Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Exploring Meta-Ethics and Hope in Leftist Politics: A Deep Dive into Moral Intuitions and Philosophical Traditions
Curious about the moral underpinnings of leftist politics? Join us as we sit down with Devin Gouré and Charles Dashings from the Moral Minority Podcast to navigate the often-neglected realm of meta-ethics within Marxist traditions. We challenge the pervasive moral skepticism and cynicism that could derail emancipatory politics, emphasizing the need for coherent moral frameworks that go beyond mere emotional reactions. This episode is not just about ideological discussions but also a call to action for leftist thinkers to engage with philosophical questions that shape political motivations and actions.
Hope and ethics in history take center stage as we scrutinize the pitfalls of a purely dialectical approach to progress. We juxtapose Kant’s optimistic outlook with Adorno’s focus on individual rights, questioning the very rationale for hope in revolutionary endeavors. Our conversation reveals how different philosophical traditions offer unique perspectives on historical progression and ethics, urging listeners to reconsider the value and ethical dimensions of hope in the face of past revolutionary failures and ongoing social struggles.
Our exploration continues with an examination of moral intuitions, ethical frameworks, and their implications for liberal left ideologies. By contrasting Kantian and utilitarian perspectives, we shed light on the contradictions and challenges posed by universal moral laws in addressing issues like racism and gender equality. We also delve into the complex relationship between cultural norms, moral pluralism, human rights, and international law, questioning the very foundations of rights in liberal societies. This episode promises a thought-provoking journey through the vast landscape of ethics and morality, challenging conventional wisdom and inviting listeners to reflect on their own moral intuitions and political beliefs.
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Hello and welcome to Varm Blog, and today I'm here with Devin Garay and Charles Dashing of the Moral Minority Podcast and we are talking about we're talking about a lot of things meta-ethics, morality and the left whatever the fuck that is in front of each of those words. But one thing that I will say just to start us off here is as a person who works a lot from a Marxist standpoint and in a Marxist tradition. Marxists are shit at metaethics. They're just terrible at it. They don't want to deal with it. It's not something they want to touch. When they have touched it, it's been the analytic Marxist, the worst kind of Marxist, and so all my bias is just laying about in the beginning.
Speaker 2:But go for it. Cards on the table.
Speaker 1:You know. So like if I have to listen to another morality lecture by GA Cohen, I might like bash my head into a wall. But I wanted to talk about moral frameworks and ethics and meta ethics because I do actually think it matters. When you're dealing with um, trying to build future societies and work towards how you build them, it's not both in questions of means and ends, but also in questions of what your teleology or overriding goal really is. I mean, the common response to Marx and Marx says that German idealist thing where he tries to collapse, the normative end of description. That's the same thing. And the common response to Marx is why do we give a shit about exploitation? That actually still is a moral argument and it kind of is.
Speaker 1:I mean, you could take the Nietzschean answer, which Devon will probably. You could take the Nietzschean answer, which Devon will probably speak to a Nietzschean answer probably not the Nietzschean answer, but it's probably the one that Nietzsche had which is we don't care about exploitation. Exploitation is what happens to lesser beings and plebs. So who cares? And you might say, well, there's a logic that ensues from that of struggle or whatever. But that doesn't really answer the question Like, why do you want to get rid of exploitation or oppression or any of that. And then, once you define that, you realize that at a very, very basic level, you also need a meta-ethical answer, because how are you going to justify coming to that conclusion in the first place?
Speaker 3:I. I think you've hit the nail on the head and this really speaks to the impetus for devon and I starting this podcast, because if you look at the landscape of left-oriented podcasts and philosophy podcasts with the leftist men, the topic of morality is really skirted around, if it's not outright, outright dismissed, and there are historical reasons for this within the Marxist tradition that you've alluded to in your opening there. But I think that's the point it's like if you care about emancipatory politics, why does identifying structural injustice oppression within a society? Why does that matter? Why do we care about it and why do we have the value judgments that we do of it? Why do we say it's bad and we should change it? What is driving a vision of a different world and that is part of the reason we started Moral Minority is we see it as a corrective within leftists and philosophy spaces to the lack of serious discussion around the ethical implications of any emancipatory project.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think and this would fit within the Marxist tradition as well, I think there's sort of a question about the relation between theoretical and practical reason, theory and praxis, that we're at least circling around here in the sense that my view is that there's a widespread sense that some of these meta-ethical questions are simply the domain of analytic, abstract, analytic philosophers. They have little bearing on real political struggles. You might take a realist perspective, but you know real, real power and locating who holds power and how it's exercised is really the decisive political question. Maybe in on a certain Nietzschean view, maybe that will to power is what matters and morality is just a kind of superficial gloss on top of that kind of bad justification.
Speaker 2:But the reality, in my view, is that we do have deep practical commitments to making certain kinds of moral and normative judgments that we very much bring to bear on politics, our views on politics, our reactions, whether it's our kind of opinions, considered opinions or even just our affective and emotional reactions, and that realists are wrong to discount the kind of practical import of these moral questions for our everyday lives and for how we actually experience political events, and that when we don't think these through on a philosophical level, even if sometimes that may feel abstract.
Speaker 2:Uh, forms of moral skepticism and moral cynicism end up becoming refracted into political culture in ways that are deeply destructive, that allow people to get off the hook for certain basic moral violations, because there's a sort of general skepticism, skeptical, relativist perspective on moral questions, and that, I think, is a very real threat in our contemporary political culture and something that also is a danger to whatever sources of agency like again, whatever you want to call the left, whatever you consider to be the political subject or subjects of a kind of left political project right now. I think that kind of destructive cynicism and moral nihilism has a dampening effect or depressing effect on whatever agency we picture there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm going to lay out another card on the table. I'm a Macatarian, which is weird for a non-Ethnic.
Speaker 2:It fits reasonably with the Marxist. I mean, obviously MacIntyre has written extensively on Marx and the teleological question. If you wanted to go the Marxist direction in ethics, if you want to look at the 1844 manuscripts, you can argue that it's an Aristotelian picture on a certain in a certain species. Being right, so I think it fits.
Speaker 1:But. But I noticed in progressive and leftist courses which we can debate all day, whether or not those are the same thing. But there obviously have been diagram, whether we like it or not.
Speaker 1:Oh no, I was just gonna go ahead yeah, yeah, um, uh, I find that we really do tend to be emotive, which means you have a lot of people who cannot explain, they can merely assert their moral reasoning, which in many ways actually opens them up to being both manipulated pretty easily by by cynical, nihilistic actors and also having no ability to hold those actors to account to any sort of, um discipline. I mean, I really do think, and I I think this in Marxism is a problem. I do think it actually goes back before Marx. I think it's kind of in Hegel, where there is this attempt to respond to Hume, basically, and for those Marxists like, why are you talking about all this philosophical stuff? Well, you can't get into Marx unless you go through German idealists.
Speaker 1:Sorry, it's kind of required, but there's this initial response to Hume because the problem of separating norms and descriptions is a real problem. And it's a real problem not just in the way Hume sees it too, because, as other people will say, as post-structuralists will say, our words for describing the world still are based in normative judgments. We have put normative judgments in the descriptors because we can't describe the world without them, but that doesn't mean they're actually the same thing. You still can't fully collapse the two categories of norms and descriptions. So Hume's total separation doesn't really work, but the idea that a lot of the German idealists had and I think for mostly theological reasons people will try to argue with me on this, but I think they actually kind of say it is to just say that well, we can use the description of the world to arrive at the norms, because the world is a manifestation of the absolute, ie, god.
Speaker 1:So, like, if you don't catch that, um, you start thinking well, you know, uh, how do we, you know, come up with any with anything here? When do we come up with anything here? And what I see often happening is because emotive logic is given to this is falling into basic friend-enemy distinctions, as if that is a moral category. So I know there's a lot there, so I'm just going to throw you guys to respond to that.
Speaker 3:Well, since you're a McIntyre guy, I will point out that McIntyre begins, after virtue, by talking about the fact of what seems like interminable moral disagreement that we are simply just like have these inherited, unreflected moral systems that are continually clashing with one another, and it's because we haven't sufficient.
