Topics Philosophy

Question I don't understand the approach in answering some of the questions. When asking if something is "important" or what "duty" is or what "right" is, why answer with examples of stuff that's one of those terms or give an insight on the subject rather than attacking the word itself and finding what it means. We're already in a hole due to the problem of causation and must find associations and directions of fit. So why not really get deep within the skin to find out what a word like "important" or "right" or "duty" means (at least to the best of our abilities). Isn't the source of much dispute in other fields that people aren't on the same page as to what a particular word or term means? Philosophy is much better than that. Or am I missing something?

Accepted:
July 11, 2006

Comments

I think most people here would agree with much of what you have to say, though with some differences.

First, the question isn't so much what the word "right", say, means but, rather, what rights are. And similarly, it isn't so much that people don't agree about what the word "right" means: It's that they don't agree about what rights are, or under what circumstances someone would have one, or what have you. It doesn't follow that all these people mean different things by the word "right". If it did, then it would be impossible to disagree about anything.

Second, to answer some questions involving the notion of a right we may not need to know exactly what rights are. This is a good thing, since some very smart people have considered this question over the last several centuries and, while real progress has been made, complete consensus has not yet been reached. Still, for some purposes, as I said, we may not need complete consensus. It may be enough if we agree about certain aspects of the notion of a right.

Nonetheless, the problem remains what rights are. So suppose we do attack that problem. Well, how shall we proceed? There are various ways one might proceed, but one popular one, in recent times (and, arguably, for quite a long time), is to attempt to reach what John Rawls called "reflective equilibrium". We start with certain kinds of examples of cases in which it is clear to us, generally speaking, that someone does or does not have a right to do this or that, and then we start to theorize: What accounts of what rights are, and when people have them, will yield the results we expect? We want the theory to account for the data. Maybe we decide, on reflection, that some of what we thought were clear cases aren't so clear. So we revise our conception of the data, and begin again. Ideally, we reach a point where our theory and our intuitions about cases are in balance: That's reflective equilibrium.

So examples have an important role to play in such discussions. That's why they get mentioned so much.