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January 2, 2005
Posner: Condescending Moral Philosophers
Richard Posner has been posting at Brian Leiter's blog, making a couple fairly controversial claims. One is his fairly sophisticated moral relativism. Another is that he seems to think the average person should view moral philosophers as consdescending. I know little about Posner, so I can't evaluate whether the clearer statement of Posner's views by Jon Mandle at Crooked Timber comes from a misunderstanding of Posner's views (note his interesting claim that it's Posner rather than the moral philosopher who is condescending, which my relative ignorance of Posner also leaves me unable to evaluate). Still, it does seem to me even in my relative ignorance that Gerald Dworkin is the sort of person who would understand Posner completely, and the distinctions he makes in his Left2Right post do seem to undermine Posner's argument (if he's presented it accurately, which I would assume is the case).
I'm interested in the details here, but I don't feel like getting into them myself at the moment, which I would ideally at least summarize, so you'll have to read all those posts I linked to if you want more details before commenting. Here's what I'm interested in knowing, though. Does Posner really say what Mandle and Dworkin claim he's saying? In particular, does he really claim that every moral belief we have is held not by any rational reasons? Does he really believe that ethical reasoning is pointless? That claim seems to be refuted by the fact that people are sometimes convinced by reasons. In ethics courses, I've seen students convinced by arguments from papers I've assigned that argue for views that I myself don't even hold, but these students were convinced in class to change their view simply by hearing those arguments.
Update: John Turri at Fake Barn Country and Lindsay Beyerstein and Majikthese have more to say about Posner's posts.
Posted by Jeremy at January 2, 2005 8:54 PM
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