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?"

The true god is called Logic. There's another god called Random.

Logic and Random are very cold gods. They don't care about a specific pain limit. Logic provides the axiom that reads "life without variety would be no life", and Random sets the maximum possible pain experience at random. The christian semi-god has to follow their rules; he's employed as a hotel manager.

Partly, this is less of a problem for the older theology because modality was dealt with quite differently. Modality was primarily conceived of in terms of act/potency. "Is it possible for a cat to become a frog?" The old answer would be "no." You're talking about substantial change there, replacing one thing with another. It is only possible for a cat to become something that it already possesses the potency to become. It must "be that thing potentially." If something isn't "potentially actual" then it isn't possible. If one contrary is present, "in act," say "light," then its opposite, "darkness" is not a possibility.

I think it would be fair to say that, starting with the nominalists, modality gets much more "expansive" and "linguistic," while also becoming less "metaphysical." Possible worlds modality ends up looking a lot different. I suppose the critique of it would be: "just because you can slam words/concepts together and not recognize an explicit contradiction doesn't mean there isn't one to be found if the things you were speaking of were fully understood."

In one of his homilies (Pentecost I think), St. Thomas claims the collective efforts of the human race have not even come close to fathoming the essence of a single fly. On this view, thinking up possibilities in terms of linguistic composition, and then searching for obvious disqualifications, seems less justifiable. So, they stick to a understanding of necessity grounded in act/potency.

I don't like to think in hard yes/no categories. I prefer gradual, relative thinking. So, a little pain is OK. That's not brutal. That's enough to get warned about caries or fire. It's not neccassary to exaggarate it.

It reminds me a bit of existentialist "overcoming." How absurd must the world be for us to find meaning in our capacity to overcome absurdity? Just a little? A lot?

I would imagine the ideal is likely closer to "as absurd as possible without resulting in a total collapse into despair" for a lot of those thinkers though.

Marriage is also "until death do we part," an oath to stay faithful to an imperfect human being within set bounds of responsibility. I don't think this is really analogous to the will becoming irreversibly and intrinsically"fixed" in anything other than the Good (which would seem to imply an end to appetite, a rest and satisfaction of the will in a finite end).

The more appropriate analogy would be pledging one's eternal soul to a person, or to Satan. I think people can choose to enact such pledges, but they cannot rationally continue in them forever. Holding on to such an oath would be akin to Jephthah burning his daughter.

This is why I initially assumed some sort of external, extrinsic block on repentance or extrinsic punishment despite repentance. I don't think the idea of the will becoming forever at rest in finite goods, or in evil (in the absence of Goodness) makes sense if the will is conceived of in terms of intellectual appetite.

However, mankind throughout the ages got around just fine without governments micromanaging every facet of their lives. The 'nanny state' really is much more modern than people think. Even the Soviet Union didn't achieve the level of micromanagement that modern states do.

This is true, but they had other institutions to do what the state has increasingly become responsible for: collegia, guilds, churches, families, extended-family/clan networks, religious orders, much tighter-knit communities. For instance, if you look at natural disasters in 19th century America, there will be less of a role for insurance (requiring massive state regulation) or FEMA, because of things like neighbors rebuilding each other's homes. Aside from a loss in relevant institutions, market specialization has also made this sort of thing more difficult (e.g. home repair is no longer a default skill set). But even things like friends giving each other rides to the airport, or bringing each other food while sick have been taken over by on-demand services provided by anonymous contractors, supported by Big Tech apps, and eventually state regulation.

That's one of the ironies of the liberal state. In order to empower individuals to increasingly act as individuals, to "free" them from past institutions, the market or state must step in to fulfill the hole left by institutional erosion. The right/left divide is often about which should fulfill these gaps. Often the market moves in first, but then externalities, gross inequalities, systemic risk (e.g. insurance), etc. force a later movement by the state further into public life. Plus, the modern "market" now requires a vast administrative state wherever it expands.

Entertainment is an interesting example because both drama and musical performances long had been primarily religious events, and still retain something of this even in their commercialized forms.

In terms of self-determination (an important sort of liberty), I think it's worth noting that people often positively identify with the prior sorts of institution. They are a member of a parish, a military regiment, a guild, a family, a clan, a religious order (perhaps as a lay tertiary), etc This sort of positive identification of the self in the institution that Hegel sees as foundational for positive freedom is much more difficult with the anonymized market and mammoth welfare state. I think the thread on the NHS is a good example of this. People feel powerless, dependent on forces lying wholly outside the ambit of their personhood, whereas a man might be asked to risk his life for his regiment and feel quite empowered.

Some good posts here. I think they bring out a difficulty for classical theodicy, which is that it must either adapt itself to changes in modern conceptions of man and nature, or else rebut these changes before proceeding.

Classically, the idea of nature as merely "laws + initial conditions," which God must tweak so as to "minimize suffering," wouldn't even have been on the table. Beings possess their own self-determining natures, although in the fallen cosmos they fail to fully correspond to the "divine idea" underlying them. In struggling to maintain their form, each being is doing the best it can to be "like God" in the way they are adapted to by their limiting essence. Each being is self-determining to some extent, and is striving (poorly or well) to become more so. "Evil as privation" suggests then that evil is ultimately a failure of things to "become what they are." Suffering as "negative sensation" plays a role in this, but the sensible world is ultimately "less real" than the intelligible, often "passing away" in many cosmologies. Evil, by contrast, lies wholly in the inappropriate use of things (including sensible suffering).

In this world, man is a "middle being" strung out between the corporeal/sensible world and the intelligible order. He is not "the highest of beings," as he often is in the modern view. The fallen cosmos involves a web of sin or imperfection/confusion involving not only human action, but also superhuman rebellion, the turning away of Satan and the corrupt archons and principalities, which manifests in the decay for nature. Earth itself is accused of rebellion by some of the earliest Jewish commentators because God tells it to "grass grass" (a use of the verb akin to "dance a dance") and it instead "puts forth grass." Whereas in the modern view, it often becomes just man, mechanistic nature working according to inviolable laws, and God in the picture. There is no notion of "vertical levels of reality," and so sensible suffering is not "less than fully real," and its conquest thus largely a matter of proper perspective (as in much Pagan thought, or Boethius' philosophical consolation).

