Month: May 2016

Action, Virtue and Happiness

entirelyuseless Ethics, Uncategorized , , ,

Asking about the end of human life, Aristotle says:

Let us again return to the good we are seeking, and ask what it can be. It seems different in different actions and arts; it is different in medicine, in strategy, and in the other arts likewise. What then is the good of each? Surely that for whose sake everything else is done. In medicine this is health, in strategy victory, in architecture a house, in any other sphere something else, and in every action and pursuit the end; for it is for the sake of this that all men do whatever else they do. Therefore, if there is an end for all that we do, this will be the good achievable by action, and if there are more than one, these will be the goods achievable by action.

So the argument has by a different course reached the same point; but we must try to state this even more clearly. Since there are evidently more than one end, and we choose some of these (e.g. wealth, flutes, and in general instruments) for the sake of something else, clearly not all ends are final ends; but the chief good is evidently something final. Therefore, if there is only one final end, this will be what we are seeking, and if there are more than one, the most final of these will be what we are seeking. Now we call that which is in itself worthy of pursuit more final than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something else more final than the things that are desirable both in themselves and for the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call final without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.

Now such a thing happiness, above all else, is held to be; for this we choose always for self and never for the sake of something else, but honour, pleasure, reason, and every virtue we choose indeed for themselves (for if nothing resulted from them we should still choose each of them), but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, judging that by means of them we shall be happy. Happiness, on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these, nor, in general, for anything other than itself.

From the point of view of self-sufficiency the same result seems to follow; for the final good is thought to be self-sufficient. Now by self-sufficient we do not mean that which is sufficient for a man by himself, for one who lives a solitary life, but also for parents, children, wife, and in general for his friends and fellow citizens, since man is born for citizenship. But some limit must be set to this; for if we extend our requirement to ancestors and descendants and friends’ friends we are in for an infinite series. Let us examine this question, however, on another occasion; the self-sufficient we now define as that which when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in nothing; and such we think happiness to be; and further we think it most desirable of all things, without being counted as one good thing among others- if it were so counted it would clearly be made more desirable by the addition of even the least of goods; for that which is added becomes an excess of goods, and of goods the greater is always more desirable. Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action.

Presumably, however, to say that happiness is the chief good seems a platitude, and a clearer account of what it is still desired. This might perhaps be given, if we could first ascertain the function of man. For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or an artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the ‘well’ is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function. Have the carpenter, then, and the tanner certain functions or activities, and has man none? Is he born without a function? Or as eye, hand, foot, and in general each of the parts evidently has a function, may one lay it down that man similarly has a function apart from all these? What then can this be? Life seems to be common even to plants, but we are seeking what is peculiar to man. Let us exclude, therefore, the life of nutrition and growth. Next there would be a life of perception, but it also seems to be common even to the horse, the ox, and every animal. There remains, then, an active life of the element that has a rational principle; of this, one part has such a principle in the sense of being obedient to one, the other in the sense of possessing one and exercising thought. And, as ‘life of the rational element’ also has two meanings, we must state that life in the sense of activity is what we mean; for this seems to be the more proper sense of the term. Now if the function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies a rational principle, and if we say ‘so-and-so-and ‘a good so-and-so’ have a function which is the same in kind, e.g. a lyre, and a good lyre-player, and so without qualification in all cases, eminence in respect of goodness being added to the name of the function (for the function of a lyre-player is to play the lyre, and that of a good lyre-player is to do so well): if this is the case, and we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.

But we must add ‘in a complete life.’ For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

The basic argument is something like this: the purpose of a human being should be to function well as a human being, just as the purpose of sculptor is to sculpt well. And “virtue” seems to name that by which a person functions well as a human being. Consequently, according to Aristotle, the purpose of a man is to live a virtuous life. He goes on to say that this purpose is obtained to some degree in the active life, but most perfectly in the intellectual life. And he calls such a life a happy life.

To the degree that Aristotle is basing ethics on this position, he implies something about the meaning of moral claims. As argued in the linked post, saying that something should be done means that it must be done for the sake of an end. If the end in question is a happy life, which itself is “a life according to virtue,” then moral claims have a reference to this end. “You should not kill” means “In order to live a virtuous life, you should avoid killing.”

This brings up at least two issues:

First, the definition of happiness seems implicitly circular. Of course if your goal is to live a virtuous life, you must engage in virtuous actions. But which actions are virtuous? We normally think that actions are virtuous if they are morally good. But now we are saying that morally good actions are ones which are good means to our end, which is “a virtuous life.” So morally good actions are ones which are good means to the end of living a life consisting of morally good actions. That seems to tell us nothing, and seems to suggest that we could define virtue any way we like, and say that anything is virtuous.

Second, there is the issue raised in the last post regarding the flexibility of ethics. If the reason to do good things is in order to live a virtuous life, what about people who don’t want to live a virtuous life? It seems that there will be no reason for them to do good things.

 

Is and Ought

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In Book III of his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume argues that reason and morality are completely independent:

Reason is the discovery of truth or falsehood. Truth or falsehood consists in an agreement or disagreement either with the real relations of ideas, or with real existence and matter of fact. So anything that isn’t capable of this agreement or disagreement isn’t capable of being true or false, and can never be an object of our reason. Now, our passions, volitions, and actions are basic facts and realities; they are complete in themselves and aren’t in any way about other passions, volitions, and actions; so they aren’t capable of either of those sorts of agreement or disagreement; so they can’t be sorted into ‘true’ and ‘false’, and can’t be either in conflict with reason or in accord with it.

It is true that an action is not true or false, nor can it be the conclusion of an argument. And in that sense there is some separation between action and reason, as Hume says here. Nonetheless, Hume intends to imply something more, namely that reason cannot tell us what we should do. If reason can tell us what we should do, then doing something else instead is an action in conflict with reason, even though it is not a false statement.

