Applying moral principles to the real world requires complex reasoned judgement. Making the principles pure or absolute is an attempt to make the required judgement formulaic instead, often due to a cynicism about individual judgement abilities of people, and this wittingly or unwittingly leads to a paradoxical outcome like in the paradox of tolerance.
So, is your idea that, because of the general principle (ha) of ‘intellectual charity’, we should – typically at least, or maybe by default – habitually steelman principled arguments to automatically include any justified exceptions of which we’re aware?
I think maybe it’d be better to simply offer to, and query, our fellow reasoners about which justified exceptions they accept for any principles under discussion.
Making the principles pure or absolute is an attempt to make the required judgement formulaic instead, often due to a cynicism about individual judgement abilities of people, …
It’s in general, in my experience anyways, difficult to distinguish between cynicism and realism. People really are, or seem to be, pretty bad reasoners in a lot of situations. We really do seem to be still, mostly, running how-to-get-along-in-a-small-tribal-band software, particularly when doing moral reasoning. Do you really trust most people to make good moral judgements generally? I’m on the fence, tho I do lean to a kind of Taoist ‘people are naturally good’ stance (‘attitude’). But I’m also regularly watching for strong evidence of specific people’s actual moral decisions and reasoning – and ‘cynicism’ isn’t always wrong.
Applying moral principles to the real world requires complex reasoned judgement. Making the principles pure or absolute is an attempt to make the required judgement formulaic instead, often due to a cynicism about individual judgement abilities of people, and this wittingly or unwittingly leads to a paradoxical outcome like in the paradox of tolerance.
So, is your idea that, because of the general principle (ha) of ‘intellectual charity’, we should – typically at least, or maybe by default – habitually steelman principled arguments to automatically include any justified exceptions of which we’re aware?
I think maybe it’d be better to simply offer to, and query, our fellow reasoners about which justified exceptions they accept for any principles under discussion.
It’s in general, in my experience anyways, difficult to distinguish between cynicism and realism. People really are, or seem to be, pretty bad reasoners in a lot of situations. We really do seem to be still, mostly, running how-to-get-along-in-a-small-tribal-band software, particularly when doing moral reasoning. Do you really trust most people to make good moral judgements generally? I’m on the fence, tho I do lean to a kind of Taoist ‘people are naturally good’ stance (‘attitude’). But I’m also regularly watching for strong evidence of specific people’s actual moral decisions and reasoning – and ‘cynicism’ isn’t always wrong.