What I Have learned This Year?

The greatest thing I have gained from this course is the reading experience. It is just amazing that ancient philosophers have already discussed all the important questions of human life and our universe. And the most important thing I gained through the one year visiting program is my experience communicating with Christians. Let me talk about the two things seperately. First, I love the reading assignments so much. The wisdom of ancient philosophers inspired me a lot. I read Paedo, Nicomachean Ethics, Symposium, and other presocratics. They discuss the topic of love, virtue, death, wisdom and happiness, which sometime really get me touched. Especially Paedo, the scene in which Socrates at first failed to give a good argument about the soul of human. With several seconds of silence accompanied by the sorrow of people around him, Socrates just smiled and said that there is no need to be sad about me, because what I was doing is just for the sake of truth and to convice myself, by no means to win others. Also, the idea of doing philosophy as the practice of love and death is appealling to me, for we as limited creatures in the universe are all afraid of deathe and have the quest for being loved and loving others. These important matters of life are the basis and motives of philosophical studies, at least for myself. I hope to lead a decent and meaningful life which is not filled up with materials and products, but spiritual enjoyment. For the sake of such happiness, I believe most of us would say that puzzlements and difficulties brought about by the contemplative works are worth paying.

Second, my experience of communicating with Christains gives me two important knowledges. One is that Christian emphasis on the sinfulness of human beings is illuminating, which is one of the weakness of Chinese philosophy. My Christian Chinese friends here are always emphasizing this important aspect of Christianity in our bible study. The other thing is that Jesus is love, and God is love. Also I believe the Christian notion of love is unique and profund. Compared with Confucious notion of love, Jesus’s love is the one that is based on very intimate relationship amoing god and human, human and human. I think I will go on investigating this problem and do some further studies in Christianity.

Where Does Objectivity Come from?

I have talked about Hume’s interpretation of moral actions, which are caused by human passions and emotions. The reason why we go to save the kid falling into the well is that we cannot bare seeing the scence and feels tortured at the picture. In other word, we don't do virtuous actions because of reasoning and refecting, but something rooted in our human nature that is called emtions. Then it is a problem for him regarding how to argue against those whose emotions are different from normal people. And I think Kant’s interpretation of rationality can be helpful for us to do that job.

Kant starts with the notion of “good will”, and good will is intimated related with rationality. One essential point for us to understand the objectivity of morality in Kantian can be made clear by differentiating between humanity and rationality. For Kant, the objectivity of the goodness of human will does not consist in humanity, because human weill is only subjectively imperfect. (Grounding of morality, 414) In addition, Kant claims that the reality of moral principle cannot be derived from the special characteristics of human nature:

For duty has to be a practical, unconditioned necessity of action; hence it must hold for all rational beings and for this reaon only can it also be a law for all human wills. On the other hand, whatever is derived from the special natural condition of humanity, from certain feelings and propensities, or even, if such were possible, from some special tendency peculiar to human reason and no holding necessarily for the will of every rational beings— all of this can indeed yield a maxim valid for us, but not a law. This is to say that such can yield a subjective principle according to which we might act if we happen to have the propensity and inclination, but cannot yield an objective principle according to which we would be directed to act eventhough our every propensity, inclination, and natural tendency were opposed to it. (G, 425)

While the Hume’s interpretation of morality regards human dispositions and natural conditions as the most fundamental elements in our thinking and action, Kant thinks very differently. First, humanity has its grounding in rationality because rationality holds fro all rational beings including human beings as one of the species. While humanity has in its root both subjective inclinations and rational capacities, Kant’s conception of rationality is a transcendent and a priori capacity, without any subjective consitution. Kant does not deny that dispositions and feelings can lead us to make right choice, but he is strongly objecting to grounding moral judgment only on humanity, since it is is subjectively imperfect because of its special inclinations and dispositions.

In addition, Kant regards the rationality used as tools and means to get to another purpose as only contingetn and arbitary. Such rationality is what Williams uses to satisfy the actualization of agent’s projects and desires. But for Kant, “rational nature exists as an end in itself”, (G, 437)and only this kind of rationality is the grounding of categorical imperative. Kant claims that the practical imperative will be that “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.” (G, 429) Other imperatives and rational capacities manipulated for other purposes rather than themselves are only hypothetical, which means they are always under the test of universal law and have to practical necessity. Thus we can see that what draws the line between the Kantian and the Humean moral philosophy is that Kant provides an objectvie grounding of human nature in terms of univeral rationality, while Hume does not appeal to anything beyond the disposition and feelings withn human nature.

