Evening Note for Wednesday, October 31

Thought for the Evening: Prima Facie Duties and Humanitarian Traditions

In high school -- junior year, I think -- I picked up a cast-off book from the library free book bin, Ethics by Charles Baylis. I would not regard a book like it as good now for studying ethics, but it seems to have been good at discussing issues of concern to ethicists in its day (it was published in 1958), when the entire lay of the land consisted of Sidgwick and Moore, with probably a dash of Prichard and Joad, and when 'applied ethics' meant talking about how we could avoid nuclear holocaust or further democracy around the world, and not, as it often means today, coming up with weird arguments about killing people. I certainly would regard it as a much better discussion of that ethical world than Shafer-Ladau's Fundamentals of Ethics or Rachels's The Elements of Moral Philosophy are of the current state of the ethical landscape. And, regardless, I did learn quite a bit from it, for all that (and perhaps partly because) I agreed with very little in it.

One thing that very much caught my interest was Baylis's discussion of W. D. Ross's account of prima facie duties from The Right and the Good. I remember being struck by it as something that would make a very plausible explication of the notion of 'honor'. I still think this is true. But I think the reason for this is a more fundamental one than I realized at the time, one that I don't think really came through in Baylis's account, namely, that Ross's account is really an account of moral reasons.

Ross never gives a perfectly clear definition of prima facie duties, and spends a fair amount of time apologizing for his terminology. Prima facie duties aren't, in a strict sense, duties at all, but something related "in a special way" to duty. And they also aren't themselves prima facie, since that suggests that they are apparent, but they are in fact intended to identify objective features of the moral situation. So if prima facie duties are neither duties nor prima facie, but only something related to duties and in some way like things that are prima facie, what are they? From Ross we learn that they are features of acts that would make that act a duty if there were no other similar feature to complicate the situation; a prima facie duty does not make something your duty, but it makes something tend to be your duty. But that's about as close as we get to a clear account from Ross.* In reality, though, what Ross is describing is a topics, a set of commonplaces for reasoning, and in particular a topics identifying kinds of reasons that we use in moral reasoning to determine if something is morally required. 'Deontic grounds' might be a better label.

Ross lays out a number of things that he has in mind when he talks about prima facie duties, in a famous passage (bolding is mine):

1. Some duties rest on previous acts of my own. These duties seem to include two kinds,
    A. those resting on a promise or what may fairly be called an implicit promise, such as the implicit undertaking not to tell lies which seems to be implied in the act of entering into conversation (at any rate by civilized men), or of writing books that purport to be history and not fiction. These may be called the duties of fidelity.
    B. Those resting on a previous wrongful act. These may be called the duties of reparation.

2. Some rest on previous acts of other men, i.e. services done by them to me. These may be loosely described as the duties of gratitude.

3. Some rest on the fact or possibility of a distribution of pleasure or happiness (or of the means thereto) which is not in accordance with the merit of the persons concerned; in such cases there arises a duty to upset or prevent such a distribution. These are the duties of justice.

4. Some rest on the mere fact that there are beings in the world whose condition we can make better in respect of virtue, or of intelligence, or of pleasure. These are the duties of beneficence.

5. Some rest on the fact that we can improve our own condition in respect of virtue or of intelligence. These are the duties of self-improvement.

6. I think that we should distinguish from (4) the duties that may be summed up under the title of 'not injuring others'. No doubt to injure others is incidentally to fail to do them good; but it seems to me clear that non-maleficence is apprehended as a duty distinct from that of beneficence, and as a duty of a more stringent character.

He apologizes for some of these labels (again), and makes clear that he does not consider a complete or unrevisable list. It is, he says (with irony, I suppose), a prima facie classification of prima facie duties. But more to our point, in a response to an objection that these might conflict, he replies that something could very well be our duty for more than one reason, and if the kinds of reasons end up being irreducible to each other, that's just something that must be accommodated. We recognize that we should keep promises; we recognize that we should prevent harm; if we sometimes break a promise to prevent harm because we think our duty lies that way, we nonetheless still regard promises as reasons to think ourselves obligated. How then do we determine our actual duty? Ross denies that we have any definite rules for doing so; we use our prudential judgment in the context. And this is exactly how a topics works: topoi or commonplaces don't tell you what conclusion you should draw, they tell you what kinds of arguments might be considered, the lines of reasoning that might be relevant.

I think it makes sense to see these deontic topoi or prima facie duties as naturally becoming relevant within humanitarian traditions. This is presumably not the only context in which they can become relevant, but it is, I think one of the most influential contexts. A humanitarian tradition grows up in order to do help people in some matter, to do good to people in some way, and it seems to be common among humanitarian traditions that they develop some kind of ethical code or codes, some standard of ethical behavior in the pursuits found in that tradition. Thus, to take the most famous and obvious example, medicine cultivates the Hippocratic Oath and various quasi-Hippocratic moral standards. How do these arise? We have the attempt to help people, which by its very nature involves responsibility to them, and we are put in situations where we are required to ask ourselves, "What is our specific responsibility in this context?" And what kind of reasoned answer can we give? Something like Ross's list seems to capture the kinds of reasons that will inevitably come up for saying this or that is your responsibility. In medicine, reasons that fall under beneficence and nonmaleficence ("Do no harm") will obviously be primary, but you'll also have to do things that involve contracts and payment or things you promise patients not to do, and thus have fidelity-type reasons for acting a certain way; you'll have training and self-education that you need in order to help people well, and this gives room for reasons of self-improvement, etc. And none of the reasons will be random. It's not like you are searching around for fidelity-type reasons; you are in an actual situation of helping someone, where a promise has been made, and the fact that a promise has been made is relevant as a reason to the act of helping you are doing. Given the promise, fidelity is one standard to which your act of helping can be held, so 'X will be a better way of keeping my promise' is a reason to think you should do X. Or someone comes to you to help because of a serious condition; that Y will make their condition better is a reason to do Y, given that you are trying to help them. And so forth. And we see here how they are not really duties themselves -- they're just reasons to do something that are relevant to your work of helping people.

So these prima facie duties become relevant in a humanitarian tradition; they are a classification of the kinds of reasons that become relevant in a definite activity in which you are trying to be responsible to people, like in a humanitarian tradition, and humanitarian traditions are elaborate and stable enough that the reasoning is not just something that leads to a passing judgment but something that contributes to an elaborate body of ethics based on long experience through the generations.

Incidentally, thinking in terms of humanitarian traditions shows some weaknesses in Ross's formulations. For instance, beneficence is certainly a kind of moral reason for doing something in medicine; but Ross says that beneficence becomes relevant when you can make someone's condition better "in respect of virtue, or of intelligence, or of pleasure". (These are the three things Ross thinks are intrinsic goods.) None of these are really in view in medicine; medicine is concerned with health. But health is a certainly a way in which people's conditions can be better, and beneficence is certainly possible with respect to it. Likewise, Ross takes fidelity to be promise-related, but a look at how fidelity works in law (where it is arguably as important as nonmaleficence is in medicine) shows that this is too narrow. Promises are one way you get fidelity reasons, but lawyers, for instance, have fidelity reasons that are not concerned with promises. For instance, lawyers have the responsibility to be candid -- it is a severe ethical violation deliberately to lie in a legal context to a client or a tribunal, or deliberately to let one's client lie to a tribunal, and if you are ever caught red-handed doing it, your career as a lawyer is immediately over. It's not quite honesty -- honesty is a reason to avoid lying, but this is a different kind of reason. This kind of reasoning is not based on promises; you may or may not have made a promise, but there is a reason to avoid lying to judges regardless of what your promises have been. The reason is quite simply tied up in what you are doing: you are, at least in principle, supposed to be helping people in matters of law, and the whole tradition and system for doing that begins to break if people try to manipulate it by directly lying to clients or tribunals. Now, you could try to get this under promises (as Ross does) by appealing to implicit promises, but it's not clear that this is even necessary.

In any case, we could see the ins and outs of Ross's account better by looking at how these topoi, these 'seats of argument', work in the context of humanitarian traditions.

-----
* People have argued that Ross should have used 'pro tanto' rather than 'prima facie', but I don't think this is any sort of improvement. 'Prima facie duties' at least has the merit of suggesting that they are not necessarily duties, which thus far is at least not wrong; 'pro tanto duties' suggests that they are partial duties, which is certainly not right. Nor does it help to switch to 'pro tanto reasons', because (while they would certainly be more accurately called 'reasons' than 'duties'), they are not 'pro tanto' as reasons; they are just reasons. At least, if we call them 'pro tanto' they aren't so in any sense that they don't share with most of the things we call 'reasons'.


