Second thing? I'm working on it.

Interesting. On close reading it appears that what you giveth, you taketh away. But I'm a buyer, believing that ethics is a something, even if not-so-easy to say what. I can even resort to boot-strapping: "it is because it is." — tim wood

two things: it is "worse" than I have let on. Once we allow affect and intuited value or phenomenologically pure "data" pf pain, pleasure and the rest, then there are implications. If it is not just some historically constructed ideas, but issues right from t he heart of the "world constitution". Very weird to say this, but ethics is thereby part of this constitution, and the authority possessed in ethical injunctions comes not from mere convention, but the world itself.

No. It is a rhetorical comment on your series of questions that are unreasonably proposed, thereby drawing attention away from the project at hand. I find myself spending more time figuring out how the questions relate to a philosophy, then I do critiquing it. — Mww

Well, you were responding to my "can go on forever in a childish game of what and why" which was a reference to the way deconstructionists sometimes play a childish game of "what's that?" I have read one or two. the point many don't want engage is that whatever meaning one wants to bring to the table, if the intention is to go to the most basic assumptions and questions, philosophy, then one has to deal with language and logic, and language is self referential, roughly put.
I do completely agree that this puts everything under suspicion, for everything issue that is taken up is done so in language. Empirical science is a construct that is "made of" language. Ethics is the same, so the basic meanings that language makes are the foundation for talk about ethics, and this means ethics is deconstructable, which, as one could put it, means one is really hard pressed to get "out" of language" to "say" the unconditioned thing that ethics IS.
This is where I come in: Ethics has this. It is affectivity and value. All ethics has this not only as a presupposition, but as the very core of ethics itself.

Henry calls attention to the way in which we are aware of our feelings and moods. When we are in pain, anxious, embarrassed, stubborn or happy, we do not feel it through the intervention of a (inner) sense organ or an intentional act, but are immediately aware of it. There is no distance or separation between the feeling of pain or happiness and our awareness of it, since it is given in and through itself. According to Henry, something similar holds for all of our conscious experiences. To make use of a terminology taken from analytical philosophy of mind, Henry would claim that all conscious experiences are essentially characterized by having a subjective ‘feel' to them, that is, a certain quality of ‘what it is like'”.

“Self-affection understood as the process of affecting and being affected is not the rigid self-identity of an object, but a subjective movement. A movement which Henry has even described as the self-temporalisation of subjectivity. But as he then adds, we are dealing with a quite unique form of temporalisation, which is absolute immanent, non-horizontal and non-ecstatic. We are dealing with an affective temporality, and even though it seems to involve a perpetual movement and change, nothing is changed. In fact, it would be wrong to characterize absolute subjectivity as a stream of consciousness. There is no streaming and no change, but always one and the same Living Present without distance or difference. It is always the same self affecting itself.” — Joshs

Still reading Husserl's Internal time consciousness. Trying to construct a response. As to Henry above, it doesn't touch on the original phenomenological datum which I want to bring forward as the intuitive foundation for ethics, what is "concealed in apperception". I am convinced the regression toward the originary intuitive apprehension of things leads to something revelatory, not merely an underpinning of structure presupposed by our affairs that "proceed constructively" upon it. Husserl, and I think this onw way to put the subsequent complaints against him, assumes this intuitive given to be free and present apart from apperception, but this cannot be sustained: there is no freedom from tis, for the "ap" apperception is intrinsic to any and all thought, so any thought of a pure phenomenon is undone, as in his attempt to give a phenomenological exposition ot time, from the position of writing and thinking in time. It's not that his analyses are wrong, it's just that they cannot be what he says they are: "time and duration appearing as such." As such? He means this as a radical departure from "Objective time", and not just a, say, hermeneutical departure. I think this is what you meant by his being much more radical.

But then, at that threshold, when the suspension becomes radically exclusionary, and one's affectivity's attachments are , as well as what Fink The Sixth Meditation) calls the "transcendental aesthetic," that is, the explication of the "phenomenon of the world the explication of the cogitata as cogitata and of their universal structures, the description of acceptances" (the term "aesthetic" here confuses, but he is talking about the primordial belief that attends cognition); then it is not ust the understanding reach to a sublime height of apprehension alone. It is affectivity. And this makes a turn toward religion (in the non trivial sense).

For Nietzsche, morality isn't essentially a set of true or false statements. It's an activity. A society is doing something with its ethical approach. Look to a society's narratives to see the unfolding drama. — frank

we are in a limited way, in agreement. What is left after the historical notions of grounding ethics in some kind of logocentric idea are pushed aside is contingency. As Sartre put is, the world that we confront is "radically contingent", it does not "speak", but exceeds in its superfluity the confines language would contain it. Of course, he has beneath his thinking Kierkegaard and Hegel and Nietzsche as well, who all contest the any "rational reduction" as if logic could possess actuality. This is Heraclitus' world, not Parmenides'.

I think this is a profound insight, but with one slip: ethics and value. There may not be some overarching independent grounding for meaning and to understand is to have context for that understanding to be possible, but does this apply to value simpliciter? This is not an historical argument; it is a phenomenological one, so forget about Nietzsche's complaints against Christianity and Platonism. Phenomenology puts the burden of meaning at the level of basic questions to the "things themselves" which is, in my thinking, reduction away from argument and analysis and toward intuitional givens. The pain in the kidney is, I argue, foundational, unassailable, absolute.

Well, yeah. I said "Nietzsche." You said "perspective." — frank

Continue.

Just don't want you to be typing stupid stuff on the internet when you should be in the hospital. — frank

Stupid stuff, Frank?

Digging a hole to discover what’s in the dirt is one thing. Digging a hole just to put the dirt in a different place, is quite something else. — Mww

A reference to deconstruction? The point that they are making is that all singular assertions defer to something else. I call myself accountant, but what is this, as it is assumed I know since I am one. I can answer this question easliy, but each answer I give "begs" other questions, and this without end.Even when matters turn sagacious, talk about, say, how accounting is intrinsically misaligned with meaningful values, the questions never find the foundational "referent" they seek. Deconstruction (and I am no expert) is not a childish game, for it is something like the period on the end of a very long sentence beginning with the pre socratics: to speak at all is to have a perspective and meaningful thought can never be free of this. All meaning is contingent. Not too far afield from affirming Heraclitus over Parmenides.

to see how this all plays out, you could do what I did: read Saussure's Semiotics, then Derrida, chapter two Of Grammatology.

