neither/nor wrote:
A single woman facing a single unwanted pregnancy and these gifted intellectuals are reduced to...quoting each other?

No, again, they'd tell Mary to think for herself more than anything, I'd imagine. Or that would be their best advice to her. Now just because they, as outsiders, are ill equipped to make her own judgments for her doesn't mean they have nothing worth saying to her, and also again I've indicated what Kant would have said about the relevance or her own interests and the interests of others to deciding the question.

Let me explain this negatively: Kant will not tell Mary exactly what to do (or shouldn't tell her this). He will be able to, from his point of view, tell her that certain arguments for certain conclusions she might come up with about her pregnancy are better or worse than others. For instance, "I should do whatever my partner tells me to do," is something that Kant would tell Mary was inconsistent with her autonomy. Ditto for the will of God or her own inclinations. "Having this kid would end my life," or (pace Gloria Steinem's rhetoric), "My partner wants me to carry it to term," may or may not be the deciding factors contrariwise, but they would be points that Kant could point to as worth making while deciding what to do.

But that has little or nothing to do with the world we actually live in. Moral and political beliefs don't start with deontological premises---they start with political and economic interests. When has this ever not been the case historically?

I'm sure you've got evidence for your position, here, but that moral judgments are only made on the basis of political and economic interests is something difficult for me to imagine even being possible in the abstract, let alone a matter of fact on Earth.

Abortion, for example, is about women and political power. If women are forced to give birth against their wishes, there is no reasonable way they can achieve equality with men. Sure, the moralists will wrap their beliefs around arguments they claim reflect the will of God or some secular rendition of the Whole Truth. But is it really about that? Is it really about what the philosophers can tell us?

I thought there wasn't a general question of the rights and wrongs of abortion? I thought it was all about a private or legal struggle, you said.

Saying, "Abortion is wrong," isn't saying, "Abortion should be criminalized," unless you automatically infer legal sanctions from moral ones. But that's not something everyone automatically tends to do, regardless of whether they often do.

If we are discussing what we either can or cannot know about something [about anything] would we not first ask, "What is there to know about it?" Followed closely by, "Are there things we cannot in fact know about it at all?"

How does this translate into very high standards for knowledge?

Again, you must first provide me with 1] everything you know about it and 2] everything I would need to know about your life to date. Then we would have to devise a way to 3] garner everything everyone else knows about it.

You seem to be defining moral problems into incomprehensible complexity, here, then. I'm not going to directly object to that except to say that what I mean by obligation is something much more easily recognized than whatever you mean by the same word.

Okay, let's start there. Cite an example. Then we can work from both directions---from the particular behaviors to the general law and the general law to the particular behaviors.

Kant wrote:
To abide by the previous examples: Firstly, under the head of necessary duty to oneself: He who contemplates suicide should ask himself whether his action can be consistent with the idea of humanity as an end in itself. If he destroys himself in order to escape from painful circumstances, he uses a person merely as a mean to maintain a tolerable condition up to the end of life. But a man is not a thing, that is to say, something which can be used merely as means, but must in all his actions be always considered as an end in himself. I cannot, therefore, dispose in any way of a man in my own person so as to mutilate him, to damage or kill him. (It belongs to ethics proper to define this principle more precisely, so as to avoid all misunderstanding, e. g., as to the amputation of the limbs in order to preserve myself, as to exposing my life to danger with a view to preserve it, etc. This question is therefore omitted here.)

You are asserting as a statement of fact something that can never more than an opinion.

Again, at this point, I'm going to have to at least partly conclude that you mean something else by words like morality, right, etc. than I (and any number of other philosophers) do. That would, though, mean that some of your criticism of "moral reasoning" by us philosophers or whatever is misdirected.

It would not even have occured to me to bring it up.

Why? I'm sure you can devise your own theories. You don't have to passively wait for other people to tell you what to think.

