a bunch of inborn genetic, biological, neurological, mental, and psychological processes, structures, capacities, drives, and instincts which are modified during development and by experience and socialization. — T Clark

Hey T Clark, thanks for the welcome. I did read your posts, and found myself in agreement with your components of 'human nature', although I was wondering how you would define 'mental'?

I think of this sort of knowledge as an 'act of faith', ultimately. To say that we can define human nature seems impossible to me, given that our understanding of what that means is inevitably evolving.

But just because you have to 'choose' to believe, the act of faith itself being a choice, does not mean you are wrong. Your concept of this might be perfect, somehow, or it could be the best possible given what we know, in this moment, etc. There are many ways this could be the best way to think without it being objectively true.

Hence my use of 'aspirational'. A professor once told me that to be ethical in the face of modern uncertainty was to be 'whole-hearted and half-sure', and that stay stays with me today. I don't know much about the ancient Greeks, but the premise of 'virtue ethics' is, to my understanding, a project of maximizing your potential for good.

To me, we can't 'know' what human nature is, what the right thing to do is, but we can conclude that we are made better by having these 'ideals' to aspire towards, and then acting.

Your Chuang Tzu quote expresses a very similar premise, I believe. It's feels a 'process' philosophy. I find Buddhism similar, and personally appealing, having lived in Japan for a few years and traveled the region in the summers. Visiting all those temples and shrines in Tokyo, and in Thailand, Vietnam, etc, heck, even the churches of England when I was still calling myself a backpacker - all of those experiences helped me to ground my understanding of those religions in physical terms, and it was always the Buddhist temples I was most attracted to.

I struggle with deontological or utilitarian ethics simply due to the impossibility of objectivity, and my being an atheist. There is no 'leap of faith' for me to take. Only philosophically-informed choices to make. (or so I hope!)

But I am all for people, such as yourself, making a thoughtful decision to be relativistic, for a variety of possible reasons. It's only the default relativists I worry about, because it can lead to some collective problems with narcissism and rudderlessness. It's easy to be a lousy relativist. It's hard to be a good one?

"Your open minded and sympathetic attitude about religion is not a popular one here on the forum, which has a record of knee-jerk religious bigotry".

Thanks. Being educated in philosophy outside of the academy, I just looked at the history of philosophy (that I was supposed to be able to deliver to 17 year-olds in one semester), and saw so much done in historical contexts that necessitated an exchange between philosophy and religion that it was impossible for me to imagine disentangling them? I had super diverse classes here in downtown Toronto, including many Muslim students, Orthodox Greeks, etc., given my neighbourhood, and found this a great way to engage them.

I enjoyed thinking about your post.

Hey T Clark, thanks for the welcome. I did read your posts, and found myself in agreement with your components of 'human nature', although I was wondering how you would define 'mental'? — Jeremy Murray

I'll give a couple of examples. One of the most prominent is the capacity for language. Another important one is the capacity for what Konrad Lorenz calls "extended consciousness" that most other animals don't have. Over the past year I read two documents by him - A paper called "Kant's Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology" and "Behind the Mirror which deal with the subject and related subjects. Here is a link to the paper if you are interested.

https://archive.org/details/KantsDoctrineOfTheAPrioriInTheLightOfContemporaryBiologyKonradLorenz

To say that we can define human nature seems impossible to me, given that our understanding of what that means is inevitably evolving. — Jeremy Murray

Clearly I don't agree with that given I did provide a definition. I'm not a cognitive scientist so my take is a amateur's and, as I noted, others disagree. I've read a few articles, but I can't lay out their arguments. Since the idea of human nature is so important to me, I need to read more people who are critical of the idea.

I think of this sort of knowledge as an 'act of faith', ultimately...

But just because you have to 'choose' to believe, the act of faith itself being a choice, does not mean you are wrong. Your concept of this might be perfect, somehow, or it could be the best possible given what we know, in this moment, etc. There are many ways this could be the best way to think without it being objectively true...

...To me, we can't 'know' what human nature is, what the right thing to do is, but we can conclude that we are made better by having these 'ideals' to aspire towards, and then acting. — Jeremy Murray

Based on what I've written here, it should be clear I disagree with this.

Your Chuang Tzu quote expresses a very similar premise, — Jeremy Murray

I don't see that. Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu write about our "Te," what Ziporyn translates as "intrinsic virtuosities" and sometimes "inborn nature."

I struggle with deontological or utilitarian ethics simply due to the impossibility of objectivity, and my being an atheist. There is no 'leap of faith' for me to take. Only philosophically-informed choices to make. (or so I hope!) — Jeremy Murray

For me, and I think Taoist principles, at least expressed in the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu, there is no leap of faith or philosophically informed choices. It's something I am aware of. As I understand it, Taoism is about self-awareness.

But I am all for people, such as yourself, making a thoughtful decision to be relativistic, for a variety of possible reasons. — Jeremy Murray

I would not call myself a relativist, although I can see why you would.