I suppose the difference here is perhaps also one between having to argue that all of creation—creatures taken as a whole—must be free, versus the consideration of the freedom of individual creatures as individuals (often just man) against the backdrop of a "clockwork" nature. The shift in focus to the individuals throws up new difficulties for the classical view.

Maybe a shift in ethics and politics is relevant too. God, far from simply giving over the gift of being and freedom to creation (and of course ultimately redeeming them and bringing them to perfection, or at least offering them this choice), becomes a cosmic executive on the model of the liberal state. He must contend with the problem of one creature encroaching on the freedom of another and strike the ideal balance. The role of the higher beings gets flattened out or vanishes here, or else explodes into a major issue because they are now "encroaching on the freedom of the cosmos". And this also goes along with changes in Reformation theology that moved towards seeing redemption and election as largely about the individual (e.g. Calvinism vs Arminianism, often taken as exclusive of all possible views, versus the prior dominance of corporate conceptualizations of election).

Blame Yaldy-Baddy, the ol' Demiurge. Or, even on the more mainstream view: "Satan is the God of this world" (II Corinthians 4:4; see also John 12:31). And "the entire cosmos is under the control of the Evil One" (I John 5.19).Hence, "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him" (I John 2:15). The world is rather in need of saving: "For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved (John 3:17). But "this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil (John 3:19).

Hence, as David Bentley Hart writes in "The Gates of the Sea:"

Now we are able to rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes – and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away and he that sits upon the throne will say, ‘Behold, I make all things new...'

…of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines…Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred…As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God, but the face of his enemy. It is…a faith that…has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead...

For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.

Metaphysical optimism seems generally at odds with the picture of a fallen and rebellious cosmos.



Right, for instance the view from I Peter 4:

12: Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. 13 But rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. 14 If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. 15 But let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler. 16 Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name. 17 For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? 18 And

“If the righteous is scarcely saved,
what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?”

19 Therefore let those who suffer according to God's will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.

And I Peter 2:

19 For it is commendable if someone bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because they are conscious of God. 20 But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it? But if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. 21 To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.

22 “He committed no sin,
and no deceit was found in his mouth.”[e]

23 When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. 24 “He himself bore our sins” in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by his wounds you have been healed.” 25 For “you were like sheep going astray,” but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.

There is also Surah Al-Baqarah - 214

Do you think you will be admitted into Paradise without being tested like those before you? They were afflicted with suffering and adversity and were so ˹violently˺ shaken that ˹even˺ the Messenger and the believers with him cried out, “When will Allah’s help come?” Indeed, Allah’s help is ˹always˺ near.

2. You are, again, failing to delineate between "that which will result in X" and "that which ought to be done". You are arguing about something I am both (in this thread, anyway) not interested in, and don't really disagree with you about. The words "bad" and "good" have multiple meanings. You are not using an Ethical meaning. You are using a practical, empirical meaning. That you are not noticing this, despite it being pointed out several times is odd. Why not actually figure out what I'm saying here? You clearly don't get it. There's nothing wrong with that - but then coming at me with immature retorts isn't helpful.

The post you are replying to specifically addresses this vis-á-vis the question of ultimate ends/ends that are sought for their own sake. Ends are ordered to other ends. They either go on in an infinite regress, bottom out in irrational desires, or they are ordered to something sought for its own sake (e.g. happiness).

Can you explain what it would mean for something to be "ethically good" on your understanding of the term? Under what conditions can something be good in this sense?

That you are then, insulting and childish, instead of trying to clarify, is also odd.

Putting aside this incredibly silly and unfounded side-swipe, yes. That's correct. What's your problem with that? I make arguments as anyone else does. They are either effective, or they're not. Has it helped you understand my positions? Then it might be good. If all I've done is make people think less of me, there are two options:
1. They are bad arguments (or my positions are insensible); or
2. You hold positions that don't allow for you to be generous to certain other positions.

Do you not find it ironic that simply explicitly calling out what your own statements imply about your own words seems like an insult or "side-swipe" to you? Those are your conclusions, I don't see how it is untoward to point them out.

In particular, I don't see how it is any more rude than simply responding: "Wrong." to posts.

**Arguments being 'good' is not ethical. They are effective, or they are not. A good (i.e effective) argument for racism doesn't make it ethically good. This is not complicated, I don't think. Can you let me know what's not landing here? I think i've been sufficiently clear and patient.

Wouldn't a good argument be one that leads to truth? This definition of "good argument" reduces philosophy and science to nothing more than a power struggle or popularity contest. A "good argument" in science, or "good evidence" would then be simply "whatever combination of argument and evidence convinces people of a position, regardless of its truth."

Now to be fair, I would agree that we can sometimes speak of arguments being better or worse in terms of their efficacy, but this isn't primarily what makes arguments or evidence good or bad.

If I give my kid a choice between broccoli and a candy bar, and I accept his choice of the candy bar, does it follow that I don't care about his best interest? Respecting freedom is a pretty sound motive. To spin this and claim that I don't care about my son because I allowed him to choose would be a pretty tendentious interpretation.

But this analogy is not comparable because presumably your child is capable of later recognizing that broccoli is better for him (perhaps from the consequences of eating too many candy bars). And presumably, when he is no longer constrained by ignorance about what is truly best or weakness of will, and asks for the broccoli, you will give it to him. Nor do we need to suppose that choosing the candy bar removes any future capacity to choose the broccoli.

Further, if he can choose candy bars for eternity and never regret his choice, this would seem to indicate that candy bars are an equally fulfilling good in which man can find his absolute rest (to stretch the analogy a bit too much perhaps).

Is mercy just a magic wand that God waves which solves every problem? Traditionally mercy is not seen that way. At the very least it requires a kind of repentance, and repentance is a free act.

I have noted in the past that universalists and Calvinists are extremely close, in that both tend to be quasi-determinists who deny human freedom in one way or another. In either case the outcome is predetermined and freedom is not a real variable. I even suspect that we will see more and more Calvinists follow Barth in that universalist direction.

I think it just follows from a non-voluntarist notion of freedom. Here would be my contention: no one chooses the worse over the better but for ignorance about what is truly best, weakness of will, or external constraint.

Exactly what sort of "freedom" is being respected here? It seems to me that it is inchoate, irrational, impulse towards some end. It cannot be that ends other than God are known as being better than or equal to God (they aren't). So such a choice arises from ignorance, weakness of will, constraint, or else some sort of irrational impulse of will that, in being arbitrary, hardly seems to be "free."

