ethical standpoint may be there is a very basic form of
ethical action that is independent of this content: a person
can act ethical y only if that person is an agency that is responsible for the action in question. If a person is no more responsible
than a rolling rock, it is utterly senseless for anyone to judge that
a person has acted ethical y or ought to be held responsible for
acting unethical y. The guilty conscience would also be an absurd
experience. When an avalanche happens due to natural causes and
one rock rolling down the mountain impacts another, sending
it on a trajectory other than the one that was its heading before
being hit, that is a radical y different kind of action or interaction than an “ethical” one. Hopeful y, we can all agree on this simple but
important observation.
The problem is that the contemporary view held by the scientific
establishment is that the kind of action at play when one rock
impacts another is basical y the only kind that there is. Together
with Metaphysics, Epistemology, Politics, and Aesthetics, Ethics has
been a major concern of Philosophy since its origin 2,500 years ago
in Greece. Ethics is concerned with the question of “the good life.”
Metaphysics asks about the ultimate nature of reality. Epistemology
is concerned with the theory of knowledge or how it is that we can
know what we claim to have knowledge of. Politics is concerned
with the art of statecraft and the applied understanding of the
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concept of Justice. Aesthetics is a study of the nature of the beautiful, for example, as contrasted with the merely pleasant in judgments
of taste. Until about 250 years ago all of what we now study and
practice as the various empirical sciences were considered types
of natural Philosophy, falling within the domain of Metaphysics
or Epistemology. Science or Scientia simply means “knowledge”,
which is part of what philosophers sought in their “love of wisdom.”
Beginning with Physics in the mid-1700s, then Chemistry and
Biology in the 1800s, and final y Psychology in the early 1900s,
the various sciences attempted to distinguish themselves from
Philosophy. Yet, in fact, what had happened was that a certain type
of metaphysics had become dominant in Physics and ever since
most other scientists have tacitly deferred to it.
This dominant metaphysics grew out of a reductive and materialist
interpretation of the mechanistic approach to understanding Rene
Descartes (1596–1650), whose Latin name was Cartesius, and so it is
often referred to as the Cartesian paradigm or conceptual frame of
reference. A paradigm is broader than any given theories and is the
context of background assumptions without which theories cannot
be formed in the first place. The assumptions are cultural and
historical in character and they condition what counts for empirical
or “experiential” data regarding natural phenomena and the proper
method of obtaining it. (I’ll come back to this.)
Until very recently, scientists did not realize that they work
within a paradigm and that theories generated by one paradigm are
incommensurate with those of another paradigm. Most still refuse to
acknowledge this. Consequently, even biologists and psychologists
who deal with natural phenomena that are very different from
loose rocks hitting each other on a mountainside want to claim that
everything in Nature happens either by chance or is determined in
a mechanical way. From the perspective of Ethics, this amounts to
the same thing. In either case, a person cannot be held responsible
for having done anything. What we think of as a “person” in a
psychological sense is actual y an organism that biologists are willing to concede can further be reductively analyzed (or “broken down”)
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as certain elementary particles or quantum wave-functions whose
interactions are either determined in a chain-link of causality going
back to the initial expansion of the universe or they are somewhat
probabilistic, but not in a way that allows anyone a chance to
influence or affect the probabilities. In the 17th century, when this
view of Nature was developed the fairly explicit model for it was the
machinery then being invented and implemented in industry. Julien
Offray de La Mettrie, a reductionist reader of Descartes, captures
this zeitgeist best in Man a Machine (1748).
For the last couple of centuries there has been an almost universal
marginalization and exclusion of work in the sciences that does not
suit the metaphysical doctrine that there is only matter and that the
smallest or most elementary constituents of matter interact with
each other in a mechanical way. Yet this dominant metaphysics of
the scientific establishment makes nonsense out of Ethics. This is
true even if many have tried to worm their way out of recognizing it.
Some establishment scientists try to speak as if from out of the grey
matter of the brain and the various mechanical processes that make it
function there is an “emergence” of mind, including its ability to make choices that are free enough so that the individual making them can
be held responsible for the actions that embody those choices. Yet
mind as an “emergent property” is completely empty and superfluous
rhetoric unless the mind that emerges can do things not reducible to
the elementary particles or waves – or, these days, superstrings – that have none of the agency that is attributed to persons.
