Of course it's a jumble of different vantage points. That's the point of, say, arguments from the original position. And once again, I don't see why the fact that there are many particulars to sort through or otherwise take account of entails the impossibility of reaching a determinate conclusion to some ethical problem. Or, more pointedly, maybe the thing to do is just to sort of ignore certain factors because factoring them into the equation would make the problem too difficult to solve.

This sounds ever so seamless when the "ethical problems" are being confronted abstractly. And, theoretically, anything is possible. They're only words defining and defending other words, after all. But for all practical purposes this sort of analysis has not fared too well.

Pertaining to something more focused, what determinate conclusions did you have in mind? What factors could be reasonably ignored in broaching an epistemic assault on the trials and tribulations of folks groping to extricate themselves from one or another particular moral morass?

you say:

....while it's true that there's this massive existential flux surrounding us when we make moral decisions, the thing is that the only way for us to make those decisions correctly is to hold our judgments above that flux.

I say:

An example please. What particular judgments have you held above the fray in counseling others to reconfigure their behaviors to more closely align themselves with the Moral Law?

The powers of imagination and concentration and the ability to ask questions, when combined, free us from being completely determined by empirical facts (including determined as to how we interpret those facts).

They free us only in circumstantial contexts in which the conflicting parties all agree they are liberated. But the more folks drawn into the discussions and debates the greater the fractures. And when we begin to discuss the meaning of "liberation" we are all once again far flung across the board. What does it mean to be both free and autonomous in choosing our behaviors when weighing the relationship between empirical and rational truths? Do you imagine this can be known?

....doing science is not the same as doing ethics, which I readily agree with. But [that's] not to say anything about the objectivity or resolvability of problems faced by those doing either.

Only that scientists have made astonding progress since the time of Plato and Aristotle in grasping objectively the natural world around us; while at the same time ethicists have made virtually none at all. Unless of course you count theoretical jargon.

me [original post]:

...eventually the empirical data will confirm one side over the other.

Not necessarily (hence my remark about string theory).

String theory is out at the very edges of science. To encompass all the things scientists have, in fact, already resolved just look at this astonishing technology we are using here to discuss these things. But what has Kant resolved with respect to even a single significant moral conflict?

Lots and lots and lots of different people believe lots and lots and lots of different things about how the Earth came to exist, but this doesn't imply that everyone's opinion is equally likely to be true. Ditto for a claim like, "Mary shouldn't kill Sarah just because Sarah pissed her off, even if Mary could totally get away with it." Either it's true or it's not.

Yes, but when science grappled with, "why are there earthquakes?", eventually plate tectonics was embraced by all [believed by all] to be the explanation. Is this ever the case though when social "science" grapples with resolving the most crippling moral earthquakes?

How could "Mary killing Sarah is wrong", be true objectively? There are so many different sets of circumstances possible here, it would be absurd to conclude that it is either true or not true. And if Mary does get away with it [for whatever reason] and chooses not be bothered by it, of what possible difference could it make to her if everyone else says it was immoral? Doesn't her "autonomy" count here too?

....you're perceiving more disagreement on moral issues than actually exists (at least in the philosophical community).

Yes, in the philosophical community differences of opinion can be resolved by merely convincing others to accept the meaning and the definition you ascribe to the words you use to formulate concepts...and precepts. But what happens when this language is introduced to the far more obscure, equivocal, labyrinthine world of actual human ambiguities? We know what happens, of course.

....if no one's moral standpoint is any more valid than anyone else's (or, more precisely, if no one's is valid at all, not to mention compared to other people's), what is left to negotiate after everyone realizes this?

In democratic republics across the globe we see what happens all the time. There is discussion and debate in which different people viewing moral and political issues from different angles grope to come up with legislation that please some most of the time but please few all of the time. Not many will be quoting Kant in these sessions, that's for sure.

And there are some things all sides can agree on. For example in the abortion wars, everyone agrees that coming up with ways to actually minimize the number of abortions is a good thing. But then immediately they get into heated [futile] debates over how exactly to go about this. One side screams "abstinence!", the other side, "birth control!" But human sexuality is such a visceral, instinctive component of human relationships, it is virtually impossible to shove it out of the way so that we can be "rational" about it.

me [original post]:

The only general ethical truth I can reasonably accept is that human social interaction necessitates rules.

I don't think that that's exactly an ethical truth, though. It sounds more like a pragmatic one.

Okay, but my point is that social interaction necessitates a practical code of conduct. And if we can agree on that, we will have at least moved beyond the brute facticity of a "might makes right" law of the jungle. Or as much as we are ever likely to in world in which, indeed, in so many crucial contexts, might does make right.

Even if there is some true first principle of right and wrong, this doesn't exactly mean that, if everyone knew it, then no one's actions would conflict with anyone else's (or even that everyone would assert knowledge of that principle).

True. But wouldn't it be wonderful to live in a world in which we could confront those who transgress with irrefutable proof that they are in fact behaving unethically? We can't though, can we?

But setting that fact aside, I'll go with the idea of the original position for now and say, "Rules for behavior arrived at impartially, not self-contradictory or self-defeating if practiced by everyone, general in reference, publicly stated, meant to protect everyone's interests as much as possible consistent with the interests of everyone else, are the ones everyone should follow. And the people whose interests are in question are those who are capable of forming ideas about justice."

