Acknowledgements
This dissertation was made possible by the support and guidance of many people. I want to thank my supervisor Jussi Kotkavirta, whose keen interest in the general issues that my dissertation is about has been of great help and guidance since I was a student. Professor Eerik Lagerspetz and the whole staff at the department of philosophy in Jyv skyl have created an encouraging atmosphere for work on a doctoral dissertation. I want to thank Eerik and all my teachers, colleagues and more recently...
Validity and universality
Do these considerations affect our views concerning validity or universal validity Allgemaingultigkeit The lesson is that even the validity of the thickest and most situation-specific judgements is universal validity in the sense of minimal universality it would hold in relevantly similar situations no matter who happens to be in the situation, no matter where and non-perspectivality it is not indexed or dependent on who makes the judgement . The empirical sense of universality as statistical...
Authenticity
In chapter twelve I will defend the view that the values of authenticity and autonomy can ground the way in which one's personal resonance, or the actual shape of one's affective-conative-cognitive responses may give one reasons to make and uphold certain kind of commitments instead of other kinds of commitments. Now given that one's personal identity is partly constituted by one's long-term commitments, this means that actually one's identity can be open to criticism from the viewpoint of...
Locating access a historical source manifestation
Before going on to a more detailed analysis of the various functions that constitutive goods have in Taylor's theory, we need to distinguish, first, between locating the source and locating the access to the source. Further, we have to distinguish between the historical source of an ideal, and the constitutive source of value. Third, it is illuminating to connect Taylor's concepts of manifestation epiphany to that of a source. First, Taylor points out that for Augustine, the source of value was...
The engaged perspective and the dogmas of disengagement
What is commonly, and by Taylor, called Platonism concerning values or mutatis mutandis concerning reality in general holds that values are real in the sense of existing independently of humans, ultimately in the realm of Ideas. Our access to these values requires bracketing our everyday assumptions, we need to turn away from the illusions of the changing world. Evaluative statements have truth-value, and what makes the statements true or false are the mind-independent goods. What can be called...
The objective view and moral knowledge
The final point of disagreement between the non-objectivist view and the objective view of values defended by cultural moral realism concerns the question whether the views of a hyper-traditional society are likely to pass as knowledge. Behind the differences in such empirical estimates are differences in philosophical views. Williams seems confident that the objectivist view undermines the justifiability or truth of those views by letting the pursuits of all other societies and their...
Introduction an end in itself
In his essay on this topic, Taylor introduces the concept of a person as follows Where it is more than simply a synonym for 'human being', 'person' figures primarily in moral and legal discourse. A person is a being with a certain moral status, or a bearer of rights. But underlying the moral status, as its condition, are certain capacities. A person is a being who has a sense of self, has a notion of the future and the past, can hold values, make choices in short, can adopt life-plans. At...
The factvalue distinction and thick evaluative concepts
Simon Blackburn formulates expressive theory so that in any statement you acted wrongly in stealing that money, you are a Kraut , there is both a descriptive part you stole that money, you are German and an evaluative part stealing is wrong, Germans are fit objects of derision . It is the evaluative part which must be given an expressive interpretation I disapprove of stealing, I dislike Germans in order to avoid the problem of metaphysical queerness which moral realism must in his view face...
Taylors view falsifiable objectivismuniversalism
In chapter six, I simplified things slightly by presenting Taylor as an uncom-promised defender of the universality of goods. I think this is indeed the right interpretation, but it must be qualified. In fact, Taylor couples the meta-ethical question of the universal validity of values and the possibility of learning from other cultures in an interesting manner, which nevertheless calls for elucidation. It is of course an empirical matter to what degree different communities understand each...
Practicality requirement
One central philosophical thrust for non-cognitivism comes from issues of moral motivation. If one accepts the so called Humean belief-desire model of action and the so called motivational internalism which is to be distinguished from Williams's internalist restriction on the validity of reasons or values , one seems to be lead to non-cognitivism. Why The following three propositions are not consistent, so at least one of them must be rejected 1 Explanation of action demands a reference to a...
Does evaluative knowledge presuppose a nonobjective view
It is a widespread view, that accepting the engaged view on evaluative concepts, i.e. the dependence of values on social forms, leads one to accept a restricted validity of values. From accepting premisses P1-P3, one seems to be lead to a view, which is non-objective P5 . If there is no disengaged standpoint, then any validity that the ethical concepts have must be restricted to the form of life in question. The idea is that there is genuine knowledge only because the values themselves are in a...
