ThonyC notes that today is the anniversary of Matteo Ricci's birthday; Ricci was born October 6, 1552. Here are a few more links to remember the day.
Matteo Ricci on Chinese Government
Matteo Ricci on the Art of Printing
Matteo Ricci: Eight Songs for Western Keyboard
The Tomb of Matteo Ricci (about)
You can see a picture of Ricci's tomb here.
If you've never read The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, by Jonathan Spence, it is quite good.
Saturday, October 06, 2012
Slater on Fitch
In the most recent edition of The Reasoner, October 2012, the always contentious but always interesting Hartley Slater has discussion of the Fitch paradox of knowability. In it he rightly notes that the paradox disappears if one recognizes that epistemic modalities can be relativized. I once argued something like this in graduate school, but my argument was, like much of what I have ever done in modal logic, clunky and clumsy and went about things a rather roundabout way. [If one doesn't relativize, it seems to me that the relevant logic would have to be paraconsistent, given that K would have to cover different epistemic situations: it's not much of a paradox to say that something is unknown and that it is known that it is unknown if John doesn't know it and Jane knows he doesn't. This is not really something I've looked at.] As Slater notes, there are worries about illegitimate self-reference with the relativization approach, but these are not really insuperable. In any case, I thought it was interesting; it will also be interesting to see if there are any responses to it.
Ideas and Institutions
The question, in a broader sense, involves the general problem of the relation between ideas and institutions. This problem appears in both materialistic and idealistic historical research and historical judgment. In particular it is a problem of general history: whether a new progressive motive, along with its necessary polemics against the old, must not nevertheless be intertwined with a residue of the old, insofar as the fertility and developmental power of the residue cannot be dispensed with. In the very mind which brings forth the new motive, the aftereffect of the institution which is to be fought lingers on. In this development the old motive preserves its right in the new one; it retains its share in the development toward the new one. Thus the new idea remains connected with the old one even then, when it does not entirely eliminate the old institution, but only transforms it.
Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism (Scholars Press, 1995) pp. 175-176.
Friday, October 05, 2012
Aegidius
Capitulum Sextum Decimum
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2012/10/sextum-decimum.html
Capitulum Septimum Decimum
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2012/10/capitulum-septimum-decimum.html
I was hoping to have two more, so I could reasonably guarantee getting it done next week before I get my first major grading surge and also have to begin putting together my department teaching evaluation portfolio, but something else ate much of the free time I had available, so I only managed to get through ch. 17. Of course, by now it is quite clear that we aren't dealing with a novel but a loose sketch of one, but I do definitely want to get it out of the way this month so I can try a real NaNoWriMo in November -- and hopefully finish it in less than a year. November is generally my busiest month, but by chance I happen to be less busy this Fall than usual, so maybe something can get done. And then in Spring I can perhaps start over with this entirely -- which it's clear by now I will certainly have to do, since I wanted a light and easy novel with a dark philosophical character in the background, and Aegidius wanted a dark philosophical novel about a profoundly human character stubbornly holding on to what little he can retain of his humanity under nightmarish conditions, and while both visions share the same general structure, it is never a good sign when author and character can't agree about how the details of the story are supposed to go. And, of course, as Dorothy Sayers would point out, in the end I have to let Aegidius be Aegidius. But it's just not possible to change it all in mid-flight; hence the inconsistencies of tone and excessive deus ex machina. It's actually intended to be a deus ex machina story like Euripides' Medea, but the sudden swerves in story guarantee that there's too much artificial machina behind the deus. Oh, look! There's the character doing another thing for which there was insufficient foreshadowing, because I had originally thought it would take a different form! However, the palm to the forehead thing was mentioned previously in Tertium Decimum.
In any case, next it's on to Krasnoyarsk in Krasnoyarsky Krai to wrap up the Siberian line, during which we'll see Aegidius nearly fully unveiled and have at least one chapter which consists of people just sitting around talking, because, after all, why should we break the pattern, and Aegidius simply will not let me finish the story if I don't promise him another philosophical dialogue; and then, tying up the final string, we get the last tete-a-tete between the Wolf King and the narrator, and exeunt.
