Merleau-Ponty and Incarnation

We are embodied. This is not a generally contentious claim, but its implications are not well thought out. In this post, I want to sketch an argument for using Merleau-Ponty to fill in this claim and its impact on ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is famous for returning the body to philosophy, particularly in the existentialist tradition. His arguments push against scientific reductionism without holding the mental to be independent of the physical. This emphasis on our intimate connection to our bodies as lived allows us to use him to think through how our embodiment has and provides value.

Merleau-Ponty views the body as the center-point from which we live and discover the world. It is the condition of our awareness of the world. On the other hand, the body as center-point is dependent on the world--it must be an opening on a world, or it is nothing. The body and the world are thus correlates. We therefore must discover them together.

This is an important point: once we have accepted our embodiment, we must accept that our awareness of ourselves as active and perceptual beings (more accurately: active-perceptual beings, as there is little distinction) depends on our awareness of the world. We discover both ourselves and the world through engaging the opening onto the world which we are with the world which we open out onto.

In this active-perceptual engagement the world and our bodies arise for us as significant--having significance. The world offers us options in relation to the body, which offers us correlated capacities. The options the world offers others are options we know through intersubjectivity--our awareness of others--which, Merleau-Ponty argues, occurs through our bodies. We subtly use our own bodies to understand the activities of others.

This centrality of the body and its capacities for knowledge of the world and others entails that differences in embodiment result in different ways of understanding the world. Furthermore, the body as condition of action presents itself as a Good without which we could do and know nothing. The body constrains our way of being toward the world, and thus, while Merleau-Ponty agrees with other existentialists that we have the ability to construct our identities, and that what we do produces us, he nevertheless leaves the initial substrate outside our ability to choose. The restraints of nature, and particularly body and the culture we are born into, provide a basis on which to stand when choosing. These restraints do not inhibit agency but rather enable it. This at the very least puts the question of the validity of sex change operations into question: is it a way of developing the bodies we are, or a way of bucking the very condition of our freedom? The same kind of question may be asked of other transhumanist technologies, whether reproductive or otherwise.

The biggest metaphysical commitment I see in Merleau-Ponty is to the value-ladenness of things prior to our choices. Perception is, for Merleau-Ponty, the activity of answering a question from the world. The world offers us puzzles which demand solutions, and those solutions must form the world into a comprehensible form. The solution is demanded by the world, and includes the values of the things seen, its potentialities for reception of activities of various sorts. There are occasionally multiple viable solutions, yet not just any solution will do: it must guide our interactions with the problem of the world productively. The solution must, as it were, harmonize the world's witness. This means that form is necessary to the world's existence--it must be viewed as formed--yet form is a perceptual category, and so the world must be viewed as given perceptually, not as though the real world were a world of imperceptibles.

Once we have attuned ourselves to this notion of form, of self-sustaining orderings, we can begin to recognize much of our work as the work of producing form. This is the aim of every valid institution: to be formed in a way which harmonizes and preserves its parts in order to exhibit its form by seeking some telos. Likewise, we can see the environment and our bodies both as forms whose structure is self-sustaining and not to be violated without good reason. We will have to recognize the fact that we deal in these and many other cases with systems which are complex and which seek their own continuance until they cannot, and which then tend to decline rapidly.

Hopefully this post has shown how Merleau-Ponty may be useful to Christian thought on how to think about ethics in light of our embodiment, which we must insofar as we think of ethics in light of Christ's incarnation. There will, of course, be much to think through about what Merleau-Ponty gets wrong in virtue of denying the existence of a sovereign God, but there remains much which is profitable for our thought, and even where he goes wrong, he will offer a sympathetic interlocutor on many points.

The Means/End Relation

In this post I will likely be drawing more than I know from Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. I will also be drawing from others, however. The aim is to show how we think of the means/end relation as external, how that works out in practice, how it is an inaccurate way of thinking of the relation, and how we should think instead.

First, what does it mean for the means/end relation to be external? It would mean that any action we might do is only externally, contingently related to its effects. Such a conception can work out in one of two main ways. Either it is only the thought that counts, and what happens from there is inconsequential, or the actions are evaluated solely in terms of their effects. There are also middle grounds, where the intentions are weighed against the consequences.

This lies behind a particular kind of reasoning, called calculative reasoning, where I act for the sake of some goal in such a way that I select my aims simply to achieve the goal. The means do not matter so long as they achieve the maximum of the specified goal, whatever that goal might be. It also lies behind a particular kind of justification or excuse, where one apologizes only for the effects, refusing to accept that one may have done something really wrong because one "didn't mean it."

If I understand contemporary critiques of capitalism, they tend to rely on a critique of calculative reasoning, whereby this kind of external relation of goals to means whereby we seek to achieve them results in a flattening of the moral imagination and of the kinds of goods we can be sensitive to. Money becomes the symbol of commensurable values, and thus money gain is to be maximized at any cost. This results in the loss of non-monetizable goods, such as community and virtue. My point in bringing this up is that it won't be enough to shift away from seeing money as the medium of exchange of all values, thereby excluding non-monetizable goods, but the underlying problem is calculative reasoning about goods.

What, then, would it look like to think of the means/end relation as an internal relation? MacIntyre talks about goods internal to practices, where the good one is after is inseparable from the practice. The fun one has playing chess is inseparable from actually playing chess, as his famous example goes. This can be extended, however. The Hegelian way of articulating this is to talk of the means as the end in motion, or the end as the means at rest. In this way of thinking, the means have to fit the end, they have to be fulfilled by the end. The kind of action which the means is has to be the sort of thing which can come to rest in the end, the kind of behavior which will not tend to extend itself beyond the intended consequences. Similarly, the intent has to become embodied in action which aptly expresses it and brings it to fulfillment. One cannot sacrifice one's goal in pursuit of one's goal, in other words. One cannot oppress others for the sake of freedom or vote for a vicious person in order to preserve virtue.

Truth

A Christian account of truth should be able to do three things, at a minimum.

1. Show how statements can be true or false.
2. Show how God can be the truth.
3. Show how truth can be something one walks in.

Now, it is possible that these three involve different sorts of truth, the term "truth" used in three different ways. Even so, a Christian account should show how the uses are connected and that the extension of the term makes sense.

If we start with the everyday notion of truth as correspondence with reality, we can make some vague headway. We will need to articulate what correspondence consists in, but we can make sense of how we can walk in correspondence with reality, and how God can be the ultimate reality and thus in fundamental correspondence with it. With this talk of correspondence uniting our success at achieving our the three criteria, we now must show what this correspondence consists in in each case, and how the kinds of correspondence are at least similar.

The standard talk about correspondence as a theory of truth applied to statements tends to be quite unclear. It says that a statement is true if and only if what it says actually is. But this does not get us any further: it is still unclear what has to be if what it says is to be.We have other resources, however: recall that I have already argued that knowledge that something is the case can be understood in terms of the capacities which one possesses if one possesses that knowledge. Thus, the truth conditions of a statement should be able to be cashed out in terms of capacities in some manner. We may better expand this to dispositions in the case of beliefs, although true beliefs produce dispositions which are also capacities.

