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<P><BR>The debate was about animal rights and whether ethical arguments and/or </P></DIV>
<DIV></DIV>>goverment regulations should/could be of any service in promoting them. I'm
<DIV></DIV>>perplexed by your statement that the grad students would naturally side with
<DIV></DIV>>Singer. One was a Kantian with libertarian political leanings and little
<DIV></DIV>>concern for the interests of animals (I actually agree with him that many
<DIV></DIV>>non-human animals don't meet any reasonable criteria for personhood). He
<DIV></DIV>>wondered if Singer would be dissapointed after such a weak challenge.
<DIV></DIV>>Basically, Posner stated that even a superior ethical argument carried to
<DIV></DIV>>its logical conclusion must give way if faced with a powefully contrary
<DIV></DIV>>intution. Wait a second... I think I'm begining to see why the grad
<DIV></DIV>
<P>>students would be inclined to side with Singer. </P>
<P>Right. Posner has an odd view that moral philosophy is pretty useless--see his Problematics of Legal and Moral Theory, He says, probably correctly, that normative moral theory rarely persuades anyone. He draws the conclusion from this, which I think is erronenous, that it is of no value. It's true that if you want to induce people to be good, you probably shouldn't trty to approach them in the manner of of the Journal of Philosophy. But that's not what moral philosophy is supposed to do. "When what use is it?" Posner asked me. I said, among other things, it is supposed to make us more condfident that our moral views are justified and correct. Since P is the sort of pragmatist who has a skeptical view about truth, he wasn't impressed. </P>
<P>His argument that moral philosophy is of little use in law is better justified. Here, the pragmatist line, expressed, e.g., in Rorty's paper on The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy, or in Rawls' notion of the Overlappping Consenus, is helpful in explaining why. Basically, moral philosophy is controversial enough so that if if we think a theory is true, we might be hesitant to impose it over a the results of a democratic process. We surely would not want judges doing that, evn if we expect that they will use theory own moral views in the interstices of the law. </P>
<P>I agree with P that in general, a strong intuition trumps an apparantly strong argument for a counterinituitive conclusion. It's a pragmatist platitude taht one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens, that if an argument has an unpalatable conclusion, we might do well to reassess the truth of the premises and test the validity of the reasoning. This is also Rawls' view. It is the basic idea that the notion of reflective equilibrium i supposed to capture.</P>
<P>--jks</P></div><br clear=all><hr>Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at <a href='http://go.msn.com/bql/hmtag_itl_EN.asp'>http://explorer.msn.com</a><br></html>