I have been discussing morality with Ken, and snitgrrRl. Ken adds some clarification to what he writes about morality. I will remove his comments which were directed to specific comments I made, and put them into a list to consider as a whole.
Ken Re: definitions Friday Nov. 6/98: Hegel said "the whole is true." In other words the "whole" is the phenomenology of the spirit. You would have to be insane to accept Hegel at face value these days (last time i checked human beings weren't all that omnipotent). Adorno inverted Hegel to preserve the possibility of critique: "the whole is false." My interpretation of this debate runs like this: things are screwed up, people need to be responsible and held accountable. That's my elaboration of a 'moral' system.
Not quite - it is an acknowledgement of moral substance in any form of ethical reasoning. Ie. you can't separate knowledge from value / meaning. "The sky is blue" at some level contains more than just a propositional claim about an objective state of affairs. In many respects - it tells you to act as if the sky were blue.
Right - and this is linked with a moral web of some sort that 'emphatically' presses its way through the validity claim you are making about connectedness.
Doyle The middle statement is what I respond to here. When we talk about morality in this culture we mean the logical construction of rules. And then we add "values" or feelings to those rules. In Ken's statement, he expands morality in some sense to be something that tells us to act as if the sky is blue, where such a concept seems to me to be very hard to connect to feelings or values otherwise. So Ken is not confining morality to a domain that I would ordinarily not understand such things within our U.S. culture. That doesn't mean he is wrong. I think he doesn't have a material reason for saying this directly. He doesn't have the science as it were to prove this, but it follows from a connectionist view that indeed we can't separate feelings from consciousness, and have to understand that we "act" as if the sky is blue will include some part of feelings or values in that.
Doyle I would point out that this concept Ken is using seems to me to not include though a sense of logic to constructing the feeling the sky is blue. And I want to emphasize the main thrust of morality in our culture is the association of logic to feeling which is morality as in the rule "Thou shalt not kill". So Ken has broken down the meaning of morality in our culture in the above three statements. I would agree with the general thrust of this direction in Ken's thought. I will bring up snitgrrRl here. snitgrrRl in the past has advocated using shame to enforce moral positions with regard to for instance crossing picket lines. I have retorted that we don't know if we shame people by doing something, feelings are not that predictable. I then generalized by saying morality as Marx would have it is an unreliable tool for building social movements. snitgrrRl has retorted to paraphrase her that we all use moral judgements, that these can be found in general by statistical methods, etc. Ken I think provides the basis for better understanding morality than does snitgrrRl. snitgrrRl sees morality as a thing apart from consciousness, and Ken doesn't. For snitgrrRl morality is a thing like a tool to use, and for Ken morality is a "In many respects - it tells you to act as if the sky were blue.", thus leaving behind the separateness of morality that snitgrrRl relies upon.
Doyle To conclude with my response to Ken, his thinking is at times very close to my developing understanding. I find acceptable how Ken uses the term morality here. The term emphatic though does not get at what I think of as the basic interconnection of things. In other words we may have a value system that interpenetrates all our thoughts, but I can't see how it is necessary to think of this as emphatic. I see this as being spirit "metaphor" like in the sense that Ken has written about inverting Hegel. But I want to emphasize that interconnectedness might have a more material way of making this point which doesn't posit a spirit apart from other aspects of consciousness. regards. Doyle Saylor -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/19981108/92f6815f/attachment.htm>