, are you here arguing that at least some sense-making is non-intentional (be it either conscious or unconscious)? — javra

If it matters to us, if it is important to our goals, then we are implicitly aware of it, even if we don’t know how to articulate it explicitly in words.

, I think you can make a much stronger case for the result of Ellie's decision (no matter which it is) promoting her eudaemonia, her overall well-being. Sometimes doing the right thing doesn't, and can't, make us happy, though we may see that it is the right thing, and will work toward our eventual good — J

My objection to Aristotle’s concept of happiness as eudaemonia, and this whose ethical theories are influenced by it, is that it conflates the hedonic and the cognitive aspects of experiencing. As a result, it fetishizes intent over sense-making. One can allegedly ‘want’ suffering , pain or misery instead of pleasure and happiness. We make decision all the time between short term reward and long term benefit, between the thrill of the moment and an ‘eventual good.’ But in doing so, we are not dealing with different forms of the hedonic, but different ways of making sense of the situations that will produce happiness. In other words, it is the cognitive aspect of goal-seeking that is involved when we choose none route to happiness over another. Choosing the longer term benefit over the immediate reward requires construing this far off reward within the immediate situation.

When we get what we want, doesn’t that automatically make us happier than we would have been had we not achieved that thing that we wanted?
— Joshs

This is a psychological question, not a philosophical one, I would say. For what it's worth, my answer is No. All too often, as I know from my own experience, getting what you want can be a bitter disappointment (and bad for you too!). — J

It’s both a psychological and a philosophical question. It would be strictly a psychological question if I were looking only for an empirical explanation. You said getting what one wants can lead to disappointment. Understood in terms of temporal sequence, I begin with a desire, which already has in mind its object, at least in a vague way. What I have in mind is a source of happiness for me in the instant I imagine it. If I achieve that desire, if what I actually get reasonably matches my expectation, it will make me happier in the instant I get it, just as generating the image of it in my imagination does. What you’re talking about is a situation where what I actually achieve doesn’t reasonably match my happiness-producing expectation. The ‘real thing’ doesn’t stack up against what my expectation produced in my imagination. Your point seems to be that reality often falls short of our dreams. I dont disagree with this. I’m simply saying that, strictly speaking, it is not the case that we dont want to feel happy, since the feeling of being happier is built into the very concept of desire. Desire is the expectation of obtaining an object or achieving a goal that will make us happier than we would be if we didn’t obtain that object.

. possibly I've hung out with the wrong people but the idea that "humans necessarily want to be happy" is extremely implausible to me. Here, for instance, is a person named Pat. Pat suffers from a variety of psychological, physical, and spiritual maladies that produce a kind of chronic frustration, depression, resentment, and lack of ease -- in short, what we mean by "unhappiness." If you ask Pat if they "want to be happy," the answer you will get is: "Nonsense. What you call 'being happy' is for sheep. I operate on a higher plane. Of course I'm miserable, but that is what happens when a person of true intellect sees the world aright. — J

I’m trying to distinguish ‘ happy’ from want, desire, preference. When we get what we want, doesn’t that automatically make us happier than we would have been had we not achieved that thing that we wanted? Is it possible to will misery, or is that a contradiction in terms? I recognize that some believe consistent happiness is impossible , or that no growth comes without pain and suffering, or that misery brings with it its own insights, but that’s not the same thing as wanting unhappiness as the immediate goal of a desire.

when determining the guilt of someone in a court of law, someone might say of the accused - 'It feels like he's guilty to me.' - and determine guilt based on this emotion rather than any facts provided about the crime. I suspect we wouldn't want important decisions made based on how it 'feels' to any given person at the time. Would we not want to use differnt tools? How do we determine which approach to privilege in the light of what you write about emotion — Tom Storm

Great question. What kind of mental processing is taking place when we have an intuition, a gut feeling? How often do experts in a field, such as surgeons, pilots, tightrope walkers, rely on the felt sense of a situation to guide them? Are they ignoring the facts that they have learned over the course of their careers or, on the contrary, holistically drawing from that reservoir of knowledge to arrive at a decision? I think what makes that decision ‘felt’ rather than laid out as a logical structure is that it is too fresh an insight to articulate is such developed terms, not because it is lacking conceptual substance.

To be rational, we must often go against ourselves — Philosophim

And by what criterion do we ‘go against ourselves?’ What higher motive intervenes against ‘emotion’ except another emotion? Let’s say I derive pleasure from playing video games all day. Then I decide it is getting in the way of my accomplishing more important goals. In both instances, the pleasure motivates my actions. The video game provides pleasure by challenging my skills. and giving me a clear measure of my progress. When it occurs to me that I could be using my time better elsewhere, this is motived by the potentially greater pleasure associated with those other activities. Perhaps they are even more challenging , or challenging in a more multi-dimensional way. In each case, pleasure is intimately associated with creativity, and constitutes the measure of what is intellectually challenging.

Emotion here goes hand in hand with intellectual development. Why should we want to be reasonable unless knowledge were intrinsically rewarding? Why would knowledge change our mind about anything, causing us to ‘go against ourselves’, unless reason were its own reward? Addiction is so powerful because the rewards are immediate and the detrimental effects are more gradual.

I don't even think most anti-realists believe the position themselves, even if they think they do, since they generally end up pointing to some standards as the benchmark of the good. Even pronouncements about how such anti-realism can enhance freedom or "fight fascism," presume that freedom is good and fascism is not. And indeed, they often make this the standard that justifies everything else. So, I don't even see myself as that far from them in the end. I too put a premium on freedom, I just think they badly misunderstand its essence by only considering it terms of potency/power. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are positions that purport to go beyond the realism-anti-realism binary. I’m thinking of poststructuralists
like Deleuze, Focault, Derrida and Heidegger. They argue that of course there are standards of right and wrong, true and false. These are like the banks of the river , which maintain their stable shape against the changing flow of the river. But they point out that the bank eventually erodes and changes, just like the river itself, but much more gradually. Perhaps the changes in the bank are so incremental that we don’t notice them, ignoring the drift of sense over time of our formulations of moral goodness. What allows societies to function is not an unchanging foundational basis of the good, but shared intelligibilities and values within a contingent culture. One could say that mutual intelligibility is a foundational good , but the substantive content on which that intelligibility is based is contingent and relative.

Todd May is among those who claim that such thinking sneaks in ethical grounds through the back door:

What I would like to argue here is that despite themselves, Deleuze, Foucault, and Lyotard predicate much of their political work on several intertwined and not very controversial ethical principles. The mistake, made by Deleuze and Foucault in avoiding ethical principles altogether and by Lyotard in trying to avoid universalizing them, is that their avoidance is itself an ethically
motivated one. In the conversation cited above, where Deleuze praises Foucault for being the one “to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others,” he is laying out a principle of behavior that it would be unimaginable to assume he does not think ought to bind the behavior of others. In resisting an essentialism about human nature, there may
have been a resistance to telling people not only what they want but also what they ought to want.

Where they must form an ethical commitment, and this is a commitment in keeping with poststructuralist political theory, is at the level of practice. Some practices are acceptable, some unacceptable.” “…claims to ethical truth can be seen as no more problematic than factual claims to truth, claims made in the cognitive genre.” Ethical claims also possess a universal character. Claims that one ought to perform action X in circumstances C, or that killing is wrong, or that it is ethically praiseworthy to help those who are oppressed by one’s own government are not made relative to a cultural context… It is precisely because ethical claims mean what they seem to mean that they are universal; and if they are true, they are binding upon everyone.” The difficulty attaching to ethical discourse derives from the difficulty, given the possibility both of competing values and principles and competing descriptions of the circumstances one finds oneself in, of articulating a correct ethical position. Were ethics to be situation-specific, there would be no such thing as ethics,
because there would be no generalization.”

