Right, I am just wondering about the general linkage there. I can think of American subcultures (hardcore punk, rap) that are extremely homophobic (lyrics peppered with slurs, etc.) and yet have shed almost all outward embrace of Christian culture. Whereas historically in the West negative attitudes towards homosexuality predominated prior to Christianity.

So for example, the linkage can go in the other way. People who have strong feelings about homosexuality and gender, etc. gravitate towards existing Christian frameworks, which you see in the embrace of "cultural Christianity," or the language can simply be rolled forward without its religious foundations. And this is why I actually think a psychological argument makes more sense, even if those arguments have their obvious flaws.

The culture war makes for very weird combinations here, such that "cultural Christians" sit alongside conservative Christians in condemning liberal Christians' embrace of various philosophies of sex, and yet until relatively recently any sort of "Christianity" that denied the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, etc. would have been considered obviously the gravest sort of hersey, far above any opinion about sex.

We could talk about such things, but given the example you provided, I would simply concede that one should prefer a fertile marriage to a sterile marriage (ceteris paribus). Or using your own language, if it is better to marry a fertile wife than a sterile wife, then it is more choiceworthy to marry a fertile wife.

As to the more general question, we would need to specify the proposition in question. For example, we might want to talk about the proposition, "A sterile marriage or a sterile sexual act is necessarily illicit." I would say this relies on modal reasoning in the same way that "moral obligation" challenges rely on modal reasoning, and I think there are good Aristotelian answers to be had, but I will postpone the question for now given the complexity of this thread. That's the sort of question that could perhaps benefit from a different thread altogether. — Leontiskos

It seems relevant to many of the points made here though. It isn't considered immoral for sterile couples to marry. And if such marriages were considered wholly defective per se that would represent an extremely narrow view of marriage.

Anyhow, while I object to the idea of a sui generis moral good that is discontinuous from other goods, I do not think this means that all value judgements must become "moral judgements." Surely it is better to be born with a functional hand, but it is hardly a moral failing to be born with a mangled one. Likewise, is it immoral or even a sort of deficit for someone born sterile to marry?

This is what I mean by arguments from procreation being too weak. They have not traditionally been thought to preclude sterile heterosexual couples from marrying.

Under this scheme, eristic is what happens when I fail to escape from the direct engagement, i.e., in Adorno's terms, fail to move from the particular (Bob's argument) to the metacritical universal (Christian ideology). — Jamal

That set's a rather large task for oneself though, no? "Christian ideology," is incredibly broad. Even to only focus on the natural law tradition is quite a project. And it would require focusing on the natural law tradition, and not just "the real reasons" some conservatives are drawn to it (which strikes me as necessarily an argument from psychoanalysis of sorts). But there are lots of wrinkles there, not least that the status of homosexuality is not uniform across modern versions of the tradition, nor Christianity, nor conservatism. Yet surely those differences are important in considering the genealogy of why some strains differ.

Can there be a genealogical account of "Christian ideology," that makes absolutely no reference to Christian theology? Or one of the natural law that doesn't account for its philosophical basis? It strikes me as something like trying to explain the appeal of Marxism in the West entirely in terms of the "real motivations" of Western Marxists, as wanting to appear counter-cultural, hip, or transgressive, which, even if it is partially true, will also remain shallow. It doesn't explain the particulars. Costin Alamariu is a reactionary conservative and yet that whole set of masculinist identitarians tends to be quite accepting of homosexuality and its "classical roots." There is not a necessary linkage between the terms "reactionary," "Christian," "conservative," and any particular stance towards homosexuality.

Genealogical accounts are normally big door stoppers for a reason. One thought is that homosexuality was widely considered to be a mental illness, or defect of sorts by progressive liberals until relatively recently. So, if you want a complete genealogy, you have to look at why that changed, as a sort of broad, widely held default, and why particular groups did not find the drive towards this change compelling. But I think here, at the sociological level, you would have to look at particular theological traditions and bedrock assumptions there. This is probably besides the point for Bob though, who says he isn't a Christian, and so is probably not a good target for a critique of Christian ideology.

I think both these philosophers have been accused of committing ad hominem or the more general genetic fallacy. — Jamal

Well, in Nietzsche's case it's also just bad history, with no rigorous methodology, bordering on mere creative fiction. Also, his work is littered with emotional invective, so this criticism is always going to bite in at least some areas. :smile:

(Sorry, I can't help myself here. Nietzsche's many merits notwithstanding, I do not take him to be a very good historian to say the least.)

Ah, I get you now. I thought you had a typo because I was considering the case where one knowingly chooses the worse over the better, not vice versa; hence my confused response. I agree, Kant makes a crucial point here. Although, I would say that if one chooses the better strictly on the grounds that it is better (against one's other inclinations), this would still be a case of "choosing the better because it is better."

The way Plato would put it is that this is a case where the desires of the rational part of the soul (the nous, logos) weigh against those of the lower parts (or in New Testament terms, we might say the spirit, as opposed to the flesh and psyche; or the "heart," as in "the eye of the nous," not the passions, trumping the passions). And Plato's point is similar to Kant's, although I think more nuanced, in that he sees this desire for the "truly best" as known as good as what allows us to transcend current belief and desire, and thus our own finitude.

One of my problems with Kant is that his notion of freedom seems to largely be a sort of consequence of his epistemology and metaphysical assumptions (which I find flawed), and so he has to assume this sort of bare, inviolable, individual freedom. Whereas I think the ancients had the right of it that freedom is arduous to attain, and has a strong social and corporate (and even historical) element as well (something Hegel, Solovyov, and Dante get at quite well too).

We can particularize this to an act of charity. I may correctly see that helping an effective AIDS charity is an act of goodness, or the right thing to do, or in accordance with spiritual principles, or however one cares to phrase it. But if I do so because (though I absolutely agree that it's good to help AIDS patients) I enjoy the attention and the gloss to my self-esteem, Kant would call the action ethically worthless. I wouldn't go that far, myself, but Kant is raising an important point. Isn't there a huge difference between the person who does the right thing for the wrong, or equivocal, reasons, and the person who does it because they want to do the right thing? (An interesting subsidiary question, by the way, is whether "wanting to do the right thing" can be stated in non-Kantian -- that is, non-procedural -- terms, or whether the Kantian conception requires some version of the categorical imperative as the basis for discussing ethics.)

Like everything in ethics, this is nuanced and endlessly complex. I don't think deontological ethics offers a knockdown argument to virtue ethics. In fact, I think they work best in tandem. But one can certainly point out that the question of motivation in virtue ethics needs a lot of elaboration. Is "wanting to be a 'good' human" (in the pre-modern sense of "good human", where it's the same sort of usage as a "good hammer" or "good poem") a sufficient motivation for ethical action? Doesn't it matter why one wants this? Or must we disregard motivation entirely, and merely speak of good or right actions, or the human good as a kind of correspondence with what is essential or natural to humans? — J

Well, why someone acts is a huge part of ethics, both for Plato and Aristotle, but even moreso for the later tradition. Understanding is crucial. Mere habituation is a sort of half measure that is not fully self-determining. So, Kant is getting at something important here, I just don't see how it is missing from the earlier tradition, whereas he also misses that the good person ideally desires the good because of its goodness.

Of course, this is maybe a bit more clear in Plato than Aristotle, and certainly it is more clear in the later tradition, but I think it's fairly clear in Aristotle (or at least many readings of him, including all ancient ones by his fellow Greeks). Where it isn't always clear is in the "Aristotle" of modern "virtue ethics," which tends to ignore that ordering of the appetites (epithumia and thymos to be ruled and shaped by logos) and want to make Aristotle a "naturalist" in a very modern sense that only reintroduces a very weak notion of teleology, normally as some sort of "emergent property" of organisms. Deprived of its metaphysical grounding, this Aristotelian ethics does face issues with including Kant's insights, because understanding and phronema are no longer "higher."

I am working on a project that compares modern character education literature to late-antique philosophy and it's almost like two wholly different Aristotles! A concern in the modern literature is that Aristotle's ethics is "selfish" because it focuses on the perfection of one's virtue. This claim is even more common against Plotinus. I imagine the late-antique thinkers would be thoroughly perplexed by this because their metaphysics of goodness (heavily influenced by Aristotle) has it as diffusive, and always related to the whole. Plotinus took in and brought up orphans at his own expense precisely because he became more like God; "being like God" could hardly result in "selfishness" ("becoming like God" being the express goal of late-antique ethics). They would ask, "how could goodness be a curse and not a blessing?"

Well, suffice to say I think that metaphysics lies at the heart of this disagreement. If man's telos simply means that certain physical inputs (including social or "intellectual" ones, which in the modern context are still considered to be emergent physical inputs) are good for him, and others bad, based on what he is, and thus sex and food sit alongside "knowing and experiencing 'the Good'" as a menu of goods that make us happy, then we face an irreducible and unordered plurality of goods. "Knowing the good and being conformed to it," gets reduced to "having certain sorts of positive experiences." Whereas, when the Platonists read Aristotle, they thought it was obvious that the lower is ordered to the higher, and that the higher required ever-increasing conformity to the Good, which of course involves the willing of the Good for its own sake. This is perhaps more obvious in the Christian tradition, particularly in the idea of Blessed Virgin as the apex all creation, showing forth creation's (and man's) proper role in "giving birth to God," to the "body of Christ" (physically for her, as the Church for mankind) in thought and deed.

Hans-Georg Gadamer would say that these two viewpoints are two distinct "horizons", by which I understand him to mean that they are contexts of meaning or "traditions", that frame and delimit what we can perceive or interpret. We can never "get outside of" these horizons, we are always already situated within them, unable to get at some Kantian "thing-in-itself". — Colo Millz

Do you think this interpretation should be considered as being universal or absolute, or is it itself subject to continuous fusions, potentially becoming unrecognizable in the process?

In Hegelian terms, we might ask if it is absolute, or merely one of the moments of the absolute's coming into being? Or in classical terms would it be merely one form of participation in the infinite Logos, or a universal aspect of intelligibility itself?

As to the Biblical narrative, a difficulty here is that the Bible itself is read in fairly divergent ways by some traditions. However, I don't think the text even requires such a fusion for the notion that man is continuous with nature or an animal, and certainly not that he is a "creature." Such comparisons are quite common throughout the Scriptures. The breath/spirit, ruach, breathed into man in Genesis 2 is the same as that breathed into the brutes, and just consider that not long after this God tells man:

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (Genesis 3:19).

Likewise in Wisdom 6:7

For he which is Lord over all shall fear no man's person, neither shall he stand in awe of any man's greatness: for he hath made the small and great, and careth for all alike.

Psalm 104 (103 in the Septuagint/hours) is another pretty good example of the continuity of man with creation. But man is also a divine image bearer, hence the notion of a "middle being" within an ontology of a "suspended middle" between nothingness and the divine fullness. This carries with it a justification for a certain sort of "anthropocentrism" and yet it's hard to see how this wouldn't carry over into any fusion unless it is simply negated. Man will be an animal, but he will remain a unique one.

Also, the entire notion of man being "creaturely" seems to me to have theological undertones. Doesn't a creature and creation imply a creator? Certainly, Christian thinkers such as Pryzwarra make this essential to their philosophy. Whereas, on a certain view of "naturalism" man and animals are only arbitrary unities, just a "special case" as respects any other possible ensembles of particles that might be considered. Here, biology is only discrete from physics on wholly subjective and "pragmatic" grounds. But man isn't a "creature" here, he is a brute fact, and not even that, for he is an essentially arbitrary subdivision of a universal brute fact (or in some more recent ontologies, he simply a stream of computation in a universal mathematical object, but this "stream" is only arbitrarily distinct from the universal computation, a wholly subjective demarcation).

