BHA: Re: Epistemological relativism

["Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus@xxxxxxx>]

Marko--

I offered you two different accounts of what social construction might mean;
you seem unwilling to consider that possibility.  I think Marsh is right
when he suggests that you see social construction as simply meaning
fictitious.  Maybe you just have a biological allergy to the phrase.  Oh
well...

You wrote:

>                     One may well argue that Gravity is a concept
> that is historically quite recent, but this does not (or should not)
obscure
> the fact that Gravity did not come into being when some apple landed on
> Newton's head. The same goes for human rights.

As a logical point, this doesn't follow.  For one thing, gravity preceeded
the very existence of human beings by billions of years.  Human rights,
however, could only come into being at some point within human history.
Further, while the concept of gravity is recent, awareness of the way
objects are pulled or attracted to the earth is certainly not recent, for it
forces itself upon us continually.  Human rights, however, have constantly
to be struggled for -- they are not a reality that impress themselves upon
us *whether we like it or not*, unless they have been put into practice in
social institutions.  On the contrary, it is in some people's interest to
deny their existence in both word and deed, and in many places human rights,
as a practical reality, scarcely exist.  Gravity acts upon us whether we
have an idea of it or not; the same cannot be said about the idea of human
rights.

>                The same goes for human rights. If one reads Plato or any
> work of antiquity one can see quite clearly that people have reasoned
> ethically throughout history.

I have to admit, my jaw dropped when I read this.  Do you equate "reasoning
ethically" with "believing in human rights"?  Then what do you make of the
fact that Plato adamantly opposed democracy, and that his ideal Republic
would have an extremely rigid and authoritarian power structure,
institutional misogyny, censorship, etc?  If Plato led the charge against
slavery in Athens, it's news to me.  He may have reasoned about ethics, but
they *weren't* the ethics of human rights.  Your claim is deeply ahistorical
and eternalizing, imputing (actually imposing) contemporary ideas upon other
times.

>            But what does not differ is the innate endowment of ethical
> reasoning, which we all share, that we bring to bear on a given problem.

The claim that we are all endowed with an ability to reason ethically is
perhaps debatable -- after all, there are sociopaths and various other sorts
(some might include very young children) whose ability to know right and
wrong is (by most accounts) diminished or undeveloped.  But even if we all
share this capacity, it does not logically follow that we all possess a
notion of human rights.  For that matter, the existence of a capacity does
not mean that is normally is -- or even should be -- exercised.  All people
have the capacity to commit violence; most people commit very little, and I
hope we agree that committing wanton acts of violence should not be a human
right.

>                The
> concept of the Universe itself is quite recent.
> Is the Universe a social construction? If so how could something exist, a
> human society, prior to the existience of the totality of all existience?

I have no idea what you're on about.  No-one here has suggested anything
remotely like this -- you're battling a straw man, and it looks silly.

>             So I take the opposite view, "grounding the idea of
> discrimination on human nature is a risky strategy".

Yes, this is correct.  But that's because virtually *any* argument that
bases social practices and cultural developments on some putative "human
nature" is risky.

>                If human nature is a social
> construction then it becomes easy to discriminate...Africans are inferior
> because our culture is better than their's and culture makes the man.

And in fact, people *do* discriminate with appalling ease.  By your
argument, that pretty well demonstrates that human nature *is* a social
construction.

> The task of anyone interested in human emancipation, in my opinon, is to
> demonstrate that emancipation is not logically precluded by our nature's.

That's a first step; I hope the struggle for human emancipation doesn't stop
there.

> But I believe that the form human societies can take are constrained by
our
> biological nature, which means that society is not a social construction.
If
> society were a social construction then societies could differ arbitarily
> and without limit.

Again, your conclusions don't follow.  Is the form human societies can take
constrained by our biological nature?  Yes, quite so.  All human societies
must have a way to produce food.  No human society operates via telepathy.
Etc.  But the fact that there are biological limits and conditions scarcely
warrants your two conclusions, (1) that society is not a social
construction, and (2) that social construction means societies can differ
arbitarily and without limit.  Marx had it right: people make their own
history, but not under conditions of their own choosing.  The idea that
something is a social product does not entail the notion that it is created
in unfettered freedom; the idea that there are limits and conditions does
not entail that *everything* is limited, that there is no room for variance
or innovation.

And there *is* variance, both socially and biologically.  You have yet to
present any definition of the biological basis of human rights, and to
explain how that works.  In doing so, you need to account for human
variation; whether (and to what degree?) you grant these rights to people
who are mentally retarded, insane, deformed, criminal, toddlers, etc.; and
on what logical basis biology makes such scope sensible.  If biology defines
what human rights are, should people with different physiologies get the
same rights?  Does biology equal destiny?  Further, one way to interpret the
implications of biology is in "Darwinian" terms of "survival of the
fittest."  From such a viewpoint, it's arguably self-destructive for our
species to preserve the lives of the mentally impaired, the quadraplegic,
the blind, the short, the ugly, the nice guys who finish last, and so forth.
So what parts of biology count for defining human rights?

If human society is not a social construction, but instead reduces to our
biology, then we have few if any choices in the sort of society we have.  In
fact the hope of emancipation through social struggle would be a false one:
we cannot alter our biology -- oops, oh yeah, except through genetic
modification, eugenics, sterilization, enforced "euthanasia," genocide....

I assume that's not the direction you mean to go.  So perhaps I'm
misinterpreting something, which is easy to do since so far you have only
staked a claim, without an attempt to make a case.  You need to put forward
an actual argument in favor of your position -- an argument involving
evidence and reasoning -- and not simply declare your position dogmatically.

With this, I want to address a point Viren makes:

> Does this mean that concepts such as justice must change as well, from a
> normative perspective.  If this is the case, should we agree that slavery
> was ok in previous periods but not now?  Clearly at a descriptive level
> this is true, but I would not want to concede this at a normative
> level.  Hence with Marco and Dick, I would join in the struggle to create
> and defend a universal ethical theory.

As you say, what was considered justice at one point may be considered
unjust later.  And that's a good thing, since it means we can learn things,
see the error of our ways, and strive to do better (sometimes
successfully!).  I don't disagree with the goal of universal human rights --
far from it.  But I think they cannot find a viable basis in a predetermined
"human nature," particularly if it's defined biologically.  A fixed concept
of human nature necessarily limits the possibilities of what humans can do
and the sorts of relationships they can have -- or can be allowed to have:
some people say homosexuality is "against nature," after all.  In fact, they
said that about flying.  WE DON'T KNOW what our limits really are, and we
constantly push them back as we learn new things, allow our creative
imaginations to take flight, and do things we didn't do before.  A mere
century ago, not one country gave women the right to vote; now those that do
are appalled by those that don't.  The notion of human rights expanded; I
would like to see them continue to expand.  But that only happens when
people struggle for them -- they are not handed to us by biology.

Personally, I think our very ignorance of the limits of human possibility is
one good reason for wanting to universalize human rights.  I suppose that's
rather dialectical of me, in Bhaskar's sense: rather than ground our ethics
in the positivity of a presumed knowledge of human nature, we should start
with negativity, our ignorance.  If I don't really know what good you might
be capable of, then I should not seek to limit your possibilities, and
indeed I should to try to enhance or encourage them in order to help such
good come to fruition.  And every bit of good, no matter how tiny, makes the
world a better place.

T.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus@xxxxxxxx
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce




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