My thoughts are still under development here so hopefully readers will be kind, but for some time now I’ve found myself deeply attracted to eudaimonistic models of ethical thought. Eudaimonistic ethical thought asks the question “what is the good life?” It is focused on questions of what a life characterized by flourishing would be. Thus, where nomological/juridical models of normativity are primarily concerned with determining whether actions are right or wrong, eudaimonistic normative models are interested in questions of ultimate values and how those values might be actualized or produced. I’ll have more to say about this in a moment, but it’s important to note that for eudaimonistic models of normativity, the question is not one of rejecting rules governing or regulating action, but rather a question of priorities. Where nomological/juridical models of normativity treat questions of normativity as exclusively exhausted by an examination of rules governing right and wrong action– leaving aside the question of whether or not these rules promote and further flourishing –for eudaimonistic models rules 1) are subordinate to fundamental values pertaining to flourishing, 2) therefore follow from these fundamental values, and 3) are therefore rules of thumb rather than absolutes.
It is likely that the seeds of nomological/juridical models of normativity began with the rise of Christianity during the middle ages. Where the ethical question of Greco-Roman antiquity had been “what is the good life?”, this question was largely foreclosed within the framework of Christianity insofar as 1) this world came to be seen as fallen, sinful, and futile, and 2) the overarching aim became one of salvation in the next life. Within this framework, situating ethical questions within the framework of questions of the good life amounted to a rejection of Christian doctrine and metaphysics. To raise such questions would amount to rejecting the thesis that the world is fallen and that salvation is to be sought not in this life but the next. Accordingly questions of ethics shifted from questions of the good life to questions of how to evaluate right and wrong action according to divine Law. What mattered was whether or not action accorded with this law, whatever it might be, and not whether or not action in according with that law produced or was conducive to the good life. We see vestiges of this today in Christian variants of homosexual reparative therapy. Even if the therapy tends to generate severe psychological maladies in the form of massive depression and and suicidal thoughts, it will be seen as a success if it shifts the person from homosexual behavior to heterosexual behavior. The quality of life is secondary to obedience to the law. The function of the law is not to promote flourishing, but rather is absolute and commanded by God.
With this shift we also get a shift to a new conception of both autonomy and the body. Setting aside the strange case of Plato, in antiquity the issue was not so much one of eradicating the body, of denigrating the body, as one of how to best live and satisfy one’s passions. Our passions, when left unformed or uncultivated, can generate massive suffering as in the case of the junkie that is a slave of his passions. Yet a life without the passions would be empty and would generate great suffering as well. The question is thus one of how to rationally satisfy our passions and drives without becoming slaves. In this regard, the body is a central theme of eudaimonistic ethical systems. We need to know something of the body, of its affects, of how it functions to answer questions about flourishing. Accordingly, we get a much broader conception of autonomy or freedom. Autonomy will not simply consist of being self-directing beings independent of all circumstance, but will involve questions of our relationship to our body, the social world in which we exist, our relation to our environment, etc. Epicurus’s Garden, for example, is not merely a historical curiosity with respect to his personal biography, secondary to the proper content of his ethical doctrine. Rather, the Garden, a place where like-minded individuals devoted to the Epicurean way of life live together, was a vital component of their autonomy insofar as control over their social life and environment was necessary to achieving the form of flourishing they sought. The Garden was a part of their autonomy.
read on!
