Great news, Kurt! There's so much to appreciate about what you've outlined here; I especially like your point about affirmation and "growing into goodness" if I can put it that way. I stand ready to help, my friend.
Thank you! Maybe I could make it clearer in the linked essay, but in some sense we are born good - not morally good, but good because our natural desires are a token of life and life is good by definition. What would Aristotle say on the subject?
Hi Kurt, I've thought about this a bit. The question of whether humans are by nature good or bad might post-date classical Greece - at least in western civilization, it seems to be the Christians who first suggested that human beings fell from grace. As to Aristotle, there are several passages in which he forthrightly says that living is good; indeed, that perspective subtly suffuses his biological works, which comprise 30% of his extant corpus. I'll have more to say about this in my forthcoming book about Aristotle's conception of human fulfillment.
Interesting! My point in The Perfection of Desire is that we cannot ground ethics in a quasi-arbitrary choice to live, as Rand does. We need a context in which The Good already exists. If that is the case, then philosophy helps us do what we were already doing, only better.
You're certainly right about this. Psychologizing slightly, I wonder if the quasi-arbitrary nature of the Randian choice to live is connected to the fact that one undergoes a conversion experience when becoming an Objectivist, with the result that one's new life is discontinuous with one's old life. More philosophically, I'm learning that the phenomenologists (Husserl, Heidegger, and the like) emphasize that philosophical inquiry grows out of what they sometimes call the "average everydayness" of one's pre-philosophical way of being; this insight is there in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but really comes to the fore in phenomenological thinking.
Well, Nietzsche would say that we need to think "beyond good and evil" and Aristotle used terms like corruption (mochthēria) of character, not evil. You can read more of my reflections on Aristotle at my blog: https://philosopher.coach/weblog/ (although I'm thinking about moving it to Substack because that's where the action is these days).
Welcome to Substack! I would also like to see you write about impact of psychology (and abnormal psychology) on ethics and how that impacts community ethics.
The linked essay "The Perfection of Desire" (kurtkeefner.com/post/affirming-life) does attempt to integrate elements of psychology with ethics, since I believe that ethics cannot be fully grounded without reference to our inborn desires, especially as the mature along with reason. I don't use the word "psychology" however.
I don't think I know enough about abnormal psychology to make much use of it. However, it would be an intriguing challenge to see how psychology as I see it impacts social ethics. Thanks for the suggestion!
Great news, Kurt! There's so much to appreciate about what you've outlined here; I especially like your point about affirmation and "growing into goodness" if I can put it that way. I stand ready to help, my friend.
Thank you! Maybe I could make it clearer in the linked essay, but in some sense we are born good - not morally good, but good because our natural desires are a token of life and life is good by definition. What would Aristotle say on the subject?
Hi Kurt, I've thought about this a bit. The question of whether humans are by nature good or bad might post-date classical Greece - at least in western civilization, it seems to be the Christians who first suggested that human beings fell from grace. As to Aristotle, there are several passages in which he forthrightly says that living is good; indeed, that perspective subtly suffuses his biological works, which comprise 30% of his extant corpus. I'll have more to say about this in my forthcoming book about Aristotle's conception of human fulfillment.
Interesting! My point in The Perfection of Desire is that we cannot ground ethics in a quasi-arbitrary choice to live, as Rand does. We need a context in which The Good already exists. If that is the case, then philosophy helps us do what we were already doing, only better.
You're certainly right about this. Psychologizing slightly, I wonder if the quasi-arbitrary nature of the Randian choice to live is connected to the fact that one undergoes a conversion experience when becoming an Objectivist, with the result that one's new life is discontinuous with one's old life. More philosophically, I'm learning that the phenomenologists (Husserl, Heidegger, and the like) emphasize that philosophical inquiry grows out of what they sometimes call the "average everydayness" of one's pre-philosophical way of being; this insight is there in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but really comes to the fore in phenomenological thinking.
Well, Nietzsche would say that we need to think "beyond good and evil" and Aristotle used terms like corruption (mochthēria) of character, not evil. You can read more of my reflections on Aristotle at my blog: https://philosopher.coach/weblog/ (although I'm thinking about moving it to Substack because that's where the action is these days).
Welcome to Substack! I would also like to see you write about impact of psychology (and abnormal psychology) on ethics and how that impacts community ethics.
The linked essay "The Perfection of Desire" (kurtkeefner.com/post/affirming-life) does attempt to integrate elements of psychology with ethics, since I believe that ethics cannot be fully grounded without reference to our inborn desires, especially as the mature along with reason. I don't use the word "psychology" however.
I don't think I know enough about abnormal psychology to make much use of it. However, it would be an intriguing challenge to see how psychology as I see it impacts social ethics. Thanks for the suggestion!