Can morality be objective?

[Banno]

@Zac

I always saw virtue ethics as concerning what makes a particular person moral.

Ethics is inherently concerned with others. So what makes a particular (act or person) ethical is inherently concerned with others.

Picture instead an ad hoc process of communal improvement.

@Zac

“Why do you think this particular killing was wrong?”

It caused unnecessary suffering; it was motivated by greed; it was the wrong person that was killed… things both specific to the situated killing, yet consistent; as oppose to “it did not lead to greater happiness” or “it did not satisfy the categorical imperative” or “it was contrary to the will of God”; and being part of an ongoing conversation mediating our behaviour.

Common Law.

That’s not the clearest answer, but i want to point to an heuristic rather than present a complete solution; because I’m far from convinced there is a right answer here.

[Astorre]

@FireOlogist

We don’t need to argue to do the best we can where there are no conclusions. We can just do it, and never argue it.

It’s interesting, but it seems that any argument implies the disputant has some notion of possessing something objective. If a person were convinced beforehand that everything is subjective, they wouldn’t start an argument.

That’s a fair point. I accept it.

[j_j]

@Astorre

I would like to admit that what I value most in people is the ability to examine their own underlying assumptions.

Well said ! First find them, then examine them.

@Astorre

It’s interesting, but it seems that any argument implies the disputant has some notion of possessing something objective. If a person were convinced beforehand that everything is subjective, they wouldn’t start an argument.

That’s a fair point. I accept it.

To me this is a place for caution. We assume that we are discussing the same object. But “objective” just means “unbiased.” Where did we assume that someone unbiased was around ? Personality is bias. Remember ontocubism ? The object is a system of “faces.” That’s all we assume. We don’t need to assume that there is a “true” face or that all of the faces are here already.

Now perhaps we vaguely all assume that our beliefs or perspective on the object can be better. I might literally walk closer to the object to get a better view. In this case, better is something like more detail.

When we assert ourselves, we assert our own point of view — our own bias/subjectivity — as worthy of consideration. If we are fanatics, we might pretend that it’s not our point of view but God’s. This “God’s POV” typically wears the mask of “from no point of view at all” these days.

But this is just my point of view, which I assert as worthy of consideration but not as exhaustive or beyond improvement. And such improvement need not be understood in a kneejerk fashion in terms of accuracy. The object need not be assumed to live in an “eternity” where it already has some fixed “substrate objective reality.” We might think of the object as an open process that we enact through our very inquiry, and so on. The object might be fundamentally futural. Objects as such may never arrive. To be “here” is also to not yet be here, if we share objects ( meet in or as objects ) and we each worry about what to do next.

[Astorre]

I find this to be a very interesting topic. I’ve never actually argued with anyone about the nature of arguing itself! I really ought to make this a separate discussion =). And the positions are interesting, too.

But what about me? Why do I argue? Why is it important for me to share my opinion with you—or anyone else? Oh, truly, this is a goldmine for exploration!

[j_j]

It really is juicy stuff. I think Brandom’s work is pretty great on this.

As I understand his work, Kant’s most basic idea, the axis around which all his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for. They are a kind of commitment we undertake. Kant understands judging and acting as applying rules, concepts, that determine what the subject becomes committed to and responsible for by applying them. Applying concepts theoretically in judgment and practically in action binds the concept user, commits her, makes her responsible, by opening her up to normative assessment according to the rules she has made herself subject to.
The responsibility one undertakes by applying a concept is a task responsibility: a commitment to do something. On the theoretical side, what one is committed to doing, what one becomes liable to assessment as to one’s success at doing, is integrating one’s judgments into a whole that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity: the synthetic unity of apperception. It is a systematic, rational unity, dynamically created and sustained by drawing inferential consequences from and finding reasons for one’s judgments, and rejecting commitments incompatible with those one has undertaken. Apperceiving, the characteristically sapient sort of awareness, is discursive (that is, conceptual) awareness.
For it consists in integrating judgments into a unity structured by relations of what judgments provide reasons for and against what others. And those rational relations among judgments are determined by the rules, that is the concepts, one binds oneself by in making the judgments. Each new episode of experience, paradigmatically the making of a perceptual judgment, requires integration into, and hence transformation of the antecedent constellation of commitments.
New incompatibilities can arise, which must be dealt with critically by rejecting or modifying prior commitments. New joint consequences can ensue, which must be acknowledged or rejected. The process by which the whole evolves and develops systematically is a paradigmatically rational one, structured by the rhythm of inhalation or amplification by acknowledging new commitments and extracting new consequences, and exhalation or criticism by rejecting or adjusting old commitments in the light of their rational relations to the new ones.

