"The situation is hopeless, we must take the next step." — Tom Storm
Can you say some more about this? — Tom Storm
If you’re only saying that some forms of agency are diffuse and collective, then I have no problem with that. The OP struck me as going farther than that, and claiming that there is monstrosity apart from the acts/creations/effects of agents. — Leontiskos
All you’re saying is that if 1c is not present then 2 does not follow, and my reasoning explicitly agrees with this. — Leontiskos
There is an equivocal term between (2) and (3), and once that is removed your (contradictory) supererogatory obligation dissolves. Namely, you added the word “meaningfully” in (3). Remove the equivocation by adding that adverb to (2) or removing it from (3) and the contradiction dissolves. — Leontiskos
But let’s suppose that unregenerate man fails to fulfill his means-obligations. What then? Will telling him that he must do the supererogatory fix the situation? I don’t see how it would. If he isn’t fulfilling his means-obligations it’s not clear why he would fulfill his means-supererogations. — Leontiskos
I would say that for the non-religious, or for those who believe that this state is our inevitable and perpetual condition, the only option is some form of resignation (to failure). To reuse the recycling analogy, this would be resigning oneself to fail to correct climate impact. You can still recycle, but only with the knowledge that you will not succeed—with the knowledge that you are only delaying the inevitable. And one can play Camus all they like, but that burns out fast enough. — Leontiskos
To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too — just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow's work is today's duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future —haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth — ready to break the Enemy's commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other — dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.
It follows then, in general, and other things being equal, that it is better for your patient to be filled with anxiety or hope (it doesn't much matter which) about this war than for him to be living in the present. But the phrase “living in the present” is ambiguous. It may describe a process which is really just as much concerned with the Future as anxiety itself. Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he has persuaded himself that the Future is, going to be agreeable. As long as that is the real course of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good, because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed. If, on the other hand, he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once. Here again, our Philological Arm has done good work; try the word “complacency” on him. But, of course, it is most likely that he is “living in the Present” for none of these reasons but simply because his health is good and he is enjoying his work. The phenomenon would then be merely natural. All the same, I should break it up if I were you. No natural phenomenon is really in our favour. And anyway, why should the creature be happy? — The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis
I enjoyed their commitment to the inherent beauty and moral value of nature, though we ended up having a lot of heated discussions regarding whether brutal tragedies, like miscarriages, should be seen as other parts of God's artwork. I was of the impression that all of creation meant all of it, the nun agreed. Neither of us could quite stomach loving the majesty of suffering and indifference. The damnedest thing we spoke about was that it was ultimately our senses of compassion and espirit de corps with humanity that stopped both of us from also loving pain.
Now we are able to rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes – and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away and he that sits upon the throne will say, ‘Behold, I make all things new...'
…of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines…Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred…As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God, but the face of his enemy. It is…a faith that…has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead...
For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.
For example, one might ask sceptics whether they at least accept the notion that, on the whole, ‘history has delivered’ progress in the arts, sciences, economics, government, and quality of life. If the answer is "yes," how do they account for it? Is it chance (thus offering no guarantees for the future)? Or if there is a reason for it, what is this ‘reason’ which is ‘going on in history’?
Similarly, if the sceptics answer ‘no’, then why not? Again, is the answer chance? Or is there some ‘mechanism’ underlying the course of history which prevents overall continuous progress? If so, what is it, and can it be defeated?
Yes. Telling people that they must do more to do enough, when we already can't do enough, doesn't work. — fdrake
Answers to the problem aren't really about what to do, I think, they're about how to cope with our condition of being unable to do "enough". One way of dealing with that is to try to do enough. Or to try to bring about a state of things were people can do enough. — fdrake
I see an appeal to absurd as a metacognitive trap, it's how you think you think, but you only think that because you're not looking at how you think. It's also metaphysical stopgap, a refusal to inquire or do more. It's a refusal to be troubled by the troubling. — fdrake
...extreme leftism, which I see as a secular form of faith. — fdrake
The people I'm aware of who are troubled by these problems are generally socialists or communists, and treat The Revolution in eschatological terms. It will be Kingdom come, but of our own making. The faith they have in a future end-state with no means of imagining how to bring it about. — fdrake
CS Lewis has excellent commentary on this in The Screwtape Letters. — fdrake
Notably Lewis sees our duties tomorrow as "acts of justice and charity", which are duties in the expanded sense... — fdrake
But the bar for good human conduct raises to a level that it becomes practically unattainable. — fdrake
And I do see us as referring to ourselves as good accurately, so what is good must be more quotidian than the world transforming eternal present of Lewis', or Count Timothy von Icarus's, moral hero. — fdrake
The latter moral hero functioning as someone to aspire to, or as the regulative ideal of our moral imagination? I can agree with that. But then we circle the inherency of failure again, and of the impossibility to fulfil that ideal, despite being required to do so by the state of things. — fdrake
I am saying that. Though I imagine it can appear that I am saying something different since I see the flavour of agency that institutions and ideologies have as principally inhuman. And at a push I'd commit to human agency being kind of inhuman at its root. That's by the by though. — fdrake