And I think this goes as well for the post-Reformation Catholic theology that starts positing that rational natures can find their natural end in anything other than God—that anything other than the Good itself can fully satisfy an infinite appetite for Goodness.

So let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that death has no substantial effect on us or on our ability to repent. What then? Does it suddenly follow that humans are unable to make definitive decisions (in which they persist)? Does it follow that in the Judeo-Christian tradition the will of intellectual beings can never be fixed in anything other than God?

I don't know what you mean by "definitive decision." Is this supposed to be some sort of decision whereby, even if we realize we made a mistake in our decision, we will forever continue to be committed to our mistake? But any such commitment would be wholly irrational, born of some sort of defect of will.

The classical theological answer for why man will not be capable of sin in Paradise is that his intellect and will are perfected such that he knows God as truly best and suffers no weakness of will. Man doesn't sin in Paradise for the same reason that someone who is perfectly empowered to walk never trips and falls, not because his will becomes extrinsically fixed by some "definitive choice."

To say that man's will can become definitively fixed in anything but God is to say that man's appetite for infinite Goodness and the Good itself can be fully satisfied (and thus come to rest) by some other (finite) good. That doesn't make sense to me, nor does it make sense with the idea of Hell as a punishment. The person who has come to rest in an end is satisfied. On this view, the sinner is satisfied in sin, no longer desiring anything else.

Plus, the descriptions in Scripture of Hell are not of some attractive, finite good people settle upon instead of God. The "outer darkness" is a place of great wailing and gnashing of teeth. So, no I don't think people can make definitive choices in favor of their own suffering and perdition if this is to mean that, even if they came to know the truth about what was truly best, or ceased to suffer from weakness of will, they would still somehow choose suffering and the absence of the Good. At any rate, such a choice would be wholly irrational and arbitrary, not a "freedom in need of respect."

You seem to be relying on the assumption that one can be equally "free" in choosing the Good as in choosing the nothingness of evil. I think this only makes sense on some sort of voluntarist conception of freedom as bare choice (which I don't think actually makes much sense, because it makes "freedom" collapse into arbitrariness).

Edit: Now, the idea of people drifting ever further from God and never finding rest is another concept, but this would essentially be a slide towards complete nothingness and seems more to me like annihilation, with the end state being the passage of sin into absolute non-being, rather than the eternal survival of sin in some middle state between nothing and apokatastasis.

Do you think the doctrine of Hell requires that God or Christians must not want what is truly best for everyone? If so, why?

Explain how "unending torment with no possibility of improvement," could ever be in "someone's best interest?"

Look at it this way:

Is God is capable of showing mercy on everyone? If the answer is "yes," then you have to explain how it is that it is better for sinners not to receive mercy. If it would be better to receive mercy than justice, and you receive justice rather than mercy, then this cannot be "what is best for you," on pain of contradiction.

But God does show gratuitous mercy on some, and presumably receiving mercy is "what is truly best for them." So how do we explain the difference?

Second, it also needs to be "better for the sinner" that the "second death" of Revelation really be "eternal life, but one of punishment" or else the same situation exists vis-á-vis annihilation.

You are presupposing injustice here and then finding it in your conclusion. It could be simplified, "Suppose someone does something that does not merit Hell, and God gives him Hell. That's unjust." Yep, but no one thinks that God gives undeserving souls Hell.

Of course I'm supposing injustice here. What I'm describing would be considered gratuitous and cruel if any human being did it. It would be cruel and demeaning to the person meeting out "justice" to keep someone alive just to punish them for 100 years, let alone 10,000.

Man's justice is, of course, not God's justice. But it seems like the two terms are in danger of becoming wholly equivocal here if the response is just "something is not evil when God does it."

...and yet you are focusing on extrinsic punishment objections. Even Dante avoids those. I actually don't know of any theologians whatsoever who think in terms of extrinsic punishment. The passage I gave from Aquinas addresses this directly, with his points about the "disturbing of an order."

I am focusing on extrinsic punishment because human beings, while alive, are capable of repentance. If human beings utterly lose this capacity at death, it would seem to require some sort of extrinsic limitation that is placed upon them at death. A capacity they once had is now limited. If man has this "dual potency," it is apparently being constricted at the moment of death.

Whereas if the damned can repent and turn towards God, then the punishment also seems to be extrinsic.

Right, the human good is a particular instance of the more general principle. Harris allows this too, expanding well-being to "all conscious creatures."

I was speaking to his denial of a strong self. However, it is directly relevant to his view of reason in context. Sense experience is where we discover "good" and "bad," which are known as correlated together by a wholly discursive reason.

He says “reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will.” (3.3.2.1) Reason might allow us to connect irrational sensations of pain and pleasure with different sense objects, but “it [could not] be by [reason’s] means that… objects are able to affect us.” (3.3.2.3)

What is the claim here, that Hume really does have a use for "rational appetites?" I think it's fairly obvious if you read those sections that he doesn't.

I am skeptical of the "absolute" realization of principles, particularly one that is so specific. From a public policy perspective, it seems to make sense to me that some sort of bigoted free speech act, such as drawing the Prophet Mohammed might be allowable in a Western context, where it is likely to lead to a limited risk of violence, but unacceptable in other contexts (e.g. parts of Southeast Asia), where it might very well be expected to kick off deadly rioting.

But isn’t this more or less how ethics already works in practice?

IDK, current law in the developed world and international law is based on the natural law tradition. The ethics of the academy does not trickle down much into society any more. That elites from these societies increasingly no longer understand this tradition doesn't change where it came from (and this decay in understanding is arguably partly why it appears to be collapsing, although many explanations could be offered of course.)

Morality, as we experience and debate it, seems less like the discovery of timeless metaphysical truths and more like a code of conduct that is shaped by competing preferences, traditions, and values among different groups.

People argue, negotiate, and revise ethical standards using a mix of emotional intuitions, shared values, facts, and reasoning. Ethical reasoning isn’t absent just because there’s no fixed “Good” out there to be discovered. Instead, we appeal to consistency, consequences, fairness, or human flourishing -not because we know the good in some absolute sense, but because that’s how humans justify and improve their moral norms.

Do we need more than this?

