situations" and therefore I do not
> believe that transcendental things can be successfully said about the things
> to which those words refer, even though I do think those words can usefully
> be employed in referring to those things.
>
> Regards,
> Eric Dean
> Washington DC
>
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