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RageSk8
"Moral Universalism and Economic Triage" by Richard Rorty
"Who are we?" is quite different from the traditional philosophical question "what are we?". The latter is synonymous with Kant's questions, "What is Man?". Both mean something like "how does the human species differ from the rest of the animal kingdom?" or "among the differences between us and the other animals, which ones better most?". This "what?" question is scientific or metaphysical.
By contrast, the "who?" question is political. It is asked by people who want to separate off the human beings who are better suited to some particular purpose than other human beings, and to gather the former into a self-conscious moral community: that is, a community united by reciprocal trust, and by willingness to come to fellow-members' assistance when they need it. Answers to the "who?" question are attempts to forge, or reforge, a moral identity.
Traditional moral universalism blends an answer to the scientific or metaphysical "what?" question with an answer to the political "who?" question. Universalism presupposes that the discovery of traits shared by all human beings suffices to show why, and perhaps how, all human beings should organise themselves into a cosmopolis. It proposes a scientific or metaphysical foundation for global politics. Following the model of religious claims that human beings are made in the image of God, philosophical universalism claims that the presence of common traits testifies to a common purpose. It says that the form of the ideal human community can be determined by reference to a universal human nature...
The idea that some such vocabularies are somehow closer to the intrinsic nature of reality than others makes sense to religious believers. For those who believe that a certain religion enshrines the Word, and thus the Will, of the Creator and Lord of the Universe, not only does the question "In what language does the universe demand to be described?" make sense, but the answer is already evident. For secularists, however, the only way to make sense of the idea that the universe demands description in a certain vocabulary is to turn to science. Enlightenment secularism suggested that the vocabulary of the natural sciences is nature's own - the divisions made by this vocabulary are the joints at which nature demands to be cut...
The rich parts of the world, the ones which have already realized some of the dreams of the Enlightenment, are also the places where technology took off. Technology began making Europe rich even before the Enlightenment began making it democratic. Only people who were already exceptionally rich, and therefore exceptionally secure, could have taken the idea of democracy, much less of global democracy, seriously. Moral idealism goes along with economic success. The latter is obviously not a sufficient condition for the former, but I think we should concede to Nietzsche that it is a necessary one...
It has often been suggested that the authors of the Constitution of the United States of America were not entitled to describe themselves as the people of the United States. They were, it is said, only entitled to call themselves something like "We, the representatives of the property-owning white males of the United States". Their black slaves, their white servants, and even their wives and daughters, did not really come into the picture. Similarly, it has often been suggested that when the representatives of governments signed the Charter of the United Nations, the most that they were really entitled to say was something like "We, the representatives of the political classes of our respective countries".
The existence of a moral community which can plausibly and without qualification identify itself as "we, the people of the United States", is still a project rather than an actuality. In a few respects, my country is closer to accomplish this project now than it has ever been, thanks to the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960's and to the continuing pressure exerted by feminists. In most respects, however, it is losing ground. For the gap between the rich and poor Americans is widening steadily, and the latter are increasingly bereft of hope for their children's future...
uppose that there is no imaginable way to make decent life-chances available to the poorer five billion citizens of the member states of the United Nations while still keeping intact the democratic socio-political institutions cherished by the richer one billion. Suppose that the hope of such availability is doomed to be either hypocritical or self-deceptive. Suppose that we have passed the point of no return in the balance between population and resources, and that it is now sauve qui peut. Suppose that the rich and lucky billion come to believe that this is the case - not out of selfishness and greed, but as a result of accurate economic calculation. Then they will begin to treat the poor and unlucky five billion as surplus to their moral requirements, unable to play a part in their moral life. The rich and unlucky people will quickly become unable to think of the poor and unlucky ones as their fellow humans, as part of the same "we".
This may seem overstated. For surely, it might be objected, one can have a sense of identification with people whose suffering one has no way of alleviating...
This objection is plausible, but not, I think, convincing. Consider the analogy, suggested by Posner's phrase "pathological situation", between finding it politically unfeasible to give people hope and finding it medically unfeasible to do. When a hospital is deluged with an impossibly large flood of victims of a catastrophe, the doctors and nurses begin to perform triage: they decide which of the victims are "medically feasible" - which ones are appropriate recipients of the limited medical resources available. When the American underdass is told that it is politically unfeasible to remedy their situation, they are in the same situation as accident victims who are told that it is unfeasible to offer them medical treatment.
