. For instance, if the "mouse" version depends on the "logical version", then the fact that a thing can't be both A and not-A would be a consequence of the logical premise, not an intuition or an inductive law about the world.

I don't think I followed this. This would seem to indicate that what is true is a facet of the logical premises one chooses to adopt. For example, that the Earth cannot be spherical and not-spherical would simply depend on whatever we choose to assert? Perhaps I am misunderstanding.

Were this the case, it would be impossible to explain the "choice" of these "logical premises" because whatever truth they were based on would itself vary with those same premises. Logic would be arbitrary. This is the problem of resolving logical nihilism with a bare appeal to "pragmatism." What is "useful" depends on what is true, but now we have it that what is true depends on what is useful.

And the reverse: if the logical version depends on the mouse version, then we have a law of thought based upon the operations of the physical world.

Or what is true of being qua being, which includes the physical world (mobile being) and intelligible order of thought. Although, I agree that we might be able to say that the physical world is the proximate efficient cause of the logical intuition in man (a physical being).

How would you make the case for the two versions of the LNC being about the same thing?

LNC is part of the intelligibility by which anything is anything at all. It is a precondition for finite being's existence as "this" or "that." If the number one can also be the number three, and a circle also a square, then there is no this or that. So the physical order, to be a physical order at all, requires a higher metaphysical order. There can be no "physical order" without an intelligible order by which things are what they are and not anything else.

By contrast, a defining feature of materialism is the elevation of potency over act in priority. Here, the logical reality must come from the physical reality, which itself either exists "for no reason at all" or by a sheer, inscrutable act of divine will (not really that different in the end). Or, if one keeps going in this direction, there is no intelligibility in the world, and all intelligibility comes from a sheer act of human will (or a diffuse "world will"), a bare choice of logical axioms, etc. for "no reason at all"—i.e. everything is ultimately ordered to sheer potency/power. It's essentially the inversion of the priority of pure actuality, which isn't surprising, given the political history.

It just is" isn't the only possibility here, nor is a direct noetic perception.

Such as?

"My mouse can't be both blue and pink at once"

Probably "blue and not-blue" would work better as an example, and "without qualification or equivocation." I'm sure you know that, it's just that it's incredibly common to see facile "counterexamples" of LNC that straightforwardly involve qualification or equivocation and I figured I'd head those off. Something like the liar's paradox is at least a more robust example.

There might be something there, but here is a wrinkle: Charles Taylor reviews a lot of anthropology in his mammoth A Secular Age, and one of the things he notes is the extreme expansion of "personal privacy" in the modern era. For instance, the use of open air latrines by most people (or later communal outhouses) was the norm (and remained the norm in parts of this world into the 21st century.) But this was true in places with ablution rituals.

Likewise, wealthy people would often unthinkingly get completely naked in front of their servants to be dressed or bathed. Naked swimming classes were still normal in the West into the 20th century, and so too the open air shower and changing areas. This jives with a lot of other stuff I've read. Ablutions were often communal, and the sphere of "personal privacy" associated with toilets today was seemingly much smaller (although gender segregation was still a thing, but it was a communal thing).

Taylor convincingly ties this increase in the sphere of personal privacy to the "buffered self," the reasoning self that is immune to outside influence or cosmic forces/orders. The interesting thing here is that the rise of the buffered self has a fairly obvious connection to the end of religious ritual in general (not just communal ritual being made private). Afterall, if one is immune to cosmic forces, all ritual is ultimately symbolic and merely about affecting the buffered mind. So, the rise of toilet privacy sort of coincides with a reduction in the importance of ablutions.

But maybe this makes sense. If the point of the ritual is not the ritual itself, but its effects on the buffered mind, then it won't do to have other people around distracting you, or to have one's thoughts and actions influenced by other's actions.

I'm not sure if that's quite the difference. Perhaps can clarify, but I thought his point could variously be:

A. That there is a common sense metaphysics that can just be assumed (your reading);

B. That what is called metaphysics can just be done as part of each individual science; or

C. That methodologically one does not need to begin from metaphysics.

I think all three are true to varying degrees. Metaphysics is prior to the other disciplines in the order of generality, but not in the order of knowing. Indeed, in general we know the concrete and particular better than the abstract and universal.

I think it should be uncontroversial that parts of what are generally deemed to be "metaphysics" come into play on the sciences at every turn. For example, one cannot discuss the "origin of species" in biology, or different "types" of atom or molecule without the notion that different concrete particulars can nonetheless be "the same sort of thing" (i.e., the notion of species, essences, and universals coming into play). Likewise, questions of emergence includes the relationship of parts to wholes, and shows up in physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Perhaps the most obvious example is causation.

Now, I think it's fair to say that scientists work on these sorts of issues all the time without conducting an analysis of being qua being. But, it does not seem to me to make sense to say that the way in which different particulars are the "same sort of thing" in chemistry is completely unlike and unrelated to how this is so in physics or chemistry, hence metaphysics, as the general study of this sort of issue. It seems problematic to have a unique causation specific to each science in particular.

One difficulty in supposing that such issues are unique to each science would be that, without a higher science, there is no way to determine what rightly constitutes a unique science in the first place. We have seen declarations of "Aryan versus Jewish physics," "socialist versus capitalist genetics," "feminist versus patriarchal political science," etc. There would be no unity, and strictly speaking no "science" or "philosophy" (singular) if all the issues in whatever was declared to be its own science were sui generis, but rather a potentially infinite plurality. This is perhaps related to the idea of each science as a unique, hermetically sealed magisterium (Latin Averroism redux).

One need not study metaphysics, or "do metaphysics" to do biology, but one will invariably be forced to take up metaphysical questions at some point. One cannot even have a "science of life," without eventually getting around to the question "in virtue of what are all living things 'living'" which leads to the more general question "in virtue of what can all x be x, while being distinct beings."

Consistency consists in simply not saying things that are logically incompatible, mostly not saying things which contradict one another. No intuition required; it's as simple as 'yes' and 'no'. If you say both yes and no about the same subject you are contradicting yourself.

You're attempting to ground logic itself in a notion of what is "logically compatible." This is circular without intuition. This is just an appeal to LNC as being intuitive. This seems like: "no intuition is required because the LNC is self-evident." I agree it is self-evident. However, this is the definition of an intuition, perhaps the prime example of it historically. There are logics that reject LNC at any rate.

The reason consistency is better than inconsistency is that if you allow the latter you can say whatever you like and all sayings would become equal what you mean would become inscrutable. The reason truth is to be preferred over error is that basically it is a matter of survival; if you constantly believed what was false you would not survive for long.

This is not a demonstration without assumptions or axioms. It essentially says "consistency is better because it is better to be consistent," (circular) and "truth is better because it aids survival." I'm not even sure the latter is necessarily true (e.g. Hoffman's fitness versus truth theorem, or work on the reproductive fitness of false signals or memes versus true ones), but it is based on the intuition that survival is good.

You cannot have a logical system that is just "rule following" all the way down. If this was the case, there would be no reason to prefer any of the infinite possible logics over any others.

I'm not sure that you mean here. Following an inference rule consistently is what leads to consistency; any rule followed consistently is consistent in application. However, you cannot even make an argument that "consistency" is a good, choice-worthy metric for selecting inference rules without some intuition or understanding to start with. Consistency is, in general, considered crucial because of LNC, which is axiomatic. But if you want to elevate consistency over LNC, you will still need to assume consistency as axiomatic (from intuition) in the same way LNC usually is.

By all means, please try to demonstrate, from absolutely no first principles at all, why consistency is better than inconsistency, or truth is to be preferred to falsity.

Or to Flannery's point: why does anyone choose anything other than God at all?

This is essentially the old question of: "why was man not created perfect, such that he did not fall?"

I agree, it's a difficult one—one theologians have grappled with from the begining. One obvious point to bring up is that, if God's essence is unknowable, then man never had full access to the Good that would attract the will—that Good "on which the ranks of angels dare not gaze."

But for historical man, the answer is easier. Man is born into sin: "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me (Psalm 51:5). St. Gregory Palamas describes the truly relevant death that entered through Adam as separation from God, sin. But sin is also slavery, the opposite of freedom.

As I pointed out to boundless, there are basic empirical problems here. If humans rest in things other than God in this life, then why couldn't they rest in things other than God in the afterlife? I don't think you are appreciating the acuity of Flannery's point.

They don't though. Who, upon laying hold of finite goods, says "I am complete, I want for nothing," and then goes catatonic because they have reached absolute rest? Absolute no one. That's an empirical fact pointing in the other direction. Man is constantly striving in pursuit of finite goods. The vice-addled man doesn't "get enough" and then desist from his vices. The junkie doesn't shoot up and then say, "I am now complete, I will no longer strive after junk," just as the billionaire isn't content with their first hundred billion, nor the conquerer with just half of Europe. People attain fleeting satisfaction from worldly goods, that's it.

Humans have an intrinsic appetite for an infinite goodness. This is what defines the rational soul, its orientation towards Goodness and Truth themselves. This is one of the phenomenological arguments for the existence of such an infinite good (at least as an intentional object) that is rolled fairly often. Even atheists like Leopardi acknowledge "the insufficiency of every pleasure to satisfy the spirit within us." Likewise, it's often a facet of human life that is commonly rolled out to refute materialism. If materialism were true, we should be absolutely satisfied by finite goods, but we aren't.

To choose something is not to find rest in it.

My view is that this life and our choices in this life really matter. Your view seems to entail that this life and our choices in this life don't really matter. That someone can choose ends other than God for their entire earthly life, and then everything will just be reversed after they die. That the nature and shape of this life is entirely incommensurate and unconnected to our eternal destiny.

I don't think that's the case though. Were it so, it would mean that human life and history is only given meaning by a final reward or punishment that is extrinsic to history (and really, it would be the punishment that matters, since you're saying universal reward would render life meaningless). History would have no telos outside the extrinsic eschatological horizon. I would imagine that even many defenders of a hell of infinite duration would not want to argue that human life and history is only given meaning by the threat of damnation. That would be to elevate damnation to the force that gives human existence meaning.

I think you are probably aware that Thomists do not think man chooses evil as evil. The damned have chosen a lesser good.

Right, Aristotle and Thomas both say man cannot choose to be oriented towards the Good or not, only the means of pursuing goodness. That's why I don't get why you are calling this specifically a "Platonic" view of the will. It's all over the patristics and scholastics.

Now many of the patristics hold to perpetual punishment, but they do so in quite extrinsic terms. John Chrysostom, for instance, describes an end to sin, but continued punishment for the damned. St. Maximus is less clear, but there it also seems that any punishment would have to be an extrinsic limit on the damned. My point was that the wholly intrinsic punishment makes no sense outside a theory of the will as ultimately not oriented towards the Good, but rather as an arbitrary power. Otherwise, the soul would always be oriented towards repentance as its natural end (and presumably could be motivated towards this end).

This also jives better with Scripture in many ways than something like "people choosing lesser goods in a sort of false contentment for eternity" (e.g. Lewis' vision). The terms used for Hell are positive, "chastisement/punishment." The images are of an outer darkness filled with wailing and a lake of fire. I do not get the impression that Hell is something people will positively choose in any respect, which is another reason why the idea of a wholly intrinsic punishment has never sat well with me.

The second question is whether an extrinsic punishment of infinite temporal duration is just, discussed earlier.

Note first that I strengthened the argument by avoiding "rational nature." I don't think we just automatically seek God because of our rational nature, as if Pantheism were true or as if salvific faith were the result of a logical syllogism.

The end of all things is God, so it's true that it is not the rational soul that uniquely specifies this end. However, the rational soul includes our attraction to Goodness and Truth. A human being without these would be a human being without a will and intellect, which is, IMO, no longer a human being.

That point seems ancillary to the discussion though.

I find it interesting that you associate this sort of thing with Peterson. Nietzsche has tended to be more fodder for the left, and I think the "death of God" tends to get rolled out more often by post-structuralists, or at least Continentals more generally, than anyone else. The "political right" has, by contrast, tended towards "God never died in the first place" (or "if 'God is dead and we have killed him,' nonetheless he is risen!"), holding up living traditions as a counterpoint to modernity.

Peterson is, in this respect, definitely a figure of the "nu-Right," which tends to be more unmoored from tradition (even if it tends to be vaguely respective of it). In a lot of ways, the nu-Right is very post-modern in its sentiments and methodology, and its critiques of the liberal order (which is ironic because they blame "post-modernism" for all their ills, when in fact it seems like a lot of what they decry is a symptom of right-leaning neo-liberalism).

Ah, but which ones are the fly-bottles?

An excellent question. The problem with Wittgenstein's approach, at least in the hands of some practitioners, is that if very quickly shifts into seeing the entire world as made of nails because they (think they have) found a hammer. Every philosophical problem becomes a "pseudoproblem," and perhaps more importantly it becomes a particular sort of pseudoproblem. Language is always the culprit, not say, epistemic presuppositions, an understanding of mereology, etc. This is problematic if a problem might be (more or less) convincingly resolved by looking at the latter instead of language.

Why must we make any metaphysical assumptions at all?

I think we'd find it quite impossible not to. Can one do philosophy without making any assumptions about universals, how parts relate to wholes, whether something can both be and not be in the same way, at the same time, without qualification, identity, etc? How does one discuss the "act of knowing" without any assumptions about what act entails?

To "not make assumptions" is really just not to explore one's own assumptions and make them clear. A lot of analytic philosophy is guilty of this move. It "brackets" metaphysical questions, and then uses this "non-assumption" to make a defacto metaphysical assumption. To say: "I simply won't consider universals or parts and wholes," tends towards simply uncritically presupposing nominalism and a deflationary mereology for instance.

Pryzwarra has a good section on this in Analogia Entis. While epistemic and ontological questions will always jockey for primacy, it simply isn't possible to move into the epistemic without at least some ontic presuppositions. Epistemology itself doesn't even make sense without a reality/appearance distinction. If appearances are just truth, there is no problem of knowledge!

