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JohannesdeStrepitu t1_jbhgl6v wrote

> But it seems like we have a sense that moral activism would-have-been-right so many times, and times when it is not the sociocultural norm.

Where here or in his written work does Blackburn imply otherwise?

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[deleted] t1_jbjjnnw wrote

In this video he sort of goes through this history of Truth-seeking and at the end of this video, landing on Robert Brandom who is a deflationist. Brandom reduces (my opinion) morality to the making-explicit-of a "discursive rationality", which (I believe he implies) originates from implicit... practices?

All of that seems fine to me (logical, pragmatic), except it seems to say that Moral Good (which we make explicit always later) is dependent upon the happenstance of a landscape of possible actions with respect to that discursivity.

To say it stupidly, if one imagines the actions of the present time as a bunch of lines on a hurricane spaghetti model, the actions we later define as "good" are those ones which happened not to strike land. In this way, Moral Good (I'm specifically talking about non-normative Moral Good, thus "cancelling out" the utility of actions) at present is chaotic. To me this is intuitively repugnant. I believe humans can intuit moral good. I believe humans can "tap into something" morally good, when the world around them is screaming otherwise, even placing them at great peril. I think deflationism leads to [Brandom and Blackburns] conclusion about morality [that it is, in the moment, chaotic].

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JohannesdeStrepitu t1_jbkgbdf wrote

At what timestamp does he mention Brandom? I don't remember Brandom coming up in the video (though given the context I did almost hear 'Brandom' when he talked about 'rebranding' the redundancy theory of truth as the deflationary theory). Brandom's anaphoric/prosentential theory of truth is definitely a version of deflationism but I don't know if Blackburn specifically had Brandom in mind when he mentioned deflationism at the end (again, unless I missed that moment or there's a longer version of this video?).

In any case, I don't think your worry applies to Brandom's account of truth. Yes, he does take the content of our thoughts and utterances to depend on how those discursive acts make explicit norms within larger social practices. However, those are specifically practices of giving and asking for reasons (his "deontic scorekeeping") and the structure of that scorekeeping in the cases of science, morality, and a host of everyday topics - e.g. what food is in the fridge, to take Blackburn's example - is specifically one of representing objects (his "de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes"). Those two features alone easily makes room for a minority of moral activists in a community to be right and even for an entire community to be wrong, since by making claims that answer not just to one another (in a community) but to objects they specifically point to limitations in individual perspectives on the truth and even to all of the perspectives the community has so far.

None of this would look like "tapping into something" in a sense that looks like a direct intuition of the moral good but it would involve responding to the objective moral features of the world, just in a way that involves a fundamentally perspectival access to those objective truths and a need to arrive at that truth by learning from the perspectives of others (including perspectives that no one in one's community has yet reached).

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[deleted] t1_jbkyjxq wrote

That all sounds great to me. And I think

>responding to the objective moral features of the world, just in a way that involves a fundamentally perspectival access to those objective truths and a need to arrive at that truth by learning from the perspectives of others (including perspectives that no one in one's community has yet reached).

is obviously much better than "tapping into something". I do not have the best words. And admittedly I'm not well read on Blackburn OR Brandom, but I cannot help myself maundering. Thank you for humoring me!

edit- I have no clue where I got Brandom, it's very possible I was reading SEP and listening to the video at the same time, apologies.

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JohannesdeStrepitu t1_jbl2rh2 wrote

Glad I could clear things up :) Brandom's someone I've spent a lot of time reading and talking with others about in my studies, so I'm always happy to talk about him more.

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