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2012/10/sextum-decimum.html
Capitulum Septimum Decimum
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2012/10/capitulum-septimum-decimum.html
I was hoping to have two more, so I could reasonably guarantee getting it done next week before I get my first major grading surge and also have to begin putting together my department teaching evaluation portfolio, but something else ate much of the free time I had available, so I only managed to get through ch. 17. Of course, by now it is quite clear that we aren't dealing with a novel but a loose sketch of one, but I do definitely want to get it out of the way this month so I can try a real NaNoWriMo in November -- and hopefully finish it in less than a year. November is generally my busiest month, but by chance I happen to be less busy this Fall than usual, so maybe something can get done. And then in Spring I can perhaps start over with this entirely -- which it's clear by now I will certainly have to do, since I wanted a light and easy novel with a dark philosophical character in the background, and Aegidius wanted a dark philosophical novel about a profoundly human character stubbornly holding on to what little he can retain of his humanity under nightmarish conditions, and while both visions share the same general structure, it is never a good sign when author and character can't agree about how the details of the story are supposed to go. And, of course, as Dorothy Sayers would point out, in the end I have to let Aegidius be Aegidius. But it's just not possible to change it all in mid-flight; hence the inconsistencies of tone and excessive deus ex machina. It's actually intended to be a deus ex machina story like Euripides' Medea, but the sudden swerves in story guarantee that there's too much artificial machina behind the deus. Oh, look! There's the character doing another thing for which there was insufficient foreshadowing, because I had originally thought it would take a different form! However, the palm to the forehead thing was mentioned previously in Tertium Decimum.
In any case, next it's on to Krasnoyarsk in Krasnoyarsky Krai to wrap up the Siberian line, during which we'll see Aegidius nearly fully unveiled and have at least one chapter which consists of people just sitting around talking, because, after all, why should we break the pattern, and Aegidius simply will not let me finish the story if I don't promise him another philosophical dialogue; and then, tying up the final string, we get the last tete-a-tete between the Wolf King and the narrator, and exeunt.
Grave Mother of Majestic Works
Of Old Sat Freedom on the Heights
by Alfred Tennyson
Of old sat Freedom on the heights,
The thunders breaking at her feet:
Above her shook the starry lights:
She heard the torrents meet.
There in her place she did rejoice,
Self-gather'd in her prophet-mind,
But fragments of her mighty voice
Came rolling on the wind.
Then stept she down thro' town and field
To mingle with the human race,
And part by part to men reveal'd
The fullness of her face -
Grave mother of majestic works,
From her isle-altar gazing down,
Who, God-like, grasps the triple forks,
And, King-like, wears the crown:
Her open eyes desire the truth.
The wisdom of a thousand years
Is in them. May perpetual youth
Keep dry their light from tears;
That her fair form may stand and shine
Make bright our days and light our dreams,
Turning to scorn with lips divine
The falsehood of extremes!
Thursday, October 04, 2012
Moral Debates Online
Elliot Milco has an excellent post at "Fare Forward" (and a slightly longer version at "The Paraphasic"). The argument is quite good, although interestingly I find myself not agreeing with much of it. That is, I think the argument would be rock-solid if its underlying diagnosis were correct; but I think this diagnosis, while reasonable, is in fact false.
The basic starting idea is that internet debates go sour because we see opponents as floating bits of text rather than real people. This is nothing new, however; we have had textual intermediaries for ages. And while polemic by book and article and letter to the editor has often been heated, the textual wall has in practice always been a control rod in the reaction. Likewise, people are less likely to wrestle with mere projections when dealing with people by text than when dealing with them face to face, for two reasons. First, the evidence of what people have actually said and done is more stable and available, and therefore constantly has to be dealt with rather than ignored, by both parties; thus one notices that people are much more likely to apologize in internet debates than elsewhere, and even when they don't, a heated debate is much more likely to diffuse into something milder, even if still shot through on occasion with irritations. Second, face-to-face interactions involve projection as much as any other kind of interaction, but the lack of an obvious intermediary -- because we don't think of faces and spoken words as intermediaries in the way we still think of texts as intermediaries -- means that people are less likely to consider the possibility that they are dealing with a projection. In both cases we are inferring someone's state of mind from evidence; but people often take offense for much more obviously absurd things in face-to-face interaction than when they interact by text.
