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Rationality and Dialectical Necessity

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Rationality, Virtue, and Liberation

Part of the book series: Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy ((LOET,volume 33))

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Abstract

As the name of this chapter implies, I apply my previous characterizations of rationality, rationalism, and naturalism to the prominent dialectical ethical theories of Hare, Gewirth, and Habermas. All three theories share important commonalities with regards to pragmatic consistency and practical justification. These commonalities constitute a major strength in their theories and thus actually offer a powerful collective dialectical model, but their accounts fail to address and incorporate many important features of rationality as I have characterized it and, as such, fail to recognize the meta-theoretical basis for aretaic and teleological conceptions of action, behavior, and general states of affairs. Not only does the dialectical approach inherently de-emphasize the theoretical consequences of experiential rationality and thereby fail to have application to what might be considered general questions of value (such as the questions cited at the beginning of this book, as well as even such questions as “What is good?” and “What is better?”), but its dialectical conception of logical judgment is also limited by its depiction of ethical judgment as purely dialectical. I show, therefore, that there are major semantic and conceptual gaps in this theoretical framework with regards to definitions of “good,” “better,” “ought,” and “must” and that, without accompanying analyses and characterizations of these concepts, certain major components of their theories are exposed as vapid and lacking in directional content. It can be shown, I argue, that, because such theoretical frameworks overlook such analyses, they miss a vital foundational component of their own theories, a component that is inherently aretaic in nature.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001).

  2. 2.

    G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1903): 11.

  3. 3.

    R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals, (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1952): 84.

  4. 4.

    Ibid., 85.

  5. 5.

    David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989): 52.

  6. 6.

    William Frankena, “The Naturalistic Fallacy,” Mind. 48 (1939): 464–477.

  7. 7.

    Arthur N. Prior, Logic and the Basis of Ethics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1949).

  8. 8.

    Rawls, A Theory of Justice.

  9. 9.

    Smith, The Moral Problem; Ethics and the A Priori: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Meta-Ethics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004).

  10. 10.

    Rottschaefer, The Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency.

  11. 11.

    Brand Blanshard, Reason and Goodness. (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. 1961); Philippa Foot, “Moral Beliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1958–59), 59:83–104. Reprinted in Philippa Foot, ed., Theories of Ethics, pp. 83–100; Hare, The Language of Morals; Freedom and Reason, (New York: Oxford University Press. 1965); Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point, (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1981); Sorting Out Ethics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1997); Macintyre, After Virtue; Thomas Nagel, The Last Word, (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1997); Sen, The Idea of Justice; Henry Babcock Veatch, Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. 2003).

  12. 12.

    Catherine E. Amiot, et. al., “Can Intergroup Behaviors Be Emitted Out of Self-Determined Reasons? Testing the Role of Group Norms and Behavioral Congruence in the Internalization of Discrimination and Parity Behaviors,” Pers Soc Psychol Bull January 1, 2012 38: 63–76; Bandura, Social Foundations; Self-Efficacy in Changing Societies; Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control; Seln Kesebir, “The Superorganism Account of Human Sociality: How and When Human Groups Are Like Beehives,” Pers Soc Psychol Rev August 1, 2012 16: 233–261; N. Kugihara, “Effects of aggressive behaviour and group size on collective escape in an emergency: a test between a social identity model and deindividuation theory,” Br J Soc Psychol. 2001 Dec;40(Pt 4):575–98; Kim-Pong Tam, et. al., “Intersubjective Model of Value Transmission: Parents Using Perceived Norms as Reference When Socializing Children,” Pers Soc Psychol Bull August 1, 2012 38: 1041–1052; Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda, “A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality: Reconceptualizing Situations, Dispositions, Dynamics, and Invariance in Personality Structure,” Psychological Review 1995, Vol. 102, No. 2, 246–268.

  13. 13.

    Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, 139.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 145.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 137.

  16. 16.

