All good.

But in the ethical problem, there is this unknown X, call it, in the spirit of Kant. As is, and this is a big point, I believe, speaking of Kant: where did Kant ever get that idea of noumena? He grudgingly had to postulate it, but why? — Astrophel

Yes, he did, and that’s an excellent reading. Nonetheless, Kant’s noumena pertains to the understanding thinking objects for itself, without relation to either the categories, or the human version of intuition.

If you’re thinking there is some possible unknown X pertaining to the matter of ethics, it would have to have a ground set for it. What would that look like? Kant’s unknown something reduces to a prohibition on sensibility, but that wouldn’t work for ethics, which requires unrestricted sensibility.

Interesting possibility, but methinks ‘tis a hard row to hoe.
———-

Aesthetics and ethics Wittgenstein puts in the same bin. — Astrophel

I’m sorry.....who???

This doesn't just tell us what the subject of ethics is, but states a thesis about what ethics is (emphasis in the original). — SophistiCat

But the question, unless I misunderstood, is not "what is ethics definitionally", but rather "what is ethics ontologically?".

Odd here: You speak of innate moral intuitions, then deride ethical Realism with a capital R — Astrophel

For me this is as real as it gets. But capital R types usually want more, as you did in the previous post. You want to justify these intuitions, not realizing that any possible justification must take place within the framework of these intuitions.

In fact, the idea is so obvious than I cannot even imagine seriously dismissing — Astrophel

What follows is so far from obvious as to be incomprehensible.

You are thrown into a world of givens. Choice intervenes, but choices are only among what is given to choose; and so many are now beyond choice: I can't choose to hate chocolate or adore traffic noise. — Astrophel

Our choices are made relative to a pre-existing system of understanding. But those choices alter that pre-existing system to some extent. Affectivity is a measure of the organizational dynamics of our system of understanding.
Our feelings express how effectively we are able to assimilate events along dimensions of similarity with respect to our prior experience. Negative feelings like guilt, anxiety, sadness and anger indicate impending or current chaos and confusion in our engagement with the world. Our audacity as experimenters , explorers and questioners determines how successfully we are able to
move beyond these crisis of intelligibility. It is up to us to re-construe our world , since there are no limits to the ways that we can re-organize how we make sense of things. Our feelings will tell us which channels of construing make the world a more creatively anticipatable place and which channels lead to the incoherence of negative moods.

In all honesty I think that an example of narrow thinking.

Explaining behaviour in terms of evolution had a veneer of credibility within pop science, and is common on this forum - to the point of predictable tedium.

But there is little support amongst scientists. That's mostly because it is logically fraught. A little thought will show that any behaviour can be made to fit the model. In your own example, helping the blind and killing and eating them can both be explained as procuring survival.

Anda theory that explains anything is of no use.

And there's further philosophical reason to reject evolution as a basis for ethics, from Moore. Even if evolution proscribes what we do, it remains an open question as to whether we ought to do as evolution prescribes. Since we have at least some sort of control over our actions, it might be the case that we ought fight whatever it is that evolution drives us towards.

You had these ideas when you were fifteen. Apparently empathy grows as the brain develops, so perhaps you have grown out of them.

But the truth is that these unselfish acts invariably protect not the self, true, but the tribe, the family, the nation, the species. In other words, the derivatives of one's own DNA. And the beneficiary is invariably is also a protector of the person who sacrifices for the community.

This is sort of a scenario that plays out this way: "I pay a sacrifice to the community to help the community survive, so then they can protect me and help me survive too." — god must be atheist

At the very bottom everything is an selfish thing, act, even ethics. The problem is that we people prefer the temporal Ego benefit, which isn't that significant and neglect the great long term Ego benefit that we can gain.
We have many "excuses" for doing that but still is totally wrong. Wrong mostly for our own selves.

I think I'm trying to say that we experience the ethical as absolute, as something beyond our opinions, not up to us, something in a way external.**

There is a word for this experience: 'conscience'. Maybe it's more phenomenologically sound to start with conscience than with The Good, which looks a little theorized already.


** There’s a nice bit of writing in “The Train Job” (Firefly, episode 2) that captures a difference I’m interested in:

“Sheriff: When a man finds out more about a situation like ours, well, then he faces a choice.
Mal: I don’t believe he does.”