I think the illusion that this is not so arises chiefly from the fact that we live in an anti-argumentative culture; there are very few situations in which it's OK to just argue, and those are often of a very restricted type. Democrats and Republicans don't generally argue with each other, for instance; they mostly talk about each other behind the other's back with occasional limited forays for potshots. And politics is more argumentative than the rest of our culture; try to do the Socratic thing and get someone arguing about moral issues outside of a clear political forum, and you will find that people freak out. IRL we like our arguments rare and well-insulated. There are some definite advantages to this for certain aspects of civil harmony, but I think we should not treat it as much more than a matter of cultural taste -- and in fact should recognize that it at times borders on pathological. But the online world is, to a very great degree, an argumentative medium: not little insulated statements of opinion like people are culturally confined to in real life, but responses to responses to responses, and while these need not all be arguments, arguments are inevitable. It is mostly the sheer quantity of argument online that makes it seem like arguments are always going sour. Further, when internet arguments do go sour, it seems mostly to be due to the fragmentary nature of the medium -- arguments are not done all at once, as they are done face-to-face, nor in large chunks, as book and article arguments proceed, nor as rhetorical face-offs, the way debates in the editorial pages have often been done. Rather, they are done by bits and pieces stretched over days by people who are often busy doing other things as well. This is a very difficult way to argue; that people slip under such conditions is not really surprising.
I think, however, that even if this were not so, Elliot's suggestion that "everyone’s insistence on his own position against all opponents can lead to the illusion that moral disputes are fundamentally insoluble" is not generally true. In fact, in most cases it is the reverse: people who have actually argued in moral disputes are less likely to think moral disputes fundamentally insoluble, not more likely. No one who has engaged in heated arguments more than occasionally can possibly avoid having the experience of progress being made, either by being stumped oneself by an excellent argument, or by coming up with a stumper oneself, or by both parties coming up with new arguments. It is stagnation that leads to the illusion of insoluble moral disputes. And this is true elsewhere. People who argue about religion, whatever their position, are not people who think that no progress can be made. The major problem on the internet, of course, is that its fragmentary nature means that only a handful of arguments actually see any serious development. But in all honesty, it probably happens more online than it does elsewhere, for precisely the reason that our culture is anti-argumentative about face-to-face interactions.
Elliot's first two concluding points, that participants in arguments need to make an effort actually to address each other, not just lecturing at each other without listening, and that they need to be making an effort to understand what they are talking about, with the humility to recognize when they don't, are quite right; the closer we get to these the better arguments get. However, while I think the idea behind Elliot's third point is right, I think the formulations is problematic. It sounds well and good to say that pedagogy trumps belligerence, but if you look at the long history of good teachers, Socrates and the like, you find that many of them were quite capable of jumping into a fray swinging. Likewise, it sounds good to say that "Our moral debates have become so unproductive because we treat them as wars over particular conclusions, rather than organic explorations of the truth flowing from first principles," but organic explorations of truth flowing from first principles are things you do in treatises and non-argumentative conversations, not debates. Likewise, it sounds good to say, "The good teacher works by knowing his students, meeting them at their level, and drawing them patiently up to a fuller understanding of things," but in an online debate you are not a teacher except in the sense that everyone is a teacher all the time. A debate online is not your classroom; the kind of patience needed online is very different from the kind of patience needed to teach people in an insulated setting where you have a clear position as a teacher. I've watched professors in the blogosphere for quite some time, and have noticed that many of them have difficulties stemming from this: the habits simply do not always carry over well, and can make things worse. In an internet debate you aren't generally dealing with people who want to be your students, and they certainly have no financial incentive to bear with you in your round-about ways.
