h3 class=”title”>Notes to Chapters 5-10 of AV
In chapters 5 Mac. addresses the inherent contradictions which assured that any project (Enlightenment Era) which sought to rationally justify morality was doomed to fail.
In Chapter 6 we talk about how the world view must look in light of these failings.
Chapters 7 and 8 talk about the failure of ‘social science’ to provide us a coherent explanation of human behavior.
Chapter nine servs as a bridge as we ask, in light of the failure of social science, ethics persists, where do we go?
Chapter ten starts charting the birth of the Classical (Aristotelian) ethical mode’s genesis with the heroic cultures (Illiad, Oddyssey).
Chapter 5: Why the Enlightenment Project of justifying Morality had to
fail
I. The Kant / Kierkegaard / Hume arguments failed due to
characteristics in their shared history
C. All arguments move from premises about human nature to conditions about moral rules’ authority.
II. Any project of the variety described in I.C. was doomed to fail. Conception of moral rules
battles human nature.
III. Aristotle’s Nichomachean
Ethics serves as both in the Classical (pre-Enlightenment era)
B. Ethics gets man between his natural state and his perfected teleological state
C. Teleologically defined
D. This is a tri-partite construct and all three parts are required
2. Correct nature contingent upon telos
3. Rational ethics
IV. This breaks at The Reformation (Protestantism and Jansenism)
B. Under this, the tri-partite construction becomes:
2. Correct nature contingent upon telos
3. Divine Path - God’s Grace delivers you to this
D. Actions are based on nature, custom, and habit.
V. Signs of weak use of reason
among KKH
B. Reason discerns no teleology
C. There is no teleological end
D. Thus, the tri-partite construct looks like
2. Correct nature, unmotivated by telos
3. Weakened reason
VI. With the telos gone, we cannot make any sense of the
tripartite scheme. Thus the Enlightenment authors inherited an
insoluble scheme
VII. Kant saw the criticality of the telos and his inherent
failure. Moral law cannot be derived from statements about human
nature or God’s will.
VIII. Kant’s statement instantiates the general: No valid
argument can move from entirely factual premises to evaluative
conclusions
B. Moral utterance changed in the 18th century such as the statement in VII could be understood intelligibly
C. What if the conclusion follows from the terms used?
IX. The Watch Example
B. This watch is inaccurate
C. This is a bad watch (evaluative), against VIII
D. Factual premises can legitimately yield evaluative conclusions when the object under discussion is a functional object
X. Arguments following the form of IX are exempt VIII’s burden
B. Man is a functional concept, similar to watch::good watch
C. Something in discourse changed to destroy this classical construct and netted the Enlightenment projects’ failure
D. Man is t fulfill roles that define the extent of good
E. Only when man is prior to and apart from roles is he no longer a functional concept
XI. “Man is not a functional object is a cataclysmic event.
This breaks classical morality and ruins Enlightenment projects.
There were essential human
purposes
B. Consider the bad watch, it is bad qua chronometer, but might be sufficient qua weapon to kill a bird
C. But how do we agree to the purpose for which an X is sought?
D. Once essential functions vanish, we end the project
E. Kantian ‘oughts’ are imperatives, not true-or-false statements
XII. Moral judgments as true/false continues today, but sans
referent. Once the truth about moral evaluations was spoken
sensibly.
XIII. Yet this move was praised. This was a decisive change
with two features
B. The invention of the individual. What were the political and social consequences of this invention? — Chapter 6
Chapter 6: Consequences of the Enlightenment Projects’ failure
I. Status in the post-Enlightenment world
B. Transformed rules of morality
C. No means to appeal to an telos, validate a rule
D. Philosophies came about that appealed to the ‘freed self’ or the ‘transformed rules’
II. Utilitarianism attempts to fix by utility as telos
B. Assumes educated utilitarians, doing well for all.
C. Mill finds that the man enlightened may not exist and Benthanism’s telos erodes
D. How do we define happiness?
E. Ultimately happiness is capriciousness informed, these caprices are intuitions
F. These intuitions -> Intuitionism -> Emotivism - moral rules are pure caprice
III. The Analytics could not buy into the Emotivist project
because they were Theory of Meaning,
not use. Thus they tried to legitimate Practical Reason’s rules
to save it from the precipice.