A personal for instance please. As Rand might suggest, Name this impartial, non self-contradictory rule of behavior. Ironically, Rand's rules basically revolved around the objective individual! Think about it. The individual behaved objectively if they behaved as she would. Rand despised Kant, of course, but Kant's Moral Law is really not all that far removed from Rand's own alleged metaphysical conquest. Kant was just more sophisticated as a philosopher.

me [original post]:

Give me an example of a trial you are familiar with. Or I'll give you an example of one I am familiar with. Anything that gets us away from the purely hypothetical or the abstract or the theoretical.

I'll make it simple and directly relevant to this conversation: Roe v. Wade. Otherwise, I'd think it's more or less common knowledge that American law is so complex that a murder trial, for instance, involves a labyrinth of definitions, procedures, etc. and, for the defendant and those close to the victim, a very emotionally loaded navigation thereof

Actually, I was thinking more of a trial and tribulation you had endured personally in calibrating your behavior against the conflicting behaviors of others. But okay, Roe.

The law here is complex because no one can say with any degree of certainty [finality] whether [when] the killing of a human fetus ought to be construed as murder. No one can generate an argumentt such that everyone will agree it is... categorically and imperatively...immoral for any woman in any set of circumstances at any point in time to kill it.

When Kant suggests we must behave so as to project that behavior onto all of us in a universal application of the Moral Code, what could he have possibly known about being pregnant with a fetus he did not want to bring into this world?

What can any man possibly know about this particular relationship?

neither/nor wrote:
What factors could be reasonably ignored in broaching an epistemic assault on the trials and tribulations of folks groping to extricate themselves from one or another particular moral morass?

Whichever ones, on a case-by-case basis, would make that morass inextricable from. Whether I did X on Tuesday or Wednesday, for instance, is not, by itself, something I exactly have to take into account when judging X. I'm actually starting to not see how empirical contingencies are very relevant to solving moral problems at all, though, so I guess I could say that the thing to do is throw out virtually everything empirical about the actions in question.

An example please. What particular judgments have you held above the fray in counseling others to reconfigure their behaviors to more closely align themselves with the Moral Law?

Not many. Usually the thing is that I'm trying to align *myself* with that law. So I hold judgments about my own actions above that fray. For instance, I recently showed myself when dealing with a person from my past (well, maybe "past" is too strong a description since I'm talking only like a month or so since I last saw that person) to be mentally and emotionally weaker than I think I should ultimately be, so judged my expression of that weakness as... maybe not exactly wrong, but definitely not ideal, either.

They free us only in circumstantial contexts in which the conflicting parties all agree they are liberated. But the more folks drawn into the discussions and debates the greater the fractures. And when we begin to discuss the meaning of "liberation" we are all once again far flung across the board. What does it mean to be both free and autonomous in choosing our behaviors when weighing the relationship between empirical and rational truths? Do you imagine this can be known?

I still don't know how you'd define knowledge, even stipulatively, so I don't want to answer that question yet.

Only that scientists have made astonding progress since the time of Plato and Aristotle in grasping objectively the natural world around us; while at the same time ethicists have made virtually none at all. Unless of course you count theoretical jargon.

Well, I think they *have*, and even if only theoretically, well, here's something interesting I read a short while ago:

... it is not surprising that, despite Kant’s defense, many people continue to believe that ethical theories are useless in practice. Contemporary philosophers who work in “applied ethics,” particularly in bioethics, often say this. Part of the problem is that every general ethical theory seems flawed, for reasons such as we have mentioned. But even setting that aside, the precepts of ethical theory seem too neat and abstract to be of any use in dealing with real cases, which are messy and particular.

Is this a fair complaint? Suppose it were said that physics is irrelevant to automobile mechanics, because a mechanic cannot “apply” the principles of physics to determine what is wrong with a car? Or that biology is irrelevant to medicine because a physician cannot “apply” the principles of biology to diagnose a patient’s illness? Such remarks would seem very odd. Certainly, the highest-level laws of physics are not of much use to the auto mechanic; nevertheless, cars obey physical laws, and a working knowledge of scientific principles is often useful. The same may be said of the physician’s knowledge of biology: while a good doctor needs to know a lot more than biology, in many instances a working knowledge of biology might be critical.

The relation of ethical theory to practice might be like the relation between biology and medicine. Just as fundamental research in biology may sometimes concern matters distant from the physician’s problems, fundamental issues in ethical theory might sometimes seem far from issues of practical choice. Moreover, as in medicine, practical judgment in ethics may require more than theoretical knowledge, and theory may be more useful in some instances than in others. But this does not mean that ethical theory is useless in practical decision-making, any more than biology is useless in medicine. In both areas, Kant’s remark might be apt: “No-one can pretend to be practically versed in a branch of knowledge and yet treat theory with scorn, without exposing the fact that he is an ignoramus in his subject.” (James Rachels, "Theory and Practice")

But even if we haven't gotten farther than square one in our theorizing, it's not a valid inference from, "Students of X are not progressing at knowing X," to, "Progress in knowing X is impossible."

String theory is out at the very edges of science. To encompass all the things scientists have, in fact, already resolved just look at this astonishing technology we are using here to discuss these things. But what has Kant resolved with respect to even a single significant moral conflict?

No more than any individual scientist singlehandedly delivered us contemporary information technology. But all the ethicists from Socrates and the Stoics to Jesus and Locke, Rousseau, and Kant and then Mill and so on have together helped encourage the ideals of political freedom and cosmopolitan enlightenment in a way that does find some reflection in the facts on the ground of the moral development of humanity on Earth.

