Comment author:[deleted]
10 April 2011 05:03:15PM
2 points
[-]
"Would you rather live in a society where people would do X or Y?"
This is, however, not the question anybody really faces. It is, for sure, the question that we are often asked to face when doing moral and political philosophy. Kant's "categorical imperative" is similar (via Wpedia):
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."
But the reality is that our individual acts do not automatically become universal laws. We really do not get to choose our society from among all possible societies (at best, we get to choose from the much narrower range of actual societies). These imagined shortcuts are attractive to the impatient philosopher who wishes to retrace ten thousand years of development with a single thought, and who fancies that he can do better with these mental shortcuts, but they have little to do with reality, which renders their results of dubious value.
Very few people have been anywhere near to a position in which they can choose their society. And the ones near that position - such as the supposedly most powerful man in the world (currently Obama) are themselves highly constrained in what they are able to do and what they are inclined to do given their incentives, so that the result is not much like choosing what society they want to live in. Even absolute dictators such as Castro and Kim Jong-Il, while I'm sure they're taking care of themselves (which is all they ultimately seem to care about), probably have not built anything like the societies they dreamed of building. The incomplete Ryugyong Hotel stands as a symbol of the gulf between their aspirations and the reality of what they produced.
The choices that we all do have are local and concrete, and our local and concrete answers to these questions are, in aggregate, I think the most powerful factor shaping custom and morality, though they do it slowly, as the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon.
There are, however, mental toolboxes which provide shortcuts for possibly understanding and anticipating the outcome of long years of past and future societal evolution. Economics and game theory are two of these. These two fields are specifically intended to understand what eventually happens when large numbers of people with their diverse agendas interact. These are, I think, our best general theories of social phenomena such as custom and morality.
Comment author:dschwarz
13 April 2011 02:49:24AM
1 point
[-]
I have to respectfully disagree with your position. Kant's point, and the point of similar people who make the sweeping universalizations that you dislike, is that it is only in such idealized circumstances that we can make rational decisions. What makes a decision good or bad is whether it would be the decision rational people would endorse in a perfect society.
The trouble is not moving from our flawed world to an ideal world. The trouble is taking the lesson we've learned from considering the ideal world and applying it to the flawed world. Kant's program is widely considered to be a failure because it fails to provide real guidelines for the real world.
Basically, my point is that asking the Rawlsian "Would you prefer to live in a society where people do X" is valid. However, one may answer that question with "yes" and still rationally refrain from doing X. So your general point, that local and concrete decisions rule the day, still stands. Personally, though, I try to approach local and concrete decisions the way that Rawls does.
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This is, however, not the question anybody really faces. It is, for sure, the question that we are often asked to face when doing moral and political philosophy. Kant's "categorical imperative" is similar (via Wpedia):
But the reality is that our individual acts do not automatically become universal laws. We really do not get to choose our society from among all possible societies (at best, we get to choose from the much narrower range of actual societies). These imagined shortcuts are attractive to the impatient philosopher who wishes to retrace ten thousand years of development with a single thought, and who fancies that he can do better with these mental shortcuts, but they have little to do with reality, which renders their results of dubious value.
Very few people have been anywhere near to a position in which they can choose their society. And the ones near that position - such as the supposedly most powerful man in the world (currently Obama) are themselves highly constrained in what they are able to do and what they are inclined to do given their incentives, so that the result is not much like choosing what society they want to live in. Even absolute dictators such as Castro and Kim Jong-Il, while I'm sure they're taking care of themselves (which is all they ultimately seem to care about), probably have not built anything like the societies they dreamed of building. The incomplete Ryugyong Hotel stands as a symbol of the gulf between their aspirations and the reality of what they produced.
The choices that we all do have are local and concrete, and our local and concrete answers to these questions are, in aggregate, I think the most powerful factor shaping custom and morality, though they do it slowly, as the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon.
There are, however, mental toolboxes which provide shortcuts for possibly understanding and anticipating the outcome of long years of past and future societal evolution. Economics and game theory are two of these. These two fields are specifically intended to understand what eventually happens when large numbers of people with their diverse agendas interact. These are, I think, our best general theories of social phenomena such as custom and morality.
I have to respectfully disagree with your position. Kant's point, and the point of similar people who make the sweeping universalizations that you dislike, is that it is only in such idealized circumstances that we can make rational decisions. What makes a decision good or bad is whether it would be the decision rational people would endorse in a perfect society.
The trouble is not moving from our flawed world to an ideal world. The trouble is taking the lesson we've learned from considering the ideal world and applying it to the flawed world. Kant's program is widely considered to be a failure because it fails to provide real guidelines for the real world.
Basically, my point is that asking the Rawlsian "Would you prefer to live in a society where people do X" is valid. However, one may answer that question with "yes" and still rationally refrain from doing X. So your general point, that local and concrete decisions rule the day, still stands. Personally, though, I try to approach local and concrete decisions the way that Rawls does.