On Mullins on Simplicity

Tap asked for my thoughts on Ryan Mullins's criticism of the doctrine of divine simplicity. I have been having conversations about this subject for over twenty years now, and it's very much as if some recent critics of divine simplicity, like Mullins, are trapped in amber; none of the arguments are in any way new or unanswered, nor do any of them show any signs of serious research on the question. Mullins does get one very crucial thing correct that critics often don't -- that 'simplicity' in this context just means 'not composite' -- but then immediately we get this little jab:

What doctrine is this that elicits such strong rhetoric? Perhaps you think the answer has something to do with Jesus Christ, or a major biblical teaching. Surprisingly, the answer has nothing to do with either.

Anyone who does not know that proponents of divine simplicity take it to be directly connected with both the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the unity of God, both of which are very obviously major biblical teachings, and have consistently done so on both the Jewish and the Christian sides for well over a thousand years now, does not know enough about the doctrine to be talking about it. (The "strong rhetoric" to which Mullins refers is the claim that denial of divine simplicity leads to idolatry or atheism if consistent. He makes it sound as if this were just some arbitrary thing people said. Did it never occur to him to consider why anyone would say that?) And what is very, very noticeable that nowhere in his essay does Mullins at any point do what should be the first step for any serious criticism of a major position: he never looks at why the doctrine is held in the first place. The closest he comes is trying to tie it, very vaguely and noncommittally, to perfect being theology -- which is not at all a standard reason for it. The doctrine of simplicity did not become a major position because people said that God is a perfect being and then said, "And I guess one model you could have of a perfect being is that it's not composed out of anything more fundamental." Indeed, talk of God as "perfect being" is a very, very late development that originally presupposed the doctrine of simplicity; there is no word in Greek or Latin that is the direct correlate of our word "perfect", although there are circumlocutions for things that we might classify with that word. "Perfectus" in Latin means 'complete', or more strictly, 'completed'; this was also one of the original meanings of the word "perfect" in English (technically still is, although mostly confined to certain kinds of longstanding expressions). When Aquinas in the thirteenth century asked whether it was appropriate to call God perfect, he had to draw a very careful distinction about the different things you could mean if you said God was complete, and a key step to ruling it admissible was that it could not be taken to mean (as it would usually be taken to mean in applying the term to creatures) that God could also be incomplete in the sense of partial, because that violated the doctrine of simplicity. We call God 'perfect' because there was a sense of the word consistent with the doctrine of divine simplicity, not vice versa.

So Mullins is starting entirely the wrong way around. He should instead start with the doctrine of creation. God is the uncreated Creator of other things. It is this that serves as the foundation for the theological doctrine of simplicity, and the basic line of thought is that given by the great Saadia Gaon: when we look at creatures and ask what in them indicates that they were created, shows their status as creatures, we do find such indicators. These are things like mutability, dependence, and composition. So God, who is uncreated, must lack these telltale markers of things that are made, and thus must be noncomposite -- simple. In addition, the term 'simple' is historically a relative term, in the sense of admitting of more and less; you can find any number of people arguing that the soul is more simple than the body, for instance, or that the saints by divine grace are made more simple, all in this sense of noncompositeness; the idea is that the soul is more unified than the body, less divisible into parts and therefore more properly called 'one'. And since God has none of the divisibility into parts, none of the composition that indicates createdness, He is least composite and therefore most simple.

That is it. That is the essential idea of divine simplicity. Mullins makes a very big show of how complicated and difficult the doctrine is to understand; this is obvious nonsense, as you can find laymen in practically any large Presbyterian or Catholic church who can fully and completely understand the point that God, being unmade and unmakeable, is not in any way made out of anything. Complications only arise when you are no longer asking what the doctrine of simplicity itself means and start asking how this or that already complicated topic relates to it. It's not an accident that Mullins runs to talk of properties: there is no generally accepted theory of properties, literally none at all, so any discussion of properties is necessarily complicated in order to pin down what you are talking about; therefore any discussion of simplicity and properties is necessarily complicated. But the doctrine of divine simplicity is not in any way downstream from any account of divine 'properties', in whatever of the many, many senses of that term you are using it. It's likewise not surprising that he builds another criticism out of the application of simplicity to freedom and necessity; these are very complicated topics. There's nothing wrong with seeing what a simple position implies about a complicated topic; but it is very, very absurd to complain that applying a simple position to a complicated topic gets complicated.

Another example of complicating the basic position by applying it to something complicated is his reliance on the notion of identity. Identity is a notoriously difficult subject in analytic philosophy; of all equivalence relations, identity is the one we least understand. It is also a concept that is fairly new. Mullins says:

On the classical understanding of God, theologians will say that all of God’s essential properties are identical to each other, and identical to the divine nature, which is identical to God’s existence. The identity claim here is very strong, and can be easily missed. This is because we use the word “identity” in rather loose ways in contemporary English.

This is not "the classical understanding of God"; this is a translation, a reconstruction, of the classical understanding within a specific vocabulary, that of analytic philosophy. And the problem is that it seems to be based on an assumption that the Latin word "identitas" means "identity" in the analytic sense. This is a very false assumption, because "identitas" is a looser and weaker word, not a stronger and stricter word, than the word "identity" in colloquial sense. It just means 'sameness', in most of the senses we would give the word 'same'. The primary application of the word is in saying that things are the same kind of thing, but it can also cover other kinds of sameness. When people did theology in Greek and Latin they had no word at all for the "very strong" sense of identity to which Mullins is pointed. They could talk about it, but it required some complicated circumlocutions. And it was not the sense in which 'sameness' was used when talking about divine simplicity, in saying, for instance, that in God wisdom and power are the same. (Aquinas, for instance, pretty clearly denies that the "very strong" sense of sameness is the right one in this context.) One of the most influential texts in the Latin West on discussions of the doctrine is Augustine's De Trinitate; in his brief comments on the point, Augustine's analogy for divine simplicity is the unity of the virtues. In a fully virtuous person, even though "prudence" and "justice" and "fortitude" and the like are not synonymous words, justice will be prudent, courageous, etc.; this way in which all the virtue-terms applied to a fully virtuous person in some sense include all the others is the closest we come to something like divine simplicity, the main difference is that we can't be prudent, etc., except by acquiring these bit by bit, whereas for God, to be God is already to be wise, good, etc. Try to translate the unity of virtues analogy into standard analytic identity-talk and you get gibberish. That is a warning sign that the new terms are bringing baggage with them that the original terms might not carry.

In any case, Mullins's divine freedom argument against simplicity depends entirely on the "very strong" sense; Premise 8, for instance, requires strict transitivity, despite the fact that, historically, theologians and philosophers have denied that strict transitivity applies to the kind of sameness talked about in divine simplicity. Mullins does suggest that certain common arguments require it, but I think a closer examination of those arguments than Mullins gives would show that (1) he is confusing general implications of simplicity itself with transitivity of specific properties; (2) he is dropping, as he does all the way through, the notion of compositeness as a sign of createdness; and (3) the arguments generally have perfectly acceptable analogues in Augustine's virtue analogy despite the latter clearly requiring the rejection of strict transitivity. To put it in fashionable theological terminology, all one requires for a doctrine of divine simplicity is 'perichoresis'; but perichoresis does not imply that one thing can always be directly substituted for another in every context.

***

While not my main point, it's perhaps worth noting that even assuming the application of identity, the argument is not as straightforward as he suggests, since it is known that even the strong form of identity, even in ordinary cases, only allows intersubstitution within the same modal context; if we are talking about things that are described in different modal contexts, things get immensely more complicated, and you can't assume that something like Premise 8 would apply. And as it would be obviously false to say that terms like divine necessity and Creator have no modalities, and very implausible to say that they share exactly the same modalities, you would need to establish that claims about them could be formulated in the same modal context before you could use a premise like Premise 8. Otherwise it would be exactly like claiming that, because the real temperature measured by a Celsius scale and the real temperature measured by a Fahrenheit scale are exactly the same real temperature, therefore Celsius scales are Fahrenheit scales. 'Real temperature measured by a Fahrenheit scale' and 'real temperature measured by a Celsius scale' are modally different descriptions. Mullins completely muddles this in his discussion of what he calls the "Modal Mystery strategy", assuming rather than establishing a unitary modal context that makes it so that the modal term 'necessity' is not shifting meanings in the different uses.

Mullins also obscures the matter by ambiguous use of terms. The puzzle about freedom that he tries to develop can't arise if we are using 'freedom' in an intransitive way: 'God is free'. There is no problem whatsoever with claiming that this is necessarily true or that God is necessarily free. The puzzle only arises if we are talking about freedom transitively so that it is taking a non-necessary object. But while it is obviously the case that God-freely-doing-this-non-necessary-thing is not necessary, this is obviously because 'God-freely-doing-this-non-necessary-thing' is a mixed description that depends on something that's not God. 'God being free' and 'God freely doing X' do not share exactly the same modal context; the one is entirely about God Himself, but the latter is about God only relative to X. "1+1=2" is necessary, but "this apple I am picking up and this other apple I am picking up are two apples" is, strictly speaking, not, because it is neither necessary that there be apples nor that I pick them up; it is a mixed description that partly depends on something that's neither a 1 nor a 2 nor a mathematical operation. It would be absurd to claim that talking about necessary numbers in terms using contingent apples makes numbers contingent or apples necessary. And equally obviously, a description that includes a creature is not intersubstitutable with a description that does not.

These are different versions of points that are also made by both Lenow and Feser in their contributions.

Edith Stein

Today was the feast of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, also known as Edith Stein, martyr. We don't know exactly when she died; we know that she was sent to Auschwitz on August 7, 1942, and probably died in the gas chambers with her sister Rosa a couple of days later.

As were the hearts of the first human beings, so down through the ages again and again human hearts have been struck by the divine ray. Hidden from the whole world, it illuminated and irradiated them, let the hard, encrusted, misshapen matter of these hearts soften, and then with the tender hand of an artist formed them anew into the image of God. Seen by no human eye, this is how living building blocks were and are formed and brought together into a Church first of all invisible. However, the visible Church grows out of this invisible one in ever new, divine deeds and revelations which shed their light in ever new epiphanies. The silent working of the Holy Spirit in the depths of the soul made the patriarchs into friends of God. However, when they came to the point of allowing themselves to be used as his pliant instruments, he established them in an external visible efficacy as bearers of historical development, and awakened from among them his chosen people.

