From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Jun 17 2003 - 01:36:24 BST
>JOHNNY
> > Me too, but I want to point out that there is an internal contradiction
> > there. If the intellectual level love is all about individualization,
>or
> > personal, each person seeing themselves as the person to please, their
>own
> > eudaimonia the highest goal, how does that relate to loving someone
>else?
>
>RICK
>You've confused Eudaimonia with mere "self-interest". Go read Sam's essay
>again.
OK. OK, I'm back. I was going more by that post of the 'levels of love',
where love is described as evolving away from social love (role-based love)
to a 'personal love' based on eudaimonia. I then looked up Eudiamonia and
found: "a theory that the highest ethical goal is happiness and personal
well-being." That does look to me like self-interest, still.
I'm happy that the Greeks and Sam describe it more as 'the good life',
'living well', and 'human flourishing,' as that seems to refer to society as
a whole and living a moral, virtuous life for human fourishing's sake. But
'personal' - that doesn't seem to refer to society as a whole at all. So
the confusion I had distinguishing eudiamonia and 'self-interest' isn't hard
to understand, it seems the m-w.com dictionary has it too. I'm not sure how
Sam would prevent this confusion without having m-w.com drop the whole
'personal' thing and put it back to Aristotle's /activity according to
excellence', which is where we were before with morality (just not, uh,
*intellectually* enunciated).
Well, there is a difference, actually. Morality describes expectation, and
as I had said, it isn't a very hard target. You can be moral without being
excellent. Very few of us posess Achilles' or Odysseus' arete, that's why
the books were written about them, and not some average Athenian cobbler
with a bum knee. Doing everything well, from archery to loving, the way it
should be done, is not easy, most of us fall a little short at something,
but do a fine moral job in general. We are expected, morally, to try pretty
hard to do things like they should, but not too hard - how hard we try is a
socially regulated thing, and in different days, people surely both tried
harder and less hard than we tend to do now. The conection between arete
and morality is that both strive to do what is expected.
> JOHNNY
> > Adultery is very clear cut, it's entirely biological.
>
>RICK
>Way to think outside the box J :-). But seriously, the particular mix of
>self-righteousness and value rigidity that a statement like this indicates
>is downright intellectually scary. Besides, the term "adultery" isn't a
>part of the term "emotional cheating", so if it's semantics you're worried
>about, you're objecting to nothing.
Why do you say it is self-righteous? I did think you both were suggesting
that emotional cheating was adultery, I'm glad you weren't. But there did
seem to be some confusion about what adultery was. Don't you remember
Clinton? He did not have sexual relations with that woman. He wasn't
lying, it was all sodomy, and it wasn't adultery. The law is to keep messy
family relations, with a man having children by different women, women
having children by different men, etc. You are right that people don't seem
to think that is so strange anymore, it is a step in the direction of not
being related to the children we raise at all.
>RICK
>First off, "getting fat" still isn't a recognized cause of divorce (if my
>snapshot was selective yours is outright fictitious).
Well, you have to say you are unhappy, you have irreconcilable differences,
etc. But lots of men divorce their wives if they don't like looking at them
anymore. I dont think that it is fictitious.
> Second, "barrenness"
>wasn't (and still isn't) a ground for divorce because it always has been
>(and still is) a ground for "annulment" (I'll assume you know what the
>difference is).
is that right? In the Catholic church, barrenness is grounds for annulment?
I know that not being able to have sex is, because that means the marriage
never was consummated, it never happened. But barrenness? That's what
Henry the 8th had to cut off so many wives heads for, wasn't it? The Pope
wouldn't grant a divorce for him to try to have children with another woman?
I think the chance you take that your spouse may be infertile should be
shared by both spouses, neither is supposed to know which is infertile - the
marriage just won't have any children. There is no 'right to have children'
- only a right to marry someone and try. You get one shot, with one person.
Just like you only get one shot with yourself, and with your parents, and
your siblings.
(If a marriage is annulled by the church, no divorce has to be filed? What
if the wedding wasn't in a church?)
> Finally, while cruel and inhuman treatment, alcoholism
>(substance abuse) and neglect were among the recognized Common Law actions
>for divorce, most states (like my own NY) overrode the Common Law by
>statute
>and made the available remedy for such actions a judicially ordered 'legal
>separation', which could only be converted into a divorce after years of
>the
>fulfillment of harsh and often impossible conditions. Even the states that
>did adopt the Common Law causes of action made them all but unattainable.
>I'm sorry I wasn't specific enough for you... perhaps I should have said
>adultery was the only grounds for divorce 'effectively' recognized by
>statute in most states. The trends during which most states have made the
>Common Law remedies more convenient and widely available didn't really come
>on until several decades ago.
That 'no fault' divorce started in about 69 or 70 or something in
california. I don't know if I can provide one time and place that had
perfect marriage laws for you. I want to move forward, not backwards,
anyway, even if it means repeating some past mistakes. There will always be
a adjustments and what not to prevent exploitation and abuse and balance it
with a real commitment to the state and to each other for a man and a woman
to come together as one for each other their whole lives. What do you think
of the new 'Covenant Marriages' some states are adopting?
And by the way, lots of abused people aren't married, so how do you explain
that?
Johnny
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