Various Links of Interest

* There has been, for a number of years a baffling mystery in Europe -- large quantities of toads turned up dead, their little corpses looking like they exploded. Nobody could figure out the reason for a long time, despite the fact that it was spreading. They recently solved the mystery -- the toads really were exploding, and the reason that they were exploding, and doing so in increasing numbers, is that crows are dangerously clever birds and capable of learning clever things from other crows.

* Speaking of which, crows have recently been observed constructing multi-part tools. That crows are tool-users has been known for a while -- one of the famous experiments was when some food was put at the bottom of a bottle whose neck was too narrow for the crow to reach into; the crow picked up a wire that was nearby, bent it into a hook, and fished out the food. But this is the first definite example of crows putting together different parts to make a single tool.

* Bernard M. Levinson, The Metamorphosis of Law into Gospel: Gerhard von Rad's Attempt to Reclaim the Old Testament for the Church

* A school in New Zealand recently relaxed its recess rules to allow students to do riskier things, and the results were much better than anyone expected.

* Nathanael Blake, Why 'Mansfield Park' was Jane Austen's Best Novel

* Abdoulaye, Allison, Baxter and Niang, Boy Scouts in a War Zone is a very interesting report on how Boy Scouts in the Central African Republic have been doing things like investigating possible Ebola outbreaks or mediating peace talks. Ironically, the Boy Scouts of the Central African Republic are under suspension from their world scouting organization because they are not in compliance with more recent policies.

* Cardinal Zen, unsurprisingly, is not impressed with the Vatican's recent deals with China, but urges Chinese Catholics not to try to kick up resistance when they can avoid it.

* Post-Reformation Digital Library has a vast number of texts from both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

* Alex Nevala-Lee, Dawn of Dianetics: L. Ron Hubbard, John W. Campbell, and the Origins of Scientology

* Adrian McKinty, Collected Letters of Flann O'Brien review: The missives of a brilliant mind

* Mary Rezac, Polish priest, martyr and hero: Remembering Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko

* The awesome worstness of the awesome Tim Curry performing the worst Halloween song in the history of the world:



Currently Reading

Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
John of St. Thomas, The Gifts of the Holy Spirit
Tim Button and Sean Walsh, Philosophy and Model Theory
Umberto Eco, On Literature
Jules Verne, Mathias Sandorf

Like the Laughter of the Moon

The Witch with Eyes of Amber
by Clark Ashton Smith

I met a witch with amber eyes
Who slowly sang a scarlet rune,
Shifting to an icy laughter
Like the laughter of the moon.

Red as a wanton's was her mouth,
And fair the breast she bade me take
With a word that clove and clung
Burning like a furnace-flake.

But from her bright and lifted bosom,
When I touched it with my hand,
Came the many-needled coldness
Of a glacier-taken land.

And, lo! the witch with eyes of amber
Vanished like a blown-out flame
Leaving but the lichen-eaten
Stone that bore a blotted name.

The Grail and Not the Gleam

The White Witch
by G. K. Chesterton

The dark Diana of the groves
Whose name is Hecate in hell
Heaves up her awful horns to heaven
White with the light I know too well.

The moon that broods upon her brows
Mirrors the monstrous hollow lands
In leprous silver; at the term
Of triple twisted roads she stands.

Dreams are no sin or only sin
For them that waking dream they dream;
But I have learned what wiser knights
Follow the Grail and not the Gleam.

I found One hidden in every home,
A voice that sings about the house,
A nurse that scares the nightmares off,
A mother nearer than a spouse,

Whose picture once I saw; and there
Wild as of old and weird and sweet,
In sevenfold splendour blazed the moon
Not on her brow; beneath her feet.

The Nethermost Unknowable Abyss

Haunting
by Clark Ashton Smith

There is no peace amid the moonlight and the pines;
Deep in the windless gloom the lamplike thought of you
Abides; and ah, what burning memories pursue
My heart among the pallid marbles! . . . Night assigns

Your silver face for wardress of the doors of sleep;
Beyond the wilder bourns of dreamland flown, your eyes
Are amber planets on the ultimate lost skies;
Moonlike and dim, you wander ever in the deep

Which is the nethermost unknowable abyss
Of my own soul, and in its night your spirit lives.
Shall I not find the very draught that Lethe gives
Salt with your tears, and sweet with savor of your kiss?

A Wind Whereby the Stars Were Disenthralled

Averted Malefice
by Clark Ashton Smith

Where mandrakes, crying from the moonless fen,
Told how a witch, with eyes of owl or bat,
Found, and each root maleficently fat
Pulled for her waiting cauldron, on my ken
Upstole, escaping to the world of men,
A vapor as of some infernal vat;
Across the stars it clomb, and caught thereat
As if their bright regard to veil again.

Despite the web, methought they knew, appalled,
The stealthier weft in which all sound was still. . . .
Then sprang, as if the night found breath anew
A wind whereby the stars were disenthralled. . . .
Far off, I heard the cry of frustrate ill,
A witch that wailed above her curdled brew.

The Medieval Symbol

The medieval symbol is a way of approaching the divine, but it is not the epiphany of something numinous, nor does it reveal to us a truth that can be articulated solely in terms of myth and not in terms of rational discourse. Rather, it is the preamble to a rational discourse, and its duty is to make clear, at the point when it seems didactically useful and appropriate to its role as preamble, its own inadequacy, its own (almost Hegelian) destiny to become real by a subsequent rational discourse.

[Umberto Eco, On Literature, McLaughlin, tr., Harcourt (Orlando, FL: 2004) p. 147.]

Voyages Extraordinaires #38: Claudius Bombarnac

CLAUDIUS BOMBARNAC,
Special Correspondent,
“Twentieth Century.”
Tiflis, Transcaucasia.

Such is the address of the telegram I found on the 13th of May when I arrived at Tiflis.

This is what the telegram said:

“As the matters in hand will terminate on the 15th instant Claudius Bombarnac will repair to Uzun Ada, a port on the east coast of the Caspian. There he will take the train by the direct Grand Transasiatic between the European frontier and the capital of the Celestial Empire. He will transmit his impressions in the way of news, interviewing remarkable people on the road, and report the most trivial incidents by letter or telegram as necessity dictates. The Twentieth Century trusts to the zeal, intelligence, activity and tact of its correspondent, who can draw on its bankers to any extent he may deem necessary.”

Verne usually does not have punchy beginnings, but he gets to the point here: Claudius Bombarnac, a special correspondent for the Twentieth Century is asked by his paper to do a people-oriented feature on the Grand Transasiatic from the Caspian Sea to Pekin (Beijing). Doing so, he meets a number of people from all over the world. He worries, though, that he might not find sufficiently exciting material to keep his readers interested. But he needn't worry; there is the mystery of the man in the crate, and a new armed car gets added to the train, purportedly carrying a Mandarin's coffin to Pekin, and it becomes clear enough that bandits are out to seize the train. Not everything is what it seems, and, among the odd people on the train it is harder than usual for a special correspondent to figure out what is real and what is not.

Claudius Bombarnac, also known in English as The Adventures of a Special Correspondent, has a few passing callbacks to other works by Verne. One of the people on the train is trying to beat the world record for going around the world, which allows Verne to give some nice tribute to people who tried to do a trip like that in Around the World in Eight Days -- Nellie Bly, Elizabeth Bisland, and George Francis Train all get special mention. In addition, the stage version of Michel Strogoff is mentioned in passing. The characters on the train often have definite similarities to characters in other Verne works, so some have seen this as Verne poking light fun at some of his more distinctive creations.

Fortnightly Book, October 28

Perhaps the most famous of all Verne's works, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (or, in a slightly stricter translation, 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas) was first serialized in 1869 and 1870. The Nautilus was likely inspired by the Plongeur, the first mechanical submarine, which had first been tested in 1863, and had appeared in the Exposition Universelle in 1867, where Verne is known to have been. The name itself is a tribute to one of the earliest sucessful submarines, Robert Fulton's Nautilus, which had been built in 1800. The 20,000 leagues is about 80,000 kilometers.

I'll be reading Lewis Mercier's translation, from 1873. It is notorious for not being great as a translation, but it happens to be the hardcopy I have on hand. I have another, more modern translation, somewhere, but for some reason I cannot find it. I will, however, be comparing with F. P. Walter's well regarded modern public domain translation from the original French.

Favorite Story and Family Theater both did adaptations of the tale to radio, so I will try to fit those in if I can.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Introduction

Opening Passage:

To Mrs. Saville, England.

St. Petersburgh, Dec. 11th, 17—.

You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.

Summary: It is lonely in the heights of greatness. The human mind and will can achieve sublime things, and, being human, wishes to share it with a mind and will that can truly appreciate the sublimity, that can answer back with its own sublimities. But in sublime things, as the old proverb goes, 'My friend, there is no such thing as a friend'.