“Ethics is first philosophy” because philosophy is an ideal, project. The philosopher is a “hero.” The world is a “stage” because we perform social virtue for one another. Nothing is more real than other people, for they are the witnesses to give us back our own unity as a self. I think we both agree that the “I” is utterly dependent on the “Thou.” Left and right, north and south, you and me.

In the case of philosophy, this virtue includes the coherence of the self as a dynamic system of belief. I can disagree with you, but I should not disagree with myself.

[j_j]

@Astorre

But what about me? Why do I argue? Why is it important for me to share my opinion with you—or anyone else? Oh, truly, this is a goldmine for exploration!

This is a great theme all by itself. What do I want ?

I want status, of course. But it’s not so ugly and simple as that. I want to share in status. I want to share a “high vision” with others. I used to be in bands, and we sometimes all got to a “high place” together musically. We tore in new asshole in spacetime, according to us. And that was enough. “Two or three gathered in my name.” A satisfied joint narcissism. The group affirms itself, often in terms of what it excludes.

“We don’t eat pork.”
“We never lie.”
“We have explicit hygeine.”
“We are the sexy people in this room.”
“We don’t let anyone fuck with us.”
“We are above greed and lust and ego.”

And so on. More or less concrete.

[Astorre]

Start the topic! We’re going to argue fiercely.

[FireOlogist]

@Wayfarer

Has to do with a ‘transcendental source of values’

Ok, so are you saying that, as I am attempting to support the notion that a meaningful exercise of morality has to involve the objective, that I am raising the notion of a transcendent source of moral truths?
Are you saying that an objective source is sort of a default or back-door transcendent source?

If you meant something else, I’d be interested in that too, but I hadn’t thought about the third-party nature of both the objective and the transcendent before. Interesting.

I always, perhaps naively, seen the objective closer to the subjective, right in contact with each other (‘subject’ being just my personal space for another object in the objective world we share, at least as a simplified starting point to making this distinction). The transcendent was something more other-worldly, like another species of objects.

But I avoid dualism too, so I shy away from using the term ‘transcendent’ very much. It feels like a deus ex machina, or a bookend outside of the discussion. I’m more of a ‘everything that matters, must be immanent’ guy. The truth is right here, just out of reach. We taste it, as we look for it, and we hear it as we reach out to touch it, having only enough sense of the truth to keep sniffing it out, but always looking here, not elsewhere.

Bringing it back to the OP, there are doings in our world happening among our fellow subjects, like a rape, or a friend sacrificing something for you.

And we evaluate those doings to measure them as good or bad.

To evaluate them, we need a measuring stick (an ideal, a fixed repeatable process, an objective standard).

Then we can decide on the measurement, and in so doing, speak a rule “rape is wrong” or “friendship is good”.

If we subjects are the source and manufacturers of both the measuring stick and the resulting measurement, objectivity is jeopardized, morality may be subjective, and, in my view, morality becomes less important and lest interesting, less impactful; my good is never the good, so why ask anyone else about it?

---

The aversion to objective truth and objective moral truth creates more of a slavery than a freedom to me. People seem to think that if there is an absolute moral law, a bunch of rules to follow, like “thou shalt not rape”, we become robbed of our deliberations forced act inauthentically, and enslaved to one course of action, not chosen, but imposed. We become lifeless rule followers. The caricature of a Catholic, I suppose.

