Ethics & Moral Philosophy - Reason, Tone & Judgment - Raimond Gaita (2013)

Professor Raimond Gaita gives the first talk in a series on 'Prejudice, Reason and Understanding' at the Australian National University as part of the Freilich Foundation's Eminent Lecturer Series back in 2013. Some years ago, Mirko Bagaric, then Professor and Dean of Law at Deakin University in Melbourne, published in the Age an opinion piece in which he argued that we should torture people in certain circumstances if doing so would save many lives. His article provoked incredulity amongst some people: what had seemed to them to be undiscussable and which they believed had partly defined their political culture just because it was undiscussable, was again “on the agenda”. Bagaric was in his turn incredulous that people could be so lacking in respect for rational discussion as to believe that some matters were undiscussable or unthinkable, and that they could be so morally and politically irresponsible as to deem undiscussable something that could potentially save thousands of lives. In the first two lectures, Raimond Gaita tries to bring out what he takes to be most serious in the incredulity voiced by Bagaric and his critics in order to explore what it shows about political discourse that aspires to be a conversation of citizens. He will explore why the ideal that even in ethics and politics, reliable and sound cognitive achievements is best achieved in a tone-free zone, is widespread amongst philosophers, at least in the analytical tradition. He will suggest that attractive as it may be as an elaboration of how best to rise to the claims of reason, it erodes the kind of judgment and sobriety necessary to critical thought about ethics and politics and thereby impoverishes our understanding of what the distinction between legitimate illegitimate persuasion comes to in those realms. It erodes entirely, he will argue, the conditions necessary for the conversation of citizens. In these lectures, Raimond Gaita explores an ideal of a democratic politics as ‘a conversation of citizens’. Reflection germane to the topic goes back at least to the time of Socrates. In Plato’s Gorgias, whose bitter political tone has often been noted, Socrates says to an aspiring young orator that he is good at oratory but bad a conversation. He meant, in part, that oratory betrays a trust intrinsic to real 'conversation’ that one’s partner in conversation will respect ones need to be legitimately persuaded to a belief – that she will not exploit her skills and one’s vulnerability to them, for example. For that reason, Socrates did not look upon oratory as a morally neutral skill that could serve good or bad ends. He regarded it, as many now regard spin, as rotten through and through. More often than not, belief requires trust and so an inquiry into persuasion which honors that trust, will be in part an inquiry into how to discipline trust so that it becomes the expression of good judgment rather than gullibility, for example. Reason, its limits, judgment, trust, sobriety, and realism as these show themselves in ethics and politics is the topic. 00:00 Talk 40:04 Q&A #philosophy #ethics #moralphilosophy