[The following are articles posted by Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) to usenet
newsgroups in 1992, and also a few email messages related to usenet
threads.]
Hi, Chris --
I'm sorry it's taken so long for me to get back to you. I was out of
town for a while, on a camping vacation with my wife and children.
>You say lots that I agree with, and then all of a sudden make (what
>seem to me to be) very strange statements that I disagree with entirely.
I'll respond to the points you raise. I believe that the strangeness
of my statements (from your point of view) arises from differences of
perspective that can be identified and discussed.
>It's not really any harder to keep in touch with people; but there are
>so many more people that one can keep in touch with. Because the
>people we can easily communicate with is so high, we have to be very
>selective about it. Most people use criteria related to shared
>interests; and family members don't have more common interests than
>others.
I don't think it is the ease of finding other people with whom to talk
or to pursue one's hobbies that has been behind the weakening of family
ties. In any town there have always been thousands of people with whom
one could easily communicate.
I would be more inclined to attribute the change to a shift in how
people deal with practical matters.
To the extent the family is an institution that serves practical
functions family members have common material interests. Furthermore,
they tend to develop common interests regarding other matters. People
who work together tend to hang around together and develop a similar
outlook on any number of things. More generally, people who have to
deal with each other and rely on each other because of common material
interests tend to develop a common outlook as to matters with no
immediate practical bearing as well. (I believe the Marxists would
agree with me on that point.) These principles apply to families as
well as to other organizations.
How people deal with practical matters, of course, depends on the
society. It seems obvious that to the extent in modern commercial
society a huge variety of goods and services are available on the
market and it is most efficient to carry on production by enterprises
that are larger than family-sized, family will be less important than
previously. It also seems obvious (at least if you are with me up to
this point) that to the extent the welfare state takes on the remaining
practical functions of the family -- the education of children, the
care of children and other family members who can't look after each
other and general mutual aid -- family ties weaken further.
As an aside, it seems to me that the process whereby production by
large enterprises of goods and services purchased on the market has
displaced home production need not go on forever, and may even reverse.
I have two reasons for my belief:
1. As mechanization, automation and who knows what (biotechnology?
supermicrocryocybernetics?) progress, functions that must be performed by
individual human beings will take up a larger share of total economic
activity. The basic economic activity used to be agriculture. Today,
education and health care are both bigger. Tomorrow psychiatry,
counselling and related professions may be. So the tendency seems to be
for functions to take up a larger share of economic activity that aren't
best performed by large enterprises, and in fact could be performed in
the home.
2. The improved communications you mention make it possible for small
enterprises to play more of a role in the market. A large enterprise
is a collection of people, equipment and so on bound together by fairly
permanent and exclusive bonds that arises because that is the most
efficient way to organize economic activity under existing conditions.
Better communications means that more flexible ways of organization
become possible -- instead of employees, people become consultants,
part-time workers or pieceworkers, and producers subcontract rather
than doing it all themselves. It seems to me that this process is
likely to result in more production of a type recently carried on by
large enterprises becoming once again home production.
>Here we can bring in the analogy of drug laws (analogous w.r.t. laws
>reacting, rather than creating attitudes. Clearly, not analogous
>w.r.t. the state being passive vs. active :-). People don't stop
>wanting to get high just because it's illegal. They're not going
>to stop having children out of wedlock just because there isn't
>financial support of one sort or another, IMHO.
One reason drug laws aren't particularly effective is that they affect
very few people who violate them. People look around them and see lots
of people violating the laws and don't see any particular consequence
to the violation in most cases. If there were some legal change that
meant that drug use would generally create major difficulties for the
user that wouldn't exist if the change had not occurred, then I think
the legal change would affect drug use and attitudes toward drug use.
>I tend to think [rising illegitimacy is] caused by the changing
>structure of society, a tide which cannot be stemmed; but we can all
>find different reasons.
To me, your cause (the changing structure of society) is just another
way of describing the effect (rising illegitimacy), and so is not an
explanation.
>> Why do you
>> suppose the change of heart was greatest among people at the bottom of
>> the income scale?
>
>Because they can least afford weddings and divorces, is the quick
>and easy answer.
Weddings and divorces hadn't gotten any more expensive. Divorces are
certainly easier to get than they were in the fairly recent past.
Also, a civil ceremony is cheap.
>Because more of the higher income people had already reached a
>quasi-equilibrium, and the lower people were catching up, is another
>possibility.
But the absolute rate is much higher at lower incomes than at higher
incomes.
>I certainly don't deny that the way people are dealing with one another
>is shifting. But this doesn't mean that changing the law to encourage
>formal marriage will do very much if anything.
I agree that encouraging formal marriage directly (by giving people
marriage bonuses, say) wouldn't do much.
>> I'm not sure what a well designed social safety net would look like.
>> (That's mostly a true confession of ignorance.) If the net is high
>> enough to guarantee people a materially decent life, it seems to me
>> that it's too high.
>
>The actual level should depend on finances available and social
>attitudes as to what is adequate; it can't be determined without
>a lot of trial and error, I suspect. The main thing IMHO is to
>make it *universal*; this is the only way to stop people from
>falling through its holes, while not introducing excessive
>administrative complexity. The second thing is to ensure that
>marginal rates of taxation at the bottom are not prohibitive,
>as they are at the moment.
Your initial points seem based on your apparent view (that I consider
to be the main source of the differences between us) that people are
going to live the way they are going to live and nothing in the legal
environment will much affect the matter, and therefore what the laws
should do is to help pick up the pieces when they have problems whether
or not the problems result from their way of life. Your last point
seems to relate to preserving the economic incentive to work and so
seems somewhat at odds with your overall view.
>Britain's welfare system has been run for the past 13 years by
>people who didn't believe in it, underfunded it, changed the
>groundrules umpteen times, etc. That, IMHO, is a large part of
>the reason that property crime has been rising.
I'm somewhat short of facts here. Here in the U.S. most crime,
including most property crime, is committed by single young men, who
are not the people I would expect to be most affected by changes in the
welfare system. Reading the local papers in Scotland led me to think
that the situation is the same in Britain. I don't have any figures
showing the growth in property crime rates before and after 1979. I do
have a graph that shows that in England and Wales violent crime rose
from about 60 crimes/100,000 inhabitants in 1968 to around 200/100,000
when Thatcher came in, and from there to 314/100,000 in 1988. So the
increase in violent crime in Britain, which has also been very large,
doesn't seem to have much to do with the particular policies of the
Thatcher government.
>By the way, Britain's big lurch towards the welfare state was in 1945;
>if that was the problem, you'd expect that problems would have arisen
>before now.
It can take time -- a generation or more -- for changes in
circumstances to change what people think is an OK way to live. Also,
there have been particular changes since 1945 (e.g., the Criminal
Justice Act of 1967 or the Homeless Persons Act) do matter.
I've written enough, though.
Jim
tmhoff@oogoody.Corp.Sun.COM (Todd Hoff) writes:
>By definition the outcome of any negotation between socialists,
>anarchists, and libertarianisms will not result in wholesale adoption
>of any one belief system, there will be a mix, just as there is now.
No. Libertarianism ("the government does a few things, those necessary
to qualify it as a government") can be viewed as a mean between
socialism ("everything is under social a.k.a. government control, so
the government does lots of things") and anarchism ("the government
does nothing whatever"). So a three-way negotiation with lots of
difference-splitting could end with libertarianism.
In addition, negotiations sometimes conclude with an agreement based on
principles that become generally accepted in the course of the
negotiation, perhaps because they seem better to most of the
participants than other principles that might otherwise govern. So a
negotiation between Wilhelm Reich ("government-funded orgone therapy
compulsory for everyone") and the Ayatollah ("chadars compulsory for
women and jehad compulsory for men") could well end in libertarianism
("the government keeps the peace and protects property and otherwise
people are free to pursue what they think is good").
>A negotiation is not taking place if "making arguments of principle"
>means no compromise occurs. Then then only way your views will win is
>either by force or the religious conversion of enough people to your
>side.
In the United States today, a lot of issues are decided by the Supreme
Court ignoring vote-counting and basing their decisions on principles
that the justices and the people they look to for approval think are
the right ones. How does that situation fit into your scheme of
things?
>I don't see the Salvation Army making any kind of significant dent on
>florida right now. They can't help everybody.
I have no special theory about disaster relief. It seems to me rather
different from your previous example (family of 5 with no money) and
less troublesome from the point of view of someone who wants to limit
the responsibilities of government because it relates to situations
that don't arise in day-to-day social life. Since it can be treated
separately from issues relating to government responsibility for the
welfare of individuals, it seems to me I don't need to have a theory
about if for purposes of this discussion.
Having said that, it seems to me that a lot of disaster relief is
extended because politicians like to appear to be doing something about
things that are in the news and a lot of it relates to things that
people should insure or otherwise provide against. There are no doubt
people on the net who know more about this issue than I do and who have
thought about it. If so, I urge them to comment.
>There are needs for people in the country that are not beeing met by
>private organizations. I and majority of others, apparently, believe
>people should be helped in and organized manor and not be left to the
>winds of fate. The court of last resort is the government. In then end
>you believe this as well by investing all legitimate use force in the
>state.
Again, you express your belief that to help people in an organized
manner is the same as having the government help them, that being "left
to the winds of fate" is the alternative to government aid and that the
"court of last resort" is the government. Why can't people deal with
the world in an organized way other than through the government? Why
is the agency that possesses a near monopoly of force also necessarily
the agency that is responsible for all final substantive decisions?
The idea of private property is the idea that some final substantive
decisions are left to agents other than the government, and that the
role of the government is the limited one of protecting the right to
make such decisions. What's wrong with that?
You seem to view the government as society in action, so that anything
that we all have some sort of obligation to see to is an appropriate
(or rather necessary) subject for government action. A libertarian
might view the government as a specialized agency that is responsible
for situations in which the use of force is necessary, but is no more a
stand-in for society in general than the director of the FBI or the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Why is the libertarian
obviously wrong?
ald@clipper.ingr.com (Al Date) writes
>By holding that human rights are absolute and that *your* version is
>the correct one, *you* effectively close all discussion.
One advantage to holding that moral principles are absolute is that it
makes it possible for people who disagree about which moral principles
are the correct ones to believe that they are talking about the same
things (correct moral principles), even though they disagree about
them, and that discussion may lead to agreement. If there are no moral
principles that are absolutely correct, but only principles that
correctly sum up the purposes, habits and feelings relating to human
conduct of particular persons or particular communities, then the
possibilities for moral discussion between people with different ways
of life becomes much more limited.
>The way to find common ground for peaceful discussion is to agree that
>animal and human rights are whatever we agree that they are, and that
>they should be established because they work best, for reasons that we
>can agree on (like the desire to not see animals suffer needlessly).
"What works best" -- from whose point of view, if there is no absolute
in these things and if not everyone agrees? I'm not sure there's a
distinction between "what works best" and "the will of the most
powerful" as a criterion.
pcollac@pyrnova.mis.pyramid.com (Paul Collacchi) writes:
>A consequence of incorporation was that it directed litigants to go
>after the fictitious entity, the corporation, rather than persons who
>performed the alleged dirty deeds. This is a deflection of direct
>feedback.
The persons who actually perform the dirty deeds are still liable. By
making very large business concerns possible incorporation gives
litigants another very deep pocket to reach into, though. Most of them
do just that and don't bother with the individual malefactors. You're
right that it's a deflection of direct feedback and to that extent is a
bad thing. On the other hand, big businesses are often in a position to
reduce risks in a more systematic way than small businesses.
>Under unlimited [I believe "limited" is meant] liability, a certain
>segment of corporate participants, "owners" are more protected from
>the consequences of their actions, which are to choose to give their
>money to (potentially) unscrupulous persons and to not supervise same.
>As you correctly point out, it encourages the participation of someone
>who "won't know much about or have much control over what goes on..."
>It doesn't support the mindful, engaged participation of owners who
>might otherwise stand to lose their shirts. Losing your shirt, like
>gravity, wakes you up real quickly in my opinion. The game is to wake
>ourselves up, to act responsibly, not to give ourselves excuses for
>going to sleep. Let the owners police their own corporations.
One could extend this line of thought by making lenders, customers and
suppliers liable for claims against businesses as well. After all,
lenders and customers also give their money to potentially unscrupulous
persons and don't supervise them, customers ask for high-quality
products and services at a low price and don't inquire how that miracle
is achieved and suppliers give businessmen the materials they need to
engage in potentially unscrupulous acts and don't supervise how the
materials are used.
If you don't accept my extension of the line of thought, then it seems
you think there's something special about advancing risk capital
(compared with lending money, selling supplies or placing an order) that
in and of itself makes the investor personally responsible for what the
people who get the advance do with it. I don't see why that should be
so. If you do accept it, then it seems that you just don't like modern
economic life, which is based on world-wide markets with lots of
participants who really don't know or care much about the people they
have dealings with. Of course, you might be right to reject modern
economic life. Lots of people have objections to it, although few would
be willing to give up the goodies it provides.
>If there were no fictitious 'catch-all' entities, one would seek
>damages from specific, personal entities. Again, the effect -- direct
>feedback loops for the participants. What you do comes back to you not
>the corporation [ . . . ] Bigness would diminish, I agree, unless it was
>capable of sustaining its level of risk, i.e. acting responsibly.
>Maybe certain big things are just too risky. Maybe we ought to not
>undertake them.
I understand the first three sentences better than the last three. In
the absence of limited liability, businesses would be smaller so risky
things would be done by people with fewer resources to pay claims than
(say) IBM has. As a result, claimants would be worse off than they are
today.
tmhoff@oogoody.Corp.Sun.COM (Todd Hoff) writes:
>[T]o the following questions a lib would answer yes: Must I pay taxes to
>pay for protection of your property, your life, your defense, to build
>jails, and for a judicial system?
>
>I would ask why do I have to pay for the things you want but you don't
>have to pay for the things I want?
That's a question someone might ask who wanted the government to do lots
of things, but not provide a police system, a military establishment or
a judicial system. How many people like that are there? Does that
point of view even make sense?
>If I were debating against a lib I would ask: If a family of 5 was out
>of work, and they exhausted all avenues of help, would you let the
>family starve? The lib would after many protestations would eventually
>have to say yes. I don't agree with this and neither to most people.
When used in a debate with a human being, the pronoun "you" does not
normally refer to the government. So the lib wouldn't have to say yes
any more than other people -- he could say as readily and as sincerely
as anyone "I believe each of us should help those in desperate need by
what we do individually and in cooperation with others."
There would be an issue, of course, as to what procedures to follow and
what organizations to work through. You might think that when there are
serious problems the government is plainly the right instrument to use
to deal with them. In some countries many people would assign that role
to the army. Whether you, they or the lib are right needs discussion,
although your use of the pronoun "you" suggests that you don't see that
need.
>Immutible principles inevitably leads to righteousness. Righteousness
>leads to nothing but hate and violence. Witness Bosnia, the holocaust,
>muslim attitutes towards women, christian attitudes toward
>non-christians, etc., etc..
I haven't the faintest idea why immutable principles and righteousness
are supposed to be responsible for current events in Bosnia or the
holocaust. I would have thought that some moral courage -- which has a
lot to do with fixed principles -- could have helped prevent or mitigate
those catastrophes. I'm not enough of a historian of religion to
comment on what Muslim or Christian attitudes have been from time to
time.
tmhoff@oogoody.Corp.Sun.COM (Todd Hoff) writes:
>In article 11075@panix.com, jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>>So a three-way negotiation [among anarchists, libertarians and socialists]
>>with lots of difference-splitting could end with libertarianism.
>No chance. Libertarianism is in no way a mean between socialism and
>anarchy. Libertarianism completely fails to address any of the concerns
>a socialist might have.
How so? Socialists want social justice enforced by government. One
part of social justice is not having individuals or groups with greater
physical strength simply (that is, without color of law) taking what
they want, or reducing the weaker to servitude. Libertarians and
socialists would agree that the government should repress that kind of
conduct; an anarchist would not agree. So libs and socs have at least
some concerns in common that are not shared by everyone (like
anarchists).
>>In the United States today, a lot of issues are decided by the Supreme
>>Court ignoring vote-counting and basing their decisions on principles
>>that the justices and the people they look to for approval think are
>>the right ones. How does that situation fit into your scheme of
>>things?
>
>I'm not quite sure what the problem is.
You seemed troubled by the view of many libertarians that there are
certain principles that should govern what the government is and is not
entitled to do, without regard to whether the government measures in
question or the principles themselves have popular support. It seemed
worthwhile pointing out that that view is currently accepted as part of
the fundamental law of the United States.
>There's only a difference in scale not effect [between disaster relief
>and relief to families whose breadwinner is out of work]. And if you
>summed all the the families who needed help throught the us they would
>equal or surpass the problem in Florida. It's only because the problem
>is so diffuse in relation to individuals that you perceive a difference.
>To a family it hardly matters if their lives were destroyed by a
>hurricane or a terminal illness.
I don't agree. It seems to me that the basic argument of free-market
types is that in the absence of government intervention people will
develop ways of dealing with the things that arise in the normal course
of events. For example, people deal with the risk of unemployment (your
original example) by choosing stable jobs when they have a choice, by
saving part of their income to tide them over hard times, by developing
skills that seem likely to be useful, by moving where the work is, by
recognizing the obligation of helping out family members, relatives and
neighbors who are having difficulties, by voting against politicians who
do things that burden economic activity, and so on.
It seems clear that that approach (look out for yourself and yours,
recognize an obligation to help out your friends and neighbors and leave
economic activity free) will work best with regard to problems that are
not completely unexpected and don't suddenly afflict you, your entire
family, all your friends, relatives and neighbors and everyone in your
entire community at the same time. For that reason, it seems to me that
large-scale natural disasters are distinguishable from a breadwinner's
unemployment.
>>Having said that, it seems to me that a lot of disaster relief is
>>extended because politicians like to appear to be doing something about
>>things that are in the news and a lot of it relates to things that
>>people should insure or otherwise provide against.
>This is a bit cynical for me.
Is it so cynical to believe that politicians often favor measures that
look good but aren't really justifiable on the merits?
>One of the purposes behind goverment is to distribute risk. Florida will
>have a hurricane one year, California will have an earthquake another
>year, the farm belt will have drought another year , the Pacific
>northwest may have a volcano or floods, or one region can enter economic
>decline. Individually no one region has the resources nor does the
>insurance industry to the damage, but as a country we can.
There's a cost to distributing risks that people can do something about
or that constitute a forseeable cost of doing something (like building a
house on a lot that's likely to be flooded every 20 years). Also,
economic decline seems to be in a different category from volcano
eruptions.
>>Why can't people deal with
>>the world in an organized way other than through the government? Why
>>is the agency that possesses a near monopoly of force also necessarily
>>the agency that is responsible for all final substantive decisions?
>
>Decisions don't mean much if they can't be enforced. Since the ultimate
>power of enforcement is the government they are the only ones who can
>provide certain services.
My decisions to lend money to my brother-in-law and to give money to the
Salvation Army, and the decision of the Salvation Army to help out A, B
and C, are enforced by the government through the government's
protection of property rights.
>>The idea of private property is the idea that some final substantive
>>decisions are left to agents other than the government, and that the
>>role of the government is the limited one of protecting the right to
>>make such decisions. What's wrong with that?
>If that's what you believed then you would also believe the government
>has no business collecting taxes for defense, courts, and police. But
>you believe more than that. You believe the goverment should help
>protect the rights of property owners.
I don't understand your "more than". By "protecting the right to make
such decisions" I meant protecting property rights and laying taxes to
provide the means for such protection.
>That's fine. But I also believe the government should do a little more
>than that, not much more, but little more. What's wrong with that?
Depends on what the "little more" is, what effect it would have on what
other people do to have government do the "little more", and whether as
a practical matter government action could be limited to the "little
more". You seemed to suggest, for example, that the government should
tax other regions to help out regions of the country that are
experiencing economic decline. Once that sort of thing becomes an
accepted function of government it may be difficult to keep the "little
more" little.
>Arguing about specific beliefs is to completely miss the point.
>Libertarians want government actions confined to actions they deem
>appopriate. I'll go back to my orginal point that goverment is created
>by negotiation informed by a base set of playing rules where those rules
>are continually in contention. Libertarians want to say their rules are
>the only rules. As a general proposition this is BS. The reality is that
>society is populated with a set of players operating from different
>premises. Every child playing king wants to say their rules are the
>rules for all time and no king after them can change the rules. The next
>king of course says no fare and changes the rules. Adults recognize no
>king can say these are the rules forever and expect other adults to take
>them seriously.
You seem to favor political arrangements in which everything is always
up for grabs in a perpetual negotiation involving all the members of
society. I've pointed out that the current political arrangements of
the United States aren't like that, so it appears that libertarians are
not alone in opposing such a system. I've also tried to describe how a
political system with a lot of players with radically different views
might come to accept the shortest possible list of government functions
-- in other words, libertarianism -- if only because of the
impossibility of getting people to agree on substantive values to be
promoted by government. So I would say that that ideological
intolerance not is peculiarly characteristic of, nor is negotiation
antithetical to, libertarianism. I would also say that arguments from
principle should be made if the principles are worthy, and that some
good things (like limitation of the functions of government) are
difficult to achieve without authoritative acceptance of principle, for
example in constitutional law.
holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes) writes:
>[W]hen you _act_, you must apply your current [ethical] standard (and
>if you do not, it is not actually your standard!)
Does this mean wrongdoing is always caused by ignorance of the correct
standard? Or would you say that it is possible to know a standard to
be correct without that being your standard? The latter possibility
seems even more paradoxical than the former if "standard" is taken to
mean "standard for judgment".
nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson) writes:
> The bottom line is still that it's hard (I would say impossible) to
> come up with an intellectually credible defense for the existence of
> absolute rights.
I take it that your complaint would equally apply to claims that there
are objective standards of right and wrong. But why is it harder to
come up with a defense for the existence of objective morality than for
a defense of the proposition that minds other than one's own exist, or
similar things that philosophers sometimes worry about?
It seems to me that we accept the existence of things if we can't do
without those things when we try to understand the world and human
conduct. It seems to me impossible to think about human conduct
sensibly without assuming that there is objective right and wrong. Try
to discuss politics, for example, or think about how to treat your wife
or bring up your children, without the assumption that it really is
better -- regardless of what one's own purposes or inclinations may be
-- to do some things rather than others. But if that's so, how can we
reject the assumption that some things really are better than others --
that is, that morality is objective?
ald@clipper.ingr.com (Al Date) writes:
>In article <1992Sep6.021415.10802@panix.com> jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>
>>One advantage to holding that moral principles are absolute is that it
> ~~~~~~~~
>>makes it possible for people who disagree about which moral principles
>>are the correct ones to believe that they are talking about the same
>>things (correct moral principles), even though they disagree about
>>them, and that discussion may lead to agreement.
>Yeh, like between Randall Terry and a woman who consciously chooses to
>have an abortion? I see no hope of that discussion leading to agreement.
>Ever try to discuss ethics with the Ayatollah?
I would rather discuss ethics with the Ayatollah than with someone who
says "I do it because it's what I feel like doing and it fits in with
the things I like". In the latter case I might be able to point out
ways in which what I'd like the guy to do also fits in with what he
likes. On the other hand, I also might be able to convince the
Ayatollah that what I want him to do is required by the Koran. So to
that extent, one argument would be as likely to succeed as the other.
But in the case of the Ayatollah, I would also be able to appeal to the
principle that there are objective standards of right and wrong that
bind both of us and that are no more dependent on what he thinks or
wants than on what I think or want, and take it from there. So with the
Ayatollah I'd have two shots at convincing him, compared with only one
for the relativist.
Of course, the Ayatollah might personally be a rather dogmatic fellow,
and the relativist might be personally more accomodating. But the
reverse might be true as well -- there are many psychopaths who are in
the habit of doing whatever they think works for them but are personally
rather unpleasant, and many highly conscientious people who think that
"good" definitely means something different from "what suits the
purposes that I and the people I get along with share", but don't think
of the absolute as their private property. I don't believe that either
the Nazis (if you don't object to my using the all-purpose example) or
the communists were big in transcendent standards of morality or
anything else. The Nazis emphasized will rather than knowledge -- one
gathers from their concept of "Jewish science" that they even rejected
objectivity in the case of knowledge of the physical world -- and the
communists thought "morality" could be reduced to class interests, by
which I suppose they meant whatever the members of a class thought would
work out practically.
>[Y]our statement here that there is subjective utilitarian value to be
>gained by claiming to be the holder of absolute moral truth effectively
>undermines any claim to absolute moral truth.
Unfair! You claimed (I believe) that there is subjective utilitarian
value to rejecting the notion of absolute moral truth, and I was
contesting that claim on your own ground. I thought I was being a nice
guy. Possibly I should simply have said that your claim was irrelevant.
In any case, I don't see why claiming a viewpoint is useful implies that
it is false.
>Everyone will never agree on everything of a moral nature. But at least
>"what works best" has a greater chance of empirical verification than
>some a priori principle. I mean, you can SEE IT. And, who wants to
>adhere to a priori principles which result in all kinds of unacceptable
>results in the real world?
One could believe that moral principles are as absolute as the speed of
light and also believe that we discover what they are in the same way we
discover what the speed of light is -- by reason and experience.
>To me the essence of morality is tolerance of others. Not because it is
>an absolute truth, but because it works.
Would you abandon tolerance if you became convinced that it didn't serve
your purposes? In that event it wouldn't work for you.
>Tolerance says that you can believe whatever the hell you want, as long
>as you dont impose it on me. This allows people to interact in positive
>ways (including economic), without ever having to confront their
>inevitable disagreements on absolute moral truth.
It's not clear to me what the connection is between tolerance as so
defined and belief that there are moral absolutes. Someone who rejected
moral absolutes (de Sade, for example) might like to use people for his
own purposes against their will. On the other hand, someone who
believed that human freedom and dignity are absolutes might decline to
impose anything on anybody.
turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin) writes:
>I find that politics and morality are most usefully thought about IN
>TERMS OF people's desires, purposes, and inclinations, rather than
>under the assumption of some Good that transcends these, which seems to
>me to cloud the issues rather than help.
>
>Perhaps Jim Kalb would be good enough to give an example where this
>assumption is helpful.
Sure. You're trying to decide how to raise your son. Your son's own
desires, purposes and inclinations ("I'd like to eat chocolate more
often", or what have you) may be relevant, but more as data to take
into account than as something to negotiate about. It seems to me that
you should not make your decision based simply on whatever your own
desires, purposes and inclinations happen to be, and still less on
those of third parties. You can't sensibly make the decision based on
speculations as to your son's future (and presumably mature) d., p. and
i., if only because those things will be formed by his education. So
the only thing left is to base your decision on the good of the child,
conceived as in principle independent of anyone's actual d., p. & i.
nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson) writes:
> *I* don't believe in objective rights but I have no trouble
> thinking about the world and human conduct. That is, model that
> says that rights are socially defined and granted has at least
> as much explanatory power as one which assumes absolute rights.
To gain my point I would have to discuss the world and human conduct
with you and show that the things you say implicitly assume
transcendental standards of conduct (I prefer that phrase to "absolute
rights" because it's more general). Maybe you could consider the
example I just presented to Russell Turpin. In dealing with your son
would you consider your obligations to him to be reducible without
remainder to whatever they are socially defined to be?
> But "better" could be defined in terms of practical consequences.
> And that doesn't support absolute rights since I can conceive of
> situatioons where it would be better in a practical sense to kill
> or rob someone and other where it would not
I don't think this gets to the heart of the matter. Possibly, what is
absolutely right could be to promote the best possible practical
consequences. The issue at this point (at least from my point of view)
is more the existence and status of moral truths than what those truths
are.
>turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin) writes:
>In article <1992Sep11.010546.5396@panix.com> jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>> ... You're trying to decide how to raise your son [ . . . ] It seems to me
>> that you should not make your decision based simply on whatever your
>> own desires, purposes and inclinations happen to be, and still less on
>> those of third parties. ...
