Obviously, I can't speak to academic moral philosophy at all. But I think, in part, that the right has staked a claim to rooted values--values that just are, and don't need explanation--while the left seems, variously, to be making simple technocratic claims rooted in reason, and at the same time attacking the simpleness of the such technocratic claims and pointing out the hidden vices in the claims. You're left with a feeling that there isn't, as you say, a unified message or even the possibility of one. But I also think that's changing.

Hmm. I think there's something to Tim's 1, but Republican "values" is such a tendentious term that I'm not sure it's worth anything. If "moral values" == "no buttfucking," then ceding that ground is ceding nothing.

I don't deny there's something to it - some of the traditional values that liberalism is sceptical of are legit, or at least deeply-grounded - but I'm dubious that starting from such a Doublespeak position can lead somewhere useful.

So why would someone like Neimann, who seems smart and fair from Appiah's brief description, think that "those whose business is to think about morality have been remiss"?

Possibly because she may have spent a lot of time reading metaethics.

The right hasn't staked an uncontested ground to liberal values; they've stake a claim to their antithesis while pretending the result is "liberal" for disinformation purposes. The basic, central message of the War on Terror -- and its various permutations, like the Decent Left movement which is neither decent, nor left, nor a movement -- is that "we must save the liberal enlightened West by cleansing it of all this liberal enlightenment bullshit like 'tolerance' and 'intelligence'." It's various forms of the same old jingoistic and/or racist and/or fascist bullshit dressed up in new clothes.

The extent to which this has succeeded can indeed be partly characterized as a failure of the left, insofar as it has wrong-footed or outright duped various representatives thereof. Its success in the broader political spectrum is more down to its successful mobilization of the old jingoistic formula of positing an "us" and a "them" and demanding to know who is with "us."

an uncontested ground uhh, uncontested claim, rather.

Moral values means patriotism and patriarchy, and if your values are grounded in anything else, you're pushing uphill.

This kind of goes back to solidarity as the missing moral module. Remember when we did moral modules? That was awesome.

I think the problem is that in contemporary public discourse, there really is a grain to moral discourse, and if your moral critique cuts against that grain, you just look like you are stamping your feet and out of touch.

Quick poll: do people prefer the hill metaphor from p.1 or the grain metaphor from p.3?

I don't think there are many leftists out there who would be reluctant to call an act like 9/11 "evil" -- the denunciation of terrorism is really what's at stake in the neoconservative embrace of sharp moral lines. The primary difference is that leftists or liberals will ask why the terrorists did evil things, whereas conservatives appear to believe in terroristic evil as a kind of "uncaused cause." Relatedly, leftists or liberals would tend to call actions committed by the United States "evil," as appropriate (for instance, what other word is there for torture?), whereas conservatives appear to have bought into a dualism that would make the Manicheans hesitate.

In short, it's the difference between common sense moral language and stupid moral language. I don't even think it's a matter of "nuance vs. simplicity" (in fact, I think there should be a moratorium on discussing things in those terms, because it just buys into the frame set up by the right) -- it's not immediately apparent how being an agent of the US government makes you incapable of doing anything wrong, for instance. It's not like the legal arguments used to create a limbo state in which (people who are called) terrorists are homo sacer and subjected to whatever arbitrary violence we see fit are "simple" or "clear-cut" or whatever.

To put it differently: it's really the difference between the normal, human use of moral language and a really sick perversion.

it's really the difference between the normal, human use of moral language and a really sick perversion.

Or the difference between the use of moral arguments to draw moral distinctions and to draw tribal distinctions.

4: The "decent left" phenomenon is interesting: the truly "left" position is to sign on whole-hog for a right-wing imperialist campaign. Relatedly, noted theologian John Milbank recently claimed that the truly "left" position is to strengthen "the family" and social hierarchy more generally -- that is, the only way to be a true leftist is to be a fascist.

Undoubtedly we'll soon learn that the left must bite the bullet and admit that certain races are inferior and that gays are nothing but disease-ridden vermin. We're getting to the point where Hitler could be seen as the most radical leftist imaginable.

Yet I'm not sure if all this nonsense counts as a "failure" on the left -- it shows that the moral force of the notion of the "left" is still strong enough to be worth hijacking.

The left hasn't ceded the moral ground, and neither has the right, but the right cast out procedural liberalism, which doesn't lend itself to fire-and-brimstone condemnations of society. Left and liberal are often conflated; liberal arguments end up in service of leftist positions.

