The existence of ethics
I think before we can talk about Mill or Kant, or the nature of moral obligation or how moral attitudes figure into morality itself, and so on, we have to ask a more fundamental question: what IS ethics? What is an ethical exemplar's essential features that are required to say it is ethical at all? This is reductive: actual ethical affairs are variable in content and matters at stake. The philosophical question is, how do we talk about ethics at a level where these incidentals are suspended so as to identify the "what is it?" of an ethical matter? Suspended are the book that is stolen, the value of the book, the intent to steal, the rationalization, and, of course, the search for a principle of determining what to do (categorical imperative and duty, principles of utility and hedonic measuring: not that these are unimportant, but that they are not about the question I am asking here).
What is a proper analysis of the "parts" of an ethical problem? A geologist will observe a stone, identify mica, feldspar, quartz, determine age, the crystalline structure, and so on. What is "in" an ethical case?
Why do this? Well, it is philosophically interesting, nay, important. All this talk about how attitudes vary and cultures cannot agree and the popularity of ethical nihilism seems to beg the question: What is it, exactly, that is "annihilated"?
What is a proper analysis of the "parts" of an ethical problem? A geologist will observe a stone, identify mica, feldspar, quartz, determine age, the crystalline structure, and so on. What is "in" an ethical case?
Why do this? Well, it is philosophically interesting, nay, important. All this talk about how attitudes vary and cultures cannot agree and the popularity of ethical nihilism seems to beg the question: What is it, exactly, that is "annihilated"?
Comments (326)
Quoting The Definition of Morality
It is not the definition of moral theory I am after. Note how this "definition" puts the burden of analysis on the "target", then proceeds to defer to psychologists, anthropologists and the rest. I ask, in order tp have a moral theory at all, you have to have something before you to theorize about. What is it there, in the reduced analysis of actual moral affair, that can make moral theorizing possible? If an anthropologist is going to proceed with an anthropological take on ethics, she is going to have a tendential perspective. I want to know, a tendential perspective about what? Does this yield yet another perspective that is deferred to? Or, if not this, then what?
Consider, after all, the first moral utterance of every child: "It's not fair!" This is an untaught appeal to fairness and justice.
No, you got the wrong idea. Read on.
This answer seeks to smuggle a specific position on metaethics into the very definition of the subject matter. This is all too common in discussions such as this.
Ethics in general, is the nature of man.
A theory on the nature of man gives a ethical doctrine related to it.
Same as it ever was.....
As if there were an "essence" which all men had in common and which could be set out in a book...
The problem of ethics is not "what is the case" but "What do we do"?
And this specific position is?
Of course. But oughts are about normativity and they are everywhere. One ought to put on socks before shoes. But all oughts have their terms of engagement. At the basic level, what are the "terms" of ethics? Of course, there is a long history here, but Mill or Bentham, say, begged this question.
Rationality follows these terms rather than dictating them.
But the distinction I pointed out to @Mww seems pivotal: ethics is not about what is the case but what to do. It is not to be found by looking around at the world, but in deciding what actions one will take.
SO there's a start.
How can you lift an arm without knowing what an arm is?
Quoting Banno
I think that's backwards. The latter is decided on the basis of the former: "what do we do?" is the question of morality which is variously answered by (naive, banal or reflective) ethics.
What you describe is a structured event whereby "inborn" feelings of fairness and justice are taken up in fixed systems of thought. I am sure this is somewhere close to right. But those inborn concepts and feelings, how inborn are they? what is the separation between what is acculturated and what is "natural"? And even if something natural is discovered, ain't this at best a prima facie part of the normativity? That is, if I have a feeling, a pang of conscience, isn't this to be brought up under review to see if it's right? And this applies as well to way we apply the established code: we have laws, rules, legally determined or otherwise, but the ethical correctness of these is complicated.
Of course, we all see where this goes: These complications are what underlies any given determination, prescription, decision. One has to work things out if one is to go beyond the reflexive obedience of a traffic light, and this leads to interpretative trouble. But beneath this trouble (which is beneath the reflexive act) isn't there something more analytically fundamental?
I think there is. I think ethics is Real, not just a construct. All constructs are constructs OF something. All meaningful affairs are meaningful only to the extent that there is a material basis for them.
Well in any case, it would seem that "how" needs a "what". (i.e What is the plan, how are we going to execute it). Unless good and evil is universal amongst mankind.
If good is not known to be a universal, then how one acts "good" is relegated to subjective standards, which kind of defeats the point of making a list on "how" to do things.
Note how the definition is supposed to identify " the target of moral theorizing. So, social theory, e.g., finds this target and then can organize its theorizing with this as its objective. It enables "empirically-oriented theorists to design their experiments or formulate their hypotheses without prejudicing matters." Well said, I say. Alas, if one is looking for something substantive about the nature of ethics, one is directed toward what it is these disciplines tell us.
Calling ethics the target of all thinking that deals with ethics is vacuous. This is a philosophical problem, not an empirical one.
Why, metaethics? Whatever cold you mean by this?
Keep in mind, there are metaethical answers to this question that vary wildly.
Er, is what odd? Sorry, I just didn't know which part of what I said you were referring to.
Well, this just a tad general, don't you think? Reason could be here substituted for ethics and it would still be true. What kind of doctrine would an ethical doctrine be? And once you have that doctrine, what are the assumptions built into it that would expose a deeper understanding of ethics?
Meh. Ethical actions tend to betray rationality more often then not, I'd think.
But then, it is certainly a different matter using a conditional logical form to talk about the weather, on the one hand, and talking about assaulting Mrs. Griswald for her cookies. Reason is omnipresent. Perhaps, so is ethics, in a way. But one cannot call ethics an exercise in reason and think the matter done.
I wrote the following two papers explaining why ethics can't be defined. The thrust of my thesis was that ethics in fact comprises two separate and irreconcilable systems, each of which can be defined, but the two are always lumped together into one, and that causes a lot of confusion for philosophers. There are distinct similarities and differences between the two systems which I tried to describe in the papers.
Everyone on this site poo-pooed on these papers, those who criticized them, but mainly those who never even bothered to look at them.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10744/ethics-explained-to-smooth-out-all-wrinkles-in-current-debates-neo-darwinist-approach/p1
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10903/shortened-version-of-theory-of-morality-some-objected-to-the-conversational-style-of-my-paper
Sorry, I couldn't make sense of this.
I think Apostrophel talks about logic and truth; how logical speech does not ALWAYS concern itself with ethics, so restricting ethics as a subset of reason is a bit of a useless exercise, is what I think he is saying. If he says that, I agree.
Ohh. I would agree as well if that's the case.
They ramble on with different arguments here and there with different people, finally Socrates puts on the table his version of ethics: Ideals, Forms, and the cave.
WTF? Where is the ethics in there, old foker? WHERE'S THE BEEF??
Socrates is the most misguiding and most over-rated philosopher of all times.
Let's ask him if he meant to say that.
Apostrophel, did you mean to say what we came up with speculatively trying to understand you?
I'll have to come back tomorrow to check. I got a plane to catch, and I need my beauty sleep.
Good luck in the ring.
What ring? It does not ring a bell.
You mean like a boxing ring? A fighting arena?
Quoting Astrophel
What makes you think we should talk about ethics ‘in general’ before talking about Mill or Kant? This reminds me of what Foucault does with concepts like sexuality
or morality. Rather than giving us a history of something , which pre-supposes the meaning and then inserts it into the history, he gives us a genealogy of a concept, showing us that its history isn’t a history of changing applications or attitudes towards what has already been assumed in its basic structure. Rather, a genealogical analysis reveals a thoroughgoing transformation of the concept itself from one historical
period to the next. So in looking for the ‘parts’ of ethics which are transcendent to cultural contingency, we have to ask what it is that belongs to the genealogical structure in general. That may bring us to something on the order of local systems of intelligibility and their transformations. Ethics ‘in general’ may then be analyzed in terms of a drive toward creating new futures, an impetus to societal transformation oriented around diversification of values.
Only some ethical theories involve a list of how to do things. Seems an add approach, I agree; as if this or that rule might be formulated that would work in all cases.
Talk of universals looks like a hang over from talk of what is the case - and never worked that well there.
Subjective standards - whatever they are - won't be of much help. Ethics, on the other hand, seems to involve taking the concerns of others into account.
Sure it is, but so was the question to which it referred.
Quoting Astrophel
To ask “what IS reason, you mean? Otherwise, I don’t understand the question. Anyway, not so sure it makes sense to ask what reason is. To reason about reason is intrinsically circular, whereas to reason from an ethical...or more accurately, a moral, predisposition.....is not. Ethics presupposes reason; reason does not presupposes ethics. So I don’t think there’s sufficient justification to substitute one for the other.
Quoting Astrophel
If ethics in general is the nature of man, then an ethical doctrine would be the kind premised on whatever one thinks the nature of man to be, then develops a metaphysics that relates one to the other. Pick a starting point, go from there.
Quoting Astrophel
A deeper understanding of what ethics is, would be given as logical derivative of the metaphysics. It’s a metaphysical domain.....there are no proofs beyond the logical. So maybe something is always assumed, somewhere in the system.
And again, I'g put it in terms of direction of fit rather than rhetoric and dialectic.
But you already know how this goes. One doesn't do until one know what lies before one. And further: the question cares nothing about what to do. It assumes one has an issue and things are in the balance. Philosophy steps in with its inexhaustible curiosity and asks the question about a thing's nature or essence. Asking such a question may not solve any particular ethical problem, but that is not the point. The point is, what IS an ethical problem qua ethical? The answer may reveal something that has meaning beyond actions, for in this analysis, the inquiry at one point has to be about ethical agency. Asking what ethics is implicitly asks what ethical agency is, and things get far more interesting.
I'll read one. Then I'll get back to you.
What is non reciprocal helping? I, mean, someone is not reciprocating in their .....help?
I'm not sure that is right. We often - even mostly - are obliged to act before having a clear account of what is the case.
I recall an excellent analysis of institutions that suggested that the need to be seen to act usually overwhelmed the need to collect information; resulting in irrational decisions justified post-hoc.
Quoting Astrophel
In that regard philosophy is must unhelpful. No sooner is an essence found than some bugger undermines it.
So I remain unconvinced that any general ethics setting out rules for moral action could be applicable to all situations.
You said, "Meh. Ethical actions tend to betray rationality more often then not, I'd think." I take this to mean you think talk about ethics is reducible to what reason can say qua reason. So, I am an ethical agent in so far as I am rational, and it is rationality out of which ethics comes into existence.
Something like that?
That's a ballsy statement. Nietzsche would have agreed but he was... Nietzsche. What's your excuse? :razz:
Quoting Astrophel
Human beings are meaning making creatures. We can't help but contrive and codify, systems, rules, positions, behaviours. Why is ethics different to any other human behaviour? Or are you coming at this from a foundational position?
Not much in the way of speculation is called for. Merely description. When we want to philosophically analyze ethical issues, we generally look to theory. I am asking that this be put off until we actually know what it is that sits before you that you are theorizing about. Is there an objection to this?
To the extent that we see them expressed in even 'unintelligent' and very nonhuman species, such as fish, we can guess: quite.
Quoting Astrophel
The innate ethical tendencies are shaped and directed by culture in very varied ways. The same as with our innate linguistic tendencies, sexual tendencies, etc.
Quoting Astrophel
Except, our innate moral intuitions already underlie any such review. Reason here can only rationalize what we already feel to be true.
Quoting Astrophel
You are one of many who feels compelled to believe that ethics is Real with a capital R. I don't sympathize. Do you seriously think there is a material basis for ethics? This is
philosophically naive.
Good. What does phenomenology make of ethics - isn't this the approach you are suggesting? For my money what sits before ethics is behaviour that either repels or attracts us. Then comes the postulation.
But you know what I'm going to say already, I suspect. In what I have read of Husserl and his intuitive foundation as a bedrock of philosophical analysis, I do not find a suitable account in the reduction of ethical issues. Only Levinas sees this. All matters bow low to ethics/aesthetics, for here is existential basis for all conceivable matters. And studies in the principles of historical progressions presuppose something more basic, and this is the intuited presence of value-in-the-world.
Is this to say that ethics is grounded in something apodictic, intuitively insisting, like the principle of sufficient cause? Yes, I actually believe this is the case.
I don't wish to discuss reason beyond saying, with Hume, that reason is just a vessel (and Kant did analyze reason, calling it a synthetic principle, but then, you are quite right to say, as Wittgenstein would tell us, that this would be an analysis that presupposes exactly what is to be questioned. That's most egregious question begging. Then again, it is well understood that that Kant was not assuming the perspective of God. He was very clear about this).
The point I was making is that rationality as such, as principled thinking, is not sufficient for an analysis of ethics. But, one can say the same for anything at all one an think of; it's trivially true, for anything that can be thought at all requires reason, making reason always a necessary but insufficient condition.
Reason does not presuppose ethics? True. But it is more interesting than this in actuality. Not ethics, but value, and value is a presupposition of both ethics and aesthetics. Reason is, after all, an abstraction from the experience. There is no "reason" as an observable existence. There is judgment, then there is abstraction from judgment, which we call reason. Nor is there value which can be laid before our eyes. Value is rather an abstraction from experience.
So, to make the point I m defending, I think when one looks closely at an ethical matter, and puts aside all else that would otherwise intrude into an interpretation of what is there, one will "see" that matter for what it is, and it is not a discursive discovery, it is intuitive. Ethics has an intuitive dimension that exceeds the contingencies of theory.
Any idea of ‘ethical nihilism’ is rather stupid because it is like saying I cannot measure the concept of ‘string’ therefore the concept of ‘string’ is of no value whatsoever. We can actually measure the length of a piece of string though and understand various ways to use a piece of string.
I haven’t read any posts here but just noticed you saying the same thing above briefly so I’ll leave it there. It is obvious. What is obvious some people stubbornly struggle with because it doesn’t map onto their current scheme of the world.
Why? I don’t see any solid evidence to suggest that ‘rationality’ is somehow distinct from ethics let alone prior to it? These are just terms we use for convenience and what is convenient in one situation is meaningless in another … I think this is ‘another’.
Not necessarily true. Often enough, for us pathetic humans, we are passengers to our ‘actions’ then justify them after the effect deferring authorship dependent upon the perceived value of the outcome.
We (the passing judgement) is merely pushing against the wave of what has happened in order to better equip (or try to) for future events. As we’re temporally focused/confused we often do this in a hindsight sense too much and stagnate. Letting go of time is not something we seem to recognise or understand. We live with a repeated pattern (memory) that is constantly rewriting itself and implanting ‘errors’ that suit our wants/needs.
Most, if not all ‘ethical’ views, are done after the matter of fact. This is probably where the nihilism can slip in … but it is still mistaken because it is contrary by its ‘principles’.
If these studies conclude that history is a progression, then they are already assuming a fixed basis of the movement of history, a founding value defining the progress as progress rather than mere change. Progress is a ‘good’ kind of change, a change that conserves its origin. This conserving of the good isn’t a placing of ethics in first position as Levinas thinks, it’s a confusion of ethics with Nietzsche’s aesthetic ideal, the attempt to freeze history by keeping the ethical impulse at a distance from the contingency of time.
What we believe will nearly always overwhelm what we observe. This is especially the case for pillars upon which we orientate our lives - rightly or wrongly. We need to be delusional and misinformed in order to grasp at understanding as if some ultimate understanding exists … that is basically the core of ‘ethics’.
Sure, all that.
The salient point is that what separates Ethics (with an "E")from other studies is the focus on changing the way things are, not on describing the way things are.
That ethics tends to post hoc rationalisation adds to the need for cultivating the habits of virtue.
Ethics is something to do with behavior, and in particular something to do with our behavior towards one another, but there are many ways to describe two (or more) persons in relation to each other without an ethical ‘dimension’, as we might say — biological, economic, and so on.
I’m tempted to say something like this: suppose we start not with persons only, but with another element, something like The Good. Seriously, full-on Plato. Suppose we think the minimum configuration we’re interested in is two people in relation to each other and also in relation to The Good. This, rather than just taking “good” as a way we might categorize the relations obtaining between people, because we want more than that: an ethical act, an ethical moment would be one that is not just a matter of what I do to you “being good” or not, but also of my “being good”, of my acting out of goodness, of my sharing in goodness with you, inviting you also to be good, of inviting you also to take up a relation to The Good as I have, recognizing your capacity to relate to The Good as I do, and so on. Not a matter only of categorizing an action, but of a multifaceted interaction with this third thing.
Reifying it like this can also serve to cut off the temptation to ‘finish’ good instrumentally — that is, as “good for” something or other. An ethical action is one that is good, full-stop, not good for you, or for your happiness, or your well-being, or for society, or for anything. Not in furtherance of some purpose, higher or lower, something we might eventually attribute simply to individual (or social, or biological) preference or habit or desire, but only in relation to The Good. If I act with one eye on you and the other on this third thing, The Good, with a commitment to you but also to this other thing, that is ethical. It’s not just you that has a claim on me, but this other thing as well.
I generally go in fear of Platonism, but off the top of my head I can’t really think of another way adequately to convey the absoluteness of the ethical, if you see what I mean. And I can’t imagine how we give substance to this third thing, The Good. I’ve no idea what to say about it. Maybe it’s just a way of throwing everything that touches our ways of behaving toward each other into one basket — all the biological, social, cultural factors, all those little hints and warnings and exhortations about what is good. All of that taken together seems to have a life, or at least an existence, of its own, that we find ourselves beholden to as much as we are beholden to ourselves and to each other.
Ethics is about presupposing a set of rules and means to live by that suit ALL people OR enough people to help the most people in the long run … or even to help humanity in the long run rather than the most people (hence how genocides and war are ‘justified’ by some).
I am against ‘ethics’ in this sense. I am against rules set out by others regardless of there use to me. My view is my view and if I think something is okay then I’m good. Sometimes this upsets others and that is just something I have to live with rather than ‘justify’. I think moral justification is probably the singular most dangerous element of human cultures.
The moral journey is an individual one and all make the necessary mistake of looking for public backing for their views rather than operating and adjusting them as suits experienced living. Thankfully enough people are too sheeplike most of the time so the minority have more clout. In more recent times this has become imbalanced and we’ve seen dozens of examples of this since history began (and likely further back than that?). When I said ‘recent’ I was talking on an evolutionary scale! I do still view the modern era as shedding more light on this problem because of the population explosion, but my view is myopic because I’ve not even been alive for half a century yet and just because I believe I am ‘better’ than most at viewing the human species with a good degree of objective indifference it doesn’t make it so :D
If there is a foundation that reveals itself in the inspection of the phenomenon of ethics, then what would that be?
If it was used for ethics it would have to take on other forms. Heidegger and others (the hermeneutical types) probably go there in part with their slither the greater phenomenological body (meaning based principally on interpretations of mere words tangential to experience).
Odd here: You speak of innate moral intuitions, then deride ethical Realism with a capital R.
At any rate, no it's not naïve at all. In fact, the idea is so obvious than I cannot even imagine seriously dismissing it. Keep in mind that an ethical situation is what I am calling a thing of parts, and what I mean by this is that is stands analysis as a simple ethical case apart from any theory, empirical or otherwise. There are the facts of a case, then there is the intuitive essence. This latter carries the argument.
I ask then, what is in an attraction or repulsion?
Sorry about this elentic method of going about this. My argument is not popular, so I am not going to simply lay it out for all to misconstrue. Best if I let others come to see it as I do through their own reasoning. At least they can't blame me when they themselves have constructed the premises.
I don't follow.
But it is not up to me, I mean, I don't decide what is delicious, disgusting, joyful, wretched and so on. I may choose among things, but choices all presuppose an established value, which is there, in the ethical matter, and ethics and all of its complications turns on this.
Joy is an attitude not really a ‘feeling’. The ‘feeling’ is attached to an attitude and the attitude to the feeling. They are not the same thing yet exist due to each other. We have gone past the point where they can be viewed as one item because our language has evolved this way due to societal interactions.
The ‘established value’ is established how and by whom/what?
In terms of philosophical investigation we ‘view’ a sound and notice that it requires volume, tone and timbre. We cannot talk about a sound without these things. It is nonsensical to then atomise ‘volume’ endlessly.
We make value judgements based on the instant. This is different to meditating on how these judgements are made. By meditating on how the judgements are made we are necessarily involved in judgements of judgements of judgements … or we can simply pick very different items of judgement and see if anything common shows itself. Either way we’re forcing our will upon the situation so we don’t know if we’ll favour what is or what we want to believe is.
We rather not have things done to us.. This can be summarized in a principle: Don't do things to others you wouldn't want done to you.. This "don't want it done to us" can be generally deemed as "harm", or "suffering". Don't do it to others is a good place to start. Don't start it for others is also part of that.
The ‘emotional wellbeing’ involves self-deception as much as revelation (or perhaps more so).
The ‘rational’ is tied to the disassociation of authorship over our actions. All too often people ‘rationalise’ their actions (pre/post) in order to protect/confront their emotional states. To look at ourselves and see how monstrous we are (not can be, WE ARE) is not an easy task or a sensible one for that matter, unless we understand the danger … which we cannot. This is basically the Jungian Shadow.
The counter to that is that people have different opinions on what is good or bad. Your assumption of good onto someone else could be drastically wrong. Then we have a more important foundation.. be cautious to what you do to others, as it may not be what they want, and if they mistakenly did that to you, you might not want it either. Don't presume. Don't start create situations for others that create collateral damage for them, if you can help it.
I suspect many are built into our lizards brains and may not be related to rational thought. Some are about survival and procreation. I hate it when people rest all things on evolution but I suspect that we are repulsed and attracted by biological imperatives which then work their way up over history into predilections and imperatives.
