**Matthias Wasser writes: To many people, if you see someone getting beaten on the street, get angry, and do something to help, that's "morality," . . .**
Cbc: Notice, that to make sense of this you have to assume that the incident is over, that you are sitting calmly at your computer, and making an abstract judgment of the incident. And you try to base this abstract judgment (essentially an act of classification, of establishing the genus of which the particular act was a species) on a Moral Law. Try to state that moral law and to establish its FOUNDATION. What is it about the universe that justifies that Law or Principle on the basis of which we can say: X is an instance of The Moral; Y is an instance of the Immoral."
And to follow up on your particular example. A is beating up on B. You step in and stop A from doing so. Immediately both A and B join together to beat up on you. (My example is an actual one: this is what happened to one of my cousins.) B does not want A to beat up on her, but she is even more insistent on the Moral Law that one does not interfere in the private affairs of others. Hence your Moral Act is by the Universal Moral Law she follows an Immoral Act.
How do we settle the argument between these two Universal Moral Laws?
But this is the beginning of the endless intellectual and political confusion Moralism (the belief in abstract moral or ethical principles) generates. Notice that to bring our morals into play we had to leave the scene of action and sit down at our desk at home or perhaps in the Seminar room. When you saw that person getting beaten, did you stop and retrieve the proper Moral Principle that governed the action? Or did you just act? Then ater the act you rationalized it in terms of this or that abstract theory of The Moral. You placed the concrete act of interfering in someone else's quarrel in the category of The Moral.
(Where does that category exist, incidentally? But we'll postpone that questionl.) Moral judgment depends on the separation of thought and action. First one thinks through a question, while refraining from action. Then one acts. Meanwhile the person getting beaten is dead and the assailant has begun to beat on your head because he does not want to leave a witness behind.
**MW{ even if you understand that your desire not to see people suffer is an irrational product of culture/evolution/whatever. . . .**
Cbc: What in the world is irrational about it? This completely baffles me. Five thousand years of human struggle went into creating this desire not to see people suffer. Our social life constantly regenerates that attitude (even as it also undermines it - we're in deep complexities here). The problem/confusion lies not in this desire but into the itch to find a universal principle after the fact under which to clasify that desire. Your calling that desire irrational is irrational, a product of the same division of thought and action, feeling and thought, that generates the confusion to begin with. In fact, I have serious doubts as to the usefulness of this concept of "The Irrational." Like "The Moral Law" it tends to divide humanity into two groups, one of which is superior to the other. (Incidentally, reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn along with What Maisie Knew and Twain's other great work, The Mysterious Stranger, can throw a lot of light on this.)
**MW] Carrol seems to think it requires moral realism; that for an objection to be moral it would have to be grounded in reference to a transhistorical True ideal. **
Cbc: The wording sneaks Moralism back in here by the phrase "for an objection to be moral."
**MW] Carrol sees people say "moral" and thinks they're engaging in metaphysics. Doug (or whoever) sees Carrol say "moral" and thinks she's claiming not to care about things.**
Cbc: This is a pretty good summary. It seems to me that those making moral judgments do need to give some thought to what constitutes the foundation for those judgments - and that will involve them in metaphysics. I don't necessarily object to metaphysics; I do object to the confusion caused by those who are making a metapkhysical argument while beeing totally unconsicious of that fact.
**MW] There's an empirical component here, of course ("what do X leaders in the Democratic Party think they're trying to accomplish?") but that seems to be comparatively clear.**
Cbc: I'm not sure it is clear. And I'm not sure it's an empirical question. As an empirical question it is apt to call for mindreading of motives, and that leads to confusion. One way I think to avoid this mind-reading is ground historical analysis on the principle that within their context people act ratioally. The assumption of irrationality is apt to be quite offensively arrogant: that is, it assumes that the critic is rational and he/she, in the position of the other, would do so and so, and since that is not what The Other does, The other is irrational. It seemed to me, anyhow, that Chuck was making this error in his analysis of the "rot" which the Obama administration needed to cure. It is also the error, I think, in the judgment that Bush did damage to "The Empire." (There is the additional problem here of giving concrete content to that phrase, "The Empire." My own view is that the concept is misleading, that we need to focus not on The U.S. Empire but on the Empire of Capital, which calls for much more compelx analysis.)
Carrol