My Ethics Philosophy

Blake, I don’t think we need knowledge of a meta-theory or even of most universals in order to know whether an act is good in the sense of being desirable for us by God. To me you are conflating issues when you claim that one is necessary for the other.

This is why I distinguished between the Good in the sense of being the most abstract principle from more limited senses of good-for. It might be good for me to brush my teeth. I’m not sure of the exact relationship between the Good and brushing my teeth. There are many kinds of relationships I’m in though with different sorts of good-for judgments. We have to keep all of those straight.

As for the issue of verificationism there are pernicious kinds of verification, such as held by the positivists, and then kinds that aren’t since they are much, much broader such as I feel is held by Peirce. For Peirce the process of knowing metaphysics (or mathematics or logic) is a kind of verifying. So once again let’s be careful here and not create a simple strawman that is easier to argue against.

As for why information from God is vague, you’ll have to ask him. I can but say that everything I’ve seen or experienced is vague. I recognize that your claim rests on there being complete perfect atomic propositions communicated by God. I don’t buy that in the least. I have theoretical reasons for why I don’t as well, but I think the main reason is that I’ve seen no example of this.

I never asserted I believe in something like Platonic universals. I’ve argued against that quite forcefully. I believe that symbols though can have a real relation to the universe independent of what any particular individual believes about them. If you’re interested in Peirce’s theory of universals I’d be more than happy to do a post on it with the arguments for them.

Clark: I join Jacob in asking how it is we know what is right and wrong. It seems that we are just phenomenally ignorant of what is morally required of us on your view. That seems to be a good reason to believe that we in fact are not morally accountable since such knowledge is a necessary condition for moral responsibility in any given situation.

Clark: You still haven’t answered in the least how we know. You’ve merely affirmed that we know vaguely — tho way too vaguely.

Knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong isn’t a problem on my view since it is written in our hearts and a part of our nature. Because it is a function of heart, we can hide such knowledge from ourselves in an act of self-deception. How’s that a problem re: epistemology of ethics?

Jacob, I noticed that Peirce’s Lectures on Pragmatism are available online. The section on “The Reality of Thirdness” contains several of Peirce’s stronger arguments. Or you can just wait until I can put up a post.

Lincoln, this aspect of universals is actually fairly key to pragmatism. I’m surprised you’d be skeptical. I’d really strongly suggest Peirce’s Lectures on Pragmatism if you haven’t read it. Of course my problem with James was always his not paying enough attention to logic - of which the three categories are pretty important.

Blake, I thought I told you already. I didn’t say the light of Christ takes care of it. I said that we have sufficient justification from a combination of society, genetics, values like happiness and what appears to obtain them, religious tradition as well as the light of Christ. Clearly for you that is inadequate. Which is fine if you believe that. (As I said I didn’t expect you to agree) You’ve not shown how this is problematic.

As to how universals function, if there are laws in the universe that determine what desired ends can be obtained then those are knowable. So, for instance, it seems undeniable and empirical that torturing babies doesn’t lead to a general increase in happiness. Whether or not that grounds the ontology of goodness that does provide us epistemological justification for believing torturing babies is evil. So long as the belief we hold is both justified and true then that seems sufficient (except in a few weird cases).

My sense is that you want something (a) foundationalist and (b) infallible to ground our ethical knowledge. As I’ve said I not only do not think this necessary I do not think it possible.

Further saying that “in the dialectic of this discussion this respeonse is just inadequate” seems odd given that despite many requests you’ve never explained why the physical states LFW produces can’t be arrived at via chance. I recognize you think that creativity leaves its mark but that is a long way from saying that chance can’t mimic this exactly. (It might be improbable but I’ve seen no argument, merely assertion, that it is impossible)

Jacob, could you clarify what you see as the problem in the justification example I gave earlier to Blake? That we are justified in believing torture of babies is evil because it doesn’t lead to happiness, because it doesn’t lead to advancement of people, because it doesn’t lead to a stable society, because our religious traditions argue against it and because our genetic evolution suggests is bad. My sense is that there is a hidden assumption in what you demand for justification that needs be made explicit.

By anthropology I just mean that existing studies of how humans interact with each other is one set of data we can use to theorize.

John re: # 15: I have addressed the very questions you ask at length in chs. 3-4 of vol. 2 of Exploring Mormon Thought.

Clark: Of course I wouldn’t say that a person has to be capable of a meta-ethic to know right and wrong. But if your basis for ethics consists of the kinds of things you say, then there isn’t really a basis for ethics at all. You say that evolution, anthropology, the light of Christ and investigation give us some vague idea of right and wrong and that right and wrong is finally determined by universals. That is quite a hodge podge. They seem quite inconsistent to me. How do we know what the universals are? I still haven’t heard anything from you that would suggest we have any way of knowing right and wrong and I haven’t seen anything to suggest that such universals ground an ethic aside from your sheer assertion that they do.