What the Sheriff says is nice, spotlights individual responsibility — things don’t just happen, people do them. Acknowledge your part. That’s a solid starting point, certainly. Mal’s not disagreeing with that, but shifting the locus of responsibility away from the choice. If you know what is right, the real question is whether you will do it. It’s not a matter of choice but of character.

You see that sort of thing all through Confucius, as well: there are no moral dilemmas, there’s only degrees of courage and fortitude in doing what everyone acknowledges is right. — Srap Tasmaner

I think you are right about courage and fortitude and a number of other virtues that describe a "good will". This is an essential point. There are good acts and their are good wills. This latter is not to held accountable for maximizing the former. But what does this mean, this "desire to do good" regardless of the efficacy or consequences?

This is quite a thing to say, and I think defending it puts one very hot water: after all, didn't Hitler think he was doing the right thing? And that serial killer, didn't he believe there was in place a clear rationalization for all he did (or she!), so the "good" of it did have its defense, no? But also there are those who wish to do well, nothing but good intentions, but their best laid plans go horribly wrong.

Very difficult issue, I believe. But I think the couple that goes off to dangerous environments to help people and infinitely more moral and decent and worthy of our praise than the wealthy one that gives thousands or millions to these same people and does many times more good. Bill Gates and his wife were great philanthropists??? Really? Where does greatness lie? My thought: it lies in sacrifice, unsung, often as it goes.

Where does greatness lie? My thought: it lies in sacrifice, unsung, often as it goes. — Astrophel

”But anyone who has really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and got something in return, – perhaps something of himself in return for something of himself – that he gave up here in order to have more there, perhaps in order to be more in general, or just to feel like “more.”
(Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

“I dealt especially with the value of the ‘unegoistic', the instincts of compassion, self-denial, self-sacrifice which Schopenhauer had for so long gilded, deified and transcendentalized until he was finally left with them as those ‘values as such' on the basis of which he said ‘no' to life and to himself as well.”
(On the Genealogy of Morals)

didn't Hitler think he was doing the right thing? — Astrophel

But that's an argument, not phenomenology, right? It's also not an argument I find all that persuasive as it stands: I've always been struck by the Nazis trying to destroy evidence of the Holocaust as the red army advanced -- they were like children caught doing something they knew perfectly well was wrong.

But, yes, history and anthropology seem to teach us that different communities have different values. Some apparently have no problem with practicing slavery, say, or genital mutilation, and then we seem forced to conclude that there is something relative about our moral judgments. This is all still argument though, rather than a phenomenology of ethical experience. It's just that the argument suggests such a phenomenology is useless, because in every case we'll find people experiencing what seems to them ethical in the same way. (Orson Welles explained Touch of Evil by quoting Jean Renoir: "Everyone has their reasons.")

There are two ways to begin to answer the relativist (or perspectivist): one is to say that the claims of variation are overblown, that there is obvious and substantial overlap in the mores of different communities, and even some research to back that up; the other is to question the experience more closely. If those who practice genital mutilation have to overcome their recognition of a young girl's fear and trauma, have to suppress their sympathy for her, then that's not evidence that their conscience is constituted differently from ours, but that they choose not to listen to it, that they let some other consideration overrule it.

I think the jury is still out on whether phenomenology is doomed to failure here.

I think the jury is still out on whether phenomenology is doomed to failure here. — Srap Tasmaner

What phenomenology has going for it is that it doesn’t leave personal intent dangling in mid air by presuming it to be guided by mysterious impulses toward good or evil, selfishness or self-sacrifice. Instead, it ties motivation with sense making, and sense making with an interaubjective community. The idea of good or evil intent is a kind of superstition, a failure to understand motivation in the light of a need to anticipate events, which is neither selfish nor selfless.

Human flourishing simply begs the question: why should humans flourish? Something more basic is required. Something that cannot be analyzed because it issues from t he world itself. — Astrophel

I consider this to be wishful thinking and mysticism. You said earlier that I was making it more complicated than it need be and now here you are saying something serpentine like this. :razz:

Sounds like you want a transcendent or magical foundation point to this question and this may well be an emotional reaction. You won't be the first to reach this position.

Human flourishing does raise the question what does human flourishing look like when done well? We know that pretty much all people are attempting to achieve this. Even the Taliban - they, like all fundamentalists, think a particular interpretation of God's will leads to human flourishing - generally flourishing in the afterlife.

