My Virtue-Existentialist Ethics

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Ishkah
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Re: My Virtue-Existentialist Ethics

Post by Ishkah »

Gertie wrote:
Aye, I agree with all that, well said and cheers for taking the time :D
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h_k_s
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Re: My Virtue-Existentialist Ethics

Post by h_k_s »

Ishkah wrote: September 25th, 2020, 9:56 pm
h_k_s wrote: September 25th, 2020, 5:08 pmIn philosophy we have arguments in favor of the proof of God and others that deny a God.
I honestly don't know how you think you've proven that everyone gets their morality from god or they're forced to be moral relativists. I'm likely just going to ignore your posts, unless I feel it necessary to correct something for a wider audience. But, all the best.
If you want to go onto my enemies list that's fine. Here goes.
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Ishkah
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Re: My Virtue-Existentialist Ethics

Post by Ishkah »

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Some updated edits to a few of the sections:

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PURPOSE & MEANING

We are born with biological drives and grow up being taught environmental drives we have to grapple with and make sense of.

All attachment or grasping necessarily entails risk of suffering, sometimes very low level suffering mixed in with greater happiness, which is necessary for meaning, but potentially distressing suffering none the less. 

We can't quantify for the individual what level of suffering it is right that they owe themselves to muddle through to achieve some level of happiness later on.

We can only say if a persons reason for ending one's own life, is to desire to make a meaningful decision, in the face of 'unfair' meaninglessness, the sum of one's existence only becomes more absurd. So, actual suicide or philosophical suicide - in the form of on some level choosing to be piously ignorant to what life entails - being viewed as meaningful, is simply an attempt to deny that meaninglessness or no one stable meaning is the foundation to all life.

So, in terms of the internal value to the practice of learning why we are here, we can say grappling with these biologically and environmentally bestowed drives is a goal in which achieving some headway, brings us happy flourishing.

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MORAL LUCK & FOLK PSYCHOLOGICAL CONCEPTS

The evolution of our material capabilities created values, the ability for things to matter to us. 

Everyone has different views as to what percentage of study in the hard sciences vs. soft sciences is the most productive balance for gaining new insights into human behaviour short term and long term. I lean heavily towards if we want to come to a fruitful understanding of what matters to us, our perspectives as agents in the world, we need to look to social science and the very complicated holistic social framework we build up through perceiving what others are thinking and modifying our actions accordingly. 

That's not to say study into ways to alleviate mental conditions like arachnophobia can't be improved by learning about how natural selection affected our genes. Simply that the character traits that provide us the most meaning in our interconnected world, is not whether someone has a personality trait that can be connected back to their lower primate ancestors, but how that person seeks to deal with the capabilities they're dealt. 

For example, if a person were to win the lottery tomorrow, the character traits they had forged throughout their life would be being put to the test on a massive ethical quandary in such a way that the main character traits that person would be known for is at this social level of description of do they have the ware with all to navigate that road well.

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WHAT CONSTITUTES RIGHT AND WRONG?
Because human beings are complex, their flourishing takes complex forms: we can flourish intellectually – hence, the “intellectual virtues” (both practical and theoretical); we can flourish as builders and makers and artists – hence, the “virtues of craft” – and we can flourish in terms of our non-technical, social and civic activities – hence, the “moral” virtues. [1]
Now, if you're a consequentialist, you can simply relate to this philosophy as through pursuing your own happy flourishing, either the goals are related to other people or it's more easily achieved by helping others, so we have an obligation to be altruistic and achieve a global calculus of happy flourishing.

But, I would simply appeal to what is good for any one person being more complicated than an external calculation of ends:
Virtues and therefore morality can only make sense in the context of a practice: they require a shared end, shared rules, and shared standards of evaluation. The virtues also define the relationships among those who share a practice: “….the virtues are those goods by reference to which, whether we like it or not, we define our relationships to those other people with whom we share the kind of purposes and standards which inform practices” (After Virtue 191). We must have the virtues if we are to have healthy practices and healthy communities. [2]
So, if how a person was raised to understand virtue is primarily respecting the shared rule that the dignity of a person must not be violated then, in so far as practicing that virtue is meaningful to that person, it will bring that person happy flourishing.
It goes beyond the contractarian view in its starting point, a basic wonder at living beings, and a wish for their flourishing and for a world in which creatures of many types flourish. It goes beyond the intuitive starting point of utilitarianism because it takes an interest not just in pleasure and pain [and interests], but in complex forms of life. It wants to see each thing flourish as the sort of thing it is. . .[and] that the dignity of living organisms not be violated. [3]
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SCAFFOLDING

There are many guide sticks we can use, like narratives of character virtue exemplars who each are near perfect exhibitions of what it means to hold character virtues like wisdom, courage or compassion.

