File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9712, message 508


Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 02:09:47 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Response to Re: Christopher Phelps' *Young Sidney


At 02:47 AM 12/15/97 -0500, Justin Schwartz wrote:
>Pragmatism has nothing necessarily to do with utilitarianism or any form
>of consequentialism. The most important pragmatist in modern ethics is
>Rawls, who is also the major liberal critic of utilitarianism. I myself am
>an anti-utilitarian on pragmatistic grounds. 

I take it your objection is based on a distinction I purposely blurred: the
difference between an epistemological and ethical position.  Is your
objection to ethical utilitarianism based on epistemic pragmatism or on some
sort of ethical pragmatism?  As for Rawls, isn't the problem with his theory
of justice the same sort of problem as utilitarianism has: i.e. that it's
suspended in mid-air?

>Insofar as this imaginary
>figure Ralph constructs appeals to a sort of nonsocial Cartesian
>individual without any social embeddedness, this individual is a stock
>target of pragmatist attacks on classical philosophy. Practice in the
>abstract is not an important category for pragmatists. Like Marxists we
>want to know, what interests does a particular proposition or theory or
>line of argument or way of doing things promote?

And isn't this formulation equally as vacuous?  Isn't this also the point of
departure of the pomos?  We've moved from the detached individual to the
socially conceptualized individual as a philosophical abstraction, but is
the latter any improvement at all if the goal is merely to deny objective
truth on a priori relativistic grounds?  And isn't "interest" as an
abstraction equally vacuous, precisely the problem with the strong
relativist program in sociology of science?  Does this petty bourgeois
conception of naked interest offer the sorts of explanation that Marxism
enables?

>Pargmatist theories of knowledge don't purport to tell you in the
>abstarct how to adjudicate truth claims. The enterprise of doing taht in
>the abstract is antithetical to pragmatism. What pragmatists do is direct
>you to the social practices in which we do adjudicate truth claims, look
>at science, look at its social context, see how it actually operates. 

Piffle!

>Finally, Dewey's politics. D's bad line on WWI is something that's always
>thrown at us, as if no one else ever made a mistake. D was a democratic
>socialist who believed in worker's control. He defended Trotsky against
>Stalin's lies. He opposed the red scares and worked to free Sacco and
>Vanzetti. Some apologist for the domination of capital.

Dewey was a petty bourgeois reformist, who both analyzed reality in a
piecemeal fashion and advocated piecemeal reform.  He complained that
Marxism reduces several factors to one factor, the economic, as if Marxism
cared about factors rather than structure.  Just as Jukka warned, a
recognition of multiple and interacting factors ("mutual determination")
alone without a firm basis does not get us where we need to be.

But doesn't "piecemeal" characterize the way you think, too?



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