And it is true that no one is persuaded by defeat or humiliation, but persuasion is only an aim of argument insofar as argument is purely a matter of rhetoric -- the aim of argument as such is simply to make explicit reasons in their proper place. You should not in fact argue to persuade except under very carefully limited conditions; arguing to persuade as a general rule is what orators and sophists do, and it sounds innocuous but is in the long run not so. You should certainly try to argue in such a way that persuasion is open -- but what kind of attitude and tone that will actually require will vary wildly, and you will often merely be guessing -- but you should instead argue to show what's right and what's wrong, to the best of your ability, so as to refute if you are right (whether refutation yields persuasion or not) and to be refuted if you are wrong. That gentleness in argument is a wonderful quality is not to be denied, and those of us who are too acidic or impatient or coolly ruthless to attain it easily should strive for it. But in a culture like ours one must watch out for the tendency to conflate gentleness with rhetorical pandering. I think Elliot's third point is actually for gentleness precisely as a mean between belligerence and this pandering; and to that extent is right. But we must not slip into thinking that it is our place to win people over: that is for their own reason to do. Rather, we should see our place as making clear what's going on -- providing diagrams, maps, and directions, so to speak, so that they can find the way themselves. And it ends up being a rather different thing.
The basic starting idea is that internet debates go sour because we see opponents as floating bits of text rather than real people. This is nothing new, however; we have had textual intermediaries for ages. And while polemic by book and article and letter to the editor has often been heated, the textual wall has in practice always been a control rod in the reaction. Likewise, people are less likely to wrestle with mere projections when dealing with people by text than when dealing with them face to face, for two reasons. First, the evidence of what people have actually said and done is more stable and available, and therefore constantly has to be dealt with rather than ignored, by both parties; thus one notices that people are much more likely to apologize in internet debates than elsewhere, and even when they don't, a heated debate is much more likely to diffuse into something milder, even if still shot through on occasion with irritations. Second, face-to-face interactions involve projection as much as any other kind of interaction, but the lack of an obvious intermediary -- because we don't think of faces and spoken words as intermediaries in the way we still think of texts as intermediaries -- means that people are less likely to consider the possibility that they are dealing with a projection. In both cases we are inferring someone's state of mind from evidence; but people often take offense for much more obviously absurd things in face-to-face interaction than when they interact by text.
I think the illusion that this is not so arises chiefly from the fact that we live in an anti-argumentative culture; there are very few situations in which it's OK to just argue, and those are often of a very restricted type. Democrats and Republicans don't generally argue with each other, for instance; they mostly talk about each other behind the other's back with occasional limited forays for potshots. And politics is more argumentative than the rest of our culture; try to do the Socratic thing and get someone arguing about moral issues outside of a clear political forum, and you will find that people freak out. IRL we like our arguments rare and well-insulated. There are some definite advantages to this for certain aspects of civil harmony, but I think we should not treat it as much more than a matter of cultural taste -- and in fact should recognize that it at times borders on pathological. But the online world is, to a very great degree, an argumentative medium: not little insulated statements of opinion like people are culturally confined to in real life, but responses to responses to responses, and while these need not all be arguments, arguments are inevitable. It is mostly the sheer quantity of argument online that makes it seem like arguments are always going sour. Further, when internet arguments do go sour, it seems mostly to be due to the fragmentary nature of the medium -- arguments are not done all at once, as they are done face-to-face, nor in large chunks, as book and article arguments proceed, nor as rhetorical face-offs, the way debates in the editorial pages have often been done. Rather, they are done by bits and pieces stretched over days by people who are often busy doing other things as well. This is a very difficult way to argue; that people slip under such conditions is not really surprising.
