Thinking about moral courage has led me to some odd thoughts. Let's see if I can make any sense of them, and then maybe see whether they are at all plausible. Perhaps really it's a combination of thoughts.
One of these is the idea that certain things are obviously evil, for instance cruelty. The Bible (Leviticus 19:14 to be precise) tells us not to place a stumbling block in front of blind people, which is the kind of thing you might think would go without saying. This kind of thing is just obviously wrong, it seems to me. If you want some explanation of why it is bad I guess you could talk about cruelty, human dignity, and so on, but it's hard to imagine a human being not understanding that playing tricks like this on handicapped people is evil. (It's hard also to imagine a human being who didn't understand the temptation to engage in such evil deeds, too, at least at some level, but that is a different point. Maybe it's because we hear the voice of this temptation and recognize it as a voice not to be trusted that we see its suggestions as evil. Or maybe not.)
Another is the idea that a wise person will see, know, or understand what to do in any given situation. I'm not sure that I believe this, but it seems to me that it might be true and it also seems that it might be a good thing to hold it as true. Anscombe believes in absolute moral prohibitions, which raises questions such as "Is it really wrong to lie even if doing so is the only way to save someone's life?" Her answer, as I recall, is that it really is wrong to lie, but that it might be very hard to see a way out of certain situations without doing something wrong. If you can see no other way out, she thinks, then it is better to lie than to let an innocent person be murdered, but it is still wrong to lie. After all, God has forbidden all lies. It would seem a bit unfair of God to do this unless it were not really necessary to lie ever after all. And that, I think, is what Anscombe believes: there always is a way to do the right thing, if only we are wise enough to see what it is. For this reason she sticks to her absolutism and rejects the consequentialist idea that lying, e.g., might sometimes be the right thing to do.
I don't have Anscombe's faith, so I don't believe exactly the same thing. But I agree with her that wisdom or creativity can find ways that are not obvious, and that we should not be too quick to accept the anti-absolutist idea. There are sometimes better consequences to be had by sticking to absolutism rather than weakening our commitment to such things as human rights. Anscombe says that someone who thinks in advance that we shouldn't rule out options such as executing an innocent person shows a corrupt mind. If they think we shouldn't rule it out when faced with a horrible dilemma (of which such an execution is one horn) then they are, she says, just a normally tempted human being. This seems right to me. And if we think this way then we still might end up murdering people, but only if we really are in an unusually bad situation and only after we have run out of other ideas. Justice requires a commitment not to commit such crimes as murder, wisdom requires the vision or imagination to see how to avoid committing them. And something that we might call humanity requires both justice and wisdom.
But humanity is something that we (like to think we) share with others. If others simply do not care about justice or wisdom then they are scarcely human. But what if they care, yet do not share our view of what justice or wisdom dictates? Then it seems we ought to talk to them, to try to persuade them to see the truth (unless the disagreement is about something trivial). Why? For the sake of justice or wisdom (or whatever), but also for the sake of not being alien in relation to them, for the sake of the commonality of humanity, which has to do with both our own sanity and community. (I'm conscious here that I need to read, or re-read, Gaita's A Common Humanity
.)Combining these ideas, I find myself leaning toward the following: a truly human person (by which I mean something like a truly virtuous person,a truly humane person) will be able to get other human beings to see what is required by the humanity that they share. Failure to do this is a human failure, a failure of one's humanity (which might also be called a moral or a spiritual failure). If you take a stand against injustice directed against you by saying "I am a Man," and you fail to persuade your audience, then you have failed to establish common humanity with them.
