The philosophical scam begins, probably, with Socrates, as Nietzsche noted. Socrates easily persuades the gullible sons of the wealthy that moral matters require not only justifications, but also the trappings of the rational, such as consistency. Once they have made that fatal move, they have, in effect, bought the farm.
Morality is a matter of personal preference, it is NOT a matter of REASONING, justification, or defense. If you prefer strawberry ice-cream over chocolate, you do not think for a moment that this demands a defense. If people point out to you that your preferences in deserts are "inconsistent," do not follow from any general principle, you reply: So what? Your moral "attitudes" are no more complex than your attitudes on food. The super-structure of justification and defense do make sense within the artificial context of the law, but that is because the law expresses previously agreed upon generalizations that are based on the preferences most common in our society. Morality is logically and psychologically and historically antecedent to the law. We write law by appeal to our de facto preferences, but this does not imply that our preferences are themselves an expression of an underlying law-like structure.
Much of philosophy has been plagued with the sometimes tacit conviction that our surface behavior is a clue to an invisible underlying rational structure that can painstakingly be teased out by clever philosophers. Wittgenstein had an idea like this in his Tractatus period and he explicitly rejected it in 1927. It is what he meant when he wrote "ordinary language is all right." Well, "ordinary" morality is also all right -- that is, not an expression of a logically perfect underlying morality.
None of this means that one cannot fight for one's preferences. How hard one fights is just a matter of how strong one's preferences are. What we have to give up is our reluctance to fight for our preferences in the absence of a "justification."
Interestingly, we actually have a strategic advantage over the "Social Justice" types. The SJs cannot release us from the need for justification. In the absence of a need for justification, they cannot claim that we "must" cooperate with their re-distribution agendas; and if we don't "have to," we likely won't. But, at the same time, if they hold on to the doctrine that moral matter must be justified, then they come face to face with the fact that there is no defense of a moral theory: de gustibus non est disputandum!
It is precisely because of this dilemma that "Social Justice" theorists always couch their appeals in terms of Post Modern obscurantism and pseudo-technical bafflegab; if they attempt to make their case in the arena of common sense and ordinary language ... they fail.
We, other other hand, dispense with justification on moral matters, but retain the willingness to fight for a world we prefer, and fight solely on the ground that that is the world we prefer.
The point I have been arguing with respect to conceptual analysis applied to ethics is also applicable mutatis mutandis to conceptual analysis in general.
No comments:
Post a Comment