For ethics, one has to see how extraordinary this is. At this terminal threshold where language is seen not as an avenue into the world of truths waiting to be discovered, but as a stand in for this world that is constructed out of the "difference" of meaningful play among other meanings. This looks a lot like ethical nihilism finding its rationalization, for if God is out of the picture, then all that is left for metaphysical affirmation of right and wrong is left in the hands of what can be said, and if what can be said (and I think very much of Wittgenstein here. He is, in the Tractatus, emphatically against making meaningful statements that step beyond the boundaries of the limits of language) cannot make sense of what is true outside of language, then language's limitations apply to ethics.

I try to argue that ethics has an absolute grounding that is evident in the anatomy of avgiven ethical case: value simpliciter is not deconstructable. What we say is, but the intuition of pain, say, is not, and this pain is the kind of thing that drives all ethical possibilities.

You have a raging pain in your kidney? Are you peeing blood? — frank

A non sequitur, Frank. Perhaps you could restate.

Values vary by culture and class, as Nietzsche pointed out.

If there's a foundation, it's the complex of human emotion that gets sorted post hoc in ethical terms. — frank

A matter of perspective, eh? Then, what is it that is a matter of perspective? Is this raging pain in my kidney a matter of perspective?

is the category of thought responsible for generating behaviors conducive to both individual and collective well-being, flourishing, health, happiness, creativity, productivity, and peace. How's that for a definition? — Garrett Travers

Not sure what happiness is, really. The question is, how does such a thing bear up under scrutiny? I can say I am happy, but what is there in the world that makes this meaningful? Is happiness "good"? What is this? Is it like a good couch? But good couches are good for good reasons. What is the reason happiness is good?
I am not interested in a definition of ethics that moves forward without being clear about what it is at all to value something, to love, cherish, hate, detest, and so on., valuing something is the essence of all ethical issues. This takes the matter to agency: what makes for an ethical agency, one that is capable of being in relationships where something of value can be put at risk? This gets to the heart of the "existence" of ethics. You see how this goes: all the shoulds and shouldn'ts of an ethical nature presuppose this valuing nature which is IN the world. We made culture and its value institutions, but we did not make value as such. This issues from existence.
Valuing is the existential foundation of ethics, I say. The question that remains is, what does this tell us about our ethical affairs in terms of their nature, their essence?

I've got Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness here. Let me read it and and see what I can say.

Pity.

I, on the other hand, think the default sense that things ARE, is inherently logical. — Mww

And right this is. But re. logic: I think of Hume. It is empty, formal. Meaning has no message here. When we say something is rational, we are talking about how content is structured, not how structure is structured.
And, we can say that logic is transcendental if one tries to inquire as to its nature, since such an inquiry is itself inherently rational. The same goes for affect. But as I see it, affect has manifest meaning which something that stands outside the categories that would attempt to possess it. That is, we can think of affect and contain it in our thoughts, but its "beyond" (logic has this "beyond, too. See what Wittgenstein says in Tractatus) has real presence, evidenced in the very foundation of our affairs. To observe dispassionately is to observe with, if you will, passion, for human existence has its way of being in caring--- and caring, which is part of my point, begs a question: caring about what? the reduced answer to this is affect. or value.

That's as misguided as saying "appetite, urinating, flatulence, defecating ..." is what metabolism is "all about". :roll: — 180 Proof

If you think of these as bodily functions, you might think like this. But there are many ways to contextualize this. Physics can give, in a limited way, a particle-physics description, evolution can discuss the historical structures of the brain, we could talk about how these fit in some social etiquette and how these differ in cultural systems. But more we step out of the familiar talk and head out into philosophy, we discover that what is familiar doesn't rest on something else that is so solidly there. Here is an interesting scienc-grounded question: What does it mean that existence exploded in being (putting aside any terminological distinctions one might think of) in some Big Bang and fourteen or so billion years later started torturing itself through the agency of humans, goats and chickens and so forth?

Of course, this is not a question about biological evolution. It is a question that is put to the qualitative nature of suffering.

As an illustrative example, you find in Mahāyāna literature the frequent expression that 'everything that exists is subject to birth and death'. Nirvāṇa does not exist, but is the reality beyond the vicissitudes of birth and death. So, beyond (the vicissitudes of) existence.

I make this distinction because when you encounter the puzzling phrase 'beyond being', I think what you're really reading is 'beyond existence', where 'existence' means 'phenomenal existence'. — Wayfarer

It does present the question, what is being? So, when you walk into a room, there is this implicit "sense" of things being there. It is a kind of familiarity, isn't it? So I say (and of course, I am working with what others have said), and this account is not going to set well with everyone, along with Heidegger, that this general sense of things being there is utility they have. I see a desk and its "being" is the way I can approach it, sit, get up, straighten posture in it, and so on. the room is filled with this way of realting to things. Then there is the affect, that I care, have an interest, maybe I admire the form, appreciate the function. I follow Dewey on this: all pragmatic relations are inherently aesthetic. I think language itself is just this, after all, how did I come to know language if not through a process of associating sounds with things modeled by others, then, gettin it right and everyone is very pleased: Problem solved! Dewey called this consummatory, both knowing and feeling at once. This is being, call it that substratum of encountering things that you acknowledge "are".

But then, is this an exhaustive account? It is a simplified account, granted (pages and pages of philosophy reduced to a paragraph) But, I say, and I am not arguing for this, for an argument has to have presentable evidential premises, that there is something in the intuitive encounter that exceeds this. The affect (consummatory affect, as Dewey put it) is the ontological foundation of the affair: affect is not an abstraction. To love, hate, have pain or pleasure, I think not only are these real, but are what makes a relationship with objects in the world one that intimates the being real.

And it is the subject that issues this affect. so when I say this tree exists, it is not the tree's existence I am encountering. It is my own. Not that the tree is out there, beyond me, but that the existence I experience when I see the tree is my own.

Nirvana does not exist? well, it is beyond birth and death because it is NOT birth and death. Birth and death refer to conditions in the world, the circumstances in which we find nirvana. But nirvana has nothing to do with this as I can see. Nor does it have anything to do with sitting lotus style or having a good teacher. These are contexts.

Beyond the vicissitudes of existence, meaning beyond what exactly? How about the above (the Dewey, the Heidegger above)? Isn't existence about that intuited "sense" of things around us being there? It can't be about some unseen substrate qua existence, because this is not to be witnessed at at all. As in, one never sees substance; one only sees individual objects, not what "all things are" underneath.
I think of nirvana as the Hindus do: It is absolute affect. Defined as joy, happiness, bliss, or whatever terms we have that are, as terms, merely "stands ins". Is there such a thing? I think there is such a thing as a powerful experience of bliss that occurs when one reduces the world to its bare presence. Being in love intimates this. Being a child (n the Wordsworthian "Intimations of Immortality" sense) was like this (how do I know? I remember this) Talk fails us here for no other reason than we do not have shared experiences so that we can match vocabularies. Not that it is transcendence in some impossible concept. The fact that, as Levinas would put it, we look beyond the totalities of familiar categories, does not to me mean these "beyonds" are in some other realm of being. The atman is the brahman: we are already "there".

