3.3 DYNAMIC ENGAGEMENT
In this section I explore issues related to the questions of whether and how we can engage with members of a community whose morality is different from our own. When the conceptual distance between moralities is great, only limited kinds of engagement will be possible, which I discuss first.
More substantial engagement requires communicating well enough to judge whether to accord others normative competence, on the basis of which genuinely open, reasoned discussion can take place. I end with consideration of non-discursive kinds of engagement and of the norms that ought to govern such practices.3.3.1 Pragmatic Disagreement
A good first step is to see whether we can understand their moral reasoning well enough to assess it in our terms. If not, then there is considerably less room for reasoning, though other types of engagement may still be possible, which I will discuss later. Suppose that we recognize that they condemn an action which we endorse, but that there is considerable difference in what each side takes the action to be. The concepts expressed by verbs and adverbs, after all, are no less inferentially articulated than other concepts. We may find ourselves unsure how to translate the word - or make sense of the concept - with which they have categorized an action. In such a case we may not, at least for the time being, be in literal disagreement with them, since we are not sure what to make of their concept in our terms. So long as we can conclude that they are condemning that which we endorse, we are still in pragmatic disagreement.
If we find ourselves in pragmatic disagreement with them but unable to communicate effectively about wherein or why we differ, it seems clear that there is little room for our convincing them that they are mistaken. Situations like this, which I doubt are very common, are the most radical of conceptual differences; I have suggested above that we call the two languages “incommensurate” in such cases.
There are only two possible routes to reasoning with them in a case like this. First, linguistic innovation on one or both sides might render the two languages adequately commensurate for communication to succeed. Such changes may be intentional or not, and they may be consciously resisted by those with a stake in the current social-conceptual order.[51] Once they occur, engagement along the lines sketched below can take place.Another option is to learn their language from the ground up - to acquire a “second first language,” as Alasdair MacIntyre has put it [1988, p. 374] - and then to criticize their moral standpoint from the inside. I will deal with this internal criticism in a moment, since it applies even when conceptual differences are far less radical. The idea that we might learn their language and then reason with them also suggests another possibility: If we have learned their language and their value system like natives, aren’t we perfectly placed to decide between the two systems? Shouldn’t such a bilingual be able to judge which moral assessment best applies to the action, whether or not the languages are incommensurate? MacIntyre has discussed such a case, which he calls a “boundary situation”:
Consider the predicament of someone who lives in a time and place where he or she is a full member of two linguistic communities, speaking one language, Zuni, say, or Irish, exclusively to the older members of his family and village and Spanish or English, say, to those from the world outside, who seek to engage him or her in a way of life in the exclusively Spanish- or English-speaking world. [MacIntyre 1989, pp. 184-5]
Granting for discussion that English and Irish moral languages are incommensurate, and supposing that there is some action over which English and Irish speakers come into pragmatic ethical conflict, could someone in such a boundary situation weigh the conflicting reasons he or she is given by speakers of the two languages?
It certainly seems possible for someone in a boundary situation to be gripped by two very different sets of ethical standards.
Sometimes the person will in effect be able to live two lives, holding himself or herself to one set of standards when in their village and another when dealing with business people from London. Immigrants or exiles may also find themselves in similar situations. I’ll call such people moral schizophrenics. If the moral schizophrenic is lucky, no circumstance will arise to force an important choice in which the two sets of standards conflict. When a choice must be made, though, there can be no simple weighing of one reason versus another. The choice will often demand that one renounce one way of life in favor of the other, but not because one can see that the chosen path is superior to the path not taken. The choice instead has the character of a leap, an existential commitment. Some people may be able to leap back and forth between perspectives for a period of time - perhaps Oskar Schindler was one of these? - but I suspect that for most, such a fluidity in basic moral commitments would prove psychologically untenable. When we offer reasons to such people, therefore, we are not attempting to convince them of the independent, rational superiority of our way of judging. We are attempting to woo them into looking at it from our moral perspective rather than from the competing perspective.Suppose that this is all that can be said in the case of incommensurate languages. In most cases, though, communication is less problematic. We may not be supremely confident that we are understanding them correctly, but the snags that we are hitting seem minor (at worst). Their terms are different from ours, but as I suggested earlier, languages like English have considerable histories which give us resources for understanding and translating others. We may recognize their moral concepts as ones from our past. In some such cases, we will have arguments ready to deploy against the use of such notions; in others, social changes may simply have made the older concepts irrelevant to us.