Later, Hume clarifies his position:

I can’t forbear adding an observation that may be found of some importance. In every system of morality I have met with I have noticed that the author proceeds for some time reasoning in the ordinary way to establish the existence of a God, or making points about human affairs, and then he suddenly surprises me by moving from propositions with the usual copula ‘is’ (or ‘is not’) to ones that are connected by ‘ought’ (or ‘ought not’). This seems like a very small change, but it is highly important. For as this ‘ought’ (or ‘ought not’) expresses some new relation or affirmation, it needs to be pointed out and explained; and a reason should be given for how this new relation can be—inconceivably!—a deduction from others that are entirely different from it. Authors don’t ordinarily take the trouble to do this, so I recommend it to you; and I’m convinced that paying attention to this one small matter will subvert all the vulgar systems of morality and let us see that the distinction between vice and virtue is not based merely on the relations of objects, and is not perceived by reason.

Hume suggests that it is “inconceivable” that a statement involving the word “ought” would derive from statements without that word. This can be taken as a mere point of logic: the conclusion of a syllogism will not contain a term which is not contained in the premises. But if we understand it in this way, his point is true but rather unimportant, at least in relation to his argument about morality. For the same thing is true of all terms. In the statement, “Trees have leaves and branches,” the word “trees” cannot possibly be logically derived from statements that do not mention trees. It does not follow that statements about trees are somehow cut off from all the rest of reality. It does not even follow that people cannot explain what they mean by a “tree.” Someone can explain this by referring to various fairly common experiences that people have.

So as a logical point, this proves nothing in particular about morality, although it is a partial explanation for the difficulty of philosophy. I pointed out in the discussion of Spinoza’s Ethics that the fact that philosophy wishes to speak about reality in general implies that it must use a practically unlimited number of terms, and consequently that it cannot be built up as a formal system like geometry.

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses ethics as a kind of art which aims at an end:

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. But a certain difference is found among ends; some are activities, others are products apart from the activities that produce them. Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the nature of the products to be better than the activities. Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth. But where such arts fall under a single capacity- as bridle-making and the other arts concerned with the equipment of horses fall under the art of riding, and this and every military action under strategy, in the same way other arts fall under yet others- in all of these the ends of the master arts are to be preferred to all the subordinate ends; for it is for the sake of the former that the latter are pursued. It makes no difference whether the activities themselves are the ends of the actions, or something else apart from the activities, as in the case of the sciences just mentioned.

If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is, and of which of the sciences or capacities it is the object. It would seem to belong to the most authoritative art and that which is most truly the master art. And politics appears to be of this nature; for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state, and which each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should learn them; and we see even the most highly esteemed of capacities to fall under this, e.g. strategy, economics, rhetoric; now, since politics uses the rest of the sciences, and since, again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, the end of this science must include those of the others, so that this end must be the good for man. For even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for city-states. These, then, are the ends at which our inquiry aims, since it is political science, in one sense of that term.

If we understand ethics in this way, this explains what is meant by saying that something “ought” to be done, because we know what is meant when we say, for example, “If you want to attach those boards with a nail, you ought to use a hammer.” This implies that a hammer is useful, or perhaps even necessary, in relation to the goal in question. In fact, “ought” is sometimes replaced with “must,” which is a word directly expressing necessity.

Of course, “you must use a hammer” does not imply that there is a physical necessity that you use a hammer, so that you cannot avoid using one. The necessity is a hypothetical one: given that you are going to obtain the end, you must use a hammer. If you do not use a hammer, you will not obtain the end.

This explains, in a certain way, why Hume has difficulty with the point. A repeated concern in his work is that he cannot see a way to understand the idea of necessity. He says for example that he has a hard time understanding any “necessary connection” between cause and effect:

Having thus explained how we reason beyond our immediate impressions, and conclude that such and such causes must have such and such effects, we must now retrace our steps and pick up again the question that first occurred to us, and that we dropped along the way (near the end of section 2). The question is: What is our idea of necessity, when we say that two objects are necessarily connected? As I have often said already, if we claim to have such an idea we must find some impression that gives rise to it, because we have no idea that isn’t derived from an impression. So I ask myself: In what objects is necessity commonly supposed to lie? And finding that it is always ascribed to causes and effects, I turn my attention to two objects that are supposed to be related as cause and effect, and examine them in all the situations in which they can occur. I see at once that they are contiguous in time and place, and that the one we call ‘cause’ precedes the one we call ‘effect’. In no instance can I go any further: I can’t find any third relation between these objects.

He does go on to say that there is something else, but in turns out to be something like the vividness with which the mind expects the effect, or in other words, a property of the mind, not of the causes and effects. Similar concerns lead him to deny the possibility of probable knowledge about the future, and here to effectively deny the possibility of the knowledge of morals. If moral knowledge consists in knowing that something must be done, even for the sake of an end, then according to Hume, it is not possible to know this. If we cannot even know that the sun will rise tomorrow, we also cannot know that we need to use a hammer in order to attach two boards.

Aristotle’s account of ethics is, I think, the correct account. But people find it troubling, mostly because they suspect that it has unlikely or unpleasant implications. If saying that you “ought” to do something only means that you must do it in order to obtain a certain end, what if you do not care about that end? There will no longer be a need to do that thing. Likewise, if you do want certain ends, then perhaps you ought to do certain things which we really think you ought not do. For example, if you want to inherit money, perhaps you ought to murder your elderly relatives. But this consequence is absurd: of course you ought not to murder your relatives.

In order to be sure e.g. that you ought not to murder your relatives, regardless of what ends you have in mind, people prefer something like Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperatives. I will not discuss Kant’s moral philosophy in detail at the moment, nor am I necessarily asserting that the usual understanding of his philosophy is correct. But the usual idea is that the rule is absolute: “you must not kill” is not relative to an end, but stands in itself.

