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.

It's a pity you think that.

Sure, we have feelings. One's own feelings are all well and good, and you might do well to work towards feeling good rather than feeling miserable. But that's not the foundation of ethics.

Ethics concerns itself with how one is to relate to others. — Banno

But this with others, what is it? Saying you have concern for others turns the table to you, because you are an other to others, and the most accessible possible examination would lie in an examination of yourself.
You see this, no? It is not saying that ethics is not about others at all. It is sayning what IS it about others that makes for the ethicality of ethic?

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. — Tom Storm

Nothing mystical about a knife in your kidney. That matter is much more basic than you would have it. You, I surmise, would like to treat that knife as Hume and Wittgenstein treat facts. But there is something in the occurrent event of misery, I mean while one is actually miserable, that needs attention. the habit we have, and this I take to be seriously understood, the habit that language imposes of the world both lifts it into understanding as well as silences and occludes. What I am saying is that the "magic" is magical to you because is unfamliar. Face it, Heidegger was right: the more science and technology dominates thinking regarding the place and status of what it is to be human, the more the powerful and profound are pushed out of existence, and by existence, read the manner of our thoughts and feelings. Cell phones are more real to modern sensibilities than existential matters. The fact that almost no one at all takes up such matters is exactly what makes them strange and magical.
That knife in the kidney. Answer me this: what would be a complete analysis of teh bare features of the one sitting there in misery? Spare me the medical contingencies, as well as what a biologist might say, or an evolutionist. Just observe what is there sitting before you.
Clue: there is in the event, at its final determination, something that defies explanation, but is the most salient feature.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

I am not trying to defend phenomenology, and it I were, I would be in a poor position. That would be an true academic's job. I do defend the phenomenologist's approach to basic problems, and I defend things the way I think along these lines.

Phenomenology cannot be doomed to failure, unless Trump destroys the world and all is lost like the library of Alexandria. It is too intuitive. I mean, this and that can be argued, dismissed, and so on, but phenomenology is what you might call a profound and enduring insight.

What I do here is not about what is at issue in all you talk about. What is not arguable is the presence of affect, no matter how this term finds context. And affect (happiness, sadness, misery, joy suffering pleasure, and so forth) is foundational for ethics.

... 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This one seems uncomplicated (however I confess to finding Dostoevsky dull). Are you a Jordan Peterson neophyte?

If you believe in moral realism (derived via God or some kind of idealism) then you are likely to think killing is wrong.

If you believe there is no foundation, then you need to approach such questions existentially - what do you consider right and why. Maybe virtue can guide you, or principles like human flourishing - it's an open question. — Tom Storm

No, I despise Jordan Peterson. Too smart for a conservative, and that makes conservative views sound better than they are.

Moral realism is not about this or that idea. It is a discovery in the analysis of what makes ethics, ethics. Is there something that defies contextuality that also makes ethics what it is? This is like asking, is there something in the nature of ethics that is absolute, that is there, logically prior to any ethical situation or discussion about it? the answer is: well, we all know there is something that is not us, and it "shows itself" in our affairs, imposes upon us needs to pragmatically engage. But all that is imposed is taken up in our world AS part of the way we deal with things. This "being taken up AS" is language and culture. So, I have a bit of moral reasoning, should I assault the old lady for her cookies? The context is the incidentals, how cruel she is, how she is a serial killer and deserves to die, but then, there is no solid proof of this, and she is owns an animal shelter, but those cookies are sooo good. And so on. The question is, in an analysis of this ethical case, is there anything that is to be conceived that is not defined by context? Most think this is an invitation to talk about evolution or biology, but then those are contexts. What about affective meaning? The pain of the bludgeoning qua pain?
Human fourishing 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.

Yes, I would agree with all that, considering your disposition towards consequentialism. On the other hand, from another disposition rather than yours, ethics in itself, as a doctrine, is neither discursive nor intuitive; it is aesthetic. This follows from the notion that ethics presupposes morality. Whether or not that presuppositions holds, is what the philosophy is all about.

The key, I think, is your “what is there” is in need of something that says how “what is there” got to be there, and perhaps more importantly, what the “what” actually is.

To put aside intrusions into matters by interpretations of them, is counter to basic human epistemological nature. We want to know stuff, always have, always will. Even granting that intrusions, re: analysis, of matters sometimes just makes the matter less explained, isn’t going to prevent us from doing it. — Mww

Aesthetics and ethics Wittgenstein puts in the same bin. They are value generated. (Note how modern art aligns with ethical complexities: ANYTHING that can have an impact of an affective nature is both ethically and aesthetically viable.)

I have never appreciated any meaningful distinction between ethics and morality. They are the same problematic. there are "dictionary differences" I am aware.