Yeah Sean, I suppose we “should” accept the truth or something? Is there some sort of obligation to do that? If not, then why are you even bothering to relate what you take to be the case?

Clark: You are certainly entitled to define your view in whatever way you see it. As I understand you, the basis for ethics consists in semiotic universal. How do we grasp these universals even partly? Why would the kinds of anthropological, biological (neurological), evolutionary and other considerations give us an idea of these universals? I guess I’ll be patient and wait for a post.

Blake:

Re: #18. I don’t have access to chpt. 3&4 of Vol. 2, so I can’t make out your account. (I checked your site, but the pdf. download only offered the first page of each, as far as my computer could tell, so unless you’d e-mail me a full pdf., I’d have no idea what you’re claiming). But I was struck how readily you’d “accused” Clark of succumbing to a naturalistic fallacy, when you yourself made appeal to some sort of inbuilt or given “nature”. I’d guess there are different senses of “nature” being applied, at least to your own mind. (I’d also guess some of your sense of “nature” involves a theological stipulation that might not more generally apply). But I didn’t take Clark to be claiming a derivation of norms from any simply in-built nature: I took his reference to “anthropology”, -(though he’s since corrected my surmise),- as a reference to “philosophical anthropology”, as some rough, general account of “human nature”, and his reference to evolution, which, IIRC, concerned its heritage of in-built cognitive structure, as involving a precondition of our “perceptions” of moral norms. But Clark, AFAICT, is referencing the possible sources of moral knowledge, not the generative source of moral norms. It may well be that Clark’s accounting might be lacking a sense of the “categorical imperativeness” of such norms,- (though Kant’s account of such precisely retreats behind the veil of the “noumenal”), but, I think he is pointing, at least, to the situatedness and context-dependency by which any such imperativeness emerges, and to the futural element involved in any ethical “promise”, which might come to “break” its present imperativeness. (At any rate, Whitehead’s “process” account of the universe does allow for a certain openness to its futural horizons, but, I think, also entails a “follow-through” and transmission of its present causality). The tying of such a sense of imperativeness to a sense of “present” nature might be precisely what’s at issue. Which is why I raised the questions about your account above.

At any rate, Clark seems to regard Peirce as his native “happy hunting grounds”, to which he recurs, but from which he ventures far and wide. If you’d checked the link to Peirce that Clark offered above, there’s the following remark: “These are the Qualities of Feeling which the physicists say are mere illusions because there is no room for them in their theories. If the facts won’t agree with the Theory, so much the worse for them. They are bad facts. This sounds to me childish, I confess. It is like an infant that beats an inanimate object that hurts it. Indeed this is true of all fault-finding with others than oneself, and those for whose conduct one is responsible. Reprobation is a silly [business].” Something of that attitude toward “reprobation” might form something of Clark’s “moral” sensibility. But it occurs as part of Peirce’s account of why logical good/bad distinctions in arguments are (partly?) subsumable under moral good/bad distinctions, and, in turn, the latter might be (partly?) a question of esthetic good/bad distinctions. And, if I can take a stab at guessing at the point within Peirce’s overall “logic of inquiry”, the “esthetic” element, (not withstanding its etymology from the Greek for “perception”), would involve the overall integrative element in thinking/understanding, corresponding to “thirdness”. That such an integrative element might always be partial and incomplete does not necessarily detract from its needfulness. (And, Clark, please correct me here, if I’m wrong or significantly off the mark, to at least save me from myself or Whitehead).