>
>Why not? "It seems to me" is pretty weak explanation, especially
>when this is almost universally how parents base their decisions.
You should not make your decision on such a basis because your son is a
human being who is in your power and for whom you are making decisions.
In such a case it is wrong to base decisions purely on your own
interests (which I take to include desires, purposes and inclinations)
or the interests of other parties rather than on the interests of your
son. That might be appropriate in the case of a chicken but not in the
case of a human being. (I am sure you will let me know if you
disagree.) But to make a decision in your son's interests, you need a
conception of those interests that goes beyond your son's actual
desires, purposes and inclinations, if only because those are too
undeveloped and uninformed to serve as a guide to action. Thus, it is
sometimes useful to view our actions as guided by principles that
transcend actual d., p. & i (which I think was the point at issue).
Contrary to your impression, parents who think about the matter rarely
view themselves as basing the decisions they make on their children's
behalf simply on whatever their own d., p. & i. happen to be. A piece
of evidence in this regard is that parents usually say they love their
children, want what's best for them and are willing to make at least
some sacrifices for them.
>> ... You can't sensibly make the decision based on speculations as
>> to your son's future (and presumably mature) d., p., & i. ...
>
>Nonsense. A parent can do this *because* the parent has
>influence over the child's future values.
I was discussing what values can and should guide the parent's choices
and my point was that those values can be neither the child's present
actual d., p. & i. (because they are too unformed) nor the child's
future d., p. & i. (because they will be what they will be in part as a
result of the choice to be made).
>But as many children come to learn, parents who *proclaim* a
>transcendant good are actually dressing up their *own* desires,
>purposes, and inclinations, and can give no sensible explanation that
>what they proclaim as a transcendent good is really that.
You seem to mean "all parents" rather than "some parents". Claims that
a moral principle or an argument should be accepted by everyone
regardless of subjective inclinations may, of course, be nothing more
than a mask for the will to power. I see no reason to believe that all
such claims are of that nature, though. It appears that you would have
the readers of this newsgroup believe that claims that arguments are
valid in that manner are sometimes made in good faith but feel
differently about moral principles. Why?
>The child's question "*Why* is that good?" can only be answered
>"because." The child (most likely a young adult by now) learns that
>the parent reifies the parent's values, and tries to hide this magic
>stunt with a bunch of rhetorical smoke and mirrors.
Many such questions can be answered, although possibly not in a way the
child can understand fully. For example, you can tell a child that
honesty is good because if he is honest then people will trust him,
that lying to someone shows he doesn't really care about that person,
that if people lie to each other they won't be able to cooperate and
live happily together, and so on. How much that kind of explanation
means to a child is limited by the child's experience and rationality,
and the child necessarily has to take a lot on faith. If the parent
has a sound moral system the child is likely to absorb most of it and
to find that his own experience bears out the soundness of the system,
so he's not likely to become the kind of scoffer you forsee.
Part of your point may be based on the observation that there is
eventually an end to justification. One can say to someone that lying
is bad because it destroys the possibility of communion with others and
communion with others is good because man is a social animal and
realizes his nature through such communion, or that people who
systematically cut themselves off from others tend as a matter of fact
to be unhappy. If he responds that he doesn't care about realizing his
nature or about unhappiness, then there may not be much more to be
said. Similar remarks apply to justifying things other than moral
principles, though.
>Sometimes the child adopts this deception as their own, and other times
>the child rebels. Because I dislike deception, I think such rebellion
>is justified.
I find your use of the word "justified" puzzling. Do you mean nothing
more than that it fits in with your personal desires, purposes and
inclinations for children to rebel against parents who view moral
judgements as objective? If so, it's an extremely odd useage, and I
wish you'd use language in a way that's more consistent with the way
other people use it. You would communicate your meaning better if you
did.
>It may take more guts as a parent to say "you have to behave this way
>because I and other adults want children to behave this way," but it is
>often the truth, and as the child matures, this honesty will give the
>youth a more accurate understanding of social relations.
Shouldn't you say "always" rather than "often"? Also, when you say
"you have to behave this way" it appears that what you mean is "you
will do what I tell you because I am physically stronger than you".
I'm not sure what other reason you can give the child for respecting
the claim to authority implicit in your "you have". Whatever may be
true in other situations, this certainly seems a case in which
rebellion would be justified.
pcollac@pyrnova.mis.pyramid.com (Paul Collacchi) writes:
[I had written:]
>|> So the only thing left (or so it seems to me) is to base your decision
>|> [how to raise a child] on the good of the child, conceived as in principle
>|> independent of
>|> anyone's actual [desires, purposes and inclinations].
>How does "the good of the child" makes itself known to you. Since this
>knowledge is presumably arising within you, how do you distinguish
>between it and your own "desire?"
Same way I distinguish between my perceptions and knowledge of the
physical world. You start with perceptions, preconceived notions,
things that people have told you, things that seem obviously true and
so on, and then pick through them, criticize them, systematize them and
reflect on them in the light of experience, and arrive at views that
you believe come closer to the truth of whatever it is you're concerned
with, whether that thing is ethics or cosmology.
If you're interested, Randall Holmes and others have just posted
extended discussions of this very topic in sci.philosophy.meta in the
thread on _The Story of O_.
exukjb@exu.ericsson.se (ken bell) writes:
>Perhaps a distinction between rational and irrational desires is needed
>here. Very often we are justified in directing someone's behavior
>because we are in a position to know what is really in their long-term
>interest.
>
>Natural rights need not then be conceived as transcendent, but rather
>as rooted in people's deepest, long-term, interests as human beings.
It appears to me that on this view the content of natural rights (which
depends on people's rational interests) might be viewed as determined
by the characteristics that people are found through experience to have
and to that extent would not be transcendent. However, I'm not sure
that the status of natural rights as natural rights can be derived
through determining what people's rational interests are. For example,
even if behavioral and social scientists all agree that honesty is the
best policy in the sense that people who are honest are most likely to
have enduring feelings of satisfaction and happiness, one could still
ask whether a father is justified in training his son to be honest when
some aspects of the training are opposed to the son's current
dispositions, purposes and inclinations.
In addition, I take it that on this view the actual dispositions,
purposes, inclinations and so on that people have over time would be
taken as evidence for a theory of what their rational interests are. I
believe it is a truism that theories regarding non-observable entities
like "rational interests" are under-determined by the evidence for
them. So it appears that the key to your suggested system of natural
rights -- rational interests -- will in fact transcend all actual
experience.
Dave Chalmers appears to hold that consciousness is distinct from the
physical properties of human beings and that it doesn't cause anything
physical to happen. In particular, it has no consequences for
psychological phenomena that can be fully explicated behaviorally, such
as belief.
This view (if he holds it) is puzzling, since it seems to imply that our
belief and our assertions that we are conscious are not causally linked
to the fact that we are conscious. What am I missing?
chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>[It may seem that] with respect to consciousness, *all* the available
>positions are bad. Materialism seems to deny the phenomenon, and
>dualism seems to make it irrelevant. Nobody likes the idea that
>consciousness is epiphenomenal.
Why not say that our ability to talk about our qualia shows that the
physical is not causally closed? I can understand that many people
would be reluctant to concede that physical science can't explain
everything that happens, but what more specific objections are there?
turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin) writes:
>Parents "love their children, so they want," i.e. *desire*, their
>children to have fulfilling lives. Parents have their own
>*inclinations* of what constitutes a fulfilling life, and so they raise
>their children with this *purpose* in mind. Here, I see a lot of human
>desire, purpose, and inclination, and nothing transcendent at all.
I also said that parents speak of love as a motivation for "making
sacrifices" for their children, which shows that parents have a
conception of their own interests as different from and possibly in
conflict with the interests of their children, and view love as having
a component which sometimes motivates them to give up the former in
favor of the latter. It is that component that I would identify as the
part of love that transcends desire, purpose and inclination.
I would identify that component as the recognition that the loved one
is as real as oneself. It is that recognition, together with
acceptance of rationality (neither of which can be reduced to desire,
purpose or inclination), that makes it possible for the interests of
other people to motivate us without regard to what our own d., p. & i.
happen to be.
>> ... Claims that a moral principle or an argument should be
>> accepted by everyone regardless of subjective inclinations . . .
>
>I assert that people "can give no sensible explanation" of such claims
>from their many attempts to do so and their universal failure. May I
>suggest that, in this regard, a single counter-example would work
>wonders.
I'm not sure of what you're looking for. "A parent should not use his
own children always and purely as a means to advance his own interests"
is an example of a moral principle that should be accepted by everyone
regardless of subjective inclinations. As to arguments, you yourself
advance arguments with the apparent intention that people whose
subjective inclinations favor the contrary view should recognize them
as valid.
I also don't know what you mean by "universal failure". I suppose that
if you have demanding standards for success attempts to explain why
anything whatever should be accepted as true have universally failed.
Nonetheless, you, I and everyone else go on affirming things as true
because we can't get by without doing so.
>You might begin by explaining what it means to say that "a moral
>principle ... *should* be accepted by everyone," in the absence of some
>implicit understanding of what is the *purpose* of this "should".
Your point seems to be that the only evaluative judgments that make
sense are judgments that evaluate fitness for some actual purpose. My
answer, of course, is that we can't think about life sensibly and in
fact none of us do think about life without evaluating purposes as good
or bad categorically. For example, we can't think sensibly about the
relation between parents and children without judging a father who uses
his son purely and solely as the means to satisfy whatever inclinations
he finds he has to be a bad father. In making that judgment we don't
need to refer to the actual desires, inclinations or purposes of anyone
involved. So the categorical "should" is something that I think we all
understand, at least implicitly.
>> Many such questions can be answered, although possibly not in a way the
>> child can understand fully. For example, you can tell a child that
>> honesty is good because if he is honest then people will trust him,
>> that lying to someone shows he doesn't really care about that person,
>> that if people lie to each other they won't be able to cooperate and
>> live happily together, and so on. ...
>I see nothing to complain about your explanation of why honesty is
>important (notice that it is in terms of people's desires, purposes,
>and inclinations!), and if a child cannot understand all this, I see
>nothing wrong in saying something like "you may not understand all of
>this now, but you will when you are older."
The explanation is not in terms of d., p. and i. but in terms of things
presumed to be already recognized as good. Saying what you suggest to
the child sounds like the equivalent of saying "this is for your own
good". Is that what you mean?
>> Part of your point may be based on the observation that there is
>> eventually an end to justification [ . . . ]
>Exactly! There is no going past people's desires, purposes,
>inclinations, etc. Values cannot transcend these.
In understanding the physical world, I believe it is possible to go
beyond first-person present-tense sense experience (the analog of
actual desires, purposes and inclinations). I believe that we are
justified in stating that the Golden Gate Bridge exists, electrons
exist, and Julius Caesar existed, and that when we make such statements
we are talking about things that are not reducible to any set of
observations that we have made or ever will make and thus transcend all
the evidence we will ever have about them. It also seems to me that if
my son were a Cartesian sceptic and I tried to justify these statements
to him I would have a hard time doing so. But since we can't get by
without believing in physical objects none of this bothers me a great
deal. It seems to me the same considerations apply in the case of
objective values.
>An adult's "conception of [a child's] interests that goes beyond [a
>child's] actual desires, purposes, and inclinations" *inevitably*
>depends on the adult's desires, purposes, and inclinations. This
>should give every parent pause for thought.
Why should the parent pause for thought if his actions always and
necessarily follow from his actual desires, purposes and inclinations
and nothing further, and if there's nothing wrong about that? Your
comment would make more sense if you thought that parents should
attempt to act on a conception of the child's real interests formed
without reference to their own d., p. and i.
ald@clipper.ingr.com (Al Date) writes:
>Love of your children is not inherently rational. It has rational
>components, but there is much more to it, much of which we cannot easily
>quantify.
It seems to me that human love inherently has rational components -- the
recognition that the loved one is as real as we are, and the
corresponding acceptance that the well-being of the loved one is as much
a reason for us to act as our own well-being. There may indeed be much
more to it, but it includes at least these components. So I agree with
your second sentence but not your first.
[I had written:]
>>"A parent should not use his
>>own children always and purely as a means to advance his own interests"
>>is an example of a moral principle that should be accepted by everyone
>>regardless of subjective inclinations.
>You are assuming that we all agree that the child has some value of his
>or her own, and that society will be better off without abused children
>running around.
I don't assume that. There are people called psychopaths who (I am
told) think people other than themselves have no value of their own.
For all I know, some such people might hope to profit by the social
chaos that is produced by abused children running around. Quite
possibly there are times and places in which such people constitute the
majority. My point is not that such people don't exist, but that their
views on the value of people other than themselves are wrong.
>This is a cultural assumption which can NOT be stated as a universal
>moral principle.
I think you're being dogmatic here, and I won't accept use of all
capital letters as an argument. Why should I accept what you say?
It seems to me that it's irrational to view other people and their
well-being as less real than ourselves and our well-being. If you think
that it's possible for action to be rational, and that rational action
is action that in an appropriate fashion promotes some overall good,
then it seems that action that takes only my well-being into account is
less rational than action that also takes what is good for others into
account. I don't see why that line of thought (which I think supports
my proposed principle for parents' treatment of children) has any more
to do with cultural assumptions than the Pythagorean Theorem does.
>Certainly I agree with the principle, but that is not the same as saying
>that it "exists" like the Golden Gate Bridge.
It doesn't exist as a physical object, of course. Why can't it exist as
a truth about parents' obligations to their children in a way similar to
the way the Pythagorean Theorem exists as a truth about Euclidean space?
>Of course, it is only because of certain scientific cultural
>assumptions that we might agree that there is value in modeling reality
>accurately. (8-)
Part of my argument was that we can't be moral sceptics (that is, we
can't reject the existence of moral truths) for the same reason we can't
be sceptics regarding knowledge of the physical world -- scepticism is
not a position that any of us in fact hold, and life won't let us hold
it. Here you too seem to put the two types of inquiry on a similar
footing but you add a smiley. How serious is the smiley? What part of
science do you think is justified without regard to specific cultural
assumptions in a way that morality is not?
>>My answer [to RT], of course, is that we can't think about life sensibly
>>and in fact none of us do think about life without evaluating purposes
>>as good or bad categorically.
>Any good or bad categorization has to be based on outcomes, (whether
>expected or actual), or else it is just moral mysticism.
Once you know the outcomes, you still have to determine whether those
outcomes are good or bad and you will have to weigh the multiple
outcomes that action or actions may have against each other. You will
not be able to do that simply by looking at further outcomes.
Eventually, you will have to determine how final outcomes are to be
valued in themselves. If that's moral mysticism, then you can't make
moral determinations without moral mysticism.
>Let's take an historical example of an absolute "should."
>
>*You shouldnt eat pork! Why? (because it sometimes causes lockjaw).*
>Oh wait, we now know that it is the trichina that causes lockjaw, which
>is killed by cooking pork to 180 degrees-- so now it is OK to eat
>pork....get it? "Absolute" moral truth is based on what we think works.
Your example shows that prudence (acting in ways that are likely to
promote good results) is part of morality, and moral rules based on
prudence change when what is prudent changes. You haven't shown and you
can't show that prudence is all of morality, because prudence can't tell
us what results should be treated as good in themselves. If illness and
suffering were good in themselves, for example, then there would have
been a moral rule that people should eat pork, and that rule would now
have been refined in the light of our present knowledge by adding a
prohibition against cooking pork thoroughly. As so modified, the rule
would work to promote certain ends, but even though it worked it would
be a bad rule because the ends it would promote are bad ends.
ald@clipper.ingr.com (Al Date) writes:
>But what about the bigoted storeowner who calls the cops to get
>undesired customers off his property in libertaria? I visualize the
>following scenario:
>
>BS (Bigoted storeowner): I am a taxpayer; I want you cops to get
>these orange people out of my store.
>
>Cop: Are they breaking any laws?
>
>BS: Yes, they're trespassing.
>
>Cop: But it says that you are open to the public [points to OPEN sign].
>
>BS: Yes, but I reserve the right to refuse to serve anyone.
>
>Cop: Well, that's fine, these orange people cant FORCE you to serve them,
>but as long as you are open to the general public, and they are breaking
>no laws, we cant remove them. Why dont you put a big sign outside stating
>that you are not open to certain people?
>
>BS: That would be bad for business.
>
>Cop: That is your problem [exits].
Why should the scenario would play out this way? If the shopkeeper
displayed an OPEN sign or did something else that by convention
constituted a general invitation to come into the shop and an offer to
deal with anyone who did come in, and if for some reason the offer
couldn't be revoked after a customer had come into the shop (perhaps
because detrimental reliance would be presumed), then I suppose the
Libertarian cop would act as you describe. But it seems to me that the
shopkeeper could avoid getting into such a fix by not putting up an OPEN
sign, or by putting up a sign saying "we reserve the right to deal with
whom we choose", a sentiment the citizens of Libertaria might well
applaud.
I suppose that what your example may show is that the law of Libertaria
would interpret informal commercial contracts (like those between
shopkeepers and their customers) to include whatever the ordinary
business usages of the community are. So if in a particular community
refusal to deal with every member of the public (including orange
people) would be considered rather eccentric, a shopkeeper might have to
indicate a contrary intention rather explicitly in order to avoid being
required to do so. If discrimination were common, though, I don't see
why a contract not to discriminate would be inferred in the absence of
specific evidence that was what the shopkeeper intended.
Since people who favor anti-discrimination laws generally believe they
are needed because there are discriminatory customs that need to be
stamped out, I don't think you're going to be able to convince them that
the laws of Libertaria would include anything that would serve their
goals directly.
isbell@ai.mit.edu (Charles L Isbell) writes:
>jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>
>|It seems to me that human love inherently has rational components -- the
>|recognition that the loved one is as real as we are, and the
>|corresponding acceptance that the well-being of the loved one is as much
>|a reason for us to act as our own well-being.
>
>What's so rational about that? I might accept thatsomeone is as real
>as I am (which may not even be rational) but how do I go from there to
>"the well-being of the loved one is as much a reason to act as [my] own
>well-being"?
It seems to me that to act rationally is to act in accordance with
principles that are generally applicable -- ideally, principles that are
valid for all rational persons. My actions are most rational if they
follow from principles that could apply to everyone and that everyone
could accept. The two principles that come to mind that might apply to
actions promoting well-being and that people generally might possibly
accept are:
1. Everyone should act to promote his own well-being, and
2. Everyone should act to promote well-being in general.
If you choose the first principle to the exclusion of the second you are
making the distinction between your own well-being and the well-being of
other people fundamental to your decisions in a way that seems to call
for justification. That justification seems hard to provide if you
accept that other people and their well-being are as real as you and
your well-being.
>Hmmmm, is it possible that maximizing individual happiness will maximize
>overall happiness? Do you not buy that (I don't, but I wonder if you
>do)?
Each person maximizing his own happiness won't necessarily maximize
overall happiness. (Proof on request -- I gather I don't need to give
you one.) That's one reason we need morality, law, conceptions of the
public good, and so on.
I should say that as a practical matter the happiness that each of us is
best placed to understand and to promote is normally his own, and that
attempts to promote the happiness of others -- or to force people to
promote the happiness of others -- often end badly. It also seems to me
that in a well-ordered society (in which, for example, force and fraud
are repressed) the things people do to promote their own happiness will
in general promote overall happiness. My claim is only that we should
recognize (and that it's irrational and therefore wrong not to
recognize) that the well-being of others matters as much as our own, and
that in a proper case we should be willing to sacrifice some personal
benefit to things like the good of our children or the public good.
As to love, which I also mentioned -- I suppose my point was that
turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin) writes:
>Catholics *define* good so that it is god-centered, Objectivists
>*define* good so that it is man-centered, and radical ecologists
>*define* good so that it is centered on some view of "nature" . . .
>Consider the many young Catholics who, first encountering the
>university environment, but not (yet) being deep thinkers, become
>Objectivists. Thenceforward they label "good" many acts that they
>previously labeled "bad", and label "bad" many acts that they
>previously labeled "good". They change their explanation of what
>constitutes the "good". I do not know what it might mean to "simply
>turn in their definition of 'good' and adopt another" if it is not
>this!
This is an odd account of how people deal with the word "good". If your
account were correct, then the young Catholics you mention would be
changing the linguistic conventions they observe rather than their views
on morality.
When a Catholic defines "good" as "doing the will of God" or an
Objectivist defines it as "promoting one's own self-interest" (if that
is indeed how those people would define the word) they aren't just
introducing a short-hand expression to substitute for a longer string of
words. They assume that the person hearing the definition already more
or less knows what the word "good" means and they intend the longer
string of words to make more explicit what the word already means, help
prevent errors in applying it, clarify the relation of goodness to the
world as a whole, and so on. From a Catholic's point of view, defining
"good" as "doing the will of God" is rather like defining "water" as
"H2O". When a chemistry teacher does that, his intention is not at all
to have his students simply turn in one definition for another. Rather,
the new definition is intended to teach them something about the thing
they already know as water.
>Finally, the issue is not whether *some* notions of "good" can be
>reconciled or subsumed within a greater scope, but whether *all* such
>notions can be so reconciled, not just Aristotelian ethics, Randian
>egoism, and Catholic morality, but also what the Viking conqueror,
>Marxist theoretician, and Nazi propagandist would label "good". In
>arguing that there are differing notions of "good", I do *not* argue
>that none of them are related, nor do I need to.
The objectivity of the good (or moral realism, if that is the preferred
expression) is not refuted by differing notions of "good", any more than
the objectivity of time is refuted by the circumstance that some have
thought it linear and infinite, some cyclical, some illusory and so
on.
As to Mr. Turpin's particular examples -- my impression is that the
Marxists (at least the more orthodox) treated words like "good" as
expressions of class interest and nothing more, and that the Nazis
considered the will of the German people (identified with the will of
the Fuehrer) to be the highest law. If so, both rejected objective
morality and a proponent of the view they rejected need not reconcile
his theory with their language.
I take it that the others (except possibly the Vikings -- I know nothing
about their moral theory) believe that they are not simply in the habit
of using words differently, but rather are in disagreement on an
important issue -- the nature of the good. Mr. Turpin seems to believe
that they are all wrong on that score because it is impossible to
disagree significantly on the nature of the good -- apparent
disagreements are simply signs that words are being used differently by
different people. That belief strikes me as implausible, and if it
follows from some account of language (or whatever) it is a serious
objection to that account.
>Even if there is some common concept of "good" that underlies the use
>of this word by everyone, I do not see how this -- by itself --
>provides *any* reason for me to do what is good (in this sense of the
>word), much less providing the "best possible reason".
It is not the concept (common or not) but rather goodness that is the
best possible reason for doing things. People would not call it
goodness if they didn't believe it to be a reason for doing things, and
varying accounts of what it is that is good can be viewed as varying
accounts of the things that constitute non-instrumental reasons for
action. Is it Mr. Turpin's view that the only reasons for doing
anything are instrumental reasons? If so, why?
ald@clipper.ingr.com (Al Date) writes:
>It is my intent to argue that the law in Libertaria would be neutral
>with respect to private discrimination, and that if this is the case,
>private discrimination would usually require economic sacrifice on the
>part of the bigot. It would subject bigots to economic boycott, which,
>if the number of fair minded people who disfavor arbitrary
>discrimination is as great as most people claim, would be sufficient to
>discourage or eliminate the vast majority of racist customs, probably
>more effectively than by govt decree and harassment.
Clearly, private discrimination would tend to result in the loss of the
business of those discriminated against, and of other people as well if
it's a kind of discrimination that violates commonly-held feelings as to
what's appropriate. I suspect, though, that there would be quite a lot
of discrimination of one sort or another. The desire people have to
associate with people like themselves seems enough to guarantee that
result.
It seems to me that the libertarian argument has to be that (1) some
discrimination makes life better overall, or at least can't be
eliminated without making life worse, and (2) the truly bad kinds of
discrimination would be impossible, or at least much less likely, in
Libertaria.
The first point seems correct to me, even a lot of people are likely to
reject it vehemently. Man is a social animal, and is usually happiest
pursuing the things he recognizes as good and living the life he thinks
is best in the company of others who have a similar outlook and way of
life. Especially in a society with a lot of different kinds of people
who view things very differently, like is going to want to associate
with like, and as a general thing it seems destructive and intolerant
not to permit that to happen.
A few examples might clarify the point. Many religious groups have
some way of life that they think is best. To the extent that way of
life has implications for how people should act in economic matters, I
don't see why people who belong to a particular group and want to act
in concert in the way that group favors shouldn't join together to
engage in economic activity. I don't see anything wrong with
monasteries, even though they run farms and everyone working on the
farm is a monk who has signed on to the religious program and is
required to get up at 4 A.M. for prayers. Similarly, I don't see why a
bunch of Southern Baptists shouldn't be allowed to go into business
together and set up an enterprise that is explicitly intended to
promote the Southern Baptist way of life and requires that people who
want to work there join in the common effort.
The way of life that a business organization facilitates need not be a
religious one, of course. If there are a bunch of guys who like cars,
horseplay, drinking, and not-very-refined jokes about sex, and they want
to establish an auto body shop that will give them the work environment
they are happy with, it strikes me as intolerant not to let them do so
even though most women would be uncomfortable in that environment and
things might work out best if they had a general rule of not hiring any.
If there's another bunch of guys who want to work together and play
squash at the club their grandfathers all belonged to after a hard day
of advising their prep-school buddies what stocks to buy, the principle
of "live and let live" suggests to me that their choice should be legal.
So if the "let a hundred flowers bloom" principal suggests that
discrimination should be allowed, the task is to show why in Libertaria
it would be defanged. One objection to discrimination is that those
doing the discrimination might have a monopoly of some sort and be able
to shut those discriminated against out of the market altogether. It's
worth noting that better communications and better transportation make
it harder to corner markets than it used to be. It's also worth noting
that in Libertaria the government would impose no barriers to entering
markets, making it harder for (say) the prepsters I mentioned in my
last example to maintain their position in the investment advisory
business unless they actually were better at it than other people.
Of course, the ultimate evils attributed to discrimination are things
like pogroms, slavery and the Holocaust. The argument seems clear that
to the extent rights of individuals are formally equal, and government
is limited and concerned only with repressing force and fraud, the
likelihood of such evils receeds.
>There would also be the perennial civil trial for those who felt that
>they were economically damaged as a result of discrimination, which
>would be the final legal battleground for drawing the line between the
>freedom of association and any of its alleged ill effects.
Civil suits are normally based on a claim that the defendant has
infringed some legally-protected right of the plaintiff, such as a
contractual right or a right not to be injured by someone's negligent
acts. A showing of damage is not enough if no right has been infringed
-- businesses are sometimes damaged by the failure of the public to buy
their products, and I have been *greatly* damaged by H. Ross Perot's
decision to spend a lot of his money running for president instead of
giving it to me. In neither case is there a civil remedy. In
Libertaria, what right would be infringed by discrimination?
dliebman@terapin.com (David Liebman) writes:
>lisbeth schorr, in _Within Our Reach_, responds:
>
> if welfare benefits figured in the decision to have a baby,
> more babies would be born in states with relatively high
> levels of welfare payments. But careful state-by-state
> comparisons show no evidence that Aid to Families with
> Dependent Children (AFDC) influences childbearing decisions;
The first sentence seems wrong. If it were true that in every state
AFDC and whatever other benefits are available to unwed teenage mothers
made it practical for an u. t. m. to set up housekeeping on her own,
but in no state were the benefits high enough to be particularly
attractive in themselves, then I would expect whatever the effect may
be to be rather similar from state to state even though benefit levels
might vary substantially.
Maybe another example would make my point clearer. I believe that the
prospect of getting paid figures in the decision people make to get
jobs. That doesn't mean I expect labor force participation necessarily
to be lower in states where average wages are lower, or for a rise in
average wages necessarily to lead to higher labor force participation.
