Peterdjones comments on Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy - Less Wrong

106 Post author: lukeprog 20 March 2011 08:28PM

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Comment author: Peterdjones 08 December 2012 03:40:48PM *  0 points [-]

I don't know what example you are referring to, or what you mean by "some objective phenomenon". Justice clearly isn't something you can measure in the laboratory. It is not clearly subjective either, since people are either imprisoned or not, they can be inprisoned-for-me but free-for-you. Philosophical questions often fall into such a grey area. Socratic discussions assume that people intersubjectviely have the same concept in mind, or are capable of converging on an improved definition intersubjectively. Neither assumption is unreasonable.

Comment author: Fyrius 08 December 2012 04:19:07PM 4 points [-]

I don't know what example you are referring to

I'm quoting the essay.

For example, in Book I of the Republic, when Cephalus defines justice in a way that requires the returning of property and total honesty, Socrates responds by pointing out that it would be unjust to return weapons to a person who had gone mad or to tell the whole truth to such a person. What is the status of these claims that certain behaviors would be unjust in the circumstances described? Socrates does not argue for them in any way. They seem to be no more than spontaneous judgments representing "common sense" or "what we would say." So it would seem that the proposed analysis is rejected because it fails to capture our intuitive judgments about the nature of justice.

Justice is subjective, after a fashion. It is a set of intuitions, systematised into commonly accepted laws, which can change over time. Whether people are in jail isn't part of the phenomenon 'justice', only of how people act on these subjective ideas. On the other hand, people can be rightly-imprisoned-for-me and undeservedly-imprisoned-for-you if we disagree about the law.

Comment author: Peterdjones 09 December 2012 08:07:18PM *  1 point [-]

Justice is subjective, after a fashion.

An intersubjective fashion. It's not one person's preference. If justice were objective, Socrates should have tested it in the laboratory instead of discussing it. If it were subjective, he needn't have invited his friends over--he didn't need them to tell him who makes his favourite restina. Justice can only be intersubjective because it regulates interactions among people, and the appropirate way to decide intersubjective issues is to solicit a range of opinion from a number of people and iron out the bumps. I don't see anything broken in what Socrates was doing. We still do it, in the forms of ethics committees, think tanks and panel discussions.

It is a set of intuitions, systematised into commonly accepted laws, which can change over time. Whether people are in jail isn't part of the phenomenon 'justice', only of how people act on these subjective ideas.

I can't see what distinction you are drawing. If there is s a phenomenon of justice, it is an intersubjective way of combining preferences that fulfils certain criteria, such as being the same for all, in order to regulate certain concrete events, such as who lands in jail. So who lands in jail is in fact part of the intersubjective idea.

On the other hand, people can be rightly-imprisoned-for-me and undeservedly-imprisoned-for-you if we disagree about the law.

I don't see why. If I think 2+2=5, then "2+2=5" isn't true-for-me, it is just wrong. Disagreement is not a sufficient condition for something's being properly subjective.

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