I don't mean to say that it is your fault, that you are to blame, if you fail in this kind of attempt. (It might be that you could have presented your case better, but there is no moral blame here even if you chose really bad tactics. All the moral blame goes to those who don't recognize your humanity.) But you have gambled and, in the case I'm imagining, lost some of the sense of your humanity. Whose is this sense? It might be your own. That is, you might (although you should not) start to doubt your own humanity. It might be other people's sense of your humanity, although that seems doubtful. It's more the public, shared sense of your humanity. You have made a claim to have your humanity publicly, commonly acknowledged and, I'm imagining, you have failed. The risk of such failure is part, it seems to me, of the reason why it takes courage to take this kind of stand. (There is something odd about the idea of a man holding a sign saying that he is a man, something that makes it hard to believe anyone could deny the claim. And indeed I think it is impossible to deny it. So the moral risk in this case is not great (compared with the physical risk). But the claim still needed to be made by African-Americans in the 1960s and could have been rejected in some way, even if not honestly denied.)
And (this is the point I originally wanted to make) there is a similar risk in taking such a stand for others. Imagine an old woman being racially insulted by some young men. You hesitate to get involved but realize that you cannot stand by and let this happen. So you try to persuade them to leave her alone. You risk being attacked, of course, but there are other risks, too, I'm inclined to think. What you are trying to do is, in a sense, to get them to see the woman as a human being. If you fail you might confirm them in their view that she is not really a human being. By opposing them you also create, or at least accentuate, a division between them and you. If you succeed then this division will be healed. If not, you have divided humanity still further, you have made our shared sense of common humanity weaker than it was. (Is that right, I wonder? Maybe not. But it depends who ends up knowing about your action, and how they react to it. So there is at least a risk that opposing racists will weaken the social bond.) And to the extent that you fail you will have been dismissed as someone who is not wise or just and who is, in that sense, not fully human. You speak but you are not heard, so in a sense you have no voice. You become part of the silent, faceless mass. Not in your eyes, necessarily (although you might feel that way), but in the eyes of the bullies and therefore in the eyes of the common humanity you had hoped existed, or could be made or found to exist, between you and them.
Acts of moral courage risk loss of face, I want to say, and not only in the sense that they risk social embarrassment. But I might be letting metaphors carry me away or muddy the water. I might be relying on an ill-conceived theory of virtue. I might be trying too hard to be clever or tidy without paying enough attention to reality. Let me try just to say as simply as possible the kind of theory that is appealing to me, so that its flaws might be most evident. Here, in summary and conclusion, is what I feel like saying (note, I'm not actually saying it yet):
Human beings see what is true, do what is right, and live in the same world as other human beings. If you stand up for yourself as a human being you risk having your status as a human being denied. To the extent that this is denied (though this is not your fault), you do not live in the same world as (all) other human beings and therefore do not get to be, or live as, a fully human being. If you stand up for others as human beings you run a similar risk, because your status as a being that sees what is true and does what is right is at risk of being denied. And to the extent that this is denied, your status as a human being is denied.
That's it. I'm not prepared to adopt this theory yet for various reasons, including the following: the idea of humanity seems to be doing an awful lot of work here without being very carefully examined or explained, and it comes close to saying that reality is socially constructed, which just sounds false (even if there might be a grain of truth in it). But I feel as though there is something to the theory nevertheless. So I throw it out to see whether others have any thoughts on it.
(Oh no, you already disclaimed your post in the time it took for me to put together a reply!)
ReplyDeleteA long reply to a long post. Consisting of a few different trains of thought it triggered in me:
1)
Within the Wittgensteinian tradition in moral philosophy, "the idea that a wise person will see, know, or understand what to do in any given situation" has been criticised by Rush Rhees, who notes regarding "love thy neighbor as thyself" (I can't find the passage right now, it's in one of the posthumously edited volumes) that there are certain situations in which, were he to find himself in them, he could not say with certainty what he would like people to do to him - and that using this as a guideline as to what he should do to others in this kind of situation is therefore conceptually impossible. I personally regard this criticism as quite compelling.
