My own scatted thoughts + some comments on Aria's comments
Ok so this response will be a medley of some thoughts I had in response to Aria’s blog as well as some unrelated thoughts I had.
To start off - super cool blog Aria! I don’t disagree with the notion that our will is influenced by social/economic/cultural factors and as I read your post, I think that essentially you’re getting at a similar idea to Aiden last week in determining wether or not we have free will at all since these factors influence our decisions. As we unpacked in seminar last week, I’m not sure that it entirely matters wether or not we have free will or full autonomy or not because at the end of the day, we still make decisions based on the world we’re in and the information available. Definitely a cool point that I’m excited to talk about more.
The other note of your post I briefly wanted to touch on was your assertion that “the majority of, if not all, belief is transient” because while I agree that widely held beliefs shift over time in accordance with new cultural attitudes etc, I also think that there are many beliefs that have stayed (for the most part) consistent across time. For example, the notion that unjustified murder of another human has generally been frowned upon throughout generations. Though the conditions under which violence is considered justified and exceptions may vary, I think the core belief that the unjustified murder of another human has generally been a constant across different cultures and time periods.
I also appreciate how you note when discussing the example of the woman that just because she doesn’t perceive her own situation as unjust doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t prevent it form occurring. In making this claim, I think you’re alluding to an idea that I feel should be made explicit: just because victims of oppression don’t perceive their circumstances or treatment as unjust doesn’t mean they are not unjust. I might actually go a step further and note that it is perhaps more dire when individuals perceive their unjust circumstances as natural or just because, as we’ve seen through Marx, that’s exactly the mark of a good (and highly dangerous) ideology—if it can make individuals complicit in their own oppression
Going back to the Varden directly, I appreciate that she attempted to make the jump between Kant’s ideal theory into non-ideal theory since during last seminar, it was clear that where most of us struggled was thinking about how to apply Kant’s ideas into our society. As I understood it, Varden notes that what we need to do when looking at non-ideal interpretation of Kant’s ideas is to eliminate the binary distinction between the state of nature and civil society and acknowledge that there can be pockets of anarchy, barbarism, or despotism within otherwise just societies (which Kant would label as republics). While I don’t disagree with that idea, I wonder how many “pockets” of injustice are needed to make the society as a whole unjust? Where’s the line or the threshold? Is it a matter of quantity of the injustices or severity? Both? To flip it, how many pockets of justice are needed before we can consider an unjust society a republic? Also, is there a lexical ordering of the "badness" or severity of the different injustices (barbarism, anarchy, despotism)?
Hey Sophia! Just wanted to clarify my point a little bit. I'm not trying to make Aidan's point here about not having free will (as you say, that is kind of beside the point and, for what it's worth, I do believe in free will). I am more so making the claim that, over time, our intuitions on morality will change because they are molded by circumstance and surroundings. As such, we have no protections in place/guarantees for our morals as we value them today. Religion is one way of preserving morality, but it isn't guaranteed that religion will continue to function and exist as it currently does. Given this, to what extent should moral education be entrenched into our other institutions to prevent future moral perversion (and, consequently, perversion of omnilateral will)?
ReplyDeleteI take your second point, that some of our base intuitions seem to remain consistent - I guess my worry is about the fringe cases, or grey areas. Murdering the innocent is wrong; is abortion murder of an innocent baby, and therefore wrong? Without clear moral answers to these secondary questions, we face practical issues.
Hey Aria!
DeleteThanks for clarifying - I see what you’re getting at more clearly and think it’s an interesting insight to consider! In fact, I’ve cooked up some thoughts that expand on what you’re getting at.
What’s so interesting about moral guardrails in the way that I think you're talking about is that they suggest making such moral education strong in the public sphere—something that I think changes the stakes entirely. With religion, even though it can involve deep moral instruction from a young age (and arguably borders on indoctrination in some cases), it's generally viewed as a private matter (at least in secular states). Families pass down beliefs, and while this does shape a person’s moral framework before they have the tools to critically assess it, there’s still the sense that religious adherence is ultimately a personal and voluntary choice—at least in theory, and certainly in liberal democracies.
