[MD] Morality and Prudence

[david buchanan]

Steve said to Matt:

... I agree with you in that neither of us think that dmb is a closet Kantian. I just wanted to use his comments as a jumping off point to talk about pragmatism with regard to the prudence-morality distinction. ...

dmb says:
Right. The distinction wasn't Kantian or even philosophical so much as psychiatric. But since you mentioned it, I'd guess that a psychopath would do quite well with Kant's ethics because they rely so heavily on rational calculations. The distinction I had in mind is not ideal or theoretical so much as it is descriptive. It describes the standard operating procedure of 80 to 85% of convicted criminals and several percent of the general population outside of prison. The Sam Harris quote posted by Steve had talked about people with psychopathic brains, and so I was thinking about the distinction in those terms. The distinction is between "normal" people and those who have been severely damaged by neglect and abuse in early childhood, so much so that they are more like animals than people. They prey on people. We're talking about the type of personality that describes almost all serial killers and serial rapists. We're talking about real horror, real monsters. In that sense, Sam's analogy to tornados is quite fitting. They both cause huge amounts of damage.


Steve also said to Matt:
... Your [Matt's] 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.


dmb says:

That thought experiment strikes me as quite unrealistic. I mean, an actual habitual liar who tries to fake morality for a lifetime would be a very sick person. He'd be putting on show in order to hide something besides his own lack of sincerity. I'm thinking of the many pedophile priests, for example. Isn't fake morality and constant deception their whole game? I think this is a more concrete and psychologically realistic view of the way psychopaths calculate their actions for the sake of appearance. 

On the second point, I'm fairly certain that pragmatism does not discount motives in the way you suggest. That might be a good way to describe a behaviorist approach or a utilitarian calculation but not the pragmatism of Pirsig or James. Pirsig's talk about ego climbing, for example, seems to suggest that motives are extremely important. Any endeavor that has self-aggrandizment as it's goal, he says, is bound to end in disaster. In his "Pragmatism", James begs his Absolutist rivals to confess their own personal feelings and motives behind their philosophical positions. That's not exactly a position on morality and yet he was asking them to be more sincerely and honest and open about the push from inside, if you will. They both get at philosophical rivalries by way of basic temperaments, namely the classic and romantic personalities. 


Matt said:
Steve said that moral responsibility doesn't start to make sense "until we get to beings that have social patterns because only such beings have behavior which is modifiable through praise and blame."  ...  That is at the conceptual level, and Steve's example--of the scolded child--gives us the pedagogical level.  What Steve said suggests that praise/blame is in some way basic to social patterns and moral responsibility and that in creating moral behavior in children, one begins with praise/blame. What Steve has not said more about are those further non-Kantian answers I mentioned in relation to Dave, about how one precisely moves from praise/blame to "thinking that is itself not consciously motivated by potential praise or blame."  That is Dave's definition of moral behavior again.  

dmb says:

My definition of moral behavior? I didn't intend to do anything that ambitious. I was only making an obvious point about determinism. If our behavior is determined, then we can't rightly be blamed or praised. In that context, the terms are evaluative. In the context of training children, on the other hand, blame and praise are a particular kind of reward and punishment. That's a very different sense of the terms. Just want to be clear about that.