ELEPHANT TO STRUAN AN ALL
STRUAN WROTE:
> Elephant, you make a very peculiar leap from a definition of morality being
> concerned with actions towards the other, to the erroneous claim that this
> necessitates a morality with 'no connection with the lives that real people
> lead'.
ELEPHANT:
Certainly this would be a peculiar and erroneous bit of reasoning if I had
made it. But happily I didn't. I went some way beyond *concerned with
actions towards the other* in my characterisation of what constitutes an
unreal and unconnected 'morality'.
(as is evident even from the passage Struan quoted: "There is a certain
logic to keeping the word 'morality' always and only for actions and
reasoning directed first at the other, and then only second at the truth, or
Good, or Quality, or God or whatever. That's just fine: you can define your
terms how you like. But it seems to me that if you define 'morality' like
that, then morality becomes a perfect set of absolutes existing in someother
realm, and having no connection with the lives that real people actually
lead, and the desires and fulfillments that they actually pusue. It is a
joy for a Platonist, like myself, to be able to lay this pragmatist charge
justly against someone else, and it is a strong point which Struan should
answer. Because we do use the word 'moral' and the concept 'morally good'
to describe ordinary people and actions: it is not reserved for the canon of
saints. Ordinary moral goodness is a kind of selfless devotion to some
truth, but in human beings this devotion mostly takes the form of some
struggle with confused and mistaken self-images. It may be thought that
there are those who have no difficulty in this area, and are able to have
some clear and distinct image of themeselves and others and the
(contractual?) obligations between them. I doubt this. Such a situation
sounds to me like the certainty of the unexamined life. Mere habit,
convention: not morality.")
Struan thinks my "directedness" is a synonym for his 'concerned with'. It
is not. My posting concerned the ontology of the moral situation, not
merely the referential spread of moral language. I want to know what is
ultimate and wher 'ultimate' resides, and have taken the fact that we ought,
ultimately, to be primarily concerned with others in our daily lives as
read. That seems plain, to me, in my own reading of what I wrote.
What I actually said was that a 'morality' which lacks some fundamental
directness towards ultimate a truth and a good that we can all intuit, and
is instead directed at meeting the particular desires of subjects *without*
primary reference to any such higher universal, is one that can have 'no
connection with the lives that real people lead'.
I intended that remark to hold true in two different ways. Firstly it (the
lacking kind of 'morality') has no connection because it is not like the
moral lives we actually lead and the moral questions we actually ask
ourselves: we want to know what is *right*, not what will fullfill some
contract. Secondly it makes no direct appeal to our own pursuit of the
Good. Instead it makes a detour, through fear of punishment, or the demands
of soceity, or the dictates of reason, or love of the rule, or some such.
To be 'mediated' by love itself would not be a detour: but then that is
precisely the point. The detour comes when we start by specifying the
objects that can be loved, rather than by tackling the question 'what is
love?', and letting the answer to that determine the lovable, ie valueable,
objects.
What comes *first*? -What is *higher*? -What is *good*? these are the kind
of 'directedness' questions which I have been asking and suggesting answers
to. One answer I have repeatedly suggested is that the good is the
transcendent reality:
"Plato makes the assumption that value is everywhere, that the whole of life
is movement on the moral scale, all knowledge is a moral quest, and the mind
seeks reality and desires the good, which is a transcendent source of
spiritual power, to which we are related through the idea of truth. Good
is what every soul pursues and for which it ventures everything, intuiting
what is, yet baffled and unable to fully apprehend its nature.¹ (Republic
505e.) [Iris Murdoch: Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals p56]"
Of course morality must be 'concerned with' the other. It has to be
'concerned with' the other in just the same way that it has to be 'concerned
with' truth or the Good or enlightenment or Dynamic Quality or whatever you
want to call it. I wasn't arguing about what morality has to be 'concerned
with', in the sense of what it must take into account and *refer* to. I was
talking about what comes first as the ontological ground of morality. And
my answer, like Murdoch's, like Plato's, like Prisig's, and like the
Buddhists, is that Truth or The Good comes first, and that the claims of
persons (intellects) are derivative from that. No fair reading of my long
argument would conclude that I was discounting the claims of the person: I
was merely trying to put the claims of the person into some kind of
ontological context. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals? Well in such a
guide to morals the metaphysics comes first. Metaphysical reality is what
any metaphysical morality should be directed at, in the sense of 'paying
attention to first'.
