[MD] Morality and Prudence

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Steve and Ian,

Steve said:
Your thought experiment concerning a habitual liar who fakes moral 
behavior in every instance throughout his entire life is along the lines 
I was thinking. If we view issues of morality in practice as 
pragmatists will want to do, then motivation for action only matters 
to the extent that it it predicts what sort of actions we can expect.

Matt:
This is the bit I still struggle to articulate in pragmatic terms.  For I'm 
not sure your consequent follows exactly, and it's the kind of thing 
that raised Dave's hackles.  I don't think we want to say that 
motivation "only matters to the extent that it predicts" because I'm 
not sure we _don't_ in fact want to deem the hypocritical atheist 
theologian as a worse human being than the believer theologian, 
even if they are equally good theologians.  So now I've made a 
distinction between various offices/roles (professional, familial, 
etc.) and this vague other thing called "human being," which is 
often the repository of Kantian-like notions of "dignity" and the like, 
things universal across our species, which is not what I want.

The formula you fielded, Steve, seems to suggest that the only 
reason to discern motivation is pedagogical, which would be parallel 
to Dave's concern over the reduction of wrongness to social 
conformity--is it wrong, or is it wrong because the community says 
so?  Is it wrong, or is it wrong because I want to reinforce people 
thinking it is wrong?  That's a Kantian-esque stance because if 
driven to its theoretical extremities it forces you to isolate the Moral 
Law as divorced from what any particular human community has to 
say.  However, when we are in the first-personal point of view, do 
we judge things wrong because our community thinks they are 
wrong or because _we_ think they are wrong?  The morally 
autonomous individual we want says "because I think it's wrong."  
However, _where_ did this sense of wrongness come from?  After 
you reject all the various supernaturalisms that includes Kant's Moral 
Law (along the lines of what happened to Newton in ZMM), your 
answer is that _your_ sense of what's wrong came _from_ your 
community, but cannot be _reduced to_ your community (though 
perhaps _revised by_).  I think the distinction between "came from" 
and "reduced to" catches the distinction we need between individual 
and community, such that the kind of human being communities 
invest their pedagogy into training up are individuals that can 
abstract themselves away from the community ("abstract" being a 
Pirsigian hint).

So, how would I rephrase the bit about motivation?  I would suggest 
saying that motivation sometimes matters and sometimes doesn't, 
depending on what you are doing or judging.  _Broadly_ speaking, 
all of our actions are practical/pedagogical, but when we come down 
from the broad, theoretical level in which we are pragmatists to the 
lower-levels of praxis closer to the scenes of life in which we actually 
do some judging, sometimes we act pedagogically (like when we 
shame children for misbehaving) and sometimes we don't (like when 
we silently judge someone to be wrong, but say nothing).  

For example, take that hypocritical atheist theologian: could he raise 
up an entire generation of great, high-functioning true believers, in 
fact more than our true believer theologian?  I don't see why not 
(probability being a different matter).  But say he confesses to us 
halfway through his career, and we don't say anything ever to 
anyone, and he finishes his life successfully obfuscating his atheism 
except for that one time.  In fact, we watched him terribly closely, 
looking for possible poison pills he might be planting in the 
children--but nothing ever appeared.  He was a perfect theologian, 
but our vague sense that there was something wrong with him 
never left us, despite not being predictively useful.  In fact, that vague 
sense holds in place a sense that his hypocrisy might spread to other 
offices and venues (is this not the only valid kind of inference for 
thinking that infidelities should matter for election to political office?), 
but he was perfect in every other avenue of his life, too.  Should our 
"vague sense" be reduced to a predictive marker?  I'm not sure it 
should.  There _was_ something wrong with him, hypocrisy _is_ a 
vice even if it sometimes doesn't matter (or is sometimes not only 
useful _but the right thing to do_), and I think it might be to the 
exact point that we _have_ to make a distinction between that "vague 
sense" and its predictive capacities in order to pedagogically create 
autonomous individuals.  What pragmatists might want to add, 
though, is that an _even higher_ level of moral autonomy is seeing 
that though principles are created out of the authority of a 
community, the principles themselves are flexible rules of thumb.  
(I take it that much of the above compasses Ian's qualms, and that 
"flexible rules of thumb" captures what he meant by "clearly there 
IS a prudence / morality distinction ... but it's not an absolute one."  
What I've attempted to make explicit is how one can be a pragmatist 
while thinking that: and you do so by making a distinction between 
theoretical pragmatism and practical moral behavior.  This may seem 
weird at first, but pragmatism can't be a philosophy about sending 
you back to the scene of life if you haven't first distinguished 
between philosophy and life.  And I think that distinction is basic to 
what Dewey meant by distinguishing inquiry/reflection from the rest 
of life.)

>From the above can be created a defense of pragmatism on truth: is 
it true, or is it true because the community says so?  The above is a 
general outline of what _autonomy_ means, moral or otherwise, and 
autonomy might be in some ways what Pirsig meant by "intellectual 
level" (the connection between the two being, surprise of all 
surprises, discovered by Kant and savored for pragmatism by 
Brandom most of all).  Only some ways, though: Pirsig's notion of 
DQ makes things complicated.

Addendum on Kant and Rorty on Kantianism:

The basic idea behind Kant's distinction between morality and 
prudence is that prudence seems self-serving: you do what you need 
to do to get what you want.  The only way to escape seeming 
self-interested was his Law of Universalizability: if you cannot desire 
everyone else to behave as you are behaving, then it is wrong.  So 
instead of various ends there's a big End, Everybody's Big Fat End.   
This is the Golden Rule: do unto others, yahdah yahdah.  The 
trouble people have had is that character doesn't matter anymore on 
this view.  It narrows the scope of moral judgement such that virtues 
and vices don't matter anymore, just so long as your practical 
inferences touch an End.  (Something like that.)

Here's Rorty on Kant from Philosophy and Social Hope ("Ethics 
without Principles"):

-----
>From Kant's point of view, however, Aristotle, Bentham, and Dewey 
are equally blind to the true nature of morality.  To identify moral 
obligation with the need to adjust one's behavior to the needs of 
other human beings is, for Kantians, either vicious or simple-minded.  
Dewey seems to Kantians to have confused duty with self-interest, 
the intrinsic authority of the moral law with the banausic need to 
bargain with opponents whom one cannot overcome.

Dewey was well aware of this Kantian criticism.  Here is one of the 
passes in which he attempted to answer it:

"Morals, it is said, imply the subordination of fact to ideal 
consideration, while the view presented [Dewey's own view] 
makes morals secondary to bare fact, which is equal to depriving 
them of dignity and jurisdiction . . . The criticism rests upon a false 
separation.  It argues in effect that either ideal standards antecede 
customs and confer their moral quality upon them, or that in being 
subsequent in custom[s] and evolved from them, they are mere 
accidental by-products.  But how does it stand with language? . . . 
Language grew out of unintelligent babblings, instinctive motions 
called gestures, and the pressure of circumstance.  But 
nevertheless language once called into existence is language and 
operates as language."

The point of Dewey's analogy between language and morality is 
that there was no decisive moment at which language stopped 
being a series of reactions to the stimuli provided by the behaviour 
of other humans and started to be an instrument for expressing 
beliefs.  Similarly, there was no point at which practical reasoning 
stopped being prudential and became specifically moral, no point 
at which it stopped being merely useful and started being 
authoritative. (74)
-----

Matt