On the impossibility of rational radical change

Ed Brandon On the impossibility of rational radical change

Portents, premonitions: time to retire Dream of OC Find myself producing an argument for conservatism Prelude

My first paper, on adult/child relationship, ended with reflections on whether we should adopt a utopian approach: treat children with the same respect as we treat adults. I ended by saying “The universalistic principles of critical moral thought, if they point to any determinate social relations, would tend toward some utopia out of touch with any actual human society; nor would they easily excuse a coercive introduction to particular s-r categories, just because they are there. So we see that if rights over children are abjured, the obvious imperfections of our social relations make it impossible to find a satisfactory justification in universal terms, the only terms we think can give us a morally acceptable and not simply an expedient justification, for a coercive initiation into them. So either we cannot get a morally acceptable answer to our original question, or we must radically revise our expectations of morality.” Approaches to the problem(s): 1

Murphy and Nagel, The Myth of Property, argue that we must not think about the legitimacy of taxes from an assumed given set of property rights that taxes somehow infringe; there are no prior property rights; taxes are an integral part of the rights/obligations we face. So, we have to look globally ..... 2

Once again thanks to Roxanne for the immediate stimulus to my thinking: John White, whose book was the excuse for my previous contribution. At the end of it, he says we must not just argue about a national curriculum on the basis of subjects and other stuff we happen to find, we must start from objectives and then derive our curriculum etc. from them. 3

Fred omitted the word 'rational' from what I had in mind as a title, but it is crucial to the issue. You can do anything you like if you don't mind not being rational. But I am supposing that rationality requires that there be a good reason for doing A rather than B. Rational

& I am supposing that this good reason should be something intrinsic to A/B, not just that one happens to be here and now and the other not. (My 1st article had looked at learning a language; no such good reason why we should learn French (or English come to that) rather than Chinook; pragmatic considerations, yes, but that's all.)‏ Good reason -> quasi-moral

This reveals common pattern: we can justify having something of type T (a language, a way of bringing up children, ...), but we cannot in the same way justify this version of T instead of that one. There remains an important element of arbitrariness. Gappiness of many justiifcations

Why can't we justify within the type? Because many equally good but different versions. More than one way to skin a cat, so they tell me. Foundation of this arbitrariness

So, if you want informed citizens, you could have rigid timetables and the English National Curriculum, or you could have no timetable and access to wikipedia, or you could have an infinite number of things in between. Applied to curriculum

Murphy/Nagel want a society to achieve these goals: any number of different packages can do this, so how to start making decisions? Much easier to take most of it as outside the debate, and play around with a few options. Applied to tax

So cannot -> it's not the case that you ought So, it's not the case that I ought to seek justification for what cannot be justified. Is that not conservatism? Ought -> Can

¬ ought is not same as ought ¬ but it does seem to show that, when there is a number of otherwise equal alternatives, “just because they are there” becomes a weighty, rational consideration – without it, there would be no rational way of deciding. No

On the impossibility of rational radical change