Speaker 3:What is lacking in these systems that we're kind of unaware of is this, he'll say, is a teleological development, is a purpose oriented, is a narrative structure to human life to unify these kinds of disparate inherited moral systems which have become historically detached from their point of origins. So only by understanding the history under which these moral systems arose, the conditions that they arose to make sense of and the problems that they dealt with and the problems that they dealt with can we hope to reorient our society towards a purpose-driven theology. That makes sense. And for McIntyre, as you've already said, his answer is that we can kind of revive an Aristotelian picture of the natural telos of human life. Whether that's a satisfactory answer or not, I will leave up to you. Obviously, you find a lot of value in it. But I think McIntyre's main contribution is pointing out that a lot of our moral discourse is seemingly hopelessly irrational and emotive rather than reflective.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean relative to the discussion of Hume. You know, in the Is-Odd divide that you were, Derek. I mean relative to the discussion of Hume. You know the is-ought divide, that you were, derek.
Speaker 2:You were just talking about McIntyre's, a narrative about modernity and the decisive shift away from an ancient teleology and a medieval theological and cosmological picture that brought moral principles and moral ideals into some kind of reality, metaphysical reality, right? So that's what's missing and we in modernity, according to this narrative. Macintyre is one version of this narrative, others, you know, charles Taylor, hans Blumenberg, there are a billion different versions, weber, of what kind of what difference modernity makes in this respect. But what you're getting at, I think, with the Marxist point of view, is that, in theory, the Hegelian Marxist tradition is an attempt to give a distinctively modern teleology, one that's founded in a philosophy of history that is rooted in the idea that again distinctively modern idea of freedom, as contained in the French Revolution, and that there is supposed to be some kind of self-reflective, dialectical development through which objective contradictions in capitalism come to be manifest, through some kind of ethical consciousness on the part, shared ethical consciousness on the part of the proletariat.
Speaker 2:I think maybe Marxists would be upset if you're referring to class consciousness as a form of ethical consciousness. But I mean, just thinking about it as a kind of substantive community is kind of a form of Zittlischkeit in Hegel's sense. And Hegel and Marx are of course what's kind of notably missing from after virtue, I think, because they're the exception to MacIntyre's narrative about teleology being essentially missing from the Enlightenment project of justifying morality. But then I think this is kind of where we end up is how much stock used to put into philosophy of history in the Hegelian Marxist vein, especially in light of the kind of existential despair that I think many on the left understandably have in the face of rising fascism, anthropogenic climate change, enormous income inequality, et cetera, wealth inequality. There are any number of reasons to be extremely pessimistic. But that is also a reason to potentially worry with Adorno that the only universal history is the one that goes from the slingshot to the atom bomb, rather than one that tends towards emancipation. And if the philosophy of history is no longer a stable ground for bridging the empirical and the normative, or the real and the ideal, then what is the replacement for it, and is this more than just a theoretical question? I think it is because I think it makes a real difference in terms of what kind of sources meaningful sources of agency we locate in the real political world.
Speaker 2:Political world and I think, does animate many of these debates that people have about what is the real revolutionary approach versus something that is only going to be co-opted by capitalism or neoliberalism, etc. There are kind of oftentimes unspoken moral and normative assumptions that animate these debates and I think that it's going to be difficult for the left to navigate whatever political direction you know it might have without having some better strategy and better vocabulary for talking about these issues. Then there's specifically a better one than this subjectivist, emotivist one that you highlighted, the one where it's simply a brute reaction and one that we can't articulate rationally yeah, I mean, one of the problems you get into with all this is basically, I do think Dornian despair is a rational answer to some of the problems.
Speaker 1:If you are assuming Hegelian models of history, you just have to go. Well, what if Hegel's right but it's all bad Like that's? It really is that simple yeah, it's a development into a pit. Um, and I mean there's things in that. I mean there are other marxist answers. Uh, one of the ones that I have really started leaning into um is bactine, which doesn't seem like it's a moral theory.
Speaker 1:It seems like it's a novel and language theory, but it actually is a moral theory as well as a novel and language theory About the parent play of voices, the way development works, the way those build on each other, the dangers of dialectical thinking, because it flattens out the development. Even though Bakhtin does not condemn the dialectic, he's still.
Speaker 1:I mean he survived the purges because he's obstinately still a Marxist kind of of history as such, as a reified totality that doesn't deal with its, with its innards, whereas if you take the Hegelian thought on totality, you really do have some deep problems seeing a way out. I mean, it was one of the things that I that I always think about. You guys have recently, on your podcast, covered the dialectic of enlightenment, which is one of my both favorite and also least favorite books simultaneously.
Speaker 2:I think that's the general sentiment on dialectic um, but it does get to like.
Speaker 1:Okay, if you take this totality thing and you add stuff like real subsumption and and other ideas that come into the left a little later, uh, from you know, all those dastardly marks notes, um, what you get is something like you get in in notes, volume one, where it's just like well, everything's, everything's totally subsumed and fucked and, uh, we can get out of it but only by responding to everything being so fucked that we have to like and it's just like not really helpful yeah.
Speaker 3:So I have a question for you, because you started out what you were saying with this idea that you find an ethical core in Adorno and in his pessimism. That what if it's the case that Hegel's right? But instead of a progressive development of history, we have a progressive development. So the question becomes what can we salvage? Whereas I think the ethical starting point has to be with Kant, with Kant's more hopeful question what can we hope for? Because I don't see a way. I mean, obviously, in some realistic way we are in a ditch, right, so we are doing the work of salvaging, of digging our way out, yeah, but I think any ethics has to be premised upon the way things ought to be. So there has to be this, this pregnant moment of hope, of like trying to make the world better. I don't understand really an emancipatory project based on a fundamental pessimism, where all we can do is really dig ourselves out of the hole, where all we can do is really dig ourselves out of the hole To defend Adorno a little bit here.
Speaker 2:so I think the ethical core I take it in Adorno has to do with the rights of the particular and the non-identical to the tyranny of the concept and its identity logic. And this is, I think, for Adorno eminently an ethical question for, as you say, the Hegelian historical totality and also any revolutionary narrative that justifies the suffering of either the proletariat, the oppressed of any sort, and also the past defeats of the revolutionary movement that justifies those in the name of some kind of final realization of that project. And Adorno has this kind of moment of protest that is like it's similar to Hannah Arendt. When she talks about she quotes Cato saying you know, history favors the victorious cause but Cato favors the defeated one, in the sense of I still want to honor the defeated cause and its kind of rights to honor, even though history may have borne the tide in a totally different direction.
Speaker 2:And I think this is a worry that Adorno has about the Hegelian moment of totalization? What happens to all of the failed revolutionary movements and the historical particulars that were sloughed off to the side through the progressive movement of the dialectic? Are these just justified in the name of the kind of final realization of the historical telos, or is that to some extent of theodicy, right? Does that run into the same basic problems as the questions? Is the problem of evil, of well? Okay, maybe it's justified in the God's eye view, from God's perspective, but don't we still feel that this kind of, you know, this suffering is an objection to this relentless process, teleological process of history?
Speaker 2:And I think that's a way that Adorno gets into these squarely moral questions that do come out of a Kantian tradition, because it's his conviction of the non-identity of the particular, is a very Kantian conviction against Hegel, but one that's very different, that remains the negative moment and does not have the kind of affirmation, charles, I think you want, of some kind of and I think that I, as a Nietzschean, the affirmation, the affirmative moment of some kind of positive value that I would want.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so I would.
Speaker 1:So, so we, we can see like a Kantianism Okay, that gives us a bunch and Kant looms large. Kant has his own problems. I mean, one of the things about I find interesting about drawing from any of these philosophers like, if I map out Kantians and neocontins, I get everything from like soften Howard to like to like Afro-pessimism to everything in between. So clearly by itself it doesn't give us an answer and like half the analytic tradition, whether they realize it or not, are probably secretly contained or not so secretly contained. So I can see the thing on hope and I can draw a lot from that. But what do do we have to? I mean this is going to be a sound like a strange question to the average listener, but why should we care about hope, like at all? Like what's our, what's our, what's our justification and rationale for hope? I'm going to throw that open. I'm going to throw that open.
