Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ethics-l
Date:         Fri, 10 Apr 1992 10:22:50 EDT
From:         Ed Nilges <EGNILGES@PUCC.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Feminism, Orwellian Authoritarianism or Ethical Foundations?
              5 Apr 1992 05:16:00 EST from <JDOWNEY@RCNVMS.RCN.MASS.EDU>

On Sun, 5 Apr 1992 05:16:00 EST JIM DOWNEY said:
>
>Either I am missing your point or buying into the idea of incoherence
>that you have made...  This does not relate to the paragraph
>preceeding this one (which I deleted), and it starts out with one point
>and suddenly I'm in Orwell's _1984_...  Can you tell me how I/we got
>here?

Your replies lack substance.  Rather than coming to grips with the
issues raised, they ask "how can you know?"  This is not about meta-
physical issues or religious questions, mind, but about whether certain
practical approaches exist in an engineering discipline, meaning that
your skepticism is out of control.  You are, I contend, on a slippery
slope which leads you to O'Brien in 1984.

>
>> Because of the structure of the world, computer science has long
>> known a few things which can be readily taught.  There is a claim,
>> promulgated by certain feminist writers on logic and computer
>> science that this is oppressive, and your doubts
>> remind me of these claims.
>
>First, computer science can not know anything.  It is a field of study
>and not an animate thinking body.

That's a quibble not an argument.  Okay, computer scientists (and those
rare computer science students who either (A) stayed awake in class
or (B) refrained from doing an alcohol-assisted brain flush directly
after finals) can know more than CEOs (gasp).  I specifically exclude
those droves of MSCSs who don't know what a Turing Machine is.

> Now, if you are referencing those
>who have expertise in computer science, then I would ask you to
>delineate that knowledge...

It's already been done, I merely refer you to the ACM's work.  As to
the reply from the hideous trenches of Corporate America, concerning
the "real world", I find in many cases that what's being done in those
trenches is nothing more and nothing less than compiler development
and operating system development under the rose, by people who
simply don't know (for example) that a client/server application
raises operating systems issues and that developing a multisite
general-purpose application or "rule data base" is largely a problem
in compiler development.  I expect to be flamed from Hell to Hudders-
field for this view, but 20 years of experience, 15 in corporate
Amerika, has only reinforced my heterodoxy on this matter.  Details
on application.
>
>If it is the former, I would appeal to you to make clear the linkages and
>connections that thrust me into the collective incoherence and joined
>me to both the feminists and Orwellians of the world.

Read my numerous references.  And you restate and reify my position.
I am less interested in what YOU call "feminists and Orwellians" than
in unholy alliances and other structures.

>
>I don't know... Tell me, what is your reading of Kant.  (I use this
>poking-fun tactic, much as did Socrates, to demonstrate that once
>again you have become the central point, the hub, of the
>interpretation...  You consistently return to the foundations of
>subjectivism, ethical egoism and/or cultural relativism to make your
>points.)

I've already told you.  You regard Kant as a failure because you
misread the categorical imperative as a rule rather than a metarule.
As to your absurd self-comparision with Socrates, I have found that
Socrates wannabes don't have the success they expect on the net, for
the Socratic method is necessarily the public destruction of an
outsider in the necessary presence of a horde of frightened and
unimaginative disciples who laugh at appropriate moments (cf. Pirsig's
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.)  In written network
conferences, it has been observed, these conditions do not obtain.
>
>
>Right... very few rules pass Kant's test and therefore his ethical
>theory is impractical...

You've stumbled, Socrates, on the central issue.  Good going.  This
is that precisely BECAUSE "very few rules pass Kant's test" it is
*** LIBERATING ***.  It is only "impractical" from the standpoint
of people with a vested interest in making rules: cops, lawyers,
and the less creative forms of unix systems administrators.

> I would also offer the idea, and this is a
>hotly debated area in the field of ethics, that Kant is far too often
>misread, misunderstood and misrepresented...

Indeed.

>
>> No, I feel that there's a way of interpreting Kant that is workable.
>
>We can re-interpret Kant all we want, but no matter how we try to
>apply his approach it fails... It is impractical and unworkable in
>application...  It is a program that has a basic logic but is missing
>a few loops :)

As a programmer/philosopher I will state with assurance that philosophy
and programming differ.

Kant, in his work on ethical foundations, provides some test applications,
one of which is paying debts.  If I (for example) get a line of
credit from Master Card and blow the lot on strong drink, without
intending to repay Master Card, Kant would say, not that my conduct
is unethical in some absolute sense, only that the RULE "pay your
debts, Ed" appears to be a valid ethical rule, if there are any ethical
rules at all.  This is because the system in which I operate demands
some basic level of honesty, especially as regards future committments;
otherwise the time value of money would be inordinately skewed
(Wendell Berry reminds us of the basis in honesty, an altruistic
virtue, in capitalism, and how this basis deconstructs the self-interest
theorists including Adam Smith.)

But Kant's critique does not tell me in what manner to pay my debts.
Many so-called moral rules, including many rules around sexual
conduct, fail Kant's test because they overprescribe.  It is
true that if all women killed their children the human race (the
Kantian basis for existing as a woman able to abort) would cease
to exist.  But proChoice people are not asking for "abort your
child" to be a moral rule!  They are instead asking for "let the
choice be hers" be a moral rule, to which cops, doctors and judges
must subscribe, and if the choice is hers, the human race would
flourish, with parents less ambivalent about their committment to
their children.

>
>> You forgot Plato who in reality lurks behind these ideals.  Whose
>
>I didn't forget him, I dismissed him... His ABSOLUTE FORMS and
>inability to perceive the real world makes me nervous to the point
>where, if I adopted his views, I would question whether or not we are
>enagaging in discourse... In which case I could just as easily adopt the
>philosphical (and practical) arguments of Bette Midler when she says
>in resignation, "Why bother?!" (c.f. Bette Midler, _MUD WILL BE FLUNG
>TONIGHT_)

I claim that Platonism enters, in the manner of the police, by the
back door.  You used the Socratic method; is this not the reentry of
Platonism?


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