After all the heaviness of the VTech tragedy, I came upon this 'test' of sorts. They cite a few philosophers in the article. I thought some of you might find it interesting.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
Here's an interesting article that attempts a diagnosis of contemporary philosophy and why it seems not to progress or hold much external sway.
http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/What'sWrong.pdf (Hat tip Stephen Hicks)
I am sympathetic to the points made in the article, in particular regarding analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy has, in its current academic form, largely become irrelevant, esoteric, and insular. What used to be -- and still is billed as such -- the quest for asking and answering "The Big Questions" has become overly concerned with technical terminology and peculiar puzzles.
Can you really imagine Aristotle at the Lyceum worrying about whether it is a logical possibility for a cat to give birth to an elephant? I recall several times thinking in a seminar: "if we resolved this _fill in the blank_ puzzle, definitely and once for all, what difference does it make?"
What do others think?
The subject of this posting is ‘moral stalemates.’ I think moral stalemates are kind of interesting. I consider these to be occasions in which there is a moral conflict between two (or more) parties and all parities have legitimate claims to their respective moral positions. Take for example, the following case:
Two people have a disagreement as to what television show to watch. Let us say that the specific disagreement is concerning a particular television show X; one party wants to watch the show and the other does not. Both moral claims, the right to watch show X and the right not to watch show X, are justified by the fact that both parties are autonomous individuals with the right to determine their own life choices and the fact that they both have legitimate right of ownership to the television in question. The fulfillment of each moral claim also entails consequences of equal moral worth; one party will not have its legitimate moral claim fulfilled. How do we resolve this moral conflict?
Now, it could be suggested that the party who does not want to watch show X has the moral upper hand because by subjecting this party to a television program that they do not want to watch amounts to torture, and torture is never a good thing. Now, granting this, my intuition is that the other party has the same recourse. They can claim that denying their right to watch show X also amounts to torture. Now what?
It may be possible to rely on the old maxim that ‘you can’t always get what you want’ and evaluate the consequence following from the one party not getting what they want, the denial of this party’s particular moral claim, as being less of a loss to one’s autonomy than denying the other party the right not to do what they do not want to do. Now this is where I start to waiver.
A part of me wants to say that this is a convincing argument. It seems that there is something different about positive rights and negative rights, but I’m not sure exactly what that might be. However, if the difference simply amounts to the fact that we can’t always get what we want, this seems to be irrelevant to the weight of the moral claim to positive rights. That all our claims to positive rights do not go fulfilled seems irrelevant as to whether or not they should.
Furthermore, if we buy the ‘you can’t always get what you want’ solution, using the same logic, we can say that ‘you can’t always get what you don’t want’ and suggest then that the consequence of denying someone their claim to negative rights amounts to a loss equivalent to that of the one being denied claims to positive rights. Given this, it seems that each party has equally weighted claims to either positive rights or negative rights, resulting, once again, in a moral stalemate.
Of course, one may suggest that the other party need not be forced to watch a television show they don’t want to watch, he or she can just leave the room. However, the point here is about resolving the moral conflict resulting from conflicting legitimate moral claims. The other party may leave the room, and by doing so the moral conflict no longer becomes an issue, yet the question of whether one moral claim trumps the other still remains.
I found this and recognized it as presenting a ground-breaking, obvious knock-down argument against evolution. I don't know anything about the site on which I found the video, but the video itself is pretty amazing. I'll never open peanut butter (or for that matter, jelly) again.