However, even if this development did not occur, or has not occurred, this doesn't imply that ethical theories are uniformly false. Unlike judgments of scientific fact, which aim only at one thing, truth (in some form), ethical judgments involve a struggle between right and wrong within us. So while the unity of scientists' goals serves to unify their judgments, the moral conflict inside of us could serve to prevent us from accepting the ethical truth instead, thereby impeding the progress of ethical theory on Earth.

Yes, in the philosophical community differences of opinion can be resolved by merely convincing others to accept the meaning and the definition you ascribe to the words you use to formulate concepts...and precepts. But what happens when this language is introduced to the far more obscure, equivocal, labyrinthine world of actual human ambiguities? We know what happens, of course.

Philosophers' agreement has to do with more than just accepting certain definitions. Both Kant and Mill, for example, as apparently opposed as they are, arrived at the same justification for religion: take evidentialism about legitimate belief but pair it with an acknowledgment that belief is not the only propositional attitude out there, raise everything to the power of morality, and what you get equals that people are very well entitled to hope that death is not (necessarily) the end.

In democratic republics across the globe we see what happens all the time. There is discussion and debate in which different people viewing moral and political issues from different angles grope to come up with legislation that please some most of the time but please few all of the time. Not many will be quoting Kant in these sessions, that's for sure.

But they're still quoting some moral outlook. If you convince them to abandon those outlooks, what would they have to discuss?

And there are some things all sides can agree on. For example in the abortion wars, everyone agrees that coming up with ways to actually minimize the number of abortions is a good thing. But then immediately they get into heated [futile] debates over how exactly to go about this. One side screams "abstinence!", the other side, "birth control!" But human sexuality is such a visceral, instinctive component of human relationships, it is virtually impossible to shove it out of the way so that we can be "rational" about it.

Okay, but if there's some general starting point that everyone agrees on, then (again) in principle the moves we need to make from that point to get to our goal could eventually be figured out.

Incidentally, I don't think anything is too visceral or instinctive to shove out of the way of our thinking. My estimate of reason's power must be quite different from yours...

But wouldn't it be wonderful to live in a world in which we could confront those who transgress with irrefutable proof that they are in fact behaving unethically? We can't though, can we?

What would be so great about it? If they're going to do the wrong thing even if they're aware of its wrongfulness, it doesn't make much difference whether outsiders can prove this to them.

The main advantage of ethical proofs would not be for interpersonal judgment, or even judgment of our own past actions, but for use in deciding what to do in the future.

A personal for instance please. As Rand might suggest, Name this impartial, non self-contradictory rule of behavior.

I'll just directly cite Rawls again (plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/#TwoPriJusFai):

First Principle: Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all;

Second Principle: Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions:

They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity;
They are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle).

Actually, I was thinking more of a trial and tribulation you had endured personally in calibrating your behavior against the conflicting behaviors of others.

Why? That's not the kind of trial I was referring to. Again, less than entirely relevant train of thought...

The law here is complex because no one can say with any degree of certainty [finality] whether [when] the killing of a human fetus ought to be construed as murder. No one can generate an argumentt such that everyone will agree it is... categorically and imperatively...immoral for any woman in any set of circumstances at any point in time to kill it.

Other laws in this country are complex, though, too (see blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2009/10/ochoa_on_the_du.htm for an example). And legality and morality are rather not absolutely the same thing.

When Kant suggests we must behave so as to project that behavior onto all of us in a universal application of the Moral Code, what could he have possibly known about being pregnant with a fetus he did not want to bring into this world? What can any man possibly know about this particular relationship?

Since Kant doesn't suggest that...

n/n original post:

What factors could be reasonably ignored in broaching an epistemic assault on the trials and tribulations of folks groping to extricate themselves from one or another particular moral morass?

szavieur:

Whichever ones, on a case-by-case basis, would make that morass inextricable from. Whether I did X on Tuesday or Wednesday, for instance, is not, by itself, something I exactly have to take into account when judging X. I'm actually starting to not see how empirical contingencies are very relevant to solving moral problems at all, though, so I guess I could say that the thing to do is throw out virtually everything empirical about the actions in question.


I am imagining you discussing this with folks who are in fact in the middle of a tumultuous moral morass: "What you must learn to do is throw out the empirical contingencies altogether and concentrate only on what it is your duty to do in order to be in compliance [philosophically?] with the Moral Law".

And this would, for all practical purposes, help them....how? I suspect [and it is only a supposition on my part] it is the contingencies themselves you wish to make go away. It muddies the theoretical arguments, as it were.

Admit it: Kant can't help them unless he can convince them to abandon the circumstantial contexts that ever vex them and instead become philosophers who contemplate these things more...scholastically?

I still don't know how you'd define knowledge....

Do I know what knowledge is?
Do I know what knowledge is?
Do I know what knowledge is?

Nope.

Do you?

As near as I can tell, knowledge is only what I think I know knowledge might be---here and now. Tomorrow? Well, tomorrow I could come across a point of view [here in ephilosopher, for example] that leads me in another direction altogether.

What intrigues me more though is this: I need to choose a new behavior. Why? Because a situation has arisen that puts my behavior in conflict with the behavior of another [or others]. Now, what do I need to know about this in order to make the most rational, dutiful behavior?

From my existential perspective, this always, ever depends on a confluence of subjective points of view that are always, ever shifting and changing in unfolding circumstantial contexts we can never be fully knowledgable of.


