Are moral systems always futile?
I should preface by saying that I've never been all too enamoured with morality as a field of study quite frankly. Using obtuse thought experiments to parse what is good and bad simply always seemed like a rather pointless endeavour, and I personally feel it's more fruitful to investigate morality in specific terms rather than universal terms and evaluate morality more so from a personal and societal perspective than from a seemingly objective view-point.
But the question I wish to ask is, in some sense, aren't all universal moral systems inevitably going to be flawed in some way and therefore rendered futile? What is the point in laying out moral edicts that are so abstract and impractical when the layman already has a fairly solid intuitive grasp of how to act ethically based off sheer compassion and, for want of a better term, "common sense"? A consequentialist will always oppose a deontologist yet neither seems any closer to understanding the actual concept of "goodness." It all just seems a bit pedantic and pointless quite honestly.
But the question I wish to ask is, in some sense, aren't all universal moral systems inevitably going to be flawed in some way and therefore rendered futile? What is the point in laying out moral edicts that are so abstract and impractical when the layman already has a fairly solid intuitive grasp of how to act ethically based off sheer compassion and, for want of a better term, "common sense"? A consequentialist will always oppose a deontologist yet neither seems any closer to understanding the actual concept of "goodness." It all just seems a bit pedantic and pointless quite honestly.
Comments (97)
Welcome to the forum.
Well... I agree with everything you've written, but you'd probably like something more than just that. Like you, I find most philosophical discussions of morality pointless for exactly the reasons you give. Here's how I've come to think about it. First, the morality I care about is personal. How should I behave. As you note "the layman already has a fairly solid intuitive grasp of how to act ethically based off sheer compassion and, for want of a better term, 'common sense'" I count myself among the laymen.
The formal systems of so-called morality you discuss are more about how someone thinks other people should behave. As I see it, that's not morality at all, it's social control - the rules and practices a society sets up to protect it's members and make sure things run smoothly. Murder is prohibited not because it's wrong, but because it hurts people that a community is obligated to protect.
Philosophically, the principles expressed in the "Tao Te Ching" and "Chuang Tzu," the founding documents of Taoism, are the ones I feel most at home in. This is from Ziporyn's translation of the Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi).
No. If its a true universal moral system, it will be objective. Not saying it can't be improved upon or more discovered, but it would be a solid science at that point.
Quoting Dorrian
1. AI. We are rapidly creating intelligence without morality. This is incredibly dangerous.
2. "Common sense" is not so common and really just a comfortable cultural subjectivity based on context. So for the common everyday, sure. But I also don't need a ruler to see if one person is taller than another. Its pretty useful when I have to use specifics, height matters, etc. Moral precepts would be for the higher levels situations. If they're generally accurate we would think they wouldn't contradict the base moral too much. Essentially an objective morality should measure how 'tall' something is, not declare that the taller individual is somehow shorter.
If you're serious about it and not just lamenting, I've done a serious attempt at an objective morality here. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15203/in-any-objective-morality-existence-is-inherently-good/p1 Its a several part series, so ask for clarification on the first part but then go onto the second part linked at the bottom of the OP when you're ready.
I cannot claim to say I always felt this way, but I do now.
Quoting Dorrian
I believe that all moral systems are flawed.
I do not believe that they are futile.
I can understand the feeling between the two. But upon examination it seems to not hold up.
A moral system can be flawed in this or that circumstance, and I have even less control over what circumstance I'm in than I have with respect to my believed moral system.
I'd point this out as at least an analogy for living: When I first started building wood structures I was terrible, now I'm OK. It takes time to become better, and on top of that there is more than one acceptable moral system to follow depending on what you're doing.
Continuing the craftsman analogy: You need to call a plumber, an electrician, a building maintenance manager, an automated engineering technology specialist, etc., to fix the job.
Why not treat morality as specifically as we treat the various industries where we make specifications?
In some ways I feel like it's the first social morality -- as I was influenced to pursue what I wanted as a child, so goes the moral systems.
They're not futile systems as much as incomplete, but necessary (in spite of their incompleteness!) ways of thinking. Or suggestions.
Theres a hitch in the first question which you pose. To be futile presupposes the requisite of fulfilling some aim, which futility fails to allow for. So in this very question is presupposed an end pursued, one which ought to be obtained thereby and end which is of itself good - which universal moral systems can only fail to actualize.
It might be that certain meta-ethical enquiries seek to better understand just what exactly this just mentioned good is, or at least what it could be. If so, these meta-ethical enquiries - which to be valid can only be universally applicable must necessarily be descriptive of what already is, has always been, and will continue to be. They therefore dont prescribe "moral edicts" in an authoritarian sense, but rather, it at all successful, describe what is and allow one to thereby more lucidly decide for oneself what one ought do, this given such and such scenario. Because of this,such meta-ethical enquiries, if successful, cannot be futile, almost by definition - for they would then make clear the very end relative to which you question the functionality of "universal moral systems" by wondering if they're all futile in their nature.
No.
No this does not follow (i.e. hasty generalization fallacy).
e.g. flourishing via preventing or, as much as practically possible, reducing harm to others, no?
Quoting Philosophim
:up:
Quoting Moliere
:up: :up:
Just like codifying to law (in general) doesn't remove the need for trials for specific cases.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. That's why a deliberation like this below is necessary.
Quoting LuckyR
What do you suppose uncontrived condition of the inborn human nature means? Do we have an inborn nature? Or do we contrive our nature through our interactions with others? If the latter, then perhaps goodness is to be made as much as found?
No.
While some philosophical discussions of morality may be futile and pointless, no society of sentient beings can function without a shared system of values on which its rules are made, obeyed and enforced.
While there is no universal, objective morality, each society has a moral basis that accords with the world-view shared by its members. On that belief system, that moral understanding, each society enacts its governing principles or constitution, its social organization and legal code.
Those pointless discussions are generally aimed at better understanding, communicating and articulating the moral principles by which we operate.
Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Stephen Pinker think we have inborn natures. So do I. Others are skeptical.
Quoting Joshs
Emerson calls it our "genius." Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu call it "Te."
Quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance
I sometimes call it my heart, but that's not really right. Our soul? I guess not. It's something I experience all the time. I imagine a spring bubbling up to the surface in a pool in the woods bringing ideas, motivations, metaphors, and memories into consciousness and directly into action without reflection. In Taoism that's known as "wu wei," action without acting, without intention. If that sounds loosey goosey mystical mumbo jumbo, so be it, but I'm a pragmatic engineer used to seeing the world in terms of concrete, abstract constructions. I don't find any conflict in seeing things both ways at the same time. As I said, it's something I personally experience.
So what is our human nature? I'll go out on a limb here. It is a bunch of inborn genetic, biological, neurological, mental, and psychological processes, structures, capacities, drives, and instincts which are modified during development and by experience and socialization. I'll try to be more specific. We are social animals. We like and want to be around each other. We care most for those closest to us - our families and especially our children. We are born with temperaments that express themselves from the very start. We are born with an instinctual drive and capability for language. We are born with an inborn drive to find a mate, usually, but not always of the opposite sex. This is from William James. I'm not sure whether it will seem relevant, but it does to me and I like it.
For what it's worth, as I noted, there are a lot of people who don't see things this way.
Clearly we all have our own natures as some have very eloquently stated here. Trouble comes when our own moralities collide with other individuals, group or whole societies. And I mean very big trouble. Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures have vastly different moral frameworks from Western cultures whom also have substantial variations within their own populations. One only has to pause for a second and consider the state of the world to realize just how an important a topic this really is. Our very existence depends on getting this right.
Thanks. I appreciate it.
:up: That pretty much sums it up.
What about culture? Could it also be human nature to devise myths and tables of values to pass onto the next generation?
Yes, all moral systems are flawed (comments to the opposite seem... silly. Where's the flawless moral system you think exists?). That doesn't render them futile. It just, again, makes it dangerous to pretend they are flawless.
The aspects of human nature I've proposed are not intended to be comprehensive - they're just examples. I think there's a lot more going on. Humans are story tellers so it seems plausible to me that there may be an inborn tendency and capacity for mythology. As for values, there are studies showing that children might be born with the fundamentals of a moral sense. Here's a link to a discussion.
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.yale.edu/dist/f/1145/files/2017/10/Wynn-Bloom-Moral-Handbook-Chapter-2013-14pwpor.pdf
The @ function won't automatically tag my name. I think that's because it includes a space. But if you type it in by hand, it will work.
Let's see if that works..
Yes, we have innate moral feelings, maybe even something like a directional moral sense, but I don't think its enough on its own to get fully functional morality. We have a long education period for a reason it would think, unlike other animals.
If there's a cultural component to how we get our values, if that is part of human nature, then it seem like pointing to human nature as an explanation misses something, or doesn't really answer the question, as there is a yet to be defined component to human nature.
I do think education, or moral systems, can go to far or go wrong if they veer to far from the basic moral feelings. This is how I see Taoism for instance, partly as a correction to an overbearing Confucianism. A lot of high Chinese officials were Confucian in public and Daoist in private.... But I don't think you could have had a functioning Chinese society with Taoism alone.
Quoting T Clark
I think part of moralities function is social control. Murder derails societies as it tended to lead to bloodfeuds and the like... it was bad for social order. It seems weird to me that you would want to excluded that from morality, as a functioning society is a prerequisite for any kind of human flourishing it seems to me.
You have to use the @ function at the top of the comment box or write it with quotes around t clark.
Although my focus was on inborn human nature, I specified that it works by interacting with environmental factors. As I wrote:
"Quoting T Clark
Human nature isn't the explanation for who we are and what we do. It's part of the answer. We aren't blank slates.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I don't disagree, but I think Lao Tzu sends a much more extreme message than that. Whether or not Chinese society, or ours, would be impossible - it seems clear to me that they would be very different.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I think social control in the sense I'm talking about it is fundamentally different from morality. The judgment that a behavior is bad or wrong rather than disruptive is also fundamental. They will likely have a significant impact on how the behavior is addressed and how the person acting is treated.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I don't think so. It has a big impact on the actions chosen to address unwanted behavior.
Fair enough, and I do agree with this.
Quoting T Clark
Could you elaborate on this, I'm curious what you mean with it. Is it something along the lines of the Chuang Tzu quote?
This seems remarkably similar to what Nietzsche is getting at. Goodness as springing from the body, from the particular physiology of an individual... as opposed to Goodness coming from the holy spirit or the logos, imposed from the outside via the 'word', universal and abstract, and therefor not geared to the individual.
While I certainly would agree that the former is better for the individual, this still seems like a bit of a problem for society, because what society needs is not necessarily allways congruent with what is best for the individual.
The best expression I've found of the sentiment I'm describing is the Chuang Tzu quote you reference. When I first read it, after already having read the Tao Te Ching, I was struck with a sense of recognition - insight. I think it is the natural expression of Lao Tzu's principles in relation to moral behavior. From what I've seen, the observation in the Tao Te Ching that expresses it best is this, which is from Gia-Fu Feng's translation of Verse 38.
Quoting Tao Te Ching - Verse 38
[Edited]
Fifteen years later, I've come back to philosophy following some personal losses and trauma, that led to personal dissatisfaction with 'spiritual' answers to moral questions. Reading secular philosophy really helped me get through some dark stuff.
So apologies in advance if I miss something obvious to those with sharper minds than mine, formal academic training, etc. I predict I will make some mistakes... and I hope people point them out to me!
As for the topic, it seems to me like the concept of 'human nature' is in the same category as 'objective morality', in that both are aspirational and unknowable, but worthwhile pursuits nonetheless. It is in pursuing these ideals that we can honor our human nature / act 'morally'.