With the rise of Christianity, however, the place of the body and the nature of autonomy changes significantly. Where before the question was one of how to best live the body, how to, as Spinoza would later put it, achieve joyous affects, the body is now a mark of sin that we must minimize to the greatest extend possible. In the marital setting, for example, we are not to enjoy sex, but only undertake sex for the sake of procreation. Likewise, it is likely that European attitudes towards cleanliness throughout the Middle Ages and up through the Enlightenment had less to do with a fear that water would generate sickness, than a belief that cleaning the body was a form of vanity that privileged the body over spiritual life. Bathing is what those Romans did. Similarly, the concept of autonomy shifts from being materio-spiritual as in Greco-Roman antiquity, to being purely spiritual. Autonomy will no longer involve questions of material conditions that must be satisfied in order to achieve the good life, but will now be purely spiritual, pertaining to our ability to act independent of any bodily inclinations and material conditions. This shift will receive its highest formulation in Kant, where categorical imperatives are 1) to be undertaken solely for the sake of duty without any regard for what consequences might follow from them, where 2) categorical imperatives (absolute duties) and hypothetical imperatives (actions undertaken for the sake of achieving an end) are rigorously separated such that hypothetical imperatives are excluded from the domain of ethics altogether, where 3) actions done for the sake of duty are to exclude any reference to pathological inclinations (“pathos” referring to bodily inclinations, feelings, sympathies, etc), and where 4) categorical imperatives arises from reason alone and are not contaminated by experience in any way. All that matters here is whether or not the action accords with the law, whether it is right or wrong, and not whether or not the action produces results that promote or inhibit flourishing. We are to purify ethics of all experiential elements.
It is sometimes suggested that eudaimonistic ethical systems do a poor job addressing issues of injustice and whatnot. “What if,” the rejoinder runs, “my flourishing relies on the oppression of others?” For example, people living in first world countries rely on the cheap and oppressive labor of people living in second and third world countries. However, we should note that this criticism is formulated from within the framework of assumptions about morality belonging to nomological/juridical models of normativity. In particular, this criticism assumes a framework based on the idea of isolated individuals acting and living independent of others. However, when we begin to seriously pose questions of flourishing, the first thing we notice is that we live in relationships to the world around us and other persons. We are not isolated and sovereign individuals, but rather beings that exist amongst other beings. As we begin to pose questions of what flourishing would be and how it can be obtained, the first thing we notice is that answers to these questions are deeply bound up with questions of these relationships. In this regard, eudaimonistic normative systems are profoundly ecological in character. Questions of my flourishing will thus be bound up with questions of the flourishing of the world around me (it’s hard to flourish in an environment that, for example, has been contaminated by radioactivity) and the flourishing of others (where those others are both other people but also other living things: it’s hard to flourish when the bees have been driven away).
This is in stark contrast to juridical normative models that focus on the rightness or wrongness of an act. Where a eudaimonistic model ineluctably leads us to some variant of a Marxist conception of both what society is and what it ought to be, juridical models tend to erase any ecological dimension to how we think about right action and society. Where in Marx I’m made aware of all sorts of ecological relations embodied in the commodity and how it is produced (e.g., the fact that it is congealed labor, that it’s value comes from this labor, the systematicity through which inequalities are produced, the manner in which I too am enslaved by this process, the impact of capitalistic production on the natural environment, etc), such an ecological dimension is occluded in juridical normative frameworks. Within this framework the ecological is occluded in two ways: First, insofar as, in Kantian models, the focus is on universality and necessity when evaluating actions, I am to ignore all contextual features pertaining to the circumstances in which the action is undertaken, focusing on the verb of the action in its generality. Circumstances are to be ignored altogether for they would ruin the universality of the moral law. Yet this amounts, very precisely, to ignoring all that is ecological or relational. Second, as a result, in such a juridical model, my relation to the seller in the act of buying really is just a relation between me and this seller. My obligations do not extend beyond this relation (to all that labor, for example) precisely because those are circumstantial elements that are to be excluded in following and formulating the moral law. All that matters is my obligations in this relationship. In short, it is actually the juridical model that occludes the broader social dimension, not eudaimonistic models.