This is interesting. What happens when we apply it, with some tinkering, to logical form? (in the noncontroversial, not Platonic, sense) "Modus ponens is 'how it is'; the only way this can be 'how it is' is if logical forms are necessarily valid. Hence, logical forms are necessarily valid." Is the minor premise still a problem? One wants to reply, "Yes, I am sure it's the only way. It's not simply that I can't imagine how modus ponens (given the usual stipulations) could be invalid, it's that such a thing would be like imagining a square circle." Notice that this can be said without invoking what's real and what isn't.

Right, if any role for intuition and understanding is ruled out and reason is 100% discursive, you have an infinite possibility space of possible "games" and no reason to choose one in favor of any other. The authority of reason itself rests on intuition and understanding.

Something like that . .

"The study of being qua being," and so not as any particular sort of being (as opposed to say, biology for living beings, or physics for mobile being). "The most general of all sciences." That's often how it's framed, and it has inherited this view at least as far as its "subject matter" is concerned. Hence, metaphysics is generally taken to include part/whole relationships, act/potency, universals, modality, identify, etc. These come up in every science because they are wholly general.

If I was born millenia ago, I'm sure my life and perspective on the world would be so substantially different that it becomes absurd, due to the substantial differences in our technology, understanding of reality, religious values, and so much more.

That beliefs and attitudes about something vary by time and place should not suggest that such beliefs and attitudes are "stories all the way down." For example, what a person believed about the shape of the Earth or the etiology of infectious diseases varied by time and culture. If you lived 20,000 years ago, or even 2,000, you likely would have held very different beliefs about how diseases spread or the shape of the planet. This does not mean that there is no "fact of the matter" about the shape of the Earth or the way diseases spread, nor that the shape of the Earth varies with time and culture (I think most people can get on board with this much).

That man—all living things—are "children of the stars" sounds poetic enough, but on some popular views of nature all this amounts to is that man is "the product of arbitrary laws and initial conditions that exist 'for no reason at all.'" For man's nature to bestow dignity on him nature has to be more than mere "initial conditions + mechanism."

I don't think it's necessarily helpful to set up a dialectical between nature and culture here though. Man is the political animal as much as the rational animal. There is not, and has never been, human beings who exist "without culture." Culture and politics (the pursuit of common goods that do not diminish when shared) is part of human nature. The human good is always filtered through a particular culture and historical moment, but it isn't reducible to those either.

One way to think about it would be to take a simpler animal, a dog or a cat. What makes a cat thrive, the type of food it needs, the type of play, stimulus, environment, etc. is not what makes a dog thrive. So also for man. One cannot treat a man like a dog and expect him to thrive. Man has social needs, thymos, the need for recognition, and intellectual needs, logos. Likewise, determining a "good" treatment for pneumonia is a question of value and ends/goals. Yet it isn't an arbitrary one or one that changes much with culture. Nor is the higher order end/goal of promoting health particularly malleable. Good health is part of the human good in all cultures.

Did Buddha behave according to nature any more or less than Hitler did?

On any view of man where man has rational appetites for Goodness and Truth themselves, as such (e.g. Aristotle: "all men by nature desire to know"), yes, absolutely. The Buddha, Laotze, Saint Francis, Boethius, Saint Maximus the Confessor, etc. all lived more flourishing and happier lives than Hitler or Stalin, or even a Jeffery Epstein. This is a pretty easy case to make, since the latter lived fairly miserable lives despite their great wealth, status, and power (two of them took their own lives in despair). One of the reasons that virtue is preferable to merely having good fortune (e.g. being born with wealth and status) is that it allows for a self-determining happiness. Saint Francis, Saint Anthony the Great, and Laotze were happy in the wilderness with nothing. Boethius and Dante penned sublime works while under death threats. Socrates could be sublime as he faced death. By contrast, someone like Jeffery Epstein had a happiness that evaporated as soon as his good fortune to avoid punishment for his crimes ran out. Participation in common goods like "a good marriage " or "good family life" is part of a good human life. Stalin absolutely cut himself off from these (his biography is quite grim).

Anyhow, the idea that virtue is "culture all the way down," and that culture is in some sense arbitrary or infinitely malleable would suggest that we should find plenty of cultures where cowardice is preferable to courage, gluttony to temperance, rashness to prudence, weakness of will to fortitude, petty spite to justice, etc. Yet I know of know such culture. The closest thing I know of is the degeneration of some modern cultures into a celebration of "no-holds-barred competition," and yet these still show some vestigial appreciation of virtue. At any rate, the virtues identified in Indian and Chinese philosophy don't differ all that much from those identified by the Greeks, and these tended to remain relatively stable across cultural changes over millennia of recorded history.

So, my point there would be that it isn't just "whatever story we'd like to tell." We prefer stories about heros who have prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, and courage for a reason.

That's a thoughtful post. I am wondering if you have ever read Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy?" It was the most copied book of the Middle Ages and a real masterwork. Boethius had been the second most powerful man in Rome, having had both his sons made consul, having a loving wife, a position of power, great wealth, etc. He lost everything. He wrote the Consolation while in prison or exile, awaiting his eventual (quite brutal) execution, a punishment he suffered largely for doing the right thing and trying to fight corruption and the degradation of the state as the Western Empire's traditions fully collapsed.

Anyhow, it's a great synthesis of ethical philosophy, bringing in Stoic philosophy as the first "numbing medicine" to prepare Boethius (and the reader) for the "erotic ascent" that is informed by Plato, Plotinus, Aristotle, and Saint Augustine. Boethius initial argument against worldly goods, e.g. food, sex, fame, status, wealth, etc. being the "point of life" take a lot from Aristotle and St. Augustine, but present this information quite well. In some ways, St. Thomas Aquinas' treatise on the human good in the Summa Contra Gentiles is an improvement on Boethius but it's much drier and a lot of people have an allergy to Christian philosophy, so I tend to recommend to Consolation instead since the delivery is better.

I terms of what you've said, I've lately been considering if the time is right for a return to the ascetical schools that were so popular in late-antiquity, in Rome's decadent phase. Education here was focused on the development of virtue, on human happiness, and ultimately, on becoming "like God" (this being the goal for Pagans as well as early Christians, in the former case vis-á-vis the God of natural reason, which could be taken as a mere "intentional object" or "ens rationis" by skeptics, as opposed to an actual entity, although it normally was not). Or, at the very least, education in philosophy and the humanities might benefit from not treating students as "customers" and a setting removed from campus party life and constant access to the internet and digital entertainment.


Where I would disagree is here:

Norms are illusions. There is no normal, as the world is simply in constant flux. All the laws we have created for ourselves, the traditions we keep or reject, the way we shape our daily lives, and how we interact with the world and each other, are consequences of the stories we tell ourselves. It is a combination of the technology we invent and use, the values we instill in our children, our understanding of the world in the current era, and simply conformity. When you see the raw, true reality, you can see that everything boils down to two elements: nature, and the human condition. There is a natural world, the greater reality, as only a solipsist would deny this.

I am not sure if it makes sense to set up a man/nature dualism. Does man have no nature? Is man not part of nature? As respects the causes of norms and the "stories we tell ourselves," do these have no grounding in nature? Do they spring from a sheer human will unconstrained by causality or any natural ends?

I will grant you this, modern political thought tends towards making custom and even "natural law" ultimately arbitrary, and this is in part because the modern conception of nature is incredibly impoverished. Having reduced nature to mathematics, there is no longer any room in nature for ends. Hence, all ends, meaning, purpose, etc. must be either illusory (eliminativism) or must spring from the mind of man as a sort of sheer, sui generis force. The latter is basically just Reformation Era Protestant voluntarist divine command theology with God chopped off and man (the individual or collective) elevated into his place.

This sets up a strange binary. Man is elevated into the sui generis source of all meaning and value even as he, as part of nature, is degraded into a machine, a mere colocation of atoms acting according to mechanism.

My point, with this critique, is that I do think you are getting at something important vis-á-vis how we tend to view norms. However, I don't think the answer is to say "norms are just arbitrary, and man has no end, no telos." Were this true, there would be nothing to learn about how man flourishes and becomes happy and fulfilled, and so no coherent way to frame which (now arbitrary) norms we should reject or embrace in the first place.

Because freedom is often now defined largely or wholly in terms of "authenticity" and "lack of constraint" in our era, it can be tempting to see norms as a constraint on liberty, but I think a little thought shows that they are also absolutely for any sort of positive or reflexive liberty as well (but only if they aren't arbitrary). Ultimately, a satisfying philosophy grounds norms in a metaphysics of the common good and human nature, which is a tall order, but a worthwhile project.

Could you be so kind as to specify where he says that?

I wish I could be more helpful, but IRCC it's all in the last chapter, where he presented his "agential realism" as an alternative to the intractable problems he has hitherto been describing. Basically, "everything I've said had something wrong with it, so we need to start over."

I recall he name drops a number of figures as doing something similar to him, Spinoza, Hegel, (maybe Aristotle), but I don't recall thinking his "solution" was actually all that similar to these because he seems to still be wedded to reductionism and mathematization (as opposed to "the truth is the whole" of Big Heg). The higher levels of reality, the more intelligible, must still be "reduced" to the lower (a key conceit of materialism, which is the elevation of potency above actuality, or difference over identity).

I think the modern fetish for mathematization is probably what leads him in this direction.

As I said in the shoutbox:

Interesting comment I saw that isn't worthy of its own thread:

In the commentary on the Metaphysics St. Thomas says: " However, the objects of mathematics neither are moved nor cause motion nor have a will. Hence in their case the good is not considered under the name of good and end, although in them we do consider what is good, namely, their being and what they are."

Basically, mathematics is about bulk quantity (magnitude and multitude, as opposed to the "virtual quantity" of intensity in quality) as abstracted from things' definitions. Hence, it doesn't include ends. Hence, it cannot include any notion of final causality and telos. Thus, the mathematization of science, the demand that all of being be reduced to mathematical physics itself contains the demand that the world be "valueless and meaningless" and devoid of good and intentionality.

Hence, the birth of the much maligned but oft-recreated "Cartesian dualism" and "Cartesian anxiety."

---

And this goes right with the evolution of modern nominalist thought. Things are just math, and so things have whatever telos (and this ultimately whatever form) we give to them. Indeed, strictly speaking there aren't things at all, but our only our purposes for declaring some mathematical patterns to be "things"). This is how man's mind becomes the sui generis source of all meaning and value in some philosophies, or God's sheer will in others (with even man himself lacking any telos and nature, instead generating his own telos out of a sheer act of will). I think there is probably a relationship between the mathematization of being and the triumph of volanturism here. With all consideration of form and intrinsic telos excluded, the sheer will is all that is left to bestow purpose and meaning (first God's will, and later in history man's).

But, is this correct? Does a bee truly have no intrinsic telos? Man? Are there no such things as bees and ants but for the volanturist declarations of man, who slices up the world-as-mathematical-object based on utility? I tend to think not.

At any rate, radical nominalism certainly does seem to have a fetish for mathematization, and wants to reduce the emergence of "things" to "mathematical patterns," "regularities," "information," etc. But I think there will also be some bare remainder here, because mathematics cannot generate the purpose by which any "pattern" might be declared a thing or quality. Hence, the volanturist will is always lurking in the background of nominalism. There is a reason why, historically, nominalism and volanturism went together hand in glove. In post-modern thought, there is a turn against the individual as the seat of the volanturist will, but this isn't really a turn away from volanturism, so much as its globalization in a diffuse "ocean of will/intention."

Agential realism, as a reduction of being to mathematized sheer will, goes along with this.

A good question for Hoffman would be: "could there be a perceptual/cognitive system (a mind) that was 'selected for' or 'engineered' based on 'truth instead of fitness?'" If so, "would this represent a privileged viewpoint on reality? Would the thoughts of such a mind be 'more real' (less illusory) than our own?"

I think the obvious answer from his perspective would be: "no, I am not saying that some one special 'really real' mind can evolve or be engineered." But then what is he talking about? A reality/illusion distinction only makes sense if there is something other than illusion, some mind that knows "reality in itself" as opposed to fitness. If it is just "fitness all the way down," then fitness is reality and his argument is based on a false distinction.

I suppose that's somewhat the point he makes in the last chapter when he calls his previous position self-refuting and argues for idealism, but arguably the problem is that his previous position (which is a popular sort of view in materialism) is incoherent. The final chapter's argument is something like: "A or B, but not A, so B" yet it's never made clear that A (representationalist materialism) or B (idealism) are the only options. The whole "user interface" analogy also seems to presuppose some sort of Cartesian theater. My conviction is that materialism/physicalism is really defined by a sort of insoluble—in its terms—dualism, that dresses itself up monism by attempting a "reduction" of this dualism. Hoffman seems trapped in this model and simply flips towards trying to "reduce" in the other direction.

"Everything is received in the manner of the receiver" is a very old idea. The more I learn, the more I think that Kant's "revolution" only makes sense in terms of a pretty narrow period in the history of philosophy, rather than being an effective criticism of "all prior metaphysics." It's more a making explicit of the dualism at the heart of modern materialism, and the consequences of a "metaphysics of appearances" where appearances are arbitrarily related to an 'objective reality' set over an against them.

R. Scott Bakker has a neat horror story on the consequences of "neural implants" that would allow people to adjust their own emotions "on demand" from the Midwest Philosophical Studies journal (plus an accompanying essay). Want to get along with others better? "Jack the 'mirth slider up a few pips." Need to be more assertive? "Turn the aggression slider up."

His book "Neuropath" is a thriller on the same topic, but a bit grizzly (being about a sort of neuroscientist serial killer). Of course, we already do this sort of "self-modification" through cognitive and behavioral techniques, and through the ingestion of psychoactive substances (which often have massive side effects).

Anyhow, Bakker's work is interesting because, unlike many writers who are deep into the "eliminative materialism" mindset, he has a strong (if perhaps contradictory) notion of reflective freedom, i.e., freedom as self-governance and self-determination. But then this "freedom" ends up seeming largely incoherent in his work. I think he might agree with this too, there being no soul to become self-moving.

Yet in general, I find a lot of "scientific philosophy" tends towards overly reductive analysis, almost as if reductionism is what makes something "properly scientific." I certainly don't think this needs to be the case; it's just a tendency I've noticed. It's an issue that becomes particularly fraught when one starts discussing "engineering human nature," since a strong reductionism will tend to deny that there is any human nature to engineer in the first place, nor any Good by which to orient such an engineering effort.