This last is stickier. The history you refer to, the "how it got there" is important, for nothing meaningful is ever presented ex nihilo. That is, there is history in the understanding-- the acquisition of language, the acculturation process, and so on, and encounters we have bring that history to bear for interpretation. This is, roughly, the issue. Do I ever observe anything at all that is free of the temporal structure (the anticipation of a recollection that is projected into a future) of perceiving? Is all perceiving apperceiving?

The answer seems to be, yes, all that can be understood about what stands right before us is, if you will, an historical event. BUT: does this mean one cannot apprehend IN the language and culture matrix, something that stands outside of it?

It depends on what you mean by "apprehend". I know there is a cup on the table because I learned about cups and tables all my life and this recognition is actually a occurrent recollection. Repetition is what we are! 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? It is because he could "see" the noumenal IN the phenomenon.
Noumena is not some impossible "out there"; it is an impossible "in here". This then moves to ethics, putting Kant aside, completely.

I suspect many are built into our lizards brains and may not be related to rational thought. Some are about survival and procreation. I hate it when people rest all things on evolution but I suspect that we are repulsed and attracted by biological imperatives which then work their way up over history into predilections and imperatives.

Curious point - many animals have strong codes of behaviour. Where does that come from? Same as above I'd say. They keep it simple, they clearly don't go on the lecture circuit advocating mindfulness or contemplative prayer. — Tom Storm

I agree. And animals are, in my thinking, ethically included in our concerns about others. I also agree that "all things resting on evolution" is not the way to go. To me, evolution is a well established body of theories, but there is nothing in these that tell us anything about the qualitative nature of what is experienced beyond, This here was able to win out in the competition with alternatives for survival and reproduction. Pain is an evolutionary plus, but all this says is that pain is useful.

The question in my mind is, pain (and pleasure) was there, in the possibilities of genetic construction (randomly "chosen", of course). What is something like a living hell even there......AT ALL?

Of course, it is almost just a rhetorical question because there is no answer, one might say. I think there is an answer, but it lies in metaphysics; it isintimated here.

There is no ‘foundation’ for phenomenological investigations. That is basically one of the greatest benefits of phenomenology. It doesn’t adhere to any particular ‘foundation’ although it was created (by Husserl) to provide a better grounding for science (not ethics). It is a ‘science’ of consciousness.

If it was used for ethics it would have to take on other forms. Heidegger and others (the hermeneutical types) probably go there in part with their slither the greater phenomenological body (meaning based principally on interpretations of mere words tangential to experience). — I like sushi

This is rather to the point. What does one do with a phenomenology of ethics? I opened with the idea of attending to the case itself that stands there for determination, like a star to the astronomer. An astronomer will deploy paradigms of normal science, and this is not at all unlike what we do all the time: we observe a blade of grass and already the interpretative resources are in play, making the encounter a "regionalized" event. The assumption you bring to light is that this regionalized event of a singular apprehension fills the horizon of understanding. Kant was there before Heidegger: (sensory) intuitions without concepts are empty. But Husserl was revived after Heidegger and in spite of Derrida: Even in this hermeneutically saturated world, we still defer to what is there and it would be ac hoc to dismiss something that is firmly in our intuiitive midst. Husserl reduction is a method for discovery which he believed uncovered the intuitive world that stands before us unregarded (a Douglas Adams word that deserves respect!) There is trouble defending this, for intuitions are "of a piece" with interpretation and it cannot be otherwise. I think this right, but..
Enter ethics. In the analysis of a exemplar of ethical affairs, there is something there, int he intuition that is affective in nature, while certainly conceived AS (as Heidegger would put it) in the language taking it up, an existential residuum that defies deconstruction, tha t is, is analytically unassailable for it is not contignent, not a thing "of parts". Obviously, we understand it contextually, but IN all of this, something tht is not contingent stands before us.
Wittgenstein (in Culture and Values) says his idea of the Good is divinity. WITTGENSTEIN said this!! Why would he? I mean, there is a very good reason he went to al that trouble in the Tractatus to speak "nonsense".

Kant and Bentham-Mill would've never formulates their theories sans a definition i.e. answering the question "what's ethics?" is first and foremost.

For Kant, ethics is simply a universal law! Consequences, ergo what an act leads to, whether happiness/sorrow, are immaterial.

For Bentham-Mill ethics is grounded in the happiness-suffering duo! Consequence, happiness/suffering to be specific, matter.

Are these not the same thing?