People have to live somehow, after all. With respect to welfare, the
concern that in some forms it causes illegitimacy by making having an
illegitimate child one way of guaranteeing yourself a not-very-good but
reliable livelihood doesn't seem either farfetched or rebutted by this
particular evidence.
> sex and childbearing among teenagers do not seem to be a
> product of careful economic analysis.
Plainly true. However, I would expect s. & c. among teenagers to be
largely a product of the attitudes of the people around them, which are
in turn formed largely by what people see when they look around them.
If the world is such that many girls can easily improve their situation
by having an illegitimate child, attitudes and therefore conduct will
be affected.
>schorr provides the following citations:
Thank you for the cites. On something like this, more info is
certainly better than less.
mpolen@suntory.mti.sgi.com (Michael Polen) writes:
[I had written:]
>|> The concern I've heard has to do with teenage girls who have a baby as
>|> a way of getting on welfare so they can establish a life of their own
>|> away from a home situation they don't like. Do you believe that
>|> concern is based on myths?
>The concern I have is that some business executives are crooks. I
>don't, however, assume that they are all crooks, thereby saying that
>there should be no businesses.
I don't understand your complaint. If you thought there was some
government program (like price supports for tobacco) that increased the
number of farmers doing something that you thought bad for society (like
making a living growing tobacco), it seems to me you could discuss the
situation without assuming that all farmers are bad.
>The minute one starts empowering examples to be representatives of the
>whole, it ends all opportunity to rationally discuss issues.
How did I do anything like this? To mention a concern and to ask
whether someone thinks it is baseless is hardly a way to end discussion.
>If one's objectives are to end two way communication, it would be a lot
>nicer if they would just stop posting.
I couldn't agree more.
[I had written:]
>>If it were true that in every state
>>AFDC and whatever other benefits are available to unwed teenage mothers
>>made it practical for an u. t. m. to set up housekeeping on her own,
>>but in no state were the benefits high enough to be particularly
>>attractive in themselves, then I would expect whatever the effect may
>>be to be rather similar from state to state even though benefit levels
>>might vary substantially.
[David Liebman wrote:]
>i'm not sure i follow. it seems like you're defining 'practical' as a
>level of AFDC that allows one to have children without worsening one's
>economic condition, and 'attractive' as a level of AFDC that results in
>a net surplus for the prospective parent . . . you hypothesize that
>AFDC benefits aren't usually 'attractive', and then maintain that they
>would be a _livelihood_ -- in other words, a net gain for the mother
>after she has spent money on her children, which would certainly be
>attractive.
To clarify: By "practical . . . to set up housekeeping" I meant that
the benefits would constitute a "not-very-good but reliable
livelihood". In other words, that an unmarried mother with no job and
little support from family and friends would find it possible to live
(even though not particularly well) on AFDC and other benefits
available to her. If that is so, then having a child out of wedlock
would be one of the ways that a young women with limited prospects
could establish herself in the world. My suggestion was that that
particular "career path" is different enough in important nonmonetary
ways from other possibilities (staying home with Mom; staying in
school; getting a job; marrying a reliable man with a steady job) that
even substantial changes in the dollar level of benefits might not
affect conduct much as long as benefits were high enough to constitute
a livelihood of some sort. As Schorr points out, the economic
calculations are not likely to be particularly refined.
>perhaps more importantly, _neighborhood_-based centers would provide
>a valuable social space for both the children and their parents,
>fostering social development for the one and empowerment for the other.
Are there examples of government welfare programs that promote
small-scale social ties? My impression is that most have the reverse
effect.
nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson) writes:
> The other problems with the whole "welfare makes women have babies"
> arguments are these:
>
> 1. It's hypothetical and relies on correlations. It is not so easy
> to find instances where women and girls demonstrably choose to
> have babies die to [sic -- should read "to get"?] welfare benefits.
Does anyone know of any studies? If someone's looked at the matter it
would be interesting to know what the findings were.
It seems to me it should be possible to investigate motivation apart
from statistical correlations, although I don't know how much of that
social scientists do. Certainly, anyone doing a study of whether
government program A leads people to do B would have to deal with
certain complexities. For example, it would be true that "welfare makes
women have babies" if the availability of welfare means that women are
less careful to avoid having babies because funded babies create fewer
practical problems.
> 2. The child in all this is an innocent victim. NOT offering
> benefits to poor women who have babies only hurts the child.
This isn't relevant to the factual issue of whether the availability of
welfare in particular forms or in any form leads to illegitimacy and
other unintended things. If it does, and if you believe that
illegitimacy or some of the other unintended things (long-term welfare
dependency, say) make life worse for people, then offering the benefits
(or offering the benefits in the particular form) would also cause
damage.
Children are always the innocent victims of whatever problems there are
in people's lives, and to me the issue is whether in the long haul
welfare or a particular form of welfare results in people living better
or worse. What the answer is isn't obvious to me, so I think there
should be open discussion.
dliebman@terapin.com (David Liebman) writes:
[I had written:]
>>Are there examples of government welfare programs that promote
>>small-scale social ties? My impression is that most have the reverse
>>effect.
>lisbeth schorr discusses a number of experimental programs that attempted
>to do so, most of which were beheaded by reagan et al in spite of their
>evident success.
Any non-experimental programs? Talk about an experimental program that
would have been great but got defunded seems (justly or unjustly)
rather like talk about the fish that got away.
My impression is that ever since the late '60s there has been talk
about "empowering the poor" -- making welfare systematically promote
something other than dependency -- but in spite of a lot of ideas and
experimentation no-one has found out how to do it.
The problem as I understand it is that people tend to take those social
ties seriously that they have to rely on. The whole point of welfare
is to prevent suffering when people's social ties (other than their tie
to the government) fail them. So welfare by definition reduces the
extent to which people have to rely on informal social ties, and
therefore can be expected to weaken them.
(I should say that I haven't read Schorr, and there is nothing like
experience to test grand theories, so any further comments or
references would be welcome.)
>i had hoped to generate some sort of discussion of this sort of welfare
>reform.
The purpose of your suggestion (giving children meals at community
centers rather than giving their mothers money to buy food) seemed to
be to join the provision of material aid with more government
involvement in how the recipients of the aid live.
That sounds rational in the abstract, at least in the case of long-term
welfare clients whose inability to achieve economic independence may be
due to some lack in their way of life, but might be hard to carry out
in America today. If the government has a lot of trouble teaching
basic skills like the 3 Rs, I think it would have a lot more trouble
turning around the lives of people with real problems. Also, the
tendency seems toward the view that it is none of the government's
business how people live their lives, and many people think people on
welfare should have as many rights in that regard as anyone else.
Given the strength of such attitudes, how real is the prospect that the
government is going to be able to guide people into a more productive
way of life by requiring them to visit community centers?
dliebman@terapin.com (David Liebman) writes:
>'welfare dependency' . . . is a dependency in the psychological and
>spiritual sense as well. they lack confidence, trust in themselves and
>in others, a sense of community and collectivity -- in short, the
>_capacity_ for motivation. social relationships -- love, encouragement,
>support -- provide these things. what they lack is not, as you say
>later in your post, in their way of living but in their way of being .
>. . the purpose [of community centers] is to clear a space in which the
>participants are empowered to recreate a healthy and productive social
>milieu . . .
These seem like rather refined problems for government programs to deal
with. If there have been successes, then of course there's not much for
me to say until I find out more about them. So for the time being I
will comment no further.
holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes) writes:
>Think about the political consequences of saying that there is a
>rationally accessible universal moral standard. Think about who is
>likely to object. All kinds of issues will become visible.
I'm curious as to what you have in mind here. (If you don't want to
carry the discussion too far afield, of course you're free to ignore my
curiosity.)
pcollac@pyrnova.mis.pyramid.com (Paul Collacchi) writes:
>In article , hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu
>(Herman Rubin) writes:
>|> But I fear that only draconian measures, whether libertarian or statist,
>|> can deal with the problem as it is now.
>The suggestion is that "poverty" is a "culture" whose values, beliefs,
>mores, and behaviors are socially transmitted in much the same manner as
>any other cultural values and behaviors are transmitted. There is a
>difference between pulling the plug on the "culture" and pulling the
>plug on its citizens.
Any non-draconian suggestions for doing the former and not the latter?
David Liebman has touched on some ideas (which I didn't fully
understand), but the more the merrier.
isbell@ai.mit.edu (Charles L Isbell) writes:
>I suspect that the biggest problem with the Liberteria solution to
>discrimination (ie suggesting that it won't matter, and will have its
>worst effects on theose discriminating) is that it tends to ignore
>that the discrimination is widespread ususally. In other words, we
>don't have to worry about restaurants alone, we have to worry about
>banks and other loaning facilities, schools and other education
>dispensers, real estate developers, employers, the courts & police
>officers, etc, etc.
>
>Each taken in a vaccuum might indeed be unimportant, but taken all
>together, it spells trouble for the discriminated against.
It seems to me that the problem you point to will normally be greatly
mitigated if the class suffering generalized discrimination (let's call
them "Croats") is large, transportation and communications are good,
and the economy is diverse and continually changing. Then to the
extent the others (call them "Serbs ") don't want to have much to do
with them, the Croats will be able to set up their own businesses,
restaurants, banks, schools, and so on. Since such enterprises would
receive no government aid in Libertaria whether run by Croats or Serbs,
the ones founded by the Croats would be able to compete on more equal
terms with established Serb enterprises than in a non-libertarian
political order. Opportunities would increase still more for the
Croats if they were faced not with a uniform mass of hostile Serbs but
with a diverse agglomeration of peoples, mostly Serbs but also Slovenes
and others, as well as Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim religious
communities. (I should add that if our "Croats" really were faced with
a dominant mass of hostile Serbs there would be no possibility that the
government would enact anti-discrimination laws anyway. So that can't
be the real situation we're talking about.)
The story I just told may not be very relevant to conditions in
Yugoslavia today or in rural Alabama in 1940. It does seem relevant to
the experience of most of the groups that immigrated to the United
States. Many of those groups (like the Irish) weren't much liked when
they first came here and some of them (like the Chinese and Orthodox
Jews) look different from everyone else. They have nonetheless
prospered, partly through dealings with other people who wanted to deal
with them and partly through developing their own institutions.
I suppose one way to approach the issue you raise is to ask what makes
sense for a group to do that finds itself poor and discriminated
against in a setting like the one I described. I imagine that if I
were a member of a group in that situation the things that would run
through my mind might include the following:
1. Experience shows that it's possible for people in our
situation to prosper.
2. The groups that have done so most have not gotten where
they are by getting more government aid than other people. Rather,
they have been helped by the qualities they have valued -- family
cohesion, mutual aid within the group, industry, love of learning,
enterprise. We are capable of those qualities and I would like for us
to exemplify them.
3. Government aid as the foundation of a way of life is
habit-forming, which means it leads to the acquisition of qualities
that cause people to continue to need such aid. Those qualities don't
lead to happiness or prosperity.
4. If it's really true that most of the world doesn't think
much of people like me, then I'd be happier associating with people
like me who respect me, and trying to get something good going among
ourselves, rather than trying to force the majority to pretend to
respect me.
5. Therefore, rather than trying to advance by getting help
such as anti-discrimination laws from the government, it will be better
for us to pull together and make our own success.
>Of course, there is another argument. Anti-discrimination laws make
>sense because they help to keep the minority from getting so unhappy
>that they revolt and kill all the people declaring their right to free
>association. For example, one can see that in a case here at MIT. An
>MIT student was killed by some guy from one of the less affluent parts
>of town last week. The campus is up in arms and morally outraged, etc.
> A judge puts this kid's bail at something like $1 million. The kids
>from his block are like, "hey man lots of other people in our hood get
>killed and the murderers get out in a year or two and their bails are
>never that high...." The message is clear: your lives aren't worth as
>much. This compounds the problem they existed in the first place. For
>the discrimination laws, the message is clear: we don't care if the
>banks, schools and everyone else dumps on you; we got ours--go get
>yours. Eventually, someone is going to get pissed enuff to do
>something that everyone (at least everyone who has something to lose)
>will regret.
>
>In short, this is a good idea because it gives the illusion (if not
>the reality) of a real stake in the system and its promise of
>opportunity for the hard-working individual. Without that stake, an
>individualistic system like Liberteria loses whatever moral backing it
>may have.
The MIT example you give is of discriminatory government action that
would have no justification under the laws of Libertaria. Certainly, it
has no connection to freedom of association.
I don't think of Libertaria as all that individualistic a place. It
seems to me that if people can't rely on the government to do much for
them beyond repress force and fraud, then informal social ties to
family, friends, neighbors and the like will be taken more seriously.
If those ties are strong then the kind of alienation you refer to, in
which it seems that there is me on one side with no power except the
power to destroy, and social institutions like banks and schools that
are indifferent to me on the other side, will be less common.
> -\--/-
> Don't just adopt opinions | \/ | Some of you are homeboys
> develop them. | /\ | but only I am The Homeboy From hell
> -/--\-
I admire your spirit.
isbell@ai.mit.edu (Charles L Isbell) writes:
>Actually the Chinese in America are among the poorest in this country
>(per capita). Despite the popular myth (which depends on household
>income, a skewing statistics in a household with three or four wage
>earners), the American dream still hasn't come true for them.
My impression is that most of the Chinese here are rather recent
arrivals who tend to work very hard at low-paying jobs, but that the
second and third generations tend to hold not-so-low-paying jobs. If
I'm right, then my claim that the things they value as a culture helps
them prosper as a group in this country still stands up. Does anyone
have any figures?
>Furthermore, it is a myth that Asian-Americans do not get "govt help"
>(ie Affirmative Action): their AA help tends to be in the social
>sciences where they are underrepresented while Black folx mostly get
>theirs in the sciences where they are underrepresented.
My claim was that the explanation of the success of the groups that
have been successful has not been AA and other forms of govt help, and
that reliance on such things is a distraction from the real task of
developing the habits and institutions that will lead to success.
Under our current system, the government tries to provide the greatest
goodies for the greatest number. So I have no reason to doubt your
statement that some Asian-Americans get AA help.
>Further, as a liberterian, I would expect that one would find the
>requirement that one "assimilate" (that is subjugate one's individual
>cultural mores to the mainstream) in order to succeed somewhat
>distasteful. Why is it that it doesn't engender that response?
What's the requirement? You get what you pay for. If you want to be
successful and prosperous you cultivate one sort of cultural mores. If
there are other things you value more, that's fine but don't complain
that you're not successful and prosperous.
>Also, it is a myth that Blacks aren't better off in a whole lot of
>ways since the 1960's. At current trends, >50% of Blacks will be in
>the middle class by 2000. The income gap between Black families
>(two-income households) and White families has narrowed . . .
What was going on before the 1960's? I don't have any statistics
readily at hand specifically relating to blacks, but in the Fall 1982
issue of _Public Interest_ Charles Murray cites figures from the
_Statistical Abstract of the United States_ showing that poverty as
defined by the Bureau of the Census declined from 33 to 28 percent
between 1949 and 1952, to 22 percent by the end of the '50s, to 18
percent in 1964 (the beginning of the Great Society), and to 13 percent
on 1968. There really hasn't been any progress since then (the poverty
rate dropped as low as 11.1 percent in 1973 and has since risen). So
the net benefit for poor people in general of the more active
government role in fighting poverty that we have had since the middle
'60s seems to be limited at best. I have no reason to think that poor
blacks benefited more than other poor people, although of course they
may have.
As to the position of blacks in particular, how much does the relative
success of two-income black households aid the two-thirds of black
children who are now born out of wedlock? The employment rate of young
blacks has also dropped a great deal since the 1960s. These trends are
not encouraging.
> 5. Therefore, rather than trying to advance by getting help
>|such as anti-discrimination laws from the government, it will be better
>|for us to pull together and make our own success.
>
>Why not both?
They come out of different understandings of your situation in society.
If you believe you can't succeed because you are weak and everyone is
against you, you will believe you deserve special benefits and
protection from the government and you won't have the outlook needed to
succeed in any other way. If you believe there are lots of good people
and opportunities in the world and that you are capable of making
something of them, then you will go ahead and try to make a go of it
without waiting for the government to act, and in any event you won't
think you have any special claim on the government.
In addition, of course, I think anti-discrimination laws are wrong, but
you don't seem much impressed by my arguments on that score.
>|The MIT example you give is of discriminatory government action that
>|would have no justification under the laws of Libertaria. Certainly, it
>|has no connection to freedom of association.
>
>Bullshit. Both systems would have human judges and I suspect that it
>would be impossible to claim that one system will not have the
>problems of the other in this regard . . .
I don't claim that the MIT situation (unequal treatment of murder
victims by race and social class) could not arise in an actual
Libertaria, only that it would be no more consistent with the laws of
Libertaria than with the current laws of Massachusetts and that it has
no particular connection with whether private discrimination is
allowed.
>One of these days, I'm going to have to explain why I think Liberteria
>will, over time, degenerate (if that's the right word) into what we
>have now. Except that maybe the drug war wouldn't have been
>declared....
One could always take the view that the way things are is the way things
necessarily are, and that view might even be correct. I don't believe
in defeatism, though.
isbell@ai.mit.edu (Charles L Isbell) writes:
>I think it [the low-paid jobs taken by Chinese immigrants] adequately
>belies the notion of Chinese-do-better-due-to- their-self-sufficiency.
I don't understand this. If the way of life of a people doesn't give
them instant prosperity, but does help them manage their current
situation and build a better life for their children, what more can be
asked?
>|My claim was that the explanation of the success of the groups that
>|have been successful has not been AA and other forms of govt help, and
>|that reliance on such things is a distraction from the real task of
>|developing the habits and institutions that will lead to success.
>
>Well, develop this further then. I'd argue that the facts do not
>support this well enough to allow a simple "claim" to stand. This
>seems to me to be the problem of the myth of the model minority: it
>leads us to claim things that are incorrect.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Comments that may be relevant:
1. The groups that have eventually prospered most (the Jews and the
Japanese, for example) have not prospered because they got involved in
politics and secured government benefits, but for other reasons.
2. By its nature, government support can only raise you to the level at
which the government -- meaning your fellow citizens who pay taxes -- is
willing to support you. That will generally be below the average level
of your fellow citizens.
3. Government support tends to be a trap, because you lose it when you
are successful and don't need it. The effect is equivalent to taxing
heavily the efforts of the unsuccessful to become successful.
>|>Further, as a liberterian, I would expect that one would find the
>|>requirement that one "assimilate" (that is subjugate one's individual
>|>cultural mores to the mainstream) in order to succeed somewhat
>|>distasteful.
>
>|What's the requirement? You get what you pay for. If you want to be
>|successful and prosperous you cultivate one sort of cultural mores. If
>|there are other things you value more, that's fine but don't complain
>|that you're not successful and prosperous.
>
>I'm afraid that this doesn't follow from my point (or maybe it does
>and I just don't follow you).
It's not a matter of assimilation. The Quakers prospered in
Philadelphia even though they dressed and talked funny and Orthodox Jews
seem to be prospering even though they resist assimilation. In neither
case did their prosperity have anything to do with government support.
It did have a great deal to do with the cultural mores of those
particular groups, though.
I don't see anything distasteful in saying that people should recognize
that how they live has consequences that they will have to live with.
So if people want to prosper they will have to develop the habits and
capacities that lead to prosperity -- in an orderly commercial society,
these will usually include things like hard work, reliability, frugality
and so on. I can easily understand someone preferring a different sort
of life -- savoring the pleasure of the moment, pursuing spiritual
enlightenment, or whatever. The rewards of such a life will not include
material prosperity, though, and I see nothing wrong with that.
>All stats that I've seen note a very sudden spurt of growth [in the
>proportion of middle-class blacks] after 1965 which can be related
>almost directly to AA and other ways fo including Blacks in the
>mainstream work force . . .
There's no doubt that the number of blacks who are middle class could be
raised by requiring that 12% of jobs in all categories go to blacks. (I
take it that AA measures are intended in the aggregate to do something
very like that.)
I deny, though, that such a measure or similar measures would be in the
long-term interests of anyone. I have touched on some reasons for
thinking freedom of association is a good thing in previous posts.
Another issue is that imposing such requirements seriously weakens
whatever connections exist between (i) capacity and achievement, (ii)
the recognition of capacity and achievement by others and (iii)
occupational success. The advantage of those connections is that they
encourage people who want to be successful to cultivate qualities that
will make their success a public benefit, and they link success with the
respect of other people.
>The other trend [toward high rates of illegitimacy and low rate of youth
>employment] can be attributed to many things, but the overall picture is
>more prophetic than anything else: the gap between the rich & poor is
>widening and widening fast (this is also true of the overall
>workforce--I can almost assure you that we'll be talking about that
>constantly by decades end).
One thing that contributes to the gap between rich and poor is cultural
mores -- if 2/3 of black babies are illegitimate there will be a lot of
poor black families and poor black children. I suggested above that
some of the benefit for blacks from programs such as AA is more apparent
than real. If it's true that welfare programs result in more
illegitimacy then the same would be true of those programs as well.
>|In addition, of course, I think anti-discrimination laws are wrong, but
>|you don't seem much impressed by my arguments on that score.
>
>I honestly don't recall the arguments (I do remember the assertion)
>:-). I'd argue that these laws make sense pragmatically and make
>sense ethically. I'd be more than happy to discuss it further: 1)
>explain why you think they are wrong and 2) explain why you think they
>make bad policy (ie have bad real-world effects).
If you want to pursue this, could I ask you to look at and comment on
some of my earlier posts? If you don't see anything that seems
relevant, I will send you the ones I meant.
>I recall you arguing that it [the MIT incident] would be less likely in
>Libertaria... perhaps I misread you. I'll go back and re-read your
>article. But if you weren't asserting that, what was your point?
You said (as I recall) that one argument for anti-discrimination laws
was that they kept people from getting angry and gave the MIT incident
as an instance of people getting angry because of discrimination. My
response was (1) the MIT incident would be no more likely to happen in
Libertaria, and (2) the kind of alienation from society in general that
lies behind the extreme reactions ("killing everyone") you seemed to
have in mind would be less likely in Libertaria because informal social
ties (e.g., to family, friends, relatives and neighbors) would be
stronger.
>I do not think Communism "degenerates" into what we have now. I do
>think Libertaria *in particular* would.
As to Communism, we will have to see what happens in Eastern Europe.
The people there say they want to live in a "normal country", which may
mean something like what we have now. As to Libertaria, the history of
the United States suggests you may be right.
>In fact, particularly on issues of children, discrimination and the
>enivronment I've found that most Libs with whom I've had sustained
>email/personal conversations are much closer to the sort of compromises
>we've worked out in the USA than they are to the "official" Lib
>positions.
Radicalism is a difficult position to sustain for people who aren't
slightly crazy -- it's ever so much easier to go with the flow.
fuller@athena.cs.uga.edu (James P. H. Fuller) writes:
> I had in mind cases in which you might speak an infinite number of
>words and *never* convey your idea. For example and as an exercise,
>try reformulating your disquisitions on Locke in a language the
>speakers of which lack the concept of property. Malay, for instance [
>. . . ] Or for even more fun try Proto-IndoEuropean. You'll find PIE
>is just the thing for naming tree groups but less than adequate for
>Enlightenment longwindedness [ . . . ] For an even sharper lesson in
>what ideas may inhere in language A but not in language B, repeat the
>project in Australopithecine.
Are these examples of any use whatever to someone who is not fluent in
Malay, PIE and Australopithecine unless he already shares your views on
thought and language? Locke would have expected speakers of all three
languages to be able to understand and discuss the concept of property,
and for all I know he might have been right. The example reminds me of
the joke about the man who argued that the verse "Then David came into
the house of the Lord" showed that the Orthodox requirement of wearing
a hat is an ancient one: "Would *David* go into the house of the Lord
without a *hat*?"
On a somewhat related subject, the New York Times had an interesting
article this past week about a survey some anthropologists had done
that showed that the concept of romantic love appears to be universal.
It seems that nobody had noticed its universality before because people
were convinced _a priori_ that it *had* to be culture-specific.
I didn't see anything to differ with in what you posted. It seems to
me that what people today say they want from other people is abstract
freedom and equality, and the fulfilment of whatever desires they may
happen to have. So sex roles have to go, because they limit our
ability to do what we happen to feel like doing, and because they are
unequal.
The problem, though, is that if all people look for from each other is
fulfilment of their own desires, and their idea of morality is limited
to the proposition that no-one should have any sort of advantage over
anyone else in the common struggle for what each happens to desire,
then life becomes intolerable.
Man is a social animal. In the past sex roles and the family connected
man to other people and made a decent life possible. I don't see
anything that can replace them.
On a less general point -- why do you call yourself "lunatic"?
>I was pleased to see your reply. I normally worry that my needless
>verbosity acts as a good incentive to terminate an interesting line of
>thought.
Without the opportunity to blather and harangue, how could life be worth
living? Somewhat more seriously, "political theory" covers a lot of
ground, and discussions have to wander around a while before much can be
communicated. I'm happy to read anything you feel like sending me --
lists and all -- as long as I can comment where I want and talk about
whatever I feel like talking about.
>If someone thinks liberty pure and simple is the sole proper goal of
>politics then I suppose he thinks it's good -- preeminently so -- for
>people to be able to do whatever they feel like doing. That's one
>possible view of what is good for man, but certainly not the only
>possible one.
>I have seen good arguments (from Marty Albini, for instance, as well as
>from more historical sources) that one can see such liberty as the
>source of most other possibilities.
I don't know anything about Albini. The best historical sources I know
of on the point are British -- for example, Adam Smith and J. S. Mill.
My own problem with the view that liberty is the highest political good
is that it requires the belief either that (1) doing whatever you happen
to feel like doing is the highest human good, or (2) politics should
play a strictly limited role in human life, and in particular is not a
means through which the highest goods can be pursued. View (1) seems
absurd to me. View (2) is more plausible, but doesn't seem consistent
with the modern tendency to expand the scope of politics.
>It is certainly difficult in our age to argue the case for, say,
>benevolent dictatorship: the experiments and ideas of the 17th & 18th
>century have really firmly established this idea that liberty means
>liberty for each man, or none at all. From such liberty, such claims
>would say, comes the ability to pursue other ends.
I agree that if you have liberty you have the ability to pursue whatever
ends you may have. I also agree that it's difficult to argue the case
for absolute rule by one man or a small elite. Any number of
restrictions on liberty could exist without creating a dictatorship,
though.
The problem, though, is that man is a social animal and the ends it is
possible for him to choose depend on the society he lives in. Because
of the society we live in, for example, it is impossible for us to
choose "following the ways of the ancestors" or "loyalty to throne and
altar" -- or anything like them -- as the guiding principle of our
lives. A society devoted to "doing your own thing" will always be short
of social institutions that can serve as the objects of love and
loyalty, and one kind of human aspiration will always go unsatisfied in
such a society.
Also, people take seriously the things they view as universally valid,
which in practice usually means the things accepted as valid by their
society. In a society in which the only publicly recognized good is
increasing our ability to do whatever we feel like doing, I think it
would be unusual for someone to take seriously anything but prosperity
and recognition by other people (that is, his career). But it's hard to
be so eccentric as to choose (for example) the good, beautiful and true
as one's goal when the only serious goals the people around us have are
their careers.
>I think that what the European "New Left" (as opposed to the US '60s
>New Left) is trying to discover is how to overcome what has classically
>been termed "false consciousness" . . . People are . . . trying to get
>out and show others how their lives are diminished or limited by
>existing economic arrangements, how their options are curtailed by the
>assumptions of the societies in which they live . . . [I]t is . . . the
>foundation for trying to construct a new economy, a new set of social
>orders and groups . . . The "New Left" is . . . seeking to build (or
>rebuild) those social structures (coops, small businesses, communities,
>schools) that are essential in allowing the resources that might later
>become available to be spent wisely and usefully.
>So to summarize: the new means are primarily an attention to detail at
>the local level, building and encouraging social habits and structures
>that promote and stimulate alternatives to existing economic practice.
