A couple of interesting posts re: postmodernism, Heisenberg, and morality over on the Tres Producers blog, the first of which contains this provocative Eric Olsen philoso-nugget:

PoMo isn

2 Replies to “Morality and its Discontents”

1. Andrew Northrup says:

   May 27, 2002 at 8:20 pm

   It’s pretty safe to say that morality is a seperate issue from scientific observation – it’s true that the language and ideas of quantum mechanics and relativity influenced our culture in many non-science areas, but that doesn’t imply that the behavior of sub-atomic particles buzzing around quantum land has a whole lot to do with the price of tea.

   Morality is a synthesis of observation, action and opinion, and as such it’s not really falsifiable like scientific theories are.  There are some things that people pretty much agree are profoundly immoral: murder, incest, cannibalism, wearing socks with sandals.  But if you are asked to “prove” that murdering nuns really is evil, you are at a loss.  Someone can argue, too, that quantum mechanics is fundamentally wrong, and they could probably convince me of it, because I am an intellectual charlatan – but they are going to have a somewhat more difficult time convincing a laser that it isn’t really emiting coherent light, and if I shine it in your eyes you are going to have to be one hell of an orator to convice your retina not to fry.

   The “uncertainty” in morality isn’t really a problem as such, because it’s always a construction of the human mind.  There are axioms that most people agree on, and many of them have a certain pragmatic value – I won’t let myself murder people because I want other people to not murder me.  But the root of it is still a belief you hold.  And that’s a sense of “uncertainty”, because the source of the belief is not unassailable.  And there is also “uncertainty” in the sense that any system of belief can have contradictions in it – sure, murder is wrong, but if you could could go back in time and kill Pauly Shore before he made “In The Army Now”, wouldn’t you pull the trigger?  So even armed with some rigorous Bertrand Russell Principia Moralica, every application of the system (which itself must contain unsolvable problems) is still “uncertain” because it is being applied by a falible agent.

   But so what?  It’s not say that morality is all arbitrary – we may have a B+ in Philosophy 101 now, but we’re a long way from saying that it’s OK to (oh, I don’t know) fly a couple of jumbo jets into the WTC.  If you think that’s OK, it’s not because matter is a wave and a particle, or because of Kurt Godel, or because Pierre Apres-Moderne’s doctoral thesis says that everything is a social construction, or because the human mind is less than perfect (present company excluded, of course).  It’s possibly because the people who did it are totally fucking crazy, but most likely it’s because they are evil.  And, if you want to get down to brass tacks, the reason it’s evil is because I will insist that it is, because I refuse to live in a world where it’s not.  And I can’t “prove” it, because it’s not in the class of provable things.  And you are perfectly free to disagree with me on this, but, thank God, my army can beat up your army.

2. Jeff G says:

   May 27, 2002 at 8:44 pm

   The problem with much of PoMo philosophy is the disingenuous (in my opinion) shift from a simple recognition of the role contingency plays in the establishment of moral codes, to the idea that—because there’s no metaphysical mandate for a particular morality (outside of worldviews that believe in such mandates specifically, I mean)—morality is somehow arbitrary.

   Much of morality, for example, is codified species-specific self-interest—pragmatism, as you note.  Clearly not “arbitrary” in any important sense.  And then there’s the advent of communities, established and perpetuated around a given set of beliefs.  Rorty’s “solidarity.”

   Poorly wielded PoMo, though, takes uncertainty and extrapolates it out to equivalency—without recognizing the universalist bent of its own position, which is to say the one Truth is that all truths are contingent.

Comments are closed.