STRUAN WROTE:
> If one is motivated by a love of mankind to 'love thy neighbour as
> thyself', for example, and then one sets about acting towards others with
> love as the motivation for every action, then in what sense is one not
> pursuing 'desires and fulfilments' and in what sense is one not an
> 'ordinary' person engaging in 'ordinary' actions?
ELEPHANT:
In no sense whatsoever, but this is entirely besides the point. Again, I
haven't been arguing against any particular concernedness: be concerned with
rules, with persons, with mankind etc: by all means be concerned with
whatever borrows some portion of ultimate value. But be directed at that
ultimate - this will be what informs your concern. Without that
directedness the concern lacks an anchor, the account and justification that
could make it knowledge rather than opinion, morality rather than habit.
Remember I am a Platonist with a capital 'P', and think that Justice is all
one with Wisdom, properly understood.
STRUAN WROTE:
> Indeed, Situation Ethics,
> which postulates precisely that love should be the motive for all action, is
> a very good example in that its creator, Joseph Fletcher, placed pragmatism
> as one of the four fundamental principles of his 'agapeistic calculus'. The
> loving thing to do is, by definition, in part, the thing that works.
ELEPHANT:
Absolutely - I couldn't agree more. But we do or should love things
because they are lovable, not call them lovable because we (at this point)
happen to love them (people do turn nasty sometimes). The loving thing to
do must work, but it does not follow that whatever works ennacts love (nb
gas chambers). Selecting moral means requires selecting moral ends. A
morality is a picture of the kingdom of ends, and in fact mine is a
higherachical picture of that kingdom, with persons near the top, but the
true and the good are somewhat higher.
STRUAN WROTE:
> Of course, if you want to point to love in this example as being, 'de
> facto', the 'whatever' at the end of your first sentence in the quotation
> above, it may well be, in your words, 'that this has become an argument over
> words merely,' but, if that is the case, how can you possibly see the
> 'pragmatist charge' as a 'strong point which Struan should answer'? A rose
> by any other name would still as sweetly smell, would it not?
ELEPHANT:
Point taken. I do not yet understand your own veiw well enough to see how
and where it might fit with the novel kind of platonic pragmatism I hold to.
This is not for want of my asking questions or attempting to stimulate some
kind of expanded account of your veiw. Please then, if you wish, take my
'strong point' merely as a provocation to a self-defence. I have offered
many accouts of your thinking that you have not offered yourself, and this
is partly because you offer so few, and partly because my speculative nature
can not resist such flights of fancy. Well, bring me back to earth. Even
academic philosophers have a veiw, when pushed: how else could they be so
convinved of everyone else's ignorance? Why don't you tell us what it is?
STRUAN WROTE:
> As an aside, I have often pointed to the complete failure of the ethical
> examples in Lila to provide any sort of consistent advice upon how to live
> one's life.
ELEPHANT:
You think that is an aside, but I think it goes right to the heart of the
matter. "Consistent advice on how to live one's life": what might that be -
a collection of rules perhaps? Well MOQ, IMHO, says that we should all
think carefully about the rules we live our lives by, but that since the
objective of these rules is to serve higher goods (dynamic quality and
enlightenment towards that quality) different rules will serve better in
different situations and for different individuals. We should not deify the
rules, and not deifying rules we might not look "consistent". All I can say
is that some kinds of 'consistency' constitute the consitency of the
graveyard. (this is something like Schopenhauer's point against Kant's rule
on lying - you have to lie to the murderer or you become his accomplice).
Good Actions don't have to be consistent with each other, they have to be
consistent with the good (they have to be *directed* at the good).
Perhaps you and I will now have a long argument a'la williams v. smart....
and I will then have to explain where MOQ advances on and differs from
utilitarianism. Another time.
all the best,
ELEPHANT
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