Re-orientation
Yesterday you ended the entry with a pretty big claim. You said that there were no dilemmas between deontology and consequentialism. But if this is true, then what was that ridiculous argument about that you had with those hypocrites on that eventful day?
I guess that this is where it gets controversial. It seemed like the morally compelling thing to do in each case was to sacrifice yourself so that a society could survive. This is something about which I thought that the people in the group were quite cynical. All agreed that the moral thing entailed untold self-sacrifice, yet:
In other words, the moral argument had no practical force whatsoever. Nevertheless, the argument did still seem to have rhetorical force. These bastards were defending with ferocity a code that they had no intention of practising. They refused to approve of a code that sanctioned what they were actually doing. I found this both peculiar and hard to explain.
I think you need to analyse your own presuppositions here. You seem to think that ethics is only to be taken seriously if you are actually going to obey it.
Yeah, well, I think that's fair enough! Certainly I thought that ethics was not worth studying if I was only going to ignore it where it was inconvenient.
And here's the point: Most philosophers would still study ethics even if they were not going to obey it when it became inconvenient.
Well, I can think of at least one philosopher who thinks the same way that I do. He had a moral argument where you had to give, say, 90% of your salary to the Third World. Even if they were only marginally better off because of it. His conclusion to this was that ethics is a pretty funny sort of thing to be studying. Consequently, he prefers to concentrate on an area like metaphysics or epistemology.
Unfortunately, this was not an option for me. For both those disciplines would have been much more useless than ethics. And what I did at university had to be practical to me or it would not have been worth doing. Of course, it is almost true by definition that an academic job is not practical. But I thought that if I studied ethics, then what I was doing would be practical. First I would create my theory of ethics, then I would apply that theory to real-life scenarios. I actually envisaged becoming a bioethicist, maybe being on boards for medical ethics. And it was all shot to pieces because of one fateful argument at the very end of my Honours year. If it had happened in the middle of my Honours year, it would have been enough to stop me from applying for the MPhil. Yet I still have my MPhil today, for what it is worth. Even though most of that degree turned out to be a struggle to keep my studies relevant to my needs.
At the end of it all, however, I decided that they could be relevant to my needs. I decided that the examples that caused my dilemma were empirically invalid. They were ridiculously farfetched, not problems in practice. This was significant because it meant that one could not form reliable intuitions from studying them. Furthermore, moral social norms were empirically based moral intuitions. They were both commonsensical and viable as practices, and this meant a great deal to me. It meant that if I simply based my own ethics in commonsense viable morality, then I would be fine.
But by that stage, something else had happened to make me leave philosophy. During my MPhil, I started my first job, as a temp word processor operator. And I discovered that I liked working in an office much better than I ever liked my university studies. This basically made me want to enhance my qualifications for an office job. For me, this meant getting a Grad Dip in Computer Science. To this day, I still think I am a lot happier for having made that decision. Even my old supervisor agreed, just because there are no real jobs for philosophers around anymore. It was that way when I left philosophy eight years ago, and it is still that way now.
On the other hand, he also said that I could yet do philosophy. He noted that Western philosophy has been progressively de-academised in modern times. John Stuart Mill was not an academic philosopher, nor was Jeremy Bentham. Thomas Hobbes was not a university academic, although he did work as a private tutor. Ayn Rand is a thinker much quoted in libertarian circles, but she was never an academic. Indeed, she was quite hostile towards many academics for their left-wing views. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement was not an academic movement. On the contrary, some Enlightenment thinkers actually founded new universities based on enlightenment ideals. Kant was an academic, but he didn't write anything philosophical until after he retired. So there's hope for me yet, if I still want to philosophise, and right now, it looks like I do.
Well, this seems to leave you with your work based in commonsense viable morality. I mean, you were hoping to capitalise on the notion of commensurability. It was mentioned as a contribution by one of the markers. This made you more keen to explore the notion wherever it led. I actually think that it led to some pretty interesting ideas about how social mores would progress.
