This is how I read the meta-ethical position:
Insofar as we are critically reflexive about our own values,
insofar as we understand them as positioned, we do take into
account inter-group relations; we ask how individuals who
signal membership in groups not our own might in fact offer
in their dispositions, their positioned discourse, the resources
that we ourselves do not and can not provide in certain projects.
Not that we should select job candidates solely on their group
identities, but that we should take our own and others'
positionings into account when we imagine the fit between a candidate and
work that has to be done (not the fit between the candidate's
dispositions and our own).
As Jay said, it's tricky. He emphasizes
that it's our own values that we are judging -- but "with some
sort of 'input' from higher levels of the system." But reflexive
judgement is necessarily a judgement of our valuing
vis a vis other possible ways of valuing, ways that others
might show. It's not only that we take others' interests and
viewpoints into account when "devising a model of the interests of
the higher levels" - it's not only a representational task.
It's also imaginative... Jay wrote, "It has to involve a
sort of discomforting hybridity"; which might be seen as a
function of _meeting_ (in Piotr's terms) others different from us.
And it concerns not only the logic that pertains to decisions at the
level of the larger-system. It also bears on what we keep in
mind in the meta-ethical middle space where we are judging
individuals. I assume there must be linkages (which I'd like to
articulate, any help welcome!) between the incommensurable
criteria for making decisions at different levels of the system.
- Judy
Take Eugene's recipe for empathetic collaboration,
>add my logic that diversity among collaborators tunes the group
>better to the larger systems at stake, and prepare for a long,
>tough chew. JAY.
>
Judy Diamondstone diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
Graduate School of Education Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
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Eternity is in love with the productions of time. - Wm Blake