Indignation, practical rationality and our moral life : a grammatical investigation

This paper offers a grammatical investigation of some important aspects of our moral life taking a scene from the movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town as a test case. The main question I try to answer is whether there are situations in our moral discussions in which the proper and rational attitude is to sh...

ver descrição completa

Detalhes bibliográficos
Autor: Techio, Jônadas
Formato: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2016
País:Brasil
Recursos:Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
Repositorio:Repositório Institucional da UFRGS
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:www.lume.ufrgs.br:10183/151118
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/10183/151118
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Cavell, Stanley, 1926-
Moral
Ética
Razão
Filosofia
Indignation
Practical rationality
Stanley cavell
Moral perfectionism
Descrição
Resumo:This paper offers a grammatical investigation of some important aspects of our moral life taking a scene from the movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town as a test case. The main question I try to answer is whether there are situations in our moral discussions in which the proper and rational attitude is to show disagreement (e.g. by expressing indignation), as opposed to continuing the dialogue. Many philosophers seem committed to a conception of moral reasoning that takes as its end rational agreement among agents; from that perspective, expressing indignation would just amount to an irrational way of trying to get rid of the burdens put upon the agent's shoulders in the context of a moral discussion. Against that widespread view I will defend a Cavellian version of moral perfectionism, which takes rational disagreement as a legitimate (and even productive) outcome of moral arguments. That view, as we shall see, will be predicated upon a distinctive understanding of practical rationality, hence the importance of comparing moral discussion to other forms of rational engagement (e.g., aesthetic, scientific and mathematical).