Or categorical for yourself and people with a sufficiently similar background (which I think is a perfectly legitimate position - we live in a society and much value is to be made of working with that particular society)?
This is where I put most of the work that needs to be done, I think. This is where Putnam's Australia comes into the picture. (Since I'm home, I'm able to finally pursue the reference.) He imagines this Australia is peopled by "super-Benthamites" who have worked out "an elaborate science" of morality based on utilitarian principles, so that acts such as torturing children can in certain situations be easily justified without any cognitive dissonance. He argues that in applying this science, they will have rendered their language radically different to our own:
Every super-Benthamite is familiar with the fact that sometimes the greatest satisfaction of the greatest number (measured in 'utils') requires one to tell a lie. And it is not counted as 'dishonest' in the pejorative sense to tell lies out of the motive of maximizing the general pleasure level. So after a while the use of the term 'honest' among the super-Benthamites would be extremely different from the use of the same descriptive term among us. And the same will go for 'considerate', 'good citizen', etc. The vocabulary available to the super-Benthamites for the description of people-to-people situations will be quite different from the vocabulary available to us. Not only will they lack, or have altered beyond recognition, many of our descriptive resources, but they will very likely invent new jargon of their own (for example, exact terms for describing hedonic tones) that are unavailable to us. The texture of the human world will begin to change. In the course of time the super-Benthamites and we will end up living in different human worlds.
In short, it will not be the case that the super-Benthamites and we 'agree on the facts and disagree on the values'. In the case of almost all interpersonal situations, the description we give of the facts will be different than the description they give of the facts. Even if none of the statements they make about the situation are false, their description will not be one that we will count as adequate and perspicuous; and the description we give will not be one they could count as adequate and perspicuous. In short, even if we put aside our 'disagreement about the values', we could not regard their total representation of the human world as fully rationally acceptable. [. . . T]he inability of the super-Benthamites to get the way the human world is right is a direct result of their sick conception of human flourishing.
Insofar as people speak the same language, there is a sufficiently similar background on which to make a case. People who are really theocrats in liberal democrats' clothing may well be unpersuadable; neoliberals, on the other hand, probably have a sufficiently similar paradigm for a conversation to be possible. Indeed, that's my central argument: that liberal democracy in particular contains within itself its own contradictions which give birth to radical feminism and the quest for systemic justice.
Or do you expect them to be categorical for every human being?
I don't reject this out of hand, but there is something un-postmodern and un-radical feminist about it, I think. Still, I'm not quite as radical as I once was when I was younger, and if the entire system doesn't need to be demolished, then it seems needlessly destructive to throw out the whole thing. (I don't think we could throw it out all at once, but we could concievably replace it piece by piece like the Ship of Theseus.) My claim is only something along the lines of that everything we think is categorical for every human being, forever and ever world without end, isn't necessarily so.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 01:34 pm (UTC)This is where I put most of the work that needs to be done, I think. This is where Putnam's Australia comes into the picture. (Since I'm home, I'm able to finally pursue the reference.) He imagines this Australia is peopled by "super-Benthamites" who have worked out "an elaborate science" of morality based on utilitarian principles, so that acts such as torturing children can in certain situations be easily justified without any cognitive dissonance. He argues that in applying this science, they will have rendered their language radically different to our own:Insofar as people speak the same language, there is a sufficiently similar background on which to make a case. People who are really theocrats in liberal democrats' clothing may well be unpersuadable; neoliberals, on the
other hand, probably have a sufficiently similar paradigm for a conversation to be possible. Indeed, that's my central argument: that liberal democracy in particular contains within itself its own contradictions which give birth to radical feminism and the quest for systemic justice.
Or do you expect them to be categorical for every human being?
I don't reject this out of hand, but there is something un-postmodern and un-radical feminist about it, I think. Still, I'm not quite as radical as I once was when I was younger, and if the entire system doesn't need to be demolished, then it seems needlessly destructive to throw out the whole thing. (I don't think we could throw it out all at once, but we could concievably replace it piece by piece like the Ship of Theseus.) My claim is only something along the lines of that everything we think is categorical for every human being, forever and ever world without end, isn't necessarily so.
And now I need to get ready for church.