Actually, no extreme analogies are needed, historical examples will do. The Nazis were very efficient utility maximizers - the extracted golden teeth, the gassing trucks utilizing exhaustion fumes, human bodies made into soap, the arbeit-mach-frei ethics, the macht-ohne-moral approach to social policy, no-minimum wage labor, working-to-death people who would have died anyway because of food shortaged due to a war - they are all examples of rational utilization of scarce resources for a profit stripped of any sentimentality that Milton Friedman and GOP would be proud off. Portraying Nazis as irrational crazies is double falsification - of the nature of Nazism and of the nature of utilitarianism.
>No, I think you can do it from where you are. by appealing to shared
>premises, etc. Usually. If the disagreements get deep enough, it gets
"Shared premises" is a rationalist fallacy, at least to a large extent, I think. If utternaces have a nondescript (or none at all) empirical meaning - they are like Rorschach blots - they mean everything and nothing in particular, depending what different people want them to mean. Most abstractions and buzzwords are in this category - including those favoured by the Left, such as "capitalism," "imperialism," "racism," "socialism," "working class," etc. What is "shared" about them is not their (empirical) meaning, but their emotive connotations - "capitalism" or "racism " connoting disapproval and condemnation, whereas "socialism" and "working class" connoting a desirbale thing and an approval.
Hence the discussion involving such concepts tend to be an expression of attitudes disguised as empirical statements. For example, when I call the fact that few business establishments exist in Baltimore's inner city an example of racism - I am simply saying "I deplore the fact in question" - but I am also dressing up that opinion as a matter-of-fact statement. In the same way, when I call assorted neo-cons "nazis" I am merely expressing my disapproval of them, but instead of saying simply "I hate them," which does not sound very intellectual, I make a pseudo-factual statement that does.
Empirical meanings can also be "shared" but not a priori. For example, the term "bigot" has an empirical meaning, which denotes a class of people who hold pejorative opinions about other social groups that are based on prejudice rather than fact. Suppose that I hear someone expressing pejorative opinions about, say, Eastern Europeans. If I had omniscient knowledge of that person's mind, I would be able to determine whether the expressed opinion is based on that persons's experience or not, and thus whether she is or is not a bigot.
However, we do not have such knowledge, and in lieu of that we make certain assumptions about "shared experiences." If I met many Eastern Europeans and know quite a bit about negative traits in their behavior, and if that person's opinion roughly correspond with what I know, I am likely to make an asumption that the speaker and I "share" the same experiences i.e. her opinion is based on observations similar to mine, and thus she is not a bigot. If, on the other hand, my contacts with Eastern Europeans are very limited, I can make a quite different assumption about our "shared experiences" - namely that the speaker knows about Eastern Europeans as much as I do, that is next to nothing, but nonetheless she passes judgments about them. Ergo, I see her as a bigot.
To summarize, people often make certain assumptions about 'shared experiences,' namely that others' experiences are similar to their own, and use that as the basis of interpretation of what others say. I can see a suburbanite or a campus liberal calling working class people "bigots" because he assumes that working class people have the same experience and know what he does. I see that all the time - in fact, i used to do the same thing before I decided to live in an empowerment zone in Baltimore's inner city.
>
>However, this is getting too philosophical. When I disagree witha view,
>it's because I think it is wrong. I may not have any deep reason for this
>judgment--most people don't--beyond the arguments for their own views and
the
>arguments against the other guys'. You statrt talking omniscienct etc.
around
As I said before, I am not quite sure when one disagrees with a view or simply reacts to its emotive connotations. Language, especially public conversation, has a Rorschach blot aspect - people project into it their own emotions and react to them as if that emotive content was out there. In that sense, the conversation turns into a monolog or a dialog with one's own thoughts. I see that a lot, especially among intellectuals who often have a real difficulty talking with someone other than oneself.
>her. But if she thinks that blacks are lazy, aggressive, etc., she holds
>bigoted views, although it may not be diplomatic to say that to her just
>ther\na nd there. And of course, we might be wrong--aftera ll, it is
>logically possible that blacks are lazy and agressive, etc., but we don't
>think so.
As I said before, that would be true only if that persons had no factual basis to hold such a view. However, if that person's only experience with blacks were limited to people who are lazy or aggressive, she would not be a bigot. Au contraire, she would be a pathetic Pangloss if she denied that experience and expressed "pc" opinions instead. Being determines consciousness - we can meaningfully say only what we have experienced - everything else is daydreaming and projections, that is, poetry or religion.
wojtek