[Edith Stein, "The Hidden Life and Epiphany", The Hidden Life, Collected Works of Edith Stein (Volume IV), ed. Dr. L. Gelber and Michael Linssen, O.C.D, ICS, 1992.]

Evening Note for Thursday, August 8

Thought for the Evening: Perversion in the Context of Humanitarian Traditions

All humanitarian traditions, like medicine, law, and clerical ministry, are by their nature oriented to human common good. These traditions involve using many skills and instrumentalities in order to provide some care for human beings as such. These skills and instrumentalities, however, do not have the humanitarian end of the tradition as their own immediate ends, and this creates the possibility of a perverse use of the skills and instrumentalities of a humanitarian tradition for non-humanitarian ends. Recognizing and understanding these perversions seems to be of considerable importance to many ethical problems, so it seems worthwhile to try to be more clear about what perversion of medicine, etc., is. All human obligation is tied to human common good; since humanitarian traditions are among the major cooperative means for creating, developing, and protecting good shared in common, their integrity is directly related to moral life.

'Perversion' by its nature indicates an inconsistency of a particular kind. Roughly, we can say that,

(1) Given that humanitarian traditions have for their ends some major aspect of human common good,
(2) where some skill or instrumentality has as its natural context such a humanitarian tradition,
(3) it is impossible for it to be good for this skill or instrumentality to be used in a way in itself contrary to the end of the humanitarian tradition.

(This is analogous to the sense of perversion used in so-called perverted faculty arguments. See Edward Feser, "In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument," Neo-Scholastic Essays, St. Augustine's Press [South Bend, IN: 2015] pp. 378-415.)

'Natural context' here is sometimes straightforward and sometimes more tricky. The most obvious case of a medical skill being used within the humanitarian tradition of medicine as its natural context is the case of its being used by a doctor acting as a doctor. Since medicine is a very large tradition, we would obviously have analogous cases for nurses, pharmacists, medical technicians, and the like. More difficult are cases in which we have someone with medical skills who is not explicitly working as a doctor or whatever else may be relevant. In such cases I'm inclined to think that the origination of the skill within the humanitarian tradition is enough to make the humanitarian tradition its natural context, but there are bound to be gray areas and difficult lines on this point, and very little study as been done in what it means (for instance) for a medical skill to be medical if it's used by someone not intending to use it medically. Nonetheless, we should not let such potential marginal ambiguities disguise the fact that the central cases are quite clear. A pharmacist acting in his role as a pharmacist, using his knowledge of pharmaceuticals and his skill as a pharmacist in compounding drugs to poison people is engaged in a perverse action, a perversion of his skills, within the humanitarian tradition of medicine.

Perversions are not simply failures, nor are they accidental misfires; if a pharmacist accidentally poisons someone, this may, if avoidable, be a sign of incompetence, but it is not a perversion of the skill. If we think of the whole set of skills, practices, methods, and instruments and the like that are formed to serve the ends of medicine as 'the medical panoply', medical perversion is the deliberate use of the medical panoply in ways that are inconsistent with the ends of medicine it has been proposed to serve. This also makes it different from mere repurposing -- if we use a skill in a new way, it's not the original purpose of the skill that is relevant but the ends of medicine that are the standard that have to be met. If the new purposes to which the skill are put are still consistent with the ends of medicine, it is not a perverse use of the skill but simply a new development of it.

Medicine provides the clearest and most obvious cases, as it often does in talking about humanitarian traditions due to its age, relatively consistent history, and complexity, but the same kind of reasoning would also apply to law and spiritual ministry; some (although not all) of the gravest immoralities associated with these are perversions of skills, practices, etc., whose natural context is these humanitarian traditions. The account also extends to kinds of humanitarian traditions that are spottier than these three big ones -- cases where the humanitarian tradition is sometimes more virtual than actual, where consistent maintenance of them as humanitarian traditions has sometimes failed, like education or journalism or politics; the primary difference is that they will have more of the marginal cases noted above. Where professions grow up within humanitarian traditions (which is common), the professional ethics associated with each profession will often be greatly concerned with avoiding perversions within the context of that humanitarian tradition, and the moral growth of a profession is often related to its development of means to limit, correct, and avoid ways in which professional means can be perverted to ends inconsistent with the humanitarian tradition.

Previous Evening Notes on Humanitarian Traditions
- Humanitarian Traditions
- Prima Facie Duties and Humanitarian Traditions
- Humanitarian Traditions and Cliental Privilege

Various Links of Interest

* Russell Sparkes talks about G. K. Chesterton's fight against the eugenics movement. (ht)

* Andreas Kapsner, The Stories of Logics (PDF)

* Jonathan Greig, Nicholas of Methone and Thomas Aquinas on Participation in Their Critiques of Proclus' Elements of Theology, Proposition 23

* Gregory DiPippo on Raphael's Transfiguration of Christ

* Agnes Callard reflects on the relation between aesthetics and ethics.

* Michael Pakaluk and Catherine Ruth Pakaluk discuss the Gospel of Mark. Michael Pakaluk's recent translation of the Gospel, The Memoirs of St. Peter, is quite good.

* The original watercolors for The Little Prince

Currently Reading

Maria Edgeworth, Belinda
Augustine, The Trinity

'Centrism'

One of the things the past few years has made clear to me is that there are many, many supposedly intelligent people who nonetheless cannot grasp the elementary point that 'centrism' is a miscellaneous category; it is just the term we use in political matters for anything that doesn't definitely fit into 'left' or 'right'. This should be extraordinarily easy to figure out. 'Centrism' itself is a relative label (center compared to what?), designating what is neither definitely to the right or definitely to the left. It is why there are so very many people who count as centrists of some kind but almost all politics in modern liberal societies gets divided according to some local version of a left vs. right divide -- there is no stable position or set of positions that is 'centrism', even locally, but lots of different leftover positions. And centrists who self-identify as centrists always do so because they don't think that they count as typical 'left' or 'right'. 'Centrism' is capable of covering any number of very different positions.

It's an interesting question why this seems to be so difficult for people, even people who specialize in fields like political philosophy, political science, or history, where you would expect them at least to ask the question of how people get sorted into the category to begin with. I suspect it comes down to two things:

(1) Left-vs.-right talk makes these sound like substantive and stable options along a line. In reality, 'left' and 'right' are none of these things. Even the historical reason for talking about 'left' and 'right' has nothing to do with a line; it seems to trace to a historical accident about which side of the legislative chamber different factions happened to sit on at some point. The terminology stuck, and the reason for assigning people to 'left' or 'right' is just based on a crude sense of precedent -- those people are 'left' who seem to us most like the 'left' of the previous generation, and those people are 'right' who seem to us most like the 'right' of the previous generation. And this means that it wavers all over the place on particular details. Easy movement across borders, for instance, was a 'right' idea opposed by the 'left' that became a 'left' idea opposed by the 'right'. It's just the overall package that gives the labels. And 'left' and 'right' vary considerably according to society. The 'right' in Canada is very different from the 'right' in America.

In reality, politics has many dimensions. When we get to more serious analysis, this becomes obvious -- the alliance of certain fiscal and social positions is obviously due to historical accident, which is why primarily-fiscal and primarily-social factions of both the 'left' and the 'right' rarely get along very well. There is no obvious reason why someone who is 'left' on labor issues should always be 'left' on immigration issues, no obvious reason why being 'right' on marriage must always go with being 'right' on tax cuts. People get sorted into two groups just because binary contests are easier to follow than complicated ones (there are incentives for lumping as many of your opponents into a single group if possible, so that you have an Us faction and a Them faction), and because self-identification as 'left' and 'right' indicates a willingness to ally -- even with gritted teeth -- with other groups who already self-identify as such.

But the fact that we do sort people this way, and the fact that we can pretty easily identify some of the alliances at any given point of time, means that the way we use 'left' and 'right' makes it sound like these are definite positions along one and only one line. And if they were, then 'centrism' would presumably be the definite center of the line.

(2) The name tends toward a confusion of 'moderate' with 'centrist'. This is something you even find in dictionaries. I recently saw a tweet that said that 'centrism' was a false application of the Doctrine of the Mean to politics. This is an immensely stupid thing to say; Aristotle's account of the Doctrine of the Mean directly says that the moderate or mean is not the central point, because what counts as moderate depends on what the extremes are, and the real mean is typically closer to one of the extremes than the other. In addition, the claim requires assuming that left and right are unitary and the only real, stable, and definite directions in politics; this is entirely false. And it is simply not the general motivation for centrism. The most common motivation for centrism -- or at least the most significant in the history of centrisms -- is that people started on the 'left' or 'right', but something happened that made them unwilling to identify as definite allies of whichever one they were, without giving them reason to identify as definite allies of the other side. Alienation, not moderation, is their primary and explicit reason. (Indeed, one of the most widely recognized experiences in contemporary politics in liberal societies is how thoroughly alienating disputes between 'left' and 'right' are; people complain about it all the time. The sense of having no real place in the standard political discussion is a widespread result of the way modern societies work.) Perhaps another common motivation is a mix-and-match of different positions, so that on any one issue they would be classifiable as 'left' and 'right', but not always or even usually the same. There is nothing about the classification that makes this impossible; you could only rule it out if you thought, again, that 'left' and 'right' were substantive and stable options giving direction to a single line.

In reality, of course, everybody everywhere should usually be moderate according to the reasoning of a reasonable person; while probably very few are, I suppose most people at least assume that they are so, and most of the rest are assuming that they have some reasonable emergency justification for extreme measures. Given this, it is inevitable that people on the 'left' and 'right' will often think that 'centrism' is gibberish -- an attempt at finding a middle ground between being reasonable and being unreasonable. But this is an imposed interpretation, and not a discovered fact.