Curious point - many animals have strong codes of behaviour. Where does that come from? Same as above I'd say. They keep it simple, they clearly don't go on the lecture circuit advocating mindfulness or contemplative prayer.
Kant's old rationalisation itself relies on recognising the other. That's were we start.
Yeah but then I sort of gave the counter.. people's ideas of what they might like can differ.. Thus I would say that lest one is unethical by being unduly negligent, the foundation would seem weighted such that it is best to not create harm unnecessarily upon others. When given the choice of creating harm in order to create happiness, not creating harm wins out.
Are dichotic features real? How are difference defined? What is a the difference between open and closed as opposed to hot and cold? Opposites come in various forms and some are harder to categorise than others. Some can be called gradable in one situation and something else in another.
I can be NOT hot but not necessarily cold. The door be open OR closed NOT somewhere in between.
Attraction and repulsion are just two ways of saying the exact same thing depending on what features you are focusing on.
I don't think the point is to take the Golden Rule in such a concrete manner. 'Do unto others' can mean we respect the other's preferences even if we don't share them, just as we how they well respect ours. Live and let live. No one has ever started a bar fight or war over being shown excessive courtesy... or not being stolen from or assaulted or murdered.
What makes something ‘repulsive’ is the same as what makes it ‘attractive’ … novelty! Fear is part of discovery in some step of the journey. Discovery without some initial comprehension of fear isn’t discovery it is just ‘normal’.
I actually agree with that assessment. But I am giving an example where someone presumes the other person wants something because they themselves want it.. Taking the ultra-affirmative version creates an ethic that is not "live and let live" but "live and assume everyone should want what I want". Thus if I took an action that forced your hand because I am doing what I would have wanted, that is unethical.
If the history is IN the occurrent ethical issue then I follow the epoche down to the wire: I call the history incidental, Hume's facts, along with everything else that would steer judgment that is factual. This would include physiological details, the dialectic tension between opposing values, claims about our natural constitution, legally and culturally arguments, and so on. You see, I am convinced Husserl was on to something in his reduction to essentials, the "originary presentive intuitions" but everywhere I look, I see Derrida deconstructing what is supposed to be originary. But then I follow follow Michel Henry's Four Principles of Phenomenology: So much reduction, so much givenness; so much appearing, so much being.
What then is given, and is there more or less givenness, being, appearance? Is there anything that can survive, that is, be intuitively free of, the "play of difference and deference," free of "taking something AS"? The answer, it seems, is yes nd no. No, because, and I am still working on the way to caste this, no, because language is the "through which" the given is given. Yes, because language does not construct affectivity (to speak broadly of feelings, likes, dislikes, etc.).
I don't want to freeze history. I want to discover what is "presuppositionless" in historically structured occurrent affairs, and affectivity (broadly conceived) is this.
The selfless man is spineless, selfish man is spineless. But the man who cares for being neither one nor the other … is the Self.
For Kant, ethics is simply a universal law! Consequences, ergo what an act leads to, whether happiness/sorrow, are immaterial.
For Bentham-Mill ethics is grounded in the happiness-suffering duo! Consequence, happiness/suffering to be specific, matter.
Are these not the same thing?
My best guess: Bentham-Mill ethics is basically an interim solution to ethical problems/dilemmas until such a point when Kantian ethics becomes practicable/implementable.
Depends on what is at issue. More to the point is when what we observe overwhelms what we believe. Language brings the world to heel with pass the salt and talk about late buses and busy family life and so on and so on. This world is where people live, but pull apart from this enterprise of busyness and ask basic questions, you discover all knowledge claims implicit in this are "open". This is a radical, and overarching openness that runs through all things, and is overwhelmingly alien to familiar thinking.
Quoting I like sushi
You said it yoursef: your taste will vary due to mood, etc. I am not a mood. When a mood comes to me, I can deal with it, true, but the mood and its alternatives are givens. You are thrown into a world of givens. Choice intervenes, but choices are only among what is given to choose; and so many are now beyond choice: I can't choose to hate chocolate or adore traffic noise.
That is the phenomenological approach. There is no statement of what is or isn't only constant reorientation through consciousness.
Quoting Astrophel
Where does the 'mood' come from? France? Make sense or don't speak. What is it you are 'dealing with' and what does this 'dealing with it' entail? Note: I'm not trying to be funny or evasive here nor am I expecting an answer ... that is counter productive to disentangling oneself from 'ethics' as a reasonable quest.
You can choose to hate chocolate or adore traffic noise. Saying you cannot does not make the plasticity of your taste disappear it merely covers it up. You may or may not be predisposed towards x more than y but that doesn't necessarily make x a certain choice over y.
If you say you cannot choose it is because you don't wish that to be the case because it is upsetting on some level of rationality (which includes emotional aspects too as it must ... unless I'm wrong!).
Well, you sound you would very much enjoy Emanuel Levinas. It's a tough nut to crack, requires patience if you've not read anything like this. But his Totality and Infinity is a revelation.
When we think of the Platonic Good, we think of the Republic, right? And the cave, the shadows, the sun and so on. Now, Plato was, I guess, the father of rational realism, and we think of the Good, it is some IDEA that all instantiations of good are of.
There is only one way to reify the Good, and that is, find what is Good (and Bad) in the fabric of things: just what is so bad about, say, a toothache?
Well yes - we kind of have two loose options - taking the Platonic ideal that all balance, goodness, order is located in the Logos and knowledge of this is available to all of us if we have the right teaching. Or we can take a more Nietzschian view, that all human truth is perspectival. Nietzsche has that great line - if you believe in grammar, you're a theist.
But to see this point, you have ask analytic questions. Sure, a system of laws. Now, why do we have laws? Asking why will eventually lead to foundational justifications. Indeed, all contingent goods and bads eventually go this way: It a great lamp because it's bright and so on. What good is brightness? Well, it good for this and that. And what good are these? It may sound tedious, but note where this line of questioning ends up: with some claim of inherent goodness. If this is not there, then you have a mere abstraction, nothing can be good for no reason that does not have its implicit foundational claim in the fabric of existence. Of course, it is not as if this being a good couch or that a bad pair of shoes is written in stone....or is it? The goodness of the couch is certainly tied to the vagaries my likes and dislikes, but the liking itself, the occurrent affair of liking something, something AT ALL, this is is beyond contingency. It doesn't matter why, or in what circumstance, or how evil one's intent is--- liking something, adoring it, despising it, and so forth, have in every case an existential counterpart: that which is in the world which is adored, despised and the rest.
Just to add, the argument for moral realism I defend is quite involved. This is but an iceberg's tip.
But you make it all so complicated. As for me, I observe the world, not at all like a scientist would. What is there, in the ethical case. There is the old lady, and there is Raskolnikov, there is the bludgeoning. What about this is there of Plato or the logos?If not here, in this typical case, then nowhere. One should not think down from established ideas to and interpretation of a particular; one has to first discover what is IN the particular given case that might warrant a dramatic move toward metaphysics.
Quoting hypericin
This:
Quoting hypericin
This doesn't just tell us what the subject of ethics is, but states a thesis about what ethics is (emphasis in the original). This thesis may be right or wrong - I am not going to argue about it here - but it can't be right or wrong by definition - that would be cheating.
I've always thought Kant's imperative rested with utility, notwithstanding the "good will". How can I universalize my maxim in any meaningful way unless the principle details the specifics of the case? And what is a case if not for the real value that is in play? Act utilitarianism seems right.
I don't think Kant would've agreed; unfortunately, he (Kant) is no more and all we can do is guess his responses. I'm too ignorant to comment on that matter.
This one seems uncomplicated (however I confess to finding Dostoevsky dull). Are you a Jordan Peterson neophyte?
If you believe in moral realism (derived via God or some kind of idealism) then you are likely to think killing is wrong.
If you believe there is no foundation, then you need to approach such questions existentially - what do you consider right and why. Maybe virtue can guide you, or principles like human flourishing - it's an open question.
Because you say so. I don't buy it. I'm not into atomisation. This is literally one of the main contentions Husserl had.
Quoting Astrophel
I don't believe this via certain experiences I've had. I cannot share those experiences though only state that I cannot fully justify what you are saying or really hold to it with a large degree of seriousness. Nor should you care about my experiences too much just go about your business splitting things in half and you'll find the loop eventually or deny it (or maybe I denied it?).
Quoting Astrophel
I find immoral to argue for a moral position. I think the term is far too suspect being entwined with social norms, claims of justification, reducing life to formulas and embedded in a medium (this one of words) that exists in a social format rather than one which is orientated about the individual being (Selfhood).
Humans are Legions whether alone or together.
As an exercise of thought anything can be justified and some things more easily than others. Understand it is a game though and not much more - that is probably the heart of what you are asking so there it is ... ethics is a game and it becomes more about what a game is ... you can go round and round, and so you should, until some of the parts and perspectives make more sense. What ever the hodgepodge conclusion you arrive at as sufficient will be nebulous and avoid precise articulation because we're not just words bundled up in a mindball.
Example: Maybe in an alien culture the females would select males based on how well they kill dolphins or build temples made of wood ... this would lay out a 'value system' upon which ethical schemes are based. In such a society maybe they question the underlying value of caring about temples made of wood or killing dolphins BUT they would still care about them to the point that such things have gone hand in hand, or tentacle in tentacle, with their evolutionary history.
When we look at humans we could take this tack too. How do females select mates? How do males select mates? How have such choices laid out the evolutionary groundwork for our ethical views via our biological predispositions and how influential are these 'innate' parts when it comes to us living out our lives?
Yeah, that was the intention. Seems my joke wasn't a KO...
Oh no, actually it was the opposite haha. I meant that ethical behaviour has a tend to not follow rationality.
Hm, I think I get the gist of it.
Seeing that we are talking ethics, I had to make sure...not to mistake it for Geiges' ring. (Plato refers to it in the Republic.) It made perfect sense in the context. But I still had to make it sure.
Quoting Banno
When I was fifteen, I worked out that ethics -- though a noble and grand feeling, and praised by society -- is an insidiously selfish act in each case of its manifestations. I figured some sort of a sacrifice is always part of an ethical behaviour. This, put together with the inherent aim of ethics to always benefit some other, it seems like the most unselfish, noble act.
BUT!! But. But the truth is that these unselfish acts invariably protect not the self, true, but the tribe, the family, the nation, the species. In other words, the derivatives of one's own DNA. And the beneficiary is invariably is also a protector of the person who sacrifices for the community.
This is sort of a scenario that plays out this way: "I pay a sacrifice to the community to help the community survive, so then they can protect me and help me survive too."
People help blind people across the street, and expect no reward; but the tribe has not lost a blind member, who is weak and not very useful for the survival of the tribe, and therefore of the individual, yet the blind DOES represent some value. He can do things that others can't or won't.
So... now there you go, John27, and tell us that ethics often contradict reason. I am sure that is how it is on the surface.. and the reason may be hidden from the person acting ethically... yet the final result (if such a thing exists... "final") or the intended final result is the most precisely and accurately formed best way to achieve with a seemingly unreasonable act.
Much like the selfishness is hidden in appearing unselfish, the reason is hidden (even from the person who acts morally) behind the apparent lack of reason.
These two totally hidden and yet invariably underlying concepts have been formed by evolution, whereby an unreasonable act is performed to carry out the reason down the road. The behaviour is randomly formed, yet of all randomly formed behaviours this is one that supplied survival superiority. So the reason and the selfishness are hidden, but the behaviour still serves them.
Yes, I would agree with all that, considering your disposition towards consequentialism. On the other hand, from another disposition rather than yours, ethics in itself, as a doctrine, is neither discursive nor intuitive; it is aesthetic. This follows from the notion that ethics presupposes morality. Whether or not that presuppositions holds, is what the philosophy is all about.
The key, I think, is your “what is there” is in need of something that says how “what is there” got to be there, and perhaps more importantly, what the “what” actually is.
To put aside intrusions into matters by interpretations of them, is counter to basic human epistemological nature. We want to know stuff, always have, always will. Even granting that intrusions, re: analysis, of matters sometimes just makes the matter less explained, isn’t going to prevent us from doing it.
This is rather to the point. What does one do with a phenomenology of ethics? I opened with the idea of attending to the case itself that stands there for determination, like a star to the astronomer. An astronomer will deploy paradigms of normal science, and this is not at all unlike what we do all the time: we observe a blade of grass and already the interpretative resources are in play, making the encounter a "regionalized" event. The assumption you bring to light is that this regionalized event of a singular apprehension fills the horizon of understanding. Kant was there before Heidegger: (sensory) intuitions without concepts are empty. But Husserl was revived after Heidegger and in spite of Derrida: Even in this hermeneutically saturated world, we still defer to what is there and it would be ac hoc to dismiss something that is firmly in our intuiitive midst. Husserl reduction is a method for discovery which he believed uncovered the intuitive world that stands before us unregarded (a Douglas Adams word that deserves respect!) There is trouble defending this, for intuitions are "of a piece" with interpretation and it cannot be otherwise. I think this right, but..
Enter ethics. In the analysis of a exemplar of ethical affairs, there is something there, int he intuition that is affective in nature, while certainly conceived AS (as Heidegger would put it) in the language taking it up, an existential residuum that defies deconstruction, tha t is, is analytically unassailable for it is not contignent, not a thing "of parts". Obviously, we understand it contextually, but IN all of this, something tht is not contingent stands before us.
Wittgenstein (in Culture and Values) says his idea of the Good is divinity. WITTGENSTEIN said this!! Why would he? I mean, there is a very good reason he went to al that trouble in the Tractatus to speak "nonsense".
I agree. And animals are, in my thinking, ethically included in our concerns about others. I also agree that "all things resting on evolution" is not the way to go. To me, evolution is a well established body of theories, but there is nothing in these that tell us anything about the qualitative nature of what is experienced beyond, This here was able to win out in the competition with alternatives for survival and reproduction. Pain is an evolutionary plus, but all this says is that pain is useful.
The question in my mind is, pain (and pleasure) was there, in the possibilities of genetic construction (randomly "chosen", of course). What is something like a living hell even there......AT ALL?
Of course, it is almost just a rhetorical question because there is no answer, one might say. I think there is an answer, but it lies in metaphysics; it isintimated here.
Now why should one ethical system preferred above another one? This meta-ethical question obviously can't be based on the ethical systems to be chosen from. There is no overarching ethical system giving a morally justified answer. All we can say is that the ethical systems exist (or are absent) in the people following them, and that it's amoral to impose them on people with force.
Quoting Astrophel
This is already a moral imperative. Who says the astronomer has to deploy "paradigms of normal science"? Kuhn may have analyzed science improperly.
Aesthetics and ethics Wittgenstein puts in the same bin. They are value generated. (Note how modern art aligns with ethical complexities: ANYTHING that can have an impact of an affective nature is both ethically and aesthetically viable.)
I have never appreciated any meaningful distinction between ethics and morality. They are the same problematic. there are "dictionary differences" I am aware.
This last is stickier. The history you refer to, the "how it got there" is important, for nothing meaningful is ever presented ex nihilo. That is, there is history in the understanding-- the acquisition of language, the acculturation process, and so on, and encounters we have bring that history to bear for interpretation. This is, roughly, the issue. Do I ever observe anything at all that is free of the temporal structure (the anticipation of a recollection that is projected into a future) of perceiving? Is all perceiving apperceiving?
The answer seems to be, yes, all that can be understood about what stands right before us is, if you will, an historical event. BUT: does this mean one cannot apprehend IN the language and culture matrix, something that stands outside of it?
It depends on what you mean by "apprehend". I know there is a cup on the table because I learned about cups and tables all my life and this recognition is actually a occurrent recollection. Repetition is what we are! But in the ethical problem, there is this unknown X, call it, in the spirit of Kant. As is, and this is a big point, I believe, speaking of Kant: where did Kant ever get that idea of noumena? He grudgingly had to postulate it, but why? It is because he could "see" the noumenal IN the phenomenon.
Noumena is not some impossible "out there"; it is an impossible "in here". This then moves to ethics, putting Kant aside, completely.
:up: An intelligible-pragmatic formulation of "the golden rule" (e.g. Confucius, Hillel the Elder, Buddha, Epicurus).
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think this is only a half right. We (can) know what is bad for our kind – h. sapiens as a species – that is, what harms us and makes us suffer. This makes disutilitarianism (especially as a normative modality of aretaic-eudaimonism) much more applicable to –reflectively practical for – flourishing than utilitarianism, deontologism, emotivism, etc.
No, I despise Jordan Peterson. Too smart for a conservative, and that makes conservative views sound better than they are.
Moral realism is not about this or that idea. It is a discovery in the analysis of what makes ethics, ethics. Is there something that defies contextuality that also makes ethics what it is? This is like asking, is there something in the nature of ethics that is absolute, that is there, logically prior to any ethical situation or discussion about it? the answer is: well, we all know there is something that is not us, and it "shows itself" in our affairs, imposes upon us needs to pragmatically engage. But all that is imposed is taken up in our world AS part of the way we deal with things. This "being taken up AS" is language and culture. So, I have a bit of moral reasoning, should I assault the old lady for her cookies? The context is the incidentals, how cruel she is, how she is a serial killer and deserves to die, but then, there is no solid proof of this, and she is owns an animal shelter, but those cookies are sooo good. And so on. The question is, in an analysis of this ethical case, is there anything that is to be conceived that is not defined by context? Most think this is an invitation to talk about evolution or biology, but then those are contexts. What about affective meaning? The pain of the bludgeoning qua pain?
Human fourishing simply begs the question: why should humans flourish? Something more basic is required. Something that cannot be analyzed because it issues from t he world itself.
I think I'm trying to say that we experience the ethical as absolute, as something beyond our opinions, not up to us, something in a way external.**
There is a word for this experience: 'conscience'. Maybe it's more phenomenologically sound to start with conscience than with The Good, which looks a little theorized already.
** There’s a nice bit of writing in “The Train Job” (Firefly, episode 2) that captures a difference I’m interested in:
“Sheriff: When a man finds out more about a situation like ours, well, then he faces a choice.
Mal: I don’t believe he does.”
What the Sheriff says is nice, spotlights individual responsibility — things don’t just happen, people do them. Acknowledge your part. That’s a solid starting point, certainly. Mal’s not disagreeing with that, but shifting the locus of responsibility away from the choice. If you know what is right, the real question is whether you will do it. It’s not a matter of choice but of character.
You see that sort of thing all through Confucius, as well: there are no moral dilemmas, there’s only degrees of courage and fortitude in doing what everyone acknowledges is right.
Quoting Banno
And so you reject a suffering-focused ethics as insufficient for judging 'what to do and what not to do to / with others'?
You mention the taking of something AS something, Heidegger’s depiction of the interpretive mode of understanding, and you use it as an example of contextual, contingent play. You oppose this contingency and historical relativity to affectivity, which you say is presuppositionless. But the ‘as’ structure not only depicts interpretation , it depicts temporality.
“ Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment, and on closer analysis it turns out to be time. And this being-ahead-of-myself as a returning is a
peculiar kind of movement that time itself constantly makes, if I may put it this way.”(Heidegger 2010b)
Because the basis of affectivity for Heidegger is temporality, the ‘as’ structure at the same time depicts the origin of affectivity. In experiencing something as something, Dasein comes back to its having been from its future, which is to say, it interprets a global context of relevance via the ‘as’ structure. In so doing, it “takes apart’ the relation between what it encounters and a previous instance of it by coming back to it from a fresh context of relevance. Seeing something as something makes sense of what is encountered in a new way, on the basis of a freshly modified totality of relevance. It is produced rather than discovered.
"The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all, and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing. "(Heidegger 1994)
Beings can only be produced because the foundation of their being is created anew as a ‘ground-laying’ every time we see something as something. The creative re-making of the ground, which Heidegger says is the essence of feeling, is at the same time the productive seeing of an intentional object.
“Every “foundation” in the sense we discussed comes too late with regard to the positing of the essence, because the productive seeing of the essence is itself a productive seeing of that in which the essence has its ground—a productive seeing of what its ground is. Knowledge of the essence is in itself a ground-laying. It is the positing of what lies under as ground“(Heidegger 1994)
Heidegger(1994) refers to this ground-laying as displacement, because the act of laying a ground is the displacing of a previous ground. This self-transcendending movement is the basis of all attunement( affectivity)
“What we are now calling displacement is the essential character of what we know under the name of disposition or feeling. A deep-rooted and very old habit of experience and speech stipulates that we interpret feelings and dispositions—as well as willing and thinking—in a psychological-anthropological sense as occurrences and processes within an organism, as psychic lived experiences, ones we either have or do not have. This also means that we are “subjects,” present at hand, who are displaced into these or those dispositions by “getting” them. In truth, however, it is the disposition that displaces us, displaces us into such and such a relation to the world, into this or that understanding or disclosure of the world, into such and such a resolve or occlusion of one’s self, a self which is essentially a being-in-the-world.”
So affectivity cannot be presuppositionless. Rather, it is the change in the frame of presuppositions( a way of comporting ourselves) that interpretation develops further in our everyday dealings with others. And the frame is always being reframed.
Well its strange, there are people who find the phenomenological perspective intuitively appealing, and others just don't understand why. Perhaps there is a phenomenological explanation for that, but it's beyond me. lol.
All good.
Quoting Astrophel
Yes, he did, and that’s an excellent reading. Nonetheless, Kant’s noumena pertains to the understanding thinking objects for itself, without relation to either the categories, or the human version of intuition.
If you’re thinking there is some possible unknown X pertaining to the matter of ethics, it would have to have a ground set for it. What would that look like? Kant’s unknown something reduces to a prohibition on sensibility, but that wouldn’t work for ethics, which requires unrestricted sensibility.
