tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10835776.post3914075042698678201..comments2023-10-30T07:45:43.656-04:00Comments on Thoughts and Ideas: Re: Response to meA Wiser Man Than Ihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02405864709965908573noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10835776.post-18100817374483291082008-04-27T22:22:00.000-04:002008-04-27T22:22:00.000-04:00I think I need to clarify my view on our ethical s...I think I need to clarify my view on our ethical situation. My position is not utilitarian. To be utilitarian, a theory must advance a single, comprehensive, conception of the good -- in terms of utility -- and then it must stipulate that the moral worth of an action is determined by the extent to which it maximizes that good. I, on the contrary, believe that there are a plurality of real goods and that we have to give priority to ourselves and the people close to us (although I won't directly defend the latter part of this claim, unless you're especially interested). The satisfactions of helping someone solve a difficult problem, of listening to a symphony, and of enjoying a glass of fine wine, for instance, are qualitatively distinct in such a way as to preclude quantitative comparisons. You can't mechanically assess the pleasure of athletic competition against the pleasure of intellectual debate; they are different kinds of goods, providing different kinds of satisfaction. There are other problems with utilitarianism, of course, but this one is the most important for our purposes. I think that when you accuse me of utilitarianism, what you mean is that I assess the value of actions according to essentially human standards of satisfaction and well-being, and this amounts to no more than an egotistic hedonism. The first part of this description is correct, but I hope to persuade you that the second is not. <BR/><BR/>To help explain my position, let me introduce a distinction, which I have not hitherto employed, between the ethical and the moral. Let the ethical be concerned with pursuit and achievement of goods, and let the moral be concerned with the categorical restrictions or obligations incumbent upon us as we live our lives in pursuit of these goods. First of all, notice that, with a sufficiently robust conception of human goods, pursuit of the same is no mere hedonism. Pleasure is only one kind of good -- and by no means the highest, however one might rank them. <BR/><BR/>I suspect there are at least two points of disagreement between us. The first is the scope of the moral. I believe that its domain is quite limited. We live most of our lives at the ethical level, where we enjoy considerable discretion about which goods to pursue. There are no ethical laws to which I might appeal when I'm deciding whether to go into academia or law, whether to raise a family or join the clergy, whether to devote my reading time to Aquinas or Hegel, etc. This isn't to say that all decisions are equally good or that it doesn't matter what one does with one's life, only that the relevant standards must be supplied by the individual's conception of "the good life," her sense of who she is and who she wants to become. One will live out a more or less fulfilling life according to how true she is to how penetrating of a self-conception (among other things, no doubt). Society cannot legitimately indict her for spending her evenings at the bar with friends, let's say, rather than at the soup kitchen with the poor. You might persuade her to elect for the latter -- if you can compellingly link her individual conception of the good life with this larger community good -- but you cannot condemn her for pursuing what she perceives as valuable and important, however narrow that perception may seem to you.<BR/><BR/>Notice, now, that working toward the good life requires a minimal kind of self-consciousness: it is not just a matter of activating pleasure-centers in the brain, but of achieving describable goals -- however these may shift about in the course of a life. It is, in other words, a matter of *self*-actualization. What counts for me as achieving a good life depends upon who I am. Furthermore, since selfhood (I claim) has to be cashed out in terms of irreducibly social commitments and identifications, the good life is necessarily situated in larger social framework. Furthermore, it is up for social negotiation whether my deeds fall under the act-description I invoke and whether I live up to the identity I claim for myself.<BR/><BR/>For example, there is no intelligible sense in which someone might "really" be a good professor in spite of his inability to capture the attention and imagination of his students and colleagues. If students don't learn anything under his tutelage, he is a bad teacher; and, if he thinks otherwise, he is deluded. It is only in being recognized as being a good teacher that he can be assured that he is, in fact, the teacher that he takes himself to be. To be clear, what is important is not that there always be another person physically there affirming your success to you, but only that the standards by which you assess yourself are essentially social standards.<BR/><BR/>This claim for the centrality of recognition in any account of the ethical brings us to a second point of disagreement, nearer to the surface than the first, concerning the origin and content of the moral. How is it possible that some actions are categorically wrong, whatever I might think of them, and what kinds of actions qualify? <BR/><BR/>We can answer this question by turning from the ethical to its condition of possibility. What we need to see is that our ethical success is crucially dependent upon the composition of our recognitional networks. Without shared social practices, standards, and ideals, human life would be reduced to a pathological hedonism. We have an obligation, therefore, to maintain the most fundamental of these networks -- the conditions of lawfulness itself -- by respecting the dignity of the self-conscious agents in which these networks subsist. This is the motivation you requested for our commitment to the Kantian categorical imperative (albeit a categorical imperative interpreted and qualified in a rather controversial, Hegelian way).<BR/><BR/>Anyhow, there's more I want to say -- I haven't addressed everything I want to in your last post -- but I'm going to leave it at this for now.<BR/><BR/>Cheers,<BR/>PJPJhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03211470393162983933noreply@blogger.com