Are you saying the value of a thing is its purpose? That which has purpose has value, and that value is its affectivity? So an act, the purpose of which is to solve some ethical problem, obtains its value from that solution, and that’s what ethics is?

That works fo me, iff value is not taken to be a quality. If the value of the solution reduces to a relative quality, which is where I was coming from, we’re no better off than before. — Mww

The value of a solution begs the question: what good is even a maximal value FOR a solution? Or, what is it about a solution that makes it at all desirable? This goes to the manifestness of the quality.

I'm not saying at all value and purpose do not align, but then if someone has a purpose for something, then we can inquire about it, and inquiry can go on forever in a childish game of what and why. The point I would make is that such repetition of inquiry works annoyingly well because the purpose is set in a background of further questionable accounts. I want ot be an accountant? Why? What is an accountant? What is money? And this never ends (something Derrida points draws attention to. I have read some deconstructions that sound ridiculously childish as they do just this kind of thing).
But regarding the purpose, once the answer turns to value--- It makes someone feel good! then questions run out, for the "good" of the good feeling is unassailable.
Of course, questions can turn to other goods and bads that stand in competition, but the good of the feeling as such, cannot be defeated. One could ask, "are you sure it is a good feeling"; but this does not question goodness, but only the ambiguity in certain cases. Unambiguous cases of "the good" are indefeasibly good. Absolutes.

Qualities are CHANGES, referential differentials, ways of likeness and difference with respect to what came before. They are transitions, transformations. — Joshs

But I'm not following Husserl regarding qualities as I am talking about them.

Husserl did not go ‘Cartesian’ unless you getting this from Dreyfus’s terrible misreading of him. Intuitions are instants of experiencing that never repeat themselves identically. That is why a real object is transcendent. Our belief in an enduring self-identical object is just that , a belief that makes us see continuing self-identity in a phenomenon test is in fact flowingly changing. — Joshs

"Going Cartesian" is simply lifted from the Cartesian Meditations. Referring to the basic inspiration behind the reduction:

The meditator keeps only himself, qua pure ego of his cogitationes, as having an absolutely
indubitable existence, as something that cannot be done away with, something that would exist even though this world were non-existent. Thus reduced, the ego carries on a kind of solipsistic philosophizing.

But he continues by saying

In this unhappy present, is not our situation similar to the one encountered by Descartes in his youth? If so, then is not this a fitting time to renew his radicalness, the radicalness of the beginning philosopher: to subject to a Cartesian overthrow the immense philosophical literature with its medley of great traditions....

This idea if the "beginning philosopher" seems at the center of what have always thought his move to a phenomenological ontology was about: an ontology that is defined as "immediately presentative intuition". Everything issues from this. I have wondered, why did Kant have to talk about noumena at all?
Such an irresponsible bit of metaphysics, but then, he really felt he had no choice. But here I leave Kant, and ask, assuming he is right, and that one cannot both be faithful to the "evidence" of worldly presence and ignore this metaphysical insistence, there must be something in the world that that does the insisting. Noumena is not some impossible "out there"; it is some impossible "in here", I mean, in our midst, and this line that Wittgenstein wanted to draw between sense and nonsense was simply a way of systematically reducing the world to sensible talk to the reasonable and familiar.

Husserl argues that the self-identical object on which duration and mathematical quantification is based is transcendent to what is actually experienced; it is an idealization , a synthesis pieced together from moments of experience that never reproduce their sense identically. Actual experience does not subsist, inhere or endure, and this does not produce countable instances.

“…it makes no sense to speak of something that endures. It is nonsensical to want to find something here that remains unchanged for even an instant during the course of its duration.”(Husserl 1964). — Joshs

But this deals with the object and its knowledge structure. I don't think the "presence" of affect in actuality has its meaning bound up in such an analysis. Pain, e.g., is intuited entirely outside of how time and its flow is construed, regarless of it being an event IN time. I would put it like this: there is no way to conceive the structure of time such that it has any bearing whatever on the immediate experience of affect. This is not true of what we say about pain. I say pain is awful, but what is this other than a verbal stand in for pain? Nor is there a context in which pain is somehow recast differently. Contexts are contingencies that gather around pain, and perhaps can have a psychologically mitigating effect, I admit, such effects are very often mitigating or augmenting, and this is the way it is with contingencies. It changes nothing with regard to the phenomenon of pain as such. And I appeal simply to the phenomenon of pain as such.

You're right to think I am influenced by others, and I have read Dreyfus' Being in the World, but I don't see the things I am trying to defend here in what others say. I frankly find the Christian content of Henry, Caputo and others off putting, and they really never get to the point, as I see it. If the idea is to confront "things themselves" then the epoche takes you to the intuitive givenness, and here contexts fall away, and the context of givenness qua givenness (and all the theoretical environments that makes this possible) remains, and this, as Dennett showed in his paper on qualia, has no meaning that remains. "Presence" simpliciter means nothing that I can see. But the affective (as I am saying, broadly conceived) dimension of an event is entirely different.

I claim, we don't know what ethical (absolute) "bad" is, and any attempt to claim otherwise is just bad metaphysics. But the injunction to do X or not to do X is very clear. It is an injunction that issues from existence itself, I hold, and once entangled, becomes relativized.

Yes. WE.....are. Not another thing not us. It is we alone that is affected and exhibit affectivity. All else is merely occasion for it. — Mww

I mean to say, res affectus considered apart from a thing is just as impossible as thinking of it apart from any properties or from rational categories. Of course, I could be emotionally numb, appetitively numb, and so on, but, I would argue, I would no longer be a person and the furniture of the world would fail to be things. I think the existence of a thing, that default sense that things ARE, is inherently affective.

Yes. WE.....are. Not another thing not us. It is we alone that is affected and exhibit affectivity. All else is merely occasion for it. — Mww

Res affectus: I don't think it's possible to talk about other things like this. The "otherness" of the thing as a thing apart from all the ways I give it meaning is impossible, for the moment you bring a thing to mind at all, it is already my world.