Transfiguration

Hear and listen, you covetous one: the Apostle explains to you in another place more clearly this that he said, "Let no man seek his own, but another's." He says of himself, "Not seeking my own profit, but the profit of many, that they may be saved." This Peter understood not yet when he desired to live on the mount with Christ. He was reserving this for you, Peter, after death. But now He says Himself, "Come down, to labour in the earth; in the earth to serve, to be despised, and crucified in the earth. The Life came down, that He might be slain; the Bread came down, that He might hunger; the Way came down, that life might be wearied in the way; the Fountain came down, that He might thirst; and do you refuse to labour? 'Seek not your own.' Have charity, preach the truth; so shall you come to eternity, where you shall find security."

Augustine, Sermon 28.6.

In Sooth, the Heavens are Splendid to the Eye

Sonnet to an Evening in August
by Kashiprasad Ghosh

The mellowing glory of the setting sun
Is pouring over Ganga's golden stream;
As when a lofty poet's thoughts have run
Wild and extatic by the soft, sweet dream
Of Fancy many-hued:—the dazzling light
Of genius true and poesy divine
Within his bosom beams in splendour bright,
And makes his every thought resplendent shine.
The variegated streaks, which glow afar,
Appear as if, in his ethereal track,
Arun, who drives the Sun's refulgent car,
Had from his radiant pinions flung them back.
In sooth, the heavens are splendid to the eye;
August! indeed august thine evening sky!

Ghosh, also known as Kasiprasad Ghoshe, was a Bengali poet who largely wrote in English; he was also the editor of the Hindu Intelligencer, an English-language newspaper published in Calcutta.

On Anti-Vaccination Conscientious Objection

At The Atlantic, Eula and Mavis Biss have an absurd article on anti-vaccination conscientious objection; the answer to the title question, "Are Anti-vaxxers Conscientious Objectors?" (which I presume was given by the editor) is obviously "Yes", and in fact, the article itself points out that they have always been considered one of the major classes of conscientious objectors for as long as the phrase 'conscientious objector' has been around. But of course, what the argument is trying to do is play games with the name 'conscientious objector', gerrymandering it so that, if you squint at the word 'conscientious' in just the right way, they won't count. Because exactly what we need in these volatile times is to undermine a major safeguard against large-scale medical programs being used as an instrument of government abuse of power.

The word-game proceeds by a set of equivocations. They say:

Today we tend to think of the conscience as an inner voice, or a form of moral intuition. It’s a little cricket whispering in your ear. Your mind talking to itself. The idea that the conscience is an inner source of knowledge has obvious appeal. If your own conscience can tell you what to do in morally significant situations, you don’t need to struggle with others to arrive at justifiable decisions.

They will later have to face the problem that people in these circumstances don't seem to treat conscience as a source of knowledge but as a source of belief; they will get around this by proposing, in a completely ad hoc way, that people are confusing knowledge with firmly held belief. In reality, of course, when we are talking about 'conscientious objection' everyone recognizes that we are talking about belief to begin with -- the whole point of recognizing a category for conscientious objectors is to take into account the fact that people have strongly held religious and moral beliefs. But what they are trying to do with this apparently arbitrary intrusion of 'knowledge' into the mix is found in the last sentence. You see, when you engage in conscientious objection, you aren't asking other people for permission to opt out of them doing things to you.

The particular thing they have in their sights is the so-called 'philosophical exemption'. Now, it doesn't take any elaborate investigation to show that the adjective here is not being used in a technical or formal way but in the colloquial way in which people talk about their philosophy of life and similar such things. The real point of the exemption is to recognize that people could have moral reasons for objecting that are not strictly religious. But Biss and Biss, of course, decide they will take the term in a full formal way:

Philosophy is not a matter of declaring rigidly held beliefs, but of working out what can be held true in conversation with others. In the Western tradition, going all the way back to Plato, philosophy is based on dialogue. But philosophical exemptions to vaccination laws excuse people from explaining themselves.

Even in the sense in which they are using, this is a muddled bit of reasoning. Philosophy may be "working out what can be held true in conversation with others", but it doesn't follow from this that it specifically requires working it out in conversation with this or that group of people (Biss and Biss have certainly done nothing to show that anti-vaxxers aren't conversing about it, for the obvious reason they can't -- the reason it has become a large-scale problem is that anti-vaxxers converse about it at great length with each other, which has led to this being an actual movement and not just a few random people). And unless you hold that philosophy can't actually find the truth it's supposedly working out, nothing prevents your philosophical conversation from leading to what Biss and Biss, at least, would consider "rigidly held beliefs". And even if they did not, it is an entirely different question whether we should have laws requiring people to explain themselves on the matter, one that can only be determined on political and legal grounds, not on the definition of the word 'philosophy'.

They then introduce the Kantian account of conscientiousness, as if anti-vaxxers have any particular reasons to be Kantians. But the real equivocation is here:

Thorough self-examination might not reveal to everyone the true stakes of a decision against vaccination: the risk of exposing infants, cancer patients, and other vulnerable people who cannot be vaccinated to a life-threatening illness. But Kant’s logic still applies: Acting from a belief system that may run contrary “to a human duty which is certain in and of itself” is unconscientious. Conscience demands that the relatively healthy prioritize their duty to protect the vulnerable from disease.

Note what they do not say, even though someone would naturally tend to assume it: they do not say that the last sentence follows from the Kantian account of conscience given. It in fact does not. Any Kantian account of such matters is not going to look primarily at consequences but at maxims -- roughly what in ordinary conversation we call intent. Consequences are largely irrelevant in a Kantian account of anything. And because the Kantian approach is to fit maxims to moral law, to act with intent that is appropriate to being a rational being as such, there is no sense in which we 'prioritize' duties in a Kantian account -- either we have it as a duty or we don't, either this is one of the circumstances in which we must do it as our duty or it isn't. What they are doing is using a Kantian account to argue that we should examine our motivations, and then splicing a different account of conscience onto it to get their preferred conclusion.

This becomes much more obvious when one recognizes that their repeated insistence throughout on conversation is not particularly consistent with Kantianism. There is indeed a very fundamental sense in which conscience can be considered social in Kant's account, but it is not in the sense of "working out what can be held true in conversation with others" or, as they later put it "work out what counts as fulfilling our duties to others with everyone in our community". (In moral matters that would be what Kant calls heteronomy, and is very much not consistent with what he would regard as conscientiousness.) It is in something like the sense that when you act in moral matters you are effectively doing so as a rational being, and therefore are making moral decisions for everyone, not just yourself, so your moral decisions have to be suitable for everyone. But a Kantian account would also very much have to say that you should sometimes stand your ground on a moral matter, no matter what anyone else might say.

How would anti-vaxxers be assessed in Kantian terms? I don't know. Since it matters a great deal what they are actually intending, and anti-vaxxers probably intend quite a wide range of things, it would depend on the case. Protecting the vulnerable from disease is universalizable, so it would certainly be a duty. But it would also certainly be an imperfect (i.e., incomplete) duty, not on its own telling you exactly what you have to do in order to do it. Vaccinations are not universal rational options that all rational beings have access to; it's in principle possible that there could be medical methods massively more effective than vaccines, so it's an empirical matter whether they are among the most effective ways to protect people from disease; from both of which it will follow that there is no specific duty to vaccinate. It still may be that fulfilling your duty to protect the vulnerable requires vaccination; but this, of course, is precisely what is usually at issue in this case. (Mavis Biss is a quite competent Kant scholar; nothing directly attributed to Kant in the article is wrong. Perhaps Mavis Biss has a much stronger view than usual about what is involved in imperfect duties, or of the way in which community functions in a Kantian context, or something else. That is possible. But the problem is that we seem to move in and out of a Kantian context without warning or indication that it is even being done, which is, again, equivocation.)

Thus Biss and Biss are pretty clearly not appealing to Kant because they are proposing (here, at least) a Kantian view of the anti-vaccination movement, but to show -- well, I don't know what; perhaps that they are more thoughtful than the rubes. It's unclear to me whether they think that Kant is the source of the individualistic view of conscience that they are opposing -- they say a few things that possibly could be interpreted that way, but really Kant is just thrown into the argument, and that whole part of the discussion doesn't seem to contribute anything to the actual argument beyond the self-examination point, which didn't need his authority to be made.

When we step back and look at the argument overall, it becomes clear that they take exemptions for conscientious objectors to be exemptions "from our obligations to others"; this is a very serious misunderstanding of conscientious objection exemptions, which are given so that we can fulfill our obligations to others, and which do not preclude conscientious objectors from fulfilling their obligations to others. This is obvious in every other case of conscientious objection; it's not suddenly untrue here. And all of the word-games in the article mean that Biss and Biss never really argue that the anti-vaxxers are doing anything wrong. They don't argue that our obligations actually must be fulfilled by vaccinations in particular; they don't argue that anyone actually has the account of conscience they are opposing; they don't in fact argue that their account of conscience as having the particular social component that their argument requires is a correct one. Now, I'd have no problem with this, except that they made such an extraordinary fuss about the claim that philosophy was "not a matter of declaring rigidly held beliefs, but of working out what can be held true in conversation with others", and yet here we find them very much not engaging in any kind of dialogue or conversation with anyone, doing nothing but forcefully declaring their beliefs -- whether rigidly held, I cannot say, but there's nothing in the article to make it possible to say that they are not.

Vaccination is one of the greatest medical discoveries of all time, and the value of what it has contributed to the health of the human race is perhaps rivaled only by improved sanitary conditions for the sick and antibiotics. But vaccination in general is also quite intrusive and, what is worse, somewhat indefinite in the extent of its intrusiveness. Talking about conscientious objection to vaccination is often made to sound like it's protesting over getting a small handful of doses, but the CDC's recommended vaccination schedule involves various vaccines adding up to over a hundred doses over a lifetime. (Most people who would characterize themselves as having had all their vaccinations really mean that their parents made sure that they had all the vaccines legally required at the time for schoolchildren, and perhaps a few others afterward. More zealous people do regular flu shots, and probably a few others as they happen to come up for traveling or in medical consultations or what have you. No doubt a few people are as entirely thorough as they can honestly be. But we could add any number of other vaccinations to the list, depending on any number of medical discoveries or newly recognized threats. There is no particular number that is the number of vaccines we should have.)

