An Audience for Moral Philosophy? PDF
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AN AUDIENCE FOR MORAL PHILOSOPHY? An Audience for Moral Philosophy? lohn T. Edelman Assodate Professor ofPhilosophy Nazareth College of Rochester, Neui York Palgrave Macmillan ISBN978-1-349-21105-0 ISBN978-1-349-21103-6(eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21103-6 ©[ohn T. Edelman 1990 Softcoverreprint ofthehardcover1stedition 1990 978-0-333-52989-8 All rights reserved. For Information, write: Scholarly and Referenee Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of Ameriea in 1990 ISBN 978-0-312-04931-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Edelman. [ohn T. 1953- An audienee for moral philosophy/John T. Edelman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical referenees and index. ISBN978-0-312-04931-7 1. Ethies. 2. Logic, I. Title. BJ43.E34 1990 90-36808 17O-dc20 cn- Contents Preface vii Part I: A Tradition Observed 1 The Politicization of Morality 3 2 The Classic Text: Hobbes' Leviathan 11 3 The Tradition Renewed 27 4 'The Great Beast' 49 Part 11: Some Limits of Moral Philosophy 5 An Audience Assumed ... 61 6 Differences and Distances 78 7 Argument and Agreement 90 8 'What Is To Be Done?' 103 Notes 114 Bibliography 118 Index 121 Ta Kathy Preface The main ideas in this book were first developed in a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Wales in [une of 1981. In May of 1985I returned to the University College of Swansea as A.E. Heath Fellow and took the opportunity to reformulate those ideas and present them in aseries of seminars there in the Philosophy Department. The present essay incorporates revisions made in the light of comments and criticisms offered by those attending those seminars. In the book I am concerned to do two things: first, to criticize a certain tradition in western moral philosophy and, second, to understand something of what it is to have done that. H, despite the faults that remain, there is some value in this book, it lies, I think, in this: By drawing out some of the connections between certain enduring problems in moral philosophy and some funda mental issues in the philosophy of logic, the book manages, I think, to throw some light on the nature of moral philosophy, that is, on the nature of philosophical criticism in ethics. This seems to me especiaIly important today, given, on the one hand, a variety of things said in recent years suggesting a certain moral neutrality for moral philosophy and, on the other hand, the recent growth in philosophers' contributions in 'applied' or 'prac tical' ethics, contributions that sometimes suggest a certain pre scriptive role for moral philosophy. While I try to point up a sense in which moral philosophy cannot be morally neutral, I also suggest a sense in which it cannot be prescriptive. In these respects I am concerned with what I shall speak of as 'some limits of moral philosophy'. My debts are many. I am grateful to the University College of Swansea for offering me an A.E. Heath Fellowship, and to Naza reth College of Rochester for a research grant enabling me to complete the book. I have benefitted from a variety of conver sations with Howard Mounce and Peter Winch. I am grateful to each of them, as weIl as to the late Rush Rhees, for attending the seminars in Swansea. The late Peter Robertson also attended those seminars. We spoke at some length after each of them, and I benefitted greatly from those conversations. Sadly, he and vii viti Preface Rush Rhees did not live to see me acknowledge my debt to them here. My greatest debt is to D. Z. Phillips who over several years has patiently offered valuable criticisms of my thoughts and of my several attempts to articulate them. Nazareth College of Rochester ]TE Part I A Tradition Observed 1 The Politicization of Morality I In 1948, Georgi Tenno, like many others who had served in the army of the Soviet Union during the Second World War, was suddenly demobilized, soon after arrested, and finally sentenced to twenty-five years in punitive labour camps.' In the Soviet Union it was a time of numerous arrests for such crimes against the State as 'anti-Soviet propaganda' and 'the attempt to create an anti-Soviet organization'. But Tenno, unwilling to accept the fate handed hirn by the authorities, immediately set hirnself to planning an escape. In 1952, after several unsuccessful attempts, he finally broke out of his prison. With one other man he trav elled toward freedom for twenty nights, hiding out during the day. Then, having met up with a workman and his wife on a boat on the Irtysh River, Tenno could not bring hirnself to steal from them, much less to kill them. With his captors elose on his trail, and fearing that this man and his wife would betray him, Tenno was quite sure that robbery and homicide were the way to freedom; and with the rejection of both his downfall began. ('We had lost something: our confidence? our tenacity? our ability to think straight?')? He and his companion were soon tracked down, once more arrested, and sentenced to another twenty-five years in the camps. Now some might want to say that in sparing the workman and his wife and in leaving them, as he put it, 'the money they had earned in the sweat of their brows'," Georgi Tenno acted rightly or justly. But that would suggest that justice or morality might demand of a man his life. It would suggest that in certain circumstances the man who is unwilling to pay that price is unjust or immoral. It certainly would make justice a hard task- 3
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