How shall we articulate this truth in terms of dispositions? There are two properties which the dispositions must possess: they must be are fruitful and they must be stable. Fruitfulness means that the dispositions have benefit: you can get something from them. Stability requires that the dispositions stick. It means that having further experiences does not remove the disposition. To articulate truth in these terms, however, we should take the long view: fruitfulness and stability over the course of eternity is what matters, short-run fruitfulness and stability are only hints of the long-run fruitfulness and stability.

With an account of the truth of statements in place, the account of walking in the truth is relatively easy. To walk in the truth is simply to act in such a way that one is exercising those dispositions and capacities which knowing the truth produces. We can also articulate it as walking in correspondence with reality, since this is what knowing truth claims enables one to do. Knowing the truth enables walking in the truth.

In the case of God being the Truth, correspondence is not much at issue. Rather, the fact that God is who must be known if we are to live rightly, if we are live fruitful and stable lives in accord with how things are, is made clear. It is only in knowing God's power and mercy, his foresight and provision, his deep knowledge of us and his deep love for us, that we can live well. To live without this personal knowledge is to be doomed to live without good dispositions and without the capacity to--at least reliably and for the right reason--do what is right.

Value and Money

Money has the property of being exchangeable for anything which one can exchange for. It is the medium of fungible value, or to put it in the vernacular, it can buy anything that can be bought. There are valuable things which cannot be bought. These are internal goods, such as virtue, or social goods, such as community. These goods which cannot be purchased are still considered worth monetary value, however, via the supposed equivalency of time and money. The value of the internal goods may not correlate with how much time they require, however.

It is also worth noting that the value of items is variable. I do not simply mean that prices change, but that the value of an item is agent relative, and this in several ways. The most obvious way in which the value of an item is agent relative is that we prefer different things and have different needs. Another way in which things vary in value is that we have different funds, and thus for the poorer, the more essential items are worth more. The essentials are of basically infinite worth, although how one attains those essentials, what kind of food one gets, may depend on other factors, including one's budget.

Some of the preferences we have, and thus the values we regard things as having, are irrational. The costs of some items therefore do not fit with what it takes to make those items, but is simply dependent on how much we want them. This drives up costs for those who do not regard those items as worth the cost.

Some items could be made so that they would be worth more to us, and yet no one has any interest in producing them. In particular, planned obsolescence ensures that purchasers buy more often, and introduces more bad quality items into the market, and thus into the junkyard. If a company wants to prove that it cares about the environment, making products to last would be a good way. Other ways cost companies little, but gain them the applause of nominal environmentalists.

Some internal and social goods have an absolute value which is independent of both economic status and preferences. It is just as worthwhile to cultivate virtue and community no matter where one is in society. Nevertheless, it costs differently for different groups. The time it takes is actually worth more for those who are poor, despite their hourly wage generally being lower, because it costs more directly in the necessities of life. The rich can cultivate virtue in the spare time which they can afford because they have more money than is requisite to securing the necessities of life. The opportunity costs, then, of living a good life, are greater for the poor than for the rich.

In fact, this can be generalized to almost anything: opportunity costs of acquiring goods, internal or external, are greater for the poor than for the wealthy. Not every dollar is of equal value. Because of this, the less one has, the less ability one has to impact the economy, and thus the more one must buy according to a traditional account where quality and cheapness of the goods matters, and the supplier is fungible. Thus, the poor cannot use their purchasing patterns to push back against companies which hire them for little, because they are either dependent upon those companies for acquiring what they need, or could not purchase from those companies if they wanted to.

The same applies to work choices. The wealthy can afford to be concerned with life/work balance. The poor cannot. If a company requires workaholism (otherwise known as being "career oriented" "dedicated to the company" etc.), and it pays, then there is a class of workers which cannot avoid being formed into a vicious form of life.

None of this is limited to the poor qua low income. There is also a group which we may call the poor qua high outgo. What matters is that both groups get to keep a small amount of money, if any, after food is bought, bills are paid, etc. Whether this is due to loans or bad jobs, both are in a situation which is harmful to cultivating virtue and community. Companies then sell to these groups by promising them community and virtuous living--promises which cannot be kept, because they promise what cannot be sold.

Mourning and Perspective

Bad events justify mourning. Bad events, being bad, are mourn-worthy. This seems like an accurate statement, but it must be refined. Do we mean that every bad event justifies everyone mourning forever? If not, why not? It cannot be because the proper response is not, for some people, to mourn, supposing that the mourn-worthiness is inherent in the event. Of course, we might give an account on which the mourn-worthiness of events is relative to the agent. In that case, what makes an event mourn-worthy to some but not others?

Now, there are likely some events which are mourn-worthy only for some and not for others. I would like to set those aside for now, however, and consider only those events which are mourn-worthy for anyone who hears of them. Even in such cases, the degree may vary. I want to suggest that, where the badness to the agents is the same but the mourn-worthiness differs, this is a result of how worthy those events are of consideration by the agents.

On this account, we have more reason to consider bad events the more they affect our lives and the lives of those close to us. Two equally mourn-worthy events, or the same mourn-worthy event at two different times, may rightfully elicit different degrees of mournfulness from us on account of our differing practical relations to them. The events continue to provide reasons for us to mourn, but we cease to be in a situation where those reasons warrant as much consideration.

Depending on one's conception of reasons, this may amount to the events giving less reason. That is, if a reason just is something which should be given consideration in practical reasoning, then the fact that one has reason, all things considered, not to give weight to a fact in practical reasoning entails that the fact is not a reason for one, and similarly if one merely has some reason not to give weight to a reason, then the reason is less weighty of a reason. If this is one's account of reasons, then it should be no surprise that reasons come and go over time.

If, on the other hand, we presuppose that reasons are eternal in the way that other ideal entities are supposed to be (e.g., numbers, the predicate "being red," etc.,), then the reason goes along with the event, and is just as much a reason whether or not we have reason to take it into (or exclude it from) consideration. Translated into a less Platonist idiom, this might becomes the view that an event provides a reason for action phi provided only that, were one to consider it and only it, then one would rightly reach the practical conclusion *phi*. Combinations of events will provide different reasons from their isolated parts, and might not provide a reason derivable from their parts. This conflicts with our ordinary language of "weighing reasons" which seems to suggest that distinct reasons can be placed alongside each other. Yet it is not an uncommon claim that it is only in a context that reasons exist and have force. That the light turned green is only a reason to go because of its situation in a set of laws, and it seems to provide no reason to go if the road is blocked ahead of me. Again, the reason appears to evaporate in certain contexts.

So we seem to be forced to claim that reasons are ephemeral things. Nevertheless, mourn-worthy events remain mourn-worthy. That is, they remain such that the proper reaction to them, when faced with them, is to mourn over them to an extent corresponding to their degree of mournfulness and how directly one is faced with them. The reason to mourn provided by a mourn-worthy event may evaporate, but this is not because the event ceases to be mourn-worthy, but because we lack reason to consider it. The mourn-worthy event only provided reason to mourn at all because it occurred in a context where it made it fitting for someone to mourn. If we were given fresh reason to consider the event, as on the anniversary of the event, then the reason to mourn would revive because the event retains whatever features made it a mourn-worthy event.