BTW, if anyone is interested in reading a particularly dismal anthropology, I would highly recommend Rollo Tomassi's "The Rational Male." His book on religion is a particularly good example.

The thing is though, if you pair back all the Manosphere-speak in the book, the decrying of "manginas" and terse formulations of the imperatives of evolutionary psychology in catch-phrases like "beta need and alpha seed" (it is truly atrocious), what you'll find is a view of humanity that isn't that far off mainstream liberal welfare economics, or the more "enlightened liberalism" of guys like Stephen Pinker or Sam Harris. It's basically those anthropologies boiled down to their essence and stripped of all social niceties or appeal to sentiment, and then presented in particularly low-brow form.

It is, I'd argue, in many ways a "demonic" anthropology; it's pretty much the anthropology of Dante's damned in Hell (which of course borrows from a wide history of conceptions of demonic, fallen man).

Phil Cary says that one of the key differences between ancient and modern thought is that the ancient were chiefly afraid of degenerating into beasts, whilst today we are scared of becoming machines. But actually, given mainstream philosophy of nature, I'm not sure there is really all that much difference between these two outcomes anymore. The brute just is a particular sort of machine.

Like I said, I wouldn't necessarily equate democracy with liberalism. There is a lot of right and left liberalism that is quite skeptical of democracy and the tyranny of "the mob" over the individual.

The Manosphere is really just hyper-liberalism. Mark Fisher rightly identifies gangster rap culture and its notion of "keeping it real" as the end state of liberalism in "Capitalist Realism." To "keep it real" is to abolish all sentiment and to become most fully an atomized, self-interested, egoist utility maximizer. Homo oecononimicus is a sociopath for whom all relationships are transactional, for whom power relations define all human relationships and for whom the Good is defined fully in terms of power and epithumia. Thymos is only allowed to enter into the picture in terms of one's "rep," one's ability to credibly signal the use of violence to impose one's will vis-á-vis the conquest of sensible goods.

You see the same thing in hypercompetitve cut throat "reality" TV, where the ideal contestant in also a sociopath. This is "reality," the really real of the "state of nature." In many ways, the Manosphere is just the spread of this phenomenon to the middle class. The Manosphere's "alpha Chad" is very much the image of the power focused gangster constrained by nothing but his own will and directed by nothing but his own appetites, whose gratification is the fullest realization of freedom. "Might makes right" is just market logic become totalized and absolutized.

As Deleuze and Guattari among others have noted, capitalism desacralizes everything. Thymos and logos are pushed out of human concern. Instead we have Mill's ideal where the "constraints of custom" are severed, the late-night TV culture where absolutely nothing is serious or sacred. This is why the Manosphere and Alt-Right (and intellectual discourse in general) are dominated by irony. The human of late-capitalism, particularly the male, is emotionally and spiritually constipated, subject to the tyranny of epithumia and the death of eros and the other.

This is all the fruit of liberalism, not some extrinsic opposition to it in the way reactionary monarchism or confessional states were. If it contradicts liberalism that's because liberalism is beset by internal contradictions. And of course, the solution on the left is just "more liberalism." The administrative and carceral state must expand. We need enhanced hate speech laws to throw the defectives in prison, and enhanced welfare to meet more biological needs so that fewer people "rebel."

But these people aren't really rebelling, they are simply becoming the people liberalism tells them they are "by nature" and should be. They are engaging in the same "no-holds-barred" competition that progressive liberalism's obsession with "meritocracy" creates in more cultivated forms in the elite.

I'm no expert on Russell Vought, but this strikes me as another case of progressive liberals identifying conservative liberals as "not real liberals," even though they are still making their arguments for conservative liberalism on the basis of liberal values and anthropology. The only thing that seems illiberal here is the lifting up of religion and culture, not the antipathy to the "deep state."

Of course, democracy isn't necessarily wed to liberalism. As I said above, the two are actually normally actually in tension. But Vought seems to be arguing for a stronger executive as an enhancement of democracy, on largely liberal grounds. That is: "the executive should be stronger because they are selected by the 'people' and the people need the liberty to dispense with the administrative state and interference from the career civil service, as these are themselves a constraint on liberty."

Such a position is contradictory in two ways:

A. It's the very free market and marketization and commodification of everything, which conservatives have long supported, that leads to the growth of the administrative state into all corners of public and private life. The market dismantles the old institutions and culture and then the legal system and state must come in to stabilize market failures left in the wake of this deconstruction. So, conservatives support the very thing that leads to democratic demand for the "deep state" in the first place. One might suppose that the only reason attacks on the career civil service are even successful is that people have forgotten about the problems of unregulated capitalism that it was originally enlarged to tackle. Now that food inspectors, etc. are gone, companies will once again try to up profits by dumping chalk into milk, etc. People will get upset and demand a re-expansion of the administrative state.

B. The "Christian Nationalism" thread is more explicitly illiberal, but it is contradicted by the strong commitment to capitalism and classical liberal principles (it also is not based on a coherent alternative anthropology, political metaphysics, or conception of the human/common good in the way the confessional state was). Basically, it's just the desire to somehow maintain culture and tradition, even as the movement seeks to empower and advanced the very forces of capitalism that have dismantled culture and tradition in the first place.

"Christian nationalism" isn't, in most forms, a return to the confessional state. It's instead a sort of incoherent fever dream of "liberalism, but Christian"—a return to America's history that is obviously impossible given the progress of liberalism. Citizens of liberal states receive two decades of positive indoctrination in liberalism's preferred materialist metaphysics, and this means that any alternative system is largely inaccessible to them without their overcoming a great deal of bias and conditioning. Hence a non-liberal understanding of human liberty, telos, and the common good is unlikely on any large scale. People have been sold on "the world is just little balls of stuff bouncing in the void, which exist for no reason at all, and this is what 'science says,' and to reject it is to reject light bulbs, automobiles, and vaccines and return to the Middle Ages" since pre-school. Religion here exists as a carve out, a sui generis space of "private" "spiritual" "faith-based" (as opposed to "evidence-based") belief. Such a view obviously excludes a conception of spiritual goods as precisely those goods that do not diminish when shared. It makes them inherently private and atomized.

It strikes me as one of the paradigmatic features of liberalism. The solution to the problems generated by liberalism is always "more liberalism!" (just more conservative or more progressive).

The most obviously illiberal thing I know Vought has said is that the US should prioritize Christian migrants. But why is this illiberal? It's not obvious why selecting immigrants who share a faith with the dominant faith of the polity that is accepting migrants is "illiberal" or how exactly it is supposed to constrain the freedom of citizens to have more (or less) co-religionist migrants living amongst them. If we read about a Greek polis selecting migrants in this way, I don't think "this is a constraint on liberty for the current citizens" would be our first thought. Rather, the charge of "illiberalism" here relies on the liberal axiom that the Church (and culture) are something people need to be "freed from," with both contained to the atomized "private realm." Yet since religion is the primary way humanity has historically framed the ultimate human good that is to be promoted by the polis, this exclusion ultimately reveals itself to be totalitarian; it cannot avoid making a strong positive pronouncement on the whole of the human good and enforcing it in all spheres of public life.

It's worth considering why, in general, it is not considered damaging to "liberty" to select migrants based on their "economic qualifications " and ability to "grow the economy," but it is considered damaging to "liberty" to select them on the basis of their ability to assimilate to the dominant culture.

Are there any strands of this thinking you are sympathetic to, and if so, which ones?

Very little, except for the observation re the impotence of legislatures. I think this has fairly obviously tended to hold true, with the executive taking on more power. There is a parallel to how monarchs were able to radically expand their power in the early modern period, generally with the support of urban populations and the peasantry, since a strong monarch was seen as a check on recalcitrant elites. In the same way, legislatures are seen as both ineffective on national defense and impotent in the fact of powerful elite interests. I don't think that's an unfair judgement either, particularly in the context of America's donor-centric ridiculously short two year election cycles, where campaigning essentially never stops.

The Claremont Institute is not against liberalism though. I think only left-leaning liberals would tend to see it thus. And that's only because they associate "real liberalism" with their particular brand of progressive liberalism. For instance, Claremont describes itself as a "champion of small government and free markets," the boilerplate pronouncement of right liberalism. Neocons aren't against liberalism; they have so much faith in liberalism that they have tended to embrace rather extreme economic coercion to spread it, or outright use of violence to "force others to be free."

They might be more skeptical about democracy, but then I think anti-democratic sentiment within liberalism is even stronger on the political left these days. There is a lot of angst about populism and "low-information voters" for instance. Coverage of Brexit is a great example. You can also find all sorts of left-leaning analysis on "the threat of illiberal democracy."

This sentiment is sort of in line with the old Greek conception of democracy as leading to anarchy, but I think it's actually quite distinct because the real concern is that the "exceptional individuals" will have their freedom constrained by "the mob." But, on the liberal view, the "exceptional individual" is the driver of cultural, technological, and economic progress (progress being the great idol and a subject of almost religious faith). It's the same way "start-up tech culture" shouldn't be forced to suffer due to the demands of recalcitrant mediocre workers. So, if there is conflict between the freedom of the exceptional individual and democracy (which there is), so much the worse for democracy (granted "protecting minority rights" is a more palatable way to portray this opposition to democracy).

In general, conservatives are anti-democratic in not wanting migration to shift the constitution of the nation and its laws and culture (despite having pushed quite hard for that same migration). I think they are simply unable to own up to an inherit contradiction in conservative liberalism. Conservatives value "tradition," culture, and religion, and liberalism demolishes these things. They are in the odd position of arguing for unrestrained capitalism AND trying to protect traditional culture, even though the former flattens out and destroys the latter. Capitalism is diabolical in the full sense of the word.

Left liberalism has the same sort of problem. It wants a robust, all-encompassing welfare state, but then liberalism destroys the very sense of common identity and culture that originally built support for large scale redistribution and elite acquiesce to it in the first place. When "everywhere is everywhere is else," why exactly would a billionaire or leaders of mega corps have much civic spirit? The polity becomes just an administrative apparatus serving the interests of the liberated individual (particularly the exceptional one).

Glad you liked it. It's a good book. One thing to bear in mind is that in most pre-modern ethics "good" is predicated of something as respects some end, i.e., does an act lead toward/attain its end? Yet ends themselves can also be said to be "good" as respects some other end (e.g. I study medicine in order to be able to provide medical care (end 1) so that I can help promote health in myself and others (end 2); end 1 is ordered to end 2). Hence, when trying to order ethics, we are looking for a good that is "sought for its own sake, not on account of anything else" and a "highest good" by which all other goods/ends can be ordered.

This is why pre-modern Christians, far things being good or bad themselves, we have an analysis of use towards different ends: "Nothing created by God is evil. It is not food that is evil but gluttony, not the begetting of children but unchastity, not material things but avarice, not glory but vainglory. It is only the misuse of things that is evil, not the things themselves . (St. Maximus the Confessor). This is also why St. Augustine breaks his analysis down into "things sought to be used" and "things sought as a final end" (a distinction Plato and Aristotle make as well).

"Practical reason" is reasoning about what is good (and thus action), as opposed to "theoretical reason" which targets truth. A key thing to note here is that ethics is not the architectonic science of practical reason. That is politics. Ethics is about how we live good lives, are good people, develop excellence, etc. A good human life involves common goods, and "spiritual goods" (i.e. those goods that do not diminish when shared). But, the promotion of the good of all properly relates to the science of the common good, to the polis. This is just like how the art of bridal-making must be ordered to horseback riding, or shipbuilding to sailing. A problem that MacIntyre doesn't make particularly clear is that contemporary ethics tends to collapse politics and ethics, or to conflate the two. This is why contemporary ethics has such a hard time refuting the "rational egoist," Homo oeconomicus; first because it often has a poor conception of common and spiritual goods (not always true though), and second because it has collapsed the distinction between the good of the polis and the good of its members. These are deeply related, but not the same thing.

As Aquinas helpfully distinguishes in the commentary on Aristotle's Ethics: "moral philosophy is divided into three parts. The first of these, which is called individual (monastic) ethics, considers an individual’s operations as ordered to an end. The second, called domestic ethics, considers the operations of the domestic group. The third, called political science, considers the operations of the civic group." Collapsing these into one amorphous soup is not helpful, particularly for kids as respects education.

↪Tom Storm I'm unsure, as it's never been particularly attractive to me, but it sounds that way.
A person steeped in Wahabi teachings couldn't be "virtuous" as compared to a Catholic vicar. Or, for that matter, a physicist. LOL.

What "virtue ethics" are you referring to? In general, people of any background or vocation are capable of virtue. The four cardinal virtues have nothing explicitly to do with religion; indeed they are distinguished from the three "theological virtues." That's certainly the case in the mainstream Thomistic virtue ethics that is popular in Catholic philosophy. Dante, for instance, has Pagans and Muslims spared from torment due to their virtue in Limbo, while most of Hell is populated by Christians.

One need not have any particular profession nor profess any particular religion to possess fortitude, justice, temperance, and prudence. Rather, the idea is that the pursuit of the spiritual life aids in/is essential to the perfection of these, but by no means their mere possession. But "progress in the spiritual life" is also in no way equivalent with "professing faith" (again, with Dante, we see a lot of high-ranking clergy in Hell).



In Aristotle, yes, this is true to some extent. I think this comes out even stronger in the Chinese tradition, although I am less familiar with it. It's negated in Christian and Buddhist virtue ethics though, and even in the later Pagan virtue-ethics to a large extent. Epictetus notes that some slaves are able to attain to freedom while most masters are slaves to their vices for instance. Aristotle's elitism can also be moderated by the idea that the ideal polis works more to make "every man a king," as opposed to "every king a commoner." This is true for Plato as well to a lesser extent as well. To the question: "who should be the philosopher kings," it would seem the answer is probably "as many as possible." Plato's ideal city is complicated by the fact that it is:

A. Really meant to be an analogy of the soul, and there are difficulties in looking at it purely politically; and
B. To the extent it is based on real cities, one has to understand that in Plato's time most people had to spend most of their time working on agriculture or else everyone starves, and defense also had to be a major focus.