But it’s the opposite to me. Where there are no rules, I am not free, I am incapable of doing anything.

Driving through town with no rules would be chaos and we’d all get nowhere. But with a right side of the road, I am free to move quicker, safer and get somewhere. When there are no objective parameters, our judgments don’t actually matter or align with what actually happens; everything in flux, morality is arguments, yelled out your window in traffic you both contributed to unknowingly, and have no control over, no agency left.

But if something I think is good, once taken out of context, could be bad, or indifferent, it seems morality is merely a local game, best avoided given the players.

[j_j]

@FireOlogist

And we evaluate those doings to measure them as good or bad.

To evaluate them, we need a measuring stick (an ideal, a fixed repeatable process, an objective standard).

I think it helps to have a discursive technique for edge cases, but I don’t consult a book in order to be disgusted by cruelty. Including my own cruelty, when I cool off and feel ashamed.

I am biased. I think we all our. But my bias is that we social animals. It’s not a top down thing where “though” directs the meat. This symbolic layer is a late arrival, good for edge cases, good for complex systems. But utterly dependent on emotional intelligence.

I think we do largely share in this, though certain outliers show up in true crime videos. It’s like they are missing something, relative to the rest ( most) of us.

[Wayfarer]

@FireOlogist

@Wayfarer

Has to do with a ‘transcendental source of values’

Ok, so are you saying that, as I am attempting to support the notion that a meaningful exercise of morality has to involve the objective, that I am raising the notion of a transcendent source of moral truths?

My point is — and it’s a difficult point— that what is transcendent is something greater and more importan than what is objective. It includes but exceeds it. I researched the history of the term, ‘objective’, and it only came into use in the early modern age (ref). My tentative theory is that the whole ‘subject-object’ orientation— the individual subject confronting a world of objects—is very much part of the advent of modern liberal individualism. The pre-modern mind lived in an ‘I-thou’ relationship, as the world was the expression of the Divine will. We were subjects in a different sense to what we are now. Now we are the isolated ego who is also the only real arbiter of value. Nihil ultra ego is the motto of modern individualism. And, hey, individualism is a great thing! But it has a shadow, and that’s what we’re discussing here.

As I think I said earlier in this thread, this is not to disparage either objectivity or individualism. I’m not a post-modern relativist. I’m someone more like the ‘perennialist’ or ‘seeker’ who believes that the various ‘wisdom traditions’ are expressions of a primordial insight or vision of truth which modernity has in some fundamental sense fallen away from or forgotten.

So as regards what is transcendent, I will repeat the example I gave in a previous conversation, rather a quotidian example but which I think conveys the point. It is that the meaning of ‘7’ transcends all of the different ways in which it can be written or expressed.

It has long been apparent to philosophers that numbers are real in a way that sense–objects are not. They are not perceived by the senses — you can point to a numeral, say “7”, but what you’re gesturing towards is a symbolic representation and one which can take many forms:

7 - Arabic numeral
VII - Roman numeral
111 - Binary code
Seven - English word
七 -  Chinese - Japanese word
सप्त - Sanskrit word

In each case, the symbolic form varies, but the value does not. In grasping a number, we are recognizing a quantitative and logical relation that has a specific value as a matter of definition. They are the same for any mind capable of counting.

So in the numerical example, the actual value transcends the specific expression or symbolic system in which it is encoded. So I think mathematics embodies a truth which is more than objective; that is why mathematics is utilised to determine what is objective in so many cases. When we grasp a mathematical truth, it is not contingent in the same sense that facts of experience are.

Moral realists will say the same applies to moral principles: they are expressed or encoded in divergent systems and cultural tropes but the underlying reality is invariant. So what is that ‘underlying reality?’ you might ask. But it can’t simply be stated outright. It’s not that simple! We see through a glass darkly, as it is said.

@FireOlogist

People seem to think that if there is an absolute moral law, a bunch of rules to follow, like “thou shalt not rape”, we become robbed of our deliberations forced act inauthentically, and enslaved to one course of action, not chosen, but imposed. We become lifeless rule followers. The caricature of a Catholic, I suppose.