The Hedonism of Liberalism

Should we be happy that someone is happy? At first glance, an affirmative answer seems unobjectionable. What we must query, however, is what we mean by "happy." Liberalism, or, more accurately, that form of liberalism which has adopted evangelicalism's use of "testimonies" to convince people to adopt certain views, presumes, as its evangelical predecessor often did, that I can easily tell whether or not I am happy. This requires a conception of happiness as something one feels, an experience which is accessible both when it is occurring and later, in memories which cannot be systematically distorted.

While how I feel right now may be easy for me to detect, how I felt a week ago about something which I have ideological reasons to want to feel a particular way about may be very hard to accurately detect. I will, after all, be prone to think about how I felt, how I should have felt, and in the remembering and re-experiencing I am very likely to confabulate how I wish I had felt. My memories about my happiness are thus unreliable.

Even if these memories were reliable, this kind of happiness is not actually so important on its own. If people feel happy in this way as a result of hurting others, or as a result of opiods, we are unlikely to be happy for them. We may rather feel sad for them, since they seem deluded or trapped in being happy for bad reasons. So, to feel happy for someone's happiness, one must believe that the person's happiness is valid, that is, that the person is happy for a good reason. One must not think that the happiness is a mistake, that the individual should instead be sad.

To suppose that each moment of this experiential happiness counts for the same amount is hedonism. This may take the form of holding the best life to have the most experiential happiness in it, which might give the right results in the case of the addict, or it might be generalized to the best state of affairs being that in which the most people have the most experiential happiness in their lives, as in utilitarianism, which would give the right result in the case of the sadist. However, both of these theories go around the reason we are not happy when people are happy in these ways. Our problem is not that they are decreasing total happiness (in their lives or among sentient beings or otherwise), but that they are not justified in their happiness. They are experiencing something which is not justified by the circumstance, and thus are in a similar position to someone who is deluded with respect to how the external world is in other ways.

Moral Subjectivism, Relativism, and Objective Expressivism

Yesterday, I brought up expressivism, the moral theory according to which terms like "good" and "bad" primarily, if not exclusively, express sentiments about actions. Since the next section of Hegel's PR is quite relevant to expressivism, that is where we are headed today.

The account which Hegel is opposing is not exactly expressivism. It is not a theory about the meanings of moral terms, but about what makes an action good or bad. The account appears to be, roughly, that what makes an action good is that it is done from a good motive or that the agent is convinced that he is doing what he should be doing.

As Hegel traces the account which he is opposing, he argues that it leads to relativism. This should be a familiar argument, whether one accepts it or not. It is basically the same development which leads from "it doesn't matter what you believe so long as you're sincere," to "what's true for you might not be true for me."

(e) Subjective opinion is at last expressly acknowledged as the criterion of right and duty when it is alleged that the ethical nature of an action is determined by the conviction which holds something to be right. The good which is willed does not yet have a content; and a principle of conviction contains the further specification that the subsumption of an action under the determination of the good is the responsibility of the subject. Under these circumstances, any semblance of ethical objectivity has completely disappeared. Such doctrines are intimately connected with that self-styled philosophy... which denies that truth...can be recognized. --PR,, remarks to §140, italics in original.

This is what I refer to in the title of this post as "moral subjectivism." It is not the stage of our present culture but the stage which our culture was in not long ago. It is what some people refer to as "postmodernism." One of my occasional discomforts with agreeing with MacIntyre's claim that we are, culturally, expressivists, is that we are no longer relativistic expressivists. We do claim that there is right and wrong, that there is true and false, albeit even as we continue to regard moral discourse as exprevissivistic.

(f) ...The only possible culmination - and this must now be discussed - of that subjectivity which regards itself as the ultimate instance is reached when it knows itself as that power of resolution and decision on [matters of] truth, right, and duty which is already implicitly [an sich] present within the preceding forms. ...in addition, its form is that of subjective emptiness [Eitelkeit], in that it knows itself as this emptiness of all content and, in this knowledge, knows itself as the absolute - The extent to which this absolute self-satisfaction does not simply remain a solitary worship of the self, but may even form a community whose bond and substance consist, for example, in mutual assurances of conscientiousness, good intentions, and enjoyment of this reciprocal purity...and certain other phenomena [Gestaltungen] are related to the stage [of sunjectivity] which we are here considering - these are questions which I have discussed in the Phenomenology of Spirit (pp. 605ff). --ibid., italics and brackets in the original. 

Turning to the Phenomenology of Sprit, then, we find:

Conscience, then, in its majestic sublimity above any specific law and every content of duty, puts whatever content it pleases into its knowledge and willing.

...When, however, consciousness finds expression, this puts the certainty of itself in the form of pure self and thereby as universal self. Others let the act hold as valid, owing to the explicit terms in which the self is thus expressed and acknowledged to be the essential reality. The spirit and substance of their community are, thus, the mutual assurance of their conscientiousness, of their good intentions, and rejoicing over this reciprocal purity of purpose, the quickening and refreshment received from the glorious privilege of knowing and of expressing, of fostering and cherishing, a state so altogether admirable. (The Phenomenology of Mind, 384-385 in the Dover edition, trans Baillie) 

 At this stage, the subject takes itself to determine what it should do by itself. To be in this stage does not require that we take ourselves to be consciously legislating morality for ourselves. Rather, I would suggest that the idea that one must follow one's heart fills the same role. In fact, Hegel seems to suggest this in the Phenomenology when he says:

Conscience, which in the first instance takes up merely a negative attitude towards duty, qua a given determinate duty, knows itself detached from it. But since conscience fills empty duty with a determinate content drawn from its own self, it is positively aware of the fact that it, qua this particular self, makes its own content. Its pure self, as it is empty knowledge, is without content and without definiteness. The content which it supplies to that knowledge is drawn from its own self, qua this determinate self, is drawn from itself as a natural individuality. (ibid., 387, italics in original)

What Hegel is saying here is simply that, though we think we are find what is good emanating from our inner "true" selves, we are actually only finding our own natural, particular, undeveloped desires. For Hegel, the true good is universal, whereas the particular, qua particular, is evil. Hegel does not completely oppose the idea of being oneself, but his idea of what that should amount to is distinct from what we mean by it. Hegel's notion of the self is one where the self is what it is only in the context of a whole which it finds itself in. The notion of the self which we use when we tell someone to be herself is a notion of the self as separable from the social context the self is in, as a self-sufficient, self-legislating almost-divinity--the notion which Hegel is critiquing in these passages.

Let me point out, too, that these passages speak of a community composed of people assuring one another that they are okay--"I'm ok, you're ok." This is a phenomenon one can find easily in certain circles, and it helps to strengthen bubbles because this assurance keeps us from second-guessing ourselves. One often hears such a community's opponents suggesting that the assurances are required because the members are afraid that they are wrong, but notice that there are some groups of this kind which oppose each other. Perhaps both are wrong, and I suspect both are correct about the other, that they are afraid they are wrong, because no one has a firm basis on which to make their moral claims, and thus no one has any valid certainty (incidentally, his analysis of hypocrisy, which follows shortly after the above passage, appears to apply very well to virtue signaling).

