> 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 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.
>
> 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.
>
> > 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.
>
> 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.
>
> --jks