Moral Investigations - 2.0
After having read over my last post and become increasingly disappointed with the deep problems that seems to beset every part of it, I am going to try and restate a few things. Perhaps add something, perhaps change something else. Anyway, we'll see how it goes.
First of all, what is lying behind these moral feelings? It's the question that constantly haunted me in the last post. This time, we are going to have to try to say something a little more substantial about it.
First of all. What must morality be? Well, it cannot be anything supranatural or handed down to us by some being somewhere. The reason why this is so is because a) there is no such being in the world, b) if there was such a being it would give us better knowledge of the good and lastly: c) such a thing would NOT be called morality at all. The fact that someone tells us that so and so is right, and so and so is forbidden is hardly what we talk about when we talk about morality. Perhaps some form of emotivism or even naturalism would say that this was so, but it hardly resonates with our moral intuitions. After all, that we do what someone tells us to do, is not quite what we consider right.
Second of all, we have to have some theory of what morality is good for. Personally, it seems that the fact that we are herd animals begins to give us some indication of where we should look. One of my concerns is that we are going to have to end up with a naturalist theory (ie, a theory which indicates that what is good or bad is really some easily identified state, such as pleasure or pain) just out of these premises. However, I am not sure that this is the case. After all, what kind of thing is the social organization that all humans gravitate towards? It can hardly be called only, say, the medieval feudal organization, the 20th century Christian family model or anything else. It is all these things, yet more. That might be what morality is like.
Now, thirdly. Morality must deal with people or moral agents in one sense or the other. I am not going to say that this is necessarily humans, but I think they are at the very least the most likely group. I have written some on this before, and it has very much to do with a belief that we can only measure things, and thus give things some meaning, by comparisons. Ie, something can be judged to be bad, good, etc because we can compare people, situations and so on.
Perhaps David Hume was on the right track. He (who Kant calls "that acute man") worked out a relatively good theory of virtues. Virtues give us the addest strength of saddling our morality firmly in our social relations, just like with our third premise above. It helps us to also make it firmly material as per premise one and two. It also begins to swing a great deal with the culture, which sets us in the well-known fact of different moral beliefs throughout peoples and history.
A virtue is something that is good for the community as a whole, perhaps judged by the illusive third person subject that I mentioned quite a bit in the first post.
Indeed, what does a pseudo-Humean theory of virtue give us? Basically, Hume thought that we see some virtues that tend to be for the good of population as a whole (I believe we might even say that we again find our "scaled-down" theory of third person spectator in this). This would allow us to understand that different virtues that are good for different societies, groups and actually - classes. Our actions, ie, our utilization of our virtues, can be seen as good or bad from different perspectives that we must see in political theories of what is good for society. Communists like me, for example, would not consider loyalty to your boss to be a good thing. Loyalty to other proletarians is a good thing, illoyality a bad thing.
We thus find some kind of motivation: the veritable pat on the back that you might feel mentally or actually, as well as the motivation of doing what you believe is good. All people want the good.
Virtues, however, cannot be mere platonic entities (and I think tropes that allow us grades are far more appropriate here as in other metaphysics anyway) but are actually exercised. We exercise our loyalty, our duty (Kantian intuitions on morality) through our virtues (or the other way around), just like whatever virtues, like, say, graciousness that will create happiness or satisfy preferences (utilitarian intuitions) and so on. Ie, the primary moral-ontological form is the virtue, not the rule.
From this, we can perhaps work out an ethico-political schema on the virtues and vices that are appropriate, why the virtues and vices that are considered as such exist as they do in this or that time and which ones are actually the right ones - for our society. I say the last part because I believe that different virtues have different strengths for different times. It is probably so that some loyalties, like national ones, are bad: but they are no less virtues for that. They are simply virtues based on faulty assumptions. But to get back to my first point; the virtues of the medieval farmer might not be the virtues of the modern student.
