Is level 2 ethics possible?
Currently, we have worked out two definite paradigmatic rules:
Actually, the second rule can be seen as a special case of the first rule. By being in the habit of acting upon one's own moral judgement, one can be said to be readily deriving that judgement from life experience, because the judgement forms part of the fabric of one's life to begin with.
What if one obeys one's own judgements, but then most other people do not obey them? Some of my early attempts at an empirical theory of ethics had certain requirements along the lines that most people would have to be likely to obey a given moral rule. But one would need a sophisticated approach to such requirements in order to avoid obvious difficulties. For example, most people might be capable of doing all kinds of horrible things, as in the Third Reich. Also, how would such requirements account for such things as civil disobedience, which at least in some cases must be morally legitimate? And what about the case of paradigmatic individuals such as Jesus, who become role models for whole cultures, even if those cultures never come close to fully obeying their ethics?
It seems to me that absolute integrity must be a priority for any theory of ethics. However, I fall short of claiming that a conscientious act is of moral worth simpliciter, mainly because the obvious counterexample is, what if you're a conscientious Nazi? In any case, this kind of assumption is unlikely to bring us any closer to non-coercive agreement. Too many conscientious acts will already be subsumed by our second rule above in a way that does seem plausible.
Is there any circumstance under which non-coercive agreement is possible in ethics to begin with? It seems to me that, within any given culture, it is. In fact, this can be seen as part and parcel of the claim that society and its practices cannot be specified without a constitutive reliance on moral terms. If it is part of what we mean by 'society' to say that it has rules of morality, then presumably part of what makes a society the same society in different areas will be precisely that its members share certain basic mores. This does not mean that non-coercive agreement is possible all the time, such as in areas like the abortion issue. Then again, at the epistemic level, this is no different from the anomalies that one finds in science as well, where the current paradigm seems to have difficulty explaining a particular phenomenon. Such anomalies do not end up invalidating the paradigm alone, any more than moral dilemmas in our society end up invalidating our general ethos.
In this respect, therefore, a culture can be reasonably seen as a moral paradigm. Kuhn argued that different scientific paradigms could not compete according to an abstracted scientific method because of their incommensurability. All the criteria that one could use to judge one claim as true and another claim false belonged to one paradigm or another, so no direct competition between them would be possible. By the same token, therefore, we would expect, by analogy if nothing else, that differing cultures would also have moral incommensurability. That is, the rules for determining right and wrong views would belong to one culture or the other, thereby removing the possibility of non-coercive agreement.
However, it is important not to be misleading about the so-called incommensurability of scientific paradigms. Kuhn did argue that in a very real sense, the new paradigm was better than the old paradigm in any scientific revolution. For example, the Copernican paradigm clearly had greater explanatory power with respect to the apparent motions of the planets than the Ptolemaic paradigm. Ptolemaians had to rely on the notion of ever-increasing numbers of epicycles to explain planetary orbits, whereas Copernicans more elegantly spoke of simple ellipses. Simplicity and elegance, therefore, could have been seen as a major reason for the replacement of Ptolemaism with Copernicanism.
What analogous ways can differing moral paradigms relate to each other? And to what degree can one codify the relative merits of scientific paradigms to explain how one can so decisively supplant another in a revolution? In order to answer these questions, I am going to have to read much more about what Kuhn actually said about scientific revolutions. This means that I must refer to his classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I happily bought from the bookstore earlier this week. Stay tuned, because I intend to go about reading it in the immediate days to come, making notes in this blog where appropriate. I think that this work has now become more important to my research than The Moral Animal, so it will now get my immediate priority instead.
- Legitimate moral judgements must be readily derivable from life experiences.
- Legitimate moral judgements must be such that the moral judge must at least be in the habit of acting on them.
Actually, the second rule can be seen as a special case of the first rule. By being in the habit of acting upon one's own moral judgement, one can be said to be readily deriving that judgement from life experience, because the judgement forms part of the fabric of one's life to begin with.
What if one obeys one's own judgements, but then most other people do not obey them? Some of my early attempts at an empirical theory of ethics had certain requirements along the lines that most people would have to be likely to obey a given moral rule. But one would need a sophisticated approach to such requirements in order to avoid obvious difficulties. For example, most people might be capable of doing all kinds of horrible things, as in the Third Reich. Also, how would such requirements account for such things as civil disobedience, which at least in some cases must be morally legitimate? And what about the case of paradigmatic individuals such as Jesus, who become role models for whole cultures, even if those cultures never come close to fully obeying their ethics?
It seems to me that absolute integrity must be a priority for any theory of ethics. However, I fall short of claiming that a conscientious act is of moral worth simpliciter, mainly because the obvious counterexample is, what if you're a conscientious Nazi? In any case, this kind of assumption is unlikely to bring us any closer to non-coercive agreement. Too many conscientious acts will already be subsumed by our second rule above in a way that does seem plausible.
Is there any circumstance under which non-coercive agreement is possible in ethics to begin with? It seems to me that, within any given culture, it is. In fact, this can be seen as part and parcel of the claim that society and its practices cannot be specified without a constitutive reliance on moral terms. If it is part of what we mean by 'society' to say that it has rules of morality, then presumably part of what makes a society the same society in different areas will be precisely that its members share certain basic mores. This does not mean that non-coercive agreement is possible all the time, such as in areas like the abortion issue. Then again, at the epistemic level, this is no different from the anomalies that one finds in science as well, where the current paradigm seems to have difficulty explaining a particular phenomenon. Such anomalies do not end up invalidating the paradigm alone, any more than moral dilemmas in our society end up invalidating our general ethos.
In this respect, therefore, a culture can be reasonably seen as a moral paradigm. Kuhn argued that different scientific paradigms could not compete according to an abstracted scientific method because of their incommensurability. All the criteria that one could use to judge one claim as true and another claim false belonged to one paradigm or another, so no direct competition between them would be possible. By the same token, therefore, we would expect, by analogy if nothing else, that differing cultures would also have moral incommensurability. That is, the rules for determining right and wrong views would belong to one culture or the other, thereby removing the possibility of non-coercive agreement.
However, it is important not to be misleading about the so-called incommensurability of scientific paradigms. Kuhn did argue that in a very real sense, the new paradigm was better than the old paradigm in any scientific revolution. For example, the Copernican paradigm clearly had greater explanatory power with respect to the apparent motions of the planets than the Ptolemaic paradigm. Ptolemaians had to rely on the notion of ever-increasing numbers of epicycles to explain planetary orbits, whereas Copernicans more elegantly spoke of simple ellipses. Simplicity and elegance, therefore, could have been seen as a major reason for the replacement of Ptolemaism with Copernicanism.
What analogous ways can differing moral paradigms relate to each other? And to what degree can one codify the relative merits of scientific paradigms to explain how one can so decisively supplant another in a revolution? In order to answer these questions, I am going to have to read much more about what Kuhn actually said about scientific revolutions. This means that I must refer to his classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I happily bought from the bookstore earlier this week. Stay tuned, because I intend to go about reading it in the immediate days to come, making notes in this blog where appropriate. I think that this work has now become more important to my research than The Moral Animal, so it will now get my immediate priority instead.
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