I was tempted to say that a real moral was a more, and a real ethics was an ethos. But sometimes abstract theorising about ethics can make a difference to the way of things. It has done so at least twice in Western history: the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
I guess that this is where it gets controversial. It seemed like the morally compelling thing to do in each case was to sacrifice yourself so that a society could survive. This is something about which I thought that the people in the group were quite cynical. All agreed that the moral thing entailed untold self-sacrifice, yet:
- Nobody was prepared to do it;
- Nobody thought that most other people would do it; and
- Even more upsettingly, nobody would even punish anybody else for not doing it.
In other words, the moral argument had no practical force whatsoever. Nevertheless, the argument did still seem to have rhetorical force. These bastards were defending with ferocity a code that they had no intention of practising. They refused to approve of a code that sanctioned what they were actually doing. I found this both peculiar and hard to explain.
I think you need to analyse your own presuppositions here. You seem to think that ethics is only to be taken seriously if you are actually going to obey it.
Yeah, well, I think that's fair enough! Certainly I thought that ethics was not worth studying if I was only going to ignore it where it was inconvenient.
And here's the point: Most philosophers would still study ethics even if they were not going to obey it when it became inconvenient.
Well, I can think of at least one philosopher who thinks the same way that I do. He had a moral argument where you had to give, say, 90% of your salary to the Third World. Even if they were only marginally better off because of it. His conclusion to this was that ethics is a pretty funny sort of thing to be studying. Consequently, he prefers to concentrate on an area like metaphysics or epistemology.
Unfortunately, this was not an option for me. For both those disciplines would have been much more useless than ethics. And what I did at university had to be practical to me or it would not have been worth doing. Of course, it is almost true by definition that an academic job is not practical. But I thought that if I studied ethics, then what I was doing would be practical. First I would create my theory of ethics, then I would apply that theory to real-life scenarios. I actually envisaged becoming a bioethicist, maybe being on boards for medical ethics. And it was all shot to pieces because of one fateful argument at the very end of my Honours year. If it had happened in the middle of my Honours year, it would have been enough to stop me from applying for the MPhil. Yet I still have my MPhil today, for what it is worth. Even though most of that degree turned out to be a struggle to keep my studies relevant to my needs.
At the end of it all, however, I decided that they could be relevant to my needs. I decided that the examples that caused my dilemma were empirically invalid. They were ridiculously farfetched, not problems in practice. This was significant because it meant that one could not form reliable intuitions from studying them. Furthermore, moral social norms were empirically based moral intuitions. They were both commonsensical and viable as practices, and this meant a great deal to me. It meant that if I simply based my own ethics in commonsense viable morality, then I would be fine.
But by that stage, something else had happened to make me leave philosophy. During my MPhil, I started my first job, as a temp word processor operator. And I discovered that I liked working in an office much better than I ever liked my university studies. This basically made me want to enhance my qualifications for an office job. For me, this meant getting a Grad Dip in Computer Science. To this day, I still think I am a lot happier for having made that decision. Even my old supervisor agreed, just because there are no real jobs for philosophers around anymore. It was that way when I left philosophy eight years ago, and it is still that way now.
On the other hand, he also said that I could yet do philosophy. He noted that Western philosophy has been progressively de-academised in modern times. John Stuart Mill was not an academic philosopher, nor was Jeremy Bentham. Thomas Hobbes was not a university academic, although he did work as a private tutor. Ayn Rand is a thinker much quoted in libertarian circles, but she was never an academic. Indeed, she was quite hostile towards many academics for their left-wing views. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement was not an academic movement. On the contrary, some Enlightenment thinkers actually founded new universities based on enlightenment ideals. Kant was an academic, but he didn't write anything philosophical until after he retired. So there's hope for me yet, if I still want to philosophise, and right now, it looks like I do.
Well, this seems to leave you with your work based in commonsense viable morality. I mean, you were hoping to capitalise on the notion of commensurability. It was mentioned as a contribution by one of the markers. This made you more keen to explore the notion wherever it led. I actually think that it led to some pretty interesting ideas about how social mores would progress.
I was tempted to say that a real moral was a more, and a real ethics was an ethos. But sometimes abstract theorising about ethics can make a difference to the way of things. It has done so at least twice in Western history: the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
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