Vaccination also requires a fairly significant amount of trust in doctors, and in vaccine supply lines, and in medical researchers. Critics of the anti-vaccination movement tend to be good at arguing for the value of vaccines in the abstract; but the movement has largely built on a loss of trust by certain populations in significant portions of the actual medical establishment.

And even if none of this were true, large-scale medical programs by their nature generally need voluntary participation anyway; depending on the kind of program, it's sometimes just voluntary participation of the community generally, but vaccination doesn't work that way. It's the sort of thing you might want to be required; but actively imposing it on people against their will is not actually going to help things in the long run. The standard way of getting around this problem is exactly the one we use: make it legally required, but allow fairly generous exemptions. That way most people will do it both freely and as a duty. One can improve it even more by making it even easier to keep up with vaccinations; that's basically what we do with flu shots. Misinformation, of which there is certainly a lot, can be fought by better information campaigns. It's entirely possible to be insistent on the importance of vaccinations while also recognizing that honest and decent people can have worries that need to be addressed; and respect for conscientious objection is a recognition of the importance of consent and patient autonomy, which are pillars of modern medical ethics. Conscientious objection is entirely the wrong point about which to worry.

(I should perhaps note that Biss and Biss never actually give any legal recommendation. There's a sort of implication, at least an apparent one, that they think philosophical exemptions, or most philosophical exemptions, are illegitimate, and one could read the article as suggesting that they should be eliminated. But the authors never actually say this, and an alternative reading would be just that they are arguing for a regime of persuasion rather than legal coercion. If that's the case, it's not obvious what most of their argument does toward that end, and the argument they give seems actually more subversive of the notion of medical conscientious objection than that would suggest. But the argument given is at its strongest in the insistence that conscience is not purely individualistic but communal, and if you emphasized that aspect of it, you could very well argue that the argument's practical import is really that these things need to be 'discussed' (in some way).)

ADDED LATER: Related to this is this recent article on how much easier it is to get parents to agree to vaccinations if you just bother to answer their questions patiently and start giving them information early and well before the vaccination times come up.

Dashed Off XVI

(Due to grading and a number of other things, the fortnightly book will be delayed another week instead of coming out tomorrow.)

We do not have introspective acquaintance with credences, nor are any behaviors so closely linked with beliefs as to give us credences indirectly; thus the only reason for accepting the existence of credences is the reason for using probability theory to describe belief.

A schedule should exist for a productive end, not for the sake of having a schedule.

We tend to divide curricula materially (deals with plants, deals with stars), but there are many situations in which it would make more sense to divide formally (applied linear algebra, applied probability theory, etc.).

free will as a transcendental condition of thinking in terms of possibilities (universals as another)

conservation laws as local principles for explicability arguments

felt contingency & the perceived almostness of some failures and successes

Befindlichkeit, Stimmung, and Geworfenheit as features of inquiry

Our entire conception of nature is of nature as being-able.

Inquiries are generally parts of larger inquiries, but there is no infinite regress in inquiries being proper parts of inquiries.

God is both theophany and prior to theophany.

Every mathematician converts to the phantasms in different ways.

Savage limits subjective Bayesianism to 'small worlds' in which all possibilities are known and well defined.

The grue problem is an issue of classification, not induction.

fashion as a cross between sculpture and theater

People are always confusing sincere tribal participation and sincere belief.

Norse mythology shows a recurring interest in the power of leftover things.

architecture : nonliving :: landscape gardening : vegetable nature (Schopenhauer)

"The present *interprets* the past to the future." Royce

Explanatory power is relative to sufficiency of reason.

lying as a failure to express mutual dignity

accounts of 'Nazi at the door' // accounts of how to respond to other evil situations (dealing with evil generally)

autonomy as instrument good (Tollefsen)

One creates a market tending to just price by establishing protections against fraud, duress, and emergency, and by making accurate information easily available.

You are usually not worthy to fight for a moral cause unless you are willing to do so even under the assumptions that your being on the right side is merely a matter of your good fortune, that your opponents outnumber and overpower you, and that you are less intelligent than at least some of your opponents.

An explanation of the predictable is at the same time an explanation of why a prediction can be accurate.

angelology as a theory of teaching

the Church as Christ's project -&;gt; Marian subprojects in the Church
Christ as Sovereign of all ends -> Mary as Mother of many ends

Unintended consequences are the Achilles' heel of most progressive politics.

modeling : conversion to phantasms :: experiment : sensory experience

hagiography as first-approximation hagiology

Constitutional puzzles are often constituted by the difference in answers that one gets extrapolating from similar cases versus deducing from principles.

the sacrament of matrimony as involving intrinsically efficacious signification (ex opere operato signifying) -- we are taught according to the sign even if we do not recognize the sign

ontological argument : contemplative life :: cosmological argument : active life

Sacramental grace is inherently prevenient, although it is not what people usually think of when talking about prevenient grace.

God has dignified human nature in the very creating of it.

"It is hard for us to realize that 'I am' is an active verb." Gilson

the habitude for logic (the 'reserve' or what is available to be actualized by definite logical operations, judgments, and the like)

estimative intentions as significations

Philosophers can reason their way to human rights individually, but widespread acceptance of and respect for human rights requires a religion affirming them.

"Absolutism mainly consists in commanding the purse of others." Rosmini

the 'ownership' most relevant to most rights is that of providential responsibility

"Experience is inherent in the very nature of the mind; experience is possible only in relation to a finality which gives it an orientation." Marcel

Where philosophers of mind say 'consciousness', substitute 'experience' and see the result.

Toolmaking beyond a certain level of sophistication is partly a linguistic skill - a reclassification of an item that can be articulated into requirements and implications.

Christian obsequies : resurrection :: formal betrothal : matrimony

temperance as the virtue of ambience-for-virtue

"Do we ask what cause is? To be sure, it is reason in action, i.e., a god." Seneca Ep 65

The anthropological notion of fetishism was an attempt to conflate Catholic and tribal religion under a diagnosis of primitive 'wishful thinking' or desire-worship (cf. de Brosses, Bosman, etc.).

market value, novelty value, nostalgia value, social value

usury as treating money as 'self-valorizing value' (Marx)

Every contract presupposes obligations that make it possible. These obligations might be derived from other contracts. But it is not possible to have an infinite regress in contracts; thus there must be obligations prior to any contract.

Simultaneity is a form of overlap. Overlap is not transitive.

temporal underlap

The test of civility is what would happen to society under general reciprocation.

For there to be a 'beyond the pale' there must be a definite fence.

Every age produces a form of false sanctity.

Where there is no honesty, there is no republic.

Things endure longer in folk physics, folk logic, folk epistemology, folk psychology, etc., if they give the appearance of practicality -- even if this appearance is in fact illusory.

scaling problems in welfare provision

hypocrisy as a folk-politics explanation

Historical comparison is often a normative judgment by its nature.

responsibility qua owner vs. responsibility qua principal agent

Often we classify things as 'prediction' when they are really just investigation of abstractions that could be used to predict.

no hidden taxes // no secret laws

Sometimes in talking about the passions we are talking about the feeling (what is sensed) and sometimes about the valuation (abstracted from the feeling).

St. Joseph is dikaios, righteous or just, because he is willing to do good to another even in response to being apparently wronged.

To marry is to take on a communal responsibility.

the analogy of the Nativity and the Dormition in the legends of the latter

Evangelism on the level of the whole Church is like forest-cultivation: many upfront cost and difficulties for rewards that are usually relatively very far in the future, although those rewards are very great.

diversification & long horizon as risk management approaches in inquiry

"A has a privilege to phi iff A has no duty to phi" can be right only if we have a duty not to do impossible things (i.e., impossibility, physical or otherwise, implies obligation not). 'A has a claim that B phi iff B has a duty to A to phi' is true only if ;claim' has nothing to do with recourse or appeal -- i.e., if you can have a claim even without means to claim it.

freedom from being obligated, being object of obligation, power to obligate (being subject of obligation), immunity from being obligated

A privilege to use a hammer is a claim for others not to use it in a way excluding your use.

It is obviously not true that to *say* 'P is true' is the same as to *say* 'P'; thus the deflationary approach has to be about what is asserted regardless of the words used, and to make assertion always and intrinsically concerned with truth, in the sense that what you have in asserting P is already to assert P to be true. This requires privileging 'true' over other modalities (e.g., asserting things to be possible or impossible). Thus the deflationist about truth must be a nondeflationist about assertion.

The equivalence scheme in deflationism presupposes that we already know how to assign truth values.

NB that Dooyeweerd does not assume that his fifteen modal aspects are exhaustive.

Orthodoxy is not merely an absence of heresy but immunity from it, an active resistance to it.

Dooyeweerdian aspects are related by
(1) dependence
----(a) functional: A requires B for its own full function
----(b) anticipatory: B gets its full meaning in facilitating C
(2) analogy
Spatial requires quantitative (spatial hasfunctional dependence); quantative requires spatial for full understanding of irrational numbers (quantitative has anticipatory dependence).

Petitionary prayer requires us to reflect on our lack.

the Aristotelian argument for action-by-contact for locomotion:
(1) All locomotion is by pushing, pulling, twirling, or carrying.
(2) Twirling and carrying are reducible to particular combinations of pulling and pushing.
(3) Both pulling and pushing require contact.

'Property dualism' is not a well-defined position, in part because there is no generally accepted account of properties.

Besides form and experimental matter, scientific theories may be distinguished by their manners of getting conclusions.

The notion of a field gives us reason to think activity is more fundamental than contact in the explanation of change.

Thought experiments in physics seem primarily to be a consistency guide.

