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37

progressing at different rates on different moral issues. One culture may be more enlightened
than another with regard to, say, the treatment of animals while being less enlightened about
economic equality.

However, one might still claim that there is elitism here insofar as some people might
have more cutting edge knowledge than do others. But then why isn’t it elitism to admit that
some people have high-level mathematical knowledge which others lack? Rather than elitism,
this may be a call for better education - say, having ethics courses in secondary school.

Another relevant point here is that one must distinguish moral knowledge from what one
chooses to do with it. This is really just Chomsky’s distinction between competence and
performance applied to morals. As it was first applied in linguistics, competence is knowledge
and understanding of language; performance is what one does with that knowledge and
understanding (1965). Performance, for Chomsky at least (1980; 2002), involves free choice in a
libertarian or a-causal sense. It is reasonable to suppose that performance in language often
involves what one chooses to say and hence that there can be no strictly quantifiable science of
performance as there can be of, say, syntactic competence. Hence, Chomsky’s efforts at theory
have focused wholly on competence. A similar point can be made for moral judgment: Moral
judgment or knowledge is distinct from how people choose to act, and so a theory of moral
judgment need not be expected to be a theory of behavior or choice. The latter may well be
impossible, either because of the extreme complexity of the human mind considered as a whole
or for some deep metaphysical reason having to do with the nature of choice and causality.

A possible example of the complexity of the human mind considered as a whole is
weakness of will. One must not forget what Plato pointed out long ago, namely that there are
other elements to the mind than just the part which generates or recognizes moral value. Human
behavior results from complex interactions. Temptation may thwart one’s best judgment.



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