We open the book with Walton, writing to his sister Margaret. Walton has set out to explore the arctic regions and find the North Pole. It is a high and sublime deed, and a very lonely one. He writes to his sister of his loneliness, and the ache of having no one with whom he might really share any success he might have: "I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate in my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection." But into his life falls Victor Frankenstein, and this, at last seems to be the friend for whom Walton has wished. For Victor Frankenstein has already achieved a high and sublime deed, the creation of rational life. It is an achievement far beyond what most people can even imagine doing. And yet Frankenstein, too, is utterly alone. Horrified by the thing he created, he was unable to share it with his closest friends, Elizabeth Lavenza and Henry Cherval; and both of them were murdered by the creature.

The creature, too, has a mind capable of high and sublime things; he shows a genuine genius and a capacity for learning that runs far beyond what most people could possibly have. But he is also utterly alone. He was born a new thing in the world, a pinnacle of human achievement, but, grotesque to the eye, his own creator repudiated him. Uncared for, he wandered, and realized that everyone would treat him has his creator did. He demands that Frankenstein make him a companion who could understand him. Frankenstein agrees, but, in terror at the thought of what such another monster could do in the world, he backs out on his promise, destroying the companion before he has brought it to life. So close, so close to having a friend, to ending that pain of loneliness, and Victor Frankenstein destroyed it right in front of him. All the two have left between each other is revenge, and the absolute guarantee that one of them must die.

Thus by the end, everyone has been cheated of all possibility of a friend. Such is the splendor of the heights.

Much of this gets pushed into the background by the interest of the main characters. Walton himself comes across almost as a nonentity; in the abstract, he's an interesting character, but in the actual course of the story he can't compete with the high tragedy and pain of the creature or the infinite melodrama of Frankenstein. He is also, perhaps not unrelatedly, the character who is least concerned with himself. Frankenstein himself is immensely self-absorbed -- not a bad man, but he is really ally about himself. When he vows revenge on the creature, one of the sacred things he swears by is his own grief; he treats all of his actions as being of world-historical significance; the creature calls him, correctly, I think, "[g]enerous and self-devoted being"; Walton says of him, impressed, that he "seems to feel his own worth and the greatness of his fall." This is, indeed, part of what other characters find so magnetic about Frankenstein: he is very well aware of his own importance and the assessment spreads by a sort of sympathetic contagion.

Most mind-bogglingly of all is that Victor Frankenstein, who has violated practically every obligation he has undertaken, is quite totally convinced that he is justified. "During these last days I have been occupied in examining my past conduct; nor do I find it blamable." Did you not create a rational being, Victor? Yes, in a fit of "enthusiastic madness". Were you not bound to care for such a creature, Victor? Yes, but there was a higher obligation, to the beings of his own species, so I destroyed the companion I was supposed to make for him; and he acted with malignant selfishness.

But, of course, it is impossible not to think that the creature has had the worst of the exchange. Yes, he did deliberately murder innocent people, but one can sympathize under the circumstances. And it would all have been prevented if Frankenstein had fulfilled his obligation to care for the life he had made. For that matter, further deaths after the first would likely have been prevented if Frankenstein had spoken up at the trial of Justine; he excuses himself on the grounds that they would have thought him a madman, but when he finally talks to a magistrate later (his own skin on the line), he actually gets a remarkably sympathetic hearing. And, of course, it is possible it could all have been brought to an end again if Frankenstein had not broken his promise to his creature by destroying the companion, because there is nothing at all that sparks vengeance as having your hope dangled in front of you and then deliberately ripped up so that it will never be fulfilled.

In addition to reading the book, I also listened to two radio versions of the story, one from the classic show Suspense, and the other from The Witch's Tale. Unsurprisingly, they both focus on the making of the monster. Both put some emphasis on the trespassing-human-bounds angle -- an aspect that you can find, here and there in the book, but that does not actually play a major role in the story. The Suspense version particularly suggests that Frankenstein's problem was a lack of religious humility. Of the two, the Suspense is much less faithful, being closer in structure to what the story becomes on stage or screen. The Witch's Tale, on the other hand, makes a truly valiant attempt to distill as much of the sprawling story as possible into about twenty minutes -- an impossible task, but it's a fairly impressive attempt. Plus, I really like the sheer, savage rage of the creature in it.



Favorite Passage:

“Oh, it is not thus—not thus,” interrupted the being. “Yet such must be the impression conveyed to you by what appears to be the purport of my actions. Yet I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall endure; when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone...."

Recommendation: Recommended.

Dashed Off XXV

Evil being a privation, for any argument from evil one should look at what it implies about good.

sins that rust, sins that burn

the task of the statesman (the happy life of the citizens):
(1) opibus firma: strength for their safety.
(2) copiis locuples: abundance for their goods.
(3) gloria amplia: fame for their self-worth.
(4) virtute honesta: good for their virtue.
[Cicero, quoting Scipio, Ep. 8.11 to Atticus]

Imagination is hampered by lack of logical analysis. It is logical analysis that shows that what seemed necessary was not, that this is indeed possible given that.

The human heart needs more than safety and pleasure; give human beings nothing but safety and pleasure and they begin to rot.

Centralization of power facilitates dishonest government.

If you keep boring people, they will inevitably start doing shocking things.

The insistence on wheat & wine & oil for the sacraments is linked to the historical character of the Incarnation.

Even the Church cannot fight every evil equally intensely all the time.

circumcision as the symbolic acceptance of natural evil for the sake of God

Claims of Christ suggesting that He is God:
Either they are (1) later legend or (2) fact.
If (2), they are either (2.1) misunderstood metaphor or (2.2) correctly understood.
If (2.2), they are either (2.2.1) false or (2.2.2) true.
If (2.2.1), Christ is either (2.2.1.1) a liar or (2.2.1.2) a lunatic.

The Church's claim that Christ is God:
Either the Church is (1) right or (2) it is deceived.
If (2), it was deceived either (2.1) by Christ or (2.2) by disciples of Christ.
If (2.2), those disciples were either (2.2.1) the Apostles or (2.2.2) the Fathers.

holy devotion : human person :: glory : God

In theology, the intellect must hold itself to an ascetic discipline.

Power, wisdom, and goodness are the three things that form hierarchies, and that evoke a sense of deference in the human mind.

The natural religious tendency of centralized liberal democracy, in the European sense, seems to be to somewhere between agnostic unitarianism and ietsism, just as the natural religious tendency of Greek democracy was to syncretic polytheism, and the tendency of the rougher American-style republican democracy is to something like moralistic deism.

All substantive credibility depends on some kind of temperance or self-restraint.

Political lying leads to political violence in the long run.

Liberalism is the form of government that tries to create freedom by artificial method.

A people without a strong sense of loyalty slip into authoritarianism, because loyalties create limits to the use and exercise of power. (It does not follow that loyalty on its own is universally adequate to prevent every kind of authoritarianism.) The shifting of loyalties on the grounds of preference and convenience is exactly one of the things that most easily leads to authoritarianism. Who has no stable loyalties is easily manipulated.

purgatorium = emendetorium

Saints are signs, exemplates, and paths oriented to the Word Incarnate.

"For it must be a strange sort of rational creature that can live in such a beautiful fabric was we inhabit, without thinking how it came here, and who was the maker of the universe." Mary Astell

No one talks up freedom and rights more than usurping tyrants.

what signs express vs what signs evince

layers of Christian devotion
(1) Gift of Piety
(2) Theological Virtue of Faith
(3) Infused Virtue of Religion
(4) Acquired Virtue of Religion

[the Gift] -- [what it perfects]
Understanding -- speculative intellect in discovery of truth
Wisdom -- speculative intellect in judgment
Counsel -- practical intellect in discovery of truth
Knowledge -- practical intellect in judgment
Piety -- will in itself
Fortitude -- will with respect to irascible appetite
Fear -- will with respect to concupiscible appetite

A nation is a guise under which people seek and preserve common good.

Vico's criticisms of Hobbes can be summarized as: human societies must grow, not be mechanically constructed; human society's rise is marked by poetry, not by calculation.

Although they are not always stated in this way, design arguments typically are two-stage: design vs chance (the phenomena are designed) and unified design (common cause) vs separate causes (there is a designing agent rather than just a design-converging complex of factors). A reason this is not always made clear is the modern muddle about final causes.

Sometimes we classify to know the thing, and sometimes we classify to regiment our thought about it.

"Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance, man makes himself the measure of all things." Vico

design // obligation

Extensive conquest requires previously existing political structures that are capable of being coopted and then built upon.

Moralism sees no sublimity.

Confirmation (of a theory, etc.) is a transition from one kind of modal operator to another.

Our views on punishment are often more about stories we want to tell about ourselves than about justice.

