soy based question (this is an ethics course after all)

[Peter A Yong]

My paper criticizes Jacobson’s sentimentalist interpretation of Mill. One
big picture issue that comes up, but isn’t explicitly addressed (yet),
concerns how Jacobson thinks we should asses the relative merits /
demerits of putative Mill interpretations. All the players, including J,
accept that dissonant claims can be found within Mill’s oeuvre.
Consequently, every putative interpretation is forced highlight some
passages while de-emphasizing others. On the one hand, Jacobson takes
passages in OL as primary and rejects many sections in U; while, on the
other hand, the standard interpretation tends to emphasize certain
passages in U (e.g. the proportionality doctrine, higher pleasures, etc…)
and then discounts some of the strong rhetoric about rights and
anti-paternalism in OL. So, for example, when Jacobson rejects the
Crispian dissimulation hypothesis as implausible it can’t just be on the
basis of the fact that it doesn’t take certain passages seriously, since
his own interpretation does this. He seems to think that his
interpretation is, on the whole, more charitable to Mill. How are we
supposed to evaluate such claims about interpretive charity? Prima facie,
it looks like we can either (a) ground it in conceptual plausibility, or
(b) ground it in the author’s own self-interpretation. But there seem to
be problems associated with either option: (a) what is conceptually
plausible will vary with one’s collateral philosophical commitments. Ex:
For a Kantian (with a very low opinion of utilitarianism), a hodge-podge
deontological interpretation of Mill would be the most plausible even if
it were culled from seemingly random sources. (b)We don’t have any clear
Mill meta-passages where he systematizes his own work. J does cite a bit
from the Autobiography, but it is not clear enough to ground one
interpretation over another. Ex: It doesn’t say, “I’m committed to
categorical anti-paternalism, and I wasn’t serious about any of the other
stuff.”

[Nat!!]

This is a great question, and it's one that I've had to struggle with
for both my papers. I'm not going to pretend that I have a great
answer; the outcomes of my struggles were pretty farcical. But I do
think there's a distinct consideration in addition to your (a) and
(b). There's the matter of pschologizing the text (I'm sure there's a
better term for this). So, in chapter V of Util., there's a footnote
which approvingly cites a book which presents a genetic, naturalizing
account of primitive ethics. I picture Mill reading this, it appealing
to his empiricism, and then him trying to shoehorn it into his
utilitarianism. And I get a strong suspicion in V that this is the
source of all the sanction-utilitarian worries. So, what would the
"official" Mill interpretation be? It seems to me that he was really
an act-utilitarian and the silly things he said about deserving
punishment were just an artificial excrescence. I've been thinking
about diving back into that chapter and trying to disentangle two
separately coherent strings. I think that would add plausibility to
this account. But it still feels like cheating because it discounts
both what Mill says about his work and it gives up on having a single,
unified reading.

[David]

There is a somewhat different possibility, viz. that even if M's
commitments are strictly inconsistent, some have a better claim to be
part of his considered view in the sense that they fit with more texts
that their rivals, fit more important passages than their rivals, or
cohere better with the totality of M's commitments. This sort of
Overall Fit need not conform with one's view about what view is right
or with M's own self-understanding.

Moreover, (a) has the limits that you suggest only if we are
philosophical relativists. Non-relativists will think that the
comparative plausibility of philosophical commitments could guide
choice (if only as a tie-breaker) among rival interpretations. Also,
I should say that even philosophical relativists might agree that the
interpreters background philosophical commitments can allow them to
see possible interpretations of texts that might otherwise be hard to
see, and so teach us all (even those without those commitments)
something about what the texts might stand for. Terry Irwin (no
philosophical relativist) has some very nice essays in the history of
ethics in which he shows how different philosophical commitments of
interpreters has played an important role in identifying and
adjudicating significant interpretive possibilities.

DB

On Mar 10, 11:25 pm, "Peter A Yong" <p1y...@ucsd.edu> wrote: