Abstract
Thus far I have been arguing that social criticism — moral, but also the-oretical — requires not that we transcend our practices, but that we remain within them. Contrary to what thinkers like Rorty suggest, the distinctions on which the critic relies are internal to the practices whose “relation to reality” the platonist seeks to get into view. Ironically, it is precisely in attempting to transcend these practices that the platonist risks losing the critical capacity that, it was thought, required the sought-after “external” viewpoint. Thus, in rejecting the platonist’s putative point of view as illusory, we need not relinquish the resources required for rational dissent and critique. In this sense, I have been defending the adequacy of what I called “ordinary” — as opposed to platonistic — realism.
So then in questions of theory, truth is the same for everybody, both as to principles and to conclusions … In questions of action, however, practical truth and goodwill are not the same for everybody with respect to particular decisions, but only with respect to common principles; and even those who are equally in the right on some particular course of action are not equally aware of how right they are.
Thomas Aquinas1
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Notes
That such concerns about the adequacy of our moral discourse can arise after having renounced platonism is nicely brought out by James Lindemann Nelson, who writes that “it might be argued that those skeptical about ethics as a form of knowledge base their doubts on features of the language game that are plainly accessible — the prevalence and endurance of deep ethical disagreement, for example … Such observations do not require taking a ‘sideways on’ view of ethics but rely rather on the presumably laudable activity of describing differences among language games.” James Lindemann Nelson, “Review of Ethical Formation by Sabina Lovibond,” International Philosophical Quarterly 42(8) No. 168 (December 2002), 556.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 6.
MacIntyre suggests that our alleged present predicament is one “which almost nobody recognizes and which perhaps nobody at all can recognize fully.” MacIntyre, After Virtue, 4. However, it is worth noting that MacIntyre is not the first to have suggested such an “hypothesis.” Emile Durkheim, for example, suggested that “morality … is going through a real crisis.” He continues, “Our faith has been troubled; tradition has lost its sway; individual judgment has been freed from collective judgment.” Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (New York: The Free Press, 1933), 408–409.
R.W. Beardsmore, Moral Reasoning (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 107.
J. Kemp makes a similar point when he writes, “If I am asked to justify my action in refusing to give money to a beggar in the streets I might say that I could not afford to, or that the man was not really as poor as he looked, or that giving money to beggars tends to weaken the moral fibre of the community. It might be disputed whether any of these were good reasons, or just how good any one of them was, but there would be no dispute that the reasons offered were at least relevant to the question at issue. But if, when asked to defend my refusal, I say that Glasgow is west of Edinburgh nobody would accept this as in any way relevant to my lack of generosity; it is no reason at all, not even a bad one.” J. Kemp, Reason, Action and Morality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 106–107.
Theo van Willigenburg, “Shareability and Actual Sharing: Korsgaard’s Position on the Publicity of Reasons,” Philosophical Investigations 25 (April 2002): 180. I do not think that van Willigenburg would want to say that in arriving at a conclusion about what the right thing to do is, one makes it the right thing to do by the mere fact of thinking it is. If whatever decision one made were ipso facto the right decision, the difficult work of moral decision-making would be evacuated of its entire significance.
Peter Winch, “Apel’s ‘Transcendental Pragmatics’,” in Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences, ed. S.C. Brown (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), 66.
Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101.
John Kekes, The Art of Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 54.
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© 2005 Richard Amesbury
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Amesbury, R. (2005). Agreeing to Disagree: Toward a More Capacious Conception of Tradition. In: Morality and Social Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230507951_6
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