Preproceedings 2006 - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Conflicts, Language, and Rationality
Alcino Eduardo Bonella, Federal University of Uberlandia, Brazil
Moral divergences have been the normal condition of
human life. There are divergences related to the facts. For
the latter we may use the alert observation of the involved
factual characteristics and a common language for
references to them. But there are the most important
evaluative divergences related to what to choose, or what
to do even after our factual divergences have been solved.
It might be a good rational solution for moral conflicts to
find a similar factual method (a descriptive method) for
solving evaluative divergences like the factual ones. What
I have in mind is one form that combines clarifying our
referential language and attentively and mutually
observing the facts with an eye to which and when is the
case for applying a word. However, in this paper I will try to
show that this is a mistake because this blocks the
communication among divergent views and maintains a
kind of circular and “closed” agreement among
convergences. We need a rationality (a logic) that makes
possible both intelligible divergences and “open to
criticism” convergences!
The main problem of the descriptive method is that
any person of another culture or any divergent person
within the same culture may use exactly the same
strategy. She could restrict the entire meaning of her
evaluative words to her truth conditions. Something
essential in the communication, the expression of
intelligible evaluative divergences would be impossible
because the meaning of the moral words, for example, it
would be totally encapsulated in the descriptive references
of a given culture. To learn to use those words as the
descriptive words would always mean b restricting all their
meaning to the linguistic and moral status quo of that
culture, ending any possible divergence within the culture
and making every different or new moral proposition,
inside or outside, a necessary divergence and conflict. In
some aspects the relativism is maintained and incentives
offered to the insoluble conflict and (probably) the violence
among the divergent.
We would not be contradicting ourselves if we would
have divergences because we would always be right in our
truth conditions, simply treated as real truth conditions for
all, not our.particular truth conditions. At the same time
there would not be any disagreement when we confine
ourselves to our truth conditions because those conditions
may be accessed in our linguistic community. They are our
truth conditions, but even so, every different culture may
do the same, and in all cases each group is always right.
And if there were real divergences among them, with the
descriptive interpretation of the moral words, every group
or person would have a reason to maintain the conflict
and, who knows, to solve it by violent means, since the
rational resolution is now impossible. This type of
descriptive practical rationality is doomed to relativism, but
in practical cases, relativism is a kind of conservatism and
an authoritarianism of groups or persons aversive to
criticism.
If descriptive words (for example, white) may be
used for referring to a property when we observe certain
things, evaluative words (for example, good) are not used
primarily for describing properties that can be described
with other merely descriptive words. Consider an example.
For some people the word “eugenics” is a bad word, and it
is used in general for reproving certain actions (for
example, some medical action described in a certain way).
For another people, it can be used for approving the same
conduct described in certain way in the same way. For the
former, the word “eugenics” is equivalent to wrong acts or
bad conducts and it is used for blocking theses acts. For
the latter, it is equivalent to a good conduct. But we may
not say “eugenics is wrong because it is eugenics, an
obviously wrong conduct”, neither “eugenics is right
because eugenics is obviously a good thing for humanity”!
For having an intelligible or rational argument we need to
operate without circularity and to attack or defend
“eugenics” because it is a medical conduct described so
and so, in a descriptive way of descriptions, that can be
factually accepted by everyone (who attacks and defends).
It is in this sense that evaluative words may not be used
for describing and that descriptive words may not be used
for evaluating. “Eugenics”, as a descriptive word, referring
to a certain conduct in its physical properties, does not
necessarily incorporate any value.
The possible intelligible evaluative divergence – one
that is intelligible because it may be rationally right or
wrong, thus makes it possible that the evaluation may be
different for different groups or persons because one of
them may be wrong and because the agreement between
them is not a simple matter of internal communitarian
commitment aversive to other possibilities. So not only
does every consolidated cultural group have the right (an
“intellectual” right) to defend its way of life because the
group is a cultural and consolidated one, but every
possible group orpossible person can express divergences
that are intelligible inside her culture as a change of
rational or justified reform. If all of them are always right,
the change of reform is always as arbitrary as the status
quo and the divergent may be easily excluded by force.
The possibility of rational evaluative divergences is
made possible because our evaluative thinking is not an
act of describing, but rather of approving or disapproving
certain conducts or subjects. We use value words (as
good, right, acceptable etc) for expressing this
fundamental behaviour and stipulating the criterion or
criteria for clarifying the approval or disapproval. These are
the reasons or the “why” we approve or do not approve of
some conduct or subject. These reasons are the facts or
physical properties present in the conduct or subject and
its objective context, but to approve is not only to
recognise these facts as present, because approving
involves choosing or deciding. Therefore, the meaning of
these evaluative words or of these evaluative-cumdescriptive
discourses does not restrict itself to the truth
conditions or conditions of application of theses words in a
given linguistic community, because the truth conditions
are stipulated by the approbatory use of the evaluative
words logically preceding the standards or criterion for
applying the words. This evaluative meaning makes
possible that we agree with the presence of the same
physical properties (the same descriptive context) as our
opponent, but even so we may to maintain divergences
about how to evaluate the same properties.
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