"Just following unjust orders": the implicatures of deontic Grice

by J. L. Speranza
-- for the Grice Club.

From the link provided by Kramer, "Breaking the law" (comment, this blog):

http://www.eichmannprosecutorinterview.org/part_three.html

There is "[e]vidence that Eichmann, who claimed just to be following orders," also did four other things:

FIRST,

Eichmann "overrule[s] the Regent of Hungary
to insure the deportation of a trainload of Hungarian Jew."

SECOND,

Eichmann "[d]isregard[s] the directions of
the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, for which
he was reprimanded, when those directions
would have spared Jewish live."

THIRD,

Eichmann "[t]rie[s] to frustrate the
directive of another superior, Ernst
Kaltenbrunner, with respect to
killing captured Jewish parachutists."

FOURTH,

"On one occasion, [Eichmann] even undermine[s] an
agreement which Hitler had reached with the
Hungarian Regent which would have saved 8,700 Jewish
Hungarian families."

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Implicatures of 'only':

Is 'only' equivalent with 'just'?

i. I was just following orders.
ii. I was ONLY following orders.

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Is there a scalar implicature:

cfr.

'merely'.

iii. I was merely following orders.

Grice on contrastive stress:

"I was not following orders; I was MERELY following orders" (WoW:iii -- Stress, adapted).

IMPLICATURE:

"regardless of whether the order was ... whatever".

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Oddly, I discussed all this vis a vis Habermas in my "Strategy" essay that Habermas cared to quote in his "Pragmatics of Communication". For Habermas, as once blogger (elsehwere) has it, "Habemas walks in where Grice fears to tread".

For Habermas it is VALIDITY claims, and righteousness (Richtigkeit) is just one of them!

I approached Habermas about this (at the Goethe Institute) with words to the effect, "Surely your four validity claims have something more than a mere resemblance to Grice's scheme".

Perhaps 'scheme' was the wrong word to use -- in German!

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In any case, he seems to have felt superior to Grice in that Grice is liberal enough NOT to bring in 'moral' issues to the cooperative principle!

Consider the irritating passage in Grice, WoW:ii later sort of overridden in the Retrospective Epilogue.

He refers to things like

"Be polite"

and other maxims as being 'aesthetic' or "moral" in character. I.e. he is suggesting that there are "MORAL maxims" which his 'conversational' maxims are NOT!

Try to tell your son that 'Try to make your contribution one that is true' is IMMORAL!