Friday, February 26, 2010

For next Friday

It seems to me then that a good question is whether moral laws can be private. In the previous example, B2 might say, "Yes there is a generally accepted moral law that says you shouldn't invade a woman's privacy by touching her breast and trying to make it look accidental but I don't accept that. I have a different set of principles of my own. Principles that are more flexible because they are based on an assessment of likely consequences and not some hard and fast law."

Further B2 might claim that his principles are private. He isn't saying, ""We should take the existing moral law and replace it with my principles." He is saying that it's okay for him to ignore the existing public moral law because these private principles are all he needs to behave morally.

I think that Linda Hogan is striving for something like that. (I'll admit that, although I don't know her, I have here deliberately constructed an example I suspect she would find repulsive. )

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