It sounds like the European New Left has at least in much in common with
traditionalist conservatives -- who tended to emphasize informal local
habits and social structures and the sense of belonging to which they
give rise -- as it does with libertarians or with old-fashioned liberals
or socialists. All of the latter wanted overall social rationality, to
be achieved either by the market (in the case of the libertarians) or
the state bureaucracy (in the case of the others). (For an early
denunciation of "sophists and calculators", and emphasis on the "little
platoon" to which one belongs as the birthplace of social attachment,
you might look at Burke's _Reflections on the Revolution in France_.)
>[T]he options one can choose between and the choices one makes are not
>related by strict causality. Our choices have the effect of creating or
>removing other choices, either for our contemporaries, or for future
>generations. It is true that society offers us the ability to be "free
>to choose" many more things than life as a hermit would; but our very
>choices and decisions are what make those particular options available,
>as well as new ones that might result.
Iagree that to some extent the choices we make are made for other people
as well as ourselves. But how many people look at the choices they make
in that light? In particular, how many people look at things that way
in a society devoted to doing your own thing? People tend to go with
the flow and act the way they are accustomed to see other people act.
>>A society devoted to "doing your own thing" will always be short of
>>social institutions that can serve as the objects of love and loyalty,
>>and one kind of human aspiration will always go unsatisfied in such a
>>society.
>Here I disagree. You're assuming that "doing your own thing" implies
>that each person will have different goals, different objects of love
>and loyalty. There's no reason to suppose that granting almost
>unlimited liberty results in such a situation. Given that we share
>culture, it seems extremely likely that our behaviour is to some degree
>statistically predictable; the chances of 240 million (or 5 billion)
>people all doing different things is nil. The only implicit feature of
>a do-your-own-thing society is the abscence of a requirement to do
>anything. This doesn't imply that my thing won't be similar to you
>thing, and that you and I, along with the others who also have the same
>thing, will not create the same social institutions and objects to
>"honor, love and/or cherish".
In a society in which the highest publically-recognized goal is
maximizing the satisfaction of aggregate individual preferences, there
is a particular goal that people are likely to have in common. That
goal is facilitating the achievement of whatever it is that each of us
happens to want. Such facilitation has two parts, one negative (removal
of restraints) and one positive (provision of material means). So such
a society will primarily value liberty and prosperity (with perhaps a
requirement that the liberty and prosperity be somewhat equally
distributed). The social institutions that people take seriously will
be those that minimize the demands that social institutions place on us
generally (that is, those that promote liberty) and those that enable us
to make money. Neither type of institution is particularly loveable.
It's true that eccentrics who value things others don't much care about
can in theory band together and create their own little world in which
-- say -- music is more important than social position. But that's
easier said than done. My impression, for example, is that both Bohemia
and the Ivory Tower are dead. People in the art world today tend to
care more about money than what is beautiful and people in the academic
world tend to care more about their careers than what is true.
To make my point another way -- to "love, honor and cherish" is to treat
something or someone as no less important than your own wishes. To take
"doing your own thing" as the final goal is to treat nothing as more
important than your own wishes. The two aren't consistent. If someone
loves his children and tries to help them live good lives he does it
because he thinks it is important that they live good lives, not because
looking out for them happens to be "his own thing". When he makes a
decision regarding them the question he asks will not be "is this what I
really want to do", but rather "is this what will really be good for
them".
>Either the fact that career/recognition goals are the only ones is a
>cause or an effect of the lack of publically recognized good other than
>personal liberty. It is either a manifestation of or the reason why
>people find it hard to follow their own way, but not both. I have to
>confess that I don't see how liberty being viewed as good implies that
>a good life means becoming well known for doing your own thing. Our
>propensity for hero worship and desire for recognition are, I think,
>quite independent of this liberty issue.
I view the connection between career/recognition goals and
liberty/prosperity goals as follows:
1. Career success means money and therefore freedom to pursue your own
goals.
2. More importantly, people aren't satisfied with simply getting what
they happen to want. They want to feel that what they do and are is
real -- that is, objectively valid. If someone has a sufficiently clear
view of what is objectively good, then he can be satisfied in pursuing
that good without regard to what other people think of him. He can feel
that what he is doing is important, and that if other people don't think
so, they are simply mistaken. On the other hand, if people believe that
there is no objective good that exists and is valid without regard to
what anyone thinks, but only the particular desires of particular
people, then the closest people can come to objective validity is
universal acceptance. So in a society in which "doing your own thing"
is the highest goal, people will want to feel that what they do and are
is universally accepted. The best way to get that feeling is to get
social position.
3. To summarize -- the moral relativism that lies behind acceptance of
"doing your own thing" as the appropriate goal for each of us makes us
nervous because we want the things that we do to matter and we don't
think the mere fact that we want to do something makes it matter. So we
want the rest of the world to assure us that we and our actions matter.
Therefore we try to fit ourselves into as central a position in the
social network as possible -- that is, we are careerists.
I'm sorry the above is so abstract, but it's hard for me to know how
much of it seems obvious, how much seems clear but wrong, and how much
just seems obscure. So I don't know what examples would help.
>>The social institutions that people take seriously will be those that
>>minimize the demands that social institutions place on us generally
>>(that is, those that promote liberty) and those that enable us to make
>>money. Neither type of institution is particularly loveable.
>I like this whole paragraph except the last sentence. What possible
>grounds are there in the above for this claim ?
The next-to-last sentence draws a conclusion from what had come before,
and the last sentence makes a claim regarding that conclusion without
arguing for the claim.
I think the claim is correct. One doesn't love something unless he
thinks that thing has value in itself and would have value even if he
had never seen or heard of it. If John loves Mary he doesn't think that
she is loveable because he loves her; he thinks he loves her because she
is loveable. He also doesn't think he loves her because she benefits
him in some way; he thinks he loves her for what she is. The things we
love are the things we think are good in themselves, not the things we
think are good as a means to something else.
In the case of social institutions, it follows that we don't love them
if our reason for taking an interest in them is that they achieve some
other goal we have. If we view our reason for being connected to
society as the furtherance of our goal of doing what we feel like doing,
there is no reason why we should love the institutions that help us
achieve that goal. I know of no-one who loves the New York Stock
Exchange or any other institution whose reason for being is moneymaking.
I also don't know anyone who loves the institutions -- like the Army,
the New York City Police, or the ACLU -- whose legitimate reason for
being is to prevent us from being unjustly coerced. (A career Army man
might love the Army for the comraderie he has found there, but his love
doesn't have much to do with the particular reason the Army has for
existing and isn't likely to be shared by anyone who isn't a career Army
man.)
>>My impression, for example, is that both Bohemia and the Ivory Tower
>>are dead. People in the art world today tend to care more about money
>>than what is beautiful and people in the academic world tend to care
>>more about their careers than what is true.
>Again, I'd beg to differ. What evidence do you have that art or the
>academia have ever been different in this way ?
We draw conclusions about what the people in a particular milieu care
about now or cared about in the past from a great many indications, none
of which prove anything conclusively. In this case, some of the
indications that lead me to my view are the following:
1. The multiplication of grants, prizes, awards and salaried positions
in the arts and academia. I am inclined to expect that in a democratic
consumer society the things that multiply are the things that people are
interested in, and that if numbers increase it shows that interest has
increased. Also, such things tend to draw careerists to an activity.
It is now realistically possible to have a career as a poet; fifty years
ago it wasn't.
2. The particular nature of what is produced. If people produce art
that debunks the notion of beauty and scholarship that debunks the
notions of objective inquiry and truth, and such productions are
applauded, I begin to suspect that the people involved in the arts and
scholarship are losing interest in the specific goals of those pursuits.
This suspicion is confirmed if the art and scholarship that arouses the
most interest seems to arouse that interest to a greater extent than
formerly on account of its political content. But if people who pursue
the arts and scholarship are less interested in beauty and truth than in
the past, other motives must have relatively greater importance. The
obvious possibilities are ideology and careerism. I view careerism as
the more important of the two, because ideology is too social a motive
to carry much weight over the long term in a society devoted to doing
your own thing.
3. The quality of what is produced. Admittedly, I'm no authority on
what is being done currently in the arts and in scholarship. I dip into
it now and then (I'm speaking more about the arts now), and always
decide that it would be a lot smarter to stick with stuff that's been
done in the past. It seems to me, though, that there's not all that
much that's all that good. The critics I read and the people I talk to
who know more than I do seem to confirm my judgement. So far as I can
tell, no-one loves or is captivated by what is being done in the arts
today. That was not always so. If I am right, and quality was higher
in the past, I would expect poor quality today to be related to lessened
concern on the part of the people involved for the specific goals of the
activity and increased concern about other matters -- like their
careers.
4. Personal experience and anecdote. For example, when I went to law
school in the mid to late '70s, the older faculty seemed more interested
in understanding and theorizing about law in a somewhat disinterested
way, the younger faculty in finding ways to interpret the law to advance
their political agendas. People I have talked to who have been involved
in the New York art world say things like "it's all such a fraud", or
"what it's really all about is making money -- *big* money". This last
category of evidence may not be of much use to you, though.
>I look at it this way. The dependence of our own personal goals on the
>society in which we live is variable, both across people, and across
>individual goals . . . So, there is a spectrum of social involvement
>implied by "doing our own thing". Those who choose goals (to the extent
>that any of us choose them) that rely on elaborate social structures,
>advanced or extensive technology, or large amounts of money, will find
>themselves drawn inexorably into a social structure that requires them
>to seek approval from their peers . . . Because we have developed a
>fairly communicable culture (as humans), our desires and wants tend to
>be somewhat statistical in nature: we see, hear, taste, and generally
>experience many of the same things as our neighbours. When you couple
>this tendency for convergence implied by culture with the tendency for
>convergence implied by our goals becoming more sophisticated and
>interdependent, you have a very strong force that results, by and
>large, in a society of people all doing similar things and wanting to
>approved of by their neighbours.
Your first point is that it is easier for us to achieve whatever goals
we have if others cooperate with us, and your second point is that we
pick up tastes and attitudes from other people and therefore find that
we end up wanting to do the same things other people do. I agree that
such considerations account for a lot of social cooperation, and even
for our habit of seeking the approval of others to the extent we need
them to help us in attaining some other goal.
These explanations only work, though, to the extent we pursue our
careers for some purpose other than success in the career itself. By
"careerism" I mean taking as our goal the achievement of an important
position in society as an end in itself, or (perhaps more accurately)
simply for the sake of obliging other people to take us seriously. I
think some other explanation than the one you propose is needed to
explain why people like power and social prestige as such. People
sometimes sacrifice all their pleasures and everything they love to
their ambitions. I have several old friends who have been eaten alive
by their careers -- they are much less interesting and seem to enjoy
life much less than they used to, but now they are successful. The
question is why that happens.
>>To take "doing your own thing" as the final goal is to treat nothing
>>as more important than your own wishes . . . If someone loves his
>>children and tries to help them live good lives he does it because he
>>thinks it is important that they live good lives, not because looking
>>out for them happens to be "his own thing" . . .
>And why does he do that ? There are fathers and mothers who have done
>otherwise, which does not prove that choice is involved, but certainly
>implies that it plays a role. Do you think that, given the existence of
>choice at all, people do not choose to care for their children, to
>offer them care and love and asistance because it is their desire to
>see their children cared for, loved and assisted ?
My point is not that choice has nothing to do with how parents treat
their children, but rather that taking "having my own way" as my
ultimate goal in life is inconsistent with love. In a sense, of course,
each of us always and only does the things that he desires to do. But
that does not mean we always think that it is our desire to do the thing
that makes the thing worth doing; sometimes we think that it is because
the thing is worth doing that we desire to do it. It seems to me that
the things we do for love fall into the latter category.
>>More importantly, people aren't satisfied with simply getting what
>>they happen to want. They want to feel that what they do and are is
>>real -- that is, objectively valid.
>Can you back this up so that it becomes more than just an assertion, or
>a statement about here & now ?
This is another "what do people have in mind when they do what they do"
issue, so I'll give you another list of some of the considerations that
lead me to my view:
1. People like to feel justified in doing what they do. That's why
when people do things that are wrong they usually don't just say "I felt
like doing it" -- they have excuses and are often willing to tell you at
length just what they are. Even someone who murders someone because he
feels like murdering someone tries to find some sort of excuse, for
example by asking the guy for a cigaret and blowing him away when he
refuses.
2. We need some sort of explanation why people are often so ambitious
for power that they are willing to sacrifice everything else to the
pursuit. The language you quote provides such an explanation -- if you
have power your reality and the validity of your decisions has to be
recognized by other people and so you find it easier to believe in them
yourself. One of the things I've noticed in the Wall Street circles I
spend a certain amount of time hanging around in is that people with a
lot of position, power and money are more real than other people in all
sorts of ways. When they are in the room, everyone feels their
presence. Their views on almost any subject are well worth listening
to, their taste in food, clothing, entertainment or what have you
automatically matters, even their little jokes are funnier than other
people's, and well worth repeating. That's what everyone thinks,
anyway, and if everyone around you is convinced it's true how can you
claim it's false?
3. People like to have stories that they tell themselves about their
lives. "Everything I did I did because I happened to feel like doing
it" isn't much of a story. "Everything I did I did because it followed
from the principles that govern the world" is a much more inspirational
story that ties my personal life story into the saga of the whole
universe. Therefore, it's a story that we all tend to prefer. In fact
we even try to make it true to some extent, for example by acting in a
principled fashion.
Thanks for your e-mail and good luck with your house. I know what
living with plaster dust is like -- just remember that better times are
ahead.
On to the discussion:
>I would not seek to be so presumptuous of my fellow humans as to judge
>the nature or the objects of their love. I know that I certainly do not
>love such institutions as the NYSE, the ACLU etc., but I also know that
>I relish having no TV, and avoiding the use of our car as much as
>possible. It may be that my fellow humans have been twisted by the
>world, but I prefer to remain more neutral than this, and merely assert
>that "I do not, but they might".
If the idea of love is to play any role at all in our understanding of
human life, we have to be able to discuss it -- its nature, its relation
to the rest of human life, its sources and consequences, and so on.
Claiming that it's so personal that no general statement can be made
about it is equivalent to saying that it doesn't matter, at least from a
social and political viewpoint. But since man is a social matter,
that's close to saying it doesn't matter at all.
More generally, I don't see how human life can be discussed without
discussing and passing judgement on what people think is important. Our
judgements on that subject can be wrong, of course, but so can all our
judgements. What saves them from presumption is the necessity of making
them and the willingness to change them if there is sufficient reason.
>>1. The multiplication of grants, prizes, awards and salaried
>>positions in the arts and academia.
>As you indicate, I would see this solely as an indicator of the
>existence of (1) a sufficient surplus (2) people with access to that
>surplus who are willing and able to divert some of it into arts
>support. This appears to me to be merely a corollary of agricultural
>and technological development, and in fact, for most of our history,
>has been a prime motivator for them.
Your reason (1) is a matter of economic development; (2) is not but
depends on the cultural situation. The surplus could have been spent on
cathedrals or potlatches if people thought religious ceremonies or pure
conspicuous consumption were more important. More to the point, if the
people with the access to the surplus actually liked art they would do
what the Medicis did and use it to pay for the things they like
themselves. Instead, the money either goes into the community group
pork barrel or goes to support the careers of functionaries and grant
recipients. The art actually produced doesn't seem to be the main
consideration -- so far as I can tell, not many people really like it
much.
>> 2. The particular nature of what is produced. If people produce
>>art that debunks the notion of beauty and scholarship that debunks the
>>notions of objective inquiry and truth, and such productions are
>>applauded, I begin to suspect that the people involved in the arts and
>>scholarship are losing interest in the specific goals of those
>>pursuits.
>You don't find it possible that genuine explorations of both art and
>science might come to these conclusions (that beauty and objectivity
>are both desirable and inclusive) ?
I don't follow you here -- I have no problem with art and science that
expand our perception of beauty or understanding of truth. That doesn't
appear to be what's going on, though.
I can imagine that a genuine exploration of things might lead to the
conclusion that "beauty" and "truth" don't make much sense as concepts.
If that were the conclusion, though, the appropriate response for people
generally would be to stop funding art and scholarship and to put their
money into things which hadn't been shown to be futile. Of course,
artists and scholars might prefer to have their funding increased, so
that the pleasure of getting prizes and grants might make up for the
lost joys of pursuing things they now recognize as phantoms.
>I'd point out that in the visual arts, the very movements to which you
>refer have done rather atrociously in such a culture.
Somehow, I've lost the reference -- I'm sorry. What do you mean?
>I would suggest that in fact, ideology, if you wish to call it that, is
>the primary motive, and that this state of affairs is entirely logical
>and expected. The simple realization, to quote David Byrne, that words
>all come with points of view, inevitably leads to questions about the
>shapes and sounds of words with different points of view. The fact that
>these p.o.v's are marginal means they are all the more vociferous.
I can't help but believe that in a democratic consumer society, career
will always win over ideology except in the case of a few crazies who
won't have much influence until the whole thing's about to collapse
anyway. Of course, one can always make a career as an ideologist.
(Stanley Fish is one example that comes to mind.)
My view is that in the long run people ignore their immediate interests
only if they have some compelling reason to do so. If you're a
perspectivist who believes that "words all come with points of view"
that it's impossible to transcend, then the love of some disinterested
good ("justice", "God", or whatever) can't give you a reason to
sacrifice your interests because such goods don't exist. It seems to me
that the most likely motive a perspectivist might have for leaving the
comforts of consumerism or the demonstrable rewards of careerism for the
stern demands of ideology is hatred for the world as it is. Talented
people usually don't have that much hatred in them, so in our kind of
society they tend to take ideology less seriously than their more
concrete interests. They have to to talk about something that everyone
agrees is important, though, so why shouldn't they talk ideology?
>However, over all, the movements in the arts that have challenged
>beauty have really flunked in the mainstream, other than some of the
>usual incorporation. Its too easy to focus on the radical when the
>normal is so homogenous and widespread.
It seems that most art is produced to be hung in office buildings. The
reason for focusing on the radical and ignoring the bland is that it
appears that the radical might be significant.
>>3. The quality of what is produced . . . If I am right, and quality
>>was higher in the past, I would expect poor quality today to be
>>related to lessened concern on the part of the people involved for the
>>specific goals of the activity and increased concern about other
>>matters -- like their careers.
>You might want to try reading some art history. I think you might be
>suprised at the lives and concerns of historical artists.
Rubens and Velasquez wanted to rise in the world, and they did. They
thought they could do so by producing art of supreme quality, and they
did that too. The two goals were not at cross purposes then. They have
become so since.
>I'm not convinced that what everyone talks about is what is really
>going on - we certainly react to it more than the background stuff, but
>my guess is that its just the tip of the iceberg so to speak, and the
>bulk of today's art is done for the same reasons, and in the same way
>as it has been for many centuries.
The question is what the result is -- whether what's being done in the
1990s is worse art that what was being done in the 1890s, 1790s, 1690s,
and so on. If not, then you're probably right.
[ ... stuff about social cooperation and goals ... ]
>I humbly submit that no other explanation is needed, and I do based on
>exactly the observation you make about some old friends . . . We want
>careers, as you note, for the power & prestige they offer; we want
>power & prestige so that we can do what we want. However, then we find
>that what we want is just power & prestige.
I agree that people like predictability and comfort. In your last
sentence you seem to be agreeing that people also want power and
prestige as such, which I think was my point. By the way, I don't think
that the desire for power and prestige is limited to people on the fast
track. You can find petty tyrants in all walks of life. Another
example -- when the building next to my house was a crummy rooming house
I had to listen to a lot of drunken arguments about who was dissing
whom, who wouldn't take no shit from nobody, etc. All those arguments
had to do with jockeying for power and prestige.
>I think that the media and ourselves in general are very good at
>picking up on stuff like this even when it really isn't that important
>a phenomenon. I would go so far as to say that its actually a non-event
>taking on a national (or even international scale), and only assumes
>significance in the limited context of those who get careers (rather
>than jobs) in the first place.
I can't help but think that it's important what kind of people the
leaders in a society are and what they think is important. Man is a
social animal, and it matters what the influential people in a society
are like. In the United States the leadership consists mostly of people
who are mostly interested in their careers, and that situation has
consequences.
>Most people who desire anything do so because of the thing in and of
>itself. It is having what we want for their own sakes that collectively
>(across all such "things") constitutes "having our own way": the
>freedom to do those things we think worthwhile.
If someone thinks that goodness is a property of things other than
himself rather than a property of how he feels about things, he will
draw a distinction between what he wants to do and what he should do.
For example, he will recognize that he might be mistaken about whether
something is good or not. So he is not likely to view having his own
way as the highest goal he can have.
Jim
>The matters with which that book are concerned are pretty well
>all of them, arent they?
Yes.
>I actually put in a fair bit of time reading
>that book, you know. I feel obligated to look at everything, not just
>things that sit well with me currently. I spent a whole day reading
>that book.
I'm sorry it took up so much of your time so uselessly. You seemed to
want something that dealt with issues of concern to net.libertarians,
but in a less simple-minded and mechanistic way. I thought it filled
the bill. I should say that after rereading the book and reading your
comments I was very much surprised by how little you took in of what the
book said. I found it a remarkable example of cognitive dissonance in
action.
>Thats a strange reason. I've given away books that I don't want anymore
>because they took up space, but they were worth something (the
>physical token takes labour and resources to reproduce) and this is not
>true of the Murray piece. Why not just delete it?
It *was* a strange reason. I was at a loss for what to do after going
over your most recent set of messages, and what I did was somewhat
inconsistent (for example, I deleted what I had written in response to
your comments on Murray but sent on what I had written regarding legal
issues).
>I wonder who anthologised these. Its easy to pick stupid stuff out of
>Marx if you want fantasies, but there's good stuff there too. Why not
>go
>for that if you want to get the "wisdom of the great ancient masters".
>This, in fact, is an example of what I was talking about. Instead of
>reading Marx's rather badly presented account of historical
>materialism,
>you can read a rationalised, cleaned up, but essentially sympathetic
>re-telling of it by Gerry Cohen in "Karl Marx's Theory of History: A
>Defense". This is more valuable than trying to get it out of Marx, for
>the average person.
I've relied mostly on an anthology put together by Robert C. Tucker that
a Marxist named Rappoport [sp? Also, I forget her first name. Linda?]
chose for a night course at Boston University on political philosophy
that I took in the early '70s. I didn't find the stuff at all stupid on
a lot of issues. And even fantasy is useful to read if it's influential
fantasy. I've read the Cohen book you mention and found it a sensible
exposition, although I certainly wouldn't read it in preference to Marx
himself. Incidentally, I thought the quality of Cohen's discussion
dropped sharply when he turned from expounding Marx to current political
issues.
>[Kojeve] sounds ridiculous. Unfortunately, this book is signed out of
the >library at the moment.
I urge you not to read it. I was enormously excited by it, but I doubt
that you would find it helpful.
>| Nietzsche's good on modern society in general.
>He is? Which book do you recommend. I tried with him a few times and
>found it nonsense . . .
The list of things that you find nonsense or otherwise unacceptable is
quite long. There's nothing he wrote that I would recommend to you.
>Indeed. I am talking about books that ARGUE logically and clearly for a
>viewpoint which suggests the government should be a Murray-esque
>conservative government . . .
Given your response to Murray's book and to other writings that I have
learned something from I doubt that many things that seem illuminating
to me would seem that way to you. I'm sure you know of the books that
people usually discuss in connection with generalized criticisms of the
welfare state (Nozick, for example). One specific problem with respect
to political discussions may be the need (in arguing for something as
overarching as the superiority of one type of government over another)
of making all sorts of unproveable judgements about what people are
like, how society works and so on. A single book could never argue all
the points needed to support a particular conclusion in this area --
certainly not to the satisfaction of an unsympathetic reader. All that
can be done is to point out what the basic assumptions are and possibly
argue plausibility.
>I am not a member of a "party", and I think that current discussions
>sound better than older ones NOT for the same reason at all, but
>because we have advanced and now actually do have better views on many
>of the subjects discussed (such as the four mentioned above. At least
>we have far better machinery to address them with).
>For you to say "for the same reasons" like this astonishes me! Thats
>clearly false, isnt it?
Obviously you believe that current anglo-american analytic discussions
are simply better. That's OK, of course -- to hold views of a certain
type is to believe that views of that type are better. But that doesn't
mean that you don't belong to a party. Do you believe that everyone
seriously concerned with philosophical issues in 1991 throughout the
world agrees that the names you mentioned are the ones to pay attention
to and with your list of nonsensical writers? Maybe you would prefer
the phrase "tradition of inquiry" to "party".
>This notion of outlasting is rather bizarre too. Who cares how long a
>theory lasts? Better that it die, and give birth to better theories as
>a result.
The value of a classic -- and what makes it a classic -- is not that the
particular conclusions presented are everlasting, but that the
discussion is of lasting interest. One way a discussion demonstrates
its lasting interest, of course, is by continuing to give birth to
theories. Over time, neo-Platonic, neo-Aristotelian, neo-Kantian and
neo-Hegelian theories have continued to arise. That circumstance argues
for the continuing importance of those writers.
>You mean that you *want* to drop it. I suppose I shouldnt have bothered
>to type any of this in, since you wouldnt be likely to address it,
>given that you saw the rest of my message as having so little value.
I do want to drop it, for the reasons mentioned in my last message. You
and I are not communicating. It's difficult for people who disagree on
important issues to communicate under the best circumstances, and we
don't have the best circumstances. I have my theory as to what the
problems are, which I am satisfied is correct, and you have yours. If
it pleases you to write something in response to anything I say, do so.
I probably won't respond, but I might.
I would be interested in any thoughts participants may have on the
following points:
1. People who think about politics from a somewhat disinterested
perspective often accept some one political goal as overriding, and tend to
judge policies by the degree to which they advance that goal.
2. My impression is that most people in America who deal with politics in
a somewhat theoretical way tend to view substantive equality as the
overriding goal. (Think of feminists and most law professors, for
example.) For many participants in this newsgroup, however, the overriding
goal seems to be liberty, understood as maximizing individual choice.
3. Is either the egalitarian or the libertarian perspective a sensible way
to view politics? Why should liberty or equality take precedence
over all the other good things that might be achieved or destroyed through
politics?
>>The real point of my original question was whether it makes sense to
>>assume that liberty, equality and prosperity (with one weighting or
>>another) are the true goals of politics, or whether some other
>>understanding of the public good would be superior.
>I suspect not. Paul Sand made the point (rather too forcefully for my
>taste) that it might be proper to question if the notion of public
>goals (a conjuction of political goals and public good) is even valid.
I don't see how joint purposive action -- which would include all public
policy -- is possible without joint acceptance of the good that is the
goal of the action. If someone thinks liberty pure and simple is the
sole proper goal of politics then I suppose he thinks it's good --
preeminently so -- for people to be able to do whatever they feel like
doing. That's one possible view of what is good for man, but certainly
not the only possible one.
A side point -- it strikes me that liberty, equality and prosperity are
very closely related. Equality (in part) is the view that one man's
values are as good as another's -- in other words, that all desires are
equal, at least to the extent they don't interfere with the realization
of other desires. Liberty is the view that people ought to be allowed
to pursue whatever desires they happen to have. And prosperity is
material liberty -- the means of realizing desires. So the whole scheme
of things implies that the public good is getting people what they want,
whatever that happens to be. Maybe an economist would summarize the
matter by saying that "maximizing the aggregate satisfaction of
individual preferences, subject to fairness constraints" is the proper
goal of public policy. Is that consistent with what Lasch says?
>I would tend to separate out the ends of socialism from its proposed
>means, and what I see as having happened to the Left in Europe is a
>realization that, valid as their ends may be (largely concerned with
>the reduction or elimination of alienation caused by lack of ownership
>of the means of production and the heirarchical power structures that
>implies), the old means just don't cut it.
