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Value and Integrity and Their Place in Morality

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MichaelDonovan United States1453 Posts December 28 2014 02:03 GMT #1 If I try to make use of an updated version of this essay and the people I submit it to Google some of the text and find this page, they might think I plagiarized it from here (Michael Donovan isn't my real name). So since I might clean this work up a bit and try to use it, I'm deleting the text from here just to be safe. A little snippet of the original text still seems to show up in the little Google preview on the search results page, but that shouldn't be a problem if I change the title and the text that shows up in the preview I guess. Pfff. Well hopefully it won't be a problem.

hoby2000 United States918 Posts December 28 2014 21:49 GMT #2 This is really well written. I haven't finished reading it yet, but you have definitely fascinated me. This is a subject I have thought about quite a bit, but never in these terms - Mostly because I haven't given myself the time to sit down and read Kant.

GERMasta Germany212 Posts December 29 2014 11:20 GMT #3 Your start made it a bit unclear as to how exactly you want to go about this. You say that you want to figure out "which one of the two seems most accurate or makes the most sense" (later on you also use the word 'plausible', but I think you mean it to say the same thing as 'making the most sense'), which needs some clarification (although I will take the time here to scold you for committing two sins of all philosophical essay-writing: 1. not defined your terms clearly and 2. used various terms interchangeably without telling us about it). What I believe you mean by saying that a moral theory is "accurate" is that we, in everyday life without thinking too much about it, consider certain actions to be moral and others to be immoral, so that a theory is "accurate" if it most accurately maps onto those pre-existing moral considerations and is somehow able to systematize all of them under a list of guidelines or principles. From this it doesn't have to follow that the theory makes the most sense though, since it does not rule out that the theory could be (1) inconsistent, insofar as our pre-existing moral considerations are inconsistent or (2) unintuitive, insofar as it leads us to do things we would deem morally insignificant or even immoral. Those issues aside, even if we say that a theory can be both accurate and make the most sense, this does not give us sufficient reason to say that it is true (and that it thereby should be a "suitable base from which to derive morality"). All this means is that the normative content of the theory best matches our pre-existing moral considerations. Whether we want more from the stuff we've already been doing or whether we should aspire to something else entirely is an important question that is left open here. In philosopher parlance: Normative fit does not make for moral justification. Whether normative fit even lends any justificatory support at all depends on what kind of assumptions you want to make about moral justification: Someone like Spinoza for example doesn't care so much as to how we regularly act, he derives normative ethics from a set of true, self-evident and necessary axioms (at least he thinks they are such). If the resulting theory fits the way we normally think about morality, then all the better for us! If it tells us we have been entirely wrong this whole time, then this doesn't count against the theory, it counts against us. The same I would argue for Kant as well, which means you've been begging the question. To illustrate the problem on an example, consider this: removed Following the way you have defined self-constraint and integrity (which by the way I will go out of my way to say that I very very much dislike those terms because they make for the possibility of falling into all kinds of confusions based solely on the various other meanings those words can have; just stick to the standard "intention", "moral will", "duty" that is so prevalent in deontology) it cannot possibly be the case that (1) deontology is right and (2) self-constraint can lead one to refraining from an action they ought to do. This is because self-constraint according to (1) is supposed to be a 'right-making principle' to begin with. So you cannot judge (1) on the basis of whether self-constraint really fits what we ought to do because according to (1), there can be nothing that we ought to do that does not fit with self-constraint. So (2) as a premise is only possible if you adopt a different normative theory that tells you what you ought to do and then, from that, infer that (1) is right or wrong, but this of course begs the question against (1). This kind of issue comes up again and again in various guises: removed You assume that motivations and intentions are important in moral judgements because (I would guess) this is what we would deem important in an everyday sense, but the question as to why we should have our everyday considerations override consequentialism is left out entirely.

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