Interesting possibility, but methinks ‘tis a hard row to hoe.
———-
Quoting Astrophel
I’m sorry.....who???
But the question, unless I misunderstood, is not "what is ethics definitionally", but rather "what is ethics ontologically?".
For me this is as real as it gets. But capital R types usually want more, as you did in the previous post. You want to justify these intuitions, not realizing that any possible justification must take place within the framework of these intuitions.
Quoting Astrophel
What follows is so far from obvious as to be incomprehensible.
Quoting Astrophel
Our choices are made relative to a pre-existing system of understanding. But those choices alter that pre-existing system to some extent. Affectivity is a measure of the organizational dynamics of our system of understanding.
Our feelings express how effectively we are able to assimilate events along dimensions of similarity with respect to our prior experience. Negative feelings like guilt, anxiety, sadness and anger indicate impending or current chaos and confusion in our engagement with the world. Our audacity as experimenters , explorers and questioners determines how successfully we are able to
move beyond these crisis of intelligibility. It is up to us to re-construe our world , since there are no limits to the ways that we can re-organize how we make sense of things. Our feelings will tell us which channels of construing make the world a more creatively anticipatable place and which channels lead to the incoherence of negative moods.
Explaining behaviour in terms of evolution had a veneer of credibility within pop science, and is common on this forum - to the point of predictable tedium.
But there is little support amongst scientists. That's mostly because it is logically fraught. A little thought will show that any behaviour can be made to fit the model. In your own example, helping the blind and killing and eating them can both be explained as procuring survival.
Anda theory that explains anything is of no use.
And there's further philosophical reason to reject evolution as a basis for ethics, from Moore. Even if evolution proscribes what we do, it remains an open question as to whether we ought to do as evolution prescribes. Since we have at least some sort of control over our actions, it might be the case that we ought fight whatever it is that evolution drives us towards.
You had these ideas when you were fifteen. Apparently empathy grows as the brain develops, so perhaps you have grown out of them.
At the very bottom everything is an selfish thing, act, even ethics. The problem is that we people prefer the temporal Ego benefit, which isn't that significant and neglect the great long term Ego benefit that we can gain.
We have many "excuses" for doing that but still is totally wrong. Wrong mostly for our own selves.
I think you are right about courage and fortitude and a number of other virtues that describe a "good will". This is an essential point. There are good acts and their are good wills. This latter is not to held accountable for maximizing the former. But what does this mean, this "desire to do good" regardless of the efficacy or consequences?
This is quite a thing to say, and I think defending it puts one very hot water: after all, didn't Hitler think he was doing the right thing? And that serial killer, didn't he believe there was in place a clear rationalization for all he did (or she!), so the "good" of it did have its defense, no? But also there are those who wish to do well, nothing but good intentions, but their best laid plans go horribly wrong.
Very difficult issue, I believe. But I think the couple that goes off to dangerous environments to help people and infinitely more moral and decent and worthy of our praise than the wealthy one that gives thousands or millions to these same people and does many times more good. Bill Gates and his wife were great philanthropists??? Really? Where does greatness lie? My thought: it lies in sacrifice, unsung, often as it goes.
Quoting Astrophel
”But anyone who has really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and got something in return, – perhaps something of himself in return for something of himself – that he gave up here in order to have more there, perhaps in order to be more in general, or just to feel like “more.”
(Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)
“I dealt especially with the value of the ‘unegoistic', the instincts of compassion, self-denial, self-sacrifice which Schopenhauer had for so long gilded, deified and transcendentalized until he was finally left with them as those ‘values as such' on the basis of which he said ‘no' to life and to himself as well.”
(On the Genealogy of Morals)
But that's an argument, not phenomenology, right? It's also not an argument I find all that persuasive as it stands: I've always been struck by the Nazis trying to destroy evidence of the Holocaust as the red army advanced -- they were like children caught doing something they knew perfectly well was wrong.
But, yes, history and anthropology seem to teach us that different communities have different values. Some apparently have no problem with practicing slavery, say, or genital mutilation, and then we seem forced to conclude that there is something relative about our moral judgments. This is all still argument though, rather than a phenomenology of ethical experience. It's just that the argument suggests such a phenomenology is useless, because in every case we'll find people experiencing what seems to them ethical in the same way. (Orson Welles explained Touch of Evil by quoting Jean Renoir: "Everyone has their reasons.")
There are two ways to begin to answer the relativist (or perspectivist): one is to say that the claims of variation are overblown, that there is obvious and substantial overlap in the mores of different communities, and even some research to back that up; the other is to question the experience more closely. If those who practice genital mutilation have to overcome their recognition of a young girl's fear and trauma, have to suppress their sympathy for her, then that's not evidence that their conscience is constituted differently from ours, but that they choose not to listen to it, that they let some other consideration overrule it.
I think the jury is still out on whether phenomenology is doomed to failure here.
What phenomenology has going for it is that it doesn’t leave personal intent dangling in mid air by presuming it to be guided by mysterious impulses toward good or evil, selfishness or self-sacrifice. Instead, it ties motivation with sense making, and sense making with an interaubjective community. The idea of good or evil intent is a kind of superstition, a failure to understand motivation in the light of a need to anticipate events, which is neither selfish nor selfless.
Quoting Astrophel
I consider this to be wishful thinking and mysticism. You said earlier that I was making it more complicated than it need be and now here you are saying something serpentine like this. :razz:
Sounds like you want a transcendent or magical foundation point to this question and this may well be an emotional reaction. You won't be the first to reach this position.
Human flourishing does raise the question what does human flourishing look like when done well? We know that pretty much all people are attempting to achieve this. Even the Taliban - they, like all fundamentalists, think a particular interpretation of God's will leads to human flourishing - generally flourishing in the afterlife.
We can debate how best to accomplish human flourishing but there seems little doubt to me that pretty much all people have agreed in their own way that this is a starting point. I don't think we need any more than this.
Quoting Tom Storm
Timothy Snyder has an interesting book about the Holocaust, called Black Earth. He makes a particular point of explaining collaboration by pointing to the destruction of local institutions and the lack of "political capital" to organize resistance. It's understandable, he suggests, that people behaved badly in desperate circumstances. But then he spends a few chapters examining individuals who behaved heroically; he tries to find some explanation, but comes up empty. It's a really striking asymmetry.
Isn't there something a little mysterious about moral courage? What's so awful about acknowledging that?
I have no idea - you seem to be the one advocating mysteries. :smile:
But does all this track back to the initial question about the origins of ethical behaviour? It's not hard to see how heroism might belong just to a few outliers in a society where dark forces heavily punish dissent. It's also not hard to see why there may be no ready made answers for heroism - people often behave for reasons unknown even to themselves. And the ostensible reasons people give for why they do certain things are often post hoc rationalisations.
I just don’t know what moral courage is, except something we pat each other on the back for, a weapon we use against those whose motives we can’t relate to. Other words that work this way are selflessness, kindness, compassion. They reveal more about the person using them than those they are intended to describe. In particular , they reveal that the user of the word believes the self is some sort of fortress that has to be breached by force of will in order to want to do things for others. The user of the word doesn’t comprehend that the self is already social, that we can’t help but want to do things for others we identify with, and are threatens by those alien to us. The problems in the world aren’t due to ignoble intent but lack of insight. Words like selfish, uncourageous and immoral are part of the problem rather than the solution.
This is a theory that explains anything too.
I am a firm believer in evolutionary theory (ET) and how it shaped our lives, psyches, societies. This you call pop theory, but that's your main argument against it... appeal to authority.
Interestingly, the society that has been made big and strong and wealthy by applying one of the purest forms of evolutionary theory (or allowed it to develop without as much interference as other societies) to their economy, counts among its own people the strongest opponents of ET. I am not saying, because I don't know actually, that you are part of that society, Banno, I am just saying how that society is denying the validity of the theory the workings of which has made it big.
No.
Two arguments:
1. It has the structure of an all-and-some doctrine; for any behaviour there is some evolutionary advantage. Hence it provides and explanation for any behaviour, and it's negation. It is of no use.
2. It fails to answer the question of what we ought to do, so does not address ethics.
That it can be made to parallel your pet nationalistic myths is a curious piece of psychological biography, not an argument.
Isn’t there a difference between the man who, being completely selfish, doesn’t give a shit about the Jews being rounded up and does nothing to help them, and the man who sympathizes and wants to help them but is too scared to follow his conscience?
Quoting Joshs
But it’s quite specifically not a question of whether you want to do the right thing, but whether you can muster the courage to do so. Are we wrong to admire that sort of thing? Often enough, someone who behaves heroically doesn’t see themselves as having done anything particularly extraordinary, and thus has no explanation, since there’s nothing to explain. (“I just did what anyone would’ve done.”) And often enough, people talk of hoping they would behave as the hero did, but admitting that they don’t know whether they would — in short, people will admire behavior that they also think of as not quite a matter of choice. It’s a funny thing all around.
This is the strength of evolutionary theory, not the weakness. You just called it a weekness ("no use") because that supports your opinion. While what you said indeed supports that evolutionary theory MUST be true.
Actually, it does not fail to answer that question. Again, an argument by you that you used that declares an opposite to reality.
Banno, just because you utter a claim, it does not become the truth. You keep doing that, as far as I can see. You do other things as well, of course, but you more than once fall into the trap of believing unsubstantiated claims just on the strength of their being stated.
Measure twice lift once, as they say.
Sure. In the grand calculus of the universe, I suppose all acts are ethical, or are necessary in some shape or form.
I think we should admire insight, not mythical ethical attributes. Terms like courage are dangerous, because they imply a hostility toward and condemnation of those who we judge as lacking in courage.
The courageous person could just as well be described as sensation-seeking, reckless or simply someone who has a closer bond of understanding with those they try to help than others who are not ‘courageous’. If we don’t recognize use that we all
live within different worlds of interpretation , we end up forcing everyone into a single world and then have no choice to but to explain differences of behavior in terms of ethical intent and associated concepts like courage and altruism.
Quoting Joshs
Of course, I see this (not, of course, I understand Heidegger so well. This certainly isn't true). But to pre "suppose"-- this goes to comprehension. Affectivity may be "of a piece" with the future making event, but, I would argue, affect is not interpretative. I admit, it can be called this, and if the case is being made that when one comprehends, one is doing so affectively, so taking up the world AS is to take it up as in an affectively qualified way, and the thought and feeling are not different things in the construction of an actual future existence. they are only different in the analysis. Dewey held the same kind of view.
I guess, to use Heidegger's language, I am looking at affect in a "present at hand" way: it is there, this misery is there, and among all the descriptive things one could say about an actual situation, there is one that is THE most salient feature, which is this undefinable part that is the ethical dimension of it, which is: I find this misery, just awful, dreadful, appalling, and so on, all of which are synonyms, but what is the defining thread? It is undefinable, for it lies in the givenness, regardless of how what is given is given in a structured presuppositional (or predelineated) way.
Comprehension is term that encompasses affairs of the understanding, or believing, knowing and thinking, and for Heidegger this knowing is instrumentality, the localized way of "dealing with" a thing. So the presuppositions for knowing hammers are prior dealings with hammers and their regional equipmental environments. Affect is an intrinsic part of all this, the caring. Dewey called this the aesthetic dimension of consummatory experience, and he, too argued that this is bound up in the forward lookingness of apprehending an object. But he was also dismissive of the present at hand of the affect:
In fact emotions are qualities, when they are significant, of a complex experience that moves and changes. I say, when they are significant, for otherwise they are but the outbreaks and eruptions of a disturbed infant. All emotions are qualifications of a drama and they change as the drama develops.
Outbreaks and eruptions? He means considered apart from any possible context of experience. He doesn't want to talk about what will not be talked about, which is the mere presence of affect, and he is, right I think. It is the one reason philosophy will pass over any discussions of the presence (the "metaphysics of presence") of what lies before one.
But I challenge this idea. I think there is something critically important about things being miserable and delightful. Not just important, THE most important part of our existence. Even Levinas doesn't go into the palpable presence of it (though granting through all of this that I really don't have the detailed grasp that you do. I read, think, that's all) . The face of another in misery, to be significant requires misery to be significant. How is misery significant? It is "presuppositionlessly" misery, stands as "its own presupposition" as Kierkegaard put it (though he wasn't talking about this, precisely) because the understanding lies in a different dimension of how things are intimated.
One's misery may bound existentially to ready to hand environments, and the temporal structure of this carries misery into a future creation of a "displacing" future, but misery exceeds utility, it is, again with Levinas, something in the "ideatum" of misery that exceeds the ready to hand. It is a presence at hand that "speaks" the injunction not to do X if X makes misery.
Likely that you have not read Husserl's Ideas I? I remember reading Kant for the first time and I was bewildered. I understood the words and the logical constructions, but I would look out the window and think, but there is obviously a tree and a sky and this guy is just insane. Later I read Some Kierkegaard and to this I can wrap my mind around his Concept of Anxiety to the degree of 60 percent or so. I had to read Hegel, and Hegel is fascinating madness, to be sure.
The more I read, the more I see that THIS is really where philosophy must go, and the most compelling case for this, I think, lies with Husserl's Cartesian Meditations.
I would hazard that no one at all gets comfortable with continental philosophy without doing some very difficult reading. But having said this, I think "some people" are intuitively inclined to take existence as a theme more seriously than others. Analytic philosophy KILLS this intuition.
Framework of intuitions? I don't follow. What is this framework? As to taking this seriously, you wrote: Do you seriously think there is a material basis for ethics?
Why I think there is such a thing is frankly complicated. But it does begin with a "reduction" of the world to its essential givennes. An odd idea if you've never considered that there is such a thing to do, but initially I did invite one to consider a moral affair as it stands, the way a geologist might observe a rock or a mineral. First observe what is there, in your midst. Categorical placement comes after (though, the mere approach is always already categorical, but never mind that) and identify the features "present". Again, there is Astrophel, the ax, the man who murdered his beloved cat and the law that prohibits murder (or assault, etc.). At the very basic level of analysis, what is there? Rules and consequences swimming around my head, rage, conscience in an epic struggle, but more essentially, the possible act itself: WHY ALL THE FUSS?
The fuss is because there is some pain, misery, horror, unpleasantness (or then, joy, pleasure, bliss) that is AT STAKE. This is the foundational premise the this argument: These words of affect, joy, pain, pleasure, wretchedness, and so on: If these are absent, then the ethics vanishes completely. It is not simply a necessary condition, like say, reason; I mean, one has to have the ability to reason through competing ideas in order for ethics to rise up and be what it is, we might say. But note: take the matter of the ax being buried in another man's back. Remove the rational dimension and the essence of the affair still remains, though mysteriously. There is something horrible about the pain apart from the way pain is contextualized in a situation or even a theoretical rationalization. Mysteriously, the ethical objection sustains, and you can disagree with this, but it would by my thinking be disingenuous. It is too obvious. this brief idea sketched out here of a contextless horrible pain is in itself an argument, a very powerful intuitive argument, against ethical nihilism.
It is not the objection that is the focus of this argument. It is the intuited negative affect. This is something that issues from t he fabric of things, if you will, buried in contingency, but unmistakably there: wretchedness is unassailable by circumstances.
I wonder if maybe what you’re after is an idea of feeling that can be found in the German Romantic writings of authors like Schelling and Fichte.
Sounds right to me. But one can ask, why make the world a more creatively anticipatable place? If there is no answer to this, then the mundane objection still holds: there is question begging in the assumption that "we should do X". Why?
Rorty was accused by Critchley of being a contradictory "liberal ironist, someone who is committed to social justice and appalled by cruelty, but who recognizes that there is no metaphysical foundation to her concern for justice." I think there is a foundation, though it is no stone tablet, that is, it is not language the world that "speaks" but intuition.
Unassailable, given in the barest sense. I am reading Derrida on Levinas, and he expresses it, in his exposition, thusly: "A thought for which the entirety of the Greek logos has already erupted, and is now quiet topsoil deposited not over bedrock, but around a more ancient volcano. A thought which, without philology and solely by remaining faithful to the immediate, but buried nudity of experience itself, seeks to liberate the Greek domination of the Same and the one."
I know he not going to defend this, (though he admires it. He called Totality and Infinity a work of art) but this brief flourish puts the matter forth with a nice rhetorical lift. Notwithstanding the prestation, though, his "ancient volcano" is an apriority to all systems of understanding.
The thinking goes this way:
There is no such thing as bad intent. We all
want the same thing, to be able to make sense of the world, and the behavior of other people most of all, in the most assimilable and internally harmonious way, and that means not force others in our worldview but rather expand our worldview so that we are able to emphasize with others. What we call evil is just the shortcomings of those attempts. Feeling has no intrinsic content, it is nothing but an organizational feature of our construing of events that indicates how well we are making sense of things. Giving affect some primordial content leads to the danger that we substitute a conformist impulse for the attempt to see things from others’ perspectives.
I am not trying to defend phenomenology, and it I were, I would be in a poor position. That would be an true academic's job. I do defend the phenomenologist's approach to basic problems, and I defend things the way I think along these lines.
Phenomenology cannot be doomed to failure, unless Trump destroys the world and all is lost like the library of Alexandria. It is too intuitive. I mean, this and that can be argued, dismissed, and so on, but phenomenology is what you might call a profound and enduring insight.
What I do here is not about what is at issue in all you talk about. What is not arguable is the presence of affect, no matter how this term finds context. And affect (happiness, sadness, misery, joy suffering pleasure, and so forth) is foundational for ethics.
I can think of circumstances, institutions, where this is probably true, maybe in the military or in public safety. But in general? I think people mainly just marvel at courage. It's okay to be awestruck by Martin Luther King -- doesn't mean you implicitly condemn everyone else, does it?
Anyway, don't you think your argument is overbroad? How you can you praise anyone for anything if it implies condemnation of everyone else?
You haven't understood the point...
Quoting Banno
SO, what is it that evolution says we ought to do?
The good thing is, you can pick anything, and it will fit.
Ah, then we're not having the conversation I thought we were.
I have some attraction to a very old-fashioned "moral sentiments" view, such as you'd find in Adam Smith.
It's a pity you think that.
Sure, we have feelings. One's own feelings are all well and good, and you might do well to work towards feeling good rather than feeling miserable. But that's not the foundation of ethics.
Ethics concerns itself with how one is to relate to others.
Nothing mystical about a knife in your kidney. That matter is much more basic than you would have it. You, I surmise, would like to treat that knife as Hume and Wittgenstein treat facts. But there is something in the occurrent event of misery, I mean while one is actually miserable, that needs attention. the habit we have, and this I take to be seriously understood, the habit that language imposes of the world both lifts it into understanding as well as silences and occludes. What I am saying is that the "magic" is magical to you because is unfamliar. Face it, Heidegger was right: the more science and technology dominates thinking regarding the place and status of what it is to be human, the more the powerful and profound are pushed out of existence, and by existence, read the manner of our thoughts and feelings. Cell phones are more real to modern sensibilities than existential matters. The fact that almost no one at all takes up such matters is exactly what makes them strange and magical.
That knife in the kidney. Answer me this: what would be a complete analysis of teh bare features of the one sitting there in misery? Spare me the medical contingencies, as well as what a biologist might say, or an evolutionist. Just observe what is there sitting before you.
Clue: there is in the event, at its final determination, something that defies explanation, but is the most salient feature.
But this with others, what is it? Saying you have concern for others turns the table to you, because you are an other to others, and the most accessible possible examination would lie in an examination of yourself.
You see this, no? It is not saying that ethics is not about others at all. It is sayning what IS it about others that makes for the ethicality of ethic?
The "most accessible possible examination" is your interaction with others, which is there for all to see.
An attempt to base ethics on private self-reflection will lead to nonsense. And does.
Ethics isn't an armchair self-examination. It's about getting out in the world, being amongst others, interacting.
Smith? No. I see no fault with moral sentiment, but these are not foundational in their attachment to incidentals (facts). They are, however, as sentiment, filled with meaning, and it is here I find a grounding.
In the most important way, evolution has NOTHING to do with ethics. For evolution will reduce ethics to what is conducive to reproduction and survival. Or, perhaps, an accidental gene mutation? Nothing here speaks to ethics, for whatever any science may say constitutes an ethical obligation, it will be a factual account, and ethics is not about facts.
Yep. You clearly state that which @god must be atheist has failed to grasp.
Take away the reality of emotive, consciousness endowed subjects that interact. What remains of ethics? Nothing. Ethics is thus contingent upon this reality. What of this reality brings about the occurrence of ethics? The only possible answer - were one in search for it - can only be found in that which is universal to such subjects: something like "hinge rules" by which all subjects play regardless of their wants and choices. And this cannot be ascertained by looking at what is perceivable in the external world - but only via self-reflection into the universal properties applicable to the cohort of all such subjects, a cohort which one oneself is a constituent of.
Same for the occurrence of aesthetics, or of value in general.
Were interacting with others to of itself be that which defines the ethical, mass murders would then qualify without reserve, for such are known by their interaction with others. Humans, however, don’t typically deem mass murders to be ethical.
I'm not here to try to provide answers to the OP, but I disagree that self-reflection - the notion of knowing oneself - can only be a wrong-minded approach to the matter.
Sure. So is art, science, politics, horse racing... The question is, what is particular to ethics.
Ethics is not about what one wants. That's just appetite.
Ethics is about human interactions. What ought one do in relation to others.
Interesting that you mention hinge rules. These are the rules that are constitutive of a game; and games are a social affair. Hinge rules only exist publicly.
Introspection is fine, but it will not tell you how to treat the homeless, or what abortion laws should be in place, or how much to donate to charity.