A moral system is always equal to a legal system. Certainly, law is subjected to perpetual changes. We cannot intend legality as something that is detached from morality.

Logic itself is objective. Only one universal reasoning could inquire into whether ‘logic is objective or not’, and any conclusion from that inquiry would be built using only logic; basically, you can only use logic to prove whether logic is objective or not, and so you prove ‘you can only use logic to prove’ as an objective experience of things. Some things we experience are universal, and that is an objective truth. — Fire Ologist

Logic is objective because logic depends on an already constituted set of assumptions concerning what an object is. Therefore, logic can’t be used as a means to reveal the psychological genesis of those assumptions, as writers like Wittgenstein, Husserl and Heidegger argued. Derrida summarizes Husserl’s opposition to Frege on this point:

“… only "composed" logical notions can be defined without referring to psychological genesis; these notions are mediate and hence insufficient. They are already constituted, and their originary sense escapes us. They suppose elementary concepts like "quality," "intensity," "place," “time," and so on, whose definition cannot, in Husserl's eyes, remain specifically logical. These concepts are correlative to the act of a subject. The concepts of equality, identity, of whole and of part, of plurality and of unity are not understood., in the last analysis, through terms of formal logic. If these concepts were a priori pure ideal forms, they would not lend themselves to any definition; every definition supposes in fact a concrete determination.

This determination cannot be provided except by the act of actual constitution of this formal logic. Thus, we must turn toward concrete psychological life, toward perception, starting from which, abstraction and formalization take place. An already constituted logical form cannot be rigorously defined without unveiling the whole intentional history of its constitution. If such a history is not implied by all the logical concepts, these become unintelligible in themselves and unusable in concrete operations. Thus, Husserl maintains against Frege that one has no right to reproach a mathematician with describing the historical and psychological journey that leads to the concept of number, One cannot “begin" with a logical definition of number. The very act of this definition and its possibility would be inexplicable. (The Problem of Genesis)

Hello Mr. Murray,
(16 years of Catholic school and that’s the only way I can address high school teachers — Fire Ologist

Hi Fire Ologist, thanks for the welcome, and that's funny - I still have students who call me Mr. Murray, despite my promising them they can call me what they want when they graduate. Families, careers, and they still call me Mr. ...

I appreciate the respect shown teachers though, and I am happy you had that inspiring experience in English class. Not everybody has those.

what would be the point of the whole discussion if we could not distill how to act and how not to act towards each other in some form that we can all share and look to — Fire Ologist

Well said. I think my attraction back to philosophy has come from precisely this .... it seems to me that so much of what passes as morality is simply an 'act of faith', which is fine if we acknowledge it to be incomplete, a work in progress, and that all we aspire towards is synthetic, in a sense. 'Many paths, one truth'.

This synthesizing project is relational, based on reason, responsibility and a striving towards objectivity - in keeping with your model. I always saw my role as a high school teacher, welcoming students from seemingly everywhere, as working towards this synthesis.

But to aspire towards this, one has to remain 'whole-hearted and half-sure'.

To be specific, I have major problems with 'wokeness', which is often presented as a completed project, one that has come to absolutely dominate our educational institutions in a remarkably short time. The 'woke' have set out to 'dismantle' objectivity as white supremacist, which, per your 'required playing pieces', undermines the entire project. The woke prioritize 'lived experience' - anecdote - above all else, but only the lived experience of the 'marginalized'.

I find this dangerous, the moving target of 'marginalization', the refusal to play with the pieces we've played with, as human beings, since we first started thinking about morality. It seems to me that the response to this is synthetic - to identify shared values in religion, philosophy, cultural tradition, science, storytelling, etc and to bring the best of the various means of thinking into conversations with each other.

And I worry about a belief system that appears to be more religious than scholarly, but has managed to claim a scholarly standing that derives from it's own 'inherent' virtuousness.

This is true of all sorts of belief systems, it's just this new one, 'wokeness', that has me wondering what our shared language for moral discussion is / should be.

I spent some time thinking about your post and how to reply, and still find myself on shaky ground. The only conclusion I can come up with is that it is the act of pursuing an 'objective' morality, in free dialogue with others, seems essentially, necessarily 'human', even though the end goal is almost certainly unattainable.

That's my best practice, currently.

What would you recommend for dialogue with people who seem to be playing checkers with a chess set?

What would you recommend for dialogue with people who seem to be playing checkers with a chess set? — Jeremy Murray

Ignore them. They are not playing hte game. And they know it. That's why the 'woke' don't actually get much truck. You'll never see a screaming blue-haired, chain-wearing trans woman(purposefully inflammatory, to paint a picture, to be sure) having a serious ethical discussion with heads of state, or anything of the kind. People will real interests in unity and getting along don't behave those ways, and we don't allow them to. We allow concessions, the way we do with children. Yes, i'm being sanguine, but i don't think too far from reality.

one has to remain 'whole-hearted and half-sure'. — Jeremy Murray

The fact that people keep making inquiry of morality, to me, is a reasonable basis for a hope all of these same people who even ask “yeah, but is it good?” might one day make a morality that is not futile. But, to me, if all is only relative, or we reduce the responsible agent to neurons and prior forces, we are not talking morality anymore. So we have to address relativity in the face of objectivity.

