Gabrielle wrote:
Then I expect you’ll succeed, for a loving person is the most lovable of all persons.
DallasAnn wrote:
To comprehend the world is to know what the world is like, or in short; what is. Moral values aren’t declarations about what is, but what ought to be. You might remember Rousseau’s claim:
“One half of the children born die before their eighth year. This is nature’s law, why contradict it?”
But given that I’m also part of nature, and given that I go nearly mad with anguish at the sight of a dying child, who is Rousseau to contradict my wanting to help that child? Moral values are not “out there” waiting to be discovered. Morality comes from within us, it’s a vital part of what makes us human. In order for Rousseau’s statement to be credible, it would have to be uttered by something non-human; a disinterested, amoral, spectator. Rousseau is trying to convince us that he’s not really human, that it doesn’t matter whether he has sugar or cyanide in his coffee. In his book, A Common Humanity, Raimond Gaita wrote:
“We cannot prescind from the ethical constitution of our lives without becoming unintelligible to ourselves. As things stand, for us to try to describe the inner life without reference to good and evil would be like trying to describe it without reference to our mortality or our vulnerability.”
If a surgeon were to transplant my eyes into your eye sockets, when the bandages came off you wouldn’t exclaim, “Oh my God, Polemarchus saw the world in ultraviolet!” Likewise, our kidneys, heart, and liver function exactly alike. What about our brains? What are the chances that our brains operate on entirely different principles? Furthermore, what do you think the chances are that my pain triggers an intense sensation of inner pleasure? Going even further, do you have any expectations about how I might react if I learned that my mother had died? Yes of course, the news might mean nothing to some, and a few others might actually laugh at it. But if you should happen to be with a complete stranger when he or she heard this news, would you reach out to congratulate or to console that person?
Ann, the fact is that I already have a vast amount of knowledge about you. Perhaps I don’t know your favorite color or whether or not you like Brussel Sprouts, but what I know is far more important. I know that you don’t want your mother-in-law to pour gasoline on you and ignite it. I know you want to live your life with dignity and that you prefer joy over sorrow. I know these things because we’re cut from the same cloth; the cloth of humanity.
I agree with you, Ann. But please notice that in saying so, we’re both making a moral judgment; we’re not saying what is, but what ought to be.
“Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were the warp and woof of our consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?” – Steinbeck, East of Eden, Chapter 34
Best wishes,
Michael