I also endorse the Sam Harris book, he makes a strong case, and I feel my personal stance is very close to his, except that I do believe religion, (human traditions of morality, as they were developed and situated in time, ever-evolving) and even spiritual traditions such as meditation, that can be practiced in secular fashion, all bring value to the pursuit of an 'objective' morality.
I'm an atheist, but am not hostile to religion itself. Like any ideology or belief system, flawed and imperfect, to my mind, but I respect the 'goodness' of some of the religious people I've known far too much to discount that this is a moral practice with tangible positive outcomes.
Much of my interest in moral philosophy came from my first encounters with moral relativism in 'the wild', at university in the 90s. It seemed that, in the rare circumstances (imagine that today) a professor addressed morality directly in my social sciences and English courses, they were expressing morally relativistic beliefs.
Since then, I've been somewhat repelled by the premise, not as a considered stance by those who have done the work to decide on relativism, but rather as a default premise amongst people who might not think much about anything philosophical. A 'lazy relativism' if you will.
I still think like the high school teacher I was, so I try to think of the 'simplest' way to summarize the subject being discussed - in that spirit, is this not simply a question of whether or not moral relativism is inevitable?
There had been some mad and deranged moral systems in practice in some parts of the world in the past. Who knows how the future generations will judge the current moral systems in place in the world.
Welcome to the forum.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
There are plenty of unsharpened blades here on the forum. Judging from your post, you're not one of them.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
If you've read my posts on this thread, you can see I disagree with this strongly. Perhaps it's a matter of definition. Here's how I defined human nature previously in this discussion.
Quoting T Clark
I noted that some people don't agree that such an inborn human nature is a major determinant of who we are, so my position is open to disagreement, but it's not "aspirational and unknowable." It's a matter of fact - true or false, open to verification or falsification.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Your open minded and sympathetic attitude about religion is not a popular one here on the forum, which has a record of knee-jerk religious bigotry.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
As I wrote previously in this thread, I'm with Chuang Tzu when he said -
I guess that would make me a relativist in your book. I see it more as taking responsibility for my own actions. As I note, stopping others from hurting people without justification does not call for morality - "that's evil" - it calls for reasonable control - "stop that."
(16 years of Catholic school and thats the only way I can address high school teachers. And it was because of my senior year English class, where we read the Allegory of the Cave from the Republic, that I became a philosophy major in college.)
Welcome to the forum.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Many people deep in the weeds of moral philosophy might disagree, but I see that as THE question.
Can a morality of universal, objective rules be built using logic? And by using logic, do we avoid the inevitable descent into relativity that being a mind itself seems to promulgate?
Personally, I dont think so. If one doesnt see objective truth in experience, morality discussions are always reducible to something like sentiment, or habit, or psychology, or a bit of bad beef - or some combination thereof.
But I also dont see why it is so hard to see objectivity in our experience. Logic itself is objective. Only one universal reasoning could inquire into whether logic is objective or not, and any conclusion from that inquiry would be built using only logic; basically, you can only use logic to prove whether logic is objective or not, and so you prove you can only use logic to prove as an objective experience of things. Some things we experience are universal, and that is an objective truth.
And human beings deliberate some of their actions. Thats demonstrable to myself about myself (as I edit and revise this post, deliberating my choice of words), and clearly the case when you observe, or better, ask, other people about their actions. We think, using logic, about what we do using our bodies. More objective truth.
To skip to the end, to play the game of morality at all, I think you need the following playing pieces, and if any one of them are missing, morality is no longer the discussion:
1. more than one personal subject (people/society)(if you are on a desert island, you either have to treat yourself in the third-person to care about morality, or interact with God, otherwise how could anything be immoral);
2. Reason. We have to know things. We have to be able to deliberate about what we know. We have to be able to express it, so language and logic and reasoning are just as essential as multiple people are to the discussion;
3. Responsibility. There is no point to moral judgement without subjects who take responsibility for their actions - the moon pulling the tides is not a moral act because the moon cant admit it is responsible for that - and if the subjects on the game board of morality discussion are like the moon, then nothing they can do or say or be, or have done to them, is a moral act. There must be a deliberative subject with agency (even if this agency can be questioned) before we can talk morality;
4. Objectivity. If you take this piece off of the game board, then there is no means to distinguish between any of the other pieces. And further, because our logic and deliberations are only captured in language, objectivity becomes the ground to codify things as Law. If a law isnt objective, to be applied and enforced universally, its not a law. And what would be the point of the whole discussion if we could not distill how to act and how not to act towards each other in some form that we can all share and look to - there must be law, law with the goal of it being universal/objective.
So yeah, maybe we are wasting our time thinking about all of this because we dont believe in or experience some of those game pieces. Maybe were resisting the inevitable conclusion that all conclusions are temporary (so not conclusive), and relative (so not conclusive), and all objectivity awaits its implosion into the same stormy seas objectivity sought to fix as knowledge and morality seeks to make calm. I currently hope not.
Hey T Clark, thanks for the welcome. I did read your posts, and found myself in agreement with your components of 'human nature', although I was wondering how you would define 'mental'?
I think of this sort of knowledge as an 'act of faith', ultimately. To say that we can define human nature seems impossible to me, given that our understanding of what that means is inevitably evolving.
But just because you have to 'choose' to believe, the act of faith itself being a choice, does not mean you are wrong. Your concept of this might be perfect, somehow, or it could be the best possible given what we know, in this moment, etc. There are many ways this could be the best way to think without it being objectively true.
Hence my use of 'aspirational'. A professor once told me that to be ethical in the face of modern uncertainty was to be 'whole-hearted and half-sure', and that stay stays with me today. I don't know much about the ancient Greeks, but the premise of 'virtue ethics' is, to my understanding, a project of maximizing your potential for good.
To me, we can't 'know' what human nature is, what the right thing to do is, but we can conclude that we are made better by having these 'ideals' to aspire towards, and then acting.
Your Chuang Tzu quote expresses a very similar premise, I believe. It's feels a 'process' philosophy. I find Buddhism similar, and personally appealing, having lived in Japan for a few years and traveled the region in the summers. Visiting all those temples and shrines in Tokyo, and in Thailand, Vietnam, etc, heck, even the churches of England when I was still calling myself a backpacker - all of those experiences helped me to ground my understanding of those religions in physical terms, and it was always the Buddhist temples I was most attracted to.
I struggle with deontological or utilitarian ethics simply due to the impossibility of objectivity, and my being an atheist. There is no 'leap of faith' for me to take. Only philosophically-informed choices to make. (or so I hope!)
But I am all for people, such as yourself, making a thoughtful decision to be relativistic, for a variety of possible reasons. It's only the default relativists I worry about, because it can lead to some collective problems with narcissism and rudderlessness. It's easy to be a lousy relativist. It's hard to be a good one?
"Your open minded and sympathetic attitude about religion is not a popular one here on the forum, which has a record of knee-jerk religious bigotry".
Thanks. Being educated in philosophy outside of the academy, I just looked at the history of philosophy (that I was supposed to be able to deliver to 17 year-olds in one semester), and saw so much done in historical contexts that necessitated an exchange between philosophy and religion that it was impossible for me to imagine disentangling them? I had super diverse classes here in downtown Toronto, including many Muslim students, Orthodox Greeks, etc., given my neighbourhood, and found this a great way to engage them.
I enjoyed thinking about your post.
I'll give a couple of examples. One of the most prominent is the capacity for language. Another important one is the capacity for what Konrad Lorenz calls "extended consciousness" that most other animals don't have. Over the past year I read two documents by him - A paper called "Kant's Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology" and "Behind the Mirror which deal with the subject and related subjects. Here is a link to the paper if you are interested.
https://archive.org/details/KantsDoctrineOfTheAPrioriInTheLightOfContemporaryBiologyKonradLorenz
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Clearly I don't agree with that given I did provide a definition. I'm not a cognitive scientist so my take is a amateur's and, as I noted, others disagree. I've read a few articles, but I can't lay out their arguments. Since the idea of human nature is so important to me, I need to read more people who are critical of the idea.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Based on what I've written here, it should be clear I disagree with this.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
I don't see that. Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu write about our "Te," what Ziporyn translates as "intrinsic virtuosities" and sometimes "inborn nature."
Quoting Jeremy Murray
For me, and I think Taoist principles, at least expressed in the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu, there is no leap of faith or philosophically informed choices. It's something I am aware of. As I understand it, Taoism is about self-awareness.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
I would not call myself a relativist, although I can see why you would.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Logic is objective because logic depends on an already constituted set of assumptions concerning what an object is. Therefore, logic cant be used as a means to reveal the psychological genesis of those assumptions, as writers like Wittgenstein, Husserl and Heidegger argued. Derrida summarizes Husserls opposition to Frege on this point:
Hi Fire Ologist, thanks for the welcome, and that's funny - I still have students who call me Mr. Murray, despite my promising them they can call me what they want when they graduate. Families, careers, and they still call me Mr. ...
I appreciate the respect shown teachers though, and I am happy you had that inspiring experience in English class. Not everybody has those.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Well said. I think my attraction back to philosophy has come from precisely this .... it seems to me that so much of what passes as morality is simply an 'act of faith', which is fine if we acknowledge it to be incomplete, a work in progress, and that all we aspire towards is synthetic, in a sense. 'Many paths, one truth'.
This synthesizing project is relational, based on reason, responsibility and a striving towards objectivity - in keeping with your model. I always saw my role as a high school teacher, welcoming students from seemingly everywhere, as working towards this synthesis.
But to aspire towards this, one has to remain 'whole-hearted and half-sure'.
To be specific, I have major problems with 'wokeness', which is often presented as a completed project, one that has come to absolutely dominate our educational institutions in a remarkably short time. The 'woke' have set out to 'dismantle' objectivity as white supremacist, which, per your 'required playing pieces', undermines the entire project. The woke prioritize 'lived experience' - anecdote - above all else, but only the lived experience of the 'marginalized'.
I find this dangerous, the moving target of 'marginalization', the refusal to play with the pieces we've played with, as human beings, since we first started thinking about morality. It seems to me that the response to this is synthetic - to identify shared values in religion, philosophy, cultural tradition, science, storytelling, etc and to bring the best of the various means of thinking into conversations with each other.
And I worry about a belief system that appears to be more religious than scholarly, but has managed to claim a scholarly standing that derives from it's own 'inherent' virtuousness.
This is true of all sorts of belief systems, it's just this new one, 'wokeness', that has me wondering what our shared language for moral discussion is / should be.
I spent some time thinking about your post and how to reply, and still find myself on shaky ground. The only conclusion I can come up with is that it is the act of pursuing an 'objective' morality, in free dialogue with others, seems essentially, necessarily 'human', even though the end goal is almost certainly unattainable.
That's my best practice, currently.
What would you recommend for dialogue with people who seem to be playing checkers with a chess set?
Ignore them. They are not playing hte game. And they know it. That's why the 'woke' don't actually get much truck. You'll never see a screaming blue-haired, chain-wearing trans woman(purposefully inflammatory, to paint a picture, to be sure) having a serious ethical discussion with heads of state, or anything of the kind. People will real interests in unity and getting along don't behave those ways, and we don't allow them to. We allow concessions, the way we do with children. Yes, i'm being sanguine, but i don't think too far from reality.
The fact that people keep making inquiry of morality, to me, is a reasonable basis for a hope all of these same people who even ask yeah, but is it good? might one day make a morality that is not futile. But, to me, if all is only relative, or we reduce the responsible agent to neurons and prior forces, we are not talking morality anymore. So we have to address relativity in the face of objectivity.
