Reading the dictionary
I was just looking through the dictionary of philosophy. I was stunned to discover that my notion of relative morality is comfortably subsumed under actualism, a concept I had never heard of before tonight. I just happened to come across its entry in the dictionary, and the concept comes from an article by Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter in Philosophical Review 95 (1986). I think it behooves me to read a little of this dictionary every day, because I am really going to need to know more about philosophy to survive in this field.
Reading the first ten pages of the dictionary just now has benefited me yet again, because of the entry on akrasia. One of the things that it notes is that according to certain moral theories, approving of a course of action, consists in having an intention to perform the action. For theories of this kind, weakness of will becomes an important problem. Well, based upon what I claim about real morals, I am committed to this kind of position, so weakness of will becomes an important problem for my theory as well.
I think that akrasia is impossible to understand unless you make a distinction between the rational and the emotional parts of the will. These correspond to Aristotle's appetitive and rational parts of our nature. The rational part of our will can approve of something without the emotional part of the will approving. Aristotle would have us forming habits that would bring our emotional will into line with our rational will, but Kant would simply have us acting against our inclinations until we were really quite miserable and even contemptuous of reason as a result. Aristotle's view seems more attractive, if nothing else.
What is the role of akrasia in social mores, however? Has any entire society in some ways generally been considered to have a weak will--a logically separate question from whether it has ever been in some ways unjust? My current view lets me say that an entire society now can always in some ways be unjust, especially when one looks at world history. But I really don't know whether, anthropologically, there have been whole societies that have in some ways been considered to have weak wills. I say this because in the former case, we judge the unjustness of whole societies by our own values. But in the latter case, we are forced to judge the weakness of will of those societies by their own values, because weakness of will presupposes that you lack to some degree the tendency to act according to your own values. A possible example that springs to mind is Victorian sexual mores, but they might just as easily have been hypocritical. I would have to research this question before I could know for sure.
The attractiveness of your current position is that it eschews hypocrisy. Perhaps you simply need to delineate under what conditions a person exhibits hypocrisy, and what conditions akrasia. Obviously, if a person experiences akrasia, then that certainly poses a prima facie problem for your requirement that ethics be viable, so you will have to administer to this difficulty accordingly.
You should be able to argue that according to your view, akrasia, if it exists, occurs only a minority of the time and/or for a minority of the people. This would support your view comfortably enough as applying to normal human beings.
Well, The Moral Animal makes it all too clear that we have instincts that run clearly contrary to anything we would consider moral. It seems compelling to me that morality does have to be universalisable, as Kant thought. Kant has his own formulation of this, in his first formulation of the categorical imperative. Equally, Hare has his own formulation of it in the form of moral statements as containing universals for terms, and Rawls has his formulation in terms of the original position. It does seem to me that if you think that it is right to do a certain thing to someone, then you should be able to hold this view no matter who you were in the moral statement, for it to hold. But as we considered in "Moral Anthropology", the sexual interests of men and women are not universalisable, because their reproductive methods are asymmetrical. I wonder what other non-universalisable instincts we might have in The Moral Animal as well...
Last night, I was feeling very frustrated with my philosophical project. The basic defect was that it never seemed to be able to get off the ground, because of a sensitive dependence on new information. This was mirrored in the beratings of the external reviewer that 'my bibliography was remarkably limited and showed some glaring absences'. My supervisor said that there was so much material out there that it was ludicrous to expect that anyone could read it all. And yet somehow I must stand on the shoulders of giants.
I think that this philosophical dictionary is the key. When I read its first ten pages last night, I immediately saw the relevance of two concepts covered: actualism and akrasia. It seems to me that I can keep adding new references from the dictionary as they come my way, with a possible section for each one. This could be a new bottom-up strategy, to assemble the theory from the proper building blocks. Based on my small past sampling, I can look forward to picking up a new fruitful reference every five pages or so, to finally get the comprehensiveness and thoroughness that I need.
Reading the first ten pages of the dictionary just now has benefited me yet again, because of the entry on akrasia. One of the things that it notes is that according to certain moral theories, approving of a course of action, consists in having an intention to perform the action. For theories of this kind, weakness of will becomes an important problem. Well, based upon what I claim about real morals, I am committed to this kind of position, so weakness of will becomes an important problem for my theory as well.
I think that akrasia is impossible to understand unless you make a distinction between the rational and the emotional parts of the will. These correspond to Aristotle's appetitive and rational parts of our nature. The rational part of our will can approve of something without the emotional part of the will approving. Aristotle would have us forming habits that would bring our emotional will into line with our rational will, but Kant would simply have us acting against our inclinations until we were really quite miserable and even contemptuous of reason as a result. Aristotle's view seems more attractive, if nothing else.
What is the role of akrasia in social mores, however? Has any entire society in some ways generally been considered to have a weak will--a logically separate question from whether it has ever been in some ways unjust? My current view lets me say that an entire society now can always in some ways be unjust, especially when one looks at world history. But I really don't know whether, anthropologically, there have been whole societies that have in some ways been considered to have weak wills. I say this because in the former case, we judge the unjustness of whole societies by our own values. But in the latter case, we are forced to judge the weakness of will of those societies by their own values, because weakness of will presupposes that you lack to some degree the tendency to act according to your own values. A possible example that springs to mind is Victorian sexual mores, but they might just as easily have been hypocritical. I would have to research this question before I could know for sure.
The attractiveness of your current position is that it eschews hypocrisy. Perhaps you simply need to delineate under what conditions a person exhibits hypocrisy, and what conditions akrasia. Obviously, if a person experiences akrasia, then that certainly poses a prima facie problem for your requirement that ethics be viable, so you will have to administer to this difficulty accordingly.
You should be able to argue that according to your view, akrasia, if it exists, occurs only a minority of the time and/or for a minority of the people. This would support your view comfortably enough as applying to normal human beings.
Well, The Moral Animal makes it all too clear that we have instincts that run clearly contrary to anything we would consider moral. It seems compelling to me that morality does have to be universalisable, as Kant thought. Kant has his own formulation of this, in his first formulation of the categorical imperative. Equally, Hare has his own formulation of it in the form of moral statements as containing universals for terms, and Rawls has his formulation in terms of the original position. It does seem to me that if you think that it is right to do a certain thing to someone, then you should be able to hold this view no matter who you were in the moral statement, for it to hold. But as we considered in "Moral Anthropology", the sexual interests of men and women are not universalisable, because their reproductive methods are asymmetrical. I wonder what other non-universalisable instincts we might have in The Moral Animal as well...
Last night, I was feeling very frustrated with my philosophical project. The basic defect was that it never seemed to be able to get off the ground, because of a sensitive dependence on new information. This was mirrored in the beratings of the external reviewer that 'my bibliography was remarkably limited and showed some glaring absences'. My supervisor said that there was so much material out there that it was ludicrous to expect that anyone could read it all. And yet somehow I must stand on the shoulders of giants.
I think that this philosophical dictionary is the key. When I read its first ten pages last night, I immediately saw the relevance of two concepts covered: actualism and akrasia. It seems to me that I can keep adding new references from the dictionary as they come my way, with a possible section for each one. This could be a new bottom-up strategy, to assemble the theory from the proper building blocks. Based on my small past sampling, I can look forward to picking up a new fruitful reference every five pages or so, to finally get the comprehensiveness and thoroughness that I need.
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