Does the constitution of goods need constitutive goods A further question
According to Taylor, moral agents have more or less implicit or explicit further views concerning the source of the value, or goodness, of the ideals or evaluative properties.23 They have an answer to the question of what makes these ideals good or what makes good-making properties good-making instead of neutral. In Taylor's terms, moral agents have conceptions of constitutive goods which Taylor also calls moral sources when he discusses their role in moral motivation . These constitutive goods...
The constitutive goods as metaphysical goods
Taylor's constitutive goods are not only supposed to be constitutive of ordinary life-goods, but they are goods themselves, things worthy of awe, admiration, praiseworthiness and the like. As Nicholas Smith put it, Taylor's question is to the extent that the order in which we are set is the object of such awe, admiration, and praiseworthiness or maybe contempt blameworthiness , how is it to be conceived brought to expression 58. I will call this idea the metaphysical-theological goodness of...
The essence of humans
There are important differences between different versions of the engaged view defended by different philosophers. The most fundamental differences in their conception of humans concern essentialism, or the strength of the philosophical defence of the engaged perspective. In the next subsection, I will discuss the differences between ordinary language philosophy, phenomenology, Kantian transcendental arguments and Hegelian dialectics. Another difference is the scope of essentialism, or, so to...
Consist Of Strong Evaluations
So far we have discussed the relevance of strong evaluation to human agency and personhood, now I will take up the question which already has surfaced several times what is the relationship of strong evaluations and self-identity 1 This chapter relies on the arguments put forward so far, that strong evaluation is inevitable for human agency and identity-formation. What remains is a clari-ficatory task what exactly is personal identity Does identity consist of interpretations or facts Do strong...
Orientation and commitment Commitments and policies
According to Marcel Lieberman 1998, 5 , a commitment has three main features it is stable over time while remaining potentially revisable under critical, rational scrutiny , it has action-guiding force, and lastly, it has a central role in one's self-understanding and identity. Commitments structure our lives, strengthen our identity, and they reinforce our self-esteem and integrity ibid., 59 . What interests us here are substantive commitments to principles, political causes, and interpersonal...
Diversity Universality Validity
As we saw in chapter six, the diversity of value-beliefs has been one source of skeptical arguments, and it has been taken as an indication of cultural relativism. I argued, following Joseph Raz, that the skeptical argument from diversity can be countered. The argument agreed that P1 beliefs must be sensitive to the reality to count as knowledge, and that P2 our evaluative beliefs are sensitive to the social forms, and claimed that P3 also the reality of values is dependent on social forms....
Qualitative distinctions concerning worth
Just as Frankfurt went one step further than Strawson, Taylor goes one step further than Frankfurt in his views on what characterizes persons.5 Not all 'Frankfurt-persons' are necessarily 'Taylor-persons'. Taylor draws a further conceptual distinction, although it may be that one of the two classes is in fact empty. But even so, the further distinction may add to our understanding of what is distinctive in persons. To show what really is distinctive of human agency, or personhood or selfhood,...
Philosophical anthropology and the engaged view
The engaged view supports a philosophical anthropology which is equally far from a subjectivist exaltation of the cogito as from an objectivist shattering of the ego.18 According to it, both sides of the dualism have been construed through disengagement from the lived lifeworldly perspective. In the life-worldly perspective, the starting point is not an empty certainty that I am I, nor a view from nowhere, as in the objectivist views. It rather defends the claims of the manifest worldview,...
Are all views equally groundless
The realist answer in the second point of disagreement is that it is a non sequitur to conclude that if some views turn out on comparison to be groundless, that all views do. Indeed, if hypertraditional views are shown to be simply worse than more insightful views, this presupposes that the insightful views are better in terms of truth. For example, the insightful views take the 'disturbing' implications into account. So, comparison cannot yield a result that everything is equally groundless....
Taylors view of personhood
In this section I go through in a summary form Taylor's view of descriptive or metaphysical personhood, adding a bit flesh to the claims that persons in the descriptive sense are strong evaluators, and that in the Aristotelian-Hegelian ontology personhood is literally an end or an achievement. Taylor's conception of personhood can be called i animalist, but he also holds that ii persons differ from other animals in being strong evaluations and possessing other C-characteristics . Taylor accepts...
