Ethics
Retribution is a kind of ritual that seems to be necessary to reshape a common understaning in which certain boundaries are seen as sacred.
There is a difficulty of reconciliation without punishment.
If societal trust is breached, there needs to be a moment of punishment.
Althusser: was reluctantly punished after killing his wife because he was famous; he saw this as humiliating, he was not seen as a normal human because he was so famous; and as such he was denied as a subject that can take responsibility. Punishment in the retribution idea is to pay the debts that you have incurred.
There is a far more inhumane treatment of those in jail. Now a days, there isnt a specific amount of time you need to be there, as you can relieved depending on how dangerous you are to society. The idea is that society needs to be saved. It is no longer society that decides about your case, but rather random experts and their decisions. This is scary for a lot of prisoners.
Durkheim likes retribution, and you can make punishment somewhat humane according to professor.
If you have solidarity on conformity, certain behaviours are transgressions. If these transgressions are committed, the ritual of punishment needs to be acted out in order to reestablish societal trust.
Boundaries and expectations are needed in society. Without this, the professor says society collapses like in Eastern Congo, as he puts it.
What is important about Durkheim is the emotional element. There would be no authority for law, science, if there is not an emotional sacredness attached to it. If we live in a society where this emotional sacredness fades, sciences sucks.
The idea of Durkheim is that we need to defend the sacredness of science, by having an educational system that creates a group affinity that is stimulating and has love for what it teaches. WOW.
What is needed to realise yourself is society. There are a lot of societal circles that are there which helps us become an individual who understands themselves.
Europe doesn’t exist because no one is concerned about what happens on that level of the world; there is no feeling that says that Europe is a point of concern that we need to follow. People rather follow the news of the US than the European ones.
Durkeheim does not care about grid in analyis of societies. Mary Douglas once again.
Enclavistic: we vs them.
Individualistic: no one cares
Hierarchic: we got caste system or somin
Isolated: fuck everyone and obey the rules
This schema does not cover all of society; you belong to many micro-societies all the time. Society can differ massively between your own home, your playground and school.
Different people in the same group can experience the mentality in a different way even: this is true but how the fuck can we analyse society at this point???
Durkheim is a kind of hegelianism for dummies (professor’s words). It makes people aware of the collective conscious, and the fact that we are participating in something together, and that what makes sense comes about as oriented by society. He explains in a very natural and readable language instead.
In our individualistic society we have lost the idea that we need community to realise what is important. Things like language, value and experience of things of importance, do not come from a direct relation with that thing, but rather mediated through our systems of meaning in which we participate in through society. When an individual is raised outside of society, the result would not be a human being; this doesn’t mean they can’t become human however.
Thomas Hill Green: tried to explain why the humean utilitarian approach was problematic.
He starts out with epistemology. It starts with what we experience: immediate experience of things is the start of the meaningful things. When we experience something, and can name it, and make judgements about it, we need a lot of understanding: this requires time and space. If we have no tools of understanding, then these things cannot be brought to our attention in combination. It is because we have particular concepts, that we can see things in relations with other things, and as such have meaning. We all manage to experience reality in the same way, and if we were totally individual, this would be impossible. Rather we participate in the same kind of common understanding, adjust our relations to things to match each other. Our understanding isn’t just mediated by groups, it is shared by them. We understand things as they should be understood by our community. At the end, it isn’t only a particular community in which we share understanding, but quite a broad community that is worldwide. There is a way to contextualise things so as a global audience would ”agree” with it. This becomes a bit confusing when we identify this communal identity with something like God, as is often done in Hegelian frameworks.
If we want to have an accurate approach to ethics, it needs to be an approach that can be agreed upon. People can follow my reasoning and see that it fits. It needs to make things understandable that otherwise is difficult to understand; and needs to be a way of understanding that should be understood by everyone. Ethics follow such a horizon. As such, rather than saying that there is something we can grasp now that we can all agree on, it is a common goal for society in doing, to find this sort of thing, and in this attempting to find, we actually are already doing that common thing together.
If a child has a desire, it wants it impulsively, and it just does it. But the moment it develops a possibility to refrain from immediate action, but to have a moment where the child can decide what it will do, is the moment it can take responsibility. It can give reasons for actions. In function of the kind of person one wants to be, one makes decisions. This also the moment you can realise yourself in an autonomous way. At this point, you are more than an animal, because you have responsibility.
In this kind of project: the calling to what you want to be; it is self-evident for Green that it will be in line with what is important with what is important for the community as a whole. This is something we would question today. Why is this the case? When you are part of a natural community like a family, it seems self-evident as long as your family is functional. But this doesn’t mean the same is the case on the macro-aimed level.