This seems to me to be a mistake, and one where Hume’s criticism would be valid. There is obviously no physical necessity that you abstain from killing. It is quite possible to kill people, and it is sometimes done. So if you say that you “must” not kill, and you do not refer to hypothetical necessity, to what do you refer? There does not seem to be anything left here. And this is probably the motivation behind error theory. The obvious interpretation of the theory is that it is saying, “I do not believe in right and wrong.” In reality, however, it seems to be based on the mistaken assumption that right and wrong refer to something like categorical imperatives, and then it proceeds to rightly deny the existence of these things. For no one except an actual follower of Hume would deny the existence of hypothetical necessity, namely that if you want to obtain certain ends, you must use certain means. In this sense, error theory is mistaken, but it is mistaken much in the way that Richard Dawkins is mistaken to suppose that theists intend to speak of something complex when they speak of God.

The objection to Aristotelian ethics, then, is that it is too flexible, and may ultimately imply that people may do whatever they want. I would respond to this by making two claims, although I will not establish their truth in this post.

First, the truth about ethics is in fact more flexible than people suppose. If you take extremely complex situations, the moral truth about those situations will be complicated, not simple.

Second, the truth about ethics is less flexible than people tend to suppose would follow from an Aristotelian account. It does not follow in any meaningful way, for example, that it is sometimes fine to murder your relatives in order to obtain an inheritance.

 

Doing and Making

entirelyuseless Ethics, Metaphysics, Uncategorized

“Doing something” is closely related to “making something.” In some languages one word is used for both, as in Latin facere means both “to do” and “to make.” Even in English, various idiomatic expressions bring the two together, as in “doing the dishes,” “doing my homework,” and the like, where the person is both doing something, and making something, namely clean dishes or completed homework. Similarly, expressions like “making love” and “making out” actually refer more to doing something than to making or causing anything.

Nonetheless, the two are not equivalent. Doing, at least in relation to human beings, generally contains the idea of an action which is chosen, either directly, as we spoke about actions like walking to the door or opening it, or indirectly, through a series of such actions, in the way that the action of “going for a walk” would involve many such actions. Making, on the other hand, is roughly equivalent to efficient causality, and the effect is considered the thing which is made. Anyone who does something, of course, also causes or makes various things in the world, but it is not the same to say that he is doing something and that he is causing something.

 

Will and Experience

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Just as we learn the nature of desire from experience, so we also learn from experience the effectiveness of some desires. Thus for example if I want to move my hand, I move my hand. On the other hand, if I want the lamp on my desk to pass to the other side of the room, it does not do so in the way that my hand moves when I want that to happen. Or if I am inside the house and want to be outside, I do not simply pass through the walls, but I need to perform a particular series of actions such as walking to the door and opening it.

All of these are simple facts about the world that we learn from experience, long before any philosophical reflection. But they are facts about the way the world works, not self evident consequences of the nature of our will or desire. I cannot rearrange the stars simply by willing it, but there is no reason in principle why I would find it strange if I could; it is merely a fact of experience that moving the stars is not in my power.

Likewise, there are some things where I do have some immediate ability to do what I wish, but not a perfect ability. For example, I can choose to draw a circle, but the circle is not perfect. And the circle would have been even less perfect in the past, before I had some experience of drawing. So my ability in this case can be improved by practice.

In a similar way, by the use of biofeedback, people can sometimes learn to change their body in various ways that one cannot normally control. Naturally, there are limits to this technique; no one will use it to obtain power over the movement of the stars.

 

Desire and The Good

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A confusing thing about the meanings of one and many  is that the meaning of each seems to depend on the other. The reality behind this is that there is a back and forth process in which each is used to understand the other better. First we understand being, which is something one, although without the specific idea of unity. Then we understand distinction, which implies several things, again without the specific idea of “many.” Then we understand the one by contrast with things that are distinct. Finally we understand the many as a whole composed of ones as parts.

A similar thing happens with the meanings of “desire” and “good”. Thus St. Thomas defines the good in reference to desire:

I answer that, Goodness and being are really the same, and differ only in idea; which is clear from the following argument. The essence of goodness consists in this, that it is in some way desirable. Hence the Philosopher says (Ethic. i): “Goodness is what all desire.” Now it is clear that a thing is desirable only in so far as it is perfect; for all desire their own perfection. But everything is perfect so far as it is actual. Therefore it is clear that a thing is perfect so far as it exists; for it is existence that makes all things actual, as is clear from the foregoing (3, 4; 4, 1). Hence it is clear that goodness and being are the same really. But goodness presents the aspect of desirableness, which being does not present.

But he also seems to define desire in relation to the good:

I answer that, We must needs assert that in God there is love: because love is the first movement of the will and of every appetitive faculty. For since the acts of the will and of every appetitive faculty tend towards good and evil, as to their proper objects: and since good is essentially and especially the object of the will and the appetite, whereas evil is only the object secondarily and indirectly, as opposed to good; it follows that the acts of the will and appetite that regard good must naturally be prior to those that regard evil; thus, for instance, joy is prior to sorrow, love to hate: because what exists of itself is always prior to that which exists through another. Again, the more universal is naturally prior to what is less so. Hence the intellect is first directed to universal truth; and in the second place to particular and special truths. Now there are certain acts of the will and appetite that regard good under some special condition, as joy and delight regard good present and possessed; whereas desire and hope regard good not as yet possessed. Love, however, regards good universally, whether possessed or not. Hence love is naturally the first act of the will and appetite; for which reason all the other appetite movements presuppose love, as their root and origin. For nobody desires anything nor rejoices in anything, except as a good that is loved: nor is anything an object of hate except as opposed to the object of love. Similarly, it is clear that sorrow, and other things like to it, must be referred to love as to their first principle. Hence, in whomsoever there is will and appetite, there must also be love: since if the first is wanting, all that follows is also wanting. Now it has been shown that will is in God (19, 1), and hence we must attribute love to Him.