I think I see what you are talking about, although these things are not so real to me, living in a totally different society than yours. Anyway, to stick to our subject of ethics and well-beingness, I could say that each country thinks more about its own good than the good of the world, even if Unions of countries are created for supporting each other. For example, I don't think that Germany as a state thinks more about the good of the EU than about its own. And I also think it's not the only one. This is what I call "lack of ethics". In other words, we cannot talki about ethics on a social plane. Ethics is a personal think. — Alkis Piskas

But there is a line that refuses to be drawn, so we are always redrawing it. Look at it at a more local level. I have ethical concerns about lots of people and their situations, and I feel the tug of obligation everywhere. But I cannot prosecute all of this; in fact, I have to ignore most of it. One cannot live a life like this, as if unless the world is morally leveled out, I can't do anything for my self and family. And we get into the habit of ignoring others, so busy living and breathing. and to be a professional, an artist, a philosopher, and so on, this takes a lot of ignoring.
Where does the ethical call to duty draw its line? People who do great things are utterly absorbed. I don't know. Tough call.

1.) The true object is not in the same system as affectivity and its structure. The true object is an effect on the system such that the system is affected by it. The true object is external to the system it affects. — Mww

I don't think this is true. I am not here defending some set of ideas conceived by continental philosophers. The argument has Dewey and Rorty. There is Dewey's "experience". I take a great deal if insight from John Mackie's book "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong". He helped me frame the argument. So did Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Lecture on Ethics, and "Culture and Value". I am also indebted to the East (fine points omitted). Husserl gave me the phenomenological reduction....and on and on.

It is not, however, an exercise in the history of philosophy (which I frankly could not pull off at all. People who do this are really good with details). The things I try to defend are pretty intuitive. Most thinking people are inclined to lay over what is given here with what they already know, and therein lies trouble.

1.) The true object is not in the same system as affectivity and its structure. The true object is an effect on the system such that the system is affected by it. The true object is external to the system it affects.
2.) It is implied that the true object and the qualified existent are indistinguishable. While it may be necessary that a true object is an existent, it remains that there are no conditions under which its qualities are given from its mere existence. — Mww

I don't deal in "effects on the system" talk, for causal accounts of any kind are off the table. There I am, sprained ankle, in agony. Agony? What is this? Even if there were an exhaustive account of all that brought the agony to consciousness, it would not having any bearing on the phenomenon of agony. You may even ground the agony in a temporal displacement dynamic (Joshs explained Heidegger like this), but this changes nothing (I argue). The true object is there, the agonizing ankle, I am observing. It may be that there are nerves and brain activity (but then, this would be the brain's observation of brain activity! A very important point) but this still is outside the "issue" I am raising.

You may object: one cannot "talk" about agony qua agony. And I would reply, exactly. Then move on to implications

3.) Phenomena are the affects of true objects on the system of sensibility in humans. If it is the case that no qualities are given from a mere existence, and mere existence is necessary for phenomena as affects of those true objects, then it follows that qualities do not belong to phenomena. — Mww

This kind of thinking is alien to what is being defended here. I don't really understand "mere existence" very well. Affect is not effect. Affect refers to the qualities of caring, broadly conceived. To despise something, or savor something, along with that which is the object of these, the taste of food, the sound of music, and so on. As far as affect goes, there is nothing more, I would argue, that can be a phenomenon than affect, for a mood, an aesthetic feeling, is most immanently "present", that is, intuitively apprehended. it is not that there is a violin causing vibrations in the air that excite the ear drums and so forth. The joy of, say, being love, QUA joy, not as anything else that might be part of its explanatory contexts, which are many, is the pure phenomenon. This idea of something pure is debated alot, and you might be familiar with Dennett's paper on qualia in which he denies qualia to be meaningful, and he is right If, as he does, you exclude the eidetic (the ideas that are inherent in the "presence" of a thing) dimension, then it is impossible to talk about, say, the color yellow. Yellow qua yellow does not "speak" yellow. We, in the way we take things AS yellow and smooth and what have you, and talk about it in different contexts, make the designation "yellow" possible. But affect, the emotion we might experience in the presence of yellow, this, sans any eidetic part at all, does truly, I argue, "speak".
What is "says" comes later.

4.) Because qualities are determinable, but cannot belong to phenomena as an element in a system of sensibility, it follows that qualities are determinable by a method in a system which is itself affected by phenomena. — Mww

Qualities ARE phenomena. This cup is red, and the red predicated of the cup is the quality, and it has, arguably, intuitive presence, and AS presence, there is nothing more "real". Husserl went Cartesian on this. He thought the the world out there of facts and science and the naturalistic attitude were a kind of second order of reals, for these issued from a foundation of intuitions, and these intuitions were absolute, unassailable, as say, something Descartes evil genius might try. You know how Descartes found the external world doubtable to our res cogitans sego. What is NOT doubtable? Husserl says its the phenomenon, the intuitive presence of what is there that is then taken up by science and everydayness.

5.) Deliciousness does not belong to, is not a quality of, phenomena. The true object that effects, and the qualified existent that is an affect, are in fact distinguishable. Deliciousness, and all qualities, cannot be determined from a given object by sensibility, but must arise from a system incorporating a method capable of it, such that qualities can be determinable as relating to an object. — Mww

So you see, as this goes, the object is not a res extensa thing, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson might tell us. We are in, literally, another order of perceptual awareness. The landscape of things and their qualities are acknoweldged for their "thereness", their appearance. The logic can be simple: One has never ever witnessed anything else. Talk about what has not been encountered is just bad metaphysics. Empirical science taken an ontology is just bad metaphysics.
Deliciousness, then, is taken as a direct intuition. It may be associated with apple eating, but saying apples are delicious is not something you find at this level of description. Nor do you find Jupiter being a larger mass than Saturn, or my shoes being untied. these are facts. Phenomenology is interested what underlies these facts as a facts' predispositions.
Think of how Kant (the "grandfather" of phenomenology?) analyzed reason. He wasn't interested in Jupiter either, but only the form of propositions and judgments that could be about Jupiter. These forms are what underlie presuppositionally familiar talk about things. His was an phenomenological analysis of reason.

Might it be that the entirety of phenomenal possibilities we classify as valuable serve as essence of ethics? In which case, consequentialism holds. But if we classify something as valuable, value is then a contingent assignment, and cannot be existential in that to which we assign the value, so consequentialism fails. — Mww

This is a rather good way to look at this, because arguments that deny moral realism often look simply at the differences in the way likes and dislikes are distributed. Differences can be radical. But the case for moral realism doesn't care about this, for the relativity in judgments about value is only intersubjective difference. But value as a phenomenon is very different, for the assessment of the value something has is allowed to be judged for what it is, not what it compares to.

There is the objection that even when value is "observed" as a phenomenon, it is still entangled, compared and so forth, for the mind is not a rigidly determined world. True, and this can confuse whether somethin is good or bad. But when something is deemed good in a relatively uncompromised sense, like this pizza, the goodness as goodness is unassailable. Fall in love? Unassailable, and by this I mean, it is not a prima facie case of being good. It is, rather, indefeasable, apodictically good. The pain of being axed in the groin is apodictically bad, and while the moral principle that would condemn axing another person thusly does not change or become fashioned differently because pain is apodictically bad, it does take on a dimension of meaning that is otherwise not there.