I am going to make a stop here and consider before I move onwards in 3. Comments are always gratefully received, but this is an investigation in process: not a complete dogma.
First of all, what is lying behind these moral feelings? It's the question that constantly haunted me in the last post. This time, we are going to have to try to say something a little more substantial about it.
First of all. What must morality be? Well, it cannot be anything supranatural or handed down to us by some being somewhere. The reason why this is so is because a) there is no such being in the world, b) if there was such a being it would give us better knowledge of the good and lastly: c) such a thing would NOT be called morality at all. The fact that someone tells us that so and so is right, and so and so is forbidden is hardly what we talk about when we talk about morality. Perhaps some form of emotivism or even naturalism would say that this was so, but it hardly resonates with our moral intuitions. After all, that we do what someone tells us to do, is not quite what we consider right.
Second of all, we have to have some theory of what morality is good for. Personally, it seems that the fact that we are herd animals begins to give us some indication of where we should look. One of my concerns is that we are going to have to end up with a naturalist theory (ie, a theory which indicates that what is good or bad is really some easily identified state, such as pleasure or pain) just out of these premises. However, I am not sure that this is the case. After all, what kind of thing is the social organization that all humans gravitate towards? It can hardly be called only, say, the medieval feudal organization, the 20th century Christian family model or anything else. It is all these things, yet more. That might be what morality is like.
Now, thirdly. Morality must deal with people or moral agents in one sense or the other. I am not going to say that this is necessarily humans, but I think they are at the very least the most likely group. I have written some on this before, and it has very much to do with a belief that we can only measure things, and thus give things some meaning, by comparisons. Ie, something can be judged to be bad, good, etc because we can compare people, situations and so on.
Perhaps David Hume was on the right track. He (who Kant calls "that acute man") worked out a relatively good theory of virtues. Virtues give us the addest strength of saddling our morality firmly in our social relations, just like with our third premise above. It helps us to also make it firmly material as per premise one and two. It also begins to swing a great deal with the culture, which sets us in the well-known fact of different moral beliefs throughout peoples and history.
A virtue is something that is good for the community as a whole, perhaps judged by the illusive third person subject that I mentioned quite a bit in the first post.
Indeed, what does a pseudo-Humean theory of virtue give us? Basically, Hume thought that we see some virtues that tend to be for the good of population as a whole (I believe we might even say that we again find our "scaled-down" theory of third person spectator in this). This would allow us to understand that different virtues that are good for different societies, groups and actually - classes. Our actions, ie, our utilization of our virtues, can be seen as good or bad from different perspectives that we must see in political theories of what is good for society. Communists like me, for example, would not consider loyalty to your boss to be a good thing. Loyalty to other proletarians is a good thing, illoyality a bad thing.
We thus find some kind of motivation: the veritable pat on the back that you might feel mentally or actually, as well as the motivation of doing what you believe is good. All people want the good.
Virtues, however, cannot be mere platonic entities (and I think tropes that allow us grades are far more appropriate here as in other metaphysics anyway) but are actually exercised. We exercise our loyalty, our duty (Kantian intuitions on morality) through our virtues (or the other way around), just like whatever virtues, like, say, graciousness that will create happiness or satisfy preferences (utilitarian intuitions) and so on. Ie, the primary moral-ontological form is the virtue, not the rule.
From this, we can perhaps work out an ethico-political schema on the virtues and vices that are appropriate, why the virtues and vices that are considered as such exist as they do in this or that time and which ones are actually the right ones - for our society. I say the last part because I believe that different virtues have different strengths for different times. It is probably so that some loyalties, like national ones, are bad: but they are no less virtues for that. They are simply virtues based on faulty assumptions. But to get back to my first point; the virtues of the medieval farmer might not be the virtues of the modern student.
I am going to make a stop here and consider before I move onwards in 3. Comments are always gratefully received, but this is an investigation in process: not a complete dogma.
posted by Björn at 2:20 AM
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