From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Transcendent values  (was: human rights...)
Date: 13 Sep 92 18:43:55 GMT
Organization: PANIX Public Access Unix & Internet, NYC

turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin) writes:

>Parents "love their children, so they want," i.e. *desire*, their
>children to have fulfilling lives.  Parents have their own
>*inclinations* of what constitutes a fulfilling life, and so they raise
>their children with this *purpose* in mind. Here, I see a lot of human
>desire, purpose, and inclination, and nothing transcendent at all. 

I also said that parents speak of love as a motivation for "making
sacrifices" for their children, which shows that parents have a
conception of their own interests as different from and possibly in
conflict with the interests of their children, and view love as having
a component which sometimes motivates them to give up the former in
favor of the latter.  It is that component that I would identify as the
part of love that transcends desire, purpose and inclination.

I would identify that component as the recognition that the loved one
is as real as oneself.  It is that recognition, together with
acceptance of rationality (neither of which can be reduced to desire,
purpose or inclination), that makes it possible for the interests of
other people to motivate us without regard to what our own d., p. & i.
happen to be.

>> ... Claims that a moral principle or an argument should be 
>> accepted by everyone regardless of subjective inclinations . . .
>
>I assert that people "can give no sensible explanation" of such claims
>from their many attempts to do so and their universal failure.  May I
>suggest that, in this regard, a single counter-example would work
>wonders.

I'm not sure of what you're looking for.  "A parent should not use his
own children always and purely as a means to advance his own interests"
is an example of a moral principle that should be accepted by everyone
regardless of subjective inclinations.  As to arguments, you yourself
advance arguments with the apparent intention that people whose
subjective inclinations favor the contrary view should recognize them
as valid.

I also don't know what you mean by "universal failure".  I suppose that
if you have demanding standards for success attempts to explain why
anything whatever should be accepted as true have universally failed. 
Nonetheless, you, I and everyone else go on affirming things as true
because we can't get by without doing so.

>You might begin by explaining what it means to say that "a moral
>principle ... *should* be accepted by everyone," in the absence of some
>implicit understanding of what is the *purpose* of this "should". 

Your point seems to be that the only evaluative judgments that make
sense are judgments that evaluate fitness for some actual purpose.  My
answer, of course, is that we can't think about life sensibly and in
fact none of us do think about life without evaluating purposes as good
or bad categorically.  For example, we can't think sensibly about the
relation between parents and children without judging a father who uses
his son purely and solely as the means to satisfy whatever inclinations
he finds he has to be a bad father.  In making that judgment we don't
need to refer to the actual desires, inclinations or purposes of anyone
involved.  So the categorical "should" is something that I think we all
understand, at least implicitly.

>> Many such questions can be answered, although possibly not in a way the
>> child can understand fully.  For example, you can tell a child that
>> honesty is good because if he is honest then people will trust him,
>> that lying to someone shows he doesn't really care about that person,
>> that if people lie to each other they won't be able to cooperate and
>> live happily together, and so on. ...

>I see nothing to complain about your explanation of why honesty is
>important (notice that it is in terms of people's desires, purposes,
>and inclinations!), and if a child cannot understand all this, I see
>nothing wrong in saying something like "you may not understand all of
>this now, but you will when you are older."

The explanation is not in terms of d., p. and i. but in terms of things
presumed to be already recognized as good.  Saying what you suggest to
the child sounds like the equivalent of saying "this is for your own
good".  Is that what you mean?

>> Part of your point may be based on the observation that there is
>> eventually an end to justification [ . . . ]

>Exactly!  There is no going past people's desires, purposes,
>inclinations, etc.  Values cannot transcend these.

In understanding the physical world, I believe it is possible to go
beyond first-person present-tense sense experience (the analog of
actual desires, purposes and inclinations).  I believe that we are
justified in stating that the Golden Gate Bridge exists, electrons
exist, and Julius Caesar existed, and that when we make such statements
we are talking about things that are not reducible to any set of
observations that we have made or ever will make and thus transcend all
the evidence we will ever have about them.  It also seems to me that if
my son were a Cartesian sceptic and I tried to justify these statements
to him I would have a hard time doing so.  But since we can't get by
without believing in physical objects none of this bothers me a great
deal.  It seems to me the same considerations apply in the case of
objective values.

>An adult's "conception of [a child's] interests that goes beyond [a
>child's] actual desires, purposes, and inclinations" *inevitably*
>depends on the adult's desires, purposes, and inclinations.  This
>should give every parent pause for thought.

Why should the parent pause for thought if his actions always and
necessarily follow from his actual desires, purposes and inclinations
and nothing further, and if there's nothing wrong about that?  Your
comment would make more sense if you thought that parents should
attempt to act on a conception of the child's real interests formed
without reference to their own d., p. and i.
-- 
    Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
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