I think, however, that even if this were not so, Elliot's suggestion that "everyone’s insistence on his own position against all opponents can lead to the illusion that moral disputes are fundamentally insoluble" is not generally true. In fact, in most cases it is the reverse: people who have actually argued in moral disputes are less likely to think moral disputes fundamentally insoluble, not more likely. No one who has engaged in heated arguments more than occasionally can possibly avoid having the experience of progress being made, either by being stumped oneself by an excellent argument, or by coming up with a stumper oneself, or by both parties coming up with new arguments. It is stagnation that leads to the illusion of insoluble moral disputes. And this is true elsewhere. People who argue about religion, whatever their position, are not people who think that no progress can be made. The major problem on the internet, of course, is that its fragmentary nature means that only a handful of arguments actually see any serious development. But in all honesty, it probably happens more online than it does elsewhere, for precisely the reason that our culture is anti-argumentative about face-to-face interactions.
Elliot's first two concluding points, that participants in arguments need to make an effort actually to address each other, not just lecturing at each other without listening, and that they need to be making an effort to understand what they are talking about, with the humility to recognize when they don't, are quite right; the closer we get to these the better arguments get. However, while I think the idea behind Elliot's third point is right, I think the formulations is problematic. It sounds well and good to say that pedagogy trumps belligerence, but if you look at the long history of good teachers, Socrates and the like, you find that many of them were quite capable of jumping into a fray swinging. Likewise, it sounds good to say that "Our moral debates have become so unproductive because we treat them as wars over particular conclusions, rather than organic explorations of the truth flowing from first principles," but organic explorations of truth flowing from first principles are things you do in treatises and non-argumentative conversations, not debates. Likewise, it sounds good to say, "The good teacher works by knowing his students, meeting them at their level, and drawing them patiently up to a fuller understanding of things," but in an online debate you are not a teacher except in the sense that everyone is a teacher all the time. A debate online is not your classroom; the kind of patience needed online is very different from the kind of patience needed to teach people in an insulated setting where you have a clear position as a teacher. I've watched professors in the blogosphere for quite some time, and have noticed that many of them have difficulties stemming from this: the habits simply do not always carry over well, and can make things worse. In an internet debate you aren't generally dealing with people who want to be your students, and they certainly have no financial incentive to bear with you in your round-about ways.
And it is true that no one is persuaded by defeat or humiliation, but persuasion is only an aim of argument insofar as argument is purely a matter of rhetoric -- the aim of argument as such is simply to make explicit reasons in their proper place. You should not in fact argue to persuade except under very carefully limited conditions; arguing to persuade as a general rule is what orators and sophists do, and it sounds innocuous but is in the long run not so. You should certainly try to argue in such a way that persuasion is open -- but what kind of attitude and tone that will actually require will vary wildly, and you will often merely be guessing -- but you should instead argue to show what's right and what's wrong, to the best of your ability, so as to refute if you are right (whether refutation yields persuasion or not) and to be refuted if you are wrong. That gentleness in argument is a wonderful quality is not to be denied, and those of us who are too acidic or impatient or coolly ruthless to attain it easily should strive for it. But in a culture like ours one must watch out for the tendency to conflate gentleness with rhetorical pandering. I think Elliot's third point is actually for gentleness precisely as a mean between belligerence and this pandering; and to that extent is right. But we must not slip into thinking that it is our place to win people over: that is for their own reason to do. Rather, we should see our place as making clear what's going on -- providing diagrams, maps, and directions, so to speak, so that they can find the way themselves. And it ends up being a rather different thing.
A Brief Introduction to Natural Law Theory I
I have been intending for some time to put together a few points about natural law theory; while there are some good resources online, there are a great many that are not at all good. My goal here is primarily to lay out the basic ideas in proper order and in such a way that the most common of the many misinterpretations of these ideas can be avoided.
We must begin, then, first with that genus of which natural law theory is a species, namely, theories of practical reason. Natural law theory being the theory of practical reason qua law, we must, second, add to it the general concept of law. We must, third, say something about the features of natural law itself, of which the most important are the ways in which the precepts of natural law are known, the ordering of those precepts according to the ordering of goods, and the reasons for deviations from natural law and disagreements about its precepts. Fourth, we must say something about its relation to human law.