Speaker 3:Well, to speak to the Kantian tradition, I would argue that the Kantian attempt to resuscitate a foundation for our moral norms has been largely successful. In secular consciousness, most people have this unconscious view of themselves as rationally autonomous agents who are self-legislating wills, and it's because we have this ability to choose our ends that we are moral agents. So I think in many ways the Kantian view of normativity has entered popular consciousness in a way that people who do view themselves largely as individuals and we can talk about how individualism is complicated by, as what Adorno calls the wrong society, whether we actually are the kind of self-positing individuals that Kant wants us to be under the domination of capital. But I think largely this is something that has become part of the common language, of thinking about how we go about making moral decisions and why it matters. It matters because it's a law that we give ourselves.
Speaker 2:I think if I were posing what I take, the Marxist or I suppose going back to Dialect of Enlightenment, what the sort of pessimistic objection here would be. It comes back to this issue of the ideal and the real, and the normative and empirical, and part of the most of the objections to Kant center around these dualisms that continue to crop up throughout his philosophy, whether it's between appearance and thing in itself, or between theoretical and practical reason. Um, and part of one consequence of this is that practical reason is a sort of uh assumed, it's an intelligible structure that we assume, even though, according to the first critique, when it comes to empirical reality, everything is determined by causality. It's a sort of practical assumption that we make. And so I think what ends up being dissatisfying about the Kantian standpoint? It ends up being this fundamental gap between practical reason, the kind of odd demands that we make, and the felt, the institutions of reality and how they actually impact our lives.
Speaker 2:And this is where this, I think, the perspective of some of dialectic enlightenment would be that this structure of rational autonomy can be both a blessing and a curse, that it's a between both the kind of ethical ideals that we presuppose as rational agents and how the world really is, and also a gap between the kind of rational agency we think we ought to have and the agency that we feel ourselves having in the world.
Speaker 2:And this is where the narrative about capitalist reification, these rationalized structures take on this kind of alien life in their own when they're embedded in commodities, they have this fetishism moment where precisely the same rational structures that seem to undergird the moral autonomy are also inextricable from the kind of logic that governs capital-social relationships. And that's, I think, the dialectical concern that Adorno and Horkheimer are raising. And I am sympathetic to this. And this is where I think your question, the original question in this regard gets closer to the kind of Nietzschean worries of maybe there has to be some kind of final, decisive question posed as to the value of the human species as such, right as to what justifies our kind of broad civilizational projects in general.
Speaker 2:And maybe that can only be posed in the face of something that really is a truly civilizational threat climate change. You know, take your pick, there are plenty to choose from these days but I think that there's some validity to this concern that I think probably intersects with this question of a negative universal history, you know, and what kind of universal history might still be salvaged in the face of the defeat of at least the classical kind of working class project.
Speaker 1:I posit a little bit that the Kantian problem I'm going to have to edit this episode is. Actually, I do think it's a problem in the sense that you're right. I think Kantian moral norms and my least favorite philosophical school on the planet utilitarian moral norms are more or less for most people in the West, and that's another whatever the fuck that is question. The West and that's another. Whatever the fuck that is question. It's pretty generalizable to society, particularly on the liberal left, and the left, whether they realize it or not, are more or less acting on Kantian moral norms about individual behavior modified through an assumption of greatest good and utility, not a deontological assumption about laws of which you can give yourself, except sometimes when talking about very specific things like, say, racism or gender equality or specific subgroups, where we become Kantians again, and this I've always found very unsatisfying because it's like these two frameworks lead to weird places if you really follow them through. Um, rawls is like the most positive example, although I hate him and uh, it's just the other thing I'm laying out there. I think it's important and the least you know, like the most dark-pilled version of this is like David Benatar, where it's just like why, wife, let's just follow this through through a utilitarian judgment, but also, like, maybe posit some kind of law in which suffering is actually more value uh, the lack of suffering is more valued than pleasure. Therefore, no life, and it's just like, well, obviously something's gone wrong and there's more. Reasonably, and if reasoning, if you think the logical implications of morality is to basically be thanos for everything, um, and it does strike me then that and we talk about the Nietzschean conception a little bit but it does strike me then that we are looking At a problem Of Moral intuitions that do come from worked out theories that have been blended kind of ad hoc and folk ways due to our post-enlightenment political traditions, and that lead people into weird reasoning cul-de-sacs, because some of these intuitions actually do contradict with each other.
Speaker 1:And, furthermore, I I don't know that we can justify any one law or criterion universally, like the first thing you do when I used to teach ethics to actually to high schoolers in Mexico, and one of the things that we would talk about as we go through the implications of deontology. We just go through it step by step by step, the way kant does, and you get into some really weird hang-ups when you're like wait, I can't make exceptions, uh-oh, like um. And for those of you who don't know and I'm the the philosophical interest of my audience is probably vast and vast in their experience deontology would say you have to act as if what you're doing is universal law and you have to act because it's a morally right thing to do, not just because you like it, and because of that you have to walk through its universal applicability. But then when you start stacking those questions, those universal applicabilities get really, really strange, like when? Like?
Speaker 1:The most famous one is when are you allowed to lie? And then there were circumstances. And since there's no hierarchy of values here, there's no way to like adjudicate that. And I think that's why a lot of people rely on utilitarianism as a kind of way to fix that problem. But that doesn't really work, because the utilitarian impulse is actually completely contradictory to the Kantian one, except when John Rawls touches it.
Speaker 3:Well, if I could push back a little, I don't think that the average person does rely on utilitarianism has become a kind of master discourse of the ruling class that on a broad managerial, societal level, utilitarianism makes sense with the the formalistic, overly formalistic criticism you've brought up about kant and the lack of a, a rank order, as anita would say, or a hierarchy of various goods.
Speaker 3:I think my personal view, my cards on the table uh, is that our moral lives are irreducibly particularistic, uh, meaning that there is no formal maxim, maxim that will capture all the nuances of our moral lives and decision-making, that there's actually a plurality of goods and that the way we go about adjudicating or weighing them against each other is imperfect. It's more of an art than a science. So the whole idea, kantian Hegelian idea of a science of morality, I do believe, is fundamentally misguided every day. Is that? Not only does it it jail better with uh our folk, our moral folk, psychology uh, but it avoids the pitfalls of the formalistic science of morality that you get from the kantian hegelian tradition and it doesn't implicate you in the uh the horrific implications of a society premised on uh utilitarian considerations.
Speaker 2:First.
Speaker 2:I'm going to switch gears and defend Kant a little bit here. So like this is a mistake that's very frequently made, which is to recognize there are three different formulations of the moral law and the groundwork the categorical imperative and the universalization principle is only one of the formulations. They are meant to be mutually reinforcing and hang together, the other two being always treat others not as ends and never merely as means, and always act in such a way as to wail the kingdom of events right. And one response which I don't think is a fully convincing response to conflict of duties, issues like you've raised concerning do you lie to the Nazi commander who's at your door while you're hiding Jews? Right, as the most often used example, one response is to say that Kant never meant the categorical imperative to be this one shot. You know this is exactly how you're going to determine, how you're going to act in every case, without consideration of balancing it with the other formulations of the moral law. And there's reasons to think. You know the fact that he raises the problem of the rules regress in the first critique and explains very clearly why no general principles and general concepts can ever determine, fully determine judgment in a particular case, suggesting that there's always going to be some kind of room for judgment among any set of these determinating principles. So I do think that Kant gets you know it is sort of unfair.
Speaker 2:The formalistic critique I think is valid, but I think it is to some extent unfair, to the extent that it, at least as long as it doesn't include all of the different ways of formulating the moral law.
Speaker 2:And arguably, here, this is where utilitarianism fails along the lines of the second of these formulations, because you can make very similar kind of reductio ad absurdum arguments to utilitarianism too, as in you know, organ harvesting cases of you know, do you harvest the organs of one person in order to save five different people who are dying of various different things?
Speaker 2:Right, this clearly violates a deontological principle according to which the act itself of murdering that person for the organs is wrong. But it also seems to be a basically perverse consequence to think that we could just sacrifice people for the greater good with that kind of impunity or that, for example, we could punish innocent people so long as it was beneficial for the greater good. So there's the further problem of utilitarianism failing to make sense of some of these basic I think as Charles was saying, basic kind of folk ethical intuitions we have, such as we have a kind of prima facie obligation to keep promises, even if it would be for the greater good to break our promise. While, obviously, this is going to be subject to considerable judgment, there are going to be cases where we do feel like the greater good really outweighs the obligation to keep our promises.
