A strict egotistical conception of human nature, though capable of accounting for some parts of justice, can not accommodate Taylor's conception of justice and the common good i.e. do not hinder but help (as there are some cases when hindering and not helping are far more beneficial to a person than the opposite). Moreover, Taylor's conception required what he called sympathetic projection, or putting yourself in another's shoes, which is something that makes sense on a straight egotistical account. In the real world there are people, in fact many people, who are more than capable of sympathetic projection and who act for the common good and thus it can be concluded than a conception of human beings as purely egoists will not do. Though an incentive, egoism is not the only incentive that human beings have; humans are compelled to act by other incentives as well, those being: self-hatred, malice and compassion. I will not discuss self-hatred because it is irrelevant to the current discussion. Like egoism, it is essentially morally neutral and thus undeserving of more reflection when morality is my prime concern.
Yet why they are morally neutral requires some explaining before moving on to malice and compassion. The reason that egoism and self-hatred are morally neutral is because they are to be conceived independently of their effects. If I were to act entirely selfishly there may be many evils which result, but these evils, as Taylor conceives them, are not moral evils. To understand this it is essential to understand Taylor's conception of good vs. his conception of moral good. The good, without the moral preface, is simply the satisfaction of desire or that which helps in achieving it. So then actions are deemed good insofar as they satisfy desires, bad insofar as they thwart desires. The moral good, on the contrary, is to be understood as the quality of an action independent of any of its effects. In other words, one can understand moral good and evil as the spirit in which a particualr act is performed. What it is that makes this spirit either morally good or evil, and thus the act, is (as far as I can understand) human sentiment towards it. I would like to interject my own thought here quickly. Though this sounds at first a little off in terms of the likelihood of people having differing sentiments, I have, after a bit of thinking, determined this to be not as likely as one might think. Certain actions just elicit revusion while others just as equally elicit admiration. It does not seem as though any human being could watch torture and not think it bad nor could any human being watch an instance of great kindness and not think it good... Thus, it should be quite clear that, in virtue of their producing no sentiments one way or the other, certain actions are morally neutral because of the fact that their incentives are. For example, that a man should act in his own interest is, independently of its effects, of no moral value one way or another as it elicits no feelings in either direction.
Malice and compassion, on the otherhand, and the actions that spring from them, do elicit such emotion. To show this Taylor gives three examples for each of the two incentives, yet I will only discuss one for each here. Malice shall be considered first. Imagine a scenario where three underfed and weary soldiers on patrol in a war ravaged and newly conquered land suddenly come upon an old shack and notice signs of life. They go to the shack and throw open the door which reveals an old, decrepit and starving man huddled in the corner. The fact that he is a citizen of their opposed nation is enough for these soldiers and they drag him out of the shack and force him to start digging a hole. Once he has finished they beat him to a bloody pulp with their rifles butts and then leave him quaking and dying in the recently dug hole. As they are about to leave the soldiers here a cry from inside the shack and return to investigate. What they find is a small, malnourished baby in her crib. They first flash shiny objects in front of her to make her laugh before killing her with a single gun shot before leaving. What Taylor intends this story to show, and what it does show, is our feeling of revulsion after reading this story. His question then, is what makes us feel this way? He then considers the varying options that different philosophers have given, rejecting them all in turn. (Briefly, it is not the failure of these men to do their duty, realize that they should only treat rational beings as ends or will that their maxim be a universal law that causes such revulsion. Nor is it caused by the consequenes of these heinous acts as our feeling does not change if it is revealed to us that those who died were mere hours away from starving to death. Their death is doubtlessly an evil, yet what changes it from just an evil into a moral evil is our perception of the incentive that produced and was aimed at producing these evils. This incentive is malice and it is its precense here that causes our revulsion and thus it is its precense that yeilds moral evil.
Part II coming soon...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I don't think I understand why self interested or self hating actions are supposed to be morally neutral. What if, purely out of self interest and without any malice or the like, I take the last bit of food from a starving child? Both self interested actions and self hating ones certainly have consequences as well as goals (my own good and my own bad).
I must have explained this poorly. Taylor means that actions out of self-love or self-hate are morally neutral when considered independent of their consequences. The fact that sometimes people act in their own interest is morally neutral whereas the fact that sometimes people act for the betterment of another with no gain for themselves is morally significant. Of course the implications of certain actions may be important from a moral standpoint, but these are not being considered here.
Post a Comment