(I refer readers to the second season of Star Trek.) So now two more documents marked "classified" have turned up in a storage locker owned by Donald Trump.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
My Stuff
https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0
Coming Soon:
The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."
Total Pageviews
Search This Blog
Philosopher's Stone
Blog Archive
-
▼
2022
(209)
-
▼
December
(20)
- WHILE I WAIT FOR TUESDAY
- FUN TIMES
- HERE I STAND - A REPLY TO MARC SUSSELMAN
- OLD THOUGHTS FROM AN OLD MAN
- UPDATE
- AS PAUL NEWMAN SAYS TO ROBERT REFORD IN THE STING,...
- WHAT IS NEXT?
- BUT I REPEAT MYSELF
- ANOTHER UNPUBLISHED PAPER FROM MY FLES
- WHAT REALLY COUNTS
- THE TROUBLE WITH TRIBBLES
- THE SACRIFICES WE MAKE FOR OUR DEEPEST CONVICTIONS
- A NERDY QUESTION
- A GOOD DAY
- A MESSAGE FROM MY OLD STUDENT DR. ANDREW BLAIS
- LEGAL SPECULATION BY A NON LAWYER
- AN IDLE QUESTION
- MR. TOAD RIDES AGAIN
- JUST SITTING AND WATCHING
- HOMAGE TO MY BIG SISTER
-
▼
December
(20)
About Me
- Robert Paul Wolff
- As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.
52 comments:
Tribble trivia:
Because of their role in the Star Trek series, geneticists adopted the name to apply to a protein, Tribbles 1, which regulates cell division.
Tell me the scientific nomenclature of tribbles; species, genus and so forth
Anonymous,
Tribble-1 is a member of the Tribbles subfamily, part of the CAMK Ser/Thr protein kinase family
Nice, but also tribbles on Star Trek or Vulcans for that matter
Anonymous,
Sorry, I thought you were referring to the protein named after the Tribbles.
I don’t think geneticists have figured out the genus and species of the Tribbles on Star Trek.
Good thing we have a trained attorney here to Google things for us!
Dr. Wolff,
Concerning acts of duty...
If all acts of duty are selfish, wouldn't that mean there are no acts of duty which are unselfish? And if there are no acts of duty which are unselfish, then how could there be a standard to hold that any act of duty is selfish? Wouldn't all selfishness of all acts of duty be cancelled out as selfish since no act of duty is unselfish? So the standard of selfishness & unselfishness, concerning acts of duty, must be thrown out & only a new grading system must come into play concerning duty's virtues & the old one must be thrown or tossed out. A person cannot be old unless they were young, and human beings cannot be considered young unless other human beings are older or were older than themselves in the past or present. If there is only one opposite, but never its contrary, how could that former opposite ever exist if its contrary doesn't or never existed before?
Michael,
It sounds like you ae tying yourself up in knots over this.
If all acts of duty are selfish, then, yes, it follows that no acts of duty are unselfish. All acts of duty are selfish by their nature, and one does not have to have a grading system in order to determine that an act performed out of duty is selfish. Also, all acts which are not performed pursuant to duty- of which there are two kinds - are also selfish. There is an act which is not performed pursuant to duty because there is no duty involved, e.g., I go to the store to buy a loaf of bread for myself – there is not duty to buy the loaf of bread. There are also acts which are contrary to one’s duty – like refusing to go to the store to buy a loaf of bread for your ailing parent or spouse because you prefer to use your time to do something else. The upshot is that all human acts, whether pursuant to a duty, or not pursuant to a duty, are selfish. There do not need to be unselfish acts to determine which acts are selfish – they all are, and there are no unselfish acts. But being a selfish act does not entail that it is a “bad” act – selfish acts performed pursuant to a duty are “good” selfish acts; selfish acts performed in the absence of a duty are neither “good” nor “bad” acts; selfish acts performed contrary to one’s duty are “bad” selfish acts. In sum, being selfish is not per se bad – it depends on what the act is and why you are doing it.
To Anonymous,
And I didn’t have to use Google to figure out the answer to Michael’s question.
