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what we owe to each other
Jan. 2nd, 2021 12:08 amG and I thoroughly enjoyed The Good Place, which if you haven’t seen it is absolutely worth the time — a sitcom about the afterlife. The series makes repeated reference to a particular philosophical text, What we owe to each other, so I ordered it from Amazon a few months ago. I am not a philosopher and it is very slow going for me. Some passages I have had to read five times before I had an inkling what was being said. In particular Chapter 1 bogs down in a long discussion of reasons, specifically what it means to have a reason, and I kept getting tangled up in an ouroborean way in how the definition seemed to hinge on itself, like, in order to make a reasoned argument for what you think a reason is, don’t you need to have defined it already?
Chapter 2, Values, had me in a muddle at first too, as “teleological” is one of those concepts that never quite sticks for me. But it was worth persisting for this phrase:
This felt like a sort of aha moment: the idea that a weakness of (certain types of?) consequentialism is that it treats as scalar a moral world that is fundamentally otherwise. A landscape that is not only multidimensional, but one in which the different dimensions are qualitatively different as well, maybe.
I don’t yet know how Scanlon will use this perspective in building the argument suggested by the title. I could imagine an argument in which individual differences, or classes of relationships, feature: what it means to value two friends with different hopes and dreams, or two people with whom I have different classes of relationships, could look different. Or I could imagine an argument in which this how-to-value theme is applied to different obligations: maybe our reasons for not killing and our reasons for not lying have a different texture.
I’m a little nervous about the way the end of this chapter seems to imply that what we owe to other people depends in some way on their capacity for rational thought. That can lead to some ugly places.
Chapter 2, Values, had me in a muddle at first too, as “teleological” is one of those concepts that never quite sticks for me. But it was worth persisting for this phrase:
Understanding the value of something is not just a matter of knowing how valuable it is, but rather a matter of knowing how to value it — knowing what kinds of actions and attitudes are called for.
This felt like a sort of aha moment: the idea that a weakness of (certain types of?) consequentialism is that it treats as scalar a moral world that is fundamentally otherwise. A landscape that is not only multidimensional, but one in which the different dimensions are qualitatively different as well, maybe.
I don’t yet know how Scanlon will use this perspective in building the argument suggested by the title. I could imagine an argument in which individual differences, or classes of relationships, feature: what it means to value two friends with different hopes and dreams, or two people with whom I have different classes of relationships, could look different. Or I could imagine an argument in which this how-to-value theme is applied to different obligations: maybe our reasons for not killing and our reasons for not lying have a different texture.
I’m a little nervous about the way the end of this chapter seems to imply that what we owe to other people depends in some way on their capacity for rational thought. That can lead to some ugly places.