HoP & the logistics of rational discourse

The relation between exemplar and exemplate is easier to grasp than the relation between universal and instance; which is why the former is more common across many cultures and why certain views -- like empiricism, intelligent design theory, etc. -- have consistent imaginative purchase.

conservation laws and the universe as a necessary being (in the Third Way sense)

In online as well as offline arguments, feeling entitled to victory is a harbinger of aggressive nastiness if victory is denied.

Peter as the chorypaeus of the choir (Chrysostom)

Sometimes when people speak of tradition they mean little more than a sense of propriety.

One reason for giving rational accounts is to prevent our meanings from drifting out from under us, by tying them in particular ways to other words and to real things.

the logic of implication as the logic of enthymeme
-- the paradoxes of implication as arising from issues with enthymemes
-- modal division of enthymemes: strict [ □(a->b) ], material [ (a->b) ], and suppositional [ ◇(a->b) ].

Syllogism establishes union, enthymeme presupposes it.

inferential division of enthymemes: rational (therefore), conditional (if), causal (because)

Null hypotheses are formed by dichotomizing, and face the same problems as using dichotomy to classify.

Law must be made present by promulgation and enforcement.

The endurance of rights in human society requires that there be memorial witnesses to them.

piacular guilt as a sign of sublimity

moral debt
(1) for good received: gratitude
(2) for bad received: vindication
(3) for unintentional bad done: piacular honor

Military strategy requires a genius for finding ways to change the rules.

NB Vico takes other words to arise from interjections, and pronouns to arise out of the sharing of ideas with others about things we can't name, or for which they don't understand the names.

"The threat prompting resentment, made fully explicit, is of license with impunity." Margaret Walker

Arendt's dictum: We cannot genuinely forgive what we cannot punish.

Court nobility, as such, arises when functional roles maintained by families become more titular than functional, either by the function becoming otiose, or by a shift to a new function without a shift of name in order to maintain continuity in familial honor.

"The basic problem of every former colony -- the problem of intellectual servitude, of impoverished tradition, of subaltern spirituality, of inauthentic civilization, of obligatory and shameful imitation -- has been resolved for me with supreme simplicity: Catholicism is my native land." Nicolas Gomez Davila

incongruity
(1) pleasant: humor
(2) unpleasant: bitter irony?
novelty
(1) pleasant: surprise
(2) unpleasant: shock

We define substances not by enumerating sensible ideas but by determining what is required for them to act as they do.

It is remarkable how many people fail to understand that finger-wagging does not encourage mercy or kindness in general.

Rhetorical cascades have an ideal component and a material component, and it is the combination that makes the cascade.

Full consent is only possible to the moral good, for reasons given in Plato's Gorgias.

"The greatest examples of the action of the spirit and of reason are in abnegation." Tolkien

We clearly can be moved by anticipated plights and by probable but not certain plights; thus we can be moved by imagined plights and by fictional plights.

All belief is inside-a-story belief.

Fictions influence emotions by evoking moods, which are then concentrated.

NB that Vico takes our sense of civil beauty to be prior to our sense of natural beauty.

Complaining about the diaphonia of schools in philosophical inquiry is like complaining about the diversity of instruments in a symphony.

If abstract objects exist, they act, for what actually is, acts as it is. If abstract objects are known to exist, they act, for things are known, directly or indirectly, as they act.

A problem with too many modern political theories is that they attempt to pass themselves off as healthy simply on the grounds that they are not fast-acting poisons.

A true intellectual life is an entire economy: for some truths we hunt, for some we trap, for some we fish, for some we sow.

Music on My Mind

Árstíðir, "Heyr Himna Smiður", an Icelandic hymn sung impromptu in a train station. A more standard version by another group:



Háskólakórinn, "Heyr Himna Smiður".

Heyr Himna Smiður means something like, "Hail, Smith of the Heavens".

Boil Water Days

Because of recent serious flooding here in Central Texas, Austin is now on its third day of a Boil Water Notice (the first it has ever had). So far there has been no problems with bacteria or anything like that, but the water treatment plants are falling behind on supplying treated water due to high turbidity in the Colorado River, so we are also on a slight water conservation regime. It's interesting. Since floodgates are still open and we are still getting rain, estimates for how long this will last are anywhere from a few more days to two weeks. So far I haven't been affected myself much at all (I always have on hand an emergency supply of drinking water for several days, and in the kitchen almost the only thing I regularly use water for anyway is tea), but it's interesting how much it changes things broader afield -- a lot of little things, like there being no soda fountains, and restaurants having to change their menus. Bottled water has been vanishing from the shelf almost as soon as it is put there; breweries, which have to boil large amounts of water for a long time anyway, have been cutting back on brewing (to conserve water) and devoting part of their time to boil water specifically to give to those who need it, including restaurants and coffee shops.

Most of civilization, its infrastructure and component parts, is in the background of our lives; we only really see it when it is put to the test.

UPDATE (October 28): The Boil Water Notice has been lifted.

Strange and Full of Doubt and Fear

To Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

1. Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed;
Yes, I was firm—thus wert not thou;—
My baffled looks did fear yet dread
To meet thy looks—I could not know
How anxiously they sought to shine
With soothing pity upon mine.

2. To sit and curb the soul's mute rage
Which preys upon itself alone;
To curse the life which is the cage
Of fettered grief that dares not groan,
Hiding from many a careless eye
The scorned load of agony.

3. Whilst thou alone, then not regarded,
The … thou alone should be,
To spend years thus, and be rewarded,
As thou, sweet love, requited me
When none were near—Oh! I did wake
From torture for that moment's sake.

4. Upon my heart thy accents sweet
Of peace and pity fell like dew
On flowers half dead;—thy lips did meet
Mine tremblingly; thy dark eyes threw
Their soft persuasion on my brain,
Charming away its dream of pain.

5. We are not happy, sweet! our state
Is strange and full of doubt and fear;
More need of words that ills abate;—
Reserve or censure come not near
Our sacred friendship, lest there be
No solace left for thee and me.

6. Gentle and good and mild thou art,
Nor can I live if thou appear
Aught but thyself, or turn thine heart
Away from me, or stoop to wear
The mask of scorn, although it be
To hide the love thou feel'st for me.

Earth Transcended Yields the Stars

Today is the feast of St. Severinus Boethius, killed in 524 by King Theodoric the Great. From his short treatise, De Fide Catholica:

Christ, then, was slain; He lay three days and three nights in the tomb; He rose again from the dead as He had predetermined with His Father before the foundation of the world; He ascended into heaven whence we know that He was never absent, because He is Son of God, in order that as Son of God He might raise together with Him to the heavenly habitation man whose flesh He had assumed, whom the devil had hindered from ascending to the places on high. Therefore He bestowed on His disciples the form of baptizing, the saving truth of the teaching, and the mighty power of miracles, and bade them go throughout the whole world to give it life, in order that the message of salvation might be preached no longer in one nation only but among all the dwellers upon earth. And because the human race was wounded by the weapon of eternal punishment by reason of the nature which they had inherited from the first transgressor and could not win a full meed of salvation because they had lost it in its first parent, God instituted certain health-giving sacraments to teach the difference between what grace bestowed and human nature deserved, nature simply subjecting to punishment, but grace, which is won by no merit, since it would not be grace if it were due to merit, conferring all that belongs to salvation.

From his most famous work, the Consolation of Philosophy:

...we have shown that happiness is the Good itself; the Good is the very thing for the sake of which all actions are undertaken; therefore it is the Good itself that has been placed before human actions as if it were their common reward. And yet, this reward cannot be separated from good people--for one would nto rightly be called good any longer if one lacked the Good--and for this reason its proper rewards to not abandon righteous conduct. Therefore, no matter how brutal evil people may be, the crown shall never fall from the head of the wise man and shall never wither; nor shall another person's unrighteousness pluck from the souls of the righteous the distinctions that are theirs alone....

...Since true happiness is the Good itself, it is clear that all good people, by the very fact that they are good, become truly happy. But it is agreed that those who are truly happy are gods. Therefore, this is the reward of good people, which no future day can grind down, which no other man's power can humble, which no other man's unrighteousness can stain--to become gods.

[Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, Relihan, tr., Hackett (Indianapolis: 2001) pp. 100-101.]

Postures of Inquiry vs. Positions

There's an interesting ambiguity, at least as it is often used, that I've always find interesting in the English phrase 'questioning (something)': an ambiguity between asking questions of or about something and putting it into question. They are two different things; for instance, you can do the former without ever doubting what you are asking questions about, but the latter precisely means to put something in doubt. This is an ambiguity between a posture of inquiry -- in this case, asking questions -- and a position -- in this case, that whatever is talked about is questionable. People in casual conversation will often conflate the two, despite the fact that they are very different.