But when we start talking about moral education as something embedded in public institutions (which I think you might be alluding to), especially if it involves a common set of values meant to guard against the “corruption” of the omnilateral will, it feels much more coercive. The public nature of it means the stakes aren’t just about individual upbringing—they're about shaping a collective moral compass, potentially through state-sanctioned norms. That’s where it gets tricky. How do we ensure that these “guardrails” don’t just reflect the dominant ideology of the moment? And how do we avoid the risk of reproducing systems that seem moral on the surface but are exclusionary or oppressive in practice? If there was widespread rejection to this sort of moral education, would it be justifiable—even if norms that are generally widespread and agreed upon like the right to life—were taught?
This is where your earlier point about not knowing how cultural norms will evolve becomes especially important. What we enshrine now as “moral” could look deeply problematic a century from now. So maybe the approach isn't to define what is moral, but to focus public education on developing the capacity for moral reasoning—teaching people to think critically, challenge assumptions, and engage across difference—rather than handing them a finished moral worldview. At the same time though, I’m not sure what that really looks like in practice since it feels like there are a ton of potential pitfalls and areas where things could go wrong.
Hi! I think these points are really important because I think the portion of Varden and Kant's (I'll just say Varden's from here on) argument that answer your criticisms are what elevates the argument above others we've read so far. I take Aaria's point to be that because Varden's ideal public authority relies upon omnilateral will to claim authoritative legitimacy and consistency with Kantian principles, the theory entails potentially problematic procedures to prevent the "corruption" of ominlateral will. I don't think this interpretation properly delineates between the ideal and non-ideal portions of Varden's argument. In an ideal society, omnilateral will would be incorruptible, and thus doees not need to be problematically maintained. In a non-ideal society, I take omnilateral will to be a given society's cultural historical attempt at finding a "'union and harmony of [...] human morality [...] and human happiness' (8:279)–and it is a union that we can never perfectly or stably obtain" (Varden 15, 16). Ominlateral will has authoritative legitimacy for a given society at a given time not because our current attempts at aligning with ideal Kantian principles are necessarily successful, but because it represents their best attempt at doing so. We are generally positive about moral progress in society, and so both Aaria and Sophia indicate, there are real dangers in trying to preserve every aspect of our morality today (for example as much as I can recognize religion's ability to enshrine "good" moral values, I believe it historically has caused arguably more moral harm through existential exploitation, stunting empathy, and validating wrongdoing).
ReplyDeleteAs Sophia notes, Varden's theory does encourage breaking through ideology, though it is more concerned with encouraging a method of thinking rather than claiming to be beyond ideology itself. I like this quote a lot: "we have a tendency to generalize ('universalize') our contingent ways–whether as individuals or as cultures–rather than realize them within the bounds of morality (moral laws of freedom) [...] Kant argues [that] 'the beginning of human wisdom' is to 'know your heart'–an endeavor that is truly difficult yet constitutive of pursuing the highest good or realising ourselves fully" (Varden 15).
I agree that it is probably futile to make appeals to what has generally seemed true as the base of our morality (although I think there may be an argument from shared biology), and this is why I the fixation of preserving freedom is so crucial to Varden's argument to me. To avoid moral relativism, we have to make some assumptions about morality. Varden's argument points to moral anthropology and our animality as providing this basis for justice. She advocates for a system that facilitates free interpretation of our animality to most closely arrive at an ideal society. I think :P
*Also* my take last time was supposed to be that because free will only exists in a societal framework, any definition of freedom most be accompanied by further contextualization of what level of action accountability we are choosing to think from. While in general you can vibe that out, I felt like the Brettschneider we read did not define freedom clearly enough for the theory to be useful in deciding contentious questions of what freedoms we value. I worded it poorly, but Aaria's points in class spoke to the core feeling of flippancy in the theory that I was reacting to.