We can debate how best to accomplish human flourishing but there seems little doubt to me that pretty much all people have agreed in their own way that this is a starting point. I don't think we need any more than this.

mysterious — Joshs

transcendent or magical — Tom Storm

Timothy Snyder has an interesting book about the Holocaust, called Black Earth. He makes a particular point of explaining collaboration by pointing to the destruction of local institutions and the lack of "political capital" to organize resistance. It's understandable, he suggests, that people behaved badly in desperate circumstances. But then he spends a few chapters examining individuals who behaved heroically; he tries to find some explanation, but comes up empty. It's a really striking asymmetry.

Isn't there something a little mysterious about moral courage? What's so awful about acknowledging that?

Isn't there something a little mysterious about moral courage? — Srap Tasmaner

I have no idea - you seem to be the one advocating mysteries. :smile:

But does all this track back to the initial question about the origins of ethical behaviour? It's not hard to see how heroism might belong just to a few outliers in a society where dark forces heavily punish dissent. It's also not hard to see why there may be no ready made answers for heroism - people often behave for reasons unknown even to themselves. And the ostensible reasons people give for why they do certain things are often post hoc rationalisations.

Isn't there something a little mysterious about moral courage? What's so awful about acknowledging that? — Srap Tasmaner

I just don’t know what moral courage is, except something we pat each other on the back for, a weapon we use against those whose motives we can’t relate to. Other words that work this way are selflessness, kindness, compassion. They reveal more about the person using them than those they are intended to describe. In particular , they reveal that the user of the word believes the self is some sort of fortress that has to be breached by force of will in order to want to do things for others. The user of the word doesn’t comprehend that the self is already social, that we can’t help but want to do things for others we identify with, and are threatens by those alien to us. The problems in the world aren’t due to ignoble intent but lack of insight. Words like selfish, uncourageous and immoral are part of the problem rather than the solution.

Anda theory that explains anything is of no use. — Banno

This is a theory that explains anything too.

I am a firm believer in evolutionary theory (ET) and how it shaped our lives, psyches, societies. This you call pop theory, but that's your main argument against it... appeal to authority.

Interestingly, the society that has been made big and strong and wealthy by applying one of the purest forms of evolutionary theory (or allowed it to develop without as much interference as other societies) to their economy, counts among its own people the strongest opponents of ET. I am not saying, because I don't know actually, that you are part of that society, Banno, I am just saying how that society is denying the validity of the theory the workings of which has made it big.

but that's your main argument against it... appeal to authority. — god must be atheist

No.

Two arguments:
1. It has the structure of an all-and-some doctrine; for any behaviour there is some evolutionary advantage. Hence it provides and explanation for any behaviour, and it's negation. It is of no use.

2. It fails to answer the question of what we ought to do, so does not address ethics.

That it can be made to parallel your pet nationalistic myths is a curious piece of psychological biography, not an argument.

:up:

I just don’t know what moral courage is — Joshs

Isn’t there a difference between the man who, being completely selfish, doesn’t give a shit about the Jews being rounded up and does nothing to help them, and the man who sympathizes and wants to help them but is too scared to follow his conscience?

the self is some sort of fortress that has to be breached by force of will in order to want to do things for others — Joshs

But it’s quite specifically not a question of whether you want to do the right thing, but whether you can muster the courage to do so. Are we wrong to admire that sort of thing? Often enough, someone who behaves heroically doesn’t see themselves as having done anything particularly extraordinary, and thus has no explanation, since there’s nothing to explain. (“I just did what anyone would’ve done.”) And often enough, people talk of hoping they would behave as the hero did, but admitting that they don’t know whether they would — in short, people will admire behavior that they also think of as not quite a matter of choice. It’s a funny thing all around.

Two arguments:
1. It has the structure of an all-and-some doctrine; for any behaviour there is some evolutionary advantage. Hence it provides and explanation for any behaviour, and it's negation.It is of no use. — Banno

This is the strength of evolutionary theory, not the weakness. You just called it a weekness ("no use") because that supports your opinion. While what you said indeed supports that evolutionary theory MUST be true.

2. It fails to answer the question of what we ought to do, so does not address ethics. — Banno

Actually, it does not fail to answer that question. Again, an argument by you that you used that declares an opposite to reality.

Banno, just because you utter a claim, it does not become the truth. You keep doing that, as far as I can see. You do other things as well, of course, but you more than once fall into the trap of believing unsubstantiated claims just on the strength of their being stated.