If we want to be more scientific/analytic about this, I have to show you where I’m coming from. I see three ways the specter of futility creeps into the conversation.

First, if all metaphysics is futile, as an unfalsifiable exercise in the logic of tilting at angels dancing on the head of a windmill, there is no such thing as any “system” and so all moral systems are futile attempts to merely describe a fabricated windmill. Morality merely adds the concept “good” to the parallel question “are all systems futile?” which they may be, if we are honest.

(At this threshold spot where we see the futility of identifying any “system”, you find a similar but different threshold futility due to our reliance on language alone to point out all of these musings and figures of speech like “moral system”.…. This is also where epistemological problems lie, where how we know anything is questionable, so how is knowing about morality knowing anything “true” about morality and not simply about my own construction of something? There is a lot of potential futility to any philosophy before we even get started on morality.)

A second layer of futility arises, if we somehow address the problems with systematizing human experience, and come to agree that metaphysics and moral system-making is as concrete as any science, that we can use reason to agree on universal moral laws and a means to adjudicate our own and others’ actions - we still have to come up with those laws and reasonably apply those laws to situations. What is a moral system and whether it can even exist, becomes, what action reflects the moral law? Making universal laws seems just as futile as making a system, even if we have solved the threshold metaphysical/epistemological problems, given how opposed people are to each other in life. In a practical sense, in today’s climate of distrust, and just stubborn ignorance, no one wants to even listen to each other, let alone devise together a law that will equally tell all parties what to do and what not to do. We face the futility that we will never actually be able to agree on one “system” and so we will never actually create the metaphysical “system” we assumed was possible before but now can’t agree on, and moral systematizing remains a futile attempt. The “law” part of the “moral system” is still cloudy and dubious for us even if we agree the type “law” is clearly possible.

But third, even if we worked out all of the metaphysical questions, and we built an entire system of just, moral laws that the entire world’s citizenry agreed was best for one and best for all, threw a party like New Year’s Eve to celebrate because everyone is happy, together if only for a night - now we each still live in time, and the party ends, and we have to go separate ways, and in future moments we have to pit morality against opposing desires, but protect and keep this morality by being moral, daily, being as good as we can. Seems to me, even if we are certain about metaphysical absolute objective truth, and certain we have found it in the moral code we consent to with our whole hearts, we are still able to render this moral system futile.

But then, is it futile build a moral system in attempt to resist or temper these human passions and reasonings of thought and body, anyway?

Wasn’t it myself I was really trying to regulate with morality in the first place, or, can’t I live according to my morality despite the futility of it?

Can I learn to do better, next time? Is there a “better” I can make in the future that guides my actions in the present and makes them better now as I act?

Is there a moral system that I would create out of my own actions despite anyone else, even myself?

Even though moral systems seem futile and I fail my morality every time, is it still better, and so, good, to be moral?

“Good to be moral” - that’s seems either self-perpetuating, or empty tautology.

I think this is the space the existentialists carved out from which to sit on the question of morality. It’s before good and evil, not beyond it - it’s the understanding that we never got there, because we can never get there. So not beyond anywhere.

But here, for some reason, we can still “be moral”, we just have to be moral, anyway. It’s just that now, morality is a creative act merely among persons.

My sense is this was always the case - we learned to speak, we shared communications, and morality was born all simultaneously.

Making a moral system is self-defining act at the same time. So the universal (system) is the particular (self-defining). So maybe making a moral system simply means making myself better. I still have the problems of defining what’s “worse” from the “better” and identifying what is responsible, and how to codify it in law, but I’m doing all of these things looking at the law as a sculpting of my very soul itself.

We define ourselves when we define our morality and, also when we, ourselves, act according to our morality. The moral sense of things, the sense of “good” agreed upon with another, is tied up with what human beings are. Making morals, universalizing, is tied up with being a person, which is tied up with speaking to other speakers, because being a person is tied up with other human beings being people with you. We each define ourselves, together, with the others. Separate, but with each other. This is what morality is, or comes from, or makes. Being moral is an act as much as it is a law that could be acted upon or a system that could teach us how to live best.

We dont need to equate the law with oppression and stagnant resistance to change. The law is just as necessary for us to rejoin as “us”, as is the lawless relativity necessary for us to be apart in our lawless, silent separate subjectivity.

If I saw nothing objective about our existential condition, and left all things relative to forces of undoing and remaking, then what would be the point of speaking at all? Speaking itself can be futile, even thinking logically if thinking about something that isn’t there. Without objectivity, nothing else is there with us, each, a lonely, cut-off subject.

There are a lot of holes in the above. But hopefully something to chew on in between those holes.

I also endorse the Sam Harris book, he makes a strong case, and I feel my personal stance is very close to his, except that I do believe religion, (human traditions of morality, as they were developed and situated in time, ever-evolving) and even spiritual traditions such as meditation, that can be practiced in secular fashion, all bring value to the pursuit of an 'objective' morality.