I am not really sure what you think a "fixed" or "transcendent" good is here. However, an ethics based on facts about human flourishing is not anti-realism. Sam Harris, for instance, is not an anti-realist. He has an ethics based on knowledge about Goodness (which he has a fairly reductionist account of, claiming it to be "certain sets of possible brain states.") By contrast, the Good for the Aristotlian tradition (and much of the pre-modern tradition) is a principle like "fairness" or more specifically "lift" or "entropy," etc. It is an extremely general principle though, hence the large role for intuition and (properly oriented) emotion in ethics. You and @J both have denied goodness as a possible principle for ethics, but then turned to "fairness," "harmonious relationships," and "justice." I am not really sure what the difference here is supposed to be, such that the latter are more acceptable, since these are also very general principles.

An anti-realist says there are absolutely no facts about fairness, consistency, consequences, or human flourishing that have any bearing on which ends ought to be preferred. How exactly do you propose "facts and reasoning" to guide ethics if there are no facts that have a bearing on which ends are choice-worthy? Wouldn't the facts necessarily be nothing but window dressing on a contest of emotions, and ultimately, power? Facts select means, not ends in anti-realism.

On something like the emotivist view, where ethical discussion is just "noises people make to signal emotional states vis-á-vis certain actions," what exactly could constitute "good or bad argument" or "good or bad faith" in argument? It seems to me that ethical debate is nothing but ritualized power struggle at this point. There are no relevant "facts of the matter" to guide one's conclusions. No choices can ever be "more right" or "more wrong."

Your appeal to "fairness" and "human flourishing" to mediate arguments presupposes these are choice-worthy and knowable. I'd agree they are. But then we aren't talking about the situation I was describing. Presumably, "consequences" can guide ethical decision-making because some consequences are more choice-worthy than others. If they aren't, then I'm not sure about that either.

I haven't read the the rest of this, because I want you to not make this same mistake over, and over, leading me to ignore: This is the not the same assessment as what one ought to do. This is a different consideration, based on the essentially arbitrary goal of 'curing liver cancer' or whatever you want to be done, in the abstract. Whether or not one should do X is not hte same as whether X would achieve such and such a goal. This is why it already seemed obvious to me we're not talking about hte same 'good' and I do not take yours as 'ethical'. I may well come back to the rest of that as I can see Leontiskos has replied also, so might feel the need to put somethign in. But it seems your basis is off from the way I see things (and this seems, to me, patent, not subtle). Its very hard to go through making the same criticism at each point.

"I'm not going to read your posts past the first sentence or actually engage with any arguments at all. But my position is very strong. No, I can't positively articulate it either. I will write posts consisting of just the word 'wrong' though."

I address the ordering of ends to other ends, and the question of ultimate ends/ends sought for their own sake in the next paragraph. So the "mistake," was perhaps trying to take the time to work up from the simple to the more difficult.

Then again, why should am I expecting that someone who declares that there is no good or bad, so no good or bad argument, or good or bad faith discussion, to act otherwise? I suppose you're "living your truth" in emotivism, because it does seem to be "true for you." Afterall, what possible arguments or explanation could I offer that could constitute "good" arguments? On the upside, I also cannot possibly have "bad" arguments either.

And thus, when you make your moral pronouncements (which seems to be in most posts) about all the flaws of "Wokeness," I take it that this is just meant to articulate something like "boo-hoo for Wokeness." It cannot mean that it is truly bad to accept such beliefs at least.

Really? I think "hodgepodge stew" might be guilty of not going far enough. A stew is, after all, a whole, and fairly inseparable. For Hume, we're a "bundle." As he says in the Treatise: "I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement."

Or take Nietzsche:

With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds—namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." ONE thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "one thinks"—even the "one" contains an INTERPRETATION of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the usual grammatical formula—"To think is an activity; every activity requires an agency that is active; consequently"... It was pretty much on the same lines that the older atomism sought, besides the operating "power," the material particle wherein it resides and out of which it operates—the atom. More rigorous minds, however, learnt at last to get along without this "earth-residuum," and perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, even from the logician's point of view, to get along without the little "one" (to which the worthy old "ego" has refined itself).

Beyond Good and Evil - 1.17

IDK, anti-realists and voluntarist have their view. I think it's wrong, but I also don't think they're really just realists and intellectualists in disguise.

If Goodness cannot be known—if there is nothing to know—and if facts, truth, can never dictate action, then one cannot have an ethics where ends are ultimately informed by the intellect. The intellect becomes limited to a subservient role in orienting behavior towards positive sensation and sentiment (positive, but not known as good). I do think Hume is quite right about this. I think Hume is rarely wrong about tracking down where his assumption lead (I just don't know why we'd accept many of his assumptions).

Plato is also in agreement with Hume here. This is precisely what the soul is like when "reason is a slave of the passions," right down to the epistemic concerns. The disagreement lies in Plato's belief that this does not represent the totality of human experience or the limits of the rational soul.

The difference between my defense of postmodernism and your critique of liberalism is that I would never dream of passing judgement on any political system put into practice by a society from a vantage outside of the normative
dynamics at play within that society.

So you cannot critique the Islamic State because you don't live in a Muslim nation? You cannot call out the abhorrent practice of American chattel slavery unless you live in the ante-bellum South? My take would be: "any ethics that requires withholding judgement in that way is a ludicrously deficient ethics."

And in the many posts of yours I have read have never seen you actually try to argue for the claims that seem to lead to this position, e.g. that all intelligibility must be situated in/emerge from a specific language game/metaphysics. Obviously, most philosophy disagrees on this point, which of course doesn't make the majority right, but it does make simply asserting the opposite insufficient. One might suppose that if assumptions like that lead one to an ethics that cannot condemn ISIS or slavery, or forces one to reject "razor sharp hunting knives are not good toys for babies because of what they are," as an overly dogmatic judgement, it's a good indication that something is seriously wrong with it.

Blaming immigration for the dissolution of labor unions is a common meme on the right, and especially by the Trumpists. I’m more persuaded by arguments like this:

What is this supposed to be, some sort of guilt by association argument? "The evil boogiemen said it so it must be false!" You know who else made this argument? Unions, all through the Clinton years. Only later shifts in the Democratic coalition led to them abandoning this messaging. Union leaders met with Clinton at the border as he stated his commitment to do more than Bush re immigration.