In a wonderful article entitled “Responsive Becoming: Ethics Between Deleuze and Feminism” in Deleuze and Ethics, Erinn Cunniff Gilson outlines four points of overlap between Deleuze’s ethical thought and feminist ethical thought that largely accord with the eudaimonistic theory of normativity I’m trying to think about. Gilson writes that “firstly… both approaches [Deleuze and feminism] articulate an understanding of ethics that is rooted in and grows out of experience rather than being purified of experiential element” (64). This is a crucial point. Although eudaimonistic models of normativity strive for flourishing, they don’t begin from the premise that we know what flourishing is or would be. Not only can we be mistaken about what constitutes flourishing, but our knowledge and understanding of flourishing can grow and deepen as we learn more about ourselves, the world, the social world, and so on. Where, in juridical models, we are to bracket all reference to experience so as to ground universality and normativity, eudaimonistic models are situated squarely within the field of experience. Through this bracketing of experience, juridical models find it extremely difficult to deal with issues of race, gender, class difference, etc., precisely because these are all particularities that are to be ignored in the formulation of the moral law. By contrast, eudaimonistic models, insofar as they are ecological in character, can begin from these singularities.
As a consequence, within these eudaimonistic models we get an “immanent ethics”. As Gilson writes,
In his book on Spinoza’s practical philosophy, [Deleuze] defines ethics as ‘a typology of immanent modes of existence,” a definition that emphasizes that he regards ethics not as supplying standards for judgment but as a practice through which one invents for oneself better ways of living. Following Nietzsche, he considers valuing and evaluating as the primary ethical activities: through living, one values, and how one lives defines what one values. Ethics consists of distinguishing between those affects, relations, ways of thinking, and, ultimately, ways of living that are life-affirming, joyous, and active and those that are life-negating, sad, and reactive… Only through experimentation is one able to discern the difference between those things that can be said to be good for us and those that are bad for us, and devise for oneself such a typology of ways of living. For Deleuze, then, ethics is a question of ethology in the sense that it has to do with studying bodies– both animal and human –in terms of what they are capable of doing and undergoing, and evaluating those changes from within the experience of affecting and being affected. (64 – 65)
An immanent mode of ethics will thus not begin with transcendent moral rules, but rather will allow for a pluralism of different modes of existence or different existing entities. These modes of existing will then be evaluated immanently according to their own affects or capabilities of acting and whether or not they live in such a way as to maximize those capabilities of acting. Is one living in a way that produces sad passions or that produces joyous affects? Moreover, it here becomes clear that ethics is not restricted to the domain of humans, but now includes nonhumans as well.
“Second,” Gilson continues, “…both are concerned to understand ethical comportment in terms of practices rather than in terms of adherence to abstract rules and forms of moral reasoning” (65). Ethical thought is to be understood in terms of practice or engagement with the material world and others. It cannot be divorced from this engagement. Insofar as abstract universal rules tend to occlude this dimension of material engagement and relations to others insofar as these are all circumstantial, it blinds us to our relations with the world. What follows from this, according to Gilson, is a care ethics where we are concerned with “…concrete individuals in their singularity and in relations with other unique individuals” (ibid.). Here we find a rich overlap between Gilson’s model of ethical thought and Timothy Morton’s ethical comportment towards “strange strangers” that are simultaneously both within us and infinitely distant from us.
The concept of immanent ethics might give rise to the worry of a radical relativism in which each individual entity immanently defines its own values without regard to other beings. For example, we might get the question of what the active and life-affirming of a serial killer would be in its own mode of existence. However, this ignores, once again, the relational dimension of eudaimonistic ethical systems. As Gilson continues,
A third commonality is a shared line of critique that focuses on a conventional understanding of ethical subjectivity that emphasizes autonomy, rationality, independence, impartiality, and self-mastery. For both Deleuze and feminist thinkers, this form of subjectivity is one that demands submission: submission to a norm of what it means to be a “good” person, which implicitly determines the qualities virtuous as being masculine, as well as obedience to the moral law itself… Deleuze’s critique of the subject also shifts the focus from the subject as autonomous substance to the relations that constitute it, whether these relations generate a molar identity or a “fascinated self” in a process of becoming. (65 – 66)
It is in fact the juridical model that tends towards a sort of ethical solipsism, that is monosubjective, in that the issue is one of obedience and subordination to the law, not regard for the other. I outlined this in my post on Kant and Sade. For Sade, what is important is obedience to the necessity of the law, not any sentiments either the agent of the law or the patient of the law might have with respect to that law. As such, the relational dimension entirely disappears. It seems to me that what might be called “moral pathologies”– those states where morality generates a form of horror and suffering –always involve either a) a brute and mechanical application of the law that ignores its effects (Eichmann speaking about his moral duties), or b) an evacuation of relationality that ignores the other (the serial killer that reduces his victim to an object of enjoyment to be absorbed in his economy).