I. Practical Reason
Reason or rationality by its nature concerns itself with order. It is concerned with order in one way when it attempts to identify correctly the order of nature, that is, the explicit and implicit order of the world. It is concerned with order in another way when it attempts to maintain and refine in its own order, which is logical. It is concerned with order a third way when it makes decisions, which require ordering means to ends in choices and actions. And it is concerned with order a fourth way when it concerns itself with making things in appropriate ways, through building or some other skill. These four kinds of order can easily be seen to be of two kinds. The first kind is speculative or theoretical; the second kind is practical. Theoretical reasoning is concerned with correspondence between mind and what actually is; practical reasoning is concerned with correspondence between means and ends. Or, to put it another way, theoretical reasoning is concerned with the true, while practical reasoning is concerned with the good.
It is important to grasp the fact that these two kinds of reasoning are not simply separate compartments; almost all our acts, and perhaps all of them, require the confluence of both. For instance, in order to reason correctly about the world one may have to plan how to proceed in one's inquiry or to make instruments, both of which require practical reasoning; and practical reasoning in practice requires both logical thinking and reasoning about what is true of the world. Rather, what we are concerned with here is what makes the theoretical theoretical and what makes the practical practical, in all the very different interrelations they have in an actual human life.
There are surprisingly few theories of practical reason, properly speaking; bits and pieces of such theories are common, but the relatively complete theories of practical reason can arguably be counted on one hand and certainly on two: Kantianism, Mill's Art of Life and similar utiliterianisms that take the principle of utility to be not just a moral principle but a general practical principle, rationalism, and perhaps a couple of others. Natural law theory, understood as including the theory of practical reason it uses, is one of these. There are a large number of features that all such theories of practical reason share: for instance, each one insists that rationality must include some notion or account of practical rationality, each one insists that there is a reasonable sense in which people can be practically irrational, each one requires some kind of account of obligation. These are all well-motivated. We can easily recognize that there is something unreasonable about trying to discover how caterpillars become butterflies simply by staring into one's shoe, for instance, and that this is not how one ought to go about studying caterpillars. This is because we recognize that for practical acts like research there is a rational order of means to ends and an irrational order of means to ends; and that what one ought to do in order to meet the goal of your research is determined by the rational and not the irrational order of means to ends. There is, therefore, a great deal of analogy and overlap among these theories of practical reason; they tend to recognize more or less the same things as involved in reason, practical life, and practical reason itself. Where they tend to differ is in what they regard as central to these things, and this can affect, despite the many commonalities and analogies, many of the finer details. We will not be doing any comparison or contrast here, but will simply focus on natural law theory itself.
Reasoning being a kind of order, there must be some underlying principle or principles of that order. The most obvious and important of these in the case of theoretical reason is the principle of noncontradiction, which all theoretical reasoning presupposes in some way or another. For our purposes there are a few things we should note about the principle of noncontradiction. First, it is self-evident and basic: to reject it out of hand shows that you do not understand it, and it is impossible to have any reasoning at all that does not presuppose some kind of application of the principle. Second, despite this it is not a premise in every theoretical argument; it rarely is, in fact. It is instead what makes it possible for arguments to be arguments and also what draws the line, so to speak, between well developed and poorly developed arguments, whatever their premises. It structures reasoning itself. Third, and for the same reason, you can argue without ever explicitly formulating a principle of noncontradiction; being able to formulate the principle of noncontradiction in a reasonable way is very helpful for seeing the structure of reasoning, and in particular the structure of good reasoning in comparison with bad reasoning. Likewise, an erroneous formulation of the principle will not necessarily make all one's reasoning bad, although it may vitiate reasoning that explicitly uses it and may make it difficult to distinguish certain kinds of good reasoning and bad reasoning, thus making it hard for someone to correct their errors, however egregious.