Speaker 2:But neither. I think it's a way of saying that. Neither Kantianism or utilitarianism has a totally comprehensive way of making all of our kind of moral intuitions hang together. And this might be evidence of kind of basic state, of kind of moral pluralism that is just kind of the nature of the human universe. Or it could represent a state of alienation and bifurcation, as in the Hegelian and Marxist tradition, where it is some kind of unrealized social totality or false life that is causing this kind of state of moral incoherence. And I tend to think, as a Nietzschean, I tend to think it's a bit of both. So, devin, I have a question for you on the.
Speaker 3:You bring up a good point, that Kant has three formulations of the categorical imperative which he says are supposed to be equivalent. They're supposed to be able to reduce them to each other. They amount to the same thing. But you seem to be suggesting that under one formalization of the other that we can make sense of these kind of moral dilemmas, like whether or not you lie to the Nazis about hiding Jews. We can make sense, under a different formulation, of these moral dilemmas that seem to have perverse consequences when we follow one formulation or another. Is there one that you favor? The Kingdom of Ends one. Perhaps, if I had to guess, that would be the one I think you favor. Uh, the the kingdom of ends ones. Perhaps, if I had to guess, that would would be the one I think you favor I think, um, yeah, I mean some combination of the second and third.
Speaker 2:I mean I think there is the like utopian moment of the kingdom of ends where there's no sense in which you can justify, uh, complying with nazis as promoting the kingdom of ends right and just kind of some straightforward way.
Speaker 2:But I also think that many of the most more sophisticated Kantian formulations of this kind of deontological ethics now I think many of the more convincing ones are discourse ethics, where we think about the ways in which certain Kantian, broadly Kantian normative assumptions about equal dignity and reciprocity are basically embedded in the kinds of forms of communication that we engage in, just in ordinary contexts, and that if we kind of wish, try to wish away those normative commitments, we're committing a kind of performative contradiction by kind of denying these commitments that we do in fact practically make in our everyday lives.
Speaker 2:And so I think that kind of reformulates. The second, treating everybody as always as ends and never merely as means, as a recognition of a right to be given good reasons for actions that are done to or to them power that is exercised over them. Right that people are owed a right to justification, as Reiner Forst puts it. Right that people are owed justifications for actions that are taken in the kind of collective setting where power is exercised, and that there is no sense in which we can point to some overriding principle that would entitle somebody to exercise power indiscriminately over another human being totally without that demand for basic justification.
Speaker 1:So, okay, my answer to the problem was thinking about pluralism, not in the terms of relativism. And this, wait, because one of the fascinating, fascinating things, the other thing that you'll see, I think we've all taught at some point in our lives, and I've taught in english and in philosophy, so I I don't really know how I'm qualified to teach in philosophy, but nonetheless, um, I have and um, I've gone through and read students responses and they often both have a deontological, individual, rule-based view of morality and they also have a relativistic view of morality which I often point out to them, aren't compatible. Like you, actually, if you walk through this, these are not compatible belief sets. And one of the reasons I was attracted to mcintyre, because the first half of the mcintyrian critique, I kind of believe, the we can rebuild aristotelianism, uh, via aquinas. And why don't we all join the catholic church? Uh, I kind of don't even remotely believe. And so I was left with this idea of how do you have a moral pluralism that is not utterly relativ as an enclosed totality of norms, um which makes up a moral worldview? There's no way, um to justify any change other than it being effectively stochastic. And there the my students were like oh yeah, but I don't know, uh, pet explode. And that was the response for several years in a row when I taught this course. Um, but it is, most people's moral norms is both we have, we have, and maybe even there's a way in which part of that categorical imperative the not treating others as and not ends leads to also thinking that you have to respect all their moral norms because you somehow see it as inherent to them as individuals. There is a way that you can reconcile these two contradictory impulses that people have.
Speaker 1:I've tried to walk through the thought process, but when I went to virtue ethics it was because, one, I'm not assuming they're natural Unlike McIntyre, I do not assume they have any theological grounding. Two, they're pluralistic. Three, you can have some of them and not others. And four, they're modelable. And so that was a very simple kind of layman's answer. I have more articulate answers for this and, uh, in some ways, uh, my friend daniel tutt has always been on my back because he thinks I'm secretly probably too much of a nietzschean, and he's probably right. Um, but yeah, um, I do think you have to assert these values, like these are values I assert. Think you have to assert these values like these are values I assert, like I am laying out this norm for me.
Speaker 1:The other thing I think that is troubling about the kantian worldview, even though and I this is going to get into a meta ethical question, but also like I'm maybe in a meta philosophy question um is the way that individuals and the Kantian sense, which I do not think are necessarily alienated atoms, is still somehow easily moved into the Hobbesian category, going all the way back to Hobbes, and by people who think Hobbes meant this as an analogy. He did not. He literally believed in a material god, but that society is basically built up of individual brutish atoms of which humans are. I mean, people get the social contract part, they get the life brutish and short part, but they don't always get the physics stuff that he's assuming about people that they are so generously self-contained atomic units. Um, and the individual and the atom and the atomized aren't the same thing, but they easily become that in liberal and in in liberal society.
Speaker 1:Um, uh, I'm not. I'm not sure that's all hobbs. It might be alienation in the market too. It might be instrumental reason. We haven't even introduced that yet, but nonetheless it does seem to be a whole lot of people's limit on their morality. I'm not sure that. I think, charles I think you're right that probably people don't actually think this way, but they do talk this way, right, and I think.
Speaker 3:I think what you're getting at is that there is a kind of default assumption among relatively educated people, even extremely educated people, of cultural relativism which can bleed into a general moral relativism.
Speaker 3:Bleed into a general moral relativism that the norms and practices of any given society are determined by social and historical circumstances and therefore there's no outside perspective in which to judge them. And this is very amenable to the premises of liberal society and to pluralism, that we want a diversity of viewpoints. And a way to understand a diversity of viewpoints is that they are products of different historical and social developments. And the rub is that within a liberal society, supposedly we want a diversity of potentially extremely conflicting viewpoints but we want to unite them under this rubric of liberal democracy. But if we're going to have a truly pluralistic society that unites all disparate viewpoints, there are going to be some people who don't buy into that. And they don't buy into that for the very fact that they think their norms and practices have objective validity, that they have, in principle, the ability to be universalized, default educated opinion of a democratic populace. Without running into the question of well, what exactly are our inviolable norms and principles that unite us?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's, I mean, the classic sort of solution to this and kind of extending what Charles was saying is Rawls and political liberalism, where we start with the assumption. Political liberalism starts with the assumption of the fact of reasonable pluralism, but hinges upon important distinctions between morality and ethics on the one hand and public and private reason on the other, where what we ought to seek, from the standpoint of political liberalism, is an overlapping consensus over core moral concepts, while allowing there to be a plurality and tolerating or respecting a plurality of metaphysical doctrines which falls under the category of ethics from Rawls' standpoint. And so what political liberalism demands of citizens is that, when disputing over political issues, of course, of political power in public, is that we use public reasons, which are reasons that my fellow citizens could plausibly accept, even if they don't share conservative Catholic, even if they aren't an Orthodox Jew, et cetera, et cetera, or just a militant scientific atheist. So I think most of what we're responding to when we talk about these questions today is the failure of political liberalism as a kind of moral settlement right, the continual, the increasing tendency on the part of the political right to defect from anything resembling some common core of liberal norm, of basic liberal norms in favor of some kind of might makes right, thrasymachus style politics and the corresponding thus the corresponding breakdown of anything like an overlapping consensus that could legitimize the power of the state as an actor that is somehow a neutral arbiter among different competing conceptions of the good.
Speaker 2:And so this is where I think the critiques that to that McIntyre leveled against liberalism at the time of active virtue and similar critiques that Charles Taylor, michael Sandel leveled against Rawls virtue and similar critiques that Charles Taylor, michael Sandel leveled against Rawls, that the kind of missing place of the good life in liberalism as a kind of substantive ethical vision of a common concept of human flourishing, the fact that liberalism deliberately doesn't play that role or deliberately avoids playing the role of providing that, precisely because of its origins in absolutism and the need for some kind of political solution to the wars of religion, that has become the kind of defining crisis.
