Transcript taylor-bennett

Challenge to
“Standard Ethics”
The role of “fellow-feeling”
Good Quiz
Question
Taylor (“Compassion”) and Bennett (“The
Conscience of Huckleberry Finn”) both challenge
the “standard view” of ethics.
1.
What do both authors AGREE on in
challenging the standard view?
2.
How are the two authors’ views
DIFFERENT?
Just one or two sentences for each.
The Earthquake Dilemma
What should you do?
1.
Stay with the girl and comfort her in
her dying hours.
2.
Leave her and help many more
people whose lives can be saved.
3.
Put her out of her misery by striking
her in the head with a large boulder.
What would Taylor do?
“Goodness of heart, tenderness toward
things that can suffer, and the loving
kindness that contradicts all reason and
sense of duty...shine like a jewel.” (p. 46)
[my emphasis]
“We have in all these cases a real war
between the head and the heart, the
reason and the will, and the one thing
that redeems them all is the quality of
the heart, which somehow withstands
every solicitation of the intellect.
It is the compassionate heart that can
somehow make itself felt that makes
men’s deeds sometimes noble and
beautiful, and nothing else at all.”
(p. 47)
Compassion over Reason
“The impulse of compassion so far
transcends reason that it can as easily
as not contradict it. It is sometimes the
very irrationality of compassion, the
residual capacity to respond with
tenderness and love when all one’s
reason counsels otherwise, that confers
upon a compassionate act its
sweetness, beauty, and nobility.
(p. 50)
Taylor: Wrong Approaches


Morality subjective. Protagoras: “man is
the measure of all things” (pp. 134-35)
Subject
Object [subjective view]
Subject
Object [objective view]
For Taylor morality is objective but not
rational.
Taylor: Wrong Approaches

Consequences don’t make actions
moral or immoral

Suffering is part of life. Cancer death
(e.g.) is an evil but not a moral evil (p.50)

Moral goodness and evil comes from
requires moral agent.

Kant is right in locating the morality of
action in the moral agent, not in the
results.

But Kant wrong to emphasize reason
instead of compassion.
Taylor and Mayo Both Skeptical
of Unifying Principles

Ultimate aim of ethics: to formulate a
correct moral theory

Most philosophers recognize that this
may be complex or pluralistic

Still, standard approach struggles for
unifying standards, perhaps through a
method of reflective equilibrium.
Mayo and Taylor reject principlebased ethics

Mayo: “Of course we can in theory give a unity to our
principles...but the attempt to construct a deductive
moral system is notoriously difficult and in any case
ill-founded.” (p. 305, my emphasis)

Taylor: clearly rejects pure rationality, but “most
men...know just what human goodness is when they
see it, whether they have read treatises...or...tried to
fathom its metaphysical foundations. For the fact is, it
seems to have no such foundations.
Romantic vs
Rational/Enlightenment Views

Are “innocent” children more moral than
sophisticated, “civilized” adults? Romantic
view: yes. Civilization corrupts

Lord of the Flies (novel) counter-example.

Taylor: human kinship with rest of creation.
Morality applies to all beings that can suffer.
Bennett: Sympathy vs “Morality”

Huck Finn: acts on his sympathies,
opposes bad morality

Heinrich Himmler: acts on his bad
morality in spite of his sympathies

Jonathan Edwards: suppresses all
sympathies
Nice guy, Heinrich
“What happens to a Russian, to a
Czech, does not interest me in the
slightest…Whether 10,000 Russian
females fall down from exhaustion while
digging an antitank ditch interests me
only if so far as the antitank ditch for
Germany is finished.”
More Heinrich Himmler
“I also want to talk to
you quite frankly on a
very grave matter. I
mean…the
extermination of the
Jewish race…Most of
you know what it mean
when 100 corpses are
lying side by side, or
500, or 1000.
“To have stuck it out and
at the same time…to have
remained decent fellows,
this is what made us hard.
This is a page of glory in
our history…”
Sympathy vs “morality”?

The conflict is with a bad morality based
perhaps on custom (for Huck Finn)

Is this a false dichtomy: custom vs
sympathy?

What alternative to customary morality
and sympathy?

Answer: Philosophical/critical ethics
Bennett recognizes this
“Huck clearly cannot conceive of having
any morality except the one he has
learned…from his society….
“The basic trouble is that he cannot or will
not engage in abstract intellectual
operations of any sort.”
(p. 146)