What are the new means? The Left has traditionally been concerned with
"social justice", a term that suggests extensive conformity of society
with abstract principles. I don't see how such conformity can be
achieved without lots of hierarchical power structures and alienation.
To the extent society as a whole must conform to abstract principles
it's not the people on the spot who are calling the shots.
>For my part, I increasingly feel that in fact the revolutionaries have
>it right - you really can't change anything significant by tinkering,
>and if you want the distribute the means of production, you have to
>kill the people who own it right now. I'm not comfortable with this
>approach, however.
I thought the traditional orthodoxy was that the changes are brought
about by historical processes rather than anyone's act of will. In the
Soviet Union, certainly, terrorist methods didn't achieve anything
wonderfully good.
>I was more inspired by some current work that Thomas Ray at U. Delaware
>is doing (and now me too, in my spare time) working with evolving
>programs. One thing that interests me in this work is as follows: so
>far, Ray has been able to create a system which results in the
>evolution of highly optimized self-reproducing programs. What he has
>not yet done, to the best of my knowldge, is to create a system that
>tends toward large programs - the constraints he has set up all push
>programs towards small size and optimal code, rather than large size
>and complex but "productive" code.
>Evolution seems to have gotten where it has because its working under
>an interesting set of constraints that encourage small, simple systems
>as well as large, complex ones. It seems to me from what I can intuit
>from the tierran systems that Ray, Jakob Skipper and others have
>created, that if you want a system of independent objects to develop in
>interesting ways, then the constraints are everything. Its not clear to
>me that the constraints in modern economies are satisfactory in this
>regard.
This seems an interesting line of research that holds out more promise
for advancing our knowledge of evolving systems than more abstract
reasoning. I hope that some day it produces useful results, but don't
think that time has come yet.
What do you identify as the constraints on biological evolution that
have brought about the results we see around us? The constraints that
are lacking in modern economies? For that matter, what might the
constraints have been that brought about the industrial revolution? Or
maybe I am rushing things -- it seems difficult to predict what effect
particular constraints will have on a system without doing the actual
modelling.
>Almost everyone here seems to place a very high value on being able to
>live out their own lives, with merely a hope (and sometimes some
>attempt to explain how) that a society of individuals going about
>their own lives can accomplish that which we call "good".
My own observation is that when people -- at least people of a
theoretical cast of mind -- become dissatisfied with the somewhat self-
seeking idea of liberty current here they are more likely to become
concerned about "equality" than "the public good".
It's much more common here, by the way, to see discussions that treat
prosperity or efficiency as proper goals of public policy than
discussions that take seriously a more refined understanding of the
substantive goods that people can pursue through politics. The real
point of my original question was whether it makes sense to assume that
liberty, equality and prosperity (with one weighting or another) are the
true goals of politics, or whether some other understanding of the
public good would be superior.
>Socialism has *not* fallen on hard times there. Most Europeans do not
>suffer the knee-jerk equating of communism, socialism and eastern
>Europe/the Soviet Union that is seen here.
I'm not well informed in these matters, but I was under the impression
that the traditional concrete goals of socialist movements -- state
ownership of major industries and an ever-expanding welfare state -- had
run into trouble lately, quite without regard to events in Eastern
Europe.
>As the infrastructure of Europeans nations comes more and more to
>resemble that of the US (satellite shopping, commuting, suburbia, chain
>stores, franchises, service industries etc.), the same slow but
>inevitable disappearance of the things that make "fraternity" possible
>is happening there.
You seem to be attributing the decline of fraternity to the decline of
traditional local social and economic relationships and the growth of
mass society. I'm inclined to agree with you, but your view seems quite
different from the leftist view that fraternity would be promoted by the
elimination of traditional social distinctions.
>Some of the smarter libertarians I've met see their ideals as a way to
>make both possible, and see the current "lack of liberty" as being very
>involved in the "lack of fraternity". I'm not sure.
Part of the idea may be that "fraternity" does not exist unless people
rely on each other through the sort of particular, local and informal
social arrangements (family, friends, relatives and neighbors) that lose
importance as the welfare state is perfected and people find they can
rely on the government to get them through the serious difficulties of
life.
>What happened to you. Arent you contributing to talk.philosophy.misc
>anymore?
Mailfeed problems. I've been able to read very few of the articles
posted to this newsgroup (or any other) for the last week or so.
>| >Its much easier to see how morality might be a delusion than our
>| >personal experience. The simplest scientific theory of how the world
>| >operates suggests the former but not the latter.
>| I suppose my thought is that we shouldn't accept a view of the world
>| that we couldn't accept if we thought about the things we do with ideal
>| clarity and consistency. "The simplest scientific theory of how the
>| world works" is not sufficient to make sense of all the things -- like
>| judging human conduct -- that we necessarily do, and so could be
>| accepted only by someone who fuzzes issues.
>Well, perhaps I should have not have said "scientific". I take a
>somewhat broader use of that word than many; try to take it a bit
>broader. I mean, in general, systematic inquiry . . . Anyway, what you
>say here sounds rather vague to me. What we "necessarily" do? "ideal
>clarity"? That we "couldn't accept" (for apparently, reasons more
>cosmic than evidential ones, such as perhaps "because it makes us so
>insigificant"? Even the use of "shouldnt" in "shouldnt accept". Without
>the mystical tones of this, might accept it.
Systematic inquiry is a fine thing, but it's not the only form of
systematic action we engage in. Systematic inquiry makes more sense if
we assume that it is aimed at "truth"; similarly, systematic action in
general makes more sense if we think of it as aimed at "good". If one
accepts whatever assumptions about man, the universe or whatever are
needed for systematic inquiry to make sense, I don't see why one should
reject the assumptions that are needed for other necessary forms of
systematic action to make sense.
I didn't mean to be mystical or adduce cosmic reasons. The things we
"necessarily" do are the things we all in fact do and can't imagine not
doing -- like judging human conduct, including our own, on moral
grounds. For "ideal clarity and consistency" I will accept "the
greatest clarity and consistency we can imagine". My point is that if a
theory -- like moral nihilism -- would make nonsense of things we
necessarily do and that seem to make sense, that theory should be
rejected. If we did not reject it, we would be committed to a
contradiction -- "moral judgements make sense" (which we are committed
to because we can't avoid making moral judgements) and "moral judgements
are meaningless" (moral nihilism). A clearheaded and consistent person
would not accept a contradiction, and I think it is good to be that kind
of person if only because the conclusions of such a person are more
likely to be true than the conclusions of any other type of person.
>An emotive/prescriptive kind of moral anti-realism seems, ultimately,
>just as acceptable, and to me, easier to make sense of. The rest of it
>seems to be wishful thinking, and unlike James I am not a "All's right
>with the world, Gods in his heaven" type pragmatist.
When you are making a moral judgement can you really view it as a
projection of your emotions or as an attempt to induce people to do the
things that you would like them to do? The view I am presenting is that
we have no choice but to believe what we in fact fundamentally believe.
Is that a pragmatist view? It seems to me more like simple acceptance
of necessity.
>However, I do believe that there are certain presuppositions that we do
>have to accept in order to do inquiry, although I dont think they are
>given to us transparently . . . (Aside from the indictment of moral
>realism, I hope this above paragraph, somewhat impressionistic, makes
>sense to you?)
I believe you are saying that we're not going to be able to prove
everything, but that we have to sort things out as best we can. Is that
close enough?
>Personally, Ive only ever been unpleasantly suprised. Well, when I
>have been pleasantly suprised, it has never been by anything
>significant or lasting. Usually, it was illusion.
I've been more than pleasantly surprised a number of times. In college
I was stunned several times by one thing or another -- the _Symposium_,
_Paradise Lost_, and a few of Shakespeare's plays come to mind. The
experience gave me the enduring impression that the world is better
(bigger, anyway) than we are inclined to think it is. I am sure that
impression affects my theorizing. As to women, I can't say anything
that would be of any use. Things change for people, though, and when
they do they are surprised. Until I was 29 I had no halfway
satisfactory relationships with women. Now I have very different
problems.
>I hope I didnt sound so presumptuous as to claim I would be "educating"
>people.
What's wrong with being overly ambitious?
>[T]he main concern of my plan is to work out clearly the implications
>of an extreme physicalism: to show to what extent we can recapture
>intentionality, and in particular, EXACTNESS and CLEAR AND DISTINCT
>IDEAS, within it. I am not too concerned with moral issues in this
>task. Intentionality is something that people cant as readily deny, and
>it is something that most think compatible with physicalism without
>even thinking about it, and what a mystery it actually is.
An interesting idea. It seems that you want to do with physicalism what
(in my view) Nietzsche and the others did with various forms of
scepticism -- clarify what they are and let people decide if that's
really the way they think about things.
>[M]y original recommendation of Richard Boyd's paper "How to be a moral
>realist" remains. Its quite similar, really, but much better written
>and argued. Much better. And much shorter (only about 30 pages). Its in
>the book "Essays in moral realism" ed. Sayre-McCord. I note that you
>use a public access Usenet site. I hope you are near a good university
>library?
I can get most things through the New York Public Library.
>[ Jim - I try to avoid t.p.t these days. Interesting questions are
> lost amidst the rest ]
I added "/guns/h:j" to my kill file. I have nothing against fans of the
2nd amendment, but gun discussions don't have that much to do with
political theory.
>>2. My impression is that most people in America who deal with
>>politics in a somewhat theoretical way tend to view substantive
>>equality as the overriding goal. (Think of feminists and most law
>>professors, for example.) For many participants in this newsgroup,
>>however, the overriding goal seems to be liberty, understood as
>>maximizing individual choice.
>This appears to me, being of European descent, plainly an artifact of
>US culture in general. By this, I do not mean to judge the extent to
>which Americans put liberty so high on their list, but it is plainly a
>ranking that most Europeans do not use.
The relative ranking of liberty and equality is different among
different groups of Americans. The variations may have something to do
with the degree of foreign influence. Academics, who tend to be
somewhat cosmopolitan, tend to favor equality more than most, while
intelligent autodidacts favor liberty.
As to Europe -- is "liberty, equality, fraternity" still a living ideal
there? The traditional strength of socialism there suggests that the
emphasis has been on equality and fraternity, but socialism seems to
have fallen on hard times recently. If liberty is still not much of a
draw, has the ideal in effect become "prosperity, especially for me"?
>It is not clear to me that liberty is well correlated to anything in
>the world that pertains to human biological existence . . . The
>American dream of liberty has no conclusive evidence that it is capable
>of creating a better world than one in which there is no liberty, if
>only because "better" so often includes the very notion of liberty
>itself.
Free market economics is an argument for the constructive effect of at
least some forms of liberty. There have also been arguments that
freedom of speech aids the search for truth, and freedom in general the
unfolding of human potentialities. Certainly, some forms of unfreedom
are extremely destructive. (I should say that my own view is that we
need both liberty and authority, and that neither liberty nor equality
is the proper goal of politics.)
>>3. Is either the egalitarian or the libertarian perspective a
>>sensible way to view politics? Why should liberty or equality take
>>precedence over all the other good things that might be achieved or
>>destroyed through politics?
>Mike Peercy or Marti Albini can give you a good answer for this.
What answer? And where?
>I question whether anyone can claim to any objective value judgement.
>To go on and say that such a judgement is one which does not depend
>upon who makes it isn't any help, since one will find someone who is
>otherwise sane and rational can dissent to any given point of view.
One can find a sane and rational person who dissents from any
proposition. Does that mean that the concept of truth makes no sense
across the board, in history or natural science as well as in morality?
You are right, of course, if you are merely saying that almost any
particular judgement one of us makes might in fact be wrong. The
possibility of error does not negate the possibility of truth, though.
And in morality, all I am arguing for is the possibility of truth.
>Take, for example, the point of view of the Marquis de Sade. He was
>most rational and justified crimes which most people find abhorrent.
>In fact, he revelled in the abhorrance, seeing the abhorrance as
>irrational, and not in line with the individual's good.
I always found the divine Marquis incoherent. How could abhorrence or
any other attitude be irrational in the absence of objective standards
regarding the attitudes people should have? His plots always involve
some small elite that makes a principle of using others merely as the
instruments of their pleasures, but always sticks together because they
admire each other so much for their clear perception of the truth about
God, morality, and the world. The idea seems to be that the proposition
"the truth is that there is no truth" is coherent and could serve as the
foundation for cohesion among a group of people. Not what I would call
a rational view of moral issues.
>On the other hand, there are countless examples of good, charitible
>parents who subject some of their children to intolerable circumstances
>"for their own good".
I agree that people make mistakes. There are also examples of medical
treatments that kill patients. Does that mean that no beliefs about
medicine are better than any others?
turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin) had written:
>>>Kalb would care to define more what "objective" means when it
>>>precedes the word purpose . . .
[I wrote:]
>>To say that a man's life has an objective purpose is simply to say
>>that (1) there are things which are objectively good or bad for him
>>to do,...
[and you said]
> To me you look like to have defined what a purpose is rather than
>defining "objective".
He asked me to define "objective" when it precedes "purpose". I
basically said that it means the same thing that it means when it
precedes "good" or "bad". Depending on what his concern was, that might
have been an adequate response -- it's much less unusual to hear people
talking about objective good and bad than about objective purposes. If
his concern was about the concept of objectivity in general, then my
comment immediately following -- in which I basically said that that
something is objective if it doesn't depend on what people think or want
-- should have been at least the beginning of a response.
By the way, if you want to discuss the notion of "objectivity" in
general (and related notions like "truth" and "reality"), I'd be happy
to.
>If one is a moral realist, then the best theory of how people work
>should include terms of good.
Sounds like a plausible approach to the question ("research program", as
people say). I think it was Kant, though, who said that one could
investigate what what actions are required by the moral law even though
it is possible that no one has ever performed such actions. There have
also been moral realists who believed in the total depravity of man.
And Plato thought there was a big difference between the necessary and
the good. So ethics may not be a branch of anthropology. I would
imagine that most moral realists would say that man (and possibly
everything else) can be best understood by reference to the good, but
some would affirm the possibility of a natural science theory of man
that did not include moral terms.
There's something a bit odd about the idea of a complete science of man,
which seems to be what your notion of "the best theory of how people
work" implies. Presumably, that would be a science that among other
things studies itself. Would the best theory of how people work include
"truth" and similar terms? (As part of what the theory studies, I
mean.)
>Now, as far as coherence goes. This approach is neutral, really, to the
>nature of truth.
What I meant was that the "desire" theory does for (or to) ethics what
the coherence theory does for truth. Each takes a word ("good" or
"truth") that had been thought to refer to something evidence-
transcendent and transpersonal and reinterprets it as referring to a
kind of harmony among things (desires, feelings, sensations, beliefs,
commitments) that are thought to be more immediately accessible and less
problematic.
>| But if I find it impossible to imagine what it would be like if
>| people rejected the kind of moral language I know about, how can I
>| seriously entertain such a rejection as a possibility?
>People dont have to reject it. Fact is, it can still be in their nature
>to act a certain way, without their word "good" referring to some
>property of acts. Do other animals have a morality? But do they not
>have a nature that causes them to cooperate with one another, and act
>for the interests of more than just their own self?
The human world is determined by how people understand things as well as
by their more observable actions. The lower animals, on the other hand,
don't have language. And the moral language we all use -- that reflects
our understanding of the world -- embodies moral realism.
The last sentence (at least) may strike you as dogmatic. But if it's
not at least plausible, why is it so difficult to produce a believable
account of moral language that accepts the language we actually use but
rejects moral realism? On the face of it, when X says to Y "Alpha is
good", X wants Y to believe that there's something about alpha that
doesn't depend on X's say-so or what X wants or believes and that gives
Y as well as X a reason to favor alpha regardless of the wants or
beliefs of either. Sounds very much like moral realism.
>Turpin rejects foundationalism?
At least rhetorically. One of his responses to my claim that good is a
fundamental concept was to say that the claim smacked of foundationalism
and that people had been attacking foundationalism for 30 years and it
wasn't likely to rise from the dust any time soon.
>You believe in the existence of some "absolute morality". We believe
>that humans are animals that evolved, and their behavior is continuous
>with that of other species and can be explained ultimately using
>similar devices . . . [I]t is clear how to fit the last set into an
>increasingly powerful explanatory world view (which gives non-
>referential explanations of religion and similar statements formerly
>thought to be referential). It has lots of connections to other kinds
>of knowledge, and is a rapidly advancing research programme. All these
>things speak in its favor. What speaks in favor of the other view? And
>based on this, who really has the burden of proof?
What speaks in favor of the other view is that it's a view that's been
around a long time that seems implicit in the way people discuss moral
issues, now as in the past, and people have attacked it for a long time
without putting forth any very believable replacement. Maybe your
research program will change all that, but the rest of the world is
justified in waiting until it does before putting faith in it. (I don't
mean the research program is just yours -- I have no doubt that hundreds
of people are committed to it. There are billions of people who aren't,
though.) Also, as noted above, the notion of a comprehensive science of
man is an odd one.
In a way, "burden of proof" arguments seem pointless. Each of us
already has his own understanding of things, and each of us properly
puts the burden of proof on whoever is proposing something inconsistent
with that understanding. Maybe saying "the burden of proof is on you"
is something like saying "this discussion is taking place within a
tradition that does not favor the sort of claim you are making." No one
is likely to be persuaded by either assertion.
>I am not sure you are correct about actual thoughts beliefs and
>practices. I think that if people were asked, many would deny that when
>they said something was objectivly wrong, they really meant that,
>STRICTLY SPEAKING. They would say something like "society wouldnt
>survive if that were allowed", "things would be chaos", "its in all our
>best interests", etc.
>Surely you have seen tons of discussion on the net in the political and
>abortion groups where people VEHEMENTLY deny that states are based on
>moral notions, but rather are based on some kind of pragmatic notion?
I know there are people who say all these things. But do they correctly
understand the nature of their own moral views? A lot of the same
people would answer like logical positivists when asked about knowledge,
even if logical positivism can not adequately account for the knowledge
they otherwise claim to have about the world.
>|[M]oral realism is presumptively correct if it is the theory that best
>|makes sense of the moral beliefs and judgements that all (or nearly
>|all) of us actually make. Furthermore, if no one seems to be able to
>|suggest a workable way to reform our moral beliefs and judgements to
>|make them consistent with something other than moral realism, then
>|moral realism is more than presumptively correct -- it's unavoidable.
>But you have yet to provide any argument for those antecedents. In my
>view, the best explanation is provided by evolution through primarily
>natural selection.
Here and there (including a few paragraphs up) I've suggested reasons
for thinking the first "if" is true. As to the second "if", I suppose I
have to look at the proposals as they come.
With respect to your natural evolution proposal -- I'm not quite sure
what the claim is. You seem to be saying that moral language is a type
of behavior that has evolved through natural selection. Fine, but what
follows from that? The same could be said of the language of factual
assertions, mathematics or philosophical argument. Maybe the claim is
that moral language is non-referential even though some language (like
"tree", but maybe not "fifteen") is referential. What does the theory
of natural selection have to do with this claim (assuming it has
anything to do with your point)?
>Read Thomas Nagel's "The Absurd". Better than anything ever written by
>an existentialist. I already said: we can ask ourselves, why do
>anything at all?
We can also read Descartes, reject the way he gets out of the hole he
has dug himself into, and ask ourselves: why believe in anything except
first person present tense experience?
Absolutely overarching questions don't have non-mystical answers.
That's the problem with taking the notion of unified science to the
limit. I have nothing against mysticism, though, where it can't be
avoided. Where the discussion is domain-specific, though, we can and
should speak as clearly and prosaically as we can. (Excuse the somewhat
random nature of my thoughts.)
>Evolution stuck in this "reculer pour miex sauter routine" (with
>respect to reasons AND beliefs, although it seems to affect them
>differently (this is related to the Cogito, I think: it doesnt seem to
>get past that. But there is no analogous wall for reasons)) but it
>almost goofed up, allowing us to back up right to the edge of a cliff.
>Although we do seem to get vertigo there and manage to step away, so it
>didnt foul up totally. But I think this is what Turpin does: he just
>finds it a little easier to step back further than you do . . . The
>fascinating thing is that we CAN see these [innate errors] to be
>shortcomings and not rationally "good", just like we can see our desire
>for sweets as something to be indulged, but not "good" for us unless
>carefully kept in check. How did this ability come about and how far
>can it go? This gets back to that vertigo.
This sounds like it might be an interesting line of thought if I could
follow it. Could you rephrase?
>Well, if you could [comment intelligently on the Symposium], thanks.
>I'll go stronger and say it caused me great pain and anger to read it.
>I thought it STUNK. Im a little ashamed at this reaction, because it
>does seem to be incorrect, given what Ive heard. So help if possible.
Maybe I'll reread it -- I'm rereading the Wille zur Macht now, but one
advantage of reading people like N. who don't write consecutively is
that you feel free to put them down when you feel like it and pick them
up again later.
>It would not be necessary to explicitly characterise me as a
>recreation. But you are saying that she might not actually mean that?
>Later on, she might act as if she hadnt said it, if things seem to work
>out? Well, I'm not sure I like that technique. But I guess I prefer to
>believe that than believe that she really meant it.
It's unfair to call it a technique. People are afraid to expose
themselves and a lot of the things they say shouldn't be taken
literally. Anyway, women and men don't mean the same things by what
they say. Of course, it's possible she's quite clear about the
situation and meant exactly what she said. If so, she's different from
most people I've run into.
>How is it relevant how you felt in your 20's?
The reason I referred to how I felt "in my 20's" is that I had said
immediately previously that until I was 29 my relations with other
people seemed rather bleak and I saw no prospect of improvement. I
wasn't stating a law about how people feel at that age.
>I am not in my 20's. Do I sound like I am?
I would have guessed late 20's or early 30's. Very definitely not a kid
any more, but not established in the world either.
>How old are you, then, might I ask? And what do you "do for a living"?
I'm 44. I'm a lawyer with a big law firm here in New York.
>Of course, that is one main reason an embarassment of riches is bad: it
>often necessitates choice.
There can be other problems as well, for example multiple inconsistent
attachments that you can't imagine breaking. Suppose (for example) M
and W are married, but not to each other, and each has small children.
By choosing details appropriately any good novelist could make their
situation as difficult as he pleased.
>[T]he physical facts about a world determine all the mental facts about
>that world. If two possible worlds are identical physically, then they
>must also be identical mentally. This even allows for mental
>epiphenomena. But it usually goes along with a token token identity
>where every mental event is ALSO a physical event.
>The basic point is that clearly, we are mechanisms. We take ourselves
>apart and see complex machines. We are building more and more complex
>machines that do more and more of what we can do, and do so on the
>basis of explanations that also seem plausibly to apply to us (as
>manipulating syntactical tokens according to formally specifiable
>rules).
Clearheaded people are all thoroughly convinced the above is true. It
*has* to be true -- anything else is too weird to contemplate. On the
other hand, someone abstracting from what of course we all believe and
looking at the matter sub specie aeternatis might see problems. For
example, do physicists believe that possible worlds can be specified so
exactly that it makes sense to say that one is identical to another
physically? I was under the impression that they thought that position
could be specified only at the expense of specifying momentum, and vice
versa. Also, the views that the physical rigorously determines the
mental, and that whatever is, is a mechanism, seem to be based on an
intuition of universal strict causality that is not necessarily
applicable to the world. Again, I understand that the physicists have
admitted a category of uncaused events.
>All that is left is a little bit of epiphenomena.
That are remarkably difficult to get rid of, so they have to be shoved
into the corner. If the epiphenomena don't cause anything, how can we
know they're there? Is the knowledge purely private? Then how do we
talk about it? Don't the epiphenomena at least cause the word
"epiphenomena" to appear on computer screens now and then?
>But is [the NYPL] good research for technical stuff?
Name some books and journals and I'll see if they have them. (I can
connect via modem with their electronic card catalog.)
>Who pays for the library?
Mostly the city. They also get a lot of money from private contributors
-- they recently had a director who was successful in making the library
one of the cultural institutions here that rich people like to associate
themselves with for prestige. Also, Jewish immigrants and their
children who made good seem to have a soft spot for the library and are
often big contributors.
Jim
>You left the "In" off of the front of Murray's book, so it took me a
>while to find it . . .
Sorry -- I had tried several times to log onto the NYPL on-line catalog
to get the correct title, but it was busy.
>[T]his library throws the dust covers out: does the NYPL do that?
The lending libraries don't, the central research library does.
>Well, I would think, for the most part that, yes, they have been
>superceded. Even if they got it right themselves, careful scholars
>since then will have written it out better and made in more accessible,
>and cleared up minor flaws. On the other hand, if you read philosophy
>as literature, this analysis need not necessarily apply. (In fact, I
>would consider N literature before philosophy).
To the extent something's been reduced to a condition like that of the
mature parts of the natural sciences, with generally accepted results
and explanations and a generally accepted method for dealing with
unresolved issues, so that most things of importance can be set forth
textbook-fashion by the careful scholars you mention for anyone who
wants to learn them, you no longer need the great writers of the past
(who, we all agree, had a grip on something or other, even though they
were never able to set it forth clearly and correctly). Since I don't
believe ethics or ontology have yet reached that stage, I expect that
people will continue to consult Plato and all the others from time to
time, especially when the latest research program turns out not to be as
successful as hoped.
What do you think the point of reading literature is, by the way? I
would say that a lot of the point is to develop some sort of
understanding of things that really can't be articulated in any clear
and definitive way. So maybe my view is that philosophy is literature
until it's reduced to science, and not much of it has been reduced to
science yet.
>What if one starts off with some other criterion for the best way for a
>polity to be structured, and ends up at something *like* points 1-5?
>You have placed these points inside an "ought" which raises them up to
>a priori principle. It could be a pragmatic result.
In fact that's usually what happens. One starts off with a criterion
(eliminating the exploitation of man by man, say) and concludes that it
could never come close to being satisfied unless a great deal of
political power is given to a small group of theoreticians who have the
knowledge and the will to apply the criterion correctly. Commonly one
pictures himself as one of the theoreticians (who could be a better
choice?) but that's not necessarily the motive. It doesn't hurt,
though.
In any event, pragmatic results have their own consequences. Regardless
of one's motives in adopting a constitution in which fundamental
political power is in the hands of a small group of theoreticians, that
kind of constitution ought to raise certain concerns.
>I was not under the impression that judicial interpretation only had
>noticeable global effects in appeals. Surely arguments presented to
>judges appeal to precedents set in the original cases? I suppose they
>arent nearly as important though, which is the real point you are
>making.
Under stare decisis a court is bound only by its own precedents and the
precedents of courts to which its decision on the issue can be appealed.
(Of course, courts sometimes depart from their own precedents, but they
make excuses when they do.) Other precedents can be persuasive
(especially if they're numerous or well reasoned or from respected
courts), but courts are quite willing to ignore them when they feel like
it. Because of the appellate process, in the U.S. system there should
always eventually be a precedent on important constitutional issues that
all courts are bound by. That precedent will, of course, be a decision
of the Supreme Court.
>| If constitutional law is to be kept coherent the decisions will often
>| be rather at variance with the input, though.
>Well, with SOME of the input, as necessarily any decision would be,
>since the input conflicts (and is sometimes based on narrow self
>interest of the participants, something that has to be filtered out,
>and perhaps something that can be more readily filtered out if we
>promote, and expected to be satisfied, certain images of the
>judiciary).
The decision isn't reached by eliminating narrow self interest from the
input and choosing the result that best fits the remainder. Rather,
it's primarily based on previous judicial decisions and on theories
about them developed by D. and his colleagues and accepted by judges.
The input from the public may suggest to the courts a prudential need
for avoiding issues, for deciding issues narrowly, for phrasing things
one way or another, and the like. If the input says X and precedent and
theory say ~X on some major point, though, then it will be time for the
courts to wrap themselves in the mantle of the fearless defenders of the
law, indifferent to the political winds and the passions of the
majority, etc. I quite agree that cultivating certain images of the
judiciary makes the input more manageable.