If we want to be more scientific/analytic about this, I have to show you where Im coming from. I see three ways the specter of futility creeps into the conversation.
First, if all metaphysics is futile, as an unfalsifiable exercise in the logic of tilting at angels dancing on the head of a windmill, there is no such thing as any system and so all moral systems are futile attempts to merely describe a fabricated windmill. Morality merely adds the concept good to the parallel question are all systems futile? which they may be, if we are honest.
(At this threshold spot where we see the futility of identifying any system, you find a similar but different threshold futility due to our reliance on language alone to point out all of these musings and figures of speech like moral system. . This is also where epistemological problems lie, where how we know anything is questionable, so how is knowing about morality knowing anything true about morality and not simply about my own construction of something? There is a lot of potential futility to any philosophy before we even get started on morality.)
A second layer of futility arises, if we somehow address the problems with systematizing human experience, and come to agree that metaphysics and moral system-making is as concrete as any science, that we can use reason to agree on universal moral laws and a means to adjudicate our own and others actions - we still have to come up with those laws and reasonably apply those laws to situations. What is a moral system and whether it can even exist, becomes, what action reflects the moral law? Making universal laws seems just as futile as making a system, even if we have solved the threshold metaphysical/epistemological problems, given how opposed people are to each other in life. In a practical sense, in todays climate of distrust, and just stubborn ignorance, no one wants to even listen to each other, let alone devise together a law that will equally tell all parties what to do and what not to do. We face the futility that we will never actually be able to agree on one system and so we will never actually create the metaphysical system we assumed was possible before but now cant agree on, and moral systematizing remains a futile attempt. The law part of the moral system is still cloudy and dubious for us even if we agree the type law is clearly possible.
But third, even if we worked out all of the metaphysical questions, and we built an entire system of just, moral laws that the entire worlds citizenry agreed was best for one and best for all, threw a party like New Years Eve to celebrate because everyone is happy, together if only for a night - now we each still live in time, and the party ends, and we have to go separate ways, and in future moments we have to pit morality against opposing desires, but protect and keep this morality by being moral, daily, being as good as we can. Seems to me, even if we are certain about metaphysical absolute objective truth, and certain we have found it in the moral code we consent to with our whole hearts, we are still able to render this moral system futile.
But then, is it futile build a moral system in attempt to resist or temper these human passions and reasonings of thought and body, anyway?
Wasnt it myself I was really trying to regulate with morality in the first place, or, cant I live according to my morality despite the futility of it?
Can I learn to do better, next time? Is there a better I can make in the future that guides my actions in the present and makes them better now as I act?
Is there a moral system that I would create out of my own actions despite anyone else, even myself?
Even though moral systems seem futile and I fail my morality every time, is it still better, and so, good, to be moral?
Good to be moral - thats seems either self-perpetuating, or empty tautology.
I think this is the space the existentialists carved out from which to sit on the question of morality. Its before good and evil, not beyond it - its the understanding that we never got there, because we can never get there. So not beyond anywhere.
But here, for some reason, we can still be moral, we just have to be moral, anyway. Its just that now, morality is a creative act merely among persons.
My sense is this was always the case - we learned to speak, we shared communications, and morality was born all simultaneously.
Making a moral system is self-defining act at the same time. So the universal (system) is the particular (self-defining). So maybe making a moral system simply means making myself better. I still have the problems of defining whats worse from the better and identifying what is responsible, and how to codify it in law, but Im doing all of these things looking at the law as a sculpting of my very soul itself.
We define ourselves when we define our morality and, also when we, ourselves, act according to our morality. The moral sense of things, the sense of good agreed upon with another, is tied up with what human beings are. Making morals, universalizing, is tied up with being a person, which is tied up with speaking to other speakers, because being a person is tied up with other human beings being people with you. We each define ourselves, together, with the others. Separate, but with each other. This is what morality is, or comes from, or makes. Being moral is an act as much as it is a law that could be acted upon or a system that could teach us how to live best.
We dont need to equate the law with oppression and stagnant resistance to change. The law is just as necessary for us to rejoin as us, as is the lawless relativity necessary for us to be apart in our lawless, silent separate subjectivity.
If I saw nothing objective about our existential condition, and left all things relative to forces of undoing and remaking, then what would be the point of speaking at all? Speaking itself can be futile, even thinking logically if thinking about something that isnt there. Without objectivity, nothing else is there with us, each, a lonely, cut-off subject.
There are a lot of holes in the above. But hopefully something to chew on in between those holes.
The Moral Landscape?
I'm a big fan even though I disagree with its core thesis and methodology. I still think it's a helpful framing of ethics for people who have had little exposure to it, even if it tends to be too reductive.
I get the feeling that Harris hasn't engaged much with pre-modern ethical theories (he certainly demonstrates an inadequate understanding of the "Platonic Good" when he thinks it is absent from conscious experiences, rather than being present in, not only all good things, but everything that even merely appears good). However, I think his core points regarding our ability to learn about the human good, and to act on this knowledge, are well-taken (and would be even more well-taken integrated into a richer moral philosophy and philosophy of science).
What you've noted are often popular reasons people give for advocating for a return to virtue ethics. I will just note that a sort of virtue ethics has also been dominant outside the West, so there is a lot to look into there even outside the Aristotelian and Christian traditions.
Right, well said. I appreciate people using philosophy to analyze our current moment. It seems the best equipped discipline to make sense of things, right now. So many disciplines have been completely captured, ideologically. The rigour of the thinking required by philosophy contrasts with the rest of the humanities, the arts, whatever you want to call this collective, who are guilty of all sorts of academic failings right now.
This is the air we breathe, and I assume a lot of people here on TPF are aware of, adjacent to or even profoundly affected by this woke capture of many institutions. This goes far beyond education. Morality via algorithim, delivered via screen.
So applying the tools of philosophy to the culture wars is fascinating to me as a lay social scientist appalled by the state of the field. Not to sound partisan. I am a conscientious objector. It's just that my entire adult life in Canada has been lived in progressive environments, my employer is arguably the wokest institution on the planet - this is the gestalt I can best analyze.
"Good to be moral" is not how I would put it. Good to be good?
"Seems to me, even if we are certain about metaphysical absolute objective truth, and certain we have found it in the moral code we consent to with our whole hearts, we are still able to render this moral system futile".
I always think about William James and the 'Will to Believe" on subjects such as this.
What if we changed your postulation to "not-at-all certain"? Certainty doesn't matter. The lack of objectivity is not a central problem for me here.
I resonate with your language, the phrase "the spectre of futility creeps" is dynamite metaphor, nicely done. Brings to mind pessimism, which I discovered by accident ordering "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" thinking I was ordering a horror story, and instead getting the only work of philosophy by this dark, underground horror writer I wanted to check out.
It's a perfect marriage for me, the language of horror expressing the emptiness of existence in a world in which there is no meaning. I do some creative writing as a hobby and I find pessimistic philosophy a great source of dark inspiration - I would love to have shared, say, parts of True Detective season one with a high school philosophy class.
Again, I'm self taught, so there are gaps in my basic philosophical knowledge no doubt, but the 'pessimist' philosophers Ligotti describes sound to me like the logical end game for a world that ceases to aspire to morality, or shared humanity, or goodness, or whatever and however we can best define that, right now.
A perpetual creation of the world we wish to see? Does that make me an existentialist?
The pessimists Ligotti describes, along with Ligotti himself (a lay philosopher), present a bleak vision, and the potential that the pessimists, or anti-natalists might be 'right'? That risk, however small, is enough for me to 'make the choice' to believe. I know that is not the language James uses to describe it, but that's the concept I endorse, I suppose?
And then I guess, to try and engage with people and yourself, perpetually, in an act of creation. Sounds exhausting...
The pace of the conversation for me is fast at TPF, being largely disconnected from the online world, and somewhat out of practice with certain thinkers and terms, but It's posts like yours that are challenging me to think hard before replying!
We have discussed Ligotti here a few times before. A really interesting book on the emergence of a sense of a "lack of meaning," which is in many ways a distinctly modern phenomenon, is Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (also one of the big Candian philosophers). I think he does a good job showing how this concern grows out of reconceptualizations of nature, more than religion (although the two are deeply related).
Of course, the "valuelessness and meaninglessness" of the universe has itself become a sort of dogma, guarded with the ferocity of early modern Catholic defenses Aristotle's physics in some cases. When existentialism becomes a sort of religion, it becomes important to safeguard the absurdity of the world, since we cannot be triumphant overcomers of absurdity if the world is not absurd (and would in fact, simply be deluded about the fundamental nature of the world).
In earlier ethics, both the dominant pagan philosophy of late-antiquity and ancient through medieval Christendom, the goal of ethics, and of philosophy itself was often framed more as "becoming like God." I think this framing explains why even thinkers who did not believe in the immortality of individual souls nonetheless did not seem to face a "crisis of meaning" (its absence). Robert M. Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present is pretty good on that idea.
The hyper politicization of ethics is indeed a huge problem. In my education, which I don't think is unusual, ethical education largely consisted of drilling the obedience required of students, and then jumping right to political ethics (also framed in the, then far less dominant, broadly "woke" frame). My personal position would be that you need to deal with the basics of individual ethics before delving into the ethics of politics, particularly contentious issues. Students today get essentially no direct education in ethics, and then are asked to jump right into political questions.
I was just thinking about James, because his essay seems to accord with a lot of Orthodox apologetics I've been reading. A key point raised by James is that our access to evidence in support of our beliefs is often contingent on our (perhaps conditional) acceptance of some beliefs prior to the consideration of evidence that supports them. I think this point is in line with the credo: credo ut intelligam, I believe that I may understand, advanced by St. Augustine and St. Anselm (from Isiah 7:9)
This credo is usually invoked in the context of religious beliefs. However, in our increasingly skeptical and conspiratorial era, it is worth noting that it actually applies equally to all areas of knowledge. We can doubt anything. We can always ask of any belief: but what if I am somehow wrong? or of any statement but what if it is a lie?
Yet, if we approach the world in this way, it does not seem that we will be able to learn much of anything. For instance, if we doubt every word in our physics textbook, if we cannot get past a suspicion that the entire field is an elaborate hoax, etc. we shall never learn physics. Likewise, we cannot hope to learn to speak Spanish if we doubt the accuracy of every Spanish speaker as they attempt to instruct us. It is only after we have understood a topic that we can have an informed opinion about it. For example, even if it were really true that some key element in modern physics is mistaken, we can hardly expect to be able to identify this problem, or to find a solution to it, while remaining ignorant of the subject because we have refused to learn about it due to our concerns over accepting error.
But this would apply to religion as well. One doesn't just read and assent or withhold assent. If the (at least traditional) Christians are right, our nous is darkened, and our reasoning will remain clouded until we are healed (which involves ascetic discipline, prayer, sacraments, and a redirecting of the appetites and passions). The Platonists, Stoics, and Buddhists make similar points. I had written about this in a more specifically Christian context awhile back, but I think it applies to a wide variety of things. One doesn't really discover if "meditation" or "mindfulness" or "prayer" "works" by reading about it an assenting, but only after pursuing them.
I think this is important because ethics (and aesthetics) is very much a doing, and not something that seems to reduce to affirming or not affirming propositional beliefs.
Any thread to point to?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
So, I read a lot of existential-adjacect stuff - "At the Existentialist Cafe" is a fave - but I doubt my ability / desire to read a lot of primary sources like say, "Being and Nothingness". I may be missing something ... but the existentialists do seem to enjoy absurdity, and the pessimists do not?