....here's something interesting I read a short while ago:

... it is not surprising that, despite Kant’s defense, many peoAndple continue to believe that ethical theories are useless in practice. Contemporary philosophers who work in “applied ethics,” particularly in bioethics, often say this. Part of the problem is that every general ethical theory seems flawed, for reasons such as we have mentioned. But even setting that aside, the precepts of ethical theory seem too neat and abstract to be of any use in dealing with real cases, which are messy and particular.

Is this a fair complaint?

My point is not that ethical theory is useless, only that it is always more or less problematic existentially. And never knowledgeable enough to resolve even the most insignicant of moral disputes. So, yes, the complaint is right smack dab in the bullseye.

Suppose it were said that physics is irrelevant to automobile mechanics, because a mechanic cannot “apply” the principles of physics to determine what is wrong with a car? Or that biology is irrelevant to medicine because a physician cannot “apply” the principles of biology to diagnose a patient’s illness? Such remarks would seem very odd. Certainly, the highest-level laws of physics are not of much use to the auto mechanic; nevertheless, cars obey physical laws, and a working knowledge of scientific principles is often useful. The same may be said of the physician’s knowledge of biology: while a good doctor needs to know a lot more than biology, in many instances a working knowledge of biology might be critical.

As long as the mechanic and the physician can derive the knowledgeable behaviors necessary to make the car and the body function with the least amount of breakdown, theory and practice will of be little concern to most.

The physical relationship between the parts of an engine and the parts of a vital organs can be grasped with an extraordinary amount of sophisticated understanding. The moral relationship between human behaviors however is unimaginably less coherent. Kant hasn't changed this.

But even if we haven't gotten farther than square one in our theorizing, it's not a valid inference from, "Students of X are progressing at knowing X," to, "Progress in knowing X is impossible."

But that is the sort of rationalization a religionist might broach when suggesting "just because I haven't gotten any closer to proving the existence of God does not mean His existence is impossible. And I am making progress."

Really, what progress? What hard evidence [subject to experimentation, prediction and replication] can you proffer?

And re the Moral Law, it would be a more reasonable argument if there was any progress at all to report. But there is not. Only theoretical conjectures said to be more sophisticated than...what? And with respect to what singular moral conflict that is tearing us apart?

.....all the ethicists from Socrates and the Stoics to Jesus and Locke, Rousseau, and Kant and then Mill and so on have together helped encourage the ideals of political freedom and cosmopolitan enlightenment in a way that does find some reflection in the facts on the ground of the moral development of humanity on Earth.

I don't believe they were the primary impetus. Instead, the "progress" is rooted more organically in the evolution of political economy. As slash and burn cultures gave way to hunters and gatherers gave way to feudalism [in Europe] gave way to mercantilism and burgeoning world trade gave way to capitalism gave way to the welfare state gave way to the modern global economy, it was always necessary to reconfigure the social, political and economic superstructure such that the rule of law and democracy came into existence.

Is it going out of existence now?

There is no moral progress...only different ways in which human communities choose to interact. Anything can be rationalized. In part because, throughout human history, almost everything already has been.

Kant in his own way is like Marx: He seeks to transcend the enormously complex vagaries of human interaction historically by grounding human conduct in that which transends contingency, chance and change. Marx did this "scientifically", Kant, "synthetically". And Rand, "metaphysically".

But the only constant is change.

Ethical theories themselves can be "uniformally true" because all one need do is convince others that the words and concepts used to encompass them are uniformally true. And you can always challenge those who disagree to demonstrate that they are not.

Or, as I constructed my argument above:

....in the philosophical community differences of opinion can be resolved by merely convincing others to accept the meaning and the definition you ascribe to the words you use to formulate concepts...and precepts. But what happens when this language is introduced to the far more obscure, equivocal, labyrinthine world of actual human ambiguities? We know what happens, of course.

To which you respond:

Philosophers' agreement has to do with more than just accepting certain definitions.

Yes, but if accummulating all the things they do agree on doesn't get us any closer to ending the crushing moral conflicts themselves the accomplishment is bascially academic.

....they're still quoting some moral outlook. If you convince them to abandon those outlooks, what would they have to discuss?

Again, I'm not suggesting people abandon moral outlooks, only that they situate them in particular existential trajectories. And then come to recognize that had those trajectories been very different so no doubt would the moral narratives.

Most importantly, they must come to accept there is not any one narrative that is...by definition or analytically...better than any other. People have different experiences and the experiences always change over time. That has to be the most crucial ingredient in any approach to prescribing and proscribing any particular human behaviors.

....I don't think anything is too visceral or instinctive to shove out of the way of our thinking. My estimate of reason's power must be quite different from yours...

No shoving, just situating.

And my estimate of reason's power [or lack thereof] is embedded in a lifetime filled to the bursting point with turbulence. From a childhood bruited about in the belly of the working class beast, to living in a hell hole in Vietnam, to a no holds barred rollercoaster ride in college, to a 20 + year stint in and out of various radical political organizations, I was confronted time and time again with moral conflagrations that easily shredded anything epistemologists grapple with in conceptualizing right and wrong behavior. Duty? Obligation?

To that I feel duty bound to say this: Get real!!!

The main advantage of ethical proofs would not be for interpersonal judgment, or even judgment of our own past actions, but for use in deciding what to do in the future.

