Walter wrote, in response to my contention that if a putative moral theory allowed for the torturing of the innocent it was a defective moral theory at best, and not a moral theory at all at worst (I just added that last bit), that he ‘found a lot of question begging’ in my reply to something said about Elizabeth Anscombe’s mention of boiling a baby.
I have no idea why Walter says some of the things he says, e.g., that when I said that this was a test of moral theories, I somehow ignored an alleged counter example, viz., that ‘many men in Iran…aver that rape within marriage is not possible’ ‘(presumably because on their view women are not fully human and may be regarded as sex toys). The argument seems to be that if some (unspecified) number of men in Iran believe something it’s true. This argument is no better—and has the same form as—an unspecified number of men in Iran (or Bristol) believe that the sun orbits around the earth, therefore it does. I think that any so-called moral theory that believes that women are not fully human and may be regarded as sex toys is a moral theory in name only.
I believe too that anyone who thinks this needs proof (what would such a proof look like?) is seriously mistaken about the very nature of morality. To say that to believe it’s wrong to think that women are sub-human and are rightly at the mercy of men is a ‘mere intuition,’ and has no grounds unless something called ‘moral epistemology’ supports it is to to miss—among a great many other things—that morality is the province not of logicians, but of human beings who are capable of pain and suffering. ‘That innocent man is being tortured—don’t you see?’ ‘Yes, I do see, and perhaps, as you say, he’s innocent, but I’m not far along enough in my study of meta-ethical theory and ‘moral epistemology’ to be able to pronounce upon the matter.’
If someone wants to imply that there’s some truth in radical relativity when it comes to morals they need to show that it’s morals they’re talking about, and not the mating habits of carp. If it were to be discovered that some tribe or culture thought that a god determined the sum of the interior angles of a right triangle, so that on certain e days it was this and other days that, should we call this ‘their form of plane geometry’? And would it be odiously culture-bound to say no?
Robert Paul The Reed Institute ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
