Ethics
There are a lot of ethical theories, and they are all contradictory, so how can we reasonably talk about being good in one ’system’ when it entails being entirely bad in another?
Likely we should skip all these systems instead.
Bernard Williams wants to show that we know less than we think, whilst also realising that there is something beyond our control, something contingent that we need to accept about our situation.
Realising yourself is about finding an unconditional project that you want to accomplish, not because it is enjoyable for yourself or your private desires, but rather there are projects that are so interesting that you make your live worthwhile in terms of eventually fulfilling those projects. You want them because the thing that needs to be done is of unconditional importance, and you may realise it.
What you really are, what you stand for, what you identify as, is the kind of project that you really desire. As long as we have such kinds of projects we can live enjoyably.
Some projects are not good. Some people feel it is entirely necessary that their house is clean.
It has to be a project which is not conditional on yourself. If you imagine yourself no longer there, and the goal no longer remains, then it is not a good project. It has to be a project that propels you into the future. This is the best antidote against suicide. People who have the idea that they are an instrument of worth, they may not kill themselves becaue they have things to do.
If you lack an unconditional project, you easily feel that your life has been good enough and you wanna kill yourself, there is no courgae or energy to continue.
You cannot justify what you are doing in advance. You cannot make ethical calculations about whether a decision is good. What will be can only be seen in retrospect. You would have to see the future in order to know what decisions are good.
When thinking about people who have done bad or good in the past, if it is too far in the past it becomes nonsensical. In 200 years we might view at positive, in 400 we may view it as negative. This is a kind of contingent thing. It needs to be necessarily part of how we answer problems today.
In one essay by Williams, he shows that Kant is an agreeable philosophy because it creates the idea that we are all equal and have the same chance of being good. This message is very comforting. But the reality is harsher. For some people it is far more easy to be a good person. By saying that everyone has the same chance of developing goodness is a typical protestant idea.
In ethics and the limits of philosophy he speaks about how ethics shifts to a morality system, ie. a function that ensures that someone is blameless and justified in what they need to do by calculating it with an argumentative theory. This is a very narrow ’being busy with ethics’ which is not really what the ethical generally is about. Instead of thinking what we need to do to be blameless we actually react to what other are doing. This as such becomes an ethical problem in and of itself, if we are only busy with our own grace then are we really ethical at all?
People are busy with doing the most blameless thing rather than doing the right thing as they find it.
In shame and necessity he talks about how Greeks actually are less unwoke than we think. Instead they had type shit concepts like now.
In Truth and truthfullness he critiques notions that talk about truth as something which we lack access to, critiquing a kind of postmodernism. He talks mainly about Nietzsche as an example of someone who really wanted to be truthful.
Some postmodern philosophers refer to Nietzsches metaphor ideas to say that there is no truth. The problemacy with such a position is that defending such a position seems to be true. There is still truth. If you are already concerned with this kind of issue, you are already trying to describe what is truthfully the case. You cannot stop being busy with truth. Indeed we can realise that the reason we see fruit and so on is the result of the fact that we use conventional words that could have easily been different.
And this way of seeing is indeed the world, but it is not the reality, it is only a reality. So who cares that it isn’t the real-real world.
Ethics doesn’t start from any point beyond the world, it starts in it and with what we actually need to do.
If you restrict the identity of a concept by saying that it is what it has been said to be and can be nothing else, and must always be there, without taking into account the relational things around it, you may say it is stable immovable and pure.
But you can also put it upside down and say that we are what we are because of all the relationships we bear to those things around us.
If we removed all those things to which we have relationships, we, as we understand ourselves now, would stop existing.
The reality of a human being as a desiring being is not a stable static entity with an essence, but is rather on the move of trying to fulfill some thing that is not reachable, and as long as it is not reachable the movement continues, without an end to the individual.
We desire to be desired and we want to be recognised and loved and so on.
In ethics this analysis is important, in order to give an actually interesting and useful description of a human being.
In Lacan there is also the desire to be something indestructable, to be something like a less transitional object.