Even then, we may be prepared to argue why our current categories, and our corresponding evaluation of the action in question, are better. Let me turn now to consider these and other types of more reasoned engagement.3.3.2 Substantive Engagement
There are many ways to engage with members of a group whose morality differs from our own. We can talk, negotiate, tell stories, take tours, study, and so on. We can do these things together and separately, in our land and in theirs. As we will see in subsequent chapters, engagement of these various kinds pervades Chinese rights discourse in the twentieth century. Many of these things can be done while simultaneously pursuing one of the other strategies explored earlier; this is especially so since groups are rarely monolithic. In the next section I will explore the possibilities for and ramifications of multiple strategies. Can one really engage and repress, for instance, at the same time? Here I will confine myself to the grounds and dynamics of engagement.
Engagement can take three forms. Full-fledged engagement requires that I grant you competence as a normative judge. Since engagement aims at changing your norms, in order not to repress you, I need to give you reasons that you will accept in your terms. Therefore, I must work under the premise that your terms are adequately akin to my terms, and that you and I can recognize the same kinds of reasons. If this is so, then in principle you might realize something that I had missed, yet ought to see and accept. Full-fledged engagement may begin with the goal of changing your values, but it can end up changing both of ours, or even only mine.
I have purposely left some important clauses in the preceding paragraph vague, because whether our terms are “adequately” similar and whether our reasons are of the same “kinds” are not things that can be known for sure prior to engaging with one another. This type of engagement, that is, can be carried out between two people or groups whose moralities are somewhat different from one another.
Pluralism need not bar engagement. I pointed out earlier that communities with rich traditions of moral reasoning can often draw on or modify resources from earlier, or currently non-canonical, moments in their moral discourse in order to understand and evaluate foreign claims. Engagement can also involve learning: I may have no concept that corresponds to one of yours, but I may be able and willing to learn it and use it to enrich my moral language. I may even be willing to use it in place of current concepts. Perhaps, after reflecting on the commitments and entitlements entailed by my current vocabulary, I come to embrace the entailments of your concept rather than those of mine. This process, which as we saw earlier Brandom calls “expressive rationality,” can lead to the revision of my moral language. At least, if a result of the engagement is that people in my community come to speak in the new way, then we can say that “our” moral language has changed. If revisions that I feel are necessary are resisted by my home community, this should be understood as a (partial) splintering of my community, with my coming to share some of your norms and vocabulary.Rather than pursue this issue of a divided community just yet, let me turn to the second kind of engagement, namely internal criticism. The idea here is that either because I explicitly deny you normative competence or because I simply cannot understand you well enough (in my terms) to grant it, I may be ineligible for full-fledged engagement. Still, thanks perhaps to careful study on my part, I may be able to engage with your norms on your terms. My criticism, that is, is completely internal to your system of values. For you to accept my internal criticism as potentially valid, of course, you must be willing to grant me normative competence based on your own standards, and it may take some work on my part to convince you that I merit such acceptance. Unless your attitude toward me is simply parochial, though, it should be possible in principle for me to earn the right to engage your norms from the inside.
One value of internal criticism is that it assures us that even radical differences need not stand in the way of some kind of reasoned engagement with others. Of course there are no guarantees that internal criticism will issue in any particular result. Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that in certain circumstances, internal criticism can lead to the rational choice of one tradition over another. He says that when one tradition fails by its own lights, and a second tradition not only does not fail (internally), but also has the resources to explain why the first tradition failed, then adherents of the first tradition can reasonably choose to switch their allegiance to the second tradition [MacIntyre 1988].
MacIntyre’s argument seems quite reasonable, and may even be right. For better or worse, though, choices are hardly ever all-or-nothing decisions between two traditions, as MacIntyre’s own historical studies show. Traditions and moralities are not monolithic; despite the degree to which one aspect can be systematically related to another, whole moralities do not stand or fall as integral entities. Criticism, revision, and other changes are always more piecemeal, so a single vision of how reasoned cross-cultural criticism goes on must be inadequate. As I will discuss in this chapter’s last section, internally contested concepts and communities make these matters still more complicated, and as we will see in the next several chapters, the development of rights discourse in China was in fact more complicated in just the ways this chapter should lead one to expect.
Finally, I want to discuss the possibility of non-discursive engagement: tourism, trade (perhaps especially in cultural products like books and movies), employment by multinational business firms, and so on. Richard Rorty has argued that this is in fact the most important kind, or even the sole valuable kind, of engagement. He calls it “sentimental education,” and argues that in today’s world, “most of the work in changing moral intuitions is being done by manipulating our feelings rather than by increasing our knowledge” [Rorty 1993, p. 118]. I agree with Rorty that non-discursive engagement can be effective, but I must add two qualifications. First, it is evident that the various forms of discursive engagement considered earlier are important and clearly legitimate. Second, we must ask what attitude “they” might have toward non-discursive engagement of Rorty’s or some other kind. If they find it illegitimate, does it therefore count as repression? If so, are there any differences between this form of repression and those based on discursive demands? Suppose that some of them object to Hollywood movies, but others stand in line to see them. How should we feel? Such complexities lead us directly into the question of how to handle divided communities.