You don't think parents who see gender dysphoria as an illness are capable of truly or fully loving their children? Would this apply to something like autism or Down's syndrome too (which are surely even more relevant to personal identity)?

Anyhow, if seeing gender dysphoria as a pathology amounts to "denying someone's identity," wouldn't this mean that sex actually is deeply essential to identity in precisely the way essentialist claim? I suppose this would go along with the sentiment that even if a treatment for gender dysphoria existed it would not be desirable, or that it should be removed from the DSM.

Hence, the notion that the primary purpose of marriage is, or has historically been, to reproduce is a bit of joke in light of the surplus of evidence that presents itself. — javra

I'm not really sure what you mean here. That is precisely how marriage tended to be viewed by philosophers and theologians. Of course, these pre-modern thinkers would probably be the first to agree that "most people" behave contrary to this ideal, but that doesn't amount to evidence that it wasn't the ideal. Also, most people were peasant serfs (and earlier, many were slaves) and so not particularly focused on alliances and amassing generational wealth and prestige.

Homosexuals, just like Shakers, can well adopt those children that were unwanted by their own parents—this if they so desire to have children of their own. God knows there are far too many unwanted children in this world. And as has been evidenced time and time again, being raised by two gay men or two gay women does not in any way convert the naturally inborn sexual inclinations of the child come their adulthood. But maybe more importantly, if gay folk want to be monogamous for the remainder of their lives, then let them so be via marriage. They ought not be condemned to forced promiscuity or else celibacy or else in any other way punished for their monogamy-aiming aspirations (such via lack of corresponding legal rights)—however implicit this proclamation might be. — javra

I'd imagine that many people who view homosexuality as a sort of imperfection could agree with this though, no? My extremely Catholic grandmothers were fine with civil unions, back when that was a thing. It's not like those who see gluttony as defect want to ban fancy food (and here "gluttony" traditionally referred not only to over consumption, but any undue focus on food).

The issue of "condemnation" is interesting though. Leaving aside homosexuality for a moment, there is the whole idea that any notion of gluttony is "fat shaming" or perhaps "consumption shaming." To speak of licentiousness is "slut shaming," etc. There are all "personal choices," and all personal choices are relative to the individual, so long as they do not transgress the limits of liberal autonomy and infringe on others, or so the reasoning seems to go.

I do wonder if the shift in moral language is part of the difficulty here. To say something is "bad" becomes to describe it as possessing a sort of specific "moral evil." But this is hardly what was traditionally meant by gluttony being "evil." It was a misordering of desire, although towards something that is truly desirable, and didn't denote anything "horrific."

So, to 's point, this is perhaps more an issue with liberalism. Liberalism has a strong sense of the "morally bad" as distinct, because everything else is personal choice, and so to say anything is bad, that it "ought not be done" or that it is "not ideal" become a sort of "condemnation."

Of course, this says nothing about whether homosexuality is ideal or not, I only mean to underscore where certain tensions come from.

Now, this libertarian principle is complicated for a Christian - it would, for example, legalize prostitution, I suppose. — Colo Millz

Well, it depends if you accept the liberal anthropology of man as a more or less atomized actor. That is, are such "personal choices" really only effecting the people who make them? Or more to the point, should the law be instructive, so as to lead people (both individually, but also collectively) towards virtue in a positive sense, as an aid to virtue. That's how Saint Thomas thinks of human laws, as aids. However, he also didn't think it made sense to make many vices illegal.

To be honest, it has always seemed bizarre to me that prostitution is illegal, but then all manner of pornography is incredibly easy to access for children. The latter seems to have a far more corrosive and dehumanizing effect, and I think feminist critiques of the porn industry have a lot of bite. Of course, prostitution involves objectification, but pornography seems to take this to another level.

, there are many possible reasons for choosing the better over the worse, — J

Such as? If one had "good reasons" for choosing "the worse" over the "better" it seems to me that, by definition, we must think that "the worse" is in fact, in an important respect, better than "the better." Else why choose it?

No doubt, I might choose the "worse character" in playing a video game against a child, because I want the competition to be more fair, etc. But in those cases, I am choosing the "worse" because it is truly better as respects the ends that I believe to be themselves better. So, in this example, winning the game is not better than having a more equal competition.

Not sure I get this. Can you expand? — J

Well, that's the classical definition of goodness, and it might take some unpacking. Goodness isn't something over and above a thing, just as there isn't a thing and its truth as something distinct, over and above it. Being "transcedentals," goodness and truth are conceptual, not real distinctions (but of course, "objective"). They are being as considered from a particular aspect, as intelligible/knowable (truth), or as desirable (goodness).

An easy way to see how this takes shape in ethics is to consider that pre-modern ethics (in the East too from what I can tell) is primarily concerned with reality versus appearances, and the higher versus the lower. We want what is truly most desirable, not what merely appears most desirable. We know we can be wrong about what is most desirable, and this leads to regret and bad consequences. Ethics is about discovering the best way to live/act, i.e., what is truly desirable. In this context, to knowingly choose the worse over the better is essentially to act contrary to reason and desire.

Of course, a difficulty here is that subjectivism has sort of crept into our definitions. "Desirable" becomes just "whatever is currently desired." However, Etymonline tells me that the word entered the English language in the 14th century, then meaning: "worthy to be desired, fit to excite a wish to possess." That's the better way of taking it here.

So we agree there is (or perhaps may be) a logical basis for the is/ought distinction? — Banno

No, I agree with the many critics who say that the division is wholly metaphysical. Maybe it can be justified, but it would have to be justified on metaphysical terms. However, what Russell is talking about is a real limitation of deduction. I am not totally sure why she is calling it "Hume's Law" though since it's a slightly different issue. My suspicion is that maybe people use the name for the issue she is talking about too, a sort of semantic drift in the literature maybe, sort of like how "Aristotelian essences" in many articles in analytic philosophy have very little to do with Aristotle's metaphysics. IDK though.

Hume's issue isn't just that we cannot go from "particular" to "universal" facts about values, but that there simply are no such facts, because value statements can never be purely descriptive since they relate to purely subjective sentiment. It's a very early-modern sort of division.

The other point of contention is your "Hume's psychology... precludes knowing virtually any facts at all", which is far too strong. Experience grounds our knowledge. — Banno

I agree that it's too strong. That's the problem with Hume! I mean, he basically says as much too. He says you'd go insane if you took his conclusions to heart. Bertrand Russell said something similar, basically "Hume demolishes the line between sanity and insanity" or something to that effect.

Is the opposed view "purely philosophical"? This is one of the double standards at play in such issues, and like the slavery question in my thread, "Beyond the Pale," the double standard is most obvious when it comes to deciding the burden of proof. The anti-metaphysicalists tend to say, "Well if you can't demonstrate your position via purely philosophical arguments, then I guess my position wins by default" (i.e. such a person accepts no onus to provide arguments for their own position, and one manifestation of this within this thread is the emotivism).

The modern egalitarianism that secularity has become so reliant upon is deeply religious, as the historian Tom Holland and others have shown in detail. The struggle between modern egalitarianism and traditional Judeo-Christian morality is basically an internecine conflict about how to weigh different "theological" premises (such as the equal treatment owed in virtue of the imago dei).

The irony in this case is that the modern view is much more religious than the traditional view, and this can be glimpsed by noting that non-Christian cultures are not internally tempted by the positions that the West is now staking out. Egalitarianism is not a conclusion of natural reason. A culture guided by natural reason does not come to the conclusion, for example, that men and women are of equal athletic ability and should compete in the same sports leagues. — Leontiskos

That's a fair point. I don't think there is an obvious "default." As I pointed out, a number of traditions move towards seeing all sexual relations as, at best, unnecessary, and so one could argue that all that is required is that marriage is itself justified.

Isn't this a bit like what you argue against in posts like <this one>? You seem to be saying something like, "Well it would be better, but it's not morally obligatory." — Leontiskos

Sure, but I here just thinking through the traditional response "out loud." Traditionally, it has not been considered a "misordered love" to marry someone of the opposite sex who is sterile, or for elderly people to marry, no?

This is why I think any sort of justification has to rest on a thicker philosophy of sex and anthropology (which personalists do get into in more modern terms).

and we get another instance of interminable moral debate that doesn't touch what I think is interesting and important, namely the genesis and the social meaning of the ideas. — Jamal

This is interesting because this is exactly the sort of critique Rosaria Butterfield, who had been a lesbian professor of queer studies and is now married to a male pastor, levels against modern LGBT categories. That is, they are a sort of coercive identity thinking, particularly when taught at state schools and framed as (relatively) immutable and immune to agency. It makes sense given her background in post-modern and critical theory and new orientation I suppose. You know, something like: "I found my true identity in Christ, despite what the controlling cultural dialectic tried to tell me." To me, this sort of thing always suggest the interminability of post-modern arguments and arguments from psycho-analysis more generally.

3. It leads to a more humane society: no loving couples are told by authorities that what they're doing is a privation of goodness or that they are sick in the head. — Jamal

It's worth noting here that Thomas himself did not think that it was prudent to criminalize all manner of behaviors he considered harmful. For instance, prostitution and gambling. Unless you mean "authorities" in the broadest sense, in which case any society that allows religious freedom will fail at 3, no? So, we will be forced to either tell imams, priests, and rabbis that they cannot speak with their authority on certain issues, or else default on 3.

Russell's paper is interesting but she is actually only speaking obliquely to Hume's position (actually, the choice of title is a little puzzling in that respect; maybe the term "Hume's law" is used differently in some areas of philosophy for what she is talking about, but it isn't Hume's original position). It's true that, from the epistemic direction, the Guillotine is justified as a sort of a special case of the more general attack on induction, but Hume's objection would also prohibit moves from the "universal" to the "particular" wherever "values" are concerned. I did find that a little strange actually, Russell is speaking more to Hume's justification for the "law" than the "law" itself.

Hume's claim is more expansive though. Because morality is just sentiment, it can never justified by reason alone, full stop. Reason is also wholly inert in terms of action, so even if normative claims did work in this way, they could never drive behavior. Those claims are what set up the Guillotine. What Hume is objecting to has nothing to do with form, it has to do semantics, what kinds of facts there are, and how language refers to them.

Russell gets at the epistemic side: we cannot know universal value claims. But actually, Hume goes further. There can simply be no such thing as a descriptive fact about value, so of course one cannot derive "ought" from "is" even leaving aside the gap from particular to universal. His position can be described as ontologically eliminativist in this respect. It isn't a sort of skepticism on this issue; because of his psychology, such facts are impossible. He is pretty explicit about this in the Treatise BTW, he compares "vice and virtue" (values) to secondary qualities (which in his context are wholly subjective and do not exist in the world objectively at all).

A great many philosophers since have rejected the fact/values distinction and this has nothing to do with logic per se. If you want a close analogy, consider logical interpretations by emotivists.

Well, if the good is being qua desirable (what is truly most fulfilling of desire) in what way is it ever "better" to choose the worse over the good?

Why is it morally obligatory to choose the better over the worse?

