A weedy florilegium

One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, He was being carefully watched. There in front of Him was a man suffering from dropsy. Jesus asked the Pharisees and experts in the law, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?” But they remained silent. So taking hold of the man, He healed him and sent him away. Then He asked them, “If one of you has a son or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull him out?” And they had nothing to say.
—Luke 14:1-6

The Golden Rule fails because the criterion you might have for who qualifies as “stupid” (deserving of your “moral wisdom” through moral action or through the content of your speech acts) is not cognitively forthcoming and therefore possibly unjustified by the moral standards of those who you’ve helped or will help. Epistemically, something is dubious; there’s a practical assumption of yours quivering over their unforeseen moral grounds. On the road of moral action, propositions proper do not become situated behind the wheel.

For you, “impiety” is this, and “piety” is that. For another person, “impiety” might be your that, and “piety” might be your this. Moral of the story: you end up doing “unto others” based on a set of values that they do not willingly or consciously consent to; you end up “steering the stupid” because you assume they’re “stupid” about your morality. Where is the definite “hurrah!” for a serious moral connection? Where do we even begin to look for it?

Do you learn morality like you learn mathematics? No; it ain’t so clear-cut and objective. Do you have a formal training in ethics? No; and even if you did, “stupids” can be moral just the same as graduates in ethics.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” as a moral principle assumes that “what you would have them do unto you” is what “they would have done unto themselves” when that is not necessarily the case. Our moral propositions are built on a bridge of possibility; my hunch versus yours.

The Golden Rule is for herd morality. I will see everywhere as an outright contradiction: “I’ve got the Golden Rule! It’s personally mine; I am now justified!”

We’re all well aware of the self-deprecating habit we might have due to our own principles and the inconsistency those principles introduce as regards our humanity. A priest would probably have a witch burned at the stake to “rid her of evil spirits,” and all the same, as a priest, he’d have himself burned at the stake if he thought that was the only option to rid himself of spirits, thus protecting his family and community. But where are the “witches?”

I wish not to dwell on extreme cases. However, this hyperbole, and many others like it, do show that, in principle, the Golden Rule so stated explicitly fails. You might think that you adhere to the Golden Rule, but, if you do, you’re only giving it lip service when you say that you do. The Golden Rule must be shown, not stated like some wizard of the Weave. Even then, wizards read and follow scrolls, and in doing so, spells are cast more or less perfectly. This is the grammar of morality.

In the ears of charming faces who wish to “see” your “inner” markings (just how human you are!), what is shown is nothing of how you say you operate. Let’s all naively praise and foolishly dance around this person who speaks humbly of his intellectual arrogance! How gullible are we to grammar!

The Golden Rule is like a geometric figure on an exam sheet; you know you’ll never see it in real life. Hell, even the professors tell you, “Don’t find the length of the sides by just looking at it. Don’t even guess! You must use the equations we gave you.” But do events in life present themselves so clearly, as if begging to be solved by an equation? Can you just not look at the beauty and stupidity of your loved ones and friends? This is the paradox of morality and explicit statements and conditions lurching about in normative ethics.

False analogies exist–the argument from design [of watches] saw a metanarrative of Mechanism to its highest plateau. Is the argument from design monist or dualist?–A meaningless inquiry, and yet here we are. Some attempt a metanarrative by analogy, but, most times, these subtle tricks the “wise” handle do exactly what they were meant to do: explain something mundane, something practical, something meta-nothing! Analogies are used to relate something insipid to something uncharted and new, and with a minor degree of falsity, a successful connection is made. Down the chains of history, droll and profound analogies travel the sociolinguistic lines of probability of thriving. We might contemplate their ventures through unwary cultures, infiltrating norms, disrupting traditions–like rogues of meaning but containers of knowledge!

