The last blog question of the semester!
We touched on this a bit last week, but I wanted to expand on it a bit, especially in light of some of the issues raised in the simulation today and -- although you may not realize this yet, if you haven't read ahead -- in the thing I assigned for Thursday’s class. Basically, the thing I want you to wrestle a bit with is that Torodov’s three axes of alterity, the epistemic, the axiological, and the praexological, are made roughly equivalent in his account. In part Todorov is able to do this because the only “epistemic” dimension he discusses is knowledge of the other. He does not discuss knowledge of the effects of different cultural practices. The problem, or perhaps the challenge, is that knowledge of effects is, or purports to be, of a different order than questions of value hierarchy. (“Human sacrifice is wrong,” for example, is, or purports to be, a different kind of statement than, e.g., “human sacrifice is an inefficient way to organize a political system, and produces long-term instability,” precisely in that the former can't be adjudicated with evidence, but the latter can and should be.)
So, the question is: if we consider knowledge of effects, does “difference with equality” lose its moral force as an ideal? Should we be looking instead to eliminate inaccuracies in favor of better-supported empirical claims? Or is that process itself a reassertion of the kinds of hierarchies that Todorov argues that we need to call into question?
Or: can you be correct without illegitimately subordinating the other? Is there such a thing as the correct dismissal of alternatives, so to speak?