And it's a lot easier to rally around 'Damn the wicked' than it is 'We must be tolerant.'

those whose business is to think about morality have been remiss"?

Because the prescriptive discourse of auto-de-fe or BURN SHIT DOWN has been abandoned.

Morality is tribal, requires an enemy, and real rhetoric and projects toward hurting your enemy.
Otherwise it is technocracy (solving problems) or spiritualism (there really are no problems).

Huh Pwnd by Cala

Is it that the left has failed, or that fascism is often successful because it uses the language of morality to appeal to and absolve bigotry?

The big problem with liberals is that they think moral philosophers have some relevance in the public dialogue on morality.

I think Zippy's argument is wrong, even dangerously wrong. Any large social movement, even one as diffuse as "the left", will attract its share of stupid people. Some of those stupid people will be unable to grasp the subtleties of the movement, and come to believe a simplified canned version of the message.

The phenomenon of "the Decent Left" is people who really thought before 9/11 that being on the left meant rejecting moral distinctions, so when 9/11 happened, and they found themselves in need of moral distinctions, they had to abandon their current simplicity for a new one.

Okay, maybe not dangerously wrong.

We're getting to the point where Hitler could be seen as the most radical leftist imaginable.

Zippy is unmasked as Jonah Goldberg !

I am imagining an old man sitting on a rocking bench on a porch, walking stick raised in hand, telling a mob of virtue ethicists to get off his land. In other words, I am imagining my dotage.

I think the problem is that in contemporary public discourse, there really is a grain to moral discourse, and if your moral critique cuts against that grain, you just look like you are stamping your feet and out of touch.

It's more than that. The caricature is that if you're moving against the prevalent moral discourse, you're not just out of touch, but completely ungrounded. I'm sure there's tons of interesting work on this been done by someone, but off-the-cuff is that left-liberal position often seems less passionate than the other side. They're worried about the MURDERS of BABIES. We think there's a right to choose. They think gay people are IMMORAL and AN ABOMINATION. We think that whatever we may think of their personal lives, the state should not discriminate.

The reason it's a caricature is that there are people making serious moral leftist critiques, but they're ignored.

15: But why still claim to be on the left? Why not just convert and become conservative? That's not unheard-of -- just look at the neocons themselves.

It's kind of funny that the post with the Latin title is the fluffy post, and the post that mentions Apo is the philosophy post.

What are you trying to imply, B?

1. As noted above, the right has been more comfortable drawing on the totality of moral sentiments -- Haidt has "harm, reciprocity, ingroup, hierarchy, and purity: The left has -- at least in explicit rhetoric -- largely abandoned all but harm and reciprocity. That's a rhetorical error, at least. In practice I think both purity and ingroup have a lot of practical weight on the left.

2. #1 can be a species of SCMT's claim above, but I think it bears noting that rootedness, and the importance of unchosen obligation, is largely suppressed in left thought. That makes it seem anemic.

3. As a special case of #2, the left has had a long-standing problem with patriotism. That's not meant as an insult: there's lots about nationalism to dislike, and lots about cosmopolitanism to endorse. It just doesn't make you the go-to guys in times of perceived external thread.

4. Moral philosophers can't be blamed for anything, because they are utterly impotent in the short run. Rosalind Hursthouse has a typically excellent article on this.

5. That said, it's of course crazy to say the left has drifted away from the Western tradition. Rather, it's an intensification and selection of certain strains in that tradition: In the case of anti-globalization, goofy Rousseauian strains, in the case of gay rights, admirable Millian strains.

If I was capable of building a mixtape, I would might probably put Decameron's acappella version of "Rock & Roll Woman" on it. Just saying.

21: That you're fluffy, Apo.

Oh. Well, yes.

Neiman, an American philosopher who runs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany,

I don't know why, but the need to identify the country in place name situations like this always sticks out to me.

As a special case of #2, the left has had a long-standing problem with patriotism.

I think this is a reiteration of the left's problem with "morality" - but that you are missing the actual problem. The problem is with the fucked up popular definitions of patriotism and morality.

Patriotism, like morality, has been popularly - and somewhat absurdly - conflated with rightwing sentiment.

Bush's assistance to al Qaeda becomes patriotic, in this framework. Likewise, even if the Pope comes out against pre-emptive war, the Left is regarded as amoral for doing the same thing.

. In practice I think both purity and ingroup have a lot of practical weight on the left.