2. Freedom and well-being result are required for rational agency
3. If you hold the above you are logically committed to them ‘being a right’
4. Rights don’t exist
IV. Both the utilitarians and neo-Kantians escape failure.
Emotivist discourse is the reward for unfettering the self; that same
act ruined tho ability to rationally explain moral allegiances.
2. The Emotivist theory of use holds sway, and we are in a paradox
2. As we have no means to evaluate moral actions in the Emotivist society, we are constantly knowingly using each other - our society may have evolved to embrace this - chiefly notably by the existence of characters which praise the society where this has happened
V. 3 Uniquely modern moral appeal concepts exist in this strange moral
simulation we inhabit
2. Protest
3. “Unmasking” (culture jamming, in Wolfe)
2. They all serve as impersonal rational criteria, but they are not, trying to put an objective stake in the Emotivist swamp
2. Rights and utility appeal to “justice”, another fiction, but by appealing to this notion, we can seemingly objectively validate our mere Emotivist preferences
E. Protest is the act of decrying that which has been unmasked, generally a Right versus Bureaucratic Efficiency (Utility)
F. Protesters are attempting to appeal to an objective moral yardstick when the Utility-culture is part and parcel of that same environment
G. When the arbitrary shows the arbitrary in another it is unmasked - usually out of desire to cover insecurity about our own failings (Freud)
VI. Emotivism gave us 3 characters, all of which trade in moral
fictions,. To the end, we model off them and we are damned
B. The therapist continues despite the empirical worthlessness of their trade having been shown
C. The manager has his own particular fiction: the appeal to effectiveness
2. It is inseparable from a mode where you are required to treat people as means
3. how do you measure efficiency? What is the difference between effectiveness and long term economy?
4. Whence comes this effectiveness’ justification - from the character it quickened!
5. Managerial power trades on a false or indefinable measure.
6. Managerial science is merely the art of being able to propagate the symbols that perpetuate the belief in managerial science, and thus management, and thus effectiveness, and thus the manager character who affirms our Emotivist world-view.
VII. We can provide social reality of the character, but not have
a value for it (is this manager character fiction any good?).
Like Carnap and Ayer’s God, this manager is a social entity that serves
a function, but not not have a genuine objective existence.
VIII. Summation of current status
2. Allows us to trade in moral fictions
3. Pervades moral utterance
2. The myth of effectiveness pervades modern discourse
IX. The manager claims law-like knowledge by which social
institutions can be modeled
B. Claims the existence of law-like rules that are derived from the above
X. Changes
B. There was a historical changed that rendered the progression of factual premise to evaluative conclusion false
C. This shift requires an elucidation of fact, next chapter!
Chapter Seven: Fact, Explanation, and Expertise
I. Fact is a folk concept
B. Perceivers without concepts are blind
II. Ex planation
2. This was intended to resolve the is/seems appearance/reality gap
3. It makes each experience a closed realm, thus all is
4. Thus seem/is finds no home
5. It’s odd because natural history strives to push between is and seems - the earth seems flat but it is spherical
6. How can a world that posits experience and natural history gel? It cannot.
b. Thus we grabbed the erroneous moniker ‘Enlightenment’
c. Aristotelian science is shunned
d. Thus we seek a ‘natural history’, i.e. science of human behavior
e. Given the Aristotelian structure where Natural history and Ethics are fused, NH is removed (81-2)