But that is a caricature, as you say. It is typical of what a lot of those here will say. For those actually grappling with transcendent truths, they are by no means possessed of the kind of unctious certitude exhibited by even many atheists. You know there’s a saying in Zen, ‘great doubt, great awakening’. That kind of doubt is not doubting ‘the veracity of a proposition’ or something jejune like that. It is doubting your grasp of reality itself, the realisation that the world is a madhouse, that all of us might really be living in illusion. That’s great doubt! I think that is nearer to a true faith than the repitition of platitudes.

[FireOlogist]

@Astorre

when we speak of morality, we are—roughly speaking—asking what is good and what is bad. By introducing the concept of “value,” we ask instead: “What is important to us?” or “What do we desire?”

We can also ask, and I think you do: do we discover values, or do we impose them? Instead of “what is important to me, and what do I desire” we can just ask “what is important, and what is desirable.”

I think that makes all the difference.

@Astorre

the desires and aspirations of an individual or a group, while also acknowledging that something can be considered important regardless of those desires. It prompts us to look beyond the concepts of good and evil to find specific grounds for significance—grounds that cannot be reduced to the mere fact of existence.

In my view, what is most significant to me is what is significant because of what it is, because of itself. It may not be something the group finds significant, and I may find a personal significance in something I would expect others to find insignificant, but I think we can distinguish more ephemeral desires and significances before finding a way to attach “good” or “truth” to the more impactful and more resoundingly significant.

@Astorre

Yet, in the world I described, killing one of those ten remaining women carries entirely different weight and value. It is a completely different objective reality.

@Astorre

Objective factors do indeed influence our views.

And if we unpack the baggage of the word “objective” I think most here are basically agreeing with that.

@Astorre

something objective—rather than merely subjective—does indeed influence our notions of good and evil, or our values.

I think we are rounding back to the beginning of this, where we asserted morality involves a free agent judge and decider who acts - this is the necessary subjective component.

And I certainly agree that we need an object enacted in the world - an act affecting other moral agents - so an objectifying influence there.

I think I’m saying that, the third thing we need and always have when playing at morality, is a rule, an ideal, or measurable standard - something to measure how aligned the subjective agent’s judgment and the objectified world are to each other. This is a third component, and one that I think brings it together. We make or follow a rule that reflects our values with what is.

@Astorre

The catch, however, is that objective conditions can vary from place to place (referring to the differing living conditions across the planet’s regions).

I also agree that objective conditions change and influence moral decision-making. And it may force us to question the objectivity of the rules we’ve made in the past, now facing new factual conditions. But it is not necessary that the old rule isn’t still valid. It may be the case that an utterly new rule needs to be found/discovered/created to address any variances between values and facts in the agent’s deliberations before acting.

What becomes a problem is when there is no rule we can create that can ever possibly remain true in all circumstances. If that is not even possible, to me it means, rules are not possible. And moral judgment becomes hollow.

There is an aspirational nature to even joining the human race to become a good person. We aren’t necessarily ever going to be good or do good things. But we would not be able to know the difference or really play the game, without hope for some ideals, some virtues that remain virtuous.

How much of a compliment is it for an evil loser to call someone a good guy? That’s all of us - the losers. If we want to play “good guy/bad guy” with each other, we need some solid rules, or what fun is that?

[Astorre]

@FireOlogist

What becomes a problem is when there is no rule we can create that can ever possibly remain true in all circumstances. If that is not even possible, to me it means, rules are possible. And moral judgment becomes hollow.

That is precisely why (among other things) I said earlier that in a dynamic ontology—unlike in substantialism—the question we are discussing here simply does not exist.

After all, if we accept that the world is mutable, then “truth” must be mutable too, right? And if truth is mutable, what is there left to say about absolutes?

Note that it was your own premise that led me to this conclusion. So, you see, we are coming right back to the idea of ​​irreducibility, aren’t we?