Why choose the better over the worse? Why choose good over evil? These seem extremely obvious to me, so I am not sure how to answer. Those who deny morality tend to say that nothing is good or evil, not that it makes sense to choose evil as evil. Even Milton's Satan has to say "evil be thou my good," because "evil be evil to me that I might choose you anyway" makes no sense. So, what is the definition of "morally obligatory" here?

Of course they don't. That's why they aren't moral injunctions. Whereas "You ought to help the poor" is. Is there a reason why "ought" can't have both moral and non-moral uses? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that "we still don't use the word 'ought' exclusively in this way"? For why should we? -- surely the deontological ethicists weren't recommending that. — J

So, helping the poor isn't truly desirable or a path to happiness? Then why do it?

Kant's response relies on sheer formalism to answer this question. I suppose what is "desirable" is "the good will willing itself," but because of his epistemic presuppositions Kant is only able to establish this by sheer definition. Indeed, other people and their freedom as moral agents cannot be known according to Kant, but are mere "postulates of practical reason" needed to justify practical reason's definitional drive towards universalization.

I will just repeat what I've said before here:

The problem here is that Kant makes "moral goodness" a wholly sui generis (and wholly formal) good that is isolated from all other goods (e.g., the good "good food," or a "good baseball player," or even the good of being in love, etc.). I do not think it is too strong to say this is a sort of castration of the Good as classically conceived. We go from a source of endless fecundity and plentitude, which is present in all being, both reality and appearances, to a sheer formalism. The good that we have access to is no longer generative. It is essentially cut off from how the world is. No matter how the world is, all "rational entities" will share the same sterile goal, none able the affect the other's aims.

More to the point, this makes being "moral" unrelated to "having a good life" except accidently. But if being "moral" doesn't make us or others happy, what good is it? Why should we care about contradicting our "rational nature" when rationality itself seems only accidentally related to desire? Although Kant comes to many laudable conclusions, I think there is something perverse in the idea that "what is most choice-worthy" is a "good will" that is its own object and law giver. It makes desire collapse into a solipsistic black hole. The creature must never look outside itself for the "moral." There is no Eros drawing us on. The Other is irrelevant. Only the Same matters; the entire goal of ethical life ends up being an effort to universalize an isolated, autonomous will so that it becomes self-similar ("law-like") in its willing. Is this not a picture of the incurvatus in se with a halo of moral conclusions disguising it?

It's also arguably the height of hubris to think that "how to become a good person" is something that requires no contact with being or others, but only isolated reason. The entire edifice hangs on the idea that practical reason can never be corrupted (an assumption that seems phenomenologically suspect). This is a move that pretends to flow from epistemic humility, but which absolutizes the self above all others. Yet, given the epistemological constraints, this only makes sense. Kant might be said to be doing the best possible with the conditions he has set for himself.

I mean, what is the point of Kantian ethics if you don't agree with his epistemology? Kant himself seems to allow that it must be developed only because of the extreme epistemic limits he has set on himself.

Well, I don't want to go off topic, but it seems somewhat relevant insomuch as an attraction to children (or animals, and other such orientations) are considered to be "bad for people" such that they ought never act on their desires and should move to purge themselves of them.

Now, consider this in comparison to those ascetics who feel this way about all sexual desire. If we are of the opinion that the ascetics are wrong, but also that some sexual desires ought never be pursued, then we are somewhere in the middle and we have some range in mind for what constitutes "proper" or "good" sexual desire and conduct.

As regards biology, as far as I know, there is no evidence to indicate that pedophilia is inborn at birth. — javra

Well, that is very much how people describe it, they "just knew," from an early age. And they have the same sorts of aggregate differences in brain behavior that one finds with homosexuality, etc., although this is hardly surprising. No strong genetic correlates have been identified that I am aware of, but it's also an area that has garnered less attention in research.

Perhaps this is just an "angle" for advocacy, but AFAIK, research suggests that some people do experience such a strong orientation.

, on the other hand, there is evidence to indicate that homosexuality is inborn at birth. — javra

Right, but it's very much the same sort of evidence. This is exactly what "MAP" advocacy groups point to.

This such that those homosexuals which are in no way bisexually disposed cannot be altered into holding heterosexual drives no matter the culture or any imaginable attempt (such as that of “conversion therapy”, aka "sexual orientation change efforts" – which, btw, is commonly acknowledged today to be very harmful). — javra

Right, but this is equally true for pedophilia. There is not a reliable "cure" for it. Although, people do relate being "cured" of it, this is true for homosexuals as well (and I see no reason to believe that all people who express having undergone such a reorientation are necessarily somehow lying or self-deceiving).

And, there is no harm that results from consensually homosexual activities — javra

I would disagree with this. Grave harm often follows, and from "consensual" heterosexual relationships as well. These are often some of the experiences people regret most in life. Wouldn't the point instead be that homosexual relationships are not "necessarily harmful?"

And this I think is a large difficulty for any sort of natural law explanation that tries to argue that homosexuality is a vice per se. However, it seems easy to point out at least one way in which such relationships may be less than ideal, in that they cannot produce children. Yet this doesn't seem to me to offer the sort of clear moral linkage we might expect.

To see why, consider the case of someone who is paralyzed from the waist down. No doubt, it is "ideal" that they be cured and be able to walk. However, it hardly follows from this that using a wheelchair is "wrong" because being able to walk might in some way be a fuller realization of human life and capabilities. Thus, a natural law theory really needs to show that it is, all else equal, better for homosexuals to be celibate (this is of course, excluding any criticisms of fornication, lust, etc. in general). This is where I find traditional explanations to often be lacking because they don't really countenance the idea of a monogamous homosexual relationship.

For instance, from a Patristic or Thomistic perspective, being "intrinsically disordered" doesn't mean "horrific" or "evil in every respect." The idea is more that the powers of the soul are directed contrary to their purpose/fullest fulfillment. In this context, the real issue is the special sacramental meaning of procreation (it's interesting to note here that this philosophy was largely developed by people who had chosen to eschew their desires and live as celibates, even though many had previously engaged in sexual relations).

I would imagine then that they would say that the wheelchair analogy breaks down because the wheelchair is a sort of remedy that compensates for absence, whereas the procreative focus of marriage is a sort of signification of divine mysteries (sacramental) but not an essential part of "the good life" (for many saints were celibates, and the Blessed Virgin was of course, "ever-virgin"). Hence, as respects many types of relationships, the point would be that, even if an act brings pleasure, affection, and mutual support, it can still involve a love that is ultimately misdirected. This is essentially the same rationale used against masturbation, fornication, and adultery (of course, there is a sort of stigma issue in these texts too. Saint John of the Ladder finds masturbation too depraved to even mention, an idea that had long currency until fairly recently, resulting in some rather funny letters written by Wagner to Nietzsche's doctor over the fear that he was engaged in "self-abuse.")

But of course, such an explanation is deeply tied to the idea that the sexes are revelatory of God, e.g., Genesis 27:

So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

I do not know if the conclusion can be justified outside this understanding. And what is interesting here is that in similar Western Pagan and Eastern traditions, the move is generally not towards saying "all sorts of sexual relations are beneficial," but more often towards seeing them as unnecessary, or even as pernicious distractions. Hence, the justification of marriage here is more about its positive sacramental significance.

However, and here is the tricky part from a Christian perspective that wants to argue that homosexuality is a vice per se, Saint Paul seems to allow for concessions to human frailty as at least part of the justification for sex (e.g., I Corinthians 7):

Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

Now as a concession, not a command, I say this. I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another.

And the traditional response here goes back to the particular function of marriage and procreation as a sacrament and a sort of transfiguring divine pedagogy (which is also the argument against contraception). However, there is a question about pastoral responses here (and birth control is a great example here too) where it seems that the standard is unlikely to be met by many (and yet the ideal is that all can attain to "sainthood").

But at this point, aren't we relying on more theological points? It's hard for me to see how this can be a purely philosophical argument. The procreative function of romantic relationships is too weak to justify a claim that homosexuality is a vice per se. To be sure, it might be better if, if one wanted, one could have children with one's spouse, but it hardly follows from this that it is somehow wrong to marry some who is sterile when one could marry someone who is fertile, etc.

Good point, that's another common usage of "ought." And given Hume's epistemic commitments, I do wonder if there can ever be anything other than these sorts of "ought" claims outside claims about "relations of ideas," which are themselves grounded in sense perceptions from which we can only ever derive predictive oughts (which arguably can never be justified according to his epistemology and psychology).

Hume's division isn't logical, it's metaphysical and epistemic. If one rejects Hume's psychology, which Hume himself seems to acknowledge cannot be justified given his epistemology, one has no reason to accept the division.

Just consider the assumption that there are facts about values.

So:

X is better than Y (X is more worthy of choice than Y) is true (a fact).

It does not follow that this fact can never imply "choose X over Y." To be truly "more worthy of choice" or "better," or "more desirable," is simply to be what ought to be chosen. The only reason this is obfuscated is because much modern ethics has this bizarre fixation on "ought" as only applying to a sui generis sort of "moral obligation." Yet even after centuries of this, we still don't use the word "ought" in this way. "You ought to try the chicken," or "she likes you, you ought to ask here out," do not imply "you are morally obligated to eat this chicken," or "you are morally obligated to ask our friend out on a date."

I suppose, if we face objections here we can allow that it is an axiom of practical reason that: "it is true that one ought to choose the better over the worse, the more choiceworthy over the less, etc."

So:

1. It is true that we ought to choose the better over the worse.
2. X is better than Y.
C. Thus, we ought to choose Y.

Is fine, and so it follows that if there are facts (is statements) about values we should have no problem following these into conclusions about what we "ought" to do. If people insist that 1 must be included in all arguments involving "values" I would counter that this seems unnecessary given what "better" or "good" mean, but it hardly seems too problematic to include it since it is obviously true.

The point of the division is more that Hume's psychology precludes ever knowing such facts, although it also precludes knowing virtually any facts at all, which we might suppose just indicates that it is a grievously deficient theory of knowledge.

Good points, and it's worth pointing out that the status of homosexuality in "thick" teleological accounts varies a bit across traditions. This is why I have tended to point towards lust and fornication in general, since these are more widely accepted as vices and the reasons why seem fairly straightforward (of course, some traditions are skeptical of sex in general), and so they are better entry points for understanding if and why such a tradition might consider homosexuality a sort of "vice."

The particular justification of homosexuality as a vice in the Christian and Islamic traditions is sort of obscured by the fact that, since there was no such thing as a "gay marriage" an easy justification was that any such relationships necessarily fell outside the covenetal relationship in which sex was appropriate. And likewise, since most people married regardless of "desire" such relations also generally involved adultery.

Sexual sins are in some respects unique in these traditions because of their particular anthropology which sees man as the image bearer of God, which then gives human procreation and generation a unique role in the cosmos and history (Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body in Simple Language is quite good here). So, even when homosexuality was not remotely on people's radar, there was still the idea that heterosexual intercourse ought to be solely oriented towards procreation (whether this is an error is another question), hence "missionary position," etc. Indeed, Saint Paul's comments on heterosexual marriage can (although they need not be) read somewhat ambivalently (personally, given his context, where there was such a huge focus on childbearing, I think he is more offering a justification of the desirability if the celibate life for those who are oriented towards it).