    Thomas Magnell, 1993a, “Evaluations as Assessments, Part I: Properties and Their Signifiers,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 27: 1–11; 1993b, “Evaluations as Assessments, Part II: Distinguishing Assertions and Instancing Good of a Kind,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 27: 151–63.

  17. 17.

    J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, (London: Pelican Books. 1977): 38.

  18. 18.

    Mark Schroeder, “What is the Frege-Geach Problem?” Philosophy Compass. 3/4, (2008): 703–720.

  19. 19.

    John McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” Mind, Value, & Reality. Ed. John McDowell. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1998): 131–151; Michael Smith, “Objectivity and Moral Realism: On the Significance of the Phenomenology of Moral Experience,” Ethics and the A Priori: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Meta-Ethics. Ed. Michael Smith. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004): 234–258.

  20. 20.

    Hare, The Language of Morals, 93.

  21. 21.

    Ibid.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., 46.

  23. 23.

    Hare, Freedom and Reason, 7.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 8.

  25. 25.

    Magnell, “Evaluations as Assessments, Part I”; “Evaluations as Assessments, Part II.”

  26. 26.

    Hare, Moral Thinking, 69.

  27. 27.

    Oderberg, Real Essentialism.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 69.

  29. 29.

    Hare, Sorting Out Ethics, 54.

  30. 30.

    Hare, The Language of Morals, 56.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 159.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 28.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., 24.

  34. 34.

    Hare, Freedom and Reason, 91.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 93.

  36. 36.

    R. B. Brandt, “Act-Utilitarianism and Metaethics.” Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking, with Comments by R. M. Hare, Ed. Douglas Seanor and N. Fotion. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1988): 229.

  37. 37.

    Douglas Seanor and N. Fotion, Hare and Critics: Essays on Moral Thinking, with Comments by R. M. Hare, (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1988): 216.

  38. 38.

    Michael Smith, “Internal Reasons,” Ethics and the A Priori: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Meta-Ethics. Ed. Michael Smith. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 17–42; “Internalism’s Wheel,” Ethics and the A Priori, 318–342.

  39. 39.

    Hallvard Lillehammer, “The Doctrine of Internal Reasons,” The Journal of Value Inquiry. 34, no. 4, (2000): 508.

  40. 40.

    Ibid.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 510.

  42. 42.

    Ibid.

  43. 43.

    Ibid.

  44. 44.

    Hampton, The Authority of Reason, 78.

  45. 45.

    Hare, Moral Thinking, 92.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., 95.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 94.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 108.

  49. 49.

    Seanor and Fotion, Hare and Critics, 229.

  50. 50.

    Hare, Moral Thinking, 112.

  51. 51.

    Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers. 2006): 48.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., 419.

  53. 53.

    Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006).

  54. 54.

    Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

  55. 55.

    Douglas Walton, Ethical Argumentation. (Lanham: Lexington Books. 2009): 200.

  56. 56.

    Marcus George Singer, Generalization in Ethics, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1961): 31.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 25.

  58. 58.

    Ibid.

  59. 59.

    Smith, The Moral Problem.

  60. 60.

    Foot, “Moral Beliefs”; Natural Goodness; Hampton, The Authority of Reason; Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1999); John McDowell, Mind, Value, & Reality, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001).

  61. 61.

    Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1986); On What Matters: Volume I; On What Matters: Volume II, (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2011).

  62. 62.

    This, of course, is one use of the term “nihilism.” Another interpretation of nihilism holds that ethical statements have truth values but that they are all false. This, however, is not the interpretation I am addressing at present.

  63. 63.

    Of course, this also implies that there can be true value judgments of the form “X is not a valid reason for doing Y,” but this is a somewhat vapid point, for the statement here is still essentially negative in that it merely further clarifies which reasons are not valid and not, by contrast, which reasons are valid. A positive theory of value judgment would demonstrate not only which kinds of value statements are true but, in addition, which kinds of statements yield valid reasons for action.