Harry Frankfurt and secondorder volitions
Peter Strawson 1959, 102 analyzed persons as the kind of 'basic particulars' to which one can ascribe both 'states of consciousness' and 'corporeal characteristics'. Harry Frankfurt accepts Strawson's analysis but claims that it applies to all animals.2 It therefore does not capture the difference between persons and other animals, namely the capacity for reflective self-evaluation. Harry Frankfurt analyzes this more precisely as the capacity to have second-order volitions. While animals have...
Biographical identity and the background role of strong evaluation
Biographical identity concerns the question of one's whole life, which can be grasped in narratives about one's life.24 It is possibly a human constant that humans conceive of themselves in terms of narratives. It is helpful to analyze this putative human constant into four different claims a we are not 'punctual selves', our temporality is extended towards future and past, b the life of each human person is one there are a priori structures, which determine non- 23 MacIntyre 1985, Mulhall amp...
The engaged view
The engaged view holds that there is a manifest world consisting of persons, groups, institutions and practices, living things, tools, works or art, roads and Our point of departure is, indeed, the subjectivity of the individual, and that for strictly philosophic reasons. And at the point of departure there cannot be any other truth than this, I think, therefore I am, which is the absolute truth of consciousness as it attains to itself. Every theory which begins with man, outside of this moment...
Cultural Moral Realism An Outline
Having discussed strong evaluations in the context of philosophical anthropology, I will now turn to discuss issues of theory or moral and other values. In the remaining chapters I try to live up to the promissory notes in chapter one, concerning the ways in which Taylor's theory of strong evaluation needs to be extended. I defend a 'cultural' but nevertheless non-relativistic moral theory, taking Charles Taylor's writings on this topic as my guide.2 Taylor is a realist concerning natural...
Internalism
There are many variants of such sophisticated positions, but no doubt the most important one is internalism the relevant framework for evaluating my deeds is my or our own framework. As we saw already in chapter six, according to in-ternalism about reasons or values it is good and right for person P to do D only if D has a suitable relation to the person's evaluative framework. Internalisms are variants of realism there are correct and incorrect judgements concerning values, i.e. there is truth...
Idem ipse collective and speciesidentity
Personal identity can be discussed in many senses.4 Since Locke, philosophical discourse on personal identity has often been understood as the question about 2 For Taylor's reply, see Taylor 2002c, 177. 4 On practical identity, see Frankfurt, Taylor 1985a, 1985b, Taylor 1989a, Ricoeur 1992, Quante 2002 biographical identity see MacIntyre 1985, Carr 1986, Ricoeur 1984-7, 1991b, 1992, Giddens 1991, Kerby 1991, Meuter 1995, Quante 2002, Taylor 1989a, sameness, numerical identity under what...
The phenomenology of moral reactions and cognitivism
Geoffrey Sayre-McCord 1988, 5 defines 'minimal realism' in any area of inquiry as consisting of two theses 1 the claims in question, when literally construed, are literally true or false cognitivism , and 2 some are literally true. There are correspondingly two ways of being an antirealist first, by accepting a non-cognitivist analysis of the claims in question, saying that they have no truth-value. In the case of moral non-cognitivism, the most important suggestions have been expressivism and...
Evaluative Beliefs And Knowledge
Above we have defended the view that goods are plural, incommensurable and minimally universal. The diversity of evaluative beliefs is a fact, but as such it is no reason for skepticism. Also values can be diverse, not only value beliefs, and therefore beliefs can be genuine knowledge, even when diverse. Now I will turn more directly to issues of belief-formation and justification. There are several critical questions that moral realism must face does moral understanding require some mystical...
Firstorder and secondorder reasons
Joseph Raz 1990, 35-48 has suggested a distinction between first-order and second-order reasons. We may have reasons for and against doing phi. These are first-order reasons. Conflicts between first-order reasons are resolved by the relative strength of the reasons. A second-order reason is a reason to act for a reason or a reason to refrain from acting for a reason. The negative second-order reasons are called exclusionary reasons. An exclusionary reason is a reason to refrain from acting for...