Opinions differ on the aggregate effects of migration on unions. It's hard to pull out the effects from everything else, particularly because there are likely strong interaction effects between disparate concurrent forces. But the idea is mainstream in economics. Aside from increasing the labor supply, immigration also tends to make it more difficult to unionize due to intercultural friction and labor/culture barriers.

And employers agree. For instance, leaked documents from Amazon show they explicitly sought to diversify their workforce at the jobsite level to combat unionization risks. That employers pursued this tactic in the first Gilded Age is also well-documented.

That's a neat typology. Sorry you didn't get any interest in this

Ultimately, the analysis suggests that knowledge is not a static possession but a dynamic, perspective-sensitive process — always vulnerable to revision, and never entirely immune to epistemic luck

I tend to see these sort of issues as indictive of the fact that "justified true belief" is simply a bad way to define knowledge. It's a definition that recommends itself by being analytically quite easy to work with; however this is a bit like the guy who lost his keys on the lawn and looks under the street light for them instead because "that's where he can see."

If knowledge involves the adequacy of the intellect to being, then simply affirming true propositions with proper discursive justification is not all there is to knowledge. Truth is primarily a property of the intellect, and only analogically predicated of linguistic utterances (as signs of truth in the intellect). When someone thinks p is true for bad reasons, and p is true, there is an adequacy of the intellect to being insomuch as truth is properly affirmed, but this will not involve the fuller adequacy that comes with understanding (which we would tend to call "knowledge.")

I think the empiricist tendencies in analytic thought tend to lead to a neglect of the role of understanding in knowledge. However, even if one dismisses any faculty of noesis/intellectus (which I wouldn't), I still think the phenomenology of knowledge suggests a big role for understanding (and this a relevant role for problems of vagueness). With vagueness, it seems we can have properly justified true belief and still lack "knowledge" in a strong sense. Knowledge is understanding and if "the truth is the whole," it is also in some sense inexhaustible. A "model" that tries to make truth primarily a binary property of propositions is going to miss this (and has other problems if truth/falsity represent contrary instead of contradictory opposition).

Consider the following illustrative case: A student believes that “2 + 2 = 4” simply because their teacher told them so. While the proposition is necessarily true, the justification rests entirely on trust in authority. Unbeknownst to the student, the teacher is generally incompetent and usually wrong about mathematics — in this case, they just happen to be correct. From the student’s internal perspective, the belief seems justified and true; there is no epistemic tension (coded as 1100). However, from the perspective of an external analyst, who knows the teacher’s reputation, the belief’s justification collapses while the truth remains stable — yielding a classic Gettier case (coded as 0101). Taking a normatively rigorous view — for instance, applying reliabilist or safety-based criteria — the belief may fail entirely as knowledge, since it is both unjustified and lacks epistemic control (0001).

Right, but 2+2=4 is a perfect example of a case where individual understanding becomes a factor.

When we get to the "metaphysics of knowledge" I don't even know if it is appropriate to call knowledge (or at least what is most fully knowledge) a "belief." When we are sure that there are cars in the oncoming traffic lane and that we mustn't drive into them, I think this is not simply a case of sense data + ratio (computational reason) = propositional belief. The reason we find it quite impossible to ignore such knowledge lies, IMHO, more in the co-identity of knower and known in such cases (a union). People find it impossible to believe otherwise because their intellect is "informed" by truth in the senses (sense knowledge), or what we might call the communication of actuality.

Older notions of knowledge also tend to have an ecstatic (ecstasis) and erotic (penetration) element that seems important for moral, aesthetic, and spiritual knowledge that gets bulldozed in the JTB formulation. Likewise for the ethical ideal of "knowing by becoming." But I doubt many analytic philosophers would be swayed to much by those concerns.

That seems like the state putting the rights of one group over another (and also something it does quite broadly and not in any special relation to communitarian life), not a tension between the individual and communities. Slavery involved the state putting the property rights of individuals above the personal rights of individuals; it can happen in that context too.

In general, liberal states have not had too much trouble justifying segregation, colonialism, slavery, or expansion by conquest, which I don't think should be that surprising considering key early liberal theorists argued in favor of them. Israel is not really that different on that front, just behind the curve of change. The move away from these always seemed to me to involve liberalism's sublation of their socialist and nationalist opponents. At least in the US case, federal pressure to end segregation was motivated specifically on those grounds, and nationalism seemed to be a major driver of decolonization.

Edit: And note, liberalism has not fully outgrown this sort of justification of slavery. In some cases, globalization has led to conditions that might justifiably be called "wage slavery" (and it's also played a determinant role in fact that there are more slaves today than at any point in history). Sometimes, apologists do absolutely repudiate these effects, but it's not uncommon to see them minimize them or even to advocate for them as necessary positive steps in economic development in terms that very much recall Locke's admonition that savages be "liberated from indolence."

Yes, that's a very good point. I think that's something like what Robert Wallace would say of his version of Hegel.

It is, indeed, part of the liberal attitude to assume that, especially in the economic field, the self-regulating forces of the market will somehow bring about the required adjustments to new conditions, although no one can foretell how they will do this in a particular instance. There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people's frequent reluctance to let the market work as their inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control.

He has a point to some extent, but this misses the (now much more well-known) fact that dynamic systems can also hit tipping points and totally break down. Also, even if there is "equilibrium in the long run," as Keynes said, "in the long run we're all dead."

Anyhow, to the OP, of course there is great hypocrisy in corporate America (and often vis-á-vis where politicians and corporate interests intersect). Unfortunately, the system is sort of set up almost to ensure that.

I've read a few interviews with Big Tech CEOs on their path from 2008-2012 Obama supporters to 2024 Trump cheerleaders. Their grievance was that the new hires coming out of elite universities (which is where Big Tech hires) after the Great Recession (and Great Awokening) were actively hostile to their companies. The work climate became hostile. At the same time, the political climate became hostile. They are of course, real people and were (I think quite plausibly) really left leaning, but they were also operating in a system of furious competition where "responsibility" means watching short term profits and share prices. At the same time, they were watching their own "tribe" turn them into public enemies even as everything they had learned about corporate ethics in their professional training urged action in another direction.

There was a polemical documentary on how corporations meet the psychiatric definition of "psychopath" many years back, e.g., a tendency towards short term thinking and a total disregard for the welfare of others. It verged on propaganda, but there is a grain of truth there. The system is set up in such a way that it undermines principled leadership and promotes hypocrisy, and the pressure cooker education elites tend to receive, which focuses so heavily on "success" and method just feeds into this.