There is also R. W. Beardsmore's classic criticism of Anscombe by name, in his early paper "Consequences and Moral Worth": to the Anscombean claim that "no one [...] can know in advance that there will be, in any given case, only two alternatives to choose from. There may always be a third way out of the difficulty", he replies that "if it is true that no one can know a priori that there will be only two possibilities, then it is also true that Miss Anscombe cannot know a priori that there will not be. And it is just this knowledge that she seems to be claiming." (In fact, Beardsmore's whole paper seems extremely relevant to your interests.)
Speaking a bit more generally, Lars Hertzberg has characterised the moral philosophy of D. Z. Phillips as standing in opposition to "moral optimism" (Phillips's own term in conversation), defined as "the mistake of supposing that nature, or at least human nature, can somehow be counted upon to be 'on the side of' morality, and that[,] accordingly[,] sympathetic reactions to other human beings must be thought to be in some sense more basic, natural, [...] than reactions of the opposite kind". I must confess that personally, this opposition has made Phillips's moral philosophy significantly more appealing to me personally than that of some other Wittgensteinians. The opposition to moral optimism has a strong family resemblance to Rhees's and Beardsmore's criticisms of Anscombe-type moral philosophy (Phillips quotes Beardsmore with approval), but writ somewhat larger.
What would a good response be to a claim that, in the light of the history of humanity up to now, appeals to a common humanity are just "bawling upon paper", which Bentham memorably termed appeals to natural law?
On Certainty §336: "Very intelligent and well-educated people believe in the story of creation in the Bible, while others hold it as proven false, and the grounds of the latter are well known to the former." My problem is that "very intelligent and well-educated people" similarly take the Benthamite view of appeals to a common humanity - "while others hold it as proven false, and the grounds of the latter are well known to the former".
Much as I admire the moral philosophy of a Rai Gaita or a Cora Diamond, and much as I find myself eagerly nodding in assent to very many individual points they make - and it was a red-letter day for me when I met each of them, such was their sheer impressiveness as human beings - the above considerations nevertheless return to nag me time and again. Because I also find myself nodding in assent to many individual points made by a philosopher such as, say, Raymond Geuss, whose moral philosophy is as far removed from theirs as can be - and who also claims Wittgenstein on his side: the Wittgenstein of remarks such as On Certainty §§611-612 and Investigations §217. Matters are not helped by the fact that Geuss cannot by any stretch be accused of the much-lamented frivolity and triviality that infests the main stream of contemporary analytic moral philosophy: he is plainly put off by it just as deeply and strongly.
ReplyDelete2)
It is also interesting for Anscombe's position that there are situations in which not to lie would not merely be frowned upon socially, but would be a criminal offence. A simple example is the ban on insider trading. If you are an executive of a publicly traded company that has a profit warning coming, someone asks you whether there is one coming, and you answer truthfully, you could go to prison for it.
This, of course, shows nothing by itself. After all, speaking of Anscombe's paradigm case of knowingly executing the innocent, the United States Supreme Court for one has ruled that a claim of actual innocence based on new evidence discovered after the trial is not a bar to execution - with the result that a person with such a claim, and not a frivolous one at that, was actually executed.
But part of the reason why I used the example of insider trading is that the ban on it seems to rest on another value Christianity values about as highly as honesty, namely equality. Humans are supposed to be equal before God, and the argument against insider trading is precisely that, being equal, they should have an equal chance of making money on the stock market. Why should honesty automatically trump equality and not the other way around? Are there theological grounds, and if so, what are they?
3)
I think your "we shouldn't rule it out when faced with a horrible dilemma" is uncomfortably close to what D. Z. Phillips called "philosophy by italics". It seems to me that it merely turns the initial disagreement about who has a corrupt mind and who doesn't, into a new disagreement about which dilemma is horrible enough to be relevant and which isn't. One person's horrible is another's not-that-horrible. And if one is so minded, one will probably find excuses easily enough to explain away any horribleness one is confronted with if it threatens to cause embarrassment to moral views already held.