I owe an explanation of how this developed form of expressivism is not relativistic. A large part of this is that the phenomenon which Hegel is articulating is not self-consciously relativistic. It is inherently open to relativism, but claims to be objective. When someone claims to be following his own heart, he is not claiming to be inventing his own morality, but to be following true morality as revealed by his heart. Our natural dispositions sway us to clump toward similar positions, and so we can maintain the illusion that we are all tracking moral reality even when none of us are, since there is consensus. Because there is no verifiable basis for moral claims, however, expressivism comes to be how moral discourse works, even thought morality is not, itself, expressivistic. If our hearts are our only guides, then the only way to convince someone of a moral claim is to sway her heart, the only way to disagree with someone's moral claim is to view him as being untrue to himself.

Any relativism which exists, then, is buried under claims to objectivity. The expression of moral claims may be made in such a way that is reminiscent of relativism, with the same kinds of empty objections to opposing views, but the individuals making the claims no longer think the opposing views are right for anyone.

I should note that there are genuine arguments offered for some positions in some circles. Often these arguments are not very well thought out, however, and occasionally they are more rhetoric than genuine argument. The semblance of argument, however, remains. It likely never left, and it forms the seed from which we may hope to regain a morality based, to some extent, on rational disputation.

Alienation and Retreat

the tendency to look inwards into the self and to know and determine from within the self what is right and good appears in epochs when what is recognized as right and good in actuality and custom is unable to satisfy the better will. --Hegel PR, Remarks to §138

In the context of the rest of Hegel's Philosophy of Right up to this point, I take this to mean that the retreat into the self for guidance as to what to do occurs when the guidance provide from outside oneself breaks down, whether by the guidance being obviously wrong, or by the authoritative guides losing standing (e.g., by being found hypocritical). I have also heard it suggested that this kind of retreat occurs where the general public finds that it lacks social efficacy, that is, where people find themselves in a position where it appears that they can have no influence in the culture or state. Both of these situations are situations where the self fails to find itself represented outside itself, that is, where it is alienated from the outside world.

If these ideas are right, then the modern ideas of "finding oneself," "being true to oneself," and "not caring what others think" are a result of alienation. All three of these adages are forms of retreat, wherein we are advised to see ourselves as authorities on how to live. There is truth to these adages, but when they are absolutized they become corrosive to social cohesion. We become atomic individuals without interaction, and we deny the permissibility of exchanging moral views. What Hegel is suggesting, however, is that the social cohesion was corroded first. We take charge of our fates and souls because we are at a loss as to who else to grant authority over them.

As someone who is generally critical of the above mentioned modern ideas, this framing of the problem presents the challenge of navigating a way forward which respects the common and in many ways justified distrust of authority and lack of hope for social efficacy. In the latter vein, the rise of locally focused social movements benefits us. By focusing on smaller, low-level issues, we prove that we can change something, and can work our way up from there. With respect to our distrust of authority, however, I have not noticed any promising developments. As much as we follow leaders, we seem to trust only those leaders who are within our own groups. This is better than nothing, but is not promising for an exchange of moral views.

The challenge is compounded by the way in which our distrust of moral authority expresses itself. As MacIntyre has argued, we tend to operate with an implicitly expressivist view of moral discourse: we think of claims about good and bad as merely expressing cheers and boos for different actions. This lies behind the difficulty people have distinguishing between condemning an action and condemning an agent who acts in that manner. Because condemning the action is heard as booing, any agent who performs it seems to be booed along with it. Claims about good and bad become inherently charged with blaming and praising and cannot be heard dispassionately any more than swear words can. Because we hear moral claims in this way, we hear disagreements about moral claims as power struggles, and thus the resolution of moral disagreement is viewed, not as a rational processes, but as a processes of rhetorical, particularly emotional, persuasion. We are as suspicious of attempts to persuade us regarding moral claims as we are of advertisements, because we view both as the same kind of thing.

Formal Unity and Triviality

There is an objection common to approaches to ethics of the sort I have been presenting. The objection goes as follows: you have given merely a formal criteria for ethics, which can be achieved trivially in a manner which we would not think was good. In terms of my account, one might say that unity can be accomplished by restricting oneself to very few beliefs, social groups and roles, and taking extreme care of one's health. An obsessive health nut, it seems, is an ideal according to my account. Well, I certainly do not want this consequence, and I agree that if my account has this consequence, then that is a reductio against my account.

How, then, do I answer this objection? First, I think MacIntyre, in Dependent Rational Animals, already offers a way to work from our actual embodied situation to at least a sketchy yet substantive ethics. A similar tactic is available to me: I, too, can note the way that rationality requires training, how we develop from dependency to independence through being raised in a culture, and how we are always already situated in a social world which provides roles and background beliefs from which we must begin our task of self-unification. Much of what follows is my way of putting what MacIntyre has already said.

Thus, we can point to the way that an obsessive health nut is dependent on health researchers, gym owners, and trainers, or to the fact that he must have been introduced to this kind of life by someone, and likely continues in it as a member of a group of people interested in health. He is thus required to cultivate beliefs, desires, and ways of acting which will contribute to his ability to take advantage of these resources for his goal of health. There will be an etiquette to the use of exercise materials, the need to gain help from others, and a duty to provide help to others. There will be pressure to learn about health and thus cultivate a moderate understanding of human biology.

One of the points I want to make here is that obsessive interests tend to metastasize into a field of interests. The athlete wants to understand how to be a good athlete, will tend to gain an interest in a particular form of athleticism, will want to understand the history of her activity, if only to glean tips from long-dead masters. To gain access to these fields, she will need an introduction, or at least an introduction to teaching oneself. If the athlete does not gain these interests, she will need to rely on others who do have these interests. In either case, she is now a member of a community of mutual helpers.

She will thus tend to be drawn into the lives of others, simply because she is interested in them as fellows in the project she herself is engaged in. This interest is due to our need to learn how to live from others. We learn how to live by watching others live. It is to our detriment to be self-obsessed, because then we will have no resources to draw from in navigating new problems in life. Supposing the athlete treats fellow athletes merely as resources, then she will be, not only a worse human for it, but a worse athlete. She will be spurned as not helpful. Others will cease to care about how she is as a whole person. Yet the whole person is relevant to athleticism. One's health is affected by things beyond pure athleticism. How her work affects what she can eat, how she can get exercise into her day, how her recovery from a sprain is affecting her emotional health, all are avenues which tend to lead to a concern for others as people, rather than merely as athletic machines. By spurning others, she loses out on learning of how to incorporate athletic practices into her particular day, because she loses the ability to see how others do it.

By hooking my ethics into our actual human constitution, I am able to overcome the objection to formal ethical systems. Further, by framing my ethics at a general level, I enable it to act as a framework for thinking about our particular constitution, and avoid the appearance of ethics being completely relative to a kind of constitution. Rather, the formal level provides substance when applied to a concrete constitution.

Unity of the Self

It is a relatively uncontentious thesis that consciousness is, at least experienced as, a simple and unified thing. I want to argue that the embodied self has a unity, as well. This unity is not a factual unity but an ideal unity, that is, to be more fully a self one must be more fully a union.