The Moral Landscape?

I'm a big fan even though I disagree with its core thesis and methodology. I still think it's a helpful framing of ethics for people who have had little exposure to it, even if it tends to be too reductive.

I get the feeling that Harris hasn't engaged much with pre-modern ethical theories (he certainly demonstrates an inadequate understanding of the "Platonic Good" when he thinks it is absent from conscious experiences, rather than being present in, not only all good things, but everything that even merely appears good). However, I think his core points regarding our ability to learn about the human good, and to act on this knowledge, are well-taken (and would be even more well-taken integrated into a richer moral philosophy and philosophy of science).




What you've noted are often popular reasons people give for advocating for a return to virtue ethics. I will just note that a sort of virtue ethics has also been dominant outside the West, so there is a lot to look into there even outside the Aristotelian and Christian traditions.

In a practical sense, in today’s climate of distrust, and just stubborn ignorance, no one wants to even listen to each other, let alone devise together a law that will equally tell all parties what to do and what not to do — Fire Ologist

Right, well said. I appreciate people using philosophy to analyze our current moment. It seems the best equipped discipline to make sense of things, right now. So many disciplines have been completely captured, ideologically. The rigour of the thinking required by philosophy contrasts with the rest of the humanities, the arts, whatever you want to call this collective, who are guilty of all sorts of academic failings right now.

This is the air we breathe, and I assume a lot of people here on TPF are aware of, adjacent to or even profoundly affected by this woke capture of many institutions. This goes far beyond education. Morality via algorithim, delivered via screen.

So applying the tools of philosophy to the culture wars is fascinating to me as a lay social scientist appalled by the state of the field. Not to sound partisan. I am a conscientious objector. It's just that my entire adult life in Canada has been lived in progressive environments, my employer is arguably the wokest institution on the planet - this is the gestalt I can best analyze.

"Good to be moral" is not how I would put it. Good to be good?

"Seems to me, even if we are certain about metaphysical absolute objective truth, and certain we have found it in the moral code we consent to with our whole hearts, we are still able to render this moral system futile".

I always think about William James and the 'Will to Believe" on subjects such as this.

What if we changed your postulation to "not-at-all certain"? Certainty doesn't matter. The lack of objectivity is not a central problem for me here.

I resonate with your language, the phrase "the spectre of futility creeps" is dynamite metaphor, nicely done. Brings to mind pessimism, which I discovered by accident ordering "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" thinking I was ordering a horror story, and instead getting the only work of philosophy by this dark, underground horror writer I wanted to check out.

It's a perfect marriage for me, the language of horror expressing the emptiness of existence in a world in which there is no meaning. I do some creative writing as a hobby and I find pessimistic philosophy a great source of dark inspiration - I would love to have shared, say, parts of True Detective season one with a high school philosophy class.

Again, I'm self taught, so there are gaps in my basic philosophical knowledge no doubt, but the 'pessimist' philosophers Ligotti describes sound to me like the logical end game for a world that ceases to aspire to morality, or shared humanity, or goodness, or whatever and however we can best define that, right now.

A perpetual creation of the world we wish to see? Does that make me an existentialist?

The pessimists Ligotti describes, along with Ligotti himself (a lay philosopher), present a bleak vision, and the potential that the pessimists, or anti-natalists might be 'right'? That risk, however small, is enough for me to 'make the choice' to believe. I know that is not the language James uses to describe it, but that's the concept I endorse, I suppose?

And then I guess, to try and engage with people and yourself, perpetually, in an act of creation. Sounds exhausting...

The pace of the conversation for me is fast at TPF, being largely disconnected from the online world, and somewhat out of practice with certain thinkers and terms, but It's posts like yours that are challenging me to think hard before replying!

We have discussed Ligotti here a few times before. A really interesting book on the emergence of a sense of a "lack of meaning," which is in many ways a distinctly modern phenomenon, is Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (also one of the big Candian philosophers). I think he does a good job showing how this concern grows out of reconceptualizations of nature, more than religion (although the two are deeply related).

Of course, the "valuelessness and meaninglessness" of the universe has itself become a sort of dogma, guarded with the ferocity of early modern Catholic defenses Aristotle's physics in some cases. When existentialism becomes a sort of religion, it becomes important to safeguard the absurdity of the world, since we cannot be triumphant overcomers of absurdity if the world is not absurd (and would in fact, simply be deluded about the fundamental nature of the world).

In earlier ethics, both the dominant pagan philosophy of late-antiquity and ancient through medieval Christendom, the goal of ethics, and of philosophy itself was often framed more as "becoming like God." I think this framing explains why even thinkers who did not believe in the immortality of individual souls nonetheless did not seem to face a "crisis of meaning" (its absence). Robert M. Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present is pretty good on that idea.

This is the air we breathe, and I assume a lot of people here on TPF are aware of, adjacent to or even profoundly affected by this woke capture of many institutions. This goes far beyond education. Morality via algorithim, delivered via screen.