>I would expect that ordinary commercial contracts are subject to the
>same problems in interpretation, but perhaps not as badly. Something
>like a constitution, or a substantial piece of legislation, has to be
>somewhat vague because it is meant to deal with an awful lot of
>unanticipated development that can only be expressed in "visionary"
>terms to begin with ("due process of law", "cruel and unusual
>punishment", "equal protection of the laws", "unreasonable search and
>seisure", "property", etc).
Obviously, issues can arise with respect to the subject matter of any
contract, law or constitution that are not resolved by the document or
by any evidence of what the people who drafted and accepted the document
had in mind. What's normally done in such cases is that the parties or
an arbitrator or judge come to some result that seems sensible and that
is consistent with (even though not required by) the document and what
is known of the intentions and expectations of the parties. If the
result is one that would clearly have been rejected when the document
was adopted, it's not acceptable interpretation as an interpretation of
the document. But it tends to be the latter class of results that those
who reject OU want the courts to adopt.
As for your "visionary" terms, I believe they had reasonably clear
meanings at the time they became part of the constitution. "Due process
of law" meant that if the government wanted to fine, imprison or execute
someone they had to comply with the basic procedures of the common law
-- such as a judge, a public trial by jury, witnesses under oath with
opportunity for cross-examination and so on -- rather than simply having
some administrators make a decision, as sometimes happened in France.
"Cruel and unusual punishments" were punishments other than the common
law punishments (fines, forfeitures, imprisonment, execution) such as
those imposed by the Court of Star Chamber. I believe these included
things like cropping your ears or slitting your nose. And so on. I
don't see why we should think that when the Bill of Rights was adopted
people thought it was a perfect set of provisions that would outlaw all
abuses and ensure just government for ever -- rather, they were
provisions aimed at specific abuses. (I should say I know less about
the history of the phrase "equal protection" than about the other
phrases.)
Obviously, there will be issues in applying these terms to new
circumstances (does a jury have to have 12 members? is it OK for
popularly-elected judges with 2-year terms to preside at criminal
trials? if it's not called a fine, can an administrator impose it?).
It's not that kind of issue that people are concerned with in this
debate, though.
>Dworkin didnt suggest that Congress was irresponsible here. Were they?
Obviously, he wants to say that it's a standard situation. I should
find out more about exactly what went on before holding forth any
further on this, though, rather than relying on my *very* vague
impression of what happened. In fact, maybe this whole discussion would
be improved if I read Dworkin so we could have some particular book to
talk about.
>>I take it Bork's view would be that if Congress hasn't spoken
>>comprehensibly, then it hasn't spoken at all and in effect no law has
>>been passed.
>Who is Bork to say this? How many laws does this invalidate? Probably
>every damn one of them! Wow! Borks view, if this is it, certainly
>doesnt fit practice. And if congressmen had to list every possible
>effect their laws had, on its own and in consort with all other laws in
>effect or to be passed, and social conditions as they develop, we
>wouldnt need a legislature. Just take that congressman and elect him
>God!
The point isn't that there's no law unless all possible issues have been
resolved. The point is rather that there's no law unless the essential
issues have been sufficiently resolved that it makes sense to think of
administrators and judges as applying rather than making up the law.
The point at which that requirement is violated is of course a matter of
judgement, but there can be clear cases in which it's violated. Bork
would say, for example, that the 9th amendment can not be considered
law. I believe he would also say that if your "visionary" terms are
interpreted in a visionary sense (to mean, for example, "all practices
that violate the evolving demands of liberty, democracy and justice are
hereby forbidden") rather than in a sense closely connected to the sense
they had when the document was drafted and adopted, the provisions in
which they appear would become non-laws.
>| Original understanding is also most consistent with what people think
>| they are doing when they come to an agreement and write it all down.
>What concrete situations are you talking about, though, when you say
>"what people think they are doing" and why should this be similar to
>legislation? Do you mean nonlegal agreements? And if not, its sort of
>begging the question because those agreements are already understood in
>a legal context.
I don't understand the difference between a legal and a nonlegal
agreement. Almost any agreement can be legally enforceable.
I'm a little lost here. How do you think people who write laws view
themselves? It seems to me that predominantly they want to control the
future for some purpose. They think they're making rules that other
people are going to have to follow, and they try to use language in a
way that will make it as clear as possible to the people required to
obey the rules what the rules are. Sometimes they grant discretion to
someone to oversee something or other. Sometimes they prescribe general
standards and let the specifics be worked out in practice. Those
situations are different, though, from a situation in which people
assume that the words they use will be read in a sense different from
the sense in which they were originally intended. That latter situation
seems quite exceptional to me.
>(One example is the will agreement Dworkin uses: where a guy kills
>another guy who listed him in the will as the sole benificiary. Its
>clear there, apparently, that the guy should get the money. But the
>judges disagree).
I don't follow the example. Why is it supposed to be clear the guy
should get the money?
>>Bork's views (as I understand them from a course I took from him in
>>law school, from one or two things he's written, from hearsay, and
>>from your account) seem by and large consistent with OU, but with
>>ambiguities in OU resolved by letting the majority do as it chooses.
>That "but" doesnt render it consistent with OU. I would imagine there
>are a number of historians that would disagree entirely with that.
>Given the reason that Madison *didnt want a bill of rights in the first
>place* (because it would give the *majority*, through legislation, *too
>much power* to usurp the rights that were not explicitly listed), this
>idea seems to go completely against OU, assuming that Madison spoke for
>OU.
That was indeed an objection to the Bill of Rights. The objection
failed and the B. of R. was adopted. Even if Madison did speak for OU
on this point I don't see why it follows that he thought it was the
function of the Supreme Court to make sure Congress walked the straight
and narrow in doubtful cases. Bork's theory relates to when the courts
should override the act of some other part of the government, not how
the officials in those other parts of the government should view their
role. Perhaps what I should have said is "but with ambiguities in OU
resolved by the elected branches of government rather than the courts".
>Well, if this "elite" is going to protect the dissemination of
>scientific research so I can get easy access to and read books on
>evolutionary theory and the like, then mark me down as an elitist. I
>have nothing against elitism as you describe it above, except that
>empirically it could be dangerous. But I am not convinced that
>democratic populism would be any less dangerous.
I introduced the term "elite" but not the term "elitism" to the
discussion. My comment was that I didn't like giving the legal elite so
much power because of its particular characteristics and the basis on
which it would exercise power. It seems to me that all societies have
political elites.
>As far as worrying about the "elite" goes, its not clear that the elite
>of judges is worse than the elite of legislative special interest
>groups, is it?
Legislative special interest groups at least stand for something that
someone really wants, and they're willing to make compromises with each
other. Also, they aren't interested in remaking the world in the image
of a theory. I'd rather be governed by them than by judges.
>The thing I like about the judges is as a centralised mechanism for
>making the entire body of law as coherent as possible, to provide some
>sort of unifying principle. I dont necessarily like the lack of
>accountability but I am not sure that they cannot be separated.
Coherence is a fine thing, but in politics it should not be forced.
>| People take seriously what they need to rely on. So to the extent
>| there are supports in place to help the unfortunate who are
>| friendless or without families, or to guarantee a materially decent
>| life to those who are without a job and have no-one to support them,
>| people will find that the qualities that allow one to have a family,
>| friends or a job are dispensible. The fact that they are dispensible
>| means that over time they will come to be taken less seriously, fewer
>| people will develop them, and those that develop them will develop
>| them in a lesser degree. Depending on the nature and degree of the
>| state support system and cultural and other factors, the time can
>| come when the system results in more misery than would have existed
>| if the system had never been established. There may be ways
>| permanently to avoid the problem in the case of a comprehensive state
>| system with reasonably high standards of support that is part of a
>| political and social order that values the right of each individual
>| to choose how he will conduct his life, but I'm pessimistic.
>[T]his argument . . . rests on empirical assumptions which I havent
>seen proof for, but which Ive seen trotted out with ease by many who
>think people on welfare are just lazy bums . . . Here . . . is where we
>need some really non-ideological empirical study.
There's been considerable discussion of these issues among social
scientists over the past dozen years. Of course, social science
research findings can all be interpreted a number of ways. If you're
interested in seeing the sort of thing that's influenced me (in addition
to my basic understanding of how the world works, which I get from any
number of sources), you might look at "Family Decline in the Swedish
Welfare State", by Popenoe, in the Winter 1991 _The Public Interest_,
"The British Underclass", by Charles Murray, in the Spring 1990 issue of
the same magazine, and "Welfare and Dependence in Switzerland", by
Segalman, in the Winter 1986 issue. (As you may have guessed, I
subscribe to the magazine.) The last-mentioned article, by the way,
suggests that in Switzerland it has been possible to combat poverty
without creating the sort of problem I suggest but at the expense of
what liberals and libertarians would consider the right of each
individual to choose how he will conduct his life. Those articles are
serious but not scholarly and so are unlikely to convince anyone who
thinks the basic line of thought is implausible -- I can't give you any
references to the scholarly literature.
"Lazy bums" doesn't have much to do with the issue, by the way. "If
it's possible to get by without doing something and no-one makes a fuss
about it then eventually a lot of people will get into the habit of not
doing it" -- what does that have to do with calling people lazy bums?
Seems more like realism to me. Not everyone's a go-getter -- I know a
lot of people who tend to let things slide if they're not prodded to do
them.
>Are you suggesting that the only reason a person needs friends and
>family is in order to provide them with the economic means of survival
>when they cant do it themselves? . . . One could just as easily argue
>the other way, that relationships based on such things will
>overemphasise such things and make it difficult to develop more
>meaningful and substantial relationships. The point is concretely
>evidenced in the way women in the past were so economically reliant on
>their spouses: I dont think anyone wants to go back to more of that as
>we start to move away from it.
There are a lot of things that make people pay attention to friends and
family. The argument is that if one of those things disappears, then
they'll pay less attention. If the thing that disappears is something
that we can see plays a powerful role across the board in molding
people's behavior, then a lot of people will pay a lot less attention.
Economic factors are of this kind. There have been people (Marxists)
who have thought that economic factors are behind all moral, cultural
and intellectual phenomena. One doesn't have to go nearly that far to
observe that family and friendship connections are a lot stronger in
societies in which there aren't many formal social structures to rely on
than they are in America in 1991. Read Njal's Saga (mediaeval Iceland)
or an account of life in an Asian peasant community and compare with
life in Toronto. (I should say, by the way, that the dependence of
strong kinship structures on circumstances that make kinship structures
something that people need to rely on doesn't mean that people's
immediate motivations in cultivating relations with their family are
self-seeking.)
The idea of disinterested love is an admirable one, but it doesn't seem
to be something that can be relied as the basis of a social order.
Society has to be based on motivations that apply pretty much across the
board. I believe you've commented on the remarkable scarcity of people
with a disinterested love of learning. There aren't as many people as
their should be with a disinterested love of each other that's strong
enough to rely on through thick and thin. It seems to me that relations
between people are usually strengthened if there is mutual reliance from
a practical standpoint. Army buddies, for example, are notably attached
to each other because they constantly have to rely on each other in very
difficult circumstances. As to the relations between men and women, I'm
not at all sure they've gotten better in recent years. I would have
thought the reverse.
>If people need to rely upon having a job, they will take it seriously?
>Well, there are a number of reasons for needing a job. One of them is
>to get the money to eay and pay the rent. Another is to contribute to
>society by doing something you know is truly valued and which exercises
>your capacities and all that neat stuff. I agree that the second of
>these should be taken seriously, and liberalism and libertarianism do
>not take it seriously enough, with the result of the erosion of the
>public sphere. I assume that is why you reject the 2 L's. But if you
>think you can get at it obliquely by making people work in order to eat
>and have shelter, I think you are mistaken. I dont have hard facts to
>back this up, but it seems like common sense to me.
The idea is that the institution of "having a job" will be taken much
more seriously if people have to do it to pay the rent. Once everyone
accepts that he has to have a job (because everyone else has a job and
everyone takes the need to have a job seriously) then the institution of
"having a job" can develop into something with more moral content (the
job as part of making one's own life, the job as calling, the job as a
way of participating in the work of the world, the job as a means of
supporting a family and other good things) and then something that
everyone takes seriously will be something with moral content. Also,
"making people work" seems an odd way of putting it -- people have needs
which they satisfy through their own exertions and through cooperation
with others. Why does the existence of that situation constitute
"making people work"?
>That confidence is what bugs me, though. These people come across as so
>self-important, and think that they got the way there are totally on
>their own merits, and could easily continue to do so . . .
There are lots of ways of being small-minded and self-satisfied, though.
And if you find someone really tiresome you can alway stick him in your
kill file.
>I can tell you it will be good! It sounds like you would like it or
>hate it. Taylor is a left-wing non-liberal. At least you have the non-
>liberal in common. He compares himself to Alan Bloom, in his criticism
>of liberalism. But he affirms liberalism and wants to patch it up.
But could there be a book that you and I both like? On the other hand,
I notice that he wrote a couple of books on Hegel, so maybe he's the one
who can square the circle.
Jim
>A comment on MZ: IMHO he's own of the worst we have on the net. His
>comments on Dennett, and others who he does not like, are disgusting.
I've known badly brought up 13 year olds who have acted pretty much the
same way (obtrusive rudeness, irresponsibility, showing off, harping on
how right they are and how wrong everyone else is) but he outdoes them
because he's had more practice. I'm not sure why someone would remain
stuck at that stage of development. I agree he acts far worse than
Turpin, but he doesn't make me nervous the way Turpin does. Turpin
strikes me as someone who insists that everything be clearly defined,
logical and controlled because he's basically on the verge of hysteria.
I hope you'll excuse the amateur psychologizing -- I picked up the habit
from my wife, who just happens to look at the world that way, and
confirmed it by reading too many novels and other literature with a
psychological bent (once again, Nietzsche is an example).
>I would be attempted to say that these gentleman [H. & N.] were not
>worthy of such attention, in a rather loud way . . . I would say try
>Dennett ("The Intentional Stance" and "Elbow Room").
I agree to look at Dennett. Are there any classical philosophers that
you do think are worth reading? Or do you think (as your remarks on
progress in philosophy might conceivably be read to suggest) that
they've all been definitively superseded?
>I will only guess what you are getting at: "The point of a written
>consitution is to be OBEYED regardless of what we think. (The proof of
>this, parenthetically, is that a loophole in the form of an amending
>formula has been provided). If we do not follow OI, there will be
>nothing to hold us to this OBEYING since it is the only kind of
>interpretation that could do so: without it, we could interpret the
>constitution to mean anything".
Pretty close, but a few changes are needed. You should lower-case the
word "obey" in its various forms, and "loophole" is wrong. The amending
procedure was intended as a functioning part of the constitution. Most
importantly, you should substitute "the people in control of the
government" for "we" and "us".
>I dont understand this "elite" stuff. I went to a public lecture here a
>while ago about whether property rights should be entrenced in our
>constitution and a lawyer that spoke up there with some wild views
>later called Dworkin elitist when I was talking to him. I find it
>bizarre that trained lawyers would do this! I dont find D elitist at
>all.
Why be surprised? MZ is presumably trained at something, although he's
a bit coy about saying just what that thing is, but nonetheless says a
lot of wild things. Besides, lawyers are by nature advocates and not
everything they say is justifiable.
Also, I would say that if you believe that there ought to be a body of
law that (1) is made up of the decisions of officials appointed for life
and otherwise insulated from political pressure, (2) is not based in any
very demonstrable way on external authorities that the officials are
required to follow, (3) is subject to an appellate process that ensures
coherence by centralizing final decision-making on important matters in
a very small group, (4) bases its claim to be law on the claim that it
correctly articulates and applies a theory of what the law should be
that has been developed by the officials themselves (with the help of
theoreticians such as D.) without any very clear external guidance, and
(5) is quite sweeping in its demands -- for example, requires major
social reforms -- then it makes sense to call you an "elitist". What
you are asking for is rule in accordance with a theory developed and
applied by a small group of people that is not anwerable in any very
definite way to anyone but itself. It makes sense to call that group an
"elite" even if the theory is egalitarian.
>I dont get the remark about appellate process.
Does my point (3) above help at all?
>[I]n big constitional issues, it seems that there has been quite a lot
>of input from a lot of different sources. It seems also that the notion
>of collectively forging an interpretation that fits our current society
>best, consistent with the constraints imposed by the documents, gives a
>much more compelling vision for our society than the OI alternative
>(insofar as sense can be made of it).
As you seem to suggest here, democratic centralism -- popular discussion
followed by authoritative decision by a nonelected central authority --
is part of the common justification for an expansive role for the
courts. If constitutional law is to be kept coherent the decisions will
often be rather at variance with the input, though. Practically
speaking, the discussion can be kept from getting out of hand because it
relates to quasi-religious things ("compelling visions for our society"
and the like) with respect to which there are experts (lawyers, judges,
people like D.) who know ever so much more about it than the rest of us.
So a lot of the discussion consists of "education" rather than "input".
(See my comment below with respect to situations in which the input may
not be so controllable.) I agree that the OI alternative doesn't give
much of a compelling vision of anything, except the implicit vision of a
self-governing people. That may be an idea whose time is past, of
course.
>>The very idea of communication suggests that it is normally possible
>>to determine the intent of a speaker or writer well enough for
>>practical purposes.
>It certainly doesnt! Which speaker or writer, in the case of a written
>law, is being talked about? These things were the result of complex
>negotiation, trade off, compromise, ratification, multiple authorship,
>intentional ambiguity, etc. Dworkin has pointed this out quite nicely
>in much of his writing.
Not only laws but ordinary commercial contracts are arrived at in that
way. If the people who prepared and agreed to the document do a
respectable job of it, they end up with something that's understandable
and that is in fact understood by the parties in a reasonably consistent
way. Perhaps we should use the expression "original understanding"
rather than "original intent" -- it seems less misleading to me.
Of course, sometimes people put together a document that they intend to
be binding but is incoherent. I take that was what Congress did in the
snail darter situation. Presumably, they wanted to avoid making a
decision so they decided to pass on the responsibility to the people who
would have to administer the law. But why take the snail darter
situation as a model of what laws are like and assume the framers were
as irresponsible as the modern Congress sometimes is?
I agree that in order to decide what to do in a snail darter-type
situation you need more theory than you do when it is clearer what the
law means. I take it Bork's view would be that if Congress hasn't
spoken comprehensibly, then it hasn't spoken at all and in effect no law
has been passed. That view seems consistent with the "original
understanding" theory -- if no-one who reads the law can figure out what
it means and there was no original understanding of what the law meant
then there's no law that anyone can enforce. It would also have the
benefit of putting more pressure on congressmen actually to do their
jobs -- to make decisions and to explain them to the people at election
time.
>Also, the only argument youve given for why the OI should be used
>rather than any other is that it is definite. Why not settle on some
>other definite interpretation?
Original understanding is also most consistent with what people think
they are doing when they come to an agreement and write it all down.
They believe they are memorializing and preserving a then-existing
common understanding. Can you suggest another definite interpretation
that would not seem arbitrary? Bork's views (as I understand them from
a course I took from him in law school, from one or two things he's
written, from hearsay, and from your account) seem by and large
consistent with OU, but with ambiguities in OU resolved by letting the
majority do as it chooses.
>Of course, it would totally gut the modern understanding of the First
>Amendment, and we would see a lot of states outlawing anything they
>considered pornography. (The minimalist interpretation of the First
>Amendement would be: it only protects the minimum free speech required
>to keep the democratic machinery running. So it does not protect
>artistic or scientific free speech at all).
Before you were talking about "collectively forging" interpretations;
now you're worried about what would happen if the people really did get
into the act. Is The Law a manifestation of the people that they
collectively forge, or is it something that has to be protected from the
people by entrusting it to an elite? Conflicts of that sort can be
resolved by making the collective forging ideal, and the custody by an
elite real. Is that what you would do?
>Perhaps the founders (say Madison and Hamilton as a popular set often
>appealed to) thought the same way: that we cant make sense out of
>determining the original intent of the authors of a document, and even
>if we could, it should not be appealed to . . . Also, one of these two,
>I know, intentionally held back many of his own personal notes on the
>constituion for fear that making them available would detract from the
>process of interpreting it.
I believe there was a law review article a few years back that came to
the conclusion that when the framers were writing the thing they thought
it should speak for itself, but later when issues of interpretation
actually came up they thought that the meaning it was understood to have
when adopted should control. To me, that sounds like what any good
lawyer would think about something he helped write: at the time, he
would take the view that the words on the page are what was agreed to,
and since the drafting is clear there is no need to look further. Later
on, though, if someone started to have doubts about what the thing
meant, he would say "if you can't read the document I'll tell you what
it means, and here are the notes that I made at the time that prove I'm
right because they show what we all thought it meant."
>What are the examples of these guys you mention?
The only ones that come to mind at the moment are Sanford Levinson and
Bruce Ackerman (who I also took a seminar with in law school on some
book he was writing). My memory for names was never good and is getting
worse daily. I also used to go through periods of reading law review
articles on constitutional theory and other matters, so at one point I
could have given you more references.
>As far as Dworkin goes, I heartily recommend you read him.
Actually, I've had L.E. out of the library for a while but haven't
started it (it's a week overdue, so now I suppose I'll have to return
it).
>Well, I think its mistaken that a liberal state would erode [informal
>social institutions and related habits and values]. And it could, by
>substational redistibution of material resources, set up a situation
>whereby more people were able to do just that.
If material resources could be redistributed without changing anything
else, you would of course be right. But it seems to me they can't.
People take seriously what they need to rely on. So to the extent there
are supports in place to help the unfortunate who are friendless or
without families, or to guarantee a materially decent life to those who
are without a job and have no-one to support them, people will find that
the qualities that allow one to have a family, friends or a job are
dispensible. The fact that they are dispensible means that over time
they will come to be taken less seriously, fewer people will develop
them, and those that develop them will develop them in a lesser degree.
Depending on the nature and degree of the state support system and
cultural and other factors, the time can come when the system results in
more misery than would have existed if the system had never been
established. There may be ways permanently to avoid the problem in the
case of a comprehensive state system with reasonably high standards of
support that is part of a political and social order that values the
right of each individual to choose how he will conduct his life, but I'm
pessimistic.
>*Does* libertarianism actually appeal to many people? I think it only
>appeals to the net people in the upper classes pulling in a huge salary
>because of their priveleged position in society (which doesnt imply
>they are adding to it very much, either).
I think it appeals to a lot of people, at least in the United States.
The people I think it appeals to most strongly are intelligent people
with technical training without any connection to any of the centers of
power. I think that's probably a good description of a lot of netters,
by the way. "Huge salary" is beside the point -- all that's needed is
enough confidence in your earning capacity so that you can feel
independent. "Upper classes" isn't right either -- people in what I
would call the upper classes feel very much part of the social world and
like it that way, while libertarians want to declare independence from
it.
>I find Taylor very interesting, and like to evalgelise for him. Want me
>to send you a copy of this (probably wont show up in the US for a
>while, its produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp).
When it does come out, tell me what all's in it and what you think of it
and I'll let you know.
>| If you want, I could dig out what I wrote and send it to you . . .
>Yes, if you can find it. I'm not happy with the idea though. I fear it
>requires me to deal with jerks in furthering this great plan...
On second thought, I'll spare you for now. It will be enough if I
succeed in expressing my views clearly (and understanding your comments)
on issues already raised.
Jim
>Rather than "the good", I think one can make a good case using "the
>desired" instead.
>The crucial issue here is that in terms of desire, one's desires can
>conflict, whereas the good cannot. In practice, however, ones
>motivations always do conflict. For a desire based theory of
>motivation, one has to then attempt to explain how this is dealt with.
>Can this be explained in terms of desire itself (some, obviously,
>"higher level desire")? That is the problem for a desire based theory.
>For a good based theory, its different. You have to say that one of the
>desires is "wrong".
The proposal seems analogous to proposing that we adopt a coherence
theory of truth. (Just a comment.)
>We need some facts here as to how many people actually do behave in
>these various ways.
I'm uncertain about the helpfulness of behavioral studies carried out by
social science methods, if that's the suggestion. How relevant are such
studies to questions regarding ontology or epistemology? Are they more
relevant to ethical questions? I don't deny that knowing more about
particulars can help us when we theorize, and it's quite possible that
there could be empirical studies of actual moral behavior that would be
illuminating. Can you think of a specific study that you would find
helpful if it were performed?
>And then we can still explain away moral language. It may not be
>pleasant to you to think that you have learned this kind of talk just
>because it tends to fool others into adopting your views, but this
>could very well be true. Its learned at such a low level, of course,
>that you cant easily use it to your conscious self interested advantage
>by acting like you approve of something you dont really. Now, given
>this fact, it may be that this explaining away Im suggesting could be
>done is really explaining, not explaining AWAY. Is that a possiblility
>for you?
I find it impossible to imagine what life would be like if people only
used moral language that was reducible to statements or expressions of
actually-existing desires and nothing more. It's like trying to imagine
what life would be like if no one believed in the existence of anything
but his own sensations, feelings and the like. But if I find it
impossible to imagine what it would be like if people rejected the kind
of moral language I know about, how can I seriously entertain such a
rejection as a possibility?
Of course, it's possible abstractly that objective value is an illusion,
just as it's possible abstractly that you and I are both brains in a vat
run by Russell Turpin. I can't demonstrate either possibility is false,
but I don't see what I can do with them, so unless I have very good
reason to believe one or the other I don't take them seriously.
>Like Brink, you place the onus on the anti-realists, amoralists (like
>Turpin) skeptics, and nihlists. Turpin does the opposite.
If you can construct the world out of indisputable truths and logical
inferences (although Turpin claims to reject foundationalism, that's
what he seems to want to do), then it makes sense to put the onus on the
one who makes a positive assertion to demonstrate it in the required
way.
Otherwise, you have to start with actual thoughts, beliefs and practices
and see if they can be improved on, and the onus is on the reformer. In
this case, moral realism is presumptively correct if it is the theory
that best makes sense of the moral beliefs and judgements that all (or
nearly all) of us actually make. Furthermore, if no one seems to be
able to suggest a workable way to reform our moral beliefs and
judgements to make them consistent with something other than moral
realism, then moral realism is more than presumptively correct -- it's
unavoidable. How do we go about being sceptical of a belief that we
can't avoid having? (It seems to me that the two "if" clauses in the
preceding are satisfied, by the way.)
>Moral judgements can make sense without them referring to an evidence
>transcendent transpersonal notion of the good.
I suppose my claim is that someone can say something that looks like a
moral judgement but has nothing to do with an e.t.t.n. of the good
(e.g., Turpin's statements that I owe him something, as interpreted by
Turpin), but on investigation it will turn out not to be a moral
judgement at all (e.g., it may be a statement of Turpin's state of mind,
with an account of the circumstances leading to that state of mind and a
claim that many people would be in the same state of mind under the same
circumstances). The obvious way to validate my claim would be for me
actually to carry out the investigation when presented with opposing
claims.
Actually, I don't believe Turpin's account of how he is using the word
"owe". Notwithstanding what I said above about social science studies,
it would be worth while to determine if there is any large number of
people who use moral language only (1) if they want to express their
actually-existing desires and expectations and nothing more, or (2) if
they want to persuade other people to conform to their own a.-e. desires
and expectations. I'm not sure how one would go about using social
science methods to make such a determination. People's actions are
ambiguous, and their explanations of their actions are colored by their
(often not very good) theories about things. What would be needed is an
army of socratic pollsters, adept at determining people's real views
about things that they themselves have a hard time articulating
correctly.
>| When you are making a moral judgement can you really view it as a
>|projection of your emotions or as an attempt to induce people to do
>| the things that you would like them to do?
>Even if you cant view it in these ways when acting in a nonreflective
>way, day to day, it does not follow that these ways are not actually
>accurate. Probably, if you looked at your self sub species
>aeternatatis you would not be able to do ANYTHING at all. That does not
>mean that such a view is not, ultimately, the accurate one. Self-
>deception like this could EASILY be built in by evolution.