Finally, fourth, Gilson concludes that “…both Deleuze and feminist theorists approach ethics in a way that is inherently political; the question of how to live ethically is fundamentally a political question” (66). This follows from the relational dimension of eudaimonistic ethical orientations. With the rise of Christianity we begin to get a separation between the political and the ethical. Insofar as the ethical becomes the question of right and wrong action, and insofar as it is separated from questions of flourishing, ethics comes to be separated from the political because it now pertains to humans living in a spiritual vacuum. This set of assumptions continues an unconscious and subterranean existence in juridical models of subjectivity. By contrast, the question of flourishing immediately plunges us into questions of politics because flourishing is bound up in relations to our environment, other organisms, and other persons. As a consequence, the question of ethics cannot be separated from the order of the political.
Throughout this post I’ve focused heavily on the relational dimension of the ethical. For those who have been following object-oriented ontology, this might appear strange as one of the key claims of OOO is that entities are independent of their relations. However, it is a mistake to assume that the thesis that entities are independent of their relations is the claim that entities are without relations. In my onticology, at least, the thesis that entities are independent of their relations is the thesis that all relations are external. Entities can always break with existing regimes of relations and enter into new regimes of relations. I take this to be a necessary condition for any change and for any political revolution. If entities are constituted by their relations then matters are pretty hopeless as we’re nothing more than the relations in which we’re embedded. Ontology, I believe, deals with three issues: the being of entities, quality, and external relations. Ethico-politics, by contrast, deals with relations, with what sorts of collectives of humans and nonhumans would be best, and with how those collectives might be produced.
Larval Subjects . 
June 25, 2011 at 3:23 pm
I read Character and Environment by Ronald Sandler for an environmental ethics course I took last fall. It offers a “pluralistic, virtue-oriented environmental ethic.” I don’t remember a lot about it – it was a whole semester ago, after all – but I remember liking some of the arguments and disliking others. I suppose that would be true of any philosophical argument. It might be interesting to read again in light of what you mention here – given that it was my first introduction to this kind of ethical thought.
June 25, 2011 at 3:30 pm
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=987
June 25, 2011 at 3:42 pm
Thanks for the tip, Jeremy. One of my reservations about the term “ecology” is that people immediately seem to associate it with nature. For me ecology does not mean “nature”, but relations. Technologies, media, buildings, practices, traditions, roads, etc, all belong to ecology in this broader sense.
June 25, 2011 at 7:10 pm
Could you describe in more detail how interrelationships prevent the oppressively differential “flourishing” of one group at the expense of another? In your examples, it’s clear how it becomes difficult for one to flourish when environmental factors, for example, are removed–this is literally the removal of the Epicurean garden framework which allows for the autonomy. But what of a Metropolis-like situation, in which the socialistic flourishing of the upper percentiles who live on the surface are literally sustained by the suffering of the majority below the surface–if those in the upper percentiles have no knowledge of those below, HOW is their flourishing inhibited? In fact, it seems that in this scenario the framework of their flourishing is precisely the suffering of the majority. I use this example because it is not unlike how global capitalism works and it seems to be moving more and more in this direction, as we establish little communitarian enclaves of wealtheir-multiracial-farmers-market-shopping-gated-community-socialisms which seem entirely ethical, everyone engaged in some artisinal production, all food fair trade or local, but all, of course, sustained both by the wealth and force of the Empire with its military and borders keeping out the excluded element, and by the invisible walls erected through sit-lie ordinances and the secret filtering of undesirables into a distant, hardly noticeable but nonetheless enormous system of prison camps, AND when we see this type of model now generalized to entire small nations (Singapore–now an ideal “model” for both sides of the political totality in SE Asia, the Thai king and Thaksin both admiring Lee Kwan Yew)–how exactly does this oblivious population, sustained by the massive virtual reality apparatus that is the entire image of organic, artisinal, local, “alter”-global etc. come to be ultimately damaged by the vast system of oppression they still support–often directly, as their own ability to “buy in” to these communities comes from their (or their family’s) wealth, gained through infotech, real estate, finance–the same old meat. Is their flourishing retarded even if they are oblivious?
