The use of trivial examples - update 1

I have found a legitimate criticism of the use of trivial examples in Anne Maclean's The Elimination of Morality. She criticises R.M. Hare's use of trivial examples in Moral Thinking. She says that the kinds of things that one allows to happen in trivial examples are much more varied than what we would allow to happen in examples where more important interests were at stake. She claims that Hare's use of trivial examples allows him to sneak in premises that we would not accept if he had used more important examples.

I can see how her criticism serves her purposes in the book. What I cannot see, however, is that it serves my purposes for an empirical theory of ethics where moral intuitions are experience-dependent. It shows at most that one cannot generalise from trivial examples to important examples because the more important the things are at stake, the greater restrictions we would place upon our choices. But it may simply be inappropriate to impose those same restrictions on the trivial versions of the scenarios that we are likely to face day to day. So the use of trivial examples is still appropriate to delineate our actions for 90% of the time as opposed to 10% of the time.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Philosophy of Al Qaeda

People out there seem pretty interested in the philosophy of Al Qaeda. Three of my most recent hits have involved searches on those words. Mine is the top-ranked page when "Al-Qaeda" is spelled with a hyphen, and the second-ranked page when it is not. And my page was only referring to someone else's blog page in the first place! So let's talk about the philosophy of Al Qaeda. Paul Berman wrote an excellent article about it. He identifies Sayyid Qutb as the most important philosopher behind the movement. Qutb is Qaeda's intellectual hero, its "Karl Marx". In this respect, Qutb's best known work is Milestones , his Das Kapital . Berman, however, calls attention to Qutb's deeper work, the enormous In the Shade of the Koran . It is full of literary beauty and deep ideas. Just because ideas are deep, however, does not mean that they are true, and many of Qutb's ideas, Berman argues, are indeed false. Qutb opposes the separation of church and s
Read more

Am I a reductive or non-reductive naturalist?

I tried to get The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding from the university library today after work, but the library still has limited hours until 7th March. It won't be open after business hours until Tuesday, by which time I will be busy rehearsing for my play, so I won't really be able to get to the library until 8th March anyway. I was only curious about the term anyway. But if attitudinalism is meant to be similar to non-cognitivism, then I am sure I will not accept that as an approach to ethics, because as I understand it, ethical non-cognitivism means that moral statements have no truth-value, which I cannot believe. They do have a truth-value; it is simply what determines that truth-value that can be problematic. The difficulty of classifying any view as non-naturalistic is, at bottom, the cost of allowing non-reductive versions of naturalism. Excuse me, WTF is non-reductive naturalism?? Some lecture notes from the University of Michigan
Read more

Rational Conlangs

My interest in rational conlangs has been revived. The specific catalyst is that I am trying to translate a book that I absolutely love, The Book of Matan, into one. One reason for this choice of book is that its English is very simple and readable. It does not use a vocabulary that is too obscure. But it carries an emotional, poetic beauty that reminds of me of the King James Bible. If any language should translate well into a rational conlang, I would hope it was of this kind. Another reason is that it is a logical extension of my interest in the book. It is a catalyst for me to read the book more than I otherwise would be inclined to do. It is like when, as a teenager, I would try translating The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy into a conlang. I had already read and loved the book. Translating it became an exercise in looking at it from a fresh perspective. The best conlang to me was Rick Morneau’s concept of a machine translation interlingua. To me it captured what I most
Read more