Linker On Doubt, ctd.
John Schwenkler May 21st, 2009
As an addendum to H.C.’s excellent post below, I can’t help wondering whether Damon Linker would be similarly happy to argue that since the inevitability of death, like that of doubt, “can be traced to the human condition as it exists in the here and now”, it follows that death, too, “is (and should be) the destiny of thoughtful human beings”. Or is the range of contexts in which one is permitted inferences of the form “X is inevitable, therefore X is salutary and ought to be embraced” somehow more restricted than this?
Just askin’.
P.S. JL and I went back and forth on doubt earlier this year.
Filed under: philosophy, religion
Test case:
X=shitting
If I were to (charitably) reconstruct Linker’s thought there, it might come out something like this: doubt is inevitably part of the human condition in the here and now, so there must be some virtue according to which all thoughtful human beings should engage with that inevitable reality.
But once you put it like this, what stops one from saying that the virtue lies in recognizing that doubt is a trial to be endured, an imperfection we should constantly be striving against, rather than anything we might call our “destiny”?
This puts me in mind of Andrew Sullivan’s inane schtick about doubt and certainty. Connecting the supposed inevitability of doubt with a normative requirement for one’s opponent not to dismiss one’s position out of hand is a nice weaselly way to defuse the presentation of a strong moral conviction in argument. This is exactly what’s at stake in the quote from Anscombe’s Modern Moral Philosophy that I posted here a while back – the one about “If someone really thinks x, y, and z … I don’t want to argue with him. He shows a corrupt mind.” The point is not that we should stop talking with people who disagree (after all, she wrote the paper for modern moral philosophers), but that certain ethical positions demand that certain other positions should be held in contempt. Or, to put it the other way, if we enshrine the (ludicrous) idea that all sides of some debate have to have an initially equal respect accorded to them, then we have already ruled out certain positions on the issue. Namely, we’ve defined out of the conversation any position according to which holding some of the other positions is just evidence of depravity. And Sullivan should feel this point, since he thinks all sorts of publicly accepted positions on, say, torture, are properly met with condemnation (even if one goes on to offer arguments against them).
Coming back to the doubt issue and Obama’s ND speech, the above point gets at why the speech was so clever. He harped on moderation and humility to no end, but in the way he did so he implicitly defined out of the conversation the serious opposition to his being there in that venue. If anybody takes abortion, etc. THAT seriously, she doesn’t get included in the feel-good affirmation of mutual respect and modesty. This was palpable in the interplay between Jenkins’ intro and Obama’s speech, because the obvious background was the on-campus people who weren’t there because of their disagreement.
[...] UPDATE #7: Damon Linker responds to Larison, as does HC Johns and John Schwenkler [...]