:down:

It made perfect sense in the context. But I still had to make it sure. — god must be atheist

Measure twice lift once, as they say.

yet the final result (if such a thing exists... "final") or the intended final result is the most precisely and accurately formed best way to achieve with a seemingly unreasonable act. — god must be atheist

Sure. In the grand calculus of the universe, I suppose all acts are ethical, or are necessary in some shape or form.

:zip:

But it’s quite specifically not a question of whether you want to do the right thing, but whether you can muster the courage to do so. Are we wrong to admire that sort of thing? — Srap Tasmaner

I think we should admire insight, not mythical ethical attributes. Terms like courage are dangerous, because they imply a hostility toward and condemnation of those who we judge as lacking in courage.

The courageous person could just as well be described as sensation-seeking, reckless or simply someone who has a closer bond of understanding with those they try to help than others who are not ‘courageous’. If we don’t recognize use that we all
live within different worlds of interpretation , we end up forcing everyone into a single world and then have no choice to but to explain differences of behavior in terms of ethical intent and associated concepts like courage and altruism.

So affectivity cannot be presuppositionless. Rather, it produces the frame of presuppositions( a way of comporting ourselves) that interpretation develops further in our everyday dealings with others. But the frame is always being reframed. — Joshs

Of course, I see this (not, of course, I understand Heidegger so well. This certainly isn't true). But to pre "suppose"-- this goes to comprehension. Affectivity may be "of a piece" with the future making event, but, I would argue, affect is not interpretative. I admit, it can be called this, and if the case is being made that when one comprehends, one is doing so affectively, so taking up the world AS is to take it up as in an affectively qualified way, and the thought and feeling are not different things in the construction of an actual future existence. they are only different in the analysis. Dewey held the same kind of view.

I guess, to use Heidegger's language, I am looking at affect in a "present at hand" way: it is there, this misery is there, and among all the descriptive things one could say about an actual situation, there is one that is THE most salient feature, which is this undefinable part that is the ethical dimension of it, which is: I find this misery, just awful, dreadful, appalling, and so on, all of which are synonyms, but what is the defining thread? It is undefinable, for it lies in the givenness, regardless of how what is given is given in a structured presuppositional (or predelineated) way.

Comprehension is term that encompasses affairs of the understanding, or believing, knowing and thinking, and for Heidegger this knowing is instrumentality, the localized way of "dealing with" a thing. So the presuppositions for knowing hammers are prior dealings with hammers and their regional equipmental environments. Affect is an intrinsic part of all this, the caring. Dewey called this the aesthetic dimension of consummatory experience, and he, too argued that this is bound up in the forward lookingness of apprehending an object. But he was also dismissive of the present at hand of the affect:

In fact emotions are qualities, when they are significant, of a complex experience that moves and changes. I say, when they are significant, for otherwise they are but the outbreaks and eruptions of a disturbed infant. All emotions are qualifications of a drama and they change as the drama develops.

Outbreaks and eruptions? He means considered apart from any possible context of experience. He doesn't want to talk about what will not be talked about, which is the mere presence of affect, and he is, right I think. It is the one reason philosophy will pass over any discussions of the presence (the "metaphysics of presence") of what lies before one.

But I challenge this idea. I think there is something critically important about things being miserable and delightful. Not just important, THE most important part of our existence. Even Levinas doesn't go into the palpable presence of it (though granting through all of this that I really don't have the detailed grasp that you do. I read, think, that's all) . The face of another in misery, to be significant requires misery to be significant. How is misery significant? It is "presuppositionlessly" misery, stands as "its own presupposition" as Kierkegaard put it (though he wasn't talking about this, precisely) because the understanding lies in a different dimension of how things are intimated.

One's misery may bound existentially to ready to hand environments, and the temporal structure of this carries misery into a future creation of a "displacing" future, but misery exceeds utility, it is, again with Levinas, something in the "ideatum" of misery that exceeds the ready to hand. It is a presence at hand that "speaks" the injunction not to do X if X makes misery.

Well its strange, there are people who find the phenomenological perspective intuitively appealing, and others just don't understand why. Perhaps there is a phenomenological explanation for that, but it's beyond me. lol. — ernest

Likely that you have not read Husserl's Ideas I? I remember reading Kant for the first time and I was bewildered. I understood the words and the logical constructions, but I would look out the window and think, but there is obviously a tree and a sky and this guy is just insane. Later I read Some Kierkegaard and to this I can wrap my mind around his Concept of Anxiety to the degree of 60 percent or so. I had to read Hegel, and Hegel is fascinating madness, to be sure.