There is a weird sort of relationship between modern culture and elitism, particularly on the left. There is an obsession with access to elite institutions, particularly universities and prep schools, but then this is paired with a denial that having received this sort of elite cultivation actually makes the elite any more suited to leadership. This is sort of contradictory though. If going to an elite prep school and Yale didn't better prepare one for leadership, or career/political success, then there would be no reason to expend so much effort trying to make sure that different people had access to these things. They would be hollow, ineffective status symbols. People could get ahead by ignoring them.

IDK, this to me suggests a deeper internal contradiction vis-a-vis the heavy focus on "meritocracy" (a meritocracy that currently seems to be reducing social mobility). Meritocracy is not conducive to equality. A lot of liberal theory (e.g. Mill) is very much focused on empowering the "exceptional individual." The post-Marxist left is very much on board with this sort of thinking it would seem, but then this leads to an obsession with "fair access" to becoming an "exceptional individual" through "merit," and thus an obsession with merit itself.

Yet you cannot have a system designed to ruthlessly sort winners from losers and equality and dignity for all. The system is very much based on the idea that there are "winners." The "head" is considered more noble than the rest of the body, more essential, and more free, which inevitably leads towards a no-holds bared race to "get a-head." We are a far way from de Tocqueville's America (or perhaps rather, we are where he saw it heading in the long run, a mix of anarchy and an omnipresent bureaucracy that recreates the old-world authoritarian state; the worst of both worlds.)

Another good one:

The first thing to note is the title of the book itself—The Politics Of The Real—indicates that Schindler thinks Liberalism’s chief defect is it encourages an order of putative “peace” at the expense of the truth of things as they really are. The Liberal order seeks to keep the peace via a very minimal account of what constitutes “the good” precisely in order to avoid the often socially divisive arguments that inevitably accrue to any strong account of the good. Better to bracket concepts like “the good” in order to avoid such conflicts while opening a civil space for free individuals to “privately” hold whatever account of the good they deem appropriate. So long, that is, as they do not seek to impose their idiosyncratic notions on others.

However, as Schindler notes, this is to subvert the very goodness of the good per se and only grants “equality” to all such notions by first trivializing them as equally irrelevant to the social project. In other words, Liberalism, in seeking the “good” of social amity, subverts the very thing it seeks to preserve by robbing the very concept of all goods of its reality as something holding a moral purchase in the public domain. Goods are only goods if they are viewed as true and real things, embedded in the very fabric of things; they exist antecedent to any of our private opinions and choices and therefore impose upon us the limits necessary for true freedom in the first place.

In a rich insight, Schindler builds upon this critique and points out that this rejection of the realness of goods leads to a situation wherein there are no natural limits to State power. This rejections means there are no moral and spiritual realities transcending the State and both limiting its power and forming its structure.

For example, the Liberal order claims for itself the right to self-limitation in matters of the good, which shows that it views no other limits on its powers than those it itself imposes. But that self-limitation creates a situation where the lines of limitation can move, willy-nilly, at the whim of the State since it recognizes no moral or spiritual sovereignty independent of its own sovereignty. It claims for itself a monopoly on such policing powers even as it masks the latent totalitarianism in such a regime through “granting” the “right” of private citizens to pursue the good on their own.

Other serious problems

Truth is a casualty as well since, as Schindler points out at the beginning of his text, in order for there to be a “res publica” in the first place the Liberal State must ignore the meddlesome and annoying question of “what is this thing in its essence” as the chief determiner of what constitutes the good. It resorts instead to the marginalization of all such metaphysical and delimiting questions into the realm of the purely subjective. Obviously, the State cares about “truth” in the practical domain of commerce and in the legal realm as it pursues justice as fairness. But it undermines these same realities by failing to embed them in a proper theory of the good which alone can hold them together and which alone can keep them from degenerating into a kind of technocratic proceduralism.

Nor does Liberalism have any inner principle for recovering such a theory of the good since it has been, since its inception, a movement characterized by a scorched-earth rejection of all previous moral and spiritual traditions. That includes the tradition and teaching embodied by the Church, which alone is capable of bearing forward the givenness of the good. Borrowing from thinkers such as Augusto del Noce and Pierre Manent, Schindler views the Liberal project as anti-Christian in its core.

And it is most especially anti-Catholic, insofar as it rejects the particular form of Catholicism as the very public embodiment of the coming together of Greek wisdom, Roman law, and Jewish theology—a synthesis that formed the moral and spiritual tradition of the West. And it does so because this “form” claims public warrant and is rooted in an ongoing development of a “private” Revelation that can have no such public warrant since it is not something accessible to the universal canons of secular reason.

Nor does it matter that many of the American founders spoke, theistically, of “nature’s God” as the source for all of our natural rights in the social contract. Because what they meant by “nature” was the Newtonian machine of closed and fixed laws and what they meant by God was the God so understood as the “divine architect” of this machine and whose “reality” only extended as far as universal reason can discern. Which really amounts to no God at all, especially as science marches forward and closes all of the gaps in our knowledge of nature’s autonomous operations. This is what happens to all “divine architect” formulations since God’s causative transcendence is viewed competitively with regard to nature’s causative immanence and leads to a flat-footed view of causation such that “if nature did this, then God didn’t” and vice versa.

All real religious traditions therefore are now trivialized and marginalized and relegated to the realm of private taste as “scientism”, and a vulgar pragmatic empiricism rushes in to take their place.

An anti-tradition tradition

Seen in this light, “religious freedom” in a Liberal order is no real freedom at all, but is in point of fact a kind of anti-freedom. The State, in “granting” freedom to religion, makes it clear that such freedom privileges only those forms of “religion” that make no strong claims about the public nature of the good, of God, of things spiritual. It privileges religion in the same manner as it privileges my choice of a Big Mac rather than a Whopper, which is to say it isn’t really privileging religion at all, but is instead merely privileging all such private tastes in matters that it views as trivial to the social contract. And in so redefining the social standing of religion it delegitimates Catholicism in its most essential aspects.

Thus is Liberalism an anti-tradition tradition, which is what makes it uniquely corrosive to the Christian evangel of the realness of God in time and space, as well to the Catholic belief that the Church is the very extension of the Incarnation into and within the flow of history. Therefore, there is no sense in which Catholicism can accommodate itself to such an ordo on a theoretical level and there is no sense in which Catholicism can make peace with such an ordo even on a practical level.

And this is why wherever the Church does try to accommodate itself to Liberalism, it dies.

This is also why, according to Schindler, Whig Thomism is such a flawed project. Murray’s thesis flies in the face of the demonstrable facts of the intellectual history of Liberalism and mistakes Liberalism’s smiling face toward a certain kind of religion as a gesture of “peace” devoid of deeper intent. The big lie of Liberalism is that it does not constitute a confessional creed of any kind—and Murray and his followers buy into that lie. And it is a lie because all States are necessarily confessional, which is to say, all States are ultimately theological.

Furthermore, the illiberalism we see erupting today, far from being an “aberration”, is the full-flowering of the procedural emptiness and metaphysical vacuity at the core of Liberalism which is only now coming into full view. It often takes time for the inner logic of an idea to unfold, especially when it is competing with other ideas that provide a counterweight. And in the American instance that counterweight was the cultural hegemony of a pan-Protestant theology whose ecclesiology was so “low” that for a time America itself was its “church.” And this could happen because such a low ecclesiology, with its quasi-gnostic denominationalism, allowed for a hyper-individualistic and largely “interior” vision of what it meant to be “saved.”

But that cultural hegemony has long been in our rearview mirror and so now we can see for the first time what America looks like when it is stripped of the last vestiges of even such an attenuated “traditioning”—a stripping that was inevitable due to the corrosive nature of Liberalism in the first place. What we are seeing now is what Liberalism looks like when its full nihilism takes over...

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2021/05/25/a-profound-critique-of-liberalism-essential-analysis-of-integralism/

If anyone wants an audiobook version: https://youtu.be/Gd7Trt0jWyA?si=5xcOWum_FLlouwb4

You can convert YouTube videos to mp3s quite easily if you just look on any search engine for a converter site too.

On the early part about carrying the shrine, I think he gets at something quite important. Why is it sports in particular that we say are "good for learning teamwork?" Afterall, all sorts of other, less physical pursuits involve cooperation. I think the physical exertion and ascetic discipline has something to do with the particular success of sports in this realm.

This is precisely why military training often involves shared hardship and exertion. Yes, they need to get soldiers in shape so that they can perform demanding tasks, but that's only part of it. Special forces training, for instance, is often far in excess of what is ideal for athletic output or health; the entire point is that it is extremely hard. I remember reading about how "shared hardship" is useful for building common identity and orientation towards a common good in some leadership literature. This is also why the US Americorps program (volunteer work, mostly doing disaster relief) also has a physical training component.

Mishima's observation of the way this smooths out differences in perception (getting us further away from words, which cut away through difference) is interesting.

It also reminded me of one of my favorite aphorisms from Nietzsche's Human, All too Human:

A Path to Equality. — A few hours' mountain climbing make of a rogue and a saint two fairly equal creatures. Tiredness is the shortest path to equality and fraternity — and sleep finally adds to them liberty.

His "turning back towards the sun" section reminded me of some good stuff Byung-Chul Han writes about Hegel re "living versus merely surviving." I'll try to find it.

Faith involves trust but is not just trust. It includes something more. I've set this out in detail in my previous posts.

The mark of faith is that when challenged, one's commitment is not to be subject to reevaluation, but to be defended.

The mark of rationality and science is when challenged, not to simply defend, but reevaluating and reassessing one's commitment.

This strikes me as a deficient definition. For one, it would imply that Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, etc. must have been motivated by a lack of faith because their experiences led to them challenging their existing religious beliefs and obedience to religious authority. Likewise, this would imply that when a Muslim converts to Christianity, or when Christians change denominations, this move should involve a decrease in faith.

Now, to be sure, such changes do involve a lack of faith in the original tradition, denomination, etc. However, one often hears of cases like a lukewarm Christian converting to Islam and becoming much more dedicated to the spiritual life in the process (or vice versa). This is a move from faith to greater faith (often based on evidence).

Moreover, in Martin Luther's case we have a clear example of someone who, when faced with evidence that challenged his beliefs (e.g. his consequential trip to Rome, his observation of how indulgences were handled locally, his study of Scripture and St. Augustine, etc.) did not defend those beliefs, but rather, as you say: "rationally reconsidered them." Luther's rebellion was not a matter of losing or gaining faith, so much as a reconsideration of what he thought faith implied.

Indeed, the hallmark of Western theology during and after the Reformation was an extreme focus on evidence and a discursive justification of warrant. This is how theology often became focused on collecting doctrinal "proof texts" to support beliefs, or on signs and wonders to give credence to some tradition. Likewise, Calvin wasn't led to TULIP through a refusal to countenance evidence contrary to his faith, but rather by a forensic analysis of the evidence, which to him implied TULIP.

Probably the most common critique that Eastern Christians level against the inheritors of Latin Christendom is that they are too focused on evidence, discursive justification, forensic analysis, and legalism. We can see this sort of issue replicated today in terms of "critical readings" of Scripture in Western theology. Jean-Claude Larchet is representative of the Eastern tradition when he argues that critical readings are deficient because their extreme focus on forensic analysis and the methodologies of the secular academy lead to a way of reading Scripture that destroys the unity of the text.

Likewise, argument against Protestantism on historical grounds, that its "fruit" has been a tremendous splintering of the church into thousands of different heresies and the dominance of athiesm in its old heartland, are arguments based on observation (often supported with statistics and historical analysis).

Similarly, the fixing of the Jewish and Christian Canons involved a lot of appeals to evidence and discursive justification.

"Good" is predicated relative to ends. Sustaining their own life is, in general, an end all humans (and all organisms) share. However, it is not the only end sought by people, and other ends might be prioritized above survival. In the case of suicides, an end to suffering is generally sought as a good that is more desirable than life. Likewise, people sacrifice themselves for various causes, just as individual bees will sacrifice themselves when their hive is under attack, or as many mammalian mothers will engage in fights they have little success of winning to defend their young.

Ethics as the study of ends can look to ends sought by most people, or ends sought by man by nature. But there is the question: "are these natural or common ends themselves aligned to any higher good?"

I think Aristotle and others who have followed him can make a strong case that eudaimonia (flourishing/happiness) is a unifying end (and one that incorporates shared, social/common goods). But I would say most anti-realists (and this certainly has been the case in this thread) make the mistake of jumping immediately to trying to orient all ends to a poorly defined highest good as a sui generis "moral good." Everything then becomes an exercise is "debunking" this sui generis "moral good" and "ethical ought."

For example, the person who suffers and wants to die offers a counterexample to "poison water is bad." So too, if we claim that: "it is bad for children to have heavy metals dumped into their water," is a fact of medical science that has clear relevance to human flourishing, the counterexample can be offered up: "but what if some insane dictator ordered that every child have their blood tested and then tortured and enslaved all of those with lead and mercury levels that were too low?"

But moral realism doesn't require that good is predicated univocaly, or that there be some sort of "moral calculus" by which different things can be rated in terms of "goodness points." This is a fever dream of an ethics that has already become incoherent.

More to the point, such debunking always seems to end up relying on the fact that people do recognize value, that they are aware of facts about human flourishing. The suicide counter-example relies on the value-laden fact that suffering is bad and that people might rationally seek death as an ends to avoid it. Otherwise, there would be no reason to say that "poison water might be good for some people," unless we turn to begging the question and claiming that "good" is just whatever people currently desire (i.e. it is just an expression of desire/emotion). Likewise, the heavy metals counter example relies on the value-laden fact that being enslaved and tortured is even less conducive to human flourishing than heavy metal poisoning.

If I want to die, I might very well seek out poisonous beverages.

Of course, it is only obvious that this makes poisonous beverages good in some cases if one has already assumed that "good" is equivalent with "what is currently desired." In the West, one of the great figures in ethics, Socrates, does drink poison. He does so in pursuit of a higher end. It is presumably that this end is truly choiceworthy that makes the act good, not that he wants to drink the poison. If simply wanting to drink poison made it good for us, then the jilted lover who impulsively drinks poison to get back at the person who spurned them would be equally as wise as Socrates. Socrates and Madame Bovary would be the same sort of story, the story of a rational actor maximizing their utility based on the information available to them. Sydney Carton's reflection upon choosing to sacrifice himself to save another, that "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known," in Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" has a much different meaning if it is simply the standard operating procedure of Homo oecononimicus.