Post-script:
We often say of another’s acts, that s/he acted selflessly. If there are only selfish acts, some of which are committed out of a sense of duty, and no unselfish acts, then how can we say of another that s/he acted selflessly? In order for this to be the case (and, by the way, I have not stated that it is the case – I only accepted Michael’s predicate that all acts of duty are selfish acts for purposes of the analysis), “selfless” and “unselfish” cannot mean the same thing. In order for there not to be a contradiction, one can commit a selfless act – that is an act aimed exclusively at the needs of another, and not on one’s own needs – and still be committing a selfish act, in the sense that although the focus is on the needs of another, one still derives some selfish gratification by virtue of performing the act.
MS
"But being a selfish act does not entail that it is a “bad” act – selfish acts performed pursuant to a duty are “good” selfish acts."
I guess what I'm trying to imply can be better seen in this analogy. If all men are strong, & no man is weak, you cannot say any man partakes of weakness. So men cannot be stronger or weaker than other men either, since that would imply that not all men are strong & some are weak. But my hypothetical axiom is that all men are strong & not weak. And if you say one man is stronger, then another man must be weaker. But if all men are strong, no man would be weak in comparison to other men. If that's the case, then likewise all acts of duty cannot partake of any unselfishness. So the property of selfishness dissolves in all acts of duty for further comparison since there is no unselfish act of duty to compare it to. So if someone says there are good selfish acts of duty & bad selfish acts of duty, they are basically comparing good acts of duty with bad acts of duty, and not the selfish part. However, when bad has a property that overlaps selfishness, like the property of negativity, then what you are saying is that, yes, all acts of duty are selfish, but some are more or less selfish than others because the bad and the selfish share in the property of negativity and so they share in the same property and are compared in the same way.
Now I believe Dr. Wolff is a philosophical genius, but I like to think I can find some contradiction in all his work, so I can think I understand a little about what he is talking about.
Michael.
Using your example of strength and weakness, it is conceivable that all men are strong, but not to the same degree, There are very strong men, and varying degrees of less strong men, which would entail there are strong men and weaker men. But this would not entail that there must be some weak men. To qualify as strong in this context, a man must be able lift a 125 lb. barbell over his head. That is a prerequisite. Some men can lift heavier weights, but in this society everyone can lift at least 125 lbs., and therefore everyone qualifies as strong, with some being stronger than others, who, in turn are weaker than others, But there are no weak men. Weak men do not exist, which would require the absence of strength to lift at least 125 lbs.
The same is true of selfishness. Everyone is selfish to some degree, with some being less selfish than others. But being less selfish does not equate to being unselfish. There are no unselfish people, just as in your example there are no weak people. There are degrees of selfishness, with no person exhibiting the total absence of selfishness, that is, no person exhibiting unselfishness, which is different from being selfless, as I explained above.
MS
"Using your example of strength and weakness, it is conceivable that all men are strong, but not to the same degree, There are very strong men, and varying degrees of less strong men, which would entail there are strong men and weaker men. But this would not entail that there must be some weak men."
My response to this is that with all opposites one cannot exist without the other. If there are strong men there must also be weak men & not just weaker men. One opposite generates into the other opposite coming full circle.
Plato's Wisdom & The Phaedo will answer for me:
"If generation were in a straight line only, and there were no compensation or circle in nature, no turn or return into one another, then you know that all things would at last have the same form and pass into the same state, and there would be no more generation of them.
What do you mean? he said.
A simple thing enough, which I will illustrate by the case of sleep, he replied. You know that if there were no compensation of sleeping and waking, the story of the sleeping Endymion would in the end have no meaning, because all other things would be asleep, too, and he would not be thought of. Or if there were composition only, and no division of substances, then the chaos of Anaxagoras would come again. And in like manner, my dear Cebes, if all things which partook of life were to die, and after they were dead remained in the form of death, and did not come to life again, all would at last die, and nothing would be alive-how could this be otherwise? For if the living spring from any others who are not the dead, and they die, must not all things at last be swallowed up in death?
There is no escape from that, Socrates, said Cebes; and I think that what you say is entirely true."
The weak can only come from the strong, & the strong from the weak. These properties are dynamic in life. If acts of duty are selfish, then other acts of duty are unselfish.
How would we know the light if we didn't know darkness? How would we know an act selfish if we didn't know of one unselfish? We know the unknown exists because the unknown is known to be unknown.
Michael,
You are using examples that are totally inapposite. Of course the state of being asleep is different from the state of being awake, and they cannot occur simultaneously in the same person, even if the person is a sleep walker.