This seems circular. Desire is a tendency towards the good, while the good is something that is desirable.

The correct response is that here too we have a back and forth process where each thing makes the other understood better. The first thing in this order is desire, but for the moment without the specific idea of tendency towards the good. Taken in this way, it expresses a way of feeling, a sensible experience. It does not matter here whether we take desire in particular, or its principle, namely love, or its consequence, namely pleasure or joy, or their opposites, such as hate, aversion or sadness. In any case we wish to consider them in a very subjective way, as a way of feeling.

Taken in this way, we can consider them much like a kind of sensation. People sometimes ask how we know that pain is a property of the one who feels pain, rather than of the object that inflicts pain. It seems perfectly possible to say that “this knife is painful” could be just as much an objective fact about the knife, as the fact that the handle of the knife is brown. Of course, no one actually believes this. But the question is why they do not.

It would be easy to suppose that the experiences themselves, namely of seeing the knife and being cut by it, are self explanatory. Of course being cut by a knife is something that happens to me, and of course the color of the knife is a property of the knife.

I agree with the conclusion, naturally, but I do not agree with the reasoning. I do not think that we know this in virtue of the experiences themselves. I think we learn it, very quickly and without a need for conscious attention, from the contexts in which those experiences happen. As I said in the linked post on truth in the senses, sensations are not descriptions of a thing, and they do not make claims. Pain does not assert, “I do not belong to this painful thing”; it does not say anything. Nor does color assert, “I am a property of this body.” It does not say anything. And if we simply consider the sensations as such, we could not give a reason why pain could not be a property of the painful thing, nor why color could not be a property of ourselves rather than the thing. But the contexts in which we have these sensations teach us that color belongs to the colored object, and pain to ourselves, rather than to the painful thing.

Consider the case of sadness. It is easy enough to see that sadness is a property of ourselves, and not of an objectively sad fact. Part of the reason it is easy to see this is that we can be sad, and we can know that we are sad, without noticing any particular reason for being sad. In other words, it is the context of the experience that shows us that it is a property of ourselves.

Something similar is the case with love and desire. Insofar as they are feelings that can be experienced, they can be experienced without noticing any particular object. Katja Grace talks about this situation:

Sometimes I find myself longing for something, with little idea what it is.

This suggests that perceiving desire and perceiving which thing it is that is desired by the desire are separable mental actions.

In this state, I make guesses as to what I want. Am I thirsty? (I consider drinking some water and see if that feels appealing.) Do I want to have sex? (A brief fantasy informs me that sex would be good, but is not what I crave.) Do I want social comfort? (I open Facebook, maybe that has social comfort I could test with…)

If I do infer the desire in this way, I am still not directly reading it from my own mind. I am making educated guesses and testing them using my mind’s behavior.

In this way, it is possible to feel desire as a mere feeling, without defining it in reference to something good. And this kind of feeling is the origin of the idea of “desire,” but it is not yet sufficient.

We learn from experience that when we have desires, we tend to do things. And we notice that not all desires are the same, and that when we have similar desires, we end up doing similar things. And so from this we get the idea of the good as the end and final cause of our actions. We do similar things when we have similar desires, and what those things have in common is that they result in the same ends, even if they use different means. So the end is “why” and explains the choice of means.

In turn, this understanding of the end allows us to understand desire more precisely, now as an inclination towards the good.

 

Substance

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Aristotle says in his Categories,  “Substance, in the truest and primary and most definite sense of the word, is that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject.” Earlier in the text, he explains these characteristics:

Of things themselves some are predicable of a subject, and are never present in a subject. Thus ‘man’ is predicable of the individual man, and is never present in a subject.

By being ‘present in a subject’ I do not mean present as parts are present in a whole, but being incapable of existence apart from the said subject.

Some things, again, are present in a subject, but are never predicable of a subject. For instance, a certain point of grammatical knowledge is present in the mind, but is not predicable of any subject; or again, a certain whiteness may be present in the body (for colour requires a material basis), yet it is never predicable of anything.

Other things, again, are both predicable of a subject and present in a subject. Thus while knowledge is present in the human mind, it is predicable of grammar.

There is, lastly, a class of things which are neither present in a subject nor predicable of a subject, such as the individual man or the individual horse. But, to speak more generally, that which is individual and has the character of a unit is never predicable of a subject. Yet in some cases there is nothing to prevent such being present in a subject. Thus a certain point of grammatical knowledge is present in a subject.

It is not clear from this how Aristotle would deal with sentences like, “That man is Socrates,” where something individual seems to be predicated of a subject. Nonetheless, we can at least see what he means: things which are “predicable of a subject” refer to common terms and ideas, while individual realities are not said to be predicable of a subject. And something is “present in a subject” when it is a quality, property, or attribute of a thing. So by substance he refers to individual realities which are not qualities or attributes of other things.

Why does he say, “By being ‘present in a subject’ I do not mean present as parts are present in a whole, but being incapable of existence apart from the said subject”? Later in the text he explains this:

The fact that the parts of substances appear to be present in the whole, as in a subject, should not make us apprehensive lest we should have to admit that such parts are not substances: for in explaining the phrase ‘being present in a subject’, we stated’ that we meant ‘otherwise than as parts in a whole’.

In other words, he does not want to say that my arms and legs are “not substances.” Not because they are individual things in the way that I myself am an individual thing, but because neither do they seem to be merely qualities that I happen to have. The word “substance” itself is taken from the idea of “standing under,” and this is related to his general definition. Substances are the things that have everything else predicated of them or present in them, and in this sense they “stand under” those other things. And my arm seems to be a part of what stands under on an approximately equal level: my arm can be colored just as I can be colored, and so on.