In realising oneself, one search for a project which is solid, deep and of importance. If one decides to spend one’s life drinking as much alcohol as possible, it would feel sad and stupid. There is no value to this kind of project. You will choose for something that propels you into the future, a project that tries to go beyond your individual ambitions, which later has an inter-individual character. We want to transcend the fact that we will die. And this gives us the courage to go on, because we think we have tasks that are so important as to think that they will have long-lasting effects when we are no longer there. As such, our selves attain a transcendent feature for ourselves, we make sense for ourselves of the world through this bigger project. Hill calls this the categorical duty. In realising ourselves, we will choose for callings and projects which in the community-as-community likes. This issue is bigger than my private desires. It is seeing ourselves as part of a greater whole.
Bernard Williams calls this the cateogorical project. In realising our projects we feel that we need to not commit suicide because there are bigger parts that we need to complete. Without this, we wanna fucking die. If we have sufficient categorical projects finished, we don’t wanna live anymore and we die. We are fine with dying.
As such, there needs to be sufficient freedom to make sure everyone can realise themselves, and as such the government gotta let everyone have the same chance to eat potatoes and shit.
As such Green tried to have women in university. Yay!
”The freedom of man is constituted, not by a supposed ability to do anything he may choose, but in the power to identify himself with that true good that reason reveals to him as his true good.”
If there is a community in which I know that everyone knows that x is a boundary, society can happen in cooperative manner in which goals can be constructed and as such the good. We need to aware of the common good.
For Hill, there are no laws before there is a community oriented towards the common good.
For Hobbes there needs to be a leader before the general will can be enacted, and as such the virtues are made by the leader.
Francis Herbert Bradley:
Ethical studies
Had influence on the philosophers of the 50s, 60s. Everyone had to read Bradley. It is about what ethics is about. It is comparable with what Green defends. He wants to start with how common people are thinking about responsibility. Instead of developing metaphysical theories about free will and duty, he tries to figure out what the vulgar notion of responsibility is. In the book, he doesn’t come up with a optimistic idea of moral philosophy, and thinks it is actually bad and misguided. It would be better to return to a vulgar notion of responsibility, as it is more pure and authentic. People shouldn’t have ideas for themselves. It turns them away from normal life. He contrasts this approach with the utilitarian and Kantian approach.
The vulgar notion: a person is responsible for what he has done himself, by being aware of what is expected from him. And all that he does, he does as an expression of his own self-development of what he really is. This is his most basic responsibility.
Then he discusses free will: He confronts the notion of the vulgar with the Kantian notion of necessary freedom in order to do what is right.
The idea that individuals are determined or have a free will, at the first instance, it seems the Kantians are on the side of the common people, thinking that we need free will. But the vulgar people also believe, is that there are character traits and personal features attached to human beings that make it possible to predict how they will act in a certain case. Other people can trust who will do what, as different people have different traits to themselves; they feel that they have responsibility to maintain this character trait as an expression of themselves.
In the Kantian perspective, all one is motivated by, is desires or emotions that are not based on rational thought, and we can only have a free decision when we are not disturbed by non-rational things. As such, we can never actually predict what a person will do, because most decisions are made in the moment, and kantians can never get enough time to make such a decision. If there is only a decision-making thing, there is not a human.
As such, Kantians are not of the position of the vulgar ethics.
As long as an individual feels that it is them doing what they do in a particular way, they feel responsible for it. If someone else tells them that they are doing things for reasons they can’t control, they feel they are being manipulated by someone, and as such no longer think they have responsibility.
Pleasure for pleasure’s sake is not self-realisation; duty for duty’s sake is also not self-realisation.
My station and its duties: conservative part of Bradly bleh.
Duties are linked with your station. If you go to school, you feel like you need to fulfill your duties of that station. Etc. it works for everything. Stations are not abstract, but real and clear. We can uphold the idea that we are doing something worthwhile by living up to our station.
He realises that this approach completely forgets creativeness.
The story of Goghain: went to Tahiti to get creativity, succeeded and made beautiful paintings. The relation between social expectations and creative minds seems odd. If we only had to follow our social expectations, how can we sometimes defy this?
Bernard Williams stresses that it is a matter of chance. Imagine if Goghain became sick and died before making his paintings, he wouldn’t be able to justify abandoning his family. As such we cannot calculate ahead of time whether something is justified or not, because we depend on moral luck; just like in epistemology.
Josiah Royce:
His notion of ethics is related to the notion of loyalty.
He describes how people, due to being loyal to certain parties, have duties to them. This approach depends on the quality of a community, as we can say that nazis are moral otherwise lol.
Neo-hegelians were supposed to be non-materialistic and open the perspective to the religious realm. However, none of them believed in God as a transcendental personal being. These people thought of God in an immanent way, God exists only in and for the cooperation of humanity and its relations.
This kind of awareness of being part of a whole, and living up to what is important for society, was problematic during WW1. It was always about fighting for a country, for the common good, and as such it allowed for a nationalistic tendency, in the way of Durkheim. We need to mobilise conformity and create a nation in order to not be depressed and kill ourselves.
Flanders fields poem is problematic lol.