An impossible thesis: because pain (and joy and all the rest) is apodictically bad, our moral world has the gravitas of Old Testament stone tablets. Of course, there are no stone tablets, but one has to imagine what our moral affairs would be like if there were.

I argue for this.

When there are a myriad of reasons for any of those existential matters of fact.....how is it possible to assign value merely because of an immediate observation? If the kids were lactose intolerant, if the whole family had just left the house they were in the process of remodeling, if nothing on the menu suited their tastes......all sufficiently explain what I observed, but do not necessarily explain why I paid for the dining occasion.

Nahhhh.....my ethical contribution was the consequence of my having already assigned the value of “deserving” as an aesthetic judgement, which may have been an affect of my observations, but cannot thereby be predicated on them alone. I judged them as deserving because I related that value in that instance, to another in which it was absent. It follows that the observation, the phenomenal experience, was valuable, in that it elicited an assignable value to my ethical act, but contained no predicate value in itself.

Again, the consequentialist ethics was given in the act; the cause of it was not. — Mww

I don't have any problem with utilitarian thinking at all. Only it does not always yield proper results.

And to assigning value to the immediate observation: It is not that these are not important to naking a decision. The phenomenological examination of the case is at a different order of analysis. Think again what Kant did in the CPR: individual cases are set aside, for he was trying to discover their rational essence, an analysis of what is presupposed by normal judgment. Phenomenological analysis does this with everything, the world that is there logically prior to it begin taken up in this way or that.
I argue that in all experiences in the world, there is this apodicticity that is found in the affectivity, the value. this means that in all we do and say there is this value essence that is non contingent. The world "speaks" at the foundation of our moral affairs, and all of our affairs.

I expect the worst.......

Think about acting – learning to act ("fail") better – as one is acting rather than ex post facto, concretely (re: Peirce, Dewey) and not merely in the abstract. — 180 Proof

Sure, thinking about acting. But our thinking doesn't arise ex nihilo. If I were born a 19th Zulu warrior, I imagine my moral thinking would be very different than it is. Or in the American south 200 years ago.

But is this local sense of right and wrong all there is? Isn't there a way to bring moral understanding to a higher ground?

But, more interesting: if ethics is about "learning to act better" there is beneath this a deeper assumption, which is that human being (or dogs and cats) are worthy of our better acts; that a person deserves this consideration at all. Of course, this is not unfamiliar thinking: we look to intent, for example, in criminal assessment. We also look to vulnerabilities to determine degree of culpability. If a person has no caring for another, then the other cannot be accused of mental duress. I mean to say, in all ethical conditions qua ethical, the analysis always turns on the existence of that which is in play: some caring, desire, indulgence, affection is, I argue, what ethics is "all about".
What follows from this is the next concern, but initially, in a philosophical analysis, ethics is this. Acting entirely depends on this.

Well, they are different things, aren't they? The first one means a state of being comfortable, healthy or happy. The second one is much more general and it can mean that which is right (in general), a benefit or advantage to someone or something, etc. I have clarified the word since a lot of people start asking questions like, "OK, but what is (considered) good?" etc. — Alkis Piskas

It's just that "well" and "good" are synonyms.

Please, give me something easier to do! :grin: For instance, answer to your own viewpoint(s).
In in fact, I am more interested in first-hand --people's own-- than second-hand opinions. — Alkis Piskas

Sorry, I don't mean to "give" it to you. I just write what comes to mind and I thought of Oldenquist.

n the first place, according to this scheme, "you" are more important than your "family", since you are the smaller than it, right? Well, this is one of the reasons why marriages fail. And if your marriage fails and you break up, then you get "smaller": you are retreating into your shell.

Then, how can your family be more important than your country if you need a country to live and work in, in order to sustain it?

Then, if your country is more important than the world, could you go against the whole word to defend it? If another country attacks yours, who would be there to support your country since it behaves as being more important than every else? Why do you think coalitions are created in wars?
Your country cannot live isolated except in a jungle! — Alkis Piskas

Oldequist was trying to take a conservative stand against treating third world moral obligations as equal to moral obligations at the national level. He conceived of the de facto condition that we do indeed care about family first and friends and neighbors second and so on, as a ground for de jure thinking about obligations. He wanted to give a rationality for ignoring the suffering of, and the exploitation of those abroad who have resources we can use, but we want these at a minimal cost.

You know, this is the way conservatives think. They are in this deeply immoral people, I think. But it is a good issue for arguing.

I'm not sure, but maybe "There is a no sovereign 'right'" ?
If you meant that, there is such a right. This is where customs, traditions, laws, etc., come in.
But above these, "public good" is what benefits society. And I think everyone knows what. It's another thing if people chose to ignore it or do the opposite. This has to do with personal ethics. Only insane people usually cannot distinguish right from wrong. — Alkis Piskas

Well, this these pathetic nobodies stand in the way of making our country great, and by great I mean greater wealth throughout the land, more "being comfortable, healthy or happy", More! But what about those who stand in our way? those Uyghurs in China that will not toe the line, the poor who not find a job, the useless, the mentally diseased, and so on. We could make the greatness happen if it wasn't for those that hold us back.

How does your thinking on this go?

And also The Embodied Mind, the Varela/Thomson/Rosch book that initiated the enactivism school. That is basically a combination of phenomenology and abhidharma. (Thomson has recently published a book Why I am not a Buddhist, but I don't think that detracts from the Buddhist philosophical elements of the original work. ) I think this kind of approach manages to step out of the whole 'reason v faith' dichotomy that bedevils so much mainstream thinking. — Wayfarer

Joshs wrote a paper on this book and I read it and the book. The book quite accessible, the paper difficult. I find cognitive science decidedly not philosophical, on the one hand, and the Madhyumika fascinating. In the west we have apophatic theology/philosophy. Jphn Caputo wrote a couple of books, The Weakness of God and The Tears of Derrida, that in one way of another defend the apophatic resolution in the discovery that the world that stands before us impossible to understand, and our "totalities" that is, our coherent systems for taking it up and dealing with it lead to this final aporia. What I am trying to say in this OP is inspired by this as well as Mahayana "no self" insights. In my opinion, philosophy has come to an end, but philosophers don't know this, yet. It came to and end in India long ago (reading the Abidhamma is a very tedious thing to do, and I could never wrap my mind around all that pali language. But pull back from this, and see that its basic assumption is about "seeing" the world in a pure, dynamic way).

