----- Original Message ----- From: "andie nachgeborenen" <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
> I detect some of the leftish impulse to deny that
> any improvement is
> ever possible in life.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
>
Gloom. Disaster. Failure. Despair. Proves capitalism is bad. But nothing can be done about it.
and for all of us here:
http://despair.com/noname13.html
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And for those of you who might want some substantive exposition to go along with the photos.....
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=8504
George W. Harris Reason's Grief: An Essay on Tragedy and Value George W. Harris, Reason's Grief: An Essay on Tragedy and Value, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 300pp., $75.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521863287. Swarthmore College
Reviewed by Richard Eldridge, Swarthmore College
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Here are two ways of thinking about the main topics and tasks of moral philosophy. 1) Above all else, moral philosophy is concerned with action, specifically with which actions are obligatory, permissible, and impermissible in particular situations. Figuring out the right or best or dutiful thing to do is what moral philosophy is all about. There are important choices to be made in both public and personal policy, and moral philosophy had better help us with these. We might look to any of utilitarianism, rational choice theory, or certain forms of Kantianism in order to address such questions about action, but one way or another some theory must be in view. 2) Human life is complicated, and there are no formulae or policies that will help us clearly and decisively to choose in specific settings to act in the one way that is right or obligatory or best. Moral philosophy should be devoted more to the understanding of the complexities of the human form of life and to the sorts of characters and skills people might well develop, where no characters or sets of skills will count as unambiguously best or right. Literary and historical narratives of particular cases may offer as much or more moral insight than do theories of the right and the good. The work of Bernard Williams and, more recently, Raymond Geuss points in this direction, along with certain strands of virtue ethics.
Reason's Grief is a comprehensive and ambitious book that argues for the latter stance against the former and that does so with a distinctively tragic and naturalist-Darwinian twist. Harris undertakes "to bring thinking about tragedy and the tragic aspects of life to the center of our ethical thought" (2). (Already one can hear the second stance in the phrase "ethical thought" as against, say, "moral theory.") The tragic dimension is that things, for everyone, "are likely to turn out very badly, the more so the more noble you are" (2); "high value is pervasively and perpetually vulnerable to destructive forces" (3), including at least death, illness, war, conflict of all kinds, boredom, cruelty, the indifference of nature, and so on. Homer saw all this. Aristotle challenged him in supposing that good luck, clear understanding, and cooperative phronesis can lead normally to a good life (5-6). Moral philosophy has mostly followed Aristotle rather than Homer, but with less and less confidence as images of the good develop from Leibniz and Locke on happiness, to Kant on autonomy, to Hegel on reconciliation, to Schopenhauer on resignation, to Nietzsche on ecstatic-voluntarist affirmation. Now, according to Harris, it is time to pull the plug on this tradition and to recognize that nothing unambiguously good is achievable.