So one of the first things I am going to try to get you to realize in
this course is that the sciences, as you learned them from your High
School textbooks, do not allow for Ethics – any Ethics, at al . This does not mean that Science precludes Ethics, simply that the dominant
worldview and methodologies in the modern scientific establishment
would have to change to allow for Ethics. You cannot believe both in
the reductively materialistic and mechanistic worldview prevalent in
the sciences and also think that people can be ethical or unethical.
If in the back of your mind you have been mistakenly hearing
this as an underhanded defense of religion, then it is high time to
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disabuse you of that impression. The dominant form of religious
belief in the Western world, and for that matter also in the Islamic
world, is just as incompatible with Ethics as the mechanistic
worldview of the scientific establishment. In Judeo-Christianity, just as in Islam, the overwhelmingly accepted and established doctrine
concerning the Creator is that God is both omniscient or “all-
knowing” and omnipotent or “all-powerful.” Whatever else a Judeo-
Christian or Muslim believes, this is part of it.
There is a long-standing theological debate over something
known as “the problem of evil”, namely if God is omniscient and
omnipotent then why does God allow for all of the evil in the world?
This classic formulation misses the point as far as the problem
that God’s omniscience and omnipotence poses fo
r Ethics. The
real question is this: If God always knows everything that can and
will happen, then the entire domain of possible events is already
scoped-out and defined in detail so that it can be accessible to God’s mind. Moreover, if God is also all-powerful then God is real y the
motive force behind the actualization of each of these predefined
possibilities. These possibilities that are predefined for God’s mind
and actualized by God’s power include all of the actions that we
mistakenly attribute to our agency. The problem is not simply that
God is acting when we take ourselves to be acting, but that we never
choose anything if God already knows everything, because to choose
is – at least on some minimal scale – to create. A world of predefined possibilities accessible to an eternal mind outside of time is a world that is already completed and cannot be added to. No finite agency
exists in such a world as an agent capable of transforming that world
in ways that she or he is responsible for. The world of the Almighty
Creator leaves no place for any creative act on our part.
Granted both Judeo-Christianity and Islam are full of rules to
follow. These have been “revealed” by the Creator and they are to
be “obeyed.” In fact, the fundamental presupposition of religious
revelation as such is that the Law needs to be given by authority and
accepted on faith. From the perspective of the revealed religions,
to think one’s own contemplation and exercise of conscience
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could suffice for living a good life is the worst kind of sin. But
unquestioning obedience to a prescribed code of conduct is not
Ethics. It is certainly Law and you can call it Morality if you wish,
but Ethics derives from the Greek word ethos. This means the
dynamic “character” or vital “constitution” of a person or group of
people. The very concept of Ethics presupposes choice, introspective
assessment, creative interpretation, consideration of context, and,
above al , personal responsibility. The major difference between
the two can be seen when one reflects on religious law from the
perspective of the omnipotence and omniscience of the Creator.
All reward and punishment – as well as gracious divine forgiveness
– is purely at the discretion of the Creator and the individual has no responsibility whatsoever for the actions that, from the perspective
of chronological time, appear to have preceded it. This moral begins
to become apparent in the book of Job and its fatalism ultimately
becomes most explicit in Islam.
However many times and in whatever ways Judeo-Christians
and Muslims claim that their scriptures enjoin individuals to act
responsibly and that each will be held responsible for their own
deeds, all that such insistences can do is entangle the one making
them in absurd contradictions. Remember, God is omnipotent and
omniscient. We do nothing at al . The heavenly reward of the faithful
and hellish retribution of sinners is a farcical puppet show.
So looking at it from the perspective of our cultural-historical
conditioning, we are between a rock and a hard place as far as Ethics
is concerned. The first unit, on free will as a precondition of ethics, is going to be aimed at getting you to realize that the very idea of
Ethics is incompatible with both Modern scientific materialism and
Abrahamic religious revelation. Until you sort that out for yourself,
anything else you do in this course is real y pointless.
