Steve, You said ... responding to Matt about dmb's earlier response ... (I agree Matt's contribution was spot on ... and dmb's response to you was pretty much mine.)
> .... jumping off point to talk about > pragmatism with regard to the prudence-morality distinction. This is > something I recall Rorty saying that pragmatists reject, but I don't > recall him making an explicit argument against it. Your thought > experiment concerning a habitual liar who fakes moral behavior in > every instance throughout his entire life is along the lines I was > thinking. If we view issues of morality in practice as pragmatists > will want to do, then motivation for action only matters to the extent > that it it predicts what sort of actions we can expect. > > What remains to be articulated is how the MOQ levels might shed some > light on the issue of moral responsibility and prudence versus moral > behavior .... If prudence is judged as behaviour in response to socially engineered punishments, then clearly there IS a prudence / morality distinction. A very important one, the one dmb made, but it's not an absolute one. Prudence can be based on the whole gamut or patterns of value - and where the patterns of value are your morality, then the prudence vs morality distinction effectively vanishes. It is all about behaviour as you say - expected actions - yes, but those behaviours include the motivations and intentions - so "faking it" is also a relevant behaviour - as are trust and faking / disrespecting trust, part of that whole. Even with a blatant "murder" - there will be a mass of context in the patterns around it, that affect degrees of culpability. For me the "moral responsibility" angle comes from participation (DQ) in the whole pattern of patterns, where we come to"identify" with the rights and wrongs of murder - not from some rationalised calculation rules derived from them. The latter are pragmatic only in the utilitarian "efficiency" sense of the workings of an "ordered" society - not everyone can learn all of life's lessons first-hand before DQ offers them opportunities to err. The social rules are layer well above - orthogonal to - the actual morality. (Aside - this is part of the "ironic" angle of the dangers of being over-analytically rational in our readings of MoQ. - As Matt also alluded.) It's pragmatism Jim, but not as we (customarily) know it. Ian BTW - Interesting intelligent conversation seems to have broken out ;-) Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