Ethics is inherently concerned with action, not introspection. Indeed self-reflection is so often an excuse for not acting.
One might know oneself best by looking in at one's reflection on the eyes of another.
Quoting Banno
Okay, consider then please this:
Banno denies the existence of evolutionary theory. Banno states that the evolutionary theory is faulty, wrong, and must be dismissed. Here:
Quoting Banno
Let's say Banno is right. Let's say the evolutionary theory is not a valid theory to explain behavior. In that case the following must be true:
Those whose gene-determined behaviour forces them to behave in ways that are counter-effective to survival, are the most apt to survive.
Those whose gene-determined behaviour makes them superbly adaptive to the environment, and to environmental changes, more than others, will perish.
Furthermore, those societies whose social structures -- such as education, ethics, law, religion, etc. -- are least likely to help them survive, will thrive and take over the world.
And those societies whose social structures help them superbly to survive, will perish.
----------
This is what Banno claims. Read it to believe it.
No, he doesn't. He denies that it is the foundation of ethics.
And He's right.
A claim stated, so it must be true.
:grin: Yes. I find a deeper truth in this then might many others. Needless to add, if one takes it metaphorically rather than physically. Something to do with self in other and other in self: value in that which is universal to all.
Quoting Banno
Issue being asked is what makes ethics existent in the philosophical sense wherein we contemplate and infer a rational answer to the question. Theory regarding the idea/ideal rather than practice wherein this idea/ideal is imperfectly implemented. Or at least so I take the OP to ask.
What, for example, makes abolition ethical even when most, if not all, those who surround you despise you for your intents?
My own hunch is that in order to know how one ought to act one must first know - intuitively if not at a level of conscious understanding - the ideal one is in pursuit of by so acting. To me at least such can only be discovered via reflection regrading what the self (as in both oneself and others) is.
Quoting god must be atheist
A claim argued:
Quoting Banno
But you appear to be having comprehension issues.
Abolition is a dreadful idea. Folk need to drink. :wink:
I don't agree. As I have argued, a priori intuitions or any such introspection will not survive contact.
Hence virtue ethics - but that's a longer story.
You forget to apply your critical ability when you read authors. Yes, for any behaviour there is evolutionary advantage; but not at the same time, and at the same respect. In different times some respects may be predominant; some other times some other respects may be predominant.
Example: Murder. In our society it is not ethical. In our society the human life is sacrosanct, because we can afford to sustain all human lives, and because we agree that life is better lived with no fear of life.
Example: Murder. In cannibalistic societies the available meat protein is scanty. You capture and kill members of OTHER tribes and eat their flesh.
Is our society like a cannibalistic society? No. Is a cannibalistic society like ours? No. There are different from each other by solid and permanent demarcation lines. Therefore both murder and non-murder are both moral and immoral, which only causes a confusion, such as for you, when you don't consider the differences in circumstances. Once circumstances are normalized and permanent, the dichotomy of both an action and its opposite as ethical will cease to appear contradictory to the observer.
:razz: For the record, I was addressing it in terms of slavery.
Quoting Banno
Doesn't that beg the question, though: how does anyone discern virtue from vice, kind of thing.
But OK.
From my former studies, the rarity of protein doesn't play a major role. Their spirituality however does. It bears heavy on the notion of consuming - both in the sense of devouring and annihilating - one's enemies: this both in terms of body and soul. But I grant, it's been a while since I've read up on the issue.
I am the first one to admit that I never studied anything beyond high school. Yes, I have a degree, but I did not earn it by studying. I earned it by passing tests, exams and assignments. And that was a long time ago. I get my knowledge from hearsay and from figuring things out.
As far as I can tell, the meat-protein or fatty acid necessity in diet is a contentious issue. Some swear by it; some reject it. So I cherry picked this one, to be honest; it's also cherry picked because I like to eat meat (not human flesh).
I believe there have been studies that supported the theory that animal enzymes are a must in one's diet, and there have been studies that support the opposite. The upshot is that if the animal-enzyme camp was correct, there would be no true vegans around.
Then again, some authorities or some blokes with big voices might say that trace amounts of animal enzymes are impossible to avoid in getting into your system.
Well, god only knows. But god does not exist. (According to my beliefs, anyhow.)
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_cannibalism#Reasons
Neither endocannibalism nor exocannibalism can be classified as murder per se: the first is a sign of respect/love for the already deceased; the latter usually follows warfare, and homicide during warfare is not considered to be murder (deliberate homicide without justification). There might be other examples that you could use, but, tmk, cannibalism as an accepted form of murder among some cultures is not it. "Female circumcision" however does come to mind.
Considering that introspection is the means by which all of the great ethical doctrines have been generated, I can’t imagine a better way to prepare oneself to answer any of the above questions. Your comment sounds awfully Cartesian: real world out there vs subjective noodlings in here. Thing is , the most world-changing ideas are produced by such noodlings all alone in a windowless room. That’s because the inside is already outside.
Over 30 years I have often worked with violent criminals, I know knives and I know basic. Doesn't change my view on the issue of human flourishing.
Quoting Astrophel
Not sure what you are trying to address with this lengthy response. Seems like you are using phenomenology to distract from the original point, namely that we can build a robust ethical system on some basic ideas. If you think there is some transcendent aspect to this enterprise I have neglected, maybe it would help for you to describe it directly.
But consider that talking about relationships with others precludes something about agency itself. Agency comes, analytically, before inter-agency. The question here is, what is it that makes someone an ethical agency in order for ethical relationships to be possible? Look, you can't have an ethical relationship with a fence post. It has to be an ethical viable person, or animal (depending). So, since relations presuppose agency, then what is it that constitutes agency?
These are not absolutes. Many people murder their loved ones... most murders involve domestic strife, and family members.
Murder, to use your definition, is deliberate homicide without justification. When soldiers kill each other, at least one side is fighting a non-defensive battle. Most if not all ethicists condemn wars of expansion and wars of aggression non-defensive, and therefore, non-justified. Therefore the soldiers on one side of every battle and every war commit murder when they kill a soldier of the opposing forces.
Therefore, as far as I can see, both exo- and endocannibalism involves murder and can't exist without it. UNLESS of course you eat parts of the body of your beloved, while they stay alive.
That has been known to happen, too, in at least sentimental novels, or in sentimental stories verbally passed on, where shipwrecks in a boat eat the arm or the leg of one of the survivors, one after another, until they get rescued or until they die of exposure.
Nor am I sure why this is so mysterious. This is a philosophical examination of an ethical case. The knife in the kidney is just an example. Nor is it anecdotal. It is descriptive, plainly.
Take a simple case: a person bludgeons another for her money. Why is this prima facie wrong? What is the most salient feature of this case?
I don't understand why we are talking about examples of a violent crime like we're a couple of high school students. :razz:
Are you able to tell me what point it is you are trying to examine?
It seems like you are struggling to understand what makes an action right or wrong.
I've already answered this question several times (albeit indirectly). My general position would be we should privilege the flourishing of conscious creatures. A violent action like this would go against that.
Now you have asked already - why privilege flourishing? If you are genuinely asking this then you are likely to be anti-social (sociopath). If you are asking for rhetorical purposes, there is, as I said earlier, no clear answer to this unless you are a believer in a virtue-based eudaemonistic conception of ethics as per Plato, where goodness, truth and beauty sit inside the logos waiting for us to enact them. Or you could come at it via a divine command theory of morality as per Islam and some forms of Christianity. These are the 'magical' answers I was referring to.
Other than that, we simply have to make personal choices regarding our behavior - we can be guided by virtue or malice. It's up to us.
this isn't an answer to a question that asks for the most salient features of something. I'm not asking what we should do or who should be privileged. And I didn't ask if violent actions are good or bad and why. It is far simpler: What is there in the descriptive features of an ethical case, like the one I provide? The should' and shouldn'ts are on hold until we can find out what it is that sits there in our perceptual midst that makes it ethical at all.
I do see that this sounds a little unfamiliar, but so what, the logic of the exercise is clear: I want to know about "the existence of ethics" (the OP). Existence, this is a "what is it?" question. All questions that have a long history of answers have a lot of extraneous analyses and question begging assumptions. But in all matters, the best policy is to begin at the beginning, which is always what is there in the world that gives rise to all the fuss in the first place. This is the originary ground. Ask me about the nature of, say, empathy, and I will say, well, let's look at exemplar cases of empathy and give analysis, and these cases will serve as a descriptive foundation that validates or denies relevance. If someone says to me empathy is a Godly virtue, I would say, wait; back up. Let's look at the concept of God. What is the material basis (I mean, the matters, there in the world, observable or apriori required), that is, the things in the world that gives rise to the concept, that give it meaning. Then we can determine if empathy is a Godls virtue.
The reasoning is simply that before we go on talking about shoulds and should nots, I would like to know what it is the drives the ethical engine, and that can be "observed" in the case itself. It is, if you will, right there on the sleeve of ethical issues, ignored because it is simply a given, and people don't argue about what is simply given.
I know that, but I'm saying that it doesn't become ethical until should and shouldn't or ought and ought not enter the frame. Ethics is about behaviour and how to be in the world with others.
If you want to go deeper than that, I am not sure there is a pool bottomless enough for that journey.
I'm not sure of that. Notions of self develop by understanding one's self in relation to the other. Hence one's own agency is only understood in contrast to the agency of others.
Quoting Astrophel
Exactly.
Is it? So much the worse for ethical doctrines, then.
Quoting Joshs
I con't imagine a worse way of dealing with an ethical issue than asking an armchair theorist with no hands-on experience.
I do quite a bit of disability advocacy, and have come to appreciate the need for lived experience in policy formulation, and the dignity in the slogan "Nothing about me without me!"
Quoting Joshs
Now you are just being rude. :razz:
On the contrary I've argued for downplaying such juxtapositions as subjective and objective, internal and external, public and private. Each of us are embedded in a world that includes physical objects and other folk. Ethics is about acting in a public social world, like it or not, and that's where ethical thinking must take place.
But prior to what one does, one has to BE an agency of ethical possibilities. It is not bottomless at all. All one has to do is look to that which makes an agency of ethical possibility. A person is such an agency (so is a dog or a cat, but that is another matter). A person is, say, rational, but it is not rationality that constitutes ethicality in a person. Reason, Hume made clear, is an empty vessel, and cares not one stitch whether we all live, die, suffer, or anything else. What makes an agency is the capacity for caring, and caring must have something that is of value for it to be about. I care that I can get enough money to buy Haagen Dazs. Why? Because it is so delicious. What is deliciousness? Such an odd question, no? But all such affections go like this. And note that inquiry ends here, for there is no need to justify wanting something delicious, for to be delicious is inherently good, unassailably good. Of course, you can assail many things: can I afford it? Should I steal it? Is it healthy? This kind of thing can be as complicated as human affairs themselves. But: it is these affairs that make for complications, not the Haagen dazs's deliciousness.
Herein lies the essence of ethical agency.
It wouldn't be in contrast. To make this point, as someone like Herbert Meade does, it would be this exterior event, here, the relationship with others, that generates the essential conditions for ethical possibility, which is internalized into the structure of my ethicality. Meade thought this way about language: we witness models of language and behavior outside of us, and take these observed relations of others and internalize them, and this makes for the a construction of the internal sense of self, and the "relation" one has with oneself in the internal dialog (I talk to myself as a mirror structure to the talking witnessed around me. fascinating idea, really. Not complete, but there is certainly something to this). Your position sounds similar:
But then, examining oneself and the content therein as an internalized model would possess all that is required. Further, it is not the other and one's relationship with her that is going to reveal what it is that makes ethics what it is, for external models once internalized do not as models, exceed wht the external affair would be. IN other words, there would be nothing new apart from what is in the relationship.
No, there is something else entirely that runs this show that is presupposed by ethical problems of any kind.
No, I'm totally familiar with these sorts of games. I just don't think they bear fruit. An endless recursion of conceptual snipe hunting
Quoting Astrophel
Herein lies the essence of time wasting.
That's it in a nutshell - you're much better at this than I am.
Isn't what you're looking for the summum bonum, that being 'the ultimate goal according to which values and priorities are established in an ethical system'?
Quoting Astrophel
Most of us have an inner voice, but if you're part of the minority who doesn't, this could be why
Agreed. People love the cake they are given, but don’t bother considering its ingredients. That ethics manifests as a relation between humans is given, but without the bother of considering the humans which constitute the ingredients of it.
Quoting Astrophel
Superficially true enough, and by the same logic, there is no need to justify not wanting something distasteful. The affirmation or negation of a “want” is given, without the need for arguing its justification, which reduces to the instance of a given effect (want of the cake), the cause of which is left empty (the ingredients of the how of delicious).
Now if the cause is left empty, and a superficial truth exemplified, if there is no need to judge a relative quality.....how is delicious or distasteful at all determinable? It must herein, be that the justification for the want, formerly posited as unnecessary, is given merely because it is delicious, which is the same as saying there is no reason for wanting something other than its quality. But to say there’s no need to judge an effect (the want) presupposes the judgement already made for its cause (its being delicious). Thus it is that “no need to justify” is superficial, because in truth, it contradicts itself.
It is fine to say an agent is effected by a want, but it shouldn’t be omitted that an agent is also a cause for the wanting.
And people don’t argue the given mostly because either the subtleties hidden within them are too difficult, or, they are simply not deemed to matter. The first is anthropologically lazy, the second, philosophically ignorant.
I blame myself, Tom Storm. I assumed you at least had a curiosity and a capacity to inquire. The trouble here is that you really don't know anything at all about continental philosophy, which is the implicit background to all this.
Do take note that in everything I said, there was never an attempt on your part to analyze the argument. Head scratching all the way through.
There are more graceful ways to deal with things you don't understand.
Damned Agent! Apart from being funny you truly got stuff to say! Beautiful! You turned the blue skies blue again. The shadow on the closed curtain of two birds in the tree, just pointed to by my wife agree! :up:
Just to pause on this. The structure of affectivity is twofold: A want, desire, appetite, fear, loathing and so on, can be questioned. Why do you want this? On the other side of this subjective, call it a deficit, there is the true object, the qualified existent, the phenomenon of deliciousness, say, or misery.
Quoting Mww
Did I write "effect"? If I did it was a typo. What is in play is "affect".
As to the superficiality, consider: something being delicious is rather trivial, granted. But it belongs to the same order of things in which are found extraordinary magnitudes of experience. Like intense suffering. It is the entirety of phenomenal possibilities we classify as value that I am saying is the essence of ethics. If there is nothing of this, then there is no ethics. It is more than a presupposition. Value is THE existential foundation of ethics, something existence "does"; we did not invent value, we invented culture and various foods and entertainment, and we struggle with each other over them (ethics) and so on, but this all has its grounding in the solid "givenness" of value-in-the-world. We are not principally ,to disagree with Descartes, res cogitans; we are res affectus, a "thing" of affectivity"
And by value, I mean Wittgenstein's value: the "impossible" goodness of something we call good. Non contingent goodness.
Yes, I actually believe this. I literally believe our ethical affairs are the Real affairs, in the fabric of things, so to speak. I do have my arguments. For me, they begin with Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Lecture on Ethics. They end somewhere in Nagarjuna's Madhyamika.
:100: :fire:
Quoting Banno
:smirk:
As Evander Holyfield can attest to, many do have a plan for when they are punched in the mouth – and can cope ethically enough even when their ears are unexpectedly bitten off by dumbass assholes. But we’re championing the dumbass’s affirmation as sound by placing it in boldface?
Question: What is “virtue”?
Answer: You know it when you see it.
Second Question: How so? For example: Why is Tyson’s boldfaced statement deemed virtuous, if it is?
Someone sitting in an armchair thinking can’t tie their shoe or repair an engine while contemplating. And when they are done contemplating they can’t do these things without actual experience in these areas. But hands-on experience is impossible without a network of constructs formed from prior experience providing the larger framework of intelligibility , motivation , relevance and goal
orientation for specifically applied actions in the world.
Our hands do the work but they are just appendages and tools. Our framework of understanding gives the work its sense and direction. If you select 10 people and put them into the same hands-on applied situation , you will get 10 different perspectives on the ‘same’ situation. This fact may not become apparent for a while, because the very specificity of the ‘real-world’ situation masks these differences in interpretive outlook. It may seem as thought the larger interpretive framework that we tap into in introspection is the abstract and genereral way of understanding things and the real-world, hands-on, specifically applied actions are real nuts and bolts of meaning, but it is quite the opposite. Sizing someone up on the basis of such concrete actions gives one a vague and ambiguous sense of what they are doing and why they are doing it when we try to divorce observation of behavior from the larger background perspective of the person.
The least effective way to promote positive change in the world is to put blinders on and treat persons as if they were merely stimulus bound creatures of concrete action. The best way to change the world is to creatively transform the worldviews animating and guiding our subordinate hands-on skills. This is what introspection does. Certainly it needs to be translated into concrete action, but the feedback from such actions have much less of an effect on the overall worldview than directly confronting the whole framework.
Of course, you can examine ethics from different angles, in different ways, conceptually, practically, religiously, philosophically, as a field of study and so on. However, I think what is most;y needed is to describe the essence of ethics and the usefulness of its application in everyday life, which, I believe, is the following:
Ethics is the support of survival and well-being. It is also their protection, promotion and enhancement. It is applied on many levels or spheres: individual (person), family, groups and humanity. One is higher and larger that its previous one. These are best represented as concentric spheres. An action is as ethical as it does more good to a larger number of people on these spheres. (By "good" I mean of course "in favor of, supporting well-being".)
We understand you are enamoured by Banno and his opinions in philosophical discourses. That's fine. But do you have any original ideas to share, as well? Or you are satisfied to just praise Banno.
Bah! I have my own philosophy groupies as well. Not on this forum, however. I gotta get me some.
I agree that it's a good definition of self-sacrificial ethics. However, I also maintain that the ultimate spring and origin of ethics is the survival of the individual and/or the survival of his DNA derivatives.
The circles you mention are all part of the ethical individual's wish and actual efforts to make survive. However, it is not necessarily his outright interest in that order; and his personal ethics may be skewed in the sense of what expectations society places on him, because of the discrepancy between his agenda and society's agenda.
I think I agree somewhere in there. Do I think we are "going somewhere" with all this struggling and dealing with a world of glorious beauty and wretched misery? Almost afraid to say this because it is not received well in modern "enlightened" thinking, but yes, I do think this, but my reasons are very difficult to understand. I don't understand them all that well---a good sign, I want to add, that I have the openness or freedom to make thought out of a world of threshold uncertainties. I think, above all, this is the difference between analytic and continental philosophy. The latter puts philosophy IN that marvelous world of existential aporia. The death of philosophy is dogmatism.
I think this because Kierkegaard was right: actuality and reason are a train wreck. Kierkegaard fought against Hegel who wanted to place existence in a ordered realm of reason's historical progress. My take on this is, not the qualitative difference between wht is actual and what is rational, for what is actual as actuality, qua actual, does not deliver the goods. Actuality cannot be released from the ideas that make it meaningful; there is nothing in the actual, again, AS actual, that warrants the distance Kierkegaard wants to place between them. But there is distance, and this is measured in affectivity, not actuality; or, affect-in-actuality is what makes the train wreck. There is no wreck sans value.
What attracts me to philosophers like Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is, in their own way , there is this dethroning of empirical science, which turns foundational analyses of the world into a baron waste land (reminds my of T S Eliot's Wasteland. Of course, people got very angry over his conservativism, but there is a ring of truth in his complaint that the old order of the truth and glory of God was being replaced by something soulless, and the gravitas of being human was being lightened by a trivializing social network {women come and go; talking of Michelangelo} --sound familiar?-- He had obviously read Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety); and a placement of meaning front and center ontologically (though, I don't follow Nietzsche, I don't like where he goes, regardless of how well his critiques hold up).
But for me, meaning, front and center in our assessment of our affairs at the most basic level of assumptions completely rearranges the ontological furniture. The old Cartesain order of res cogitans and res extensa is out the window. Now what rules is res affectus. This is my ontology (remember, it is a work in progress).
What does this have to do with the summum bonum? Happiness, love, joy, bliss are elevated to principle ontologies, as are misery and the rest; but wait!: It is not just wishful fantasizing. Consider that the ground for all metaphysics has to be in the affairs witnessed in the world's phenomena, and here there is nowhere to be found any God of redemption. But what we do see is good and evil. What ARE these in their phenomenological "presence"? This goes to actual conditions, I mean, evil is not an abstract concept; it is there, in the agonizing sprained ankle. And good? This bliss in the Ravel, MIles Davis (whoever): these now may ascend to a foundational status. A metavalue affirmation. Our affairs are no longer local events delimited by a science's categories (which are fine things, of course).
Out on a limb. But human understanding is out there as well.
But then, well-being is no more explanatory than good.
Anyway, there is a book you might find interesting by Oldenquist, called "Non suicidal Society". He talks in concentric level s of ethical obligation as well, only his thinking was the converse of yours: ethical obligations were stronger in the immediate social world. So, familiy comes before country, country before world; that kind of thing.
Anyway, your seem to be looking at utility to determine ethical choices. Like most people, I think this is very often right, and we do this all the time. Deontologists like Kant point to duty, but how does one determine duty? Isn't this bound up intimately with utility?
I use the principle of utility all the time. But remember utility's nay sayers: the hedonic gluttons, e.g.: one person's agony can be bliss for many others (pleasure gluttons), and the calculation for this favors the latter over the former. But clearly, we cannot condone bad treatment of one just to satisfy the balance of utility.
The problem with utility is that people are not quantifiable entities. There is a sovereign "right" one has over the public good. This asks for argument. Also, notwithstanding Bentham's hedonic calculator, heterogenous pleasures and pains cannot be quantified can they???.