I think the origin of metaphysics, specifically with Parmenides, was grounded in such a vision. There's a (somewhat maverick) classics scholar by the name of Peter Kingsley who explores those themes. (Fascinating recent review on that.)

But subsequently to my exploration of those ideas through the Eastern sources I mentioned, I came to realise that many of these themes are also to be found in the Western tradition. There is that thread in Western philosophy but it's basically been rejected by most analytical philosophy as such, although it lives on in European philosophy. I'm trying to join those dots now but it takes a lot of reading. — Wayfarer

I have Kingsley here. I'll read it.

Being and non Being are impossibly contradictory. But I never really bought this. Apophatic thinking is revelatory not logical. Parmenides is more about those "impossible" performative contradictions like, "I am lying." I have always thought Hume was right in saying that reason is an empty vessel that would just as soon scratch humanity existence out of existence. It bears no ill will or good will. It is merely formal. It is the content that has meaning, and reason has no limitations at all regarding content. God could literally show up and reveal an order of glory and beauty that is eternal, and reason would not flinch.

The proof is in the pudding: an examination of the foundational structure of experience. It has been done many times I know, and I have benefitted from these, but due regard is not given to affectivity (value).

I ask "what Is Ethics" because an analysis of ethics bring forth the Real (or, irreal?), which I think is affectively defined. I look at it like this: transcendence is by definition unspeakable and unencounterable; material substance is simply a way to reify scientific theories into an ontology. We are not, in all these endeavors, trying to affirm a thesis, even when this is exactly what we are doing. We are really trying to affirm some value: it is the desire, interest, and so on FOR this existent value. Analysis ends here in the actual concrete existent of affectivity.

Then the question goes to a hierarchy of valuing (not values. That is misleading) , and here, the Eastern notions make a great leap into the argument: They are saying, very generally, that it is not an argument at all. It is existential. It becomes, at the threshold of philosophy a search for greater and greater value, and this is an internal discovery.

More than "to act", to reflectively act. — 180 Proof

Absolutely! But what is it one has to think about? This is critical, I mean, philosophy asks, what is this all about, this struggle (this "war" says Levinas)? To address this, then certain questions come before us. Struggles are over something, power, wealth, advantages, indulgences, glorious things, trivial things, and since this is a philosophical question, then all attention is on the essence of these. I call it affectivity or value. This is the basic concept for the engine that drives ethics: the simple fact that we are in a world in which we care, and caring is the subjective side of the objective desideratum: the existent yums and ouches IN the world.
Reflection has to go here eventually, if the matter is philosophically taken on. In my thought, all roads to validating anything philosophically lead to the material basis out of which it arose.

Ethical agency seen through the 'continental' lens here seems diffuse and likely fruitless. But it is up to you to demonstrate what it accomplishes. However, I am happy to move on. — Tom Storm

The continental lens is not the issue. If you make it in issue, then you can tell me what it is. You think it is unimportant that to philosophically understand ethics, one does not have to understand ethical agency? That is analytically impossible, because ethics is an inter-agency affair. How can we say what ethics is and what the basis of obligation is if we don't understand what it is about a person that makes ethics even possible?
A fair question, and then some.

Blame - how old fashioned. :wink: But I note that in remainder of your response you put the blame somewhat harshly on me. Nice work. I don't really know anything about any philosophy, I just have an interest.

But I have read smatterings of Husserl and listened to Dreyfus' fascinating lectures on Heidegger and started reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, so I am not unsympathetic to continental philosophy or phenomenology.

You need to do better than attempt an elitist put down of a poor pleb who is so beneath you. It makes you sound like you're out of your depth. I suspect now that an inherent belief in the superiority of your own thought might explain why your capacity to communicate on this is so muddled. Possibly you are not really trying. Now it might also be that English is not your first language, so that could be a factor too.

Nevertheless, if you were any good at this you would be able to explain your idea clearly and not blame others for the deficits in your own capacity to communicate. And you might not stoop to playing 'in group out/group' games in an awkward attempt to marginalise those who have different views. :razz: — Tom Storm

I don't know where this comes from, but it was you that said your time was wasted after all that I put out there. I mean, what time did YOU waste? And you read nothing, or you said nothing at all about the argument placed before you. You didn't bring up this point, call me on that, express disbelief about the other. You made no effort at all. Snipe hunting?? That is insulting. And now you are the injured party?

I wasted YOUR time?

Alan Watts, D T Suzuki, Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharishi and Theodore Roszak — Wayfarer

Not to forget Ram Das, Timothy Leary, Carlos Castaneda, Aldous Huxley.

So - I very much see the course of modern intellectual history as the almost complete loss of the meaning of soul, which has been replaced with various forms of neo-darwinian materialism. It treats mankind as an objective phenomenon, something to study, alongside ants and whales, and has no greater conception of what matters that what works in an instrumental sense.

"Chemical scum", as Stephen Hawkings once put it eloquently. (Oddly, this kind of attitude is sometimes dignified with the term 'humanism'.) — Wayfarer

Interesting the way the scientific community so casually releases this kind of talk to culture. It is not that it is wrong, but that it is true only in the context of discussions that are thematically restricted to their own field. This IS what a person is through the eyes of a physicist, and there is no intent to denigrate humanity; they don't see it that way because they are fascinated by what they do. Just listen to Neil de Grasse Talk about the Truth of scientific discovery. He thinks it's the Hoy Grail. Utterly clueless. Hawkings' sense of humor is an in-house commonality among those so embedded in a mentality that the cannot understand anything else.

So - I very much see the course of modern intellectual history as the almost complete loss of the meaning of soul, which has been replaced with various forms of neo-darwinian materialism. — Wayfarer

Of course, Darwinism is right. So is astronomy and biochemistry. They are right, and I don't question these. But they simply are not philosophical. See Husserl's Ideas I or his Cartesian Meditations for for a really explicit statement about this: sciences and the "naturalistic attitude" on the one hand, and phenomenology on the other. The latter is an exposition of "things themselves" that are there, intuitively (he claims) prior to what a scientist does. It is "originary". This is a whole new world.

Whereas I see the great traditions of philosophy (and in my world, those are Christian Platonism, Indian Advaita, and Mahāyāna Buddhism) as representative of the philosophia perennis, and charting the course towards self-realisation. You do find inklings of that in Kierkegaard, and Heidegger wrestles with it in his own secularist kind of way, although I could never see it in Nietszche (flak jacket on.) — Wayfarer

It is said that the Buddha was the ultimate phenomenologist. I think Husserl's epoche, if taken to its logical end, is an act of meditation. The phenomenological reduction is a "method" not just a theory. It requires one to suspend most of what comes to mind to the understanding. Meditation is just this suspension, but rigorous. Is it possible to "see' the world as it "is" without recollection rushing to claim the moment? Is it possible to even conceive such a thing, for to think of it is to recall. See, if you like, Kierkegaard's Repetition: there is a difference between recollection and repetition. The former is a Platonic affirmation of knowledge; the latter is a renewal of presence IN time. You find this in Heidegger and Sartre(?). There is long history of this, starting with Plato: the present is a moving image of eternity; the Augustine, Kant, and so on. I am Trying to read Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative. I find it difficult, but there is this very old notion of nunc stans I am trying to think through. Kierkegaard is famous for his "eternal present" and Wittgenstein followed suit, I think. He was a fan of Kierkegaard.

