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Interesting interview. "Already in Republic (Plato again!) we have an argument—a clear and compelling rational argument—that even the highest political office
by Emma_Goldman 8y ago
Interesting interview.
"Already in Republic (Plato again!) we have an argument—a clear and compelling rational argument—that even the highest political office should be open to women.'
What is not specified here is the sense of 'rationality' that is required of moral realism. It is not enough that something be coherently deduced from stated premises, because we can state different premises, use different categories, and make different distinctions. What is required is that there is a sense in which we can all be rationally compelled through argumentation to adopt the same premises, categories and distinctions. And that is, frankly, absurd and untrue.
'People are free when they are unconstrained and can act as they will to act.'
Again, the argument depends on (i) that you accept the post-Hobbesian account of negative liberty, and not the Hegelian account of positive liberty, or the neo-Roman account of liberty as freedom from domination, or the various socialist accounts of liberty (and again, whether we do goes back to the first point viz. what premises we start from, and what categories we use); (ii) and upon specifying what it is to be 'constrained', especially whether this involves mental, and not just physical, interference.
- resters 8y agoI think an interesting follow-on question to his answer would have been "... and using similar reasoning what big things does society get wrong? What freedoms/rights are suppressed inappropriately?"
- eli_gottlieb 8y ago>What is not specified here is the sense of 'rationality' that is required of moral realism. It is not enough that something be coherently deduced from stated premises, because we can state different premises, use different categories, and make different distinctions. What is required is that there is a sense in which we can all be rationally compelled through argumentation to adopt the same premises, categories and distinctions. And that is, frankly, absurd and untrue. I'd think that defining "rationality" as "a sense in which one can be rationally compelled through argumentation to (verbally) adopt premises, categories, and distinctions" is circular. You end up sorta just defining "rational" as "the thing we do in the Agora".
- Emma_Goldman 8y agoI don't follow. I meant to suggest that humans will never agree on the same structure of premises and argumentation, and that we simply cannot get past that, to a space above or beyond historical language, to an uncontested consensus. But if not, on what grounds can we possibly say that one particular conception of morality is True or Rational? That is what is required of moral realism - which I take, as an atheist, to be as odd and implausible as theism.
- eli_gottlieb 8y ago>I meant to suggest that humans will never agree on the same structure of premises and argumentation, and that we simply cannot get past that, to a space above or beyond historical language, to an uncontested consensus. So what? People don't have to agree on the truth. It just has to be true. >But if not, on what grounds can we possibly say that one particular conception of morality is True or Rational? Well partly that depends on how you define "morality", but first and foremost, we can do it by the same means we use to determine that a particular conception of "cream cheese" or "routing algorithms" is True and Rational.