Practical reasoning, however, cannot be fundamentally different from theoretical reasoning on this point; it too is a kind of order, and must have some underlying principle or principles of order. Given that practical reasoning concerns means and end, the principle or principles will have to formulate ends insofar as means can attain them. The most obvious and generally applicable of these is the one given by Aquinas, Good is to be done and sought, and bad is to be avoided. (The Latin word for 'to be done' is broad enough that it can also include 'to be made'.) Like the principle of noncontradiction, it is self-evident and basic; there is no practical reasoning that does not in some way presuppose it. A plan that has nothing good about it is a bad plan; a decision that has nothing good about it is a bad decision; whether or not things are reasonable to do or unreasonable to do, can only be determined by looking at what is good and bad about them. Like the principle of noncontradiction, the principle of practical reason is not a premise in every practical argument; it can be, but its primary role is not to be a premise but to define the character of practical reasoning and identify the most general structural difference between good practical reasoning and bad practical reasoning. Like the principle of noncontradiction, it is therefore not something that has to be explicitly formulated; it simply structures practical reasoning precisely as practical reasoning. And it occupies the same place in practical reasoning that noncontradiction occupies in theoretical reasoning. In fact, we can say something much stronger: it just is the principle of noncontradiction, considered practically. The principle of noncontradiction is drawn from the idea of being, the principle of practical reason is drawn from the idea of good, but good is just being looked at in a certain light. The principle of practical reason therefore simply identifies the form noncontradiction takes in practical matters; and, conversely, it's even difficult to talk about the principle of noncontradiction without implicitly bringing in the principle of practical reasoning above, as I did when I talked about good reasoning and bad reasoning.
There is a key difference between practical reasoning and theoretical reasoning, however, and one that will make a significant difference in how they work in practice. In theoretical reasoning you can abstract from details without affecting the reasoning itself. Since practical reasoning is precisely concerned with the details of practical life, this is not possible for practical reasoning. Practical reasoning is forced to face, all the time, a level of complexity that theoretical reasoning can often get around. This has considerable ramifications, as we shall see later.
Part II
We must begin, then, first with that genus of which natural law theory is a species, namely, theories of practical reason. Natural law theory being the theory of practical reason qua law, we must, second, add to it the general concept of law. We must, third, say something about the features of natural law itself, of which the most important are the ways in which the precepts of natural law are known, the ordering of those precepts according to the ordering of goods, and the reasons for deviations from natural law and disagreements about its precepts. Fourth, we must say something about its relation to human law.
I. Practical Reason
Reason or rationality by its nature concerns itself with order. It is concerned with order in one way when it attempts to identify correctly the order of nature, that is, the explicit and implicit order of the world. It is concerned with order in another way when it attempts to maintain and refine in its own order, which is logical. It is concerned with order a third way when it makes decisions, which require ordering means to ends in choices and actions. And it is concerned with order a fourth way when it concerns itself with making things in appropriate ways, through building or some other skill. These four kinds of order can easily be seen to be of two kinds. The first kind is speculative or theoretical; the second kind is practical. Theoretical reasoning is concerned with correspondence between mind and what actually is; practical reasoning is concerned with correspondence between means and ends. Or, to put it another way, theoretical reasoning is concerned with the true, while practical reasoning is concerned with the good.
It is important to grasp the fact that these two kinds of reasoning are not simply separate compartments; almost all our acts, and perhaps all of them, require the confluence of both. For instance, in order to reason correctly about the world one may have to plan how to proceed in one's inquiry or to make instruments, both of which require practical reasoning; and practical reasoning in practice requires both logical thinking and reasoning about what is true of the world. Rather, what we are concerned with here is what makes the theoretical theoretical and what makes the practical practical, in all the very different interrelations they have in an actual human life.