Praxis, delayed for the foreseeable future, is no longer the court of appeals against self-satisfied speculation, but for the most part the pretext under which executives strangulate that critical thought as idle which a transforming praxis most needs.

Obviously, the target here is Marxism, but it's interesting here to considered Adorno's differences with Hegel and how they might spring from early understandings of "praxis" in terms of philosophical/contemplative exercises and "philosophy as a way of life." At least, if we take more theological treatments of Hegel, or Magee's "Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition" (to be fair, we should take that one with a grain of salt, but it's interesting) seriously, this could be one of the contributing factors in the dominance of necessity and identity (through the "true infinite").

There is an interesting "sociology of philosophy" question of how praxis across epochs affects an understanding of the "intelligible" and "identity," including Adorno's particular view of philosophical experience pace the German idealists.

I am a big fan of a later of the Frankfurt's thinkers, Axel Honneth, so I will try to follow along. I also share Adorno's dismay for the tendency in Hegel to wash out particularly and for his thought to serve as an apologia for everything in "providential history," although I'm more amenable to "the actual is the rational and the rational is the actual" of "properly understood."I am not sure if critiques on this front are always fair to the best parts of Hegel, but they certainly seem to be fair critiques of parts he included in his texts—his worse inclinations perhaps (sort of akin the charge of Spinozist pantheism, which he always vehemently denied, but which there is plenty of evidence for).

Hegel, on of Adorno's big sources, is very much an Aristotlian in key ways, and I think it's worth noting that Adorno's focus on non-identity really does seem to make him a "materialist" in the Aristotlian sense, since it is matter which is the principle of unintelligibility and potency in things (although he cannot embrace the Aristotlian idea of matter as essentially nothing [what sheer being reveals itself to be in the Logic!] at the limit—in some ways then non-identity might retain more of the Kantian noumenal).

I am hoping Adorno might help me with a critique of Hegel. I have begun to suspect that, because he starts without the true (good) infinite already actual it not only fails to actually be a true infinite, but radically destabilizes his whole outlook, opening it up to this sort of critique. This aspect of Hegel is essentially an inversion of the past philosophy he borrows from. There, the "emanations" of the Absolute are "lower" and "after," and I think the inversion might be broken and also leads towards the totalitarian providential aspects Adorno is famous for critiquing.

BTW, is Marjorie Taylor Green right and they force fifth graders to read this!?!?

↪J Secular culture provides a framework within which you can follow any religion or none. But the proselytizing liberalism that Timothy is referring to goes a step further in saying that none is better than any.

I think that's a fair way to frame it. But I would put it that: "you're free to practice any religion you want, so long as you practice it as an individual." Bans on public religious observance or clothing point in this direction for instance. This is very different from earlier forms of liberalism in the US, where religion was a prominent part of public life, and the prohibition on religion was rather than no one be coerced into it, and that the state play no role in supporting any particular faith.

It's a significant political issue. Pew just released a new study for Easter and it found that a full half of Americans are greatly concerned with the decline of religion in public life. Pace common stereotypes, this sentiment is not specific to White, rural Evangelicals (not that large of a population anyhow), but includes a majority of Hispanics as well. It's a difficult and complex issue, but I don't think I would be misrepresenting things to say that the opinion of aggressively secular folks on this issue tends to be: "so much the worse for the majority on this issue." Which is certainly a defensible position. My point would merely be that this is not neutral vis-á-vis conceptions of liberty and "democracy." It tends to put the individual above the community, and I think it's fair to say that there is a general hostility towards religion as a constraint on individual liberty precisely because it is communitarian and, even more so, because pretty much all world religions reject the liberal voluntarist conception of liberty.

Communitarian projects are famously difficult to operate in liberal legal systems as well, since the idea is generally that assets must ultimately lie with some individual (or corporate officers). I think it's interesting to note that a great many intentional communities and communes have been created based on more secular and liberal understandings of liberty and community, and the particular challenges they've faced. In general, they have collapsed quite quickly.

The kibbutz has been a particularly robust example though, and it's worth noting there that (aside from being grounded more in socialist thought), they have had the benefit of a friendly legal system that has enabled them, rather than one that is broadly hostile to their project.

You make this sound like it’s a bad thing. State and market influences are a reflection of and response to where the community decides it wants to make use of the state and the market.

Such a sentiment could be used to justify practically anything though, right? For instance, the people picked Trump, and they picked him despite his obviously extreme authoritarian tendencies and lack of respect for the rule of law. They picked pill mill doctors and opiates. They picked mass incarceration as a solution to opiates (and desegregation). "The market has spoken."


Yet if it was true that state action reflects community preferences, how exactly do you explain simultaneous rioting in most urban centers over the infamies of American police in 2020? Has the "market and people" spoken here? And is it obvious that if "the market (people) want it," it's a good thing? Have the American people also spoken in favor of the private health insurance system?

My mother expected to rely on the community in her decline. Specifically, she assumed she would move in with one of my brothers and their families. But that was no-go. Both of my sisters-in-law refused to allow that. It was a matter of a generational change in attitude toward the responsibility of grown children for aging family members. I don’t know anyone in my age group who expects or wants to be taken care of by a family member when they become unable to care for themselves. Perhaps we’re not as ethically enlightened as you are.

Yes, its less of an expectation. However, people of later generations do still definitely expect that extremely underfunded welfare states will continue to pay their extremely expensive benefits in old age though, which will require dramatic reductions in future investment and young people (young people who in the West will become majority minority even as they will be forced to pay for a much wealthier majority European elderly population who has also become habituated to unsustainable levels of consumption). Aside from the sustainability issues and political stability issues this brings with it, the point is that the liberal individual isn't actually some atomized super human shedding their need for community, they just force the state to force others to provide them what they need to be atomized individuals in a market context.

And if some people in their nation want to choose a more communitarian system? "Too bad, they still must pay for us to have the liberal system first and can use what they have left over," has been the general liberal solution.

This is why the left/right tension within liberalism tends to be about the state doing more or less to help people be atomized individuals by taking some people's property to enable others to be more atomized.

Anyhow, I would think the more obvious failure of liberalism on the topic of elder care lies more in creating a culture where people, particularly women, are derided and attacked, represented as dupes, etc. for supporting their families (generally in market terms of "unpaid labor"), rather than individual choices. The fact is, there is a stigma in directly the opposite direction. You're supposed to "lean in" to career and consumption.

