Re: Are You a Platonist, a Jeffersonian, or a Humean?
Posted: Sat Jul 07, 2012 10:34 pm
This still relies on the idea that there is a dichotomy between reasoned moral judgment and emotion. I don't see how you'll get anywhere with this when scientific understanding has passed this by. A divorce of moral reasoning and emotion is impossible in the sense that emotion usually gives rise to moral reasoning. The reasoning will be an attempt to give socially acceptable or useful justification to an emotional reaction. The identification of love with reason rather than emotion also seems rather strange to me.Robert Tulip wrote:My view looks at this material against a long time frame. The Gospels contrast a morality based on emotion, giving primacy to selfishness and revenge, against a morality based on reason, giving primacy to love and objectivity. The argument, as I see it, is that human culture is captured in a maelstrom of emotion, and that salvation requires evolution out of emotion into reason as the basis of culture. The problem is that this is a call for messianic transformation, and the Bible observes that when Jesus advocated that (in the story), he was crucified. The resurrection is a signal of the long term necessity of the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount, within a recognition that our world is governed by the values of the crucifiers.
Moral dumbfounding is a specific term Haidt thought up to describe people's failure to come up with logical reasons for their decisions about certain kinds of moral problems. You've run your own way with it.Well actually there is an immense amount of moral dumbfounding in this example. Most people will say it would be nice if wishes were horses and beggars could ride. But that is because it looks mean to observe that wishes are not horses. Most people would put life before property if asked, except they then vote for politicians who uphold patent law regarding intellectual property for pharmaceutical innovation, so the generic pirates who steal knowledge can be prosecuted. And if you think about it, patent law reflects a higher rational morality, based on the evidence that no company will put the investment into discovery of new drugs if it thinks it will not turn a profit. Emotional people will demand the right to steal their property, but judges support patent law because they respond to a higher rational morality than the immediacy of emotional situations.
It's true that 'instinctive recoil' is conditioned by cultural experience. I'm not even sure that Haidt uses the word 'instinct.' I just mean by it that we acquire certain automatic reactions. Whether these are learned or innate doesn't make a difference.That is speculative. In poor countries, defective children are allowed to die because the society cannot afford to keep them alive. "Instinctive recoil" from such practices tends to be a learned response. People have an "instinctive recoil" from eating cats, rats, dogs and cockroaches, but in poor countries these are delicacies. Brutality was regarded as great fun in days gone by, in gladiator fights, public executions and the like. Only once an abstract notion (do unto others) is widely taught do people come to claim that a moral theory whose origins are actually rational is based on emotion.
But don't disparage 'sentiment' or 'passion', since both evolved to aid us in survival. Reason comes in afterwards, also to aid us in survival by being of usefulness to the core of automatic responses that form the biggest part of our constitution. Certainly Hume did not denigrate emotion, either.At the base of all value judgments, there is an assumption that cannot be proved, an axiom. My view is that the core axiom of morality is that human life is good. But really, as Hume saw with his pitiless logic, this axiom is just a statement of sentimental emotional preference, a statement of passion, not reason.
If moral reasoning is post hoc rationalizing coming from intuition or emotion, the 'truth' doesn't have to be anywhere in statements themselves. The truth can be in the emotions or sentiments--but not if you hold such a negative view of the kind of cognition that emotion really is. Traditional philosophy doesn't seem to hold all the right cards anymore.Correct physical statements are those that can be proved true by observation and the consistency of natural laws. All other statements rely on something other than physical observation for us to assent to them as true in any ultimate sense. This 'something other' is our capacity to form synthetic judgments about necessary truths of experience, as Kant put it, following Plato.
You really are a Platonist.If we want to say it is necessarily true that people should think human life is good in itself, then this 'goodness' does not derive from any physical observation alone, but interprets the evidence through the lens of our sentimental values. These emotional values are what make us regard anyone who disagrees as an inhuman monster. But this valuing of loyalty to our genetic kith cannot be justified by physical evidence alone. It draws in something other than the physical, namely moral ideals that can only be properly understood as metaphysical.