That's why I'm confident enough in my own judgments as partly transcending the background they're made in: I don't just sit around receiving information from other people, I actively try to acquire it myself. And that means I test my beliefs as much as I can against information I already have, or information I can imagine having.

neither/nor original post:

A single woman facing a single unwanted pregnancy and these gifted intellectuals are reduced to...quoting each other?

szavieur:

No, again, they'd tell Mary to think for herself more than anything, I'd imagine...Now just because they, as outsiders, are ill equipped to make her own judgments for her doesn't mean they have nothing worth saying to her...

Again, show me where my argument would lead one to conclude that philosophers have "nothing worth saying" to Mary?

All I'm suggesting instead is that, as with folks who are not philosophers, their reactions to her particular existential calamity will be up one side and down the other. There is no way, in other words, to get from this predicament to a point of view that links the conflicting advice to anything approaching an obligatory behavior on Mary's part. Let alone obligatory behavior relating to all women faced with an unwanted pregnancy.

Sure, there is a relevant link between Mary and others. That is built right into human social interaction. It is the understanding that human behavior will come into conflict in terrible [and brutally unfair] ways unless certain rules of behavior are established.

But no philosopher's arguments to date about those rules amount to more than introspective prejuduces. The conclusions are supported by premises that wobble and collapse as soon as the theoretical abstractions come into contact with the deeply embedded interaction of contingency, chance and change.

You flesh this out:

Kant will not tell Mary exactly what to do (or shouldn't tell her this). He will be able to, from his point of view, tell her that certain arguments for certain conclusions she might come up with about her pregnancy are better or worse than others.

Yes, but these sound like the sort of arguments anyone might broach or proffer. The word obligation or duty, however, has little or no relevance here.

And you and I will have to agree to disagree on the matter of human "autonomy". It is prefabricated and refabricated over and over again from the cradle to the grave---depending on how many new points of view, experiences and relationships we encounter.

....that moral judgments are only made on the basis of political and economic interests is something difficult for me to imagine even being possible in the abstract, let alone a matter of fact on Earth.

Not that they are only made on this basis, only that we cannot fully grasp the choices people make unless we take them fully into consideration. Which means phenomenal interaction is integral to human behavior---not something that can be "transcended" by way of deduction.

I thought there wasn't a general question of the rights and wrongs of abortion? I thought it was all about a private or legal struggle, you said.

The "general question" is this: How will others react to the abortion Mary chose? The "general question" is this: What will others do about it?

Everytime we interact socially there are consequences. The consequences will effect different people in different ways. And people will generally react to them while endorsing different sets of value judgments. My point is then to suggest that the reactions embedded in legal [coercive] contexts be as far removed from Duty and Obligation as possible. Ethical narrators might consider the work of the great philosophers, sure. But let's have no illusions about the gaps that can [and must] exist between their words and our worlds when the punishments are being meted out.

Saying, "Abortion is wrong," isn't saying, "Abortion should be criminalized," unless you automatically infer legal sanctions from moral ones. But that's not something everyone automatically tends to do, regardless of whether they often do.

True. But lots and lots of folks in power don't make much of a distinction between immoral and illegal acts. Especially the dreaded authoritarians [coming from both political extremes] who are very much in favor of making illegal the behavior of those who refuse to accept the duty and obligation of all citizens.

Kant's categorical imperatives may well have been born of the best possible intentions. But so no doubt were the moral codes of lots of others convinced that Right, Wrong, Good, Evil were within the reach of the wisest of the wisest minds.

You seem to be defining moral problems into incomprehensible complexity....

Yes, that would be a fair assessment. The complexity of human interaction seems far beyond what philosophers can ever deduce. We can only hobble along subjunctively [intersubjectively] trying to create the least dysfunctional world for the least dysfunctional people. Acknowledging even the foolishness of trying to define what that means. Ethics as, say, the least untrue lies?