Thanks, Tommi. I'm glad my ramblings prompted some good thoughts. I'll reply quickly now to some of your points and then address the others later (tomorrow, I hope).
ReplyDeleteOn your point 3, I think there might be a range of cases, but the way you put it makes me realize that what I wrote was ambiguous. Anscombe's claim about corrupt minds is that you don't necessarily have one if you seriously consider doing a bad thing (it's human nature to do that in certain circumstances), but that you do have one if you consider doing it, or insist that we should consider doing it, when not in such special circumstances at all. Roger Teichmann, if I remember correctly, uses an example involving prejudice against gypsies. Someone who thinks in advance that gypsies should not have the same rights as everyone else shows a corrupt mind. Someone who thinks they should not have the same rights as everyone else in a situation that strongly suggests there is some need for unequal treatment may well still be badly wrong, but is wrong in a way that is understandable, perhaps forgivable (depending on the details of the case), and so not (as) corrupt. So the word 'when' as I used it refers to the time when it enters the person's head to think the previously unthinkable thought, not to the circumstances in which, all along, they thought such a thing acceptable. Perhaps you realized that all along, but I hope this makes it clearer for anyone who was confused by the way I put it. I still think Anscombe is right about this. If you object, is your objection that she is too soft on the wrong-but-not-necessarily-corrupt, or that she is too hard on the allegedly corrupt? Or something else?
On 2, I don't know. Theological grounds don't do much for me. I would think Anscombe might say that honesty is more important because of the commandment against lying, but I don't know. An action's being illegal, of course, would not make it unthinkable or immoral in her eyes.
I'll have to leave point 1 till later, but I don't mean that I share Anscombe's moral optimism. It is, as I think I said, based on a faith that I don't have. But I still think that it might be right (perhaps there are no tragic dilemmas really--how could anyone know?) and that, even if it is false, it might be a good thing to believe anyway. Of course it might also be a bad thing to believe. I haven't weighed the reasons for and against such optimism yet.
I'll have to leave point 1 till later, but I don't mean that I share Anscombe's moral optimism. [...] I haven't weighed the reasons for and against such optimism yet.
ReplyDeleteOh, one of the things you already did make completely clear is that you don't share it. I wasn't suggesting at all that you did. I eagerly look forward to reading whatever discussion of it that you might have. Maybe we fail to share it for two completely different reasons independent of each other?
So the word 'when' as I used it refers to the time when it enters the person's head to think the previously unthinkable thought, not to the circumstances in which, all along, they thought such a thing acceptable. Perhaps you realized that all along, but I hope this makes it clearer for anyone who was confused by the way I put it.
No, in fact I didn't realise it at all. I read you as evidently saying exactly what you in turn thought was evident you weren't saying.
Looking at the exact wording of the "corrupt mind" passage in "Modern Moral Philosophy", Anscombe in fact uses the words "in advance" (those italics again), but immediately goes on to add a long footnote by way of explanation in which she says exactly what Beardsmore criticises her for saying, in my view validly. So I'm not really impressed.
If you object, is your objection that she is too soft on the wrong-but-not-necessarily-corrupt, or that she is too hard on the allegedly corrupt? Or something else?
ReplyDeleteMy objection is that she expects a degree of unanimity of moral response in her own intended audience that isn't there. One person's wrong-but-not-necessarily-corrupt is another one's corrupt, a third one's neutral, and - not always but sometimes - a fourth one's admirable.
For instance, she presents the condemnation-of-innocents argument as if it were a knock-down argument, a reductio ad absurdum - at least for her intended audience (whether British academics ca. 1958, or English-speaking moral philosophers ca. late 20th century). Witness the way she returns to it in the final paragraph of her paper. Her very complaint in the paper, she tells us there in as many words, comes to the fact that this is a paradigm case of injustice, undebatable in any imaginable practical situations by anyone except misguided moral philosophers. You yourself too had this gloss on her and her example in one of your recent Joyce posts. But goings-on like the Supreme Court decision I referred to show that this just simply isn't so; it isn't a paradigm case for everyone.
