always insightful:
I don't know if I like the wording of the last point, however. Maybe I'm reading too much into "risk", but it's not necessarily a pitfall of moral reasoning that it resist a utility calculus. In fact, insofar as we admit that these "beliefs" of the moral absolutists are epistemically distinct from the "facts" of the pragmatic non-absolutists, we also imply that there are cognitive reasons to keep them distinct. The gesture, after all, is what makes possible the value of facts; and so, while rationality informs us, by utility calculus, what is useful, moral reasoning and beliefs are the means by which we select the very goal of that utility.
To put it circularly: we shouldn't be surprised that moral absolutists are enraged by tangible bribery, just as we don't expect moralist to fight against materialism. It is a rational domain that is, in some sense, defending itself. Though I think we could also give some sort of materialist, pop-evolutionary account of why moral reasoning is useful for the material survival of a social species.
Amazingly, when you consider that this conflict regularly takes the lives of hundreds of people, it was the gesture that counted. It was the fact that one side showed willingness to even budge on matters of principle that prompted the other to do the same. It just goes to show that when people promote their ideas to the rank of beliefs, they risk losing the ability to view those issues rationally.
I don't know if I like the wording of the last point, however. Maybe I'm reading too much into "risk", but it's not necessarily a pitfall of moral reasoning that it resist a utility calculus. In fact, insofar as we admit that these "beliefs" of the moral absolutists are epistemically distinct from the "facts" of the pragmatic non-absolutists, we also imply that there are cognitive reasons to keep them distinct. The gesture, after all, is what makes possible the value of facts; and so, while rationality informs us, by utility calculus, what is useful, moral reasoning and beliefs are the means by which we select the very goal of that utility.
To put it circularly: we shouldn't be surprised that moral absolutists are enraged by tangible bribery, just as we don't expect moralist to fight against materialism. It is a rational domain that is, in some sense, defending itself. Though I think we could also give some sort of materialist, pop-evolutionary account of why moral reasoning is useful for the material survival of a social species.
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