A more sophisticated version of this often occurs with philosophical skepticism. Many common arguments for skepticism quite clearly collapse the distinction between a posture of inquiry and a position. If you look at Pyrrhonism, for instance, as we find in the Ten Modes and the Five Modes, they are consistingly cases of a specific posture of inquiry -- finding balancing appearances or arguments -- and treating it as if it were in contrast to Dogmatism. But insofar as they are things you can do in investigation, they are all things a Dogmatist can do, without any suspension of judgment, while still being a Dogmatist. To be sure, they are all things that you can do suspending judgment, and it is entirely reasonable to argue that suspending judgment is more appropriate; but it has to be argued, not assumed, because the posture of inquiry in which we collect various kinds of equipollent appearances or arguments is not the position we take in suspending judgment because of them. A Dogmatist can perfectly well collect the appearance of a tower being round and a tower being square while believing it to be square in floorplan; he can look into exactly the same appearances as a Pyrrhonist without ceasing to be a Dogmatist about it. Nor does moving to arguments change anything. The Dogmatist can perfectly well collect the arguments 'The tower seems round [at a distance], so it is round' and the 'The tower seems square [up close], so it is square'. He can't accept them both simultaneously and in the same way in the same context, to be sure, but the Pyrrhonist doesn't accept either of the arguments at all. As a posture of inquiry, you can entertain both arguments regardless of whether you have a definite belief or are suspending judgment. But some of the plausibility of Pyrrhonism comes from a convenient failure to recognize that the Dogmatist can handle appearances and arguments in the way a Pyrrhonist does while not going on to the further step of suspending judgment.

Ironically, it is the Pyrrhonists who have come closest to recognizing this distinction between a posture of inquiry and a position, because they have at least since Sextus Empiricus used something like such a distinction as part of a defensive maneuver. (Arne Naess has perhaps some of the clearest discussion of this.) Thinking of themselves as 'skeptics' or 'zetetics' -- i.e., examiners or seekers -- is precisely taking up a posture of inquiry. Thus you can deny that you are just another Dogmatist by saying that you are really an Inquirer -- you'd be interested in finding the truth, if you could, but you are still in the process of looking for it, and have not, it seems to you, found it. But nothing about this in itself is inconsistent with Dogmatism; Dogmatists too may be Inquirers -- they can be interested in finding the truth, if they can, and can still be in the process of looking for it, but have, it seems to them, found part of it. The Skeptics are right that you can take this as a posture of inquiry rather than as a position; but qua posture of inquiry it is not inconsistent with any Dogmatist position at all. I mean, we can take a posture of inquiry, entirely from curiosity, about something we regard as a per impossibile hypothetical. Merely inquiring a certain way does not, itself and on its own, rule out any position whatsoever.

To be sure, Pyrrhonists, ever cautious, have tended to treat the suspension of judgment as coming on one when dealing with equipollence of arguments, etc., and so they can perfectly well say that there is no rigorous link, but only something that seems at times to be natural. But if they answered in this way, they seem only to be describing the history of their minds engaged in the error of conflating distinct things. And the Dogmatist in the face of this is free to accept all the arguments of the Skeptic as pertaining to inquiry, without making the assumption that this automatically requires accepting the result of suspending judgment.

There are other cases in which posture of inquiry is confused with position. What I've previously called the -ism mistake seems to be a particular version of the same confusion -- people thinking that the posture of inquiry of examining consequences is the position that is consequentialism, or people thinking that the posture of inquiry of trying to explain natural effects by natural causes is the position that is naturalism. As with the above, you could possibly get from one to the other by arguing with the help of additional assumptions, but you can't in fact directly get from one to the other, however much people may reason as if you could.

Radio Greats: The Devil's Bible (Night Beat)

Night Beat, which aired from 1950 to 1952, is one of the gems of the drama genre from the Golden Age of Radio. It features Randy Stone (played in an excellent no-nonsense manner by Frank Lovejoy), a reporter for the Chicago Star who works, of course, the night beat -- trying to get that last up-to-the-moment notable scoop before the presses start rolling for the morning edition. It's a good format for radio drama, because it allows each episode to have a definite, familiar structure while also allowing you any content that might end up in the news. It's also an easier genre than detective fiction, because there's less pressure to try to make every story clever. Randy Stone does often solve a crime, sometimes cleverly, but when he does so, it's primarily because he's that dogged reporter who doesn't stop digging until he actually has the story.

Because of all this, the stories tend to be diverse and interesting, ranging from quirky to creepy to puzzling to humorous. One of the quirkier ones that is also good for leading up to Halloween is "The Devil's Bible". Randy Stone is looking into a possible story when he meets Dante Alighieri. A fourteenth-century poet, a blasphemous Bible coveted by book collectors, a murder, a cold-hearted woman, and nothing is quite what it seems.

You can listen to "The Devil's Bible" at the Internet Archive (#29 in the list).

Every Foam-White Stream that Twinkling Flows

Enchantment
by Madison Cawein

The deep seclusion of this forest path,—
O'er which the green boughs weave a canopy,
Along which bluet and anemone
Spread a dim carpet; where the twilight hath
Her dark abode; and, sweet as aftermath,
Wood-fragrance breathes,—has so enchanted me,
That yonder blossoming bramble seems to be
Some sylvan resting, rosy from her bath:
Has so enspelled me with tradition's dreams,
That every foam-white stream that twinkling flows,
And every bird that flutters wings of tan,
Or warbles hidden, to my fancy seems
A Naiad dancing to a Faun who blows
Wild woodland music on the pipes of Pan.

Evening Note for Saturday, October 20

Thought for the Evening: Probability as a Measure

When we measure something of type X, it's fairly common for us to do it by comparison to something else of type X as a reference point. So, for instance, our most basic way of measuring length is to use an extension to measure an extension. Likewise, time-measurement is the measurement of changes by a change, which latter we often call generically a 'clock'. Weight, at least as a measure, is ordinarily measured by comparison of mass to mass, as on a balance scale. And so forth. This isn't universal, by any means, and you can do all sorts of more complicated kinds of measurements (measuring length by clock, for instance). But these are often derivative or else depend on complicated theory that needs already to be in place; and, at the very least, the most commonly accessible kind of measurement is to measure things of type X by relating them to a thing of type X.

If we are thinking in these terms, and think of probability as a measure of something, it makes sense to think of a probability as using a possibility to measure possibilities. Take for instance the standard dice roll example. We have identified a possible event -- the upfacing result of a roll -- and use that to measure a possible kind of state, the sides of the die that can face up. And thus each gets a measure of 1/6, all other things being equal, just as a length might get the measure of being 1/6 of the standard ruler.

This raises an interesting question. In most cases of using a thing of type X to measure things of type X, it looks like the comparison opens the possibility of some kind of relativity, for lack of a better term; the measurement can change given on how the measuring thing is related to the measured. Thus length and time measurements depend on how the measuring thing and the measured thing are moving with respect to each other; weight measurements depend on the gravitational field, so your measurements will depend on the gravitational forces acting on the measuring mass and the measured mass -- if there is a disparity between the two, it will directly affect your measurement. So is there something like this for probability, as well?

Here is a reason to think that measuring possibility and measured possibility can come apart due to an external factor in a way that at least makes room for this. If we roll two dice, we are usually trying to add the numbers assigned to each dice, which is more complicated than simply considering the single die. But we can easily handle this to calculate that the probability of rolling a 2 is a bit under three percent, the probability of rolling a 3 is a tad over three and a half percent, the probability of rolling a 4 is somewhat over eight percent, and so forth. But consider St. Olaf's Roll. St. Olaf rolls two six-sided dice and rolls a thirteen, because one of the dice shows a 6 and the other die, when it hits the ground, splits in two and leaves its 1 and 6 faces up. What is the probability of rolling a 13 with two normal six-sided dice? People will sometimes get into complicated accounts of physics and what not in an attempt at least to gesture at some finite probability, but in fact this is all handwaving. The probability of rolling a 13 with two normal six-sided dice, as measured by the sides in the normal way, is zero, just as you would have expected beforehand. But regardless of the exact relation between possibility and causation, measurement of possibilities by possibilities depends on a presumed causal set-up, and modifying that causal set-up in a way that affects the measuring and the measured differently alters things -- just as measurements of length, time, and weight depend on some causal set-up which, if modified, modifies the measurements.

So St. Olaf's Roll seems to suggest that there are causal presuppositions in place for probability as well as for length, time, and the like, that at least allow for the possibility of relativity. The implications of this are, I think, well beyond my capacity to sound. In particular, you can have a fairly precise account of what the causal conditions are for length, time, and weight. I don't know what the corresponding account for probability would look like.

Various Links of Interest

* "Men" Is Not A Group Capable of Taking Action at "DarwinCatholic"

* Margee Kerr, Why is it fun to be frightened?