Hence, a coherent Christian, Jewish, or Muslim justification of why homosexuality is a vice per se (as opposed to the general way in which all lust, fornication, adultery, etc. is a vice) needs to be built on a more complete understanding of the role of sexuality and marriage. It will suffice to say that this is already and extremely fraught topic though, even as respects heterosexual relations and marriage. It is, I would say, probably one of the worst topics to look at if one is trying to understand the basics of natural law for this reason.

Maybe I overly conflated your views with those of Count Timothy von Icarus, who from what I've so far read at least alluded to homosexuality being either unnatural or an illness — javra

What exactly left that impression? The only two things I have tried to clarify here are that:

A. The "natural" of the natural law is very different from the "natural" of contemporary "naturalism" and so one must take time unpacking its distinct metaphysics and anthropology; and,

B. What defines a "mental illness" versus "bigotry," etc. cannot be reducible to mere current opinion, which is constantly changing, and does not always seem to track particularly well with "the good life" and "being a good person" (for we often fetishize certain vices).

The fact that people seem to be reading this as "you mentioned both homosexuality (an abnormal, as in, relatively rare, tendency in sexual desire) and pedophilia (another abnormal tendency in sexual desire)," therefore you are slandering homosexuals (presumably because pedophiles really do deserve to be shamed and attacked for their particular desires or called "ill") is ironic, since it's exactly what they themselves point out as a sort of bigotry (it being important to note here that most people who sexually abuse children are not pedophiles per se, and that many pedophiles do not sexually abuse any children in their lifetimes, although the word is unhelpfully extended to both groups, but I speak here of the "illness" by which adults have a strong and/or exclusive sexual attraction to children regardless of their acts).

But, presumably many people do think in the case of those with something like an exclusive and "inborn, innate" attraction to children or adolescents that they should in fact go their whole lives without ever giving into such desires, regardless of if they were "born that way" or that such desires and interactions are "natural" in the sense that they are ubiquitous in human societies and can be found in brutes. And presumably, people who think that those with these desires ought never fulfill them would also agree that if they could be "cured" of them, they should be (hence our society's acceptance of "chemical castration" in these cases, etc.). And while people might try to justify this wholly in terms of the ethics of liberalism, focusing solely on "consent" (an issue muddied by the idea that children and adolescents can consent to attempts to change their sex or prevent puberty), I think that, on some consideration, it will be clear that it is not good for the adults involved either. An attraction to a "particular age" is necessarily an attraction to a person qua body, not a person qua soul. You can even consider this with someone like Jeffery Epstein, who was not a "pedophile" in the medical sense (his victims would have been eligible for marriage in almost all societies in human history), and yet surely it would have been better for him to be ordered towards a fulfilling marriage or the celibate life rather than towards coercing adolescents into sex.

But my only point here is that many of the arguments in this thread are defective. Something being "natural" in the modern sense of the term doesn't mean it is good or just, nor does a desire being "inborn" mean it is good and just (for as pointed out, envy, greed, lust, wrath, etc. are all "natural" and "inborn" in this sense). Nor is appealing to the rapidly shifting consensus of society or experts a particularly strong argument. These all seem to be appeals that are beside the point. Likewise, even if homosexuality were "unnatural" in the modern sense (and it isn't), that would be a terrible argument in favor of it being a vice. Nor do I think attempts to ground such an assertion in some sort of Darwinian account of the advantages of heterosexual vagina intercourse makes much sense. Presumably, any sort of natural law account of why homosexuality is not ideal has to ground such an account in a robust anthropology.

Do you disagree? — RogueAI

Absolutely. For one, this would imply that homosexuality really was a form of mental illness right up until it wasn't, and that it could easily become so again. And presumably, on any realist account of science, what is "science-based" is not, "whatever experts currently believe," but rather something like "what is really the case," or "what ideal inquiry would reveal."

As to the DSM, no, I wouldn't think so.

But, to speak more broadly, I also don't think the DSM is at all helpful for describing "mental" or "spiritual" health in a general sense. Consider that fornication is considered "normal" unless one is a "sex addict," or that greed would essentially be left out as an "illness." So the entire paradigm of medicalized "medical illness" also seems like a bit of a red herring to me. That's yet another reason why I would not say that spiritual and mental health are reducible to "what experts currently say."

So is a thing unnatural because it is not "oriented to God", as you seemed to first say, or because it is contrary to a things internal order... Or are these, for you, the same? — Banno

They are the same, although this is true for man as a rational being in a fuller sense.

Sure, although I am more familiar with Catholics criticizing that distinction to be honest. I only brought it up because "natural" in the common, secular philosophical usage tends to exclude any sort of "transcendent" end (I do not like the term here, but it is how it is usually labeled). And this tends to simply exclude the rational appetites such that there are only "intellectual pleasures" to the extent that one finds "activities of the mind" (be they literature, philosophy, or video games) "pleasing."

But if we take "natural" in this sense and speak to the natural law we end up with a weird sort of mismatch because there aren't really higher and lower appetites anymore (or I would argue, rational freedom) but just a sort of plurality of "natural goods" that are natural just in that they are "things men enjoy."

Or to put it another way, I'd say natural law presupposes a certain anthropology that tends to be not so much denied today as utterly unknown. I only meant to get at a mismatch in terminology because if you begin speaking about goodness and truth as formal objects, people nowadays immediately jump to "transcendence" often understood as "supernatural," which then seems to make the law primarily revelatory rather than immanent in being, if that makes sense.

That went out of style 50 years ago — RogueAI

So a mental illness is whatever "the professionals" or "society" says it is? IIRC, there was a somewhat successful push to normalize and legalize pedophilia in Western Europe within that time frame as well, but, had it been more successful, I am not sure if that success ought to the determining factor as to whether being a "minor attracted person" is a sort of "disorder" or not. Likewise, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had their own particular way of defining "mental illness" that I don't think most people would like to affirm. But if the definitions of secular Western liberal democracies are better than those of other parts of the world, or of Western liberal democracies not so many years ago, then presumably it is in virtue of something other than that such definitions are "current."

At any rate, I didn't lump anyone in with anyone else. Plus, taking umbrage at being "lumped in" with pyromaniacs and pedophiles (who surely didn't choose to be such) might itself be called a sort of bigotry, no? They would certainly say so.

Yet, my point was that the entire idea of a "mental illness" presupposes some sort of standard of health, and the notion of "pathologies." However, I don't see how this makes the notion of mental health intrinsically "bigoted." Appeals to contemporary or prior norms are sort of beside the point; rather that standard ("health") should be the criteria for "illness." Otherwise we would be forced to say that homosexuality was an illness, ceased to be so (in some select places), but might very well become one in the future, which seems a little odd, no?

More broadly, I would say every society, to varying degrees, has issues with making vices into "virtues." Today, you see this more with acquisitiveness, and perhaps also with male aggression and license. And while it's a tricky subject, since a "proper order" might vary by cultural, historical, and social context, it seems somewhat obvious to me that the "ideal human ordering" is not simply "what most people say it is," nor a function of "what the many think and feel," and so there is a standard/goal to which one may come closer or fall further away from. And the various ways of "falling short" would be how I would classify "mental" or "spiritual" illnesses.

A good example here is reason. Reason is ordered to truth. But reason can be instrumentalized and ordered to lower desires. And this would be "contrary to nature." Likewise, cancer is contrary to nature in that it is a misordering of body.

But "nature" here is used in its original sense, as principle. I fear there is a sort of lexical drift here that makes a sort of "translation" necessary.



More broadly, evil, as a privation, in unnatural. That, I think, is more straightforward. What a thing is cannot be a privation (what it is not).

As noted above, the problem here is that the term "nature" was radically redefined during the Reformation and we are the inheritors of the latter tradition. I almost wonder if a different word should be used, such as logoi/logos or phusis, but I am also sometimes annoyed by other traditions refusal to translate key terms so I am ambivalent about that.

The problem of what is natural and unnatural seems more difficult than the problem of good and evil, since the handy answer of free will is unavailable. Again, if everything has a divine origin, then how could anything be unnatural? — Banno

Well, in the latter traditions you will sometimes see the rough language of natural law ("unnatural") used, but against a backdrop where "morality" relates to a sui generis "moral good" that is wholly "supernatural" (a new category) in origin.

This is, BTW, exactly Alasdair MacIntyre's key thesis. The old moral language, e.g., "unnatural," "virtue," etc. is utterly incoherent in the modern context and carries on in a sort of bizarre zombie form through sheer inertia, getting rolled out in the way Warhammer 40k "techno priests" use technology they have almost no understanding of by holding to strict religious rituals that happen to coincide with their use.

If I've understood all that, you are saying that what is natural is what god wills?

Well, at least the divine origin of the normative is explicit here. — Banno

If the idea you have is a sort of voluntarism or "divine command theory," then no, quite the opposite. I'd argue that divine command theory is itself a sort of moral anti-realism.

The natural law is ontological. It has a "divine origin" insomuch as everything (being itself) has a divine origin. There is not, however, a distinctly normative command that sits outside or is projected onto the being of things (a sort of sui generis "moral goodness.")




I'm not sure if I understand this. How could one be "utterly ethical" and at odds with Goodness itself?

The basic idea here is not unique to Christian thought. One can find it all over the Pagan philosophers, in Jewish, Islamic, etc. thought (this is indeed the broader tradition I was referring to). The Good itself (i.e., being qua desirable) is the formal object of the will, just as truth (being qua intelligible) is the formal object of the intellect. That's in more Western scholastic terms, because I thought they were appropriate given the topic of this thread, and because I think the language is clearer, but you can find the same essential idea back in Plato for instance. To be "rational," to participate in the Logos, is to be ordered to the True and Good (and so Being itself, in its fullness). So, whatever is rational by nature (crucially man in this case) is ordered to the Good and True.

"Natural" here is conceived of in its original context, as relating to the phusis by which mobile/changing being changes (i.e., acts one way and not any other, the principle of cause and intelligibility in change). Man changes, but is rational.

IDK, Boethius does a pretty good job explaining this without any appeal to special revelation. It is not that revelation is unimportant, but it is also not an insight that, in its basic assumptions, is unique to any particular tradition of revelation (or even the West).

The term "natural" needs to be defined here. If "natural" has something like its more modern meaning where it is defined over and against the "artificial" or "man-made" than neither homosexuality nor oral, anal, etc. sex, masturbation, etc. is "unnatural" in that they can be observed, albeit rarely, in wild animals. Likewise, if "natural" means "ubiquitous (or even relatively common) to primitive human societies" then murder, rape, slavery, human sacrifice, cannibalism, pedophilia, etc., and of course lust, gluttony, sloth, despair, wrath, greed, envy, and pride would be equally "natural."

Whereas "natural" in the tradition Saint Thomas comes from (if not as much the modern tradition built on his name) sees man, and indeed all rational beings (and so the angels) as essentially and naturally oriented to God in a unique way, through the nous (will and intellect, with Goodness and Truth as their formal object). There is no possibility of an orientation of natura pura vis-á-vis man qua rational here, since to be rational is to be oriented towards the Good, Beautiful, and True by nature.

I think the nature/supernature distinction is one of the grave missteps of modern thought that has unfortunately attached itself to a sort of "Neo-Thomism" (although this strain has largely gone into remission in the 20th century following de Lubac and others). If we think of an end for man that is "purely natural," where "nature" is defined in opposition to the "supernatural," thus sealing off the "natural" from God, and implying a sort of self-sufficiency of ends, then it is hard to see how fornication (heterosexual or homosexual) is a "natural" evil. Afterall, having already sealed off the ultimate target of the rational appetites, the role of the intellect and will now seems to be wholly instrumental and deliberative, and the ultimate ends for which we strive are the "purely natural" ends of man as a non-rational (in the old sense) animal. Hence, sexual pleasure is simply one of the plurality of goods to be sought, and sexual sins become perhaps a sort of "exclusively supernatural" sin.