My hunch is that moral anti-realism has become so popular because of the positive indoctrination in liberalism's anthropology that most people growing up in the West receive. Liberty is the voluntarist "capacity to do what one wants." Skepticism about ultimate aims and tolerance are pillars of the ideology. These two ideas combine to give the individual special epistemic status, if not outright infallibility vis-á-vis their own best interests (so long as they are "adults" and aren't suffering from "severe mental illness," two terms that are also subject to a lot of shaping by liberal anthropology).

I think the claim is supported logically by the fact that no purely logical reason for considering races to be inferior or superior seem to be possible. If they were possible, it should be easy enough to find them, or they certainly should have been found by now, and yet they have not been, and seemingly cannot be, found, hence the conclusion that they at least do not seem to be possible.

But that's the very thing the racist denies, they will point to decades of studies on intergroup IQ scores, peer reviewed studies on rates of violent crimes when controlling for income, historical differences in regional development, etc.

The "race realist" (like the "gender realist") often comes armed with a wealth of scientific studies. And they can also point to no small number or cases where people have been persecuted for, or driven out of the sciences for daring to contravene the "social construct" or "no differences narrative," hence casting aspersions on "scientific consensus" as being manufactured by fear of accusations of "racism."

Stephen Pinker has some good stuff on this. The most common response to this issue, something like what you're saying, implies that: "if there are actually meaningful differences between races, then racism actually wouldn't be bad and maybe we should even become racists." It forces anti-racists to have to litigate the interpretation of expert data like IQ studies, behavioral genetics, etc. and get into debates about statistical controls, etc. because they have already accepted premises like: "if there is intergroup variance in anything other than the 'physical' (i.e., the mental) then racism is actually acceptable." Indeed, the "meritocracy" imagined by modern liberalism would tend to suggest this.

This is a problem that is very widespread and I think it stems from an inability to ground human dignity and worth in anything in post-modern liberalism. So racism has to be opposed on the grounds that is a transgression of the liberal ideal of individuals getting proper deserts for their actions. The transgression of racism in neo-liberalism is not the dehumanizing and alienating circumstances of the urban and rural underclasses afterall, but rather that membership in this "lower class," and more importantly membership in the small, and ever shrinking "winner class" are not evenly distributed across racial categories, implying that some exceptional individuals are not receiving appropriate desert.

For instance, a common position for both leftist elites and guys like Charles Murray is that automation, AI, etc. will deprive a vast underclass of work and make them dependent on "the state." And while both argue that standards for this underclass should be improved (they have instead been declining by many measures), they think its existence is inevitable. Racism then, is about the relative rates of people of x group making it to the upper class, whether we should expect that this is proportional to population statistics or whether we should expect between group variance in attainment to this class. The problem is not the "meritocracy," but only whether the meritocracy is effectively sorting winners from losers based on the "right" criteria, and not depriving would-be exceptional individuals from exceptional individual status.

The racists' case is thus made easier, since it becomes an argument about proper sorting. The wealth gap between white and black Americans is now larger than it was under Jim Crow (and the Arab-Jewish gap in Israel). Yet if this can be shown to result from proper "data-driven decision-making" and meritocracy, so much the worse for equality. Hence, we get debates over whether credit scores are "structural racism," because they are an example of a mechanism effecting such outcomes.

Race and sex, being highly visible and biological, are the preferred identities of analysis here. They are "constructs" but they are the focus precisely because exceptional individuals cannot yet transcend them if they choose to. Whereas class, religion, ethnicity, regional background, etc. tend not to be a focus, because the upwardly mobile individual is responsible for transcending (and really abandoning) them.

I think Magee's particular thesis is too maximalist, in part because much of what he designates as "Hermetic" is also a part of the broader medieval tradition Hegel was familiar with, or the Patristics he was exposed to as a theology student. However, it's nonetheless an important point. Gary Dorian makes a similar case in "Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit" and so does Robert M. Wallace in his work (plenty of others too).

I still recommend Pinkard's "Hegel's Naturalism" sometimes because it's a good introduction and I think the deflated Hegel is easier for people to wrap their minds around. However, it's ironic that Pinkard uses Hegel's "Aristotlianism" to deflate him, since it presupposes the modern analytic deflationary readings of Aristotle to make sense.

I feel like "mysticism" is not the best term here though. Really what bothers modern sensibilities is just metaphysics and the transcendent in general. Philosophy need not appeal to any sort of mystical experience to fall afoul of this bias in contemporary thought (particularly analytical thought). Which I feel is unfortunate. I think "anti-metaphysics" tends to actually just assume a very particular sort of metaphysics, and then this position essentially just "cheats" on justifying itself by pretending it is "just the skeptical, agnostic position."

It's interesting to think about how to frame this sort of move (which is very common in contemporary philosophy) in dialectical terms. The basic move is "we must be properly skeptical and will just bracket this confusing question and move on," with this "bracketing" actually just resulting in adopting a particular metaphysics (e.g. nominalism, materialism, etc.)

To even have "two potatoes" or "two people" requires that there are similarities between particulars such that there are potatoes, people, etc. If people are not sure if potatoes, ants, or people exist "outside the mind," I don't really know how they are able to avoid full blown solipsism and all-encompassing radical skepticism. Afterall, if there aren't potatoes and ants, then presumably there aren't people either, and all "other people" would also be "generated by the mind."

Plus, if every mind is "constructing its own world," there are either symmetries between these worlds, or else each person effectively lives in their own, isolated world.

I also reread the Divine Comedy for a book idea I was working on recently and it led me to pick up Attar of Nishapur's Sufi classic, The Conference of the Birds. If I like this I will probably do Rumi's Masnavi next, which I've tried starting a few times before.

I had the idea for a fantasy novel that would borrow some of the imagery and messaging of the Commedia but put it in more accessible (and action-packed) terms. But then the book would also have a "book within a book" story within a story based on Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius now being a powerful sorcerer vizier of course), since the themes of both go well together.

I've read a few critiques of neo-liberalism in the past few months.

Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" is excellent, and extremely accessible for a book that is working with the ideas of Zizek, Badiou, Baudrillard, Lacan, and Deleuze and Guattari. I can see why it became such an "instant classic."

Byung-Chul Han's "The Agony of Eros" and "The Burnout Society" is in a somewhat similar vein, and very good, but is written more in the abstruse style of this sort of work. I think he is a rare writer who can make it work though, rather than making it tedious. He's also a big Hegel guy, which I always appreciate.


Taking up similar themes is Patrick Deneen's excellent "Why Liberalism Failed," but it approaches the same topic from the lens of traditional political theory and largely offers a critique of our current era in terms of liberalism's ancient and medieval antecedents. The key theme here is that liberty was once defined in terms of self-governance at the individual level (which had to be cultivated and could not be taken for granted), with the assumption that political liberty required a citizenry possessed of this individual liberty and capacity for self-rule. It reminded me a bit of Axel Honneth's typology of negative, reflexive ("inner"), and social freedom in his "Freedom's Right " Honneth likewise picks up on the way modern thought tends to stress negative freedom to the exclusion of reflexive freedom, while many theorists never make it to the "social freedom" that is the focus on Hegel.

Reading these also led me to return to C.S. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man," a classic on a very similar set of topics.

Here is an example of Fisher:

The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.

He writes this in the context of how images of future ecological apocalypse have become a mainstay of the late-capitalist social imagery. As Deneen says, the assumption that looming crises shall all be fixed by "progress" is a faith that borders on the religious.

But, while I was reading these, at night I was also reading Origen's "On Prayer" and "On First Principles," St. Gregory Palamas' selections for the Philokalia and the Triads, St. Maximus the Confessor's "Centuries on Love," and St. Isaac of Nineveh's "Ascetical Homilies". The interesting thing here is how these come off today as in some ways much more radical and transgerssive than the most radical cutting-edge critiques of neo-liberalism from the contemporary left and right. When Han talks about the death of the "Other," and so of Eros, and he and Fisher (and their sources) talk about the reign of cynicism and death of the sacred, it's very interesting to see the ancient counterpoint (also written by citizens of decadent empires in decline—although St. Isaac and Origen were persecuted minorities in their time). But what also comes out is the unabashed optimism and total lack of cynicism and irony in the older works. It's almost transgressive to be this earnest. David Foster Wallace was another figure who spoke on the tyranny of irony in the era of late-capitalism, and I think any student of the nu/alt-Right can pick up on how cynicism and irony absolutely dominates those spaces (and their leftist mirror images).

Fisher talks about how protest has become a permanent part of late-capitalism. Anti-capitalism itself becomes a product to consume. He speaks of the 1960s spirit as being in some ways childlike, built on this image of a greedy, irrational father figure who restricts the young's access to pleasure out of a sort of sterile and dogmatic I'll will. What needs to be liberated is access to pleasure (e.g. the sexual revolution). This goes along with Han's insight that epithumia, sensuous desire, has come to dominate and push out thymos (spirited desire), and logos (intellectual desire). This is why anger—and Trump's movement is very much one of thymos and anger—is so transgressive today. This trend also means the dominance of what Charles Taylor calls the "immanent frame," a focus on immanent, sensible goods, which seems to dominate even religion and religious politics today (which have been swallowed up by the "Culture War (TM)") In this context, St. Isaac's assertion that:

The world" is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honor which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancor and resentment, and physical fear. Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead…. Someone has said of the Saints that while alive they were dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it.

...is quite radical. So is St. Gregory Palamas' contention that the only true death is separation from (lack of focus on) the Divine, and that it is a death the living participate in, making them a sort of "living dead," struggling tooth and nail towards nothingness.

But the thing that really struck me is this:

Han has no recommendations. It's straight critique.

Fisher ends in a hopeful note, but it's very vague.

Deneen likewise has extremely vague advice about "building local communities."

Lewis is the only modern author I mentioned who has a strong sense of "what should be done?" This is in pretty marked contrast to Saint Gregory Palamas, Saint Maximus the Confessor, Origen, and Saint Isaac of Nineveh, who are all very confident about "what is to be done." And the difference is not them living in better times. The former two were subject to military raids and dramatic instability. Origen was born in a flourishing era in a rich city to an elite family, but he was a persecuted minority. He watched his father get executed when he was a teen and he would go on to be tortured to death (without recanting). Maximus likewise had his tongue cut out and writing hand lopped odd when he refused to compromise. And yet... the optimism. And this is an optimism that even drips down into the metaphysics. For Origen, Maximus, and Gregory, the "world" is every bit as ugly as Fisher finds late-capitalism—perhaps moreso—and yet being is almost shockingly beautiful, possessed for soaring symmetries, the whole of "what is" a sign of unfathomable beauty. It is very much a study in contrasts.

Anyhow, I particularly like how Fisher and Han call on literature and film so much; it's a great element in their writing. Fisher in particular had a real gift for tying pop culture to complex theory without making his connections feel contrived; his early death was a terrible loss.

In considering Plato, we might ask: "In virtue of what are all just acts called 'just' or all round things called 'round?'" If there are facts about which acts are just, or which things are round, etc., in what do these facts consist?

If our response is that there are social rules for making vocal utterances, assertability criteria for declaring something 'just' or 'round,' I am not sure this gets us very far, since the most obvious response to: "when is it appropriate to assert that something is round?" is "when it is round, as opposed to say, square." It will be hard to trace back a rule for "round" that has nothing to do with round things (indeed, the rule would have to create roundness instead of vice versa). In order for something to "count as" "round" or "a fly" it seems there must be something identifiable by which all round things are round, all flies flies, etc. If there wasn't, no rule identifying these instances from any others would be possible. Plus, there is the further difficulty that when round things cease being round, roundness itself does not change.

Plato is certainly concerned with language, but the more primary concern is how anything is anything at all and how particulars instantiate universals. Language is downstream of this concern for Plato. In his letters, where he is more explicit, he specifically suggests that language only deals with relative truths, not the truths of metaphysics. Plato is living in a period where languages do not extend very far and are unstandardized, and where dialects vary from valley to valley. He is well aware of barbarians who use different tokens to represent things, have different customs, and "different concepts."

Nonetheless, if things can truly be just, round, cats, red, etc. then some explanation is needed. It will not do to simply point out that things are called "just," "round," "cats," "red," etc. by men, since presumably men do not call things such for no reason at all, or for no reason outside the rules regarding their own utterances. This would imply:

A. That the utterances and their rules generate themselves, as opposed to being caused by the presence of round things, cats, trees, etc. The utterances would be constitutive of anything being anything determinant. A ball would be round because it is called "round," as opposed to being called round because it is round.

B. Presumably, facts about what is taller than what, what is round and what is not, what is just or good, are not solely about the vocalizations some community tends to make in response to given sense stimuli. If it was just this (the behaviorist approach), the behaviorist theory itself would be contentless. Understanding would play no role in knowledge, and all facts would be mutable.

Given the extreme dominance of nominalism in our era, I think it's very easy to accidentally beg the question against Plato. One might point out that things like "water" "have changed." Now water is known as "H2O." Whales are no longer considered "fish," etc. However, these sorts of changes are only a challenge for universals if one has already decided that the universal just is the word in question, which is the very thing the realist denies.

A realist might object that the "water" we see today is very much the same water our ancestors dealt with when it rained, or when they came to ponds, rivers, etc. It's the same concept, it has the same quiddity. Our intentions towards it have just become more refined. Nothing about realism entails that one fully grasps a universal and all of its relations. According to Plato, we don't. If, as St. Thomas says, the collective efforts of man have yet to fathom the full essence of a fly, it should hardly be surprising that new intentions are developed of flies. The question is more: "is the fly prior to human language?" Or "does man have a name for flies because there are flies, or are there flies because man has a name for them?" If the latter, the realist challenge is "why does man create a name for flies?"

A "co-constitutional" approach that splits the difference runs into the problem of the naturalist observation that flies appear to be far more ancient than human language.

