Skip to main content

that aperture metaphor applied to nature/obligation

Earlier I tried to sketch a proposal for treating nature as conceived via natural science is related to nature as given in experience as an aperture is related to the light that shines through it.  I'd like to try a different move here, but eventually relate the two to each other.

I'm thinking now of the point that Kantians and post-Kantians make, i.e., that knowing facts about the natural world -- including facts about individual inclinations -- does not suffice to give one knowledge of obligation (in the sense of being absolute).

I would like to point out that the sense of being obliged is had first of all by one looking at a concrete situation: i.e., "do this here and now!" rather than "one ought always do such and such!"  In this sense, it's like being called or vocation.

Secondly, obligation (in the concrete situation) in the sense that I have in mind is identical with the command of conscience

Thirdly, even though this voice is internalized, it also has a social nature: the intelligibility of human actions is inseparable the shared convictions of the rational community to which one belongs.

Fourthly, there is something unbounded about this community.  When you are convinced that doing X is right/wrong, you are convinced that it's true for any rational being.  There is something potentially infinite in the.


So how doe this relate to the aperture?  In the following way: the psychological facts that attend a situation are related to obligation like the aperture is to light.  You can't deduce obligation from facts of nature just as you can't deduce the nature of light from the aperture.  But the human fact naturally gives rise to the call to action just the aperture is naturally suited to let in the light.

RD, in talking about morality, is explaining it in terms of how it originates.  But he recognizes that one can't deduce how one is to act from natural facticity.  But in recognizing this "more" he is leaving an opening to the light, to the transcendant, to the Light itself.

(gotta revise: wrote on full stomach at Panera)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...
6 comments
Read more

interesting article by Jimmy Akin on death before the Fall

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/ Akin below: Aquinas.... writes: In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some. Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals  [ Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2 ].  Aquinas thus holds that it was not  all  death that entered the world through man's sin, but human  death.
Post a Comment
Read more