The hyper politicization of ethics is indeed a huge problem. In my education, which I don't think is unusual, ethical education largely consisted of drilling the obedience required of students, and then jumping right to political ethics (also framed in the, then far less dominant, broadly "woke" frame). My personal position would be that you need to deal with the basics of individual ethics before delving into the ethics of politics, particularly contentious issues. Students today get essentially no direct education in ethics, and then are asked to jump right into political questions.

I always think about William James and the 'Will to Believe" on subjects such as this.

I was just thinking about James, because his essay seems to accord with a lot of Orthodox apologetics I've been reading. A key point raised by James is that our access to evidence in support of our beliefs is often contingent on our (perhaps conditional) acceptance of some beliefs prior to the consideration of evidence that supports them. I think this point is in line with the credo: credo ut intelligam, “I believe that I may understand,” advanced by St. Augustine and St. Anselm (from Isiah 7:9)

This credo is usually invoked in the context of religious beliefs. However, in our increasingly skeptical and conspiratorial era, it is worth noting that it actually applies equally to all areas of knowledge. We can doubt anything. We can always ask of any belief: “but what if I am somehow wrong?” or of any statement “but what if it is a lie?”

Yet, if we approach the world in this way, it does not seem that we will be able to learn much of anything. For instance, if we doubt every word in our physics textbook, if we cannot get past a suspicion that the entire field is an elaborate hoax, etc. we shall never learn physics. Likewise, we cannot hope to learn to speak Spanish if we doubt the accuracy of every Spanish speaker as they attempt to instruct us. It is only after we have understood a topic that we can have an informed opinion about it. For example, even if it were really true that some key element in modern physics is mistaken, we can hardly expect to be able to identify this problem, or to find a solution to it, while remaining ignorant of the subject because we have refused to learn about it due to our concerns over accepting error.

But this would apply to religion as well. One doesn't just read and assent or withhold assent. If the (at least traditional) Christians are right, our nous is darkened, and our reasoning will remain clouded until we are healed (which involves ascetic discipline, prayer, sacraments, and a redirecting of the appetites and passions). The Platonists, Stoics, and Buddhists make similar points. I had written about this in a more specifically Christian context awhile back, but I think it applies to a wide variety of things. One doesn't really discover if "meditation" or "mindfulness" or "prayer" "works" by reading about it an assenting, but only after pursuing them.

I think this is important because ethics (and aesthetics) is very much a doing, and not something that seems to reduce to affirming or not affirming propositional beliefs.

We have discussed Ligotti here a few times before — Count Timothy von Icarus

Any thread to point to?

When existentialism becomes a sort of religion, it becomes important to safeguard the absurdity of the world, since we cannot be triumphant overcomers of absurdity if the world is not absurd — Count Timothy von Icarus

So, I read a lot of existential-adjacect stuff - "At the Existentialist Cafe" is a fave - but I doubt my ability / desire to read a lot of primary sources like say, "Being and Nothingness". I may be missing something ... but the existentialists do seem to enjoy absurdity, and the pessimists do not?

How is existentialism a religion? I see elements of religion in 'wokeness', and elements of the postmodern in both existentialism and wokeness, but existentialism and religion? I guess Sartre wasn't deconstructing master narratives, he was pretty into communism, for example. But then, willing to renounce it, eventually?

Students today get essentially no direct education in ethics, and then are asked to jump right into political questions — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've witnessed this. Almost no ethical instruction at all. Ethical positions are simply delivered to the students as fact. I am at the point where I think that teaching kids to question ethical axioms will get them in trouble.

Question - is modern day 'ethical' instruction simply just a neoliberal /technocratic default setting for moral relativists?

Yet, if we approach the world in this way, it does not seem that we will be able to learn much of anything. For instance, if we doubt every word in our physics textbook, if we cannot get past a suspicion that the entire field is an elaborate hoax, etc. we shall never learn physics. Likewise, we cannot hope to learn to speak Spanish if we doubt the accuracy of every Spanish speaker as they attempt to instruct us. It is only after we have understood a topic that we can have an informed opinion about it. For example, even if it were really true that some key element in modern physics is mistaken, we can hardly expect to be able to identify this problem, or to find a solution to it, while remaining ignorant of the subject because we have refused to learn about it due to our concerns over accepting error. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Isn't this a false binary? I doubt any word, written or spoken anywhere and by anyone, on principle. I don't think that disqualifies me from trusting a particular source to be mostly correct, and therefore using it to improve on my own ethical / aesthetic 'doing'?

I guess I just don't see the need for something to be 'true' in order for it to be a meaningful target, in the present moment.

Hey man, (assuming 'man' given the nickname) I am on the lookout for reading recommendations, so I appreciate any you toss my way. Charles Taylor is someone I've meant to read as a Canadian. I struggle with technical primary sources, and am not as well read on the classics as a result.

I'm on the lookout in particular for 'essential' primary sources that don't seem so intentionally obscure. I get that the task of processing these works is sort of the point, but time is finite. And also essential 'adjacent' texts, I loved that Sarah Bakewell book.