Kant wrote:

To abide by the previous examples: Firstly, under the head of necessary duty to oneself: He who contemplates suicide should ask himself whether his action can be consistent with the idea of humanity as an end in itself. If he destroys himself in order to escape from painful circumstances, he uses a person merely as a mean to maintain a tolerable condition up to the end of life. But a man is not a thing, that is to say, something which can be used merely as means, but must in all his actions be always considered as an end in himself. I cannot, therefore, dispose in any way of a man in my own person so as to mutilate him, to damage or kill him. (It belongs to ethics proper to define this principle more precisely, so as to avoid all misunderstanding, e. g., as to the amputation of the limbs in order to preserve myself, as to exposing my life to danger with a view to preserve it, etc. This question is therefore omitted here.)

Kant never left the place of his birth to the best of my knowledge. What then in the world did he know about the lives of others? What could he have possibly known about his own "sense of self" when he had so little experience putting it to the test in confronting others who viewed the world around them [in and out of their head] in many other countervailing ways?

All of his words above are just that---words. They define and defend other words. They make no references to the words of others relating to the lives they live out in the world he knew very, very little about. Why in the world would anyone take them seriously as existential reference points?

neither/nor original post:

You are asserting as a statement of fact something that can never more than an opinion.

Again, at this point, I'm going to have to at least partly conclude that you mean something else by words like morality, right, etc. than I (and any number of other philosophers) do. That would, though, mean that some of your criticism of "moral reasoning" by us philosophers or whatever is misdirected.

Mary kills her unborn fetus. If someone asks, "Is that moral?", or, "Was that the right thing to do?", what do the words mean? Is it possible to tell us epistemically the most rational thing they can mean? Aside from "theoretically"? I don't think so.

How then is Kant's "moral reasoning" not just another way of taking us away from Mary, away from what she did, away from the swirling vortex of existential variables and reactions seen in so many different ways by so many different people viewing it from so many different vantage points? Taking us instead toward something more academically suitable? Someting in the way of, say, an ivory tower?

Stay up there, fine. But sooner or later someone like me will eventually toss you the keys and point to the car. ; o )

neither/nor wrote:

Mary kills her unborn fetus. If someone asks, "Is that moral?", or, "Was that the right thing to do?", what do the words mean? Is it possible to tell us epistemically the most rational thing they can mean? Aside from "theoretically"? I don't think so.

In Kant, moral judgments are only a special class of judgments. Judgments one and all are made by agents. I understand Mary, as a human, to possess the same faculties that I do, but I don't expect Mary to possess the same knowledge concerning fetuses that I do: she may have more or less, or the same, but I don't have any reason right now to suspect any one of these things.

When she judges if she ought to abort her unborn child, she doesn't need to know anything about Kant. She may want to abort her child because she is scared, or some other reason, but is possibly compelled just the same to not - or she doesn't think such a compulsion. I'm not sure what a baby/fetus means to her.

neither/nor wrote:
How then is Kant's "moral reasoning" not just another way of taking us away from Mary, away from what she did, away from the swirling vortex of existential variables and reactions seen in so many different ways by so many different people viewing it from so many different vantage points? Taking us instead toward something more academically suitable? Someting in the way of, say, an ivory tower?

The focus in Kant's critical philosophy is to step away from the actual cases, and to examine what is necessary for such moral judgments in all agents. If we don't take all agents to have the same a priori knowledge concerning morality, then we have no common ground on which to stand. Insofar as we extend our moral judgments to other people we are recognizing them as being the same sort of beings as us, endowed with the same moral capacities. Insofar as we recognize ourselves as sharing a world with other people, we expect that there is a large amount of regularity in our understandings of the world - it's this later part that often doesn't prove to be the case.

Kant provides a description of how moral judgments work in order that we might have moral experience that we have. We experience inclinations from the body, but we also experience something counter to our natural inclinations. A man may be starving, and find something to eat, but knowing that a child is starving as well may feel demanded to give up the meal for this child. The satisfaction of the man's hunger is certainly good, as any pleasure is, but he recognizes a greater good in sacrificing for the child even though it hurts him to do so.