Sure.
So follow through on that example. We have, perhaps, an awe inspiring cave, which someone decides to destroy. Sure, destruction fo the cave is annoying.
What would take the destruction away from just annoying into the realm of being evil? What moves the act beyond the merely irritating into the immoral?
Or are we to say that morality is just what you like and dislike? I don't think that captures the way we use the term, and I suspect you would agree.
If you do good, your heart keeps rhythm with the universe. It's that stretching out beyond the self, that capacity to see a bigger picture than what one likes or dislikes, that forms the distinction between ethics and mere appetite.
And that extension past the self is why armchair ethicists fail, . Name those who have had the greatest moral consequence. Not Kant, the archetypal conservative who deduced the moral superiority of his comfortable middle class lifestyle from first principles. Gandhi; de Klerk and Mandela; King; folk who are active, but who also articulate their stance.
My reading of modern philosophy is patchy. I did two undergrad years and subsequently more reading, as part of my own philosophical quest, but that was counter-cultural in orientation, I'm a 60's person. I always regarded philosophy as taught at University with suspicion because I felt the mainstream of Western culture had lost touch with the original meaning of enlightenment. At the time, in my early-mid twenties, my heroes were Alan Watts, D T Suzuki, Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharishi and Theodore Roszak - as I said, counter-cultural, not religious in the mainstream sense. (One of Roszak's books was called Where the Wasteland Ends, although I don't know how well it will have dated.)
While an undergrad, I had the distinct impression that post-Enlightenment philosophy was principally formed by a tacit commitment to Anything But God. There were kinds of ideas, styles of thinking, that had fallen out of favour because of their association with religion. At the time, the professor of the department was one of the Australian materialist philosophers, and I always thought that materialism was the work of the devil (figuratively, of course).
So - I very much see the course of modern intellectual history as the almost complete loss of the meaning of soul, which has been replaced with various forms of neo-darwinian materialism. It treats mankind as an objective phenomenon, something to study, alongside ants and whales, and has no greater conception of what matters that what works in an instrumental sense. "Chemical scum", as Stephen Hawkings once put it eloquently. (Oddly, this kind of attitude is sometimes dignified with the term 'humanism'.)
Whereas I see the great traditions of philosophy (and in my world, those are Christian Platonism, Indian Advaita, and Mah?y?na Buddhism) as representative of the philosophia perennis, and charting the course towards self-realisation. You do find inklings of that in Kierkegaard, and Heidegger wrestles with it in his own secularist kind of way, although I could never see it in Nietszche (flak jacket on.)
So after that long preamble, what of the summum bonum? I see the grand religious narratives as symbolic an allegorical presentations of the journey of self-realisation, variously conceived and envisaged in different cultural milieu. But that self-realisation, in my lexicon, is possible due to the sense in which h. sapiens is the Universe become aware of itself. We're not simply the epiphenomenal byproducts of dumb material stuff, as the secular academy must assume, absent any meta-narrative of their own. As stated splendidly in one of Albert Einstein's late-in-life musings, by way of a letter of condolence:
[quote=Albert Einstein]A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.[/quote]
Quoting Banno
I suspect that de Klerk et al are basically Kantian in their moral stance.
Keeping rhythm with the universe doesn’t just mean seeing a bigger picture. It’s not about how much of the furniture of the universe you incorporate into your soul or understanding , but how you organize that experience. We will continue to hate and attack to the extent that we aren’t able to relate to, empathize and identify with what would otherwise appear to us as alien and threatening others who we have to defend ourselves against. The ‘self’ isn’t an object among objects, it’s a synthetic activity, always going beyond itself in order to continue to be itself. So the challenge isn’t for the self to go outside of itself, since it is always already doing that. The challenge is how it is able to make sense of the new events it is moving into. If it goes beyond itself in such a way as to see a bigger picture consisting of malevolent, greedy and selfish actors, it is likely failing to organize the larger picture it has stretched itself into in a way that will help it be act insightfully, peacefully and harmoniously with others. 90% of that bigger picture is already in your head. Reflective and introspective discovery directly expands one’s world. That’s why brilliant novelists can contribute so much to ethical thought even though they spend most of their life in an armchair. Thinking doesn’t just recycle what has already been. It can create what has never existed in the world before.
Which is to say very little; perhaps that they were consistent.
And again, the point is to act.
Quoting Banno
It says that without Kant and his armchair these wonderful ethical actors would have defaulted to ethical positions more authoritarian in nature, which is what typified pre-Kantian moral thought.
Quoting Banno
Plenty of people acting, but not enough people really thinking.
Blame - how old fashioned. :wink: But I note that in remainder of your response you put the blame somewhat harshly on me. Nice work. I don't really know anything about any philosophy, I just have an interest.
But I have read smatterings of Husserl and listened to Dreyfus' fascinating lectures on Heidegger and started reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, so I am not unsympathetic to continental philosophy or phenomenology.
You need to do better than attempt an elitist put down of a poor pleb who is so beneath you. It makes you sound like you're out of your depth. I suspect now that an inherent belief in the superiority of your own thought might explain why your capacity to communicate on this is so muddled. Possibly you are not really trying. Now it might also be that English is not your first language, so that could be a factor too.
Nevertheless, if you were any good at this you would be able to explain your idea clearly and not blame others for the deficits in your own capacity to communicate. And you might not stoop to playing 'in group/out group' games in an awkward attempt to marginalise those who have different views. :razz:
This reminds of a somewhat tasteless analogy: that of a headless chicken (which is set on the ground rather than held upside-down by the legs to hurry up the rush of blood - yes, as the high school joke goes, I sometimes eat dead animals too … and they have to be killed in order for this to be … this great news flash aside). A headless chicken will act in all sorts of ways - can even be said to interact with others when other chickens are around - but this without a coherent goal. Ethics on the other hand, in order to so be, requires action governed by a coherent goal.
Deontology: that good is best approached when all one does can become a universal law were all others to find themselves in an identical situation. Utilitarianism: that good is best approached when dolor is optimally minimized among one and all within the cohort(s) considered. Virtue ethics: that good is best approached when virtue is optimally enacted in oneself and in the populace. At the very least when so expressed, all systems of ethics are founded upon an optimal approach toward a good - a good that is never fully, perfectly obtained and maintained in its pure form within practice; an ideal good, in other words. Action not governed by this ideal good is thereby not ethical regardless of the ethical system implemented - so too does this ideal good define the unethical as action that stands in opposition to the very same ideal good addressed. The headless chickens’ actions, however, stand outside both the ethical and unethical, this as best as we can tell.
What, then, is this ideal good that all ethical systems address implicitly, if not explicitly?
As previously mentioned, and in accord with @Joshs, I strongly sympathize with the notion that its discovery resides in reflection upon the nature of the self, which naturally incorporates not only oneself but what all other selves desire by shear fact of being (when philosophically addressed, even when they are deemed mortal enemies). And, in accord with @Astrophel, I can’t see how it can be discovered without discovering truths in respect to the affective beings we are - some universally applicable affective truth(s) which reason serves to guide and benefit but which is not reasoning in and of itself.
[My own answer, BTW, will be quickly disregarded as mysticism, pomo, or some such, for it in part pivots around an ultimate state of nondual awareness wherein all dolors can only be rationally inferred to vanish while awareness remains - a state of awareness that awaits to be obtained for as long as it might existentially take - in this sense akin to cosmological notions of Nirvana, Brahman, the One, etc. So, because of this derision from others, I’m not going to be offering my own answer as a contender for argument. But the philosophical question regarding ethics remains even when such “mystical” answer is at best shunned:]
What is the ideal good aspired toward that all ethical systems address - this implicitly, if not explicitly - without whose governance actions become at best amoral (i.e., neither moral nor immoral), this as per the actions of a headless chicken?
Else, how can ethics obtain in the absence of any ideal good?
Sure. It remains that the point of ethics is to act.
Hmm. I suppose the problem I see here is the singular: Goal, not goals.
Both deontology and utilitarianism seek what we might too tightly call an algorithm for deciding moral issues. A rule such that any case has a ready-made solution, a black box into which one feeds the data and derives a solution.
Virtue ethics need not seek that. It need not expect there to be any such rules. Instead it focuses on making oneself as capable as possible of acting well in whatever unpredictable situations one might find oneself in. And it leaves acting well open to discussion and transformation; not undefined, but open.
Virtue ethics lacks the hubris of deontology and utilitarianism.
Sure, being fair, being consistent, and being happy are worthy; but there's more to it.
Hence, goals.
Other than what I previously mentioned here, I don't have anything against virtue ethics.
The plurality of goals you mention to me misses the point. Of course there are a plurality of goals in practice within an individual, to not address a culture. As to their ethical standing, what is it that makes all these deemed to be good goals commonly defined - or better yet understood - as good? Herein lies the meta-ethics of good, or goodness. All concrete instantiations of good - regardless of perspective from culture or person - share in common the property of being good. And this property that defines all concrete instantiations is singular. Liken it to a universal and its instantiations: the universal is singular, the instantiations of it are plural.
While I can understand that it's a non-concern for some, it is yet a valid, if not very important, philosophical question: What is this ideal good that defines the innumerable, often enough times conflicting, instantiations of good relative to different cultures and to the different individuals within?
You'll perhaps be aware that I've a generally anti-philosophical approach. So I think that there's a fundamental methodological error in starting by deciding what is good. Good isn't found, least of all by philosophical discourse. That's part and parcel of rejecting the philosophical method of seeking essences, or setting out definitions, or fathoming the a priori...
There is no feature common to what is good, as Moore showed - apart from being good. Like all definitions, those for "good" are post-hoc rationalisations. But that does not prevent our using the term well and effectively.
So the plurality of goals, so far as it goes, does not miss the point, so much as dismiss it and yet remain on task. It bypasses the navel-gazing, admitting that we needs must act; and do so regardless of whether we know what we ought to do.
Not to forget Ram Das, Timothy Leary, Carlos Castaneda, Aldous Huxley.
Quoting Wayfarer
Interesting the way the scientific community so casually releases this kind of talk to culture. It is not that it is wrong, but that it is true only in the context of discussions that are thematically restricted to their own field. This IS what a person is through the eyes of a physicist, and there is no intent to denigrate humanity; they don't see it that way because they are fascinated by what they do. Just listen to Neil de Grasse Talk about the Truth of scientific discovery. He thinks it's the Hoy Grail. Utterly clueless. Hawkings' sense of humor is an in-house commonality among those so embedded in a mentality that the cannot understand anything else.
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course, Darwinism is right. So is astronomy and biochemistry. They are right, and I don't question these. But they simply are not philosophical. See Husserl's Ideas I or his Cartesian Meditations for for a really explicit statement about this: sciences and the "naturalistic attitude" on the one hand, and phenomenology on the other. The latter is an exposition of "things themselves" that are there, intuitively (he claims) prior to what a scientist does. It is "originary". This is a whole new world.
Quoting Wayfarer
It is said that the Buddha was the ultimate phenomenologist. I think Husserl's epoche, if taken to its logical end, is an act of meditation. The phenomenological reduction is a "method" not just a theory. It requires one to suspend most of what comes to mind to the understanding. Meditation is just this suspension, but rigorous. Is it possible to "see' the world as it "is" without recollection rushing to claim the moment? Is it possible to even conceive such a thing, for to think of it is to recall. See, if you like, Kierkegaard's Repetition: there is a difference between recollection and repetition. The former is a Platonic affirmation of knowledge; the latter is a renewal of presence IN time. You find this in Heidegger and Sartre(?). There is long history of this, starting with Plato: the present is a moving image of eternity; the Augustine, Kant, and so on. I am Trying to read Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative. I find it difficult, but there is this very old notion of nunc stans I am trying to think through. Kierkegaard is famous for his "eternal present" and Wittgenstein followed suit, I think. He was a fan of Kierkegaard.
Quoting Wayfarer
Reading phenomenology completely changes the vocabulary of ideas like this. It takes that shift from daily engagement in the world to a broader perspective and gives it a whole new meaning.
I don't know where this comes from, but it was you that said your time was wasted after all that I put out there. I mean, what time did YOU waste? And you read nothing, or you said nothing at all about the argument placed before you. You didn't bring up this point, call me on that, express disbelief about the other. You made no effort at all. Snipe hunting?? That is insulting. And now you are the injured party?
I wasted YOUR time?
Very candidly stated. I can find admiration for that. Maybe akin to the moto of not fixing what isn’t broken? Just as candidly, I remain curious … and dissatisfied with not knowing what is right and what is wrong in that oh so philosophical sense. So, from where I stand, we’re at a friendly enough impasse.
But to be clear on my part:
Quoting Banno
Not deciding, but discovering.
Quoting Astrophel
Ah yes, thanks for the reminder.
Quoting Astrophel
See Epoché and ??nyat? , Jay Garfield. Right on that wavelength.
Quoting Astrophel
And also The Embodied Mind, the Varela/Thomson/Rosch book that initiated the enactivism school. That is basically a combination of phenomenology and abhidharma. (Thomson has recently published a book Why I am not a Buddhist, but I don't think that detracts from the Buddhist philosophical elements of the original work. ) I think this kind of approach manages to step out of the whole 'reason v faith' dichotomy that bedevils so much mainstream thinking.
Quoting Astrophel
I think the origin of metaphysics, specifically with Parmenides, was grounded in such a vision. There's a (somewhat maverick) classics scholar by the name of Peter Kingsley who explores those themes. (Fascinating recent review on that.)
But subsequently to my exploration of those ideas through the Eastern sources I mentioned, I came to realise that many of these themes are also to be found in the Western tradition. There is that thread in Western philosophy but it's basically been rejected by most analytical philosophy as such, although it lives on in European philosophy. I'm trying to join those dots now but it takes a lot of reading.
You conflate disagreement with personal attack.
The time wasting comment was my response to the specific approach described below which seemed to me to lack focus and promise. Your ice scream paragraph:
Quoting Astrophel
Ethical agency seen through the 'continental' lens here seems diffuse and likely fruitless. But it is up to you to demonstrate what it accomplishes. However, I am happy to move on.
A difference subtle. Not my cup of tea I'm afraid but I'll give it my best shot: How about if I say it's a matter of degrees and not type and so destroying the cave is immoral, but not as immoral as killing a person.
:up: Don't get carried away though!
More than "to act", to reflectively act.
Quoting god must be atheist
From p.1 of this thread .
Why definitely "self-sacrificial"? Although sometimes you may sacrifice things you would like to do or have for yourself for the sake of others, e.g. your family, your company, etc., this is not always the case. But even in these cases, if, for example, you sacrifice your desire to buy a nice car and instead use that money to send your son or daughter to the a College or University, this will increase their survival because they would have a better salary in the near future than if they were just school graduates. And this will also benefit the whole family, wouldn't it? There are a lot of examples of such cases.
On the other hand, you are not supposed to sacrifice everything for the sake of others. In that case you threaten your own survival and well-being, and you can even die. And that would be not good for anyone. That's why suicide is generally considered an unethical action. It's against survival. That is, against life.
Quoting god must be atheist
OK, but this is totally physical. Well-being refers to both physical and mental aspects. Happiness, joy, intelligence, feeling free, and so on are all non-physical and attributes of well-being, and thus ethics.
Quoting god must be atheist
"Spheres!" We live in a 3D world! :smile:
Quoting god must be atheist
Please don't stick to the word "survival". A lot of people do. However, I add the word "well-being". But also a lot of people ignore it! I am not sure exactly why. (Although I have some idea why :smile:)
You may substitute the word "survival" with "life" if you like. In fact, I think I will start using that word instead myself! :smile:
Quoting god must be atheist
If there is such a discrepancy, and it is difficult for you to bear that, you might want better go and live in another society. But as long as you stay in it you must respect its rules and expectations. If your company has a certain code of ethics or rules or policies with which you disagree, you have to either live with them (because your salary is more important) or join another company. Isn't that right?
Well, they are different things, aren't they? The first one means a state of being comfortable, healthy or happy. The second one is much more general and it can mean that which is right (in general), a benefit or advantage to someone or something, etc. I have clarified the word since a lot of people start asking questions like, "OK, but what is (considered) good?" etc.
Quoting Astrophel
Please, give me something easier to do! :grin: For instance, answer to your own viewpoint(s).
In in fact, I am more interested in first-hand --people's own-- than second-hand opinions.
Quoting Astrophel
It would be good to have some examples, because I can't see how such a thing can work ...
In the first place, according to this scheme, "you" are more important than your "family", since you are the smaller than it, right? Well, this is one of the reasons why marriages fail. And if your marriage fails and you break up, then you get "smaller": you are retreating into your shell.
Then, how can your family be more important than your country if you need a country to live and work in, in order to sustain it?
Then, if your country is more important than the world, could you go against the whole word to defend it? If another country attacks yours, who would be there to support your country since it behaves as being more important than every else? Why do you think coalitions are created in wars?
Your country cannot live isolated except in a jungle!
No, sorry, this scheme does not make any sense.
Beware of what authorities (experts), known personalities --philosophers or other-- say. Don't adopt their opinions except if they really make sense to you, "work" for you and apply to your life.
Quoting Astrophel
Certainly not.
Quoting Astrophel
I'm not sure, but maybe "There is a no sovereign 'right'" ?
If you meant that, there is such a right. This is where customs, traditions, laws, etc., come in.
But above these, "public good" is what benefits society. And I think everyone knows what. It's another thing if people chose to ignore it or do the opposite. This has to do with personal ethics. Only insane people usually cannot distinguish right from wrong.
The continental lens is not the issue. If you make it in issue, then you can tell me what it is. You think it is unimportant that to philosophically understand ethics, one does not have to understand ethical agency? That is analytically impossible, because ethics is an inter-agency affair. How can we say what ethics is and what the basis of obligation is if we don't understand what it is about a person that makes ethics even possible?
A fair question, and then some.
Absolutely! But what is it one has to think about? This is critical, I mean, philosophy asks, what is this all about, this struggle (this "war" says Levinas)? To address this, then certain questions come before us. Struggles are over something, power, wealth, advantages, indulgences, glorious things, trivial things, and since this is a philosophical question, then all attention is on the essence of these. I call it affectivity or value. This is the basic concept for the engine that drives ethics: the simple fact that we are in a world in which we care, and caring is the subjective side of the objective desideratum: the existent yums and ouches IN the world.
Reflection has to go here eventually, if the matter is philosophically taken on. In my thought, all roads to validating anything philosophically lead to the material basis out of which it arose.
Affectivity...that from which a change in a given system is possible.
Structure of affectivity, then, is that by which the change occurs.
The first is an element in a system, the second is a method of that element in that system.
Quoting Astrophel
Agreed, as stated in a plethora of texts. So saying, from the continental tradition, as you admit this current subject matter takes its ground, the duality of affectivity, in its Enlightenment continental form, is given from the distinction in judgements, re: aesthetic, which regards what the subject feels about a thing, and, discursive, which regards what a subject thinks about that thing.
Quoting Astrophel
Wherein lay the problem.
1.) The true object is not in the same system as affectivity and its structure. The true object is an effect on the system such that the system is affected by it. The true object is external to the system it affects.
2.) It is implied that the true object and the qualified existent are indistinguishable. While it may be necessary that a true object is an existent, it remains that there are no conditions under which its qualities are given from its mere existence.
3.) Phenomena are the affects of true objects on the system of sensibility in humans. If it is the case that no qualities are given from a mere existence, and mere existence is necessary for phenomena as affects of those true objects, then it follows that qualities do not belong to phenomena.
4.) Because qualities are determinable, but cannot belong to phenomena as an element in a system of sensibility, it follows that qualities are determinable by a method in a system which is itself affected by phenomena.
5.) Deliciousness does not belong to, is not a quality of, phenomena. The true object that effects, and the qualified existent that is an affect, are in fact distinguishable. Deliciousness, and all qualities, cannot be determined from a given object by sensibility, but must arise from a system incorporating a method capable of it, such that qualities can be determinable as relating to an object.
There is a valid “other side of this subjective”, but it does not entail an affectivity, which belongs to the affected subject alone. A cake sitting on the table is a true object, from which its affect on a subject as a phenomenon is given. Whether the cake is made with sugar or gasoline, by which the quality of its existence is determinable, cannot be ascertained from its merely sitting on the table.
That I will act when an act is called for, is given. How I should act is not given from the mere fact an act is called for. That I will act in a prescribed manner is not given from the mere fact I should act. If ethics is the compendium of acts, a description of personal conduct in general, nothing whatsoever is given from that, that suffices as determination of the acts themselves.
Consequentialism, therefore, is valid on the one hand for its effect (there are acts), yet insufficient on the other for a cause (that which determines the act)
—————-
Quoting Astrophel
Yes. WE.....are. Not another thing not us. It is we alone that is affected and exhibit affectivity. All else is merely occasion for it.
—————-
Quoting Astrophel
No such thing. Any good-ness is contingent on the something said to bear the quality of good. To call something good immediately makes it goodness possible.
Non-contingent good, on the other hand, is that good which has nothing related to it. Contingent on nothing. Good in and of itself, as that by which relative.....contingent.....goodness is judged.
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Quoting Astrophel
Quoting Astrophel
Might it be that the entirety of phenomenal possibilities we classify as valuable serve as essence of ethics? In which case, consequentialism holds. But if we classify something as valuable, value is then a contingent assignment, and cannot be existential in that to which we assign the value, so consequentialism fails.
Closer to the content of the topic at hand.....true story......the other day I anonymously bought dinner for a young family unknown to me, for which I had no prior experience. If I understand you correctly, there was something about my immediate phenomenal experience of that family that was of such value as to cause my donation. Admittedly, I noticed a variety of existential matters of fact, insofar as they were not all that well-dressed, ordered less expensive items from the menu, ordered no dessert even with the presence of youngsters who would have appreciated a bowl of ice cream.
