On Mon, 24 Jan 2000 23:32:53 EST JKSCHW at aol.com writes:
>In a message dated 00-01-24 17:59:41 EST, Jim F writes:
>
><< [I had said that Yoshie's argument that moral theory doesn't make
>us
>better parallels Posner's attack on moral theory as useless in a
>recent book.)
>
> Jim: You, yourself have often emphasized that Posner is one of the
>smartest
> people sitting on the Federal bench today. Are there any special
>reasons
> for us to be horrified?
>
>No, I often find myself in agreement with Posner. (Not here, though.)
>
>However, I am an unashamed apologist for bourgeois rights,
>representative
>democracy, and a market economy.Yoshie, however, might be horrified
>to find
>herself in such company as Posner.
>
> I had said: > To him and to Yoshie I say that moral theory is
> >supposed to help us understand and evaluate our practices,
>iuncluding
> >those of criminal justice, and not to make people better.
>
>> Jim asks: Why would anyone bother to concern herself with
>evaluating
> practices if not to improve them?
>
>Or, as Posner put it to me, What good is moral philosophy, then? Which
>is
>important, I guess, if you are Posner's sort of pragmatist who insists
>on the
>cash payoff, to use the William Jamesian commercial metaphor, to any
>any
>practice. I suppose the answer is, it's no more use than chess or
>stock car
>racing or musicology or literary criticism
>
>Really truly, the philosophers have only interpreted the world in
>various
>ways, which is one reason Marx abandoned philosophy at an early age.
>If you
>want to engage in a scholarly activity that might have that sort of
>value,
>you could try writing modern history--it's just about the only
>discipline I
>can think of that has that sort of transpormative interaction with the
>mind
>of the educated public. Moral philosophy is an indulgence, just a
>matter of
>getting things right.
I get the impression that people like Rawls, Dworkin, Nozick along with people in the Analytical Marxist camp like Jerry Cohen, Kai Nielsen and Rodney Peffer are concerned with the improvement of our practices and not just with getting things right in a detached intellectual sense. Rightly or wrongly all these folks seem to have hopes that their work may help to change the world in some sense. I still find it peculiar that you with your political history and your pragmatist allegiances should think differently.
>
>I note that Posner, despite his official contempt for such activity,
>keeps
>writing books on jurisprudence which are about as likely to change the
>world
>as musicology. It's true that the economics and law movement he helped
>
>pioneer really has helped change the world by influencing a lot of
>judges.
>But his The Problems of Jurisprudence or the recent Problematics of
>Moral and
>Legal Theory are "just" political philosophy.
>
>> Probably no one has ever
> been morally improved simply on the basis of having read
> Kant (or Aristotle or Mill) but all these thinkers as I understand
> them were interested in critically analyzing morality precisely
> in order to improve our practices in this regard among other
> things.
>
>I am not so sure. Aristotle thought that morality can only be taught
>by
>example and was exemplified in the Man of Sophrosyne, practical
>wisdom, who
>learned it the way everyone does, by example. Ari attacks the
>erroneous views
>of philosophers, but his approach is not revisionist. He seeks to
>explain, in
>the Nichomachean Ethics, why what everyone knows to be good is so.
>
>Kant, too, is not a revisionist. He is out to capture what he thinks
>everyone
>already agrees upon. He attacks common maxims like It May Be Good In
>Theory
>But It Won't Work In Practice, or The Supposed Right to Lie From
>Benevolent
>Motives, but on the grounds that if we reflect on what we know we will
>
>realize that we already reject these maxims.
And what would the purpose of such critical reflections be but to prevent us from acting wrongly under the guidance of false ideas? It might be the case that we will perceive such ideas to be false upon reflection but the crucial thing here is to get people to reflect upon them. I would suggest that Kant was well aware that people often act without reflection and that this often leads them to act wrongly under the influence of false ideas.
>
>Mill has a better claim to be a revisionist, but less so than his dad
>or
>Bentham, who really _were_ revisionists. Mill, faced with the scary
>implications of a consistent utilitarianism, backs down. Moreover,
>Mill also
>wrote for a general educated audience in popular terms and also
>thought, like
>Ari, that real moral progress is achieved by example, successful
>experiments
>in living--like having a nonmarital relationship with Harriet Taylor.
Are you really trying to tell me that Mill was not attempting to exert some influence on existing practices when he wrote his famous essay "On Liberty" or his *Utilitarianism*. I would be surprised if he thought that there was a radical separation between his theorizing on morals and the conducting of successful experiments in living. In Marxian terms you seem to be arguing for a radical separation between theory and practice.
>
>> Also, I would keep in mind Marx's
> statement in *Theses on Feuerbach* that "the philosophers
> have only interpreted the world. The important thing is to
> change it." One would think that you as a pragmatist would
> be sympathetic to such a view.
>
>Sure, but I doubt that moral philosophy often has that effect. I do
>think the
>world needs changing, and I try to do my bit. If my writing papers in
>moral
>philosophy contributes to that, however, it is only in the smallish
>way of
>keeping a candle lit for radical thought in the field.
>
>[I had distinguished between retributive and distributive justice.]
>
> Well, a lot of philosophers do perceive a linkage between
> distributive and retributive justice. Rawls as I recall in
> his *A Theory of Justice* seemed to treat the latter as
> a species of the former.
>
>He devotes less than a page of TJ to retributive justice, saying: "To
>think
>of distribitive and retributive justice as converses of each other is
>completely misleading and suggests a different justification of
>distributive
>shares than the one in fact they have" (section 48, p. 315 of the 1971
>
>edition).
>
> > And Ted Honderich in various
> writings including his *Conservatism* sees the notions of
> responsibility and desert as underlying both the rationales
> for retribution and for the existence of economic inequalities.
>
>Well, Honderich is a hard determinist who, as someone here pointed
>out,
>thinks that the incoherence of the notion of responsibility means that
>
>socailsim is the correct political philosophy. Anyway. H is not a
>major
>player, in moral philosophy much as I like the Conservatism book.
>
> > As I recall B.F. Skinner
> in his utopian novel *Walden Two* had his alter ego Burris Frazier
> ask the same question of the philosopher, Castle, with the
> implication that such notions [as freedom and responsibility] had
>done
>little to improve human
> behavior.
>
>However, I think that we are stuck with those notions, as the fate of
>Skinner';s musings on the subject shows. No one has presented a
>credible
>alternative to living without them.
Apparently the Soviets did at one time attempt to dispense with such notions from their jurisprudence. Thus at one time they referred to "socially dangerous acts" rather than to crimes in their penal codes and spoke of "measures of social defense" rather than punishments. Soviet thinking on these matters relected the influence of Pavlov whose psychology was for a time the official Soviet psychology and which promoted a form of hard determinism within Soviet thought.
>
>I would say that retributivist notions of responsibility have played
>an
>important role in our jurisprudence, not only in getting unhappy
>support for
>cruel and repressive penal laws, but more happily in notions like the
>presumption of innocence and the panapoly of protections for the
>accused and
>the convicted.
It seems to me just as it does for Charles that all those things can be more than adequately defended on consequentialist grounds. A penal system that regularly punishes innocent people is likely to lose whatever powers for deterrence that it might have once people become aware of what is going on. And one can I think find historical precedents for such things occuring.
Jim F.
>
>--jks
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