Agnosis permeates the cracks of public discourse; between each proposition masked in putative profundity there bleeds our dopey intellectual Oedipus. And who we blame is the mind while the brain absorbs us so, some of us to the bitter myopia of reductionism. Reified become our toys and childhood friends and our academic endeavors–in principle, so too our principles. Consigned to domains of idiocy become the cracks ostensible to our immature observations; we breed atheists who chide foolishly at the ghosts of the theists who rebuke no one but their imagined selves. Our private analogies please us not at all, and we look to battered knowledge from friends of friends. We pray that the analogy might convey something real, to place us within something definite and fixed. But I am afraid that too many misanalogies have been fed to us; we might call this human abuse, a form of child abuse. Now we suffer our own idle whines like wounded postmoderns.

1 Opponents to moral relativism often raise this argument, with aim to draw out and undermine a certain “hidden” premise: moral relativism presupposes a universal Principle of Objective Tolerance.

2 This argument arises successfully only if the opponent to moral relativism construes the moral relativist as one making ought-claims, rather than arguing as a moral descriptivist inasmuch as the concept of “tolerance” is involved.

3 In asserting the truth of relativism, one does not presuppose the Principle of Objective Tolerance. Tolerance itself can be mapped onto moral language, as if a “thick” moral term. I might say that “tolerance” is a meta-moral term. Under the descriptivist framework, “tolerance” might function in gauging the conduct and manner of relation between members (persons) of a collection (societies) of all moral systems/cultures (globe).

3.1 We can get mixed up when we say, “Susan of culture A is kind of relativist; she values tolerance; she thinks people of unique moral systems ought to be tolerant” and think that this person, Susan, is only a difference in degree to a person of this type: “A moral relativist philosopher sees that some moral systems have “tolerance” placed somewhere in their system of values; she sees that some moral systems praise tolerance or shun intolerance”.

3.2 A moral relativist is not always a moral prescriptivist. “Tolerance” might be objective in that, as a meta-moral descriptive term which describes relation, it is universally and objectively present. We can employ a “tolerance calculus,” so to speak, and give certain “labels of tolerance” to certain moral systems/cultures. In order to attack the Principle of Objective Tolerance as an ought-claim, the opponent must first point out where exactly it has been advanced as an ought-claim.

3.3 The point of standing firmly by moral relativism is that if all language can be construed as moral language, then moral language is relative to values of a social or cultural group. Words themselves have no perfect correspondence to any value, but words act as expressive manifestations of value-judgments. The values are “intuitively calculated” whereas the input variables are, as far as we know, infinite. That “tolerance” is often praised across Western cultures does not imply that “tolerance,” when philosophers speak of it in ethics, is something which ought to be believed in.

Beyond mere political requirement and commitment, a person might argue that, under the assumption of being a “wealthy nation,” it is morally obligatory for the United States to assist neighboring or foreign nations in improving the standard of living of their citizens. The position of this paper will be that there is no “beyond” or “outside” political obligation when we speak in reference to a nation’s obligations. More specifically, moral obligations, when we speak in terms of human ethics, I will argue, only apply to human beings who bear what we might call “moral agency.” The argument will carry the implication that “moral agency,” if applied to nations, abuses the semantic wealth of moral language as a means for expressing blame or praise of a moral agent. I will draw upon Immanuel Kant’s concept of “autonomous will” found in his Foundations for the Metaphysics of Morals to support my argument that “moral agency” only applies to human beings. I will further draw upon John Stuart Mill’s “greatest happiness principle” as a minor refutation of my own argument, but I will show that it does not satisfactorily refute my argument because of what will be discussed as regards “moral agency.” During my discussions of Mill and Kant, I will provide a brief summary pertaining to how their ideas interact with my own on the topic of moral obligations of wealthy nations.

When I assign moral agency to any one thing (especially an aggregate of entities; i.e. nations) that assignment or attribution presupposes that I wish to speak persuasively, employing moral language as my means, about the nature of that moral agent and of where blame or praise lie. First, we must ask What definition of morality am I working with? Morality here is being defined as the principle of what ought to be done by a moral agent should that moral agent have a properly established placement of values. This should sufficiently links the two common notions of morality as being either a system of “ought claims on the behavior” or “value-judgments on the behavior.”