(This place....their in-house chocolate/peanut butter cheese cake is superb)
When there are a myriad of reasons for any of those existential matters of fact.....how is it possible to assign value merely because of an immediate observation? If the kids were lactose intolerant, if the whole family had just left the house they were in the process of remodeling, if nothing on the menu suited their tastes......all sufficiently explain what I observed, but do not necessarily explain why I paid for the dining occasion.
Nahhhh.....my ethical contribution was the consequence of my having already assigned the value of “deserving” as an aesthetic judgement, which may have been an affect of my observations, but cannot thereby be predicated on them alone. I judged them as deserving because I related that value in that instance, to another in which it was absent. It follows that the observation, the phenomenal experience, was valuable, in that it elicited an assignable value to my ethical act, but contained no predicate value in itself.
Again, the consequentialist ethics was given in the act; the cause of it was not.
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Quoting Astrophel
Yes, you do. But are they enough?
Joshs wrote a paper on this book and I read it and the book. The book quite accessible, the paper difficult. I find cognitive science decidedly not philosophical, on the one hand, and the Madhyumika fascinating. In the west we have apophatic theology/philosophy. Jphn Caputo wrote a couple of books, The Weakness of God and The Tears of Derrida, that in one way of another defend the apophatic resolution in the discovery that the world that stands before us impossible to understand, and our "totalities" that is, our coherent systems for taking it up and dealing with it lead to this final aporia. What I am trying to say in this OP is inspired by this as well as Mahayana "no self" insights. In my opinion, philosophy has come to an end, but philosophers don't know this, yet. It came to and end in India long ago (reading the Abidhamma is a very tedious thing to do, and I could never wrap my mind around all that pali language. But pull back from this, and see that its basic assumption is about "seeing" the world in a pure, dynamic way).
Quoting Wayfarer
I have Kingsley here. I'll read it.
Being and non Being are impossibly contradictory. But I never really bought this. Apophatic thinking is revelatory not logical. Parmenides is more about those "impossible" performative contradictions like, "I am lying." I have always thought Hume was right in saying that reason is an empty vessel that would just as soon scratch humanity existence out of existence. It bears no ill will or good will. It is merely formal. It is the content that has meaning, and reason has no limitations at all regarding content. God could literally show up and reveal an order of glory and beauty that is eternal, and reason would not flinch.
The proof is in the pudding: an examination of the foundational structure of experience. It has been done many times I know, and I have benefitted from these, but due regard is not given to affectivity (value).
I ask "what Is Ethics" because an analysis of ethics bring forth the Real (or, irreal?), which I think is affectively defined. I look at it like this: transcendence is by definition unspeakable and unencounterable; material substance is simply a way to reify scientific theories into an ontology. We are not, in all these endeavors, trying to affirm a thesis, even when this is exactly what we are doing. We are really trying to affirm some value: it is the desire, interest, and so on FOR this existent value. Analysis ends here in the actual concrete existent of affectivity.
Then the question goes to a hierarchy of valuing (not values. That is misleading) , and here, the Eastern notions make a great leap into the argument: They are saying, very generally, that it is not an argument at all. It is existential. It becomes, at the threshold of philosophy a search for greater and greater value, and this is an internal discovery.
It's just that "well" and "good" are synonyms.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Sorry, I don't mean to "give" it to you. I just write what comes to mind and I thought of Oldenquist.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Oldequist was trying to take a conservative stand against treating third world moral obligations as equal to moral obligations at the national level. He conceived of the de facto condition that we do indeed care about family first and friends and neighbors second and so on, as a ground for de jure thinking about obligations. He wanted to give a rationality for ignoring the suffering of, and the exploitation of those abroad who have resources we can use, but we want these at a minimal cost.
You know, this is the way conservatives think. They are in this deeply immoral people, I think. But it is a good issue for arguing.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Well, this these pathetic nobodies stand in the way of making our country great, and by great I mean greater wealth throughout the land, more "being comfortable, healthy or happy", More! But what about those who stand in our way? those Uyghurs in China that will not toe the line, the poor who not find a job, the useless, the mentally diseased, and so on. We could make the greatness happen if it wasn't for those that hold us back.
How does your thinking on this go?
Thinking about acting – learning to act ("fail") better – while acting rather than ex post facto, concretely (re: Peirce, Dewey) and not merely in the abstract.
More prolix nonsense with respect to "what is ethics?" :confused:
Sure, thinking about acting. But our thinking doesn't arise ex nihilo. If I were born a 19th Zulu warrior, I imagine my moral thinking would be very different than it is. Or in the American south 200 years ago.
But is this local sense of right and wrong all there is? Isn't there a way to bring moral understanding to a higher ground?
But, more interesting: if ethics is about "learning to act better" there is beneath this a deeper assumption, which is that human being (or dogs and cats) are worthy of our better acts; that a person deserves this consideration at all. Of course, this is not unfamiliar thinking: we look to intent, for example, in criminal assessment. We also look to vulnerabilities to determine degree of culpability. If a person has no caring for another, then the other cannot be accused of mental duress. I mean to say, in all ethical conditions qua ethical, the analysis always turns on the existence of that which is in play: some caring, desire, indulgence, affection is, I argue, what ethics is "all about".
What follows from this is the next concern, but initially, in a philosophical analysis, ethics is this. Acting entirely depends on this.
That's as misguided as saying "appetite, urinating, flatulence, defecating ..." is what metabolism is "all about". :roll:
I see. Then yes, most people think first about themselves, etc. But this depends on the culture. It has to do with social conscience. In Greece, for example, this is quite low in relation to other European countries.
Quoting Astrophel
I think I see what you are talking about, although these things are not so real to me, living in a totally different society than yours. Anyway, to stick to our subject of ethics and well-beingness, I could say that each country thinks more about its own good than the good of the world, even if Unions of countries are created for supporting each other. For example, I don't think that Germany as a state thinks more about the good of the EU than about its own. And I also think it's not the only one. This is what I call "lack of ethics". In other words, we cannot talk about ethics on a social plane. Ethics is a personal thing.
Could we instead say that the point of ethics is to communicate? A good counselor, parent or friend can save lives and souls through words. Well chosen words, backed up by careful thought. I worked as a counselor with severely emotionally disturbed and psychotic young adults. My prior armchair introspections were invaluable in making sense of and coming up with strategies of helping them. My thinking and writing constitute my ‘bible’ , the guide for all my social-ethical interactions. Every significant insight I incorporate into my writing changes my outlook on life and has direct effects on my concrete behavior with others. These days my writing constitutes my acting.
Good may not be found by philosophical discourse, at least as a universal a priori, but in saying there is no feature common to what is good, one is still assuming the coherence of the concept of ethical good, and as such is remaining within the familiar territory of religious metaphysics. Martin Hagglund has made this argument in his critique of the Leviniasian ethical stance of writers like John Caputo and Simon Critchley.
Do you have any reservations about this vocabulary — that we classify something as valuable or assign it value?
I just don’t think we experience the world that way — not universally. Maybe in some cases, we do something like “assigning” value, I don’t know. I think we mostly recognize value, understand things to have value. In this, I tend to think to think we are much like other animals: the world has things in it to be sought, and things to be avoided. Those are facts, not choices, not assignments.
I mean, I get that a biologist or a psychologist is going to say things like this: the organism, or some subsystem of it, classifies a given entity encountered as “food” or “predator” based on this or that, and assigns it a role, as if the world were a play the organism is putting on. I’m not disputing accounts of how it’s done, what the mechanism is. But that’s not the organism’s experience, which is of a world populated with good things and bad things. We’re capable of theorizing that, of seeing around our own corner to some degree, so we’re in a position to say, it’s all assignment all the time: nothing has inherent value. But of course you can only say that and mean it if you’re not a human being or a dog or an amoeba, if you’re not a living thing at all. So it looks to me like an answer to the wrong question. We want to know how we find value in things and what it means for us, and end up describing what that would be like if we were completely different from what we are. Yes, we could happen to have grown up elsewhere, at another time, speak a different language and have different customs and traditions, but none of us only happen to be human beings and could happen to have been something else.
You owe it to yourself to read Martin Hagglund’s critique of Caputo’s attempt to ‘theologize’ Derrida. I’m sure you won’t agree with it , but at least it will articulate the differences in outlook between the religion-beyond -religion approaches of Caputo, Critchely and Levinas (along with religiously oriented phenomenologists like Marion, Henry, Scheler, Anthony Steinbock, Dermot Moran, Edith Stein) and what I see as the post-religious thinking of Heidegger and Derrida.
My heuristic for this idea is that the subject of such discussions is really the nature of existence as distinct from the nature of being. This distinction revolves around the specific meaning of 'exist' - from 'ex-' outside of (e.g. external, exile) and -'ist' to stand. So 'to exist' is to be a separate entity, this thing as distinct from that thing. ('No entity without identity'.) Whereas 'to be' has a much broader range of meanings that 'to exist' (recall that the explication of the different senses of the verb 'to be' is central to Aristotle's Metaphysics.)
What exists are phenomena - that which appears - and 'what appears' or exists is invariably delimited in time and composed of parts. (Name a counter-example!)
As an illustrative example, you find in Mah?y?na literature the frequent expression that 'everything that exists is subject to birth and death'. Nirv??a does not exist, but is the reality beyond the vicissitudes of birth and death. So, beyond (the vicissitudes of) existence.
I make this distinction because when you encounter the puzzling phrase 'beyond being', I think what you're really reading is 'beyond existence', where 'existence' means 'phenomenal existence'.
See this example from the SEP entry on Eriugena (by Dermot Moran) where I have interpolated 'to exist' for what was written as 'to be'. I think this interpolation makes the passage considerably easier to interpret (although still obviously a very deep subject!)
A similar intuition is also found in Tillich's apophaticism:
In short, 'existence' is what 'the transcendent' is transcendent in respect to. Whereas to all intents, 'existence' or 'the phenomenal' defines the entire domain of operations for naturalism.
Quoting Astrophel
The proper context for such an understanding is that of the transformation of perception which was traditionally called metanoia. One of the epiphets of Buddha is yath?bh?ta?, 'one who sees things as they truly are'. The figure of the Sage is a counterpart in the Greek philosophical tradition. Sagacity in that sense requires a kind of unitive or holistic understanding, rather than the merely analytical. Again the origins of this in the axial age philosophy was with the visionary sages such as Parmenides.
So maybe the reason for its 'unspeakability' is that, in seeing it, you realise truth, probably for the first time - which is impossible to convey to those lacking that vision. (Although the tradition of empowerment in Zen Buddhism is aimed at the transmission of that kind of vision.)
Quoting Astrophel
Maybe there's a different conception of reason now to what the ancients understood as 'logos' (a word which was unfortunately incorporated into, or appropriate by, Christian theology.) But in, for example, the Aristotelian aitia, understanding the reason encompassed the reason for its existence and the end towards which it is directed, something that has been dropped from the modern understanding.
Buddhist logicians disputed the concept of atoms by saying that, if they were truly dimensionless points then they could never come into contact with one another, because they would have no sides (a side being a part, and the atom being partless. Of course the ancients didn't possess the concept of the electromagnetic field, but in their day this argument was cogent.)
But beyond that, I don't think 'the unmanifest' or 'the unconditioned' should be equated with the Democritean void. The meaning of ??nyat?, the Buddhist 'emptiness', is notoriously elusive, but suffice to note that Buddhists of all schools strongly refute its equation with nothingness (which was the common charge levelled at them by the Brahmins.) Thanissaro Bhikkhu says 'Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there's anything lying behind them.' That is why @Astrophel correctly pointed out the convergence of Buddhism with Husserl's epoché.
As for Spinoza, he says that the problem is that people normally desire “perishable things” which “can be reduced to these three headings: riches, honour, and sensual pleasure” (Treatiste on the Emendation of the intellect: para.3&9). As these things are “perishable”, they cannot afford lasting happiness; in reality they worsen our situation, since their acquisition more often than not requires compromising behaviour and their consumptions makes us even more dependent on perishable goods. “But love towards a thing eternal and infinite feeds the mind with joy alone, unmixed with any sadness.”(para.10) Finally, in the Ethics, Spinoza conveys his vision of the single “Substance” (Subject or Being) underlying manifest existence. His non-dualistic understanding of this vision is clearly articulated when he says that “[t]he mind’s intellectual love of God is the very love of God by which God loves himself” (Ethics, Part 5, Prop. 36).'
I see Spinoza as an exponent of the perennial philosophy - a lot of what is written in the Emendation of the Intellect could be transposed with little adjustment to a Buddhist or Hindu treatise on the attainment of tranquility. I think the reason for Spinoza's expulsion by the Jewish community was because his philosophy bypassed the need for the traditional religious authorities by teaching a 'direct path' type of approach.
As I have said, for me ethics is what happens when we try to cope with living with others. Ethics is only possible with others. We can't go any deeper without making stuff up or drawing from presuppositional theology or some other suspect meta-narrative. Because we have different wold-views you don't accept my answer. That's fine. Ditto. I simply don't see that there is any merit trying to 'understand' ethics from the perspective of the pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic - which is where you seem to be heading. By definition there is nothing to say.
So perhaps you can use your preferred method of enquiry and suggest an answer?
Quoting Tom Storm
:100:
There is an "indirectness" that also led to that expulsion. Arguing that the Unnamable One is not an agent we could gain or lose favor for our purposes through pleasing that agent through our petitions was the real kicker. The notion that our circumstances would improve if we weren't so stupid was recognized as something we could not explain by direct causal explanations must certainly have been annoying. But not as annoying as that first part.
After all, the lessons of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes was that one should not get too big in the britches explaining events.
I thought I would butt in here to clarify some things. Would you agree with the following? Our ability to act ethically with others evolves as a function of cultural development. To use an analogy, not too long ago it was assumed that animals had no emotions or cognition and did not feel pain. It s hard to act ‘ethically’ toward a creature when you dont see them as having any of these capabilities. Another example : we used to think that infants were a blooming, buzzing confusion. Now we know that they have all sorts of perceptual and recognition skills, including being able to empathize with others. Again, without such an appreciation of the infant’s perspective, ethical treatment of them is limited. I would argue the entire history of culture involves the growth of insights into how others unlike ourselves think and feel.
So there is a depth to coping with living with others in the sense of a base of understanding that evolves over time.
As I understand him, this is different from what Astrophel has in mind. He is looking for an affective basis for ethical behavior that goes beyond ( in that it is prior to) what we learn through pragmatic interaction. He follows approaches that hold onto a religious metaphysics, albeit of a progressive and heretical kind.
Hi Joshs - I appreciate your replies. Yes, I already suggested this to A as a point of difference.
Quoting Joshs
I think this provides a bit more substance to the matter. I particularly like your last sentence.
I guess I am in the 'pragmatic interaction' camp and anything outside of that is for specialists and likely to be as speculative as some of the ideas generated by quantum physics.
I don't think this is true. I am not here defending some set of ideas conceived by continental philosophers. The argument has Dewey and Rorty. There is Dewey's "experience". I take a great deal if insight from John Mackie's book "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong". He helped me frame the argument. So did Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Lecture on Ethics, and "Culture and Value". I am also indebted to the East (fine points omitted). Husserl gave me the phenomenological reduction....and on and on.
It is not, however, an exercise in the history of philosophy (which I frankly could not pull off at all. People who do this are really good with details). The things I try to defend are pretty intuitive. Most thinking people are inclined to lay over what is given here with what they already know, and therein lies trouble.
Quoting Mww
I don't deal in "effects on the system" talk, for causal accounts of any kind are off the table. There I am, sprained ankle, in agony. Agony? What is this? Even if there were an exhaustive account of all that brought the agony to consciousness, it would not having any bearing on the phenomenon of agony. You may even ground the agony in a temporal displacement dynamic (Joshs explained Heidegger like this), but this changes nothing (I argue). The true object is there, the agonizing ankle, I am observing. It may be that there are nerves and brain activity (but then, this would be the brain's observation of brain activity! A very important point) but this still is outside the "issue" I am raising.
You may object: one cannot "talk" about agony qua agony. And I would reply, exactly. Then move on to implications
Quoting Mww
This kind of thinking is alien to what is being defended here. I don't really understand "mere existence" very well. Affect is not effect. Affect refers to the qualities of caring, broadly conceived. To despise something, or savor something, along with that which is the object of these, the taste of food, the sound of music, and so on. As far as affect goes, there is nothing more, I would argue, that can be a phenomenon than affect, for a mood, an aesthetic feeling, is most immanently "present", that is, intuitively apprehended. it is not that there is a violin causing vibrations in the air that excite the ear drums and so forth. The joy of, say, being love, QUA joy, not as anything else that might be part of its explanatory contexts, which are many, is the pure phenomenon. This idea of something pure is debated alot, and you might be familiar with Dennett's paper on qualia in which he denies qualia to be meaningful, and he is right If, as he does, you exclude the eidetic (the ideas that are inherent in the "presence" of a thing) dimension, then it is impossible to talk about, say, the color yellow. Yellow qua yellow does not "speak" yellow. We, in the way we take things AS yellow and smooth and what have you, and talk about it in different contexts, make the designation "yellow" possible. But affect, the emotion we might experience in the presence of yellow, this, sans any eidetic part at all, does truly, I argue, "speak".
What is "says" comes later.
Quoting Mww
Qualities ARE phenomena. This cup is red, and the red predicated of the cup is the quality, and it has, arguably, intuitive presence, and AS presence, there is nothing more "real". Husserl went Cartesian on this. He thought the the world out there of facts and science and the naturalistic attitude were a kind of second order of reals, for these issued from a foundation of intuitions, and these intuitions were absolute, unassailable, as say, something Descartes evil genius might try. You know how Descartes found the external world doubtable to our res cogitans sego. What is NOT doubtable? Husserl says its the phenomenon, the intuitive presence of what is there that is then taken up by science and everydayness.
Quoting Mww
So you see, as this goes, the object is not a res extensa thing, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson might tell us. We are in, literally, another order of perceptual awareness. The landscape of things and their qualities are acknoweldged for their "thereness", their appearance. The logic can be simple: One has never ever witnessed anything else. Talk about what has not been encountered is just bad metaphysics. Empirical science taken an ontology is just bad metaphysics.
Deliciousness, then, is taken as a direct intuition. It may be associated with apple eating, but saying apples are delicious is not something you find at this level of description. Nor do you find Jupiter being a larger mass than Saturn, or my shoes being untied. these are facts. Phenomenology is interested what underlies these facts as a facts' predispositions.
Think of how Kant (the "grandfather" of phenomenology?) analyzed reason. He wasn't interested in Jupiter either, but only the form of propositions and judgments that could be about Jupiter. These forms are what underlie presuppositionally familiar talk about things. His was an phenomenological analysis of reason.
Quoting Mww
This is a rather good way to look at this, because arguments that deny moral realism often look simply at the differences in the way likes and dislikes are distributed. Differences can be radical. But the case for moral realism doesn't care about this, for the relativity in judgments about value is only intersubjective difference. But value as a phenomenon is very different, for the assessment of the value something has is allowed to be judged for what it is, not what it compares to.
There is the objection that even when value is "observed" as a phenomenon, it is still entangled, compared and so forth, for the mind is not a rigidly determined world. True, and this can confuse whether somethin is good or bad. But when something is deemed good in a relatively uncompromised sense, like this pizza, the goodness as goodness is unassailable. Fall in love? Unassailable, and by this I mean, it is not a prima facie case of being good. It is, rather, indefeasable, apodictically good. The pain of being axed in the groin is apodictically bad, and while the moral principle that would condemn axing another person thusly does not change or become fashioned differently because pain is apodictically bad, it does take on a dimension of meaning that is otherwise not there.
An impossible thesis: because pain (and joy and all the rest) is apodictically bad, our moral world has the gravitas of Old Testament stone tablets. Of course, there are no stone tablets, but one has to imagine what our moral affairs would be like if there were.
I argue for this.
Quoting Mww
I don't have any problem with utilitarian thinking at all. Only it does not always yield proper results.
And to assigning value to the immediate observation: It is not that these are not important to naking a decision. The phenomenological examination of the case is at a different order of analysis. Think again what Kant did in the CPR: individual cases are set aside, for he was trying to discover their rational essence, an analysis of what is presupposed by normal judgment. Phenomenological analysis does this with everything, the world that is there logically prior to it begin taken up in this way or that.
I argue that in all experiences in the world, there is this apodicticity that is found in the affectivity, the value. this means that in all we do and say there is this value essence that is non contingent. The world "speaks" at the foundation of our moral affairs, and all of our affairs.
I expect the worst.......
But there is a line that refuses to be drawn, so we are always redrawing it. Look at it at a more local level. I have ethical concerns about lots of people and their situations, and I feel the tug of obligation everywhere. But I cannot prosecute all of this; in fact, I have to ignore most of it. One cannot live a life like this, as if unless the world is morally leveled out, I can't do anything for my self and family. And we get into the habit of ignoring others, so busy living and breathing. and to be a professional, an artist, a philosopher, and so on, this takes a lot of ignoring.
Where does the ethical call to duty draw its line? People who do great things are utterly absorbed. I don't know. Tough call.
First off, it's clear that the foundations of ethics (the OP's target) is rather weak/shaky/even nonexistent. It's vital to get to the bottom of ethics of course but meanwhile...we can ask a better/more pragmatic question: is ethics useful? It sure is, right?
The Golden Rule: Treat others like you would like to be treated. Others, yes, but only in terms of you.
