...you don't have to eat the whole apple. That's very important to the moral empiricist, who wants to say that it is possible to judge that a life of drunken lecherous debauchery is inferior to a life of quiet homely pleasures without taking a 30 year sojourn into DLD. Yet if one captures a drunk, debauching lecher and ties him down in a chair to eat little bits of camembert while sipping mango juice and reading Proust, one is not likely to accomplish a quick conversion. The Proust booster would say: it takes time to learn to appreciate quiet evenings with Remembrance and mango juice. The debauchee would respond that it takes time to come to learn to wallow in depravity.
If the only fair test of a way of life is a test so long it doesn't leave time for another way of life, then the moral empiricist position is uninteresting. And I don't know why a short test is enough, for any sort of life, or for some sorts of lives, but not others.
Another puzzle.
Posted by shea0017 at August 3, 2005 10:08 PM