The sense of agency here is created by being demanded to do something better, but not necessarily being inclined to do it. The man can decide to eat it himself, and he very well might, but he knows what is better to do just the same since he has recognized his own judgment on the matter.

Determining a formulation of the Categorical Imperative doesn't tell us what sort of world we live in such that we may formulate a maxim to judge through it. For this you can't rely on any philosophy, we must pay witness to the moral law in each of us.

erosopher wrote:

In Kant, moral judgments are only a special class of judgments. Judgments one and all are made by agents. I understand Mary, as a human, to possess the same faculties that I do, but I don't expect Mary to possess the same knowledge concerning fetuses that I do: she may have more or less, or the same, but I don't have any reason right now to suspect any one of these things.

But Mary possesses a "faculty" Kant did not: a womb.

Let's start there then in discussing her "agency". When Kant speaks of duty and obligation how would he factor this into Mary's decision to kill or not kill the fetus?

And however much or however little knowledge Mary has of the fetus does not change the fact that bearing or not bearing a child will have an enormous impact on her life. An impact Kant and other men would know nothing about. Is that relevant here, in your view?

When she judges if she ought to abort her unborn child, she doesn't need to know anything about Kant.

Nor does she need to know anything about the ethical parameters of deontology. She just needs to make a choice she feels will have the least disruption...the least dysfunction...in her life. Yet Kant would insist this motivation is beside the point. Instead, she must concern herself only with that which is The Right Thing To Do. And yet how would Kant have even the slightest knowledge of this when he possessed not the slightest knowledge of what it is like to be pregnant with an unwanted fetus? Again, HIS approach to obligatory behavior in HER world.

You say:

The focus in Kant's critical philosophy is to step away from the actual cases, and to examine what is necessary for such moral judgments in all agents.

But "agents" are always deeply enscounced in actual worlds tbough. And no two agents are ever the same.

If we don't take all agents to have the same a priori knowledge concerning morality, then we have no common ground on which to stand.

What a priori knowledge do we all have [as agents] with respect to, say, the decision on the part of the Obama administration to send unmanned predator drones to drop bombs in Pakistan that results in significant "collateral damage"? The deaths of innocent men, women and children.

How would we, as citizens, communicate this knoweledge to each other such that we could derive the most rational ethical assessment of this action? And thus motivate us to choose behaviors deemed obligatory.

A man may be starving, and find something to eat, but knowing that a child is starving as well may feel demanded to give up the meal for this child. The satisfaction of the man's hunger is certainly good, as any pleasure is, but he recognizes a greater good in sacrificing for the child even though it hurts him to do so.

On the other hand, why in the world should either the man or the child be starving in a world where, for some of us, the problem is obesity? Why are not the Kantians insisting that part of their a posteriori knowledge is the understanding that, for the price of 10 stealth bombers, we could end starvation for all across the globe? Why does it not focus on the nature of a global economy where a tiny percentage of mankind live like kings while fully 3,000,000,000 less fortunate "agents" live on less than a dollar a day? What is our moral Duty in this world?

Determining a formulation of the Categorical Imperative doesn't tell us what sort of world we live in such that we may formulate a maxim to judge through it. For this you can't rely on any philosophy, we must pay witness to the moral law in each of us.

The formulation of Kant's Categorical Imperative doesn't tell us much of anything about the world we live in. That's my main point. And "the moral law in each of us"---what in the world might that be?

neither/nor wrote:
But no philosopher's arguments to date about those rules amount to more than introspective prejuduces. The conclusions are supported by premises that wobble and collapse as soon as the theoretical abstractions come into contact with the deeply embedded interaction of contingency, chance and change.

"Deeply embedded contingency, chance and change" sounds as amorphous as a lot of what I've said, though. When reality collides with it, it'd just wash away, too.

The word obligation or duty, however, has little or no relevance here.