I don't think that the world will ever be morally leveled out ... At least, this what the trends show. Besides, how can it be? The main force and drive of morality comes from religion. However, all the dogmatic religions, including Christianity, have evidently failed. At least "in numbers". No other institution is responsible for inspiring and promoting morality. What remains is the morality that is innate in humans. And this is obviously theatened more and more by all sorts of immoral forces or factors. Immorality is generally much stronger than morality. A single criminal or bad-intended act can destroy, in a very short time, what hundreds of commendable or well-intended acts have created in years.
Quoting Astrophel
Why's that? I believe that you can do a lot for yourself and your family.
Quoting Astrophel
I can't see why, either ... I don't think we should, anyway.
Quoting Astrophel
I don't think we can draw such line. Also, I don't think that etchics are especially connected to duty. Doing our duty can be the result of inherent ethics, but also of being forced to for various reasons. The bottom line is that an ethical behaviour benefits everyone, ouselves and others. Independently of what happens in our environment. External consitions should not dictate ethical behaviour.
In dicussions about life and the world beiing unfair, my answer has alwayse been: "Just be fair and true to yourself". This is what later I called "personal integrity". It is what makes us feel good, have a clear conscience, have a solid reality, be self-confident and a lot of other very desirable things. It is also reflected to and affects others in a positiive way.
(All this may sound as "moral talking", but it really isn't. It's rational thinking! :smile:)
My understanding of the golden rule is not to read it in concrete terms. It is not saying that you need to assume people share your preferences exactly. It is saying treat others with the consideration you would appreciate - honour their preferences as you would want them to honour yours. That and in general terms almost all people do not want to be stolen from, lied to, framed or murdered - so there is that.
Explain
1. The Golden rule (concrete).
2. The Golden rule (abstract).
Qualities are CHANGES, referential differentials, ways of likeness and difference with respect to what came before. They are transitions, transformations.
Husserl did not go ‘Cartesian’ unless you are getting this from Dreyfus’s terrible misreading of him. Intuitions are instants of experiencing that never repeat themselves identically. That is why a real object is transcendent. Our belief in an enduring self-identical object is just that , a belief that makes us see continuing self-identity in a phenomenon that is in fact flowingly changing.
Husserl argues that the self-identical object on which duration and mathematical quantification is based is transcendent to what is actually experienced; it is an idealization , a synthesis pieced together from moments of experience that never reproduce their sense identically. Actual experience does not subsist, inhere or endure, and this does not produce countable instances.
“…it makes no sense to speak of something that endures. It is nonsensical to want to find something here that remains unchanged for even an instant during the course of its duration.”(Husserl 1964).
“The consciousness of its [the object's] existence is here a belief in act; by virtue of the accord in which the perceptive appearances flow off in original presentation, retention, and protention, an accord of continuous self-affirmation, belief is continuous certainty of belief, which has its certainty in this originality of the object in its living being-present.”
The object is “a unity which “appears” continually in the change of the modes of its givenness and which belongs to the essential structure of a specific act of the ego.” “The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.”(Husserl 1973)
“ Every temporal being "appears" in one or another continually changing mode of running-off, and the "Object in the mode of running-of" is in this change always something other, even though we still say that the Object and every point of its time and this time itself are one and the same.”(Husserl 1964)
In describing an unchanging enduring tone, for instance, Husserl emphasizes “…the incessantly changing mode of givenness of this duration.” “However, …through a continual coinciding of sense a unity of the objective sense can be formed and be maintained through the alteration of lived experiences.”
It would be a mistake to think the temporality of sense data lacks duration because it is instantaneous, momentary or extremely brief. Instantaneity presupposes objective time. Rather, the primordial now returns to itself moment to moment as qualitatively altered. Husserl asserts that the intentional ‘belief' in self-identicality constitutes an empirical object out of what are in fact changing senses. So there is nothing ‘absolute’ about these intuitions other than that they are absolutely contingent and relative.
Res affectus: I don't think it's possible to talk about other things like this. The "otherness" of the thing as a thing apart from all the ways I give it meaning is impossible, for the moment you bring a thing to mind at all, it is already my world.
I mean to say, res affectus considered apart from a thing is just as impossible as thinking of it apart from any properties or from rational categories. Of course, I could be emotionally numb, appetitively numb, and so on, but, I would argue, I would no longer be a person and the furniture of the world would fail to be things. I think the existence of a thing, that default sense that things ARE, is inherently affective.
I have no reservations, no, but the vocabulary is reserved for representing the conceptions of speculative metaphysics, in order to separate value as a quality from value as a purpose.
Are you saying the value of a thing is its purpose? That which has purpose has value, and that value is its affectivity? So an act, the purpose of which is to solve some ethical problem, obtains its value from that solution, and that’s what ethics is?
That works for me, iff value is not taken to be a quality. If the value of the solution reduces to a relative quality, which is where I was coming from, we’re no better off than before.
Mmmm. I think that’s a good answer, even though I’m not sure what you mean.
I’ll say this much: I am weary of the answer to every question being “it’s purpose-relative”. First, I am wary of the feeling that comes along with this that there is something arbitrary about the relation between the individual and the purpose they pursue, the feeling that we ought generally to think of purposes as choices or preferences. That feels weak to me. Oxygen is useful and valuable relative to the purpose of the respiratory system, which is in turn useful and valuable relative to the purpose of remaining a going concern. Swell. But that’s not a choice or a preference in any simplistic way. (And I want to say that, the fact that we can choose to prevent ourselves from breathing, doesn’t mean that each moment we don’t we must have chosen to continue. Bollocks.)
What’s more, even supposing you have some analytically arbitrary purpose — based in a free choice or a preference/passion — then you don’t also choose to value things relative to that purpose: it’s automatic. Given your purpose, the world presents itself to you a certain way, things announce their suitability or insuitability to your purpose, or occasionally, but not universally, as ambiguous, requiring reflection.
(As above, at the modeling level, as they say, there’s no doubt something classificatory going on — we imagine this like a Terminator’s heads-up-display, identifying objects in the immediate environment one after another and running them through a “writing-implement-recognition protocol” or something, but of course it’s ridiculous to imagine that every time we need a pen we do a brute-force search through all the objects in sight — nope, bowl; nope, book; nope, spoon, though that’s ‘closer’ in shape; nope, glasses; ... — and at any rate, above that level of the “biological interface”, this is not at all how we experience “looking for a pen”.)
On the one hand, I could simply note that a human life doesn’t start over again from scratch, from moment to moment, but is always layered with ongoing purposes, passions, and interests; thus the “raw” unvalued world never really gets a chance to present itself to us. (Or better: it is normal for it not to, and perhaps there are practices that can peel off some of those layers, as art students learn to overcome the biases of color constancy and finally see something more like the actual colors presented to the eye rather than the simplified version we’re accustomed to.) But I also wonder if there isn’t a regress lurking: choose your purpose; now choose how to achieve it; now choose to follow that process; now choose how to follow that process, ad infinitum. At some point, the world and the things in it must be understood in a certain way, things presenting themselves as what we want or not, etc.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Living systems self-organize in a functionally unified manner, which means that they behave in ways that are normatively structured. So, yes, respiration, digesting, reproduction are useful with respect to the whole functioning of the organism, but they are also tied together such that each subcomponent affects and is interaffected by the others for the sake of a unified direction of functioning. When an ant crawls over a carpet, it doesn’t just make use of a pre-programmed set of reflexes, it adapts itself to a surface it has never experienced before. It makes choices in how it navigates the carpet, and this behavior draws upon all of the subsystems and causes them to adjust themselves in turn accordingly to the needs of the main activity.
Organisms anticipate into their environment, shaping it according to their needs, purposes, preferences This has been referred to as a kind of proto-cogntition. While the range of variation in physiological behavior is sharply constrained by inherited factors compared to actual cognition, they share the basic feature of normative goal-orientation. At the level of human cognition, choice and preference is constrained by a prior history of integrated habits of understanding, which is interwoven with social practices and conventions. So to say that’s human behavior is purpose-relative is to say that we are sense-making, goal-driven creatures whose choices are intricately constrained by a network of pre-established channels
of intelligibility.
But this doesn't say anything about the content of this ethics.
Quoting Tom Storm
The "Golden Rule" is far too easy to exploit for it to be of any relevance, other than merely rhetorical.
You can refrain from killing, raping, and pillaging, but none of this guarantees that others will not kill, not rape, or not pillage from you.
So now what?
A day-old infant has very limited cognition skills. So, by your logic, ethical treatment of very young infants should likewise be limited.
Reductive ethics is scary.
:smile: :clap:
The examples I gave dealt with limitations on ethical treatment of others resulting from lack of insight into their capabilities. As to the question of the relation between ethical valuation and capability in general I would only say that there is a direct correlation between ethical valuation and either present capability or potential for future capability. We dont presently accord rights to stones, insects or mollusks, but that could change in accord with our knowledge concerning their capabilities.
For every question, absolutely, certainly with respect to that which occurs naturally in the world of things. Those things we ourselves invent or create, I think the value, meaning and purpose are generally presupposed in them. Otherwise, there’s no reason for them, or, what’s worse, the creation and the purpose conflict with each other, the existence of the thing becomes irrelevant, which in turn negates its value. Some questions about these things could be purpose-relative, as, which hammers for which nails.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I dunno about that. The world presents itself, sure, but I get to decide suitability of things for a purpose. Should I fail in according to a purpose because I chose improperly, it can’t be the thing’s fault. You probably mean “announce” is a loose sense; things just kinda sit there, doing not much of anything on their own.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, which helps alleviate the ad infinitum process between having and accomplishing a purpose. Because we are human, the certain way of understanding anything at all, is the human way. We don’t know how that works, so the only way we can talk about it, is from speculative metaphysical theory.
Which is where the reservations in vocabulary enters the stage.
I, on the other hand, think the default sense that things ARE, is inherently logical.
Agent, Thought I explained this in my post. If it is unclear, forget it. :razz: I'm just suggesting that there is a spirit of interpretation - an intent - not a narrow, literalist interpretation.
True. There are no guarantees in life, period. I think the GR mainly applies to the self as a guiding principle - I don't think anyone sees it as a magic charm that ushers in ethical behaviour all around. I've always understood it to be like a teaching tool setting forth a simple approach. People seem to love it or hate it.
:ok:
The golden rule (GR): "What you find harmful, do not do to anyone" - @180 Proof
There are 2 kinds of harm.
1. Psychological.
2. Physical.
If the GR is to work two conditions need to be met.
i) All of us should be physically similar/identical (the same things should hurt everyone and the same things should give everyone pleasure).
ii) All of us should be psychologically similar/identical (we should all have the same values is one requirement among others).
Complications:
a) Physical similarity/identity doesn't guarantee the efficacy of the GR as it can be modulated by psychology e.g. asceticism (a mindset) can transform what is normally physical discomfort/pain into something not.
b) Psychological similarity/identity we all know is a myth. Cultural differences in outlook can mean what's pleasurable to one people will be perceived as offensive to another people e.g. child marriage was acceptable in the middle east and south asia but is viewed as rape in the west.
To get right to the point, psychology has a major role and is the confounding factor in re the GR. It (psychology) precludes the universal applicability of the GR.
Nevertheless, there's a fair level/amount of similarity/identity physically and psychologically among humans for the GR to return the fewest errors when employed to guide conduct. How different can we be, right? We're on the same planet for pete's sake! :grin:
I think this is the nub of it. There are no different cultural interpretations I know of where murdering or thieving or lying are considered cool.
When kids misbehave to others there's a famous phrase parents tend to use - "How would you like it if they did that to you?" I've generally found kids get this formulation of the GR instantly. What I like about the GR is that it is an invitation to see the rights of others as inviolable.
Nevertheless I also think that with interpreting the GR, the old maxim to follow the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law holds true. In other words, a literal or more concrete interpretation may well be done against to the intent of the principle. If you keep kosher then you may need to understand that your neighbour keeps halal. The GR is therefore not asking you to expect your neighbour to accept kosher but to accept that they have their own observances...
Do that, and you will be perceived as a pansy, and exploited.
Quoting Tom Storm
So the GR is asking you, in the case where you're black and have a KKK neighbor, to accept his "observances"?
Quoting Tom Storm
Then why bother with the GR?
That's bizarre. Only the neurotic think before they act. The normal person is always sure they have done no wrong and can do no wrong.
Quoting Tom Storm
Indeed. It makes them strive to grow up, grow strong, and make sure nobody can do to them what they can do to others.
Provided those others are, to begin with, in accordance with one's preferences. If they're not, their "rights" deserve to be violated.
People who champion the Golden Rule always find a way around it.
But the problem with this is that when one lacks the insight into another's capabilities, one doesn't know thusly, one doesn't know one lacks said insight. Instead, one is convinced that one already has the right insight into another's capabilities..
"You are inferior, and therefore, I can beat you, I can take from you, I can kill you, and you must let me do so".
It's an approach to ethics that externalizes the standard of ethical behavior, making it the responsibility of the other for how others treat them. It says, "You are responsible for how I treat you. If you want to be treated better, you need to prove to me that you deserve it."
:rofl:
Quoting baker
What observances? Of course you can twist anything to make it sound strange, but let me twist this back for you. The GR can work perfectly well here to recast the racist's understanding of people's common humanity and the importance of seeing all people as worthy of respect. Can the GR end world bigotry and fuckwit behavior? Of course not. Neither can any religious code or ethical system. Are you looking for magic spells that will somehow compel ethical behavior?
Quoting baker
Has that been your experience? In practice I have never encountered this reaction but I can't say it won't ever happen.
Quoting baker
Absolutist thinking. If it isn't a 100% done deal it isn't worth doing? Strange.
Quoting baker
Where the hell do you live? In my experience the normal person (whatever that means) has insight and often reflects on their behavior. And as people mature and grow they often reflect more and deeper. And, as for only neurotics thinking before they act, that's a fascinating frame and I would say it's wrong.
Quoting baker
That's a jaundiced view of human nature and, quite frankly, having seen many children grow up, I have yet to encounter this phenomenon unless a child was abused or neglected in some way.
Quoting baker
Bad day?
Quoting baker
Always? What is the source of your information, apart from a jaundiced view of human behaviour?
The point is not that the GR will fix the world. The point is it can be a useful frame, a teaching aid, or a navigation point. And it is not compulsory...
No, it’s an approach to ethics that makes the ability to act ‘ethically’ a function of insight, and no internalization of standards will get around that fact, because it’s not a question of ethical intent but of insight. Wanting to do the right thing, and having all manner of rules and guidelines for dong the right thing, are worthless if the attributes within another that are to be valued are invisible to one.
But I'm not following Husserl regarding qualities as I am talking about them.
Quoting Joshs
"Going Cartesian" is simply lifted from the Cartesian Meditations. Referring to the basic inspiration behind the reduction:
[i]The meditator keeps only himself, qua pure ego of his cogitationes, as having an absolutely
indubitable existence, as something that cannot be done away with, something that would exist even though this world were non-existent. Thus reduced, the ego carries on a kind of solipsistic philosophizing.[/i]
But he continues by saying
In this unhappy present, is not our situation similar to the one encountered by Descartes in his youth? If so, then is not this a fitting time to renew his radicalness, the radicalness of the beginning philosopher: to subject to a Cartesian overthrow the immense philosophical literature with its medley of great traditions....
This idea if the "beginning philosopher" seems at the center of what have always thought his move to a phenomenological ontology was about: an ontology that is defined as "immediately presentative intuition". Everything issues from this. I have wondered, why did Kant have to talk about noumena at all?
Such an irresponsible bit of metaphysics, but then, he really felt he had no choice. But here I leave Kant, and ask, assuming he is right, and that one cannot both be faithful to the "evidence" of worldly presence and ignore this metaphysical insistence, there must be something in the world that that does the insisting. Noumena is not some impossible "out there"; it is some impossible "in here", I mean, in our midst, and this line that Wittgenstein wanted to draw between sense and nonsense was simply a way of systematically reducing the world to sensible talk to the reasonable and familiar.
Quoting Joshs
But this deals with the object and its knowledge structure. I don't think the "presence" of affect in actuality has its meaning bound up in such an analysis. Pain, e.g., is intuited entirely outside of how time and its flow is construed, regarless of it being an event IN time. I would put it like this: there is no way to conceive the structure of time such that it has any bearing whatever on the immediate experience of affect. This is not true of what we say about pain. I say pain is awful, but what is this other than a verbal stand in for pain? Nor is there a context in which pain is somehow recast differently. Contexts are contingencies that gather around pain, and perhaps can have a psychologically mitigating effect, I admit, such effects are very often mitigating or augmenting, and this is the way it is with contingencies. It changes nothing with regard to the phenomenon of pain as such. And I appeal simply to the phenomenon of pain as such.
You're right to think I am influenced by others, and I have read Dreyfus' Being in the World, but I don't see the things I am trying to defend here in what others say. I frankly find the Christian content of Henry, Caputo and others off putting, and they really never get to the point, as I see it. If the idea is to confront "things themselves" then the epoche takes you to the intuitive givenness, and here contexts fall away, and the context of givenness qua givenness (and all the theoretical environments that makes this possible) remains, and this, as Dennett showed in his paper on qualia, has no meaning that remains. "Presence" simpliciter means nothing that I can see. But the affective (as I am saying, broadly conceived) dimension of an event is entirely different.
I claim, we don't know what ethical (absolute) "bad" is, and any attempt to claim otherwise is just bad metaphysics. But the injunction to do X or not to do X is very clear. It is an injunction that issues from existence itself, I hold, and once entangled, becomes relativized.
The value of a solution begs the question: what good is even a maximal value FOR a solution? Or, what is it about a solution that makes it at all desirable? This goes to the manifestness of the quality.
I'm not saying at all value and purpose do not align, but then if someone has a purpose for something, then we can inquire about it, and inquiry can go on forever in a childish game of what and why. The point I would make is that such repetition of inquiry works annoyingly well because the purpose is set in a background of further questionable accounts. I want ot be an accountant? Why? What is an accountant? What is money? And this never ends (something Derrida points draws attention to. I have read some deconstructions that sound ridiculously childish as they do just this kind of thing).
But regarding the purpose, once the answer turns to value--- It makes someone feel good! then questions run out, for the "good" of the good feeling is unassailable.
Of course, questions can turn to other goods and bads that stand in competition, but the good of the feeling as such, cannot be defeated. One could ask, "are you sure it is a good feeling"; but this does not question goodness, but only the ambiguity in certain cases. Unambiguous cases of "the good" are indefeasibly good. Absolutes.
It does present the question, what is being? So, when you walk into a room, there is this implicit "sense" of things being there. It is a kind of familiarity, isn't it? So I say (and of course, I am working with what others have said), and this account is not going to set well with everyone, along with Heidegger, that this general sense of things being there is utility they have. I see a desk and its "being" is the way I can approach it, sit, get up, straighten posture in it, and so on. the room is filled with this way of realting to things. Then there is the affect, that I care, have an interest, maybe I admire the form, appreciate the function. I follow Dewey on this: all pragmatic relations are inherently aesthetic. I think language itself is just this, after all, how did I come to know language if not through a process of associating sounds with things modeled by others, then, gettin it right and everyone is very pleased: Problem solved! Dewey called this consummatory, both knowing and feeling at once. This is being, call it that substratum of encountering things that you acknowledge "are".
But then, is this an exhaustive account? It is a simplified account, granted (pages and pages of philosophy reduced to a paragraph) But, I say, and I am not arguing for this, for an argument has to have presentable evidential premises, that there is something in the intuitive encounter that exceeds this. The affect (consummatory affect, as Dewey put it) is the ontological foundation of the affair: affect is not an abstraction. To love, hate, have pain or pleasure, I think not only are these real, but are what makes a relationship with objects in the world one that intimates the being real.
And it is the subject that issues this affect. so when I say this tree exists, it is not the tree's existence I am encountering. It is my own. Not that the tree is out there, beyond me, but that the existence I experience when I see the tree is my own.
Nirvana does not exist? well, it is beyond birth and death because it is NOT birth and death. Birth and death refer to conditions in the world, the circumstances in which we find nirvana. But nirvana has nothing to do with this as I can see. Nor does it have anything to do with sitting lotus style or having a good teacher. These are contexts.
Beyond the vicissitudes of existence, meaning beyond what exactly? How about the above (the Dewey, the Heidegger above)? Isn't existence about that intuited "sense" of things around us being there? It can't be about some unseen substrate qua existence, because this is not to be witnessed at at all. As in, one never sees substance; one only sees individual objects, not what "all things are" underneath.
I think of nirvana as the Hindus do: It is absolute affect. Defined as joy, happiness, bliss, or whatever terms we have that are, as terms, merely "stands ins". Is there such a thing? I think there is such a thing as a powerful experience of bliss that occurs when one reduces the world to its bare presence. Being in love intimates this. Being a child (n the Wordsworthian "Intimations of Immortality" sense) was like this (how do I know? I remember this) Talk fails us here for no other reason than we do not have shared experiences so that we can match vocabularies. Not that it is transcendence in some impossible concept. The fact that, as Levinas would put it, we look beyond the totalities of familiar categories, does not to me mean these "beyonds" are in some other realm of being. The atman is the brahman: we are already "there".
If you think of these as bodily functions, you might think like this. But there are many ways to contextualize this. Physics can give, in a limited way, a particle-physics description, evolution can discuss the historical structures of the brain, we could talk about how these fit in some social etiquette and how these differ in cultural systems. But more we step out of the familiar talk and head out into philosophy, we discover that what is familiar doesn't rest on something else that is so solidly there. Here is an interesting scienc-grounded question: What does it mean that existence exploded in being (putting aside any terminological distinctions one might think of) in some Big Bang and fourteen or so billion years later started torturing itself through the agency of humans, goats and chickens and so forth?
