firstly, ken, the conversation was occuring among three people who know habermas's work relatively well. a lot of shortcuts get taken. you were assuming a lot of things about what was being said and what the terms used meant that it would take several lengthy posts to spell out. i apologize, but i just don't have time. i don't have to explain to ken and rob that habermas doesn't argue that science can be an arbiter of moral disputes. sometimes i have to beat ken with a frying pan in order to remind him though, cause i know he knows this.
what you have described isn;t really a moral dispute. as you note, they haven't changed their moral positions at all. had the first student said that the prof's obligation was to, nonetheless, show up for class despite any other obligations then this is a moral dispute.
see, the problem is this: the professor faced a moral dilemma: save the child or show up for class on time. did facts help him in that case? not really.
the students had another moral dilemma entirely than what singer would like us to think it is: should we judge the professor a moral failure because he didn't show up for class on time? you could easily have persuaded the condemning student by presenting him with a series of hypothetical possibilities about why the prof might be late. he needn't have known for sure that the prof was late in order to have come to an agreement with the other student that it would be ok for the prof to be late because he was saving someone's life. in the lit on the phil of social science this is referred to as the difference between empirical and non-empirical sciences.
the former are about social phenomena [describing, explaining, understanding, sometimes predicting] whereas the latter are about propositions that can be proved without reference to empirical findings, as i note above that the condemning student could have been convinced with simply the hypothetical explanation offered for why a prof might be late.
> You will just have to explain to me the relevance of your remark that
>theories are always undetermined by facts? I am simply giving examples of
types
>of situations where A makes a moral judgment and B makes a contrary moral
>judgment and this can be solved by science or reference to the facts.
last time i checked, science wasn't about fact finding alone ['kay?] but about theoretical explanation and understanding of physical and social phenomenon. Awhile ago someone wrote to LBO maintaining that Sweden had the highest suicide rate in the world. He said that an acquaintance suggested that this was evidence that socialist countries create conditions that make people unhappy and depressed, as much as capitalist countries do, if not more. His colleague interpreted that statistic on the basis of a sociological theory of suicide derived from Durkheim. Someone else suggested Seasonal Affective Disorder. What did the facts tell us. Well, firstly, that his friend was wrong; Sweden doesn't have the highest suicide rate. But even if it did, would the facts tell us *why* people committ higher suicide rates in certain countries? No. We would need to know that if we were to address the dispute over whether socialism is as alienating as capitalism; we would need to know why were we to craft social policies to reduce suicide rates.
Science is about explaining and understanding why/how. We come up with tentative theories and then explain them by collecting more data. You then test your theory. If you're into positivism and empiricism, you do so by deploying a model of deductive-nomological explanation or inductive-statistical explanation. Or, if you're a qualitative researcher you seek to make interpretive explanations and understandings through one of the following logics of theory building: ethnomethodology [garfinkel], extended case method [m.burawoy], grounded theory [glaser & strauss], or interpretive case method [geertz].
underdetermination might be illustrated by this social policy issue: should we liberalize divorce laws further? should we introduce a convenant law in order to roll back liberalized advances, as Louisianna did? those are the kinds of public policy disputes habermas addresses. can we solve that moral dispute with facts? well, what are the issues at stake. most likely something like this: claimis that divorce is bad for children and contributes to the crime rate, to deviance, to higher rates of single parenthood, to poverty. a theory about what the effects of divorce are on two levels: at the individual level [children] and what they tend to do that affects others as they grow up [or, for some, fail to].
You are just hyperventiliating or something when you say
>that for every conclusive study there
>are ten more that conclude to the contrary.
you aren't a sociologist, are you? heh.
How do you engage in this debate without immersing yourself in the
>muck. Do you quote form Judith Butler? Or Habermas? If it weren't un-pc these
>days, I would say the muck is the essence of the matter in most cases.
sorry, ken, but you've not been reading me long enough to make any assumptions about my reputed over indulgence in high theory. in fact, i tend to move between high theory, the muck, ordinary everyday examples from my life or others, and empirical research findings.
please read the following which i posted awhile ago and then you might find that you've made assumptions that are unwarranted.
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firstly, i don't think it's a question of taking butler and zizek to the people. it may well be an issue of using these theorists to think through these issues and the problems "we" on the discordant left think we face. it may also be a good idea for those of us who can translate, to translate.
it's never going to be a matter of getting people to read the right books anyway. i mean whathefuck are ya nuts? "we" --the like-minded [broadly speaking...] can't even agree on kant, or habermas, or foucault or zizek --why on earth should we think that "we"can get "them" to be more interested in politics. or even that we can use these contentious texts to even explain why they're not. is anyone bothering to try that at all. i mean if habermas has one thing going for him it is that at least he's arguing for the need for a systematic research program to test his ideas --and he's not damn subscribing to some objectivist epistmology or a scientism either!
it's nice that zizek applies his framework to popular culture and philosophy. but this is hardly accessible stuff to the well- and widely-read. so who's bothering to try to take this to people or even to try to apply this to something that fucking matters. one thing that strikes me all the time about these debates: absolutely no one ever bothers to use real life, down to earth examples of how this stuff matters.
why does it fucking matter to take a zizekian or butlerian or habermasian or marxian position or foucauldian postilion on power in the context of understanding domestic violence? sexual harassment? the relationships between yourself, your work mates and you supervisors? lor of thinking through what might be the best place to throw your political energies if you *are* becoming in interested in politics for some reason --say by being exposed to fora such as these? or perhaps looking at films or television programs and thinking about how they affect your life, are part of your life and what might or should be done about "the media" or not? dealing with crime and police intrusions in your life? thinking through how to do something on your job, as limited as that is, that makes use of what you have in order to resist or not? what to do about urban gentrification and if that's even a problem or not.
i'm overgeneralizing a bit, because we do on occasion hit on these topics. but they are rare, as far as i can tell.
if these ideas are ever going to be persuasive to anyone who doesn't have at least a four yr degree, then i suspect we've got to start talking about how these competing analyses matter for what we do and why we do.
i have no problem with arguing minute differences in the interpretation of foucault's conception of power and knowledge, i enjoy it myself. but until we start using such a framework to understand how the health care system works or does not work and writing and talking about in terms of people's ordinary problems --the problems that fucking matter to them --then we're lost.
again, i'm not saying that no one ever does this but it seems pretty rare to me. i guess ange does more than most....
finally, i'd say that what we ought to do instead of worrying to much about taking it to the streets, is trying to figure out where *we* ought to go. i prefer working with those movements that are emerging and solidifying around us, not in imposing some ideal notion of "what ought to be done" conceived in the cloisters of some lefty/marxist/marxish student council meeting. it seems to me, then, that this is what these texts are for: for figuring out where "we" ought to intervene, where "we" ought to throw our activities and energies. so i say, start looking to where people are active in those things you might not think are politics at first and work from there.
kelley