No relevance to you, and I might not even cash my arguments out to Mary in the coin of those words, either, but I could, and I bet she'd understand what I meant if I did. Or at any rate I'd make sure to talk to her in a way that she could understand. The concept of the right thing to do would always remain applied, here, though.

Not that they are only made on this basis, only that we cannot fully grasp the choices people make unless we take them fully into consideration. Which means phenomenal interaction is integral to human behavior---not something that can be "transcended" by way of deduction.

If I'm a moral intuitionist, I can very well refer to a concrete, worldly, etc. experience of morality, not a transcendental deduction of anything, and what will your abstract, transcendental turn of phrase phenomenal interaction mean to me in that context? If I tell you, as I know some people would be liable to, that I just feel, and know that my feelings are perfectly accurate, what's right and wrong for me, how does chanting "contingency, chance and change" contradict my intuition? How can my feelings be mistaken?

My point is then to suggest that the reactions embedded in legal [coercive] contexts be as far removed from Duty and Obligation as possible. Ethical narrators might consider the work of the great philosophers, sure. But let's have no illusions about the gaps that can [and must] exist between their words and our worlds when the punishments are being meted out.

That's a much different thesis than, "No one who thinks of the world in terms of verifiable right and wrong is thinking of it correctly," though, which thesis was the one you were advancing earlier.

Kant never left the place of his birth to the best of my knowledge. What then in the world did he know about the lives of others? What could he have possibly known about his own "sense of self" when he had so little experience putting it to the test in confronting others who viewed the world around them [in and out of their head] in many other countervailing ways?

We can know about distant galaxies without visiting them. And not leaving one town doesn't mean not meeting other people (either as neighbors or through their writing and so on). Kant routinely engaged with contrary points of view, including those of the people surrounding him.

Anyway, a person X doesn't absolutely need other people to know about X. And since X = that person him- or herself, then knowing the self doesn't as such necessitate knowing other people. That would be like claiming that to know about a table M, I need to look at table N. There may be heuristic(?) value in comparing the two, but it's not absolutely critical to do the comparison, here.

All of his words above are just that---words. They define and defend other words. They make no references to the words of others relating to the lives they live out in the world he knew very, very little about. Why in the world would anyone take them seriously as existential reference points?

They're not just words, they have a fairly straightforward application to actual things that exist in the world (suicide, making plans, feelings, free will, etc.).

Why would anyone take seriously Nietzsche's writings? Did *he* know everything? Has anyone's life ever eternally recurred (or whatever)? How does "transvaluation of all values" signify anything in the real human world? (I know how it does, but since it does and it's not more exceedingly exotic than "categorical imperative," for instance, if you understand the one, you're well-equipped to understand the other.)

Is it possible to tell us epistemically the most rational thing they can mean?

Words mean what we choose them to mean, and there's not a lot in the way of "rational thing[s] they can mean" except for, well, anything we use them to refer to or connote.

My definition of, say, right action isn't exactly better than yours or anyone else's. However, unlike yours (or the gist of what you seem to mean when you say stuff like obligation), mine denotes something that exists in reality and which is readily known by everyone.

How then is Kant's "moral reasoning" not just another way of taking us away from Mary, away from what she did, away from the swirling vortex of existential variables and reactions seen in so many different ways by so many different people viewing it from so many different vantage points? Taking us instead toward something more academically suitable? Someting in the way of, say, an ivory tower?

What are you talking about when you say "Kant's 'moral reasoning'"?

Stay up there, fine. But sooner or later someone like me will eventually toss you the keys and point to the car.

Well, I'll just smash the car and then ask you how to rebuild it without using any theoretical knowledge of cars in the process.

You deeply misread the intention and the meaning of my post. You also deeply misunderstand Kant and the direction in which his ethical work points.

The shortest explanation of your misreading is that you are treating Kant's ethics like they are prescriptive when they are descriptive.

The complexity created in reading Kant is that while he is only providing a description, it is a description of judgments that we make which prescribe actions for us.

neither/nor wrote:

But Mary possesses a "faculty" Kant did not: a womb.