Speaker 2:I think the defining moral crisis of liberal sharply is that liberalism is experiencing that crisis and that we no longer recognize anything like a meaningful distinction between morality and ethics and the way that Rawls understood it, that we seem, whatever disagreements we have over ethics, seem just as sharp in the realm of basic questions of rights and equal dignity, dignity, and that does call for some kind of transition from away from the normative language of liberalism to something new.
Speaker 2:But I think the flip side of that is that there is often a tendency on the left, out of the extremely legitimate critique of liberalism as the ideology of capitalism and private property, to underestimate the normative power that still remains in basic liberal conceptions of rights and equal dignity and kind of underestimate the extent to which a any kind of more radical emancipatory political program that still breaks with liberalism would have to preserve some version of this basic normative language well, okay now.
Speaker 1:So you're, you're walking into, uh, my, my bugbear, which is rights, um, and human rights and, uh, unalienable rights, uh, which I'm just going to baldly assert, uh, do not exist. But I also am going to baldly, most of us really want them to exist for damn good reasons. So it's tricky because one of the things, if we talk about the long duray development of liberalism and this has come up, actually I've been in debates with Chris Catron, my vet noir, and this has come up. Actually I've been in debates with Chris Catron, my bet nor, and Chris and I have gone back and forth on the justification of rights, because he wants to justify liberal rights, but he wants to justify it in Hegel and in the German idealist tradition, which I'm like how? And blah, blah, blah something, history. And I'm like, yeah, okay, but I don't know what you mean by history. It seems like history is almost like god thinks like you, but now it's history thinks like you, um, but history doesn't know.
Speaker 2:I mean, rights get articulated through property relationships and the philosophy of right. You know, like certain forms of social reciprocity that get articulated in forms of mutual recognition, that we begin to recognize each other's rational moral agents by entering into certain kind of reciprocal contract relationships and, in civil society, right. That's some of the narrative that you get.
Speaker 1:Some of the narrative, but I see I can't justify all the rights though.
Speaker 3:That's the question of clarification. Gentlemen, when you say that you don't think rights exist, you don't think they can be justified, is that what you mean?
Speaker 1:I don't think we can justify the way they are justified as rights, and the problem is actually in their articulation. In most liberal societies, rights are things that you have unalienably. That's why they're human rights and not just rights granted to you by law. Are privileges granted to you by law? Because if you don't believe in the unalienability of them, they are privileges which the state grants you and thus the state can take away. But the argument is the state should not be able to take those rights away, and that is an intuitive thing for most people, right? And there's damn good reason actually to intuit that, because you don't want the state to do certain things. The justification of that some of it is justifiable in the development of property relations, and even Marx seems to kind of believe in them actually. But the historical justification outside of the German idealist tradition and actually even in the German idealist tradition it's just more articulated as a movement of history is that they are grounded in some kind of natural instantiation of you know uh we might call a metanorm, again, justified not necessarily in the christian god although initially it was um but in the relationship between you know the social contract and I don't know um, some deistic conception of uh of God which grants people based dignity.
Speaker 1:Um, we don't believe as a society liberal society in general, the society does not believe in that form of natural law anymore. Like as a historical process, we mostly abandoned it. Like as a historical process, we mostly abandon it. Um, thank you, darwin, for the most part, uh. So then we have to figure out how we justify this, and the justification it for most people can be tends to be incoherently political. So like they argue well, you need these rights, they transcend the. But like we have to fight for them, to get them from the state and also they're granted by the state and it becomes a very state centric view of what they are. But if that's true, the inalienability of rights is gone. Like, that's just not real.
Speaker 2:Why wouldn't the same kind of Kantian deontological commitments that we were suggesting people do in kind of public culture seem implicitly committed to? Why wouldn't those also? Why, natural right? Why wouldn't the Kantian tradition offer a comparable normative foundation?
Speaker 1:You know, my theory is that was Rawls was trying to do. Right, that's really what Rawls was trying to do right.
Speaker 1:That's really what Rawls was trying to do Of course, and he was going to try to take it all together like throw some utilitarianism in there, you know, and we're going to ground human rights on some other grounds in natural law, because Rawls is aware I mean, you know, he's smart that this actually is a problem, Because it is harder than I think people realize to kind of walk through what we consider natural rights and what Marxists would call bourgeois rights, actually emerging from the category imperative. It's not actually clear to me that all of them do. Property is one that definitely doesn't necessarily make sense. I mean, it kind of does but kind of doesn't. I like to take unpopular positions. Property is one that definitely doesn't necessarily make sense, I mean it kind of does, but kind of doesn't.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 2:I like to take unpopular positions.
Speaker 1:Go take an unpopular position.
Speaker 2:No, I think, if I'm playing devil's advocate, here's why I don't think human rights as a concept has the problem you're saying. I think the problem you're getting at is roughly the same as what Hannah Areck gets at in the chapter on the origins of the rights of man and decline of the nation state and the origins of totalitarianism, where she talks about human rights as the rights of those who have no rights, and the suggestion that she's making is human rights are asserted at this moment of extreme statelessness, in the midst of a refugee crisis, right so when there is an unprecedented population to which state protections and the kind of rights that traditionally came with them no longer extend, but nonetheless are considered as equal human beings who are deserving of those protections in some way. And in this sense, the argument for human rights, in my view, was never a more positive one, the powerful argument for human rights coming out of the Enlightenment was never one that posited something like a divine right or natural right.
Speaker 2:It was the more negative argument that traditional commitments to hereditary aristocracy and blood nobility, commitments to some kind of divinely ordained sanction, are a bunch of superstitions, right that the kind of justifications that have traditionally been given for inequality are really bad justifications that seem to wrongly suppress human talent, human freedom and all of the goods that come with it, when it seems to be realized more, when it's realized more universally than when it's limited to a particular class. And that when faced with this immense refugee population, the normative kind of force of the Enlightenment ideal still took effect despite the absence of any kind of meaningful state protection. And while this is a kind of crisis in a lamentable state, what it does make possible is a kind of international politics and international law where human rights claims really do have an effect, as in the mode of generating claims by stateless people and migrants on real political institutions, by giving them legal grounds for doing so. And while this is inadequate and still works simply within the kind of broader liberal system, I think it once again points to no, I think human rights have that kind of concrete legal reality and the act of positing them performatively, in some sense enabled the enabled that kind of you know Benavide calls this jurisgenerative politics to begin.
Speaker 2:And this comes out in large part to an unprecedented situation in the wake of World War II, when, truly when crimes against humanity on an unprecedented scale had been committed and they were sanctioned by existing law, right An entirely new law had to be invented, right After the experience of these immense crises of statelessness in the interwar period and obviously during World War II. So that, to me, is the argument for human rights are real. Well, what do you mean when you say they don't exist? What is the kind of ontological commitment that you're presupposing? Well, yeah, they't exist in a way that that atoms and molecules exist. I think we can agree on that, but very little that we talk about in the realm of politics exists in that sense.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. The one thing I might push back to. That is international law is treaty law, which means both sides have to agree to it and and while that was enforced in Germany in particular circumstances the neo-reactionary argument about that does have the unfortunate weight of being somewhat true that they were also carved around exceptions so they could not be applied to allied powers. So I mean like there's an idealist conception there and you run into the reality of what international law is and I think we see this right now Like we are living in a time where international human rights law is breaking down, collection of hegemons to enforce it, and we don't really have that right now. So but I mean to argue against myself. I also do like I do think there is something to the idea that these things that we call human rights are required for human flourishing and they're kind of required universally.
