Morality: Structure of theory and worries
I just realized that somebody wrote "Nietzsche Sux" on my whiteboard.
Now I'm going to babble philosophic in ad hoc lingo about stuff I haven't thought hard about yet:
In class today Reginster offhandedly mentioned that to Kant, the structure of theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning are virtually identical--that the strategies and constraints of reasoning about ultimate causes have exact analogues to the strategies and constraints of finding the ultimate justifications of things. (In the end, they land in appeals to "rational necessity," I guess.)
This highlights two things I'm uncomfortable with:
Given (1), the only easy way to make the leap to (2) would be some sort of inductive step--the logic of scientific reasoning works--is justified inductively by experience. There is no reason why we shouldn't, with some confidence, approach the similar task of moral theorizing in the same way, even though (if (1) is true) there is no way we could inductively check our methodology.
This is of course making some hard-nosed assumptions about the kinds of non-reasoning employed by what I'd call a flakier moral theorist. If anybody can tell me a compelling alternative account of the normative constraints on moral thought, let me know and I'll owe you one.
On the other hand, (1) seems silly to me because moral claims are almost always going to play out into claims about experience. "Don't kick the baby." For example. Or, (better example), "Don't take human life."
Ok, so you have this injunction about experience, and it depends on what is originally thought to be an induced concept about what human life is.
Enter reductionist science, and especially (insert more assumptions and philosophical bias here) nominalism with regard to universals. We find that we should not necessarily be realists about life. Has the moral injunction lost its meaning?
At this point it seems like a lot of people make a sort of leap backwards. Those that believe in realy moral objects or entities that enforce (somehow) morality start to separate the concept of "life" from its experiential, inductive origins and become realists about "life" by putting it into the same plane of existence as their morality (the spiritual one). They become soulists (...fucking soulists...).
Once you do this, you get a wholesale slide into Platonism (...fucking Platonists...) about anything about which one feels a moral compulsion. Again slandering Michael Prospect, I think he has a kneejerk reaction to do this to things like "love."
Well, that's not quite true--it's slipperier than that. Here's the dialogue I feel like would be typical (slander! slander!):
Me: "Well, you know love as a psychological state will probably be simulated by drugs in the future. So really, we ought to be figuring that shit out."
MP: (a smart guy) "Love, which I hold to be valuable in itself, is not a psychological state. It's a relationship."
Me: "Ah, good point."
(wait three weeks for that to sink in)
Me: "Wait--so love is then a configuration of matter that could still be replicated, maybe, by artificial means--say...two people taking drugs."
I don't know how that would actually play out if I had a conversation with MP--he's always seemed to dodge this sort of inquiry. Or maybe I just never feel these conversations resolve so I don't remember them well.
Where was I?
Oh, right. So maybe the problem is that we aren't used to admitting uncertainty about moral claims in the same way as we are used to admitting uncertainty about experiential claims (...most people seem to have trouble with the latter as well--my guess is for cognitive economy reasons). But that's just an appeal to (2) again--why should we have similar expectations of moral theory to the expectations of scientific theory?
Another justification for (2): If the constraints of scientific theory were really psychological, not normative, constraints imposed by a general learning mechanism in minds like ours, then these constraints would apply to all fields of knowledge equally.
Hmmm. I like that much better--although it leaves some questions unanswered about how one general learning mechanism would apply both to induction and induction-less moral theory. Maybe if the general learning mechanism in question were one primarily used to manipulate representations, and if moral theory and empirical theory were represented in the same medium?
It's this last sort of psychological account of knowledge which is plugging into my more general thoughts on epistemology. Sort of like Hume's skeptical solution to the skeptical problem: we just do induce.
We just do have a coherentist system for organizing and verifying beliefs, and we just do have a particular mental makeup that makes it in our interest to hold those beliefs accountable to certain standards.
EDIT: Fixed shamefully broken HTML...
