tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post7111739771553948135..comments2024-02-20T12:26:24.682-05:00Comments on language goes on holiday: The destruction of innocent lifeDuncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-9313231472006400642011-01-23T09:04:08.567-05:002011-01-23T09:04:08.567-05:00Yes, I'm not sure that there is any good answe...Yes, I'm not sure that there is any good answer or solution to the problem. If you refuse to get involved in debates about the ethics of torture, for instance, then those debates go on anyway, being pro-torture becomes a thinkable position, and torture continues (as it perhaps would anyway, of course). But if you enter the debate you can no longer really make the objection that torture is unthinkable or just obviously wrong. And that seems like a kind of victory for torture too. The best thing might be to make movies or write novels that make clear the horror of torture. But that would be hard to do, of course, and might make no difference to what people do.Duncan Richterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-88310976825117798582011-01-22T05:03:38.809-05:002011-01-22T05:03:38.809-05:00Wanting to discuss exactly what makes torturing ba...Wanting to discuss exactly what makes torturing babies unthinkable – the horror of which is evident beyond the need of explanation, for most of us -- might seem like an intellectual virtue. We should be prepared to discuss anything, some say. Anscombe and Gaita disagree. A society, they claim, is in part defined by what questions it finds discussable and what questions -- like public castraction of all homosexuals -- it finds morally in-discussable. So asking such questions might lead to corruption. It can be very hard to keep the sense of horror alive when one is foreced to think seriously and repetedly about the unthinkable. I believe Raimond Gaita has argued to this effect when talking about torture. Still, this doesn’t mean it would always be pointless to try to give an account of why something, torture, say, is and should remain unthinkable. But we ought to wait for a good (or bad) reason before making the effort. When the question has been asked -- and the ball is already in motion, as it were -- it might be necessary and a good idea to try our very best to explain why torture (despite all possible benifits) is horrible and why even the question should never have been raised. (But intellectuals who makes modest proposals ”just to provoke a debate”, as we sometimes hear, should perhaps be met with silence.)vhhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16887661953741578765noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-48108005565694960092011-01-20T12:14:09.805-05:002011-01-20T12:14:09.805-05:00That kind of experimental philosophy could be fun....That kind of experimental philosophy could be fun.<br /><br />I haven't read Benetar's book or Cowley's article, but there does seem to be a kind of contradiction in saying that life is bad. Unless you then immediately commit suicide. Or else live a tragic life of longing to die but feeling obliged (like Ralph Walker's Kant?) to avoid suicide. Or else you are Schopenhauer or some kind of Buddhist.<br /><br />If Benetar's argument leads in that kind of direction then I guess it would have to count as moral philosophy. Likewise if it acts as a reductio of a certain type of philosophy.<br /><br />As for torturing babies, I don't know what's worse. Someone who did it for fun could be not guilty because of mental illness. People who do it for other reasons might not have that excuse. And I don't think we can just stipulate <i>ex hypothesi</i> that the fun-seeking baby-torturer is <i>not</i> insane.Duncan Richterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-43166280522469289322011-01-20T10:26:25.137-05:002011-01-20T10:26:25.137-05:00Good point about creeping. (But it is, after all, ...Good point about creeping. (But it is, after all, worse if you do it <i>just</i> for fun...) I'm inclined to agree about Kazez, but maybe that's compatible with what I think is Cowley's implicit question: is Benetar's book really to be seen as a work of "moral philosophy"?<br /><br />In the midst of this, I started thinking again about the chapter on evil (and Paul West) in Coetzee's <i>Elizabeth Costello</i>, which explores this idea (via Costello) that there are places we shouldn't go. Very good to put West <i>in the room</i>. I wonder what happens if we put Chris Cowley in the room with Benetar. (Would that be experimental philosophy?...)Matthew Pianaltohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16380038537888895216noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-49858879658379461432011-01-20T10:02:33.598-05:002011-01-20T10:02:33.598-05:00Thanks, Matt. That looks like an excellent paper.
...Thanks, Matt. That looks like an excellent paper.<br /><br />One thing literature (and some history, psychology, etc.) does is to look carefully at unthinkable things. <i>Crime and Punishment </i>, <i>Macbeth</i>, (serious) books about serial killers, maybe the book about cannibalism (or maybe not) that you wrote about recently, for instance, might all be said to do this. And there's nothing wrong with that. But there might also be places where we shouldn't even look, just as it's (usually) wrong to dig up a grave. I doubt there's anything we can do to determine where we shouldn't look, though, and much would seem to depend on the motive or the spirit in which one looks. An open casket funeral is one thing, wanting to see a corpse is another. Clarifying the concept of the unthinkable seems worthwhile, but maybe you could do so by mapping the limits of where it is decent to tread, not by crossing over those limits. Or maybe not.<br /><br />Cowley also raises the question of politeness. I've only glanced at what he says, but he seems to question Jean Kazez's treatment of Benatar's book precisely because she is so respectful even while disagreeing. I find this admirable in her, but perhaps there is such a thing as too much courtesy. For instance, people (philosophers) now seem to talk about "torturing babies for fun" as an obviously wrong thing, out of deference (presumably) to colleagues who think that simply torturing babies is <i>not</i> obviously wrong. That's something that Anscombe would surely have regarded as a creeping kind of corruption. It might take rudeness to stop the creep.Duncan Richterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-15238898562939049472011-01-20T00:25:37.949-05:002011-01-20T00:25:37.949-05:00Chris Cowley has a new paper out that is related t...Chris Cowley has a new paper out that is related to this. See <a href="http://www.viterbo.edu/uploadedFiles/academics/letters/philosophy/atp/Cowley%20on%20Moral%20Philosophy%20and%20the%20Real%20World.pdf" rel="nofollow">here</a> (I hope to say something about it on my blog; am still digesting). It raises a question related to that concerning the "unthinkable." I, too, find something about the Anscombe position (and echoes of it in things Rai Gaita has said about torture) appealing, but as I think about the idea of the "unthinkable" there is some amount of paradox here, insofar as one might need to do some thinking to clarify what it is that is "unthinkable"...(this isn't very well-stated...but the idea, I think, is that it isn't pointless to seek to give an account of the horror of certain things, but this is going to be done by looking at very different kinds of examples--real, fleshy examples--rather than the kind of stripped-down dilemmas that reduce the discussion to thin categories like costs and benefits).Matthew Pianaltohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16380038537888895216noreply@blogger.com