Expression of Emotions?

I am thinking of the criticism of Hume that moral behaviors turn out to be just expressions of one’s feelings and passions. And I don't think that is the right understanding of Hume. The emotivist standpoint of Hume needs an appropriate understanding—not in terms of expression of feelings—but in terms of a logical point of view about the justification of moral judgments.

I think the passions as justificatory grounding of moral conclusions should be distinguished from the mere psychological states accompanying the process of making moral judgments. For when we consider moral conclusions as mere expression of our dispositions and passions, it is like thnking of the reason for me to sing songs to my husband in his birthday as the mere expression of my emotions, or thinking of the moral decision to salvage the kid falling into the well as an expression of one’s feeling distress. But both sounds strange. In the case of the kid, the sense of sympahty is deeply rooted in our human nature, and our decision to save the kid is not expressions of our own feeling bad about this situation. What Hume is really arguing is that the fact that “I am feeling bad about the situation” itself is not sufficient for me to conclude that I ought to save the kid unless it is supplied with a major moral principle, which is “I ought to always help those in danger”.

Here we can see the difference in Hume’s sketch bewteen two kinds of emotions: E(1) is the psychological states accompanying our thought and behaviors. E(2) is the moral justificatory reason which constitutes the sources of the major moral principle. For illustration, now the moral argument(A) of my singing songs at my husband’s birthday is like this：A(1) Major premise: I ought to do something making him happy. A(2)Minor premise: Singing songs will make him happy. A(3)I ought to sing songs. What Hume means about E(2) is that the reason why one starts with the Major premise is that one will find out the approbation of this idea rather than rational reflections. But E(1) is the one that appears in the A(2) and A(3).

To sum up, E(2) as the justificatory reason for the agent to engage into the major premise is the fundamental one for Hume. Therefore what we should ask Hume is the question of the objectivity of human emotions. In other word, what if the agent feels happy about killing and hurting people? On what grounding we can blame the agent for feeling wrongly and defectively?

About the virtue of Friendship

I am reading a book written by a neo-Aristotelian philosopher recently and just encounter his discussion about friendship. He claims the irreplaceability of friends, for although a good friend is good because of his or her embodiment of the ideal of goodness, the character of the person and the common life experience created together are hardly easily replaceable by someone else. However my story is a little different, irrelevant actually. It always comes to my mind when it comes to the word of friendship that several years ago my precious friendship with a girl during high school just broke up because of my forthright letter to her. We become intimate friends with each other after the first letter she wrote to me saying that she knew me in one way or another and hope to be my friend. Then we kept writing letters to each other for nearly four years until I became a sophomore. But it ended, for we grew up into two kinds of people, holding radically different evaluative outlooks toward how to live a good life. Anyway it is a story about my understanding of the ideal way of friendship when I was younger, which is quite Aristotelian. The friendship died by my letter and her ironic reply, which still kinds hurts.
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Aristotle repudiates the kind of friendship based on the mode of either desire-satisfaction or utility, and thus advocates the real friendship based upon moral excellence. Aristotle argues that “people do not become friends for both utility and pleasure, for things that are incidental are not often combined…it is bad people who will tend to be friends for pleasure or utility, since this is the respect in which they are alike.” (1157a-b)The reason why the preference of pleasure and utility constitute the badness of the agent consists in the fact that one does not build up the friendship for the sake of the friend, but instead the interest of agent himself. Friendship becomes something as instrumental to satisfy one’s need rather than the flourishing of the friend himself. When the importance of the friend is dependent on the external reason rather than the value of himself, he can be easily discarded or replaced by someone so as to meet the new need or end. It is a distain of human dignity. More importantly, pleasure and utility can be vicious without the scrutiny of rationality, and if so, the agents will be disqualified from talking about friendship, for their friendship only contributes to evil and evil friendship can be no longer called friendship. (1172a) Therefore, friendship should not be limited to those that friends qua friends could have towards one another, but should include all relations that friends qua human beings can have to one another. It is clear that we cannot really grasp the conception of friendship unless we first grasp what it is meant to be a human qua human. This is what Aristotle wants to make us remember: we should make ourselves worthy of friendship, not merely good at making use of friendship.
There is no doubt that the term “human qua human” can be equated with the conception of the characteristic activity of human beings. In the case of friendship, the ideal way of friendship lies in an objective goodness of friendship the grasp of which needs a full and proper engagement in it, and the way we arrive at the understanding of its intrinsic and objective goodness is to throw ourselves into it and seek what counts as a full and proper engagement. To put it another way, the value and meaning of friendship consists in an ongoing engagement in which we keep thinking and reflecting upon the value and meaning of it in terms of the nature and central constituent of a good friendship. Only through practicing and cultivating such kind of friendship can we enjoy the most satisfying sort of happiness: the kind of happiness only possible with the practicing and appreciation of objective goodness.