A Reading And Reconstruction Of Charles Taylors Central Concept
One of the central concepts in Charles Taylor's philosophy is that of strong evaluation.1 In the following chapters I will study the role of strong evaluation in the ontology of human persons, in the notions of identity and recognition and in an ethical theory aiming at moral realism. But what is strong evaluation As the concept is the unifying theme of the following chapters, it makes sense to try to define it quite closely. Charles Taylor introduces his concept of strong evaluation in the...
Strong evaluations in the extended sense
The preceding discussion in 1.3 and 1.4 made a host of distinctions concerning the breadth of the concept of strong evaluations. Six issues were identified where there may be different definitions of 'strong evaluatuion' given by the narrower Kantians, Taylor himself and the suggested extended theory. I defended Taylor against Kantians on two issues strong evaluation covers all kinds of goods, not only one kind of goods e.g. ethical , and strong evaluation covers also categorical, not only...
Is the notion of strong evaluation too broad
Taylor's concept of strong evaluation approaches morality from an angle, that challenges some deep-rooted presuppositions of much modern moral philosophy. Taylor's approach can perhaps be called modernized and individualized Aristotelianism, where 'modernization' refers to the role of identity, autonomy, authenticity and value pluralism. He holds that the self and the good are interrelated, and that issues of the good life and morality are intertwined. From the first reactions, Taylor's concept...
Real and motivated disagreements Real unmotivated and global confrontations
The often discussed subclass of moral problems is that of moral disagreements. A claims one thing and B claims another thing and both cannot be right. Here, the first important question is whether this is merely a skeptical global challenge, or an unmotivated specified challenge, or is it a motivated specified challenge A global skeptical challenge claims that even when our convictions are at their strongest, we need to take seriously the global possibility, that what we think is good is in...
MerleauPonty and Taylor
While both Strawson and Taylor oppose both reductive physicalisms and dualisms, their viewpoints differ. Taylor builds rather on Merleau-Ponty in accepting two guiding ideas the ideas of internal relations and layers of meaning.24 Strawson defends the view that persons are psychophysical entities, but does this in a more external manner than Merleau-Ponty. Whereas Strawson talks about a causal relation between a material body which usually is, contingently in his view, just one body and...
Abstract
On Charles Taylor's Philosophical Anthropology and Cultural Moral Realism. Jyvaskyla University of Jyvaskyla, 2003, 358 p. Jyvaskyla Studies in Education, Psychology and Social Research, This study examines three central claims by Charles Taylor 1 strong evaluations are inescapable for human beings 2 strong evaluations are best interpreted in a pluralist, moral realist and 'cultural' way 3 such cultural moral realism must ultimately rely on some 'constitutive goods' 'moral sources'. The first...
Conclusion Strong and weak evaluation
What distinguishes strong evaluation from weak evaluation One's evaluative convictions are beliefs, or stances or preferences, which are based on qualitative Rainer Forst 1994 has analysed different contexts of justice and recognition, which are in internal connections to the different aspects of the person. distinctions concerning the strong value of options, and which are so stable and strongly adhered to, that they are constitutive of one's identity. The strong value in question need not be...
Is nonobjectivism acceptable Relativism
The non-objectivist intuition is that the relational analysis of values together with the fact of diversity of value-beliefs points towards relativism in the sense that evaluative truth is relative to an evaluative framework. What can be called crude relativism holds that there are innumerable frameworks and they all are equally relevant and equally suitable for judging any issue at hand. This means that conceivably any action is both good and bad, right and wrong. This is implausible in many...
The nature of personal resonance Selection
Personal resonance may make a difference in the process of selecting between optional goods. Not only are many goods eligible, but personal likings and aversions may make a difference in what one should commit oneself to. Habermas's view of the hermeneutical self-clarification see chapter one fits this kind of deliberation or self-interpretation.27 26 Raz points out failure to do what one desires to do raises the same problems and can be criticized on the same grounds as failure to do what one...
StrawsonFrankfurtTaylor
Taylor's theory of strong evaluation was prompted partly by Harry Frankfurt, who put forward his own theory as a response to Peter Strawson. Strawson's famous theory of persons opposes physicalist reductions and Cartesian dualisms, and defends a theory of persons as irreducible basic particulars, as psy-chophysical entities. In Strawson's theory, person is a logically primitive concept, just as a material body is. Persons differ from material bodies in having not only spatiotemporal location...
