Any course on ethics must be on thinking about ethics. You cannot have everyone feeling the same, and so cannot necessarily be taught as a course on daily life ethics.
If one would rely entirely on emotions, it would seem like we need some kind of theory, be it normative or not. To escape the random, subjective feeling that differs from individual to individual. But this is difficult given that there is a social regulation and control over the kind of emotions we can express. We take the position of the Other and so assert these restrictions on ourselves.
And furthermore, we are raised to be like this. Though this, can also show that feelings are not actually that individual, the kinds of expressions you can use differs noticably depending on the kind of relations and interactions through which you are living. And this awareness seems unthinkably refined.
The level of discourse is different than the level of feeling, and we express this in that it deals with language. Feelings lack the insistence of having to be put forth, in the form of words, whilst thinking only expresses itself in the form of clauses and structured expression as signs.
If we have no words for what we see, feel, or remember, it is quite difficult to get a grip on what we experience. It is only when we conceptualise it that it can appear. Language makes possible for things to appear for us.
Seeing something, and then noticing that it is an apple, is not just seeing a thing and labeling it as a fruit. Rather, the fact that we see it, already entails that we have a representation system wherein that thing we see can be distinguished as a thing, and we already project on it a whole dimension of expectations. Objects are not just objects that have a name, from the moment you can frame them, you also know what kind of thing you can do with the object.
Language is important in how it mediates the structure through which we order things. For how we understand it. Given the baggage one carries with themselves.
Because we can use words, and use them to guide ourselves to all kind of places, there is great freedom in thinking and combining and constructing theories.
Language lets us do far more than the kind of things we can do in a kind of reactive attitude, language can let us explain things without someone looking over our shoulder. Furthermore, you can easily lie, you can explain a lot that isn’t the case.
The level of discourse is also the level of selling things, of rationalisation, of trying to defend what you have done and explaining how what is wrong is actually right, although we know that we never did a thing for a reason. The level of discourse so on can be untrustworthy. Dishonesty is not an evident part of it yet it is there inextricably.
We cannot only accept some theory, apply it to all cases, and be content with ethics. Ethics cannot be over just like that.
[Bernard Williams Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy]
Professor shits on ethical empirical research.
Some people say that all the ethical theories go into all kinds of directions, so we must turn to ordinary language in order to get at ethics. This is an essential part of the analytical approach of ethics.
In our daily lives, we use concepts to deal with spontaneous feelings, and by using these concepts we also mould our feelings in a particular way, we put them in a bigger frame and contextualise them and so the feelings get their particular meaning.
If we think that we will find everything on the level of praxis, this seems wrong.
We need to understand the old conceptual frames of ethics. We cannot analyse what happens today if we have no understanding of what happened in the past. By reconstructing how theories came up, the kind of conceptual frames that were constructed, and we have an awarness of this, we might have a better understanding of the kind of intuitions we have about these concepts.
So a historical approach is of imprtance.
If you want to know a friend, or a partner, often what you will do is tell each other about your past. Because a person became the kind of person they were because of the way they were in the past.
So where do we start? To begin anywhere is a difficult enterprise, and when we tell a story, we are putting our caesurae of that story depending on our own prior reasons. Before there was a dialogue, there was an ethical interaction. The beginning seems generally illusionary, but we must still begin to get anywhere. If we look back at how people told stories in the past, the beginning was always very fundamental. In most games, like chess, there is a clear beginning, and the beginning is already a sign what was most essential. A story is often begun at a point in order to glorify what has been reached. So when people tell stories of themselves, even there, they care for a kind of way of being that they justify or emphasise it by finding their path into the past. You act as if some event was the beginning of something, but really this is not the case. In the past of the western tradition, beginnings had a mythical characrer.
In the story of christian creation, existence generally has not been for very long. Human beings were also centralised into the middle.
In the indian myth of creation, human beings are not of such importance, and it happened unfathomably long ago.
For the scientific approach it seems we have barely existed, and probably will continue to barely exist by disappearing.
Little dots and emptiness
”When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.”
- Blaise Pascal.
At the end it’s not the beginnings that will comfort us, but the people around us, the people not despairing, the people loving each other. Ethics has no reason to be related to the stars. It starts with the smell of coffee in the morning, it starts every day and yet never ends.
If you feel that life is worth living in the environment you live (in the world) what reason is there for the rest of the world to matter?
For Pascal, the sollution is religion, by trusting God and embracing belief. The whole anxiety is in contrast with the idea that God is always there and always cares for you.
”Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way…”
-
Bertrand Russel.
To tell a story about the beginning of ethics, some of it certainly comes from God. There is a message to human beings about what they need to do, nature dictates what needs to be done and we are made to follow them; or as in God they are revealed to the people, and not purely read through nature itself.
Another, of when humans began to differ from animals.
Though there was probably a kind of ethics for the chimpanzees and bonobos too. They have clear culture and act differently in different colonies.
Franz De Waal defended that there is no clear line where we differ from animals, he shows that chimpanzees have the exact kind of culture that we too. Though he seems to have done so mainly anecdotally.
Michael Tomasello A Natural History of Human Morality.
Researched how animals are different from humans. He attempted to do all kinds of experiments with very young children, and tried to find out how they are cognitively different from Chimpanzees and Bonobos. What kind of cognitive features do these animals have, and what kind of language they are using, compared to small children. He came to the conclusion that they also use tools, that they are able to have representation and to follow logic, so they have rational capacities in terms of thinking. However, what they lack, is collaboration. They have difficulties to coordinate and do things together. They lack what Tomasello calls joint intentionality. This is a kind of awareness of what is necessary to be successful from a joint perspective. The moment people start helping each other out in doing something, your mind is no longer solely focused on itself, but is rather focused on the group’s general intention. Your mind is thinking about what you are thinking together, and there has to be a correction of the cooperation. People have the possibility of having awareness a higher dimension of group knowing; ”I know that you know that I know”.
Chimpanzees are quite interested in what is good for themselves. The stronger gets, and the weaker lets. Chimpanzees do not divide what has been taken in their hunting collaboration, there is only a competition of who takes first, there is no feeling of just divide; the hunting was in the end not collaboration at all. Human children on the other hand seem much more prone to a kind of altruism. They do not necessarily choose egoistic choices that are purely good for themselves. Human beings seem inherently interested in cooperation. What is important in young children, is that they seem to always be looking for eye contact. They are looking for confirmation on whether what they are doing is good, there is an awareness of being aware of the other. Chimpanzees are completely indifferent in regards to ”looking you in the eye”. They seem to lack this interest. Whilst children on the other seem to love the kind of collaboration that is happening, it becomes like a game. For children, furthermore, there seems to be a self-evident part of action that if it is done in collaboration, it must be divided justly.
For Tomasello, language started the moment we gave signs to certain movements or expressions, most importantly pantomime, which later on were vocalised.
The whole human idea of solidarity and we-them relations, are not something that makes us better than many animals however, it comes from joint intentionality, but it causes some of the most ethically impure actions ever undertaken. In the battle with the Other, and with its