This is really just a formalization of a rule I’ve held for awhile, but it needs formalization because I’m annoyed.

As I’m reading and listening to conference papers, this is the rule I came up with:

Do not make a distinction without a practical payoff and without demonstrating that payoff.

It’s stupid to write a paper with about 100 different distinctions without telling me why you’re making those distinctions and explaining the usefulness of those distinctions.

We can make distinctions all day—the only things that limit an infinity of distinctions are 1) lack of imagination and 2) time.

So, if you’re going to make a distinction, you’ve got to justify it’s usefulness.

I suspect that if we followed this rule a lot of existing distinctions would make a lot more sense, and a lot of other distinctions would never get made in the first place.

After a session today I raced to the bathroom to relieve my bladder and overheard a group of individuals coming from another session declaring the following: “Wow; that was so wonderful” “Best session ever!”  “That was incredible!”

Then, most importantly, “You know, that wasn’t even the AAR—that was church!”

And we wonder why others are suspicious that the academic study of religion is actually religious in nature.

I met up with my favorite Vulgar Marxist at the AAR, and now he knows the truth behind the mask that is Miss Marx: I’m a complete square. A complete square who drinks too much, but still a square.

I think I blew all my social capital. I should have taken off my jacket and tie and put on something leather and a fake tattoo or something.

He’s going to spread the word that I’m a conformist, middle-class type. Damn my habitus. Why did my parents have to  have bourgeois tastes and that stupid Protestant work ethic?!

Will be largely incommunicado; I’ll respond to comments etc. when I return …

Even if you believe that your god put animals here for us to eat, you can’t believe that he or she meant for us to do it this way.

Kant contrasted hypothetical imperatives with the categorical imperative. The first had the following form: if you want to get a job, then you should go out and apply for one. The force of the imperative hangs on the “if” part, which is never universal—for those out there who don’t want a job, the “you should” simply won’t apply. By contrast, the categorical imperative has no “if” part; it applies at all places and times and to all subjects, independent of all variables.

There are no categorical imperatives. The best we can have are hypothetical imperatives.

Following what I said about the importance of sympathy in my first “On Morality” post, I propose that it could be useful to think about ethical claims as offering hypothetical imperatives, which are most persuasive when the “if” is connected to existing sympathies, like this:

If you have sympathy for X, then you should do Y to help them.

Remember, if an individual isn’t sympathetic (i.e., if they’re a sociopath), then ethical claims aren’t going to have any traction anyway. That is, dressing up a hypothetical imperative as a categorical one won’t make it any more persuasive if the person just doesn’t care. The most substantial motivations for ethical behavior lie in sympathies, not in meta-ethical trimmings.

… so your essay pointing out some “exclusion” is meaningless unless you can go on to show that this exclusion was somehow unjustified.

There’s something really stupid about the meta-ethical arguments about whether or not legitimations for ethics are absolute or not, and, if not, whether people can still be ethical. Here’s what’s stupid: all cultures have legitimations for ethical behavior, and people abide by them independently of whether they have a meta-ethical account of whether or not those legitimations are legitimate.

On the one hand, one group seems to think that if the lie gets out—”there’s no absolute legitimation for the legitimations most of us believe”—then chaos will reign, so they think they need to prop up morality by demonstrating that morality has sound foundations. But that’s certainly false. Most people just don’t give a shit about meta-ethics.

On the other hand, the other group (including people like Simon Blackburn and Jeffrey Stout) seem to partially agree with the first group. They seem to think that if the truth gets out—”there’s no absolute legitimation for the legitimations most of us believe”—then chaos will reign, so they think they need to prop up morality by offering anti-foundationalist foundations for ethics. But that seems misguided too, and for the same reason: most people just don’t give a shit about meta-ethics.

To put it another way, both of these groups seem to think we’re having a meta-ethics legitimation crisis. But we’re not—only they are.

Both groups are trying to prop up something that is not, in reality, falling over.

What motivates people to act morally? I propose 3 reasons:

1. some people buy into a legitimation for particular moral or ethical codes
2. some people, as a result of their process of socialization, abide by certain moral or ethical codes as a matter of habit
3. some people have sympathy for other human beings, and as such avoid or prevent behaviors that harm others

Most of the debates about whether or not we can be ethical without absolutes—or without morality being built into the nature of the universe—are focused only on #1. On the one hand, some people offer absolute legitimations and suggest that without absolute legitimations there would be chaos. On the other hand, some people deconstruct those absolute legitimations and suggest that we never needed them in the first place—although the explanations as to why we never needed them are amazingly diverse.

It seems like most ethical philosophers today largely ignore #2 and #3. #2 isn’t of much use to us unless we have kids to train or unless we’re elementary school teachers, but #3 is pretty damn important.

In the middle of Huck Finn, Huck is trying to decide between his provincial Christianity—which tells him that he’ll go to hell for theft if he doesn’t return the slave Jim to his rightful owners—and his concern for Jim’s welfare. He chooses Jim’s welfare because he has sympathy for him. #3 trumped both #1 and #2 at the same time.

Female Genital Mutilation is a classic weird case for philosophers debating ethical relativism: if ethics lack absolute foundations, then is it okay for them to do this practice, even though we don’t think it’s okay? should our ethical norms apply to them even if they don’t agree with them? how could they apply universally if they’re not universally grounded?

But it gets a lot less complicated if we turn to #3 and think about whether or not the practice is harmful, and whether or not we give a shit about the people it harms. #3 will motivate when #1 and #2 won’t.

I also prioritize the usefulness of #3 because #1 often won’t work without #3. If I’m talking to a psychopath who is incapable of sympathy, no amount of “absolute” legitimation will convince him of anything.

To all of you with whom I argue in the comments section: please accept my apologies for my apparent bad attitude. I’m not really as pissy as I sound.

On the contrary, I very much appreciate the engagement, even when we (sometimes fundamentally) disagree!

So please accept both my apologies and my thanks.