The self is composed of a variety of aspects. The physical, the mental, and the social are the three we have been focusing on. These three aspects should each form a unity in themselves, and should be united with each other to form a self. We do better or worse as each of these and all of these together form a more unified whole.

For the physical aspect to be unified requires merely maintenance of bodily order. The bodily processes which maintain our physical life need to continue to work together and thereby succeed in maintaining our bodily presence. When the body breaks down, our ability to be as we have otherwise constituted ourselves breaks down. We can no longer fulfill the roles which we have taken on, because our bodies no longer enable us to perform the necessary tasks.

For the mental aspect of our lives to be unified requires that our beliefs hold together. I understand this broadly to require not only our explicit claims, but also those claims which we implicitly show ourselves to believe by how we act. Some beliefs we will state, other beliefs we will act on the basis of, and to be a unified self, these two sorts of beliefs need to avoid conflict. Our emotions and our beliefs also need to fit together. Now, just as we are rarely perfectly healthy, I doubt any mere mortal has ever attained perfect unity of mental life, either. Nevertheless, at the other extreme, that of breakdown, we would lose the ability to make sense of our own actions. The better we unify our mental lives, the more we will be able to regulate our own behavior, the more we will do what we say we want to do. Mental unity is not the only constrain on what we should claim, of course, or, to the extent that it is, we must notice that our perceptions and beliefs about rationality are among the constraints. Sometimes, it will be clear that we should not drop a claim simply because we have not found ourselves acting by it, but should seek means of altering our behavior, of training our desires and habits to track what we claim is true.

For the social aspect of our lives to be unified involves the roles we take up, the groups we find ourselves in, the responsibilities we accept, and the images we project of ourselves fitting together. We should not have roles which must conflict, or different groups we are in which pit us against ourselves, or sets of responsibilities which exclude their mutual fulfillment. The images we give of ourselves should not conflict, although they may provide quite different pictures of ourselves. Further, our images of ourselves should not conflict with the roles and responsibilities we have accepted. The groups we are part of should aid, rather than hinder, the roles and responsibilities we are to fulfill.

For all three of these to be unified with each other requires that our beliefs, desires, and actions should fit our roles, images, and group memberships, and that both of these should fit with what our bodies enable us to do and to be. Our group memberships and roles are constrained by what our bodies can do and the beliefs we hold. The beliefs we can hold are constrained by our bodily context and social milieu, our bodily capacities are affected by the groups we participate in, the roles we perform, and our beliefs and desires. Even where different aspects of ourselves are compatible, differences may nuance the manner in which we fulfill a role or think about a topic or care for our bodies.

We can seek to approximate a perfect unity of the self, but approximation is as good as we can hope for in this life. Further, in light of eternity, some elements of self may become less important, able to wait for the perfection to come. It is useful to keep in mind that much of these efforts at unification depend on contingent factors: sickness, intellectual acumen, social intelligence, not to mention the contingencies of the physical, intellectual, and social world one finds oneself in, can all hinder or help one in forming a unity of oneself. Thus, the ethics which this presents is not that one ought to be unified, but that one ought to be working in that direction in a manner appropriate to it.

Hylian and Aristotelian Virtue

 In Aristotle's philosophy of the virtues, the highest virtue is often phronesis, or practical wisdom. In The Legend of Zelda games, there is a triforce composed of three triangles. One represents courage, one wisdom, and one power. I understand these to represent the three core virtues of the Hylian world. If one were an Aristotelian, it would make sense to make wisdom the central virtue. The Legend of Zelda, however, presents courage as the key virtue.

When one plays a Zelda game, one plays Link, a youth dressed in green. Usually, one finds oneself with a glowing triangle on one's hand early on: the first part of the triforce. This first part is the triforce of courage. Over the course of the game, one usually collects the other two: the triforces of wisdom and power. The usual progression is courage, then wisdom, and finally power. The game presents this as a natural progression. It thus suggests that wisdom cannot be gained virtuously without courage, and power cannot be gained virtuously without both.

Interestingly, there are two other characters in the game which possess the same kind of glowing marks on their hands. The princess Zelda possesses the triforce of wisdom, and the big bad Ganondorf possesses the triforce of power. The only one of the three who can be the hero is Link, however. Zelda may be wise, but for some reason, the game suggests, one cannot work from wisdom to reach the courage necessary to face Ganondorf. Power without the other two, the game suggests, will be misused.

The account of the virtues presented in The Legend of Zelda may be compatible with that of Aristotle. Aristotle's primacy of phronesis requires one to attain it be attain other virtues, in such a way that to possess phronesis is, constitutively, to possess the other virtues. But for Aristotle courage is but one among many virtues. For The Legend of Zelda, courage is the key to growing in wisdom and power without becoming a mere guide or a bully.

I think the view that courage is central to developing virtue is common in our day. The idea that what is required to be good is to have the courage to be oneself, to face the challenges one is set, to speak up, and so on, is a popular idea. The notion that wisdom is a necessary waypoint on the way to power, however, may be endorsed less often. Our notions of success have one jumping straight from a kind of courage to power, but what The Legend of Zelda suggests is that this is not the way of courage. It thus suggests that courage requires a certain kind of direction to be courage. Indeed, Link is often presented, not only as brave, but as eager to help, concerned with the needs of others. This, I think the game suggests, is part of what Hylian courage is, the courage to aid others without fear of how they will respond, whether they will appreciate it. Yet, wisdom then takes its place as understanding what others need or want, what will enable others to develop. Power then takes its place, in the same place as in Aristotle's magnanimus man, as the power to provide for and protect others.

Expansive Concern: Environmentalism and The Good Life

In this post I want to articulate how it is that human beings, uniquely among animals, cares for and should care for creation as a whole and without direct regard for our own well being. To do this, I want to argue that we posses what I call "expansive concern." Thus, in this post, I hope to articulate my concept of expansive concern and argue that we possess it.

Expansive concern is concern which is able to regard any subject, as well as elements of the natural world, as possessing value in itself. Notice that this is similar to what I have already claimed for humans as selves, that we are able to recognize other selves as selves, and thus are able to recognize that others have their own value by recognizing that arguments we make for our own value applies to others as correlates of worlds just as well as to ourselves. Thus, in this post, I need to show how our concern expands beyond other selves.

To do this, I need to return to the concept of culture. Just as selves emerge from living bodies, so culture emerges from a natural world. The natural world is something of an abstraction, just as our living bodies are. We never encounter either one by itself, apart from their respective subjective phenomena. That is, we never encounter living human bodies except as selves or latent selves. We never encounter nature except as it has come to be entangled with culture.

Culture is a very broad term here. It includes phenomena which one might not think of as cultural, such as our natural appreciation for exercise. Culture covers the whole terrain of how we as societies value the world around us. The imagery which we have drawn from and laid over nature is a key part of culture. The ways in which weather evokes emotions and associations in us is a cultural phenomenon, whether or not it varies from culture to culture.

As I write this, it is snowing outside. Winter has a variety of connotations, whether of hardship and desolation, of curling up by a fire with a good book, or of an adventure in a transfigured world. Snow, by itself, has further connotations of purity or, in a blizzard, of isolation and stranding. These are cultural connotations. However, these are also based in how winter is and what snow is like. Winter is cold, it freezes the ground, it keeps one inside. Snow is opaque and among the whitest things in nature. We do not merely impose ideas and values on nature, but engage nature in such a way that it has values for us.