As to the ‘proselytizing’ nature of liberalism, it’s not as though Timothy isnt proselytizing from his pulpit when he attacks liberalism

Whenever you complain about "Platonic" metaphysics and routinely suggest postmodern ones, is this not proselytizing? What makes it different? It seems the only difference here is that we are in disagreement about how great liberalism is. If offering a critique at all "proselytizing?"

Of course I think there is something wrong at the core of liberalism. I said it's vision on human liberty is extremely myopic. Can one not disagree with liberalism's voluntarist vision of freedom?

Globalization lifted many more people out of poverty worldwide that it put into poverty. mEven without offshoring, automation alone would have decimated the industrial heartland. This wasn’t strictly a failure of liberalism

What's the comparison case here? If all economic growth stops in 1980 and neo-liberalism gets to claim responsibility for everything after, perhaps this is true. It seems far from obvious that neo-liberalism was the only, or best way to pursue this growth.

We actually have examples of extremely poor, (sometimes war torn) nations becoming developed nations since WWII in Korea, Finland, Iceland, etc. They did not follow the standard globalization play book of "become the sweatshop of the West." Nor did China, since the CCP continually intervened to push back on the forces of globalization in ways smaller states could not. There are strong arguments that, at least in many states, globalization, as pursued, has actually retarded economic and political development. And this is of course ignoring the ecological toll about to come due in the second half of the century (liberalism's focus on short term gains and essentially religious faith in "progress" to fix any apparent disasters we are subjecting future generations to).

I think the bolded part is demonstrably false, at least in its hyperbolic terms (i.e., "devastated"), but I wouldn't fault you for thinking this is true because people who certainly know better have tended to put out extremely disingenuous narratives on this front. The common thing to do is to simply look at US capital substitution rates in industry that has stayed in the US and extrapolate from there about what would have happened had other industry stayed. This is wholly inappropriate though, since the type of industry that is worth keeping in-market has been precisely that industry that is most cost-effective to automate (because then you aren't shipping technicians and expensive capital abroad just to ship the product back). There do not exist, contrary to popular opinion, magical machines that can just spit out most products. The factories that moved to abroad were specifically for those products that could most benefit from avoiding labor expenses.

This also ignores that sectoral shift is far less damaging when it happens slowly or that neo-liberal policy also allowed a massive influx of immigration to further drive down wages paired with the shock of off-shoring. New immigration was unpopular and couldn't be passed as a law, so they just stopped enforcing the rule of law on this issue, leading to a substantial share of the population lacking legal status so that they could also serve as a more easily exploitable underclass. The results of globalization and migration absolutely hammered unions, which is why unionization collapsed instead of spreading into the service sector.

None of my preferred philosophical touchstones accept the concept of the solipsistically autonomous individual. On the contrary, they see the self a more radically intertwined with and inseparable from the normative attributes of the larger society than you do. So my objections to your arguments are not about choosing the individual over the community, but rejecting your model of how the self and the social relate to each other, and especially your need for a transcendent ground for community ethics.

I don't really need a "transcendent" ground for these critiques. I just need to reject liberalism's voluntarism, the idea that liberty is "doing what you currently desire."

I do find your opinions interesting though, because you're statements, particularly on a permanent underclass, have often reminded me a lot of Charles Murray, but obviously the underlying philosophical assumptions are quite different. The judgements on the fate of the underclass seem very much in the vein that celebrates to "exceptional individual" one finds in liberal theorist like Mill (On the topic of Mill, he, like Locke, is another liberal who justified enslaving people who were not economically productive enough to liberate them from low consumption).

Anyhow, I don't see how one could possibly separate equality from reflexive freedom, or freedom as self-governance. For instance, you cannot have a equal society with a recalcitrant, morally bankrupt leadership class. They will tend to destroy what they rule over, in part because they are unhappy. Donald Trump, for instance, strikes me as a man ruled over by his passions and appetites, a vice addled man who cannot even follow through on the (very few) good intuitions he has because of a lack of self-discipline.

It's your argument, but that's not how I read it. The argument in a nutshell appears to be that genocidal infanticide would for Singer be morally neutral,

It's easy to dismiss an argument if you refuse to read it and just dishonestly misrepresent it over and over I suppose. I assume your reading comprehension isn't quite this poor and you are just being disingenuous at this point.

It's not that secular reason "has no use" for teleology or eschatology, it's more that to introduce either dimension into a liberal polity is to immediately desecularize the neutral normative constraints in favor of some religious tradition's view.

Do you mean specifically religious teleology or just teleology in general? There is definitely a thread in modern thought that declares all teleology to be essentially just superstition, and sometimes this thread asserts itself pretty aggressively (e.g. the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis "controversy"). However, extended into the political sphere this would seem to me to be a quite totalizing vision of secularism. I don't think teleology is necessarily, or even primarily religious. I don't even think teleology in the ethical sphere is distinctly religious; a great deal of thought would seem to be precluded under "secularism" by that standard.

I think we could acknowledge that losing one's temper, and other semi-involuntary acts, are not covered by the thesis "we always choose what we like," on the grounds that they aren't really choices.

But they cannot be total non-choices, right? Otherwise it wouldn't make sense to punish people for most assault cases where they lost their temper or to blame people for adultery if they were compelled by strong urges, etc. We'd be powerless against our vices and baser impulses if they could deprive us of choice.

Now, when a man acts on impulse and throws a punch in rage, or commits adultery when in the throes of lust, we normally say something like what you said. Such acts are "semi-involuntary." And we say this not because one appetite or passion is pitted against another. If this was the case, then we would also say that a man not cheating on his wife was also "semi-involuntary" if his lust is in conflict with his desire to do the right thing. Likewise, we don't say "my not punching my boss in the face for insulting me was semi-involuntary because my anger conflicted with what I thought was best."

Instead, we tend to speak of a suppression of choice when some passion or appetite overwhelms our self-reflective grasp of what is best. And this is precisely why it doesn't make sense to collapse the rational and lower appetites into one hodgepodge stew, Nietzsche's "congress of souls. And that is precisely how I'd answer your question re rational action.

