On making up principles

I recently began to look at Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick, for the main reason that it is available on audiobook, and I like listening to audiobooks. The audiobook edition includes the new preface by Thomas Nagel, which I had not read before yesterday. In it, Nagel describes “a discussion group called the Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy (SELF)”, which included him and Nozick, as well as “Marshall Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Owen Fiss, Charles Fried, Gilbert Harman, Frank Michelman, John Rawls, T.M. Scanlon, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Michael Walzer, among others.”

Speaking of this group, the preface includes this paragraph:

What united us were two convictions. One was a belief in the reality of the moral domain, as an area in which there are real questions with right and wrong answers, and not just clashing subjective reactions. The other was a belief that progress could be made toward discovering the right answers by formulating hypotheses at various levels of generality and subjecting them to confirmation or disconfirmation by the intuitive moral credibility of their various substantive consequences, as well as by their coherence in explaining those consequences. The method depended on taking seriously the evidential value of strong moral intuitions about particular cases, including imaginary cases, and then looking behind those intuitions for general principles, perhaps quite complex principles, which accounted for and justified them.

Now, this description is very clear and distinct, especially if you have had some philosophy discussions before. I have certainly seen people reason in this way.

But it is not a philosophical method at all. It is a description, quite literally, of making up principles to get the conclusions you already want. There is absolutely no philosophical value in doing that, and the result of doing it is not philosophy.

Philosophy begins at principles, and in ethics, traditionally it begins with a conception of “the good”. This ensures that your standards will be truly rational and consistent, rather than being what are rightly derided as rationalizations – rationalizations, that is, of your irrational passions and vices.

This blog post has no point other than to express hatred and contempt for Rawls, Nozick, Dworkin, and the others, insofar as they have engaged in this. This is a sub-philosophical, and therefore subhuman, procedure; insofar as they have done this, and it seems that they have done this a lot, they are God-damned fools, on a level with the beasts.