expressive nature of human actions, conscience, reasonableness, formal principle in practical reasoning, prudence

(I'm fiddling with the idea of actions as expressive acts, but I think my first version assumed that all expressions are like declarative sentences: they might be more like imperative sentences)

When you do something, you are often communicating with others without noticing that you're doing so.  Others may often regard your action as if it were a kind of statement when you hadn't meant it that way.  The communicative nature of actions may be closely connected to the way in which SOME actions deliberately both signify something they intend to achieve and achieve it through the very act of signification (e.g., saying , "I do" at a wedding).  But what happens in the latter case is in some ways the reverse of the former.  In the latter case, you deliberately say X and by saying it, you intend to DO x.  In the former do y but by doing so you say something else.  Still, it's worth considering how one of these two might be a necessary condition for the other.

There is a third way in which saying and doing are related.  Suppose no one sees what you've done, but you KNOW what they'd think and say about it.  It is already as if they actually HAD said it.   So in your mind, you've already made that statement to them.  And you know what they would say in return --whether you agree or not with that statement.

Conscience is something like "what they would say," but with a kind of idealization added.  It is a declaration, among other things, of how one's actions have put one in relation to others, and ultimately to the community--a statement that the person exercising his/her conscience imagines would be made by one who knows the whole situation and in that sense is competent to render such a judgment.  The "they" mentioned in the previous paragraph becomes a competent judge: one who know all of the relevant facts of the case.

Consider a person who steals in secret.  When talking about his deed, he might justify it by saying what he thinks a competent judge would say.  A wicked man reporting his own action, would represent this judge quite differently from a morally weak man who repents of his deed.  The difference in the judgments formed by  different persons comes from the different ways in which they conceive the community to which they belong.  Note that wicked men are notorious for misconceiving their community.  When forming something like a judgment of conscience, they say that "everybody": "everybody does it," etc.  They conceive of everyone else as being like themselves.  And then they have this pseudo-everyone exonerate them.

One's judgment of conscience is a right judgment (i.e., a judgment conformed to the natural law) in a large part to the degree that one has reasonably conceived of both ourselves and our community.  And one's reasonableness is always something that would seem (or must seem) correct to a community of beings who have an adequate grasp of the situation  (something we conceive of by idealizing the adequacy of our community's grasp of reality).   "Always" and "must" indicate that reasonableness entails universality and necessity.  And to the degree that reason approaches an adequate grasp of reality in making claims that are universal and/or necessary... to that degree human nature, seen as the metaphysical principle of the judgment made by this idealized community, is a kind of "is" from which "ought" originates (I'm talking about a metaphysical derivation, not a straight-forward analysis of how subject and predicate are related).  

We can say what types of actions are fitting and unfitting to human beings: just as we say "pens are for writing" so too we can say what human beings as such are for.  And the latter, like the former judgment, is based upon practices through which we attain glimpses into our own nature.  But our statements about what we are for are never as straight-forward/non-problematic as we might imagine.  For we never attain an absolutely perfect conception of the subject, of that which "is," i.e., of our rational, social nature: our self-awareness is always a work in progress.  The mere attempt to conceive of an ideal rational community general falls short to some degree in its quest to provide one with an adequate basis for judging what is reasonable.  To the degree that it succeeds, it gives our knowledge a kind of universality.  But man does not live by formal reasoning alone, for the ability to grasp universal principles could never get rid of the need for prudence, and prudence's right estimation always depends upon the adequacy of one's perception of the changing circumstances, as well as a right order in one's appetites--for the latter determine how we will size up any situation.  No algorithm for deciding how to act will ever be developed: good practical reasoning takes practice.