“The weak can only come from the strong.” False. Your claim is circular, because you are presuming that there are “weak” people who constitute “the weak.”. Empirically, there may be weak people who totally lack strength, e.g, a person suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. But you are making a semantical argument to the effect that the meaning of the word “strong” necessitates that there must be weak people. This does not follow. There can be strong, stronger, and strongest people, with the strong being weaker than the stronger, and the stronger being weaker than the strongest, but it does not necessarily follow that therefore there must be people who are “the weak,” i.e., totally lacking in strength, in order for there to be strong people. The least strong people are still strong, not weak.
As a Plato lover, I believe there are Platonic Forms in Heaven. Where they are (e.g. in God's infinite mind), I have no clue, but I believe they exist. So I believe the Forms of weak & strong exist too. And that if something is weaker or stronger it is because it is patterned (& partakes) after the weak & the strong. Also, when you say there are no weak men or only strong men, that is an absolute statement. I believe the universe is run by probability; meaning, there is always an exception to every cause. E.g. Spock is a Vulcan, so he never smiles on television. Baloney! He smiled in both The Cage & Where no Man has Gone Before TOS episodes.
Correction: NOT exception to every cause BUT exception to every rule.
Michael,
May Zeus, or his Form, strike me dead, but Plato was wrong.
Michael,
What is the basis of your belief? WHY do you believe there are Platonic Forms in Heaven. And why do you believe there is a Heaven?
David
I believe there are perfect Forms in Heaven. Either they are images in God's infinite mind or they exist somewhere in the highest Heaven.
I believe in ghosts. Because I believe in ghosts I believe in demons. Because I believe in demons I believe in angels. Because I believe in angels I believe in God. Because I believe in God I believe in Heaven.
David
I believe the Torah says we were made in the image of God. Perhaps God made the rest of the things on Earth after other perfect images in Heaven.
"I believe the Torah says we were made in the image of God."
By we I mean Adam.
Michael Llenos @4:54 a.m.
You say you believe in the Platonic Forms, so you believe that the forms of weak and strong exist. But Plato, as far as I'm aware, did not talk about Forms of weak and strong, did he?
That he talks about the Form of the Good, or the Form of Beauty, does not mean he believed there is a Form of everything (or every attribute of something). Even if he thought a table was some kind of diminished or imperfect version of the Form of a Table, that doesn't mean he believed in Forms of "weak" and "strong," or Forms of weakness and strength, e.g.
LFC
"that doesn't mean he believed in Forms of "weak" and "strong," or Forms of weakness and strength, e.g."
That doesn't mean he didn't believe in them either. In my first philosophy class, my professor asked me: Do you believe there is a perfect form of Michael somewhere in Heaven? After that class many years ago I assumed philosophers gave Plato slack as to what he meant by the Forms.
Michael,
You've added to your list, but you haven't explained WHY you believe these things. You do mention the Torah, but that just raises the question of why do you believe the Torah?
I believe the Torah was written as the Book of Moses by Moses & I believe Solomon edited & codified the Torah during Solomon's reign. But why do I believe these things? It's a long & complicated story. But to summarize, Jesus is for me the cornerstone in which I believe the rest of the Bible is true. Like Einstein said sort of: The Nazarene's character pulsates in every word.
I assumed philosophers gave Plato slack as to what he meant by the Forms
Given that the scholarship on Plato would fill up a library, I'd assume sort of the opposite. But right now I'm too lazy even to look at the Stanford Ency of Philosophy entry on Plato.
Btw, in a used bookstore last evening I bought a book I'm willing to bet no one reading this comment has ever heard of:
Douglas N. Morgan, Love: Plato, the Bible, and Freud (Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964). Don't know if I'll ever read it, but if I do I'll prob skip the section on the Bible -- not meaning to give any offense, I'm just less interested in that than in the other two sections. Come to think of it, I might only read the first part and skip the other two, if I read it at all, that is.
David , why do YOU believe in a purely materialist concept of reality?
Anonymous
I never said that I did.
Michael,
You continue to tell me WHAT you believe, but not WHY you believe it.
LFC
It looks like you suffer from the same disease I have--I buy books that I want to read, not necessarily books that I'm ever going to get to read.
David,
Yes, to some extent.