What May and other critics don’t appreciate is that criteria of acceptability are contingent products of differential relations within a community. The challenge for Deleuze and Foucault isn’t to determine what constitutes an acceptable ethical content but to avoid getting trapped by any qualitatively contentful ethical principle.
“…what is at issue here is not how to promote the correct arrangements but how to assess whether an arrangement or practice, once promoted, is indeed active or reactive. In other words, the question is not one of how to achieve a goal, but one of deciding which goals are to be achieved.”

The ethical question for poststructutalistsm is not whether and how we achieve just relations but whether and how we deal with the struggle between competing goods, how we manage to think beyond justice understood as singular traditions of the good, so that we can focus on enriching our traditions with alternative intelligibilities, thereby expanding the inclusiveness of our relational structures.

No, this is just another person trying to justify fulfilling their emotions and elevating them in importance as something approaching rational thought. It is not. Emotions are snap judgements with what we perceive at the time, and nothing more — Philosophim

Would you be amenable to the idea that it is just as a convenience that we separate affective and rational aspects
of thought into district categories? What if we just treated the rational and the affective , the hedonic and the cognitive, as two inseparable components of all thinking? Affect would be more than impetus, like a reinforcer that points the way and retires to the corner while rationality does its work. At every turn in a rational argument the aim we are driving toward acts as a guide and criterion for what constitutes the correctness and relevance of our thinking. It not only constantly tells us how we are doing , but whether we should continue to do what we are doing. It sets out and adjusts what is at stake and at issue for us at every moment of rational thought.

Emotions are for children and animals. They are guides and impulses for doing, not thinking. Rationality is contemplative. It considers all sides. It looks for outcomes. Then you have to decide if you want to act on that rational outcome, or your emotion — Philosophim

I know this won’t convince you, but I wanted to counter your comment with Robert Solomon’s view of emotion:

“I didn’t mean it; I didn’t know what I was doing. I acted without thinking; I acted irrationally. I was emotionally upset.” How often we hear that! And, without attempting a refutation, we sense its falsity, the hollow desperation that accompanies a feeble and halfhearted excuse. “I was emotionally upset”; that is the touchstone of a cop-out plea of momentary insanity. But we know better; not only did you “mean it,” but that single ephemeral “lapse,” as you call it, was more full of meaning than the years of labored inhibition that preceded it. You knew exactly what you were doing. You seized the precise moment, and you went straight for the most vulnerable spot. You knew exactly where to cut deepest, how to manage the most, and you knew exactly what the consequences would be. You had planned it for years, brooding and in fantasy, privately rehearsing and envisioning its effects in quick forgetful flashes.

And yet you think the seeming spontaneity of that instant negates those years of strategy and rehearsal. “Irrational”? Nothing you have ever done has been more rational, better conceived, more direct from the pit of your feelings, or better directed toward the target. That momentary outburst of emotion was the burning focus of all that means most to you, all that has grown up with you, even if much of it was unacknowledged. It was the brilliant product of a lifetime of experience and knowledge, the most cunning strategy, and it had the most marked sense of purpose of anything you have ever done. Despite the consequences, can you really say that a you wish you hadn’t done it? And yet we hear, “emotions are irrational”—virtually a platitude. The emotions are said to be stupid, unsophisticated, childish, if not utterly infantile, primitive, or animalistic—relics from our primal past and perverse and barbaric origins. The emotions are said to be disruptions, interfering with our purposes in life, embarrassing us and making fools of us, destroying careers and marriages, and ruining our relationships with other people before they have even had a chance to take hold. “It was fine, until you got involved,” “it would be all right if you didn’t feel so guilty about it,” or “it was a fine triangle until he got jealous and spoiled it.”

The emotions are said to disrupt our thinking and lead us astray in our purposes. This what I call the Myth of the Passions: the emotions as irrational forces beyond our control, disruptive and stupid, unthinking and counterproductive, against our “better interests,” and often ridiculous. Against this platitude, “emotions are irrational,” I want to argue that, on the contrary, emotions are rational This is not only to say that they fit into one’s overall behavior in a significant way and follow regular patterns (one’s personality”), and that they can be explained in terms of a coherent set of causes according to some psychological theory or another. All of this is true enough. But emotions are rational in another, more important sense. Emotions, I have argued elsewhere,1 are judgments, intentional and intelligent. Emotions, therefore may be said to be rational in precisely the same sense in which all judgments may said to be rational; they require an advanced degree of conceptual sophistication, including a conception of self and at least some ability in abstraction.

They require at least minimal intelligence and a sense of self-interest, and they proceed purposefully in accordance with a sometimes extremely complex set of rules and strategies. In this sense, we may well talk of the “logic” of the emotions, a logic that may at times be quite difficult to follow but a logic which is, nevertheless, never merely an emotion’s own. Even the most primitive emotions, fear for one’s life of love of one’s mother, require intelligence, abstraction, purpose, and “logic” in this sense.

The topic was how to rationally approach suicide. I didn't state you wouldn't be emotional. I stated don't make decisions due to emotion. That's irrational — Philosophim

I have a quibble with the way both of you have been opposing the rational and the emotional in this conversation. Are either of you familiar with the affective turn in the social sciences and philosophy that took place a few decades ago (Antonio Damasio’s work is one exemplification of it)? The gist of it is that emotion is the cradle within which rationality rests. It is what gives the rational its coherence, intelligibility and relevance. Without emotion rationality becomes dysfunctional and useless. I understand what you mean when you refer to situations where persons dealing with illness and death become lost in a fog of confusion. Last year my mother starved herself to death as a result of advanced dementia. My brothers and I had to support my 101 year old father in making difficult decisions concerning whether and to what extent to intervene in my mother’s actions ( feeding tube vs home hospice vs nursing home). The issue of agency becomes critical as people we love get older and their mental functions are compromised. Earlier in my mother’s illness, I fought with one of my brother over whether to sneak antidepressants into her regimen of pills to counteract her depression and agitation. I remembered that prior to the onset of her symptoms , she was opposed to the idea of anti-depressants. My brother was convinced that her alzheimer’s made her incapable of making that decision any longer, as though there was no core sense of self left there.

Health care workers have undoubtedly been influenced by studies showing that those with advanced dementia perform poorly on emotion recognition tests. But these studies can easily be misinterpreted as indicating that people advanced dementia lose their ability to understand emotion, which can lead to under-appreciating their agency and humanity in this regard. By the same token, opposing emotion to rationality by treating the former as ‘irrational’ leads to dismissing the traumatized person’s communications as deranged. That is, we blame their confusion on their ‘emotions’ rather than on the unfamiliar new situation they have been thrown into. All I’m saying is that rather than couching the issue in terms of rational vs emotional , you might consider it in terms of breadth of perspective. Those dealing with profound trauma and loss lack the conceptual anchors to process their situation, since familiar intelligibility is precisely what has been lost, not rational capacity.

Science can collect 'observations' and data. Knowledge on the other hand requires a definition to be provided and a theory of meaning to be defended.

I for one am privy in favor to demoting knowledge in part to be the socially special sorts of beliefs we possess. Knowledge as merely a subset of belief of a privileged sort by some pragmatic/social means of justification — substantivalism

Have you read any Heidegger? Philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe captures Heidegger’s approach to the objectivity of science below:

Goals, projects, and networks of purposes play a constitutive role in science, just as they do in the case of artifacts…
I suggest that background networks of projects, values, and teleologies do not merely constrain and focus scientific inquiry. As with artifacts, they also serve to constitute the very sense of the entities under investigation. For example, Dupre ´ (1993) argues that background goal structures and projects result in different modes of classification, effectively constituting different sortals which serve to classify and, more important, individuate entities.

Consider a rock on a mountain side. The rock is observed over some considerable time by a number of different parties who are all eventually asked whether it is still the same rock. A tour guide says that it is not, because a lightning strike knocked the rock from a conspicuous location which made it a famous landmark that functioned as a guide for tourists. Its significance as Beth's Rock is therefore no more. A geographer agrees with this interpretation. However, a physicist disagrees and explains that it is the same rock because it is the same ‘lump of stuff' that has endured through space-time; it is constituted from the same matter and retains the same shape. But the resident chemist disagrees with the physicist and points out that it is not the same rock. The original rock was made from element x which has been subject to fast atomic decay.