One way I predict this philosophy will be best assimilated by the most amount of people is in scaffolding up one's ethical biases from the individual, to the community to internationally. So acknowledging how each social layer will ask of the individual a different role. 

So, starting with conceptualising the individual in near solitude, living very rurally, we can say that by the way this person has chosen to live and so in turn how they would like to interact with other people is with a respect for the fact that what matters to this person is a bias for consequential ends like negative liberties (the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints) before any shared principle or means of acting.

Now scaling that up to every individual in the world, we can acknowledge we all have a bit of that person in us, and so depending on what age a person lives through, for example how much peace there is in the world, we can say increasing negative liberties like not having to be conscripted into war is an ethical good to work towards as a society. Similarly almost universally good actions throughout time like the negative liberty to happen to be gay and want to kiss your boyfriend in public or Emma Goldman's sentiment 'it's not my revolution unless I can fail at dancing to it's rhythm'. [4][5]

Next we can think of the ethical practices of a community and how an individuals negative liberty puts a healthy limit on what kind of communitarian principles we develop. For example, we can imagine the principle that what it means to be a good member of the community is working till we drop to maximize the wellbeing of future generations. This neither works in practice because of people's need to balance work with leisure in order to have a healthy head space to create and do great work, nor in theory, because people desire to hold onto their negative liberties. 

So we may not have Kantian obligations which are truths of reason, but for certain there is the intuitional: [6]
I very much like WD Ross's theory of prima facie duties. Where any felt obligation is a prima facie duty, however it can be overridden depending on the circumstances by another one, however that does not mean that the original obligation disappears, it simply means that its defeasible and it usually continues to operate in the background.

So if I have an obligation to meet you for lunch and on the way to driving to meet you I go pass a car accident and I have to decide whether to save the person inside or meet you for lunch, I'm going to say that the duty to save the person in the car is overriding, but I'm still going to try to make it up to you, I'm going to apologize, I may buy you the lunch next time as a way of making it up to you which shows that the initial obligation still operates in the background even though it was overridden.
Finally, when conceptualizing one's place in a larger social fabric than the responsibilities you desire to take on in the communities you're apart of, we can think to our place internationally and in time. Here I think when encouraging people to respect your individual liberties and communitarian principles fails, we can again be biased towards end goals in our ethics and be Machiavellian in service to the individual and community where the risk of doing nothing would lead to greater harm. 

So at it's most severe, needing to fight a war to defeat fascism where civilians will get caught in the crossfire, or least severe, where you feel you've put in your two cents of duty and nothings changing, so you play the jester with your friends in order to encourage them to accept you for who you are or not to accept you at all, in an effort to create deeper connections which builds stronger communities: [7]
It can be annoying or hurtful when others presume they know everything about you. But rather than assert their wrongness and make them defensive, you can acknowledge it as a common human failing and find creative ways to hold a mirror up to what life experiences they’ve had that lead them to jump to those conclusions.

One way is a kind of playful authenticity, telling a lie about a lie, to get back closer to the truth. So don’t outright challenge the idea, but don’t live up to it either, in fact live down to it. Playfully undermine the idea by failing to live up to the glamour of what it would mean to be that person, then find a way of revealing that it was a misunderstanding all along, so they needn’t worry about it applying to you.
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References

1. Course Notes – G.E.M Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy”

2. MacIntyre: Political Philosophy | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

3. Beyond Compassion and Humanity; Justice for Non-human Animals by Martha Nussbaum

4. To be incredibly pedantic, absurd hypotheticals are always lurking in the background to warn against universals like what if kissing your boyfriend in public started world war 3 before the left was ready and ended with a 1000 year Reich, would it still be justified then? But bar fringe absurdly unlikely hypotheticals. 

5. I know the more well known slogan is "if I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution", though Emma never said it, it's a sentiment attributed to a longer text she wrote, which I plan to write a post on next. As well as how "failing to dance to it" is more accurate and how compassionate comedy for our own failings is something we need to rekindle on the left and spread internationally.

6. Daniel Kaufman On Intuitionism and Folk Psychology

7. A Love Letter To Failing Upward

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