Well, as I have noted previously, if you ever come upon an "ethical proof" with respect to any particular conflict that prompted you to behave in an obligatory manner please bring it to my attention. Then propose the manner in which all of us might embrace it...as a manifestation of our duty...irrespective of the particular circumstantial context in which the behavior must perforce fit in.

First Principle: Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all;

Second Principle: Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions:

They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity;

They are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle).

And how exactly did Rawls manage to reconcile this with, say, human reality? Rawls is no more able to demonstrate precepts like this definitively than any other political theorist----from Plato to Marx to Rand. He invents this ideal world in his head. He invents this ideal rendition of justice. He speaks of "principles" to justify it.

This is the illusion of the autodidact. His heart is in the right place perhaps but his arguments are sheer speculation regarding what could be if only everyone else thought about human social, political and econimic interaction as he does.

On the other hand, Rawls' arguments may well be, in my view, the best of all possible worlds.

neither/nor wrote:
I am imagining you discussing this with folks who are in fact in the middle of a tumultuous moral morass: "What you must learn to do is throw out the empirical contingencies altogether and concentrate only on what it is your duty to do in order to be in compliance [philosophically?] with the Moral Law".

No, I don't want to directly talk about this in terms of any moral laws right now. I would just say, "When someone tells you what to do, and you ask, 'Why?' the only way to come up with the right answer to that question is to think it up without factoring empirical contingencies into the process."

As near as I can tell, knowledge is only what I think I know knowledge might be---here and now. Tomorrow? Well, tomorrow I could come across a point of view [here in ephilosopher, for example] that leads me in another direction altogether.

I know what I mean when I use words like know. I'm thinking of something that has to do with the epistemic regress, internalism and externalism, apriority and experience, etc. A precise definition may be impossible, not because of the fragmentary nature of the subject but because of its conceptual irreducibility.

As long as the mechanic and the physician can derive the knowledgeable behaviors necessary to make the car and the body function with the least amount of breakdown, theory and practice will of be little concern to most.

But what is or is not of concern to most is beside the point of the analogy, I think.

But that is the sort of rationalization a religionist might broach when suggesting "just because I haven't gotten any closer to proving the existence of God does not mean His existence is impossible. And I am making progress."

I wasn't rationalizing anything, I was pointing out that the conclusion you seemed to be drawing from our (alleged) lack of progress on moral issues was invalidly inferred.

Really, what progress? What hard evidence [subject to experimentation, prediction and replication] can you proffer?

How could an ethical assertion ever be predictive? They involve telling us what we ought to do, not what we will do.

I don't believe [Socrates and the Stoics to Jesus and Locke, Rousseau, and Kant and then Mill] were the primary impetus. Instead, the "progress" is rooted more organically in the evolution of political economy. As slash and burn cultures gave way to hunters and gatherers gave way to feudalism [in Europe] gave way to mercantilism and burgeoning world trade gave way to capitalism gave way to the welfare state gave way to the modern global economy, it was always necessary to reconfigure the social, political and economic superstructure such that the rule of law and democracy came into existence.

Are organizations like Amnesty International or the UN or the Red Cross and so on similarly motivated? Or do they reflect real moral progress?

... if accummulating all the things they do agree on doesn't get us any closer to ending the crushing moral conflicts themselves the accomplishment is bascially academic.

But now what is *your* kind of thinking going to do? It's even more useless than mine: it has no motivational power of its own. Whether or not everything's contingent, changing, and chancy won't influence how people tend to judge things, will it?

Again, I'm not suggesting people abandon moral outlooks, only that they situate them in particular existential trajectories. And then come to recognize that had those trajectories been very different so no doubt would the moral narratives.

But once they recognize this, what reason do they have to hold to their principles? They might as well just arbitrarily reconfigure them.

And my estimate of reason's power [or lack thereof] is embedded in a lifetime filled to the bursting point with turbulence. From a childhood bruited about in the belly of the working class beast, to living in a hell hole in Vietnam, to a no holds barred rollercoaster ride in college, to a 20 + year stint in and out of various radical political organizations, I was confronted time and time again with moral conflagrations that easily shredded anything epistemologists grapple with in conceptualizing right and wrong behavior. Duty? Obligation?

To that I feel duty bound to say this: Get real!!!

Lots of people have lots of different experiences, though. If I asked those involved with Solidarity in Poland, for instance, they might testify instead to the strength of ideals in their lives. So relying on yours or their testimony to decide the question of the relevance of ideals to reality wouldn't be the best idea. I need some higher standard, either that of a global perspective on history or a transcendental perspective on reality in general itself. Both from those points of view, to the extent that I think I've managed to adopt them now and again, it appears to me that reason, regardless of whether it has decided the course of history, can. Or more to the point, no one would have any freedom of will without reason in the first place, so every action and so every development of anything in any way by humanity on Earth ultimately turns on reason's power to develop it.

Well, as I have noted previously, if you ever come upon an "ethical proof" with respect to any particular conflict that prompted you to behave in an obligatory manner please bring it to my attention. Then propose the manner in which all of us might embrace it...as a manifestation of our duty...irrespective of the particular circumstantial context in which the behavior must perforce fit in.

Why follow your instructions? What does it matter whether "everyone" embraces my particular moral proof regarding some particular action I do? The disagreement between particularists and generalists in ethics is not the same as denying or affirming the objectivity involved in ethical judgment.

Now for an example: I had to choose a while back whether I would go live in the city with a guy I knew and was sort of friends with. His attitude dragged me down a lot, though, and I ended up deciding that I had to live without him. The ethical principle I fell back on was one of self-esteem: suffering for his sake in that situation in the way he implicitly expected me to would have degraded me.

