--- Luke Weiger <lweiger at umich.edu> wrote:
> Miles wrote:
>
> > Let me try again: why are we compelled to "give
> the avoidance of
> > needless suffering any non-negligible ethical
> weight"? It's possible
> > and quite common that avoidance of suffering is
> not a component of
> > moral decisions and action.
What planet do you live on? Of course avoidance of suffering is not a trump. Retributivists like me think that the wicked should suffer for thr crimes. But needless suffering? Imagine the following dialog:
Q: What are you doing to that cat? A: (Fill in description of some dreadful activity that causes needless suffering). Q: What the fuck is the matter with you? A: Oh, I just like doing this. What's it to you? Who cares if I like to hurt cats for no reaaon?
Is the burden of proof on Q to show that A is wrong? Not on your life. Philosophers like to play skeptic. ("Prove to me that the external world exists." Show me that avoidance of needless suffering should plays a role in my ethical system.") But it's a game, normal people don't take this stuff seriously. When real people acta s if there was no external world, we conclude they are mad and need treatment; they thy take no account of needless suffering, we regard them as sociopaths to be at best avoided, and we lock them up when they do something evil.
> It's a position that devours itself. One of the
> more robust areas of social
> concensus on moral matters is as follows: the truth
> values of ethical claims
> aren't entirely contingent on social concensus.
> You'd have a very hard time
> convincing anyone (other than perhaps a few renegade
> pomos) that enslaving
> the blacks was OK back when most Americans were
> comfortable with it.
Course there are people who don't think that moral judgments have truth values instead of emotive or expressive force. I'm not one of them but as a former dissertation student of Allen Gibbard, then a leading "noncognitivist" as they say in the ugly jargon of analytical philosophy, I had to mention this.
I think no one really accepts crude ethical relativism
of this sort, and that is so far as it goes a
sufficient reply to people who pretend to propound the
position, but I think a lot of people are
uncomfortable with having nothing more to say than we
all disagree with the position. Which is why people
like me sometimes write papers trying to explain why
that position or its close relations are wrong.
>
> Perhaps Justin could say something interesting about
> Rorty's notion of
> liberal irony, which from my reading of secondhand
> accounts seems to amount
> to the following: as an intellectual matter, we're
> forced to acknowledge
> that our ethical/political ideals are utterly
> contingent and perhaps as an
> empirical matter not widely shared, but that as a
> practical matter we ought
> to seek their realization anyway.
This is a correct characterization, except that Rorty says we DO seek their realization anyway, when we're being good. I think by "contingent" here Rorty means there is no foundation for these ideals outside human social practices -- I don't think he discusses the issue of our biological nature (much), although he should, since it is central to his thinking on this matter that we are animals that are capable of suffering and that cruelty, deliberate imposition of needless suffering, is the worst thing we can do -- ideas which are certainly related to our biological nature.
Anyway, the "utterly contingent" thesis means that it's not God or Nature that makes it wrong to torture cats or humans, it's something about us. Rorty sometimes expresses this idea in terms of vulgar cultural relativism, but that's just because he gets annoyed, I think. Except for the thing about suffering and cruelty he has little to say about what it is about us that makes the things we think are wrong or right wrong or right.
The idea that our values (or someone's -- would it be "us" if we were, Islamic Fundamentalists or 19th century defenders of slavery?) could be other than they are is obviously true.
The fact that we have arrived at modern liberal values surely depends on a historical path that could have turned out otherwise (and may yet go elsewhere). You have to believe, as I officially and ridiculously optimistically do, in something like a Hegelian or Millean notion of a historical tendency towards moral progress to thinkj that it is even likely that many of several paths by which we could have gone would have ended up in this neighborhood.
As to the notion that we should do do (at our best) true to live up to our own ideals, that's obvious. We should try to live up to someone else's ideals? (Maybe -- propound some and see if you can persuade people. That's what we socialists do all the time after all . . . .)
jks
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