Anyhow, fornication is, in the earlier context, "unnatural" and a violation of the "natural law," in precisely the way lust, greed, pride, etc. is more generally. It is a misordering of loves and a misordering of what truly fulfills human nature.

However, from the perspective of what Charles Taylor calls "exclusive humanism" which denies all "transcendent ends" (or in the classical tradition, "rational ends"), the "pleasures of the flesh" are just one good among social and intellectual pleasures to pursue.

At any rate, I think the question of "naturalness" in the first sense is a total non sequitur that several posters in this thread seem to be getting led off track by. Murder and rape are natural in this sense but surely they are not just and good. Nor does the fact that some people are "born with a strong inclination" towards something necessarily mean that such an orientation is good and just. Just consider that people are born with strong inclinations towards alcoholism, wrath, pedophilia, etc. Are these thus healthy? Surely they are "natural" in terms of being ubiquitous and present in brutes as well, and in all human societies, but that seems irrelevant to their goodness.

Whereas, under the "natural law," what accords with nature (the "law") is precisely that path that being reveals to us as good and just, leading man upwards towards what can fulfill his infinite desires, and here "what the brutes do" or "what most men do" is wholly irrelevant.

On the cultural issues you raised, I do fear there is a bit of mixed messaging here considering the degree to which heterosexual fornication, pornography, etc. has been not only normalized but even glorified in the broader culture, such that it is plastered in advertisements all over the surfaces of our cities and the media is saturated it (acquisitiveness, pleonexia, even more so, such that it is now a virtue of sorts). This is where the cultural presentation of the "natural law" starts to look outwardly incoherent and arbitrary, because the metaphysical grounding becomes submerged and we instead seem to have a sort of arbitrary, voluntarist pronouncement instead. The equivocation on "natural" doesn't help I suppose, nor do the voluntarist undertones of "law" in our current context. I would rebrand it "moral ecology," or "Logos ethics," or something personally.

Give me a fucking break with your faux innocence. Calling an entire class of people mentally ill couldn't be more bigoted. Try applying that to any other group. — hypericin

Isn't that definitionally true of any designation for any mental illness? Alcoholics are a class of people. Pyromaniacs as well. Pedophiles are a class of people who are classed according to sexual desire, as are zoophiles, etc.

I think the better question is what properly constitutes a mental or spiritual illness. If classifying a group of people according to some desires, behaviors, etc. is bigotry than the concept of a mental illness itself cannot but be bigoted. Yet surely there are such things as mental and spiritual illnesses; from the more diffuse, e.g., acquisitiveness, to the more specific, e.g. schizophrenia.

Come around for the thread of Proclus' Elements in a few weeks; he's got some great ideas on this. :grin:

Are those who can’t pay, who live on the streets, are they absolutely inevitable in capitalism? Or are they still inevitable in any larger society and any economy? Again, why is this a feature of capitalism, and not a feature of human ignorance and greed and other badness in human hearts? — Fire Ologist

Well, we might consider here that just because a problem is perennial does not mean that it cannot be better or worse in different eras and systems. "The poor you shall always have with you," (Matthew 26:11) but surely there is a difference between the worst excesses of the Gilded Age and the New Deal Era, where economic mobility (as well as equality) was vastly greater.

We might consider here the pronounced nostalgia people have for the Soviet system in Eastern Europe despite its many infamies.

Part of the problem here is that liberalism is self-undermining in a sort of positive feedback loop. Income and particularly wealth follow a power law distribution, whole all evidence suggests that human ability is largely on a normal distribution. The cumulative exponential gains on capital make this somewhat inevitable without some sort of policy mechanism to redistribute wealth of a quite vast scale. And yet, in a system where wealth is convertible into cultural and political power, this means that there is always the risk of state capture, rent seeking, and moves by the elite to undermine liberalism so as to install themselves as a new sort of aristocracy.

It's worth nothing here that many economists and historians see the rise of strong, absolutist monarchs in the early modern period as precisely a dynamic whereby the poor and emerging middle class decided to align themselves with a push towards dictatorial power so as to have someone who could protect them from recalcitrant elites. I think you can see something very similar in the West right now, especially as legislatures have largely become too dysfunctional to govern, and power is transfered to the executive.

But the point here is that this sort of problem, positive feedback loops that destroy the system's equilibrium, are part of liberalism itself.

The massive bureaucratic state arises because many people, like all children, don’t want to be responsible for their own livelihoods and decisions. We shoot each other when in a debate, and then do not come together to rebuke the shooter, for instance. We behave like spoiled brats. — Fire Ologist

Well, the anthropology undergirding liberalism says that all people are free just so long as they avoid grave misfortune or disability. It's just a power all adult humans attain. This is probably the real crucial difference. Epicetus, the great philosopher-slave, said that most masters were slaves. Plato, Saint Thomas, Saint Maximus, etc. thought that freedom was hard to win. It required cultivation, ascetic labors, and training. Self-governance, at the individual and social level requires virtue and virtue must be won. As Plotinus has it, we must carve ourselves as a sculptor chisels marble.

But education in modern liberal states often wholly avoids philosophy and ethics. It's main role is to train future "workers and consumers." Freedom is assumed as a default, and so freedom to consume (wealth) becomes the main focus.

On the view that self-governance requires virtue, which requires positive formation and cultivation, this can be nothing but disastrous. Likewise, it is hardly fair to inculcate people in vice, indeed to give them a positive education in vice (which I would say our system does) and then to say that only problem with the system is that the citizens (the elites as much as the masses) are childish and vice-addled.

The traditionalist critique of conservative liberalism is precisely that it makes people unfree. Consumerist culture and secularism are not liberatory. What is required for freedom is not merely "small government," or as progressive liberals would have it "redistribution such that all have wealth." The path out of the cave is rather arduous and requires a virtuous society.

I forgot another core part: the marketization anonyminitization of these moves also requires phenomenal state intervention since personal relationships, shame, the threat of losing access to the community (fatal in prior times), norms, etc. can no longer regulate such "transactions." Hence, a massive state must grow up to reduce the friction points between now atomized individuals, to issue licenses for all sorts of marginal professions because trust and reputation have been dramatically reduced, etc.

Hence, the champions of "small government" find themselves wed to the very process by which government must continually grow, such that it is now massively (on orders of magnitude) more invasive to the average person's life than at any prior point in history (when the norm was to hardly ever interact with anyone outside one's local officials).

For instance, transfer payments to older "workers" now dominate the budgets of modern states and have driven their wild deficits because relatives no longer take care of the aged and the default that people have been made to expect (and which our architecture promotes) is that seniors and young parents live in atomized consumer households (increasingly as single worker/consumer parents who shuttle the children between households as a normal).

An interesting facet here is that, because the procedural is generally elevated in the name of "fairness" (the liberal substitute for justice), pension benefits are normally entirely based on how much money you earned previously and no other factor. Whereas in prior epochs people might worry about their future of they alienated their family and community, money now becomes the overwhelming concern.

Cool, I am traveling the next two weeks so I'll probably start won't start it for a bit at any rate. IIRC its 212 propositions total, and normally just a paragraph for each of them. We'll see how far we get. Some are more bridge propositions, and probably don't admit of as much discussion. I'll try to figure out what would be a good translation to use that is up online, there are several.

This thread coming up again reminded me of a great quote from the Ladder of Divine Ascent (15.89)

What is this mystery in me? What is the meaning of this blending of body and soul? How am I constituted a friend and foe to myself? Tell me, tell me, my yoke-fellow, my nature, for I shall not ask anyone else in order to learn about you. How am I to remain unwounded by you? How can I avoid the danger of my nature? For I have already made a vow to Christ to wage war against you. How am I to overcome your tyranny? For I am resolved to be your master.

But, in context, the problem is not so much that "soul and body" are opposed in principle, but that they have become opposed in fallenness. It is precisely grace and deification (for which ascetic labors, prayer, and the mysteries are aids), perfected in the resurrection, that binds us back into a whole.

As Saint Paul puts it:

For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am fleshly, sold into bondage to sin. For I do not understand what I am doing; for I am not practicing what I want to do, but I do the very thing I hate. However, if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, that the Law is good. But now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I do the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin that dwells in me.

I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully agree with the law of God in the inner person, but I see a different law in the parts of my body waging war against the law of my mind, and making me a prisoner of the law of sin, the law which is in my body’s parts. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin.

It's easy to get a dualist reading out of this, but I am not sure if it is that different from Plato's description of the "civil war in the soul" (Republic), although there is now a higher, theological understanding of the phenomenon. Yes, the mind (nous) is pitted against the flesh, but these are phenomenologically distinct as appetites, and so the point can be taken without any need to project a metaphysical distinction of two "separate substances." This seems unnecessary in the context of the Epistles. The "flesh" often seems to denote the particular state of fallen humanity, not the material body per se.

Indeed, sin is in a sense extrinsic here ("not I, but sin that dwells in me"); just as in Gensis 4:7 when God speaks to Cain: "And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it.”"

Deneen is pretty good on this, and I won't be able to sum it up as good as he does. He uses the Amish as a contrast point. The Amish don't use insurance. Prima facie, insurance does not necessarily require any special technological innovation that the Amish might eschew. However, they reject it because it takes the burden of caring for the unfortunate away from the community and displaces it to the anonymous market. It allows misfortune to shift from a communal problem to that of the atomized individual consumer, who must make wise consumption choices in balancing future risks against current consumption. It is bad for the community, and that is the standard they use to judge the adoption of new practices. Whereas, under capitalist competition, there is a sense that one is forced to adopt new technologies regardless of if one thinks they are beneficial, since to not do so would be to lose competitive advantage.

You can see the displacement of community and institutions by the market in all areas of everyday life. Where once people relied on friends and family to pick each other up at the airport, or drive each other to the bus station, now there is Uber. This relationship is now marketized and anonymized. So too, where once people made meals for the sick, bereaved, or those who had just had children, now there is a host of services that will deliver meals to them, or they can simply use Door Dash, etc. Likewise, childcare is increasingly anonymized and marketized. People use app-based systems to find babysitters, they hire "sleep consultants" to help them with cranky babies because relatives no longer live close enough to offer guidance. Romance is no different, where once there were community "matchmakers" (often centered in the church) now there are dating apps, etc.

One upshot of this is that it increases inequality. Those who can pay get all the benefits of community with none of the costs. Those who can't pay lose community, and get the insecurity of the gig work of providing its benefits to the wealthy to boot.

Obviously, something very similar happens with the balkanization of entertainment and prohibitions on public festivals, etc. so as not to impede the "flow of commerce." Something like the Liturgy of the Hours, once a staple of urban Christian life (even if many did not attend) or the Muslim daily prayers is pushed out by the demands of capitalist competition.

This is a goal of capitalism though. Everywhere becomes everywhere else, aided by the destruction of cultural barriers and the free flow of labor and goods across all borders. This standardization only helps growth, and it helps attain the liberal ideal of freedom by dislodging the individual from the "constriction" of tradition and culture. Indeed, we do a great deal in terms of education and urban planning to try to positively engineer people into becoming ever more the "atomized utility maximizer" that liberalism says they are. When foreign peoples fail to live up to this standard and start falsifying supposedly universal economic theories, the move is generally to declare their behaviors as "impediments to growth" that must be overcome.