Someone could object: if Socrates is a white man, then isn’t “white” a part of the whole, namely the “white man”? If this is the case, the Aristotle has no basis for his distinction between substantial parts and other things which are present in a subject.

But it is not difficult to respond to this. I tried to give a formal explanation of the idea of whole and part earlier. And as I said there, the whole must be distinct from each of the parts. I am not my legs, my arms, my torso, or my head. But in the case of Socrates, he is both the man and the white man. So “man” cannot be a part of the whole “white man”, since the man actually is the white man.

Nonetheless, it is possible to reformulate the objection to make it more problematic. Instead of suggesting that “white” and “man” are two parts of a whole, we could say that “whiteness” and “individual humanity” (or possibly “individuality” and “humanity”) are parts of Socrates. Socrates is not any of these things as such, and consequently we cannot refute the idea that they are parts as we did in the previous case.

I doubt that there can be any formal refutation of this idea, because if we could, we could refute the definition, “man is a rational animal,” in a similar way. In fact, if we add nothing to the idea of part and whole as we have defined them, it is not even false that “whiteness” and “humanity” can be parts of a whole. They can in fact be parts of a whole. It is just not the kind of whole that we are interested in when we ask the question, “what is that thing?” And this is the question that Aristotle is interested in when he speaks of substance, and consequently that kind of whole and part is not the kind he spoke about when he said that being “present in” a subject means “otherwise than as a part.”

 

Truth in the Senses

entirelyuseless Metaphysics, Science, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , ,

Discussing Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Edward Feser says:

Take a stock example of reductive scientific explanation like the reduction of sound to compression waves, color to surface reflectance properties, or heat and cold to molecular motion.  The way these explanations work is by treating the appearance that sound, color, heat and cold present to us in conscious experience as mere appearance, as a projection of the mind that corresponds to nothing in objective, mind-independent reality.  What common sense understands by color, sound, heat and cold — the way red looks, the way a musical note sounds, the way a hot stove feels, and so forth — is held to have no objective reality, any more than the redness a person unknowingly wearing red-tinted contact lenses thinks he sees in all the objects around him really exists in those objects.  Instead, color is for scientific purposes essentially redefined by the method in terms of the surface reflectance properties that cause in us the subjective appearance of color; sound redefined in terms of the compression waves that cause in us the subjective appearance of sound; and heat and cold redefined in terms of the molecular motion that causes in us the subjective appearance of heat and cold.

Thus, as common sense understands color, sound, heat and cold, etc., the reductive method ends up treating the world as essentially colorless, soundless, devoid of temperature, etc.  What the method calls “color,” “sound,” “heat” and “cold” is in fact something different from what the man on the street thinks of when he hears these terms.  The “red” that the method says exists in the material world is just the tendency of an object to absorb certain wavelengths of light and to reflect others.  The “red” that the man on the street thinks exists in the object does not really exist in the object itself at all but only in his perceptual experience of the object.  The “heat” that the method says really exists in the material world is just the motion of molecules.  The “heat” that the man on the street thinks exists in the object does not really exist in the object at all but only in his perceptual experience of the object.  And so forth.

Now, Nagel’s point is not that there is something wrong per se with overthrowing common sense in this way.  It is rather that whatever value this method has, it cannot coherently be applied to the explanation of conscious experience itself.  If the reductive method involves ignoring the appearances of a thing and redefining the thing in terms of something other than the appearances, then since our conscious experience of the world just is the way the world appears to us, to ignore the appearances is in this case just to ignore the very phenomenon to be explained rather than to explain it.  Consciousness is for this reason necessarily and uniquely resistant to explanation via the same method scientific reductionism applies to everything else.  For the application of the method in this case, writes Nagel, “does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.”  To treat the appearances as essentially “subjective” or mind-dependent is precisely to make them incapable of explanation in entirely “objective” or mind-independent terms.

Feser is quite right that consciousness cannot be explained in such a way even in principle. I have touched on this point in a previous post. This is why eliminative materialists such as Daniel Dennett effectively deny the existence of consciousness: if the only things that exist are material things as described by modern science, then consciousness cannot even exist, because it cannot possibly be described in that terminology. John Searle, in a reply to Dennett, says:

In spite of its strident tone, I am grateful for Daniel Dennett’s response to my review because it enables me to make the differences between us crystal clear. I think we all really have conscious states. To remind everyone of this fact I asked my readers to perform the small experiment of pinching the left forearm with the right hand to produce a small pain. The pain has a certain sort of qualitative feeling to it, and such qualitative feelings are typical of the various sorts of conscious events that form the content of our waking and dreaming lives. To make explicit the differences between conscious events and, for example, mountains and molecules, I said consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology. By that I mean that conscious states only exist when experienced by a subject and they exist only from the first-person point of view of that subject.

Such events are the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain. In my account of consciousness I start with the data; Dennett denies the existence of the data. To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have. For Dennett there is no difference between us humans and complex zombies who lack any inner feelings, because we are all just complex zombies.

I think most readers, when first told this, would assume that I must be misunderstanding him. Surely no sane person could deny the existence of feelings. But in his reply he makes it clear that I have understood him exactly. He says, “How could anyone deny that!? Just watch…”

Dennett is obviously wrong about consciousness. But what about color, sound, heat, and cold? Is it true that “reductive scientific explanation” holds that these things are a “mere appearance” that “correspond to nothing in objective, mind-independent reality?”

Feser may be quite honest personally in his description of what he considers to be two opposing views. But it seems to me that he is inheriting this description from a long tradition of putting Aristotle and common sense, on the one hand, into an unnecessary opposition with modern scientific views on the other. I think that this tradition is in essence wishful thinking: this tradition came to be historically through the efforts of people who wished for disagreement between Aristotle and modern science.

