Hello all, I would like to begin by saying that a lot of the
objections that I will raise have been offered in class previously. I wish to
write this blog post in order to air some of my thoughts, and a new situation
to analyze that may end up in my first paper.
Harman does an excellent job of succinctly laying out his
thesis regarding moral relativism in the first sentence of his paper. He
believes that “morality arises when people reach an implicit agreement… about
their relations to one another (p.41)”. The crux of my argument revolves around
the nature of an implicit agreement, and the idea of community agreement. The objection
that I present here is epistemological in nature, in that I question how we
come to understand implicit agreements especially in a community setting. Every
individual has a unique perspective on the world that surrounds them, and it is
more than likely that a situation which arises, will be viewed drastically
different by two individuals.
This situation may be best described by using a (rather
disheartening) scenario. Imagine a situation in which a woman has just killed
her former rapist, and this scenario was viewed by two individuals. Both of
these individuals believe that murder is wrong. However, one of these
individuals (Person A) does not believe that rape is morally wrong, while the
other is vehemently anti-rape (Person B). B will then say that the murder was
justified due the heinous act of rape, while A will cling to the idea that all
murder is wrong.
My issue with Harman’s moral relativism is that in this
scenario the implicit agreement is entirely too vague. Both A and B seem to
have come to the same conclusion--i.e., that murder is wrong; but when a
complicated scenario arises that also involves moral disagreements regarding
rape, then their implicit arrangement fails. In layman’s terms, my argument
revolves around the ambiguity of Harman’s thesis regarding moral relativism.
How do I know that when I say “murder is wrong” and the person across from me
agrees, that we are actually agreeing to the same principle, and not our
interpretation of it.
7 comments:
I think that because they are justifying murder with a second agreement, rape, which the two subjects do not have an implicit agreement. They do not have an implicit agreement at all because they do not agree about rape and that is where there implicit agreement ends. They may have one similar implicit agreement but that is not the one that they are using to justify the murder.
The statement that, “morality arises when people reach an implicit agreement… about their relations to one another," is in keeping with a kind of "contractual" theory of ethics and very much like the theory that Hobbes proposed. Hobbes believed that in a "state of nature" there is no morality, and that it is only by agreements and conventions set up among members of a society that notions such as 'private property' and 'morality' arise. People, for thier mutual benefit, establish moral rules that safeguard their life and liberty. Of course, this theory about the origins of morality assumes as a first premise that there are no absolute moral principles or moral truths. I'm not sure if Hobbes argued for this, but it would be interesting to see if he did.
"Murder is wrong" needs qualification. In the act of self-defense it is, generally, not considered wrong; nor by some states when they exercise capital punishment. Barring these, the agreement is not implicit but explicit. A's character and disposition is at odds with the agreement over rape, B's is at odds with the agreement over due process. Our sensibilities factor in as well. 'A' would get no sympathy from a jury should he ever exercise his belief; B's appeal to revenge as motive might mitigate blame.
I would like to respond to Dylan's comment:
This is the crux of my argument. We may implicitly agree that murder is wrong, but the nature of this implicit agreement is vague. How am I to know that what I have agreed to is identical to what you have agreed to. We do not have the time and energy to go over every scenario in which murder may or may not be morally permissible, so we take the blanket statement that murder is wrong (with a few exceptions like self defense). Therefore when he take a more complicated situation like the rape-murder case, we have no way of knowing whether our implicit agreements agree.
First of all I don't think what I'm going to say really argues against your conclusion that Harman is ambiguous, but I think you need to consider his description of agreements more (also I don't have the article in front of me right now, but I want to write this now, so for better of worse this is from memory). The way I understood Harman was that the implicit agreements were very different from contractual agreements. That instead of an exchange of something for the benefit of multiple parties (that is, as a contractual agreement, and, as someone else pointed out, as Hobbes understood moral agreements - limiting rights, etc.), implicit agreements are actually the aligning of personal intentions and, perhaps, preferences. In this sense they don't have to be explicit at all, since, these personal attitudes can align without ever being expressed. W/r/t your example about murder, I think Dylan's right in saying that the two parties don't actually have an implicit agreement since their respective values and intentions don't align. All this being said, I do think there are still problems of ambiguity in Harman, especially in the case of the epistemological questions you're talking about.
I think you're touching on a crucial problem for Harman (I actually intend to write about a similar topic as well). I understand that these agreements don't have to be explicit necessarily, but I think epistemologically they almost have to be in order to distinguish between inner judgments and outer judgments. If I take everything Harman says to be true, then I feel like I want to be able to distinguish whether or not my moral judgments of others are justified, and what I mean by them. In that I mean, when I think "it seems wrong to be that S did X" I want to know what sort of judgment I'm passing. Without knowing whether or not we share an agreement, I don't think that's possible. Maybe Harman would say that it doesn't matter whether or not we know (ie. whether we're aware that we're making an inner judgment or otherwise), but it seems to me that it should matter.
Cassy, I think that Harman would have to say exactly (or nearly) that. Eric's point, that two people can't seem to understand with absolute certainty whether they are implicitly in agreement with one another brings to my mind the following scenario...
Congressmen are writing a law, and they want to write it so that people who are moral will be acting in accordance with the law and people who are not acting morally will be acting illegally. Every little specific must be discussed, so that the congressmen can be sure that they are in agreement with one another (ruling out anything implicit, really). Now, if it were the case that someone is implicitly in agreement with the congressmen, great! They will agree with the law! If they aren't in agreement, I suppose they can still follow the law, but they won't feel, under Harman's view, that it has anything to do with morality. In the end, one loses practical meaning in morality when morality is defined by what is implicitly agreed upon.
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