What exactly is a moral agent? One might argue that ambiguity stirs because a nation can have values, in a general albeit misleading sense. My definition stated above seems to open the floodgates to a slew of ought-claims based on arbitrary values. Clearly, something else is required for morality. For example, the United States commits itself, problematically so for some public figures, to abstaining from and denouncing as morally reprehensible the use of torture. This shows a statement of value, and what is suggested by that value is a corresponding ought—that we ought to prevent torture where we see it, that we ought not to utilize torture for whatever reason, etc. These ought claims carry implicitly the value held of human life; if you cherish human life, you ought not to commit atrocities against it.

Let us get back to moral agency. In principle, to who is a moral agent accountable and responsible? Can a moral agent answer to itself? To illustrate, suppose you read in the newspaper of a new, experimental jury selection method, “a sufficiently evidenced serial killer is to be entrusted as the sole member of her own jury.” To sharpen what is being denoted here, let us view a jury proper: it is a concatenation of people with negligibly dissimilar values, which echo, by means of a jury room calculus, a unified, resultant value, a judgment. Now suppose in a different newspaper, you notice a trend: “enlisted in a jury were a significant number of repeat misdemeanor offenders.” The similar psychological penchant of jury and defendant is a major concern for most of us; we intuitively bear that feeling of birds of like feathers flocking together. Now in terms of wealthy nations, the arbiter of moral requirements would be that nation’s own population, its own jury. Praise would be given unto itself, whereas in daily living your peers, family, community and so on praise this way or blame that way by employing moral language ( “praise” and “blame”), expressing moral opinion.

You might intuitively feel hesitant to trust such novel methods of seeking justice. That hesitation has certain implications which are relevant to my argument. In terms of Immanuel Kant’s notion of autonomous will, we see exactly why one cannot be one’s own jury. A jury involves multiple persons who bear distinguishable values. The autonomous will, however, gains moral import by dutifully following self-imposed and universalized maxims based on one’s own subjective experiences combined with their rationality. The importance here is the notion of the subjective. When we speak of subjectivity of mind, we speak of human subjectivity and human mind. It would be unintelligible to speak of the “subjective” of a nation. How might an entire nation instantiate a categorical imperative and follow it dutifully?

Even if a nation were to possess “autonomous will,” it could not possess it in any likeness but of sharing the name when compared to its atomic constituents, its citizens, human beings. That being most basic and atomic to a nation is not the definition of moral agency, but in the sense in which the words “autonomy” and “will” are used to apply to persons, these words cannot possess the same semantic preoccupations. From here, we see that distinction between moral agency of persons and moral agency of nations; further, clarification of terms shows the latter notion does not carry clear meaning. This lack of meaning further shows that speaking in terms of moral obligation of nations does not carry any meaningful moral weight because the semantic preoccupation of moral agency only applies to human beings.

Two counterarguments might be raised. First, only as a constituent of a wealthy nation can one raise this argument, and, adding to that, it comes off as markedly relativistic. My interpretation of this argument is that I am claiming constituents cannot argue about moral requirements from within. The strength of the argument, however, is not that being one’s own jury or playing a significant role in one’s own jury is reflexive reasoning, a reflection of value to oneself—something easily perceivable as circular. Even if it is, the point of the argument is the semantic identity of “morality” and “agency” becomes abused. By semantic identity, I mean the identification of moral concerns as chiefly arising between people. We simply cannot talk about “moral agency” or “moral requirements” of a nation. However, we can still see to assisting every world-inhabitant, persons foreign or native, as strictly politically and economically within our purview. We can speak sensibly of helping these impoverished peoples, insofar as a nation’s obligation, whatever that obligation might entail, in terms of a nation’s language, which is not moral language.