OK, this helps. I don't know if I've got @AmadeusD right, but I think the position you're describing would be something like: When we say "ought" in an ethical context, we mean "I ought to do this if I hold certain values and wish to achieve them." I took him to mean that asking for a further, special "moral ought" -- which would be categorical, and which would also specify the values -- is a mistake. If that's what he meant, then clearly he can't give any examples because he thinks there aren't any. Is that absurd? Or am I still not getting it?

"In order to be truly x, x must belong to category y."

"In virtue of what can any x be y? What makes x a member of y?"

"No clue. Membership in y is unintelligible."

That doesn't seem problematic to you?

Being moral is not rationally obligatory.

You seem to be saying that people can positively, correctly identify x as "truly, monstrously evil," but that this says absolutely nothing about whether one should or should not do x. What exactly do you think "goodness" or "evil" consists in then? (apparently nothing related to practical reason, which you seem to be rejecting).

What I find especially strange though is the contention that if one hypothetically accepts values, then oughts can be generated. So "if you hypothetically value y, and x is y, you should do x because it is y," works. And this is paired with the realist claim that things can be "truly good." But then you also claim that x being truly good can never generate an ought (yet accepting that x is good hypothetically can). What's the difference?

I'm afraid it's still not categorical, because you're assuming a desire for a car. What would be bizarre would be this: "I want a good car, and this car is better in every way, but I don't know which to pick." Again, the difference between a value and an "ought."

I can't even parse what you're trying to say here to be honest. Obviously the example involves car shopping. I chose it instead of something like "prudence is better than recklessness," to foreclose on the question "but is prudence really better?" which would be beside the point. An example about prudence being better than recklessness would be more general. It's the same thing thought. "Better" implies "you should choose this over what is worse."

Your claim is that "x is best" never implies "do x," and then you also seem to be saying that it is perfectly "rational" to choose the worse over the better. "Better" and "value" apparently have nothing to do with what should be chosen.

I'd just ask "in virtue of what is anything good?" Define what makes something good? What makes something better or worse?

In virtue of what is a practical judgement "rational" when one chooses the worse over the better?

What is "practical reason" given that facts about values have no bearing on how one should act?

I am not dogmatically sticking to Aristotle here, I am pointing out that your particular position is incoherent and you don't seem to understand what you mean by terms like "good," "better," "moral," or "ought."

I don't know why you think of yourself as a Kantian because from the Kantian perspective claiming that "x is good and y is evil, but this tells us nothing about whether we should do x or y" is gibberish. A Kantian does not say "it is good to treat everyone as an ends and not a means," and then scratch their head as to whether or not this can "generate an ought" whereby they should treat people as ends. Likewise, when Buddhists say it is better to avoid attachments and desire, they do not also mean "but the doesn't (cannot) suggest that you should avoid these things." Nor does Confucius, when he lauds filial piety, think that what he says indicates nothing about how people should treat their fathers.

There are good criticisms of Aristotlian ethics that have helped it develop. I am aware of none, however, that grant Aristotle facts about what is truly best, but then rely on the notion that the one cannot move from "x is better then y," to "so choose x," or that it is perfectly "rational" to choose the worse over the better. This is like claiming that "x is true and y is false," tells us nothing about which we should affirm (indeed, it seems to imply this is so).

Bah someone else thought of it too haha.

Don't feel too bad, the connection between ends, the unity by which anything is any thing at all, and life's maintenance of its own form is the key thread that Aristotle develops through the Ethics, Physics, and Metaphysics. It's a quality insight and can be developed in a number of ways. Lots of thinkers still pursue this basic framework and Saint Thomas Aquinas' extension and refinement of it.

Is one evil or morally culpable on the basis of ignorance? It seems not. Is one evil or morally culpable on the basis of weakness of will? It seems not. Is one evil or morally culpable on the basis of external constraint? It seems not. If moral culpability and moral evil are not possible on any of the three exhaustive options you have provided, then they are not possible at all.

I don't see this. If someone suffers from weakness of will and cheats on their spouse we normally consider them blameworthy. So too if they inappropriately strike someone in a rage; it's their fault. Weakness of will is often precisely what we mean by "blameworthy."

Certainly, there are instances of weakness of will were we find people to be more or less culpable in. Pete Hegseth getting blackout drunk and commiting adultery on a work trip (his defense against sexual assault claims IIRC) is blameworthy because middle aged men elevated to levels of high office (and subject to espionage attempts) hopefully have better self-control. Phineas Gage becoming quarrelsome and impulsive after a railroad spike took out most of his frontal lobe is less his responsibility. Self-determination and self-government isn't something people either have or don't have, but rather something that must be cultivated to some extent, even if human nature allows some individuals to transcend bad circumstances as well (e.g. Epictetus becomes free as a slave while his masters remain slaves to their vices). We also tend to blame Ivy-educated Wall Street criminals more than African child soldiers for this reason, even if the crimes of the latter are more visceral and clearly wrong.

Likewise for ignorance. Negligence can be blameworthy. Sometimes people are also responsible for enabling the external constraints they find themselves dealing with.

What makes serial killers so disturbing isn't just their strong appetite for cruelty, which would merely make them akin to vicious feral dogs, but also the way they bend reason to their evil ends. Yet you see the same thing to a lesser degree all the time. This capacity for reason denotes culpability. In philosophy, reason is often bent towards defending a notion of freedom and human nature that attempts to have man usurp the place of God for instance. This is blameworthy. There are cases where people should, or do know better. This is self-determination turned towards finitude.

Indeed, your whole argument here is that universalism is inevitable because humans could not but choose otherwise. Given your understanding of human choice, humans could never choose evil, and therefore they could never fail to choose God. You apparently view humans as something like Roomba vacuum cleaners, which may make a few wrong turns but will never ultimately fail. This is why Flannery's analysis is so relevant. Evil itself would not exist if this theory of choice were correct, and the Problem of Evil goes hand in hand with the problem of Hell.

People obviously do choose evil. Sometimes they choose evil because they cannot resist temptation. They know cheating on their spouse is wrong, but they do it anyway. Sometimes they rationalize their behavior, and might even convince themselves that what is wrong is actually good. "It's ok for me to cheat because I am a higher sort of man beyond the strictures of plebian morality." They put their intellect into the service of evil, into the pursuit of finite goods and falsity. This doesn't absolve them of blame. Rather, this is precisely what blame consists in, having the capacity to receive the light, and to know the light as light (even if vaguely), and loving the darkness instead.

My point was not that man cannot choose evil; he clearly can, although this is a (sometimes known) misordering of goods. My point was that the will's infinite desire for Goodness cannot be fulfilled by evil, or by merely finite goods. A pretty common argument against materialism runs: "if materialism is true, there is no reason for us not to find full satisfaction in the finite, material goods we see around us. Evolution should not lead us to desire an infinite Good. But man has an infinite desire for Goodness, indicating an orientation beyond the material."

If man's natural desire for Goodness and Truth cannot find rest in evil and falsity, in the absence of what is desired, then the rational soul stays in motion and hungry until it has attained its ends. It is never satisfied. Motion continues indefinitely, until it turns back towards its natural end. Hence, if it never turns back towards Goodness and Truth (repentance) it must either:

A. Be externally constrained from turning towards what actually fulfills their appetites (making the punishment extrinsic).

B. Have lost its rational nature and rational appetites, which is in some sense to have become a different substance and so to have been annihilated.

Anyhow, on your view, if man chooses evil as evil, and finds his rest in evil (i.e., he no longer has any impetus to ever turn back towards Truth and Goodness), in virtue of what does he make this choice? My point is this: It cannot be because he knows that evil is truly a better end; it isn't. It cannot be because his will is attracted to evil as evil. All goodness, even what merely appears good, participates in the Divine Goodness. To chose evil as evil would be to choose absolutely nothing. But sinners don't want nothing, rather they prize finite goods over the infinite Good. Satan, classically conceived, is seen as wanting to rule out of pride. He attacks mankind precisely because he isn't pursuing nothingness as nothingness.

I'm not sure exactly what is supposed to be "free" here except for a bare will that is uninformed by either the intellect or the object of desire. Evil, being nothing, has nothing of its own that can attract the will. It is precisely this sort of choosing that doesn't seem blameworthy to me, because it is wholly inexplicable, "for no reason at all." Being arbitrary, it is random. There is no culpability in this sort of bare remainder of will that is uninformed by intellect and is equally capable of gravitating towards and finding its rest in non-being/evil as God.

Man has real choice precisely in the process of becoming self-determining and self-governing, and transcending his own finitude. The more culpable sinner has succeeded in this to some degree, only to bend themselves backwards onto finite goods.

The idea that one can deface the imago dei is written up and down throughout Scripture. In that there is some similarity with Aristotle, but universalism is basically just a form of Platonism, of the ineluctable Good. I don't think you get to universalism from Scripture or from empirical data (Aristotle). You basically need to be ultimately committed to Platonism, and thus allow Platonic theories to override these other considerations. It's no coincidence that your theory where evil is basically derived from ignorance is so closely bound up with Socrates' approach.

Deface, yes, but not utterly destroy. I sort of meant this in the opposite way I think you took it though. It is Plato who thinks the wicked man ceases to be truly human, and to be a rational nature. For Aristotle, man cannot lose this nature without becoming something other than what he is (the original being annihilated).

I know Plato was opposed to democracy, preferring philosopher kings, so that would be elitist

The idea is also situated in a discussion of an ideal city as a model for the human soul. That's why the city is introduced in the first place, as an analogy for self-governance.

I find it ironic that Plato is often called an elitist today because this is very much the model of modern liberalism, at least in theory. There is, ideally, a highly trained, meritocratic elite who governs with the consent of the governed according to what is best for the whole. That's Plato, but that's liberalism from Hamilton writing in the Federalist Papers to modern progressivism, to the ideals of the Neocons.

If you have the patience, could you say more about the absurdity?

I am referring to AmadeusD's contention that the "good" and "ought" of most ethics is not a true "moral good" or "moral ought" (which you seemed to be agreeing with?), while nonetheless being unable to describe or give examples of what such a "moral good" or "moral ought" would even entail.

Just framing ethics in terms of human flourishing, as Harris does, already gets you to the possibility of a science of human welfare at the individual and social level, but the older definition also has a quite robust metaphysical underpinning. By contrast, the other definition being offered up is a je ne sais quoi that is even being presented by its advocate as "unintelligible." That's not a contest between two definitions, one of these is a non-definition, a shrug.


It's strange to me that someone would accept facts about values, and facts about human flourishing, but not ethics on the grounds that the aforementioned are not properly "moral." Yet this is even stranger if what constitutes "moral" cannot be stated.

But I said just the opposite! "This is not a brief for ethical relativism."

How is an ethics where it is impossible to derive any oughts not a brief for relativism though? What's the idea: "There are facts about what is good and evil, but this tells us nothing about what one ought to do?" If such facts tell us nothing about what to do, then the result is relativism—all acts are equally correct responses to "facts of values."

But as I pointed out, this seems bizarre to me. "This car is better in every way, and cheaper," doesn't provoke the response "ok, so this one is clearly better, but I don't know which I ought to pick, the better or the worse?"

I think I was careful to rule out absurd definitions. There is no standard of rationality that either one of us would acknowledge which could make this straw definition non-absurd.

Yeah, fair enough. I knew I should take the time to think up an at least plausible definition, but I think it still makes the point. What's the criteria for "absurdity" here? "You just know it when you see it?" Good philosophy doesn't just remove absurdities and keep whatever else remains as a matter of opinion, so there has to be a strong criteria either way.

But the example jumps to mind because this is actually the sort of thing nominalists on this board have defended. Nothing is really anything, everything is just a soup of "patterns" and "constraints" given names, etc. My point would be this: any thoroughgoing nominalism like this is probably going to entail moral anti-realism. It's essentially an anti-realism that is metaphysically prior to ethics.

Anyhow, this insight might be helpful: that you think "ought" must imply "obligation" is perhaps indictive of the problem I mentioned about an ethical tradition that ultimately grows out of voluntarism. When someone gives relationship advice and says "you should ask her out," they do not mean "you have an obligation to ask her out." Nor does "this place's pizza is the best, you ought to try it," mean "you have an obligation to eat this pizza because it is good." Obligation and duty are one reason why it might be good to do something. That you can find no connection between "x is best" and "you should choose x," would seem to lie in this idea you have that any "ought" must be in the context of some sort of command, a "thou shalt."

As for the rest of the post accusing me of being dogmatic, I just don't see it. I consider disparate systems of ethical thought all the time. In this thread, I tried to explain my position. The repeated objection has been "that isn't a moral/ethical good/ought" or that "x is best" cannot generate the "moral ought" for "choose x." When I ask what this "moral/ethical good/ought" is, the answer is that it's impossible to give an example and the very idea is probably unintelligible (Amadeus) or that it is unknowable and inaccessible to reason, but might perhaps be experienced (you). These are not definitions though.

One of us has a definition. The Good is "that at at which all things aim." I am not dogmatically rejecting any other definitions (indeed, I asked for them), I am pointing out that the objections in this thread are based on no definitions at all.

Tigers being "aquatic reptiles" might be "absurd," but there is certainly a dialogue to be had about why it is wrong, and why "tigers are large stripped cats" is better. This conservation seems more to me like "tigers aren't large stripped cats because real tigers are x." And then to the question: "what is this x that real tiger possess?" the answer is: "I don't know, it probably doesn't exist" or "x exists but it is inaccessible to reason."




:up:

It's perhaps indictive of the voluntarism underpinning the ethics (and metaphysics) of command (law) and obedience (duty). I think this is why anti-realists so often claim that divine command theory is a good theory of ethics, and what any "real ethics" would look like, if only God existed.

Duty and natural law aren't situated in anything broader here, they ultimately spring from the inscrutable Will, and so there is no role for desire. You don't have eros leading up and agape descending (two movements in a unity). There is rather a unidirectional impetus, be it coming from God, from the irrational sensible appetites and sentiments (Hume), or from a sort of bare human will (early Sarte, some readings of Nietzsche).

I'm not huge on deconstruction and post-structuralism, but I think Byung-Chul Han is spot on here in partly locating the "deflation of everything" and disappearance of Eros in the ever growing inflation of the self. I find it interesting that this same critique comes from different directions, because it's one made by C.S. Lewis, D.C. Schindler, etc. too.