For a last example, consider minimum lot size requirements and minimum parking requirements, which have helped turn America's suburbs and strip malls into wholly unwalkable isolated islands of private dwellings and private businesses. This is exactly the physical architecture you create if your goal is the atomized individual chooser that liberalism says man is (and that traditionalism generally says he isn't). It's also exactly the sort of physical architecture you'd expect for a country with a "loneliness epidemic." Whereas, if you go to the surviving old town centers of Europe, or a place like the Azore's, you find a sort of compact, if chaotic net with places of commerce tightly wrapped around a core common area and old church; a very different landscape.

Finally, just consider how much people must move to keep up with the capitalist economy. That alone destroys community. All the people I know who are committed careerists in the upper echelon of society have bounced around America's major urban centers in order to continue advancing (this also makes raising children a major liability). Then, on the opposite end, rural areas and rust belt towns, denuded of work by globalization, see all their young people fleeing to find work (which also destroys communities). Maybe it is worth the benefits, but conducive to "conserving tradition" it is not.

There is the old idea of "Chesterton's Fence:"

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

I get the feeling that a lot of the modern reaction in favor of "tradition" is really just a reaction against the open-ended push towards an amorphously defined "progress." Often, "tradition" is not understood as any sort of particular intellectual tradition or philosophy or aesthetic, but it rather a sort of garb for identity politics. It is thus defined in terms of what it is against. You can see this in how heavily modern traditionalist movements tend to rely on aesthetics over substantial thought. And on the opposition to "progress" Chesterton has another point:

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their un-mediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

This is not to say there aren't deep, coherent strains in appeals to "tradition." It's just that they are usually marginal, in part because most "traditions" are not (easily) compatible with mass politics and the sort of consumer culture in which ideas must now compete.

So you are proposing that this capacity is the only "ordering principle" which is valid - or the fullest expression of one anyway. — Colo Millz

Well, the ordering principle would be the rational appetites, i.e., the desire for what is really true and truly good (as opposed to merely appearing so, or a sort of "pragmatism" ordered to sensual or emotional desires). But it's important to note that these would have been considered essential to reason itself, such that this is really just "reason" leading as a principle. For instance, in Aquinas, orientation towards the Good and True—virtue—just is action in accordance with "right reason," even if it might also be considered a sort of participation in divine love (as it is more explicitly in Saint Maximus the Confessor).

That is, logos must lead, generally through thymos (spiritedness, the desire for honor, recognition, social goods, etc.), over epithumia (sensual desires re pain and pleasure). This sort of "logos narrative" can be seen in negative form in Homer (in the insufficiency of thymos in the Iliad) and the role of logos in ordering Odysseus towards the good of his oikos (household), such that he abandons the pleasures of epithumia (unending life and material comforts with a beautiful lover) even though all the demands of thymos have already been met. And it's stronger in the Aeneid, with Aeneas ordered to thymos and the historical telos of Rome (justice), but mature form comes out in Boethius, Dante, etc.

Whereas, modern literature reveals what undermines this "logos narrative." First, reason loses these ordering desires, becoming merely instrumental, but moreover "sealed off" from being (it is no longer participatory). This leads to a sort of straightjacket intellectualism where discursive human reason is never able to attain to direct contact with its object. You see this in characters like Hamlet ("nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so"), Ivan Karamazov, etc. And then, because of this first pathology, you get a voluntarist strain, best represented by Milton's Satan ("the mind is its own place, and in it self/can make a Heav'n of Hell or a Hell of Heav'n). Because being outside the self is unknowable, the will becomes its own object, and sheer self-assertion the purest freedom. A Brave New World is a good societal view of the first issue, because it is a hyper-rational society that can see no good outside the immediacy of sensual pleasure, while 1984 is a great example of the sheer worship of power.

I mean I know the philosophical definition, it is a non-discursive insight into truth, a kind of intellectual "seeing".

It's just so unfamiliar to me, living in an Enlightenment environment that I need to picture what it even could be as a human capacity. — Colo Millz

Yes, and it's very hard to escape the caricatures of it as "you just know," a sort of sheer groundless assertion. Yet that is definitely not what Plato is getting at, nor are the Patristics or Scholastics generally fideists or sentimentalists. That's why I think the easiest way to track down this "lost notion" is through the role of the rational appetites in someone like Plato.

I like how I Robert M. Wallace frames this in more accessible modern terms. The relevant "higher experience" here isn't some sort of rare "peak experience," but rather something open to all. This is supported by phenomenological and psychological exploration that secures the metaphysical grounding. Yet, in the older tradition, one could also be more or less unified in the way described, and more or less attuned to and faithful to "what is higher in oneself," and so the measure of wisdom and virtue is that saint or sage, not the "dispassioned, properly skeptical (not "enthusiastic") salon-going everyman of the enlightenment" (or the ironical cynic of the postmodern moment).

The limits of "discursive" reasoning after Kant are so absolute for someone like me, I have a hard time imagining there can be some other capacity which is non-discursive, or that that kind of insight can have any validity at all. — Colo Millz

Yes, but it is worth considering how Kant and Hume secure the claim that human reason is wholly discursive. Afterall, their claims run counter to the great sages of both East and West. What sort of discursive argument or empirical observation can justify such a move? It's hard for me to imagine what the answer could be.

The common critique is that none does in their work. Hume just asserts that it is so in the first two books of the Treaties and then follows out the implications of this from there. Indeed, according to his own epistemology, Hume cannot possibly know "how the mind works" in the ways he claims to. Likewise, Kant simply assumes that human reason is discursive by definition.

To be sure, Enlightenment thinkers can appeal to introspection. The problem is that this is exactly what all the past thinkers do as well (and they both make transcendental arguments, e.g. Parmenides "the same is for thinking as for being," Plotinus, etc.). For instance, Plato is careful to "guide us through" a sort of form of thinking, rather than asserting his position, and in this he is arguably less dogmatic.

To my mind, it's obvious that no reasoning process can be wholly discursive. One must start with something. The Enlightenment move is to try to make such intuitions "obvious to all" but I am not sure if this is successful, in part because what is "obvious to all" seems to be historically conditioned by traditions themselves (e.g., Hume gets away with his assumptions because they are already popular). Whereas, the total abandonment of any intuition, what you see in more post-modern assertions of "pragmatism all the way down" (i.e., even math and logic are ultimately just games chosen based upon usefulness) doesn't actually remove claims to intuition, so much as it absolutize them by making "usefulness" a sort of unanalyzable metaphysical primitive.

Anyhow, while the argument was originally that noesis must be forsaken because different traditions (say, Hindu and Catholic) couldn't agree, then sheer discursive reason has proven no better in this respect. Liberalism, fascism, Marxism, etc. have been no less violent in asserting themselves, and no better at agreeing. Marxism is a great example because it now seems obviously historically contingent, and yet for so many, until relatively recently, its truths were simply what dispassioned pure reason and the data of history inevitably led one to believe (and yet now we tend to see it as the semi-religion it was for many practitioners).




You're too kind. I don't really know Russian culture that well, I just have some Russian authors and thinkers I quite like. To be honest, while Dostoevsky frames things in unique terms appropriate to the "crises of modernity," I think a lot of the "solution" he slowly and painfully works out can be found in a heritage that is common to Eastern and Western Europe, as well as the Near East and North Africa. Unfortunately, I think this set of ideas ("tradition" would be a fair label) has largely been overshadowed. So, it isn't a uniquely Russian problem to have lost touch with it. It's true in Catholicism too for example, despite a decades long movement to renew interest in the Patristics and the East and West's shared heritage which has been championed by successive popes (I think it was Pope Benedict who called the East and West the "two lungs" of the Faith).

I suppose there are lots of reasons for this. Charles Taylor's stuff about closed world systems probably gets at the intellectual side, but I also think it is also very hard for a heritage that is so contemplative (the Pagan parts and those from Judaism and Islam too) to reach people in our fast-paced and stimulus saturated world. There is a sort of positive feedback loop here too. These ideas tend to be missing from popular media (novels, movies, video games, music, etc.), whereas ideas that were originally self-conscious inversions of the old forms do have a strong presence in popular culture. There are counter-examples like the Chronicles of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings, they are just vastly outnumbered.

I am in some doubt if any such "ordering principle" has yet been discovered by Enlightenment thought. — Colo Millz

For sure. I don't see how it ever could be. Enlightenment thought is in part defined by its blanket denial of noesis/intellectus, or the role of any sort of "contemplative knowledge" in valid epistemology. Empiricism is particularly robust in its axiomatic denial here (e.g., Hume just asserts it as a given in the opening books of the Treaties, even though his own epistemology forbids his knowing that this is "how the mind works," and Kant makes human reason discursive through sheer definition).

I got into this comparative difference for our essay competition recently: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15990/tpf-essay-dante-and-the-deflation-of-reason/p1 (it might be easier to read the short or long version with the links).

As you are proposing, perhaps Christ really is the only valid such "ordering principle", as it was for Dostoyevsky. — Colo Millz

Valid, no. For even on the view that Christ is the fullness of revelation, this does not mean that there is no revelation elsewhere. As Saint Paul says in the Epistle to the Romans (1:20), the signs of the divine are everywhere—"written on the Book of Nature" as it would later be put.

Since Christ is the Logos, all reason is a participation in Christ, and yet not all reason recognizes this. Indeed, this must be revealed historically, and illuminated through faith for most Christian thinkers. The perennialists often go too far in flattening different traditions to make them into a single unified philosophy, and so produce strange fictions like the "Buddhist" or "Gnostic" Meister Eckhart or Eriugena, but they do get at something quite deep and apparent in the confluences across the world's great wisdom traditions. Here, it is Western modernity that stands out as an outlier, in that varieties of virtue ethics dominated across the East and West, and an ultimate metaphysical grounding of the Good in a sort of knowledge that becomes self-knowledge is a common factor. Yet even the Epicureans, who come closest to the dominant modern metaphysics, do not face the issue of the modern irreducible plurality of goods that forces ethics to transform from primarily a dialectic of higher versus lower desires (or appearances versus reality) into one of "the self-interested subject versus the society" (a dialectic of "goods which diminish when shared" and so one of irreducible competition). This is because they don't face the same sorts of epistemic limitations that make any questions of value or metaphysics maximally distal uncertain (or even a matter of mere taste).

Charles Taylor is pretty good on the epistemic inversion that drives the problem here.

I think the Good as a unifying principle for ethics and politics can be found in many places, although in more or less full development. Boethius, for instance, relies solely on philosophy in the Consolation, and I think he gets us quite far. Virgil, a symbol of human reason and Pagan learning, also gets Dante to a sort of finite utopia in the Comedy.

In the past, I've tried to look at how a recognition of this in Aristotle could help to inform modern empiricist attempts to "ground ethics," such as Sam Harris project. However, I think Plato's psychological outline is probably the most accessible. There is, to my mind, a fairly obvious sense in which, in order to consistently seek virtue (at the individual or political level), we must establish "the rule of the rational part of the soul," such that our desire for Truth and Goodness comes to rule over and reshape our "lower" desires. Otherwise, our pursuit of virtue will always be accidental, only occuring when truth and goodness just so happen to line up with our "lower desires." There is a sense in which virtue is a prerequisite for freedom and one must be "free to choose the good" in order to choose it. The Enlightenment move to define freedom in terms of power/potency instead of actuality essentially inverts this however.

