Timothy wrote on 02/05/10 at 16:57:26:



He makes a good point about teleology being a foundation for ethics and morality, but the devil is in the details.  He's too general, too abstract, too subject to ambiguity and interpretation.  Teleology got co-opted by Catholicism all too easily.

The phrase, "moral relativism," troubles me.  "Relativity" involves the examination of what exists in relationship with what else.  All determination, all logic, all cause-and-effect in that sense are "relative" approaches.  Basically, he's introduced the confusion that exists between "relativity" and "arbitrariness."  Moral relativism does not for a second imply arbitrariness, unless it can be shown that there's no choice but recognize something as assertoric and nothing else, but, even then, one asserted moral point must be brought into relationship with others or there's no moral framework at all, and, if it's done arbitrarily, then morality becomes caprice; if it's done non-arbitrarily, that is, on a basis of rational necessity and sufficiency for a moral case, that it's not "moral relativism" as he seems to use the term.

He sounds somewhat like a recovering Catholic who needs to go to a few more Twelve Step meetings.

Timothy wrote on 02/08/10 at 14:32:17:


Heheheh.  This would end up with moral nihilism and amorality.  The phrase "counter to our personal or cultural standards" opens the door to war over just about everything.  If we set such standards, then they have to be grounded somewhere.  I'd do that increasingly in terms of evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, ethology, ecology.  Simple idea: survival, diminish suffering, and figure out patiently what's required to do them.

That's as close, for the moment, as I'm willing to get to the issues of objective standards.

What I think people want is what the monotheistic religions have always peddled.  God's revelations settle the matter.  They are not subject to human knowledge, reason, disputation.  Setting our "ethics" is something to which we have no right whatever.  They are "revealed," not "reasonable."  To believers they are objective standards.  The Hellenes had no such revealed "Nomos."

Of course, when people get this sort of transcendental solving of questions, it's always the other who gets described as "counter" their standards.  In this country, "becoming American" has usually ended up with a "know nothing" fear that others with other cultures and other values will counter all our fondest hopes.  Blacks will miscegnate with our lovely white daughters.  Queers will recruit our children and abet homosexuality.  Atheists will ruin our moral fiber and destroy patriotism.

According to its most recent "monoculturalist," Tom Tancredo, if the country becomes 30% Hispanic, it will be the end of America.  And back when old Ben Franklin was alive, people were enraged at the thought that the country would be taken over by Germans and Irish.  This country really is a very slow learner.  And so is the rest of the human race.

Multi-culturalists can be as much this sort of bigot in their own way:  all cultures are equal--that's bizarre enough--but multi-culturalist culture is more cultural than thou.  Somehow, they should be first among equals.  Multi-culturalism is the best culture, doncha'know?  

The problem is to balance tolerance of others with respect for others.  I'll tolerate your craziness, so to speak, if you respect my right to mine.  Again, the multi-culturalists, for all the good intentions they might have are too prone to regard those sweating on working out their own culture as not with them and therefore against them and therefore not to be respected or tolerated.  That being said, too often pride in one's own culture ends up with fear and hatred of other cultures.

What does tolerance mean anyway if there are no standards against which what is to be tolerated is to be measured?  Tolerance is not a standard in its own right.  It's something to be created.

Language issues are a pretty good example of how it works in this country.  Obviously somebody who speaks two languages is only half as smart as the person who only knows one.

Maybe I'd better clarify what I meant.

If you reject moral relativism, then what's left?  Moral absolutism, I'm afraid, or perfect moral arbitrariness, endlessly interpretable, finally incoherent.

No absolutist argument survives analysis.  Not even mathematical logic itself.  They are all incomplete, or self-contradictory, and perfection is unachievable.  To justify absolutism, there has to be a demonstration of the "perfect."  All demonstrations finally failing, the claim to an absolute or to the perfect, is itself, then, arbitrary.  

The varieties of arbitrariness being potentially infinite, the selection of one absolute idea depends upon some revelation, some blind assertion, some interpretation--in other words, moral absolutism itself becomes (somebody"s) preference.  Calling it "perfect" is a distinction without a difference.  The outcome can't be distinguished from moral relativism (as Christians understand it) other than by the fact that somebody gets to enforce an absolute upon others  who absolutely must comply.

Moral relativism, even as Christians mis-use the term, at least allows for a democratic exercise of choice, for all that the result may be anarchic.  Moral absolutism requires a "theocracy" or an infallible "idea" that dictates all the course of action.  It's the sort of theocracy beloved of the monotheist cults and dictators for whom all historical debate has come to an end in a state of affairs beyond history and beyond criticism.

I'll get Churchillian on this one:  moral relativism is the worst of all moral doctrines--except for all the others.

It sounds so virtuous, doesn't it?  Reject amoralism and immorality and moral irresponsibility!  Watch what you get when you do that.  We'd get Pat Robertson closing down Disneyland.  All these sloganeering exhortations to abandon vice and seek virtue, once turned over, show a pretty ugly population of creepie-crawlies.