I think that's what's changing a bit. In the past, many things were defined poorly enough, because of societal changes that the left was pushing, that purity, ingroup, and hierarchy made little sense to any reasonably sized group.

I can't believe I wrote "in practice ... practical ... " Unclean!
'

I can't believe I wrote "in practice ... practical ... " Unclean!

I was going to say something, but who am I to judge?

19: That's a good question. I do think the "Decent Left" and the neocons are part of the same phenomenon, but I'm not sure why the Decents cling to the left label. Since they're mainly British, maybe it's some cultural difference?

I don't know why, but the need to identify the country in place name situations like this always sticks out to me.

Because it could be Potsdam, New York, you know. If you're an American.

This is all about group identity and tribalism, not academic logic. The right has staked claim to group loyalty. There is no emotional contradiction in the right-wing claim that homosexual marriage is immoral but homosexual rape and torture at Abu Ghraib is not a big deal, because in one case you have outsiders claiming insider privileges and in the other you have outsiders being tortured, as they should be.

Left moral cosmopolitanism is a claim about a particular collective identity we should adopt, and has to be argued for emotionally. This shouldn't be such a big problem, as moral universalism has a powerful pull and can win on those terms. But the problem was that in the 1965-75 period many people lost faith that left cosmopolitans would defend traditional ways of life, and this was capitalized on by the right.

The intellectual problem on the left is the difficulty in handling group identity. On the one hand, you have this intensely individualist and rationalist utilitarianism, on the other, a weirdly sentimentalized attachment to the identity politics of oppressed groups. Neither will do.

The difficulty with conceptualizing the role of group identity is a general problem with Enlightenment thought, evident on both the right and the left. But in the realignment period of the 60s and 70s, the right did manage to ally itself with the identity politics of the pissed-off majority, rather than various pissed-on minorities, and reaped the benefits.

I think I just restated what SCMT in 1 and Baa in 22 said in a longer and less clear fashion.

The left has been highly successful since 1950 in ethical matters. Civil rights, feminism, and gay rights are a big shift in the countries ethical thought. These shifts are still going on. Apparently a majority of Californians are OK with gay marriage. That is a big change from even a few years ago.

Also, abortion is the countries biggest ethical policy dispute and a majority of people are pro-choice.

dsquared has a good article looking back on the "decent left":

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2008/04/next_stop_is_euston_where_this.html

Suny Potsdam is the top Google hit for "Potsdam".

Appiah is correct that left or liberal political philosophers are generally not moral relativists. However, Rawls, especially in his later work, restricts the use of moral theory to only the most general of claims in justifying public policy (so, yes, this restriction doesn't apply to blogs or political argumentation in general). Of course, this is considered a feature, not a bug, by most liberal philosophers.

In this sense, I take it that Neimann's criticism is that a liberalism based on a political consensus rather than common moral values is deficient. But it would be ridiculous to take the consensus view as characterizing political or moral philosophy as a whole. For instance, Ronald Dworkin criticizes Rawls on a similiar basis and developed a legal theory that incorporates moral claims and is both "responsible scholarship and...politically powerful."

My, I like this thread. Later, thread; don't go away.

what the article is missing is that a large part of the more mainstream left, like e.g. Labour in Britain or the Democrats in the US, have moved quite a lot to the right in the past three decades. The welfare state was created as an explicitely moral undertaking; nowadays the same parties who created it have abandonded much of it or are restructuring it and use rightwing, libertarian moral language to justify it, though still paying lip service to their old moral values.

So you have New Labour pushing choice and opportunity rather than rights.

Ethicists, trolleys are dangerous to people not on the tracks, too.

So you have New Labour pushing choice and opportunity rather than rights.

And often explicitly dismissing all talk of rights and any talk of imposing constraints upon the limitless power of the managerial state as old-fashioned, out-of-date-thinking. Managerial totalitarianism being their 'thing'. Absolute state power as justified by more 'efficient' service provision.

I have a more general theory that the whole European welfare state project only made sense as the outcome of fifty years of war, in the sense that the "right-wing" habits of hierarchy, conformity and obedience necessary for it to work were by then so profoundly ingrained that really large-scale defection from the norm was unthinkable.

But once Thatcher, Reagan, and the underclass of Liverpool have all in their various ways proved that you can ignore the demands of a wider society and still flourish the game is up.

But Reagan, for one, proved the opposite. Witness CheneyimeanBush's attempt to emulate the "deficits don't matter" strategy.

