I don't say these are easy problems. I have actually written several papers about them. I don't pretend to be all that confident of the answers. On the contrary.
But I think by our standards, which you share, that the argument from the mere fact disagreement is weak. Bertrand Russell once joked that you should make a point of taking a paper whose politics are the opposite of your own. Then when you disagreed (as usual), you'd know that at least one of you was wrong, and maybe both of you.
The point is that disgreement -- by our standards -- only means that both positions can't be right. Which really the opposite of the view you have, that disagreement means that both positions can be right.
Moreover, two seperate issues. Take the "God said it" view. We think that's wrong. We can't agree with the people who hold it. We can't think of a way to settle the difference about whether to use logic or the Bible.
(Say so for the sake of argument -- I have a theory (published, therefore true ;->) about why we can (a) explain why the fundamentalists ought to agree by their own standards, and (b) why they won't anyway. But set that aside.)
You think that this situation means we should worry that maybe the fundamenalists are right. But why is that unless we can think of a reason that is a reason by our standards to think so? If we can't think of a single reason to suppose why something's being in the Bible or the Q'ran or Das Kapital (sorry, bad joke) makes even more likely to be true, why should we even start to doubt whether our normal standards are correct?
There's another issue you haven't addressed. We have been talking of the standards of different groups rather loosely. When do we have a different group, though? How do we know that? The Nazis were white Europeans -- aren't they in the same group as the supposed white Europeans who some seem to thinking invented what we are calling "Western rationality"? Are the difference we care about _racial_ -- is that we (whoever that is) assume that Africans or Asians have Different Standards that whites can't criticize? Surely not.
Are they "cultural"? What's that? When are cultures different enough so that we can't say, you're wrong by OUR SHARED standards? Is Texican a different culture from Chicagoan? I guess in a sense, but different enough that a Chicago lefty can't say that a Texas right wing asshole is an idiot? If Chicago-Texas is too close, what about Canada? Mexico? Is it a matter of natioanlity? Isn't that what the neo-Confederates, not to mention other nasty nationalist groupings, say? (Sorry, that was unfair.) But there is a problem here, I think you will agree.
jks
Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> Uh, I think we know. Because anything you could give thatw ould count as
> a reason would have to follow those rules, or it wouldn't be a reason at
> all. If, for instance, as some people say in our society, "It's in the
> Bible that [gays are bad, whatever], God said it, and that settles it,"
> that's not a reason. Or nota good one. As you actuallt believe.
Yes, according to our (yours and my) shared web of beliefs and practices, "God said it and that settles it" is a poor argument. But that's necessarily true because we think that logic, evidence, and reason are the hallmarks of good argument. Back up: there's an infinite regress here you can't avoid. How do we know that logic and reason should be the arbiters of proper morals? If you provide logical arguments in favor of your claim, you're just begging the question!
I can imagine a community in which "God said it and that settles it" would be a plausible, powerful argument according to the auspices and practices of those people. In that moral universe, logic and reason are not "useful" or "better" tools, and people in that moral universe would consider us barbaric and heartless. --And, according to their foundational beliefs and practices, that would be a reasonable claim. According to our beliefs and practices, it's not reasonable.
Here's the problem people are ducking in this thread: there is no universally agreed upon metastandard for adjudicating between these moral universes. Each side simply takes its own beliefs as the metastandard by which all beliefs should be judged.
Miles
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