Yes, I could tune up the philosophical fiddle and do like idealistic Kant:  Act as if the premise of every action were fit to serve as a universal law.  Sorry, there ain't no such thing.  To do so, you have to buy the fiction that there is and act regardless of outcome--to do that is the antithesis of moral responsibility!  These ideas collapse immediately in fictions and contradictions.

Kant argued that we should never lie.  Good luck with that one.  It might work out sub specie aeternitatis but not on this earth.  Kant was an absolutist--that was acategorical imperative.  Given the impossibility of his notion, we're left with moral relativism whether American Christian conservatives like it or not.  It's a choice, finally between pragmatic common sense and partisan craziness.

The Hellenes were really so much better.  The gods did not announce the tenets of some absolute nomos.  They lied, stole, cheated as they chose.  They told the truth, were generous and even poignantly honest.  They exist as enduring dilemmas of action to which we respond by the Sisyphean method of endlessly returning to the same issues of judgment.  The Hellenic poets far excelled in human wisdom anything concocted by monotheist dogmatics.  They allowed us choice.  They accepted error, laughed at it, punished it.  Are we better?  

To argue that we have an absolute, a perfect, beyond refutation is not only hamartia, but hybris, an error, an impudent vanity.  This pious nonsense about rejecting "moral relativism" only serves to conceal the unspeakable ignorance and arrogance of the religious and the dogmatics who offer us only their empty speeches.

Here's something that's not.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100208123625.htm

I'm sure Hellenismos might have an interest in the evolutionary origins of morality and religion.

I'm sorry I don't apply moral relativism to my judgments of ideological and religious doctrines, but then I have a view of morality that's a bit more related to the teleology idea suggested by "Michael" in that Yahoo! quotation as being singularly Greek pagan.

I have thought of trying to translate hamartia and hybris into modern terms.  How do you think they would show up in governmental and religious life in the United States?  Among whom would you look for them?

Timothy wrote on 02/09/10 at 18:50:13:



Perhaps I've harped on the topic too much, Timothy, but I've also offended others--particularly Obamaphiles.

I've described watching his failures of leadership as something like being unable to tear my eyes from a very slow motion video of a train wreck.  I've argued (for some time now) that the "Left" ought to consider withdrawing support, running another candidate for the Presidential nomination in 2012, and, even if they can't deny him the nomination, at least increase the chance of seeing him defeated.

He's succeeded at what, two years ago, few of them would have thought possible:  making the Republicans look like the lesser of two evils.

Months ago, they denounced me.  Now nobody even has the heart left to debate the point.  At this point, we face three years of campaign rhetoric, no convincing leadership, and a one-term President.  This is an impossible situation.

Timothy wrote on 02/10/10 at 12:58:50:


I reject the "absolutist" foundations of so many of the common religions.

I agree that "ethics" is inseparable from action.  I'd just go a bit further and argue something very close to teleology without any metaphysical categorical statements to tie things up.  The model I use is of "design"--not, not, not the "argument from design" or "intelligent design" or these other absurdities, but design in the same sense as "design a house, design a policy, design an experiment, even a 'designing' woman," that is purposive behavior within a situation.

Beliefs are not "faith," just what you can establish through reflection and experience of a situation that's necessary and sufficient to "get the job done."  I suppose I could call it "games strategy" or "preferential logic," but those get carried off into too-specialized fields.  Design is not an exercise in "belief" or "faith" that requires no Reason.

In the process of design, there's no "perfection," no Absolute, hence, using design as a  general approach, everything is situational, relative.  That does not mean we have infinite choice, of course, and can be just arbitrary whenever we feel like it or wishful thinking takes over.  Any design sooner or later encounters its own insufficiency, its own compromises, and an ethics based on action as this sort of design means asking if there are dilemmas in making decisions, paradoxes that demand choices that are mutually exclusive, even contradictory.  A design has parameters and parameters bring paradoxes in their wake.  It's a model for making an action.

We design our acts, design our purposes and the manner in which we implement them with a degree of choice, in a complex situation with contradictory courses of action.  And we are responsible, further, for the actions that follow as a consequence of our actions and for the consequences which impinge upon others' actions.

We are not "gods" because every design is limited in its scope.  Only willful ignorance and arrogant denials of contradictions lead us to act like that.  Those purged, we have a chance at an outcome that could be characterized as "eudaimonic."  That's not hedonism and its not hybris either.  A correct action is eudaimonic, possibly "heuristic."  A successful design exhibits the same restraint, the same respect for constraints, the same responsible accounting for complexity and contradiction as correct action, but it's a good model because it can be made more explict than the turbulence of human conduct.

The role of Hellenic fundamentals like "hamartia" and "hybris" applies to design as well, of course.  And the pursuit of Arete, excellence, applies in both.  

Your argument that Hellenic fundamentals are correct independent of any specific religion is a bit like mine that design is an order of behavior in itself not dependent on any particular philosophy and a better guide to forming an act than any of them.

No single general term is quite right, but there are a family of terms in Hellenic history that seem to have enough family resemblances, enough of a good fit to avoid hair-splitting scholasticism.