Lovers of Sophia

by Jason Reza Jorjani

  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