Practically Profound by James H. Hall

Author:James H. Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2005-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

In this analysis, the content of an evaluative utterance is indexed to its utterer. So its applicability cannot go beyond her. “I favor X,” said by one person, and “I’m against it,” said by another, can both be true, even though the claims they “translate” (“X is good” and “No, it’s bad”) look contradictory.

“X is good” and “No, it’s bad” do, undeniably, reveal an attitude conflict. It is just that they seem to do a great deal more than that. If they don’t do more than that, then the commonsense understanding of moral discourse is a serious misconstrual, and a very large part of what people say does not mean what they think it means. As common as value talk is, however, anyone would think that time in the arena would have excised so blatant a confusion by now.

In other accounts of moral talk, straightforward disputes do occur, whether the disputants are “same school” or not:

Examples. Suppose Brown says, “Doing X is good,” and Green says, “No, it isn’t.” If both are utilitarians, Brown is saying that doing X will produce the most happiness for the most people in the long run, and Green is saying that it won’t. If both are “natural lawyers,” Brown is saying that X is a natural act, and Green that it is an unnatural one. If Brown and Green are not of the same school, then Green’s denial of Brown’s claim may be a rejection of the criterion in use, or a claim that it is not actually met. Thus, if Brown is a utilitarian and says, “Doing X is good,” and Green is a natural lawyer and replies “No, it isn’t,” Green may be saying Brown’s criterion is screwed up (“doing X may produce happiness for everyone, but it is still an unnatural act”), or that Brown is wrong on his own grounds (“doing X will have bad consequences”), or both.

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