It is not true that Ethics does not make claims about the way the
world is. A world in which ethical or unethical action makes sense
cannot be a world wherein there is nothing other than mechanistic
causality acting on microscopic material structures that make up
everything in nature without an irreducible remainder. Nor can
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it be a world wherein everything that we might do – or rather that
we might misperceive ourselves as initiating – is already an event
mapped out in a completed logical space accessible to the eternal
mind of God, a mind capable of now surveying every possible future.
Either these possible futures col apse into a single predefined future, in which case we have no free wil , or there are an infinity of parallel universes in which doppelgangers of ourselves live lives in many
cases nearly identical to our own and in other cases somewhat more
different, in which case none of these parallel selves are any more
unique or uniquely responsible for the minutely different iterations of their actions than we are for ours in this one of many possible worlds.
In the first unit, together with William James, I am going to
be making the case that a world where Ethics has any meaning at
all must be a finite world where no one has an infinite or eternal
perspective let alone unlimited power. So Ethics – in its very form
and irrespective of its content – makes claims that explicitly conflict with those of certain widely accepted scientific theories and religious doctrines. It is rootless idiocy to teach Ethics as if it could be applied in business or medicine or whatever field without recognizing this,
and making it seem as if it had nothing to do with one’s scientific
outlook or religious standpoint. Ethics as such implicitly endorses a
scientific and religious orientation different from the ones dominant
in our place and time. That orientation is very open to question as
far as its details are concerned, but we can know enough about it to
realize that it makes a different demand of us than the one made by
reductionist scientists or God Almighty.
Just as Ethics is often uprooted from metaphysical considerations
about the nature of reality that it presupposes, it is also artificial y abstracted from the socio-political context that it needs to be
meaningful. A person is not ethical or unethical in a vacuum. Ethics
is concerned with one’s relationship to others in a society, and
whether or not this society is a just one – in a political sense – has everything to do with whether and to what extent it is possible for
those who constitute it to cultivate virtuous conduct. Also, societies general y feature internal differentiation, so there is a question about 21
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whether it is possible for everyone in a society to be virtuous in the same ways and to the same degree.
First of al , consider how many of the virtues cannot be practiced
in isolation. For example, generosity requires someone to be
generous to and courage presupposes a situation of shared danger
within the context of which to be courageous. This social context
also helps us to determine whether someone is generous or simply
squanders his wealth, or whether a supposedly courageous person
is actual y rash. There is a great difference between righteous anger
and an expression of sheer wrath, but discerning the distinction
between them in any given case would involve a consideration of
the status and character of the offending and offended parties, their
respective histories and values.
In a certain context killing is murder, in another it is just
retribution, in another an act of valor in th
e defense of one’s country.
To be ethical is to tell the difference, for example, between enlisting in a just war and being party to mass murder. “I was just following
orders” is the excuse of a slave. Depending on context, might it not
also sometimes be ethical to do other things that under different
circumstances would be considered unethical? For example, is it
sometimes justified to lie? If the Nazis come banging on your door
looking for some innocent people of Jewish descent who are hiding
in your attic, is it ethical to tell a lie and say you’ve never seen them?
What about lying to an entire nation in order to protect it from an
enemy or even from its own worst impulses?
In light of these fine distinctions, it is certainly fair to say that
a person raised by wild animals would not be virtuous and we
would even have to wonder whether he were a “person.” Practice
of the virtues probably requires some degree of habituation from
childhood, and one of the things we are going to look at in the
second unit is to what degree this is the case. In addition to proper
upbringing, the development and sustenance of a virtuous ethos
requires continual practice. As we will see, Aristotle suggests that
the mirror of friendship is indispensable to maintaining virtue as an
active disposition and gaining insight into one’s own character.
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There are, however, all kinds of “friendships.” Some are
associations for the sake of successful business and others are based
on commonly enjoying certain pleasures, like participation in a
sport or a hobby. There might even be friendships predicated on the
common pursuit of a vice. Consider this: Even in the case of what
seem to be the best friendships grounded on the virtuous character
of those in the relationship, how many people would wish that their
best friends become god-like in their degree of virtue or excellence?
It is virtuous to wish the best for one’s friends, but who would wish
such excellence for their friends that it opened a chasm between
them and their friends as great as that between mere mortals and
gods?
What would such god-like virtue look like? What if it were
possible to get away with anything whatsoever in stealth – to steal
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