Alexis Burgess
Never say "Never"
The representational devices that interest philosophers tend to be somehow "central" to our thought and talk. One facet or consequence of this centrality is that the devices of interest are routinely implicated in the specifications of the contents of a wide range of other representational devices. We should therefore expect that many of the devices of interest will be deployed, overtly or not, in any given philosophical dispute. Disputes in conceptual ethics/engineering (CE) are no exception. So, putting this all together, we should expect a non-negligible fraction of disputes about whether or not (we ought) to use a given device to exploit that very device. But if one makes use of a device D to argue that we should not use D, one could be accused of hypocrisy. And similarly, if one uses D to argue for the opposite view, that we should use D, one could be accused of circularity. Can these forms of hypocrisy and circularity in CE somehow be avoided? Must they be avoided if CE is to be a legitimate field of inquiry? In general, is hypocrisy a greater argumentative vice than circularity? This paper makes a start at answering questions like these by providing a basic framework for thinking about the conceptual involutions apparently endemic to conceptual ethics/engineering.
Never say "Never"
The representational devices that interest philosophers tend to be somehow "central" to our thought and talk. One facet or consequence of this centrality is that the devices of interest are routinely implicated in the specifications of the contents of a wide range of other representational devices. We should therefore expect that many of the devices of interest will be deployed, overtly or not, in any given philosophical dispute. Disputes in conceptual ethics/engineering (CE) are no exception. So, putting this all together, we should expect a non-negligible fraction of disputes about whether or not (we ought) to use a given device to exploit that very device. But if one makes use of a device D to argue that we should not use D, one could be accused of hypocrisy. And similarly, if one uses D to argue for the opposite view, that we should use D, one could be accused of circularity. Can these forms of hypocrisy and circularity in CE somehow be avoided? Must they be avoided if CE is to be a legitimate field of inquiry? In general, is hypocrisy a greater argumentative vice than circularity? This paper makes a start at answering questions like these by providing a basic framework for thinking about the conceptual involutions apparently endemic to conceptual ethics/engineering.