Tom,You're not annoying me. I appreciate the dialogue. I'll try to respond.I'll start with your question: " How does the notion of a 'hierarchy of subjectivity' come from the possibility of infinite subjective interpretations and the fact some of those interpretations are better than others?"It comes contained in the last part of your question itself: "... the fact that some of those interpretations are better than others." If some interpretations are better than others, a hierarchy is by nature already established and an objective standard is likewise already implied.When you speak of how you grade student writing, you are talking about evaluating their display of a rhetorical skill set, not about their grasp of the truth. Those are two different things. Either one can be judged hierarchically. Elegance and cohesiveness of communication make a scale that is independent of what is true. One person may offer an elegant defense and plenty of cohesive reasoning as to why the earth is flat. Another person might stumble through a weak defense of the spinning globe. We might rank the former ahead of the latter in the skill set of rhetoric, but we might rank the latter ahead of the former in his apprehension of the truth as to the physical nature of the earth.The same is true when we look at a piece of literature: one person might write beautifully about something that goes quite astray of what the story means while another person might struggle in attempting to articulate what is essentially a deep understanding of that same story. Of course, we are most pleased when the two skills--communication and apprehension--are joined in a single work. Take, for example, Tolkien's marvelous essay (a lecture, actually), "The Monsters and the Critics." Prior to that lecture, many well-known scholars had failed to grasp both the artistic genius and the deep layers of meaning in Beowulf. In fact, they disdained many of the very things that Tolkien was able to rescue--and not because his subjective interpretation was more popular. It wasn't. In fact, it wasn't fully known until he put it into words, but when he did, many objective truths about the poem were made manifest to anyone who cared to see them and especially to those who had always had a sense for them but lacked the articulation. In short, Tolkien's interpretation was better than that of prior critics, and people knew it. They knew it because it is possible for humans to recognize when something is objectively true, especially when it provides relief against that which has been less than fully true.What I am asserting here seems in direct opposition to what you say a little later in your post: "I propose to my students that the reason for objectively seeking out different interpretations is not to pick the right one." My first thought about this is that there might not be a "right one." The presence of several interpretations is no guarantee that any of them has a good grasp on what is being interpreted. Alternatively, they might all be basically "right," more or less, though perhaps with differing levels of rhetorical effectiveness. In any case, I would always encourage my students to compare and contrast, to evaluate arguments, to measure what they read against reality, insofar as they have access to it. When the object is truth, then everyone--critics and readers--is essentially working together toward the same goal, though some with more success than others.But it sounds like, for you, the object is not so much truth as it is to work out a kind of subjective average in one's own mind. You say, "[The reason for seeking out different interpretations] is to get a non-objective sense of the center and most comprehensive comprehension of all those various interpretations." There is nothing wrong, of course, with understanding a variety of interpretations, but if the end of that understanding is merely to find the center of that variety, then we have diverted our gaze from the object under consideration and shifted it to the amalgamated opinion of the considerers. This is not exactly pure subjectivism, which would be interested only in one's own opinion, but it is a kind of preoccupation with potential means rather than the use of those means toward their natural end: to arrive at truth regarding the object under consideration.In your paragraph about morality, I'm not sure I follow the shift from moral code to moral bond. To recognize a moral code, whether subjective or objective, is a different mental act than to trust a neighbor not to harm you. The former is concerned with classification (i.e. this is good, this is evil) while the latter is concerned with prudential judgment (I predict that you will not burn my house down). So once again, both acts can be present: I can judge (whether accurately or not) that someone's burning down my house would be an evil act even as I also judge (whether accurately or not) that I do not think you will commit this act. Then if you do actually burn down my house, I will know that my trust was misplaced; the house will go up in smoke, but the classification of arson as evil will be quite untouched by those flames.It's true that if this happened, I would no longer trust you not to burn my house down. And yes, it's also possible, depending on how much I trusted you to begin with, that I might start to doubt, in general, my judgment of who is trustworthy and who is not. But to lose trust in others or in one's ability to assess the trustworthiness of others is not the same as losing the sense that some things are moral and that other things are immoral.I too find Lance and Margot to be untrustworthy in serious ways. The acts that reveal their untrustworthiness are also acts I understand to be objectively immoral. I would argue further that to even speak of trust and distrust once again implies an objective sense of morality in the one who trusts or distrusts. What makes us trust someone are typically things understood to be morally good: honesty, forthrightness, patience, stability, etc.. What makes us distrust someone are typically things understood to be morally bad: lying, deception, short-temperedness, fickleness, etc.. We know these things. Deep down.Mike
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