>Unfortunately, evolution is not perfect, and it might have goofed in
>the case of humans by allowing us an escape hatch to uncover this self-
>deception.
But we frequently succeed in making moral judgements reflectively. Of
course, even if on reflection we believe something is valid we may be
wrong. But what superior position is available to us from which we
could view morality sub specie aeternatis and see that it is a delusion?
You seem to suggest evolution may have left us an escape hatch to some
viewpoint that transcends our ordinary reflective beliefs. But what
escape hatch do you mean? Is it an escape hatch to some position from
which all our beliefs can be seen to be unfounded? After all, evolution
could easily have given us all sorts of factual beliefs and principles
of inference that are false but promote survival. (For that matter, an
evil demon could be behind our belief in evolution -- that's a view that
many people actually hold!)
>I guess Im a Philistine. I tried to read the Symposium recently, since
>I heard it was nearly the most perfect of Plato's dialogues. I found it
>incredibly boring and the accounts of love given to be totally stupid.
>I couldnt get through it. What am I doing wrong?
I'm a Philistine most of the time myself, but I happened to be ready for
the Symposium. I sat down determined to see what I could make of it (I
had heard people praise Plato but never understood what they were
talking about) and it wowed me. It's been a long time since I read it,
though, and I don't know what effect it would have on me today -- maybe
I could say something more useful if I reread it.
>"Women" is only a symptom of a more general problem: lack of value
>(heh, heh, is that objective value, though? Lack of mutually valued
>properties, anyway. Maybe I'd make a passable soup...) that makes one
>worth anything to anyone, in general.
Somehow I think a pep talk won't do much good. What can I suggest
except active pursuit of whatever it is you find good? What you find
good someone else may find good too, and then you can pursue it
together.
>Anyway, although she indicated a reaffirmation of her plan to come and
>visit me soon, she indicated clearly that she considered me to be a
>mere recreation.
What else would you expect her to say when she's coming to visit you
even though she's never seen you? She would want room to retreat
regardless of what she hopes or expects.
| Until I was 29 I had no halfway
| satisfactory relationships with women. Now I have very different
| problems.
>Oh great, I suppose you have an embarassment of riches? Oh fine. At
>least you don't flaunt it on the net like Zeleny! :-) (Smiley on last
>sentence only).
I wondered whether I was being tactless -- I remember all too vividly
how things felt when I was in my 20s. The intended point, though, was
that things that seem very bleak can change, and people who are not
easily marketable don't necessarily end up valued less by others.
Incidentally, I should say that an embarassment of riches can be one of
the most serious of problems -- not a joking matter at all.
>Besides, I would take a moral skeptic to be one who accepts the terms
>of debate and tries to show moral knowledge impossible. Nietzsche did
>something different, analysing "moral knowledge" and giving it a
>different underlying explanation (weakness of the herd or something
>like that) in which it wasnt something at all laudable.
Nietzsche thought different kinds of people develop different moralities
that express the kind of people they are. So far as he was concerned,
there is no "moral knowledge". I take that to be the position of a
moral sceptic.
>I want to shake up the complacency of those today who are physicalists
>without realising they are essentially erasing themselves. But really,
>after all that, I am a physicalist. I am more interested in clearly
>outlining the technical problems of how physicalism could really be
>possible without a complete erasing of self. The broad solution is a
>large self-referential structure inside people that reaches out into
>the world and back again, and which is spread out in time
>diachronically through natural selection.
Go for it! I should say, though, that I don't really understand
physicalism. Do physicalists believe that minds and everything else can
be reduced to physical processes? If so, it seems very odd to me. But
it's likely I don't understand what's really being asserted.
>If you want a nice outline of the approach I advocate you can pick it
>up in Phil Review 86 along with the Railton article below (its Ruth
>Millikan again, "Thoughts Without Laws". I think I recommened her anti-
>Putnam paper "Metaphysical Realism?" already).
Thanks for the recommendation.
| I can get most things through the New York Public Library.
>Ah. The library in which Loudon Wainwright III has his Muse Blues, "you
>know, the big one"? Whats that library like? Is it in Manhattan? Do
>they have open stacks? How many volumes? Can you really get, say, most
>philosophical journals there, or mathematics journals.
It's in mid-town Manhattan, at 42nd street and 5th Avenue, in a lavish
Beaux Arts edifice that takes up half a city block. I work 4 blocks
away. They don't have open stacks, but you get what you request within
10-15 minutes. It's one of the great research libraries of the world,
so it has most things. I don't know just how many volumes. 8 million?
>(I would also recommend Peter Railton's article "Moral Realism" in Phil
>Review 86. Its pretty good, but these guys (Boyd also) are taking a
>different approach from yours, in attempting to show that "good" can be
>a natural property which is explanatorily required in a naturalised
>social science.
I looked briefly at Boyd's article and didn't understand what he meant
by saying something is a "natural" property, or why natural properties
are so much better than other kinds of properties. I also didn't
understand why he was so taken with the natural sciences as a model for
knowledge. After all, most of our beliefs and knowledge don't have much
to do with natural science, and relate to questions that scientific
method isn't that much help on. (E.g., what ever happened to my other
pair of shoes? When was Genghis Khan born? Will the stock market go
up? Is currency speculation illegal in Dharain? Does she really love
me? Can good pancakes be made with Bisquick?) Possibly I should spend
more time on it, so that I can get a better grasp of what he's trying to
do.
Jim
>>| I understand Mr. Ostrum's point as to what's required for moral |
>>disagreement to exist. But are there any realists about the property
>>of | goodness who hold that all statements about goodness are
>>implicitly | indexical? The possibility hadn't occurred to me and
>>seems somewhat | odd.
>Well, I think there could easily be such realists (that is, in the
>Dummett sense). The odd part is not the realism (unless you think all
>realism is odd), but the indexicality.
I see nothing odd about realism with respect to morality (that was
indeed my point). Across-the-board indexicality as to morality does
seem odd to me and the combination of realism and indexicality seems
very odd. Would a person who held the last-mentioned position say
things like "X is good for A whether or not he or anyone else thinks so,
and Y is similarly good for B, but the goodness of X for A and the
goodness of Y for B result in all cases from separate principles because
there are no common moral principles that apply to both A and B"? (I'm
not familiar with the Dummet sense of realism.)
>Note, as Turpin has pointed out before, that much goodness can be real
>and nonindexical, as long as it is also instrumental (i.e., implicit
>hypothetical imperatives are used).
I would call that a nonmoral sense of "goodness".
>No, he doesnt mean that at all, of course. Not particular people. But
>society, in the limit of rational inquiry. See almost any work by
>Putnam, in particular, Reason Truth and History.
I read that book but didn't understand why he thought he was successful
in walking the line between objectivity and realism. He doesn't like
the God's-eye point of view, but thinks the idealized rational observer
point of view is OK. I didn't see why the latter is an advance over the
former, but quite possibly I simply don't understand the issues well
enough -- it is one of the very few recent philosophical works I have
read. (I don't understand, for example, why God isn't a rational observer
than which a more idealized cannot be conceived. If so, the God's-eye
point of view and the idealized observer point of view don't seem clearly
distinguishable.)
>But wasnt your argument going along the lines of:
> There is a strong appearance of moral disagreement
> This is a good argument that there is moral disagreement
> Moral disagreement requires objective morality
>Hence
> There is objective morality.
>
>So Im suprised you take this point so quickly . . .
My argument was pretty much as you state it. I thought your point was
that Turpin's view wouldn't make "nonsense" of moral disagreement;
rather it would make it illusory (under his view, in situations in which
there appeared to be moral disagreement there would in fact be none).
Since you spoke of "hyperbole" I thought you were mostly trying to tone
down the language that had been used in the exchange and I was happy to
go along with the attempt. I didn't take you to be saying either that
there is no such thing as moral disagreement or that moral disagreement
does not require objective morality. If that's what your point was, I
*don't* take it.
>(I dont intend to get drawn into this. My main purpose in posting was
>to point out Russell Turpins terrible lack of care in reading. I find
>this to be VERY annoying. Why do you think he acts like that?)
Comment on the issues -- for that matter, respond to my comments or
questions -- only to the extent you feel like doing so. Criticisms help
sort out issues, though, so I would be interested in any comments you're
inclined to make.
My impression is that Turpin was raised a fundamentalist, and now finds
it hard to deal calmly with issues of truth in religion and objectivity
in morality because they remind him too forceably of what he now regards
as the bigoted drivel that was forced on him when he was young. That's
mostly just a guess, although he did mention somewhere that he was once
a Christian. I think he deals with other issues more rationally.
I've become very annoyed with him too, of course.
>But the question is: how much apparent moral goodness is rephrasable in
>these [hypothetical imperative] terms? Turpin would say: All of it. If
>you cant rephrase moral goodness in such terms, it is difficult to
>explain why it tends to be motivating, by the way.
One reason for bringing God into the picture is to ease that difficulty.
If the world -- including us -- was created for the sake of the good,
then realizing the good might be a purpose that we all necessarily have
(in fact, our most fundamental purpose), as we would see if we
understood ourselves well enough.
>This is commonly considered a major argument against moral realism. I
>will post something about that, eventually, in response to Ramsay's
>last post.
I will read your post with interest.
>The latter is an advance, because God does not exist, so there is no
>God's eye point of view. Further, if there were, it would not be
>available to us, whereas the IRO view is.
I still don't understand -- there aren't any ideal rational observers,
so they don't have a point of view and their observations aren't
available to us.
>One possibility is Ruth Millikan's response to it, "Metaphysical
>AntiRealism?" published in Mind Oct 86. Most of the responses, though,
>are incredibly lame, such as Michael Devitts book "Realism and Truth".
I will look at the Millikan article.
>Unfortunately, I am not sure how to attract such people to the issue
>without compromising the seriousness and turning it into pop
>entertainment.
I have no suggestions. You might write the book you think people should
read and let the world do what it chooses. That might at least be
enjoyable while you were doing it.
>My point was as you say. But, from it, I do draw the conclusion that
>there IS NO moral disagreement, which fatally damages your argument.
I misunderstood you then. You were presenting as your own the view that
there is no moral disagreement? I thought that you were presenting it
as Turpin's, and that I was agreeing with your presentation of the view
rather than the view itself.
>Why didnt you post your response publically to begin with? It looked
>like you were planning to (with its formal structure), but I never saw
>it.
I didn't feel free to quote your private e-mail publicly. My
recollection is that you were the first to use e-mail. Am I mistaken?
In any event, I write things more for my own education than to enlighten
the world. (Of course, I'm delighted to get an intelligent response,
but those are no less likely to come in response to an e-mail message
than a public posting.)
>[I]f God does not exist, this [explaining how a categorical imperative
>can be motivating] is not an adequate reason for bringing God into the
>picture, ultimately. The depressing truth may simply be that we are
>quite deluded about all of this, and express ourselves realistically in
>moral discourse just because it sounds more convincing.
I agree with the first sentence -- we should believe that God exists
only if we really believe he really exists. As to the second sentence
-- it seems to me right to believe whatever we can't help but believe.
Specifically, if we can't help but be moral realists and believe that
some things really are good and other things really are bad, then
regardless of the abstract possibility that it might all be a delusion
we should go with moral realism and whatever else follows from it.
Maybe the issue is the extent to which we should take the notion that
morality might be a delusion more seriously than the notion that
everything but one's own present experience might be a delusion.
>Well, the notion of such a point of view is available to us. My use of
>"view" above didnt refer to an IRO's point of view, but our view that
>we can analyse good in terms of it. The IRO's point of view is at
>least, arguably, relatable to our own view which is its point.
My thought was that any IRO that wasn't God would have some definable
lack that would make it not quite idealized.
>To me, understanding something ultimately seems empty unless it can be
>shared with someone. (More precisely, reaching a point of sublime
>confusion seems empty. Thats the real aim of this project).
The number need not be large, though.
>In some sense I am perhaps even more opposed to you than he is, because
>I cant give moral claims any true cognitive status at all (but Im
>working on it. I will try David Brinks new book, and Boyd again, unless
>you have better recommendations).
I have no recommendations. I've been led in the direction of moral
realism more by reading people like de Sade, Nietzsche, and Samuel
Beckett than anything else. That's my own perversity.
>But you are mistaken. You had never responded to anything I said
>anywhere until you mailed a response to my posting to Turpin.
I must have hit when I meant . I never said I could use rn
correctly . . .
>Its much easier to see how morality might be a delusion than our
>personal experience. The simplest scientific theory of how the world
>operates suggests the former but not the latter.
I suppose my thought is that we shouldn't accept a view of the world
that we couldn't accept if we thought about the things we do with ideal
clarity and consistency. "The simplest scientific theory of how the
world works" is not sufficient to make sense of all the things -- like
judging human conduct -- that we necessarily do, and so could be
accepted only by someone who fuzzes issues.
>| The number need not be large, though.
>True. I have a (fastly receding now) dream of one other, of the
>appropriate gender, of course. Unfortunately, the professional
>philosophers and professional philosophers to be Ive met tend to be
>just that: professional.
Life has its limitations, doesn't it? But sometimes it can surprise
you.
>There is also something, however, about helping a large community to
>see that philosophy is not just silly mind games, but rather something
>that deals with very compelling questions of which some understanding
>can be acquired.
People like comfort and don't particularly want to be compelled by
questions. Maybe I'm inclined to be overly pessimistic on this
particular issue. But it does seem hard to educate people who don't
want to be educated.
> | I have no recommendations. I've been led in the direction of moral
> | realism more by reading people like de Sade, Nietzsche, and Samuel
> | Beckett than anything else. That's my own perversity.
>What? Are you saying that these writers (who I dont take to be offering
>a traditional moral theory of the kind you advocate) caused you to
>react against them? Or like Zeleny, do you see a trans-personal
>objective morality in de Sade and Nietzsche (something that seems like
>an obvious error to me)?
De Sade and Nietzsche are vigorous thinkers who aren't afraid to tell
you what their conclusions are and so are helpful in clarifying issues.
They have led me to think of moral nihilism as incoherent. For all I
know their views may imply a trans-personal objective morality, if only
because contradiction implies everything (at least in formal logic), but
that's not what I have gotten out of them. Beckett is a wonderfully
clear writer who (unlike the other two) is not a ranter. To me, his
works are a demonstration of how skepticism leads to the end of language
and thought.
>I am, generally, more impressed by argument and inquiry than prodding.
>Thats why Im going for Brink, which comes highly recommended by quite a
>few.
Considering the alternatives is part of evaluating a position. I agree
that to articulate a position, though, it helps to read someone who more
or less favors it, or at least discusses it carefully. I will take a
look at Brink myself.
I now have a copy of the Murray book and will reread it before
responding to your comments. Also, what follows probably doesn't
respond to everything you say. The discussion has become rather diffuse
and in many places I was uncertain of the state of the argument and of
the exact point you were making. Also, it sometimes seemed to me that
if I made a point once it would deal with a number of your comments. If
I do miss some important point you'd like me to deal with, repeat the
question.
>Typical conservative. The old masters had it all right. Those wonderful
>guys! I dont buy this at all. Why was Kant so great? Is it some mystery
>that we dont have Kants around today? I doubt it. People use these
>vague obscure writings as springboards, as mirrors to reflect their own
>thought of off.
The point is that if nobody seems to have gotten it quite all right yet,
you try to get what illumination you can where you can get it. A good
place to start is with the writers whom a great many very intelligent
people living at different times and differing greatly in outlook have
found helpful in advancing their own understanding. Naturally, it is
one's own understanding that one wishes to advance -- I take it that
process is what you're referring to when you talk about "springboards"
and "mirrors".
>But I dont put great stock in the idea that some idea is truly
>expressed in a literary passage that cant be expressed any other way.
>Where this appears to be so, I think it is more that we use the vague
>piece of literature as a mirror on our own thinking (of course, some
>literature may be written with this exact intent).
I suppose that once an idea is fully and clearly articulated an
intelligent student who has gone through the necessary training can
adequately express it in a number of different ways. Not all important
ideas have yet been reduced to that form, though. If something is only
partly understood, and is hard to articulate at all, then different
treatments are likely to differ wildly in value depending on the degree
of the writer's comprehension. The best treatments constitute the
"literary passages" that you pooh-pooh.
>"Who decides, smarty pants, YOU?" This begs the question entirely. The
>market is naturally better, it is assumed, or the legislators, as
>influenced by their most powerful constituents?
It seems to me that the market, and legislators who have to listen to
their constituents, are likely to come to a result that works better for
more people than someone whose chief interest in life is theoretical
consistency. The market and legislators respond to what a wide variety
of people actually want and strike some kind of balance among the
various desires. That system is far from perfect, but it's better than
a simple grant of power to theoreticians. The latter approach
introduces the vices of academic disputations -- absolutism and
intolerance, for example, and ignoring whole classes of concerns for the
sake of making a theory manageable -- into politics. It also corrupts
theorizing, since whatever small amount of disinterested love of truth
ever exists is likely to evaporate if major political consequences turn
on how theoretical points are determined.
>You didnt remark on the fact that the Canadian constitution has an
>opting out mechanism. It seems to me that this immediately removes the
>entire brunt of your objection completely.
I don't know anything about the mechanism. Please explain.
>It seems to me that there is quite a value for a part of the government
>involved in fixing policy is seen as not advocates of some particular
>group that elected them, but are theoretically independent. I dont
>believe it is impossible for this to be achieved to some reasonable
>degree. Where it isnt, one surely does need checks and balances.
That sounds fine, but the contribution from those who are theoretically
independent should not include routinely making final decisions on
important issues that they justify on the basis of their independently-
developed theory of how things should be. The latter is what has been
done in theocracies and in communist states, none of which provide
models of good government.
>Perhaps I really need to read the law. Perhaps I should go to law
>school. You appear to be saying that most lawyers are positivists here.
>Is that right? The people I know who went to law school, unfortunately,
>are legal pragmatists, primarily (since they are so left-wing).
In general, practicing lawyers like to write things so they give
definite answers, and they prefer interpretations that follow reasonably
clearly from what's written. They like the law to be knowable in a
straightforward and objective way so that it's possible for them to work
with it and feel they know what they're doing. That doesn't mean, of
course, that they won't present arguments based on anything whatever if
they think the arguments may be accepted or at least obfuscate matters.
That also doesn't mean that these general preferences don't have
exceptions. Exceptions are not rules, though.
>I find it VERY HARD to believe that the "Founders" intended to exclude
>only certain punishments that happened to equal the extension of "cruel
>and unusual" at the time the document was drafted. That seems crazy.
>Where is the evidence for this claim? Why not list these punishments?
>How about because they knew that the idea of "cruel and unusual" would
>change as technology, etc, changed.
What I believe I said (I've erased your quote of my language) was that
the framers chiefly had in mind punishments of the sort that had been
imposed by the Court of Star Chamber and other non-common law tribunals,
and that the "cruel and unusual" punishments clearly did not include the
common law punishments. So there was a list of clearly OK punishments
that notably included the death penalty and imprisonment in crummy
conditions. As a consequence, OU would make the "c. and u. p." a poor
vehicle for reform of the criminal justice system, although I agree that
it could be used to suppress novelties. (My source for this, by the
way, is the say-so of Charles Gray, a legal historian now at the
University of Chicago.)
>Dworkins main point is that an ARGUMENT must be given for why we should
>interpret the constitution a particular way. His answer to this is: we
>should interpret the constitution in such a way as to make the idea of
>the state that comes out of it a state which has the most moral power
>to demand that its law be obeyed. It seems hard to argue with this. And
>from this vantage, I dont see the OU (unless read this broadly) to be
>so compelling.
Dworkin's answer could mean a number of different things. If one thinks
that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed
and that explicit acts of consent trump passive acquiescence (a view not
unknown when the constitution was adopted), then Dworkin has just argued
for OU. If the answer means that the constitution should be read to say
"the morally best state is hereby established, and a committee of
officials with life terms will determine from time to time what the
characteristics of the morally best state are and what that state must
do to validate its status as such" I find it rather bizarre.
>The only thing that makes it compelling is that we need a notion of
>people sticking to their promises. And if we go against OU, it seems it
>means we will break our promises when it suits our advantage. But of
>course, this must be true, unless one holds to an almost anal notion of
>keeping promises. Promises are made within an implicit and never
>completely stated background, and this cant be avoided.
Sure, but if we routinely appeal to the background to ignore what was
actually promised, the institution of making promises disappears. That
kind of appeal has to be exceptional. If I took the view that all men
really aim at the good and only the good, so whenever the time comes for
me to act I will determine what the good requires and act accordingly
regardless of what words anyone may have used in the past, then it would
be impossible for me to make a promise.
>How many practising lawyers think that the 9th amendment is "not law".
>It is true that Bork has said that the reason this amendment is there
>is a "mystery". Under Borks view of law, yes, it is a mystery. Under my
>interpretation of Madison, and his view on the bill of rights
>(suggesting a broad reading of the OU), it is not a mystery at all.
I think Douglas (in one of his opinions involving emanations and
penumbras) was the first to appeal to the 9th to support a particular
conclusion. The move was quite controversial then, and I believe
remains so.
>If I make an agreement with Joe, and someone tries to enforce it, it's
>going to be hard to pull in the OU of the constitution as binding
>unless you can tell a much better story of how the agreement of some
>long dead guys affects my own individual social life today.
I don't understand your point. I would think that if it's your
agreement with Joe that's being applied it would be the OU of you and
Joe that should determine its interpretation. Why is that inconsistent
with being guided by the OU of the constitution in applying the
constitution?
>| I'm a little lost here. How do you think people who write laws view
>| themselves? It seems to me that predominantly they want to control
>| the future for some purpose. They think they're making rules that
>| other people are going to have to follow,
>Theres that "other people" again. The laws are binding on *everyone*. I
>guess conservatives who arent the lazy, shiftless, poor, who leave
>their rubbish lying in the corner of their apartment, make the laws for
>*other people*.
My impression is that people who make laws are mostly thinking about the
effect of the laws on the society at large rather than on themselves
personally. That's just what they should be doing, of course.
Sometimes there are special reasons for this -- for example, Congress
habitually exempts itself from most laws governing employer/employee
relations.
Incidentally, is the above the sort of comment that you think will
advance the discussion?
>Indeed it does. As of now, I grant you OU. Now, lets look at the sense
>in which "rights" is used in the 9th, or "priveleges and immunities" is
>used, in the 14th. I agree that we all use them in the same sense. But
>this sense has to be one which is broad based, if the constitution is
>going to have any use at all. Otherwise, that document would have been
>good enough only for a few years after its ratification, and would be a
>very haphazard piece of patchwork special cases. I dont believe we have
>to accept that.
You seem to assume that a government can't function in an acceptable way
unless there's an independent body of officials with life tenure and a
general power to forbid what they determine to be abuses (and to require
what they determine would be unjustifiable not to do). Why assume that?
Doesn't British experience suggest the contrary?
>It was the guys grandson. The will was formally valid according to the
>statues as clearly written at the time. He was the sole benificiary
>explicitly mentioned in the will. Why shouldnt he get the money? Answer
>without reading Dworkin (or looking the case up).
The background conditions you mentioned earlier. In exceptional cases
they do indeed justify disregarding what was actually said.
>| role. Perhaps what I should have said is "but with ambiguities in OU
>| resolved by the elected branches of government rather than the
>| courts".
>Right, thats what I took you to say. But this is not the OU position,
>is it? (if it were, it would be unnecessary to state it).
I don't understand the parenthetical. Also, why shouldn't it be the OU
position? If the alternative is to give the courts a kind and degree of
power that no-one at the time intended to give them, then I would think
that it would be the OU position.
>I dont believe that Bork has always held the same view (in my opinion,
>the view he holds is probably "do what Ronnie wants me to do, and
>explain it however I can in terms of some trumped up legal theory" . .
.
This is uncalled for. If your view is that people who hold views like
those held by Bork and Murray are simply bad people making bad excuses
for bad causes we can end the discussion. (Putnam has an interesting
discussion of disagreements on fundamental political issues in Ch. 7 of
Reason, Truth and History.)
>SIGs stand for those with money, and those with money are NOT EVEN
>PEOPLE, but huge businesses? Consider for example the tobacco lobby.
>We'd clearly be better off getting rid of tobacco in the long run, but
>the tobacco lobby spends millions and millions in Canada effectively
>lobbying our government.
"Huge businesses" are stand-ins for particular people. If your point is
that sometimes governments adopt bad policies, I agree with it. If your
solution to bad policies adopted at the instance of people with more
power than public spirit is enlightened despotism, I don't like it.
>Sure, legislators are interested in remaking the world in terms of a
>theory? What in blazes are you talking about? The trouble is their
>theories are often unconstitutional. How about the creationist
>lobbyists who tried to sneak a bill in Arkansas a view years ago
>demanding "equal time" in the classroom.
As you point out, legislators don't act with theoretical coherence.
Every now and then they make a gesture in support of some religious or
philosophical view that a lot of constituents hold. I don't see why
such incidents are particularly dangerous.
>| Coherence is a fine thing, but in politics it should not be forced.
>Sure it should. Thats the point of integrity. Thats the point of
>fairness. Of course "force" is a strong word. I like the Madison I gave
>above. Let's not go too far.
I have no idea why integrity and fairness should be considered the
touchstones of good government. Good government is government that
facilitates or at least does not interfere with people living well. If
what a government does is adverse to that end, then the more integrity
and fairness the worse -- I'd rather they did a sloppy and incoherent
job of it. For all I know Robespierre and Torquemada may have had loads
of integrity and fairness, but it would have been better if they had
been vulgar self-seeking slobs. As for going too far, it seems to me
the currently proposed role for the courts (remember my points 1-5) goes
quite far.
>Do you read any more middle of the road magazines like Harpers, the
>Atlantic, or the New Republic?
I'm not much of a magazine reader. I do look at middle-of-the-road and
left-wing mags now and then (I try to keep track of what people think
and why). Most things I read of a liberal or leftish tendency are quite
unsatisfying because they ignore issues that seem absolutely crucial to
me. I take that most people tend to read writers with whom they have a
certain amount in common for similar reasons.
>I suspect "The Public Interest" is much like "Policy Review" . . .
Take a look -- I find them quite different. The pieces in TPI are by
and large written by serious scholars, those in PR by cheerleaders.
>Perhaps you think that, e.g., the New Republic is a liberal rag. Well,
>thats why they had D'Souzas stupid article about PC a few months ago .
>. .
We subscribed to it for several years, but let the subscription lapse.
As I recall, we were mostly tired of the editors, who seemed pretty
sophomoric.
>[W]hen the easy way out means not having a terrible, degrading,
>oppresive job, I am all in favor of it (see Russells famous article
>too: "In praise of idleness"). My alarm button goes off when I see
>conservatives claiming that these jobs are what provide dignity to the
>poo' folk.
A basic problem of politics is dealing with what is necessary in a way
that promotes what is good. A lot of the work that has to be done is
neither fun nor glorious. If it is possible for unpleasant work to be
part of a scheme of things in which the people who do it have dignity
because they are responsibly dealing with their problems in cooperation
with others and they have some prospect of improving their situation,
then that would be a very good thing.
>Now, when the easy way out is weakness of will that goes AGAINST a
>persons best interest, and FLOW, then I want to fight it. However, I
>would like to see a different way than SCARING people through fear of
>starvation, and losing their shelter, etc, to do work they would rather
>not do.
