Ethical Reconciliation?

[Eudaimonist]

Hey Mark, I'm not going to choose. At least, not at this early stage in the thread.

It was just a recommendation. You are free to decline.

EF Schumacher, who wrote 'Small is Beautiful', once noted our tendency in the west to think in terms of either/or, and contrasted it with the eastern tendency to think in terms of both/and.

I don't see how both/and is going to help you in this case. The Law of Noncontradiction still applies even to such thinking.

You can have two reasons that something is good, and those reasons can be equally significant, or one can be less significant than another.

But what makes that good good? You can have different methods of arriving at the conclusion that something is good as long as they are both consistent with a single understanding of goodness.

If we are to reconcile the various ethical traditions - the purpose of this thread - then I think we need be prepared to think in these terms.

I suppose so, but when faced with two fundamentally different accounts of goodness, this raises a red flag for me that signals that one has failed to understand goodness and is dealing with fragmentary knowledge. It would be like the story of the blind men and the elephant.

Let me suggest this: if you are going to engage in synthetic thinking (figuring out what that elephant is), whereby different perspectives on a subject are integrated together, then you must be prepared to arrive at a single understanding of the subject, and that will almost certainly mean finding fault with the initial perspectives (e.g., no, the elephant's leg is not a tree, its tail is not a rope, etc).

In this case, you need to arrive at a single understanding of what it is for something to be "good". You cannot retain multiple understandings and reach your goal, since this defeats the whole point of the exercise. And some notions may simply have to be discarded altogether. For example, pleasure might not be the good at all, even though a few "perspectives" claim it is.


eudaimonia,

Mark

 

[Eudaimonist]

Thank you for your patience, Jane.

Yet in abstract matters that extend well into the ideological sphere (and pretty much all philosophical and ethical discussions would fall into that group), we're dealing with abstract dichotomies. Dichotomies that are at best tangentially tied to any physical reality, dichotomies that depend upon a certain ideological/religious/cultural background in order to be understood.

Even though postmodernism is not really my forté, I accept much of what you are saying.

However, I don't think that abstract dichotomies are necessarily as "tangential" to physical reality as all that, at least if they are to be useful in philosophy.

(Of course, some concepts in philosophy seem to be so distanced from reality that they aren't very useful, and can lead to precisely the problems you describe. This is why I am not fond of Plato.)

Furthermore, ethics is not merely "going through the motions", as if it were merely a physical, bodily activity divorced from considerations of the mental processes involved that sparked and justified the act. (No mind-body dichotomy intended, btw.) In this case, some very real "dichotomies" are quite necessary to understand just what was involved in the act as far as ethical considerations are concerned.

For example, if someone gives a coin to a beggar, it is quite different if someone does this as a duty to God, or after performing a quick Mentat-like calculation of the maximization of utililty to society, or as an Objectivist who reasons that he is acting in favor of his values instead of against them.

Just because the act may appear the same in all cases to an external observer, they are not the same act. They are performed with different motivations, ethical standards, prioritizations of values, justifications, etc. This is why I am suspicious of attempts to argue that they are really all the same.

The thing is, though: the more you insist on the hard, unwavering dichotomy, and the more effort you put into separating the one from the other; in short, the more you try to move matters into the abstract realm, the more you will find that these terms do not correspond to what is there any longer.

I personally think that I will find precisely the opposite, since I strive to relate my concepts to physical reality, as abstract as they may be.


eudaimonia,

Mark