Of course, our desire for "goodness as such" is always being subverted by competing impulses and desires, lack of cognitive resources, and ignorance, and that's why the development of rational freedom and self-governance is aspirational and something that must be cultivated.

You sound like David Brooks.

Brooks sometimes makes good points, particularly on the way our "meritocracy" has all sorts of negative consequences, while failing to live up to its name.

A do-it-yourself culture of intentional community only works for those who are capable of a more complex and dynamic style of interaction with the world. I believe more and more people have evolved psychologically in that direction, so for them the shedding of the old bonds of social, religious and institutional obligation is a choice rather than an imposition.

Yes, this is the "subtraction narrative" I mentioned above, and perhaps an example of the transparency issue. Liberalism is just "what happens when you remove the old forms of constraint."

Except it isn't. The atomized liberal consumer doesn't cease needing what they previously needed community to provide them, new (often mandatory) voluntarist versions of this same infrastructure need to be created, resulting in the hyperbolic growth of the state and market influence spreading into every area of life.

For instance, without community, there is no one to care for the injured or sick. People are left isolated and without resources after disasters. Older citizens cannot expect to rely on community in their decline. People cannot rely on support or intermediary negotiators in conflicts. Markets must expand to perform all these functions, but markets need regulation. Hence a gigantic (and phenomenally expensive) administrative state must take on all these roles to aid the liberal individual in attaining their individuality. The police and carceral state is the most visceral example, but also massive regulated (and often mandatory) insurance markets, etc. These are not optional (nor are laws banning community expressions or clothing that expressed cultural as opposed to personal identity so as to make the lived environment more conducive to the new individualism).

Indeed, this expansion of the state and markets comes with their own non-voluntary constraints in the form of regulation and taxation. Since liberalism and endless faith in "technology and innovation," growth, and "progress" prevail, there is a focus on the short term. Hence adequate taxes tend not to actually be raised in liberal welfare states, leading to huge accumulations of debt for operating expenses (as well as harrowing ecological debts for future generations to confront).

Aside from this, the reliance on markets to fulfill the former functions of community also has the effect of making the effects of economic inequality more global and all-encompassing. This was made particularly obvious during the pandemic, as the wealthy could comfortably "shelter in place," relying on a legion of anonymous low wage workers to bear the supposed risks for them.

At any rate, we might also ask: "freedom for who?" Industrializing education and care of the elderly certainly freed up prime aged adults from responsibilities, but not in ways that seem to be preferred by those whose care was being outsourced for greater economies of scale. Plus, if liberty requires self-governance, than the liberal education might seem to broadly fail on those grounds as well.

For others who aren’t prepared to thrive in such a world, it has been a damaging change.

You act like this is a minor issue. As far as I can see, it's one that dominates electoral politics and is tearing apart the liberal order in the world's economy and greatest military power. That's not an isolated small scale issue, it's quite possibly the begining of the historical failure of liberalism.

Plus, it presupposes the liberal notion of freedom as: "freedom to do as one currently pleases."

The idea of those being dependent on community not having evolved, or not being "prepared to thrive," does recall a quote though.

Notably, the [marginalized] groups that [liberal reformers] recognize are all defined by biology. In liberal theory, where our “nature” means our bodies, these are “natural” groups opposed to “artificial” bonds like communities of work and culture. This does not mean that liberalism values these “natural” groups. Quite the contrary: since liberal political society reflects the effort to overcome or master nature, liberalism argues that “merely natural” differences ought not to be held against us. We ought not to be held back by qualities we did not choose and that do not reflect our individual efforts and abilities.

[Reformers] recognize women, racial minorities, and the young only in order to free individuals from “suspect classifications.” Class and culture are different. People are part of ethnic communities or the working class because they chose not to pursue individual success and assimilation into the dominant, middle-class culture, or because they were unable to succeed. Liberal theory values individuals who go their own way, and by the same token, it esteems those who succeed in that quest more highly than individuals who do not. Ethnicity, [religion], and class, consequently, are marks of shame in liberal theory, and whatever discrimination people suffer is, in some sense, their “own fault.” We may feel compassion for the failures, but they have no just cause for equal representation.

Wilson Cary McWilliams - Politics

Or as James Stimson put it just a few years ago

"When we observe the behavior of those who live in distressed areas, we are observing not the effect of decline of the working class, we are observing a highly selected group of people who faced economic adversity and chose to stay at home and accept it when others sought and found opportunity elsewhere. . . . Those who are fearful, conservative, in the social sense, and lack ambition stay and accept decline.”

But this of course radically ignores the ways in which massive state intervention and diplomatic efforts were made to secure the vast (and helpfully unregulated and desperate) labor pool of the developing world so as move the economic engines of now "distressed areas" across oceans at great ecological cost to future generations in order to secure greater profit margins and lower prices in the short term (and so higher consumption), with both profits and consumption gains skewing heavily to elites. Globalization isn't an accident though, it's occured with heavy state intervention according to an explicit ideology.

Agreed. Plus, it also tends to generate an inappropriate tautology where "whatever one does" is "what gives one the most positive sentiment/pleasure." This will tend to exclude the very apparent phenomena of "weakness of will," or "losing one's temper," etc. We cannot understand St. Paul in Romans 7 when he says: "I do the very thing that I hate," because it would seem that he must love what he does more than he hates it in virtue of the fact that he has chosen to do it. Part of the problem here stems from the collapse of the sensible and rational appetites, although there are some ways to fix it without invoking this distinction.

BTW, since your familiar with Taylor, I would say part of the difficulty is that liberalism, like secularism, tends to tell "subtraction narratives," about itself. On these accounts, "liberalism is just what you get when the oppressive institutions of the past are dismantled." In turn, this tends to give a sense of inevitably to the negative aspects of liberalism, while foreclosing on alternatives as necessarily entailing a return to an authoritarian past.

Critics recognize the problems, Fukuyama is a huge cheerleader of liberalism (and great analyst), but also identifies key fault lines. But he sees this as the inevitable consequences of economic growth/prosperity and freedom from coercive institutions. I think this misses the way contemporary liberalism/globalization is very much a positive project. As Deneen says, the "inevitably narrative" tends to suggest that the only solution to liberalism is "more liberalism," either more individual economic liberty for the right, or a larger welfare/administrative state for the left. It also obscures how technology, growth, international institutions, and the state are positively shaped with liberalism's assumptions in mind and serve to create the very anthropology it assumes.