(And thinking of the Bentley case, of which Anscombe must have had a fresh memory, I wonder how it can ever have occurred to her to select just this as her paradigm case of injustice to put to this audience, of all the hundreds of possible candidates. Not only because there was disagreement about the execution, but perhaps even more importantly because there was disagreement about the scope and meaning of the word "innocent", which Anscombe uses as if it were obviously unambiguous.)
The problem with reductio arguments of the form "if we tolerate this, we might as well tolerate this" is that there will always be some people whose reaction is: yes, exactly, so let us tolerate it. ("If we allow women to drive cars, we might as well allow them to vote.") I recall you yourself making this point against Anscombe on gay marriage, although I can't find it now with quick googling.
I wonder to what extent my difficulties with Anscombe are due to the fact that I'm unsure whether "Modern Moral Philosophy" is addressed to someone like me at all. What Anscombe says it would be best to drop in terms of moral vocabulary, I cannot really express a view on, because in my own case, it wasn't mine to drop in the first place. But what nevertheless draws me back to commenting on Anscombe is that I had failed to adopt the vocabulary for reasons that I'm sure Anscombe wouldn't have liked, completely independently of the argument of "Modern Moral Philosophy".
(perhaps there are no tragic dilemmas really--how could anyone know?)
By experiencing something as a tragic dilemma? Indeed, what else could something's being a tragic dilemma for someone even consist in?
(In your "Virtue Without Theory", which incidentally is my own favourite of all your published journal articles, you write of the "nobility" there is in "the spark created by violently clashing principles". Perhaps tellingly, the very next words you write are: "This is not, presumably, the kind of example Anscombe has in mind.")
OK, here goes my attempt to respond to your point 1. First of all, thanks very much for the various references you provide there. I clearly haven't read enough Geuss, and I can't have read PI 217 very recently either. That remark (i.e. Wittgenstein's) deserves a whole essay. Perhaps I'll try that some time, although I obviously haven't been thinking or writing all that clearly lately, so maybe I should leave it for a few days.
ReplyDeleteI take the heart of your point to be this: What would a good response be to a claim that, in the light of the history of humanity up to now, appeals to a common humanity are just "bawling upon paper", which Bentham memorably termed appeals to natural law?
I think my response would be to distinguish between humanity in the sense of human nature in a biological, psychological, or historical sense (human nature considered as it is, positively), and humanity in an ideal sense, as in related words such as 'humane' and 'humanitarian,' and as in Macbeth's words "I dare do all that may become a man/ Who dares do more is none." A man who dares do more than what is fitting for a man to do is obviously still a a man in the positive sense, but there is still a perfectly good sense in which one may deny that he is really a man. We might say that he has lost his humanity. Obviously this is not 'humanity' in a biological sense. (I'm ignoring the work of people like Michael Thompson and Philippa Foot that aims to complicate or blur this distinction.)
Now, is use of 'humanity' and related words in this sense mere bawling? Not according to the dictionary, but it's something one can have an opinion about. Bentham's view makes sense, but so do opposing views. Personally I see a lot of value in the tradition of humanism, including, for instance, Aristotle's work. I think a case can be made that a life of public service is "most human," but that hardly makes sense if we think of what it means to be human in strictly positive or positivist terms.
Finally, for this part of my response, think about a Good Samaritan case. Faced with a wounded man lying on the road, some people have wanted to say that it is natural to pity and help him. Others say it just as natural to want to hurry by, or even to want to finish him off, or rob him. I agree that these are all human responses that might equally be called natural. But, other things being equal, one is a much better response than the others. Why not call helping in such a case the natural or human thing to do, so long as we don't get confused about what is meant here by 'natural' or 'human'? It is the response, after all, that comes from human nature at its best. Or so I would claim.