↪Shawn I think a case can be made that the forms are nearer to what we would call principles. Have a read of the chapter on Plato in this .pdf book, it will set you straight

That's an excellent source.

I will add another I like:

By calling what we experience with our senses less real than the Forms, Plato is not saying that what we experience with our senses is simply illusion. The “reality” that the Forms have more of is not simply their not being illusions. If that’s not what their extra reality is, what is it? The easiest place to see how one could suppose that something that isn’t an illusion, is nevertheless less real than something else, is in our experience of ourselves.

In Republic book iv, Plato’s examination of the different "parts of the soul” leads him to the conclusion that only the rational part can integrate the soul into one, and thus make it truly “just.” Here is his description of the effect of a person’s being governed by his rational part, and therefore “just”:

Justice . . . is concerned with what is truly himself and his own. . . . [The person who is just] binds together [his] parts . . . and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. Only then does he act. (Republic 443d-e)

Our interest here (I’ll discuss the “justice” issue later) is that by “binding together his parts” and “becoming entirely one,” this person is “truly himself.” That is, as I put it in earlier chapters, a person who is governed by his rational part is real not merely as a collection of various ingredients or “parts,” but as himself. A person who acts purely out of appetite, without any examination of whether that appetite is for something that will actually be “good,” is enacting his appetite, rather than anything that can appropriately be called “himself.” Likewise for a person who acts purely out of anger, without examining whether the anger is justified by what’s genuinely good. Whereas a person who thinks about these issues before acting “becomes entirely one” and acts, therefore, in a way that expresses something that can appropriately be called “himself.”

In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs.

We all from time to time experience periods of distraction, absence of mind, or depression, in which we aren’t fully present as ourselves. Considering these periods from a vantage point at which we are fully present and functioning as ourselves, we can see what Plato means by saying that some non-illusory things are more real than other non-illusory things. There are times when we ourselves are more real as ourselves than we are at other times.

Indeed, we can see nature as a whole as illustrating this issue of how fully integrated and “real as itself ” a being can be. Plants are more integrated than rocks, in that they’re able to process nutrients and reproduce themselves, and thus they’re less at the mercy of their environment. So we could say that plants are more effectively focused on being themselves than rocks are, and in that sense they’re more real as themselves. Rocks may be less vulnerable than plants are, but what’s the use of invulnerability if what’s invulnerable isn’t you?

Animals, in turn, are more integrated than plants are, in that animals’ senses allow them to learn about their environment and navigate through it in ways that plants can’t. So animals are still more effectively focused on being themselves than plants are, and thus more real as themselves.

Humans, in turn, can be more effectively focused on being themselves than many animals are, insofar as humans can determine for themselves what’s good, rather than having this be determined for them by their genetic heritage and their environment. Nutrition and reproduction, motility and sensation, and a thinking pursuit of the Good each bring into being a more intensive reality as oneself than is present without them.

Now, what all of this has to do with the Forms and their supposedly greater reality than our sense experience is that it’s by virtue of its pursuit of knowledge of what’s really good, that the rational part of the soul distinguishes itself from the soul’s appetites and anger and so forth. The Form of the Good is the embodiment of what’s really good. So pursuing knowledge of the Form of the Good is what enables the rational part of the soul to govern us, and thus makes us fully present, fully real, as ourselves. In this way, the Form of the Good is a precondition of our being fully real, as ourselves.

But presumably something that’s a precondition of our being fully real must be at least as real as we are when we are fully real. It’s at least as real as we are, because we can’t deny its reality without denying our own functioning as creatures who are guided by it or are trying to be guided by it.13 And since it’s at least as real as we are, it’s more (fully) real than the material things that aren’t guided by it and thus aren’t real as themselves.

From Robert M. Wallace - Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present

The key thing here is "self-determination." But this can be taken to be "self-determination" in a more abstract, metaphysical sense as well, as it is in other readings of Plato, Aristotle and Hegel (who is in some sense very Aristotelian). For example:

[Hegel] thinks he has demonstrated, in the chapter on “Quality,” that the ordinary conceptions of quality, reality, or finitude are not systematically defensible, by themselves, but can only
be properly employed within a context of negativity or true infinity...

Note: For instance, one cannot understand “red” atomically, but rather it depends on other notions such as “color” and the things (substances) that can be red, etc. to be intelligible. This notion is similar to how the Patristics (e.g., St. Maximus) developed Aristotle in light of the apparent truth that even "proper beings" (e.g., a horse) are not fully intelligible in terms of themselves. For instance, try explaining what a horse *is* without any reference to any other plant, animal, or thing. This has ramifications for freedom as the ability to transcend “what one already is,”—the “given”—which relies on our relation to a transcendent absolute Good—a Good not unrelated to how unity generates (relatively) discrete/self-determining beings/things.

[Hegel] has now shown, through his analysis of “diversity” and opposition, that within such a context of negativity or true infinity, the reality that is described by apparently merely “contrary” concepts will turn out to be better described, at a fundamental level, by contradictory concepts. The fundamental reality will be contradictory, rather than merely contrary. It’s not that nothing will be neither black nor white, but rather that qualities such as black, white, and colorless are less real (less able to be what they are by virtue of [only] themselves) than self-transcending finitude (true infinity) is…

From Robert M. Wallace - Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God

I suppose it's possible to try to psychoanalyze Plato and come up with a theory where the real impetus for the Forms lies in reference, but it would be very hard to claim that this is primarily what he is exploring or what he calls the Forms in to do. The Problem of the One and the Many is rather the framing from which the Forms emerge, and it's also the framing Plato uses to introduce and develop it (as well as the historical context in which the theory emerges; he is responding to Heraclitus and Parmenides as his chief dialectical partners).

Certainly, Plato's theory is open to a number of criticisms. Aristotle mounts a convincing offensive almost immediately, and the theory is significantly different in what becomes "Platonism" (which absorbed a lot of Aristotle's suggestion). But Plato's text itself is also largely consistent with this "later" Platonism (scare-quotes because we don't really have sources to know if this wasn't simply the original interpretation).

Maybe I understand you here. But doesn't MacIntyre say that Classical terms like "goodness" have lost their original meanings, in the modern context? And that therefore we shouldn't use them, unless we use them as the Greeks did? But that presupposes that conceptual development is precluded by a fixed vocabulary. Let's say I deny that "the will seeks goodness as an appetite (as truly desirable)." Wouldn't MacIntyre say that I am simply wrong about the will and about goodness, based on the only coherent meanings the words can have, i.e., their Classical roots? I don't find that thesis plausible, no, but I agree with him, and with you, that a thorough understanding of the conceptual development of key philosophical terms is important.

MacIntyre's thesis isn't that the old usages are arbitrarily to be preferred. They are to be preferred because the modern usages are incoherent and collapse into emotivism.

To the first, every philosopher is entitled to their own bedrock definitions, if they're not absurd, and this is not. All we can say in response is, That is not how I define the term. There could then be a discussion about each person's reasons for selecting their preferred definition.

Is a definition of "ethics" and "good" that makes it impossible to demonstrate a single example of such an "ethical good" or to even explain under what conditions something could be said to be "ethically good" or a "moral ought" not absurd?

Pace your claims to be a moral realist, you seem to think that in ethical matters "any definition is as good as any other." Perhaps this stems from the ethics of liberalism where everyone is entitled to "their own truth" and the bourgeois metaphysics where "things are allowed to be true so long as they prevent nothing else from being so" (such an ethics is, IMO self-refuting however). The same would apply for an anti-realism vis-a-vis universals. If someone wants to define a tiger as "an aquatic reptile," there would be an impasse so long as the person can defend "tigers are an aquatic reptile" with a straight face and some standard of "rationality."

If such a definition seems absurd to some, the words of the Big Lebowski hold: "well, that's just like, your opinion man."

But that isn't realism. Realism implies that not all definitions are equal. It does not entail a single canonical usage of "good" (indeed, we might distinguish between many types of good by looking at the same concept from different directions). It does, however, imply some isomorphism between definitions, else we are dealing with equivocal terms. There would be situations where "good" could be predicated of the same thing, in the same context, and the statement would be both true and false owing to this eqivocity (as opposed to this sort of issue being soluble through distinctions, as in cases of analogical predication).

Part of the problem here is that, if one adopts a throughgoing nominalism, it might indeed be impossible to be a consistent "moral realist." I think there is a strong argument to be made that MacIntyre's thesis might apply more broadly to metaphysics, and that the collapse into emotivism has metaphysical roots. Certainly, we have gone from a context where there was a strong metaphysical grounding and exploration of Goodness, to one where ethics is attempted largely is isolation from metaphysics (much the way logic has become detached from metaphysics, making some debates in logic, e.g. logical nihilism, essentially insoluble and difficult to even define).

No, not as an absolute, non-hypothetical obligation. I don't think that can be done. When I say to you (anyone), "I think you ought to do X," what I mean is, "If you accept the values A, B, C, which you tell me you do, then you ought to do X." A lot of the unclarity around this discussion comes from denying the difference, epistemologically, between knowing what is of value, and knowing what one ought to do

Doesn't it seem problematic that your conception of "ought" makes it impossible to develop a single example of it?

It's a strange definition of "ought" that can be divorced from value. Suppose you brought me two Toyota Siennas from the same year, with the same trim, and said you needed a family commuter vehicle. I look them both over and say one is rusted, leaking transmission fluid, and might have a bad head gasket and the other looks great. "Vehicle #2 is the better one."

And you turn around and say: "ok, but you haven't told me which one I ought to pick."

"What? I just told you #2 is better in every way. It's the same exact van, just well-maintained and not broken."

"Yes, I understand that. But where is the connection between 'best' and 'ought?' How do you move between them?"

If x is best, then from the perspective of ethical decision-making x is most choice-worthy, which means x ought to be picked. Whether this is simply definitional, or whether it requires some sort of first principle of syteresis to the effect of "we ought choose the better over the worse," has never really interested me that much. They both seem hard to object to. Provided anything can be "truly better" then it does not make sense to choose what is "truly worse," unless one is making a decision based on some other end that the worse option ranks better on.

But then you say you believe in "objective values," yet your entire argument seems to rest on such values actually being epistemically inaccessible.

You believe they involve the same process -- rationality, broadly -- and I do not. I think that recognizing moral (and aesthetic) values is non-rational -- people can't be shown them rationally -- and involves techniques that are at base experiential. However, once there is agreement on such values, the question of what one ought to do, given those values, becomes tractable...

No, there's a third alternative, as I tried to outline above. There's nothing sui generis about the moral ought. It's a good old hypothetical imperative.* Where all the confusion comes in, is when we also try to claim that values are transparent to the rational mind in this way. This inevitably leads to the idea that values themselves could be "derived" in some way, from first premises. As I understand the question, they can't -- but that doesn't mean that everyone's perception/intuition/experience of values is equally correct. It's quite possible to perceive incorrectly. This is not a brief for ethical relativism.

If "rational" is reduced to "nothing but discursive (linguistic/formal) ratio," as it so often is in modern thought, then virtually nothing can be known rationally. When I say that Goodness can be sought and known as such, I do not mean "entirely in the context of discursive (linguistic) reasoning." Definitions of knowledge that focus exclusively on discursive justification are extremely impoverished. They are particularly deficient for ethics, where "knowing by becoming" (e.g. Boethius' Consolation) is very important.

See below:

Second, in both the “Neo-Platonic” and rediscovered Aristotelian traditions Dante was exposed to, there are elements of the conception of truth that hew closer modern “identity theories” of truth. The human mind is capable of “becoming all things.”1 When man comes to know something (when the potential to know is actualized) the form of the thing know is, at least in part, present in his mind. This is not a representation of form. The intellect dematerializes the thing known, resulting in the mind becoming identical with the object of knowledge.

Of course, this does not imply that when we know an apple our minds “become apples,” for the two exist in distinct modes.2 However, it does mean that many of the epistemic issues that dominate modern thought and tend to impose a sense of unbridgeable distance between knower and known are absent from Dante’s conception. For instance, in the medieval understanding of signs, the Doctrina Signorum, the symbol that joins the knower and the known is not an impermeable barrier between the two, but the very means by which they are bound together in a nuptial union. The sign relation involves distinct elements, but it is not reducible to these; rather, the elements are what they are only in virtue of their participation in an irreducible triadic whole.

The importance of this sort of “union in knowing,” which is both a “being penetrated” by what is known and an ecstasis, a “going out beyond the self to the known,” for Dante cannot be overstated. The most erotic passage of the entire Commedia occurs at the end of Canto X of the Paradiso, in the Heaven of the Sun, where Dante meets the souls of the wise theologians who progressed furthest in knowledge of the divine:

Then, as the tower-clock calls us to come
at the hour when God's Bride is roused from bed
to woo with matin song her Bridegroom's love,

with one part pulling thrusting in the other,
chiming, ting-ting, music so sweet the soul,
ready for love, swells with anticipation

Paradiso, Canto X, lines 139-142

Indeed, the antiquated term “carnal knowledge,” with all its erotic connotations, gets far closer to the older view than the sterile formulation of “justified true belief.” The goal of Dante’s pilgrimage, and of all mankind, is ultimately to know God, which is also to love and be in union with God. Modern conceptions that make both love and knowledge an entirely internal affair cannot capture this erotic element of knowing the other as other. As Byung-Chul Han notes in The Agony of Eros, the modern “crisis of love… derives from… the erosion of the Other... Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego.”3 The beatific vision at the climax of the Commedia is fundamentally an encounter with the other, not the conquest of the other by the self. It is not the “grasping” and “possession” of the other that Han finds in the modern ethos, but rather a union, an offering of the self to the other as a gift.i,ii

Yet this knowing does involve an internal dimension, a penetration of the self by the other. To know God requires “knowing by becoming.”iii As Dante rises higher into the Heavens in the Paradiso, and comes closer to God, he is increasingly able to bear the overwhelming brightness of Beatrice’s (revealed truth’s) smile, due to a continuous internal transformation (as opposed to cumulative acquisition). In this conception, the world is not held at arm’s length while we inspect our own mental representations of it. Rather, there is a sense in which we become what is known. Thus, to know God is “to attain the very best,” to become “like onto God” as much as we are able—the theosis or deification that is man’s ultimate telos in the Christian tradition...


