Reasoning in Moral and Political Contexts
Conférence par/Conference by Mariam Thalos (University of Tennessee)
Quand/When : 1er novembre/ november 1st 2024 @ 10:00 – 12:00
Où/Where : Salle/Room: 738, Pavillon Leacock, 855 rue Sherbrooke Ouest / Leacock 738, 855 Sherbrooke Street West
*La conférence sera aussi présentée sur Zoom. /The conference will also be presented on Zoom.
The aim of this essay is to examine the forms of reasoning that are specific to collective (social and political) life. I first introduce the concept of quorum reasoning—reasoning involved in intel gathering regarding local sentiments.
Quorum reasoning involves gathering intel about certain features of the public landscape, specifically about public sentiment. That intel is meant to answer questions of the form: Do enough people in a certain target population share a certain sentiment S? For example, we have reasonable interests in sensing the political climate in our neighborhood. Thus when we learn that our neighbor—call her Linda—majored in Philosophy and participated in social justice activism, we are liable to increment the “liberal” mental thermometer and decrement the “conservative” one. We might infer that Linda has certain sentiments from information about her past activities, because we have an important stake in keeping score on such things. And we might use the inferred proposition even when it’s not relevant to the question we are asked. This form reasoning is susceptible to the recency/availability bias because quorum reasoning will rightly weight recently sampled instances more heavily.
With the concept of quorum reasoning in hand, I will subsequently advance a taxonomy of moral reasoning forms that emerge in group and institutional contexts, building on the four-models taxonomy of relations first articulated by anthropologist Alan Fiske (1991). My 2×2 taxonomy of reasoning maps readily onto Fiske taxonomy. I show that the 2×2 scheme organizes Fiske’s models, as building blocks that structure social life across overlapping institutions and cultures.
Finally, I will show that there is room for the sort of human freedom that is unavailable in certain moral psychologies (represented for example by the work of Jonathan Haidt) and linguistics (Steven Pinker and George Lakoff). In Haidt’s (2013) telling, we are only conscious of our rationalization processes, not of anything that is truly the basis of our moral or political judgments. In Pinker’s (2007) telling, the tools we use for reasoning—the cognitive models or analogies—are all too often frozen, not tools we can examine. But in the account of moral and political reasoning I am articulating, we are conscious of our reasonings because we cannot pull them off otherwise. The account on offer here, as I will show, shares the philosophical temperaments exemplified by WD Ross and Frederich Nietzsche.