My first response about Anscombe:
ReplyDeleteHere's her footnote on the man who shows that he has a corrupt mind by thinking in advance (in a seminar, perhaps) that the judicial execution of the innocent should not be ruled out:
"If he thinks it in the concrete situation, he is of course merely a normally tempted human being. In discussion when this paper was read, as was perhaps to be expected, this case was produced: a government is required to have an innocent man tried, sentenced and executed under threat of a "hydrogen bomb war." It would seem strange to me to have much hope of so averting a war threatened by such men as made this demand. But the most important thing about the way in which cases like this are invented in discussions, is the assumption that only two courses are open: here, compliance and open defiance. No one can say in advance of such a situation what the possibilities are going to be‑-e.g. that there is none of stalling by a feigned willingness to comply. Accompanied by a skillfully arranged “escape” of the victim."
This seems quite right to me, and important, although I might add that there might not be such possibilities. The point is that one cannot know in advance whether there will be or not. In my opinion one also cannot know that there aren't, or weren't, such possibilities if one fails to find them. Perhaps one just wasn't clever enough.
Beardsmore (as quoted on p. 232 of the essay by Phillips that you linked to) objects to Anscombe that there might not be more than two options, each bad (I agree, and don't think Anscombe denies this), and that we can ensure that there are only two options by using examples from our own experience or from fiction in which we know this to be the case. As I've said, I don't believe that we can know in our own experience what other possibilities there might be that we haven't thought of, or what other possibilities we might be able to create. The limits of my imagination are not the limits of the possible. And I think this goes for fictional examples too, unless we build into the fiction a God who ensures that only two courses of action can be pursued. But I don't see much point in an exercise like that.
Anscombe is optimistic at least partly because she believes that the world is ruled by God. She also believes that it is unrealistic to think we can know how many possibilities there might be in a concrete situation until we are in it (she doesn't like trolley cases, in other words). And she further believes that this kind of unrealistic thinking leads to corruption, as when consideration of philosophers' examples leads people to adopt crude forms of ethical theory, such as consequentialism. I agree with all of this except: a) I don't believe in God, and b) I don't think we can know the limits of the possible even within the concrete situation.
Two last points, one about tragic dilemmas and one about Anscombe's audience.
ReplyDeleteYou make a very good point about tragic dilemmas. What is experienced as a tragic dilemma thereby is such a dilemma for the person involved. In a sense that's true, and it would be both unrealistic and unsympathetic to deny that such things happen. But not everything that appears to be a dilemma really is one. It is possible to fail to see or understand all the options available.
Did I seriously deny earlier that one could know one was in a genuinely tragic dilemma? I'm not sure what to say about this. Part of me wants to insist that you cannot know there is no possible way out, however certain you may be that there is no third alternative. Another part wants to dismiss that as philosophers' nonsense. That in Sophie's choice, say, Sophie knows that appealing to the Nazi's good side is a hopeless idea. The problem with saying this, though, is that part of this kind of psychological torture is the doubt that plagues us in and after such situations. One reason for not just murdering one, or both, of the children is to torture their mother with guilt and doubt afterwards. Was there something else she could have done? The answer is No, I suppose, but saying so, especially saying it bluntly and definitively, shows a lack of sympathy with the tortured conscience. Or so it seems to me. (I wonder how much sense this makes though.)
You are also right to raise questions about Anscombe's sense of her audience. Who is she addressing? She must have known that her theses were highly controversial and that no amount of argument, and certainly not the little she provides in "Modern Moral Philosophy," would persuade most philosophers that she was right. Perhaps that is why she says that she is going to "present" her theses, rather than argue for them as one might expect. I don't know. But she does have arguments, however condensed, and they aren't bad. I think her goal, for the most part, was to state the truth (as she saw it) and hope that others recognized it as such. If consequentialists are in bad faith, as I think she thought they were, then even they might be able to sense, however dimly, that she was telling the truth, even if their theories led them to reject it. Roughly speaking she dished out a few slaps and thereby, without winning the war, started a fight that isn't over yet.