Sure; the most famous place where Dostoevsky uses this image is in the Grand Inquisitor, which is a short story within the Brother's Karamazov told by Ivan Karamazov (the Enlightenment rational athiest). Ivan has just been giving his brother Alyosha (a novice monk) a litany of horrible and disgusting things that have happened to innocent children. His point here is not so much that these challenge belief in God (although that is also implied) but that no "happy ending" is worth such grotesque suffering. God has demanded too much of man, and allowed far too much evil. Hence, he must "humbly return [his] ticket" to Paradise, for he will not participate in what no one has any right to condone.

The story then is about Christ coming to Spain during the Inquisition and bring taken prisoner. A high ranking church official then tells him that he had asked far too much of people. "Feed them first" and then ask for spiritual development. Christ's freedom (the vision in traditional Christianity, a sort of diefication, the transcendence of man's own finitude) is too hard. At best, perhaps only a few spiritual athletes can attain to it. And yet the people suffer and still fall into vice and sin.

The Inquisitor charges that by rejecting the temptations of Satan in the desert, Christ rejected the three things that truly move the masses: bread (economic security), miracles (irrational comfort), and power (political authority). The Inquisitor has accepted them, and so can lead man to happiness through a "nobel lie."

Christ does not respond to these charges, but simply kisses the Inquisitor. When the story returns to the two brothers, Alyosha kisses Ivan and walks away. There is a lot going on here but part of Dostoevsky's point is that Christ shows us a new way forward. There is still the Platonist idea that out desire for what is truly best (as opposed to what merely appears good to us, or is said to be good by others) and for what is really true, is precisely what allows us to move continually beyond current beliefs and desires, to transcend our own finitude, and to become more fully a self-determining whole. The love of the Good and Beautiful brings us beyond ourselves. But Christ also shows a way to transcend the finitude of the self through sacrificial love (as against the wholly instrumental approach to happiness seen in Ivan or in Crime and Punishment). Christ does not remove suffering to make us merely content, but transfigures suffering, and invites us into this process (a very Eastern view).

There is a lot more there. Rowan Williams book on Dostoevsky is quite good here. I liked David Bentley Hart's book "The Gates of the Sea" which uses the Brothers Karamazov as its main inspiration for addressing theodicy as well.

Anyhow, Peter Theil of all people pointed this out in an interview when he said something like: "the Eastern Orthodox view is actually far more radical than transhumanism, since it implies an even greater transformation of the person." I think that's exactly right. Interestingly, the first usage of "transhumanize" in a Western language comes from Canto I of the Paradiso, where Dante describes what must happen to him for him to move beyond the utopian "Earthly Paradise" atop Mount Purgatory and attain to union with the Beloved.

This is interesting as a contrast for liberal utopianism because transhumanism really helps to bring the contradictions it faces into focus.

Interestingly, by the part in the poem where Dante must be "transhumanized," he has already been purified, and in making it to the "Earthly Paradise," has returned to the prelapsarian state of Adam and Eve (Dante, following the Patristics, seems to see this higher state as "natural" to man, and our unfallen state as unnatural). The Paradiso is really a sort of "going beyond," which is perhaps why Beatrice, the erotic other, now has to lead Dante instead of Virgil (human reason). Earlier, Virgil tells Dante that he has reached a state that many transhumanists fantasize about, the perfection of the human will such as to overcome weakness of will. Virgil tells Dante:

Await no further word or sign from me:
your will is free, erect, and whole—to act
against that will would be to err: therefore
I crown and miter you over yourself.

Purgatorio Canto 27 139-142 (Musa)

But for Dante this freedom also requires being internally ordered towards the Good, True, and Beautiful, towards God. For the transhumanists, who tend to be "exclusive humanists," it often seems hard to know what the "ultimate end" is that one would be oriented towards if we somehow had "perfect control" over our own desires. Often, it is either "pleasure" (although allowing for "higher pleasures" á la Mill) or else a sort of sheer voluntarist drive for power (so well lampooned in C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet).

Harry Frankfurt has a famous paper about "second-order volitions," the desire to have or not have certain other desires. Having these, and being able to make them effective, does seem like an essential element of any truly rational, self-determining freedom. Otherwise, all our "freedom" would amount to is the instrumental ordering of whatever desires we just so happen to have started with, based on which are the strongest (e.g., Nietzsche's"congress of souls"). That is, must understand our desires as good, and choose them on that account. Without some ordering principle, it's hard to see what could drive our decision to prioritize "having one desire" over any others though, and this is the problem for post-humanism; we transcend man towards what? What makes it "utopian" instead of something like A Brave New World (whose residents see their own society as excellent)? If it's just the fulfillment of desire, we face an arbitrary multiplicity of ends, many seemingly horrific to our eyes today.

That seems to me like an interesting fault line here. D.C. Schindler's "Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty" advances the thesis that modernity has tended to define freedom in terms of power/potency (i.e., the ability to choose anything) as opposed to the classical "self-determining capacity to actualize and communicate the Good." The difficulty with a goal of technological, utopian "self-mastery" within the context of the modern vision is that it's not clear exactly what a perfectly "free" super-human ought to seek here. I imagine that would carry over for AI too. If we are orienting AI towards its aims, what are we orienting it towards?

The author R. Scott Bakker had a relevant short story that was published in the journal Midwest Studies in Philosophy a while back about the risks of having the ability to essentially "hack our own brains," called Crashspace." It is quite graphic and disturbing for a journal article, but the basic story about people losing control of themselves and committing murder because they are continually messing with their own motivations and desires is an interesting fictionalization of the risks here (although I think people already do this sort of thing with drugs and alcohol, and "better living through chemistry" is sometimes a slogan transhumanists use vis-a-vis "performance enhancing" drug use).

Point being, "utopia" is extremely fraught without some ordering principle, and I think Dostoevsky understands that, but also the infinite value of true freedom, which, as even the Platonists understood, is to "become like onto God."

I think the conservative view is at its heart tragic. — Colo Millz

Well, it's worth noting that Hamilton himself, while one of the more conservative Founders in some respects, is also within the broader liberal, Enlightenment tradition. Since, you pointed to MacIntyre, I think it's important to note that many liberal conservatives are still very much within the "Enlightenment tradition's" particular form of rationality.

Have you read Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed? Its pretty good on this topic in pointing out the ways conservative liberalism undermines itself. Its commitment to Enlightenment forms of rationality and its epistemic presuppositions, and even more so its commitment to the "free market" and liberal political-economy (and its particular, arguably tragic anthropology) ultimately leads to policies that undermine the very social structures, religions, values, etc. that conservativism attempts to conserve. That is, arguably nothing has done more to erode "Western culture" (commitment to the canon, etc.) and traditional social norms than capitalism, and yet this is precisely what conservative liberalism often tries to promote.

Deneen doesn't get at this, but there is a strong connection in the Anglophone world between Protestantism and liberalism, and arguably conservative Protestantism has a similar issue where its tenants undermine its own deep structures (just consider how Luther or Calvin would react to their traditions today, or the fracturing into 38,000+ denominations).

However, traditionalists are also "conservative" and I would say that many of them have a view that, by contrast, renders Enlightenment progressive liberalism "tragic." The view that the Platonist tradition, the Patristics, or the Scholastics held of reason was much more expansive than that of the Enlightenment. Reason had the power for real ecstasis and union with the Good, Beautiful, and True. It could transform us through a sort of knowing by becoming that terminated (often with the aid of grace, even in Pagan neoplatonism) in theosis. Key issues in Enlightenment epistemology and ethics never come up because the nous has a real union with Being and it possess its own erotic appetites that lead it upwards and properly order it (Dante's Commedia is a fantastic example here, or Boethius' Consolation).

And yet, this earlier tradition tends to have an even greater regard for tradition than conservative liberalism. Why? I think a big part of it has to do with the different framing of reason. What is truly most worth knowing and doing is not limited to wholly discursive, instrumental reason and techne. Episteme is not the terminus of knowledge and in a way it is less sure than noesis / gnosis. You can also see this in Eastern thought and its own response to modernity.

An irony here is that the instrumental reason of modern conservatism (often wed to fideism precisely because discursive ratio only gets you so far) is described in Dante, the Greek Fathers, etc. specifically as "demonic" and "diabolical," and this comes out in traditionalist attacks on capitalism and the fetishization of science as mere pragmatism.

It is tragic because it views the attempt to reach absolutes via human reason to be a doomed project of Icarus, or the Tower of Babel. — Colo Millz

Right, but consider here Dostoevsky's concern over the goals of the new social physics and liberalism as a sort of "reverse Tower of Babel," attempting to bring heaven down to Earth by force. His answer here is very different from that of Western conservatives.

Instead of a project of absolutes, we should therefore constrain ourselves to a system of trade-offs and compromises, in the style of Adam Smith.

Right, and I would argue that the dominance of the anthropology of liberal political-economy in contemporary thought and culture is underappreciated. Homo oecononimicus haunts the steps of almost all modern social theory. But it is itself hardly an "empirical finding" we are led to "by the facts." Indeed, it emerges before most of the robust data collection and analysis tools of economics even existed. It is instead and interpretive lens through which any human behavior is analyzed. In that sense, it is every bit as unfalsifiable as Marxist economic axioms (a point many economists have allowed). And yet the language of Homo oecononimicus leaks into romantic advice, parenting advice, lifestyle advice, etc. There is an interesting theological origin for this view of man that folks like John Milbank have traced, with it coming out of John Calvin's tradition. It's a good example of how rationality itself (the "rational utility maximizer") is defined within a sort of aesthetic and "theological" context (even if the dominant theology now denies or privatizes God, it has essentially stayed the same and just moved man into his role).

Anyone interested in reading Proclus' Elements and the Book of Causes? I feel like the style makes it good for a read along.

It's set up like Euclid's elements and then has commentary, and there are a number of free translations and commentaries. Really a classic, and a way to see a vastly different conception of causality than the current mechanistic paradigm.

But there is something for everyone because Proclus has a lot of logical innovations, which were sort of lost over time. I have a good book that looks at this, for instance the classification of existence as a scalar ("Themes in Neoplatonic and Aristotelian Logic Order, Negation and Abstraction" by John N. Martin) although I wasn't planning on getting too much into all that.

For taste:

On The One
PROPOSITION I.

Every multitude partakes in some respect of The One.


For if it in no way or degree participates of The One, neither will the whole be one, nor each of the many things from which multitude arises, but each mul­titude will originate from certain or particular things, and this will continue ad infinitum. And of these in­finites each will be again infinite multitude. For, if multitude partakes in no respect of any one, neither as a whole nor through any of its parts, it will be in every re­spect indeterminate. Each of the many, whichever you may assume, will be one or not one; and if not one will be either many or nothing. But if each of the many is nothing, that likewise which arises from these will be nothing. If each is many, each will consist of infinites without limit. But this is impossible. For there is no being constituted of infinites without limit, since there is nothing greater than the infinite itself; and that which consists of all is greater than each particular thing. Neither is any thing composed of nothing. Every mul­titude therefore partakes in some respect of The One.[1]

PROPOSITION II.

Every thing which partakes of The One is alike one and not one.