...For Dante, as for most pre-moderns, man has a natural desire to know Truth.“Man's mind cannot be satisfied unless it be illumined by that Truth beyond which there exists no other truth.”1 This is another desire that unifies, just as it also purifies. As noted above, contemplation of this truth involves both a union and a becoming. Just as Plato thought that the “whole person” must be turned towards the Good before a person could properly know it, the Christian tradition sees asceticism, good works, the sacraments, and other aspects of the spiritual life as necessarily preceding such a contemplative vision.2

Dante’s use of the imagery of man’s“wings” is apt here. Man cannot ascend on damaged wings. Healing and repentance, a self-aware turning away from evil as evil and towards Goodness as good, must come prior to successful flight. The mastery (and eventually, regeneration) of the passions and the harmonious orientation of man’s conditioned “rational love” with his “natural love” for the Good must come prior to beatitude. Hence, it is precisely in pursuing his highest joy that a man will also be led to be a better father, neighbor, and citizen. First, because he is no longer ruled over by his appetites and passions, nor dependent on finite goods that diminish when shared. Second, because greater knowledge of the Good is transformative, such that the knower comes to love creatures as signs and manifestations of the Divine.3

It's a strange accident of philosophical history that the empiricist tradition has largely convinced itself that it cannot know much of anything (including the validity of its own epistemic standards), but has stalwartly refused to turn around and challenge its dogmatic epistemic presuppositions, or its deflation of human rationality into just the lower faculty of just the intellect. Post-moderns, for their part, seem happy to lend the empiricists the rope they use to hang themselves with.

If you want an interesting experiment, try explaining Wittgenstein's rule following argument to people who don't really care about philosophy. Kripke's example with "quaddition" and "quus," is an easy way to present it. I have found that most people think it is, frankly, pretty stupid. They tend to think you are trolling them. As Mill once said: "one would need to have made some significant advances in philosophy to believe such a thing."

Because, when you ask people: "how are you sure that you are doing addition and not quaddition?" they rightly say that: "well, I would know." And if you press them on "third person verification," they're likely to say "something being one way and verifying that it is one way are not the same thing. When I tell a lie, it doesn't cease to be a lie just because no one can tell if I am lying or not."

You know, because people understand addition. Just like they understand ethics, or what a cat is. Discursive justification is a sign of truth, a means of communicating truth, etc.Ratio is how the intellect progresses from truth to truth. Completely eliminating understanding from the equation (and the whole of phenomenal experience) as "unobservable" doesn't just make ethics "non-rational," it makes everything "non-rational." Without intellectus all you have is rule following (rule following that cannot ever constitute understanding of its own rules).

↪J (just to cut in, as I think that's a great question) The only instance in which I think such a brute reading of "ought" could be used is where one is "living" and wishes to continue "living". There are no other options, but death, which is no option at all unless we take a 'further fact' type view of ourselves.

Excellent. Living is a natural end of organisms. Organisms are constantly at work trying to maintain their form against entropy—trying to survive. However, is it the only natural end? Does human happiness and flourishing consist solely in staying alive?

Survival isn't the number one priority of even the brutes. For instance, the bee will sacrifice itself (quite gruesomely) for the good of the hive in pursuit of its ends. In terms of the "metaphysics of goodness," it is ends that make things more fully "one." Ends makes any thing anything at all, instead of an arbitrary heap. Chemicals are unified by their role in organelles, organelles are part of an organic whole in cells, cells are unified in tissue, which in turn plays a role in the whole body of an organism. The goal-directedness of life is precisely why Aristotle has living things as most properly beings (plural). By contrast, a rock is largely a heap of external causes, and when we break a rock in half we have two rocks (whereas if we break a cat in half we have a corpse).

BUT if one believes in an objective morality, then one must assume that here the 'rational evildoer' is mistaken in their belief.

The corrupted nous is often seen as "painting beauty/goodness" onto what lacks it (e.g. when Dante's vision "transforms" the putrid siren into an alluring woman in Canto 19 of the Purgatorio). If people can be complicit and culpable vis-á-vis their own degradation then they are to some degree responsible for such misunderstanding. This is particularly true if they turn back to evil after having received healing (e.g. Hebrews 6:6).

It's just like how drunkenness might explain crimes but need not absolve them, since people generally choose to impair their judgement in this way. We still hold drunk drivers accountable in a way we do not hold people accountable if they have a stroke while driving.

I'd agree that evil, being nothing, must eventually be "exhausted." It is, in this case, not evil, but finite goods that will be exhausted. C.S. Lewis has the damned traveling ever further from one another, spreading out into absolute solitude. But to me, this suggests that motion must also stop in the other direction. Eventually there is nothing good left to impel motion and one has stasis in nothingness, which would seem to me to track with a sort of annihilation, a will and intellect oriented towards nothingness, and so contentless.

That the "Outer Darkness" is a place of wailing and gnashing of teeth suggests an appetite for Goodness though. Talbot reads this as the maximum withdrawal of God from the creature, leaving them to experience the absence of Goodness as a final (but in his view remedial) chastisement.

St. Maximus is sometimes read as a universalist (it's really his grand metaphysical vision that most suggests this IMHO), but some of his work suggests that the damned are reformed and at rest, but not deified. From Questions and Problems:

The third meaning [of apokatastasis] is used by Gregory especially in refer­ence to the qualities of the soul that had been corrupted by sin and then are restored to their original state. Just as all nature will regain, at the expected time, its completeness in the flesh [at the resurrection], so also will the pow­ers of the soul, by necessity, shed all imprints of evil clinging to them; and this after aeons have elapsed, after a long time of being driven about without rest [stasis]. And so in the end they reach God, who is without limitations [peras]. Thus they are restored to their original state [apokatastēnai] through their knowledge [of God], but do not participate in [his] gifts. It also will appear that the Creator cannot be blamed for any sinfulness.2

This makes more sense if we recall that in the Ad Thelassium Maximus says that experience of God (union with God) is beyond knowledge (building off I Corinthians 13), just as St. Gregory Palamas seems to have direct experience of God occuring above any sort of separation of intellect and will.

But isn't this tantamount to the denial of (moral) evil? Flannery rightly points out that arguments against Hell are very similar to arguments against evil, or for the claim that evil ought not exist.

In one sense, this quite true. Evil doesn't have an essence; it is a privation. I think this understanding is pretty mainstream in the West (e.g. St. Augustine), and it certainly is in the East. It is absolutely true that evil ought not exist, and thus Hell ought not exist either. The Fall is the result of irrational rebellion. Both man and the demons' rebellion is something blameworthy, something that ought not have occured.

Evil exists in the world though, and in the hearts of men. We need not deny this. Evil exists as privation and imperfection, the tendency of creatures towards multiplicity and non-being.

Hence, I don't think considerations I mentioned erase moral blame. Freedom, self-determination, self-governance, knowledge, etc. have contrary opposites (e.g. unity/plurality, true/false). We can be more or less free, more or less aware of what is truly best, and so more or less culpable for "missing the mark" in our thoughts and deeds. Spiritual sickness is not blameless, since people enable their own sickness and freely partake in their own degradation.

This is reflected in the architecture Dante's Hell. Upper Hell has the less severe sins of weakness of will. Lower Hell contains the sins of malice, evil that is known as evil and committed anyway in the pursuit of some finite good judged to be higher than the Good Itself. Dante puts the Hitlers and Stalins of his epoch fairly high up. The lowest pits are reserved for sins of fraud, the fullest twisting of the intellect away from God, and into the self (and ultimately towards nothingness). These aren't just sins that are particularly vile, but also those that are hardest for man to escape because, having enslaved his intellect to the passions, he can no longer recognize Good as Good or evil as evil. This is the maximum extent of the curvatus in se, and I suppose that one argument for a Hell of infinite temporal duration might be that this curving inwards approaches something like a black hole at the limit, a point at which no light can escape.

I don't think this in anyway precludes retributive justice, let alone remedial punishment. People know evil as such and still embrace it; they have a right to be punished. The reduction of justice solely to remediation (rather than the restoration of right) degrades justice into something like breaking a horse.

The question is not whether punishment is deserved, but whether punishment of infinite temporal duration is deserved. I have already mentioned why I think such punishment must either be extrinsic, or involve the destruction of the soul's rational nature (a sort of annihilation). The latter could be considered an intrinsic punishment that one does to oneself, but would also imply a capacity to deface (and lose) the Imago Dei absolutely, beyond any capacity to repent, which is at odds with a lot of theology (closer to Plato than Aristotle in some ways too).

At any rate, I don't think voluntarism actually helps here. The voluntarist will, to the extent that it chooses evil in the absence of the informing intellect, is acting arbitrarily. If it doesn't make sense to punish people for being sick (and I think it does make sense, because such sickness does not remove all freedom or culpability), it makes even less sense to punish them for some sort of bare remainder of uninformed will, whose action can only be random.

The question of the Fall and thus the problem of evil is a difficult one indeed. The explanation that most resonates with me is that man, in order to "be like God," had to freely transcend his own finitude in turning towards the transcendent Good (the same with the demons). But they failed to do this, choosing rebellion instead.

But there is no reason to make this assumption. Is such evil incompatible with the notion of a loving and all-merciful God? We already have such evil in the world: sinners who separate themselves from God and live—even humanly-speaking—frustrated, resentful lives. If such suffering is incompatible with the notion of the Christian God, he is either not as powerful as Christians claim (and therefore not the Christian God) or he does not exist. Given that the Christian God does exist, if such suffering is in itself not incompatible with his nature, why must its duration be incompatible with that same nature?

I'm not even sure what position this is supposed to be responding to. Objections to "punishment of infinite temporal duration" tend to focus on the duration and extrinsic nature of such a punishment (since this is how it is normally framed; the accident of one's state at death being the deciding factor) or the fact that this implies a sort of "eternal survival of sin." It is not an objection to the existence of suffering per se. The more famous examples of universalism (or theology that seems to imply it) mention Hell and punishment quite often. In his essay on the early deaths of infants St. Gregory of Nyssa points to an indefinitely long punishment for the worst offenders for instance. And a lot of theology that is pointed to as implying universalism in its grand scale also doesn't ignore suffering and Hell.

A very good question. I am not convinced it's a coherent concept. It's like something being "factually Good". Just seems a nonsense to me. To me, I guess "good" would, in an ethical sense, be a relative term. "good for..." makes more sense than "good" bare to me.

Ok, that's fair. Now, I have been trying to present a largely Aristotlian ethics for the sake of simplicity, but I think it's worth noting that Aristotle's notion of goodness is ultimately quite compatible with Platonism and medieval Christian and Muslim philosophy, as well as most earlier Pagan ethics. It is, as far as I am aware, not that far off the notions underpinning the dominant historical ethics of India and China. All of these look at goodness in terms of ends, and look to ethics as the study of ends, particularly human ends (happiness/flourishing), and human excellences (virtues) which enable the individual and social attainment of such ends.

Your complaint has been that this is not "real ethics" because it doesn't deal with "ethical/moral good," a concept which you say you cannot define or provide a single example of, and which you say seems "incoherent." You fault the Aristotelian view for dealing in "empirical goods" which suggests to me that you also think that "real ethics" must deal with some sort of a priori innate knowledge.

Either way, is this a fair demand? "For an ethics to be compelling and to be real ethics, it must match my definition of a sui generis moral good which I cannot define, nor give examples of, and which I have no clear notion of, given that I think my concept is itself wholly unintelligible."

Wouldn't it rather be the case that Aristotle, Confucius, Aquinas, Cicero, Al Farabi, etc.'s possession of an actually intelligible notion of goodness and the human good is point in their favor, not a knock against them?

You seem to be saying that, if something is sought for its own sake (by me, let's say), then I ought to seek it -- that this generates the moral ought.

How about this, why don't you try defining "moral ought" and "moral good" in the sense you are using them?

This appears definitionally obvious to you, I'm guessing, but clearly others don't understand why. Nor do I. Why does it follow? Where does the obligation come in?

I think you should probably take Alasdair MacIntyre's thesis as much more plausible after exchanges like these. Apparently, you think "moral goodness" doesn't necessarily depend on ends and that the will doesn't seek goodness as an appetite (as truly desirable) but rather that "if something is 'morally good,' there is a unique 'moral ought' that denotes that some end should be sought as an end for no reason (e.g. it being desirable) except that it is 'morally good.'

Since you think the egoist has very strong, rational arguments for not pursuing this "moral good," I can only assume that you think such a good isn't "good" in virtue of being ordered to truly desirable ends, but rather that we have some sort of "moral ought" to desire things that are "morally good," or else some duty to perform them even though they aren't actually desirable.

I struggle to conceive of what "good" is even supposed to denote in this context except the sort of bare, inscrutable "thou shalt" that underpins voluntarist divine command theories. It's obviously not the normal use of the word "good," which denotes orientation towards some (desired) end. When we say "this is a good car," we do not mean "thou shalt desire/choose this car" for instance. When someone is a "good guitar player," we also don't tend to mean "they play guitar in accordance with the 'thou shalt.'"

That is, you seem to be saying: "things are not good because they are truly desirable, but rather 'because something is 'morally good' the will has a sui generis 'moral ought' to seek it.'"


Here is my challenge: explain in virtue of what something is "morally good" in this way in a non-circular manner. Explain why something ought to be sought as an end because it is "morally good."

To me the questions:
Why ought men try to be happy instead of miserable?
Why ought we prefer truth to falsity?
Why ought we prefer the better to the worse?
Why ought organisms try to survive and reproduce (i.e. fulfill their natural ends)?

...just make me want me to ask: "what do you think 'ought' means/derives from?" Because it starts to look a lot like "you ought do what is 'morally good' and something is 'morally good' because it is what ought be done."

I realize it would do, from your point of view, but I'm saying that even if one accepted the idea of a genuine, non-subjective sense of "wrong," it doesn't help generate an ought. As it happens, I do think there are objective/intersubjective values, quite apart from my personal opinions about them. But I don't agree with @Count Timothy von Icarus and others that this creates a moral obligation simpliciter that can be expressed as "you ought to do X."

Can you explain any derivation of such a "moral ought?"