I kind of approach every subject with a 'how would I explain this to kids' mentality, not in the dumbing down sense of things, but in the scaffolding sense.

Perhaps approaching all ethical questions from the perspective of how to explain / explore / compel / impart / etc. these concepts with children is worthwhile?

You'll never see a screaming blue-haired, chain-wearing trans woman(purposefully inflammatory, to paint a picture, to be sure) having a serious ethical discussion with heads of state, or anything of the kind. People will real interests in unity and getting along don't behave those ways, and we don't allow them to. We allow concessions, the way we do with children. Yes, i'm being sanguine, but i don't think too far from reality. — AmadeusD

Hello Amadeus, and sorry for the slow reply here. I often enjoy your comments and posts, but I missed this.

I think one of the reasons I object to people saying things like 'the worst of woke is over' is that, sure, it is in retreat, or never got to the table for 'ethical discussions with heads of state' - but I've encountered a number of people close to your exaggerated, blue-haired picture, in middle-management positions for the past 10+ years of teaching high school.

And I think they are causing (unintentional) harm. "The Anxious Generation" and "Bad Therapy" are two recent reads that have me convinced of this.

It's the damage caused, the waste of resources, that makes it hard for me to 'ignore'. And that's why I'm drawn to these ethical threads. Wokeness feels like an 'own-goal' for progressives? It also feels unchallengeable, deontological, an act of faith perceived as rational morality?

Not a problem, I appreciate that.

That's fair, and yes, It's clearly an issue. Management in universities is increasingly (old news) of that kind. My current courses are... well, the courses are good.. but they're very hard to get through being brow-beaten constantly for existing. No wonder faith in Uni is falling fast.
I do think wokeness is an own-goal. So much so that the groups in question don't even notice it. Even when they lose as unlosable election.

The biggest problem I see is that people can make it all the way to PhD by doing what they're told, but believing something utterly preposterous and incoherent.
I have several (fellow) students in my current classes who say the most unreasonable, clearly incorrect stuff about factual matters - but they're passing. These types of people believe, truly, that there is no use for the concept of objectivity, and that there is no such thing as logical constraint on claims.
These people will become philosophers of nonsense. There are thousands. No wonder it doesn't pay.

Good and evil are fundamental features of our reality and are both necessary. Morality is about what is right or wrong to do in a situation. Everything is situational at the very end.

Here is the thread I remember on Conspiracy Against the Human Race.

How is existentialism a religion? I see elements of religion in 'wokeness', and elements of the postmodern in both existentialism and wokeness, but existentialism and religion? I guess Sartre wasn't deconstructing master narratives, he was pretty into communism, for example. But then, willing to renounce it, eventually?

It's obviously not a religion in some sense. But it is very much a "worldview through which someone organizes their life and makes sense of their life, human history, etc." It is a proper "worldview" in that it encompasses the whole of human experience, and it is "religion-like" in its attempts to explain the "meaning" of human life (in this case as a sort of act of creation and overcoming). Hence, it gains strong emotional valance, and needs to be "defended."

Question - is modern day 'ethical' instruction simply just a neoliberal /technocratic default setting for moral relativists?

Probably something close at least. But it's hardly a structured ethics, which I suppose makes sense if you think most of ethics is just emotion claims. D.C. Schindler has some good stuff on the "bourgeois metaphysics" that are often presupposed here.

Why might this neutralizing of truth claims be desirable? The point seems to be, above all, not to deny any particular truth claim outright, in the sense of taking a definitive position on the matter (“It is absolutely not the case that leaves are green, and anyone who says that they are is therefore wrong.”), but, just the opposite, to avoid taking an inflexible stand on one side of the question or the other. We want to allow a particular claim to be true, but only “as far as it goes,” and as long as this does not exclude the possibility of someone else taking a different view of the matter.13 Gianni Vattimo, the Italian philosopher-cum-politician, has advocated irony as the proper stance of citizens in the modern world: democracy works, he believes (ironically?), if we are sufficiently detached from our convictions to be capable of genuine tolerance of others,whose convictions may be different from our own.14 Such a stance is what Charles Péguy took a century ago to be the essence of modernity. According to him, to be modern means “not to believe what one believes.”15 Along these lines, we might think of the status of truth claims in terms of the so-called “right to privacy,” as analogous, that is, to private opinions. A thing is permitted to be true, as true as it wants to be, as long as that truth does not impose itself on others. Its truth is its own, as it were, and may not bear on anything beyond itself, may not transgress its particular boundaries. It is a self-contained truth,and, so contained, it is free to be perfectly “absolute.”


