Philosophy is not an infallible guide to moral conduct

By -
"But philosophy itself in its results may yield opportunity to self-excusing egoism. The formulae in which it expresses conceptions of moral ends and virtues must always be liable to prove misleading, in the absence of that living interest in a practically true ideal which can alone elicit their higher significance." -- T.H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 291

Comments

  1. Unknown9:07 PM

    Gene: this is why I am an ethical intuitionist. If it seems as though something is wrong, it probably is. If we get an argument that seems ridiculous - like Peter Singer's suggestion that if you don't impoverish yourself and your family to the point of nearly dying to fund relief to third world countries, you are immoral - should be discarded if they conflict with more reasonable and established intuitions, such as "it is okay to spend money on yourself, even though you might be obligated to give some money to charity." Of course, it is par the course for philosophers to reject such "simple minded" ideas, because it would make their job of obfuscation - I mean, "philosophy" - irrelevant. We must pretend that we have little to no clue as to what is right or wrong. Then, when we use all of this theoretical framework (which itself is based on intuitions), we can bash folks over the head who disagree with us as stupid, un-enlightened, and ignorant. Sorry for the rant. I'm just tired of philosophers pretending that they don't know, by and large, what is right or wrong - but they somehow *do* know that the abstract theories they peddle as a sort of religion are true.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more