All of element x has broken down to element y and hence it is no longer a lump of x so how can it be the same rock? An artist chimes in to say that it is the same rock because it retains the same unique blend of surface textures, shadows, and exquisite patterns that have made it such a popular choice among painters over many years. Needless to say we could go on and find many more projects, values, and functions which serve to constitute our sense of the extant; a thing's essential ‘whatness', ‘whereness', and ‘existence'. Again, teleological webs seem not only to constitute objects by selecting different sortals, relative to which x is individuated, but also to constitute the sortals themselves. To claim otherwise would be to commit oneself to a near infinite variety of possible sortals from which our interests select, which amounts to much the same claim in any case.

To the unspiritual rationalist, the foundations of our universe are irrational and meaningless. There is simply nothing that allows him to conclude differently. From what premises would be be able to do that? — Tarskian

You claim that rationality leads to the conclusion that the universe is absurd, irrational and meaningless, and that therefore spirituality is the only alternative to despair and desire for suicide. It seems to me you are forced into this assertion by a conception of rationality that is abstractive, narrow and rigid (the same conception of the rational that led Enlightenment and German Idealist philosophers to posit the need for a god) . It leaves out a deep range of ways of producing intelligibility , meaning and understanding that are more fundamental than abstract, derivative modes of thought like formal logic and mathematical calculation. There are more intricate and robust forms of order, continuity, consistency and relevance available to thinking than that of the stultifying and stifling forms of rationality you have in mind.

I completely agree with you that rationality as you understand it is profoundly arbitrary in its foundations, but what you forget is that it is a human invention, one method among many possible methods we concocted at a certain point in history to organize our world. And , as you have discovered, it is a limited and ultimately inadequate way of making sense of the universe. But you make the mistake of blaming the universe for one crude and inadequate way of making sense of it that human beings happened to become enamored of at a certain point in our cultural development. Instead of replacing this clunky device you call rationality with a more adequate way of organizing events, you hold onto it and supplement it with ‘spirituality’, which is just your clunky rationality in another guise, a guise which allows you to fill in the holes of you logical analyses with whatever attributes you think it leaves out (the origin of purpose, love, meaning). Instead of filling in your failing ‘rationality’ with an equally inadequate ‘spirituality’ , I suggest you dump both sides of your dualist ontology in favor of a more useful and productive method of understanding and meaning-making.

If you want to to convince people (and maybe you don't, but surely most people don't think the explanatory gap has been solved) it might be helpful to lay out the core premises and how the conclusion is supposed to follow from them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think one’s explanatory toolbox is limited by the choice to translate philosophical concepts into a naturalistic vocabulary. I’m sure you’re aware that the pansemiotic empirical notions involved in this discussion draw heavily from Peirce’s unique synthesis of Kant and Hegel. Assuming your familiarity with their work, would you say that Peirce or Hegel offer a solution to the explanatory gap?

Bayesian mechanics is about how brains minimise the environment's capacity to surprise us.

It has all the energy. We have all the smarts. We learn to make it a predictable relation. And that is how we insert an "us" into "our world". That is how a modelling relation arrives at its biosemiotic Umwelt — apokrisis

I’m thinking of Merleu-Ponty’s position, where he states:

“the world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects”

It seems to me that this deviates a bit from a modeling relation, in that it relies less on symbolization and coding , directed from organism to world, than to patterns of making changes in a world whose features are defined by the nature of that normative activity. Producing a world doesn’t mean coding a world but performing one.

The irony is that these stories are dripping with blame and reproach, attempting to guilt-trip me into buying into your irrational system. "How dare you tell poor little Susie that she wasn't doing her best! You monster!" I do think that guilt-tripping on the basis of fictional shame-porn is a problem. :roll: I would imagine you could do better, especially given the fact that your strange accusation-based strawman followed my distinction between an assessment and an accusation ("The person in question need not even be told") — Leontiskos

But you’ll notice in the story you were right about Susie not trying her best. It was just that she knew what was going on with her and the reason for it. I’m not blaming or reproaching you. But I will insist that
claiming someone is not doing their best is an accusation, regardless of how you sugarcoat it. All forms of blame (including concepts like narcissism and laziness) are based in hostility, and as such are accusations, even if they masquerade as affectively neutral rational judgements. Hostility has no choice but to remedy a violence against the moral with a corrective which itself must be violent, a battle against a bad will. I don’t blame you for blaming, because I believe you’re doing the best you can, given how things seem to you, and your blameful approach is the best way for you to make progress on your thinking. I don’t mean your were determined by causes, I mean you have put a lot of work into thinking through issues of morality, and what you currently believe undoubtedly represents an achievement with respect to your younger self. I would say the same of the larger culture that embraces moral guilt and blame. They are moving in the right direction, so I encourage rather than blame them. My approach isn’t right for them until they’re ready to embrace it, on their own terms.

I drove into town yesterday. Was I doing my best when I was driving? Of course not. Was I attempting to not-do my best? Of course not. Nor was I self-consciously aware that I was not doing my best. If I can drive well enough without doing my best then I will do that, because it requires enormously less effort. — Leontiskos

How did you know you weren’t doing your best? What kind of information should one look for to tell them where they stand with respect to ‘their best’? What aspect of a task seems effortful to us, and why? Does it depend strictly on the features of the task, independent of our own attitude toward it, or is the feeling that something requires too much effort a function of our interest in it? How many times do we say to someone, ‘wow, that task looks very hard, it must have required quite an effort’, and have them respond, Nah, I was enjoying myself so much it felt effortless’?

Where we choose to focus our energy and attention, and our perception of the effort involved, is a in large part a function of what aspect of our situation we feel we can immerse ourselves most completely into. We choose to devote less effort in one direction in order to focus on another, more fulfilling one. From a skilled coping point of view, motivation can’t be defined in quantitative terms. Cognitive scientists and philosophers of mindfulness who study skilled coping argue that one is at one’s best not when one applies a plan and then accelerates one’s way through its performance by increments of degree ( I am doing better and better, trying harder and harder, because I am going faster and faster). The measure of doing one’s best from the vantage of skilled coping is about total attentiveness and immersion within the contextual changing demands of the task at hand, a ‘going with the flow’ rather than trying to force the flow into a pre-designed trajectory and endpoint. It’s about being responsive to the changing nature of the task rather than ‘forcing’ our will on it.

When someone regrets something and says, "I shouldn't have done that," they are very often acknowledging that they were not doing their best — Leontiskos

No, they are acknowledging that how things seemed to them at the time they made their choice, and how things seem them now , has changed. Often, new information comes to light that wasn’t available at the time one decided, and one berates and blames oneself for not having known this information earlier. Guilt is about second-guessing oneself: ‘I should have , could have’. It is 20/20 hindsight. But they were doing their best when they acted in a way that they now regret, and they are doing their best in now reflecting on that original decision in light of the new information which shows that their former self to have made a mistake.

The world you are proposing is one full of narcissists who believe they are not at fault for anything and are beyond criticism. — Leontiskos

I didn’t say guilt isn’t useful. I said that we can transcend the notion of guilt as self-blame and moral culpability. As long as human beings constantly transcend their circumstances, constantly unfold new outlooks and cultural identifications, they will continually re-assess their relationships with others, and this will lead to feelings of guilt. While guilt is most often associated with our sense that we have sinned, at its core , it alerts us to the fact that , as we grow and change, we find ourselves dislodged from previous ties and loyalties. For instance, one can feel guilty for unintentionally betraying close friendships with co-participants in a fundamentalist religious community once one no longer embraces the religion’s credo. The feeling of guilt forces a new decision; do we try and conform, fit ourselves back into the social role that we have become dislodged from, or forge ahead and find ways to mend those broken bonds of trust by creating a new social role for ourselves, and friendships based on new dimensions of mutual understanding?

