Kant on Posner

As you know, Richard Posner doubts that ethical theory has much point. He challenges philosophers to name an instance when mere reason-giving ever made a meaningful historical difference to ethical practice. (My thought here was that this is the wrong question; the right question is whether we have any conclusive good reason to doubt that, in principle, such reason-giving could make a difference? Cancer research still hasn't cured cancer, but that's not a reason to give up on the project, as long as we think that it could someday find a cure.)

Anyway, not to retread old debates, but I recently came across a bit of Kant in which he address the charge Posner lays. I can't resist sharing, although it may already be familiar to some readers. In the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, sec. II, Kant gives his view of the issue in footnote 25:

I have a letter from the excellent Sulzer in which he asks me why it is that moral instruction accomplishes so little, even though it contains so much that is convincing to reason. My answer was delayed so that I might make it complete. But it is just that the teachers themselves have not purified their concepts: since they try to do too well by looking everywhere for motives for being good, they spoil the medicine by trying to make it really strong. For the most ordinary observation shows that when a righteous act is represented as being done with a steadfast soul and sundered from all view to any advantage in this or another world, and even under the greatest temptations of need or allurement, it far surpasses and eclipses any similar action that was in the least affected by any extraenous incentive; it elevates the soul and inspires the wish to be able to act in this way. Even moderately young children feel this impression, and duties should never be represented to them in any other way.

So there you have it; the reason for the historical sterility of ethical theory--in the Posnerian / Sulzerian sense of "it makes no visible practical difference"--is that philosophers overcomplicate matters. All you have to do, Kant thinks, is show a person what they already regard to be the most praiseworthy sort of act, namely, an act done from a motive of duty.

(Philosophers of education might incidentally note that Kant also purports to have insight into the moral psychology of children, and to recommend a certain sort of moral education.)

Confirmation Hearings and "Subjective" Values

On the tip of a professor (not Dworkin), I found this nice piece on the trouble with confirmation hearings. The author is Dworkin, and the money quote is this (includes a quote within a quote-- sorry):

[H]ow could Kagan decide difficult constitutional issues without relying on such [political and/or moral] conviction? She offered this answer:

I think that what I’ve said is that you look to text. You look to structure. You look to history, very much including and very especially the original understandings. And you look to precedents. And in one or another cases, one of those may be more important than others of them. In some cases, you might look to all of them. And that’s a kind of pragmatic approach, not an approach that takes a sort of grand overarching philosophical view as to, you know, it’s just one thing and it’s got to be that one thing in every case.

This answer is not only guarded but empty: it says nothing at all. In academic law, more than in other disciplines, phrases quickly grow runic: it is now expected of legal theorists that they will abjure “overarching” theories and endorse a “pragmatic” approach. In this context, however, “pragmatic” has no content. In philosophy, pragmatism is a theory of scientific truth; in politics it means doing what is necessary to achieve a stipulated goal—Mideast peace, for instance, or reelection. But in constitutional law the question is not how to achieve a given goal but which goal we should try to achieve. Is it “pragmatic” to protect fetuses from abortion? Or to protect a woman’s power to decide for herself? Justices should of course be “pragmatic” in guarding a right to free speech. But that truism doesn’t help them decide what that right embraces.

Dworkin is right that the fear of "subjective" values--evident in jurisprudential theories both left and right--is a fear that just gets in the way, and needs to be overcome.

New Paper - Against Public Reason in Rawls

A draft version of a paper I am co-writing on Rawls is now available for download, for those who have any interest in previewing the work. The abstract (hastily written) is as follows:

The present paper develops a critique of Rawlsian public reason internal to Rawlsian theory itself. The idea of public reason in Rawls encapsulates Rawls's recommendation against giving reasons in civic discourse where those reasons "belong to" any particular comprehensive doctrine; in this way, Rawls aims to maintain the sort of neutrality in public justification which he regards as essential to legitimacy, stability, and host of other political goods. Within Rawlsian theory, the idea of public reason is justified in terms of the Criterion of Reciprocity, a principle which Rawls calls the "liberal principle of legitimacy," and which insists that reasons should not be offered in justificatory discourse unless they could be thought reasonably acceptable to the citizens to whom they are offered. Granting the propriety of the Criterion, and connecting the Criterion to public reason, we show that there is no good reason to think that nonpublic reason will necessarily be reasons unacceptable to plural citizens. Consequently, and surprisingly, the idea of public reason is insufficiently supported within Rawlsian theory itself.

Comments and suggestions are of course welcome.

Against Hedonism

What is valuable? One theory, hedonism, insists that only pleasure is valuable. On this theory, other supposed values are only valuable -- can only be valuable -- given that they just are or create pleasure. (For the hedonist, the former is a case of intrinsic value, and the latter a case of instrumental value.)

So, here are some examples for the hedonist to consider; whether they are, as I hope, properly counter-examples perhaps remains to be seen.

1. Schadenfreude. We don't need to specify a context to know that it just seems wrong to have instinctive pleasure in the misfortune of others. If all you know about a situation is that it is a celebration of misfortune, you know enough to morally object. But where the celebration of misfortune contains a good on the hedonic account (the pleasure), and where it does not necessarily destroy a good or involve anything the hedonist could identify as an offsetting evil (as I think is the case here, especially given the level of abstraction I've provided), how can the moral intuition in question be correct? (The "misfortune" itself cannot be the location of the badness, since the context "celebration of misfortune" doesn't contain or cause the misfortune itself. It is one thing to object to a misfortune and another to object to pleasure-taking at misfortune).


2. Duty-bound acts. We act frequently out of a sense of duty where neither we nor anyone else has any pleasure from such acts. We often take such acts, moreover, to have some good or to contain something of worth or value. How could this be a correct judgment on the hedonic account where the thing being valued (the duty-bound act) contains no pleasure? As a concerete example of a case like this: suppose you are a professor, and a dull student comes to your office for help in understanding some of the material you covered in class. You may try to help that student long past the point at which either of you have any pleasure in the interaction, yet that interaction itself may be viewed as something of value because a case where you (the professor) are acting out of a sense of obligation belonging to a proper professor-pupil relationship.


3. The Value of Good Artwork. Hedonism implies that works of art can have only instrumental value: since works of art do not contain pleasure in themselves, their value can only consist in the pleasure they cause art-lovers to have. But this is the wrong conclusion. Imagine a world in which there were more good works of art than could possibly be appreciated by art-lovers then existing or who ever would (in that world) exist. Of such a world, how could the hedonist avoid thinking, implausibly, that the destruction of some good works of art would be indifferent in terms of value lost, just so long as enough works were left to sate the pleasure-seeking appetites of the art-lovers? Yet surely this is an incorrect conclusion; surely something of value necessarily is lost when existing good works of art are destroyed.

The hedonist could deny that the intuitions I'm going for are correct; the question then is what makes these denials anything other than dogmatic?