The second argument is the greatest happiness principle’s implication that a wealthy nation ought to concern itself with the net happiness of the world. But our arguments above displace the notion of moral obligation for nations, putting it back to where it belongs, in the sphere of human interaction where, furthermore, it is semantically and morally meaningful. There is no reason to suppose that pleasure cannot be obtained for whatever number simply because the intention of a nation is to attend to people as strictly political and economic constituents. The utilitarian calculus could add taxpayer dollars as a variable into the overall calculation; this would produce successive projections of future net happiness totals. Taxpayer dollars is an economic concern, not a moral one; that we should have values at all is not itself a variable in a calculus that we perceive ostensibly and use, nor should it be assumed that having values at all is a utilitarian concept.

Moral concerns pertain specifically to human-to-human interaction; when we speak of helping another, we do so in terms of human moral intuition, empathy, pity, etc. My arguments raised above are an attempt to preserve what gives human beings, i.e. moral agents, their moral identity in the first place, without letting non-rational entities such as nations commit violence to meaning in the sphere of morality. In effect, phrases like “a nation’s pity” and “a city’s intuitions” become patently senseless, and we should avoid them. When my fellows and I wish to help other human beings, near or far, we do so as a “collection.” We might give our collection a name or a label, but we are acting in agreement. That agreement we share does not imply our moral reasons, or even our moral intuitions, are necessarily the same. Therefore, we should not speak of or refer to the label we band under as possessing any moral characteristic that is particularly human.

I have a hunch: there’s a deficiency on our ascription of moral blame to “agents.” More specifically, there’s a semantic double standard that is employed when we describe a moral situation and the entities involved.

Primarily, when we speak of morality, a context is formed; typically, we “know” when we’re talking about something moral and when we are not. Topics of “murder” become moral concerns; the words we use in such a case are “responsibility,” “accountability,” and so forth. But, “natural” incidents cannot be held accountable or responsible in the way we use such terms within an “intuitively known” moral context. A tree cannot be held to blame for tipping over and crushing someone.

My argument here is not against moral facts; you can have them. However, if the context which dictates whether or not an incident is a moral dilemma is known “intuitively,” then this must mean that when we begin to employ terms describing the moral concern a linguistic modality is instantiated. Words, terms, phrases, etc all of a sudden become morally imbued. We are quick to see the equivocation; but yet, where did it come from? We suddenly start “talking morally” because of some arbitrary and immeasurable “feeling” which screams “that is moral!”

If there is no describable criterion which compels us into the moral sphere, where language becomes “moral,” would this mean that we accept linguistic modality? What if someone is epistemically unacquainted with a certain linguistic mode for morality; or less so than most?

This seems to show that moral intuitionism is a more accurate statement of human morality since our intuitions govern the linguistic modes by which we arbitrarily believe that we are discussing something “moral” (and thus equivocating terms).

The word “begin” and the concept of “beginning” presuppose a conceptual framework which gives them their meaning, a cognitively meaningful status. The statement “it begins” has a semantic dependency on concept “time” qua conceptual framework. Time makes “beginning” intelligible, not the other way around. Asking “When did time begin?” or asserting “Time had to begin” is meaningless.

When words, arranged in a certain way, yield a grammatically valid statement, proposition or question we should not expect that the same statement, proposition or question is necessarily semantically valid. We should often be on guard against such subtle enemies to philosophy. How to abuse the term: assert “everything has a beginning; time has a beginning because it is a thing“.

No, time is not a “thing”; “time” exists as an meta-entity (an strictly elucidatory “object”) which makes all experiential (and actual) things intelligible to our senses. The same goes for space, matter, and motion. These “objects” depend on one another to bear for themselves any sort of ontological status within the domain of reality. Beyond these terms, there is no sense. Typically, we call them “modes of thinking.”

Asking “When did time begin?” is like asking “How did matter come from absolutely nothing” (ex nihilo)? The question cannot be asked; it only collapses meaning-wise. Matter (something) and nothingness are terms which only make sense when defined in terms of each other; therefore, they cannot refute one another. “What time was it during non-time?” With time and beginning; as said, the concept “time” gives “beginning” its sense.