Bayesian mechanics models that modelling relation for us. We build a world of intent and expectation in our heads so as to feel we are in control of the world instead of the world being in control of us. We insert our being into the world as the new centre of its being. Consciousness is the feeling of standing apart in ways that subjugate material reality to our mental whims. A difference between us and the world is what must be constructed so that there is then an us that can be deeply engaged in the flow of the world — apokrisis

Do we build a world of intent and expectation ‘in our heads’ or in our embodied patterns of material interaction with an environment? What’s the difference between a model and a representation, and the difference between both of these and the enacting of a world through sensori-motor coupling with an environment? Isnt normative point of view (intent and expectation) the hallmark of all living self-organizing systems rather than just conscious ones?

Eg., - what does this mean? Can you do it in a sentence?

The boundary of the self that we care about , and whose enrichment motivates our actions, isn’t physical or spatial , but functional. That is, we naturally embrace into the self all of the world that can be assimilated on enough dimensions of similarity. If we didn’t have this filter, our world would be an indecipherable chaos, as would our ‘self’.
— Joshs — Tom Storm

The self is just a way of integrating experiences on the basis of compatibility or similarity. It is a continually evolving point of view or perspective that only maintains its unity by changing in a self-consistent manner as it incorporates and organizes new experiences. So the issue isn’t that of self vs other persons , but the limits of my ability to assimilate experiences that are too alien relative to my system of understanding. Sometime my own behavior appears alien to me , and i become unrecognizable to myself. By the same token. I can empathize so closely with those I love that they become part of my self.

aybe you should start a thread (if there isn't one) on how we pursue moral quesions using the kind of approach you prefer. I can't see how it would work except as theory, given how society currently functions. What would need to change for such ideas to gain traction in a substantive way? — Tom Storm

The beauty of this way of thinking is that it can make our life profoundly more satisfying regardless of whether a single person besides ourselves embraces it. Unlike something like Marxism, its value doesn’t come from changing the world, but from changing our own interpretation of the intent and motives of others (and ourselves). Most of why we suffer from the actions of others comes not from their actions in themselves, but our inability to fathom why on earth they found it necessary to behave in ways that cause pain to those around them. We throw up our hands and resign ourselves to the idea that humans can be arbitrary, capricious, irrational, at the mercy of narrow instincts, drives, social influences. But this leaves us with profound stress and anger.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t you argue that ‘not doing one’s best’ generally requires that the person who is the target of such an accusation be aware of the fact that they are not doing their best, that they deliberately desired and chose to underperform relative to what they knew they were capable of?
— Joshs

No. That someone has not done their best only means that they have not done their best, not that they must have known it. Note too that an assessment that someone is not doing their best need not be an accusation. The person in question need not even be told. If you stop using words like "accusation" you will draw some of the emotion out of this debate, and we might actually come to a considered answer — Leontiskos

Are you saying that Susie might not be consciously aware that she is not doing her best? Are you imputing some sort of unconscious psychodynamics here? I thought the morally responsible agent must be acting from free will? Are there two wills at play , a conscious one and an unconscious one, and if so , how can our choices be free if they are made beneath our awareness? I imagine this dialogue between you and little Susie:

You:” I know you haven’t been doing your best lately with your
piano lessons, but don’t take this as an accusation. I love you and I only want what’s best for you.”
Susie looks crestfallen and replies:
“What do you mean? I’ve never worked so hard at anything in my life. How can you say that?”

You: “You may think that, but I know better , and so does your teacher.”

Susie: “ No she doesn’t. She takes what I say at face value, because she knows I’m a sincere person.”

You:
“ It has nothing to do with sincerity. You have a little demon whispering in your ear not to try as hard as you can, but their voice is so soft, it only penetrates to a deep subliminal level of your psyche.”

Susie: “Then how can you hear the demon?”

You: “ Um, I can’t. I just know you , and what you’re capable of.”

Now Susie calls up her Kellian psychotherapist( Susie is very precocious.She also has a lawyer, so FYI) , who quotes Kelly directly on this point:

“We do not use the conscious-unconscious dichotomy, but we do recognize that some of the personal constructs a person seeks to subsume within his system prove to be fleeting or elusive. But of this we are sure, if they are important in a person's life it is a mistake to say they are unconscious or that he is unaware of them. Every day he experiences them, often all too poignantly, except he cannot put his finger on them nor tell for sure whether they are at the spot the therapist has probed for them.

Now Susie has a confession to make.
“Maybe you’re right. I did try hard to embrace piano like I have my artwork, but my heart wasn’t in it. I just didn’t want to disappoint my teacher, and especially you, since I know it meant a lot to you that I become a pianist like my sister.

The central question still looms: is your position a priori or a posteriori? Is the proposition you assert necessary or contingent? — Leontiskos

I could give a glib answer and say that I believe that my position is necessary only because I have never encountered a situation that invalidated it for me. But that would be a kind of agnosticism , as though my mind could be changed by a counter experience. But my position is a priori, resting on the belief that the concept of immoral intent and motive, which includes not trying hard enough and laziness, is a confused notion.

I'm interested. Is there more? — Moliere

Oh yeah. The golden rule, like the 10 commandments, pre-supposes what it should be putting into question, that we harm , disrespect and oppress each other because we desire such outcomes, that is, that we find satisfaction in instigating or allowing them to happen. So we have to be reminded ‘ don’t do that, it’s not nice, even if it feels nice’. My critique is connected with what I wrote you in a previous post about the psyche being a community of selves, such that the idea of being self vs other-directed doesn’t make much sense. We don’t have to be told to be other-directed or empathetic. Our skin doesn't define the boundary of our intrinsic self. The boundary of the self that we care about , and whose enrichment motivates our actions, isn’t physical or spatial , but functional. That is, we naturally embrace into the self all of the world that can be assimilated on enough dimensions of similarity. If we didn’t have this filter, our world would be an indecipherable chaos, as would our ‘self’.

The golden rule, rather than appreciating our need to make our world recognizable before we can assimilate it ( and this applies especially to the values and thoughts of others unlike us), blames ‘bad intent’, as though we already understand others and still desire to disrespect them (because we’re ‘evil’ or ‘pathological’ or ‘selfish’.) So it perpetuates violence by generating its own violence through anger and blame. Those miscreants who ignore the golden rule deserve to be punished, or at least ostracized and condemned. Can you imagine a world where most people believed that? It would look exactly the same as the world we live in now, where everyone believes in the golden rule and everyone points fingers at each other, throws stones at each other, shuns each other.

What part of the golden rule is dissatisfying, do you think?

Asking since you said "perhaps"

For myself I at least like a commitment to honesty with self and others'. But it's merely a preference. — Moliere

Nobody asked me, but I hate the Golden Rule. It perpetuates the very violences it is designed to pre-empt, by assuming that morality is a matter of motivation and intent rather than understanding.

I want you to think about why it is that someone who is doing their best is not responsible for immorality and for bad effects that might result. A central question here is whether "everyone is doing their best" is supposed to be a contingent and synthetic truth, or a necessary and analytic truth. On my lights it only makes sense as a contingent truth, because the question of whether someone is "doing their best" relies on an investigation into how they are doing what they are doing. In everyday language when someone says, "Johnny is doing his best out there," the presupposition is that it is possible that Johnny might not be doing his best. In doing his best he is doing something that he need not be doing.

On this account, "Johnny is doing his best," is a bit like, "The Corvette is going 100 mph." The claim about the Corvette is not a necessary truth, and therefore in order to verify its truth condition we must examine the speed of the car via the speedometer or a radar gun or something of the sort. Only once our examination is complete are we justified in confirming or denying the claim about the Corvette. — Leontiskos

Let me split up this issue of ‘doing one’s best’ into what I see as its different aspects. Let’s take as an example little Susie and her piano lessons. Susie has only had about 10 lessons so far. When she practices for her lesson, is she doing her best? I have argued that desire is always tied to anticipatory sense-making, to expanding possibilities of intelligibility, and that this is intrinsically reinforcing. There is therefore nothing from a motivational point of view that stands in the way of our ‘going for broke’ in terms of pushing our creative imagination to its limits. And what are its limits? Well, no one expects Susie to perform a Chopin sonata after 10 lessons. Not just the range of possible innovations of individuals , but also of cultures is constrained and defined in relation to how we already understand our world. The lone genius is a myth. Brilliant thinkers arise out of milieus (Classical Greece, Renaissance Northern Italy, 19th century Germany).