For though it is not The One itself — since it partic­ipates of The One and is therefore other than it is — it experiences [2] The One through participation, and is thus able to become one. If therefore it is nothing besides The One, it is one alone, and will not participate of The One but will be The One itself. But if it is something other than The One, which is not The One but a par­ticipant of it, it is alike one and non-one, — one being, indeed, since it partakes of oneness, but not oneness it­self. This therefore is neither The One itself, nor that which The One is. But, since it is one and at the same time a participant of The One, and on this account not one per se, it is alike one and not one, because it is something other than The One. And so far as it is multiplied it is not one; and so far as it experiences a privation of number or multitude it is one. Every thing, therefore, which participates of The One is alike one and not one.

Confusing? That's why we'll discuss it! It was written in a context where students were expected to study Aristotle first as preparatory, before going through the Platonic dialogues with their commentary tradition, so in being compact it assumes some things, but that can be clarified.

anti-realism is not a coherent perspective, it's just a means of labeling a position one finds threatening — ProtagoranSocratist

"Anti-realism" in meta-ethics just refers to the claim that there are no facts about values; which is quite popular as a position. Plenty of people embrace this term as a label for their own ideas; I am pretty sure it is coined by anti-realists themselves.

Sure, hence it would an equally hollow argument to say merely: "Clearly there are objective values, thus an analogy that implies otherwise is a bad one."

I won't deny that it is, for many, unaccessible. In part this is because, beliefs to the contrary, we absolutely do still indoctrinate children into ethical systems; it's just that the current hegemon is one of therapeutic individualism (with an irreducible plurality goods).

I don't think it is naive though. To have stepped into the frame with a strong teleology is, in the modern environment, virtually always to have step out of the hegemonic paradigm, which means that one knows that opposing paradigms exist. The naive view assumes that one is absolute (e.g., that it stands alone as the fruit of "dispassioned reason" now that "superstition" has been paired back). By contrast, people often seem to think that even the most trivial sorts of relativism must be fatal to moral realism, so that millennia of past thinkers across the West and the East must have somehow been blind to the fact that "stealing seems good to the thief," or that cultural norms vary, etc., which denotes a sort of global naivety about past (and non-Western) theorizing on values.

This is certainly true for philosophers who advocate for any sort of metaphysically robust "virtue ethics", who are always aware that their justification requires challenging dominant assumptions in metaphysics and epistemology. I would say that the "naive view" thus tends to be more along the lines of: "'science says' the world is meaningless and valueless, or at least that values cannot be observed, except perhaps as some sort of occult 'emergent' property." Or, even for those who are aware of the many "deconstructions" of the prior view, and all the genealogical treatments that make it appear historically contingent and bound up in prior theological commitments, there is still a strong naive belief that rejecting the empiricist-naturalist metaphysical and epistemic frame is simply equivalent with abandoning "science and technology," i.e., that such a frame is "necessary for doing science," or at the very least, that it played a crucial, dominant role in the "scientific revolution" and "Great Divergence" that has led to modern technology.

I think such a view is "naive" because it is inculcated in the culture as a sort of default. I don't think it is unsupportable, but I also don't think it is particularly robust to sustained criticism either. The "Great Divergence" by which Europe pulled ahead of the rest of the world starts before the "New Science" and the trend is steady and doesn't really change until centuries after the New Science has become dominant (due to the Industrial Revolution). The metaphysics dominant in an area don't seem to track with differences in military or economic power, and at the individual level there are tons of examples of great scientists and inventors who went against the grain here. But more to the point, core epistemic starting points like "human reason is wholly discursive and never finds direct union with its objects" clearly have little to do with the practical methodologies of technological development.

And you'll see this in cultural products. Science fiction and fantasy will assume that, if a culture has any substantial technology and mastery over nature, they have developed an empiricist-naturalist outlook, and even a language of "natural law /obedience." Authors clearly want to make their cultures diverse and unique, and yet it seems that the imagination balks at the notion that a Taoist, Hindu, Neoplatonic, etc. culture could ever achieve a significant mastery over nature through techne. But if one understands the paradigm that emerged from Europe as both contingent and theologically loaded (even if it now denies God, it does so from a particular metaphysics/epistemology originally based on belief in God) then this seems rather naive.



Clear to whom? A great many philosophers reject the fact/values distinction. How exactly do you justify it?

If you can show that, all else equal and on average, it is better to be gluttonous, slothful, cowardly, rash, unintelligent, weak, unhealthy, clumsy, weak willed, wrathful, etc., by all means. I have never had anyone take me up on that challenge so I'd be interested to see it! Rebuttals always seems to go in the other direction, contesting that the virtues can be defined.

If it is uninteresting today, I think that has more to do with the dominant notion that "freedom" is the ultimate good and that "freedom" involves a flight from all determination, such that any "virtues" necessarily present a sort of "limit on freedom" by "telling us not to act in certain ways." But, aside from misunderstanding what a virtue is by trying to define it in terms of individual actions, I think such a conception of freedom, as hegemonicly dominant as it is in modern culture, is straightforwardly incoherent on close analysis, since arbitrariness is not freedom. On any view where liberty must be defined in terms of rational second-order volitions (the desire to have the desires one has), desires must be understood, which in turn requires certain doxastic and practical virtues.

Indeed, even critics of such a view regularly default to it when they accuse others of a lack of intellectual humility, engaging in bad faith argument (i.e., being motivated by desires other than truth), possessing poor reasoning capabilities, being close-minded or "dogmatic," leaping to judgements, etc. These are all criticisms of intellectual or practical habits (vices). And correcting these deficiencies seems to require something like Plato's notion of the establishment of the "rule of the rational part of the soul, as a sort of "meta-virtue" required for the consistent seeking of the virtues.

Or as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it more broadly, "the good life for man must involve those virtues required to discover the good life for man."

You can think up such scenarios for any of the virtues. A rash person will tend to act impulsively and in some cases this might allow them to save their own, or others' lives. An unwise person who gives up on a misleading riddle and picks an answer at random might, by sheer luck, just happen to pick the right answer, while the wise are mislead by assuming the challenge in fair, etc.

One can do this just as easily with consequentialism (any event can plausibly lead to great benefits or evils given a long enough time horozon) or with any deontological rule that isn't incredibly vague and abstract. Perverse counterexamples are easy to generate because we generally deal with incomplete information, and because our moral choices are framed by fortune, which is outside of our control.

Hence, the "all else equal" and "on average" framing. The situations we face, and the information we have when we face them, is determined by fortune and fortune can conspire to make an enemy of vice. It normally doesn't though. More to the point, virtue is what allows us to be relatively self-determining at all, such that we have any control in how we respond to fortune. Those who are easily coerced by hardship or seduced by pleasures become more a bundle of warring appetites driven on by external causes, less a self-determining rational whole driven on by the desire for what is truly best. It is the rational appetites, the desire for what is "really true" and "truly good" that allow us to transcend our finitude, going beyond current beliefs and desires, and so to transcend the given of what we already are. Someone who just pursues whatever desires they just so happen to have, and who does not seek truth, will be wholly determined by fortune.

Note that we could just as easily flip your example. Perhaps the attacking forces are slave takers who will kill the weak and take the strong because only they will survive and make good laborers. What remains constant is that the virtuous will tend to be best prepared to weather any such eventuality. You can weight the dice in the other direction too, by just imagining a man of tremendous strength, a Beowulf or Achilles, who simply slays all 100 raiders who have had the misfortune to stumble across the village of a demi-god, or a super-genius who has built their village a Maxim gun, etc. At the extremes, it is always insufficient virtue that is the problem. No mere mortal can beat up Superman or Goku.

Virtue insulates us from fortune. Saint Francis, Laotze, and the Desert Fathers flourish in the wilderness with nothing. Saint Paul, Boethius, and Socrates are sublime in prison awaiting death and cannot be coerced or seduced. By contrast, some people are ruined even by "good fortune," by wealth or fame, such that they become miserable and morally reprehensible.

One could say that Socrates' case shows the evils of virtues because being poisoned is bad and his virtue leads to him being poisoned. I think this would be a bad way to look at things. Ultimately, beings (people most of all) are what are good or evil. The goodness of actions or events is parasitic on the goodness of beings. So the question with Socrates is not whether being executed is good, it is whether it is better for us to be someone like Socrates, or to be someone who is easily cowed, such that they cannot bring themselves to stand up for principles even if they think they should, because they value their security more.

They'll both think it good until they learn that it's not. — praxis

Everyone agrees thoughts are relative to individuals though, the question is about truth (vis-á-vis values).


Something truly being good for you (or your cat) is not necessarily the same thing as merely thinking it is good, right? Or is it as Hamlet says: "nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so?"

If the truth of what is good for any individual is simply relative to what they currently think is good for them, then we are collapsing any distinction between reality and appearances. Whatever appears good simply is good. Thus, it is good for us to drink poison any time we think it looks appetizing. (Presumably , the same "good" event "becomes bad" when we start to get sick, because our thoughts about it change. But if we don't recognize the source of our sickness, the poison remains "good for us" and so it seems we ought to drink more.)

In that case, it is impossible for anyone to ever be wrong about what is good for them. Now, what good is philosophy and reason if it is definitionally impossible to ever be wrong about what is best for us? Second, how do we explain the ubiquitous phenomena of regret and internal conflict?

Have you noticed how it is typically the wealthy who give up their wealth for the ascetic life, and not the poor? — baker

I haven't. None of the monastics I have personally met came from particularly wealthy backgrounds, and everything I've read suggests that isn't the norm today, nor in the past. Some of the more famous monastics came for wealthier backgrounds (although by no means all, or from extravagant wealth), but this seems to have more to do with their educational background, which is what enabled their writings, which is why they are known. Oblates were often from poor families that couldn't support them.

The "Father of Christian Monasticism," Saint Anthony the Great, was an Egyptian peasant. Saint Pachomius, the other core figure in early monasticism was a laborer conscripted into the legions as part of Rome's unending civil wars. Saint Macarius was a cattle herd. Saint Moses the Ethiopian was a slave turned criminal gang leader before converting. Saint Arsenius is the only one among the core early Desert Fathers I know of who was from a wealthy family. Simeon Stylites was likewise a shepherd's son. Evagrius, who doesn't appear to have been super wealthy, but was privately educated, relates being humbled for "putting on airs" because even this level made him stand out in the desert set. Because the monks taught each other to read and memorize core texts though, many could become literate even if they were from poor backgrounds, which is how they ended up taking over education (also raising oblates).

I suppose that gets back to your earlier point about only elites doing philosophy. This wasn't always the case. Epictetus was a slave, and sources speak of the poor being drawn to the Cynics in particular. It is, of course a tendency in ancient thought, the transition to Christian thought has a lot of important figures from peasant or slave backgrounds.

Also note that the majority of monks and "ascetics" live a materially better life than the majority of the human population — baker

Define "materially better." Arguably the Amish also live "materially better" lives than their secular neighbors despite eschewing several centuries of technological progress. Yet this seems to have more to do with avoiding certain vices and inculcating particular virtues.

Certainly, if you go back to the pre-modern era monasteries often were more economically successful than the surrounding communities (although again, not always). This is generally chalked up to better organization and investment of surpluses, at least initially. Some later became corrupted by this and became more something like just another feudal estate at the economic level. Others didn't (I've seen the thesis that being built on extremely marginal, unproductive and remote land helped with this, which is exactly why the founders put them there).