Alice and Bob are eating together, and Bob doesn’t finish his meal. “What a waste,” says Alice. As they leave the restaurant, someone tells them that a young, promising medical researcher has died. “What a waste,” says Bob.
In both utterances, “waste” is properly understood as waste(something). Alice meant something like waste(food). Bob meant something like waste(potential). Alice’s reference is material, Bob’s is conceptual. Those seem like clearly different kinds to me.
Yes, you could make a scale and place both references on that scale. Maybe the waste Bob noted really is a million times worse than the waste Alice noted. I don’t think that enhances understanding. In fact, I think that perspective misses something about the difference between what Alice said and what Bob said.
Is the following a reasonable paraphrase of your most recent points?
There is no hard delineation between differences in kind and differences in degree in the territory, there are only situations where one map or the other is more useful.
Assuming, that it is coherent to talk about the “territory” of morality, I think I agree with your paraphrase. But I expect that certain maps are likely to be useful much more often.
I think that classifying types of reasons actually used improves our understanding because it cuts the world at its joints. It’s subject to the same type of criticism that biological taxonomy might be subject to. And if you go abstract enough, things that look like different kind merge to become sub-examples of some larger kind. But at some point, you lose the ability to say things that are both true and useful. Like trying to say something practically useful about the differences between two species without invoking a lower category than Life.
I am not at all confident that I can intuitively distinguish a difference in kind from a massive difference in degree.
In both utterances, “waste” is properly understood as waste(something). Alice meant something like waste(food). Bob meant something like waste(potential). Alice’s reference is material, Bob’s is conceptual. Those seem like clearly different kinds to me.
Yes, you could make a scale and place both references on that scale. Maybe the waste Bob noted really is a million times worse than the waste Alice noted. I don’t think that enhances understanding. In fact, I think that perspective misses something about the difference between what Alice said and what Bob said.
Is the following a reasonable paraphrase of your most recent points?
Assuming, that it is coherent to talk about the “territory” of morality, I think I agree with your paraphrase. But I expect that certain maps are likely to be useful much more often.
I think that classifying types of reasons actually used improves our understanding because it cuts the world at its joints. It’s subject to the same type of criticism that biological taxonomy might be subject to. And if you go abstract enough, things that look like different kind merge to become sub-examples of some larger kind. But at some point, you lose the ability to say things that are both true and useful. Like trying to say something practically useful about the differences between two species without invoking a lower category than Life.