And how exactly did Rawls manage to reconcile this with, say, human reality? Rawls is no more able to demonstrate precepts like this definitively than any other political theorist----from Plato to Marx to Rand. He invents this ideal world in his head. He invents this ideal rendition of justice. He speaks of "principles" to justify it.

Again, this is to imagine that justifying ethical assertions is supposed to be like justifying scientific theories. It's not. It's more like (although with its own substantial differences) doing pure math.

No, I don't want to directly talk about this in terms of any moral laws right now. I would just say, "When someone tells you what to do, and you ask, 'Why?' the only way to come up with the right answer to that question is to think it up without factoring empirical contingencies into the process."

Yes, I well understand that. Foucusing on the relationship between any particular moral quandary and any particular human behavior takes us out of the Hallowed Hall [or the Ivory Tower] that Kant felt particularly comfortable in.

So, when someone asks a Kantian, "why do you support charging Mary, impregnated as a result of a rape, with murder for aborting the fetus?", he can say, "no, I don't wish to discuss the empirical contingencies now, only the moral parameters of abortion per se".

I know what I mean when I use words like know. I'm thinking of something that has to do with the epistemic regress, internalism and externalism, apriority and experience, etc. A precise definition may be impossible, not because of the fragmentary nature of the subject but because of its conceptual irreducibility.

Exactly. You wish to channel the discssion into an abstract debate about "epistemic regress, internalism and externalism, apriority and experience", while I wish to focus much, much more on the "experience" part.

A "precise" definition is always less problematic without the anbiguities of actual human interaction. Definitions revolve around words, after all. And if we can agree on the definition of what a knowledgeable person construes the word "know" to mean then, well, that is what it must mean.

How could an ethical assertion ever be predictive? They involve telling us what we ought to do, not what we will do.

It is predictive in the sense that if someone were to lie, one could make the prediction that a Kantian will call the lie a violation of the moral law. And one can also predict that if I were to aim a conversation about a particular lie in the direction of the circumstantial context in which the lie was uttered, most Kantians will insist the existential parameters are largely moot.

Are organizations like Amnesty International or the UN or the Red Cross and so on similarly motivated [by the historical evolution of political economy]? Or do they reflect real moral progress?

It is certainly not just a coincidence that organizations like this came into existence in a world where the rule of law and democracy prevail and not in, say, Feudal Europe. But to insist their existence transcends historical institutions and reflects instead some universal, transcendental truth about human relationships is sophistic. There are still any number of forces in play across the globe [from religious jihadists to neo-fascist political players] who seek to reconstruct the role of organizations like this to reflect their own narrower [much narrower] renditions of human rights and human freedom. And they are just as fervently convinced of their moral righteousness.

Everything is always in flux historically. All renditions of "freedom" "liberty" "justice" "right" and "wrong", like renditions of the just and proper role between the individual and government, shift over time so as to encompass any number of contradictory "definitions". And the applications are even more diverse.

At best, we can embrace these organizations and try to convince others they are, in fact, reflective of the best of all possible worlds. But in no way shape or form can a philosopher demonstrate beyond all dispute they reflect a manifestation of something analogous to an ontological truth; a truth such that we are obligated to behave only in one way if we are to be thought in compliance with some ahistorical, transcendental Kingdom of Ends.

me [original post]:

... if accummulating all the things they do agree on doesn't get us any closer to ending the crushing moral conflicts themselves the accomplishment is bascially academic.

But now what is *your* kind of thinking going to do? It's even more useless than mine: it has no motivational power of its own. Whether or not everything's contingent, changing, and chancy won't influence how people tend to judge things, will it?

True, I am basically a cynic and a pessimist with respect to the future of moral exchanges down here on the ground.

But useless? I don't think so. To the extent I can convince others to abandon the necessity of obligation in moral conflicts and adopt instead a more pragmatic, democratic approach in embracing moderation, negociation and compromise in their legislative agendas, the more civil the world will become.

In any event, it is not Kantians and their moral, political and philosophical ilk that pose the greatest danger. It is the nihilists who embrace political realism. The Bilderbergers, for example. In other words, those practitioners of the politics of convenience ["what's in it for me?"] who coopt [corrupt] words like "democracy" and "freedom" and use their enormous politcal, economic and military might to divide the world between the tiny percentage of folks who run it [own it] and all the rest of us.

What in the world does the modern global economy have to do with Kant?!!!!

Lots of people have lots of different experiences, though. If I asked those involved with Solidarity in Poland, for instance, they might testify instead to the strength of ideals in their lives. So relying on yours or their testimony to decide the question of the relevance of ideals to reality wouldn't be the best idea. I need some higher standard, either that of a global perspective on history or a transcendental perspective on reality in general itself. Both from those points of view, to the extent that I think I've managed to adopt them now and again, it appears to me that reason, regardless of whether it has decided the course of history, can. Or more to the point, no one would have any freedom of will without reason in the first place, so every action and so every development of anything in any way by humanity on Earth ultimately turns on reason's power to develop it.

Yes, but that's my point: we all have any number of enormously conflicting and convoluted experiences in our lives. The existential permutations alone must be in the hundreds of trillions. And yet there are still philosophers like Kant and Rand who insisted all of these experiences can be reduced down to the most sublime of human behaviors---behaviors that any rational and moral human being could clearly see are, indeed, obligatory.

