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DeVliegendeHollander comments on Open thread, Mar. 2 - Mar. 8, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think one reason is that as soon as one tries to build ethics from scratch, one is unable to find any justification that sounds like "ethics" for favouring those close to oneself over those more distant. Lacking such a magic pattern of words, they conclude that universalism must be axiomatically true.
In Peter Singer's view, to fail to save the life of a remote child is exactly as culpable as to starve your own children. His argument consists of presenting the image of a remote child and a near one and challenging the reader to justify treating them unequally. It's not a subject I particularly keep up on; has anyone made a substantial argument against Singerian ethics?
It is often observed here that favouring those close to oneself over those more distant is universally practised. It has not been much argued for though. Here are a couple of arguments.
It is universally practiced and universally approved of, to favour family and friends. It is, for the most part, also approved of to help more distant people in need; but there are very few who demand that people should place them on an equal footing. Therefore, if there is such a thing as Human!ethics or CEV, it must include that.
As we have learned from economics, society in general works better when people look after their own business first and limit their inclination to meddle in other people's. This applies in the moral area as well as the economic.
Wait, I didn't even noticed it. That is interesting! So if something to qualify as a philosophy or theory you need to try to build from scratch? I know people who would consider it hubris. Who would say that it is more like, you can amend and customize and improve on things that were handed to you by tradition, but you can never succeed at building from scratch.
Not necessarily, but that is certainly the currently fashionable approach. Also if you want to convince someone from a different culture, with a different set of assumptions, etc., this is the easiest way to go about doing it.
I am not very optimistic about that happening. I think should write an article about Michael Oakeshott. Basically Oakie was arguing that the cup you are pouring into is never empty. Whatever you tell people they will frame in their previous experiences. So the from-scratch philosophy, the very words, do not mean the same thing to people with different backgrounds. E.g. Hegel's "Geist" does not exactly mean what "spirit" means in English.
That's what philosophers do. Hence such things as Rawls' "veil of ignorance", whereby he founds ethics on the question "how would you wish society to be organised, if you did not know which role you would have in it?"
And there are also intellectuals (they tend to be theologians, historians, literary figures, and the like, rather than professional philosophers), who say exactly that. That has the problem of which tradition to follow, especially when the history of all ages is available to us. Shall we reintroduce slavery? Support FGM? Execute atheists? Or shall the moral injunction be "my own tradition, right or wrong", "jede das seine"?
No, that's what some philosophers do. You can't just expel the likes of Michael Oakeshott or Nietzsche from philosophy. Even Rawls claimed at times to be making a political, rather than ethical, argument. The notion that ethics have to be "built from scratch" would be highly controversial in most philosophy departments I'm aware of.
Of all these approaches, only the latest is really worthy of consideration IMHO, different houses, different customs.
One thing is clear, namely that things that are largely extict for any given "we" (say, culture, country, and so on) do not constitute a tradition. The kind of reactionary bullshit like reinventing things from centuries ago and somehow calling it traditionalism merely because they are old should not really be taken seriously. A tradition is something that is alive right now, so for the Western civ, it is largely things like liberal democracy, atheism and light religiosity, anti-racism and less-lethal racism.
The idea here is that the only thing truly realistic is to change what you already have, inherited things have only a certain elasticity, so you can have modified forms of liberal democracy, more or less militant atheism, a bit more serious or even lighter religiosity, a more or less stringent anti-racism and a more or less less-lethal racism. But you cannot really wander far from that sort of set.
This - the reality of only being able to modify things that already exist, and not to create anew, and modify them only to a certain extent - is what I would called a sensible traditionalism, not some kind of reactionary dreams about brining back kings.