I still don’t think that you’ve grasped the “force” of the small “technical” objection that was raised against your account of LFW, as offering a “contrastive” account of its possible effects, and hence you’ve been jumping around on all sorts of ancillary issues, which are interrelated by the logic of your own position, but don’t necessarily apply, as you would like, outside that position. You express frustration and repeat your account, but the frustration might be mutual and might not involve any failure to attend to your account. That objection does not necessarily signal the “failure” of your account, nor “defeat” it, but it does call for some reply and might require some loosening of the systematic connections that you might want it to serve in your account. (There were at least 3 separable, if interrelated issues: 1) drawing aside the noumenal veil, what LFW might be, in terms of its logical conditions/phenomenal descriptions,- and I’m never quite sure what degree of “freedom” might be required,- 2) what the world/environment must be for LFW to be possible, given that the conditions of possibility for LFW can not, logically, dictate the conditions of the world/environment, and 3) whether LFW is actually or meaningfully required to make out the notion of moral/ethical responsibility, or whether, even in the absence of any metaphysical account of LFW, such responsibility might still be felt/imputable). The point was not that your account was necessarily “wrong”, nor was it the case that we had failed to attend to your account and missed its aim or didn’t understand its elements or complexion. Rather there was a particular point of impassibility or arbitrariness in the account that was being addressed, (which might be over-ridden by your theological purposes, but that would be an extra stipulation that I couldn’t account for). Baldly, the point pressed was that there might be several metaphysical descriptions possible, which may or may not be mutually reconcilable or exclusive, but if there is no way, no specific criterion, to discriminate and decide between them, then they all might be equally irrelevant to support any claim, or decide any issue, that they might be pressed to serve under. An account of agency must be operable, else it drops out like “ether”. And the particular point in your account was, though you made a claim that a contrastive difference would occur between an act of will and an occurrence of a contingent event, you referred that difference to the direct intuition of the mind of God. Leaving aside any arbitrary theological stipulation, just how would that direct intuition of a difference be made out, if it would be a relation between separate beings, and not an immediate (substantialist?) identity of one being? I’ve tried to make that point clear several times, but you’ve just complained, wrongly I think, that you’re not being understood. (I even offered, which Clark didn’t like, a long-run probabilistic means of detecting a difference, though that would run into the Turing test and Philip K. Dick style paranoid phantasies). Rather than just jumping about to protect your “system”, could you please just focus on this one particular issue to see what difference its difference might make? Then all those other points of difference might be fruitfully addressed, rather than just giving rise to random accusations.

Blake, I had a full post written and just didn’t like it. It was far too technical. So I didn’t post it. Hopefully tomorrow.

But you’re basically right. Universals are tendencies or habits in the universe. (I’ll not say “nature” since I think that often includes pejorative connotations I’d not intend) To learn about them we just study the universe.

Do I really think learning right or wrong is a matter of empirical investigation? Yes. I do. To say that you don’t is to say that the universals of goodness have no effect on the universe which seems an odd thing to say indeed.

More comments later. I’ve been too busy today.

Unless what should be affects what is.

And the only way to deny that is to say morality is completely useless. If you act on morality, even if only in part, then morality has affected you which is a change in the universe and detectable.

Blake:

Just one last comment on this kerfluffle, before I leave it alone. It’s, of course, alright to be doing theology rather than philosophy, so long as one recognizes and delimits the difference between the two enterprises or projects. And, yes, there is a certain apples-and-oranges confusion that is liable to arise in making “things” out across the two kinds of discourses. But, leaving aside the small “technical” objection and its micro-logical contradictions, I don’t think the metaphysical “picture” you offer quite suffices to make out LFW in any criterial sense. I can well understand the attraction of a “process” account, both for your purposes and mine, but I don’t think it suffices per se, to make out any specific account of agency and its possible freedom. (But, in Whitehead’s account, at any rate, God “functions” through sorting of “eternal objects” as providing “lures” for the conscresences of actual occasions of organic experience, which would seem to provide some opening, at least, for linking selective agency to God’s knowledge or will). But, as far as I can tell, your account of LFW simply entailed that a completely free act would have a distinct, numerically unique causal “signature” in its “creative synthesis”, in contrast to an unfree act and its synthesis/signature, which actually amounts to saying, tautologically, that a free act would be free. But further, such a discernment is only attributed to the mind or knowledge of God. Leaving aside the problem of what might be stipulated in attributing to the mind or knowledge of God and what would regulate such a stipulation, and leaving aside that such a sense of “knowledge” would be different form the use/sense of the term in our ordinary cognitive practices in raising and attributing cognitive validity-claims, (which poses something of a “reverse ontological” problem with respect to terms), LFW would be known only to God, and your account amounts to an act of faith, which may be permissible, if clearly delimited as such, but it would not be an account of our own knowledge, experience, or understanding of LFW per se. (Again, I don’t know what other doctrinal entailments you are working with and can only infer or guess something of them from your account, though obviously you are primarily addressing other Mormons, not just Clark, and other possible constructions of Mormon tenets). I don’t quite get a sense of a phenomenal description or specification of logical conditions for LFW from your account, since the causal processes underlying our agency are partly opaque to us, if not to God, and I’m inclined to agree with Clark that an internalist account appealing to our first-person intuitions or introspective experience as agents is inadequate, since I think those intuitions and experiences of our own agency, let alone that of others, are contradictory, and that we struggle to reconcile those contradictory intuitions both in our actual agency and our accounts of it. So, at least as far as “reason alone” or the rational elements of your construction is concerned, the “skeptical” problem of agency has not been eliminated. (And I’ll add that I’d doubt that Clark would simply be a naturalistic moral skeptic in the manner of Hume, who denied any rational accounting to or for ethical ends or norms. I’ve understood this dispute here or its stakes more in line with Kantian moral “skepticism”, whose extreme or “heroic” moral rigorism is partly a compensation for his phenomenal determinism,- and I might add, his first-order utilitarian tendencies,- and makes out the moral law as the only, if noumenal, “proof” of our freedom, though also linking LFW to the possiblity of morality, indeed identifying the two).

