Tentative Deductions and Morality

Let us pick up our thread about logical deduction. Our humble example of ‘trash day before laundry day’ may help us see that even our greatest
(apparent) certainties have a probabilistic element to them. Consider our first premise. It probably is
not the case that the trash collectors ALWAYS arrive on a Friday. There may have been one or more
times since I’ve lived here when blizzard or wildcat strike or other disturbance in The Force has brought
it about that the Friday collection didn’t happen. There must be some chance, however slight, that this
Friday was one of those exceptional Fridays, so the collection I’m remembering didn’t happen until
Saturday. Which means (if the other premises hold up) that today is actually Sunday. I better get busy
on my laundry before my clothes get any more ripe!

At any rate, let's bring this in contact with my theory of the right. The right is dependent upon the
good, and the good is intuitively known. I am wIlling to embrace a very general rule (the "golden
rule") and an even more general meta-rule (that rules are made for us, we are not made for them) both
of which govern what will be regarded as right. But it doesn’t seem that we can go much further,
deductively or otherwise.

After all, I have given up any hope of measuring goodness in the (Moorean) sense in which I understand
it. We can’t measure my joy in a great work of art against yours, or the joy of artistic creation versus
that of appreciation, etc. So … how can we even coherently reason about what sort of conduct in any
particular case shall produce more of the stuff? Maybe great art is produced by starving artists living in
garretts. So I should be careful about being over-generous as a patron lest I lessen my beneficiary's
creative flow. But that's less reasoning than guesswork.

Shall I run for office or pursue some profit making activity or, again, engage in some charitable
non-profit activity? Should I seek to own land, should that opportunity present itself? Are there
conscientious objections to the very idea of land ownership I should heed? If I do decide to own, what
sacrifices does it make sense to make in accumulating money for a down payment? should I do
so only for my own use or should I lease out some of what I own? Is that itself a moral decision or
‘just business’? Should I have a child? Or more than one should I listen to those voice who argue that
the earth has too many humans on it already?

All of these questions are one question: what is the right way to live? And it does not seem at this
point in our inquiry that our discovery about the good (even assuming I have been persuasive as to
what that is) tells us very much about the right.

The very big problem for my theory of the right as stated above is just that it requires that we tie consequences to actions, while admitting that we can never, except in a very tentative sense, grasp the consequences of our actions before we see that they have occurred.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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