My best guess: Bentham-Mill ethics is basically an interim solution to ethical problems/dilemmas until such a point when Kantian ethics becomes practicable/implementable. — Agent Smith

I've always thought Kant's imperative rested with utility, notwithstanding the "good will". How can I universalize my maxim in any meaningful way unless the principle details the specifics of the case? And what is a case if not for the real value that is in play? Act utilitarianism seems right.

Well yes - we kind of have two loose options - taking the Platonic ideal that all balance, goodness, order is located in the Logos and knowledge of this is available to all of us if we have the right teaching. Or we can take a more Nietzschian view, that all human truth is perspectival. Nietzsche has that great line - if you believe in grammar, you're a theist? — Tom Storm

But you make it all so complicated. As for me, I observe the world, not at all like a scientist would. What is there, in the ethical case. There is the old lady, and there is Raskolnikov, there is the bludgeoning. What about this is there of Plato or the logos?If not here, in this typical case, then nowhere. One should not think down from established ideas to and interpretation of a particular; one has to first discover what is IN the particular given case that might warrant a dramatic move toward metaphysics.

Just to add, the argument for moral realism I defend is quite involved. This is but an iceberg's tip.

Ethics doesn’t exist. The illusion is believing in a system of laws to the point that it overrules what you actually want/need/wish to do with your life.

The selfless man is spineless, selfish man is spineless. But the man who cares for being neither one nor the other … is the Self. — I like sushi

But to see this point, you have ask analytic questions. Sure, a system of laws. Now, why do we have laws? Asking why will eventually lead to foundational justifications. Indeed, all contingent goods and bads eventually go this way: It a great lamp because it's bright and so on. What good is brightness? Well, it good for this and that. And what good are these? It may sound tedious, but note where this line of questioning ends up: with some claim of inherent goodness. If this is not there, then you have a mere abstraction, nothing can be good for no reason that does not have its implicit foundational claim in the fabric of existence. Of course, it is not as if this being a good couch or that a bad pair of shoes is written in stone....or is it? The goodness of the couch is certainly tied to the vagaries my likes and dislikes, but the liking itself, the occurrent affair of liking something, something AT ALL, this is is beyond contingency. It doesn't matter why, or in what circumstance, or how evil one's intent is--- liking something, adoring it, despising it, and so forth, have in every case an existential counterpart: that which is in the world which is adored, despised and the rest.

Ethics is something to do with behavior, and in particular something to do with our behavior towards one another, but there are many ways to describe two (or more) persons in relation to each other without an ethical ‘dimension’, as we might say — biological, economic, and so on.

I’m tempted to say something like this: suppose we start not with persons only, but with another element, something like The Good. Seriously, full-on Plato. Suppose we think the minimum configuration we’re interested in is two people in relation to each other and also in relation to The Good. This, rather than just taking “good” as a way we might categorize the relations obtaining between people, because we want more than that: an ethical act, an ethical moment would be one that is not just a matter of what I do to you “being good” or not, but also of my “being good”, of my acting out of goodness, of my sharing in goodness with you, inviting you also to be good, of inviting you also to take up a relation to The Good as I have, recognizing your capacity to relate to The Good as I do, and so on. Not a matter only of categorizing an action, but of a multifaceted interaction with this third thing.

Reifying it like this can also serve to cut off the temptation to ‘finish’ good instrumentally — that is, as “good for” something or other. An ethical action is one that is good, full-stop, not good for you, or for your happiness, or your well-being, or for society, or for anything. Not in furtherance of some purpose, higher or lower, something we might eventually attribute simply to individual (or social, or biological) preference or habit or desire, but only in relation to The Good. If I act with one eye on you and the other on this third thing, The Good, with a commitment to you but also to this other thing, that is ethical. It’s not just you that has a claim on me, but this other thing as well.

I generally go in fear of Platonism, but off the top of my head I can’t really think of another way adequately to convey the absoluteness of the ethical, if you see what I mean. And I can’t imagine how we give substance to this third thing, The Good. I’ve no idea what to say about it. Maybe it’s just a way of throwing everything that touches our ways of behaving toward each other into one basket — all the biological, social, cultural factors, all those little hints and warnings and exhortations about what is good. All of that taken together seems to have a life, or at least an existence, of its own, that we find ourselves beholden to as much as we are beholden to ourselves and to each other. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, you sound you would very much enjoy Emanuel Levinas. It's a tough nut to crack, requires patience if you've not read anything like this. But his Totality and Infinity is a revelation.
When we think of the Platonic Good, we think of the Republic, right? And the cave, the shadows, the sun and so on. Now, Plato was, I guess, the father of rational realism, and we think of the Good, it is some IDEA that all instantiations of good are of.

There is only one way to reify the Good, and that is, find what is Good (and Bad) in the fabric of things: just what is so bad about, say, a toothache?