Now I'm going to babble philosophic in ad hoc lingo about stuff I haven't thought hard about yet:
In class today Reginster offhandedly mentioned that to Kant, the structure of theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning are virtually identical--that the strategies and constraints of reasoning about ultimate causes have exact analogues to the strategies and constraints of finding the ultimate justifications of things. (In the end, they land in appeals to "rational necessity," I guess.)
This highlights two things I'm uncomfortable with:
- Moral theory and reasoning often seems logically isolated from empirical/causal/"scientific" reasoning. The moral theorist claims, often, that science can't "discover moral truths." This results either in some totally flaked-out and ultimately incoherent account of morality, or
- the logical structure of moral theory is assumed to be identical to that of other--what? I'm aware that I'm slipping all over the place in my terminology--experiential theory.
Given (1), the only easy way to make the leap to (2) would be some sort of inductive step--the logic of scientific reasoning works--is justified inductively by experience. There is no reason why we shouldn't, with some confidence, approach the similar task of moral theorizing in the same way, even though (if (1) is true) there is no way we could inductively check our methodology.
This is of course making some hard-nosed assumptions about the kinds of non-reasoning employed by what I'd call a flakier moral theorist. If anybody can tell me a compelling alternative account of the normative constraints on moral thought, let me know and I'll owe you one.
On the other hand, (1) seems silly to me because moral claims are almost always going to play out into claims about experience. "Don't kick the baby." For example. Or, (better example), "Don't take human life."
Ok, so you have this injunction about experience, and it depends on what is originally thought to be an induced concept about what human life is.
Enter reductionist science, and especially (insert more assumptions and philosophical bias here) nominalism with regard to universals. We find that we should not necessarily be realists about life. Has the moral injunction lost its meaning?
At this point it seems like a lot of people make a sort of leap backwards. Those that believe in realy moral objects or entities that enforce (somehow) morality start to separate the concept of "life" from its experiential, inductive origins and become realists about "life" by putting it into the same plane of existence as their morality (the spiritual one). They become soulists (...fucking soulists...).
Once you do this, you get a wholesale slide into Platonism (...fucking Platonists...) about anything about which one feels a moral compulsion. Again slandering Michael Prospect, I think he has a kneejerk reaction to do this to things like "love."
Well, that's not quite true--it's slipperier than that. Here's the dialogue I feel like would be typical (slander! slander!):
Me: "Well, you know love as a psychological state will probably be simulated by drugs in the future. So really, we ought to be figuring that shit out."
MP: (a smart guy) "Love, which I hold to be valuable in itself, is not a psychological state. It's a relationship."
Me: "Ah, good point."
(wait three weeks for that to sink in)
Me: "Wait--so love is then a configuration of matter that could still be replicated, maybe, by artificial means--say...two people taking drugs."
I don't know how that would actually play out if I had a conversation with MP--he's always seemed to dodge this sort of inquiry. Or maybe I just never feel these conversations resolve so I don't remember them well.
Where was I?
Oh, right. So maybe the problem is that we aren't used to admitting uncertainty about moral claims in the same way as we are used to admitting uncertainty about experiential claims (...most people seem to have trouble with the latter as well--my guess is for cognitive economy reasons). But that's just an appeal to (2) again--why should we have similar expectations of moral theory to the expectations of scientific theory?
Another justification for (2): If the constraints of scientific theory were really psychological, not normative, constraints imposed by a general learning mechanism in minds like ours, then these constraints would apply to all fields of knowledge equally.
Hmmm. I like that much better--although it leaves some questions unanswered about how one general learning mechanism would apply both to induction and induction-less moral theory. Maybe if the general learning mechanism in question were one primarily used to manipulate representations, and if moral theory and empirical theory were represented in the same medium?
It's this last sort of psychological account of knowledge which is plugging into my more general thoughts on epistemology. Sort of like Hume's skeptical solution to the skeptical problem: we just do induce.
We just do have a coherentist system for organizing and verifying beliefs, and we just do have a particular mental makeup that makes it in our interest to hold those beliefs accountable to certain standards.
EDIT: Fixed shamefully broken HTML...