intl gremlins

From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Sun Feb 18 2001 - 14:43:02 PST


I am posting this for phil graham who can read xmca but not post, for
whatever ! who-is-at #$@!$!@#$#@$ reason.
mike

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At 10:51 AM 17/02/01 -0800, Paul wrote:
>I don't think you can produce a coherent moral theory on such a basis.

Hi Paul.

From what I can gather (I have not read the Hicks article either [is there an e-copy available for the discussion anybody?]) the concept of "moral answerability" is not about a "theory" of morality, but rather about moral action, which of course includes what we say and write. These are very different "things".

Bakhtin's basic unit is the utterance, not the word, no?

That brings me back to your reference to Toulmin, and hence to Wittgenstein, who, in the Tractatus, takes the trouble to show that there is no such thing as a moral proposition; there are only moral actions (cf Toulmin and Janick 1973). The *theoretical* immorality of incest (as expressed in the proposition 'incest is considered immoral throughout humanity') is very different from a person raping their young daughter, son, sister, brother, or cousin, or from Queen Victoria saying to one of her children, "You *will* marry your cousin. It will be good for the empire".

Sometimes (often) these two (only *apparently* different) sorts of violence (the bodily and the linguistic [which is also bodily]) are conflated in very long familial histories of incestual, socio-culturally endemic rape. However initiated -- and however motivated -- they constitute a *discourse* of incest [as opposed to a "moral theory" of incest]; they end in pain for somebody; and they are therefore immoral.

According to my limited understanding, my nine year old daughter explained the whole idea of "moral answerabilty" for our utterances to her younger brother when she said: "If someone hits you, the pain goes away. But when someone says something to hurt you, the pain keeps coming back and back and back. Sometimes, it gets worse each time".

I thought that was fairly insightful for a nine year old.

But then I learn lots from my kids.

My apologies if I have caused pain to anybody affected by incest.

regards, Phil



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