A poster at Yahoo!Answers asked this: "What is morality exactly?" He seemed to have gotten, from somewhere, the answers to certain related questions that went in an obvious circle, the right is defined as the good, the good is defined as the right, so that together they remain meaningless.
I like my own answer well enough to reproduce it here, with some modification and clean-up, here:
It doesn't have to be that circular. It is a good question, though. I'll give you my personal answer, largely derived from my study of the works of William James.
The right is the quality of an action that produces or participates in moral goodness.
What is moral goodness then? That is trickier. It comes in layers, though. On the first, lowest, layer, moral goodness is simply anything that is an object of desire. If you like the feeling of pleasure you get when you hurt a baby then (on this first level!), that is for you a moral good.
But we can't live on that first level. We have to live with one another, in a society, and rules necessarily develop that enable the desires of some while frustrating the desires of others. Moral goodness is a quality not of our actions but of the best possible set of societal rules (not necessarily laws, by the way -- an anarchist society would have to live by rules of some sort, customs or whatever you would call them.)
What, then, is the best possible set of societal rules? That which contributes to the best whole, the most complete reconciliation of all the self-aware beings therein.
We can discover this only through history. Human history is itself the process of finding out how we can manage to reconcile ourselves with each other.
Your demand for defintions, then, can get these answers:
Morality is the ultimate goal of human history, the goal of richness, inclusiveness, and reconciliation.
The right is defined as that which contributes to the good.
The good is that which is desired in the first sense, but in the ultimate sense it is that which is FATED to be desired when we are all reconciled.
Showing posts with label pluralism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pluralism. Show all posts
26 February 2012
05 September 2010
Pluralism and the Big Experiment
On Friday, I quoted William James thus:
"See everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem of how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists and free-lovers; the free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists; the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the weak, -- these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed against them are simply deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world."
This is from The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, an essay in which James anticipated the point of view that later came to be known as "value pluralism," a theory in meta-ethics associated with Isaiah Berlin and Joseph Raz.
Henry responded, in the comments section, that James was too optimistic. Surely the advocates of some of those viewpoints were after things nastier than seeking the maximum amount of good that can be gained and kept in the world?
Yes, I answered, they were. And their counterparts today are. Indeed, James' language about those he here calls "radical darwinians" suggests he thinks of them as rather malevolent. He isn't referring simply to the Spencerian notion of failing to assist "the weak," but to something more active, the "suppression" of the weak, which seems to me a reference to the spread of eugenic ideas in his day.
But still, as Henry notes, James refers to these radical Darwinians as part of the great higgle-haggle with the others, so they must in some sense be part of the Big Experiment. Isn't this too optimistic a view of them?
I think James would say that the functioning of one particular faction within this Big Experiment does not depend upon the motives of anyone involved. Thus, for instance, at least some of those "free lovers" he mentions might be motivated by old-fashioned lust, and an unwillingness to abide by the contraints of monogamy. rather than by a desire to produce the best possible mutual accomodation of conflicting values. Still, if such a movement finds resonance, if it builds a base and becomes politically or demographically significant, it will be because it speaks to some dissatisfaction. It will be because the status quo locks out some sentiments, frustrates some energies, and there will be -- should be -- a constant press to include what is so far excluded.
And, yes, one could say the same about Nazism. Hitler didn't build a popular following because a lot of Germans decided they wanted to kill a lot of people. war. He built a following because life in the Weimar Republic was miserable for many, and he gavwe them a vent for that misery. This qualifies Nazism, too, as part of the Big Experiment deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world, even though nobody involved would have described it that way, and even though that particular trial was an enormous failure by that test. The idea of a Big Experiment is a way of understanding history, and thus a history-based way of understanding morality. It is not a hypothesis about the psychology involved among the people 'making' history.
Even the wreckage of Nazism, BTW, left some benefits behind. In the English-speaking countries, especially, the war seems to have thoroughly discredited eugenic ideas, for example, so that have disappeared from the fray.
"See everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem of how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists and free-lovers; the free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists; the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the weak, -- these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed against them are simply deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world."
This is from The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, an essay in which James anticipated the point of view that later came to be known as "value pluralism," a theory in meta-ethics associated with Isaiah Berlin and Joseph Raz.
Henry responded, in the comments section, that James was too optimistic. Surely the advocates of some of those viewpoints were after things nastier than seeking the maximum amount of good that can be gained and kept in the world?