Speaker 1:And it's harder to. It's been hard for me to articulate how we justify that in a non you know, in a non-liberal way, and I'm not one of these leftists who thinks we throw everything liberal out in the bathwater. I was like you know, obviously people who read Marx and think that Marx thinks that really confuse me. But it does seem to me that we do have to deal with the fact that, that you know and Marx is right about this that most of these are also there's exceptions to these in general society either carved out for the capitalists or carved out for the conflicts between nation states, or carved out for the powerful, either carved out for the capitalists or carved out for the conflicts between nation states, or carved out for the powerful, and in that, like that runs up against liberal jurisprudence pretty hard and and and furthermore I also think we can't justify, like moral claims off of jurisprudential claims. So it's like this is, is this gets into a mess pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:I do agree with you, though, like the causality going in the opposite direction there that the moral language makes jurisprudential claims possible, and not just on the international level, but insofar as treaty law has been incorporated into national law. In many cases, that would be the argument.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a sound argument. Actually, I think that's a fair one, but I don't think it solves all my problems. Go ahead, Charles.
Speaker 2:I think it doesn't solve all your problems.
Speaker 3:I think. I think what you're circling around in in your critique of human rights is how human rights is is negatively justified. It's justified as protection against the encroachment of the state, and Devin's point was that the the concept of human rights arose in a period of statelessness right.
Speaker 3:So, the positive justification is premised upon the rights that human beings would have, the extra political, the ethical rights that human beings have qua human beings. So the fact that in our current system that rights are legally enforced, that they are a mechanism of state control and domination, is merely accidental to the ideal from which human rights arise, which is to find some universal criteria to ensure the dignity of persons regardless of states. It's actually premised upon statelessness, on an anarchist world. So that's why I would defend human rights as not. I mean, I sound like a Twitter communist. It's like real communism has not been tried, but real human rights has not been tried.
Speaker 2:I think it's. I think the way to see it is that it opens up sites, possible sites of democratic struggle. But introducing that form of kind of universalist language is a not just a kind of idealist move but a kind of tactical move in opening up possible sites of contestation, Because of course the hypocrisy that you correctly point out with regards to liberal internationalism cuts both ways right, Accepting, even on the face of it, the fact that we do recognize in some fashion this need for justification and still feel compelled to offer justifications for our actions, even when we're brazenly hypocritical in violating them. The way the US is right now with Gaza, for example, supporting Israel, and you know, the that still opens is a double edged sword that opens up the possible side of further critique. Right, and this, this gets continually iterated, and I'm not saying that's ideal.
Speaker 2:I think the Nietzschean in me says it might be necessary to be willing to accept the kind of tragic state in politics where we recognize the gap between this kind of normative language that we use and the reality. We recognize the hypocrisy but we try to be Machiavellian in exploiting those gaps. Right, that we think about it in a ruthlessly practical way and accept that there is this kind of reality that moral discourse imposes on our lives, but think about it in how it can actually be exploited in the direction of emancipatory political struggle, recognizing this double-sidedness where the hypocrisy is a source of broad cynicism and skepticism, but also a possible site of critique.
Speaker 1:Well, I think we can move to my other, least favorite moral topic, which is moral naturalism, which is, which is we I was thinking about the moral discourses that were popular in the about 10 years ago and what we might call the broadly speaking liberal center and vaguely liberal left, which I think it's encapsulated, encapsulated by people I deeply and uh, have deep moral antipathy for, like sam harris, um, that uh, try to argue that these things are both obvious and emerge in and of themselves, as if from nature, because evolution or something, um, and, and also like we can throw out the naturalistic fallacy because it's boring, um, which is an argument that he pretty much literally made. Um, and another one is applied science. Morality is a science because applied scientists, applied sciences, are stickier and probabilistic than we like to pretend, and so is morality. And I was like, can you just convince me that maybe medicine isn't a science? Um, so, uh, um, so. So be careful what you wish for there, sam. But this, this seemed to be a way to kind of shock and also cudgel like a certain, like our folk, morality.
Speaker 1:It was also a lot of discussion at the time because utilitarianism was a seem to be rational, because for a lot of analytic philosophers somehow rational means instrumental reason, for some reason that I don't totally understand. Thank you, revenge of Weber. And and thus there was all these talks about people's irrational responses to, to more to moral questions like the ones we laid out about. Like actually, you talked about the easy example which cut up the, the patient and spread the organs around. I mean, you know, these are all the things we do in the intro to morality, class Right. And it seems to me pretty obvious that those aren't irrational assumptions but that this naturalization actually has consequences and that it's natural that it's naturalizing something in order to make it both a quantifiable and be unquestionable A quantifiable and B unquestionable. And yet almost nobody shares these intuitions. Like, how have you guys responded to that? I know it doesn't come up as much because you know you probably don't want to deal with stupid texts like Sam Harris's defense of natural morality.
Speaker 2:No, I think it most neatly relates to the episode we did on Christine Korsgaard's Sources of Normativity. I mean, I think the straightforward and I think I'm pretty simple in this respect, I just think that kind of moral naturalisms cannot account for the source of normativity, right, they cannot account for the distinctive bite that ought claims have in our practical discourses that we do have to take in order to make sense of that. We can't adopt the third personal explanatory perspective of natural sciences that can only at best give us prudential reasons why, if we want to achieve a certain outcome, these are the best instrumental means, for example kind of rational choice theory, as you were kind of alluding to there. But they can't. But in order to account for the kind of claim that we think moral norms actually have in our lives, we need to adopt this kind of first personal perspective of the agent and adopt a kind of intentional stance to make sense of motivations and reasons for acting. And then I do.
Speaker 2:I then kind of go towards thinking that science natural science in my view has not yet succeeded in offering a fully reductionist, satisfying, fully reductionist account of consciousness. It hasn't to me offered a convincing reason to go towards a limited materialism and just throw out our kind of folk psychological notions about intentions and beliefs and desires. And as long as we want to continue talking about those kinds of concepts and as long as we're still committed to employing them in our practical discourses, then I do think we're going to have to worry about something like the naturalistic fallacy. I do think it's a real argument, because I think there is going to be a considerable gap in what a scientific, naturalistic explanation can provide when it comes to making sense of normativity.
Speaker 3:I just want to make sure it's clear to the listeners what we're talking about when we're talking about moral naturalism. We've thrown a lot of terms around, but moral naturalism is a meta-ethical theory that seeks to find the sources of our norms and our moral behavior purely in biological, evolutionary, psychological explanations. That is, to reduce the diversity of moral behavior and norms to some ultimately, in some cases, some physical substrate, the alternative to that which is suggested by the fact that empirical sciences can certainly tell us something about our evolved receptivity to cooperative behavior, to mutual aid. They can't fully encapsulate the first-person perspective of what it means to make difficult moral decisioning. So it doesn't seem that a reductionary project based on empirical research, psychological, evolutionary research, can really fully encapsulate our moral lives.
Speaker 3:So I agree with Devin, although I'm interested in moral naturalism insofar as I do think that part of being a moral agent is having a certain evolved capacity for moral behavior, and that is interesting in itself to learn how our species has this receptivity. The question that immediately arises is that since we have this receptivity, what are we responding to? Are we responding to something that's out there in the world in some sense? Are there such things as moral facts which we have like variable receptivity and we can recognize and apprehend, or is it all internal to the contingencies of evolved human cognition and sociality? That's the big question of metaethics and that maps onto the distinction between moral realism versus relativism to nihilism. It's like whether there is some fact of the matter in some sense about moral norms, or if it's something constructed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I should be clear. This is a specific objection to kind of naturalism as a meta-ethical theory. I agree in the sense. I mean particularly from a Nietzschean standpoint. Like I think any kind of account we want to give of the human moral personality and the origins of our kind of normative commitments is going to reach some kind of limit in empirical psychology and naturalism. Those are going to be deeply informative to understanding what kind of modes of psychological flourishing are compatible with our moral norms as human beings. And that's where I see the Nietzschean side of things coming in.
Speaker 3:So I definitely want to clarify that.
Speaker 2:it's not that I think naturalistic standpoints or approaches to morality are somehow useless, just that they do leave this one very important question unanswered important question unanswered.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I'm interested in a lot of the work of comparative anthropology and comparative biology in regards to norms and normativity, but I also, like I think anyone who's ever studied anthropology cannot say that we can answer um, those norms based off of uh evolutionary discussions, of primate studies, because we a don't act like there are other two comparative species actually um bonobos and chimps. Uh, we seem to split the difference on some of those traits and b, while there does seem to be like we might call them like root norms, like reciprocity, fairness, etc. The way those get played out over a variety of cultures, it's very hard to argue that that's innate to anything. Like those root norms develop in wildly divergent ways in different societies.