June 25, 2011 at 7:45 pm
Hi Stanley,
I wasn’t making the claim that interrelationships prevent oppression (after all, oppression is a form of relationship), but rather that the relationality that eudaimonistic approaches draw our attention to at least allow us to begin seeing and evaluating these inequalities in ways that juridical models do not. I think a couple of points need to be made in response to this question. First, virtues or flourishing cannot be equated with what we like. In other words, we can be mistaken about what we take to be good. A person might certainly like eating fast food for every meal, smoking, and drinking wine nightly, but that doesn’t make these actions virtuous. The reason for this is “ecological”. Insofar as health is a virtue, living this way diminishes their possibility of attaining this aim, pushing them further away from the flourishing that requires health as a component.
I bring this point up, because the same point holds mutatis mutandis for the social world. Some segment of the population might believe that they are flourishing when in fact they are not. This, I think, begins to point us in the direction of a response to your question. Your question, as I understand it, is why should we be concerned about the oppression of people and second and third world countries when those people provide us with cheap goods that enhance our ability to “flourish”. Here I think one argument that can be made is that such a system doesn’t simply oppress these laborers, but oppresses the purchasers of commodities as well. On the one hand, capitalism generates international instabilities and conflicts from which we all suffer through the loss of loved ones and friends in war, through tax dollars required to sustain the war machine, etc. Similarly, in this system, insofar as we are not producers of our own goods, our autonomy is diminished insofar as it is necessary for us to work for a wage to purchase the commodities that we require to live. In most instances, we therefore are unfree in the sense that we have little choice about jobs and those jobs certainly aren’t connected to the meaning of our life, but are something we are forced to do merely to live. We thus enslave and oppress ourselves through participation in this system. On the other hand, capitalist production of this sort produces all sorts of environmental degradation that we all end up suffering from. And finally, of course, there is all the deskilling, outsourcing, etc., that gradually erodes my own standard of life.
I guess then that my point is that under capitalism the relationship is never one that merely exists between me, the commodity, and the seller of the commodity, but that the entire system or beast– what Morton would call a “hyperobject” –implicates me directly in a system that oppresses me by limiting my autonomy and capacity to achieve flourishing (it’s hard to flourish where one works under forced conditions of necessity that necessarily limit one’s autonomy in being able to set ends for oneself). As we begin to ask the question of what flourishing might be, we’re quickly drawn to the ecological or related nature of our existence that allows us begin to discover all these relations and networks that inhibit our ability to attain flourishing. By contrast, in neoliberal juridical models that we find in figures such as Kant, all of this becomes invisible precisely because, in formulating the categorical imperative, we are to ignore all specific circumstances, all that is “pathological” or bodily and affective, and all that is relational. We are to focus on the verb of the proposed action alone and determine whether or not it can be universalized without contradiction. For example, it follows directly from the categorical imperative that we are to respect private property. From a Kantian framework, then, there is nothing objectionable in capitalism as the capitalist owns the means of production and has compensated workers for their work. The question of a social organization that is systematically oppressive for all involved doesn’t even arise. Within the eudaimonistic framework I’m trying to develop, by contrast, we can ask whether or not flourishing can be attained at all in the sort of capitalistic social system you outline. Insofar as it can’t, we can then begin to struggle to produce other social systems that would be conducive to such flourishing.