The more I read, the more I see that THIS is really where philosophy must go, and the most compelling case for this, I think, lies with Husserl's Cartesian Meditations.

I would hazard that no one at all gets comfortable with continental philosophy without doing some very difficult reading. But having said this, I think "some people" are intuitively inclined to take existence as a theme more seriously than others. Analytic philosophy KILLS this intuition.

For me this is as real as it gets. But capital R types usually want more, as you did in the previous post. You want to justify these intuitions, not realizing that any possible justification must take place within the framework of these intuitions.

In fact, the idea is so obvious than I cannot even imagine seriously dismissing
— Astrophel
What follows is so far from obvious as to be incomprehensible. — hypericin

Framework of intuitions? I don't follow. What is this framework? As to taking this seriously, you wrote: Do you seriously think there is a material basis for ethics?

Why I think there is such a thing is frankly complicated. But it does begin with a "reduction" of the world to its essential givennes. An odd idea if you've never considered that there is such a thing to do, but initially I did invite one to consider a moral affair as it stands, the way a geologist might observe a rock or a mineral. First observe what is there, in your midst. Categorical placement comes after (though, the mere approach is always already categorical, but never mind that) and identify the features "present". Again, there is Astrophel, the ax, the man who murdered his beloved cat and the law that prohibits murder (or assault, etc.). At the very basic level of analysis, what is there? Rules and consequences swimming around my head, rage, conscience in an epic struggle, but more essentially, the possible act itself: WHY ALL THE FUSS?
The fuss is because there is some pain, misery, horror, unpleasantness (or then, joy, pleasure, bliss) that is AT STAKE. This is the foundational premise the this argument: These words of affect, joy, pain, pleasure, wretchedness, and so on: If these are absent, then the ethics vanishes completely. It is not simply a necessary condition, like say, reason; I mean, one has to have the ability to reason through competing ideas in order for ethics to rise up and be what it is, we might say. But note: take the matter of the ax being buried in another man's back. Remove the rational dimension and the essence of the affair still remains, though mysteriously. There is something horrible about the pain apart from the way pain is contextualized in a situation or even a theoretical rationalization. Mysteriously, the ethical objection sustains, and you can disagree with this, but it would by my thinking be disingenuous. It is too obvious. this brief idea sketched out here of a contextless horrible pain is in itself an argument, a very powerful intuitive argument, against ethical nihilism.
It is not the objection that is the focus of this argument. It is the intuited negative affect. This is something that issues from t he fabric of things, if you will, buried in contingency, but unmistakably there: wretchedness is unassailable by circumstances.

One's misery may bound existentially to ready to hand environments, and the temporal structure of this carries misery into a future creation of a "displacing" future, but misery exceeds utility, it is, again with Levinas, something in the "ideatum" of misery that exceeds the ready to hand. It is a presence at hand that "speaks" the injunction not to do X if X makes misery. — Astrophel

I wonder if maybe what you’re after is an idea of feeling that can be found in the German Romantic writings of authors like Schelling and Fichte.

... since there are no limits to the ways that we can re-organize how we make sense of things. Our feelings will tell us which channels of construing make the world a more creatively anticipatable place and which channels lead to the incoherence of negative moods. — Joshs

Sounds right to me. But one can ask, why make the world a more creatively anticipatable place? If there is no answer to this, then the mundane objection still holds: there is question begging in the assumption that "we should do X". Why?

Rorty was accused by Critchley of being a contradictory "liberal ironist, someone who is committed to social justice and appalled by cruelty, but who recognizes that there is no metaphysical foundation to her concern for justice." I think there is a foundation, though it is no stone tablet, that is, it is not language the world that "speaks" but intuition.

Unassailable, given in the barest sense. I am reading Derrida on Levinas, and he expresses it, in his exposition, thusly: "A thought for which the entirety of the Greek logos has already erupted, and is now quiet topsoil deposited not over bedrock, but around a more ancient volcano. A thought which, without philology and solely by remaining faithful to the immediate, but buried nudity of experience itself, seeks to liberate the Greek domination of the Same and the one."

I know he not going to defend this, (though he admires it. He called Totality and Infinity a work of art) but this brief flourish puts the matter forth with a nice rhetorical lift. Notwithstanding the prestation, though, his "ancient volcano" is an apriority to all systems of understanding.