Or, perhaps more appositely though less amusingly, you (I assume) and I and most people don’t think it would have been good to half-free the slaves.

I was going to say just that, but then as soon as I did say it, I remembered that in fact that’s exactly what did happen. More like quarter-free in some places; more like zero-free and in fact worse off than before in others. Reconstruction failed (and was systematically libeled for a century afterwards), and the Southern states passed “the black codes” which set up labor laws for black people that amounted to near slavery or just plain slavery – only this time there was no capital investment, so no incentive not to work the slaves to death. Well guess what.

This was the reason for Jim Crow. For years I thought it was just simple racism, but in fact it was mostly serfdom. Cheap labor.

Ahem. OT. Beg pardon.

Still; it is part of the larger picture. Solidarity, compassion, empathy all very well, but what about when we really really really want somebody to do the nasty hard boring dangerous work for us?

Oh well immigration takes care of that. No worries.

Ah – so we don’t want the rest of the world to catch up to the developed world then? We don’t want every single person on the planet to have a decent standard of living, complete with education and health care and equal opportunities?

Er – no, we don’t.

At least apparently we don’t, because policy makers are surprisingly cheerful about saying “Immigrants do the work nobody else wants to do.” I never know if they are unaware of the implications, or just bottomlessly cynical.

But perhaps I’m wrong about thick moral language. In any event, some moral language does seem to make claims about the sort of transcendent Moral Truths that (IMO) don’t exist. Just how we should reform our language, if at all, to deal with this problem is hard to say. We have moral fictionalists (notably Richard Joyce) who think we should go on using the old language, and we have moral abolitionists (mainly Richard Garner) who say we need to get rid of the old language.

I’m not normally of the “truth is somewhere in the middle” school. I don’t think it would have been good (by my standards of “good”) to free half the slaves. But this might be a rare case where the truth really is somewhere in the middle. I’m thinking about this, and I don’t yet have a firm view. But it looks to me at the moment as if we could get by keeping our thick moral language and maybe much of our day-to-day thinner language, only expunging some of our thinnest moral language, and only worrying about it <i>terribly</i> in fairly formal philosophical contexts.

Similar issues arise in aesthetic contexts. I always wince when someone says: “X was the best book of 2009 [or whatever].” Maybe they think it is non-cognitive: “My biggest cheers for X among all the 2009 books!” But so often it is flatly and factually stated as if there is some kind of transcendent standard of literary merit. However, I’m happy with all sorts of literary evaluative language that falls short of this.

Then there are statements about sexual beauty. If someone says, “Brad Pitt is gorgeous,” or “Angelina Jolie is beautiful,” this seems by now to be thick aesthetic language (though similar language may not have been in culturally-isolated societies). Its cognitive content is that the person spoken of, Brad or Angelina, falls within certain vague-but-familiar standards of physical characteristics, but its non-cognitive content seems to be a sort of expression of being sexually attracted, or just awed in a certain way … or a kind of recommendation of Brad or Angelina as a potential sexual partner. Generally we seem to get along fine with this thin-sounding aesthetic language, even though nobody really believes that there are transcendent standards of sexual beauty that all rational creatures must accept.

Since I’m trying to write a paper about this, I’d be very pleased to see thoughts on the above.

Most importantly, I insist that I was not trying to ground my morality in any metaphysical conception of the world, as I don’t think it’s possible to do so. I do not believe anyone can prove moral propositions one way or the other: we simply have our values and seek to see them embodied in the world. I value human solidarity and empathy, but I never claimed this was a universal human characteristic. All I meant by the phrase “fundamental moral imperatives” is that most ethical systems with any historical basis, whether Western or non-Western, seem to reject cruelty and value kindness. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, but I was trying to rule out the common argument that human rights are some sort of Western prejudice.

In other words, I do not believe there are philosophical arguments one can use to “disprove” the actions of immoral or callous people, but one can identify certain human traits, and empathy is one of them. You yourself claim that my conception of “human nature” is simplistic and that any talk of human nature is itself philosophically invalid, yet you have a very narrowly defined conception of human nature– one based entirely upon self-interest. This view of “human nature” seems to me far more one-sided and dogmatic than the recognition that numerous motives influence human behavior, one of which is our unique ability to empathize with the plight of others. I admit that this is a weak influence, in the scheme of things, but it is one I value. To say that it is non-existent is contrary to scientific evidence.

Of course, one may choose not to value empathy and to value selfishness instead and I have no way to prove you wrong. However, I insist that selfishness cannot and does not lead to human rights, because a person may well recognize that his self-interest is not served by respecting the rights of others. Would Genghis Khan have been better off evolutionarily had he been born in a rights-respecting world? Probably not, given the number of offspring he fathered through his conquests. So if you place more value on self-interest than on empathy, so be it, but one cannot claim that self-interest leads to respecting the rights of others.

Yes; that’s what I was arguing last week in disputing some of Sam Harris’s claims about morality. On the other hand I disputed your claim yesterday that compassion for strangers is entirely anomalous.

Either way I think it does matter what we are like. It’s not a conversation-stopper – we are like so and we can do no other; but it is part of the discussion.

Individualism is a means towards making lots of people happy. We think this is true because we think that humans tend to flourish best when they are (relatively) free. But how can we count on that, if not by appeal to reliable human desires for liberty? I can’t make any sense of an appeal to reliable human desires except by thinking of them as a part of our nature, at least in part. For the only other exclusive possibility would be that the desire for autonomy is enculturated — but then that would be grounding individualism in culture, which is paradoxical.

Conflict, contract; individual, collective; nature, nurture. These are all words that walk the aisle together. There’s no obvious need to abandon talk of any of them.