Let's start there then in discussing her "agency". When Kant speaks of duty and obligation how would he factor this into Mary's decision to kill or not kill the fetus?

Kant can't judge for Mary, as you should have been able to determine from my post if you had read it with any care. As for her womb, this may contribute to her inclinations in certain ways, as organs impose certain demands on us either by being in a physical condition or by releasing chemicals. This will impact what Mary is dealing with when she is determining what she will do.

neither/nor wrote:
And however much or however little knowledge Mary has of the fetus does not change the fact that bearing or not bearing a child will have an enormous impact on her life. An impact Kant and other men would know nothing about. Is that relevant here, in your view?

Once again you fail to miss the point. The knowledge she has about fetuses and particularly the fact that she has one in her, is crucial to her thinking and deciding about it. Imagine she was told she had a fetus in her and she understood a fetus to be a sort of exotic fruit - this is an extreme example, but it highlights how much empirical knowledge can skew ones reactions in moral situations.

Kant can't predict what concepts people employ when determining and understanding objects, and he makes no attempt to.

neither/nor wrote:
Nor does she need to know anything about the ethical parameters of deontology. She just needs to make a choice she feels will have the least disruption...the least dysfunction...in her life. Yet Kant would insist this motivation is beside the point. Instead, she must concern herself only with that which is The Right Thing To Do.

You are saying my point exactly. Kant's work is not a decision procedure - she is going to be torn in multiple directions, between her duty and her inclination, and nobody can determine which direction she will go in but her.

neither/nor wrote:
And yet how would Kant have even the slightest knowledge of this when he possessed not the slightest knowledge of what it is like to be pregnant with an unwanted fetus? Again, HIS approach to obligatory behavior in HER world.

He doesn't attempt to have the slightest knowledge about her. His approach is merely to provide a description of a priori knowledge, without which morality would be impossible as a concept.

If we did not have a concept of space a priori the concept of triangle would be impossible for us to generate in any meaningful way.

neither/nor wrote:
But "agents" are always deeply enscounced in actual worlds tbough. And no two agents are ever the same.

This shows that you just don't understand a concept of the a priori.

neither/nor wrote:
If we don't take all agents to have the same a priori knowledge concerning morality, then we have no common ground on which to stand.

What a priori knowledge do we all have [as agents] with respect to, say, the decision on the part of the Obama administration to send unmanned predator drones to drop bombs in Pakistan that results in significant "collateral damage"? The deaths of innocent men, women and children.

neither/nor wrote:
How would we, as citizens, communicate this knoweledge to each other such that we could derive the most rational ethical assessment of this action? And thus motivate us to choose behaviors deemed obligatory.

The a priori knowledge isn't problematic in our communication, it is the empirical knowledge that we have different perspectives on. We communicate our knowledge by talking about it.

neither/nor wrote:
On the other hand, why in the world should either the man or the child be starving in a world where, for some of us, the problem is obesity?Why are not the Kantians insisting that part of their a posteriori knowledge is the understanding that, for the price of 10 stealth bombers, we could end starvation for all across the globe? Why does it not focus on the nature of a global economy where a tiny percentage of mankind live like kings while fully 3,000,000,000 less fortunate "agents" live on less than a dollar a day?

You seem to have completely failed at engaging with my example in any meaningful way, then you seem to impute to 'Kantians' some sort of political position where we want to have stealth bombers instead of feeding everyone? I don't understand why you would suggest that.

neither/nor wrote:
[/quote]What is our moral Duty in this world?[/quote]

Whatever we judge it to be.

The formulation of Kant's Categorical Imperative doesn't tell us much of anything about the world we live in.

My point is stronger actually: the categorical imperative contains absolutely nothing about the world in it.

That's my main point. And "the moral law in each of us"---what in the world might that be?

What each person judges to be their duty, as opposed to what they are inclined to do.