  64. 64.

    Gewirth, Reason and Morality; Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1983); The Community of Rights; Self-Fulfillment, (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1998); Regis, Gewirth’s Ethical Rationalism; Beyleveld, The Dialectical Necessity of Morality.

  65. 65.

    Habermas, MCCA, 68.

  66. 66.

    Ibid.

    86: “Every person who accepts the universal and necessary communicative presuppositions of argumentative speech and who knows what it means to justify a norm of action implicitly presupposes as valid the principle of universalization…”

    89: “If these considerations are to amount to more than a definition favoring an ideal form of communication and thus prejudging everything else, we must show that these rules of discourse are not mere conventions; rather, they are inescapable presuppositions.”

    See also his application of Kohlberg’s theory of moral development:

    170: “These clarifications proved helpful in the attempt to ground moral stages in a logic of development. Kohlberg’s social perspectives are intended to have this function. As we saw, they can be correlated with stages of interaction that are ordered hierarchically according to perspective structures and basic concepts. This allows us to see how notions of justice are derived from the forms of reciprocity available at the various stages of interaction. With the transition from normatively regulated action to practical discourse, the basic concepts of principled morality spring directly from the reorganization of the available sociocognitive inventory, a reorganization that occurs with the necessity of developmental logic. This step marks the moralization of the social world, with forms of reciprocity that are built into social interaction and become increasingly abstract forming the naturalistic core, so to speak, of moral consciousness.”

  67. 67.

    Gewirth, Reason and Morality, 26.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., 40.

  69. 69.

    Deryck Beyleveld, “A Reply to Marcus G. Singer on Gewirth, Beyleveld and Dialectical Necessity,” Ratio Juris 15, no. 4 (2002): 458–73; Marcus George Singer, “Gewirth, Beyleveld, and Dialectical Necessity,” Ratio Juris. 13, no. 2 (2000): 177–195. Singer’s objections in his “Gewirth, Beyleveld, and Dialectical Necessity” seem especially biting, but they are deeply wrongheaded. He points out a problem in Beyleveld’s presentation of Gewirth’s theory which I, as well as Beyleveld, acknowledge as problematic. The inference ((P ^ Q) → R) → (P → (Q → R)), interpreted as a conclusion of logical entailment from material implication, would, indeed, be a fallacy of transposition. This inference, however, is taken out of context and is not representative of Beyleveld or Gewirth’s arguments. Thus, Singer’s conclusion that there is a “fallacy lying at the root of Gewirth’s argument,” admittedly predicated on the assumption that “Gewirth’s argument has been symbolized correctly [by Beyleveld],” is unwarranted. In his reply (Beyleveld 2002), Beyleveld points out that, if P and Q entail each other, which they do in the Argument to the Sufficiency of Agency, then the above formulation is merely the principle of modus ponendo ponens, a necessarily valid principle of the form ((P → R) → (P → (P → R)). The distinction between material implication and logical entailment here is, thus, moot.

  70. 70.

    Edward J. Bond, “Gewirth on Reason and Morality,” Metaphilosophy 11 (1980): 36–53; “Reply to Gewirth,” Metaphilosophy 11 (1980): 70–5; Singer, “Gewirth, Beyleveld, and Dialectical Necessity,” Ratio Juris. 13, no. 2 (2000): 177–195.

  71. 71.

    Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1970).

  72. 72.

    Sen, Rationality and Freedom; The Idea of Justice.

    Although Sen rejects the idea of liberty as mere control (what he labels “direct liberty”), he strongly identifies liberty with the idea of “capabilities.”

  73. 73.

    Traci Warkentin, “Whale Agency: Affordances and Acts of Resistance in Captive Environments,” Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration. Ed. Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger. (Boston: Brill. 2009): 23–45.

  74. 74.

