So tell me what this philosophy stuff is about

[faendryl]

In certain ways I can't get past the basics of philosophy. This manifests itself in class as a tendency to ask what philosophy is really after in a different wrapper each week. This week's version was the following question

Comments

[holmes_iv]

Well, I have nothing to add on the subject of philosophy, but I've been curious for a while about a different question raised by your post: what is the origin of the term "scare quotes?"

[fionnidhke]

Aha. This relates to one of the reasons I tend to find philosophy irritating, and phrases it more clearly than I've yet been able to. I tend to be a lot more bothered and less forgiving about the fact that I can't see a purpose to philosophy in general. Either philosophical works are expressions of one person's moral intuitions, accountable only to those intuitions (in which case they might have some academic interest, but no particular significance, as readers will also possess their own moral intuitions), or they are assumed to be above individual moral intuition because they are guided by some principle that for whatever reason (divine inspiration, ideological assumptions) is assumed to have higher authority, but which I would probably view as arbitrary. (Possibly because my personal moral intuitions balk at most types of dogmatic principle

[apintrix]

(Hi there, l'il cabbage! Pointed by holmes_iv

[fionnidhke]

to fionnidhke: Please understand that in your post you have discussed only ethics, not philosophy in general (ie epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, literary theory, logic and set theory...). In other words, there is a lot more to philosophy than examining moral intuitions!

Oops -- I ought to remember that, and be more careful with terms. Thanks for pointing it out so tactfully. :)

The *point* of moral philosophy is the idea that we consider it worthwhile to examine three separate questions:
first, whether a given action is right or wrong (Practical ethics);
second, how can we come up with a system for these decisions (Normative ethics);
finally, what *is* this human faculty of "practical reason", ie, moral intuition-- how does it work, and is it even a valid basis for a system of morality? (Moral epistemology).

Do you believe that these questions are worth thinking about?
I honestly don't know if I do. Certainly they're impossible to avoid thinking about to some extent. I think my problem with at least the first two questions

(continuation of prev. post)

[apintrix]

I like the answer that you were given to your question: Any moral theory, except the truly rigorous logic ones (which generally aren't at ALL practical), is based on an intuition: either an intuition of pure reason, ie an idea, or an intuition of practical reason, ie a moral instinct. Generally some comibination. The unique interest of an ethical theory is that pure reason, which we can use purely in all other branches of philosophy, doesn't give a rat's ass about what we do; it may be able to answer the hermeneutic question, "why do we moralize", but it's not going to help us make our decisions. Any moral theory on the normative or practical level of necessity has to involve practical reason. To that extend, moral philosophy is a very recursive business: the question of how to decide what is right and wrong becomes itself a moral question. But, as your answer indicates, that does not make it an impossible business. Mixing a little pure reason in with the practical and having a lot of critiques from one philosopher to another