How is existentialism a religion? I see elements of religion in 'wokeness', and elements of the postmodern in both existentialism and wokeness, but existentialism and religion? I guess Sartre wasn't deconstructing master narratives, he was pretty into communism, for example. But then, willing to renounce it, eventually?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I've witnessed this. Almost no ethical instruction at all. Ethical positions are simply delivered to the students as fact. I am at the point where I think that teaching kids to question ethical axioms will get them in trouble.
Question - is modern day 'ethical' instruction simply just a neoliberal /technocratic default setting for moral relativists?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Isn't this a false binary? I doubt any word, written or spoken anywhere and by anyone, on principle. I don't think that disqualifies me from trusting a particular source to be mostly correct, and therefore using it to improve on my own ethical / aesthetic 'doing'?
I guess I just don't see the need for something to be 'true' in order for it to be a meaningful target, in the present moment.
Hey man, (assuming 'man' given the nickname) I am on the lookout for reading recommendations, so I appreciate any you toss my way. Charles Taylor is someone I've meant to read as a Canadian. I struggle with technical primary sources, and am not as well read on the classics as a result.
I'm on the lookout in particular for 'essential' primary sources that don't seem so intentionally obscure. I get that the task of processing these works is sort of the point, but time is finite. And also essential 'adjacent' texts, I loved that Sarah Bakewell book.
I kind of approach every subject with a 'how would I explain this to kids' mentality, not in the dumbing down sense of things, but in the scaffolding sense.
Perhaps approaching all ethical questions from the perspective of how to explain / explore / compel / impart / etc. these concepts with children is worthwhile?
Hello Amadeus, and sorry for the slow reply here. I often enjoy your comments and posts, but I missed this.
I think one of the reasons I object to people saying things like 'the worst of woke is over' is that, sure, it is in retreat, or never got to the table for 'ethical discussions with heads of state' - but I've encountered a number of people close to your exaggerated, blue-haired picture, in middle-management positions for the past 10+ years of teaching high school.
And I think they are causing (unintentional) harm. "The Anxious Generation" and "Bad Therapy" are two recent reads that have me convinced of this.
It's the damage caused, the waste of resources, that makes it hard for me to 'ignore'. And that's why I'm drawn to these ethical threads. Wokeness feels like an 'own-goal' for progressives? It also feels unchallengeable, deontological, an act of faith perceived as rational morality?
That's fair, and yes, It's clearly an issue. Management in universities is increasingly (old news) of that kind. My current courses are... well, the courses are good.. but they're very hard to get through being brow-beaten constantly for existing. No wonder faith in Uni is falling fast.
I do think wokeness is an own-goal. So much so that the groups in question don't even notice it. Even when they lose as unlosable election.
The biggest problem I see is that people can make it all the way to PhD by doing what they're told, but believing something utterly preposterous and incoherent.
I have several (fellow) students in my current classes who say the most unreasonable, clearly incorrect stuff about factual matters - but they're passing. These types of people believe, truly, that there is no use for the concept of objectivity, and that there is no such thing as logical constraint on claims.
These people will become philosophers of nonsense. There are thousands. No wonder it doesn't pay.
Good and evil are fundamental features of our reality and are both necessary. Morality is about what is right or wrong to do in a situation. Everything is situational at the very end.
Here is the thread I remember on Conspiracy Against the Human Race.
It's obviously not a religion in some sense. But it is very much a "worldview through which someone organizes their life and makes sense of their life, human history, etc." It is a proper "worldview" in that it encompasses the whole of human experience, and it is "religion-like" in its attempts to explain the "meaning" of human life (in this case as a sort of act of creation and overcoming). Hence, it gains strong emotional valance, and needs to be "defended."
Probably something close at least. But it's hardly a structured ethics, which I suppose makes sense if you think most of ethics is just emotion claims. D.C. Schindler has some good stuff on the "bourgeois metaphysics" that are often presupposed here.
I don't think it's a binary at all. We can have [I]more or less[/I] faith in a source, belief, person, etc. The Academic Skepticism St. Augustine is referring to made it a point to accept next to nothing, doubt was wisdom. "Doubt even your own senses." The point is that this gets you nowhere in terms of understanding.
A Secular Age is quite accessible. It isn't really technical, although it is encyclopedic in its references. Obviously you get more out of it when you know the sources well. I know the late medieval and Reformation era better and what he is saying comes through as "familiar" and is easy to place. He spends more of the book on the 19th century, and I'm less familiar with these sources, but it's still written in such a way that it makes sense for people without any great expertise in Romanticism.
One of the more influential books on ethics I really like is Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, but that is a bit more technical, although not super technical. It provides a novel account for why ethics was relatively stable and marked by relative consensus for about 2,000 years (outside the West there also tends to be great stability and similarity as well, although he doesn't focus on this), and then, with the Enlightenment, we get radical change terminating fairly rapidly (200 years give or take) in relativism, anti-realism, and emotivism. He tries to give one explanation for this. So does Taylor. Actually, I think the two do much to support one another's theses.
And then Aristotle's Ethics is probably one of his most straightforward and engaging works. A hidden classic is Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, which was the most copied book outside the Bible for the Middle Ages, and has unfortunately largely become neglected, probably because it can't be read in a "pragmatist" direction to the same extent as parts of Aristotle. Boethius accomplished a tremendous synthesis of Aristotle, Plato, and later Neo-Platonism (including its Christian variety exemplified in St. Augustine). It has a special quality because Boethius wrote it from prison after failing to go along with corruption, and was awaiting a quite brutal execution. He had been the second most powerful man in Rome, and has lost virtually everything for trying to be just at the outset of the book.
Crazy right?
Quoting AmadeusD
That continues to amaze me. Do any people push back against insanity in these environments, or is that beyond the pale?
Quoting AmadeusD
Oh man, that's rough. How does that manifest?
I read a really interesting essay on "Moral Cruelty and the Left" by Blake Smith - he was new to me, but it was a great essay, looking at Judith Shklar, also new to me, who warned that [i]"liberalism can degenerate into a cult of victimhood that permits our sadistic desires to be passed off as unimpeachable virtue"....
The other key insight Shklar found in Nietzsche is that fear of physical cruelty can be transformed into moral cruelty by deliberate and persistent humiliation, so that the victim can eventually trust neither himself nor anyone else. Those who see themselves as fighting against physical cruelty, from Christian priests railing against the iniquities of the Roman Coliseum to their distant descendants, the social justice warriors of today, can inflict all kinds of psychological torment on their opponentsand themselves.[/i]
I do see a lot of 'moral cruelty' from the woke these days.
Which I would have preferred when I was a student at school. I went to a very expensive elite school. It was Christian, and we had a daily chapel service. This school was modeled on Eton and followed old British pedagogical traditions. This was 45 years ago. We were given ethical instruction and read pointless New Testament stories, which had no impact on most students and were at best a source of mirth. The poor and minorities were generally held to be human trash. Everyone was acutely aware that the real goal of the school was to get one into a law or medical degree, to then make money and gain power. Many of my fellow students joined their millionaireand sometimes billionairefathers in family businesses.
For the most part, despite an energetic display of Christianity and a lot of rhetoric about the centrality of morality, this school was merely churning out neoliberal toadies who, on leaving school, often treated people poorly. Which I also observed in the subsequent decades.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
There as a lot of moral cruelty in many positions including the Christianity of my early life which held to bigotry, racism and the position that we were better than others because we were part of a winning team (eg, the West and its values). We seem to be going through a period of adjustment and a period of backlash.
Moral systems are meant to be an ideal to strive for, more so than something that has to be adhered to 100% of the time all the time. It is supposed to guide behavior.
The tricky part is that all of us fail at some point or another. It's impossible not to. The problem here is that if a person makes a mistake or does something wrong, then they throw away the baby with the bathwater.
Also - there is always the risk of moralizing. It's not very useful or helpful, most of the time.
This seems to me to still be a problem of lack of ethical education though. Daily chapel service is not necessarily ethical education. Or, as you describe it, it was an ethical education in the dictum "seek power and status, for these are worthwhile goods."
But that's the type of moral education most elites get, whether it be "conservative" and tinged with Ayn Rand and the Prosperity Gospel, or "liberal" and framed in terms of "effective altruism" and post-modern anti-realism ("live your truth!").
One should hardly be shocked that such future leaders go on to be poor leaders. Yet I wouldn't take that as a knock on ethics necessarily. It would be like rejecting diets because one grew up around crash dieters who followed off short morning fasts by binging candy bars; that something is done poorly does not mean it is impossible to do well.
Yes, thats my conclusion. It ties into a point I often make: just because someone professes morality or is a strong member of a church doesnt necessarily mean they behave morally. There's often an assumption that we need to go back to Christianity to improve the world, but my question is always, which kind? And how do we determine whether a given church is faithful to the Gospels? As David Bentley Hart often quips there are many atheists he prefers to Christians.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Fair point. I wasn't intending a rejection. I'm simply suggesting that there needs to be more exploration of what it actually means to be a Christian, or a member of a given religion. What are the practices and behaviours and how do we know they are faithful? Being religious, or even a believer, is not, in itself, necessarily good or true.
Its hard to know how this works. I am fairly constantly pushing back, and it seems fairly successful when it's done in an academic fashion.
The course I'm in currently has a module on slurs. In that module, we will be allowed to say whatever we want in service of discussion of Phil of Language. I imagine that would bring up both the weak "I don't like opinions" people and the "Finally, some real meat" types. Will be fun to see in a few weeks when it comes up.
Youre touching on something deep.
Many moral systems fail because they try to build top-down, starting from abstract rules or ideals, while ignoring the underlying reality that gives value any meaning at all.
One newer view I've found powerful is that value isnt arbitrary or abstract - its rooted in life itself.
Life is the necessary condition for any perception of good or bad. No life = no values, no judgments, no meaning.
From that lens, morality isn't about rigid systems of rules. It's about what preserves, strengthens, and deepens life.
"Life = Good" becomes the simple, natural foundation, and from there, we can still debate specifics, but with a grounded reference point instead of floating abstraction.
Its called the Synthesis framework if you're curious. It flips the whole project on its head in a pretty elegant way.
You can find the formal paper HERE
Hi Count Timothy,
Great recommendation. "After Virtue" was on my list, so when you suggested it and I found it on-sale, I bought the book. I get that this is only a moderately difficult work of philosophy, with 'moderately difficult' being my default description of primary sources in philosophy.
And I struggled at times. There would be long paragraphs of one or two sentences, abundant double negatives, multiple languages deployed in quotations. As a separate question, as a non-philosopher asking, does philosophy need to be so obscure?
But back to "After Virtue" ...
This may be the most impactful thing I've read this year.
I reject utilitarianism and deontology both outright. One can never know the true utilitarian outcome, and one can never know the universal truth of morality.
Virtue ethics remains aspirational. A working towards, rather than an understanding of.
I found myself repeatedly in agreement, but what I found most valuable was the central argument that, in the moral sphere, we are not talking about the same things or using the same language, and yet we think we are.
I gather you are well versed in classical philosophy, and I am not, so I might be missing something.
But I did resonate with the idea of historically formative ethical principles, and see more value, today, in the aspirational 'working on' of virtue ethics as opposed to the binary 'right and wrong' of deontology or utilitarianism.
:up:
If virtue ethics weren't so caught up in allowing religious zeal, i'd be well on board.
If virtue ethics weren't so caught up in allowing religious zeal, i'd be well on board.
please explain that to me? I see religion as deontological? what are the virtues pursued by religious zeal?
also, I think you are the first person I've encountered who has used the word zeal. which is awesome.
My understanding of hte way virtue ethics work is that its a non-religious moral system that allows someone to say "The type of person i ought to be is *insert religious ideal*" and so work toward that, under the guise of non-religious development.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
haha, awesome!