All of this is to make the point that culture stands on material and natural conditions. To alter the environment is to alter that upon which culture stands. To fail to care about what happens to nature is like failing to care about what happens to one's body. It is a mistake which relies on a kind of Gnostic or Platonic aversion to the body in favor of an immaterial soul. The value of sociality thus grounds a concern for the environment because to act sustainably with respect to culture requires one to act sustainably with respect to the environment.

The Value of Sociality

The third area of fundamental value for us as human beings which I will discuss is that of what I will refer to as sociality. Sociality is the way we are related to other selves as selves. It involves culture and communication. I have already noted that I believe we develop as selves through sociality, but I will not presuppose that here. Instead, I hope that this post helps motivate my earlier stated view.

To begin with, notice that all of our arguments thus far could be run from any point of view and remain valid. This means that we must recognize others acceptance of those arguments as valid. This does not yet get us the claim that we should all value each others' lives.

Language is an essential part of sociality. It is a manifestation of culture and a means of communication. In language, all that we can refer to are shared realities. That is, any term we can learn a word for is a term which multiple of us can understand the use of. Thus, when any of us claim to be aware, awareness must be understood as something which both hearer and speaker are aware of if the term is to have meaning. This eliminates the possibility of a consistent solipsism, or at least of arguing consistently for solipsism.

Now, the value which attaches to my life for me attaches to it in virtue of its being, not just my having a world, but there being a world. The methodological solipsism through which that argument works is such that it operates as if each life correlates with a world, so that the value of a life is the value of the world it correlates with. Such worlds are worlds centered on perspectives and interlock with one another in a real, shared world. Thus, the methodological solipsism does not give way to either an epistemological or a metaphysical solipsism.

Because the value of my life is the value of a world, not the value of my having such a world, to be consistent I must also value others' worlds, not merely their valuing their possession of them. I must, then, value others. A brake is placed on this, however, by the fact that it is not as basic a value as my own valuing of my world. The value I place on my own world is the basis on which I build other values. Those further values are then able to compete and interact. Thus, I am not required to treat the lives of others identically to my own, although I am supposed to treat others' lives as equal in value to my own. Each self is in a privileged position with respect to their own lives, such that it is proper for them to act with respect to nearer values more than farther values. Elsewhere I may go into this in more detail, but the basic idea is that, while the values are the same, our proper response to the value of a phenomenon depends on to what extent we ought to notice the phenomenon. Two phenomena can be of equal value and yet one may require greater attention from me in virtue of being "in my face," as it were.

At this point we can say that we ought to value others, and we ought to respond to the values of those close to us in certain, albeit as yet undefined, ways. We can also say that we must presume that terms we share have a shared meaning. One big question remains: must we value interaction with others, which is what both culture and language presuppose?

First, notice that we cannot but interact with others. We are born, and if we are to become anything like what we are supposed to become, we must be raised by other humans. As soon as we are born, we begin to learn language, and are thus inextricably entangled in a culture.

Some children are literally raised by wolves and survive, albeit not in a manner most of us would recognize as flourishing. Such humans still have the same human nature which we might say should have given rise to sociality. Furthermore, such humans still utilize aspects of their social capacity to learn from the creatures around them by mimicking them. Thus, even in cases where the capacity is starved, it is naturally utilized as much as possible.

This brings me to another point: sociality includes learning. To learn any skill requires one of two things: either another who can teach or the ability to engage in a subject with an experimental attitude. In the first case, we take what the teacher offers and incorporate it into how we live. In the second case, however, we still operate through a latent sociality. This is because the experimental attitude through which we discern what actions will produce what effects involves an abstraction from ourselves. Skills are not merely abilities, nor are they merely learned abilities. Rather, a skill is distinct from a conditioned behavior by opening on a world of values and reasons. To learn a skill is to have the world articulated in a new manner, one which provides a new way of thinking about a subject. To find a new way of thinking requires the ability to entertain hypotheses and imagine what would make one wrong. To learn a new way of thinking, likewise, involves learning what those who have the skill consider when they utilize their skill.

Skills, then, involve acquiring others as interlocutors within oneself. To learn a skill from a teacher involves gaining from the teacher that teacher's manner of thinking, mediated through language and bodily action, and thus involves acquiring a way of talking and acting which belongs in the first place to the teacher but now also to oneself.

None of this is to say that we should be with others all the time. However, since sociality includes learning, and insofar as language use is a skill (and, in some ways it is, along with walking, the prototypical skill, although it is in other ways sui generis), we all carry others along with us wherever we are. We are never purely alone by ourselves, but ourselves always include others who have taught us and whose way of thinking is carried with us.

The Value of Rational Agency

In this post, I will argue for the value of rational agency. We have already touched on the value of agency in discussing embodiment, so the emphasis here will be on why we should seek to act rationally and what it is to act rationally.

We are stuck acting. We are agents, and thus we must act. Even failing to act is, so long as we are conscious and able to do something, an action in the relevant sense. Actions are behaviors which we permit or cause in ourselves for reasons. In other words, all action is action for some reason. Actions are done in response to perceived goods, in order to preserve or attain those goods. To value oneself as living requires one to value oneself as an agent, and to value oneself as an agent requires one to value oneself as one who acts for the sake of what is valuable.

We must be careful here. It is easy to think of actions and the values for the sake of which one performs the actions as distinct and separable. However, since an action is not an action apart from an end, and since one cannot have an end except as an end for potential actions, the two concepts cannot come apart. The actions we perform express our values. Actions are symptomatic of values, but values can likewise be altered via actions. By acting, we put in concrete form what we value. We thus specify our values to a greater extent. Moreover, in acting, we discover what it is like to so act. We acclimate ourselves to acting in this manner, for these reasons, in this role. Thus, if we seek a particular end, the proper action to take is not merely the most efficient way to achieve that end, but involves us in seeking actions which will express our values as we would have them be, actions which do not speak contrary to the end they are to attain. We cannot murder in order to save lives, we cannot lie in order to preserve the truth, and, in sum, we cannot make exceptions to values we would strengthen our grasp on.

This presume that our bodily actions have meanings which cannot be reduced to the agent's own intentions. This requires that the body have a kind of value-expressive structure independent of what we might value. The body must, then, have some kind of authority over us to direct us to stand with dignity and treat others with respect and care. Because we are embodied, and because we ought to value that embodiment, we ought to regard with respect the restrictions which the body places on how we can act. We should not seek to treat the sense of bodily actions as merely cultural. Even culturally defined actions are not merely cultural--culture is strong and produces real meanings for our actions. What is culturally conditioned has a meaning which permits the bodily behaviors to speak to and alter our values.

Rational agency, then, is not merely a matter of efficient action, but also of accurately connecting the meanings of actions to each other and to our values. To put it another way: the ends to which we must coordinate our means are not merely external, but internal to ourselves: virtue is an end, and we must seek it, along with whatever else we value.