In both cases, those who make the decision about feasibility are answering the question "Who are we?" by excluding certain human beings from membership in "We, the ones who can hope to survive". When we realize that it is unfeasible to rescue a person or a group, it is as if they had already gone before us into dealh. Such people are, as we say, "dead to us". Life, we say, is for the living. For the sake of their own sanity, and for the sake of the less grievously wounded patients who are admitted to the hospital, the doctors and nurses must simply blank out on all those moaning victims who are left outside in the street. They must cease to think about them, pretend that they are already dead...
On this Peircean, pragmatic account of belief, to believe that someone is "one of us", a member of our moral community, is to exhibit readiness to come to their assistance when they are in need. To answer the question "who are we ?" in a way that is relevant to moral questions is to pick out whom one is willing to do something to help. Pressing Peirce's point, I would argue that one is answering the question "who are we?" in a useful and informative way only if one thereby generates reliable predictions about what measures the group identified as "we" will take in specified circumstances.
It follows that it is neither useful or informative to answer this question by reference to a class of people whom one has no idea how to help. Moral identification is empty when it is no longer tied to habits of action. That is why it is either hypocritical or self-deceptive for the doctors to think of those who are left outside the hospital as "us". It is why it is either hypocritical or self-deceptive for those who agree with Posner about the hopelessness of attempting to rescue the black American underclass from its pathological situation to continue to use a phrase like "We, the people of the United States". It would be equally self-deceptive or hypocritical for those who do not believe that the industrialized democracies can bring either hope or human rights to the billions who lack both to use the term "We, the people of the United Nations".
When the founders of the United States and of the United Nations originally used these terms, however, it was neither self-deceptive or hypocritical. For the foundation of each of these institutions was part of a project - a project of forming a moral community out of a mass of people which was not yet such a community. Both were founded not only in a spirit of hope, but in the midst of a plethora of practical proposals - proposals which looked, at the time, as if they might be politically and economically feasible. At the time of the foundation of the Untied Nations, when the world's population was only half its present size and everybody assumed that the forests and the fish would last forever, many proposals seemed politically feasible that seem so no longer.
As I said earlier, I am not trying to make predictions. Nor am I offering recommendations for action. Rather, I have been putting forward a philosophical argument that depends upon three premises. The first is that the primordial philosophical question is not "what are we?" but "who are we?". The second is that "who are we?" means "what community of reciprocal trust do we belong to?". The third is that reciprocal trust depends on feasibility as well as on good will. The conclusion I draw from these premises is that thinking of other people as part of the same "we", depends not only on willingness to help those people but on belief that one is able to help them. In particular, answering the question "who are we?" with "we are members of a moral community which encompasses the human species", depends on an ability to believe that we can avoid economic triage.
read whole article: http://www.unesco.org/phiweb/uk/2rpu/rort/rort.html
"Who are we?" is quite different from the traditional philosophical question "what are we?". The latter is synonymous with Kant's questions, "What is Man?". Both mean something like "how does the human species differ from the rest of the animal kingdom?" or "among the differences between us and the other animals, which ones better most?". This "what?" question is scientific or metaphysical.
By contrast, the "who?" question is political. It is asked by people who want to separate off the human beings who are better suited to some particular purpose than other human beings, and to gather the former into a self-conscious moral community: that is, a community united by reciprocal trust, and by willingness to come to fellow-members' assistance when they need it. Answers to the "who?" question are attempts to forge, or reforge, a moral identity.
Traditional moral universalism blends an answer to the scientific or metaphysical "what?" question with an answer to the political "who?" question. Universalism presupposes that the discovery of traits shared by all human beings suffices to show why, and perhaps how, all human beings should organise themselves into a cosmopolis. It proposes a scientific or metaphysical foundation for global politics. Following the model of religious claims that human beings are made in the image of God, philosophical universalism claims that the presence of common traits testifies to a common purpose. It says that the form of the ideal human community can be determined by reference to a universal human nature...
The idea that some such vocabularies are somehow closer to the intrinsic nature of reality than others makes sense to religious believers. For those who believe that a certain religion enshrines the Word, and thus the Will, of the Creator and Lord of the Universe, not only does the question "In what language does the universe demand to be described?" make sense, but the answer is already evident. For secularists, however, the only way to make sense of the idea that the universe demands description in a certain vocabulary is to turn to science. Enlightenment secularism suggested that the vocabulary of the natural sciences is nature's own - the divisions made by this vocabulary are the joints at which nature demands to be cut...