Thanks. The more this discussion progresses, the more I'm enjoying it, and it wasn't at all unenjoyable to begin with.
ReplyDeleteI think my response would be to distinguish between humanity in the sense of human nature in a biological, psychological, or historical sense (human nature considered as it is, positively), and humanity in an ideal sense, as in related words such as 'humane' and 'humanitarian,' and as in Macbeth's words "I dare do all that may become a man/ Who dares do more is none."
There may well be some tacit temperamental differences behind this, or something of the sort anyhow. If these are the various senses of humanity on offer, I think my response would be to say that for me, it is the historical sense that is the primary one, such that whatever is a departure from the historical sense is primarily a departure from it.
This is one of the reasons a philosopher like Geuss interests me - and why, for instance, I raised the questions about Anscombe's audience (I'm especially glad they struck you as relevant and legitimate). Geuss's philosophy is wholeheartedly a historical philosophy in the way familiar from, and prevalent in, twentieth-century continental philosophy - which neither Wittgenstein's own philosophy nor that of the vast majority of Wittgensteinians is not. Yet he has no qualms about utilising the grammatical, atemporal remarks of a Wittgenstein, without misrepresenting their nature, to support his views whenever they seem to him to support them.
To take your quote from Macbeth, for one, a Geussian response could well be to point out that Shakespeare was writing in a Europe where witch hunts, the slave trade, trial by ordeal, burning at the stake, drawing and quartering, and other practices 21st-century liberal intellectuals are not so enamoured of were both quantitatively prevalent and widely accepted as natural and morally proper, and to question whether Macbeth's invocation of humanity can mean that much for us when it didn't, in the end, seem to have meant that much even to Shakespeare's own contemporaries. This may strike you as itself a consequentialist argument, and therefore irrelevant for someone like Anscombe who was not a consequentialist. But it is not in fact a moral philosophical argument at all, but instead an argument about the intercultural and intertemporal intelligibility of linguistic expressions, such as Macbeth's.
Part of Geuss's critiques of Kant and Hegel, for instance, consists of reminding readers of the many sorts of obvious absurdities (phrenology, Zoroastrianism, scientific racism, etc.) that were taken as seriously in 18th- and 19th-century Prussia as their philosophy was, and to ask between the lines why this should not make us less prepared to think that we have necessarily "got" them when we seem to have managed to extract from them some doctrines that can be stated in the language-game of contemporary academic philosophy. The temporal distance from Anscombe is not perhaps sufficiently long yet, but in time someone might well write a similar critique of Anscombe's moral philosophy. (Or my philosophy, or yours, or Geuss's own.)
If you want to dip a bit more into Geuss, his most recent collection Politics and the Imagination is one good place to start, especially the essays "On the Very Idea of a Metaphysics of Right" (an attack on deontological metaethics with Wittgenstein's philosophy of mind belonging to the selection of sticks he beats it with) and "On Bourgeois Philosophy and the Concept of 'Criticism'" (which takes as it point of departure the remark in Culture and Value about Ramsey's having been a "bourgeois thinker", tying it to critiques of "moral optimism" among other things). Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has good reviews of each of Geuss's four most recent books.
But, other things being equal, one is a much better response than the others. Why not call helping in such a case the natural or human thing to do, so long as we don't get confused about what is meant here by 'natural' or 'human'?
ReplyDeleteI'm not even remotely pained, outraged, embarrassed, etc., by your or anyone else's calling it so, but this just strikes me personally as itself being quite possibly one of those expressions "retaining the suggestion of force, and apt to have a strong psychological effect, but which no longer signif[y] a real concept at all" that Anscombe famously speaks of. (As to why, see above.) Thus the association chain in my head that ended in Bentham's remark.
The limits of my imagination are not the limits of the possible.