"fashionable climates of thought are apt to be rationalised in metaphysical systems" Hesse

Determinism always requires an error theory.

the concept of wasting oneself in doing X (e.g., wasting oneself in pursuit of frivolous pleasure)

natural ends and the distinction between frivolous and nonfrivolous pleasure

the importance of distinguishing odd moral reasoning from bad moral reasoning
- some moral reasoning is right but pathway-odd; that is, it treats as central what is low priority
- some moral reasoning is odd because it is almost right but drops something important or relevant
- some moral reasoning is only odd because it is very unfamiliar and/or contrary to expectation

fictional entities with foundation in real things

Prediction is a very specialized form of gap-filling.

Civility arises out of authority.

experiments that confirm to be possible vs. experiments that confirm to be actual (these often seem conflated in psychology)

standard post-war reconciliation: Victors were right, defeated were admirable.

soul ) body ) honor ) property ) access rights

(1) A probability presupposes a division of possibilities.
(2) A division of possibilities requires a justifying ground.
(3) The justifying gorund can be a priori (rational) or a posteriori (empirical).

Punishment naturally raises questions of intercession.

technological artifact as extending mimesis of organs (Kapp)

"The principle of the factory system then is, to substitute mechanical science for hand skill, and the partition of a process into its essential constituents, for the division or graduation of labour among artisans." Andrew Ure

Machinery does not replace unskilled workers; it replaces workers because of their skills.

resemblance, contiguity, and causation as legal relations governing precedential reasoning

Three Orders of Good Taste

Taste seems to comprize three orders or degrees in its universal comprehension.

The first is composed of those objects which immediately relate to the divinity, among which man claims the preeminence, when viewed in his highest character: witness the inexpressible charm which the natural virtuous affections of the soul inspire, when moved by some strong impulse, such as parental tenderness, filial piety, friendship, &c. &c. Do they not unite the moral sentiment to the divine?

The second is the immediate external effects of true taste, or moral virtue, in the social sphere; the order, beauty, and honour, which every object derives from its influence; and, of course, its sentiment must be intimately related to moral excellence.

The third and last degree is general ornament and honour, appearing in fashions, arts of decoration, &c. &c. objects which seeming not immediately to effect the interests of humanity, the taste they exhibit in this sphere appears as an uncertain light, sometimes bright and sometimes obscured ; or rather as refracted rays of taste, broken by the general love of novelty and superfluity; two principles which, though they are, to a certain degree, essential to exterior ornament, and the sentiment of true taste, are those in which taste always begins to corrupt....

Frances Reynolds, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty, &c., p. 39. Reynolds, whom I have briefly discussed before, takes beauty to be very closely related to moral good -- in fact, to be some appearance or suggestion of moral good perceived in a sensible object. An artist, of course, could make a beautiful object without being moral himself, but this would be because he was doing it by rules and guidelines gathered from other cases, and nobody can recognize it as beautiful if they cannot see any suggestion of the moral qualities of a mind in it. Good taste is a particular form of the love of virtue. This is a very strong view, of course; that aesthetics is related to ethics is certain enough, but Reynolds goes the next step and argues that the former is a particular expression of the latter.

Liguori

Today is the feast of St. Alphonsus Liguori, Doctor of the Church. A child prodigy, he got his degree in law four years earlier than was normal (he had to get a special dispensation because he was under the legal minimum for it); it's said that he looked a little kid in his doctor's gown when receiving it, so that everyone laughed at him. He practiced law for about ten years. Then one day he was in the courtroom, counsel for one side of a lawsuit; he opened brilliantly, with a very clever argument, and sat down, certain that he was going to win the case. But instead of any sign of admiration from the rest of the courtroom, there was a pause of baffled silence -- crickets, as we say. Then the opposing counsel said, "All of what you've said is wasted breath; your argument is inconsistent with one of the documents in evidence." Alphonsus demanded to know which document, and it was handed to him. He knew the document. He had read it many times. And every single time until that moment he had read it incorrectly. Seeing it now, he was crushed, absolutely mortified. It was such an absurd mistake that he didn't see how anyone else could attribute it to anything except dishonesty or incompetence. Everyone -- including, it is said, the opposing counsel and the judge -- tried to console the young man, but it was no good. When he left the courtroom that day, he never returned to law. In fact, he became so depressed he stopped eating for several days. But eventually he came to see what had happened as God showing him his lack of humility, and as a result he became an Oratorian. He would go on to found the society that would eventually become known as the Redemptorists and become one of the greatest experts on canon law and moral theology in the history of the Church. It happened almost incidentally; his writings are vast, but very few of them were written before the age of fifty. It was also a very rocky road. Due to the politics of the day, St. Alphonsus died betrayed by almost every supporter he had, cut off by the Pope from his own order, deaf and nearly blind. He was ninety-one.

Jottings on Aristotelianism and the Labor Theory of Value

There is no single 'labor theory of value'; labor theories of value can be quite different depending on what aspect of labor they consider relevant. But labor theories in general will hold that in some sense the price of something is equivalent (by some measure) to the work required to have it (by some measure). More precise versions distinguish value in use and value in exchange; in Adam Smith's famous example, few things have greater value in use than water, which is one of the most useful and one of the most necessary things we know, but water has in most situations almost no value in exchange; it's not particularly useful for buying and selling. The conclusion can then be drawn that the correct measurement for value in exchange is quantity of labor (whatever the measure of quantity might be). It is a common view that the labor theory of value goes back to Aristotle, and that it is a standard position in Aristotelianism, but this is not, in fact, true. A few gestures toward the reason why.

(1) Aristotle does not have a labor theory of value because he has no specific theory of value of the relevant sort. He does have a sketched-out theory of commercial exchange; this theory recognizes that exchanges originally are based on mutually recognized value in use. Because direct exchange is often not practical (due to things like transportation, storage, timing), we move from direct exchange of particular useful thing for particular useful thing to indirect exchange, where we exchange indirectly using something that has general usefulness. Metals are durable and relatively easy to transport and exhange, and even if you yourself have no particular use for it, lots of other people do, so you can use it in further exchanges. This indirect exchange requires all sorts of measurements, protections, and guarantees, and out of this comes our system of using money. With the advent of coinage as a standardized form of something generally useful that is specifically devoted to serving as something generally useful in exchange, we begin to get the notion of money-accumulation. In this context we have household management (Aristotle's word will later give us the word 'economics', which literally means household management; Aristotle himself would regard what we call 'economics' as politics), if we keep money-making tied to real usefulness, and money-exchange, if we treat the two as separate.

(2) It follows from this that the labor theory of value does not actually make much sense in an Aristotelian context; value is established by ends, and so will vary as ends vary. Aristotle's criticism of money-exchange has no direct relation to questions of labor; rather, the criticism is that good money-making makes money for definite ends, but money-exchange does not. Money-exchange treats money as an end in itself, and thus is unnatural. The only real connection to labor to which Aristotle appeals is that good money-making is something that he sees arising not out of labor as such but out of skill. I suppose you could argue on this basis that Aristotle has a skill theory of value, but even this would not really be accurate -- skill comes up simply because skills are a central part of human life that by their very nature involve ends.

(3) Marx often comes up in attributing the labor theory of value to Aristotle, because Marx builds his own labor theory of value on Aristotle. But I think close attention to the relevant texts shows that Marx himself did not think Aristotle had a labor theory of value; he thinks Aristotle laid some of the groundwork for it, but that he failed to solve a particular problem, how to have equal exchange of unlike things, and Marx proposes the labor theory of value as a solution to this problem that Aristotle did not solve -- in effect, we are actually exchanging A and B in terms of their labor, so the exchange is made in terms of something that can be directly compared on each side. If I read Marx correctly, I think he takes it to be the case that Aristotle couldn't have had a labor theory of value because the existence of slavery in Greek society would have made arguing for it at best very complicated and perhaps impossible. And if this is so, I think he is right here -- Aristotle can't really say that labor admits of equal comparison by quantity because he thinks some labor is better than other labor by its very nature. Some labor is slavish, some labor is noble; some labor is suitable for a free person, some labor is not. In Marx's history of economics, the labor theory of value is the child of capitalism.

(4) If you wanted to find an Aristotelian labor theory of value, St. Thomas would probably be a better candidate than Aristotle himself. St. Thomas does explicitly at times link the value of something in exchange to labor. He also in a number of places uses examples explicitly based on labor -- for instance, he explains the proportional equality of justice in wages in terms of paying twice as much for twice as much time spent in labor. But St. Thomas is not a labor theorist, either, because he also thinks that share in the distribution of benefits is a matter of justice in exchange, and explicitly thinks that workmen should receive according to the quantity and quality of what they produce (which is not the same as the quantity of labor itself). And his account of why labor is relevant is that we price things according to the need we have to use them -- the farmer wouldn't trade a bushel of wheat for a sandal in general because the amount of labor that goes into a bushel of wheat is immense in comparison to that which goes into a pair of shoes, and if he were always laboring greatly to exchange very important things (like food, which is needed to live) for things that can be produced comparatively easily and are less important, he would not be meeting his needs in a reasonable way.

Poem Draft and Two Poem Re-Drafts

Holy Simurgh

Holy Simurgh, rainbow-splendid,
on the Tree of Life you dwell,
never-ending, God-defended
from assault of death and hell.
All the birds of all the nations
make your feathers bright with song,
larks in splendid exaltations,
nightingales in choral throng,
mockingbirds all notes returning,
swallow, sparrow, scornful jay;
phoenix cries in passion burning,
thunderbirds with lightning pray.
Hear the parrot, discourse speaking,
crows and ravens caw in time,
harmony that each was seeking
melding now in tune sublime.
Thirtyfold your feathered wonder,
more than peacock, more than hawk,
beating wings resound like thunder,
vast in wingspan like the roc.
Everywhere is your dominion,
souls you rescue from the grave;
by the gift of magic pinion
lives from devil-lands you save.

Ayesha in the Fire

Life beyond life no life can now bear,
nor fair beyond fair and yet still more fair,
for fire and light beyond all desire
will quicken the heart to nothing but fire.
We are not gods, nor burning with grace,
we apes of the gods, the whole mortal race,
and though we ascend, as we think, to high throne,
yet still in the darkness we end all alone.

