[MD] Harris and Steve

[david buchanan]

Matt said to Steve:
...You are asking about the "perverse" person--how do you argumentatively defeat him with a knockdown answer?  Harris ups the ante with "well, that dude don't have a 'valid concept of "ought,"'" but what the hell does the Nazi care?  What if he's a sadist, or Robert Nozick's "immoral man" who, when it's pointed out that he can't both say he uses "ought" correctly and behave immorally, shrugs and replies, "Ya' know, given the choice, I'll give up consistency"?  What if...?  "What if we don't use these hypothetical constructs" is what Sam Harris is going to want to say.  But the hypothetical people aren't even the really tough part.  It's the real ones.

dmb says:

I really don't see how it helps to invoke this hypothetical Nazi sadist. Sam should want to suggest we don't use them. Asking for a knockdown argument that'll convince an unreasonable man is like asking if God can make a rock so big that he can't move it. Arguments only ever persuade people who are persuadable by arguments. There's no way to talk a guy into being reasonable. That's why we have cops and armies, you know? It's an unreasonable standard to put on an argument and it has a certain demoralizing, paralyzing effect. To say "we ought to avoid the worst possible misery" is true just by virtue of the meaning of the words. It's an analytic statement, just like "all bachelors are unmarried". I think that's maybe what Sam means when he says the objector doesn't know the meaning of "ought".


Matt said:
Harris is basically taking Rorty's route of saying that a "fact" is shorthand for "the way we do things around here," that "facts" are always relative to a community agreeing they are facts,  ...what it shows is that we cannot consider them a part of our moral community (which can tend to have dire consequences, like in choosing sides for war).

dmb says:

Sam's prime example was cross cultural. You remember. Islamic women covered from head to toe and Western women in bikinis. You remember the bikinis, at least. This is one of those areas where moral communities clash. Not that anybody ever went to war over fashion but those contrasting images represent two different value systems. To our eyes, those women look oppressed at a criminal level, you know. And the babes on our glossy mags look like whores from hell to them. At what point does a live and let live attitude become complicity with evil? I think Sam is suggesting that we have to get beyond the kind of cultural relativism that would make us too morally shy to stand up when we ought to. That's right, I said "ought".



 		 	   		  
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