I found the whole thing amusing. But really—it’s an absolute blast being here and debating this!

[FireOlogist]

@Wayfarer

expressions of a primordial insight or vision of truth which modernity has in some fundamental sense fallen away from or forgotten.

I agree. Poor truth - totally neglected today. The modernist has fetishized a world where “truth” can be dismissed as an appendix to a more sterile, hollow accounting.

@Wayfarer

the symbolic form varies, but the value does not. In grasping a number, we are recognizing a quantitative and logical relation that has a specific value as a matter of definition. They are the same for any mind capable of counting.

You seem to be showing both what objectivity is, and how it is, as something transcendent.

So you are saying all my talk of the objective as a vital component to answering a moral question, is an appeal to transcendent reality.

I need to think about that. Reality remains one of type of substance to me (parts and a whole, as one), even if we are spirit and body, and I just never liked transcendent, but maybe I have to incorporate it better. I do in fact believe in God, just never found a way to work Him in to an objective, more scientific/analytically testable account.

But I like the notion of the objective and the something that includes but is more than the objective.

@Wayfarer

all of us might really be living in illusion. That’s great doubt! I think that is nearer to a true faith than the repitition of platitudes.

You want to be the author, who writes the platitudes.

And the emptier you are, or the poorer in spirit you are, the more you distrust illusion, the more you doubt, the closer you become to where only the truth remains. And that truth is a starting pointing and a destination. Much more to come where nothing more is needed.

[FireOlogist]

@Astorre

world is mutable, then “truth” must be mutable too, right?

I’d still say no. Truth is “the world is mutable.” Truth never changes, though the world changes.

[Astorre]

I like that. Because it means we still have something to argue about.

[Wayfarer]

@FireOlogist

I like the notion of the objective and the something that includes but is more than the objective.

Right! Reality includes both God and man, if you like, but transcends both.

@FireOlogist

So you are saying all my talk of the objective as a vital component to answering a moral question, is an appeal to transcendent reality.

What is objective is a subset of what is.

[j_j]

@gertie

The way I get a handle on it is by going a bit further. I like Nagel’s description of conscious experience as ‘something it is like to be’’ eg gertie. And the way that manifests is as a discrete unified self with a first person pov, correlated with a specific body, moving through space and time in a world of couches, other people, gravity, brains, etc. A world which physically ‘contains’ me, as I experientially ‘contain’ it.

And when I compare notes with other people, they report much the same, and together we build a model of a shared physical world which ‘contains’, us. And then process of doubting, inferring, explaining, etc begins, if you’re that sort of person…

Well said. Are you quoting Honderich earlier in your post ? Cool.

I suggest that consciousness is the being ( or being there ) of “pre-scientific” empirical objects. For the “conscious” organism.

Basically consciousness is the being or presence of the tacitly from-a-POV pre-theoretical lifeworld or umvelt. We do not doubt that these pre-theoretical empirical objects are shared. We act out our faith in shared objects via nonverbal conduct, and sometimes through verbal conduct. We expect our cries to be heard. Nothing is more real than other people. Nothing is more real than shared umvelt objects.

Perhaps you’d agree that it takes time for us to even think of our existence in terms of objects for a subject. We enact it early on, sure, but it only becomes explicit/discursive later.

Eventually we are in a position where it is feasible to learn about and even participate in the elaboration of the scientific image.

@gertie

As I said, I’m not making a case for objective reality, but I do believe that matering, or having a stake in the ‘Is’ state of affairs can provide a justification for Oughts which is universal to sentient beings. Suffering and flourishing by their nature are qualiative and matter to us.

Right. And I suggest that the umvelt is immediately value-stuctured and immediately symbolically structured. We “paint over” some of this via the scientific image. Then naive scientism tends to mistake this image, a map within and part of the territory, for the territory under the territory, or the “true part” thereof. This is as silly as the “lossless compression” of 10 trillion bits into 10 thousand bits. Of course the point of maps is to compress, precisely so they can function as tools.