Though shade be deferred by an imminent light,
yet stunted are those who flee from the night;
though long eons stretch, we snap and we die,
and dimness will fall on the brightest of eye,
as darkness will drag us to ash and to dust:
this fate, and none other, can mortal men trust.
In ash you will end, with nothing but name,
both quickened and slain by one glorious flame.

Semé

The breezes breathe upon my cheek,
the sylphan zephyrs sigh;
the heat of day now falls away
beneath the black of sky.
The flame of sun is beaten back,
the heart in uplift sings;
the track I travel through the night
beneath my footstep rings,
and soon the moon will rise and gleam
with light no shadow mars
amid a field a-bloom with dreams,
the sky semé with stars.

Golden of Word

Today is the feast of St. Peter Chrysologus, Doctor of the Church; he is sometimes known as the 'Doctor of Homilies'. He was bishop of Ravenna at the time when Ravenna was effectively the Imperial city; he is said to have received the epithet Chrysologos from the Empress Galla Placidia, who was ruling the western Roman empire as regent at the time he was appointed.

Whoever is free from captivity to this mammon, and is no longer weighed down under the cruel burden of money, stands securely with his vantage point in heaven, and from there looks down over the mammon which is holding sway over the world and the worldly with a tyrant's fury.

It holds sway over nations, it gives orders to kingdoms, it wages wars, it equips warriors, it traffics in blood, it transacts death, it threatens homelands, it destroys cities, it conquers peoples, it attacks fortresses, it puts citizens in an uproar, it presides over the marketplace, it wipes out justice, it confuses right and wrong, and by aiming directly at morality it assails one's integrity, it violates truth, it eviscerates one's reputation, it wreaks havoc on one's honor, it dissolves affections, it removes innocence, it keeps compassion buried, it severs relationships, it does not permit friendship. And why should I say more? This is mammon: the master of injustice, since it is unjust in the power it wields over human bodies and minds.

[Sermon 126, section 5, from St. Peter Chrysologus, Selected Sermons, Volume 2, William Palardy, tr. Catholic University of America (Washington, DC: 2004).]

Oligopsychia

In my Ethics class today, I will be talking, among other things, of magnanimity and pusillanimity, so I was looking around for examples I might used, and (somewhat to my surprise, I must confess) came across a brief discussion of it by Pope Francis in a general audience from last June. (And one, moreover, that I actually largely agree with, which I confess surprised me almost as much.) The English translation of the original text, however, is not very good. It has Pope Francis saying,

Some think that it would be better to extinguish this impulse — the impulse to live — because it is dangerous. I would like to say, especially to young people: our worst enemy is not practical problems, no matter how serious and dramatic: life’s greatest danger is a poor spirit of adaptation which is neither meekness nor humility, but mediocrity, cowardice. Is a mediocre young person a youth with a future or not? No! He or she remains there, will not grow, will not have success. Mediocrity or cowardice. Those young people who are afraid of everything: ‘No, this is how I am...’. These young people will not move forward. Meekness, strength, and not cowardice, not mediocrity.

And the English for the explanatory footnote says:

The Fathers speak of cowardice (oligopsychìa). Saint John Damascene defines it as “the fear of completing an action” (Exact exposition of the Orthodox faith, ii, 15) and Saint John Climacus adds that “cowardice is a childish disposition, in an old, vainglorious soul” (Ladder of Divine Ascent, xxi, 2).

The Italian that keeps being translated as 'cowardice' is, of course, pusillanimità, pusillanimity, small-souledness. And that is what one would expect from the parenthetical oligopsychia, which means not 'cowardice' but smallness of soul and whose exact Latin counterpart is pusillanimitas.

Opus Dei has an infinitely superior translation.

(As a side note, it's somewhat interesting that, despite the existence of relevant Western discussions, almost all of the theologians referred to in the footnotes are Eastern, with St. Ignatius being the one exception.)

The Rose and Purple Evening Dreams Away

A Summer Evening
by Archibald Lampman

The clouds grow clear, the pine-wood glooms and stills
With brown reflections in the silent bay,
And far beyond the pale blue-misted hills
The rose and purple evening dreams away.
The thrush, the veery, from mysterious dales
Rings his last round; and outward like a sea
The shining, shadowy heart of heaven unveils—
The starry legend of eternity.
The day's long troubles lose their sting and pass.
Peaceful the world, and peaceful grows my heart.
The gossip cricket from the friendly grass
Talks of old joys and takes the dreamer's part.
Then night, the healer, with unnoticed breath,
And sleep, dark sleep, so near, so like to death.

Old Thunder

Hilaire Belloc was born July 27, 1870 in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France. As a child, he got the nickname Old Thunder for being noisy and boisterous, and he never really stopped. A great walker, when he was trying to convince Elodie Hogan to marry him, he once walked from the American midwest to northern California to see her, trading sketches and poetry recitations for shelter and food. From his book, The Free Press (1918), arguing for the necessity of diverse news sources:

The man who tells the truth when his colleagues around him are lying, always enjoys a certain restricted power of prophecy. If there were a general conspiracy to maintain the falsehood that all peers were over six foot high, a man desiring to correct this falsehood would be perfectly safe if he were to say: "I do not know whether the next peer you meet will be over six foot or not, but I am pretty safe in prophesying that you will find, among the next dozen three or four peers less than six foot high."

If there were a general conspiracy to pretend that people with incomes above the income-tax level never cheated one in a bargain, one could not say "on such-and-such a day you will be cheated in a bargain by such-and-such a person, whose income will be above the income-tax level," but one could say; "Note the people who swindle you in the next five years, and I will prophesy that some of the number will be people paying income-tax."

This power of prophecy, which is an adjunct of truth telling, I have noticed to affect people very profoundly.

Dashed Off XV

Ceremony by its nature is due to, and should be appropriate to, merit and office.

fundamental rights -> operationalized fundamental rights -> operationally adjacent rights

Frege's judgment stroke links argument to (one, unified) arguer -- that is, puts the premises into the same collection rather than a different one (truth-acknowledgments). Note, however, that on Frege's use of 'judgment' all judgment is correct, indicative of what is actually true. It unifies the argument by relating it to a single agent (it does not matter whom) and to objective reality at the same time.

hunting-style inquiry, trapping-style inquiry

quasi-property: patent, copyright, trademark, shell corporation, aboriginal songline, manorial title
quasi-property arising from residuation, from letters patent (or equivalent), from regularized customary law
- all quasi-property arises form rights associated with classifications

The clinical aspect of medicine needs to be rooted in a broader humane context.

Humanitarian traditions typically include many professions, some central and some ancillary.

pardon : state :: sanctuary : Church

market convergence on mere facsimiles of the good, the true, the beautiful: the convenient, the pleasant but illusory, the profitable

The essential idea of arithmetic is not number but counting. One counts forward, and backwards; one counts countings.

Human rights are operationalized by the natural workings of humanitarian traditions, and the operationalization is formalized in a legal regime (sometimes only of customary law).

We tend to think of counting as a mapping to number; but one may think of number as mapping to count.

Mathematics builds on ostensive definitions, but it does not rest satisfied with them.

To be a human being is to be somewhat abstract.

A weathervane cannot be recognized as a sign except insofar as it is recognized as in some way a unity with what it signifies.

naturalism as the collapse of the distinction between showing and saying (this seems to be the root of Wittgenstein's impatience with naturalisms)

The forms of equality that matter most -- in the sense of having the greatest effect in protecting human dignity itself -- are
(1) that more or less everyone have the ability and opportunity to build a functional independence (a space of their own);
(2) that the law not be partial in its application, but fair;
(3) that there is a standing expectation of mutual courtesy, even if mostly formal, regardless of other distinctions.

Subsidiarity, not democracy, is the fundamental principle of self-government. (As much as possible should be local and/or with voluntary participation, and supportive of people solving their own problems where possible.)

The Western liberal model for society gets all of its admirable features from, and to the degree, it has viable and navigable proxies/institutions/practices for (1) rule of law; (2) civic friendship; (3) subsidiarity. Everything that people find of lasting value in it, and that it often provides better than many competing regimes, is found in its approach to these three things. Its partisans often misdiagnose this, however, because they take the model to be the end, not a means.

the cogito as contingent a priori (its necessity is only conditional)

motives of credibility
(1) suggestions
(2) purely pragmatic considerations

Every Aristotelian category divides into complete and incomplete.
Complete-or-incomplete as a transcendental distinction (This is = perfect/imperfect.)

Free choice finds not fully adequate object short of the Beatific Vision.

Strict evidentialism in the ethics of belief confuses good taste and moral requirement.

The power of the Scottish National Covenant was the power of the idea of a nation sworn to God as it fell on a people eager for a superior alternative to its king.

Ideas change the world by meshing with incentive structures, turning loose tendencies into specific purposes.

assessment of 'fit' as an elimination by classes

ancient castles work like sand

aphorism, by way of aporetics, becoming system

forms of Catholic education: schooling, homeschooling, scouting, internship/apprenticeship

dialogue, by way of maieutics, becoming system

Businesses are rarely designed to maximize profits, and, noticeably, tend to run into problems when they focus too much on profit, as such.

the problem of collateral damage in protests (cf. Gandhi and the clothmakers)

All evaluation is a kind of classification.

Typological classification is intrinsically evaluative (goodness of fit).

Newton's Third Law & the notion of contact

forms of intemperance
(1) inappropriateness to rational role
(2) inappropriateness of mode and measure
(3) inappropriateness of response to what is communicated

to signal what is good vs to signal that one has virtue

Thayer's steps to positive plant identification
(1) tentative identification
(2) reference comparison
(3) cross-referencing
(4) specimen search
(5) contradictory confidence

foraging as based on search image
foraging as an exercise in classification

In foraging, "Each plant is a complex skill, which often takes much time to master." Thayer, Nature's Garden

"...he that is armed is always master of the purse of him that is unarmed." Fletcher

It is sophistry, literally and truly, to pretend that reason has no intrinsic teleology.

In epistemic matters, we always begin in medias res, and it is a mistake to think we ever do otherwise.