Speaker 2:Actually, I don't think that's true. You don't think that's true. You don't think that's true. No, I think the evidence in moral development is totally the opposite. Domain theory in particular there's, I think, very strong and persuasive versions of it. It's not Kohlbergian stage theory, it's kind of post-Kohlbergian moral development theory. But essentially, if you pose qualitative interviews to children, across pretty much and this has been replicated across in several different you know, I think there's specifically Hong Kong, various places in the Middle East Europe, united States children will consistently develop the same, basically the same kind of normative distinctions between moral and conventional and personal domains and certain kind of criterion judgments for demarcating what distinctively moral judgments consist in. They're independent of authority, they're universally binding. You can't suspend them. You know, if your mom tells you that it's okay to hit your brother, it still doesn't make it okay to hit your brother Kids in every culture will say that at about age four or five universally.
Speaker 2:And it's an extremely robust empirical research program. So I'm actually highly skeptical of the claims that you get from people like Jonathan. Haidt or the kind of more naturalistic leaning moral psychologists. Like this is just kind of some innate root reaction. Maybe there's extreme empirical variability. I think there is a very strong worked out Kantian framework in moral development that suggests that it has pretty robust evidence for a certain-.
Speaker 1:Why does it change when they become?
Speaker 2:adults. Ah well, I mean, now you've asked the point. The point is that having universal moral intuitions doesn't necessarily exhaustively determine cases of judgment. There remains and this remains, I think, a central mistake that is made in political discourse to imagine that agreement over moral ideals or basic categories, moral categories, guarantees convergence and moral judgments over the particular. I think we make a great many mistakes assuming that we reason about moral ideals in the same way we reason about moral particulars and vice versa.
Speaker 1:Well, I want to be very clear. I do not think that all these let's call them emergent moral norms Maybe that's the best way to call them. We talked about fairness. We've talked about violence when violence is acceptable, when it's not. I've read some of the research. It is pretty consistent in children and it wildly diverges in adults, and I find that interesting. What I will say is I've also read the anthropological research on uh, have you read six societies? Has anyone read this book?
Speaker 1:I don't know, um, it's a book from the 80s but it talks about like, uh, there's a, there's a, there's a bunch of arguments about normativity that will assert that the cultural norms will shape all these things in such a way that they're non-traumatic and people will claim that primitive people don't have trauma. That's another fun one the the anthropological studies in society actually pretty much indicates um, there are, there are societies that violate fundamental moral norms and people are traumatized by it. Um, so I I do think there is the reason why I called them root is. It seems like something about that logic expands as you age. The complexity around that logic, how you lean into that, makes it harder to say that we all understand what fairness is, but we do when we're six.
Speaker 2:To be clear, the explanation that I have in mind it's not an innate explanation. It's not that these are somehow ingrained intuitions. They're developed and constructed through forms of social interaction and social knowledge, right, theory of mind, empathy, these sorts of basic capacities that start to get triggered in early childhood. But I mean, you're of course posing the question why is it that you know we all share these basic moral intuitions and then depart from them? Well, I mean, one answer might just be that as adults, we get increasingly sophisticated at letting ourselves off the hook for what otherwise we can't fail to know is the right thing to do, right. So I mean one it could be that you know our capacities to justify and rationalize are rationalize, are this double-edged sword where, you know, perhaps we see things more clearly in this respect as children.
Speaker 1:Well, this is, I mean we're getting into. Uh, so my, my educational background is, uh, a degree in English studies and then a degree in liberal studies, half split between anthropology and philosophy, so, um, so I do think a lot about this, this stuff in particular, and it seems, it seems very interesting that we have a hard time dealing with the fact that there is evidence that certain social norms actually are destructive, like there is. I mean, like even in brain scans and stuff, we can see that this stuff traumatizes people. It has physiological, developmental effects. I mean, it's not as simple as the way it gets used in pop psychology today, but it's there. So, for example, if you have a society that normalizes spousal rape, it shows up. And if you can get people to feel comfortable with you and tell you their emotions, or if you can get them in a scanner or any you know you do thorough ethnography after you've proven some kind of kinship bond, so they'll trust you, you can start mapping out that, yeah, this clearly has an effect, and it's not just the weirds that it has an effect on. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, that's why industrialized, educated, forget what the R is Rich and developed world, so it is interesting in that regard.
Speaker 1:I think we have a lot to do on moral psychology here, but I also think it's hard that when people try to make the evolutionary biology standpoint, my point on that is our comparative species don't act the same as us and they're very closely related, and they don't act the same as each other. If you look at hominids and they're very closely related, um, you know, and they don't act the same, as he said. Or if you, if you look at hominids and we're the only one that's currently surviving, and then the great apes that are very similar to us, they actually have pretty divergent social norms and, uh, we have evidence of, uh, primate cultures and those have an effect too, and and stuff like that. So it's it's very interesting to kind of parse that out. Um, I wonder why this stuff doesn't get talked in in political world enough, though, because I do think if you want to just like side swipe norms and and yet we can say, like we have evidence that reinforcement and mimesis and probably evolved social instincts interplay in certain ways, they can go in wildly different directions, and humans are kind of particular in our ability to rationalize what seem like practically irrational things like the. My favorite study is if you give chimpanzees a task that has additional tasks in it and they figure out that those additional tasks are unnecessary, they will drop them. We will find some weird metahuman way to explain them. Like we'll still do the unnecessary tasks but we'll be like we'll come up with some meta person that's making us do it for other ritualistic reasons and that is really weird. But like that does imply something and and something that implicates morality.
Speaker 1:And it often gets left out of left-wing discourse. I think it's my point. Like I hear a lot more about this from the Sam Harris's, who I think are wrong, than from leftist, who I think are right but can't articulate this or won't go to both the anthropology and maybe even the problems with it. There are. You know we can get into the critiques of anthropology later, it's probably on discussion today. But like the, there are things there and I do agree with you. There's robust sense of like kids know what fairness is if it's reinforced at all. Like it's it. But I don't like and it's not. I don't even think it's, I don't just think it's rationalization, because I think part of it's also like my models of mine get super complicated.
Speaker 2:Um uh, which is another thing that we could talk about, but I think the point is less when I when I think about this point, about kind of normative agreement or disagreement, and whether kids develop the same moral norms.
Speaker 2:I think about it less as solving any problems. To explain how yes, you know basic questions of fairness articulated in highly schematic scenarios to children will events very similar reactions. When you get to the profound questions of how we're designing a society distributive justice, retributive justice you know all of the actual details then there are far more opportunities for disagreement over how those norms are realized. It's a question of sort of how we focus our conception of normative agreement or disagreement. What are the real sources of disagreement? And one one version of that story is that there really is just all across the world, in different cultures, fundamentally conflicting intuitions that human beings have about what is right and wrong, and I and I that's the picture.
Speaker 2:I want to resist that. If we're starting with that conception, that kind of strong anti-universalist conception, we're underestimating the extent to which we as human beings share this kind of deep structure of association and social learning. And it's something that I think the kind of innatists are also ignoring by wanting to jump to immediate comparisons with chimpanzees or bonobos, like the idea that somehow our specific moral vocabulary and moral intuitions are detachable from processes of socialization that have not evolved naturally but have developed over thousands and thousands of years by being passed down through human societies right even in prehistory, and so I think that this is, I mean, I think, it's not entirely surprising that these kinds of discussions are not had in leftist circles, because they often come off as highly abstract. But I, you know come back to the theme that I'm trying to reemphasize that I think, when we actually get into the concrete and practical questions of politics, these kinds of normative disagreements and unreflective assumptions actually start coming out and becoming sources of disruption and disagreement that we might find more productive ways to work through.
Speaker 3:Another way of thinking of what Devin is saying is that the problem that the moral naturalist runs into is in their suppressed meta-ethical supposition that all moral behavior is pro-social behavior, that we have developed in our ancestral environment a certain repertoire of pro-social behavior and it's just modifications of that. But the problem is with increasing complexity we can't really map on the ancient environment of our ancestors to contemporary society. The problem is in the meaning of the social what cooperative behavior looks like, what mutual aid looks like, when to cooperate, when not to cooperate. You can't simply reduce all of moral behavior to some kind of pro-social behavioral modification. It's confusing morality, the norms of morality, with social norms that I think a lot of contemporary moral disagreement arises is conflatingating the two, and the naturalists don't help with that so, um, I guess we've gone.