Isn't it also said that there's an elitist element to it? Only certain people with the right reading and education and sensibilities are able to understand and achieve virtue in this way?
A person steeped in Wahabi teachings couldn't be "virtuous" as compared to a Catholic vicar. Or, for that matter, a physicist. LOL.
I am not sure, but are you suggesting we all have compassion and basically the same life experience, manifesting a shared "common sense"?
I am thinking of people who, by their own account, were pretty unpleasant people. One such person believes his radical change into a compassionate and gentle person was a miracle he experienced when he was baptized and became a Christian. He praises God for this miracle.
I forget the experience that another man believes changed his life, but I remember he explained as a fascist, he enjoyed being brutally cruel. The cruelest of the group had the most status within the group. Then one day, he had an experience that totally turned his life around. He now attempts to turn others around.
I don't think we should trust the layman's "common sense". These people can become fascist and agree to do very cruel things to others, such as the KKK and the terrorism it practiced in the persecution of people of color. Nice Christian ladies were very much a part of the persecution of people of color as they united and intentionally spread a culture built on the history of slavery. In Germany, this was expressed in the persecution of Jews and mass murder. We are still dealing with these problems, so your belief in "common sense" may be in error.
I would say human nature comes from the evolution of our species. We are naked apes (without hair covering us). Anthropology is one path of studying human nature.
Right now, we are learning a lot through brain imaging. We can actually see different areas of the brain light up when they are stimulated. This is a far better way of understanding our nature than reading the Bible.
I also love comparing religions. We are what we believe we should be, and basically, there is much religious agreement, but the mythology is different. Hinduism and Buddhism have different mythologies compared to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, which share the same mythology from the perspective of different cultures. Christianity seems to be a combination of many religions that were popular back in the day, with the story of Jesus being familiar in other religions.
History has to be included as an interesting way to study humans, along with sociology. psychology, and related sciences. I think we can be confident in science and the collection of facts to understand humans, and then practice self-government through a democratic republic.
Glad you liked it. It's a good book. One thing to bear in mind is that in most pre-modern ethics "good" is predicated of something as respects some end, i.e., does an act lead toward/attain its end? Yet ends themselves can also be said to be "good" as respects some other end (e.g. I study medicine in order to be able to provide medical care (end 1) so that I can help promote health in myself and others (end 2); end 1 is ordered to end 2). Hence, when trying to order ethics, we are looking for a good that is "sought for its own sake, not on account of anything else" and a "highest good" by which all other goods/ends can be ordered.
This is why pre-modern Christians, far things being good or bad themselves, we have an analysis of use towards different ends: "Nothing created by God is evil. It is not food that is evil but gluttony, not the begetting of children but unchastity, not material things but avarice, not glory but vainglory. It is only the misuse of things that is evil, not the things themselves . (St. Maximus the Confessor). This is also why St. Augustine breaks his analysis down into "things sought to be used" and "things sought as a final end" (a distinction Plato and Aristotle make as well).
"Practical reason" is reasoning about what is good (and thus action), as opposed to "theoretical reason" which targets truth. A key thing to note here is that ethics is not the architectonic science of practical reason. That is politics. Ethics is about how we live good lives, are good people, develop excellence, etc. A good human life involves common goods, and "spiritual goods" (i.e. those goods that do not diminish when shared). But, the promotion of the good of all properly relates to the science of the common good, to the polis. This is just like how the art of bridal-making must be ordered to horseback riding, or shipbuilding to sailing. A problem that MacIntyre doesn't make particularly clear is that contemporary ethics tends to collapse politics and ethics, or to conflate the two. This is why contemporary ethics has such a hard time refuting the "rational egoist," Homo oeconomicus; first because it often has a poor conception of common and spiritual goods (not always true though), and second because it has collapsed the distinction between the good of the polis and the good of its members. These are deeply related, but not the same thing.
As Aquinas helpfully distinguishes in the commentary on Aristotle's Ethics: "moral philosophy is divided into three parts. The first of these, which is called individual (monastic) ethics, considers an individuals operations as ordered to an end. The second, called domestic ethics, considers the operations of the domestic group. The third, called political science, considers the operations of the civic group." Collapsing these into one amorphous soup is not helpful, particularly for kids as respects education.
What "virtue ethics" are you referring to? In general, people of any background or vocation are capable of virtue. The four cardinal virtues have nothing explicitly to do with religion; indeed they are distinguished from the three "theological virtues." That's certainly the case in the mainstream Thomistic virtue ethics that is popular in Catholic philosophy. Dante, for instance, has Pagans and Muslims spared from torment due to their virtue in Limbo, while most of Hell is populated by Christians.
One need not have any particular profession nor profess any particular religion to possess fortitude, justice, temperance, and prudence. Rather, the idea is that the pursuit of the spiritual life aids in/is essential to the perfection of these, but by no means their mere possession. But "progress in the spiritual life" is also in no way equivalent with "professing faith" (again, with Dante, we see a lot of high-ranking clergy in Hell).
In Aristotle, yes, this is true to some extent. I think this comes out even stronger in the Chinese tradition, although I am less familiar with it. It's negated in Christian and Buddhist virtue ethics though, and even in the later Pagan virtue-ethics to a large extent. Epictetus notes that some slaves are able to attain to freedom while most masters are slaves to their vices for instance. Aristotle's elitism can also be moderated by the idea that the ideal polis works more to make "every man a king," as opposed to "every king a commoner." This is true for Plato as well to a lesser extent as well. To the question: "who should be the philosopher kings," it would seem the answer is probably "as many as possible." Plato's ideal city is complicated by the fact that it is:
A. Really meant to be an analogy of the soul, and there are difficulties in looking at it purely politically; and
B. To the extent it is based on real cities, one has to understand that in Plato's time most people had to spend most of their time working on agriculture or else everyone starves, and defense also had to be a major focus.
There is a weird sort of relationship between modern culture and elitism, particularly on the left. There is an obsession with access to elite institutions, particularly universities and prep schools, but then this is paired with a denial that having received this sort of elite cultivation actually makes the elite any more suited to leadership. This is sort of contradictory though. If going to an elite prep school and Yale didn't better prepare one for leadership, or career/political success, then there would be no reason to expend so much effort trying to make sure that different people had access to these things. They would be hollow, ineffective status symbols. People could get ahead by ignoring them.
IDK, this to me suggests a deeper internal contradiction vis-a-vis the heavy focus on "meritocracy" (a meritocracy that currently seems to be reducing social mobility). Meritocracy is not conducive to equality. A lot of liberal theory (e.g. Mill) is very much focused on empowering the "exceptional individual." The post-Marxist left is very much on board with this sort of thinking it would seem, but then this leads to an obsession with "fair access" to becoming an "exceptional individual" through "merit," and thus an obsession with merit itself.
Yet you cannot have a system designed to ruthlessly sort winners from losers and equality and dignity for all. The system is very much based on the idea that there are "winners." The "head" is considered more noble than the rest of the body, more essential, and more free, which inevitably leads towards a no-holds bared race to "get a-head." We are a far way from de Tocqueville's America (or perhaps rather, we are where he saw it heading in the long run, a mix of anarchy and an omnipresent bureaucracy that recreates the old-world authoritarian state; the worst of both worlds.)
Everything you've said applies what I am noting, and exactly what makes it unattractive to me.
Hey man!
I reject your framing.
I don't really know the history of people who advance this premise philosophically.
I just know that most people today seem to frame moral issues as either utilitarian (left) or deontological (right).
I celebrated McIntyre's argument because it aligned with my personal experiences - that expecting people to be able to do utilitarian math is stupid, since it is not possible.
and as an avowed atheist - not a default atheist - i reject deontology.
the only moral system that resonates with me is the aspirational moral system.
I don't care that values meant different things when Aristotle described them.
none of the alternatives require work.
for sure, it seems elitist, to argue that some people are better equipped to make moral decisions for others.
but then again, some people are better equipped to make moral decisions than others.
It is odd. In my experince, here, it's the left that is often elitist - in terms of culture and it's the right who are generally the low brow. I guess it all depends upon how one frames elite. Are we talking who owns the means of production, or who owns some Penguin classics?
I am reminded of art critic Robert Hughes' stance from his autobiography - "I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it's an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails. I don't think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones."
right. but, from a modern perspective, does that matter? I know the premise was that historical ethical systems are embedded in modern ones, but the fact that aristotelean ethics were embedded earlier means that they are inevitably fundamental today?
me, personally, I'm just looking for a belief system as an atheist. virtue ethics might be considered the best system, even if flawed? that sure felt like McIntyre's conclusion.
I assume the most positive human thing possible is to aspire to betterment. 'betterment' is historically contingent.
to me, as a default, virtue ethics is superior given the fact that equips someone to make 'moral' decisions in the moment, whereas both utilitarianism and deontology seem to imply that there is a 'correct' answer to arrive at, rather than the 'best' answer of virtue ethics?
here you go :)
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Virtue Ethics, then. This is what I am critiquing. It allows for whatever 'aspirations' one can coherently generate to be followed. Not really the boundaries I would prefer, at any rate.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
I'm unsure this makes sense in a aspirational system. Your aspirations wont match the person's who you are making decisions for. On it's face, I feel as if this is true, though.
the point isn't what's 'right' or 'wrong', since both are unknowable, the point is being better positioned to answer and act when it matters.
I don't care that my aspirations don't match others, or are not obviously right or wrong.
I believe that I am better positioned to make ethical decisions if i practice morality. I practice morality by aspiring to virtues. as do others who disagree with me on virtue considerations. the virtues are debatable, the premise is debatable.
But what seems more 'true' to me in terms of virtue ethics is that virtue requires work.
my teaching colleagues happy to tell our boys that they are 'toxic' are not doing work. they are just repeating whatever is the dominant belief system.
I can still forgive them, work with them, do better for kids, in that we all believe we are pursuing virtue.
utilitarianism and deontology would prevent that, no?
so, if not, what then?
Yep. And that makes me extremely uncomfortable. Not that its 'wrong'. Can't quite see what's being got at here..
Quoting Jeremy Murray
This is exactly hte pitfall I am decrying (though, i used a religious basis to illustrate it).
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Sort of. But I am not partial to any of the three systems hereabouts noted.
The older I get the and the more permissive society has become a little bit of agreed social control would be good thing.
I have thousands of unwritten rules for all occasions and these change as circumstances change. Are they morals? I don't think they are but I like when I recently thought about why I think and act how I do, it was quite amusing think of the actions consciously. We all do it but the structure of my thousands of rules come from a fairly consistent framework. Many people have a terrible framework for making decisions and how they act. Is that a lack of morals or just bad coping strategies for how they've been raised?
I wasnt speaking against social control, its needed. I was only making the distinction between that and morality. But when you take out the idea of morality, social control loses much of its authority. And thats probably a good thing. Theyre doing it because they want to control my behavior, not because I did anything wrong.
I think society needs controlling without any need for recourse to morality. It shouldnt be a they it should be a we
We need a framework for social interactions that dont need to be linked with morality. A few social expectations of behaviour and dress would be a nice start.
You write as if there is not such a system in place already. There is, but perhaps it is not being done in accordance with your preferences. There is often no consensus on who is we and who is they.
Yes that is correct. It definitely isnt being done as I think it should.
Without knowing for certain, Im guessing how you think it should be done is significantly different from how I think it should be done.
Guess away. Im a slightly left of centre liberal who expects people to step up in life. Do whatever they wish in private as long as it doesnt affect the people around them too much.
Why?