Further, virtue is not an end we may escape. Because we are agents, we seek what seems good to us, and we implicitly presume that there is a right answer to questions of what to do. Merely be acting, we are bound up in wondering what to do, how to live. By acting, we express answers to this question. By deliberating, we presuppose that it is possible to go wrong, as well as right, in answering this question. The question we are seeking an answer to can be put many ways: What is valuable? What kind of life is worth living? What is it I must value to be consistent with valuing my life and seeking, therefore, to make it a good life?

The Value of Embodiment

Having laid the groundwork for values, we can progress to some particulars. In this post, I want to argue that our embodiment is something we ought to value. From there, we can examine how to regard particular modes of embodiment, and what our relationship to them should be.

Our bodies are our means of interacting with the world. We perceive through our bodies and alter our surroundings via our bodies. To live is to have a body. The world we find ourselves in correlates with the body we find ourselves to be. Thus, in presuming the goodness of our lives and of the world, we are forced to value our embodiment as a means to having lives and a world.

Because our bodies are how we have and alter a world, we can say that the purpose of a body is to provide us with perceptual and active access to the world. Thus, one way a body can be good is by enabling us to perceive the world well and enabling us to affect the world well. The next question, then, must be: what counts as perceiving or affecting the world well?

To perceive the world well is to perceive the world in such a way that we can act in a way that fits how the world is. This does not require complete accuracy and specificity of perception, but the degree of accuracy and specificity required for our projects. Thus, perceiving well is relative to our other projects. Augmenting human vision, then, is not a good in and of itself, but only insofar as it enables us to achieve other goods.

To affect the world well is to alter the world in a sustainable manner. To affect the world sustainably is to affect the world in such a way that the effect preserves and enhances the way in which the world hangs together. It thus includes economic sustainability as preserving and enhancing how the physical environment hangs together, but also includes social sustainability as preserving and enhancing how society hangs together, bodily sustainability as preserving and enhancing how our own bodies hang together, and rational sustainability as preserving and enhancing how our thoughts hang together.

Because our bodies are how we live, the goodness of a body serves the goodness of a life. Thus, part of the purpose of a body is to enable us to live well. What we are as bodies is part of what determines what counts as living well, but it is not all. There are two other fundamental values that we will argue for--rational agency and sociality--which also impact what a good life for beings like us is. The goodness of a life is thus served, at least generally, by affecting the world well. In each case of sustainably affecting the world, the aim is the same: to preserve and enhance the way the parts come together to form a unified, synergistic whole.

The Value of Life

It is somewhat depressing to try to argue for the irrationality of suicide, but it is the only way I know of to achieve lift off in thinking about what we should value. If we must value our own lives, then we must, to be rational, value what is conducive to that life.

We will start with a thought experiment. To compare the value of one's own life to one's own lack of life, we need two states of affairs. One, where one is alive, and another, where one is not. We are considering the value to oneself of one's own life, however, so both cases must be from one's own point of view. Let us, for the purpose of this thought experiment, suppose a view I think is false: that when you die, you no longer exist. So when we are considering these two cases, one exists versus one does not exist, how do we compare the value of the two cases to oneself? Well, we might try to imagine both from one's own point of view. What happens when one does that, however, is that one has nowhere to look out from in the case where one does not exist.

There are two ways to try to solve this problem. One is a solipsistic method, the other is a value-expansionist approach. In order, then:

If we approach the case solipsistically, then one is a case where there is a world, and the other is a case where there is no world. So, is the world better than the cessation of the world? To put it another way, is the value of the world, for oneself, greater than zero? To show the irrationality of suicide from this point of view, one merely needs to show that the value of the world can never be less than or equal to none at all. Having argued for the presumption of goodness already, we can say that we should always presume that the world is at least somewhat good.

If one approaches from the value-expansionist approach, then, instead of losing the world standing in for one's loss of existence, one utilizes the perspectives of others who remain. Thus, the question is whether the value of one's existence to those around one is greater than the value of the loss of one's existence. I want to make two points about this. First, to prove that suicide must be irrational on this approach, one must show that everyone is valued more than disvalued. Second, people who are actually thinking about suicide generally either do not have this option because they have ceased caring much about what others think or they are not in an epistemic position to be able to tell what others think about their value because they project their own feelings onto others. So this approach is useful only for the use I am trying to put it to, that is, establishing the value of life for the sake of grounding value.

Now, in order for someone to disvalue another, they must have some basis for such disvaluing, which will have to be some further value. If there is no ultimate basis for value, then the value of things will be relative to the observer. In that case, the value of one's own life will be modifiable, in principle, by altering what one cares about and thus whose values one takes into consideration. In fact, if one ceases to value anything, then one will no longer have any basis on which to select others' perspectives from which to evaluate the world, but if one does not exist, then one does not value anything. If, on the other hand, there is some ultimate basis, then we can work from whatever one's present valuations are, as well as derive what others valuation of one should be, and further, if we permit a Kantian move, then to disvalue another person completely, as a human person, requires the disvaluation of oneself as such also. If one has to regard oneself as valuable qua human (or qua rational being, etc.,) then one has to regard oneself as valuable at a basic level, however disvaluable one may be under less basic descriptions.

These are arguments against the cessation of any conscious being's existence being more valuable than the continuation of such a being's existence. From thence, one can provide arguments for and against the value of other things. Thus, I can now support the claims I made last time about three fundamental ways in which we must value ourselves. They are all based on the value of one's continued existence, although each also allows an argument for one's continued existence as well.

Embodiment: one cannot be aware of a world without a body.

Rational Agency: one cannot act without regard to reasons so long as one lives.

Sociality: one cannot begin apart from a society which brings one forth.

More on each of these three to follow.

Teleological Ethics

In this post, I take up the task of arguing for a teleological ethics, that is, an ethics in terms of ends. I will be stealing an immense amount from Korsgaard, but I am not exactly sure which works, and some of it is likely second-hand.

A teleological ethics need not presume that things have ends given them by some external agent. It must, however, assume that ends of things can be posited in some manner. It is generally connected to a view of good in general that holds that "being good" is a predicate with application relative to the ends of the bearer.

Let us begin by elaborating this notion of good with a case where the end is provided by an agent: chairs. A chair has a purpose: to hold someone up who sits in it. Most chairs are supposed to do so in a manner comfortable for--and even better, good for--the individual sitting in the chair. Thus, a sturdy, ergonomic chair is a better chair, as a chair, than one which can only hold 100lbs, and is uncomfortable. These goods are all relative to the purpose the chair is to be put to, however. A children's chair makes a bad chair for a grownup. A good chair may make a bad prop. Furniture is often intended to be aesthetically pleasing, that is, they should look nice. So a futuristic-looking chair would be a bad chair for a cozy log-cabin-style den.

A teleological ethics claims that human beings have an end, and that to be a good human being is to fulfill that end. Some teleological ethics utilize revelation to determine what this end is. Others examine how humans operate in social life to try to figure it out. Both, however, assume that pursuing this end will result in a life we will be glad to have lived.

We all have a view about what our ends are. We all have views about what kind of life we will be able to look back on with pride versus shame. Further, I would claim, we all live in an effort to fulfill the ends we take to be ours. Insofar as we identify as being certain ways, we try to be those ways well. We try to be good versions of what we take ourselves to be. When we do not, it is because we do not value being those things. If you want to be x, then you will try to be a good x, whatever you take that to be, just as, if you want a chair, you will want a good chair, whatever that means in the given context.