“You see this hammer ? This hammer is True Reality. Everything other than this hammer is Unreal. Now that’s Philosophy son !”

People tend to look in “objective reality stuff” to ground morality. The map-for-anyone is now “the secret from no point of view.” They adopt a “true actual stuff” map that scrubs the world of value and then look for a map of value within that scrubbed map. “First we empty the glass. Then we try to drink from it. That’s philosophy son !”

Of course they really just inherit a prejudice from their training. “Everybody knows” that this “omjective reality” map is “sacred.” To look for a “value map” in the scientific image is to uncritically lift that map up as a “God” implicitly. “We kneel before thee, hammer and bucket of nails.”

The “sacred” is/ought distinction is part of this. The stuff that “is” is map stuff, basically the compressed mathemagical skeleton of genuine-world umvelt stuff. Then the “ought stuff” is understood as “painted on.” So the world of the alienated / bifurcated theorist is “map stuff” decorated with “ought stuff.” That this “profound distinction” is an inherited prejudice, a mere tool, is ignored, never noticed. The “is stuff” is vaguely — as I see it — a mathematical platonism ectoplasm, but tacitly. “Everybody knows” that “real stuff” is “green source code in eternity.” Thus spake “Critical Thinking.” Or rather The Golden Calf.

So we go from POV-umvelt to compressed devalued map for the generic anyone and then to a dualism of “fact” and “value,” where “fact” is just map-stuff. That the scientific image is a tool is forgotten. For we are lost in the realm of sacred theory, pure seeing. The normativity (status seeking) that drives this “unbiased” seeing is curiously unseen.

NOTE:

I allowed myself some poetic license above, because I sometimes think what kind of approach would have been able to “punch through” my own former naive scientism. Immanent critique. Out-Herod Herod. Mock scientism in terms of its abandonment of the empirical for the merely metaphysical. NOT from the expected side. NOT from the mysticism it can see but from the left, from the blindside of its own unseen mysticism.

[Astorre]

@FireOlogist

I also agree that objective conditions change and influence moral decision-making. And it may force us to question the objectivity of the rules we’ve made in the past, now facing new factual conditions. But it is not necessary that the old rule isn’t still valid. It may be the case that an utterly new rule needs to be found/discovered/created to address any variances between values and facts in the agent’s deliberations before acting.

I would like to dwell on this point a bit more, as it is a very important topic for discussion.

As I mentioned earlier in another discussion, I am a proponent of pragmatism. However, not in its radical form—the idea that “truth equals what works.” Despite its apparent simplicity, that formula harbors a great deal of tension.

First, consider the phrase “what works”—but when does it work? Always? To be honest, I have never encountered such a thing. There are always exceptions, limitations, and conditions—not to mention the possibility of refutation (as Popper described it). I have never come across anything that works universally, without exception.

Second, regarding “what works”—for how long does it actually work? The world changes daily: things vanish, new elements appear, and existing things are transformed. Take this example: “This bridge has stood here for a hundred years, so it represents the truth.” We don’t speak that way. Tomorrow it might rain, causing the river to swell and wash the bridge away. Everyone will forget how good that bridge once was. A new bridge will be built in its place—using modern materials and the latest technologies—and this new bridge will be superior to the old one. But for how long? Until the emergence of some factor that hadn’t been taken into account?

Third, there is the “problem of double standards.” Someone might proclaim that “hitting your neighbor is wrong” and shout this to the whole world. Then, as time passes, the urge arises to punch a particular “vile” neighbor in the face (even though you—or your forebears—had declared the opposite). You start rationalizing: calling it a “battle for the truth,” a “fight for our ideals,” or a “special operation to enforce friendliness”—churning out nonsense designed for impressionable minds. What is really going on here? Perhaps a principle was proclaimed too hastily—one that failed to account for your own interests? Or was it to your advantage to proclaim this in order to gain the respect of those around you, even though that wasn’t actually what you meant? Or did you simply like how it worked for you—until you didn’t anymore?

Does truth stop working? Or is it, after all, something more than just what works?