f. Man ceases to be a functional concept
III. We attempt to explain human nature in mechanistic terms
B. Quine says that any such science must remove human motivation
2. Status of belief is too murky to yield a law
D. Aristotle versus Mechanistic explanation
2. No assertion about what is ‘valuable’ is made, it simply is
3. We divorce is and ought
IV. Something odd happens for the human scientist when he
manipulates. He excludes himself,
suddenly he is imprinting his own will - something incoherent is
inherent in this model
V. Our false belief in the panacea of this science was to drive
expertise in the bureaucratic realm
B. The sought-after civil servant
C. Government intrusion is justified by appeals to competence.
D. Corporations do the same
E. Competent managers of social change are said to be managers.
F. Bureaucrats appeal their right to adjust means and ends efficiently on the basis of scientific knowledge
G. Bureaucrats justify by
2. claim to manipulative power
3. It is not coincidental that this is exactly the state of our moral discourse today
Chapter 8: Character of Generalizations in Social Science and
their lack of predictive power
I. Status of social science
B. Oddly, Social science has not been renounced
C. Failings
2. Does not produce law-like generalizations
3 Is it effective and we simply missed it (answer turns out to be “no”)
II. 4 maxims produced by SS statements
B. Not truly defined in scope r universality
C. We cannot apply them as hypotheticals
D. These are not laws but they masquerade as such
III. Science comes from philosophy, where does SS come
from? It is ancestral to Machiavelli’s writings
2. To predict is to invoke a generalization prospective
3. Progress is the diminution of predictive failure — not being right on the prediction is tolerated
C. Fortuna’s interference would give tolerance for failure in this art
IV. This endeavor is failed from the get go as there are p4
sources for unpredictability in human affairs that cannot be overcome
B. Prediction of one’s actions based off of as yet unmade decisions
C. Game theory constructs do not map to reality, the assumption of a game comes with a load of pinned variables
D. Pure contingency: Had Cleopatra not been so beautiful, no Battle of Actium, etc.
V. Summation: We cannot determine human action
meaningfully, no science of human behavior is possible, the manager is
a social fiction with no explicable strength
VI. Counter to the 4 sources of unpredictability
B. No assertion of logical relationship.
C. No accurate explanation of the latter is possible if the first precludes them. In any case if the art which asserts the former exists, this problem should be overcome as well.
VII. There are 4 predictable elements in social life
B. We know statistical regularities
C. Human life is fragile
D. Human life is vulnerable
E. The enlightenment and Marxists thought that human science could overcome C and D. This science cannot be and thus these two are predictable regularities
VIII. Problem:
B. Predictability renders us vulnerable to being used
C. What conclusions can we derive about the possibility of this human behavior science?
2. It will exist with counter examples - illogically
3. It will be inscopable
IX. Back to Machiavelli
B. It is Immeasurable
C. It is permanent - any attempt to be totally effective begets unpredictability
X. The bureaucratic manager expert is bunk
B. It is a contemporary moral fiction
C. It is a social myth
Chapter 9: Nietzsche or Aristotle
Synopsis: Nietzsche destroyed the Enlightenment project first,
although he mistook the scope of his critique to be “all morality”
versus “the Enlightenment’s account of morality”. As Nietzsche
did not suggest a replacement moral scheme, could we not reject the
Enlightenment’s rejection and go back to Classicism, that is,
Aristotelian ism?
I. Morality has only became available for a certain kind of
use. Marxist questions are irrelevant is they ultimately demand:
who wields the systems of control. Ultimately, in this discussion
that is always the Emotivist characters.
II. moral utterance is too vulgar, to accessible, as Nietzsche
predicted.
III. Nietzsche saw that moral language usage is like ‘taboo’ when
Cook encountered the Polynesians. It is inexplicable, powerful,
illogical. We must supersede with an act of Will to “create new
tables of good.”
IV. Nietzsche has no coherent replacement in mind
V. Weberianism is Nietzsche rooted as we must arbitrarily assert
moral tables
2. The goal is effectiveness
3. Success is what others deem it, this is central. not the Aristotelian belief for honor is secondary to virtuous acts meriting such accolades
C. Was he right to dismiss Aristotle
VI. Nietzsche and MacIntyre ask what sort of man am I to become
B. We should attend to virtues before rules
C. We must chart Aristotelianism’s rise, to map this we must start with the Epic Societies
Chapter 10: The Virtues in Heroic Societies
Synopsis: Virtues and Virtue Ethics exist in heroic societies
where ought is clearly defined within a heroic teleology and sense of
obligation
I. Values are predetermined
B. Role defines imperatives
C. Actions are equal to character
2. Fidelity, etc.
3. All are keyed off of the man’s ability to put himself in peril to fulfill the obligations of his role
G. Execution of virtuous actions, inevitably, leads to death. The longer you live, the more friends you have, the more often you must fight to keep your credits and debits equal. Courage is to accept that you will die as part of this contract.
II. Contrast to Emotivism, existence in society is essential to
selfhood
B. A specific social structure is required
2. We can only experience virtue as part of our traditions, if our traditions don’t keep it, neither do we.
D. Evils
3. To cease to be your social role is to die, morally at the very least
III. The narrative can tell us what characters therein cannot:
i.e. Homer asks can you win, yet lose?
IV. Two key moral claims
2. Virtues enable fulfillment
V. Nietzsche’s characterization of heroic society was self
serving to his argument (129)
VI. We cannot escape our historical forebears
VII. Epic era’s ties to modernity
B. Two key questions:
2. Must we use discursive style, or is a narrative form satisfactory … Next chapter