You seem to be taking something close to a stimulus-response view of
human motivation. If the practical difficulty of securing the food,
clothing and shelter that people think is needed for a decent life is
viewed as a difficulty that people themselves rather than the government
must deal with, then the ultimate sanction for not doing what's needed
is going without, just as the ultimate sanction for not obeying the law
is physical punishment (imprisonment or whatever). That doesn't mean in
either case that fear is normally what is in people's minds. Rather,
the existence of ultimate sanctions makes it possible for a situation to
exist in which people generally accept that they are responsible for
looking out for themselves and those connected to them or for obeying
the law. I'm not sure that starvation has much to do with it -- I would
think you could have soup kitchens, for example. Elimination of all
public goods (parks or what have you) doesn't have much to do with it
either. What you could not have is a government guarantee of the
material means of a decent life. Or maybe you could if you had a
closely knit society with lots of formal and informal controls on how
people live, but that doesn't appear to be a realistic prospect today.
A closely knit society doesn't seem like something that can be
manufactured to order by goverment programs although if it exists maybe
it can be strengthened and supported by laws of a kind liberals and
libertarians don't like. I don't think funding public libraries or
forbidding the sale of poorly-prepared food (two of your suggestions, I
think) would do it.
>Dont let those lawyers accumulate a lot of money so they could take
>time off if they want to, and dont have to worry about losing their
>job. Keep prodding them with the threat of starvation. I agree. If this
>principle of forcing people to do whats good for em is so good, lets
>apply it to more than the poor.
"Forcing people to do what's good for them" is not a principle that has
been proposed in this discussion. The point is people should believe
that they are responsible for what their own lives are like and act
accordingly. Both too many government benefits and too much taxation
are adverse to that result.
>[W]hose to say we cant get around that some other way, that will avoid
>the bad parts of individual family members depending upon one another
>when things go bad.
People are either responsible for things or not. If they are, then
failure to discharge the responsibility has bad results. That's simply
what it means to be responsible. Do you really believe that the good
society is a society in which people have no serious responsibility for
each other?
>Marx claimed that the forces of production determined, ultimately, the
>relations of production and hence other social relations, but it was
>more of a chanelling, or distorting, of already pre-existing human
>tendency. Thats not quite the same thing as what you said. Also, even
>if that was true, it doesnt mean that forcing particular economic
>relations to be true will in turn cause the social relations you want
>to become true. There's no connection between what he said and what you
>are saying, as far as I can see.
My point had been that how people in a particular time and place find
they have to solve the practical problems of living has a profound
effect on social institutions and culture generally, and that the social
institutions that people take seriously tend to be institutions that
contribute to the solution to those problems. Wouldn't most Marxists
agree with at least that much? You seemed to find the idea "fantastic",
and to claim that the institutions of family and friendship would likely
be strenthened by being liberated from practical considerations. It
seemed worthwhile to suggest that my view was not unprecedented.
Naturally, I don't claim to be a Marxist.
>Can you name a place with our level of technology and education that
>has the same kind of family ties? You appear to be doing the same thing
>Murray does: ignoring other considerations that make a big difference.
I don't know what you're looking for. The argument is simply that other
things being equal more government benefits means less reliance on
informal social structures such as the family and therefore a weakening
of such structures. Two of the Public Interest articles I mentioned
discuss the situation in Sweden and in the U.K. Obviously a lot of
other things also bear on the strength of the family system, such as the
growth of the industrial system and availability on the market of
services once provided in kind by family members. (I'm not sure you
should find such things relevant, though -- you seemed to suggest at one
point that it's highly speculative to think that the strength of family
life has something to do with the practical functions of the family.)
In discussing public policy it makes sense to consider the effects of
public policy, and whether those are overall good and bad. It's
perfectly true that other things may have good or bad effects as well.
At times you seem to have the view that all features of social life
should be viewed as things that public policy has created and that
public policy could change as desired. Such faith in the possibilities
of social engineering (if you have such faith) seems misplaced to me.
>The idea of a nuclear family that people have to be tied down to, even
>when they've made a mistake and the father abuses and beats his wife
>and children, hardly seems perfect either.
If your point is that major problems arise for many people in all social
settings, I agree completely.
>Is this "peasant Asian community" the same one Murray reports on, in
>Thailand? Hmm...
Actually, I had Afghanistan in mind, where I spent a couple of years as
a Peace Corps volunteer.
>>I believe you've commented on the remarkable scarcity of people with a
>>disinterested love of learning.
>Because they are taught from an early age that they've gotta get a job
>that pays well, I speculate.
What can you do? If there is no generally accepted conception of the
good then money will be the most authoritative thing around.
>Which is why we need a state, to bind us in the cases where we cant
>rely on [disinterested love].
Pure love is quite rare. If we need the state in all cases in which
pure love does not make people act as they should then the state will
have to prescribe all actions of any consequence.
cbo@cs.toronto.edu (Calvin Bruce Ostrum) writes:
>On a related point, since the others seem to see a clear distinction
>between a reason and a motivation, perhaps they could elaborate on
>that.
Motivation is a matter of psychology, reason of what is justified. It's
the same distinction as the distinction between the things that cause
one to have a belief and the things that justify that belief. My belief
that Walt Disney is dead might be caused by my horror of occupying the
same planet as the creator of Disney World, but the justification of
that belief would be quite different. If we are good enquirers we tend
to believe those things we have reason to believe, and if we are good
actors generally we tend to do what we have reason to do.
Comments?
cbo@cs.toronto.edu (Calvin Bruce Ostrum) writes:
>Is anybody else reading these posts? This is getting to be a lot of
>work, and if this thread would die without my contributions I don't
>really feel much like keeping it alive.
I have read the ones that have gotten through and believe ("hope" might
be a better word) that my mailfeed problems have diminished enough for
me to join the discussion again.
>Yes, I await explanations on the parts of Mr Kalb and Mr Ramsay. But I
>am assuming that they will retract their strong claim and replace it
>with a somewhat weaker one. I don't think they have given a very good
>explanation of the relationship between an objective concept of good,
>and its relationship to reason and motivation.
Are you referring to the claim that some action's being good is the best
possible reason for doing it? If so, I don't see why I should retract
it. What better reason could there be?
By "reason" I understand valid and orderly thought. More specifically,
reason is the collection of practices that permit us to draw a
conclusion in an orderly and reliable way from general principles and
particular beliefs. For the conclusion to be reasonable the general
principles and particular beliefs must be reasonable -- that is, they
must follow reasonably from other reasonable principles and beliefs or
they must be plausible and demonstrate their reliability in use. A
statement of how the conclusion was reached constitutes one's "reasons"
for the conclusion.
The point at issue seems to be whether "reason" relates only to the
contemplation of the world, or whether it also relates to action (that
is, whether the "conclusion" to which reason leads must always command a
belief or may command an action). I don't see why one should accept the
validity of orderly thought in connection with belief but not in
connection with action -- in other words, why one should hold that one
can believe reasonably but one cannot act reasonably in matters other
than those relating to accepting or rejecting beliefs. When we consider
actions we go through the same mental operations (comparing,
contrasting, logical analysis, appeals to experience and common
understanding, etc.) that we go through when we are deciding what to
believe about a matter of fact. In both cases we are convinced that
what we are doing makes sense. What grounds do we have for thinking
that in connection with belief those mental operations lead to valid
conclusions while in connection with action they do not?
If we accept reasoning regarding action as valid, we must accept the
essential elements of such reasoning. One of the things we do in
reasoning about actions is to accept some conception of objective good
as the ultimate reason for action. It's not surprising that we do this,
since an essential part of reasoning is showing that conclusions follow
from principles of general applicability. And so far as I can make out,
we all do this. (People who deny they do this very soon start to sound
incoherent to me. I believe I am not alone in my reaction -- Mr.
Ramsey, for example, has commented on the oddity of Mr. Turpin's use of
the word "owe".) So it appears that some concept of objective good is
necessary for rational action.
Someone might suggest that one could act reasonably without accepting
(and applying) a concept of objective good, for example by always acting
in a way that tends to realize whatever desires he finds he actually
has. I don't see what would be gained by such a suggestion. The belief
"if I buy 500 shares of Amalgamated Widgets at 8-3/4 I will become rich
and satisfy all my desires" by itself does not result in action. Many
people fail to maximize their advantage, and the conduct of some people
is pointlessly self-destructive. For such a belief to give rise to
rational action, some principle of action like "always act to maximize
satisfaction of your desires" is required. But where does that
principle come from and why is it so much less problematic than (say)
the Golden Rule? For that matter, why isn't it a principle that applies
to everyone and is therefore equivalent to the statement that it is
objectively good for each agent to try to satisfy whatever desires he
happens to have?
I am not sure why a moral realist must present an account of moral
motivation any more than someone who is a realist as to truth must
present an account of epistemic motivation. Logicians, mathematicians
and scientists don't give us an account of the psychological factors
that will lead us to believe them but nonetheless think there is
something wrong with people who reject their conclusions. The usual
view is that psychological factors are more relevant to error than to
truth. Of course, people sometimes draw religious or other conclusions
from moral realism and from the observation that conceptions of the good
do in fact motivate us to do things. But one need not start with such
conclusions in order to accept moral realism.
>Plato was reacting against the school of relativists that were popular
>at the time (sorry, I've just forgotten what they were called; but they
>were laughed at in Aristophanes' The Clouds, I think, and the word has
>negative connotations.
The sophists. For a fee they promised to teach young men how to be
successful in politics. Traditionally they haven't been considered
philosophers, although you're right that there are people today (many of
whom are also concerned with political success of one sort or another)
with similar ideas who are considered philosophers.
>With complex systems, it may be impossible to understand them entirely;
>so we have to approximate, forming simpler models that we can reason
>with. Different people tend to form different models, each of which
>explain a part of the behaviour of the system well, and which fail to
>explain other parts. "Everyone must recognize as valid" suggests that
>everyone has the same model; but this can only happen by imposition.
"[T]his can only happen by imposition" -- is that statement intended to
be valid only for yourself or do you think it is something I should
believe as well? If the former, why tell me about it? If the latter,
why are you trying to tyrannize me?
You say different models explain different things well. What is
involved in the word "well"? Are you only saying that particular people
like some sets of sentences better than others? Or are you saying that
there is some kind of a relationship between a model and the system it
is a model of, and in some cases the relationship is closer than others?
(That's what the expression "model" suggests, after all.)
For example, does the statement "the Holocaust really happened" model
events in Europe in the early 1940's better than the sentence "the
Holocaust is a myth invented by blood-sucking Jewish Bolsheviks and
international bankers and propagated by their lackeys"? If it does, do
you think everyone should share your preference? Why?
One objection to social welfare measures has been that they tend to
undermine the habits of individual responsibility and the
non-governmental or informal institutions -- family, friends,
neighborhood, church, mutual aid societies or whatever -- that people
would otherwise rely on.
Some have said that in an advanced welfare state the cost of social
services will increase without limit as a result of this tendency, and
that even if the services can be provided many people will be miserable
because without a material basis for close ties to particular people
(such as mutual responsibilities within the family) the social ties that
are needed for a tolerable way of life will tend to dissipate.
Any comments on this line of thought?
>>Action motivated by admiration of another person, though, is not
>>action motivated by personal pleasure except in the trivial sense that
>>we take pleasure in doing the actions we want to do.
>What about the adulation of movie stars, major league baseball players
>and political heros?
It strikes me as somewhat mindless, but relatively disinterested and not
motivated by personal pleasure, although people do take personal
pleasure in it.
>[T]here have been societies where torture was pursued with interest and
>pleasure . . . [G]ranted his heros are unreasonably successful, but so
>are the heros in other literature of the time.
For the torturer, torture has its pleasures. It seems to me, though,
that de Sade hasn't presented a believable picture of a coherent way of
life for a human being on planet Earth that includes the joys of torture
as one of its essential components. Other writers have told tall
stories as well, of course.
>I think that M. de Sade has a blind spot here. If, as you say above,
>his view is that autonomy is goal, then at some point one would no
>longer need to act out one's autonomy in order to prove the point.
My problem is that I can't think of what it could mean to take absolute
autonomy as an ultimate goal other than absolute and therefore mindless
rebellion. Absolute autonomy doesn't exist unless it's acted out. To
the extent you simply forget about social, moral or religious strictures
and do what you please, you are making pleasure rather than autonomy
your ultimate goal. The paradox of the outlook I attribute to de Sade
is that it can't do without moral authority, the very thing it attacks.
>[By constructing a rational system of morality] I meant satisfying the
>formal demands of logical consistency, without regard to exterior
>customs, interior intuition or experience.
That's easy enough because it's trivial. It's not of much interest,
though. ("The summum bonum is eating the largest possible amount of
peanut butter, and morality commands me catagorically to do just that no
matter what the cost.")
>>To me, the real difficulty is in talking about human affairs without
>>the explicit or implicit assumption that some things really are better
>>than others. It seems to me we all make that assumption and can't
>>help but make it, so we are in no position to deny that it's true.
>I would agree that all people make these assumptions, but I would
>disagree that we all make the same assumptions. We might make
>contradictory assumptions. The difficulty I have is with your word
>"really". If, by saying that something is "really" better than
>something else, what criteria are to be provided to convince me of this
>case, supposing that I see things differently?
People certainly have different views as to what's good and bad. They
believe those differing views constitute disagreements, and they advance
reasons that usually have some plausibility as to why one view is better
than another. If people do that -- including you and me -- and they
can't avoid doing that, it seems to me they're stuck with the view that
there is a "really" in morality. Skepticism in morality must be
rejected for the same reason other forms of skepticism must be rejected
-- it's impossible to adhere to as a coherent view of the world.
Of course, saying moral skepticism is wrong doesn't prove anything very
definite about morality any more than saying minds other than one's own
really exist proves anything very definite about what other people's
thoughts and experiences are like or saying that the past really existed
proves anything very definite about things that happened in the past.
In addition, arguments on all these subjects are often inconclusive.
The scarcity of demonstrative knowledge about something doesn't show
that the thing doesn't exist, though, if we have other grounds for
believing it does.
>One may of course create a rational moral system. This has been done.
>The Catholic Church has a rational morality, for example. So does the
>Marquis de Sade. (By the way, his work should be read with the
>universality of R.C. morality in mind, as was true for him in France in
>that age. His principle is making personal pleasure the highest good,
>and the truth he disclaims is R.C. morality.)
I'm not well informed on Catholic morality. I really don't find de
Sade's moral outlook rational, though. He recognizes implicitly that
man is a social animal and finds his good in part -- in necessary part
-- in community with others. Thus, it is essential to _Juliette_ that
Juliette, Clairwil and their friends not betray each other. The reason
they do not is that they admire each other. Action motivated by
admiration of another person, though, is not action motivated by
personal pleasure except in the trivial sense that we take pleasure in
doing the actions we want to do.
It's also worth noting that de Sade's fictional world is factually not
like the real world. His sex-and-torture scenes strike me as medically
impossible, and it's not believable that anyone could be as uniformly
successful in crime as his heros and heroines are. So his moral outlook
is not only incoherent, but it finds its natural setting in a world that
is not the one we live in.
Incidentally, it seems to me that de Sade tends to make absolute
personal autonomy and not personal pleasure his highest good. If I am
right, then there is the additional difficulty of understanding what
absolute freedom could mean. One starts, of course, by defying accepted
moral views in the most extreme way possible, but as his characters
observe here and there, that becomes boring after a while. But what
else is there to do if the final goal is something as empty as self-
will?
>The difficult part is not creating such a system, but in getting others
>to go along with it.
It seems to me quite difficult to create a rational system of morality.
Also, the difficulty in getting others to go along with one system or
another doesn't show that no system is really better than another, or
even that there is no unique best system. It's hard to get scholars to
agree on who wrote the Oddysey and the Iliad and when, but I suppose
that there is a unique truth about the matter.
To me, the real difficulty is in talking about human affairs without the
explicit or implicit assumption that some things really are better than
others. It seems to me we all make that assumption and can't help but
make it, so we are in no position to deny that it's true.
>However, if you desire to create a scientific morality, i.e. one that
>purports to explain how and why people make the moral choices that they
>do, then I do not believe that you will be successful. There seems to
>be too much variety in the actions and choices of people to fit into
>any formal system.
By "scientific morality" you seem to mean "scientific moral psychology."
How and why people make the choices they do is one question, what
choices they should make quite another. Similarly, one might find it
hard to create a "scientific epistemology" that purports to explain how
and why people adopt the beliefs as to matters of fact that they do.
The difficulty of creating such an epistemology does not show that truth
is not objective.
russotto@eng.umd.edu (Matthew T. Russotto) writes:
[someone said:]
>>He thinks that it is up to the state legislatures to enumerate these
>>rights, or else go for a federal Constitutional amendment.
>Interesting. This would seem to put him in the position as accepting
>that the 9th amendment, plus a right enumerated in a State
>constitution, could override the Supremacy Clause.
What's the argument? The 9th says that the enumeration in the
Constution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage
others retained by the people. If a state constitution said (say)
nobody had to pay his debts, I don't see how that provision plus the 9th
would override the Contract and Supremacy Clauses.
To believe in social justice is to believe that social institutions
should be judged in accordance with their tendency to make the members
of society equal in material resources and dignity, and that the
fundamental command of social morality is to remake existing
institutions to make them more equal in that sense.
On its face, such a view seems likely to promote a state of affairs in
which the cruder evils of social life are avoided. It also seems
consistent with rational morality since it appears capable of being
affirmed by each member of society.
The cost of these advantages may be too high, however. Judging social
arrangements in accordance with an abstract criterion that can never be
satisfied undermines every-day morality and existing institutions, and
remaking institutions in accordance with such a criterion is a perpetual
enterprise requiring irresponsible power. The realization of an
abstract ideal like social justice requires society to be dominated by a
cohesive elite responsible to no-one outside of itself. Accordingly,
the ideal of social justice has a natural affinity with tyranny.
One side of this affinity is the tendency of laws intended to promote
social justice to weaken institutions other than the state. As social
justice is perfected, the power of the state increases without limit
because people become more dependent on it, and the institutions that
could otherwise limit its power become incapable of doing so.
This tendency can be seen in the case of welfare and civil rights laws,
which in America are the primary legal means of promoting social
justice. Such laws make people dependent on the state rather than upon
the willing cooperation of other people, and weaken the family and
community institutions that rely on the habits of willing cooperation
and responsibility epitomized by traditional morality. The more
effective welfare and civil rights laws are in preventing suffering and
assuring equality of treatment, the less people need to rely on or to
aid those to whom they have a special tie. Accordingly, such laws
strengthen the state and weaken all other social ties. The political
consequences of such a process are not necessarily beneficial.
Apart from the likelihood that perfected welfare and civil rights laws
would result in tyranny, they would make their beneficiaries miserable
because man needs order. Today, people learn to organize their own
lives because they must, by and large. Unless a substitute is found for
need in this connection, laws that promote social justice will be
personally and socially destructive because they undercut individual and
community coherence.
For example, without such a substitute the government should not
guarantee to each individual a materially decent life. By its terms,
such a guarantee would provide that one's actions could never put him in
a bind that he couldn't extricate himself from immediately. Such a
guarantee would deprive human actions, and especially the actions of the
poor, of much of their weight, because nothing people could do could
cause them serious economic trouble. Nor could this difficulty be
solved by guaranteeing only the opportunity to live a materially decent
life. In matters of personal welfare it is impossible to guarantee the
opportunity without guaranteeing the result because of the variety of
disabilities and misfortunes that may exist and the difficulty of
knowing whether they are present in particular cases.
Of course, economic need is not the only motive for action. However, it
is a strong and nearly universal motive, and for people who are socially
marginal and do not habitually act from motives such as the desire for
respectability it is often the only motive that can be relied on --
other than the outright threat of punishment. It follows that extensive
state control of people's lives enforced by penal measures would be
necessary if the spur of economic need were eliminated.
For example, an alternative to leaving the poor (at least those who do
not suffer from a demonstrable disability) to their own devices, and to
the voluntary assistance of whoever chooses to help them, would be to
give them state relief on condition that they enroll in something like
an industrial army, in which they could be disciplined, trained and made
to be productive. An effort might be made to run such an organization
in a humane manner, but there would be necessary limits to its humanity
because it would have to deal with people just as they are. For
example, the most recalcitrant members of such an organization would
care only to be fed, and would make it a point of honor to give nothing
in return. The organization would have some such members, and if they
could not be expelled they would presumably be treated like rebellious
slaves. That necessity would affect the character of the organization
as a whole.
To my mind, the conclusion of all these speculations is that social
justice is a phantom the pursuit of which is more likely to be
destructive than beneficial, and its widespread acceptance as the
highest moral goal is extraordinarily troubling. Since there seems to be
no competing ideal that is taken nearly so seriously by nearly so many
people, though, I don't expect the situation to change soon.
turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin) writes:
[I had written:]
>> The line of thought I'm more familiar with is that if man's life has
>> an objective purpose -- that is, a purpose that he
>> must recognize as binding without regard to the feelings or
>> beliefs he or anyone else might happen to have ...
>It is precisely this line of "reasoning" that I criticize. Perhaps Mr
>Kalb would care to define more what "objective" means when it precedes
>the word purpose . . .
To say that a man's life has an objective purpose is simply to say that
(1) there are things which are objectively good or bad for him to do,
and (2) that there are enough such things to give him occupation. It
seems to me rare for someone seriously to deny that (1) is the case --
in other words, seriously to claim that in all cases value is simply the
projection onto the valued object of an outlook that the valuer happens
to have. (I realize, of course, that many people say that is what they
believe, but few are willing to stick with that view to the bitter end.)
And I'm not sure why (2) should give anyone any trouble. After all,
there are lots of bad things and lots of good things in the world, and I
would think that pursuing the good and avoiding the bad would be enough
to occupy anyone.
>, or explain in what sense a purpose "must" be binding "without regard
>to the feelings or beliefs" anyone has . . .
This is simply another way of stating what it is for a purpose to be
objective.
, and then tie this to what the gods can provide.
I'm not talking about the gods, I'm talking about God. Why do you
affect the plural? The concepts are quite different.
As I said in the article to which you are responding, the objectivity of
value implies that purpose is a fundamental characteristic of the world.
It then appears, since purpose seems to require a person, that the world
can best be understood by reference to a person that made the world what
it is.
>I have seen many attempts along these lines, but none that are anything
>more than nonsense on stilts.
Is this really the way you want to open a discussion? I realize, of
course, that people often find it difficult to respect those who have
different views on fundamental issues, but I would have hoped for
better.
turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin) writes:
>[M]y point is that there is no one "normal moral sense of the word".
>This is proved by what Mr Kalb proposes as a "moral disagreement". He
>writes:
>> A claims that capital punishment for murder is a good thing, B claims
>> it's a bad thing. A and B don't disagree on the relevant non-moral
>>facts . . .
>There are several possibilities. The first is that A and B share a
>common concept of "good", and they know they share a common concept . .
>. In this case, the issue is whether "capital punishment for murder"
>fits this concept, much as we might ask whether a cube is a Platonic
>solid . . . [T]his is actually a logical problem rather than a moral
>one . . .
>A second possibility is that they have different concepts of "good",
>and they realize this. In this case, they are having what is commonly
>called a "semantic" disagreement. There is no point to the argument .
>. .
>A third possibility is that they do not know whether they share a
>common concept for the word "good". This is a communications problem .
>. .
>A fourth possibility is that they are not "arguing" in the "logical"
>sense assumed by the above possibilities. A wants to motivate B to
>support capital punishment, and hopes that by using the word "good" . .
>. that his claims will be more persuasive.
>I am curious which of these possibilities Mr Kalb would include under
>"moral disagreement" . . .
The second, although I disagree with Mr. Turpin's characterization of
the situation. The first is a question of pure conceptual analysis, and
the other two aren't disagreements at all.
The "normal moral sense" of "good" and "bad" requires at least that
something's being good is a very strong reason for doing it and that
something's being bad is a very strong reason for not doing it. In each
case the reasons are regarded as valid whether the agent views them as
such or not -- in Mr. Turpin's language, whether or not they fit the
agent's moral concepts. "Moral disagreement", then, is disagreement
over what these valid moral reasons are. I take it that such
disagreements are what Mr. Turpin refers to as "different concepts of
'good'".
[Messrs. Ostrum, Turpin and Ramsey said, here and there:]
>there is no one concept of "good" that serves for
>everyone the purpose that Mr Kalb wants of it, to wit, that it is
>a primary motivator.
>I don't recall his saying it was a primary motivator. We have to be
>careful of our conflicting terminology here. I suspect Mr. Kalb didn't
>understand what you meant . . . I think he's suggested . . .
>Both Mr Kalb and Mr Ostrum assume . . .
>I think one of the major disagreements between Mr Turpin, on one side,
>and Mr Kalb and Mr Ramsay, on the other
>Mr Ramsay and Mr Kalb seem to disagree . . .
>I have said that even if there were a common concept, that does not
>mean it would do what Mr Kalb wants of it . . . Mr Ramsay correctly
>corrects me: Mr Kalb asks of something being "good" . . .
I'm in the awkward position of being unable to take part effectively
in the discussion because something has gone wrong with the news feed at
my site and I'm not getting most of the postings. When the problem is
fixed I hope to catch up with all the comments, some of which are quite
illuminating, and to rejoin the discussion if there seems to be anything
I can contribute.
>[I]f "feminism" requires opposition to separate roles for the sexes
>than I would have agree that feminism should be rejected. However, I
>*don't* think most feminists really think this way. Even so-called
>"radical feminists", as I understand it, don't fundamentally reject the
>idea of sex roles; what they reject is *traditional* sex roles.
I've never seen an extended presentation of feminism that I thought was
coherent, so it's hard for me to say what feminists really think. But
the rejection of socially determined sex roles ("sex role stereotyping)
does seem central to the movement. The point of antidiscrimination laws
and the United States Equal Rights Amendment, for example, seems to be
that it is wrong for differences between women and men to be publicly
recognized (except possibly to the extent that such differences must be
taken into account in order to minimize their effect). Such egalitarian
legal measures are not considered at all radical; instead, people who
oppose them are considered very odd.
I'm not sure what sort of sex roles someone would approve who really
disliked traditional sex roles. Strong silent women and sympathetic and
emotional men? So far as I can make out, in all societies women have
been primarily responsible for children and domestic matters and men
have dominated more public matters. I don't see any reason to expect
future societies to be different from past societies in that respect.
People can try to invent wholly new sex roles, of course, but what
reason is there to think people will adopt them and find them
satisfying?
>I have softened my stance, by understanding feminism liberally as a
>concern for women's rights.
In my experience, "concern for women's rights" usually means concern
that women have the same rights as men. But to accept socially
determined sex roles is to accept that women should not be as free to
make certain choices as men. So I'm not sure the two go together. Of
course, it would be possible to be concerned that women and men have
rights that fit their needs and are part of a system of social life that
is good for people generally, without worrying whether the rights
differed somewhat. I don't know of many people who think about things
that way, though.
I found nothing to disagree with in your e-mail. A few comments:
>I think that feminism is one of the least coherent of ideologies . . .
>Feminism is probably more an attitude than an ideology. Perhaps the
>right question is not "what do feminists think" but "what do feminists
>*feel*?"
True enough. The women with whom I can talk frankly about the subject
seem to have very mixed feelings that are impossible to sum up. I got a
stack of feminist books from the library a couple of years ago because I
wanted to learn about the subject. The impression I got was that
something had gone wrong somewhere, but it was hard to say what it was
exactly -- the writers themselves weren't much help.
>Rather than thinking, "what can I as a man do that a woman can't?" I
>would be better to think, "If I were a woman, what would I want to be
>able to do that I can't now?" This sort of thinking by a man requires
>much empathy, and the ability to discuss issues openly and honestly
>with intelligent articulate women. Unfortunately, that is difficult to
>do in the present climate, since modern intelligent articulate women
>have mostly been captivated by a particular feminist agenda.
In some moods I'm rather pessimistic about the outlook. Discussions of
political, social and moral issues seem to feature more slogan than
nuance today, and people who don't agree on slogans find it hard to talk
to each other at all. It seems to me that nuance -- and for that
matter, sex roles with enough fixity to be roles and enough flexibility
to be acceptable -- requires mutual trust and good faith (and a stable
and coherent way of life) to a degree that is becoming increasingly
difficult to attain.
Jim
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