As a child, when we discover objects and their names, there is really the belief that all things are immutable things which really exist as they are called. When we can give a name to all the objects of the world, they start existing as really there. And in having the idea that you know the names of the things you may have control over them, and on reality itself. It also bestows upon you the idea that reality is a bundle of objects and creatures with names. But later on, you may realise that a word has a meaning because it is a bundle of things: ’chair’ is the name of a whole range of things. The more you learn language, the less things become the name of a specific thing, but of generally accepted features, generalisations of generalisations which are very abstract. This is the moment at which you lose the certainty about yourself. You lose the thinking of yourself as an immutable object that is what it is supposed to be. I am not a pure and proper student ever, I am doing my best to be a good student, but this does not really imply that I see myself as one.
Freud and Durkheim had a parallell in being accepted in the US.
There isn’t really a pure person in Freudian theory.
What was stressed when Freud when to the US was the idea that we need to enforce the Ego to make it as strong as possible, whilst Freud questions whether there is such a necessity.
Durkheim’s subject without a society is empty. One gains a subject by being a part of the whole. But when it went to the US it became a kind of functionalism that confirms the idea that there is a personality and a permanent subject, whilst this isn’t really what Durkheim argued for.
What is intriguing about the French philosophical approach regards the deconstruction of the subject.
Power in Foucault does not come from above, as in Marx, but it is impersonal and can be a way of understanding things, techniques, and so on.
Jonathan Haidt.
A psychologist who tries to figure out what morality is about. He is critical towards the education system in the united states.
In the book, the righteous mind, he connects ethics with features we developed through evolution. It starts with some cruel questions. There is a dog on the street and it is killed by a car, and the father of your family decides to eat the dog. Is this morally right?
There is a brother and a sister who have sex together and no one hears about it or knows about it, is it right?
Wow what questions.
Rich, white and well-educated people may easily say that no one is hurt in either situation and as such no problem. Others may comment how one even dares to ask the question. He makes distinctions that seem to be of importance depending on the class and culture you are from. There is also pureness and sacredness and in certain cultures this is important. He distinguishes democrats and conservatives precisely on these kind of distinctions. Idk really.
Tomasselo again
A lot of people refer to evolutionary theory, and tries to show that certain features of humans have a relation to how we evolved in the beginning. This is sometimes used as a justification for things like patriarchy. This is not a healthy use of social biology because it relies on a lot of speculation.
He thinks about morality, only at the end of his research, he was never interested in ethics, but found out about ethics by accident. He was only interested in why certain animals don’t act like humans and develop like us. He tried to find the one difference between other animals. And the difference seems to be that other animals have yet to develop joint intentionality, ie. to figure out what is at stake in the kind of collaboration and the meaning about what they are doing. If we encounter something meaningful or valuable, it is not a spontaneous subjective feature; but rather a reaction from the general joint position about what the meaning of the thing I am encountering is.
If a dominant chimpanzee takes the food of a weaker chimpanzee, there is no reflection about it being dominant or about it being an insult to the weaker chimpanzee, it is only bad luck.
Margaret Gilbert
Joint committment, what we do as a we.
Elinor Ostrom
In economy there is a kind of pessimism, a tragedy of the commons, if everyone was maximising their personal profit, they would never be able to agree on common value because people are inherently egoistic. Ostrom did a lot of research on the willingness to collaborate. She found that many people are very willing to collaborate. If someone no longer collaborates they are pepared to punish that person at the expense of their own profit.
In irrigation traditions in a lot of countries, there were stable systems where people were caring for them together to make sure there were sufficient space for having agricultural space. Everyone was doing there peace to make sure there was no breach of solidarity. As long as people have the impression that they are guided by a joint perspective, everyone will shame those who it feels as if they are not actually trusting the cooperation. This is quite stable. However, when there are too many people that use the system in an opportunistic way, then these systems of cooperation collapse. As long as there are rules, transparency and a common awarness of what needs to be done, people like taking care of each other, and are willing to punish those who don’t.
As such, ethics, and the way people feel spontaneously has something to do with their mentality, the kind of environemnt in which they feel that life is trustable and valuable, and in which they feel they can regulate the community to continue acting in a good way.
Aristotle suggests that politics comes first, because we need to question what kind of society we want to have. If we have a serious discussion on this issue, we can negotiate a society in which we can all have sufficient access to the categorical desires we have.
We will not make the world better by coming up with ethical system.
This needs to be the result of a common dialogue and discussion.
Ethicists can help by explaining what ethics is not about.