Ethics, Hitler, and Thought Experiments
I was scanning Tapped, the blog for The American Prospect, when I found this post by Matt Yglesias about a debate he’s been having with Jonah Goldberg. At risk of either a) ignoring the context of the original discussion and/or b) opening up an uncessary additional front, there were a couple of things that got me thinking.
The core of the conversation seems to be about the status of ethical statements and whether they can be factually right or wrong. Do we treat “Stealing is wrong” as being true or false in the same was that we treat “It’s raining outside” as true or false. Goldberg and many other moral conservatives think so, and that’s what tends to get them irked at pragmatists and other philosophers whom they accuse of being relativists, or folks who think anything goes, ethically. I actually think that pragmatists preserve more of a notion of ethical truths than Yglesias’s position, but either way there’s more pluralism than some folks want to accept.
Anyway, what interests me are a couple of things that Yglesias says. First, there’s this:
When you argue with people, you try to appeal to shared sentiments, point out alleged inconsistencies in the other guy’s position, and so on and so forth. What underlies the possibility of discussion isn’t objective moral truth but the fact that, say, Jonah and I have a vast stockpile of things we agree about and one tries to resolve controversies with appeals to stuff in that store of previous agreement.
That sets up this point:
Sometimes you face someone whose disagreements with you are so profound that appeals to shared premises don’t get you anywhere. Or you face someone who just doesn’t care about doing the right thing. It’s precisely because there’s no way to decide who’s objectively right in a dispute between, say, Adolf Hitler and liberal democracy, that we resolve the biggest moral controversies with force and threats of force rather than moral discourse and appeals to conscience. Debate and deliberation only work for the small stuff.
Now, I’m in a good mood, so I’m more in pie-in-the-sky idealist mode. But I’m wondering if the problem between liberal democracy and Adolf Hitler isn’t that moral discourse fails, but that it never begins. I mean, let’s say that instead of invading Poland, conquering Czechoslovakia, and setting up concentration camps, Hitler had just proposed invading Poland, conquering Czechoslovakia, and setting up concentration camps. And then folks responded that this was not a great idea, and was in fact morally wrong, and tried to convince Hitler of this. Meanwhile, Hitler would be trying to convince us of the opposite. If we imagine that the conversation could go on as long as it took, could we imagine convincing Hitler that it’s all a bad idea, and not likely to accomplish what he wants to accomplish to boot?
Now, obviously, to make this work we have to imagine a Hitler who is more patient and more open to external ideas than the actual Hitler was. And ultimately, that’s the problem. There are some people for whom moral discourse or deliberation is not a value that they hold. They literally won’t start the conversation, and sometimes they provoke conflicts with those who do believe in deliberation.
Now, by definition, if valuing deliberation is a moral position, then if someone gets into moral deliberation with you, they already are in a substantial agreement with you, and maybe everything else looks like “small stuff” in comparison. But what about those folks who don’t accept deliberation as a moral value? It seems that we’re stuck with what Yglesias talks about, having to use force to settle the issue. Now, the one out that I leave myself there is that I think that people tend to discover that deliberation works pretty well on questions of fact, which is how the scientific process has been successful. So I think there’s some potential for getting folks to extend that set of skills to moral questions. But getting that agreement would likely take a much longer conversation than is practical or even possible, which means that sometimes in the real world we face the kind of conflict Yglesias describes, where there’s nothing to do but see which side wins.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.