Meta-Ethics.7.1: Robert Cavalier Fri, 18 Oct 1996 09:52:50 EDT (34 lines)
If someone wandered into these conversations -- perhaps in preparation for one of the topical discussions that follow -- he or she might be well advised to consider this dialogue as an aspect of a larger and longer conversation. It reflects discussions that have been occurring in Moral Philosophy for at least the past 15 years. That no 'conclusion' or 'consensus' has been reached amongst our participants may be telling -- or perhaps not. Others will come in the future and the 'argument' will continue.
A good analogy for this experience was suggested to me by my colleague Richard Young. It may be fitting to repeat it here:
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
[From Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. (1941; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 110-11.]
I offer this story as my way of summing up the effort so far...others should feel free to add their perspectives as well.
A good question, I think, is 'What is the MEANING of the interminability of the discussion?'
I think that Burke is right about its BEING interminable—well, this is hardly controversial as a statement of fact; what more important, perhaps, is to emphasize that the discussion is not merely unterminated but, as Burke clearly says, interminable.
Anyway, there are some possibilities that it is useful to distinguish.
1) The conversation is interminable because everyone comes in in the middle of things and hence doesn't understand the issues well enough to make the kinds of contributions which would result in the termination of the argument.
2) The conversation is interminable, independently of whether 1) is true, because the partipants are too 'one-eyed' (as we say in Australia), i.e. self-absorbed/self-interested to listen properly to arguments that would terminate the discussion if they were properly attended to.
3) The conversation is interminable because, like Plato's cave-dwellers, the participants are under illusions that prevent them from composing their disagreements.
4) There are, as objective pluralism holds, multiple incommensurable perspectives—the conversation reflects the play of these perspectives.
On this last account, the conversation might be terminable IF it weren't for the 'master illusion' (hardly the one Plato had in mind)—to wit, that there IS an answer to the disputed question which is incumbent on all. If we shed this illusion—i.e. accepted the truth of objective pluralism— then we might terminate many of the conversations Burke has in mind simply by compromising or 'agreeing to disagree'.
To be sure, even 'compromises' can be destabilized when coalitions shift and new interests make themselves heard, so even this picture is somewhat idealized. I think that many issues in the meta-ethics of applied ethics can be understood in terms of the question I have posed—'What is the meaning of the interminability of our disucssions of ethical issues?' How you answer this question is, I think, diagnostic of your meta-ethical views.
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