Thursday, November 17, 2011
Actually The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread
Anyone teaching moral or political philosophy inevitably comes across some surly know-it-all student who's convinced that the entire enterprise is an obvious mistake. Typically they have incredibly bad reasons for thinking that we should just stop investigating whether it's acceptable for people to treat in each other certain kinds of ways; certainly, you can be sure they'd feel they had some kind of complaint if you told them that everytime they made some stupid remark about it 'all being relative', you'd thrash them to within an inch of their life. Unfortunately, pointing out the performative contradictions in their attitudes like this is morally unacceptable, a point you can be sure they'll make - and fail to realise the relevance of to their earlier insistence that the whole practice of making moral claims is, like, so bourgeois. On the other hand, actually engaging with them, given how deep-seated a patently contradictory form of ill-considered relativism or scepticism often seems to be, can be very frustrating, for them as well - and it's not always their fault they hold ridiculous attitudes - as well as preventing you from teaching what you're supposed to be teaching. This, designed by the wonderful Tom Porter at Manchester, then is an excellent tool: a careful and patient online guide through why most of the common and most obvious forms of scepticism about moral and political philosophy are quite straightforwardly wrong - although I should say that I don't think framing the question in terms of the ontological status of moral claims, rather than in the terms of the less contentious question of whether there are standards of correctness for them, is a good idea.
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6 comments:
Piss. I left a long comment, which Blogger then swallowed, and which I don't have time to repeat.
Basically it said that I like the resource, in general, but I think he misses the problem of political philosophy perhaps being oppressive, which can't be dismissed as glibly as he does by just saying, aha! you're making a normative claim, so you're doing political philosophy after all.
It's more complicated than that, and the worry is fuelled by the real-world sociology of political theory classrooms much more than it is by shallow and easily refuted points about scepticism or relativism or what have you.
But, as I say, Blogger swallowed the long version. Bloody blogger.
Gah, it's doing it to me too. Basically, I think it's an appropriate reply, none of which is to say that the sorts of problems you have in mind aren't problems. One reason for that is that although practices may be corrupt, those specific forms of corruption do not necessarily transfer to the practices' outputs. The Soviet scientific system had all kinds of morally undesirable features which weren't necessarily shared by the theories of, say, the structure of hydrocarbons it produced. If not done carefully, I suppose as a reply it could be an instance of exactly the sorts of problems I think you have in mind, but that's just part of the way that anything that teachers say to students can be silencing and authoritarian and the like.
Thanks both for your comments, and Rob for the plug. I think that in reply to Chris's worry I'd say this: my aim is to address those students who are worried about the very practice of making normative moral claims, rather than those who are worried about the possibility that the practice of political philosophy itself is oppressive (which seems to me the kind of worry that you have to get comfortable with the practice of making moral claims in general in order to be able to entertain seriously). I'd welcome arguments from students worried about that. Perhaps, though, I should say something on the website to acknowledge the distinction.
As a reply to the students who are worried about the practice of making normative moral claims in general and who express this by saying that it's oppressive to make moral claims, a swift, glib 'aha!' seems to me okay, so long as it's accompanied by an acknowledgement that nevertheless forms of the practice of moral claim-making can indeed be oppressive.
And Rob, you are of course right that I've set things up badly insofar as I suggest that the questions I'm addressing are questions of realism rather than questions about the possibility of truth-evaluability or at least standards of correctness. 'Realist FAQ' just seemed more catchy than anything else I could think of.
I'm happy to plug something I like so much. And the dislike of ontological claims in general is a strange idiosyncracy of mine that I shouldn't really inflict on the world, or at least only in small doses. And since one of your responses to worries about who has the authority to make normative claims is to say, well, in principle, anyone, really, I'm not so sure about Chris' worry. I actually don't think it's true that we can all go round making whatever moral claims we like, even when they're true (see Cohen's Casting the First Stone for the sorts of reasons why), but I'm not sure that really matters here.
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