    Beyleveld and Roger Brownsword, Human Dignity in Bioethics and Biolaw. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001); Beyleveld and Shaun Pattinson, “Precautionary Reasoning as a Link to Moral Action.” Medical Ethics. Ed. Michael Boylan. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall. 2000): 39–53.

  75. 75.

    Beyleveld and Brownsword, Human Dignity, 122.

  76. 76.

    Ibid., 123.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 128.

  78. 78.

    The only historical exception to this, if there is one, would be the ancient Roman Empire.

  79. 79.

    Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1990); Eric Reitan, “Self-Defense and the Principle of Generic Consistency: Must Gewirth Be an Absolute Pacifist?” Social Theory and Practice 32, no. 3 (2006): 415–438; Suzanne Uniacke, Permissible Killing: The Self-Defence Justification of Homicide, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994).

  80. 80.

    We must set aside the intrinsic implausibility of this situation as it applies to physical laws of momentum and energy conservation. Let us, for instance, believe that this man is extremely massive.

  81. 81.

    Stephen Nathanson, “Can Terrorism Be Morally Justified?” Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy. Ed. Thomas A. Mappes and Jane S. Zembaty. New York: McGraw Hill, 2007. 322–332.

  82. 82.

    I find the “Contrary Double-Effect Principle” a more accurate label, for it emphasizes that this principle and the Double-Effect Principle are, in terms of formal logic, contraries of each other.

  83. 83.

    Sen, Rationality and Freedom; The Idea of Justice.

  84. 84.

    John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, (Upper Saddle River: Longman. 2006).

  85. 85.

    T. M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2008).

  86. 86.

    It is key here that I am not aiming at harming merely as few people as possible; this is simple consequentialism. Instead, I am aiming at saving as many people as possible without harming anyone. This is implicit in the norms derived from the PGC.

  87. 87.

    Rüdiger Bubner, “Habermas’s Concept of Critical Theory.” Habermas: Critical Debates. Ed. John B. Thompson and David Held. (Cambridge: The MIT Press. 1982).

  88. 88.

    Ibid., 49.

  89. 89.

    Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. (New York: Columbia University Press. 1986); Robert C. Holub, Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere. (London: Routledge. 1991); Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. (Cambridge: The MIT Press. 1978).

  90. 90.

    Habermas, MCCA, (Cambridge: The MIT Press. 1990): 49.

  91. 91.

    Ibid.

  92. 92.

    Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia; Bubner, “Habermas’s Concept of Critical Theory”; Holub, Jürgen Habermas; Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1973); McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas; William Rehg, Insight and Solidarity: A Study in the Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1994); Matthew G. Specter, “Habermas’s Political Thought, 1984–1996: A Historical Interpretation.” Modern Intellectual History, 6, no.1 (2009): 91–119; Habermas: An Intellectual Biography. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010).

  93. 93.

    Jürgen Habermas, “Hermeneutic and Analytic Philosophy. Two Complementary Versions of the Linguistic Turn?” German Philosophy Since Kant. Ed. Anthony O’Hear. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999); Holub, Jürgen Habermas; McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas; Specter, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography.

  94. 94.

    Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, 230.

  95. 95.

    Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, (Cambridge: The MIT Press. 1990).

  96. 96.

    Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, 230.

  97. 97.

    Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2002).

  98. 98.

    Habermas, MCCA, 66.

  99. 99.

    Ibid., 65.

  100. 100.

    Ibid., 89.

  101. 101.

    Rehg, Insight and Solidarity, 35.

  102. 102.

    Ibid., 43.

  103. 103.

    Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia; Bubner, “Habermas’s Concept of Critical Theory”; Holub, Jürgen Habermas; McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas; Rehg, Insight and Solidarity; Specter, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography.

  104. 104.

    Rehg, Insight and Solidarity, 140.

  105. 105.

    Ibid., 147.

  106. 106.

    Ibid., 166.

  107. 107.

