Brian Leiter
speaker
530 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2009
last heard Sep 2010
Brian Leiter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That is, you highly appraise something, you highly value it, you admire it.
This is what's at issue in in appraisal respect.
And it's not clear to me, though, that religion, or indeed, I'll go I'll make a stronger claim, because what Nussbaum says is that what is the object of respect is the faculty of conscience.
Every human being has the faculty of conscience, and therefore that is the capacity for figuring out the meaning of life, how they ought to live, what's important, what's valuable, and that this itself warrants respect.
And in particular, I think she's got to say it warrants respect.
And I have to see, I don't find the intuition underlying that very compelling.
It seems to me that whether or not an exercise of conscience warrants respect, whether conscience warrants appraisal respect, depends upon how the faculty is actually utilized.
And I will give you an example meant to be provocative, but I think it drives home the point.
And it's often forgotten.
Adolf Hitler was a man of conscience.
He was a man of very
Very severe conscience.
He was not a mere pragmatist.
He was very, very principled.
Evidence of this?
Towards the end of the war, when it would have been extremely useful to have taken the Jews and the Slavs and the other disfavored peoples out of the concentration camps and used them as slave labor to free up Germans to fight.
Hitler, on principle and as a matter of conscience,
kept them in the concentration camps, kept them running, didn't utilize them, and as a result didn't have the manpower necessary to sustain the war.
It doesn't seem to me the fact that Adolf Hitler had a faculty of conscience is adequate to ground the idea that it should be an object of appraisal respect.
Now, happily, most exercises of religious conscience are not as appalling as the Hitler example I just gave.
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