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t you argue that ‘not doing one’s best’ generally requires that the person who is the target of such an accusation be aware of the fact that they are not doing their best, that they deliberately desired and chose to underperform relative to what they knew they were capable of? Bringing this back to little Susie, dont we need to surmise that she simply didn’t feel like putting all her effort into practicing? It wouldn’t be a question of aiming a radar gun at her speed of playing, since this wouldn’t tell us anything about her performance relative to her potential unless we compared the results over time and discovered that she was moving in the wrong direction. Even this wouldn’t take us very far without asking her whether she thought she was losing interest in the piano, or alt least losing interest in exceeding her previous level of skill, for whatever reason.

As you can see, I’ve moved the terrain of the issue of ‘doing one’s best’ away from that of a variability in performance given an unchanging ground of positive motivation (intrinsic reinforcement) to push the limits of one’s ability and understanding, and toward connecting variation in performance directly to shifts in intent and motivation. Now things become complicated. Let’s say the teacher calls Susie lazy. What does laziness mean? Does it mean that Susie has decided not to push her creative potential to its limit, and that my claim that such a directedness toward expansive knowing is not intrinsically motivating? Or does it mean that Susie continues to actively expand her curiosity and inventiveness, but not in the direction her teacher wants her to direct it? There are all kinds of reasons we hold back in performance situations. We may be entering a crisis of commitment, where we discover that our time is better spent elsewhere. Perhaps our daydreaming which gets in the way of a current task lead us to our true calling. The question , then, is whether laziness reflects a failure on the part of the accused or a failure on the part of the accuser to recognize that the lazy person is in fact doing their best, but not in a way that conforms to the accuser’s expectations. Perhaps your perception that the other is not doing their best indicates an inability to see past the normative expectations through which you judge their motives. You see what they’re not doing, but not what they are doing.

As my favorite psychologist, George Kelly wrote:

When a teacher complains that her pupil is ‘lazy’ and the psychologist encourages her to observe what the child does while he is being ‘lazy’; when a social worker complains that her client is ‘shiftless’ and the psychologist suggests that she observe and describe the persistence and ingenuity with which he maintains his indigent status; when the psychiatrist complains that his patient is too ‘passive’ for therapy and the psychologist urges him to delineate the variety of ways in which the patient utilizes his ‘passivity’; when a fellow psychologist describes his subject as ‘unmotivated’ and one urges that self-expression be more carefully observed—all of these are examples of the application of the psychology of personal constructs to the analysis of spontaneous activities.

When we find a person who is more interested in manipulating people for his own purposes, we
usually find him making complaints about their motives. When we find a person who is concerned about motives, he usually turns out to be one who is threatened by his fellow men and wants to put them in their place. There is no doubt but that the construct of motives is one which is widely used but it usually turns out to be a part of the language of complaint about the behavior of other people. When it appears in the language of the client himself, as it does occasionally, it always-literally always appears in the context of a kind of rationalization apparently designed to appease the therapist, not in the spontaneous utterances of the client who is in good rapport with his therapist.

One technique we came to use was to ask the teacher what the do if she did not try to motivate him. Often the teacher would insist that the child would do nothing -absolutely nothing - just sit! Then we would suggest that she try a non-motivational approach and let him "just sit." We would ask her to observe how he went about "just sitting." Invariably the teacher would be able to report some extremely interesting goings-on. An analysis of what the "lazy'" child did while he was being lazy often furnished her with her first glimpse into the child's world and provided her with her first solid grounds for communication with him. Some teachers found that their laziest pupils were those who could produce the most novel ideas; others that the term "laziness" had been applied to activities that they had simply been unable to understand or appreciate.

There simply is no evidence that things will get better. It does not exist. Still, the only way to sit out a bad patch, is to believe it anyway in spite of having no evidence. The rational person will reasonably give up, while the spiritual one keeps going. This phenomenon seems to be enough to explain why atheist societies do not last long enough to actually make it into the history books — Tarskian

Some of the most famous atheists ( Sartre, Marx, Derrida, Nietzsche) believe that rationality evolves or becomes, so that today’s evidence becomes tomorrow’s superstition. By the same token, spirituality and doubt walk hand in hand. Perhaps these atheists have a more reliable approach than the faithful.

There cannot be an intersubjectively valid metaphysics worth rational consideration which is not consistent with, and coherent within, the terms of science. That is not to say you are not free to believe whatever seems right to you for living your own life. We all have that prerogative, just don't expect such beliefs to be universally relevant, as science is — Janus

All scientific paradigms rest on an underlying set of metaphysical presuppositions, but it is not job of the scientist to make this metaphysics explicit. Occasionally we get a scientist who is up to the task of pointing to these philosophical presuppositions (Heisenberg, Bohm, Smolen, Prigogine). When a new paradigm replaces an older one, the underlying metaphysical framework changes , along with criteria of what constitutes evidence, proper method, and many other aspects of scientific conduct. The idea that there is only one scientific method, and that science is superior to philosophy because it relies on validation of evidence, is in itself a metaphysical presupposition.

The difference between science and philosophy is that science translates its metaphysical assumptions into a conventionalized language of empiricism, whereas a philosophy fleshes out its underlying assumptions within a less conventionalized language. Neither domain, neither philosophy nor science, is superior to the other in terms of arriving at new metaphysical positions and thus new paradigms. They just use different conceptual vocabularies to get there.

Often, philosophy will produce a new set of grounding assumptions before the sciences get there (Descartes and Spinoza vs Newton, Kant and Hegel vs Einstein, 19th century neo-Kanrianism vs cognitive science. As Jerry Fodor puts it, "In intellectual history, everything happens twice, first as philosophy and then as cognitive science.").

Translating the metaphysics into the language of a science may make it accessible to a larger percentage of the population , and therefore more ‘universally relevant’, but by that same criterion the translation of a basic science into technological devices is more relevant that the basic science by itself. In any case, naturalizing and empiricizing it doesn’t make it more “intersubjectively valid” , it just makes the terms of its philosophical validity intelligible to a larger community.

The focus on "values" doesn't really fit with philosophy prior to the 19th century. In its current usage, it's a term coming down from economics. Nietzsche seems to have been big in popularizing it, and I honestly think he uses the shift to "values" as a way to beg the question a bit in the Genealogy (to the extent that it assumes that the meaning of "good" has to do with valuation as opposed to ends). I'd agree that the idea of something being "valuable in-itself," is a little strange, since "value" itself already implies something of the marketplace, of a relative transaction or exchange. At the very least, it seems to conflate esteem with goodness, which essentially begs the question on reducing goodness to subjective taste — Count Timothy von Icarus

The good for Nietzsche has to be understood not in terms of individual values but in terms of an organized system of values. A scientific theory is one such organized system of
values, with the meanings of the concepts being employed referring to each other on the basis of an overarching gestalt of meaning. Within such value systems , or worldviews, what is true and false can be agreed on, both in terms of moral and empirical issues. When the value system changes, so too do the criteria for marksman’s empirical truth. But one is never i ln a situation where there is normative structure at all within which to navigate such issues. Is there an overall evolution of truth from one worldview to another? I think one can argue this without violating the intent of Nietzsche’s thinking, but it would not be some kind of Popperian progress through falsification.