June 25, 2011 at 8:21 pm
You might say then that the “tragedy of the commons” is a juridical illusion about the possibility of flourishing. That’s one of the key ideological and practical political struggles today. When we fight for medicare-for-all versus private health-insurance, and are told that government is inefficient and wasteful, we’re faced with this challenge of thinking eudaimonistic rather than juridically. That said, we can’t stick our heads in the sand about government inefficiency and other problems, but we can turn the issue around. A good place to star would be by asking people to think about why privatization and principles of accounting are the source of so much bureaucracy and so-called government-inefficiency.
June 25, 2011 at 10:27 pm
[…] it in his excellent Character and Environment: A Virtue-Oriented Approach to Environmental Ethics (thank you, Jeremy!), A character trait is a virtue to the extent that it is conducive to promoting […]
June 25, 2011 at 10:59 pm
I’m not denying that there is also an oppression in the first world exactly as you have pointed out. My point is that we can imagine a world–this is why I used the reference to Metropolis–in which a perfectly nice-seeming SOCIALIST society, in which our relationships do not seem commodified, we engage in “authentic” artisinal production, organic farming, and we do really have deep, intricate relations with others in this society beyond the capitalist framework of the bourgeois family, the company, etc. In this society, non-profit endeavors are the standard (or, at the very least, petit-bourgeois yeoman-farmer type property relations) AND there is an authentic commons space. The problem is that it is all, effectively, behind a wall. It is a gated-community socialism, a semi-autonomous zone in which a non-capitalist form of society can exist in a bubble, so to speak. But this is all built on the necessary EXCLUSION of the outer element. Think, for instance, of the problems of the Northern European democratic-socialist countries when faced with enormous amounts of immigration from the more heavily exploited parts of the globe. I’m saying that capitalism can conceivably MARKET these bubbles of non-capitalist existence, making them the standard for the highest percentiles of the first world–an entire virtual reality all the more convincing since it is constructed from actual reality invisibly filtered. How are THESE individuals not flourishing even if they do not know they are not flourishing? To repeat: I am NOT talking about the first world as it is right now. It’s easy enough to show how people in the first world are not flourishing. It’s harder to show how the communitarian solution ALSO prevents such flourishing.
June 25, 2011 at 11:04 pm
Ah, Stanley, I get it. I took you to be asking why someone might conceivably care about the lives of those second and third world workers when they don’t directly live amongst them and in relation to them (ie, the “I got mine mentality”). I’ll have to mull on your question more. I haven’t seen Metropolis.
June 25, 2011 at 11:06 pm
Stanley,
I’m also curious as to how such a system would remain, as you seem to suggest here, capitalistic. Not endorsing it, just wondering.
June 26, 2011 at 1:13 am
Well, there are a few options. The first is to point out that where these things have just begun to develop–the way in which new eco-friendly suburbs serving, for instance, large infotech centers such as those constructed by Google–they are actively company-sponsored communities. So you have a lot of the “good” and “authentic” in the community, but all supplied by the company. This is a central point in radical geographic studies of how public space works in many of our large cities, where you do have a “common” space, but it is surrounded by a private wall. There is no cost to it, necessarily, but undesirables (the homeless, illegals, anyone who would use this public space against the interests of its private “stewards”). This can even be seen on the small scale with public wi-fi networks being offered through proprietary businesses, though you don’t necessarily have to even buy anything to use the network–they just know that if you are near it you are more likely to buy something. Similarly, I think of places like Humboldt County in California, where I lived for several years–one of the most officially impoverished places in the State, which allows it to sustain massive, beautiful expanses of coastline and redwood forest (because there’s no economic development, other than growing weed) and which also then becomes a haven for artists and those seeking an escape from the inauthenticity of the city. So you have an absolute abundance of artisinal industry, niche manufacturing, specialty agriculture, artistic production and lots and lots of organic farms. But much of this is either sustained by the marijuana market or by outside money from those moving to the county from the larger cities in CA, or by outside money given to college students in the form of trust funds and parent financing, etc., all not just causing false inflation in rent and food and everything for the parts of the county that are still severely economically depressed, but also creating an enormous illusion in the “bubble” zones inhabited by those with access to this external money that they are wholly self-reliant and so utterly different from the rest of the state. Behind the redwood curtain is seen as a kind of autonomous zone, in which an independent economy operates on closed loops with its integral parts organic agriculture, boutique marijuana (as opposed to the true bulk of large-scale, interstate and internationally traded product) and all kinds of artistic/artisinal efforts. Of course, when you look at the actual economic data, it’s clear that large-scale marijuana predominates in profit (followed by a resurgent logging and a bloated healthcare industry), and that in cities such as Arcata (which houses Humbodlt State) the visible “alternative” prosperity is sustained entirely by the external money of trustafarian students or expats from San Francisco who now simply work at the same jobs (finance, infotech, etc.) from their home out in the “nature” of the coastal redwood range. So it is explicitly capitalistic and a much flimsier illusion.
