Up@dawn 2.0

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

RR on a larger loyalty

"...should we describe such moral dilemmas as these as conflicts between loyalty and justice, or rather, as I have suggested we might, between loyalties to smaller groups and loyalties to larger groups? This amounts to asking: Would it be a good idea to treat “justice” as the name for loyalty to a certain very large group, the name for our largest current loyalty, rather than the name of something distinct from loyalty? Could we replace the notion of “justice” with that of loyalty to that group—for example, one’s fellow citizens, or the human species, or all living things? Would anything be lost by this replacement? Moral philosophers who remain loyal to Kant are likely to think that a lot would be lost. Kantians typically insist that justice springs from reason, and loyalty from sentiment. Only reason, they say, can impose universal and unconditional moral obligations, and our obligation to be just is of this sort. It is on another level from the sort of affectional relations which create loyalty. Jürgen Habermas is the most prominent contemporary philosopher to insist on this Kantian way of looking at things: the thinker least willing to blur either the line between reason and sentiment, or the line between universal validity and historical consensus. But contemporary philosophers who depart from Kant, either in the direction of Hume (like Annette Baier) or in the direction of Hegel (like Charles Taylor) or in that of Aristotle (like Alasdair MacIntyre) are not so sure."

"Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism": https://a.co/iVMyPfa

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