Presumably, Goodness, at least as the target of practical reasoning, has to have something to do with what people desire. However, to simply claim that Goodness is equivalent with whatever people happen to desire is to deny any reality/appearance distinction as respects the Good, which in turn entails that no one can ever be wrong about what is good for oneself — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am one of those who argue that desire is equivalent to goodness , if one defines desire in terms of anticipatory sense-making. One can never be wrong about the aim of desire to expand options and dimensions of understanding the flow of events. One can only be wrong about the consequences of one’s queries of the world. We construe things people a certain way and they end up invalidating our expectations. But this doesn’t invalidate the desire to know.

Intellectually speaking we can see that the Other is always radically alterior, and as such my own elemental projections of what the psyche is aren't always going to apply. The intellectual achievement is in coming to be able to distinguish between self and other (collectively?) and realizing that Alterity, Otherness, is not the same as badness -- it's discomforting, but a mature, moral sense of self emerges from recognition of this alterity and giving it moral weight in our deliberations — Moliere

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Shaun Gallagher has recently written some interesting things on reconciling self and other in human and animal ethics.

Gallagher links justice with the enactivist concepts of relational autonomy and affordance.

“Play involves action and interaction and the ability or possibility of the participants to continue in play. It's defined by a set of interactive affordances. When one animal starts to dominate in playful interaction, closing off the other's affordance space (or eliminating the autonomy of the other), the interaction and the play stops. Self-handicapping (e.g., not biting as hard as the dog can) is a response to the other's vulnerability as the action develops, based on an immediate sense of, or an attunement to what would or would not cause pain rather than on a rule. Role-reversal (where the dominant animal makes itself more vulnerable) creates an immediate affordance for the continuance of play. If in a friendly playful interaction one player gets hurt, becomes uncomfortable, or is pushed beyond her affective limits, this can generate an immediate feeling of distrust for the other. That would constitute a disruption of the friendship, a break in this very basic sense that is prior to measures of fairness, exchange, or retribution. Robert Solomon captures this idea at the right scale: “Justice presumes a personal concern for others. It is first of all a sense, not a rational or social construction, and I want to argue that this sense is, in an important sense, natural.”

“Justice, like autonomy, is relational. I cannot be just or unjust on my own. So an action is just or unjust only in the way it fits into the arrangements of intersubjective and social interactions.” “Justice consists in those arrangements that maximize compound, relational autonomy in our practices.” The autonomy of the interaction itself depends on maintaining the autonomy of both individuals. Justice (like friendship) involves fostering this plurality of autonomies (this compound autonomy); it is a positive arrangement that instantiates or maintains some degree of compound relational autonomy.”“Accordingly, although one can still talk of individuals who engage in the interaction, a full account of such interaction is not reducible to mechanisms at work in the individuals qua individuals.”

“ As the enactivist approach makes clear, a participant in interaction with another person is called to respond if the interaction is to continue. My response to the other, in the primary instance, just is my engaging in interaction with her—by responding positively or negatively with action to her action. Although research on primary intersubjectivity provides a detailed model of elementary responsivity, it may also be useful to consider Levinas's analysis of the face-to-face relation in order to explicate what this research tells us.” “…according to Levinas, the face-to-face relation primarily registers in an ethical order: the other, in her alterity, is such that she makes an ethical demand on me, to which I am obligated to respond…In contrast to Heidegger who might speak about a system of involvements that consti tute the pragmatic world (characteristic of secondary intersubjectivity), Levinas describes a direct embodied encounter with the other.…the failure to enact that transcendence [recognizing the alterity of the other], as when we simply objectify or reify the other person, is also a possibility of relational contingency.

If everyone is doing the best they can at each moment of their life then no one is responsible for anything, and therefore it is entirely backwards to say that humans are responsible because they are always doing the best they can. — Leontiskos

If we are always doing the best we can, this means no one is responsible for immorality. But one is responsible for rethinking one’s premises when things go badly, and one is responsible for audaciously envisioning new vistas of thought even when things are going well. Being responsible means we are never the victims of circumstances. The reason I say we are not responsible for immorality is because I believe that equating moral harm with intention conflates the positive, productive nature of choice, desire, want, preference, decision, agency, response, intention with the negative nature of the sufferings, harms and deprivations that we are used to associating with the immoral.

Let me elaborate. I believe there is a positive and a negative freedom that characterizes human experience. Positive freedom is the freedom to produce new options of understanding and of action, it is the freedom of new insight, of finding new connections, relations, unities, patterns where previously these were not seen. Positive freedom always moves in the direction of greater intimacy of relation with ourselves and others. We never just desire things. Desire is always directed toward as far reaching an anticipation of events to come as we can manage. Furthermore, because our psychic system is functionally unified at a superordinate level , even the most trivial day to day choices are authorized and guided by our most super ordinate concerns , which always have to do with our core sense of our relations with others, where we see ourselves fitting into larger webs of social dynamics. So even the most trivial choices are aimed at deepening the intimacy of our anticipatory understandings within the social groups that matter to us. Emotions are not separate from these aims. Rather, emotions are the barometers that inform us of how well or badly our efforts are working out. Emotions are not physiological reinforcers, randomly assigning reward to certain actions and punishment to others. Pain and pleasure don’t motivate us in this extrinsic , reflexively causal way. What motivates us, what produces pleasure or pain, is the success or failure of our efforts to make sense of the world.

This is where negative freedom comes in. Negative emotions like guilt, anger, anxiety and despair alert us to the fact that such anticipatory efforts have failed, and we are about to be plunged into the fog and confusion of anxiety, anger and guilt. Negative freedom is the freedom of the flow of events as we perceive them to violate our expectations, to disappoint us, to leave us groping for firm footing. Negative freedom is not much of a freedom at all, because it is only the freedom to experience unproductive chaos. When we find ourselves plunged into this kind of freedom, we can’t go forward or backwards.

It seems to me that you see two kinds of positive freedom, the freedom to do what is morally good and the freedom not to do so. And that these two kinds of positive freedom appear simultaneously in the same decision. For instance, we desire to torture someone. In this instance , my intention is at the same time the cause of my own pleasure and my awareness that I desire to be the cause of the other person’s pain. I think you would consider this a paradigm example of ‘not doing the best I can’. You may also be able to see that from my vantage, desire is never primarily about hording as many pleasurable morsels as I possibly can within a fortress-like self and having to learn to share my things with others. Rather , it is expansive and world-oriented. This doesnt mean we are naturally selfless and altruistic rather than selfish. Both ways of thinking utterly miss the point , which is that there is no hedonic self. It is not selfishness but self-consistency that motivates us.
We want to greedily assimilate the world into ourselves in terms of anticipating events within an ordered system, as we expand ever outward into that world. The choice of doing for self versus doing for others only comes up when others put up barriers to our ability to integrate them consistently within our self-understanding.

The suffering other can only be acknowledged if they can first be identified and made sense of as a suffering other. What matters to us, what we care about, whose suffering we empathize with, is dependent in the first place on what is intelligible to us from our vantage. We can only intend to recognize and welcome the Other who saves us from chaos; we intend to reject the Other who offers the oppression of incommensurability. Freedom from incoherence implies a sense of liberation, freedom from the order of intelligibility and intimacy a sense of subjection. We always have intended to welcome, sacrifice ourselves for the intelligible Other, and always disliked, `chose against' the incommensurate Other. What is repressive to us is what we cannot establish harmonious relation with.

In sum, I would argue that one of the two forms of positive freedom you formulate , the freedom to desire the other’s suffering , or to not care about their suffering, is adding a freedom which is really an enslavement , the freedom to be confused, to decide with blinders on. It seems to me that what you have done is to borrow from negative freedom, the bad things that happen despite our best intent, and attach it to intention itself ( I WANTED to be callous, insensitive, cruel, immoral). This reduces the real positive freedom of desire, intention and choice by compromising its creative, expansive novelty. Because for you there is always the threat that the intent itself is corrupted, positive freedom is partially unfree, and this is just as much the case when we are ‘doing our best’ as when we supposedly are not. It is only because the criterion of ‘doing our best’ is tethered to norms that restrict positive freedom to imagine new realities that the idea of corruption of intent makes any sense.