But the limits of my imagination are the limits of what is possible for me. This I take to be the gist of Beardsmore's objection and the suggestion that we can also take real examples from our own personal life, not just fictional ones from fiction. I'm not one for trolley cases any more than Anscombe was, but such examples are not trolley cases.
Part of me wants to insist that you cannot know there is no possible way out, however certain you may be that there is no third alternative. Another part wants to dismiss that as philosophers' nonsense.
Now what I'd basically like you to do - what I've already been trying to get you to do - is to encourage the latter part. To goad it on or so to say.
"I say to those repressed doubts: you are quite correct, go on asking, demand clarification!" (Philosophical Grammar, II, §25, p. 382)
In any case I hope that you'll in time be writing more on this whole cluster of topics, and not necessarily just for the blog.
Addenda:
ReplyDelete1) drop the double negative from "which neither Wittgenstein's own philosophy nor that of the vast majority of Wittgensteinians is not"
2) on "the limits of my imagination are not the limits of the possible", compare also the Culture and Value remark from 1930:
"If anyone should think he has solved the problem of life & feels like telling himself everything is quite easy now, he need only tell himself, in order to see that he is wrong, that there was a time when this 'solution' had not been discovered; but it must have been possible to live then too & the solution which has now been discovered appears in relation to how things were then like an accident. And it is the same for us in logic too. If there were a 'solution to the problems of logic (philosophy)' we should only have to caution ourselves that there was a time when they had not been solved (and then too it must have been possible to live and think) -"
Completely similarly: "If there were a 'solution to our tragic moral dilemmas that hasn't just occurred to us yet, due to our limited powers of imagination' we should only have to ..."
Thanks, Tommi. I'm enjoying it too. Let's see...
ReplyDeleteWe might never 'get' Shakespeare or Kant or whoever (and certainly Anscombe felt out of tune with her times), but they do still speak to us in some sense, don't they? Macbeth aside, it's not too hard to imagine contemporary people having a similar dialogue: "Go on, be a man. Kill him!", "I am a man. What you're talking about is something an animal would do, not a man," etc. (OK, I'm not a dramatist.) I think the point remains. The distinction between the actual nature of humanity and the ideal nature is like the distinction between me and "the real me," and many other similar distinctions. I don't want to give these all up. But also, I think that doing so would miss something. I think that Derrida talks about an ideal of justice that never gets realized but that is necessary for the practice of what gets called 'justice' in reality. We have a kind of platonic ideal that is too pure to exist in our world, but that guides our actions (or some of them) like an impossible-yet-aimed-for target. So we can criticize a bad decision by saying that justice was not done. An excessively positivistic stance might reject this claim and say that, yes, justice was done. The justice system worked as it does, and to call this only "so-called" justice is to indulge in some kind of fantasy. I think that it is a mistake to want to squeeze the normative or the ideal from our concepts. There is a fact/value distinction to be made, but I don't think it goes all the way down. The two ends of the spaghetti are not completely separable, so to speak. Maybe the historical sense is primary, but it is not the only sense. There is something as it were puritanical about wanting to purge the language of these normative uses. It doesn't appeal to me, and I don't think an ordinary language case for it would work (the ideal senses are there, like it or not), but a moral or social case could perhaps be made for it.
I think I basically agree with you about imagination and possibility. But I don't want to go too far too quickly in giving up (or urging others to give up) on imagination or trying to solve problems. If we just stick with a lemma, rather than a dilemma, a man in a prison might know there is no way out. It would be dishonest to insist that there must be something more he could do (although, of course, there might be something he hasn't tried that would work). Much the same goes for dilemmas and situations where a person is involved (who might be reasoned with, tricked, or won over in some way). I want to keep the thought that situations can be reconceived, that creative solutions and reframings are possible, and that we cannot know in advance (or perhaps at all) what the limits of such creativity are. But I also want to be realistic.