There must be a good God for there to be a Jane Austen.

childishness as a vice opposed to temperance

Adequate moral reasoning requires both classificatory and causal forms; the loss of the latter is one sign of degeneration, and the loss of the former a sign of a different degeneration.

yin-yang as the structure of causing

ostension, depiction, description

attention, joint attention, ostension

"Homo est substantia rationalis constans ex anima et corpore." Aug DT 15.7.11

We perceive sympathetically that something is alive directly by its way of movement, and learn what it is for it to be alive indirectly by analogical inference.

perceptions that involve inferences

rhetorical cascades & options that are live vs dead, force vs unforced, momentous vs trivial, low-effort vs high-effort

the 'religious black market'

political argument and denial of area

relevant worlds analysis

Determinism requires some form of principle of sufficient reason. (Presumably, varying the PSR would vary the kinds of determinism possible -- think about this.)

thrownness as creatureliness (Edith Stein)

consensus gentium as first approximation (preparatory for consensus sapientarum)
consensus gentium as the ordinary standard for material fallacies

the original of beyondness
- poss. from diff. of infinite and finite
- relation to (metaphor arising from) diff. between visual and tactile , which seems more basic, but also to give a more limite dnotion of 'beyond', if taken only on its own.

Nietzsche's survival account of the logical depends on the perishing of ideas in the 'chaos of ideas' being linked with inconsistency. ('The ideas that were consistent with one another remained, the greater number perished -- and are passing.') N. is savvy enough to recognize that the account only gives an ongoing process, a still-changing logicality, but he is perhaps too swift to think he can get a sufficiently strong link between inconsistency and perishing (it's not clear he has any adequate mechanism for it.)

theories of personal identity // theories of constitutional maintenance
(1) continuity views
--- (1a) formal
--- (1b) material
(2) teleological views
-> note that fission is not an issue for constitutional maintenance; it's a weaker identity than personal identity on any account

trust-busting and market checks-and-balances

Evening Note for Thursday, July 25

Thought for the Evening: Friendliness as a Civic Virtue

I was discussing Aristotle's virtue ethics today and mentioned the importance of the virtue of friendliness for Aristotle's view. Aristotle doesn't spend a lot of time talking directly about it, but it is structurally important for his entire account in the Nicomachean Ethics. We tend to think of it as just a nice trait, but Aristotle takes friendship to be essential to civilized life, so he regards it as a civic virtue. (This is actually quite easy to prove: Aristotle gives it as one of the major virtues; all of Aristotle's major virtues are civic virtues, because the reason he selects them out as important is that they each play an important role in life in a Greek city state; therefore etc.) The virtue of friendliness, philia, amicitia, affabilitas is, roughly, the virtue of being the sort of person open to friendship of the sort that binds society together.

Aristotle says that the Greek of his day had no name for the virtue. (One of the less-appreciated, but immensely important, implications of the Doctrine of the Mean is that we can discover virtues and vices for which we have no name.) It concerns general pleasantness toward others (NE II.7.13) but is like friendship (NE IV.6.4), which is no doubt why he calls it by the name philia in II.7.13. It's not the same as friendship in the proper sense, but the person who has the virtue is the sort of person we would tend to say is a good friend, except that in itself it does not involve the actual bond of affection that is required for an actual friendship. The person who is friendly acts in a pleasant way even to strangers, although not indiscriminately. He will please where it can be done honorably and appropriately, and will refrain from pleasing where it cannot, adapting his behavior to each context. The virtue is a mean between obsequiousness and flattery on one side (the difference being that the obsequious are overeager to please for pleasure's sake and the flatterers are overeager to please for what they can get out of it) and what is usually translated as surliness on the other (in English, we would certainly usually just call this vice unfriendliness). Aquinas's terms for the vices are adulatio (fawning, we might say) and litigium (quarrelsomeness).

Aquinas gives a nice summation of why friendliness needs to be seen as a civic virtue by drawing an analogy with truthfulness (ST 2-2.114.2ad1):

...because man is a social animal he owes his fellow-man, in equity, the manifestation of truth without which human society could not last. Now as man could not live in society without truth, so likewise, not without joy, because, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. viii), no one could abide a day with the sad nor with the joyless. Therefore, a certain natural equity obliges a man to live agreeably with his fellow-men; unless some reason should oblige him to sadden them for their good.

As he notes, it maintains fitting and orderly relations among human beings. (It is often overlooked that when Aquinas discusses natural law, one of the precepts he explicitly gives for natural law as it concerns goods of reason is "to avoid offending those among whom one has to live" [ST 2-1.94.2], which is exactly the obligation to which he is appealing here in his discussion of friendliness.)

That seems basic enough. But it is a severe test. Argument, and remonstrance, and sometimes rebuke, are all things that can be done in a way consistent with friendship; but how many of our political arguments do we pursue in a way that still leaves open friendly relations with the people with whom we are arguing? In how many cases are we starting -- not reluctantly being forced to accept in the end, but starting -- with a stance of enmity and opposition. To live agreeably with the people with whom you happen to have been cast, to the extent honestly and genuinely possible, is not the only obligation we have to consider, but it is always an obligation. And when we do not at least attempt to comply with it -- if we do not at least recognize it as a valuable thing and, even if sometimes we fail in the spirit, at least grit our teeth and try -- that is a very corrosive thing. Nothing will eat through social bonds more quickly than that acid. And what corrodes our social bonds is both never good for our characters and absolutely toxic for civilized life.

Various Links of Interest

* Conimbricenses is a resource site for information on early modern philosophy associated with the University of Coimbra -- Suarez, Portuguese Aristotelianism, and the like. It's still slowly building, but already there's quite a bit that's of interest.

* The Loyalist side of the American Revolution

* The U.S. State Department recently honored Imam Abubakar Abdullahi for having saved 262 Christians from massacre in Nigeria, even at one point begging the would-be killers to take his life instead of theirs.

* Mark Pulliam discusses the various false stories that have sprung up about the Scopes trial.

* Armin Rosen discusses the recent surges of reported anti-Jewish crimes in New York City. It's a good discussion of just how difficult it can be to pin down the causes of something like this.

* Carol Goodman, A Home of Her Own – How Jane Austen Found the Space to Write

* The Unicorn Tapestries, at "Public Domain Review"

* Keith Sciberras argues that Caravaggio's famous painting of Judith beheading Holofernes might not be by Caravaggio.

* Victor Mair discusses the little we know about the historical Mulan.

Currently Reading

Maria Edgeworth, Belinda
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History
John Skalko, Disordered Desires
Augustine, The Trinity

Poetry Interrupted

Freedom is fullness, especially fullness of life; and a full vessel is more rounded and complete than an empty one, and not less so. To vary Browning's phrase, we find in prose the broken arcs, in poetry the perfect round. Prose is not the freedom of poetry; rather prose is the fragments of poetry. Prose, at least in the prosaic sense, is poetry interrupted, held up and cut off from its course; the chariot of Phoebus stopped by a block in the Strand. But when it begins to move again at all, I think we shall find certain old-fashioned things move with it, such as repetition and even measure, rhythm and even rhyme.

G. K. Chesterton, "The Slavery of Free Verse", Fancies Versus Fads.

A New Poem Draft and Two Poem Re-Drafts

Cicadas

Cicadas now sing me to sleep
with a blanket of late morning heat
as I on the cool grass am laid;
my memories they carry away.
The ceiling, a pale turquoise blue,
my pillow a tuft by a root,
the clouds in their friendship now hide
the blazing and blazon of light.
My attention now flickers and fades
into sleep at the nooning of day.

Rome is Dead

Rome is dead; its pillars fall,
they crumble down to blowing dust.
The rabbits bound in ruined hall,
a shell, a long-degraded husk.
A lonely pier upon the seas
is stretching boatless, unremarked.
Upon the hills the careless breeze
ignores things buried by the park.
The temple formed for sacred rite
by gawking tourist's heedless tread
is unrevered, its holy might
a souvenir; yes, Rome is dead.

But heart is stirred by Latin word,
the hand inspired by Roman deed.
The names we have in splendor heard;
from press of time they have been freed.
This temple stands, a church now made,
and Christ now rules, a greater king,
where once to Jupiter they prayed
or to Minerva hymns would sing.
All things recall; that power still
constrains the world like earth and sky.
Where Rome has stood, it ever will:
if Rome is dead, it does not die.

bad cat

some cat has jumped
onto the poetry books
jumbling the words
cutting lines and verses
into pieces
shredding sonnets

the rhymes are all displaced
the meters
disarrayed
the metaphors are all
tissue paper shreds

when i catch
the crazy feline
who stole the capitals
the punctuation marks
i will say
bad cat

Hermit of Annaya

Today is the feast of St. Sharbel Makhlouf, or Charbel, monk, priest, and hermit of Lebanon. He joined the Lebanese Maronite Order in 1851, and was granted permission to enter the eremitic life in 1875, in which he stayed until his death on Christmas Eve in 1898. The Maronite Catholic Church began as an ascetic movement, St. Maroun himself having been an open-air hermit, so hermits are very important to it as part of carrying forward its heritage. A few months after his death, there were reports of a bright light shining over his grave, and people have ever since traveled to his grave at Annaya for healing.

A little-known fact: there is a fossil crustacean, Charbelicaris maronites, a probable relative of the modern-day lobster, named after him, due to its discovery in Lebanon.



Feast of St. Sharbel

O Christ our Light, You fill the earth with light;
You choose worthy teachers to teach Your Church,
securing the good of those who love God,
molding Your people into Your image.
You give Your saints the word of life and truth;
as flame to flame they kindle ardent faith,
each a star to show us the path of life.

From Sharbel's hermitage a great light shines:
through his prayers we receive salvation,
through his intercessions, health of spirit.
O Sharbel, you found the pearl of great price,
giving everything that you might have it.
Our Lord Jesus Christ called you to follow,
and without hesitation you followed.

Annaya

Cedars grow tall on Liban hills,
life rooted deeper than human will;
flame is bright over muddy grave
of a hermit-saint who hid his face;
the heart is kissed by burning light
as cedar soars to sun and sky,
is charged with day without a night,
and burns but is not burned.