As one last point or remark, as I’ve said, I don’t think a conception of agency can be made out in punctual, (nor purely causal), terms and requires a temporally distended, “longitudinal” account, in terms of which the agent’s acts are inter-related, and involving the development/choice of ends and the struggle to render our desires conformable to the choice of our better ends. But that would entail an historical, (auto-)biographical perspective, and, in accordance with Kierkegaard’s dictum that life is lived forward, but understood backward, something of the structure of inter-relations I outlined above with respect to the work of historians, which involves a “future anterior” perspective. (Indeed, ever since Augustine, autobiography has involved a “conversion” structure, whereby the eponymous author represents the error of his past ways from the standpoint of their future “redemption”, though the agent-author can not remove or sever himself from the relation to the past which lives on in him, else he would render his account/self incoherent.) Any history involves a relation between continuity and discontinuity, whereby any “free” disposal over the present through its opening to the anticipated horizon of the future transforms (the memory or meaning of) the past. (That would be part of why a “process” rather than “substance” account of agency holds more appeal). But that also involves the peculiar implication that our “free” acts are never quite self-identical, nor continuous through time, though neither can their connections with our pasts be honestly disavowed. Which goes to why there is a peculiar intrication between “fate” and “fore-knowledge” in our experience of “free” agency. And that, in turn, might go to why the question of God’s fore-knowledge would arise. But then, I think the effort to construe or account for agency in terms of its “origins” rather than “works” is hopelessly problematic and fairly futile, (not to mention inferring back from intentions to motives, in which case there is no end of murkiness and gloom, not to mention ad hominem reductions and polemics). There might even be some scriptural warrants for that.

Blake, not it’s not. Once again you’re conflating metaethics with epistemology.

John: “mentioning as a possible resource Whitehead’s “lures”, though I’d guess his account of “eternal objects” might be something Hartshorne rejects.”

Right you are. Hoartshorne doesn’t have much use for Whithead’s Platonism. The lure for Hartshorne is much more interpersonal. God determines the data that he will lend to the actual occasions to lure and persuade them to act as he wishes. In Whithead’s thought, impersonal Platonic Ideas do the work of creating the lure of behavior that the actual occasions respond to.

Clark: No I’m not conflating anything. The issue as to what in fact moral responsibility is consists in an ontological issue. How we come to know is of course epistemology. However, any account of moral responsibility must explain how the two match up for us. That is, we must have some reliable way of knowing what moral duties are because if we don’t it follows that we’re not morally responsible even if there were some moral universals. The problem with universals is always how we come to know them. I see absolutely nothing in your account that can give us anything approaching the kind of knowledge necessary for moral accountability. We have to be scientists to be morally responsible on your account — and even then you cannot (at least you clearly have not) tell me what to look for in the world to see what I should do.

Now you say that we should learn from circumstances what leads to happiness and joy. That is consequentialism. Moreover, your view of what is good and evil isn’t based on some universal that teaches you what good and evil is, because you’ve decided before you go looking that good consists in happiness and joy and evil in lack of such goods. So how did you come to the belief that these are good things to look for? Not by looking at what is since the judgment of what to look for in the universe is already guided by the commitment that happiness and joy as consequences of our acts are the basis of right and wrong.

John: “but which would also involve something of Clark’s criterion of discernible difference.” By my lights I’ve given a contrastive explanation that is ontologically grounded. It is true that we don’t have enough information to definitively say that we have LFW — but that just happens to accurately reflect the issue’s status in philosophy. One of the reasons that it is interminably debated is precisely that we lack this kind of information when we don’t trust our experiences and adopt an error theory or some kind of eliminativism.

Clark: “All the scriptures that talk about our knowledge by consequences”

Uhh, not they don’t. They talk about knowing in the heart and through the spirit. So I agree that regular people come to moral conclusions, but not by looking at consequences. They do so by the intuitive sense of right and wrong, good and evil which they already have. In fact, if I cast about to see what the best outcome for me will be, I will often engage in immoral conduct because I am merely being opportunistic. If I look around to determine what I should do based on likely consequences for the greatest number, I come up with a good social theory or legal theory, but I don’t come up with moral obligation.

Look, just knowing what consequences are doesn’t tell you whether the consequences are good or bad. You don’t know what you should do just by knowing what has occurred and what may result. To be able to assess the consequences, you have to have some prior standard of judgment about right and wrong to even know what to look for. So consequences are already placed in a world-view where you have a prior assessment of right and wrong. You don’t derive right and wrong, or moral obligation, from looking at consequences.

Now I’m not saying that moral people don’t assess the consequences of their acts. However, the mere consequences aren’t the guide for what is right and wrong, though it may guide the practical judgment of what to do.