Posted by zeugma on March 14, 2005, at 16:29:09
In reply to Re: holism » zeugma, posted by alexandra_k on March 13, 2005, at 23:44:22
> > it sounds like you like Habermas
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> Who? (I am serious). No way. Did someone else beat me to it? No way. No fair :-(He's an interesting philosopher, who does a lot of work on 'inter-subjectivity.' I wish I had one of his books on hand (I don't, but it's lying around here somewhere). I didn't follow up on Habermas because he's too difficult. Philosophy of math is a lot easier :-)
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> > I wonder if this has any bearing on the problem. But I think that a strong case can be made that moral terms, and hence judgements made using them, *are* holistic. But if they are holistic, then no two people mean the same thing when they use a moral term. Because no two people have the same relation to the culture in which they live, and it seems that this relation conditions how people use their moral terms and judgements that involve their use.
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> ... But then it would seem that we couldn't even communicate about ethics :-(
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That's the standard objection brought against holist theories of meaning. It does seem to me, though, that when one makes evaluative statements, one is presupposing a norm that is in fact the norm only for oneself; i.e. that the terms are idiosyncratic and relativized to the individual (or culture etc.)This is a lot more clear in the case of aesthetics. Is aesthetic realism a plausible position? I once heard a philosopher say that denying aesthetic realism is just an excuse for bad taste :-)It hurts a lot less to say that is aesthetics is relative (to an individual, culture, etc.) than to say morality is. More on this below..
> Don't we need to go with 'standard meaning' or something like that...?
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What would be the 'standard meaning' of ethical terms? An action is 'good' depending on the criteria each ethical system applies to it; thus, Kant would not countenance lying under any circumstance, while Mill would say that it is the consequences that follow the act of lying that determine its ethical value. Ethical terms, like aesthetic terms such as 'beautiful' or 'ugly', certainly imply attitudes towards actions or individuals, but it is not clear that the dictionary helps us determine which objects are beautiful or ugly, much less evil or good.> Aren't you begging the question towards moral relativism (to a culture)?
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Yes. But suppose that we say that ethics is not relative to culture. It can be relativized to cultures, in the same way that appearances are relativized to locations; but I'm skeptical that there is a moral framework like the spatiotemporal framework that allows us to relativize while preserving determinate truth-values. If there were one, though, do you think it would be 'inter-subjective'? Do you think that it would be the relations between subjectivities that would ground the framework, or could the framework be constituted in some other way?In other words, assuming that we don't have access to reality1 (absolute reality, as seen by God or a 'perfect observer') what would constitute access to reality2 in terms of ethics?
-z>
poster:zeugma
thread:468601
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20050305/msgs/470980.html