Of course, this is not a question about biological evolution. It is a question that is put to the qualitative nature of suffering.
And right this is. But re. logic: I think of Hume. It is empty, formal. Meaning has no message here. When we say something is rational, we are talking about how content is structured, not how structure is structured.
And, we can say that logic is transcendental if one tries to inquire as to its nature, since such an inquiry is itself inherently rational. The same goes for affect. But as I see it, affect has manifest meaning which something that stands outside the categories that would attempt to possess it. That is, we can think of affect and contain it in our thoughts, but its "beyond" (logic has this "beyond, too. See what Wittgenstein says in Tractatus) has real presence, evidenced in the very foundation of our affairs. To observe dispassionately is to observe with, if you will, passion, for human existence has its way of being in caring--- and caring, which is part of my point, begs a question: caring about what? the reduced answer to this is affect. or value.
Ok. Thanks.
Times two.
Pity.
Pain is no different than the intuited moments of sense that Husserl describes as flowingly changing.
From a recent paper of mine:
Husserl's grounding of affectivity in inner time consciousness is a transcendental grounding, not a naturalistic one. Underlying and founding all strata of bodily and interpersonal dynamics is the assimilative basis of temporal constitution as retention, primal impression and protention. This is Husserl's primordial pre-condition for any world , any being.
The subjective and objective sides of the structure of temporal synthesis are not separate entities but only poles of a single act of intentional sense. In this synthesis, both the subject and the object pole contribute their own quality of feeling to what ‘an object is for the subject' in its valuative , affective sense. The energetic dynamism of feeling isn't something added to a content of perception from outside of it, in causal relation with it as agent of conditioning. Meaning content implies its own affective force, the affective signature is intrinsic to the objective and subjective sides. This is what constitutes the ‘life' in what Husserl calls the living present. The affective qualities contributed by the objective pole (noema) are its vivacity. Husserl describes the affective allure contributed by the objective pole as “that varying vivacity of a lived experience, of a datum of consciousness.”(Passive and Active Synthesis, p.214)
And an affective signature is intrinsic to the subject, in the form of desires, tendencies, strivings, anticipations, aimed at the objective pole. As Husserl says, there are rays emanating from subjective side to the objective side and vice-versa. Both affects originating on the subjective side and those originating on the objective side are implied in all intentional meaning. The always present affective qualities of the object (beautiful, pleasurable, unpleasant) are not made thematic in objectivating acts (perceiving a spatial object), but they are in valuative acts. And one's affective, hedonic attitude toward the object of an intention (disappointed, depressed, elated, bored, frightened) may not be thematized in theoretical interest, but will appear in our practical attitude toward the world.
Natural bodily structures are not the basis of affect for Husserl. If one wants to still talk about a body, what remains of the body for Husserl once one has dug beneath all the sedimented layers of constituted meaning, would be the ‘body' of the retention-impression-protention triad of time consciousness. Husserl's starting point in time consciousness is already is already a self-othering, thus an exposure to the foreign from within the resources of subjectivity, prior to any configurational-corporeal constitution, prior to any empirically defined physiological or psychological structures, prior to human beings, but presupposed by them. Affect is not an evolutionary device, it is synonymous with entity, being, existence, object, subject. Being as the moment of experience is simultaneously the feeling of being affected and the feeling of anticipatory striving. These precede the notion of a body as biological organism, and instead is a pre-condition for being of any sort. Feeling, understood most primordially, is simply movement (not in empirical but subjective space), transition, becoming, time.
Husserl's model of inner time consciousness generates a primordial motivational principle in the guise of associative synthesis. Unlike naturalist causal forms of association, in which the bond between elements is externally conditioned, in Husserl's motivational model noetic anticipatory assimilation dominates the foreignness of the noematic object pole. That is to say, associative synthesis achieves a belongingness between the constituting and constituted poles as a unity of identification, homogeneity, similarity, likeness.
“Thus each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a similar sense. To the extent that there is givenness beforehand, there is such a transfer.“ (Cartesian Meditations, p.111) “ all immediate association is an association in accordance with similarity. Such association is essentially possible only by virtue of similarities, differing in degree in each case, up to the limit of complete likeness. Thus all original contrast also rests on association: the unlike comes to prominence on the basis of the common. Homogeneity and heterogeneity, therefore, are the result of two different and fundamental modes of associative unification.” (Experience and Judgement) “...consciousness is connected in the most general way to another consciousness by a commonality that is correlatively noetic and noematic; and all connection is connection through "commonality." through uniformity and similarity.”(Passive and Active Synth, p.485)
This means that the capacity of experiences to delight or disturb us, particularly when it comes to profoundly self-affecting valuative concerns, is much more a function of the relation of the event to our strivings and anticipations than it is to whatever qualitites of feeling (enticement, allure, vivacity) are contributed by the object pole in itself.
I've got Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness here. Let me read it and and see what I can say.
-G
Not sure what happiness is, really. The question is, how does such a thing bear up under scrutiny? I can say I am happy, but what is there in the world that makes this meaningful? Is happiness "good"? What is this? Is it like a good couch? But good couches are good for good reasons. What is the reason happiness is good?
I am not interested in a definition of ethics that moves forward without being clear about what it is at all to value something, to love, cherish, hate, detest, and so on., valuing something is the essence of all ethical issues. This takes the matter to agency: what makes for an ethical agency, one that is capable of being in relationships where something of value can be put at risk? This gets to the heart of the "existence" of ethics. You see how this goes: all the shoulds and shouldn'ts of an ethical nature presuppose this valuing nature which is IN the world. We made culture and its value institutions, but we did not make value as such. This issues from existence.
Valuing is the existential foundation of ethics, I say. The question that remains is, what does this tell us about our ethical affairs in terms of their nature, their essence?
Values vary by culture and class, as Nietzsche pointed out.
If there's a foundation, it's the complex of human emotion that gets sorted post hoc in ethical terms.
A matter of perspective, eh? Then, what is it that is a matter of perspective? Is this raging pain in my kidney a matter of perspective?
“....To know what questions we may reasonably propose is in itself a strong evidence of sagacity and intelligence. For if a question be in itself absurd and unsusceptible of a rational answer, it is attended with the danger—not to mention the shame that falls upon the person who proposes it—of seducing the unguarded listener into making absurd answers, and we are presented with the ridiculous spectacle of one (as the ancients said) "milking the he-goat, and the other holding a sieve.".....”
Digging a hole to discover what’s in the dirt is one thing. Digging a hole just to put the dirt in a different place, is quite something else.
A non sequitur, Frank. Perhaps you could restate.
Just don't want you to be typing stupid stuff on the internet when you should be in the hospital.
A reference to deconstruction? The point that they are making is that all singular assertions defer to something else. I call myself accountant, but what is this, as it is assumed I know since I am one. I can answer this question easliy, but each answer I give "begs" other questions, and this without end.Even when matters turn sagacious, talk about, say, how accounting is intrinsically misaligned with meaningful values, the questions never find the foundational "referent" they seek. Deconstruction (and I am no expert) is not a childish game, for it is something like the period on the end of a very long sentence beginning with the pre socratics: to speak at all is to have a perspective and meaningful thought can never be free of this. All meaning is contingent. Not too far afield from affirming Heraclitus over Parmenides.
to see how this all plays out, you could do what I did: read Saussure's Semiotics, then Derrida, chapter two Of Grammatology.
For ethics, one has to see how extraordinary this is. At this terminal threshold where language is seen not as an avenue into the world of truths waiting to be discovered, but as a stand in for this world that is constructed out of the "difference" of meaningful play among other meanings. This looks a lot like ethical nihilism finding its rationalization, for if God is out of the picture, then all that is left for metaphysical affirmation of right and wrong is left in the hands of what can be said, and if what can be said (and I think very much of Wittgenstein here. He is, in the Tractatus, emphatically against making meaningful statements that step beyond the boundaries of the limits of language) cannot make sense of what is true outside of language, then language's limitations apply to ethics.
I try to argue that ethics has an absolute grounding that is evident in the anatomy of avgiven ethical case: value simpliciter is not deconstructable. What we say is, but the intuition of pain, say, is not, and this pain is the kind of thing that drives all ethical possibilities.
Stupid stuff, Frank?
Well, yeah. I said "Nietzsche." You said "perspective."
Continue.
we are in a limited way, in agreement. What is left after the historical notions of grounding ethics in some kind of logocentric idea are pushed aside is contingency. As Sartre put is, the world that we confront is "radically contingent", it does not "speak", but exceeds in its superfluity the confines language would contain it. Of course, he has beneath his thinking Kierkegaard and Hegel and Nietzsche as well, who all contest the any "rational reduction" as if logic could possess actuality. This is Heraclitus' world, not Parmenides'.
I think this is a profound insight, but with one slip: ethics and value. There may not be some overarching independent grounding for meaning and to understand is to have context for that understanding to be possible, but does this apply to value simpliciter? This is not an historical argument; it is a phenomenological one, so forget about Nietzsche's complaints against Christianity and Platonism. Phenomenology puts the burden of meaning at the level of basic questions to the "things themselves" which is, in my thinking, reduction away from argument and analysis and toward intuitional givens. The pain in the kidney is, I argue, foundational, unassailable, absolute.
There once was a guy who had no theories and life was constantly like salt on a wound. A simple case of a dead raccoon on the side of the road was too much for him. That it had been killed and nobody cared, it overwhelmed him.
He had to grow some theories to act as buffers on what you're calling the "absolute.". That pain remains unassailable. Theories do put distance between us and the absolute. And that's a good thing. It's a necessary thing.
On the one side are phenomenologists like Henry, who talk about grounding affectivities as immediate and unchanging:
“Henry calls attention to the way in which we are aware of our feelings and moods. When we are in pain, anxious, embarrassed, stubborn or happy, we do not feel it through the intervention of a (inner) sense organ or an intentional act, but are immediately aware of it. There is no distance or separation between the feeling of pain or happiness and our awareness of it, since it is given in and through itself. According to Henry, something similar holds for all of our conscious experiences. To make use of a terminology taken from analytical philosophy of mind, Henry would claim that all conscious experiences are essentially characterized by having a subjective ‘feel' to them, that is, a certain quality of ‘what it is like'”.
“Self-affection understood as the process of affecting and being affected is not the rigid self-identity of an object, but a subjective movement. A movement which Henry has even described as the self-temporalisation of subjectivity. But as he then adds, we are dealing with a quite unique form of temporalisation, which is absolute immanent, non-horizontal and non-ecstatic. We are dealing with an affective temporality, and even though it seems to involve a perpetual movement and change, nothing is changed. In fact, it would be wrong to characterize absolute subjectivity as a stream of consciousness. There is no streaming and no change, but always one and the same Living Present without distance or difference. It is always the same self affecting itself.”
On the other side are phenomenologists like Husserl:
“…sthere is no Being which has sense outside of this
historicity or escapes its infinite horizon, since the Logos and the Telos are nothing outside the interplay of their reciprocal inspiration, this slgmfies then that the Absolute is Passage. Traditionality is what circulates from one to the other, illuminating one by the other in a movement wherein consciousness discovers its path in an indefinite reduction, always already begun, and wherein every adventure is a change of direction [conversion] and every return to the origin an audacious move toward the horizon.” (Derrida on Husserl)
Quoting Astrophel
No. It is a rhetorical comment on your series of questions that are unreasonably proposed, thereby drawing attention away from the project at hand. I find myself spending more time figuring out how the questions relate to a philosophy, then I do critiquing it.
Still reading Husserl's Internal time consciousness. Trying to construct a response. As to Henry above, it doesn't touch on the original phenomenological datum which I want to bring forward as the intuitive foundation for ethics, what is "concealed in apperception". I am convinced the regression toward the originary intuitive apprehension of things leads to something revelatory, not merely an underpinning of structure presupposed by our affairs that "proceed constructively" upon it. Husserl, and I think this onw way to put the subsequent complaints against him, assumes this intuitive given to be free and present apart from apperception, but this cannot be sustained: there is no freedom from tis, for the "ap" apperception is intrinsic to any and all thought, so any thought of a pure phenomenon is undone, as in his attempt to give a phenomenological exposition ot time, from the position of writing and thinking in time. It's not that his analyses are wrong, it's just that they cannot be what he says they are: "time and duration appearing as such." As such? He means this as a radical departure from "Objective time", and not just a, say, hermeneutical departure. I think this is what you meant by his being much more radical.
But then, at that threshold, when the suspension becomes radically exclusionary, and one's affectivity's attachments are , as well as what Fink The Sixth Meditation) calls the "transcendental aesthetic," that is, the explication of the "phenomenon of the world the explication of the cogitata as cogitata and of their universal structures, the description of acceptances" (the term "aesthetic" here confuses, but he is talking about the primordial belief that attends cognition); then it is not ust the understanding reach to a sublime height of apprehension alone. It is affectivity. And this makes a turn toward religion (in the non trivial sense).
Well, you were responding to my "can go on forever in a childish game of what and why" which was a reference to the way deconstructionists sometimes play a childish game of "what's that?" I have read one or two. the point many don't want engage is that whatever meaning one wants to bring to the table, if the intention is to go to the most basic assumptions and questions, philosophy, then one has to deal with language and logic, and language is self referential, roughly put.
I do completely agree that this puts everything under suspicion, for everything issue that is taken up is done so in language. Empirical science is a construct that is "made of" language. Ethics is the same, so the basic meanings that language makes are the foundation for talk about ethics, and this means ethics is deconstructable, which, as one could put it, means one is really hard pressed to get "out" of language" to "say" the unconditioned thing that ethics IS.
This is where I come in: Ethics has this. It is affectivity and value. All ethics has this not only as a presupposition, but as the very core of ethics itself.
Language viewed as a logical grammar is self-referential. Language viewed through the phenomenology of someone like Merleau-Ponty is embodied, and therefore self-transformating. For Derrida language points beyond itself. Deconstruction , as a post- structuralism, began as a response to the structuralist models of language that think of it as a self-referential totality.
two things: it is "worse" than I have let on. Once we allow affect and intuited value or phenomenologically pure "data" pf pain, pleasure and the rest, then there are implications. If it is not just some historically constructed ideas, but issues right from t he heart of the "world constitution". Very weird to say this, but ethics is thereby part of this constitution, and the authority possessed in ethical injunctions comes not from mere convention, but the world itself.
Second thing? I'm working on it.
The beyond of language?
Husserl: "the intuition of the past itself....is an originary consciousness" (Section 12)
Time therefore does not exist at all, it would seem to follow. After all, what has the past ever been other than a mode of a timeless actuality?
Yes, this is at the core of Derrida’s thinking, and Heidegger’s as well.
In 'Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language' Heidegger tells us he wants, 'in a confrontation with the tradition', to rethink logic, to "revolutionarily shake up the notion of logic" from the ground up, but that he can only provisionally point to his notion of the primordial ground of language as the basis of this new grounding of logic. Traditionally, language is thought as a tool of thinking, as secondary to thinking, as grounded on grammar, which in turn is grounded on logic. Heidegger says “the first thing we need is a real revolution in our relation to language.”
Thanks for that! I have it here.
I don't know what this is about. I have always thought it was hermeneutics that sealed the fate of adventuring "beyond" for Heidegger. Taking up being in the world would never step beyond the boundaries of historical possibilities, just as science could never step radically out of the paradigms that make its thinking possible, just as a person's freedom is bound to personal and cultural history, still. Anything beyond must be familiar in its parts, and any revolutionary shake up can only shake what is contained therein, that is, "shake" language as such. If it is within language that the shaking occurs, then this cannot be beyond language.
It is confusing. At one end is ‘Das man’ , a stiflingly normative mode of discursive being-with-others that precludes original thinking. At the other end is authentic Dasein pursuing its ownmost possibilities of being. But I would suggest that for Heidegger even when we are caught within the normative framework, we are not simply introjecting shared ways of speaking and thinking.
Heidegger's(2010) task is to explain how a Dasein which always understands others in relation to its very own pragmatic totality of relevance ends up believing in a cultural world of linguistic practices that appear to be the same for all. “...what purports to be an opening up of the world is in fact its concealment: by appealing to public opinion and tradition, idle talk creates in Dasein the belief that it possesses universally acknowledged and thus genuine truths.”
Heidegger chooses words like average, vague, flattened , confused, uprooted state of suspension, and ambiguous to describe Dasein's being as Das Man, to indicate that the heedfulness of Care is still primordially and implicitly operative even when it is explicitly concealed and suppressed . Average everyday discourse has to be vague, approximate, superficial and ambiguous enough to conceal, disguise, cover over, miss, obscure, suppress the fact that the meaning of what is shared is never interpreted identically for each dasein.
“What is talked about is understood only approximately and superficially. One means the same thing because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said.” “Publicness ” does not get to "the heart of the matter," because it is insensitive to every difference of level and genuineness.”
“Idle talk conceals simply because of its characteristic failure to address things in an originary way [urspriinglichen Ansprechens]. It obscures the true appearance of the world and the events in it by instituting a dominant view [herrschende Ansicht].”“Usually and for the most part the ontic mode of being-in (discoverture) is concealment [Verdeckung]. Interpretedness, which is speech encrusted by idle talk, draws any given Dasein into 'one's' way of being. But existence in the 'one' now entails the concealment and marginalization of the genuine self [eigentlichen Selbst]. Not only has each particular given itself over to 'one', 'one' blocks Dasein's access to the state it finds itself in [Befindlichkeit].”(Heidegger 2011)
Heidegger says that there are genuine modes
of discourse where individual differences do not become flattened in this way.
You don't say.
In that case, the GR is a liability, not an asset. Or in the best case scenario, its only value is in that it can function as an ego boost.
Of course.
It was a question inviting you to elaborate, not to read it as a mere rhetorical device to be scoffed at.
Thinking before acting is what makes one neurotic; ie. score high on the neuroticism scale, since "neurotic" and "psychotic" aren't official terms anymore.
Or maybe you're just blind to how humans work; or pretending to be thusly blind. Don't you repudiate it, such blindness is an important psychological asset.
You silly. Are you really so limited that you cannot envision that someone might have a view of a matter whereby this view is not limited or defined by their personal experience or emotions, but is, instead, a well thought-out view?
For what? World peace? Feeling good about oneself no matter what? For what?
You yet need to show that the GR is a better theory of motivation than any other, such as adherence to rules (and threat of punishment for breaking them), or fear of God's punishment, and that it brings about better results than any other theory or more consistently.
Quoting Tom Storm
Of course there are, depending on who it is that should be killed, stolen from, or lied to.
Several nations now believe that it would be good to annihilate the Russians and take their land and natural resources. And these people see absolutely nothing "uncool" about it.
It's not clear where you're going with this.
But what you're putting forth so far excuses, for example, the way the Nazis treated the Jews during WWII. "The attributes that are to be valued in the Jews were invisible to the Nazis. The Nazis acted ethically, in accordance with their insight into the Jews."
That's ironic because on the ground level, whether or not you have a pain that justifies a visit to the ER or to the doctor at all is a matter of perspective.
I witnessed another example of this just a couple of months back, when the pain in my right side became too much and I asked my father to take me to the ER. At 3 AM. In the middle of the pandemic. That's how bad it was. I hate going to the doctor as it is, and this was only the second time in my entire life that I went to the ER.
But the first doctor in the ER who saw me almost threw me out, saying that just because I vomitted and because I have a pain in my right side that's no reason to go to the doctor at all. She did an EEG and she was quite rough.
The next doctor took my blood and ran some tests, and it turned out I had a gastrointestinal infection.
So much for perspective.
That’s exactly right. Ethical intent was not the issue. Lack of insight was. The Jew for centuries represented the alien interloper in European thought. The intent wasn’t to see them as alien and thus morally suspect. Antisemitism was and still is the product of a failure to transcend the gap between cultures.
I don't need to show anything, Baker the GR is a principle and has been a motivator in many people's lives for centuries. But it won't please everyone. My approach is simply that we can recommend ideas to each other and people will either see the value or utility in them, or not. My view is that the GR can be defended as a useful principle and you seem to want something more compelling. I don't think there is such thing unless one is some kind of fundamentalist - religious or political.
Quoting baker
I can't believe this is a genuine response. I've answered this. My view of morality is that it recommends principles to guide human behaviour towards each other and towards other conscious creatures. We discuss and decide upon which principles assists us best in this task. That's all. If you want some kind of totalising, meta-narrative that compels people, go for it, show us something better.
Presumably our aim in ethics/morality is that people would coexist in relative harmony. But this relative harmony can be brought about in many ways (such as fear of God, obedience of rules, "good boy/good girl" mentality, following the GR), and following the GR is just one of them. Since you are a proponent of the GR, it's on you to show how it is better than those other ways.
At this point, with this all-too-relevant example, we'd have to venture onto some very delicate territory.
But all the other examples in which your reasoning applies also end up being problematic (in that we'd have to dismantle some taboos).
To the best of my knowledge, transcending the gap between cultures has never actually been a value. Sure, some people talk about it a lot. But in order for there to be different cultures at all, there must be gaps between them, otherwise, they would all be one.
Do you consider yourself and your circle of friends to be “all one” or do you recognize all kinds of wonderful
differences among you? Are your friends all of one gender, ethnicity, religion and country of origin? And yet you have transcended enough gaps in understanding to embrace them as friends.
Ideally, yes.
No. Over time, those differences drifted us apart.
There is apolitically correct notion that one should be able to be friends with pretty much just anyone. But my experience is that while this may make for politically correct, fashionable relationships, it also makes them shallow and unreliable. With people who are too different from oneself, one may be on "friendly terms", but this is not to be confused for friendship.