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From: ddfr@tank.uchicago.edu (david director friedman)
Newsgroups: alt.individualism
Subject: Re: Moral blindness
Message-ID: <7268@tank.uchicago.edu>
Date: 18 Jan 90 02:20:39 GMT
References: <4818d1b4.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
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Organization: University of Chicago
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My response to those who diagree with my posting does indeed hinge on
the distinction between moral facts and moral theories and on
defining moral facts as judgements about well-specified situations. A
statement such as "it is wrong to do X (have two wives, for example)"
is a complicated combination of normative and positive propositions.
If you ask someone why it is wrong, many of the answers you will get
will involve positive propositions, claims that bigamy will lead to
consequences that both parties to the argument regard as undesirable.
Bigamy will lead to infidelity, or unhappiness, or ...  .Another
answer may be: "because god condemns it, and a) one should do the
will of God or b)we will be punished for not doing the will of God."
Here part a) is a normative proposition, all the rest is positive.

Again, consider the Nazi policy towards the Jews. The normative
conclusion (Jews should be expelled or exterminated) was predicated
on a set of positive facts (the jews are engaged in a centuries old
conspiracy against the aryan race). The positive untruth was an
essential part of justifying the normative untruth, precisely because
what remains without it is the normative proposition "people unlike
us who have done nothing wrong should be killed," which most Germans
would have found very unconvincing.

My claim is not that we have perfect agreement about normative facts,
but only that we have about as much agreement about normative facts
as about positive facts. The usual examples of normative disagreement
are cases where a sizable part of the disagreement is in fact
positive.

"if Mr. Friedman thinks there is such broad consensus on ethical
issues he either has not traveled to other cultures very much or he
has not studied much history or anthropology." (Peter Nelson)

I have travelled quite a lot (Europe, Turkey, India, Iran, Israel,
Japan, South-east Asia, Ecuador, Australia, ...), and try to talk
with people where I travel. On the other hand, I am pretty much
limited, in arguing philosophy, to people who speak English, and I
have never lived for any substantial length of time in a non-western
society. I know relatively little anthropology but quite a lot of
history--I have published articles on saga period Iceland and the
medieval doctrine of the just price. Incidentally, Icelanders
certainly did not limit their definition of murder to people living
within fifteen miles of home (Russell Turpin). "Vikings" defines a
profession, not a nationality, but I doubt it was true of any of the
other viking period Norse cultures.

On the general issue, I refer my critics to C.S. Lewis's book "The
Abolition of Man." It is an interesting book in a number of ways, one
of which is the attempt to disprove the relativist position
empirically. Lewis argues, with a good deal of evidence, that basic
moral propositions are pretty much the same across essentially all
cultures. Of course, the detailed interpretation of those
propositions varies a good deal--but I would claim that that is at
least as much due to positive as normative disagreements.

My main direct experience relevant to all of this, incidentally, is
arguing with other people from my culture but with widely differing
political views--including four years as a Goldwater
conservative/libertarian and Harvard undergraduate (1961-1965).
Arguments boil down to disagreements over positive propositions very
much more often than into disagreements over normative propositions.

I am not sure if I have been clear enough in my distinction between
normative facts and normative theories. A normative fact, as I use
the term, is the statement that a particular act or set of acts was
wrong. "John should not have beaten his son yesterday" is an
assertion about a normative fact. "Fathers should never beat their
sons" or "You should never initiate coercion" is a normative theory,
a general rule used to make or explain moral judgements.

I should perhaps add that, in my opinion, no normative theories are
as well worked out, understood, and justified as the more successful
positive theories, such as physics, geology, or economics, and I am
not particularly optimistic about that situation changing. That is
one of the reasons that I almost never write about normative issues.
I was however persuaded, many years ago, that the conventional sharp
distinction between absolute, objective physical facts and relative,
subjective moral judgements was much less convincing than I
previously thought it was, hence the argument I have been presenting
here.

I believe Peter Nelson, in another posting, said that he would like
to be convinced of a number of things, but so far had not been. My
position on these issues is, ultimately, the result of losing an
argument with Isaiah Berlin when I was about nineteen (he was
visiting at Harvard). Before that, my position was the same one that
Peter now holds. So sometimes, although not often, arguments do
change beliefs.

David Friedman