Interpreting Modernity by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2020-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Which Model Is Best?

When deciding which of these four models (or some other) to adopt, philosophers no doubt have their official reasons for adopting the views that they do, based on an impartial assessment of the facts as they see them. When discussing the issue more informally, however, I find that conversation quickly turns to the moral reasons that people have for favouring (or disfavouring) one or another model. Often these are based on the degree of comfort that different philosophers feel with the conventional morality of their own society, with those who are least comfortable favouring views that seem to give them the most critical purchase.

This desire for critical distance, however, generates something of a dilemma. There is, on the one hand, what we might call an “Enlightenment” concern about the inadequacies of conventional morality. We think it is important to maintain some room for reflection and revision, so that individuals – including moral philosophers – are not obliged to endorse whatever the received moral ideas in their society happen to be. There is also a widespread concern that taking conventional morality too seriously will open the door to relativism, simply because social norms differ so greatly from one culture to the next.36 This tends to push moral philosophers in the direction of wanting a stand-alone conception of morality proper, which could serve as an Archimedean point from which the morality or immorality of any particular practice could be judged. On the other hand, there is a “Burkean” concern about the consequences of straying too far from the tried-and-true precepts of conventional morality, in favour of rules that have been made up from scratch by intellectuals.37 Revising morality is an endeavour that seems fraught with peril, partly because the process, by its very nature, has a tendency to undermine any moral limitations on how far the revisions can go.

To see the force of the Burkean concern, imagine that individuals could take a pill that would cause them to forget anything they had learned about right and wrong from the ambient culture (e.g., parents, teachers, peers, etc.), and erase any innate heuristics. The result would be to deprive the individual of all know-how, intuitive competence, or prejudices, when it comes to moral questions – it would erase all traces of conventional morality. The person would then be given a selection of the best available work in moral philosophy (perhaps confined to a single school of thought), in order to learn from first principles how to act morally. Would the widespread use of such a procedure be likely to promote any improvement in the human condition? I think most sensible people would find this scenario somewhat terrifying. A real-life Kantian or utilitarian, one who had no independent ability to determine when the application of her preferred principle was generating the wrong answer (and therefore no incentive to gerrymander application of the principle to produce the right answer), would be an extremely dangerous person to be around.38

So what most moral philosophers want

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