Let us call this a “bourgeois metaphysics." 6“Bourgeois” is an adjective meant to describe any form of existence, pattern of life, set of “values,” and so forth, that is founded on the principle of self-interest, which is posited as most basic. To speak of a “bourgeois metaphysics” is to observe that such an interest,such forms, patterns, and values, are themselves an expression of an underlying vision of the nature of reality, namely, a view that absolutizes individuals, that holds that things “mean only themselves”; it does not recognize things as belonging in some essential manner to something greater, as being members of some encompassing whole, and thus pointing beyond themselves in their being to what is other, but instead considers them first and foremost discrete realities.On the basis of such metaphysics, it is perfectly natural to make self-interest the basic reference point for meaning, the primary principle of social organization.17 In fact, given such a view of the nature of reality, nothing else would make any sense. This principle of social organization does not in the least exclude the possibility of what is called “altruism.”18 Quite to the contrary, we just articulated an expression of the “bourgeois metaphysics” precisely as a kind of concern for others: we are willing to affirm something as true only on the condition that we leave open the possibility for others to take a different position. We thus seek to give others a special respect. Toleration is, at least in our postmodern era, essential to this view of reality. In a certain respect, then, there is nothing preventing our judging that the “bourgeois metaphysics” is radically altruistic or other-centered.

Nevertheless, this judgment demands two qualifications. First, insofar as it is founded on a “bourgeois metaphysics,” it follows necessarily that any altruistic act will be equally explicable in purely self-centered terms. In this case, altruism will always be vulnerable to the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” such as we find,for example, in Friedrich Nietzsche: there can be no rational disputing the charge that what appears to be done for altruistic reasons is “really” motivated by the prospect of selfish gain.19 Second, the affirmation of the other inside of a"bourgeois metaphysics” is inevitably an affirmation of the other specifically as a self-interested individual. Altruism is not in the least an “overcoming” of egoism, but rather the multiplication of it. This is the essence of toleration: “live and let live” means, “let us agree to be self-centered individuals; we will give space to each other so that each may do and be what he likes, and will transgress our separateness only to confirm each other in our own individuality, that is, to reinforce each other’s selfishness.” One thinks here of Rilke’s famous definition of love, which may indeed have a deep meaning in itself, but not so much when it appears on a refrigerator magnet: “Love consists in the mutual guarding,bordering, and saluting of two solitudes.”20

Isn't this a false binary?

I don't think it's a binary at all. We can have more or less faith in a source, belief, person, etc. The Academic Skepticism St. Augustine is referring to made it a point to accept next to nothing, doubt was wisdom. "Doubt even your own senses." The point is that this gets you nowhere in terms of understanding.

Hey man, (assuming 'man' given the nickname) I am on the lookout for reading recommendations, so I appreciate any you toss my way. Charles Taylor is someone I've meant to read as a Canadian. I struggle with technical primary sources, and am not as well read on the classics as a result.

I'm on the lookout in particular for 'essential' primary sources that don't seem so intentionally obscure. I get that the task of processing these works is sort of the point, but time is finite. And also essential 'adjacent' texts, I loved that Sarah Bakewell book.

A Secular Age is quite accessible. It isn't really technical, although it is encyclopedic in its references. Obviously you get more out of it when you know the sources well. I know the late medieval and Reformation era better and what he is saying comes through as "familiar" and is easy to place. He spends more of the book on the 19th century, and I'm less familiar with these sources, but it's still written in such a way that it makes sense for people without any great expertise in Romanticism.

One of the more influential books on ethics I really like is Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, but that is a bit more technical, although not super technical. It provides a novel account for why ethics was relatively stable and marked by relative consensus for about 2,000 years (outside the West there also tends to be great stability and similarity as well, although he doesn't focus on this), and then, with the Enlightenment, we get radical change terminating fairly rapidly (200 years give or take) in relativism, anti-realism, and emotivism. He tries to give one explanation for this. So does Taylor. Actually, I think the two do much to support one another's theses.

And then Aristotle's Ethics is probably one of his most straightforward and engaging works. A hidden classic is Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, which was the most copied book outside the Bible for the Middle Ages, and has unfortunately largely become neglected, probably because it can't be read in a "pragmatist" direction to the same extent as parts of Aristotle. Boethius accomplished a tremendous synthesis of Aristotle, Plato, and later Neo-Platonism (including its Christian variety exemplified in St. Augustine). It has a special quality because Boethius wrote it from prison after failing to go along with corruption, and was awaiting a quite brutal execution. He had been the second most powerful man in Rome, and has lost virtually everything for trying to be just at the outset of the book.

Even when they lose as unlosable election. — AmadeusD

Crazy right?

These types of people believe, truly, that there is no use for the concept of objectivity, and that there is no such thing as logical constraint on claims.
These people will become philosophers of nonsense. — AmadeusD

That continues to amaze me. Do any people push back against insanity in these environments, or is that beyond the pale?

brow-beaten constantly for existing — AmadeusD

Oh man, that's rough. How does that manifest?

I read a really interesting essay on "Moral Cruelty and the Left" by Blake Smith - he was new to me, but it was a great essay, looking at Judith Shklar, also new to me, who warned that "liberalism can degenerate into a cult of victimhood that permits our sadistic desires to be passed off as unimpeachable virtue"....