So after that long preamble, what of the summum bonum? I see the grand religious narratives as symbolic an allegorical presentations of the journey of self-realisation, variously conceived and envisaged in different cultural milieu. But that self-realisation, in my lexicon, is possible due to the sense in which h. sapiens is the Universe become aware of itself. We're not simply the epiphenomenal byproducts of dumb material stuff, as the secular academy must assume, absent any meta-narrative of their own. As stated splendidly in one of Albert Einstein's late-in-life musings, by way of a letter of condolence:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. — Wayfarer

Reading phenomenology completely changes the vocabulary of ideas like this. It takes that shift from daily engagement in the world to a broader perspective and gives it a whole new meaning.

Ethics is the support of survival and well-being. It is also their protection, promotion and enhancement. It is applied on many levels or spheres: individual (person), family, groups and humanity. One is higher and larger that its previous one. These are best represented as concentric spheres. An action is as ethical as it does more good to a larger number of people on these spheres. (By "good" I mean of course "in favor of, supporting well-being".) — Alkis Piskas

But then, well-being is no more explanatory than good.

Anyway, there is a book you might find interesting by Oldenquist, called "Non suicidal Society". He talks in concentric level s of ethical obligation as well, only his thinking was the converse of yours: ethical obligations were stronger in the immediate social world. So, familiy comes before country, country before world; that kind of thing.
Anyway, your seem to be looking at utility to determine ethical choices. Like most people, I think this is very often right, and we do this all the time. Deontologists like Kant point to duty, but how does one determine duty? Isn't this bound up intimately with utility?
I use the principle of utility all the time. But remember utility's nay sayers: the hedonic gluttons, e.g.: one person's agony can be bliss for many others (pleasure gluttons), and the calculation for this favors the latter over the former. But clearly, we cannot condone bad treatment of one just to satisfy the balance of utility.
The problem with utility is that people are not quantifiable entities. There is a sovereign "right" one has over the public good. This asks for argument. Also, notwithstanding Bentham's hedonic calculator, heterogenous pleasures and pains cannot be quantified can they???.

Isn't what you're looking for the summum bonum, that being 'the ultimate goal according to which values and priorities are established in an ethical system'? — Wayfarer

I think I agree somewhere in there. Do I think we are "going somewhere" with all this struggling and dealing with a world of glorious beauty and wretched misery? Almost afraid to say this because it is not received well in modern "enlightened" thinking, but yes, I do think this, but my reasons are very difficult to understand. I don't understand them all that well---a good sign, I want to add, that I have the openness or freedom to make thought out of a world of threshold uncertainties. I think, above all, this is the difference between analytic and continental philosophy. The latter puts philosophy IN that marvelous world of existential aporia. The death of philosophy is dogmatism.

I think this because Kierkegaard was right: actuality and reason are a train wreck. Kierkegaard fought against Hegel who wanted to place existence in a ordered realm of reason's historical progress. My take on this is, not the qualitative difference between wht is actual and what is rational, for what is actual as actuality, qua actual, does not deliver the goods. Actuality cannot be released from the ideas that make it meaningful; there is nothing in the actual, again, AS actual, that warrants the distance Kierkegaard wants to place between them. But there is distance, and this is measured in affectivity, not actuality; or, affect-in-actuality is what makes the train wreck. There is no wreck sans value.

What attracts me to philosophers like Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is, in their own way , there is this dethroning of empirical science, which turns foundational analyses of the world into a baron waste land (reminds my of T S Eliot's Wasteland. Of course, people got very angry over his conservativism, but there is a ring of truth in his complaint that the old order of the truth and glory of God was being replaced by something soulless, and the gravitas of being human was being lightened by a trivializing social network {women come and go; talking of Michelangelo} --sound familiar?-- He had obviously read Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety); and a placement of meaning front and center ontologically (though, I don't follow Nietzsche, I don't like where he goes, regardless of how well his critiques hold up).

But for me, meaning, front and center in our assessment of our affairs at the most basic level of assumptions completely rearranges the ontological furniture. The old Cartesain order of res cogitans and res extensa is out the window. Now what rules is res affectus. This is my ontology (remember, it is a work in progress).

What does this have to do with the summum bonum? Happiness, love, joy, bliss are elevated to principle ontologies, as are misery and the rest; but wait!: It is not just wishful fantasizing. Consider that the ground for all metaphysics has to be in the affairs witnessed in the world's phenomena, and here there is nowhere to be found any God of redemption. But what we do see is good and evil. What ARE these in their phenomenological "presence"? This goes to actual conditions, I mean, evil is not an abstract concept; it is there, in the agonizing sprained ankle. And good? This bliss in the Ravel, MIles Davis (whoever): these now may ascend to a foundational status. A metavalue affirmation. Our affairs are no longer local events delimited by a science's categories (which are fine things, of course).

Out on a limb. But human understanding is out there as well.

Superficially true enough, and by the same logic, there is no need to justify not wanting something distasteful. The affirmation or negation of a “want” is given, without the need for arguing its justification, which reduces to the instance of a given effect (want of the cake), the cause of which is left empty (the ingredients of the how of delicious). — Mww

Just to pause on this. The structure of affectivity is twofold: A want, desire, appetite, fear, loathing and so on, can be questioned. Why do you want this? On the other side of this subjective, call it a deficit, there is the true object, the qualified existent, the phenomenon of deliciousness, say, or misery.

Superficially true enough, and by the same logic, there is no need to justify not wanting something distasteful. The affirmation or negation of a “want” is given, without the need for arguing its justification, which reduces to the instance of a given effect (want of the cake), the cause of which is left empty (the ingredients of the how of delicious). — Mww

Did I write "effect"? If I did it was a typo. What is in play is "affect".