a little about symposium

One question raised on class yesterday is quite interesting, that is, how to relate our ordinary life with those erotic practices in ancient Greece? Normally we don’t die for the loved as what is described in the Greek mythologies. Nor we really believe that women and men were originally combined together and then separated by Zeus. Even it is hard for me to believe in ordinary sense that we engage into love relationship is to be immortal. If people fall in love and become obsessed with each other so that they are willing to die for the other any time anywhere, they are normally viewed as crazy, insane.

Most of time I doubt the possibility of being both standing at the top of the mountain and understanding the ideas of ordinary people. Philosophers, like those who are in deepest love relationships, are beyond understanding. Only those who are in the same position with them can understand each other. But that may be too pessimistic. Actually philosophy does help we ordinary people understand some transcendental domain in the world. The truth and value of such domain is not as real as what we can normally experience in daily life, but conversely, much more real than our daily life. The analogy of watching movie or telling story might be helpful for us to understand that. We all know movies are “not true”, for they are stories and scenes created by people who desires to gain our sympathy, or money. However we watch movie in a way sometimes more seriously than we treat our daily life. I believe it is because we can see something more fundamental in pictures and colors and fictional dialogues in the movie. Maybe that is the meaning of art, which sometimes is remote from our life and seems illusory but always makes feel something ineffable. Therefore it seems to me that we should figure out some way to see the limitation of our ordinary life. We would have to appeal to story, movie, fiction, sacrificial relationship etc, to better understand the meaning of life. We might never have the chance to die for people we love, nor to successfully contemplate the form of that beauty itself, but at least we know there are people and philosophical activities promoting human knowledge of that.

Truth and truths

In the last post I wrote about my understanding of the originality of morality, endorsing Humean distinction between fact and value. I said that I disagree with the philosophers who makes the objectivity of morality tethered to the repudiation of distinction between fact and value. These philosophers, claiming that objectivity of morality comes from the possiblity for a mere fatucal statement to entail value judgment insintrically, might not be doing jobs on the right track, for I think in the job of depicting the fact there can be already mixture of something beyond fact.

Last week I read something by John Searle. (The Construction of Social Reality, 1990: 14) With an example of heart, he argues that even in biolgoy there is no factual statement as just factual. To claim “a heart’s normal function is to pump blood” is based on such evaluative judgment derived from the following syllogism: (1) anything impinges positively on survival is the function of the subject; (2) it is a fact that the heart pumping blood effectively is benefical to survival; (3)therefore the heart functions to pump blood. If we change “survival” into another standard as “making sound”, then the function of heart is “to beat” which is obviously anther bare fact about the heart. Thus Searle rightly advocates that “Functions, in short, are never intrinsic but are always observer relative. We are blinded to this fact by the practice, especially in biology, of talking about functions as if they were intrinsic to nature.” (14)

But normally we are afraid of such conclusion, for we are afraid of being relative. In biology there might be less disputes about the dominant value of survival and reproduction of certain species, but in human affairs there might be too many disputes about how I should live, about what should I believe and not to believe, or about why I should be generous instead of not to strangers outside our community. While one can stand along the same line with Rorty who advocates the existance of truth, rather than Truth with a capital T, it is not easy to believe so in each and every aspect of life. When the need of toleration is going hand in hand with the acknowledgment of diversity, the question of justification of each different kinds of so called truth remains equally urgent, and people might become worried about the limitation of tolerance, and even the justification of tolerance.

It is a common sense that human beings not only share some basic and universal features but also have their specialities. Deciding when and how to justify either of them needs wisdom. But what is wisdom if its legitimation and truth cannot be justified? It is an empirical domain and I don't think it is where philosophors should be. Philosophers are not used to tell you how to decide between the conflicting values, but they can only testify and examine your way in which you reach your conclusion.

