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Too Soon to Say
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 June 2012
Abstract
(1) Rupert Read charges that Rawls culpably overlooks the politicized Euthyphro: Do we accept our political perspective because it is right or is it right because we accept it? (2) This charge brings up the question of the deficiency dilemma: Do others disagree with us because of our failures or theirs? – where the two dilemmas appear to be independent of each other and lead to the questions of the logic of deficiency, moral epistemic deficiency, epistemic peers, and the hardness of philosophy. (3) In reply, on an expanded principle of charity Rawls does not overlook the Euthyphro but rather offers ground-breaking solutions to it, (4) that nonetheless trip on the independent bootstrap (5) – as also do Dreben and Nussbaum. (6) Furthermore, Rawls's ‘burdens of judgment’ seek to bypass the necessity of moral epistemic deficiency and (7) suggest a wider framework for understanding disagreement that sees disagreement as arising from inquiry being in development, unpredictable and uncertain. (8) This wider framework entails that disagreement does not mean moral epistemic deficiency and (9) that our responses to the Euthyphro are ‘too soon to say’.
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References
1 Read, R., ‘On Philosophy's Lack of Progress from Plato to Wittgenstein (and Rawls)’, Philosophy 85 (2010), 341–367CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All references to Read are to this work. The emphases are Read's.
2 For an analysis of ‘epistemological carelessness’, see Frankfurt, Harry, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar. For an analysis of the perverse and the evil, see my ‘Going Astray: Weakness, Perversity, or Evil?’ in Rouner, Leroy S. (ed.), ‘On Selfhood’, Boston University Series in Philosophy and Religion 12 (South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 73–92Google Scholar.
3 Audi, Robert, ‘The Ethics of Belief and the Morality of Action: Intellectual Responsibility and Rational Disagreement’, Philosophy 86 (2011), 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Audi gives very few examples of propositions that we disagree on. He primarily generalizes on the symbolic and singular proposition, p, and, when he gives examples of p, he offers specific empirical claims, e.g. that a branch fell in the wind (15), that a person is innocent (23) and a fact in astronomy (28).
5 While I confine myself in this essay to the specific discipline of philosophy, this understanding of philosophy underscores how philosophy is found in all of the disciplines, from physics to psychology, insofar, for instance, as they all must question what epistemic status their respective claims represent.
6 See Fogelin, Robert J., Philosophical Interpretations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where he argues that to ‘alethic charity’ – mostly true by our lights – should be added respect for semantic competence, as understood by both local and global interpretations (3–4).
7 Laden, Anthony Simon, ‘The House that Jack Built: Thirty Years of Reading Rawls’, Ethics 113 (2003), 371CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All citations to Laden will be to this essay. See, too, Cohen, Joshua, ‘For a Democratic Society’, in Freeman, Samuel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar, who takes Rawls to be ‘asking what the most reasonable conception is for a democratic society, … [where] we address a disagreement among people who all accept an understanding of persons as equals but who dispute the implications of that understanding’(88–89). Laden finds even this interpretation of Rawls to be too broad – a cousinly disagreement I need not adjudicate in this essay.
8 Rawls, John, ‘Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy’, in Freeman, Samuel (ed.), John Rawls: Collected Papers (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999), 514Google Scholar. I was made aware of this through Onora O'Neill's essay, ‘Constructivism in Rawls and Kant’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, op. cit., note 7, 356.
9 Op. cit., note 7, 88.
10 I have argued against Rawls's TJ on similar (pluralistic) grounds in past essays – especially in ‘A Reasoned Ethical Incoherence’ in Ethics 89 (1979), 240–243CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in ‘Butler, Fanaticism, and Conscience’, in Philosophy 56 (1981), 517–532CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Burton Dreben, ‘On Rawls and Political Liberalism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, op. cit., note 7, 323. For a more partisan assertion of such a finality, see Fukuyama's, Francis declaration of ‘the end of history as such’ in his The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992)Google Scholar, which he has, rightly, rejected in his later works.
12 Nussbaum, Martha C., ‘Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberalism’, in Philosophy and Public Affairs 39 (2011), 37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All references to Nussbaum are to this essay. This essay made clear to me the distinction and tension in Rawls between epistemic and ethical reasonableness.
13 MacIntyre's, AlasdairWhose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988)Google Scholar is a work that naturally comes to mind here.
14 Coope, Christopher Miles, ‘The Bad News of the Gospel’, Philosophy 86 (2011), 271CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 For this concept of a practice I have been helped by MacIntyre's, AlasdairAfter Virtue (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 175Google Scholar.