I agree, there is "reason" and "freedom of will". But they are always situated, aren't they? And not always in the clarity of The Word, either. In fact, as soon as The Word is introduced to The World, concepts tumble down over and again like so many houses made from cards.

What does it matter whether "everyone" embraces my particular moral proof regarding some particular action I do? The disagreement between particularists and generalists in ethics is not the same as denying or affirming the objectivity involved in ethical judgment.


Well, suppose we lived in a world where everyone did embrace your moral proof because it could in fact be shown to reflect the most reasonable and humane and civilized manner in which to behave. Sure, there would still be contrarians who refused to behave accordingly. But far fewer I suspect if the argments were as convincing as those relating to, say, gravity or to electro-magnetic forces.

Instead, what often happens is that folks embrace some ecclesiastic or ideological Truth and insist everyone must behave like them---or else.

And in my view these essentialist, objectivist doctrines owe their popularity more to the philosophical foundations of folks like Kant than to folks like, say, Nietzsche. True nihilists cause enourmously less human carnage over the ages than do the True Believers convinced that Duty and Oblgation can indeed be known. Even deduced into existence!

Now for an example: I had to choose a while back whether I would go live in the city with a guy I knew and was sort of friends with. His attitude dragged me down a lot, though, and I ended up deciding that I had to live without him. The ethical principle I fell back on was one of self-esteem: suffering for his sake in that situation in the way he implicitly expected me to would have degraded me.

What this speaks of however is merely a series of psychologisms. You express your own emotional and psychological states [and reactions] without allowing us to understand the circumstantial contexts in which they unfolded. Who is to say for example that you interpreted these relationship as they actually were and not merely how you perceived them to be?

See how the complexities here can be simply staggering?....far beyond the capacity of a philosopher [or a philosophy] to pin do deontologically.

Did you do the right thing? Well, you thought you did. But it says little at all about the experiences others have. However similar they might seem to yours.

....this [n/n's understanding of Rawls] is to imagine that justifying ethical assertions is supposed to be like justifying scientific theories. It's not. It's more like (although with its own substantial differences) doing pure math

My own point is that, alas, all too many epistemologists are convinced that establishing [knowing] obligatory human behavior is really not all that far removed from establishing the laws of nature. The only difference is that the laws of nature inherently oblige matter to behave in one way while human minds [mindful matter?] have the capacity to either accept their obligation or refuse it.

Though not necessarily in the manner in which I imagine "pure math".

neither/nor wrote:
So, when someone asks a Kantian, "why do you support charging Mary, impregnated as a result of a rape, with murder for aborting the fetus?", he can say, "no, I don't wish to discuss the empirical contingencies now, only the moral parameters of abortion per se".

Do you think Kant would've supported that charge, though? Even if he thought the abortion was immoral, he might not have thought it criminal (and he actually says something about the killing of children born out of wedlock that might be relevant to assessing his attitude towards ending pregnancy prematurely).

Also, again, you're asking a question about a past action. That kind of judgment wouldn't be as empirically indeterminate as those about what we should do in the future.

You wish to channel the discssion into an abstract debate about "epistemic regress, internalism and externalism, apriority and experience", while I wish to focus much, much more on the "experience" part.

I don't want to debate those things right now, though. I just mean they all have to do with the concept of knowledge, and that the nature of knowledge can be understood partly in terms of those more specific concepts of it. And this understanding allows a person to say, without prejudice, "I know that..." about some things.

It is predictive in the sense that if someone were to lie, one could make the prediction that a Kantian will call the lie a violation of the moral law. And one can also predict that if I were to aim a conversation about a particular lie in the direction of the circumstantial context in which the lie was uttered, most Kantians will insist the existential parameters are largely moot.

This is to confuse, "According to theory X, you ought not to do A," and, "You ought not to do A." The latter type of claim doesn't predict anything.

It is certainly not just a coincidence that organizations like this came into existence in a world where the rule of law and democracy prevail and not in, say, Feudal Europe. But to insist their existence transcends historical institutions and reflects instead some universal, transcendental truth about human relationships is sophistic.

I don't think it's supposed to be transcendent. It just means that, sometimes, ideals shape how people act. And if these are constructive ideals, it means it shapes how they act constructively.

"a truth such that we are obligated to behave only in one way if we are to be thought in compliance with some ahistorical, transcendental Kingdom of Ends" is not how a Kantian constructivist understands ethical truths. For the KOE doesn't exist in some completely determinate form outside of the Earth's universe waiting for us to instantiate it, but instead is something we have to go about determining inside that universe.

... useless? I don't think so. To the extent I can convince others to abandon the necessity of obligation in moral conflicts and adopt instead a more pragmatic, democratic approach in embracing moderation, negociation and compromise in their legislative agendas, the more civil the world will become.

I'm questioning how you're going to go about doing this, though. You say that everything's in flux. Someone's like, "No, it's not," or, better, "If it is, then even that everything is in flux is itself in flux, so maybe the world might become more stable one day." And then he or she can decide to hold on to his or her sense of duty in the hope that one day the world that (contingently) was averse to the solidity of obligation would change(!) into one that, by chance(...), was consistent with absolute, objective, etc. morality.

What in the world does the modern global economy have to do with Kant?

Since, "Act only on maxims by virtue of which one can present oneself and everyone else as giving universal law through those maxims," encompasses the entire domain of possible and actual people in its terms, figuring out how to connect it up with particular people and their lives depends on deductive logic.

