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@VirtueSophist I read “Use of Knowledge” and I’m about halfway through Rationalism in Politics. It’s gotten to be a bit of a slog.
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@PyrrhicRational You’ve already read most of what’s relevant to our previous conversation.
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@PyrrhicRational Though definitely do not skip “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind.”
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@VirtueSophist His discussion of Hobbes seems endless and at odds with what he says in the earlier essays.
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@PyrrhicRational He’s odd, but you needn’t exhaustively survey of his peculiar way of looking at things to mine some very useful ideas.
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@VirtueSophist Such as his notion that politics and morals are contingent to a particular tradition and particular context.
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@PyrrhicRational Indeed. His is a traditionalist, and emphasizes case-by-case reasoning.
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@VirtueSophist What are “intimations”? He loves that word and I have no idea what the hell he is talking about.
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@PyrrhicRational The cricket example (even for those of us non-cricket players) is the most instructive, I think.
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@PyrrhicRational He speaks of two people making arguments for changing a rule or keeping it the same based on the evolution of how cricket
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@PyrrhicRational has been played. Arguments in court making reference to prior court decisions are similar; attempting to place a question
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@PyrrhicRational in its proper context in order to search for hints of what its answer might be.
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@VirtueSophist So traditions provide the context, and from it we divine hints about right action, right politics, right…sports rules?
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@PyrrhicRational You put it better and more succinctly than I could. Of course, the sports rules are the most important of the bunch.
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@VirtueSophist Forget morality and policy, at last we have a philosophy that keeps football from falling into nihilism!
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@PyrrhicRational This may be the first truly useful thing that philosophy has contributed to the world.
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@PyrrhicRational About the rules of football?
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@VirtueSophist About this line of thinking. It seems to me that you can simply use tradition to justify anything you already wanted to think
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@VirtueSophist it’s a grab back of justifications in the air that provide nothing truly concrete.
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@PyrrhicRational I think you will find in practice that disagreement is excessively narrow, and that conversational communities
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@PyrrhicRational (here’s why you’ll want to read “The Voice of Poetry”) fall into patterns that are not so arbitrary as you’re implying.
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@VirtueSophist Oakeshott discusses the conversation thing a bit in his essay on political education.
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@PyrrhicRational Oh, splendid! I admit it has been a long time, and I couldn’t remember just how much he discussed it in that volume.
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@VirtueSophist I still come to “so what?” Using a few similar rules, one can generate beautiful fractal patterns. But who cares?
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@VirtueSophist Similarly, sure, conversational communities fall into certain patterns. Our thoughts become bounded by the traditions,
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@VirtueSophist we are embedded within. So what? Why should I care? How can that possibly make any moral philosophy, or any life, meaningful?
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@PyrrhicRational When we met, you mentioned that you had gone through a Hume phase.
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@VirtueSophist Yes. One of history’s greatest skeptics.
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@PyrrhicRational He was also one of history’s great moral philosophers.
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@VirtueSophist I wasn’t as interested in that side of Hume, I’ll admit.
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@PyrrhicRational Unlike most moral philosophers, Hume was interested in describing morality than creating a system to inform our choices.
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@PyrrhicRational At the heart of his theory of how it all worked was what he called sympathy, or what we would call empathy.
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@PyrrhicRational Our emotional connection to the people we observe in our lives.
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@VirtueSophist Your moral metaphysics rests on some biological grounds, then? Something like Pinker’s “Moral Instinct”?
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@PyrrhicRational As I have never had a religious epiphany and I find all mysticism exceedingly tedious, I find no other recourse
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@PyrrhicRational for understanding human beings than to look at them as biological creatures, yes.
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@VirtueSophist At least we agree there. But sorry, you were going somewhere with Hume?
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@PyrrhicRational Hume was still alive before the fall of virtues.
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@PyrrhicRational In his day, what we today call virtue ethics was the background assumption of any moral philosophy.
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@PyrrhicRational So in his system, fueled by fellow-feeling, he spoke of “natural virtues” that are intrinsic, and “artificial virtues”.
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@PyrrhicRational The latter are what you and I and Oakeshott would say are conventional, or tradition based virtues.
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@VirtueSophist I’ve read distinctions like this in many places.
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@PyrrhicRational Indeed, they are practically as old as philosophy itself.
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@VirtueSophist I’ve always found them to be slippery.
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@VirtueSophist Usually the philosopher defines as “natural” that which he approves of, and “artificial” that which he wishes to critique.
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@PyrrhicRational I agree, and I’m not so sure that an actual division exists. I think we probably have instinctive reactions to seeing
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@PyrrhicRational someone do violence against another person without any context, or someone abusing a child, or something.
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@PyrrhicRational But otherwise I tend to think the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” virtues
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@PyrrhicRational is sometimes a useful thought experiment but not a true description.
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@VirtueSophist That all sounds fairly plausible, I suppose.
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@PyrrhicRational But Hume wasn’t “for” the natural or artificial virtues particularly; again his goals were descriptive.
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@PyrrhicRational Both natural and artificial virtues are valid parts of human morality, in his view.
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@PyrrhicRational As a fairly conservative fellow who favored stability, he was partial to the artificial virtues that promoted it.
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@VirtueSophist Seems like we’re getting to a pretty instrumental notion of virtue here.
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@PyrrhicRational Hume can certainly be read that way, but I don’t agree with him on that point.
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@PyrrhicRational I’m closer to his student, Adam Smith, who was both a moral scientist and a moral philosopher, proper.
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@VirtueSophist So what’s the bottom line here?
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@VirtueSophist You’ve given me a biological and tradition-based description of what morality is. Again I ask: so what?
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@PyrrhicRational To thine own self be true, young rationalist. We are feeling, moral creatures. We care what happens to the people around us
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@PyrrhicRational As Smith put it, we want not only to be loved, but the be lovely—we want to be praised, AND to be worthy of praise.
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@PyrrhicRational We have many cravings after meaning, and dignity, and reaching for something higher,
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@PyrrhicRational that cannot be reduced to something cynical and ugly.
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@PyrrhicRational Indeed your own grasping after meaning and a reason to care is a perfect example!
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@VirtueSophist what about sociopaths, or people who fall short of whatever ideal you’re proposing?
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@PyrrhicRational Justice takes many forms in many places, but people usually have ways of responding to someone who is genuinely horrible.
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@VirtueSophist I just don’t understand what virtue ethics, which makes some highly specific claims, has to do with any if this.
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@PyrrhicRational the system of virtues that was first introduced in Western thought by the ancient Greeks and
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@PyrrhicRational was built on for thousands of years is very powerful and very clarifying. I don’t know why that is.
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@PyrrhicRational It’s a question I’ve thought a lot about but can’t give you a definitive answer.
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@PyrrhicRational I can tell you that the rationalist projects of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries
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@PyrrhicRational which came after the rejection of this system have been utter failures.
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@PyrrhicRational I can also tell you that once you have internalized this system you see that people are grasping at little pieces of it.
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@PyrrhicRational Even after virtue, and even within rationalist projects. Anscombe is good on this subject; see “Modern Moral Philosophy”.
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@VirtueSophist As usual, you give me plenty of food for thought. I’m not convinced.
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@VirtueSophist But your weird, postmodernist-type traditionalism plus totally traditional virtue theory does intrigue me.
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@PyrrhicRational I try to be at least intriguing, perhaps even puzzling.
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@VirtueSophist I’m going to settle down with Oakeshott and see how I feel at the end of the volume. Take care.
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