Yes, I answered, they were. And their counterparts today are. Indeed, James' language about those he here calls "radical darwinians" suggests he thinks of them as rather malevolent. He isn't referring simply to the Spencerian notion of failing to assist "the weak," but to something more active, the "suppression" of the weak, which seems to me a reference to the spread of eugenic ideas in his day.
But still, as Henry notes, James refers to these radical Darwinians as part of the great higgle-haggle with the others, so they must in some sense be part of the Big Experiment. Isn't this too optimistic a view of them?
I think James would say that the functioning of one particular faction within this Big Experiment does not depend upon the motives of anyone involved. Thus, for instance, at least some of those "free lovers" he mentions might be motivated by old-fashioned lust, and an unwillingness to abide by the contraints of monogamy. rather than by a desire to produce the best possible mutual accomodation of conflicting values. Still, if such a movement finds resonance, if it builds a base and becomes politically or demographically significant, it will be because it speaks to some dissatisfaction. It will be because the status quo locks out some sentiments, frustrates some energies, and there will be -- should be -- a constant press to include what is so far excluded.
And, yes, one could say the same about Nazism. Hitler didn't build a popular following because a lot of Germans decided they wanted to kill a lot of people. war. He built a following because life in the Weimar Republic was miserable for many, and he gavwe them a vent for that misery. This qualifies Nazism, too, as part of the Big Experiment deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world, even though nobody involved would have described it that way, and even though that particular trial was an enormous failure by that test. The idea of a Big Experiment is a way of understanding history, and thus a history-based way of understanding morality. It is not a hypothesis about the psychology involved among the people 'making' history.
Even the wreckage of Nazism, BTW, left some benefits behind. In the English-speaking countries, especially, the war seems to have thoroughly discredited eugenic ideas, for example, so that have disappeared from the fray.
11 September 2007
W.D. Ross
Today I'm going to describe the ethical theory of Scottish philosopher W.D. Ross, author of THE RIGHT AND THE GOOD (1930).
Why? Well ... because Ross' view, which he called intuitionism, was for a time influential, although it has siince fallen into obscurity, and such Ozymandias-type theories are intrinsically interesting.
Also, because Ross' views seem a British-isles re-write of Jamesianism, of the sort of pluralism expounded in The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.
Ross argued that there are several obligations that play a role in moral reasoning -- in deciding what we ought to do. Each of these obligations is in itself ony a "prima facie duty," because any of them can be counter-balanced by others. The "absolute duty" is by definition that which, in a given situation, outweighs any others.
How do we know which duty in cases of conflict is the absolute one? Our intuition (hence the name for the theory) will tell us case-by-case, which feels weightier.
Technically, Ross' views are classed as "deontology," that is an example of views in which the right dominates the good, duty exists separate and sometimes above the issue of making-the-world-better. Well, Ross' list of duties included at least two that a making-the-world-better philosopher would approve of. We have a duty of self-improvement and we have a duty of beneficience -- of improving the lives of others. Still, there are lots of other duties on his list that can run against these, such as fidelity and gratitude, so if he's right, then there will be times when my duty will be to act in such a manner as to decrease the amount of good.
http://www.wku.edu/~jan.garrett/ethics/rossethc.htm
Why? Well ... because Ross' view, which he called intuitionism, was for a time influential, although it has siince fallen into obscurity, and such Ozymandias-type theories are intrinsically interesting.
Also, because Ross' views seem a British-isles re-write of Jamesianism, of the sort of pluralism expounded in The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.
Ross argued that there are several obligations that play a role in moral reasoning -- in deciding what we ought to do. Each of these obligations is in itself ony a "prima facie duty," because any of them can be counter-balanced by others. The "absolute duty" is by definition that which, in a given situation, outweighs any others.
How do we know which duty in cases of conflict is the absolute one? Our intuition (hence the name for the theory) will tell us case-by-case, which feels weightier.
Technically, Ross' views are classed as "deontology," that is an example of views in which the right dominates the good, duty exists separate and sometimes above the issue of making-the-world-better. Well, Ross' list of duties included at least two that a making-the-world-better philosopher would approve of. We have a duty of self-improvement and we have a duty of beneficience -- of improving the lives of others. Still, there are lots of other duties on his list that can run against these, such as fidelity and gratitude, so if he's right, then there will be times when my duty will be to act in such a manner as to decrease the amount of good.
http://www.wku.edu/~jan.garrett/ethics/rossethc.htm
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