Tedious metaethical discussion

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Sun May 12 14:10:46 PDT 2002



>
>Yeah, OK, we know you think metaethics is boring. But what do you think
>about the questions raised at the origin of this thread? It certainly
>seems
>to me that ethics is prior to politics in the sense that, if concepts like
>good and bad were wholly chimerical, there wouldn't be much point in
>advocating any set of political positions.
>
>-- Luke

Ethics is never prior to politics, for two reasons. The first is that there are political positions we have that no ethical argument could ever make us give up. I have argued here for the priority of democracy, for example. For many of us, socialism is like that two. Oh in the abstract I suppose you could say, suppose therew ere iron-clad, irrefutable arguments that democracy or socialism led to the Gulag and universal poverty. But in fact if there were arguments like that I couldn't refute, I'd just assume I wasn't smart enough to find what was wrong with them.

The second is that ethics and politics are all mixed up with each other and with lots of empirical assumptions about how the world worlds. You can't isolate the ethical element and say, it's prior. Sure, I think we need moral principles to navigate politically. And we need political principles to navigate ethically, and lots of empirical knowledge to make sense of both ethics and politics. We go backa nd forth, trying to explain our considered moral judgments in terms of principles we accept and rejected principles or judgements to make thgings fit. Pragmatism isn't one choice among many, or something you can reject. It's called thinking. That's why metaethics is boring.

jks

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