David, who made you the grand inquisitor of this place?
Anonymous,
Nobody. I just asked a simple question of Michael who doesn't seem to mind. Why does it trouble you? I do think that asking a question is a legitimate part of a discussion. In fact, I've found that I learn more from asking questions than for proclaiming something, although I must admit that I find proclaiming more satisfying.
the professor gets a shout out: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/beyond-liberalism-on-raymond-geusss-not-thinking-like-a-liberal/
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore achieve for the first time anywhere nuclear fusion in a lab that yielded more energy than was input to produce the reaction.
It's not the top story on the NYT webpage.
Buried paragraphs deep in the report is this:
The main purpose of the National Ignition Facility is to conduct experiments to help the United States maintain its nuclear weapons....
The results announced Tuesday will benefit the scientists working on the nuclear stockpile, the NIF’s primary purpose. By performing these nuclear reactions in a lab at a less destructive scale, scientists aim to replace the data they used to gather from underground nuclear bomb detonations, which the United States stopped in 1992.
The greater fusion output from the facility will produce more data “that allows us to maintain the confidence in our nuclear deterrent without the need for further underground testing,” Dr. Herrmann said.
I think the energy output vis-a-vis energy input did not include the enormous amount of energy needed to fire up the lasers in its energy budget.
On a somewhat related point, it's interesting (at least to me) that the reports on the military bill now flying through Congress spend a lot of words on the social aspects of the bill--improving the housing, child care, etc.--and almost no words on how much is going to military weapons and the military-industrial complex.
I got it. You're doing something good for someone. Like taking care of someone. Say you're doing it for many months. Say in the beginning you're doing it for duty's sake: so you are thinking of reasons why you have to do it & not not do it: some of them being feelings of love & empathy. Well you do it everyday so many times that after many months it becomes routine. Sometimes in fact it becomes so routine that like a robot you do certain acts of kindness without thinking about them. Shouldn't the acts of kindness you did for that person at certain intervals, without thinking about them before-during-& afterwards, be considered unselfish acts of duty according to Kant? And remember they're acts of kindness because you did those acts, not because you considered them acts of kindness while doing them.
If they're not what Kant meant, then at least those unthinking acts of kindness are greater than what the great Mencius says about the child who is about to fall into a well:
"When I say that all men have a mind which cannot bear to see the sufferings of others, my meaning may be illustrated thus: even now-a-days, if men suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, they will without exception experience a feeling of alarm and distress. They will feel so, not as a ground on which they may gain the favour of the child's parents, nor as a ground on which they may seek the praise of their neighbours and friends, nor from a dislike to the reputation of having been unmoved by such a thing. From this case we may perceive that the feeling of commiseration is essential to man, that the feeling of shame and dislike is essential to man, that the feeling of modesty and complaisance is essential to man, and that the feeling of approving and disapproving is essential to man. The feeling of commiseration is the principle of benevolence. The feeling of shame and dislike is the principle of righteousness. The feeling of modesty and complaisance is the principle of propriety. The feeling of approving and disapproving is the principle of knowledge. Men have these four principles just as they have their four limbs."
My gosh this is the fourth time I posted without changing the anonymous icon to my Google one!
Well, my break from commenting didn't last long. (It'll resume as soon as this conversation seems concluded.)
I just want to try to clear up some things for Michael Llenos, who seems to be responding to this passage I quoted from Kant's Groundwork:
In fact, it is absolutely impossible to make out by experience with complete certainty a single case in which the maxim of an action, however right in itself, rested simply on moral grounds and on the conception of duty. Sometimes it happens that with the sharpest self-examination we can find nothing beside the moral principle of duty which could have been powerful enough to move us to this or that action and to so great a sacrifice; yet we cannot from this infer with certainty that it was not really some secret impulse of self-love, under the false appearance of duty, that was the actual determining cause of the will.
I think one of us may be misunderstanding this passage, or perhaps both... :)
I don't see Kant making the claim that "all acts of duty are selfish." Here I only see him making a claim about what motivates us to act - or rather, what we are entitled to believe about our motivations, in light of all the evidence available for us to draw from experience (and in light of no other considerations).