But you literally captured the post-blame conception in popular culture, i.e., "Leave him alone, he's doing his best!"
I think you yourself will end up sneaking blame in through the back door as well, unless you yield to (psychological) determinism — Leontiskos

What do you want to tell the person who I say is doing their best? Try harder? What’s the difference between the person you praise and the one you blame other than the difference in the result you’re looking for? Are you judging their motives based on your disappointment? How can you tell the difference between the one who is doing their best and the one who isn’t? Or are you arguing that no one is ever doing their best? If I say that a decision always represents the best one can do given the circumstances, I am not saying that the decision is nothing but the effect of a cause , I’m saying that the decision is formed by the circumstances but always transcends it. Any choice must be defined by a background, or else it isn’t a choice at all, but is only the freedom of utter meaningless chaos.

To say that someone could have done better is to miss that what they did choose already leapt beyond the conditions that formed their background. Can anyone know in the instant of that choice what its consequences will be? Because the choice is utterly new, so are the consequences, and only the unfolding of events will tell whether it will be validated or invalidated. A choice is an experiment, the venturing of a bet that one hopes will pay off. Are you to judge its success based on what new consequences it puts into effect for them, or on the basis of an old standard? In either case, who are you to judge what must be their own decision, based on their vantage, and how can you judge the necessity or wisdom of the decision based on its originally unforeseen outcome rather than how things seemed to the person at the time they chose? Isnt this 20/20 hindsight?

And that's when ethics becomes an interesting endeavor: Suddenly I have deliberations and choices not just about what I want, but also others' desires (including different moral sentiments — Moliere

What’s the difference between ‘I’ and ‘other’? Is the ‘I’ a single thing or a community unto itself? Perhaps the difference between self and other is an arbitrary distinction we fabricated , and it’s really a matter of degree? In other worlds, the notion of selfishness is incoherent, because it isn’t a unitary ego we are protecting, but the ability to coordinate the myriad bits within the community of self that makes up our psyche so that an overall coherence of meaning emerges. the sense of a unified self is an achievement of a community , not a given. Whether we do things for ‘ourselves’ or for ‘others’ , the same motive applies, the need to maintain integration and consistency of meaning. None of us can become altruistic, generous, selfless, sharing unless we can find a way to integrate the alien other into ourselves. This isnt a moral achievement , but an intellectual one.

By age three, it actually matters whether his mother takes care of him because she loves him, or just because she has to. It begins to matter what she wants. He can "be good for Mommy" if he tries. By six, he often offers to do something he doesn't really want to, just to please her. (Remember, she's already done 5000 things she didn't really want to, just to please him. He's figuring that out. Now, we have a loving relationship between two individuals - a whole new dynamic of balancing wants — Vera Mont

Why do you think the younger child is not able to figure out what the older child does concerning the balancing of wants? Is it as simple as selfish needs being primary, or is the dichotomy between ‘self’ and ‘other’ too simplistic a way of treating the nature of motivation?

When I hear someone say that we need to get rid of blame (and anger et al.), it seems to me that they don't usually recognize that to rid the world of blame would also be to rid the world of praise, for both are premised on the idea that human beings are responsible for that which they cause. Or simpler, that human beings can cause things, and they can do so in better and worse ways.

As an example, if a soccer game comes down to penalty kicks then the person who scores will be praised and the person who misses the net altogether will be blamed, and it is not really possible to praise the first without blaming the second. Both acts flow out of the same anthropological realities. If I can do well, then I can do poorly. And if my activity can be good or bad, then it can also be appraised as good or bad, and this appraisal can be communicated to me — Leontiskos

Human beings are responsible. But that just means that they do the best they can given the limitations of their framework of understanding at any given point in time. Because their efforts change this background system of appraisals, their future isnt determined by those limitations in a causal manner proceeding linearly from past to present to future. Our past is reconfigured by how we can change our future in the present. But this doesn’t authorize the superstitious belief in the magic of ‘willpower’ , as though some mysterious , divinely inspired force wells up in us to inspire us to do the right thing, or to push us beyond what we thought was humanly possible (how miraculous!) in order to score that goal. The ideology of blame tells us that this strange power is what separates the men from the boys, the heroes from the cowards , the good from the evil.
This completely misses the fact that it is impossible to perform such feats of will as long as there isn’t an adequate cogntive structure in place to make sense of the circumstances we find ourselves in. Our ability to deal with each other without violence and brutality evolves over the course of human history in direct parallel with the evolution of cognitive structure. In a word, the smarter we get, the more peaceful we are capable of being, and the closer we get to a post-blame form of thinking.

I find your position to be very popular, albeit not at an academic level. Where I grew up your position is baked into the culture in a way that creates many, many unexpected problems. My cousin and I used to joke that it was a wonder that the people in our town even kept score at all when playing games such as volleyball, because the logical conclusion of this philosophy would be a ban on score-keeping altogether. I think this has become more common elsewhere via the psychological/therapeutic culture — Leontiskos

I recently wrote a paper on the history of blame in philosophy and psychology . I couldn't find a single example of a post-blame thinking in pre-modern, modern. or postmodern Western philosophy, nor in non-Western traditions. Reductive determinism doesn’t count, because as I argued in an earlier post, they just shift the locus of blame from a free willing person to material causes. This is not at all what I mean by post-blame. No philosophical or psychological approach makes the claim to have entirely eliminated the need for anger and blame. On the contrary, a certain conception of blameful anger is at the very heart of both modern and postmodern philosophical foundations. As a careful analysis will show, this is true even for those philosophical and psychological arguments that pop up from time to time extolling the virtues of moving beyond blame and anger.

I’d like you to give me some examples of what you consider to be post-blame approaches, and I’ll demonstrate the ways in which they sneak blame in through the back door.

We aren't rational by default, but grow into those roles through our communal stories of what a rational individual does. — Moliere

Sense-making is more fundamental than abstract logic or formal rationality, which are just secondary derivatives of it. We dont grow into sense-making, and dont have to be taught by a culture how to do it. We begin as sense-makers, construing events along dimensions of similarity and difference with respect to previous experience, creating channels of interpretation in order to recognize meaningful patterns out of the flux of changing events. Our culture provides us sources of validational evidence but doesn’t dictate the rightness or wrongness of our construals of the world, since no two persons will construe things the same way.

So, if what you want is against a law, you probably shouldn't do it because you can anticipate formal retribution of some kind. If what you want is against a moral precept, whether you should do it or not depends on how much you need the community's support. If what you want conflicts with the desires of a neighbour, you should weigh the foreseeable consequences against the immediate satisfaction. If what you want is a matter of indifference to most of your fellow citizens, go ahead and do it. — Vera Mont

An even more effective e approach is to anticipate how your actions are likely to be misunderstood by others so that you can ‘fly under the radar’ and get what you want without causing others to be threatened by what they don’t understand.

Guilt can be elicited through these stories due to our cultural rituals surrounding acts being blameworthy or priaseworthy, but the story that comes from the guilt isn't the guilt. Our culture invokes guilt in particular circumstances as a means for teaching people to be good (or obedient, or whatever) and the stories arise from that basic manipulation. The particular circumstances of ones own guilt is the narrative, but guilt is an emotional response from an attachment of some kind (the attachment could be as simple as "See clouds:Feel guilt:Explain guilt" -- it needn't make rational sense for the guilt to be there. — Moliere

I’m not inclined to separate guilt as physiological arousal
or somatic sensation from guilt as cognitive assessment. I think the former are meaningless without understanding their basis in the latter. If guilt , or emotion in general is irrational, then rationality itself is irrational. I believe the basis of affect is the assessments that come from our attempts at sensemaking, the extent to which we are able to experience events as intelligible, recognizable, coherent with our aims. Emotion is the barometer that indicates whether we are falling into hole of confusion or confidently assimilating events. Whether a culture invokes guilt or not, an individual will not experience guilt unless they perceive their actions to violate their standards for themselves, regardless of whether this conforms to society’s expectations and norms. Guilt is a crisis of identity that is triggered whenever we discover that our actions dont conform to what we consider our values to be. Guilt is an emotion reflecting the growing pains of personal transformation. To make any significant change in one’s outlook is to risk feelings of guilt.