There are surprisingly few theories of practical reason, properly speaking; bits and pieces of such theories are common, but the relatively complete theories of practical reason can arguably be counted on one hand and certainly on two: Kantianism, Mill's Art of Life and similar utiliterianisms that take the principle of utility to be not just a moral principle but a general practical principle, rationalism, and perhaps a couple of others. Natural law theory, understood as including the theory of practical reason it uses, is one of these. There are a large number of features that all such theories of practical reason share: for instance, each one insists that rationality must include some notion or account of practical rationality, each one insists that there is a reasonable sense in which people can be practically irrational, each one requires some kind of account of obligation. These are all well-motivated. We can easily recognize that there is something unreasonable about trying to discover how caterpillars become butterflies simply by staring into one's shoe, for instance, and that this is not how one ought to go about studying caterpillars. This is because we recognize that for practical acts like research there is a rational order of means to ends and an irrational order of means to ends; and that what one ought to do in order to meet the goal of your research is determined by the rational and not the irrational order of means to ends. There is, therefore, a great deal of analogy and overlap among these theories of practical reason; they tend to recognize more or less the same things as involved in reason, practical life, and practical reason itself. Where they tend to differ is in what they regard as central to these things, and this can affect, despite the many commonalities and analogies, many of the finer details. We will not be doing any comparison or contrast here, but will simply focus on natural law theory itself.
Reasoning being a kind of order, there must be some underlying principle or principles of that order. The most obvious and important of these in the case of theoretical reason is the principle of noncontradiction, which all theoretical reasoning presupposes in some way or another. For our purposes there are a few things we should note about the principle of noncontradiction. First, it is self-evident and basic: to reject it out of hand shows that you do not understand it, and it is impossible to have any reasoning at all that does not presuppose some kind of application of the principle. Second, despite this it is not a premise in every theoretical argument; it rarely is, in fact. It is instead what makes it possible for arguments to be arguments and also what draws the line, so to speak, between well developed and poorly developed arguments, whatever their premises. It structures reasoning itself. Third, and for the same reason, you can argue without ever explicitly formulating a principle of noncontradiction; being able to formulate the principle of noncontradiction in a reasonable way is very helpful for seeing the structure of reasoning, and in particular the structure of good reasoning in comparison with bad reasoning. Likewise, an erroneous formulation of the principle will not necessarily make all one's reasoning bad, although it may vitiate reasoning that explicitly uses it and may make it difficult to distinguish certain kinds of good reasoning and bad reasoning, thus making it hard for someone to correct their errors, however egregious.
Practical reasoning, however, cannot be fundamentally different from theoretical reasoning on this point; it too is a kind of order, and must have some underlying principle or principles of order. Given that practical reasoning concerns means and end, the principle or principles will have to formulate ends insofar as means can attain them. The most obvious and generally applicable of these is the one given by Aquinas, Good is to be done and sought, and bad is to be avoided. (The Latin word for 'to be done' is broad enough that it can also include 'to be made'.) Like the principle of noncontradiction, it is self-evident and basic; there is no practical reasoning that does not in some way presuppose it. A plan that has nothing good about it is a bad plan; a decision that has nothing good about it is a bad decision; whether or not things are reasonable to do or unreasonable to do, can only be determined by looking at what is good and bad about them. Like the principle of noncontradiction, the principle of practical reason is not a premise in every practical argument; it can be, but its primary role is not to be a premise but to define the character of practical reasoning and identify the most general structural difference between good practical reasoning and bad practical reasoning. Like the principle of noncontradiction, it is therefore not something that has to be explicitly formulated; it simply structures practical reasoning precisely as practical reasoning. And it occupies the same place in practical reasoning that noncontradiction occupies in theoretical reasoning. In fact, we can say something much stronger: it just is the principle of noncontradiction, considered practically. The principle of noncontradiction is drawn from the idea of being, the principle of practical reason is drawn from the idea of good, but good is just being looked at in a certain light. The principle of practical reason therefore simply identifies the form noncontradiction takes in practical matters; and, conversely, it's even difficult to talk about the principle of noncontradiction without implicitly bringing in the principle of practical reasoning above, as I did when I talked about good reasoning and bad reasoning.
There is a key difference between practical reasoning and theoretical reasoning, however, and one that will make a significant difference in how they work in practice. In theoretical reasoning you can abstract from details without affecting the reasoning itself. Since practical reasoning is precisely concerned with the details of practical life, this is not possible for practical reasoning. Practical reasoning is forced to face, all the time, a level of complexity that theoretical reasoning can often get around. This has considerable ramifications, as we shall see later.
Part II
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)