Steve said to Matt:
... I agree with you in that neither of us think that dmb is a closet Kantian.
I just wanted to use his comments as a jumping off point to talk about
pragmatism with regard to the prudence-morality distinction. ...
dmb says:
Right. The distinction wasn't Kantian or even philosophical so much as
psychiatric. But since you mentioned it, I'd guess that a psychopath would do
quite well with Kant's ethics because they rely so heavily on rational
calculations. The distinction I had in mind is not ideal or theoretical so much
as it is descriptive. It describes the standard operating procedure of 80 to
85% of convicted criminals and several percent of the general population
outside of prison. The Sam Harris quote posted by Steve had talked about people
with psychopathic brains, and so I was thinking about the distinction in those
terms. The distinction is between "normal" people and those who have been
severely damaged by neglect and abuse in early childhood, so much so that they
are more like animals than people. They prey on people. We're talking about the
type of personality that describes almost all serial killers and serial
rapists. We're talking about real horror, real monsters. In that sense, Sam'
s analogy to tornados is quite fitting. They both cause huge amounts of damage.
Steve also said to Matt:
... Your [Matt's] 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.
dmb says:
That thought experiment strikes me as quite unrealistic. I mean, an actual
habitual liar who tries to fake morality for a lifetime would be a very sick
person. He'd be putting on show in order to hide something besides his own lack
of sincerity. I'm thinking of the many pedophile priests, for example. Isn't
fake morality and constant deception their whole game? I think this is a more
concrete and psychologically realistic view of the way psychopaths calculate
their actions for the sake of appearance.
On the second point, I'm fairly certain that pragmatism does not discount
motives in the way you suggest. That might be a good way to describe a
behaviorist approach or a utilitarian calculation but not the pragmatism of
Pirsig or James. Pirsig's talk about ego climbing, for example, seems to
suggest that motives are extremely important. Any endeavor that has
self-aggrandizment as it's goal, he says, is bound to end in disaster. In his
"Pragmatism", James begs his Absolutist rivals to confess their own personal
feelings and motives behind their philosophical positions. That's not exactly a
position on morality and yet he was asking them to be more sincerely and honest
and open about the push from inside, if you will. They both get at
philosophical rivalries by way of basic temperaments, namely the classic and
romantic personalities.
Matt said:
Steve said that moral responsibility doesn't start to make sense "until we get
to beings that have social patterns because only such beings have behavior
which is modifiable through praise and blame." ... That is at the conceptual
level, and Steve's example--of the scolded child--gives us the pedagogical
level. What Steve said suggests that praise/blame is in some way basic to
social patterns and moral responsibility and that in creating moral behavior in
children, one begins with praise/blame. What Steve has not said more about are
those further non-Kantian answers I mentioned in relation to Dave, about how
one precisely moves from praise/blame to "thinking that is itself not
consciously motivated by potential praise or blame." That is Dave's definition
of moral behavior again.
dmb says:
My definition of moral behavior? I didn't intend to do anything that ambitious.
I was only making an obvious point about determinism. If our behavior is
determined, then we can't rightly be blamed or praised. In that context, the
terms are evaluative. In the context of training children, on the other hand,
blame and praise are a particular kind of reward and punishment. That's a very
different sense of the terms. Just want to be clear about that.
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