Back to Searle, we do “discover” functions in nature, he says, “only within a set of prior assignments of value” (including purposes, teleology, and other functions). (1990: 14) Philosophy is unable to help people to have faith in the goodness or in God. If philosophy should has its aim to set goals for life, to decide meaning for life, it is not because it is philosophy and it has that capacity, but because we value philosophy as such. I think philosophy is only a tool, but invaluable tool. As a tool, philosophy has its limits. Everything has its limits. Helping people to realize it, however, is philosophy’s invaluable job which might be peculiar only to philosophy.

And back to the problem of Truth and truths, philosophers are unable to tell you what is truth, but only show you by their efforts that truth is worth seeking. One might think that such conclusion says nothing, but only palys a game of word, which I agree partly, but once one is looking at Socrates, one has to admit of something worth entertaining in it. The person who believes in god’s calling to sacrifice himself in the pursuit of truth, never successfully achieve any conclusion.

Some Thoughts About Morality

Recently I have been caught by the question of Fact/Value Distinction. It seems to me that human beings are moral animals is just a truism, but the real problem here is the matter of justification. How do you know that? How do you know that human beings are different from animals, even thought animals which have high intelligence such as dolphins? MacIntyre claims in his book, Dependent Rational Animals, that even though dolphins are to a great extent similar to human beings in terms of their abilities to communicate with their fellow dolphins, to learn from their human trainers, and to have the feeling of happiness when they are rewarded by successfully fininishing the tasks, human beings are different from animals in an essential way that they can establish and develop such virtues as giving and receiving.

However, what makes me feel unsatisfied is that I don't see any difference between dolphins and human beings, if the sense of giving and receiving, the ability to learn and communicate with others, and the phenomenon of feeling happy or sorrow of human beings are only in a quantitative way superior to those of dolphin. Either dolphins are moral beings as human beings, or human beings are non-moral beings as intelligent dolphins. If not so, at least one reason is needed to show that where the sense of morality comes from to transit animals that are mere animals without sense of morality into the human animals knowing eating their fellow animals are vicious. It might be helpful here to remind people of the question raised by Hume that what makes the facts, that a young tree eats his mother tree for the sake of living and the other fact that a young man eats his mother, morally different, for the same reason for living? What makes cannibalism a moral issue?

My point of view is based on the Humean credo of the distinction between fact and value. Moral judgment is the result of human projection. But there are many moral philosophers objecting to such understanding, for they argue that morality has a realistic foundation, independent of human projections, on which we are able to have a solid and basic moral judgment concerning the vice of killing, lying, cannibalism etc. These philosophers strongly repudiate such interpretation of morality as emotivism which they belive is going to destroy the objectivity of the domain of morality. On the part of the objectivity of morality I agree with these philosophers, but I doubt their belief in the relationship between the moral objectivity and the denial of distinction between fact and value.

It is factually true that human beings have such and such features, emotions, and rational capacities, but it is a mystery that the same fact of cannibalism means differently between humans and trees. If one answers that because human beings are moral animals while trees are not, one can be further asked for a justification: why human beins are moral animals or how do you know that? I imagine one response for him:

He might claim that because cannibalism is intrinsically vicious and human beings know that, But I　can further challenge him by asking how do you know human beings know rightly about the badness of cannibalism? Of course most sane people know that canniblism should be forbidded as vicious, but what matters here is the problem of why. Unless one ends up being a Moore who raises both of his hands as two proofs for the external world, I can keep asking the question: what if all human beings’ knowing some facts as intrinsically morally wrong turns out out to be wrong?

Repudiating my question as insanely skeptical is unfair, because I am not aiming at destroying whatever conclusion offered by anyone, but only curious about the reason and hope that he can give me a more explicit and convincing explanation which is not just an assertion as "self-obvious".

Also, trying to prevent me from investigating by appealing to God, which seems better than by ending up claiming intrinsic goodness as self-explanatory, is not as convincing as he believes to be. However, I can see no better way. Of course there are other ways such as claiming the objectivity of rationality, or the objectivity of human passions such as the sense of sympathy, but they are all liable to be challenged by the question of “HOW do you know that is not ILLUSORY?” It drives me crazy.

Personally speaking, I believe that value becomes value because it is valued as value. Even in the fact that human beings are moral animals we can find something not merely facutal. More precisely, morality becomes morality because it is moralized. But the same question can always emerge: how do you know that?

I just know it．I just believe it. No better way.