As to the superficiality, consider: something being delicious is rather trivial, granted. But it belongs to the same order of things in which are found extraordinary magnitudes of experience. Like intense suffering. It is the entirety of phenomenal possibilities we classify as value that I am saying is the essence of ethics. If there is nothing of this, then there is no ethics. It is more than a presupposition. Value is THE existential foundation of ethics, something existence "does"; we did not invent value, we invented culture and various foods and entertainment, and we struggle with each other over them (ethics) and so on, but this all has its grounding in the solid "givenness" of value-in-the-world. We are not principally ,to disagree with Descartes, res cogitans; we are res affectus, a "thing" of affectivity"

And by value, I mean Wittgenstein's value: the "impossible" goodness of something we call good. Non contingent goodness.

Yes, I actually believe this. I literally believe our ethical affairs are the Real affairs, in the fabric of things, so to speak. I do have my arguments. For me, they begin with Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Lecture on Ethics. They end somewhere in Nagarjuna's Madhyamika.

Herein lies the essence of time wasting. — Tom Storm

I blame myself, Tom Storm. I assumed you at least had a curiosity and a capacity to inquire. The trouble here is that you really don't know anything at all about continental philosophy, which is the implicit background to all this.

Do take note that in everything I said, there was never an attempt on your part to analyze the argument. Head scratching all the way through.

There are more graceful ways to deal with things you don't understand.

I'm not sure of that. Notions of self develop by understanding one's self in relation to the other. Hence one's own agency is only understood in contrast to the agency of others. — Banno

It wouldn't be in contrast. To make this point, as someone like Herbert Meade does, it would be this exterior event, here, the relationship with others, that generates the essential conditions for ethical possibility, which is internalized into the structure of my ethicality. Meade thought this way about language: we witness models of language and behavior outside of us, and take these observed relations of others and internalize them, and this makes for the a construction of the internal sense of self, and the "relation" one has with oneself in the internal dialog (I talk to myself as a mirror structure to the talking witnessed around me. fascinating idea, really. Not complete, but there is certainly something to this). Your position sounds similar:

But then, examining oneself and the content therein as an internalized model would possess all that is required. Further, it is not the other and one's relationship with her that is going to reveal what it is that makes ethics what it is, for external models once internalized do not as models, exceed wht the external affair would be. IN other words, there would be nothing new apart from what is in the relationship.

No, there is something else entirely that runs this show that is presupposed by ethical problems of any kind.

I know that, but I'm saying that it doesn't become ethical until should and shouldn't or ought and ought not enter the frame. Ethics is about behaviour and how to be in the world with others.

If you want to go deeper than that, I am not sure there is a pool bottomless enough for that journey. — Tom Storm

But prior to what one does, one has to BE an agency of ethical possibilities. It is not bottomless at all. All one has to do is look to that which makes an agency of ethical possibility. A person is such an agency (so is a dog or a cat, but that is another matter). A person is, say, rational, but it is not rationality that constitutes ethicality in a person. Reason, Hume made clear, is an empty vessel, and cares not one stitch whether we all live, die, suffer, or anything else. What makes an agency is the capacity for caring, and caring must have something that is of value for it to be about. I care that I can get enough money to buy Haagen Dazs. Why? Because it is so delicious. What is deliciousness? Such an odd question, no? But all such affections go like this. And note that inquiry ends here, for there is no need to justify wanting something delicious, for to be delicious is inherently good, unassailably good. Of course, you can assail many things: can I afford it? Should I steal it? Is it healthy? This kind of thing can be as complicated as human affairs themselves. But: it is these affairs that make for complications, not the Haagen dazs's deliciousness.
Herein lies the essence of ethical agency.

I've already answered this question several times (albeit indirectly). My general position would be we should privilege the flourishing of conscious creatures. A violent action like this would go against that. — Tom Storm

this isn't an answer to a question that asks for the most salient features of something. I'm not asking what we should do or who should be privileged. And I didn't ask if violent actions are good or bad and why. It is far simpler: What is there in the descriptive features of an ethical case, like the one I provide? The should' and shouldn'ts are on hold until we can find out what it is that sits there in our perceptual midst that makes it ethical at all.

I do see that this sounds a little unfamiliar, but so what, the logic of the exercise is clear: I want to know about "the existence of ethics" (the OP). Existence, this is a "what is it?" question. All questions that have a long history of answers have a lot of extraneous analyses and question begging assumptions. But in all matters, the best policy is to begin at the beginning, which is always what is there in the world that gives rise to all the fuss in the first place. This is the originary ground. Ask me about the nature of, say, empathy, and I will say, well, let's look at exemplar cases of empathy and give analysis, and these cases will serve as a descriptive foundation that validates or denies relevance. If someone says to me empathy is a Godly virtue, I would say, wait; back up. Let's look at the concept of God. What is the material basis (I mean, the matters, there in the world, observable or apriori required), that is, the things in the world that gives rise to the concept, that give it meaning. Then we can determine if empathy is a Godls virtue.

The reasoning is simply that before we go on talking about shoulds and should nots, I would like to know what it is the drives the ethical engine, and that can be "observed" in the case itself. It is, if you will, right there on the sleeve of ethical issues, ignored because it is simply a given, and people don't argue about what is simply given.

Not sure what you are trying to address with this lengthy response. Seems like you are using phenomenology to distract from the original point, namely that we can build a robust ethical system on some basic ideas. If you think there is some transcendent aspect to this enterprise I have neglected, maybe it would help for you to describe it directly. — Tom Storm

Nor am I sure why this is so mysterious. This is a philosophical examination of an ethical case. The knife in the kidney is just an example. Nor is it anecdotal. It is descriptive, plainly.
Take a simple case: a person bludgeons another for her money. Why is this prima facie wrong? What is the most salient feature of this case?

The "most accessible possible examination" is your interaction with others, which is there for all to see.

An attempt to base ethics on private self-reflection will lead to nonsense. And does.

Ethics isn't an armchair self-examination. It's about getting out in the world, being amongst others, interacting. — Banno

But consider that talking about relationships with others precludes something about agency itself. Agency comes, analytically, before inter-agency. The question here is, what is it that makes someone an ethical agency in order for ethical relationships to be possible? Look, you can't have an ethical relationship with a fence post. It has to be an ethical viable person, or animal (depending). So, since relations presuppose agency, then what is it that constitutes agency?

SO, what is it that evolution says we ought to do? — Banno

In the most important way, evolution has NOTHING to do with ethics. For evolution will reduce ethics to what is conducive to reproduction and survival. Or, perhaps, an accidental gene mutation? Nothing here speaks to ethics, for whatever any science may say constitutes an ethical obligation, it will be a factual account, and ethics is not about facts.

Ah, then we're not having the conversation I thought we were.

I have some attraction to a very old-fashioned "moral sentiments" view, such as you'd find in Adam Smith. — Srap Tasmaner

Smith? No. I see no fault with moral sentiment, but these are not foundational in their attachment to incidentals (facts). They are, however, as sentiment, filled with meaning, and it is here I find a grounding.