Imagine this kind of logic extrapolated to an entire country–the false abundance created by an external source of wealth allowing for a free and easy socialistic sharing of resources, providing for enough free time to pursue all kinds of non-profitable endeavors. Sort of like how Norway’s own democratic socialism was so integrally tied to its oil holdings and, later, to its role in financial and infotech markets.
The other idea is that it is NOT necessarily capitalistic. It could be an authentically socialist system which can solve the problems of enclosing commons, environmental destruction and intellectual property but WITHOUT solving the problems of exclusion and resurgent apartheid–indeed, the solution to the first three problems dependent on this very exclusion. This is the more truly communitarian option, though it also seems to be perfectly compatible with global capitalism in a way, as we see in Singapore today and the authoritarian capitalism of China. This aspect of the idea is discussed at length by Zizek in a bunch of his more recent work–at the end of First as Tragedy then as Farce and in Violence and in In Defense of Lost Causes also, I think.
June 26, 2011 at 10:08 pm
Levi,
Thank you so much for not hoarding your still developing ruminations and enumerations or indulging in a detaining perfectionism, if only that it evoked such a fascinating set of complicating responses from Stanley. (Stanley, do you blog, are you published somewhere? I want to read more!)
I’m still celebrating Jacob Russell’s 70th birthday so I’m hoping Jacob won’t mind me quoting from another of his masterstrokes in response to this one of yours, his poem Overriding Genesis, filled with diacritical flourishes (and not just the repeating motif of the ampersand in all of its etymological richness):
& it was so
& it was so
& it was
& El saw every Thing that El
had made
& behold
oh yeah! El said, oh yeah! Good, good…oh
so fucking good!
& there was evening
& there was morning
Day the Sixth
June 27, 2011 at 10:40 pm
[…] day Jeremy Trombley recommended Ronald Sandler’s Character and Environment in response to one of my posts on ethics. I am only about halfway through the book right now, but so far it is among the most […]
June 27, 2011 at 11:01 pm
In terms of ethics I take more seriously the challenges put forth by anti-natalists (Thomas Ligotti, David Benatar, and Arthur Schopenhauer are the best examples here). If we are to take most ethical claims seriously (most of which can be boiled down to a ground-zero utilitarianism) we have to admit that anti-natalism is difficult to diffuse. What obligations do we have to future generations? Do we have an obligation to CREATE future generations? In what sense is existence better than nonexistence? Clearly, nobody reproduces for the benefit of as-of-yet-non-existent children. People only reproduce because they want to (or by accident or…rape). We could even throw in my strange hypothesis about a world filled with sadomasochistic imperialists- are we not unintentionally torturing people by giving birth to them or is this a perverse joy? Or, given the arguments of Mackie and Joyce, are all moral-ethical statements necessarily false? And what of the impending extinction of mankind ala Ray Brassier? Damn…I think its time to write a book.