Ethical foundations of the left

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Wed Jul 25 12:08:29 PDT 2001


I said:

But I note it as a fact that argument rarely persuades people that
> > their own cherished views are wrong.
>
>I think that argument is more limited than a lot of other pragmatists would
>make. Even many non-pragmatists would agree that "argument rarely
>[although, perhaps, a non-pragmatist would disagree about how rarely]
>persuades people that their own cherished views are wrong." Posner, to
>cite
>one example, believes that there is good reason to reject a superior
>argument (likely to be sound and valid) if our prior intuitions find it
>disagreeable.

So do I. It's not a conclusive reason, but it's a good reason. But everyone believes this, and practices it. If utilitarianism would license slavery (to take a standard example), that is a good reason to reject it, even if you don't have a theory about why slavery is wrong. This holds even if one can condition themselves in such a way
>that they can, indeed, eventually accept the argument.
>

Sure, but why should we brainwash ourselves> As I said earlier, one person's modus ponens is another person's modus tollens.


>Some non-pragmatist philosophers, like Rawls, think the goal of moral
>philosophy is to square our pre-existing intuitions with each other.
>

Rawls certainly _is_ a pragmatist. And he certainly expressly rejects the view you attribute to him. He insists that once the project of reflective equilibrium is complete, at least provisionally, you can end up far from where started. For cites, see my piece, "Rights of Inequality" in Legal Theory from this spring.

--jks

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