The other key insight Shklar found in Nietzsche is that fear of “physical cruelty” can be transformed into “moral cruelty” by “deliberate and persistent humiliation, so that the victim can eventually trust neither himself nor anyone else.” Those who see themselves as fighting against physical cruelty, from Christian priests railing against the iniquities of the Roman Coliseum to their distant descendants, the social justice warriors of today, can inflict all kinds of psychological torment on their opponents—and themselves.

I do see a lot of 'moral cruelty' from the woke these days.

I've witnessed this. Almost no ethical instruction at all. Ethical positions are simply delivered to the students as fact. I am at the point where I think that teaching kids to question ethical axioms will get them in trouble. — Jeremy Murray

Which I would have preferred when I was a student at school. I went to a very expensive elite school. It was Christian, and we had a daily chapel service. This school was modeled on Eton and followed old British pedagogical traditions. This was 45 years ago. We were given ethical instruction and read pointless New Testament stories, which had no impact on most students and were at best a source of mirth. The poor and minorities were generally held to be human trash. Everyone was acutely aware that the real goal of the school was to get one into a law or medical degree, to then make money and gain power. Many of my fellow students joined their millionaire—and sometimes billionaire—fathers in family businesses.

For the most part, despite an energetic display of Christianity and a lot of rhetoric about the centrality of morality, this school was merely churning out neoliberal toadies who, on leaving school, often treated people poorly. Which I also observed in the subsequent decades.

I do see a lot of 'moral cruelty' from the woke these days. — Jeremy Murray

There as a lot of moral cruelty in many positions including the Christianity of my early life which held to bigotry, racism and the position that we were better than others because we were part of a winning team (eg, the West and its values). We seem to be going through a period of adjustment and a period of backlash.

Moral systems are meant to be an ideal to strive for, more so than something that has to be adhered to 100% of the time all the time. It is supposed to guide behavior.

The tricky part is that all of us fail at some point or another. It's impossible not to. The problem here is that if a person makes a mistake or does something wrong, then they throw away the baby with the bathwater.

Also - there is always the risk of moralizing. It's not very useful or helpful, most of the time.

Which I would have preferred when I was a student at school. I went to a very expensive elite school. It was Christian, and we had a daily chapel service. This school was modeled on Eton and followed old British pedagogical traditions. This was 45 years ago. We were given ethical instruction and read pointless New Testament stories, which had no impact on most students and were at best a source of mirth. The poor and minorities were generally held to be human trash. Everyone was acutely aware that the real goal of the school was to get one into a law or medical degree, to then make money and gain power. Many of my fellow students joined their millionaire—and sometimes billionaire—fathers in family businesses.

For the most part, despite an energetic display of Christianity and a lot of rhetoric about the centrality of morality, this school was merely churning out neoliberal toadies who, on leaving school, often treated people poorly. Which I also observed in the subsequent decades.

This seems to me to still be a problem of lack of ethical education though. Daily chapel service is not necessarily ethical education. Or, as you describe it, it was an ethical education in the dictum "seek power and status, for these are worthwhile goods."

But that's the type of moral education most elites get, whether it be "conservative" and tinged with Ayn Rand and the Prosperity Gospel, or "liberal" and framed in terms of "effective altruism" and post-modern anti-realism ("live your truth!").

One should hardly be shocked that such future leaders go on to be poor leaders. Yet I wouldn't take that as a knock on ethics necessarily. It would be like rejecting diets because one grew up around crash dieters who followed off short morning fasts by binging candy bars; that something is done poorly does not mean it is impossible to do well.

This seems to me to still be a problem of lack of ethical education though. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, that’s my conclusion. It ties into a point I often make: just because someone professes morality or is a strong member of a church doesn’t necessarily mean they behave morally. There's often an assumption that we need to “go back” to Christianity to improve the world, but my question is always, which kind? And how do we determine whether a given church is faithful to the Gospels? As David Bentley Hart often quips there are many atheists he prefers to Christians.

It would be like rejecting diets because one grew up around crash dieters who followed off short morning fasts by binging candy bars; that something is done poorly does not mean it is impossible to do well. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Fair point. I wasn't intending a rejection. I'm simply suggesting that there needs to be more exploration of what it actually means to be a Christian, or a member of a given religion. What are the practices and behaviours and how do we know they are faithful? Being religious, or even a believer, is not, in itself, necessarily good or true.

Nah, moral systems are good for the people who are terrible at governing themselves. But they're not really needed for someone who can. I enjoy them being in place because most people abide by them, and you're free not to.

Honestly, we should have never strayed too far from virtue ethics as at least they were principles to live by.

Do any people push back against insanity in these environments, or is that beyond the pale? — Jeremy Murray

Its hard to know how this works. I am fairly constantly pushing back, and it seems fairly successful when it's done in an academic fashion.
The course I'm in currently has a module on slurs. In that module, we will be allowed to say whatever we want in service of discussion of Phil of Language. I imagine that would bring up both the weak "I don't like opinions" people and the "Finally, some real meat" types. Will be fun to see in a few weeks when it comes up.