I touched on this wish in an earlier post when I said that John Locke’s understanding of secondary qualities “is actually mostly true, and mostly consistent with the philosophy of Aristotle, even though Locke would likely wish that the latter were not the case.” The early moderns did differ from Aristotle regarding the purpose of the sciences, as I pointed out here in the case of Francis Bacon. Having a different purpose requires employing different means. Consequently it was favorable for their purposes to emphasize their disagreements with the philosophy of Aristotle, regardless of how much agreement or disagreement existed in reality when the positions themselves are properly understood. If people could be persuaded to abandon Aristotelian thought and focus on the new science, the purposes of the new science would be more easily obtained.

Let us ask the question directly: if color for example consists in the reflectance properties of a surface, does this mean that colors as we see them are “mere appearances” that have no objective reality? Elsewhere, Feser says that this view implies that “Objectively there are only colorless, odorless, soundless, tasteless, meaningless particles in fields of force.”

The scientist can presumably reply in this way: Color consists in surface reflectance properties. These properties are objective properties of physical objects in the world. So color is an objective property of physical objects in the world.

Feser’s response can be found in the original quotation above:

What common sense understands by color, sound, heat and cold — the way red looks, the way a musical note sounds, the way a hot stove feels, and so forth — is held to have no objective reality, any more than the redness a person unknowingly wearing red-tinted contact lenses thinks he sees in all the objects around him really exists in those objects.  Instead, color is for scientific purposes essentially redefined by the method in terms of the surface reflectance properties that cause in us the subjective appearance of color; sound redefined in terms of the compression waves that cause in us the subjective appearance of sound; and heat and cold redefined in terms of the molecular motion that causes in us the subjective appearance of heat and cold.

Of course, the scientist would say that when a person wears red tinted contact lenses, the physical objects around him do not have the properties that constitute red, and consequently it is true that the objects are not objectively red. But other objects like red apples and the like do have those properties, and so they are objectively red. The two cases are not the same. Feser is replying by saying that whether he wants to or not, the scientist is denying the existence of red as we know it.

According to Feser, “what common sense understands by color” is something like “the way red looks,” and it is this to which, according to him, the scientist is denying objective existence. This is to say, if it true that red bodies have a certain way of reflecting light, and this fact is all there is in the body which explains why red bodies look red, Feser would say that this means that “the body is red” is a false statement. This is necessary for his position to be true: “the body is red” has to be actually false in the sense that we normally understand it, since he made the comparison with red tinted glasses, where in fact it is false that the body is red.

What do we mean when we say that something is red? We don’t just mean that it looks a certain way, because we know that sometimes things appear to be a color which they are not, as in the case of the tinted glasses. We don’t mean that it looks some way; we mean that it is that way. Take something that looks red. If we say that it is actually red, we mean that it actually is the way it looks.

All this is true, but it causes Feser to fall into error. “This is actually red” no more describes the nature of red than “this looks red” does. We know how red things look, because we experience it directly. But this experience is not a description. It is not something that can be true or false, so that we can say “surface reflectance is a false description of this experience.” It is a sensible experience, not a claim to truth or falsehood, and we consider sensible experiences accurate when they do not mislead us. Red tinted glasses do mislead us, and so we consider those experiences “false”, and say that the things are not really red. But even if color consists in surface reflectance properties, the experience of color never misled us. It never said, “This is not a reflectance property,” because it never said anything at all. It was not a statement but a sensation.

In order to determine whether something is actually red, we do not turn sensation into a description and check whether the thing matches that description. This is probably not even possible. We simply recognize that “this is actually red” when it looks red to a normal person in normal circumstances. And this is true regardless of what is present in the body that causes red things to look red to us, whether that is the properties of the surface or something else. Thus the scientist has no need to deny the objectivity of color, nor to deny his physical explanation of color.

Feser may actually have a different concern about objectivity, not merely whether statements about color are true or false. Are the distinctions in question natural distinctions, or are they essentially arbitrary from an objective point of view? Is the line between blue and green a natural one, or do our senses make that distinction in a basically arbitrary manner? Locke and others called certain qualities “secondary” because it seemed to them that the distinctions in question were basically arbitrary. We have good evidence that at least in some cases, they were right. An object feels hot or cold depending on the current condition of the one who feels it, without having to change from “being objectively hot” to “being objectively cold.” While the evidence is less conclusive in the case of color, something similar appears to be the case there. The line between different colors is in a different place for different people, as is most evidently the case in colorblind persons, and much more are the dividing lines in different places for different species of animal. This means that we have some reason to believe that green and blue things are objectively distinct, but that this objective distinction is much like the objective distinction between persons who are under six feet tall and persons who are over six feet tall. The distinction itself is objective, but the choice of distinction is basically arbitrary, if the thing is considered in itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s Draw a Line

entirelyuseless Catholicism, Ethics, Logic, Metaphysics, Religion, Theology, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

James Larson, in the note currently at the beginning of his website, accuses Pope Francis of heresy:

Note (April 16, 2016): In order to add clarity as to the nature of the explicit heresy taught in Amoris Laetitia, I have added one paragraph approximately 2/3 of the way through the article below. It reads:

Herein resides the essence of this heresy. It lies specifically in teaching that there is a “gradualness” applicable to the possession of charity and sanctifying grace. It is Catholic dogma that possession of supernatural charity is an ontological state created by sanctifying grace added to the soul, that one cannot possess this charity unless living in this substantial state, and that it is this state of being which is absolutely necessary for receiving the Eucharist and other sacraments. It cannot be possessed by a person living in objective mortal sin, or by any person who is in some process of pastoral effort working towards the attainment of some “ideal”.

