Feb
23rd
Tue
23rd
Secular reason — reason cut off from any a priori stipulations of what is good and valuable — can take us a long way. We’ll do fine as long as we only want to find out how many X’s or Y’s there are or investigate their internal structure or discover what happens when they are combined, and so forth. But the next step, the step of going from observation to evaluation and judgment, proves difficult, indeed impossible, says Smith, for the ‘truncated discursive resources available within the downsized domain of “public reason” are insufficient to yield any definite answer to a difficult issue — abortion, say, or same sex marriage, or the permissibility of torture … .’ If public reason has ‘deprived’ the natural world of ‘its normative dimension’ by conceiving of it as free-standing and tethered to nothing higher than or prior to itself, how, Smith asks, ‘could one squeeze moral values or judgments about justice … out of brute empirical facts?’ No way that is not a sleight of hand. This is the cul de sac Enlightenment philosophy traps itself in when it renounces metaphysical foundations in favor of the ‘pure’ investigation of ‘observable facts.’ It must somehow bootstrap or engineer itself back up to meaning and the possibility of justified judgment, but it has deliberately jettisoned the resources that would enable it do so.