* Patrick McKenzie, Japan's Hometown Tax

* The homily Oscar Romero gave at the Mass at which he was killed.

* Charlotte Allen, Peter Damian's Counsel.

* The Record Acting Game with Vincent Price. ht: MrsD.

* Sortes Vigilianae

* Lauren N. Ross, Causal Explanation and the Periodic Table (PDF)

* Jeanne Peijnenburg and David Atkinson, “Till at last there remain nothing”: Hume’s Treatise 1.4.1 in contemporary perspective (PDF)

* I really like this story by Owen Stephens about when a British Lieutenant who had never played a Role Playing Game sat down for a Star Wars RPG (ht: Christopher Lansdown):



Currently Reading

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Tim Button and Sean Walsh, Philosophy and Model Theory
G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention
Mary Midgley, Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay
Jules Verne, The Adventures of a Special Correspondent

Dashed Off XXIV

A bit long, but I wanted to get through this notebook. This finishes the notebook that was itself finished on July 11, 2017.

A right is an element of higher perspective from which it can be seen that you and I, although distinct, are one.

Inference is built on some immutability or invariance (vyapti).

Human moral life is instrumental to a greater moral providence.

necessarily truth-preserving vs necessity-preserving

Easter : love :: Ascension : joy :: Parousia : peace

NB the Maronite qolo on the new priesthood beginning with the Ascension.

Assessment of evidence depends in part on prior assessment of possibilities.

the face as the resume of the person

Free will structures practical reason.

Expeditionary military action is, by the very fact of being expeditionary, structured by logistics.

Frustration is normal in politics; vindictiveness is a sign of corruption.

(1) If there are mathematical relations, they are necessary.
(2) MR's are possible.
(3) If MR's are necessary, there are MR's.
(4) Either MR's are necessary or they are not necessary.
(5) If MR's are not necessary, they are necessarily not necessary.
(6) Thus: Either MR's are necessary or they are necessarily not necessary.
(7) If MR's are necessarily not necessary, they necessarily do not exist.
(8) Thus: Either MR's are necessary or they necessarily do not exist.
(9) Thus: MR's are necessary.
(10) Thus: There are MR's.

The ancient hearth is a sign of common good.

It is noteworthy that Beowulf prevails against Grendel in the hall because he does not use weapons. Grendel is immune to weapons, but Beowulf wounds him by pulling his arm off.

Beowulf's end is foreshadowed by the linking of his name to that of Sigemund son of Waels.

Note that Romanos takes the Baptism of Christ to be what makes John greater than other prophets.

the aspirational and the personalist aspects of magnanimity

Music gets its character in part from the fact that it is very much both in the world and in the mind, and both aspects are clearly part of our acquaintance with music.

Music has a literal sense, consisting of its melody, harmony, and the like in interplay, and immense array of figurative senses, arising out of music as performed in context or for a purpose.

Dance is heavily structured by different kinds of withness.

A facial expression, in and of itself, cannot say profound things, but it can be profound; so too with music.

emotional expression is to music as a character of instrumentality

Doppler shift shows auditory space linked to visible and tangible space.

It is their withness-structures that make dance and ritual analogous.

The fundamental principle of the diplomatic game is to give symbolic concession to gain substantive progress.

All potential parts of justice have a combined aspect of dignity and justice. (Cp. Soloviev on truthfulness.) This structures the moral debt, etc.

Note that Hume's rejection of the double existence view depends entirely on his account of cause (T 1.4.2.47, SBN 211-212).

We may aim at pleasure itself as something pleasant, bu this is a reflexive action, not the normal tendency of acting.

The Tao is, as it were, the reflection of the Word of God on the world and the human heart, the Way reflecting the Way.

Since perceptions may not exist separately, either the conceivability principle or the separability principle or both must be incorrect.

Two objects are not necessarily distinguishable, as we know that the latter can depend on things like quality of perception and fineness of discriminatory ability. And likewise we know that one object can be considered under two distinct descriptions, reduplicatively -- the fact that we reduplicate at all establishes this.

analogy between positions on modality and metaethical positions (J. Chandler)

the focus of trust (designated task, behavior, or role)

All punishments are imitations of death.

A pile of Maybes is a large Unlikely.

noumenal citizenship (Kant's pure juridical legislative reason)

(1) In principle, capital punishment is licit for egregious crimes against the community.
(2) In practice, there are reasons to be cautious about states resorting to it.
(3) It is admirable for Christians to refrain from, and work for the reasonable abolition of, such punishments, where this can be done justly and honestly.
(4) It is an obligation for Christians to be merciful where ever this is not confusable with injustice.

"...the law, not the judge, puts to death so long as the punishment is imposed, not in hatred, nor rashly, but with deliberation." Innocent III

respect for the majesty of law

The mgaisterial authority of the Church can be exercised in its fullness or in a more partial manner, and likewise, even in plenary exercise, can be exercised more or less solemnly, and likewise more or less explicitly. (This follows just from the character of teaching itself.) These three modes -- plenitude, solemnity, and explicitness -- are too often confused, to the detriment of analysis.

Tradition is not, generally, something superadded to reason, but that within which it is formed to be what it is.

Extraordinary action creates ordinary precedent.

Hume's theory of belief as capturing something important about reinforcement of suspicion (I suspect that...).

diagrams as dependent on modal analogies (particularly to spatial modalities)

One determines the points of an opponent's attack by disposition of one's own defenses, with two matters of concern depending on the subtlety of one's opponent: obviousness of target and weakness of defense.

memorative tradition vs recollective tradition vs speculative tradition

Worn-out traditions revive in stylized form as fashions; some of these fashions congeal as traditions. A forest of deadwood burns, but seeds restore a forest. Cells die but some generate new cells on their own template, and the body heals. Decay and revival interlace.

To reform, one must begin with the way things are.

The Tower of Babel is an attempt to make the builders immune to all possible punishment.

Newman's notes of development should apply not only from time to time but also, mutatis mutandis, from place to place; that is to say, they should still approximately apply if you are the one moving -- there should be constant principle, anticipation, etc.

spiritual authority vs spiritual credit

oddness minimization in everyday explanation

Freedom of religion must include, among other things, the freedom to exercise one's rights in a specifically religious way.

symbolic deference as part of checks and balances
-- An advantage of the British system is that the one who in practice exercises power must do so in a state of symbolic deference to one who in principle represents the greater whole.

"Society and government have two needs: justice and utility. If the government is so organized as to truly render justice to all, and at the same time it promotes the utility of all, then it is perfect." Rosmini

"The Catholic religion does not need dynastic protections, but freedom. It needs its freedom protected and nothing else." Rosmini

rites as moral entities in something like Pufendorf's sense, on analogy with time

"Caprice is the characteristic vice of miscellaneous assemblies." Bagehot

"A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people. In proportion as you give it power, it will inquire into everything, settle everything, meddle in everything." Bagehot

The Bayesian approach to evidence, taken as an account of all evidence, is nothing other than a new form of attempt to construct a universal rational language.

few/many/most as ordering of modal operators that are otherwise structurally similar

In perceiving something we generally already recognize it as becoming past.

The families of possible objections to any given argument are necessarily very limited.

empiricist account of ideas // ostensive account of language

-- a detective story involving elaborate and incredible disguises, unpredictable motives, the supernatural, discoveries made by mad scientists, elaborate and bizarre machinery, and a superhuman detective

detective fiction as narrative causal inference
In detective fiction, the primary action is a system of inferences.
Interviews in detective fiction work like letters in epistolary fiction.
- confession in detective fiction as primary confirmation (hence the often elaborate methods for inducing it)
- opportunity as causal access (contiguity in space and time)

"What is done by rule must proceed form something that understands the rule." Berkeley

(1) Divinely revealed principles
(2) Defined articulation
(3) Intrinsic principles of liturgy and catechesis
(4) Patristic consensus
(5) Common positions in liturgy, catechesis, or the Fathers
(6) Rigorous implications of common positions or principles
(7) Probable implications of common positions or principles
(8) Useful plausibilities

"The ceremonial law itself is a kind of living script, rousing the mind and heart, full of meaning, never ceasing to inspire contemplation and to provide the occasion and opportunity for oral instruction." Mendelssohn

In politics as well as art, to observe and see how it is done is one thing; to do, is another.

Infinite dabbling will eventually stumble on something substantive.

Murder is always by instrument, even if organic like a hand. Thus:
(1) Instrumental Possibility
--- (A) Formal: Access ('Opportunity')
--- (B) Material: Relevant possession ('Means')
(2) Agential Possibility ('Motive')
* One must consider motive, at least in investigation, because agents with access and possible possession of means are often legion. One needs to know which to consider first, and how closely.