Larson is saying that sanctifying grace is a binary state, that it cannot be possessed by someone “living in objective mortal sin,” that these items are Catholic dogmas, and that Pope Francis contradicts them. The text in which he supposedly does this is paragraph 305 of Amoris Laetitia:

Because of forms of conditioning and mitigating factors, it is possible that in an objective situation of sin – which may not be subjectively culpable, or fully such – a person can be living in God’s grace, can love and can also grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this end.

Larson is mistaken on almost every point. It is true that sanctifying grace would normally be considered a binary condition, where either you have it or you do not. But the Catholic Church does not typically create doctrines concerning deep matters of ontology. If someone were to assert that some people are in a vague condition where it is unclear whether or not they are in a state of grace, just as it is unclear whether some people are actually bald or just almost bald, this would not be a heresy. Nowhere does the Church condemn such a view.

But this is beside the point. It is entirely obvious that Pope Francis makes no such assertion in the text under consideration. Nor does he assert this, or anything like it, anywhere else in Amoris Laetitia.

“Living in objective mortal sin” refers to the “objective situation of sin” in the text of Pope Francis, and refers to the general idea of living a life where one regularly performs acts which the Church considers to be objectively grave sins. Larson asserts that the Church teaches that such a person cannot be in a state of grace.

This too is mistaken. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

1857 For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: “Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent.”

1858 Grave matter is specified by the Ten Commandments, corresponding to the answer of Jesus to the rich young man: “Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and your mother.” The gravity of sins is more or less great: murder is graver than theft. One must also take into account who is wronged: violence against parents is in itself graver than violence against a stranger.

1859 Mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God’s law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice. Feigned ignorance and hardness of heart do not diminish, but rather increase, the voluntary character of a sin.

1860 Unintentional ignorance can diminish or even remove the imputability of a grave offense. But no one is deemed to be ignorant of the principles of the moral law, which are written in the conscience of every man. The promptings of feelings and passions can also diminish the voluntary and free character of the offense, as can external pressures or pathological disorders. Sin committed through malice, by deliberate choice of evil, is the gravest.

The Catechism is clear that doing something objectively wrong is not enough for a sin to be mortal, or to exclude someone from the state of grace. In order for this to happen, there also needs to be “full knowledge” and “complete consent.”

The text does not explicitly address the kind of “objective situation of sin” that Pope Francis and James Larson discuss. Much less, therefore, does it assert that a person in such a situation cannot be in a state of grace. However, it is not difficult to see from the above text that a person could be in such a situation without mortal sin. One of the factors that can “diminish the voluntary and free character of the offense” is “external pressures.” The situations under discussion are precisely situations where there are external pressures. That is why they are considered “situations” as opposed to an arbitrarily repeated series of actions. Since the consent must be “complete” and since it can be diminished by these pressures, a person might very well fail to sin mortally in such a situation, even if the situation lasts for a long time.

We can see that Larson’s positions do not correspond very well with anything that the Church actually teaches. Why then does he make these assertions?

I suggest that we have here a case of highly motivated thinking. Larson wants to believe that sanctifying grace is a binary condition, he wants to believe that a divorced and remarried person could not be in that condition, he wants to believe that these are teachings of the Church, and he wants to believe that Pope Francis contradicts these things.

Why would someone have such desires? Larson says in article 25:

Since Pope Francis’ recent interviews and his letter to the editor of La Civilta Cattolica, I have received emails from traditional Catholics which speak of a new level of despair. It is as though they are desperately seeking some explanation of what is happening with the Papacy and the Church which will allow them to escape from coming to some dreadful conclusion.

The situation reminds me of a passage from Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons. In the face of all the forces of evil moving in to ensnare and destroy him, Sir Thomas More offers the following impassioned words to his beloved daughter:

“Listen, Meg, God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind. If He suffers us to come to such a case that there is no escaping, then we may stand to our tackle as best we can, and, yes, Meg, then we can clamor like champions, if we have the spittle for it. But it’s God’s part, not our own, to bring ourselves to such a pass. Our natural business lies in escaping. If I can take the oath, I will.”

It seems evident that the “tangle of the mind” from which traditional Catholics are now desperately trying to escape is the apparent overwhelming evidence that their Church is being destroyed from within. They dread that they are being irresistibly backed into a corner where they will be forced to conclude that the Church, in what they always considered to be her inviolable nature (if she is to be considered real at all) has contradicted this nature, and has therefore been proved to be a human invention, and not the work of God. In other words, they fear the loss of their faith.

I think this is a correct description of how many people feel. I think it is also a correct description of the way Larson himself feels, and I think it can explain why he desires to hold the above opinions concerning Pope Francis and Amoris Laetitia. This might seem a bit paradoxical. He accuses Pope Francis of heresy. Would not this be a very good example of the kind of thing he should be hoping to avoid?

Yes, in one way, but in another way it is an advantage to him if Pope Francis explicitly falls into heresy. This is important to him. In the first quoted passage, he mentions the “nature of the explicit heresy” taught by Pope Francis. It is not only heresy, but “explicit heresy.”

When people change their minds, they often do so gradually, and by degrees, and in such a way that sometimes they do not even notice that they have changed their minds. It follows that if someone does not want to change their mind, they have a reason to be cautious about gradual changes of opinion. Such changes not only could lead to what they do not want, namely changing their mind, but they could lead to this without the person even noticing it has happened.

Another point should be made about this. I pointed out here that despite the fact that it would be unreasonable to say that getting one year older makes you pass from “not being old” to “being old”, this does not prevent you from growing up. In the same way, if someone changes his mind gradually, at each point he may be able to say, “this change is too small to constitute a passage from not having changed my mind to having changed my mind.” He may be quite right. But this will not prevent it from being true at the end that he has changed his mind in comparison with his original position.