The hedgehog and the owl therapy ontology and history
The different defences of the engaged view of humans against physicalism or dualism differ in their philosophical strength, from ordinary language philosophy, phenomenology, and transcendental arguments to Hegelian dialectics. The task of such philosophical anthropology differs from two other tasks that Charles Taylor has pursued therapeutical arguments and philosophical history. Smith 2002a The therapeutic arguments consist of thematizations of various influential but distorting assumptions...
Implicit and explicit
Self-interpretations consist not only of our explicit answers to the question who am I but also of our implicit orientations in life. There are two levels in our identity the implicit level of reactions, motivations and actions and the explicit level of linguistic articulations. Even before the question what kind of person am I enters our consciousness, we are living one answer or another. Charles Taylor as well as Paul Ricoeur stresses that while the explicit level is dependent on the implicit...
Generalism and particularism
Charles Taylor's moral 'theory' is actually anti-theoretical. The idea is that moral knowledge is implicit in our affective-conative-cognitive reactions, as well as in our agent's knowledge is crucial for Taylor. The background of the implicit, embodied understanding is more fundamental than conscious, linguistically articulated representations in two ways 1 it is always there, whereas we sometimes frame representations and sometimes do not, and 2 the representations we do make are only...
Coherence and discordant concordance
How coherent should identity be There is a demand that the identity must be minimally coherent to be identity.39 This can be seen from the inferential conditions for someone having beliefs. A parrot can say I am an anarchist without meaning it. Similarly, if a human being cannot in a minimally coherent way tell what follows from his claims, he does not mean what he says, because he does Thus, I think Hartmut Rosa's 1998, 92-95 criterion of internal equilibrium between the implicit and explicit...
Pluralism generalism and incommensurability The plurality of goods and
Following one of his teachers, Isaiah Berlin, Taylor criticises theories, which try to derive all goods from one fundamental principle.12 Taylor claims, quite rightly, that our framework includes a plurality of diverse goods, which cannot be formalised into one principle, they are incompatible but still genuine. see e.g. Taylor 1985b, 230-47, Taylor 1994, 213-4 .13 This plurality gives rise to moral conflicts, which do not invalidate the goods in question.14 The nature of goods is such that...
Valuers evaluative features and bearers of value
In the relational ontology of values we can analytically distinguish several aspects the valuer, the evaluative features, the cultural frameworks which are needed for disclosing and possibly constituting the features, and finally the bearer of value. This need not be taken as a suggestion that value can be reduced to these elements. Quite the contrary, values are irreducible. Yet differences in any of these can make a difference in the evaluative realm. By making imaginative variations asking...
Transcendental arguments dialectics and comparative reasoning
Transcendental arguments start with something indubitable, in Kant's case with the fact that we have conscious awareness of something. The starting point is Here one might ask, though, whether Taylor neglects the critical anti-reductivist potential in phenomenology too quickly. supposed to be something that anyone, including skeptics, can be certain of.34 The next step identifies a non-platitudinous feature, which is claimed to be a necessary or transcendental condition for the existence of the...
Ontological background pictures
The claim that we can drop the question of moral sources, or at least the question of 'locating' moral sources, does not mean that we cannot analyze the goods or evaluative properties. Different kinds of disagreements, divergences or differences reveal various variables in the constitution of value. I have already mentioned the plurality of valuers, evaluative features and bearers of value, but one more factor needs to be thematized. Evaluative features can sometimes be illuminated by focussing...
Does reflection destroy knowledge
Williams's view on reflection is somewhat Jacobian. There are good reasons to think that such a dichotomy between blind confidence and reflection is misguided or at best one-sided. It is not reflection as such that unsettles, but rather the insights that reflection produces. Insights are insights because they capture something of real significance. And if reflection contains insights of real significance, it has brought home new knowledge, not only destroyed the old one.15 Williams's dichotomy...
Cultural ontology engaged epistemology universal validity
In this subsection I summarize what I take to be the main points on the first level of Taylor's cultural moral realism. Its three core theses are first, a theory of values as relational and culturally laden, second, an epistemological view ac Nicholas H. Smith suggested that Taylor would probably agree that cultural moral realism can stand on its own, without constitutive goods or moral sources, and that the real controversy concerns the further claim that introducing such concepts is harmful....