I don't claim anything based on that premise for myself. I guess the problem with my position is that I haven't defined 'virtues' or how to pursue them? I don't think we have to limit ourselves to religious virtues. The book "After Virtue" that Count Tim recommended to me harkens back to Homer and virtues that seem more grounded in citizenship than anything?
I just think that people who practice things are more likely to be better at them. I don't see in utilitarianism or deontology any requirement to 'improve' as human beings in order to improve their moral judgement, and I do in virtue ethics.
That's why I keep harping on aspirational, although that might not be the best word. We aspire to improve and we leave the possibility of being 'correct' to the realm of always aspiring, whereas utilitarianism and deontology seem premised on 'knowable' objective truths?
That necessity to work at being good really contrasts with the political extremes right now, in which 'goodness' is simply a matter of holding the right beliefs.
I see a kind of moral laziness in relativism, or at least, relativism-by-default. It is very easy to just dismiss moral considerations as lame or uncomfortable, for harshing the vibe. And thus people are happy to skip the question and defer to moral 'experts' without developing their own moral muscles. I see that happening a lot on the left - people who would view themselves as moral, who others would view that way, but who are actually amoral relativists who simply think what those around them do.
This sense of morality being 'thinking the right things' seems dangerously omnipresent at the moment.
Quoting AmadeusD
Again, I'm not formally trained, but aren't these three moral systems the primary moral systems, generally speaking? What system, if any, would you endorse?
This brings to mind something from the Tao Te Ching - from Verse 38, Gia-Fu Fengs translation.
Quoting Lao Tzu
Why does it bring to mind that?
It's important for building up a coherent ethics and moving to a "metaphysics of goodness." From a practical perspective, I don't think it's necessary to go that deep (indeed, most people will find it annoying or impossible). That's sort of the great thing about it, it's useful even if you don't want to go all the way into the Doctrine of Transcendentals and the ultimate grounding of value.
But prima facie it's quite hard to attack virtue ethics as at least a solid set of principles for self-development and moral action. To provide a strong rebuttal of virtue ethics requires demonstrating that, ceteris paribus (and not just in bizarre counter examples), it isn't more desirable to be courageous instead of cowardly or rash, that prudence isn't better on average than being impulsive or indecisive, that having fortitude isn't better than being weak willed, etc.
One of MacIntyre's points is that any notion of "just desert" or human excellence requires some notion of man's telos. Otherwise, there is no standard by which to judge excellence.
Contemporary liberal political theory tends to focus on rights instead of just rewards/punishments. It doesn't turn to just desert because liberalism makes man's telos a "private," individual question. This is at odds with politicians and citizens in liberal states (on the left and right), as well as most lay philosophers here. They constantly appeal to just desert and excellence. It's very hard not to. Even fatalists do this. Denying excellence and any human telos seems to be almost as difficult a feat to carry off as radical skepticism.
Anyhow, even if we are skeptical of our knowledge of man's "natural ends," it will still be the case that at least some virtues will be a prerequisite for even discovering these ends (or discovering that no such ends exist). Hence, we can at least say that: "the virtues important to the good life of man are those virtues necessary for discovering the good life of man" (a catch phrase of MacIntyre's). Here is a paper sort of walking through this step by step. Plato's "being ruled by the rational part of the soul," turns out to be a fairly ideal metavirtue (a virtue required for the attainment of any other virtues, regardless of what they turn out to be). Also, because moral virtue is also epistemic virtue, even the relativist cannot simply write it off. They will also need some virtues in order to become confirmed in their relativism or anti-realism.
I enjoyed your response, plenty to look up. Can I ask you why you are drawn to medieval philosophy? Not an area I know much about. Feel free to recommend any 'essential' texts, I got a lot out of reading your last one!
Prior to reading "After Virtue", I don't think I could have defined 'telos'. How does one land on the premise of a human telos, today? Is it simply moral pragmatism? Is 'excellence' fundamental to the premise of telos?
I resonate with the idea that their is something universal about being human. I am drawn to moral philosophy, as a layman, because I fear that the majority of decision-makers are either utilitarian or deontological, and that those positions are not able to respond in a timely fashion to the unprecedented changes of our globalized, neo-virtual world? Virtue ethics seems superior in terms of making decisions where the moral math, or the universal truth, is unclear?
One of my frustrations with 'wokeness' is that it seems to deny any sense of universal humanity. Wokeness seems a deontological morality, one often compared to religion, but it feels as if it fails, as moral deontology and as a substitute for religion, in its denial of anything that is 'essentially human'?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This might be a dumb question, but how is it a given that moral virtue is an epistemic virtue?
And I was under the impression that relativists write everything off anyway. Say a pomo relativist that rejects all 'master narratives'? I gather you are talking about philosophical relativists who have landed on that position after serious reflection?
Which differentiates them, to me, from the WEIRD majority, who seem to be relativistic by default?
Sorry for all the questions, I hope you take them as a compliment!
Totally by accident. I started with Nietzsche, the existentialists, and post-modern thinkers. I read a decent amount, but wasn't a huge student of philosophy. What got my into philosophy was studying the natural sciences, particularly biology and physics and the role of information theory, complexity studies, and computation in those fields. Most of my early threads on that sort of thing. I was of the opinion that useful philosophy stayed close to the contemporary sciences.
It was through studying information theory and semiotics that I got introduced to Aristotle and the Scholastics. I came to discover that, not only were their ideas applicable to "natural philosophy/science," but they also tied it together with metaphysics, ethics, politics, etc. I had sort of written those other disciplines off as interminable, adopting the popular liberal skepticism towards them (liberalism is very much justified through skepticism and a fear of "fanaticism.")
Unfortunately, medieval thought tends to be quite complex. I don't know if philosophy got to that level of specialization again until the mid-20th century (for better or worse, the printing press really "democratized" and deprofessionalized philosophy of a while). I have become a great admirer of Thomas Aquinas, but it's hard to say where to start with him because it takes a very long time to "get" it and see how it is relevant and applies broadly. I find a lot of the Patristics more accessible, but they tend to be more spiritual, theological, and practical (big focus on asceticism, meditation, and contemplation), and less straightforwardly philosophical and systematic.
One book I really like is Robert M. Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present because I think he explains the relationship between reason, self-determination, freedom, happiness, and "being like God," very well. Once one understands that, one can see how Aristotle turned these deep psychological insights into even deeper metaphysical insights. I don't know a great introduction to Aristotle though, although Sachs' commentary on the Physics is very good.
Another one I like is Fr. Robert Sokolowski's The Phenomenology of the Human Person, which does a lot with Husserl, modern philosophy of language, and modern cognitive science, but is grounded in Aristotle and St. Thomas. Jensen's The Human Person: A Beginner's Thomistic Psychology is pretty good too, but still feels a bit "historical." Fr. W. Norris Clarke's The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics is good too, I just feel like I didn't totally get it on the first pass. I got the ideas, but not their power or applicability.
Or, from another direction, Fr. William Harmless has a really good book called Mystics that delves into medieval mystical thought, and he also wrote probably my favorite introduction to the Augustinian corpus Augustine in His Own Words. Pretty sure hard copies are out of print for the former unfortunately though, although you can probably find it online somewhere.
Or, for a third direction, you could start with Dante (which is more fun!). Both the Great Courses and the Modern Scholar have excellent lectures on them (on Audible and elsewhere). Mahfood's commentary is good too, as is Teodolinda Barolini's commentary.. I feel like a close read of the Commedia gets you pretty far into the ethical, political, historical, and even some of the metaphysical dimensions of medieval thought, because Dante was a great synthesizer and weaves it into his narrative. Granted, given its subject matter, it also tends to be heavy on theology.
I think the following covers this pretty well. The "rule of reason," in at least some form, is required for good faith inquiry. A person can just write off good faith inquiry from the beginning, but they certainly won't have any good reasons for doing so. The end of the paper I mentioned talks about the anti-realist and their particular objections. Their problem is that they end up like Protagoras, unable to say why philosophy is worthwhile or why anyone should listen to them if they don't already like what they hear.
It could be, but it's normally grounded in the philosophy of nature and metaphysics.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Interesting. It was Nietzsche and Sartre who inspired me to explore philosophy more deeply. I was immersed in post-modernity at university given my age and areas of study. The humanities in the 90s were flooded with these ideas.
Do you see post-modernism as inherently relativistic, morally? I loved the postmodern art I was encountering, Angela Carter, the Simpsons, the musician Beck, but I started to feel queasy as I encountered the moral relativism - I still remember clearly a prof telling us that we had no right to judge the practice of female genital mutilation - and I see that moral relativism everywhere today.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I used to tell my philosophy students that the ancient Greek philosophers were the scientists of their era. I posit that many of our modern problems result from moving away from this generality into academic silos. I've just read Jesse Singal's "The Quick Fix" on the problems with social psychology, and he points out repeatedly how often some of the replication failures in this field could have been avoided if the social scientists in question had considered any evidence from other disciplines.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
$212 Canadian dollars on Amazon.ca. That seems high. I will look for it in the library.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That is a fun suggestion! I have yet to read Dante beyond excerpts in lit 101.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I do not get why so many people think philosophy and theology are mutually exclusive. Ignore this if it is an overly personal question, but how important to you are your religious / spiritual beliefs in terms of the philosophy you are drawn to?
I consider myself a fairly staunch atheist. Having had more than my share of bad luck, the problem of evil (and why me?) is too large an obstacle, despite how appealing I find the idea of belief. I think this best explains my interest in virtue ethics. But we both seem drawn to similar ideas?
Regardless, I like theology. I had too many students who I cared for who were religious, and too many loved ones, to dismiss it. Yes, there are strong reasons to question some of the institutions and individual actors. But I find it hard to imagine any sort of moral system today without religion.
I actually 'hmm'ed out loud when I read this.
Half a dozen examples of this spring to mind from Singal's book alone.
Quoting myself seems silly, but yes, you totally answered my question.
Sorry for the long response. I have too much time on my hands ...
I enjoy your responses and your writing here in general. I inherited a box of philosophy books from my brother when he passed away. I'm now inspired to dig it out and look for some of the classics I'd considered beyond me. My brother and I thank you for that!
Why is that elitist? For sure, someone who has been through med school will be a better doctor than someone who doesn't even know the anatomy of our bodies.
I think life experience makes some people better at determining moral behavior than others. If the most important people in someone's life are drug-dealing gang members, this person's moral judgement will not be the same as mainstream society's moral judgement.
Science makes some people better at determining the moral care for the planet, and also can make a person better at judging human morality.
And look at us today. I think fascism is more popular today than it was in the 1930s. It appears to me that we have pretty much replaced the Greek philosophers with German philosophers.
Yes, all moral systems are doomed to subversion, ideological coups or general degeneration. Most systems are resistant to change by their nature, but moral questions are constantly shifting and changing with time, material factors and social expectations.
Hey Jeremy,
I hope you dont mind me hijacking your questions for Count.
I think there is a narrow but unique contribution to be gained from post-modernism. I might say I see it as more of a method, than it is actual content. Its like a metaphysical spell-checker.
Content, which itself is too static, is secondary, asserted only so that one can look sideways at content, while focused more on itself in the looking, at the same time content is asserted. All is therefore, ironic. Or all is story-telling with the post-modern.
There certainly is a time and place for the attitude and process that post-modernism typifies. It produces a unique type of skepticism towards institution, and an ability to disagree with others and to deconstruct the content others might supply. This can be the right course of action to take, given the dubious content errant human beings often supply; but postmodernism is itself a type of subversion, and so it can jeopardize a maturity towards true wisdom.