In practical undertakings, ends reasonable individually may be unreasonable in combination.

Three linked doctrines -- Creation, Incarnation, Judgment -- combine to make all human history a family history.

Republics are often stingy in rewarding good, when they reward it at all.

Some things can only be approached by multiple lines of inquiry.

verbal etiquette and the implicit morality of language

It is a moral error to judge guilt by effect alone, and yet it is one of the most common things.

A crime is a violation of the rights of the community.

Linguistic structure requires sameness across time and causal interaction.

Every political position whatsoever allows the possibility for irrational excess and defect. Many stupidities in politics arise from refusing to accept that a given position does not and cannot confer immunity from this.

A man must have an Idea if he is to live greatly.

There is no fullness of love without memory, for love must dwell.

To evangelize the world properly, we must evangelize it many times over.

miracles of saints as symbols of holiness and its characteristics

Perception has a sort of dual referentiality, to self and world.
It's best not to think of our consciousness of ourself as a feeling of ourselves but as the referentiality of perception itself.

In transition from evidence to conclusion, risks of error are of different kinds, making it difficult to reduce the risk of error to a single probabilistic measure.

infallible teaching authority as structured according to the gifts of the Holy Spirit

The gift of understanding is the highest form of remotion.

penitential practice as the warfare of the Church

Translation is a form of commentary.

the human delight at inversion

What kind of evidence, or whether any evidence, shows up for 'updating one's prior' depends entirely on the kind of inquiry being conducted. Bayesians often talk about evidence as if it just showed up at one's doorstep; in fact, it is always formed within distinct lines of inquiry.

responses to argument from desire for immortality
(1) realism
(2) anti-realism
-- (a) expressivism
-- (b) illusionism (error theory)
(3) skepticism of the existence of such a desire

From every fact a great many necessities may be deduced, for every fact depends on many necessities for its existence.

Arguments from desire really conclude immediately to possibilities, and only thereby to actualities making those possibilities to be.

markets as the sensoria of society

Evolutionary explanations, outside purely physiological cases, too often do not properly adequate cause and effect.

Sanctity carries with it a sort of sovereignty.

Too much emphasis on expression turns poetry into pompous opinion-giving.

You do not understand what is attributed to God when we attribute power, wisdom, and goodness to Him, unless you can understand that any two of them necessarily entails the third.

Human inquiry always takes place in fragmented form, and there are many fragments.

Sometimes one must try out an idea before one comes to understand it.

Who thinks that prophecies have only one sense does not believe in prophecy.

the transmarine argument and breakaway Catholics

Separation of Church and State only works in the US to the extent that citizens are given considerable scope for self-governance.

the three post-medieval blows against the Church: Renaissance secularization, Reformation, French Revolution

Eco's account of the interpretant loses all sense of the "to something".

Heraldic symbolism involves the use of icons and symbols to perform an indexical function.

Eco's attach on iconism repeatedly confuses the actual signifying factor with the interpretant modalities (like conventions of stylization, conventions of expectation, convential salience), which do not constitute but only modulate.

Understanding may be informed by convention, and draw on conventions, without appealing to convention.

Death by its nature involves eternity, whether positive or negative, whether ever or not ever.

Labeling presupposes reference and thus cannot ground it. We use a lable to communicate a reference we recognize.

Science, art, and religion all share the principle that the surface appearance is neither all nor enough.

Every attempt to build a utopia is blocked by a confusion of tongues.

the simurgh as a metaphor for the Church

interpretivist, constructivist, and realist accounts of the external world

Much historical change seems to involve drift of ideas into uselessness -- subtle changes until they are unintelligible or (more often) inadequate for their primary function, or too difficult to teach given the infrastructure, or an impediment to highly incentivized practice.

We do not suppose substance to be something besides extension, etc., but what is extended, etc.

In argument, nothing comes from nothing; it must come from something that formally or eminently is adequate to it. This is obvious in formal logic, but should also be a leading principle in informal logic.

Whenever Hume speaks of fiction, think less skeptically of 'forming a hypothesis' or 'constructing a concept'.

The magisterium in the extraordinary magisterium and ordinary magisterium is a different exercise, not a different magisterium. Kleutgen, who gives us the terminology, understood the constitutive act of extraordinary magisterium to be definition, and the constitutive act of ordinary magisterium to be organic transmission. The former is ecumenical-conciliar or papal; the latter is more broadly ecclesial. This is the distinction to which Pius IX appeals in Tuas liberiter.

line as path not considering width

signs made by/in: cognition, recognition, ostension, replication, evocation

a possible sign situation:
painting -- model object -- purport object -- alluded object
(for instance, a painting of a local model to represent Justinian as embodiment of law)

Freedom of speech is to deliberative self-governance as protection of legislators from penalty for what they say in the legislature is to deliberative lawmaking.

Etiquette is an inevitable part of the structure of language because language is used to address other people. (Philosophers of language rarely consider language as addressing anyone at all.)

Rationality must involve the subject as well as the objective, the sketchy as well as the thorough, the holistic as well as the specifically defeasible, the obscure as well as the clear.

relations between philosophical problems: common origin, shared solution, structural analogy, consequential analogy, inclusion

Even the extremely biased are right on occasion, which is one reason why biases can be difficult to eliminate; by a sort of consequentialism of inference, people give credit even to accidental results, or results only slightly better than chance, and ignore method, means, and intrinsic end.

"The love of system, and of that unnatural kind of uniformity to which system is so much attached, as done immense mischief in the theory of evidence." Wilson
"Much of the evidence in natural philosophy rises not higher, than that which is derived from analogy."

general pressures on the reasoning of an age
(1) logical (e.g., arguments available)
(2) ethical (e.g., what is shameful to say)
(3) pathetical (e.g., normal human passions and cultural avenues for their expression)
(4) infrastructural (e.g., what time, money, manpower is available for various ends)

Even those who know better often speak of molecules as if they were solid little motes linked extrinsically, when in reality they are intrinsically integrating when they combine.

History does not vindicate; it only moves on.

What is dependent is dependent on another, with respect to: change, being, enduring, causing, measure, order.

In the Meno, the slave boy shows a more rational and teachable mind than Meno does.

Ex 18 as type of papacy

Christian love does not depend on prior relationship-building; it must be prior to it in finality and is itself only a source of relationships, while it must also be applied to those with whom one can't form a relationship.

genus-species approach to defining modal operators vs causal approach to defining modal operators

The modern era of rights-thinking began when rights were no longer seen as particular solutions to particular problems but as general solutions to problems hypotheticalized to all limits that could be imagined. That is, it began on the transition from factual response to full-scale counterfactual response, from local reaction to problems to the attempt at complete global anticipation of problems.

Berkeley's Siris as concerned with primacy of mind (cp. John Russell Roberts)

It took a thousand years for the Church to stamp out dueling, more or less, in Christendom,, using its most extensive means of pressure and persuasion, and even then progress was achieved only by combination with other factors that changed the incentive-structure.

It is easier to criticize oneself as We than as I -- and easier to evade criticism, as well.

Voyages Extraordinaires #10: Le Pays des fourrures

On the evening of the 17th March 1859, Captain Craventy gave a fête at Fort Reliance. Our readers must not at once imagine a grand entertainment, such as a court ball, or a musical soirée with a fine orchestra. Captain Craventy’s reception was a very simple affair, yet he had spared no pains to give it éclat.

The Fur Country is the tale of a Canadian expedition, led by Lieutenant Jasper Hobson to establish a fort north of the Arctic Circle in anticipation of the probable sale of Alaska to the Americans by Russia, which would make a northerly fort useful to the Hudson's Bay Company. With them goes Thomas Black, an astronomer, who hopes to study the corona of the sun during total eclipse. They succeed in establishing the fort and braving the extraordinarily dangerous winter of northern Canada, but a freak earthquake seems to throw the world into a strange disorder -- the landscape changes, and Hobson notes that the tide is not fitting the predictions of the almanac. The truth is established by astronomy: Black discovers (to his horror) that the eclipse is not, as predicted, total, which can only mean one thing: they are in fact drifting on a large ice floe. Their only hope is if their floating fort drifts close enough to land to hop off and possibly be rescued by a passing ship. It is a thin hope indeed, but they are an intrepid group.

[With this Voyage, I have gone through 2/3 of the entire series of the Voyages Extraordinaires, and have thus met my minimal goal. We'll see how close I can get to 3/4 by the end of the year -- that would require four or five more works.]

