Emotions and incommensurable moral concepts

Philosophy

Volumn 76, Issue 298, 2001, Pages 585-604

  Koons, Jeremy Randel ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62449238202     PISSN: 00318191     EISSN: 1469817X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0031819101000584     Document Type: Review

References (16)

1. See, for example, Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), chapters 6 and 14
2. and Michael Stocker, Valuing Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
3. 'Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following', Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, Holtzman and Leich (eds) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 144.
4. Of course, many externalists would deny that the brain in a vat is justified in thinking that it is interacting with real people. But the brain in the vat seems among the strongest counterexamples to externalism. If the brain in the vat - despite all the evidence at its disposal - is not justified in believing it is interacting with people, then justification has all but collapsed into truth, and we cannot carry on our epistemic practice in any meaningful way, in a way that would shape discourse. This would result in numerous unfortunate consequences - we could not distinguish between science and pseudoscience; we could not sort beliefs among those to be believed and those not to be believed; etc. For a discussion of the pragmatic importance of epistemic discourse, see my 'Do Normative Facts Need to Explain?' Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 81, No. 3 (September 2000), 246-272.
5. It seems likely (to me, at least) that such incommensurability cannot be ruled out. For example, neuroscientists report that stroke victims often lose certain concepts. Damage to the left parietal lobe can result in 'left-right confusion', in which the victim loses the concepts of 'leftness' and 'rightness'. Victims of left parietal lobe lesions often suffer from a complete inability to perform even the simplest mathematical calculations, suggesting a loss of various mathematical concepts. It is at least conceivable that the human race is systematically incapable of grasping certain concepts that are, to other intelligent races (if any there be), just as basic as the concepts of left and right are to us. It is true that we could not be aware of such a deficit, but to conclude from this that there can be no such deficit is to conflate epistemological with metaphysical issues (as I think Davidsonians sometimes do, in arguing for the impossibility of incommensurability). These sorts of brain-damage induced cognitive deficits are fairly well-known; these examples are drawn from the University of Massachusetts Medical Center Strokestop Glossary (http://www. umassmed. edu/strokestop/Glossary. html).
6. Wilfrid Sellars, 'Phenomenalism', Science, Perception, and Reality (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1991).
7. Sellars' argument is nicely reconstructed in Marc Lange, 'Salience, Supervenience, and Layer Cakes in Sellars's Scientific Realism, McDowell's Moral Realism, and the Philosophy of Mind', Philosophical Studies 101, No. 2/3 (December 2000), 213-51.
8. This case is discussed in Gary Watson, 'Responsibility and the Limits of Evil', Responsibility, Character and the Emotions: New Essays in Moral Psychology, Ferdinand Schoeman (ed. ) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 256-86.
9. Otto Kernberg, 'Factors in the Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities', Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 18 (1970), 51-85.
10. Reprinted in Essential Papers on Narcissism, Andrew P. Morrison (ed. ) (New York University Press, 1986). The above quote is taken from p. 218 of the latter.
11. David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 153.
12. See Susan Hurley, Natural Reasons (Oxford University Press, 1989)
13. David E. Cooper, 'Moral Relativism', Midwest Studies in Philosophy III: Studies in Ethical Theory, French, Uehling, and Wettstein (eds) (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978).
14. I will here be following the reconstruction provided by Gopal Sreenivasan in his 'Understanding Alien Morals', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72, No. 1 (January 2001), 1-32
15. Donald Davidson, 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme', Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 196.
16. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937). I am grateful to an anonymous referee for directing me to this work.