The rich parts of the world, the ones which have already realized some of the dreams of the Enlightenment, are also the places where technology took off. Technology began making Europe rich even before the Enlightenment began making it democratic. Only people who were already exceptionally rich, and therefore exceptionally secure, could have taken the idea of democracy, much less of global democracy, seriously. Moral idealism goes along with economic success. The latter is obviously not a sufficient condition for the former, but I think we should concede to Nietzsche that it is a necessary one...
It has often been suggested that the authors of the Constitution of the United States of America were not entitled to describe themselves as the people of the United States. They were, it is said, only entitled to call themselves something like "We, the representatives of the property-owning white males of the United States". Their black slaves, their white servants, and even their wives and daughters, did not really come into the picture. Similarly, it has often been suggested that when the representatives of governments signed the Charter of the United Nations, the most that they were really entitled to say was something like "We, the representatives of the political classes of our respective countries".
The existence of a moral community which can plausibly and without qualification identify itself as "we, the people of the United States", is still a project rather than an actuality. In a few respects, my country is closer to accomplish this project now than it has ever been, thanks to the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960's and to the continuing pressure exerted by feminists. In most respects, however, it is losing ground. For the gap between the rich and poor Americans is widening steadily, and the latter are increasingly bereft of hope for their children's future...
This may seem overstated. For surely, it might be objected, one can have a sense of identification with people whose suffering one has no way of alleviating...
This objection is plausible, but not, I think, convincing. Consider the analogy, suggested by Posner's phrase "pathological situation", between finding it politically unfeasible to give people hope and finding it medically unfeasible to do. When a hospital is deluged with an impossibly large flood of victims of a catastrophe, the doctors and nurses begin to perform triage: they decide which of the victims are "medically feasible" - which ones are appropriate recipients of the limited medical resources available. When the American underdass is told that it is politically unfeasible to remedy their situation, they are in the same situation as accident victims who are told that it is unfeasible to offer them medical treatment.
In both cases, those who make the decision about feasibility are answering the question "Who are we?" by excluding certain human beings from membership in "We, the ones who can hope to survive". When we realize that it is unfeasible to rescue a person or a group, it is as if they had already gone before us into dealh. Such people are, as we say, "dead to us". Life, we say, is for the living. For the sake of their own sanity, and for the sake of the less grievously wounded patients who are admitted to the hospital, the doctors and nurses must simply blank out on all those moaning victims who are left outside in the street. They must cease to think about them, pretend that they are already dead...
On this Peircean, pragmatic account of belief, to believe that someone is "one of us", a member of our moral community, is to exhibit readiness to come to their assistance when they are in need. To answer the question "who are we ?" in a way that is relevant to moral questions is to pick out whom one is willing to do something to help. Pressing Peirce's point, I would argue that one is answering the question "who are we?" in a useful and informative way only if one thereby generates reliable predictions about what measures the group identified as "we" will take in specified circumstances.
It follows that it is neither useful or informative to answer this question by reference to a class of people whom one has no idea how to help. Moral identification is empty when it is no longer tied to habits of action. That is why it is either hypocritical or self-deceptive for the doctors to think of those who are left outside the hospital as "us". It is why it is either hypocritical or self-deceptive for those who agree with Posner about the hopelessness of attempting to rescue the black American underclass from its pathological situation to continue to use a phrase like "We, the people of the United States". It would be equally self-deceptive or hypocritical for those who do not believe that the industrialized democracies can bring either hope or human rights to the billions who lack both to use the term "We, the people of the United Nations".
When the founders of the United States and of the United Nations originally used these terms, however, it was neither self-deceptive or hypocritical. For the foundation of each of these institutions was part of a project - a project of forming a moral community out of a mass of people which was not yet such a community. Both were founded not only in a spirit of hope, but in the midst of a plethora of practical proposals - proposals which looked, at the time, as if they might be politically and economically feasible. At the time of the foundation of the Untied Nations, when the world's population was only half its present size and everybody assumed that the forests and the fish would last forever, many proposals seemed politically feasible that seem so no longer.
As I said earlier, I am not trying to make predictions. Nor am I offering recommendations for action. Rather, I have been putting forward a philosophical argument that depends upon three premises. The first is that the primordial philosophical question is not "what are we?" but "who are we?". The second is that "who are we?" means "what community of reciprocal trust do we belong to?". The third is that reciprocal trust depends on feasibility as well as on good will. The conclusion I draw from these premises is that thinking of other people as part of the same "we", depends not only on willingness to help those people but on belief that one is able to help them. In particular, answering the question "who are we?" with "we are members of a moral community which encompasses the human species", depends on an ability to believe that we can avoid economic triage.
read whole article: http://www.unesco.org/phiweb/uk/2rpu/rort/rort.html
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