I've been thinking about the dilemma Siegel and Deven raise about whether justice or truth should be a philosopher's first love (in those at least hypothetical instances where they conflict). It occurs to me that, after all, people do epistemology, whereas epistemology does not do people, and that this fact suggests a lexical ordering. Too flippant by half, of course, but I thought it was kind of clever.
More seriously, the search for truth as such perhaps ought to presume at least baseline decency in human relations. Though we can separate the philosophical power of a Heidegger, for example, from his active participation in the Nazi party, we rightly find some deep inconsiderateness in his having forced us to make the distinction. Since his involvement was not merely that of a person caught in unpleasant circumstances, but active, even enthusiastic participation (as a university administrator he systematically and unapologetically purged Jews), the task is more than an acknowlegment of human frailty under pressure; it's a real crime against philosophy (even if the content of the philosophy itself bears no Nazi taint).
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I think this is a successful compromise. I would be remiss to suggest that we ought to dismiss the tremendously important insights of someone like Heidegger because of his heinous politics. This, of course, would be an ad hominem. But it seems to me that, in the instance that the insights themselves militate against justice, the insights no longer matter. I do not think that it would be errantly postmodern to dispense with the search for truth in this instance. After all, what good is truth if it does not serve justice?
I would amend this in a couple of ways. To the extent that Heidegger's thought, as opposed to his awful politics, might be contrary to justice, it is not quite the case that they no longer matter. Rather, what philosophers must do to such dangerous ideas is take them seriously enough to show precisely where they are mistaken.
Thus the search for truth must indeed go on in such a case, precisely because of the danger of the ideas, and not least because we must be constantly alert to the possibility, even probability, that we ourselves understand less than we think, either about truth or about justice.
A hidden presupposition underlying my last post, perhaps, is that whereas the search for truth may sometimes stray into unjust territory, the truth at which we aim cannot, in the end, be incompatible with justice. So if our findings are morally horrible, that's one signal that we're on the wrong track (and maybe this was Deven's point).
Of course, our view of what is ultimately just and unjust, as we saw in Republic, is as subject to correction as our view of any other truth. I think it's fair to say that the Socratic choice, at least in the absence of any indisputable knowledge, is to prioritize justice.
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