Speaker 1:We've gone through some key problematics and probably, uh, laid out some claims that people are going to find, um, pretty abstract. One defense I will have of this abstraction is when you actually try to do the practical, you actually end up at the abstract anyway. There's something about I don't know maybe I'm a dirty Hegelian still in this way that there's something about practical life that lends itself eventually to becoming abstract and then reinstituted into practical life. Think about even math in this way. But I do think it's something we have to talk more about, because I am very frustrated right now by the way some of our folk moral theory actually butts up with, maybe, the way we express political values. I think there's two different folk ways of expressing this. So people realize, oh, this is just wrong and OK, fine, justify it. And then they try to and like they often try to articulate it in ways that actually bump up against their own moral intuition and it makes it makes them seem more fundamentally inconsistent than they are. Like my critique of human rights in a way, for example, is also trying to get us to articulate them in a way we can actually defend them better. And because I have been very frustrated. Frustrated with a liberal human rights discourse a la Peter Singer that also throw in some utilitarianism or something, and I'm just like I don't even see how you get to what you think you're defending from these premises that you have. Or you come to like moral conclusions that seem radically counterintuitive and also probably would be socially disastrous, and yet you're promoting them as some form of rationality and also maybe eugenics, and also maybe eugenics. So it's hard for me to let those two incongruities slide, and particularly as we see.
Speaker 1:I mean one of the things about our contemporary instantiation of moral life is like, moral discourse is now and political discourse is now truly democratized. Uh, for good and bad. Like, uh, and I say for good and bad because people don't really have control over the ways in which they've been democratized. Democratized I actually should put that in quotation um, in that everyone now has access to it. Social media and anyone who has access to that infrastructure which isn't everybody, but it's a whole lot more people than it used to be um, can participate in moral discourses and do um and have access to it. It's no longer, uh, the purview of just privilege educated weirdos like ourselves. Um it, it also seems to, these discourse patterns get people in the cul-de-sacs because they're not slowing down and walking through their normative assumptions and, um, they're also not totally in control of how these patterns are being manipulated. Because when I, when I had to say we have to put them in democratic, in quotation marks, because people have access to this, to publish them and be part of the moral discourse, that used to be a very rarefied thing, even in early print culture. Um, there's also a sense in which, uh, they're not all weighted equally under the algorithm. And the algorithm actually does change moral discourses.
Speaker 1:And I don't want to go all Jonathan Haidt I think he's kind of stupid on this point and just seems to think if we got rid of the Internet, everything would be better. But it does seem to me that that creates a problem for a lot of people, that they need to articulate their norms better so that they can understand the way these discourses are actually playing out and what else is being weighed into them that they can't see. Does that make sense? All right, that's a pretty big concern and on the left in particular, I do think there's a you know, to go back to the original question, I do think there's a total skirting of these.
Speaker 1:I think we have a responsibility to talk about this. Like there's a total skirting of figuring out what the norms are. We assume we agree on norms, but look at said moral discourse that I was just talking about on twitter, facebook, instagram, tiktok, anything and I'm not talking about people who are on the right or in the center, I'm just talking about amongst leftists. We do not actually share like justifications for our moral norms at all, like even remotely, and I'm sure that, uh, you probably deal with that more than I do, since you guys talk about moral philosophy a lot more than me, but it it does seem.
Speaker 1:It does seem like we need to articulate it, um, partly because I think it would be useful for us to just map the way we understand these.
Speaker 1:I'm not trying to. I don't think we're ever going to come to some grand, unified, universal field theory of how we generate moral norms, um, beyond like the basic things we talked about a minute ago. Uh, I just I think we need to understand where these discourse patterns go and, and partly so we at least we can translate between them. Like there's so much talking past, completely past each other, uh, on this stuff, and I do think it's almost more meta ethical than ethical, because sometimes, like, we agree on the outcome, we agree on what is good, we don't agree on how we're justifying that, and that's. We just butt heads on trying to explain ourselves one on one, and so I think podcasts like yours are important for that, even though that's kind of a large, almost impossibly Herculean task kind of a large, almost impossibly Herculean task. So how do you guys think your intervention into getting the left to think about moral norms is going?
Speaker 3:Well, we're a very new podcast. We haven't even published 10 episodes yet. We've been very slow going about it, but that's because we consider our tasks very important and we want to be deliberate, uh, and we want to uh treat the subject and and what we're reading with the seriousness it deserves, but I think it's going well. Uh, we have, you know, some loyal listeners. We have a few uh early subscribers on patreon supporting the pod for virtually nothing, just a vote of confidence, and we really appreciate that. And I think in your, your final monologue, you've hit on something that motivates us is that there does seem to be confusion, at least about the moral norms that underscore our collective political projects. But I'm actually more hopeful, to bring it full circle, about our ability to negotiate a justified settlement on what our moral norms are and the specific moral norms that motivate leftist emancipatory project, and I hope we're in some way a small part of bringing moral discourse to the forefront of the left again.
Speaker 2:What Charles said. I'd love for you all to listen to our pod. I'm not taking it quite as seriously. I mean I take it seriously, but I'm going to strike the more lighthearted note and say that you know, I think we're just trying to have some fun and informative discussions about moral philosophy. At the end of the day, we've got our last episode on Dialectic of Enlightenment coming up and then we're going to be switching gears and doing a few episodes on existentialism, starting with Kierkegaard. We'd love for everybody to listen to Moral Minority.
Speaker 1:Come check out what we're talking about. I listen, it's good. Actually, it's the first when podcasting really kind of went through its first expansion, I think around the end of the teens because I'm ancient, I was really into philosophy podcasts and they got all very boring to me after a while. Yours hasn't gotten boring to me yet and I am. It's nerdy. I will say that it is. It's nerdy. If you guys think I'm nerdy and you have to, like, ask me to explain jargon listeners, you're going to, but they do explain it.
Speaker 2:I can live with nerdy. I can live with nerdy.
Speaker 1:But it's good and you're talking about key text, which also for those of you who, uh who, listen to podcasts I'm appreciate podcasts it'll take a while to actually talk about a book so they talk about it correctly, instead of reading like a 600 page theory book and thinking you can talk about it cogently the next day, when you did it in three days like we try we try to do our homework.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, um, and it shows, and so I want to endorse you guys. Um, I hope to have you guys on the show in the future. I I really enjoy talking about these topics. I also probably want to get Devin and Daniel Tutt to discuss Nietzsche on my show with me as a moderator, because I'm split between the two of you.
Speaker 2:I can probably do it, I'm not.
Speaker 1:I'm not springing this on you as a trap. I promise I had a big long discussion with him about Nietzsche. I mean, I do agree with Nietzsche's personal political. I think he's so wild it's actually hard to figure out what he actually was. But it was some kind of reactive aristocratic Although he't an aristocrat actually but like aristocratic morality, I just don't think that that's the limit to it. I don't have this like genetic notion of, like you know, yeah, I also content hagel were racist, absolutely like um, uh, you know, um, yeah, yeah, mark's, uh, mark's also could kind of sort of be racist and uh, uh, I actually shouldn't, shouldn't downplay it. He could be racist but he at least seemed to know that it was wrong.
Speaker 2:Um, and I think no thinker encourages you to go your own direction with his thought as actively as Nietzsche does, rather than to somehow subscribe to every one of his judgment.
Speaker 1:Right, that's probably true. Also, maybe we should have a discussion about does Nietzsche have a system? Yes, no, because I have no idea, but anyway, well I look forward to that debate.
Speaker 3:if you can arrange it between Todd and Devin, I will certainly be tuning in myself.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having us on.
Speaker 1:It was fun. People should check it out. It's a new podcast. It goes into this stuff, it goes into detail and also it'll expose you to some books you probably haven't read, because I hadn't read the sources of narrativity and I realized I need to. So, anyway, have a nice day. And oh, I will put stuff in the show notes. So, listeners, if you want to find their podcast, it will be in the show notes. Just look beneath, it'll be there.