    Habermas, MCCA, 87.

  108. 108.

    Ibid., 5, 8, 63.

  109. 109.

    Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, 287.

  110. 110.

    Ibid., 294.

  111. 111.

    Habermas, MCCA; Holub, Jürgen Habermas; McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas; Rehg, Insight and Solidarity; Specter, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography.

  112. 112.

    G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1991): 189.

  113. 113.

    Ibid.

  114. 114.

    Habermas, MCCA; “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Habermas and Rawls: Disputing the Political. Ed. James Gordon Finlayson and Fabian Freyenhagen. (New York: Routledge. 2011).

  115. 115.

    Hegel, Elements, 157.

  116. 116.

    Hegel, Elements, 140.

  117. 117.

    James Gordon Finlayson and Fabian Freyenhagen, “Introduction,” Habermas and Rawls: Disputing the Political. Ed. James Gordon Finlayson and Fabian Freyenhagen. (New York: Routledge. 2011): 9.

  118. 118.

    Habermas, MCCA, 68.

  119. 119.

    Ibid., 86.

  120. 120.

    Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, 295.

  121. 121.

    Habermas, MCCA, 101.

  122. 122.

    Ibid.

  123. 123.

    Beyleveld and Brownsword. “Principle, Proceduralism, and Precaution in a Community of Rights.” Ratio Juris 19, no. 2 (2006): 145.

  124. 124.

    Beyleveld. “Human Cognitive Vulnerability and the Moral Status of the Human Embryo and Foetus.” The Contingent Nature of Life, Ed. Marcus Duwell, Rehmann-Sutter, Christoph. & Mieth, Dietmar. (Springer, 2008): 85; Law as a Moral Judgment. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. 1994).

  125. 125.

    Apel, La Réponse de L’Ethique. (Louvain: Editions de l’Institut Superieur de Philosophie Louvain-la-Neuve, 2001): 77. “…mutual recognition of all possible partners as having equal rights (at the level of argumentation) and an equal co-responsibility in the discovery, identification, and the solution of all morally pertinent problems of the lifeworld via procedural methods of argumentative discourse.”

  126. 126.

    William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness. (London: J. Watson. 1842): 161.

  127. 127.

    Beyleveld and Brownsword, “Principle, Proceduralism, and Precaution.”

  128. 128.

    Rainer Forst, The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice. (New York: Columbia University Press. 2012).

  129. 129.

    The conditioned-conditional distinction with regards to rights and duties is one established by Magnell.

  130. 130.

    While the solution that left-authoritarians, and most notably Marxists, seek to such a power asymmetry is the imposition of their own power asymmetry via the establishment of new structures of elite power and domination, left-libertarians seek solutions in the equalization of discursive power via collective resistance of such structures of elite power and domination. Interestingly, the analysis thus far clearly precludes the legitimacy of the Marxist or otherwise left-authoritarian approach.

  131. 131.

    See here that I emphasize that he makes the decision that he ought not to starve, rather than that he ought to steal. There is a substantive difference here as regards his intention.

  132. 132.

    Specter, Habermas.

  133. 133.

    Ibid., 60.

  134. 134.

    McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, 11.

  135. 135.

    Ibid.

  136. 136.

    Ibid., 196.

  137. 137.

    Ibid., 175.

  138. 138.

    Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.

  139. 139.

    Michael Slote, From Morality to Virtue, (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1992): 13.

  140. 140.

    Alan Gewirth, “Rights and Virtues,” The Review of Metaphysics 38, no. 4, (1985): 739–762.

Reference

  • Beyleveld, Deryck. 2012. Emerging technologies, extreme uncertainty, and the principle of rational precautionary reasoning. Law, Innovation and Technology 4(1): 35–65.

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Petro, S. (2014). Rationality and Dialectical Necessity. In: Rationality, Virtue, and Liberation. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 33. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02285-7_3

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