And artists are always the best at working the medium (creating the best content for ironys sake), so if there is a lasting impact to post-modernist thought, I suspect it will be from the arts, and not from philosophy or the humanities. Really good pop music since the sixties is truly something that will always engage as much as it repels.
Relation and process are the most positive terms to make something out of postmodernist academia. But as a process of deconstruction and relation without relata to fix, this content remains blurred and formless, and accidental.
But really, post-modernism has no inherent content. Even existentialism had the human condition and history and a fading sense of pride as its focus, which is why Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky and Goethe and Camus and Satre are so much more compelling to read than Wittgenstein, Derrida, Foucault and anyone since, who tried to run with this spirit of meaningless meaning making. (They turn truth and metaphysics into nonsense, but for the sake of turning emotion and will into metaphysics and truth.)
But with all of that said, post-modernism is relativistic, particularly when it comes to morality and ethics (and by application, politics). Which is ironic, because even post-modernists resist being called a relativists, and as such, have come up with some of the most rigid, oppressive moral codes and dogmatic systems (DEI/political correctness, race/women/sexuality/gender dogma, climate change social virtue, anything conservative and capitalist and republican and religious is evil/facist, etc.). The post-modern is so relativist, they can be or value anything, including their own total self-contradiction, and with straight face be the right kind of absolute dogmatist when the mood suits them.
So yes, morally, the spirit of the post modern age is relativistic at base. We now can be experts at a million new specialties, and experiment constantly in our fields, and no one who isnt a new expert can tell us we are wrong (and the experts are at their best when they disagree with each other), as long as what we are doing is over-throwing something that existed yesterday. Disruption for disruption sake is the virtue. We can ask questions of our intentions and biases later, or just move on and ignore the smoldering mess that is always some old, white, rich oppressors fault anyway. We can hide in scientism, shrug off that which is not falsifiable, and silence those who just wont understand the post-modern. The adolescents have tied up their parents and taken over the high schools. You can literally see it on most college campuses for the past 50 years.
Next time Ill tell you what I really think! But seriously, its not all bad if you look at postmodernism the way postmodernists look at everything else. As self-reflection, it is a type of humility. The existentialists should have had the last word; the postmodernists just kept talking anyway.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
You are an interesting and honest poster. I think Ive told you I believe in God and practice Catholicism. I think your attitude towards the theist exemplifies my attitude toward the atheist; there is plenty of philosophy and science and practicality and wisdom to share in addition to or just without mentioning God or religion.
Religion and God are important to me, and it is the nature of religion that it is something that can make itself immediately present in any discussion. It can be all-pervasive. But just as immediately as it can be brought out, it can be kept separate and left for the believers and theologians to discuss in their free time.
To really answer your question, I see it like this.
If I talk about my children, I can discuss their biology, or reduce that to chemistry and physics, or go from biology to something more specifically human and universal like anthropology or human psychology/self-reflective consciousness But would any of that really ever account for what I could say if I as their father was telling you about my kids that I love? Does the interesting information about brain states really say the same thing as me telling a story showing why I love my kids? Can we learn more about love from me showing you, or from a neuro-scientist? I mean, even if in the end, love is just a feeling (which I actually think is reductive absurdity), isnt a story told in love always more interesting and more revealing than whatever the brain state/behavior facts/functionalist emergence story could possibly be?
So to me, talking about God like a philosopher talks is like talking about my own kids like a biologist talks. I can do it, but there is so much more interesting biology than my kids can demonstrate, and there is so much more interesting theology than the God of philosophy can demonstrate.
But all of that said, it is hard, at least for me, to find a common morality without God.
We need some sort of ideal or target to strive towards - some fixed notion of good or essential virtue - to really sink our teeth into morality. It may not have to be a God or a religion, but something necessarily good needs to be discovered to even begin constructing a morality. We both (or all) need to bite some apple to discover we know something of good and bad in themselves.
Maybe we make it up first (I doubt we will ever finish making it up ourselves), but if good and bad is not fixed between us, sitting there as if growing on a tree, morality never gets off the ground and/or it gets devoured by relativism.
Religious institution and the word of God himself make it easier for many to accept that there is a true good we either seek or fail to have. God grounds moral authority and gives a confidence in righteousness and punishment/correction.
But things like we hold these truths to be self-evident and act as if whatever you do it could be made into a universal law that all will do and treat no person as a means, which are all secular, could easily be from a religion (and basically are). The point being, these tenets arent true or good just because I am wonderful enough to understand them and agree with them - they are things we all can learn to one day take for granted, like adults who accept their duty willingly. And more importantly for this thread, in my humble experience, without something fixed and permanent like these, morality is a meaningless game.
When the moral goal post of can be moved, there may as well be no goal post.
Unfortunately, its no fun breaking the rules when there really arent any rules. So we keep reinventing the boogeyman and a corresponding brave overcoming.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
There are saints who had no idea where to really find God, or what or who God really is. Mother Teresa wrote privately about her long- lived feeling of utter loneliness and abandonment when she sought God.
With your obvious interest in the truth and what is good, you may be a saint as much as anyone, and if you dont watch out God may show up yet.
At least that is my hope for all of us!
Hey man, nope, I don't look at this as a hijacking. I appreciate your response!
Quoting Fire Ologist
Interesting. I haven't thought of it this way, but yes, I think that describes my experiences with the positives of postmodernism.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I like how you put this. I still value and respect postmodern art, remain ambivalent around postmodern philosophy, and despise how postmodern humanities have weaponized relativism. How does your metaphysical spell-check resonate with that?
Quoting Fire Ologist
I like how you put this too. I'm a lay philospher, and haven't read as widely as you, but I enjoy Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and Sartre, and find it hard to respect Derrida and Foucault.
That's likely a result of my years in education.
If there is a discipline in which postmodernity fails most abjectly, I'd argue it is education. I'm a fan of challenging orthodoxy, but when you have 25 teenagers, the very premise that knowledge is forever relative is toxic and alienating.
In other words, I feel like we are projecting our own uncertainty as relativistic adults onto children who are not equipped to deal with premises such as the death of the master narrative.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes, 100%. We live in an era of the utterly judgemental relativist. I've had a hard time parsing that, but I think you put it perfectly.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I may steal your phrasing here, I like it so much. Properly attributed!
Quoting Fire Ologist
Thank you, and I don't even think you need to refrain from mentioning God or religion. I just straight out don't get people that reject things like faith outright.
Quoting Fire Ologist
100%.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Even as an atheist I can completely agree. I feel that is where we atheists generally fail. I don't think atheism necessitates rejection of a 'true good'. It just makes it harder to work towards.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I love this. I've had a few people over the years make that case to me, and I've respected every one of them. It hasn't happened yet, but I'm not ruling anything out.
How postmodern of me?
:up: I like weaponized relativism.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
100%. History, and the best folks history could muster, are tools (if not wisdom), and we are robbing students today of so many great ideas and turns of phrase and experiences, in the name of trendy dalliances like patriarchy, and socially constructed body parts. Bring on the new ideas, for sure, but dont throw out Shakespeare and Aristotle because a few things they said might offend certain western suburban sensibilities.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
And gives them nothing to build with. I agree, it is important to challenge our deepest beliefs starting in high school for sure - the orthodoxy is always asking for trouble. But teenagers dont need to be over-taught that challenging authority is a goal; most of them will challenge authority by nature as teenagers. My sense is that, if we reify the challenging of authority, and throw out all of the authorities and institutions before they get their own chance to rebel against them, they dont ever really get past adolescence - we are building a world full of rebels with nothing worthy of their passion to struggle against and strive to out-pace.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Exactly. Better to give them a master and teach them to kill, but dont do the dirty work for them and just give them a dead master. And some of the masters are worthy of respect after all.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Yeah - you cant prove a negative after all. But I dont get the Christian who judges the atheist as really any different than they are. We all know and think different things based on different experiences. No one can know a whole persons whole life, or judge another persons soul. We are all just people doing the best we can, each deserving as much respect as we should each be giving.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
I agree. It seems harder to me. But in the end, the good is less about what you think and can teach, and more about what you do. And regardless of any religious beliefs, some people just do a lot of good. I would call them blessed with a great disposition, or a good conscience, but however it came to be, a stronger sense of what is good and wise just is in certain people.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Id say, how reasonable of you.
Cheers
HI Athena,
I think it may be time to start reconsidering your clearly either, dishonest, or delusional takes on the world:
When comparing the 1930s to the 2020s in terms of global fascism, the 1930s unequivocally show far more examples of established, state-controlled, globally impactful fascism.
Here's why:
1930s: The Zenith of Fascism's Global Power and Influence
Established Fascist States: This decade saw the rise and consolidation of major fascist regimes with immense global impact:
Italy (Mussolini): Already in power since the 1920s, Mussolini's Italy served as the ideological blueprint for many other fascist movements.
Germany (Hitler/Nazism): Hitler came to power in 1933, rapidly transforming Germany into a totalitarian Nazi state with an aggressive expansionist foreign policy. Nazism shared core fascist characteristics but added extreme racial ideology.
Japan (Militarism/Fascist-like tendencies): While not strictly "fascist" in the European sense, Imperial Japan exhibited many characteristics of fascism, including extreme nationalism, militarism, expansionism, and authoritarian rule.
Spain (Franco): Francisco Franco's Falange, heavily supported by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, won the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and established a long-lasting authoritarian regime with strong fascist elements.
Widespread Fascist Movements: Beyond these core states, significant fascist or fascist-leaning movements gained traction and posed serious threats to democracy in many other countries, including:
France: Croix de Feu, later the French Social Party, was a large and growing right-wing movement.
Britain: The British Union of Fascists (BUF) led by Oswald Mosley.
Eastern Europe: Various authoritarian and nationalist regimes with fascist sympathies emerged across countries like Hungary, Romania, and Poland.
Latin America: Fascist-inspired movements also appeared in countries like Brazil (Integralism).
Direct Threat to Global Peace: The fascist powers of the 1930s were actively engaged in military aggression and expansion, directly leading to World War II. This included Italy's invasion of Ethiopia (1935), Japan's aggression in China, and Germany's annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia.
While there are serious concerns about the rise of far-right, authoritarian, and nativist movements in the 2020s, it's crucial to differentiate them from the state-controlled fascism of the 1930s:
Conclusion:
The 1930s clearly demonstrate a greater presence of global fascism in terms of established, state-backed regimes with aggressive expansionist aims and widespread, powerful movements that directly contributed to a world war. The threat was existential and manifested in complete state overhauls in several major powers.
I have been over this. It's becoming really frustrating(not you personally - but note if anything seems terse, it's not on purpose):
You can massage any action to be pulling you toward virtue. Catholics condemning gays as a way of trying to directed them away from Hell would be virtuous to them. Allowing each individual to simply shoehorn 'virtue' in to their moral system is extremely dangerous. It may be why its so popular - it requires next to no critical thinking and practically no self-accountability. There are those who do it 'properly' as such. But the dangers are so much heavier than the potential benefits.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Which is a totally subjective, easily-hijacked concept. I'm am uncomfortable with it, as a moral motivator. "Don't hurt people if you can avoid it" for instance, seems both demonstrably better, and easier to follow. "Aspire" without content is empty anyway, so I guess my gripe is a little premature. Its not even a decently-actionable concept without the "toward virtue" aspect which I've gone over.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
I understand what you're saying, but there are no arguments which support anything else as, at least, a metaethical way of framing things (well, none i've seen - and the papers objecting to relativism appear some of the worst i've seen get published (Carlo Alvaro for instance). Intuitively, this is my exact position. Intellectually, it is clearly bankrupt (on my view).
