---------- Forwarded message --------- From: suteerth vajpeyi <[email protected]> Date: Thu, 10 Oct, 2024, 6:25 pm Subject: Fwd: Is pragmatism applicable to the normative part of philosophy ? To: Gary Richmond <[email protected]>
---------- Forwarded message --------- From: suteerth vajpeyi <[email protected]> Date: Thu, 10 Oct, 2024, 6:24 pm Subject: Is pragmatism applicable to the normative part of philosophy ? To: <[email protected]> The pragmatic maxim goes in its most popular form as follows: Consider what effects which might conceivably have practical bearings which your conception has. Then the sum of these effects exhausts the entire meaning of your conception. Let us apply it to the question of what defines justice. What are the practical consequences of the concept of justice ? Justice means giving each person his due. This includes oneself in addition to the others. What is a person's due ? It is the reciprocation of the nature of a person's actions by the actions of others. Bad conduct begets bad conduct in response as a punishment. Good conduct is responded to with good conduct as an act of appreciation. But what does one mean by "good" and "bad"? We can, for our present purposes, define good conduct as that which is facilitative of its purpose. Although such usage departs from our ordinary understanding of the word 'good'. For example there is such a thing as an efficiently conducted burglary but no such thing as a "good" burglary. We can get around this difficulty in the following way: good conduct being that which facilitates its end, we can say that we all have similiar ends- food, water, material comforts and pleasure, exercise of our natural physical and mental facilities, companionship, love, progeny etc. Human diversity manifests itself not primarily in the ends aimed at but in the MEANS chosen to facilitate those ends. Thus while there might be an efficiently conducted burglary, there cannot be a good burglary because burglary itself is a means to an end- Material comfort. Does burglary facilitate material comfort ? In the short run, it might seem so but in the long run all things considered, it is not a "good" means to attain material comfort. This is because it erodes trust and human cooperation in society. Human cooperation and trust are the bed-rock of human prosperity. For if there is little or no human cooperation, human conflicts multiply, destroying resources, time, wealth etc. So our seemingly awkward definition of "good" conduct holds. But even our ends are capable of evaluation. We appraise some ends as more valuable than others. Moreover, some ends are truly admirable, others are not. An action is "good" in the conventional sense of the term when it facilitates the realization of an admirable end. What makes an end admirable ? An end is not admirable for the sake of realization of anything else for its admirableness is an intrinsic quality. It is not a relation to something else still less is it a representation of something before a rational agent. Admirability belongs to firstness, the world of feelings. I here stop my analysis of the meaning of justice and its relation to other terms. For I do not know what makes an end admirable. Would we exhausted the entire meaning of the term justice by carrying our analysis further ? Surely, the pragmatic maxim has helped to clarify our concepts of justice. But we are not dealing with the use of the pragmatic maxim in gaining clearer apprehensions. We are dealing with the use of the pragmatic maxim as a criterion of meaning. Look at both these statements closely, with a severe eye. What is our interpretation of the term "meaning" ? The meaning of a term is the apprehension we (a community of inquirers) have of the concept denoted by that term. So the apprehension of a term is co-extensive with its meaning. Conclusion: pragmatism is not only good at clarifying a term's meaning to an interpreter, it is also capable of application to the normative sciences of aesthetics, ethics and logic. Request- what are your thoughts on the pragmatic maxim, o reader ?
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