[Xmca-l] Re: Habits (Greek: ethos)

[Annalisa Aguilar]

Hello,


In an apparently feeble attempt to keep the ethics discussion under this roof, I'm replying to Paul's post here (which is his reply to my last post [time stamp 7/8/2016 1:24pm] in the Appeal for Help thread).

Paul makes the post (from his Samsung no less) stating:

Annalisa,
There is a generalization to be made about ethics, which you highlight clearly.  It is the conclusion of Bertrand russell in his talk, "why I am not a christian."  Russell concluded, "outside of human desires there are no moral standards!"

To which I'll reply:

That could be a generalization that you share with Russell, but what I was trying to point out, is that the POINT is NOT to make a decisive conclusion with an intent to create a standard, that conclusions can only pertain to a given situation at hand.

This is a different emphasis than to say "there are no moral standards." It depends if you emphasize "moral" or "standards." (duck-rabbit)

I'm saying that there can be moral conclusions to be made, but it is up to a free individual to discover what they are through lived experience (perezhivanie?).

I am emphasizing the freedom here, for the individual to decide freely, and for that to happen, that lived experience must be considered outside of human desires, but not in the way I think Russell means when he used those words.

In other words, how I mean it is that if we put human desires to the side, there can be a way to make a conclusion, just not a generalization. This conclusion, whatever it might be, is entirely dependent upon the situation at hand, and who is in the situation, and what the choices are.

If it is the case that no moral standards are conclusive, that does NOT mean there are no morals to be discovered and adopted. It just means there are none that can be generalized (made into a standard) because there are too many variables, and all of that exists outside (beyond) of human desire.

To say there is no duck there and no rabbit there - when there is something there that could be a duck or a rabbit - is not making a generalization.

"There is no there there," is not a generalization, but it is a conclusion, it's a duck-rabbit (or it's Oakland, which is very specific), which is conclusive in its own right, or rather, it's conclusive enough (for the time being).

Kind regards,

Annalisa