There is a lot of metaethics, but there is also a lot of normative ethics. With some exceptions (internalist realists are unlikely to be utilitarians) you can let your metaethical and normative-ethical positions vary independently.

IOW, I don't think this distinction has much to do with anything else in the post.

I don't know why baa posted a link to the google cache of the Hursthouse paper.

This book sounds deadly dull. I don't think the Olin foundation ever sponsored a lecture series on "The Odyssey and Welfare Reform: Lessons from the Cave."

I have a more general theory that the whole European welfare state project only made sense as the outcome of fifty years of war, in the sense that the "right-wing" habits of hierarchy, conformity and obedience necessary for it to work were by then so profoundly ingrained that really large-scale defection from the norm was unthinkable

It was more the outcome of a general feeling of "we didn't fight this war so that we could be free to starve in the streets again". There was widespread anger at the inequalities of society, and a desire for change, especially in the UK.

45. Of course the Beveridge Report was commissioned in 1941, when the outcome of the war was far from clear. But the choice of Beveridge, whose views on these questions were common knowledge (he'd been the brains behind Lloyd George's pension and National Insurance reforms in 1911, after all), seems to suggest that the coalition government had decided in advance that they weren't prepared to repeat the experience of mass unemployment with insufficient support that followed demobilisation in 1919. At least, that or the Tory majority in the government had gone all sentimental under the pressure of war.

Btw, s3xx0r mix added in the Program music thread.

http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_8779.html#850387

Atrios gratifyingly had up a Galbraith quote the other day that I had once loved (but had forgotten) as a particularly apt and succinct characterization of the conservative program.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

7 -- I'm not a leftist, so I'm not disproving anything, but I absolutely avoid the word "evil" to describe the theorists or perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. Terrible, misguided, a whole range of negative associations, sure. Evil, though, aligns the wrongdoers with Satan, and makes their motivation incomprehensible in rational terms (and certainly not susceptible of remedy).

"We don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it" says Boss Fascist, king of the Bedwetters. And this is where promiscuous use of the word leads.

49. I am a leftist and I entiirely agree. "Evil" is simply not a useful category in this sort of context for anything except scaremongering. I don't think "evil" is the antithesis of "good", as "good" is usually employed. That would be "bad" or "wicked", either of which I'm quite happy to hang on OBL and his little friends. As you say, "evil" has connotations of the absolute which really take it out of the realm of human affairs, because one thing about humans is that they're not absolutely anything.

I don't have this problem with the concept of evil, though I'm willing to avoid the word if it's not rhetorically effective.

I think evil is real, and it certainly tempts me.

For the philosophically ignorant (me), what's an "internal realist"?

Galbraith...*swoon*. May light perpetual shine upon him, and may he rest in peace.

Alternatively, there's the Orwell option - the Tory majority was scared shitless and knew very well that a) Labour and its own rebel wing had saved their skin, b) that the public knew this all too well, c) that they'd won election by promising to avoid a war with Germany, and d) therefore there wasn't going to be any Tory majority as soon as there was an election.

53. That really only makes sense if they thought that in the case of inevitable defeat at the polls the option of leaving Labour an unmanageable shitstorm was unacceptable. Not many governments mind passing on one of those. Which implies that they were signing up to some sort of lesser evil, from their viewpoint - perhaps even deluding themselves that Labour were as Red as they claimed.

re: 51

Well, I'm not philosophically ignorant* and I'm not entirely sure what is meant either. Putnam has a metaphysical view that he describes as 'internal realism' but I'm not really familiar with the use of the term in metaethics [a reference to Williams?].

* or, perhaps, I am now revealing myself to be so ...

The US problem is simple enough: the pathetico-libertarian consensus among right-wing pundits (including a lot of religious authorities as well as academic bogositists and the rest) is that concern with others' well-being - in particular, the well-being of those worst off and least like oneself - is an optional virtue, not a moral duty. This is obviously unfaithful to their Christian sources as well as obviously stupid, but there it is. They think that compassion, fairness, and the like are matters purely of personal choice, not like the general social duty to protect capital or punish teh gay. So of course they think liberal and left-wing social/political talk is moral-free.

Not much to do about it, so nearly as I can tell, except stick to the assertion that these too are moral matters and the work of putting them into practice.

teaching algebra in the inner city is heroism
the more you read the more you learn

Perhaps the term is eccentric.