Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Moral Convictions and the Summer of (In)Tolerance

So, let's get this thing off to an uncontroversial start. I've been thinking about moral convictions, their value, and the problems that arise when various people have moral convictions that conflict. I'm mainly interested in thinking about these issues at the personal level, rather than the political. So my organizing questions concern the relationship between a person's moral convictions and the proper grounds for believing with convicition, as well as what a person may do in the service of his or her convictions. Thus, additional questions: Is tolerance incompatible with integrity? Does forbearance amount to an unacceptable compromise? Can we even, in a different sense, make compromises when it comes to our moral convictions? Or, on the other hand, is it ever reasonable to elevate a belief to a conviction? Yeats says no: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." That seems wrong to me.

I'm giving a paper in Boulder at the RoME Congress in August where I suggest that moral convictions are valuable for a variety of (not only personal) reasons, but that they are risky, and must be handled with care. As the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller attests. That situation, and the mass of ensuing commentary, gets at some of my key worries. How can someone who has the conviction that abortion is murder not feel compelled to "do something about it"? I won't go through all the possibilities or link to all the raging. But I'm pretty sure that the start is to see that there are HUGE disanalogies making the pernicious comparisons floating about--that Tiller is comparable to Jeffrey Dahmer, and (the perennial view) that abortion is comparable to the Holocaust--incredibly irresponsible and basically vicious. (And I'm sure that seeing that doesn't require that a person have a settled view on abortion.) Perhaps more detail later, in the event that it's not obvious. Discuss.

4 comments:

  1. HI Matthew,


    "Can we even, in a different sense, make compromises when it comes to our moral convictions? "

    I would say that it is not only possible but even highly probable that most men make many compromises with their moral convictions within the confines of their lifetime. It is the age old battle that man has forever since the very beginning of time been involved with, flesh against the spirit, bad against the good, having against being.

    However mans ground zero problem is not in his making compromises when it comes to his moral convictions. Mans root problem is an identity problem. Before man is even remotely able to freely discover who he is, he has already become who he is not.




    "Or, on the other hand, is it ever reasonable to elevate a belief to a conviction? Yeats says no: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." That seems wrong to me"

    I see this as a case of the best not fully and wholeheartedly believing in the identity that they have come to accept as being who they are and the worst as those who more fully believe in their false identity.

    The very ground of mans most pressing problem is his non reflective presupposition that he is who the world has told him who he is.

    Sooner or later a man needs to come to the understanding that any happiness based on an accepted lie can never be true happiness.

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  2. Jack,

    When I asked whether it was possible, I meant to be asking whether it is morally possible for a person to make compromises in "good faith"--i.e. while remaining true to oneself and one's convictions.

    So here's another way to think of the question: Can we make compromises without compromising ourselves?

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  3. Matthew quote:


    "So here's another way to think of the question: Can we make compromises without compromising ourselves?"


    "Matthew, if I start beating a dead horse from your perspective, please let me know.I can only assure you that I am speaking from a believed in conviction.


    You asked:

    "is morally possible for a person to make compromises in "good faith"--i.e. while remaining true to oneself"

    "Can we make compromises without compromising ourselves?"


    Matthew,
    I would like to throw the question back to you:

    Is it possible to remain authentically true to oneself even if one does not know the true self that one is but only knows the relative self that one is not, which has been given to one by way of the world?

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  4. Jack,

    Your response doesn't really address the question. I take it that your point is that if we don't really know who we are (or what we believe), then integrity isn't possible anyhow. So I don't think you're beating a dead horse but veering in a different direction, maybe.

    In a paper called "Integrity," Raimond Gaita commented on some other philosopher's theory of integrity and challenged it by giving a case where a man who had suffered some kind of accident which led to memory loss set about trying to figure out who he had been. Gaita seemed to think that this -might- be a case of acting with integrity, even though there was a sense in which the man didn't know who he was.

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