(by Joe)
First off, a quick bit of background. I've decided to try and read Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) over the summer. It's a thick book, and densely written, so it's going to take me a while. To keep me going I thought I'd blog about each chapter here, at least when I think that there's something the interesting to say. The book isn't really about the mind, or at least not its biological aspects, but I still think it's relevant to this blog. Parfit investigates ethics, rationality, and personal identity, all of which I consider to be closely related to cognition and the philosophy of mind. In fact, I think a lot of what Parfit's saying could maybe benefit from a closer interaction with the scientific study of the mind-brain-body(-environment?), which is part of what I'm going to try and discuss here.
Derek Parfit
Anyway, on with the show. I've just finished reading the first chapter, "Theories That Are Indirectly Self Defeating". One thing that particularly caught my attention was Parfit's notion of "moral immorality, or blameless wrongdoing" (1984: 32). I'm not entirely convinced that the notion is coherent, but he argues that one possible outcome of consequentialism could be that we are morally obliged to make ourselves disposed to act in an immoral manner. He gives the example of Clare, who faced with the choice of saving her child's life or the life of several strangers, will choose to save her child. Under most consequentialist frameworks, she will have acted wrongly - instead of one person dying, several have died - but she only acts this way because she loves her child, and in coming to love her child she may well have acted rightly. Thus we get a situation where she has done wrong, but not in any way that we would blame her for.
The reason that I'm not sure whether this is coherent is that whilst consequentialism might say that, broadly speaking, it is better to save several lives than save one life, it might also say that in this particular situation it is better to act in a way that preserves the possibility of love than to act in a way that does not. So perhaps Clare hasn't acted wrongly? However, coming back to something that I mentioned in my last post, I suspect that it might be more accurate to say that Clare has committed the action that is least wrong. Practical ethics isn't as simple as a binary choice between right and wrong, and often we will have to make extremely difficult moral decisions. In a sense it is this difficulty that characterises truly moral decisions, rather than simply doing what is obviously right. So whilst I wouldn't necessarily choose to use the precise terminology that he does, I think Parfit is on to something quite meaningful when he talks about moral immorality.
He goes on to make a distinction between what we ought morally to believe and what we ought intellectually to believe (Parfit 1984: 43). So whilst Clare ought morally to believe that her love for her child comes before preserving life (as will in fact result in the best possible world), she ought intellectually to believe that what is best is to save the most number of lives. This is a very similar distinction to that made by Joyce (2001), between moral truth and moral fiction. The distinction is that whilst Parfit retains a consequentialist moral realism on both sides, Joyce's dichotomy is between the apparent truth of moral irrealism, which means we should be error theorists about morality, and our pragmatically assenting to some kind of moral fictionalism in order gain some social advantage for ourselves. Joyce characterised the latter as assent rather than belief, but I suggested here that we might be better off viewing it as a separate system of belief, one which we only come to question under certain special circumstances. This would make Joyce's position even more similar to that of Parfit: we ought to convince ourselves to hold certain moral beliefs, even though we consider them intellectually flawed. The only difference is that whilst Parfit thinks we should do this in order to bring about the best possible world (whatever that is), Joyce thinks we should do it to benefit ourselves. In fact, earlier in the chapter Parfit makes precisely this claim, in discussing whether rational egoism might be indirectly self-defeating; he concludes that it is, because it tells us to act irrationally, but that this is not necessarily an argument against it. So Joyce's moral fictionalism is well supported by Parfit's account of rational egoism, even if Parfit doesn't think that, morally speaking, that is the position that we ought to hold.
He goes on to make a distinction between what we ought morally to believe and what we ought intellectually to believe (Parfit 1984: 43). So whilst Clare ought morally to believe that her love for her child comes before preserving life (as will in fact result in the best possible world), she ought intellectually to believe that what is best is to save the most number of lives. This is a very similar distinction to that made by Joyce (2001), between moral truth and moral fiction. The distinction is that whilst Parfit retains a consequentialist moral realism on both sides, Joyce's dichotomy is between the apparent truth of moral irrealism, which means we should be error theorists about morality, and our pragmatically assenting to some kind of moral fictionalism in order gain some social advantage for ourselves. Joyce characterised the latter as assent rather than belief, but I suggested here that we might be better off viewing it as a separate system of belief, one which we only come to question under certain special circumstances. This would make Joyce's position even more similar to that of Parfit: we ought to convince ourselves to hold certain moral beliefs, even though we consider them intellectually flawed. The only difference is that whilst Parfit thinks we should do this in order to bring about the best possible world (whatever that is), Joyce thinks we should do it to benefit ourselves. In fact, earlier in the chapter Parfit makes precisely this claim, in discussing whether rational egoism might be indirectly self-defeating; he concludes that it is, because it tells us to act irrationally, but that this is not necessarily an argument against it. So Joyce's moral fictionalism is well supported by Parfit's account of rational egoism, even if Parfit doesn't think that, morally speaking, that is the position that we ought to hold.
Joyce, R. 2001. The Myth of Morality. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.
Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: OUP. (All references from the revised 1987 edition.)
No comments:
Post a Comment