Yes, but that's my point: we all have any number of enormously conflicting and convoluted experiences in our lives. The existential permutations alone must be in the hundreds of trillions. And yet there are still philosophers like Kant and Rand who insisted all of these experiences can be reduced down to the most sublime of human behaviors---behaviors that any rational and moral human being could clearly see are, indeed, obligatory.

I don't know if that's what they're really doing (what exactly does "all of these experiences can be reduced down to the most sublime of human behaviors---behaviors that any rational and moral human being could clearly see are, indeed, obligatory" mean?). Plus, not every one of those trillions of experiential factors is very relevant to every moral question. How would whether it took me 1.2645 nanoseconds more or less to finish doing X play a very significant role in deciding whether X was right or wrong?

Well, suppose we lived in a world where everyone did embrace your moral proof because it could in fact be shown to reflect the most reasonable and humane and civilized manner in which to behave. Sure, there would still be contrarians who refused to behave accordingly. But far fewer I suspect if the argments were as convincing as those relating to, say, gravity or to electro-magnetic forces.

We can suppose that, or not see what reason there is to suppose it. "Moral assertions are objectively true or false," doesn't imply, "All moral assertions must be universal in form, meant to apply in the same exact way for everyone," any more than, "a + b = b + a is an objective arithmetic truth," implies that everyone should always do the same thing in commutative terms while solving any equation.

For instance, if one person is given 3x + 6 = 17x to solve, someone else 11x - 5 = 2x, for each person to subtract 6 from both sides of both equations would be for the second to try to apply the rule the first one was applying, but without adapting the rule to the differences between the equations.

The struggle between good and evil inside of us would also continue to provide a motive, besides just the desire to be contrarian, to doing evil. And since lying about this evil would naturally recommend itself to its perpetrators, people either professing disbelief in some ethical proof, or really denying it even inside their own hearts and minds, would also be able to take place. Since these are matters of free will moreover, there would be no way to statistically predict whether in that kind of world wrongdoing would tend to be less than it is now.

True nihilists cause enourmously less human carnage over the ages than do the True Believers convinced that Duty and Oblgation can indeed be known. Even deduced into existence!

Based on my reading of Arendt, I don't think that a lot of the rank-and-file Nazis and Soviets were really strongly invested in mass killing; they just did it as a conveyor-belt kind of job. How many of the American pilots responsible for burning millions of civilians to death since Japan to nowadays do you think are convinced that what they're doing is part of some absolutely sacred mission? Or the people who kill animals in factory farms?

What this speaks of however is merely a series of psychologisms. You express your own emotional and psychological states [and reactions] without allowing us to understand the circumstantial contexts in which they unfolded. Who is to say for example that you interpreted these relationship as they actually were and not merely how you perceived them to be? See how the complexities here can be simply staggering?....far beyond the capacity of a philosopher [or a philosophy] to pin do deontologically.

I don't have any reason to strongly doubt how I interpreted that situation, though. So who's to say what's right, here? Well, *I* am.

My own point is that, alas, all too many epistemologists are convinced that establishing [knowing] obligatory human behavior is really not all that far removed from establishing the laws of nature. The only difference is that the laws of nature inherently oblige matter to behave in one way while human minds [mindful matter?] have the capacity to either accept their obligation or refuse it.

Though not necessarily in the manner in which I imagine "pure math".

Have you ever done pure math? Like proving how division by zero doesn't work (or that 200-page proof of some conjecture that came out recently)? But anyway, I don't know of any epistemologists convinced that ethical reasoning is just like scientific reasoning. Traditions like axiomatic intuitionism, rationalism, and constructivism point towards a very different method than that of science. The method of reflective equilibrium suggests using intuitions about particular cases as "evidence" for a moral theory rather in the way that observations are used as evidence in, say, physics. But I'd expect someone equating moral with scientific knowledge to, instead of what you think they're doing, instead stress how uncertain our scientific discoveries really are. Then they could easily go on to claim that morality is very uncertain (despite or even because of its objectivity), too.

Moore and Ross were two prominent ethical philosophers during the first half of the last century. Both used the word duty as having an acceptable meaning in their writing. But they also both claimed that what our duties really are is something we probably will never completely know. Why did they say this? Because for Moore, truly knowing our obligations would require us to balance the entire scale of information about the existence and inexistence of good and bad objects on a universal scale, and for Ross, because factoring and weighing all our prima facie obligations in any particular case would conceivably surpass us. I think, ultimately, they're wrong (and so are you) in thinking that the complexity of the empirical facts translates into the complexity of moral questions, too,* but it does go to show that a person can accept the concept of duty (to some extent) without implying that duty is easily known.

* Consider this argument:

Person A asks question X in situation S.
S is very complex.
Therefore, X is very complex.

This argument is not valid. Consider, then,

Person A asks question X in situation S.
A is very complex.
Therefore, X is very complex.

—That's not valid, either, though. So despite our own personal and situational complexity while asking moral questions, our moral questions might themselves admit of extreme simplicity. Now if

(1) Our answers to moral questions will always be hopelessly complicated by the complexity of the personalities and circumstances involved in arriving at those answers,

and

(2) There is not even in principle an ideally best set of answers to our moral questions,

then

(C) Every answer to every moral question is equally acceptable.

But if (C), then negotiation might still be as difficult as if the parties at the table instead held on to a more essentialist interpretation of the process of solving ethical problems.