On Jul 25, 2009, at 9:45 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
>
> You seem to be equating the "moral" with the "visceral" -- or what
> would once have been called "moral sentiments." Which is fine, but
> there's a sea of ink that's been spilt on the attempt to justify
> or ground these sentiments somehow in something other than or larger
> than your and my individual viscera. You equate the moral and
> the visceral, but generations of philosophers have worked like
> stevedores to demonstrate -- unconvincingly, I think -- that the
> moral is something other than just the visceral.
>
> Such theorizing is what many people mean when they speak of
> "morals" or "morality", and it's this sense of "morality" --
> "abstract universal principles", to use your phrase -- that I
> find dubious, and which if I understand him correctly Carrol
> also finds dubious.
>
Wait, wait. "Abstract universal principles" are not the same as "moral atoms" (the stuff that we ground things on).
I think there are two separate questions at play. One is: what is the nature, value and significance of our visceral reactions? The tendency thus far has been to label them "irrational desire"s. While I think this is almost certainly wrong (and uncharacteristically ;-), I think evolutionary arguments do inform why that is so), this label of irrationality obtains the benefit of dismissing further analysis of these "sentiments". If, on the other hand, they are not irrational at all, but a historic encoding of a set of behaviours that have holistic value (sorry for that sentence -- I spent the hot day wading in a Cedar Creek and my brain is mushier than ever), then we can happily depart from this path to unavoidable dismissal.
A very quick note: this examination of "viscera" seems entirely in line with good empirical behaviour! Of course as every empiricist and scientist discovers, sometimes the phenomena are [a measure of something] vestigial or are outright illusionary. Or at other times, phenomena contradict each other. But this is a far cry from throwing out the phenomena altogether.
Another legitimate question (that occurs at least to me!) is: do we need to proceed from an analysis of our shared visceral reactions, and gut-level "ought"s? Certainly not. Go your own way. Perhaps the [libertarian] starting point of the obvious desire of human beings for liberty and freedom. But it seems to me that if you altogether shirk universalisation (here also used in the sense of speaking about the *real* universe of human beings, their interactions, etc), and merely offer generalised algorithms that solve pre-defined problems, you should be publishing under the self-help section... yes? ;-) (I am kidding, don't get angry!).
Second, if it is true that almost all human beings possess/exhibit such a reaction (and I argued in a response to Andie a few years ago, that indeed we do -- in that case the faculty under debate was "empathy"), then it seems quite valid to ask what the principles and prescriptions are that can be abstracted from them. In essence, morality can play the blind algorithm game too! Unless you (or Joe) have some amoral reason to prioritise "self-interest" over "visceral desire", we can choose our algorithms based on which one of these we find more convincing or attractive!
--ravi
-- Anyone who takes an effort to intellectually challenge the status quo and established habits is infinitely more venerable than hacks defending that status quo and established habits, regardless of the truth function of their propositions. -- W.Sokolowski