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Ding ding (on my view). This is absolutely the correct objection to that type of relativism (which isn't relativism, it's just self-involvement; not a serious moral thought to be found in those types).
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Yeah pretty much. There's essentially four equal parts in professional philosophy.. roughly like 25% deontology (or some form of); 25% some form of consequentialism; 25% Virtue Ethics (its slightly higher for VE actually, i'm just simplifying) and the final slice for "alternate". So i"m not exactly in bad company.
I don't really have a 'system'. What I think its 'right' applies to me and only me. I can try to enforce this where i think it is relevant but I am under no illusions that I should be persuasive, or be listened to. I do not expect anyone else to embody my moral thinking which is case-by-case. I do not have 'principles' as I do not think morality is actionable under principles without so much leeway they become pointless 'starting points'. For which we can use intuition anyway.
I think if you want me to read what you say, you'd better say it in a way that makes me want to read it.
Hey man, sorry it takes me so long to reply. I re-read loads of this thread to try and get a better sense of things before replying to you here.
This is pretty long, sorry! Feel free to skip some if you need to, but whatever you do, take the length as a compliment!
Quoting AmadeusD
Heck no. I admit, I have some adapting to do to TPF. I find some of the discussions fascinating, even the super irritating ones, but I'm not used to keeping up with arguments in this much depth. I'm gonna try mixing up my posting habits, keep on top of things, because I don't want to waste anyone's time. These posts take work. Some people bring their A game to this site and I'd like to step up.
I think I may have neglected the word 'universal' in the OP.
I don't believe that any moral system could ever be universal. It feels to me as if your responses have been towards that premise.
My argument is not that my moral orientation is 'right'. My argument is that without an 'aspirational' element, moral systems become static and irrelevant, or at least, ineffective. I think this is best seen on a personal level - how many people can you think of immediately if I ask you to think of people who are overtly woke but personally appear ammoral, or perhaps, immoral?
They don't have to do anything virtuous at all, it seems, but espouse the groupthink. A default position for the morally lazy.
Quoting AmadeusD
I am not advocating this. This is not virtue ethics, to my mind? Of course, one could easily do just that rhetorically, but I'm talking genuine principles rather than rhetoric.
I have been working on an idea all year to help me explain the moral insanity of the universe that I currently see. I missed most of the past half decade battling the black dog, and generally avoided people. I feel like I missed a lot of the gradual, day to day changes. Obviously, this is anecdote from an unreliable narrator, but experiencing the new normal when it comes to moral discourse, in my super progressive neighbourhood / profession / city / country, was jarring.
Without a moral system that requires effort, one that remains in flux, we are stuck with the static relics of
a past that cannot keep up with our rapidly evolving world. Wokeness has calcified in place. How often do woke ideas surprise, or change, or evolve? To my mind, never. Wokeness is a clown car stuffed with an ever-growing collection of identities. It doesn't grow, it swallows. It encompasses.
Without the concept of a moral system that one should aspire to, that one can learn, practice and improve upon, people become worse at morality.
So my argument is not for virtue ethics. It is for belief in ethics, with the premise that virtue ethics might better be able to respond to our increasingly uncertain era. It might be more agile.
Aspiring towards goodness, I guess. Man, I put it like that, it sounds vague as hell, but it's an attitude first. You can convince me of alternative 'best practices' for sure.
Quoting AmadeusD
Who do you see doing this? People don't seem to even be aware of alternative moral concepts such as VE. The average person today is either a utilitarian (often, a moral relatavist outsourcing their morality to experts), or deontological (usually premised on religion). I think both of those, badly practiced, require no 'critical thinking and practially no self-accountability' as well.
Quoting AmadeusD
I'm just an interested layperson when it comes to philosophy, and I find this stuff fascinating, so my thinking is sort of evolving in this thread even, but I guess I am advocating for people to chose to improve their morality, via practice, whatever method makes sense to them, while also sort of figuring out that virtue ethics might be a path for me personally, having come to a point where I can find no meaning aside from choosing to make a choice.
So yeah, personal stance. (As always, hit me with any recommendations that come to mind)!
Quoting AmadeusD
I've been calling it a 'default' relativism, and agree with you that it's not serious moral thought, although I imagine those you describe would object.
Hence the need for new conversations about morality. On a personal level, in terms of personal beliefs and actions, I think any moral system is better than none at all, generally, but see this as a personal choice.
To me, the problems of deontology are most obvious in terms of informing social policy - whose deontology?
Utilitarianism seems deontological as well, in a sense, because this too promotes a 'correct' moral action, assuming you can calculate the moral math. So, again, difficult to trust given the current candidates doing this sort of math. This feels very progressive / liberal to me, the idea that we can turn things over to experts who 'measure' unmeasurable outcomes.
Virtue ethics seems the only path that allows for rapid change, at least, on the social side of things. So, we try and get leaders who are best equipped to make hard decisions, and empower them to make those decisions. This seems to necessitate more forgiveness for making mistakes, because the premise of the 'right' choice of action is secondary - the right person to make the right choice is primary, and that involves moral practice.
I'm trying to apply this to the culture wars in my own head, and please tell me if I'm missing anything, but if we had people capable of breaking from tribal orthodoxy in positions of cultural and political leadership on Oct. 7th, perhaps we don't get the moral shit show of protestors worldwide supporting terror.
Am I right that virtue ethics might therefore be more agile than utilitarianism or deontology, and perhaps valuable in a world of social media + smart phones + AI, which just doesn't seem to have the time for utilitarian think tanks and experts to work through the permutations?
In broad strokes, I think of utilitarianism as the lefty default, and with many lefties being moral relativists, they seem happy to outsource moral thought to experts - a trend DEI types were happy to exploit.
I think of the religious as deontological, again broadly, and see 'right and wrong' as more representative of the right.
But woke true believers seem to be fire-and-brimstone hardcore religious fundamentalist at times. Hard deontologists, somehow?
This is the unholy alliance on the left - true believers drive the beliefs of default moral relativists, happy to outsource moral thought (too much cognitive dissonance) to technocratic experts, true believers themselves.
Which is all fine with our neoliberal leadership, who fancy themselves too smart to fall for culture war claptrap, and face no pressures to improve on the genuinely central drivers of inequality, the neoliberal world order that has them on top.
It was exploring how deeply woke McKinsey is that I made that final connection, but I'm borrowing here as well from John McWhorter and a bunch of those Nonesite Marxists, Adolph Reed Jr., Cedric Johnson
and others.
Re-reading that list and thinking about other possible names to add, I can't help but note that it appears only black academics can critique wokeness from the left.
Quoting AmadeusD
If I ever teach high school philosophy again, I'm borrowing that breakdown, a handy way to think broadly.
What are some of the more interesting 'alternates' you have come across?
And I was curious about VE being higher than the other two, I assume this is just the nature of the profession? Everybody studies the Greeks?
I certainly don't see much evidence of virtue ethics in 'the wild'. I see tribal conformity and almost no disagreement, which is only likely in a virtue ethical model? At least today, given the risks of differing from your tribe? The permanence of your mistakes, now?
Quoting AmadeusD
Fair point. You are obviously thinking about your 'relativism'? and therefore doing 'morality' well by my thinking. It's the considering of the questions that is important. You clearly do that more than most people. Perhaps philosophy itself can serve the purpose of a belief system.
Morality is just practicing morality, maybe? Always trying to chose morally, even if that is inherently a personal act?
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes!
Oddly, my kids always liked Shakespeare. The ESL kids maybe the most, perhaps because they were already used to decoding strange words? It was something of a right of passage. It was fun. The performances were great. And yet, Shakespeare is increasingly rare.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Agreed again.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I might steal this too ...
Quoting Fire Ologist
I have a weekly phone conversation with my uncle, and when we talk social issues, he often challenges me to articulate a positive vision rather than just ranting about moral relativism and neo-liberalism. How about starting with aspiring to be more like the people who do a lot of good?
Quoting Fire Ologist
Going back to your previous post, this is where you, me and Saad all seem to align.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I remember asking my favourite prof of all time how to wrestle with relativism as a progressive. He replied that one should be 'whole-hearted and half-sure'.
To me, the goal post is out there. Just not sure of my vision yet.
I enjoy your posts man!
No trouble!! I sometimes go a couple of weeks without replying here. It takes some effort and time that I don't always have. No harm/no foul my man :)
Quoting Jeremy Murray
That's quite a hard thing to do, despite what Banno and 180 might say :P
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Definitely part of it - most theories are intended to become a universal (i.e realists are of the opinion moral facts can be understood, which is a form of raciocination, being a universal human trait (barring aberration)). It's unique (and something I run with) that theories for morality cannot be universal. Looking for such is a "waste of time" as it serves no moral purpose to do so, under any theory, really.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
I see what you mean. Thanks for that clarification. Yes, I think that is true, but I also think that is, roughly, baked-into moral theories. They require that you aspire toward their ideal description of any given decisions/act. No?
Quoting Jeremy Murray
One extremely good example (though, I understand potentially contention) is Islam. The teachings of Islam (and conversely the behaviour of conservative-radical Muslims who adhere) are virtuous, by their lights, in almost every way one would want virtue to manifest. But this is clearly not what Anscombe had in mind.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Huh. Hte most common refrain I hear from anywhere really is "I just try to be a good person". It's rare for someone to come with some 'principled' morality when asked, in my experience. Interesting take on the other two - they seem to be true deliberative systems. I can't see them as lacking a need for critical thought. Divine Command seems the best candidate there.
As a catch-all comment on the sections I missed between those last two replies, I would say I think we are fairly close on how we see 'woke'. But I also hasten to add that this seems to be a result of stupid people doing 'woke'. Those who are 'woke' who can have a reasonable conversation don't seem to fall into these traps. I think its a maturity issue, rather than a particularly pernicious ideological one. That said, there's an added non-moral position which is the whole "in or out" mentality which seems more to do with logistics and avoiding drawn-out analysis than a moral deflection.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
So, in reverse: Great. That's a good way of working through things Imo, and coming to self-directed conclusions. I do not think people are able to 'improve' their morality without understanding that morality is subjective. Otherwise, it couldn't be improved. It would 'be' and we simply aspire to a rubric. I am an emotivist ethically, and morally I do no follow 'named' systems as best I can tell. Most here have been surprised and even taken a-back by my position.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Kantian, usually. Deontology tries to take inarguable obligations and turn them into rules, as best I can tell. So the "who" relates to "everyone" in the system. I reject it, too.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
The thing Utilitarianism gives us, though, is room to be wrong or to disagree. Utilitarians can simply have different weight on different elements of a calculus. They may come up with totally different utils for the same actions/outcomes. This makes it more flexible imo, and more directed toward actual reality than principle. Deontologists would give up Anne Frank. Utilitarians would not.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
I agree, but in light of how 'virtue' works socially, I think its more a performance game in practice. Some of the problem wth 'woke' is found here.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
I would add a few: Glenn Loury, Susan Neiman, Elisabeth Roudinesco and Ben Cobley. So, not just Black writers. But I see what you mean, and I take your point quite well. The concept that you cannot speak on a topic you aren't directly, and personally embroiled in is both pernicious and clear false. It is the other way around.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
I think it's more that more and more philosophers have come to the realisation that while they may accept that there are moral facts, these are descriptive, not prescriptive. Therefore, the other theories to hand cannot be worked adequately under that weight. If the descriptive facts are what we need to go by, we can't be 'principled' because the facts have, do, and always will change.
Quoting Jeremy Murray
Really? Moral disagreement seems to be hte order of the day, locally, globally, politically, socially.... Can you expand on what you mean here?
Quoting Jeremy Murray
I think this is all the term 'morality' can capture.