A Fallen Race

From Elizabeth Anscombe's article, "Why Have Children?":

This very title tells of the times we live in. I would like you to imagine a title for a lecture eighty years hence: "Why digest food?" I leave it to the reader to imagine -- or think of -- the technology already with us; and the 'scientific advance' and its practicalities, including the resultant apparatus ending in tubes with needles and switches in every house. Also the successful propaganda denigrating the "merely biological" conception of eating and the hostility -- known to have prevailed in the Catholic church for many centuries -- towards its pleasure and thereby towards its spiritual meaningfulness and civilized quality. As whole peoples in our time have regarded feeding their babies at the breast as something rather for savages, so might people of the future regard nourishment by digesting the lovely food we eat in the same way.

Don't think it inconceivable. The human race is a fallen race. It has fits of madness, sometimes merely local, sometimes nearly global....

G. E. M. Anscombe, "Why Have Children?", Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Volume 63 (1989), pg. 48.

The Aesthetic Value of a Duet

But is the aesthetic value of a duet really equal to the sum of the values of its parts played separately? No such thing. The query of one instrument may indeed be in itself a beautiful phrase, independently of the answer given by the other; but as seen in relation to that answer it acquires a totally different emphasis, a meaning which we never suspected. The accompaniment part, or even the solo part, played by itself, is simply not the same thing that it is when played in its proper relation to the other. It is this relation between the two that constitutes the duet. The performers are not doing two different things, which combine as if by magic to make a harmonious whole; they are cooperating to produce one and the same thing, a thing not in any sense divisible into parts; for the "thing" itself is only a relation, an interchange, a balance between the elements which at first we mistook for its parts. The notes played by the piano are not the same notes as those played by the violin; and if the duet was a merely physical fact, we could divide it into these two elements. But the duet is an aesthetic, not a physical whole. It consists not of atmospheric disturbances, which could be divided, but of a harmony between sounds, and a harmony cannot be divided into the sounds between which it subsists.

Robin George Collingwood, Religion and Philosophy, p. 113.

A Poem Re-Draft

October Night

I stood at dusk and looked around the garden small and dim;
the fountain dry was cracked, with dust and vines around the rim.
The roses dead were long and spare, the weeds were rising high;
then ghosts from ancient worlds arose and said that I would die.
In long and spectral robes they swept along the garden ways
and sang the songs no longer sung, the songs of distant days.
A Templar march I thought I heard, a troubadour's sad plea,
a hymn of love to loves long gone, a shanty rasped at sea.
Like breezes drifting, softly sped those tunes, like secret sigh.
And 'midst it all a whisper sang; it sang that I would die.
The darkness fell, it drifted down, a-float like falling shawl;
it settled over roses dead and draped across the wall.
I strained my ears to hear again that gently whispered word,
but silence through the darkness fell, so nothing then was heard,
and nothing felt by rising hairs, and nothing met my eye,
until at midnight down the way I heard that I would die.
A maiden walked like water's wave along the crumbling wall
and here and there an elegy from out her lips would fall.
A hint, a clue, a fragile thread, the song would drift my way
with meaning barely out of reach and sense just out of play,
but here and there it rose to reach the keen of sobbing cry,
and then no doubt remained at all: it said that I would die.

The moon was silver on the road, but stars were hid by clouds
that, dark and thunder-mutter-thick, were gathered up in crowds
like ghosts in endless number in some graveyard in the sky,
and somehow in the thunder's tones I heard that I would die.
On far and distant hills the wolves began to raise a howl
and down the moonlit road I saw a figure in a cowl
as black as night in color so that scarce could seeing see
where ended figure and the night; it clearly came for me,
and in its hand a scythe was held, that swept through air with ease,
and at its heels a hound did walk, as pale as death's disease.
The crows in murder raised their wings, all croaking out a cry,
and clear I heard it in their noise: they said that I would die.
The wind was blowing in the leaves and rustled roses dead
and mingled with the panic that was buzzing in my head,
till time itself with nausea was turned upon its ear
and death itself was manifest to brain enmeshed in fear.
I sought to turn, like trembling bird in pit I sought to fly,
but dizzy chills sped up my spine that said that I would die.
A hand was clamped upon my mouth; I could not scream or cry;
a voice was snarling in my ear, and told me I would die.

Man's Yesterday May Ne'er Be Like His Morrow

Mutability
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

This poem is quoted and alluded to several times in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Teresa of Avila

Today is the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, Doctor of the Church. From her Life:

O my Lord! how Thou dost show Thy power! There is no need to seek reasons for Thy will; for with Thee, against all natural reason, all things are possible: so that thou teachest clearly there is no need of anything but of loving Thee in earnest, and really giving up everything for Thee, in order that Thou, O my Lord, might make everything easy. It is well said that Thou feignest to make Thy law difficult: I do not see it, nor do I feel that the way that leadeth unto Thee is narrow. I see it as a royal road, and not a pathway; a road upon which whosoever really enters, travels most securely. No mountain passes and no cliffs are near it: these are the occasions of sin. I call that a pass,—a dangerous pass,—and a narrow road, which has on one side a deep hollow, into which one stumbles, and on the other a precipice, over which they who are careless fall, and are dashed to pieces. He who loves Thee, O my God, travels safely by the open and royal road, far away from the precipice: he has scarcely stumbled at all, when Thou stretchest forth Thy hand to save him. One fall—yea, many falls—if he does but love Thee, and not the things of the world, are not enough to make him perish; he travels in the valley of humility. I cannot understand what it is that makes men afraid of the way of perfection.

May our Lord of His mercy make us see what a poor security we have in the midst of dangers so manifest, when we live like the rest of the world; and that true security consists in striving to advance in the way of God! Let us fix our eyes upon Him, and have no fear that the Sun of justice will ever set, or suffer us to travel to our ruin by night, unless we first look away from Him. People are not afraid of living in the midst of lions, every one of whom seems eager to tear them: I am speaking of honours, pleasures, and the like joys, as the world calls them: and herein the devil seems to make us afraid of ghosts. I am astonished a thousand times, and ten thousand times would I relieve myself by weeping, and proclaim aloud my own great blindness and wickedness, if, perchance, it might help in some measure to open their eyes. May He, who is almighty, of His goodness open their eyes, and never suffer mine to be blind again!

Fortnightly Book, October 14

1816 was a year without a summer. A massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia the year before poured volcanic ash into the air, filling the atmosphere with so much dust that at times the sun looked an angry red, and blocked enough of the light that you could even at times see sunspots like a pox upon the sun. Snow fell in June in temperate places, and tropical countries had their first winter snow in centuries. Frosts nipped flowers in the bud. Crops collapsed. Livestock grew sickly and died. In rural Europe, Famine held a ruthless sway. In India, cholera took life after life as the monsoon season stretched longer and longer as if it would never end. In China, the fertile Yangtze River valley was under water for most of the year. In the midst of it all, Byron wrote a poem about the end of the world:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light....

In Switzerland, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (later Shelley), and a few friends spent much of the summer huddled indoors. "It proved a wet, ungenial summer," Mary Shelley would later say, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house." To pass the while, they would write and read stories, and (when the rain would part for a while) do some light boating on Lake Geneva. Having enjoyed a collection of German ghost stories, Byron proposed that they each write their own. It seemed like fun, but Mary Godwin agonized over it. Finally, a few nights later, after a philosophical discussion about what made living things alive, Mary in a bout of insomnia had a ghastly vision of someone animating a corpse, and she had her story idea. Percy liked it so much that he encouraged her to develop it, so what started as a short story became a novel, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, which was a hit from the beginning, and is the next fortnightly book.

Frankenstein was undergoing a surge of popularity during the Golden Age of Radio, so there are quite a few radio adaptations of it. If I have time, I will probably listen to some, as points of comparison.

There was a nice reading group on Frankenstein a few years back at "Shredded Cheddar" that covered a lot of the book (and particularly the ins and outs of the drama-queen-ishness of Victor Frankenstein himself); it was a worthwhile discussion, and worth mentioning here:

107
108
109
110
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Mary Midgley (1919-2018)

Mary Midgley died on October 10 at the age of 99. From a letter to the Guardian, in which she talked about the remarkable generation of women philosophers coming out of Oxford soon after World War II:

It was clear that we were all more interested in understanding this deeply puzzling world than in putting each other down. That was how Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, Mary Warnock and I, in our various ways, all came to think out alternatives to the brash, unreal style of philosophising – based essentially on logical positivism – that was current at the time. And these were the ideas that we later expressed in our own writings.

To be sure, 'putting each other down' is very different from philosophical criticism, and Mary Midgley, perhaps more than the others she names, was a master of sharp and pointed criticism. But for her it was always about the argument, not about outmaneuvering anyone. Despite her brilliance, she never got her doctorate, which she would later note probably helped to keep her from being boxed into the standard narrow questions people learn to discuss in graduate school. She only started writing books on philosophy at the age of fifty-nine -- she would joke that it was a good thing, because before then she didn't know what she thought. They are all excellent and rather different from the usual fare.