--- Notes on moral virtue ---

It has now been sufficiently shown that moral virtue is a mean state, and in what sense it is a mean state; it is a mean state lying between two vices, a vice of excess on the one side and a vice of deficiency on the other.... That is the reason why it is hard to be virtuous; for it is always hard work to find the mean in anything....

Aristotle

I do hold, with Aristotle that moral virtue is a median state. Even philanthropy can be an evil if carried to an extreme. Perhaps you have heard of the case of a parent who loved their family so much that they became a nag. And, of course, if a parent doesn't care at all for a child, the child will have a poor experience of growing up.

But, of course, it isn't that simple. An average murderer can't be considered morally virtuous. Aristotle's position was popular in his day but, since then, philosophers have taken his opinions apart and put them back together again in various permutations and, of course, many other schools of thought have developed. For instance, during Aristotle's time, the idea that might makes right was also popular and that philosophy reappeared in modern times in the philosophy of Nietzsche.

I also agree with C. S. Lewis in his assessment of lostness. A person can become so wrapped up in any idea to the point that they lose their humanity. They become an embodiment of that idea. He says that, in a way, they become a demon themselves. That can apply to anything including religious devotion.

I have been involved with several "special" groups such as people with specific disabilities, animal rights groups, and civil rights groups and I usually include the appeal that they maintain connection to other groups. For instance a person with multiple sclerosis can easily become so involved with a support group that all they thing about is multiple sclerosis and rights for people with multiple sclerosis. In effect, they can stop being "a person with multiple sclerosis" and become a "multiple sclerotic."

We live in a universe of relationship and those relationships are at the center of moral virtue. Responsibility and purpose, far from being the enemies of individuality and personal freedom, are what keeps us from drifting aimlessly in the world.

Jesus boiled the Christian virtues down to two points - love God completely, and, equally, love your neighbor as you (should) love yourself.

--- Notes on free will ---

What is freedom? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any restraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on
equal terms.

Seneca

My position on fortune, destiny, and the like is that we're dealt a hand at the beginning and we can choose how we play our cards. Destiny is at the first, not the last.

As long as free-will remained in the claws of the philosophers (and I include unthinking thinkers like Skinner in that group), humans could not reasonably be said to necessarily have free-will because their every action, every thought was predetermined by their circumstances. The physicists and neuroscientists have reopened the question. That's an odd twist.

As it is, there is too much chaos in the works to be able to say that there cannot be free will.

Freedom, in the language of physicists and statisticians, is the number of directions a thing can move in. They rarely talk about freedom - they talk about "degrees of freedom" - how many different ways can a thing move or change. I get the idea that when people talk about free will, they're talking about the ability of a person to make literally any decision within their physical capabilities. I hope not. Random action is not free will. Free will is the ability to choose between any of a range of rational decisions available to a person. It's the ability to think things out and then decide a course of actions.

Cognition is fuzzy enough to easily allow for free choice. The logical positivism set (may logical positivism rest in peace) wanted to believe that everything was strictly determined - it would make the calculation of everything a lot easier. But then Heisenberg came along with his uncertainty nonsense and put a stop to their dreaming.

I often have recourse to, "That's a good explanation, but not a very good excuse." Serial and mass murderers often have very good reasons for doing what they do. Hate humanity? I can see that. I was mistreated as a child? Yep, so people go through that. Humans taste good? Probably do.

But those are not good excuses. I know too  many people who had horrible childhoods and they grew up to be caring, helpful people. I know too many people who have every reason to hate humanity but, surprisingly, don't. I don't want to hear anyone use their bad temper as an excuse. I have a murderous temper, I can easily go into a berserker's rage, but I don't. People are supposed to develop self-control as a part of growing up. I don't want to hear any one say, "I just couldn't control my sex drive." I'm a satyr and have been plagued with a raging libido since I was 8 years old. If anyone had the right to claim over-active sex drive it would be me, yet I respect other people. Too many minorities grew up to be great people who quite obviously love humanity and live lives that make life worth living for others for other individuals to justify bad actions by, "I was mistreated by The Man."

So I just can't buy the, "I had to do it," or "the devil made me do it," or the "they just caught me in a weak moment," defense. I believe that people do have choice and they're responsible personally for how they use it.

--- Notes on ethics ---

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves
happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Immanuel Kant




When considering a philosophical question, I usually begin with the simplest, most naive answer I can find and then I try to figure out why the naive answer doesn't work and I modify my idea until it does seem to work. I also consider the answers given by people in the past.

"What is good," turns out to be a surprisingly problematic question. Like Judge Potter Stewart, who addressed pornography by saying, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it...", we might conveniently say, "We don't know what "good" is but we know it when we see it." But we are looking for a guide for making decisions such as, "What is the right thing to do?" and this rule doesn't help much.

Despite the fact that I chose a quote by Kant to describe my position respecting ethics, I can't quite accept his formulations for deciding how to proceed in a moral dilemma. He gave two rules:

Choose your action according to a rule that you would want to be a universal rule of ethics.

Choose the action such that humans are never an means to an end, but only an end.

The first rule seems to be a nod and a wink toward relativity. In other words, it seems to imply that there is no universal rule of ethics but that you should choose rules that you would want to be universal.

The other rule brings up some serious issues in relationships. It seems to me that things like friendship, love, marriage, and such are founded, precisely, on use. For instance, love (or some variant of love) might be defined as the intention that an other has a good life and that you are a part of the cause of goodness of their life. In other words, if you love someone, you want to be used for their benefit. You desire to be a means for the end that they are happy.

If a person is not the means of a relationship, I don't see how there can even be relationships.

My naive ethic is that what is good is that which leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

Is morality relative? Is it relevant?

The Bible isn't really much help at the outset. After 40 years of study, I'm fairly convinced that the Bible isn't much concerned with any such abstract concept as what moderns mean by "morals". When the Bible says "good", it refers more to what we would mean by "fitting". It is a practical term. What is the effective way to live? How do you maintain relationships?

And my naive model has two big problems. First, "the greatest number of people," seems rather inaccessible. There are an awful lot of people out there. How in the world could one calculate what action would lead to their greatest happiness? Further, the unexpected consequence would most certainly foil any attempt to actually secure the happiness of the greatest number of people!

My house has a favored video game called Witcher III: The Wild Hunt. In it, there are many alternative tracks that can be taken. One of the intriguing parts of this game is the end credits where it explains many of the consequences of the players actions, for, many of the heroic acts invariably lead to horrible ends - just like life. As the country wise man says, "You just never know."

So, how can I patch up my model?

Well, first I can make morality subjective - we do what we think will lead to the greatest happiness of the most people, but, then, some people seem to not value happiness as the greatest good. So let's say that "the greatest good" is a subjective thing, and then I have to accept that "good" is relative.

Well, not exactly. "Good" is a word and, like all words, it has to be defined. The first step in determining what is good is to define "good". That would be about the same as establishing a goal for good behavior. Does "the good" aim toward happiness? or survival - of the individual or the species or nature? Is it power?

But once "the good" is decided, it is no longer subjective because, having established our goal, we can no longer know exactly how to get it. There is a way to accomplish the goal but complexity and chaos gets in our way of knowing precisely how to go about doing it. But "the good" is no longer relative. It is now fixed and it's "out there" to be discovered.

So, I figure that "the good" involves a two step process: the first step is subjective and relative, the second step is objective and fixed.