@FireOlogist

I think I’m saying that, the third thing we need and always have when playing at morality, is a rule, an ideal, or measurable standard - something to measure how aligned the subjective agent’s judgment and the objectified world are to each other. This is a third component, and one that I think brings it together. We make or follow a rule that reflects our values with what is.

In light of the foregoing, I would like to clarify this point. Tell me, does the person who declares certain values ​​to be universal not simultaneously turn into a judge who grants himself exceptions to those very values?

[j_j]

@Astorre

As I mentioned earlier in another discussion, I am a proponent of pragmatism. However, not in its radical form—the idea that “truth equals what works.” Despite its apparent simplicity, that formula harbors a great deal of tension.

If I can pipe in, I suggest that “truth is what works” is not radical pragmatism. Radical pragmatism doesn’t need this sign.

@Astorre

First, consider the phrase “what works”—but when does it work? Always? To be honest, I have never encountered such a thing.

Here I am with you. The tool can always fail us. The use of “truth” suggests that some tool out there is perfect and unbreakable. The “truth” also suggests that the same tool is perfect for everyone. Monological. Everyone “should” believe…the same thing. But belief is conduct. So everyone should act the same way. The dark side of “truth lust” is just this hatred of plurality, which is basically the hatred of the freedom of other people. Feyerabend saw that science becomes ideological in terms of the “true essence” of science. Basically an articulation of the scientific method functions as the fetish, as the higher-order truth. If I get to say what counts as “science,” then I am saying what the higher “rational” human essentially is.

Feyerabend said “anything goes !”

This “anarchy” offends some people, but I see the virtue in it. To fix a method is to freeze a prejudice, to congeal and stiffen.

@Astorre

“This bridge has stood here for a hundred years, so it represents the truth.” We don’t speak that way. Tomorrow it might rain, causing the river to swell and wash the bridge away. Everyone will forget how good that bridge once was. A new bridge will be built in its place—using modern materials and the latest technologies—and this new bridge will be superior to the old one. But for how long? Until the emergence of some factor that hadn’t been taken into account?

Exactly. Note that the future is important here. So a radical pragmatism doesn’t bother to define the word “truth.” This traditional sign suggests eternity, which is a negation of the future and a negation of life as it is lived.

[Astorre]

@j_j

Exactly. Note that the future is important here. So a radical pragmatism doesn’t bother to define the word “truth.” This traditional sign suggests eternity, which is a negation of the future and a negation of life as it is lived.

This is a crucial point (provided I’ve interpreted it correctly).
On one hand, we criticize the tendency to focus on the “future” at the expense of the “present.”

But consider this: I once observed the behavior of drivers at a busy intersection. Despite the chaotic road markings and heavy traffic, they all maneuvered skillfully and avoided accidents. It was fascinating to watch. Why didn’t they all just crash into each other? After all, that would have been much simpler…

I believe each of them was driven by a sense of purpose—a goal-oriented focus on their destination. It was important for them to arrive safely, without an accident.

This observation made me rethink my “romanticized” view of the present. After all, we aren’t merely animals living in the immediate moment—creatures that “neither sow nor reap.” We usually need some sort of “vision for the future” precisely so that, while striving toward it, we can remain grounded in the present without losing our balance.

However, if we reduce everything to a goal, we risk slipping back into a teleological model where an action derives meaning solely from a predetermined outcome. Yet, a driver might change their route, abandon a maneuver, yield the right of way, or even fail to reach their destination entirely. Their actions do not necessarily lose their meaning in the process.

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Take someone suffering from insomnia (to be honest, I’m sometimes guilty of this myself). In the moment, it feels wonderful. There is so much of interest in the world, and the night is a beautiful time; the mind is clear, and there are no distractions. Yet, such a lifestyle is highly detrimental to one’s long-term health.

It follows that lacking a “vision for one’s own future” can have disastrous consequences for the present or the immediate future. What if each of us suddenly stopped believing in our own vision? I think this is brilliantly portrayed in movies like Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door or The Bucket List.