16 For a recent appreciation of the criterion of elegance, see Freeman Dyson's review of Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom (Basic Books) in The New York Review of Books LVII (2/25/2010), 20–23. For consilience, a specific application of completeness, see Lloyd, Elizabeth A., ‘The Nature of Darwin's Support for the Theory of Natural Selection’, in Philosophy of Science 50 (1983), 112–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a metaphysics that might begin to illuminate such indeterminacy of criteria see my ‘Mind-Body Continuism: Dualities with Dualism’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 5 (1991), 233–255Google Scholar; and see Clark's, Stephen R.L. ‘Deconstructing the Laws of Logic’, Philosophy 83 (2008), 25–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a discussion of the disabled, see Reader, Soran, in ‘The Other Side of Agency, Philosophy 82 (October, 2007), 579–604CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Lakatos, Imre, ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’, in Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan, (eds), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 133–134CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Christopher Miles Coope, op. cit., note 14, 290. As seen by such metaphors – ‘hard core’ and ‘stance’ – just what this fundamental orientation is remains open to further inquiry. See also Aggasi, Joseph, ‘The Nature of Scientific Problems and their Roots in Metaphysics’, in Bunge, Mario (ed.), The Critical Approach (New York: Free Press, 1964), 189–211Google Scholar.
18 This is not relativism in that the inquiry's search for an independent truth, the best view we can attain as defined by the C, is always governing our inquiries It could be, of course, and this is the ironic contradiction of relativism, not that truth is relative, but that a relativism of a certain sort is true. This backs Rawls's rejection of Rorty's relativism as too soon to say. As Rawls writes, ‘It is natural to suppose that a necessary condition for objective moral truths is that there be sufficient agreement between the moral conceptions affirmed in wide reflective equilibrium. . . . Whether this supposition is correct, and whether sufficient agreement obtains, we need not consider, since any such discussion would be premature’ (‘The Independence of Moral Theory’, in Collected Papers, op. cit., note 8, 290). That is, a relativistic project is as much a matter of meeting the C as any project.
19 Astrology and its ilk erase the edges – in, say, astrology's lack of clarity and coherence (and interest!) as to what a simultaneous influence from the stars could be, or in its lack of completeness (and interest!) in how to account for the shift of the zodiac every two millennia. See my ‘On Dismissing Astrology and Other Irrationalities’, in Grim, Patrick (ed.), Philosophy of Science and the Occult, (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1982), 24–32Google Scholar.
20 Weiming, Tu, ‘Epilogue: Human Rights as a Confucian Moral Discourse’ in de Bary, Wm. Theodore and Weiming, Tu (eds), Confucianism and Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 302Google Scholar. All references to Tu will be to this essay. See also Neville, Robert Cummings, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2000)Google Scholar. For a more confrontational exponent of Confucianism see Rosemont, Henry J. Jr., ‘Human Rights: A Bill of Worries’, in Confucianism and Human Rights, 54–66Google Scholar.
21 For reasons of space and unneeded specificity, this overly simplifies Tu's rich notion of the ‘unity of Heaven and humanity’ (302).
22 I view this essay as a a step toward a notion of the citizen that provides a way out of the current distrust that I discuss in ‘The Multivisions of Multiculturalism’, Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, MA, August, 1998. http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/PoliJamehtm.
23 I am moved here by Peirce to take rationality to be motivated by our ‘social impulse’ – that we come to see that our mere conviction (tenacity) and commitment to another (authority) and certainty in our own (a priori) insights are brought up short by the contrary beliefs of others. Peirce, Charles Sanders, ‘The Fixation of Belief’, in Wiener, Philip P. (ed.), Values in a Universe of Chance: Selected Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958)Google Scholar. By this social impulse, the epistemically reasonable would have a way of appealing to the epistemically unreasonable. (See my ‘Going Astray: Weakness, Perversity, or Evil?’, op. cit., note 2), where I argue that Aristotle shows a way of conversing with the perverse. Whether our sociality is prior to the C or vice versa is a crucial issue in its own right, which I have no position on. See Agassi's, Joseph ‘Rationality and the Tu Quoque Argument’, in Cohen, Robert S. and Wartofsky, Marx W. (eds.), Science and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Science, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 65 (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981)Google Scholar. Agassi takes rationality to be embedded in our sociality, ‘really a part of our way of life, and that goes as well for the rationalist and the irrationalist in our midst’ (475).
24 Op. cit., note 14, 262.
25 Inquiry may lead to its own self-restriction, for instance, in a Kantian phenomenal/noumenal distinction, or in a mystic move to silence, as in some versions of Abrahamic theism, Vedanta, Buddhism, Wittgenstein, or the skeptic-inspired silence of Taoism. Yet all of these still employ the inquiry – in Buddhist terms, seek to be ‘clever in means’– to attain the proper orientation toward the noumenal, or the proper silence, concerning which, of course, they disagree.
26 I wish to thank the Bridgewater State University Department of Philosophy for encouragement and criticisms of this essay and related essays in recent colloquia and the Senior Seminar – especially Professors Matthew Dasti, Robert Fitzgibbons and Catherine Womack – and a graduate student, Michael Robillard. I also wish to thank two groups of colleagues from my church, the ‘work group’ and the ‘affinity group’, for their grounding, critical insights and encouragement. The deficiencies of course, are mine.