tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post4996891584680598411..comments2024-02-20T12:26:24.682-05:00Comments on language goes on holiday: Moral Philosophy and Moral LifeDuncan Richterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708344766825805406noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-32412504770732205412021-03-12T16:45:46.483-05:002021-03-12T16:45:46.483-05:00Yes, there does seem to be a place, perhaps even a...Yes, there does seem to be a place, perhaps even a necessity, for something like utilitarianism in government. Government policy is always going to be somewhat crude, but it's hard to see how we could just get rid of it. This isn't the whole of ethics, though, of course. DRhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08332954000692559637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-77482373248894512592021-03-12T14:54:05.810-05:002021-03-12T14:54:05.810-05:00Well, I'll have to read the book. Don't wo...Well, I'll have to read the book. Don't worry, I would have had to do so already based on your original review; you certainly made it sound like a major achievement!Tommi Uschanovhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02852865209279310471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-75466298721544283352021-03-12T14:53:32.261-05:002021-03-12T14:53:32.261-05:00Well, the problem here is that if there is to be s...Well, the problem here is that if there is to be something like civic authority in a complex modern society, it seems to me there has to be something resembling decision procedures. This is not only because decisions will otherwise inevitably depend too much on officeholders' views as private individuals (although that too is an important consideration), but because there are, purely quantitatively, just too many decisions to make for anything else to be practicable.<br /><br />I said "something resembling decision procedures", because how uncomfortable the resemblance is can vary. I root for WMP when it attacks the "hooray for decision procedures!" types, but at the same time I see something like decision procedures as a necessary evil. And the moral distance between my position and the hooraying position is not necessarily any smaller than between the hooraying position and the main stream of WMP.<br /><br />Gaita writes in <i>Good and Evil</i> (p. 103 of the 2004 edition): "But if I must make a moral decision by Monday, I cannot come to you on Friday evening, plead that I have little time over the weekend to think about it, and ask you, a rational and informed agent and a professor of ethics to boot, to try to have a solution, or at least a range of options, no later than first thing on Monday morning." But the unfortunate fact is that this kind of thing, which Gaita offers to us as a reductio-type thought experiment, happens all the time in public administration in the real world. Only with the difference that the professor is usually not a professor but a civil servant. Tragic cases have to be "solved" all the time in the sense that they need to be disposed of one way or another. In the social sciences and in jurisprudence, there is a whole body of literature on tragic choices in the real world, and perhaps more than anything, I'd like to make WMP somehow confront it – e.g. Guido Calabresi and Phillip Bobbitt's <i>Tragic Choices: The Conflicts Society Confronts in the Allocation of Tragically Scarce Resources</i> (1978) – for both its own and WMP's sake, but practitioners of WMP seem to be generally unaware that it even exists.<br /><br />(If moral theory offers "crude guidance", well, it is arguable that the social world is pretty crude, and maybe crude guidance is then just what it calls for, on quite Wittgensteinian but non-WMP grounds. "Is it even always an advantage to replace a picture that is not sharp by one that is? Isn't one that isn't sharp often just what we need?" – <i>PI</i> §71.)Tommi Uschanovhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02852865209279310471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-12605676836781020992021-03-12T14:10:22.011-05:002021-03-12T14:10:22.011-05:00More evidence that Christensen does not at all rej...More evidence that Christensen does not at all reject general moral principles: in "How to Work with Context in Moral Philosophy?" she says that she endorses "the possibility of doing normative philosophy with the involvement of general principles" (p. 168, note 12). DRhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08332954000692559637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-51431992484231498292021-03-12T09:50:58.069-05:002021-03-12T09:50:58.069-05:00Just to clarify: People have done good work on Bil...Just to clarify: People have done good work on Billy Budd. I don't mean to deny that at all. But trying to 'solve' a tragic case, as a certain kind of utilitarian might try to do, seems inadvisable to me. DRhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08332954000692559637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-18111540144486093592021-03-11T15:20:03.631-05:002021-03-11T15:20:03.631-05:00its emphasis on differences is so intense, and so ...<i>its emphasis on differences is so intense, and so constantly to the fore, that at times it almost amounts to suggesting that no two cases are</i> ever <i>relevantly similar</i><br /><br />This is a danger (I almost said <i>the</i> danger), I agree. But I think it comes from the fact that Wittgensteinian moral philosophers are reacting against decision-procedure types. Or, to make it less personal, Wittgensteinian moral philosophy (WMP) is to a significant extent a reaction against decision-procedure-type views. <br /><br />To avoid the danger I think it's important to see WMP against this background, and to state explicitly that it is not incompatible with belief in general moral principles. Christensen does both (but the former more obviously than the latter).<br /><br />The case of Billy Budd sounds like what Weisberg is getting at, but I wonder (this is not a criticism of Weisberg) how wise it is to think about that case. It's easy to say "The Navy is terrible! He should never have been punished." But that evades thinking seriously about the needs of the Navy. Or it might be not hard enough to think "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4uivPpzCGo" rel="nofollow">These things happen in the Navy. What can you do?</a>" Really to feel the tragedy of the situation is to be pulled in two directions, and the right answer, so far as there is one, might be to feel this pain without choosing either direction. Or perhaps to become a pacifist. DRhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08332954000692559637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6454161596094447448.post-60187173321908808862021-03-11T11:17:16.058-05:002021-03-11T11:17:16.058-05:00I have an additional objection to the opposition t...I have an additional objection to the opposition to "any conception of morality according to which what is required of us morally is that we should act or think in accordance with standards imposed on us from outside" which is so elementary that I wonder if I can be the only one who has come up with it. Maybe Bernard Williams did in something of his that I haven't read, since it is strongly reminiscent of him.<br /><br />This objection is that if it is not required morally to act in accordance with standards imposed on us from outside, then <i>deciding how to apply a law</i> cannot be a moral decision. And this seems absurd, since many such decisions are, if anything, primarily moral decisions. Admittedly such decisions cannot be framed straightforwardly as applications of "the kind of moral theory that offers a decision procedure to tell you what to do", but they are applications of the kind of moral theory that narrows down the range of options that are entitled to be even entertained.<br /><br />This simultaneously also shows a limitation in Lars Hertzberg's argument against moral expertise. If a moral question "is always a question for a particular person in a particular situation", then deciding how to apply a law cannot be a moral question, because law is precisely a means of ensuring that <i>relevantly similar situations</i> have <i>relevantly similar outcomes</i>: for example, if two people commit similar crimes in similar circumstances, the punishment they receive must be at least roughly proportionate. As much as I approve (unsurprisingly) of Wittgensteinian moral philosophy, I am troubled by the fact that its emphasis on differences is so intense, and so constantly to the fore, that at times it almost amounts to suggesting that no two cases are <i>ever</i> relevantly similar. And so in Wittgensteinian moral philosophy, proportionality is probably the one major moral value that is discussed the least.<br /><br />As the law professor <a href="https://law.stanford.edu/directory/robert-weisberg/" rel="nofollow">Robert Weisberg</a> once wrote: "To make a moral decision about a defendant is to treat him as a unique being. And the state cannot treat him as unique under a substantive criminal law, since a criminal law is necessarily a generalization about human behavior and moral desert." I'm afraid the example of a woman deciding whether to have an abortion obscures as much as it illuminates, because it is not interchangeable with examples such as this.<br />Tommi Uschanovhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02852865209279310471noreply@blogger.com