From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Jul 02 2005 - 17:42:16 BST
Erin,
Everyone knows I don't read the politics posts. I do glance at a few every
so often (usually of people I enjoy reading), just to stay abreast and check
to see if anything interesting is going on. So I see you, Erin, and I
thought I'd take a look.
Erin said:
So going back to my scenerio "what the person does" is not the only issue
in deciding whether something was a selfish or selfless act....you had to
look at the intentions.
Matt:
I don't care much at all about the political feud (keep up the good work
Mark, though Erin has a point about the politicians/businessmen thing), but
the issue of "intentions" strays into moral philosophy and is something I'm
interested in.
I'll say upfront, I have zero answers on the topic of how intentions play
into moral matters. I don't know. But I did want to say this:
historically, intentions have almost mattered more to moral philosophers and
ethicists since Kant then actual actions. I can't remember all the history
involved leading up to Kant, but for Kant, intentions were the whole
sha-bang and have been primarily what the modern mind thinks about when he
thinks ethically. Mark is moving _against_ the grain of modern ethical
thought when he says that he's not interested in intentions, only in
actions. But he's using the wrong moral categories when he says that
actions-sans-intentions can be selfish or selfless. Those categories are
the studs of intentional thinking.
I read a wonderful book a several months ago that impressed me greatly on
the subject, Susan Neiman's "Evil in Modern Thought." The book is infused
with thinking through actual modern ethical problems and history, like 9/11
and the Holocaust, but it does it through the great moral philosophers to
take us through the history of how we think about evil. It is an amazing
book. It doesn't offer any definite answers either, but it leads us to the
Holocaust and how that pretty much destroyed the way moderns think about
ethics and how we haven't yet thought through it yet. It has to do with
intentions. When people think about what the Nazis did, it doesn't make any
sense that many of them weren't acting out of evil intentions. Take Hannah
Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem." Adolf Eichmann was a train driver to
Auschwitz. He was convicted for crimes against humanity, but in trying to
assess what kind of human being he was, his interviewers were stunned by his
total normalness. If anthing, maybe he was a little too greedy or concerned
with climbing the bureaucratic ladder, but this wasn't a killer. Arendt's
book was subtitled "A Report on the Banality of Evil." At the time of the
book, Arendt (a Jew) was damned as a Nazi apologist. But Neiman argues that
almost everyone has missed the point of the book (perhaps even Arendt
herself): the point was that evil is no longer detectable through
intentions. No longer is evil an extraordinary occurence, it is a banal
occurence, something normal people can do because of the structures (social,
political, etc.) surrounding them.
Neiman suggests that we need to rethink our ethical categories and I tend to
agree. I don't think it is possible to think about the Holocaust with
intentions at the forefront of our mind. I think this rethinking is already
happening, but it is late coming to philosophy. Part of this rethinking is
just in the places Mark points towards: business and politics. When we
think about the way an oil business, say, in its search for oil, will barely
stop at the point of driving a spike in a baby seal's head, we are left
quite taken aback. And when we encounter somebody who works for the company
we go, "How could you? Look at what they're doing." Or a shoe or clothes
company with sweat shops. But what about us, the consumers? "How could you
buy their products? Look at what they're doing."
Now, I think I can assume that Platt would think of this as fuzzy,
degenerate liberal thinking (and he'd probably bring up Pirsig and "moral
paralysis" and "soup of sentiments" stuff), but I think we need to remember
the Holocaust and how that demands a change in the categories we use to
think about evil. Evil isn't so simple as to be in the intentions of an
individual. Evil is banal, something we all could be participating in.
I don't know what the answer is. Clearly, intentions are still a big deal.
But actual actions are what do the actual evil. What's disturbing is that
we all could be doing evil. So what do we do about it?
Matt
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