The Proud Sultana of the Summer Hour

To the Poppy
by John Holland

Lethae perfusa papavera somno. -- Virg : Georg : i, 38

Poets have emblem'd Vanity in thee;
Feign'd thee a gay and worthless flaunting flower,
The proud sultana of the summer hour:
Before the breeze the crimson bloom may flee,
But shed thy charms, a capsule green remains,
With juice narcotic rich: by curious art,
The essenced drug express'd, allays the smart,
And lulls in easy trance, beguiling pains,
The woe-worn heir of life; ah, stupor sweet,
That helps ev'n pain, of watchfulness to cheat
An hour: I would not choose to yield my breath,
lull'd in the poppied atmosphere of death:
But who can tell?—the thought my soul refrains—
Yet, flower of injured fame, thy worth induced my strains.

Kant and Generality of Maxims

In introductory discussions of Kant, and sometimes beyond, it is common to raise the problem of the level of generality for maxims. Kant's categorical imperative tells us,

Act only according to that maxim that you can at the same time will to be a universal law,

where a maxim is the rule you are making for yourself in making a decision. So, for instance, if I am considering whether I should make a promise that I know would have good consequences but that I also know I can never fulfill, my maxim is "Make a promise you know you will break if it gets good consequences", and Kant holds that I should consider whether this is something that can be consistently willed by a consistently rational being under all circumstances. The answer, of course, is that in making a promise you are relying on the norm of promises being something that are kept and yet you are also making an arbitrary exception for yourself. On Kant's view all immorality is a failure to treat moral principle as moral principle by making special exceptions for yourself or other people that do not derive simply and purely from what it is to be a rational being.

But, the line of thought also goes, what if we fiddle with our maxims? So one version is, suppose a person, call her Alice, is considering whether to repay a debt to another, call her Sara, because she doesn't want to do so. 'Don't pay your debts when you feel like not doing so' is not a universalizable maxim. But suppose Alice tinkers with her maxim, and says, "But my maxim is actually, 'don't pay your debts when you are Alice and you would have to be paying Sara'. This seems universalizable!"

Alice, however, is certainly wrong here, because she is lying about her maxim; the maxim being the actual subjective rule from which her action proceeds, her maxim in fact includes trying to pretend that her maxim is merely what she says it is in order to get the result she wants, and this is not universalizable. Deliberate maxim-tampering is not a problem with Kant, because it's the actual rule you are using to guide your action that needs to be considered, not the maxim that you arbitrarily and dishonestly claim that you are following. (We run into a similar bit of sophistry in discussions of double effect; people pretend that you can be intending something just by saying 'I am intending this, not that', but in fact your intentions are not declarations but your actual disposition and aim in acting. If you deliberately murder your enemy while saying, "I am only acting in self-defense," that does not mean you were acting in self-defense but that you are a liar as well as a murderer.) Maxims are not things put out by a maxim factory according to custom specifications. They are the rules actually in play.

But there are other attempts to raise the generality problem for maxims that don't involve any attempt at maxim-tampering. To use an example from Bergeron and Tramel's "Rightness as Fairness: Kant's Categorical Imperative", 'In order to make money, rob a bank', is not universalizable. But what if, from the beginning (so it is not maxim-tampering), the maxim is actually, 'In order to provide money for such-and-such person with such-and-such characteristics unique for me, rob such-and-such bank'. That is, suppose that this is literally my first and last thought, that I in particular should rob this bank in particular. If we blow this up on a universal scale, we get -- the one unique action.

In fact this is not true; as neither you nor the bank are a universal feature of rational beings, nor of the life of rational beings, and the maxim cannot be willed as something to which all rational beings in such a situation would be subject as rational beings (which is what Kant means by 'universal'), it is not universalizable at all. Merely saying you've universalized it is not true. Nor is it willable as universal law; there is nothing in it that could be willed as a law for every rational being at all. It is something you are explicitly willing for yourself as a unique individual, and it is contradictory to do that and also will it as something that should be applicable as a rule for everyone.

The problem with this kind of counterexample is that it is based on the false assumption that all that is required for a maxim to pass is to be implementable if made general. But Kant is very clear that the point of 'universality' is specifically that it must be the sort of thing that could apply to anyone.

In general, overspecification of maxim will get the same result, and thus will not pose a problem for the categorical imperative.

But could we go the other direction? To borrow another example from Bergeron and Tramel, suppose I am deciding whether to sit in my study, and the maxim that I adopt is, "In order to work comfortably, I should sit in the study." This doesn't seem universalizable. So surely something has gone wrong.

However, this is also not a problem for the categorical imperative. If this is literally my maxim, if we are not being loose in stating it, then it is an immoral maxim, because universalized it treats working comfortably as a decisive and definitive end for every rational being, which is not consistent with the concept of a being capable of acting according to universal law. In reality, we would generally assume that there are implicit conditions that are not explicitly stated here; as it stands it is a technical maxim, how to do something I might want to do (work comfortably), and does not actually specify the point of doing so. If I intend working comfortably as a universal moral end all rational beings must pursue, I am certainly a moral loon, and not rational at all. But if I intend working comfortably as the sort of thing I could do in these circumstances in order to be better prepared for doing my duty, this is an end that could be willed as an end of significance for all rational beings, and if that end universalizes, my real maxim is universalizable.

The problem with all of these is perhaps that people tend to assume that all maxims can be perfectly written down in simple sentences, but one of Kant's key points is that rules can often have conditions that are not explicitly stated. This is why there is only one categorical imperative. I can write down an imperative in a form that indicates no conditions at all -- "Do your homework" -- but any rational person would know that it in fact has conditions -- it would be a sign of irrationality to try to obey "Do your homework" even to the point of death, for instance, and it is not even the right kind of imperative to trump every other possible imperative that might come along. Likewise, your maxim may be stated as 'Do X for purpose Y', but Y itself might be only a thing being done for some other reason, and 'Do X' might be conditional on more general imperatives being met, and X's relation to Y might itself depend on some rational or irrational principle or other. All of these are relevant to whether the maxim can in fact be willed as universal law, that is, a rule of action a rational being could will for all rational beings.

There are problems that could be raised about Kant's whole apparatus of law and maxims, mostly to do with the assumptions he makes about how practical reason works, and how it relates to the will (Kant in fact rejects there being any significant difference between practical reason and will); but there is no problem with the levels of generality in maxims. What is relevant is your actual maxim, not some dummy maxim you state as a proxy, and it doesn't matter whether it is very specific or very general as long as it can be willed as universal law. Universalizability is not about big scale but about being the kind of thing appropriate to a rational being as such. Kant has all the resources he needs to handle the major classes of supposed counterexamples that constitute the generality problem for maxims.

Universally Acknowledged

David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section VIII, Part I:

It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations. The same motives always produce the same actions: the same events follow from the same causes. Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity, public spirit: these passions, mixed in various degrees, and distributed through society, have been, from the beginning of the world, and still are, the source of all the actions and enterprises, which have ever been observed among mankind. Would you know the sentiments, inclinations, and course of life of the Greeks and Romans? Study well the temper and actions of the French and English: You cannot be much mistaken in transferring to the former most of the observations which you have made with regard to the latter. Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behaviour.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Chapter I:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Fortnightly Book, July 21

Maria Edgeworth was born in Oxfordshire, but her family was Irish, and indeed had a small estate in Edgeworthstown/Mostrim, which was where she spent most of her life -- she essentially supported herself by a mix of managing the estate and writing. The latter turned out to be surprisingly profitable -- at least for part of her career, she was easily among the most successful writers of the day.

Her second novel, Belinda, was her first triple-decker, published in 1801. It is a coming-of-age novel about a young woman, as you would probably expect from the title, and it is one of the novels that attempts to follow in the footsteps of Fanny Burney in establishing a form of novel-writing that is of moral value. She herself rejects the name 'novel' for it, because of its potential dubious associations and prefers instead to call it a Moral Tale; as she puts it in the Advertisement, she would be happy to call it a novel, but "so much folly, errour, and vice are disseminated in books classed under this denomination" that it would be better to call it something else. Belinda, of course, is the next fortnightly book.

The Standard Bearer

Today is the memorial for St. Lorenzo da Brindisi, Doctor of the Church, born Giulio Cesare Rossi in the Kingdom of Naples. He was well known in his day for his unusual talent for languages, and become the most important Capuchin preacher of his day. In 1601 he became a chaplain for the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II, in the fight against the invading Turks, where he became famous for being on the battlefield with the soldiers, with no weapons and a cross as his standard. He's quite difficult to find in English translation; from a public domain translation of his Mariale, Part I, Sermon I:

Therefore, since Christ is the Most August miracle of God, of which even Isaiah, chapter 25 in the Hebrew (says): I shall praise Thy Name because Thou has wrought a miracle [Is. 25:1]; Mary cannot be but a great miracle, since She is most similar to Christ, just as the full Moon is to the Sun. Wherefore just as God from the beginning placed two great lights in the sky [Gn 1:16]; so in Paradise (He has placed) two great miracles, Christ and Mary. Hence we read that the Angels, admiring Christ, (say): Who is this king of glory? Who is this king of glory [Ps. 23:8-10]? who is this, who comes from Edom, with garments dyed from Bosra, this handsome one in his stole, marching in the multitude of his fortitude [Is 63:1-2]? Similarly we read that admiring Mary (they say): Who is this who ascends from the desert, overflowing with delights [Song 8:5]? And again: Who is this who ascends through the desert as a stream of smoke from the aromatics of myrrh and incense and all the powders of the ointment-maker [Song 3:6]? Even still (they say): Who is this who steps forward as the surging dawn, beautify as the Moon, shining as the Sun, terrible as an army in battle array [Song 6:9]? Thrice do they wonder, since Mary, just as Christ, is a threefold miracle, of nature, of grace and of glory. Therefore, just as Christ is a great miracle to the Angels, so also Mary; a great miracle, Christ, a great miracle, Mary, the Mother of Christ: A great sign appeared in Heaven [Rv 12:1].

Stanley Gahan discusses St. Lorenzo's Mariology here.