Against stupid philosophy.

Normally, I'd just link to this post at Prosblogion and discuss, but here I actually want to paste the whole thing in.

The marginal cases argument (MCA) is designed to undermine our confidence that the possession of a particular property R is necessary for direct moral standing. The argument asks us to answer this question:

(1) Are you more certain that having property R is necessary for direct moral standing or that human being H (where H is a non-R) has direct moral standing?

The property involved is typically rationality or language-use or self-consciousness or awareness of the future, etc. For any such property R that we select as necessary for direct moral standing, there is some non-human, sentient being that possesses R to a greater degree than some human does. We are embarrassed into admitting that favoring humans over non-humans on the basis of R displays our bias for human beings. But MCA does not go far enough in eliminating bias.

Suppose you had to decide whether R is necessary for direct moral standing under the following conditions:

(2) You do not know where on the developmental scale you stand with respect to any property R proposed as necessary to direct moral standing.

For all you know, you are an early term fetus—that is, for all you know, this is the current stage in your development. But you might be at the stage of a newborn or a normal adult human being or an aged adult. You simply have no idea. Now take any property R—any property that you might not possess at all or might possess to some greater degree. Here’s the question we want to ask:

(3) Are you certain enough that R is necessary to direct moral standing that you are prepared to bet your entire adult life on it?

For my part, there is no property R that I’m so sure is necessary for direct moral standing that I’d be willing to bet my entire adult life on it. But that’s true for everyone. So when we insist that we know that some property R is necessary for direct moral standing, we are really expressing a bias arising from our knowledge that we are normal adults already. It’s not a bias for humans over other species, it is a bias for humans at a certain stage of development over those at lesser stages. You’re not a specieist, but you are a developmentalist.

Now, there isn't really anything all that wrong with this argument. My real beef, though, is with this style of writing/reasoning, which I see painted all over philosophy blogs.

As an interlude, I would like to point out that I have almost no background whatsoever in contemporary philosophy. My philosophical background drops off rather precipitously at the turn of the century (19th/20th), and then disappears completely after Heidegger. So I for all I know, the style of writing/reasoning which I am about to complain about is absolutely the norm. That effects my judgment exactly not at all.

First of all, let's talk a little bit about acronyms for things that don't need acronyms. "MCA", what the fuck is MCA you ask? Marginal case argument? You mean examining the validity of an assertion by looking to the extremes of applicable cases to see how it holds up? Yes, this is absolutely a valuable thing to do when checking a conclusion. However it is also a highly subjective, slippery form of argument, requiring a great deal of interpretation on the part of the writer. Calling it MCA makes it seems like an analytic tool which need only be applied, like a slide-rule or level. It's not, get over it.

Further in to the philosopher's fantasy of analytic precision, is the reduction of a range of concepts to a letter, R (and additionally, he throws H out there for no apparent reason and then never uses it again). Here, as near as I can tell, R stands in for every quality that anyone has ever argued was necessary to moral standing (standing? is that just to avoid the more messy "moral reasoning", presumably so, but it's a weird word choice to me somehow). By way of examples, he helpfully mentions "rationality or language-use or self-consciousness or awareness of the future".

Now, I appreciate what he is trying to do here. He seems to be advocating a bit of epistemological humility by noting that we can not imagine a range of perception more or less developed than our own. If we can accept this bit of humility, all beliefs, including belief in our knowledge of moralality, should be couched in the language of doubt. If this is point he is trying to make, than the particular contents of "R" are legitimately un-important.

Now, that said, the examples that he uses for "R" are all very different, very fundemental ideas. Epistemological humility aside, any argument about what is necessary for moral judgment really ought to treat all of these ideas seperately. When you lump them together under R you enable yourself to argue against a straw man conception of the "idea of R" rather than it's particulars, some of which are more compelling than others. Arguing that we do not have certain knowledge about R, is a lot easier than arguing that a concept of self-hood isn't necessary for morality, no?

Then we have the laziness of requiring absolute "bet your life" certainty on a subject in order to prove a point. We never approach anything like that level of certainty in anything, why even say that? Further, bet my life against what? Would I bet my life against a billion dollars that a concept of self-hood was necessary for moral judgment? Yeah, I probably would. I'm not 100% certain of this, but even taking my native skepticism in to account, I am still pretty sure, yeah.

Finally, there is this ass-hat ridiculous paragraph:

For all you know, you are an early term fetus—that is, for all you know, this is the current stage in your development. But you might be at the stage of a newborn or a normal adult human being or an aged adult. You simply have no idea. Now take any property R—any property that you might not possess at all or might possess to some greater degree. Here’s the question we want to ask:

What? That is all.