The question he's concerned with here is: Are our actions ever really motivated by respect for the moral law, or considerations of duty? Certainly they can appear to be (as when we make a "great sacrifice" for another person). But is this only appearance? Wouldn't the evidence of experience require us to believe that our actions are always caused by "self-love" or by "some secret impulse of self-love" (despite any appearances to the contrary)?
In this passage, Kant definitely seems to think so! He says "it is absolutely impossible to make out by experience with complete certainty a single case" in which we act "simply on moral grounds and on the conception of duty."
To see this a little more clearly, consider two cases: (1) Marc keeps a promise to his wife because the moral law requires it. (2) Marc keeps a promise to his wife because he somehow perceives it as advantageous to himself. - In both cases, promise-keeping is the action prescribed by the moral law; so, in both cases, Marc acts in a way that doesn't outwardly violate the moral law. However, it is only in Case (1) that Marc himself has a good will, which means it is only in Case (1) that his action has moral worth. (Unless I'm misinterpreting Kant, which is always possible.)
Naturally Marc will want to object that he does have moral considerations in mind in this sort of scenario, at least some of the time. Perhaps he vividly imagines several available courses of action, approving only the ones in which he's faithful to his wife. Perhaps he explicitly rehearses some lines of moral reasoning; perhaps this culminates in his uttering the very words, "The moral law requires that I be faithful to my wife."
Now, as I see it, Kant's challenge to Marc would essentially be: How can you be completely sure that the description of Case (2) is not the correct description of your action? - You can't! - Kant's claim is that experience alone (the evidence of the senses) cannot possibly entitle Marc or anyone else to this certainty. From the standpoint of experiential evidence, it is always possible that our actions are ultimately driven by self-interest.
(I won't attempt to explain why Kant believes this; that probably requires a pretty solid grip on his larger theoretical edifice, which I don't claim to have. I will say I gather that Kant believes in "radical evil" - that "every man has his price," and would succumb to evil under some conceivable circumstances - but this goes beyond the passage I've quoted.)
Query: Can’t Marc keep some promises for reasons both (1) and (2), in which one or the other reason is given greater weight in Marc’s thinking, but they both play a role, either consciously or subconsciously. I do believe that I have kept some promises for reason (1), because I knew that keeping the promise was not to my financial or material advantage. But if notwithstanding this I felt a certain satisfaction in keeping the promise for the sake of keeping the promise, does this push into the realm of reason (2)? And let me also make clear, I have always been faithful to my wife in deed, although, like President Carter, I have occasionally lusted in my heart (and I do not believe my wife would be upset with this revelation - she thinks that men are pretty stupid by nature).
Just a side-note on the issue of parenting. The parents of Sam Bankman-Fried, who was indicted yesterday for fraud related to the collapse of FTX, are both law professors at Stanford Law School. Putting aside for the moment the presumption of innocence, does this prove, or disprove, the adage that the fruit does not fall far from the tree?
Michael
'I don't see Kant making the claim that "all acts of duty are selfish."'
I think it was Dr. Wolff who made that claim in his book: The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals.
I made the claim 'above' (under the name Anonymous) that if good acts get so routine that you don't think about them that they can fit Kant's original definition.
I bought Dr. Wolff's ebook several days ago from Amazon for 9.99. It's so articulate that I don't know what the heck I'm reading!
Apologies, Marc, if the hypothetical was a bit tasteless, haha. s. wallerstein posed it near the beginning of the other thread, and I figured I'd roll with it. There's something amusing IMO about the thought of a guy assuring his wife, "Of course I've been faithful to you - I have every reason to! It not only happens to satisfy the standards of prudential rationality, but more importantly, its objective bindingness follows with necessity from the basic, self-evident principles of morality - unless you're going to tell me that I've wrongly intuited those principles. (Which I know I haven't...)"
As to being faithful to our spouses for both moral and prudential/self-serving reasons: I don't think Kant wants to deny that it's possible for moral considerations to factor into our motivation, nor that they could coexist with prudential considerations. I think he's just denying that we can ever claim, with empirically justified certainty, to know that we've been moved by the thought of duty.
The way this sort of position looks to me, once we admit that our self-examination has any degree of uncertainty, obscurity, and room for error - once we allow for any degree of self-opacity - we forfeit the right to deny that our "nobler" actions might have been driven by something base and self-centered which simply escaped our notice, or was undiscoverable for whatever reason. And not only is there evidence for self-opacity from common experience (as when anyone apparently fails to recognize their own motives); I think Kant also denies in principle that we can know what we essentially are - the basic tenets of "rational psychology" (the existence of the soul as an immaterial substance, etc.) are necessarily groundless, or unintelligible (?), for him, as argued in the "Paralogisms" section of the first Critique.