Guilt need not be so narratively driven -- it can be triggered by any number of events and memories, and need not make any kind of sense. I can feel my guilt is unjustified, because I know that the person guilt-tripping me is eliciting a response -- I still feel the guilt, but that doesn't mean I'm really sorry or think of myself as not-good or needing-to-be-good. — Moliere

My favorite psychologist, George Kelly, defined guilt as the perception of one's apparent dislodgment from one's core role structure. Whatever one does in the light of their understanding of others' outlooks may be regarded as their role. In guilt, our falling away from another we care for could be spoken of as an alienation of oneself from oneself. When we feel we have failed another, we mourn our mysterious dislocation from a competence or value which we associated ourselves with. One feels as if “having fallen below the standards [one has] erected for himself”

It follows from this that any thinking of guilt as a `should have, could have' blamefulness deals in a notion of dislocation and distance, of a mysterious discrepancy within intended meaning, separating who we were from who we are in its teasing gnawing abyss.
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↪Joshs - You can multiply examples of misused blame and judgment all day, just as I can multiple examples of misused knives all day. Neither one of us would be showing that blame or knives are inherently evil.

Do you think praise can exist without blame?

(Note that the example of being "too pre-emptive" is an example of misused blame, or on your account, its antecedent.) — Leontiskos

I don’t think praise can exist without disappointment, which is of course different from blame. We blame when we try our best to understand the motives of another in such a way that we can see those motives as morally justified. In an ideal scenario, it is only after we exhaust all possible generous ascriptions of their acts that we throw up our hands and reluctantly blame them. I am very sympathetic to the enormous difficulty of making sense of the often mysterious behavior of others. All I can tell you is that I’ve never met an immoral, evil, blameworthy or unjust person. It is not that I’ve never felt anger and the initial impulse to blame, but when I undergo the process of trying to make intelligible their motives I am always able to arrive at an explanation that allows me to avoid blame and the need for forgiveness. Furthermore, there is a fundamental philosophical basis for what I assert is the case that it is always possible to arrive at such a non-blameful explanation that can withstand the most robust tests in the real world. Having said that, I’m aware that my view is a fringe one. I only know of one other theorist who has come up with a similar perspective. I’m also aware that my view will be seen as dangerously naive.

On intrinsic nature.

The temptation to say "I see it like this", pointing to the same thing for "it" and "this". Always get rid of the idea of the private intrinsic nature in this way: assume that it constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you. — Banno

I don’t want to speak for TClark, but the way inner nature, or Buddha nature, is understood within a variety of contemporary philosophical perspectives is via the concept of no-self, a cognitive system with no homuncular ‘I’ driving it. As Varela explains "...lots of simple agents having simple properties may be brought together, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole".

The ethical significance of the realization of no-self is that “when there are no more boundaries between myself and the other – when I am the other and the other is me – there can be no animosity, hatred, or anxiety between us. This is the crux of St. Augustine's famous saying: Ama, et fac quod vis (Love, and do what you will). Love – understood in terms of the Christian selfless love (agape), analogous to Buddhist compassion (karuna) – is the cohesive force of interbeing, the (groundless) ground of genuine peace and co-existence. “(Sebastian Voros)

The question is whether T Clark sides with Buddhists like Menscius, who asserts that the Good is tied up with natural kinds of innate dispositions, or with a no-self notion of inner virtue.

Shaun Gallagher writes:

If we ask where precisely is the notion of the good in
Varela’s work, the answer is the Buddhist conception of compassion. The good is what compassion means, the good is to eliminate suffering. So for Varela and for Buddhist theories this is closely tied to the conception of or the elimination of the self as a source of suffering. In
some Buddha traditions, the notion of self is associated with suffering, the notion of compassion is directed towards suffering in the sense that we are trying to reduce suffering, not only of oneself, but also of others. One can conceive of this selflessness in terms of skilled effortful
coping which is associated with the Taoist idea of what is called not doing. When one is the action, no residue of self-consciousness remains to observe the action externally.
In the Buddhist practice of self deconstruction, to forget one self is to realize ones emptiness , to realize that one’s every characteristic is conditioned and conditional. so it’s this appeal to this notion of a selfless type of phenomenon that for Varela really constitutes the sort of core of the notion of goodness, since in fact by eliminating the self one eliminates suffering, and one acts
compassionately.

When you or Joshs talk about guilt this way it is much the same as claiming that a tool such as a knife is inherently evil, and imputing bad motives to everyone who uses knives. The problem is that predications of guilt and use of knives are not inherently evil acts. For example, if you get rid of knives then you get rid of a great deal of nutritious cooking, and if you get rid of guilt then you also get rid of praise and merit. Like a knife, the idea of guilt can be used for good or evil. There is no reason to believe that it is inherently evil — Leontiskos

I would rather compare the knife to our ability to place constructions on events as a tool for cutting reality at its joints. If we are too pre-emptive in how we set up our discriminations, then the intentions of others can appear as a peculiar, disordered chaos, which, measured against the relative coherence of our original assessment of their relation to us makes them appear to us now as irrational, preposterous, stubborn, lazy, malevolent, at the mercy of mysterious impulses, failing to live up to our expectations of them. Our blamefulness judfent, then, is an attempt to salvage predictive value from the only ordered construction available to us to make sense of an aspect of the other person's thinking. Despite this construction having proved unreliable, attempting to get the wayward other to conform to the original expectations (knock some sense back into them, get them to admit their guilt) is the elaborative choice we must make when the alternative is dealing with a person whose behavior in a sphere of social life that is of vital concern to us we can no longer make sense of at all.

Beyond everything that's been written here, I don't think a system that "revolves around anger and blame" is the most effective way of addressing social conflicts. — T Clark

Maybe you and I should start a movement.

If they undergo as much change as the terms for water , then isn’t a phrase like actual physical referent linguistically self-referential, belonging to the hermeneutic circle along with our changing terms for water, rather than sitting outside of it?
— Joshs
Yes. Terms like "actual physical referent" or "materialism" are increasingly difficult to use in philosophical discussion. That's one reason for doubting how useful the concept of a hermeneutic circle is. Language constantly seems to refer beyond itself, and our practices do not find it difficult to use those terms. Isn't that as good as it gets for defining an outside? — Ludwig V

I’m not sure we’re understanding ‘hermeneutic circle’ the same way. The circle of discursive practice is not closed in on itself such that it is sealed off from the empirical world. On the contrary, language expresses material practices. For hermeneuticists like Gadamer, the circle indicates that we are neither spinning our wheels in a conceptual void nor at the behest of an independent empirical outside, but involved in a back and forth between lingustic conceptualization and a world that talks back to our concepts within the language that we use , and according to the questions we ask in to make sense of it.’ As Wittgenstein showed, words only have meaning in their actual use , exposed to and altered by fresh contexts of intersubjective situations.

To understand all is to forgive all? I doubt it.
And I take exception to 'lockstep' applied to willing participation in a community, or adherence to a culture. All cultures have some leeway for individual variation - the more militaristic and authoritarian ones, less than the liberal, egalitarian ones, but always some.
Humans have never lacked the ability to understand one another's motives or tolerate one another's peculiarities. — Vera Mont

To understand all is not to need to forgive in the first place. Forgiveness requires a prior assessment of moral blame and culpability. As far as your assertion that humans have never lacked the ability to understand one another's motives or tolerate one another's peculiarities, the question is where and to what extent you see that understanding and tolerance as breaking down. I am admittedly on the fringe on this issue. I happen to believe that every time one become angry and feels the need to admonish another , or to forgive them, one is failing to understand things from the other’s vantage. Our culture and justice system revolve around anger and blame. Even those of us who believe there are profound flaws in our legal system would defend the need to point out malevolent intent and irrational thinking in themselves and others.