If I understand her right, Korsgaard holds that we should base our ethics on those descriptions under which we cannot help but value ourselves. There is something to this, and it results in ethics being inherently motivated (albeit other motives can keep us from being ethical). However, as usual with Kantian moves of this sort, it is hard to see how we can get much of an ethical system out of this. What I think is right here is that whatever ethical system is right should hook up to how we are motivated in just this way: the truth-maker for a moral ought claim "one should phi" should, if we know and accept and value it, motivate us to phi.

Instead of relying on what we cannot help but value in this manner, I would suggest we examine the kinds of beings we find ourselves to be and what traits we find we cannot do without. We should then value those traits. We may avoid valuing ourselves as embodied, rational, social beings. Nevertheless, these are characteristics which human beings ought to possess. Things go poorly for us and others around us when they are lacking. Whatever one's values, one should value being embodied, rationally agential, and social, because we cannot do without them.

In closing, I want to distinguish between three ways in which one might be said to value something one is. First, one might explicitly value it, that is, one may claim and believe that one values it. Second, one may actually value it, that is, treat it as valuable. Third, one may find one's behaviors which exhibit disvaluing it to have results which one disvalues. The third is that in virtue of which we should do the second, ceteris paribus. The first has little to do with the above. Up to this paragraph, all my uses of the term "value" are meant in the second sense. The other two are derivative meanings which I include here to disambiguate what I mean by the verb "to value."

Pragmatist Argument for The Presumption of Goodness

In the previous post, I explained the presumption of goodness and argued for it from theological considerations. In this post, I want to present an account of what good is, and argue from there to a presumption of goodness.

The account of good is a pragmatist account. It is related to a pragmatist account of what things are. The general account says that whatever exists shows itself to be  what it is in the long run. As it relates to good, then, it says that whatever is good, whatever one ought to do, in the long run it will become clear that it was so. Thus, whatever is good will be proven good, and whatever is bad will be proven bad.

Note that this account can be agnostic as to whether what proves something good or bad makes it so. My preferred view is that actions and events are good or bad on account of how they impact the flourishing of various entities, and are proven such because of a coherence among various things in the world. The view also makes no definite claims about what something's being proven good would amount to, but the obstruction of the ordinary or intended consequences of an act or event is likely to count, ceteris paribus.

This view presumes that the world works together in some kind of coherent manner, and holds that this coherent manner is, in total, good. Particular events or actions can still be bad, so long as other parts of the system, as it were, "reject" them, but the entirety of the system over the long haul has to cohere in such a manner that particular things show up as good and other particular things show up as bad. On this basis, then, we wind up at the same place when considering the world as created good: the way the world works must be, at root, good.

Creation and The Presumption of Goodness

I mentioned in my post on Empiricism and Theism that one might reach the conclusion that our desires are supposed to be fulfilled via a presumption in favor of the goodness of creation. In this post, I want to defend that presumption and articulate how it functions.

First off, then, what do I mean by a presumption of goodness? I mean that we presume things are good unless and until we have reason to think that they are not. This presumption can be based on the original goodness of creation, but more is needed: creation is no longer in its original state.

It is quite easy to view the fall as resulting in the world going from good to bad, and there is truth to that. The world is not purely and very good, as it once was. Nevertheless, it is the same world. Thus, the fundamental structures are the same. Gravity is not a result of the fall, and more importantly, the general constitution of human bodies, when they are functioning well, is not a result of the fall. It is possible that some quirks of human biology are a result of the fall and are bad, but this cannot be the usual case.

So the heuristic can be framed as follows: whatever we expect will remain in heaven, or already existed before the fall, is good. In order to claim that something is bad, then, we need to be able to articulate how a world without it could operate. In some cases, this is easy. In others, however, it is not so easy.

Further, what is bad can only be a twisting of what is good. It is bad because it either obstructs something serving its purpose or because it is no longer properly oriented to its purpose. So even when we identify something bad, we are constrained to say what good it corrupts.

There are some patterns of fallacious reasoning that we are prone to fall into as humans. We tend to justify our claims after the fact, for instance. If our reasoning is purely for the sake of truth, then this is a curious pattern for us to fall into. If we presume that this pattern has some basis in God's good creation, even though it now operates in bad ways, we are directed to ask what purpose something like this might play.

The Good of Autonomy

It is generally good to permit people to do as they please. This is a relatively modern notion, I think. It can also become a distinctively modern idol to which we sacrifice ourselves and our children. It is, nevertheless, a genuine good. What supports this good?

Autonomy is good because it allows us to exercise our deliberative capacities. It thus enables us to express our moral point of view. Autonomy matters because autonomous decisions matter to others. If my decision has no impact whatsoever on others, then my deciding thus quite literally means nothing. So allowing autonomy is a calculated risk. We allow others to mess up in order to attain a good of self-expression.

Why is self-expression good? It is not an unmitigated good. Indeed, the expression "self-expression" is not perfectly clear. When we express ourselves, we also form ourselves. In writing this post, I do not merely express my thoughts, I also develop my thoughts. My thoughts on this topic are altered by expressing them. Before, my thoughts were a bit of a fuzz, but by writing this the thoughts come into focus or, more accurately, coalesce into an articulated form. The joints of my thoughts become, not visible, but definite and therefore visible. In deciding we define ourselves and thereby clarify for ourselves and others who we are. So self-expression is a part of self-development.

To be a self is, on my account, to be a being who can perceive and act with regard to others as others. The other elements of being a self arise from this interaction with others in culture. We absorb things from others--ideas, phrases, heuristics, rules, ways of acting and modes of thought. These varied things from varied people clash. They require synthesis into a coherent self, a self who can pursue a single life. In this synthesis, dissonances must be resolved between mind and body, body and world, mind and culture, etc., and in doing so one changes.

So to develop oneself through self-expression is to articulate how one has picked up the culture around oneself, and to present what one has picked up to other, thus to contribute to altering culture. So self-expression does two things. First, it develops culture by contributing to a re-synthesizing of its elements and thus providing more for others to pick up on. Second, it develops oneself by nailing down (often partial) resolutions to various tensions we find ourselves in.

We resolve tensions in our culture in our own persons and then hold up our answers, our lives and words, to others for them to accept or reject. If we aim to reach a solid resolution, we must accept this phase as well. Others then pick up what we say as elements of themselves, whether as useful antagonists or as allies. They think with us: by means of what we have contributed. We then pick up their developments and the cycle repeats. We hope that we are coming to a closer and closer approximation, but this can only occur by taking seriously the goods others are responding to, addressing them, and finding a place for them in a renewed culture.

Autonomy is good, then, because it helps us to resolve debates about how to live, how our culture should be understood and what it should and become. Autonomy is good because it permits exploration of ways of being and doing. It is a risk because we may go wrong. The role of autonomy is to answer questions which can be answered by seeing different ways of life, and the point of autonomy can only be preserved where opposing views are given a fair and serious hearing. Autonomy is pointless without disagreement and it is sterile without debate between opposed views. To utilize autonomy is to invite dispute regarding one's choices.