And just as individual human beings change their minds, so the Church changes its mind, gradually and by degrees, and sometimes without saying that a change has occurred. So just as someone who wishes to avoid changing his mind should be cautious about gradual changes, so someone who does not want the Church to change its mind will wish it to be cautious about gradual changes. This is what is happening here with Larson’s argument. It is an advantage to him if Amoris Laetita is explicitly heretical, because in that case it can be completely rejected, preventing the process of gradual change. If the document is not heretical (and it is not) it will be bound to cause gradual changes of various kinds, and there is no way to predict the end results in advance.

In a certain way, traditionalist Catholics are often more reasonable in this regard than others who would be considered “conservative” rather than traditionalist. Thus for example Jimmy Akin says:

11. Does the document foresee any possibility for sacramentally absolving and giving Communion to people who are civilly remarried if they are not living as brother and sister?

It does. In the main text of the document, it begins by noting certain principles to be taken into account, stating:

For an adequate understanding of the possibility and need of special discernment in certain “irregular” situations, one thing must always be taken into account, lest anyone think that the demands of the gospel are in any way being compromised.

The Church possesses a solid body of reflection concerning mitigating factors and situations.

Hence it can no longer simply be said that all those in any “irregular” situation are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace.

More is involved here than mere ignorance of the rule. A subject may know full well the rule, yet have great difficulty in understanding “its inherent values,” or be in a concrete situation which does not allow him or her to act differently and decide otherwise without further sin. . . .

The Catechism of the Catholic Church clearly mentions these factors: “imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors” (CCC 1735).

In another paragraph, the Catechism refers once again to circumstances which mitigate moral responsibility, and mentions at length “affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety or other psychological or social factors that lessen or even extenuate moral culpability” (CCC 2352).

For this reason, a negative judgment about an objective situation does not imply a judgment about the imputability or culpability of the person involved. (AL 301-302).

The document thus envisions the case of a person who may be living in an objectively sinful situation but who is not mortally culpable because of a variety of factors of a cognitive or psychological nature.

Nothing in this is new. The Church has long recognized that people living in objectively grave sin may not be in a state of mortal sin.

Akin is right that “the Church has long recognized that people living in objectively grave sin may not be in a state of mortal sin.” This was discussed above. But “nothing in this is new” is simply not true, if it is understood in relation to the question about communion for the divorced and remarried. The Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts stated in 2000:

Any interpretation of can. 915 that would set itself against the canon’s substantial content, as declared uninterruptedly by the Magisterium and by the discipline of the Church throughout the centuries, is clearly misleading. One cannot confuse respect for the wording of the law (cfr. can. 17) with the improper use of the very same wording as an instrument for relativizing the precepts or emptying them of their substance.

The phrase “and others who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin” is clear and must be understood in a manner that does not distort its sense so as to render the norm inapplicable. The three required conditions are:

a) grave sin, understood objectively, being that the minister of Communion would not be able to judge from subjective imputability;

b) obstinate persistence, which means the existence of an objective situation of sin that endures in time and which the will of the individual member of the faithful does not bring to an end, no other requirements (attitude of defiance, prior warning, etc.) being necessary to establish the fundamental gravity of the situation in the Church.

c) the manifest character of the situation of grave habitual sin.

The text is clear: people in the situation under discussion are not to be given communion, whether or not they are in the state of grace. It is true that they do not assert that such people are necessarily in a state of sin, as James Larson does, but the prohibition does not depend on their subjective condition. And thus when asked whether he intended to change anything, Pope Francis said that he did intend such a change:

Rocca: Thank you Holy Father. I see that the questions on immigration I had thought of have already been asked, and you have responded very well. So, if you will permit me to ask a question on another event of the last few days, which was your Apostolic Exhortation.

As you know well, there was much discussion on one of many points – I know we have concentrated a lot on it – but there has been much discussion after the publication…Some maintain that nothing has changed with respect to the discipline that governs the access to the Sacraments for the divorced and remarried, and that the law and the pastoral practice and obviously the doctrine remains the same; others maintain instead that much has changed and that there are many new openings and possibilities.

And the question for a person, a Catholic, that wants to know: Are there new concrete possibilities that did not exist before the publication of the Exhortation or not?

Pope Francis: I can say yes. Period. But that would be too small an answer.

Akin’s way of thinking goes, “This does not contradict the Church’s current teaching. So it’s nothing new.” Larson, far more reasonably, recognizes in practice (although probably not in principle) that “this does not contradict the Church’s current teaching” can be true at every point in time, without this preventing the Church from changing its teaching in the end. By asserting that Amoris Laetitia is heretical, he hopes to draw a line, in order to remove the possibility of gradual change ultimately resulting in substantial change.

James Chastek, talking about disagreement on philosophical topics, says:

We care too much about philosophical topics ever to agree about them, and we achieve widespread successful consensus on scientific matters because we care very little which theory turns out to be true. The beauty and utility of math and science are there for anyone to see, but it’s not as if any one would kill, die, be celibate, or riot over them. Math and science of themselves, cut off from any reference to the mytho-philosophical (like the praise or the defiance of the gods) are not the sort of thing that one would think to praise in epic poetry, polyphonic splendor à la a Gounod Mass, or even a pop song.

We have discussed much the same issue here, although we pointed out that caring too much is only one part of the cause of such disagreement. Something else can be seen in the case of Larson’s disagreement with Amoris Laetita. It is not merely that he cares about the position he holds. He cares about agreement and disagreement, directly. For the reasons stated, he wants to disagree with Pope Francis. Thus in order to be sure that he does, he needs to describe the Pope’s position in various ways.

This is not uncommon. People frequently care not only about their positions, but also about the fact that they agree with certain people, and that they disagree with others. People often draw lines exactly for this reason, namely in order to disagree with someone else.