John - Relevant Considerations

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Relevant Considerations

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John Speaking

So relevance in a given case may depend on the concepts, principles, and facts that we bring to the situation?

Sometimes, everything else is in place and we only need to ascertain some fact, or how to achieve some goal. The way we set up the question about whether race was relevant to college admission was like that. In other cases, all the facts may be agreed upon but we need to decide a philosophical or theological question like "What is a person?" or "Does the embryo bear the image of God?" The personhood of the embryo would be of enormous relevance within a certain moral framework. Whether the embryo bears the image of God would be of enormous importance within another framework.

In other cases, deciding what is relevance may be a moral decision. When we decided in this country that race was irrelevant to questions of employment, perhaps that was a moral judgment.

Deciding what is relevant requires answers to different kinds of questions in different cases. I can think of several possibilities:

Sometimes the relevance of a factor may turn on a scientific fact or on establishing a causal connection between various factors. For example, when we have a clear purpose in mind, science may be able to tell us what factors are relevant to achieving that purpose.
Sometimes relevance may be determined by a moral judgment.
Sometimes relevance may be due to a logical connection between two concepts.

Hey, the water is getting deeper here. Can't anything be simple anymore?


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