Yes. I assumed you were using the obligation of X into obligation of parts of X inference in a prior post. I then attacked the inference as if it were yours. I am making no use of the inference in my arguments. The failure of the inference is part of what leaves me the room to say that some obligations require supererogations, with the requirement being a logical one. The issue is part of the OP, but me writing about it like I have is because I believed you were using the inference against the OP, and I was attacking the inference without using the principle it embodies. I care that supererogatory acts aren't obligatory, I don't want to collapse any supererogations into obligations. That our obligations can require us going above and beyond our obligations in some sense is one of my central theses. That particular sense being {achieving the spirit of our duties or bringing about the kind of world living our obligations aims to bring about or the intended outcome of following our duties to begin with}}. — fdrake
The failure of the inference is part of what leaves me the room to say that some obligations require supererogations, with the requirement being a logical one. — fdrake
The Count Timothy von Icarus leveraged this to form a counterargument of sorts, by inflating our obligations above and beyond my rather quotidian portrayal of them, our collective failures then become true "moral failings" of our duties, rather than some failure inherent in our moral conscience and the satisfaction of our duties to begin with. The latter is what I'm advocating. That we really do fulfil our duties, that they are quotidian in comparison to why we follow them, why we follow them casts a shadow on our conduct that renders our duties insufficient. Nevertheless we "do our bit", and it isn't enough. — fdrake
The monstrosity that makes running food banks required to feed people despite massive food surpluses is one that those food banks volunteers' face, if they stop going above and beyond people go hungry. They're thus "expected" to in a manner that goes beyond their duties, and life presents them a threat in the form of a modus tollens impact, if you don't do this then that will not happen. Stop going to work for free and the poor starve. — fdrake
Can you say more explicitly what you mean by "the inference"? I tried to speak to the general issue with the paragraph beginning, "↪I don’t see how the parts are going to help..." — Leontiskos
I'm still not getting a lot of traction on this stuff. I would say that if someone ignores the spirit of an obligation and clings to the letter of the obligation, then they are failing in their obligations. I don't think the spirit of an obligation can be a supererogation. It still feels like you are conflating obligation and supererogation. — Leontiskos
If we were to take the food bank example then we would say that X = <produce food surplus or food waste> and Y = <people do not go hungry>. I won't hold you to that example, but we can use it if you want. I want to analyze a concrete example and see if the word "supererogatory" is being used accurately, and if not, what better words could be used. — Leontiskos
If I construe the spirit of an obligation as "engendering the kind of world that obligation seeks to create" and the obligation's letter as "the acts constitutive of its duty", maybe that makes it clearer. Satisfying the spirit of an obligation has something like a success criterion for fulfilling a purpose or higher cause, and a duty doesn't need such a purpose or a higher cause but often {typically} has them. — fdrake
Some duties are relatively transparent in their spirit and letter. The letter of my duty to take out the trashing is... taking out the trash. The spirit is a bunch of things like "letting rubbish pile up in your house is negligent" {a vice}, "letting rubbish pile up in your house degrades the quality of your and your neighbours lives" {disrespect to community}, just general ethical principles. If one took out the trash and left it in the street, you've satisfied the letter of your duty of taking out the trash, but contradicted some of the tenets that act is supposed to embody. You definitely took out the trash, you were nevertheless not considerate to your neighbours. — fdrake
I don’t see how the parts are going to help you get to the conclusion that supererogation is obligatory (or required). Suppose there is an obligatory end and multiple independently sufficient means [...] to that end. Obligation then applies to the means qua end. One is not obliged to utilize any given means, but one is obliged to utilize some means or combination of means that is sufficient to achieve the obligatory end. — Leontiskos
One may be perversely or minimally compliant, one may also do minor violations of the spirit of ones duties and count as satisfying them. — fdrake
That's a tyrannical and absurd standard, no one can live chasing after every piece of trash like that - metaphorically and literally. — fdrake
The room opened up by perverse compliance and minor violations of a duty's spirit is also room for the failure of the aims of duty while satisfying its letter. — fdrake
Nevertheless, the world demands you relate to yourself and others as such a tyrant in order to fulfil your duties about the things which matter in spirit and not just in letter. — fdrake
I understand something as supererogatory if it is laudable but not required for one's duties, like chasing after the trash in a gale. Laudability arises from embodying the spirit of one's duties to a high degree, heights of considerateness and self sacrifice. — fdrake
Edit: I think a big part of the issue is this question: How is a properly supererogatory act motivated? Can someone self-consciously engage in a supererogatory act, or will every heroic act be self-consciously viewed as obligatory? — Leontiskos
The food bank example I think is a good one. I want to take it as given that no one is duty bound to work full time for free in a food bank, it isn't a moral requirement for anyone to do that, but some people take up the burden. What would happen if some people did not take up the burden? The poor would starve. Working as a volunteer full time in a food bank is laudable. Thus, working as a volunteer full time in a food bank is supererogatory, as it's laudable and goes above and beyond one's duties of care for humanity.
But let's have a look at what happens if no one takes up the burden - which is, no one does something which is always permissible not to do -, the poor then starve. Some people working at the foodbank in that manner is necessary for the poor not to starve - necessary as a logical requirement, the poor would starve without it. But it was also shown not to be a moral duty to work full time there as a volunteer.
The aporia arises because if some people did not compel themselves to go above and beyond their duties, the poor would starve. The state of things thus requires {logically} that people go above and beyond their duties to ensure that widely held requirements for a just society. That is a much greater imposition than occasionally chasing after trash in a strong wind. That's the monstrosity I'm speaking about. — fdrake
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