How Kant could get beyond this to maintain that we even have the faculty of pure practical reason (and can apparently theorize about this at length), is very unclear to me. Something to do with faith, something to do with the Ideas of Reason, maybe...? (Just some very shaky, sketchy, semi-educated guesses. I don't want to lead anyone astray, so, take this all with a large helping of salt.)
Hm. In Paragraph 3, I might've done better to leave out the word "base." It might be that "self-centered" (which still has a harsh ring to it) is quite compatible with the socially healthy regard for others, or with neutral/praiseworthy aspirations to self-improvement... Hopefully the drift is clear enough.
Michael Llenos, do you have any quotes from Prof. Wolff's text to give me a better idea of what you have in mind?
Gotta run for now.
I think Kant believed an action is moral if it is based on doing your duty.
Dr. Wolff previously wrote on this blog:
"In view of the intensely personal character of Geuss’s book, perhaps my best response should be equally personal. When I wrote In Defense of Anarchism in the summer of 1965, I was still deeply committed to finding a justification for Kant’s claim that there is a fundamental principle of morality that can be established universally and a priori by rational argument. In the course of writing my commentary on the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, I came to the conclusion that Kant had failed to sustain his claim. It seemed to me quite natural to conclude that if Kant could not find an argument for that claim then there was none to be found."
So basically all of this time I have falsely believed (or falsely remembered) his book The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals had this conclusion in it. That's what I get for not doing my homework.
I believe "the fundamental principle of morality that can be established universally and a priori by rational argument" is one that is not thought.
In the movie The Never Ending Story a mysterious NOTHING is destroying the world of Fantasia because people's routine robot-like actions are ruining people's imaginations & those imaginations are the only things that keep the electromagnetism of Fantasia together.
So it is my belief that quasi-counter to that fictional example, doing something so routinely that you don't think about it (during or beforehand) is the closest qualified "fundamental principle of morality that can be established universally and a priori by rational argument."
'So it is my belief that... doing something so routinely that you don't think about it (during or beforehand) is the closest qualified "fundamental principle of morality that can be established universally and a priori by rational argument."'
Of course, that is if you believe that Will (or bodily instinct) is: the closest qualified "fundamental principle of morality that can be established universally and a priori by rational argument."'
So what term do I use to describe this? You have good acts that help someone as 'routine.' Then when routine passes into 'unthinking-routine', that's the fundamental principle of morality. I think.
Or added together: good acts for someone else (as only an end) that are non-thinking-routine.
I'm not sure, but it reminds me of Aristotle, or virtue ethics. Your "unthinking routine" would seem close in meaning to "habit" or "character."
Here's a sample from Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, 10.9):
Now some think that we are made good by nature, others by habituation, others by teaching. Nature's part evidently does not depend on us, but as a result of some divine causes is present in those who are truly fortunate; while argument and teaching, we may suspect, are not powerful with all men, but the soul of the student must first have been cultivated by means of habits for noble joy and noble hatred, like earth which is to nourish the seed... The character, then, must somehow be there already with a kinship to virtue, loving what is noble and hating what is base.
But it is difficult to get from youth up a right training for virtue if one has not been brought up under right laws; for to live temperately and hardily is not pleasant to most people, especially when they are young. For this reason their nurture and occupations should be fixed by law; for they will not be painful when they have become customary.
Michael
"Now some think that we are made good by nature, others by habituation, others by teaching."
I guess one could interpret Aristotle's philosophy with a post modern twist like so:
'Now some think that we are made good by nature (a priori), others by habituation (good acts for someone as non-thinking-routine), others by teaching (a posteriori).'
Michael
"When I wrote In Defense of Anarchism in the summer of 1965, I was still deeply committed to finding a justification for Kant’s claim that there is a fundamental principle of morality that can be established universally and a priori by rational argument."
Of course, my interpretation of Aristotle proves RPW's position that Kant's claim is hard to justify, since I have proved nothing in saying unthought-routine is habit and not nature or a priori.
Post a Comment