edicts as crutches for weakness of virtue, punishments as crutches for weakness of rites
"When the Way prevails in the world, show yourself; when it does not, hide yourself." Analects 8.13
Taiping Christianity used Huang Shangdi, Shenye (God-Father), and Tianfu (Heavenly Father) as names for God.
Christian faith is the Word in man.
In being personal we are necessarily co-personal; in being co-personal, we are necessarily personate; in being personate, we are necessarily co-personate. Likewise, in being co-personal, we are necessarily personalizing; in being personalizing, we are necessarily co-personalizing.
junzi as phronimos
signs --> rites --> institutions --> institutional systems
prudence as the source of rites
rites as expressions of persons involving feedback
contractual guarantees
(1) external: enforcement
(2) internal: trustworthy purpose
(3) divine: e.g., oath, cuts across external-internal divide
All events are constituted by actions and passions of things.
the Church as the workshop of grace
Piacular apologies are quite common -- 'sorry' in English is more often used for piacular than for culpable cases.
forum as midway between space for grex and space for group
the illocutionary and perlocutionary forces of a gift
Like a parent with a child, God graces us with merit He deems fit to reward.
"Above deliberation we are moved toward some object, which surpasses our powers. Thus, in the natural order, under special inspiration of God, the authorof nature, great geniuses in the philosophic, poetic, or strategic sphere, as well as great heroes are moved." Garrigou-Lagrange
St. Leo takes it to be a central component of our redemption that it was obtained by rational justice rather than brute force.
grace for our actions, grace in our actions, grace through our actions
Our fundamental moral obligations carry no time limits.
(1) Actions reduce possibilities.
(2) Incomplete actions reduce possibilities stagewise and directionally.
(3) Different kind and mode of action, different possibilities reduced.
life as that which pre-selects ends for its actions and for the actions of other things
Artifactual functions do not erase natural functions but subordinate them.
Human dominion is the power to subordinate natural ends to our own, and the mental make-up to approach the world in a way facilitating this.
The Spirit presupposes the Father insofar as He proceeds from the Father as principle and the Son insofar as He reposes in the Son as the Son has being from the Father.
Palamas (Homologia) connects the relics of the saints to Holy Saturday.
(1) Some of our beliefs are co-believings with others.
(2) A group of people sharing such co-believing may be said to have the belief as a group.
(3) Thus group belief is distinct from any joint commitments to believe it.
(4) These co-believings do not have to be identical repetitions of belief -- they may differ in specificity or in focus and there may be defective (deviant) cases.
Arguments from evil tend to be constructed from ad hoc ethics.
Development of doctrine is cumulative; it could hardly be otherwise if there is truth in the teaching.
Newman's notes of development as specifications of the Note of Unity
--> although perhaps assimilation and chronic vigor should be associated with Catholicity?
Development of doctrine is not development of faith, but the expression of one faith in and through many situations.
Development of doctrine, as opposed to degradation, requires not merely logic but also filial piety.
resting assent vs operative assent
Beliefs do not represent how things are in the world; what is believe represents such things.
"Recognized deontologies are what makes human society possible." Searle
"The deontology of private property, marriage, and authority is a natural extension of prelinguistic forms of social life, once you have a language rich enough to create a deontology."
'X counts as Y in C' is something we find throughout animal nature: this is counted as food source under these conditions, that is counted as territory under those conditions, these count as cubs under that condition. Here, as elsewhere, humans differ by abstraction, deliberation, and design, not just individual but especially cooperative.
The most antisocial human being is in a sense more social than the most social beast; language, custom, fashion, consideration of the perspectives of others, in short being with others even when alone, is our natural mode of life.
Status functions pre-exist their collective acceptance; or, at least, there is a presumptive status function prior to any such acceptance.
It seems clear that some status functions just develop out of human interactions, not by declarations. Searle tries to get around this by saying that a 'set of representations can add up to' a declaration, but it's just odd to say you can have declarations without any declarings. What is more, in some such cases, we aren't representing the world as being a certain way, because our representations might not be unified, and the fact that, say, someone is leader may pre-exist anyone representing them *as* leader. You, Bob, and I might represent Joe's role in society differently, and not even in agreement as to his role, and may only later start representing this already existing complexity in a unified way.
"All institutional facts are status functions and all status functions carry deontic powers, and deontic powers provide desire-independent reasons for action." Searle
Many of the status functions of langauge are created through language -- we divide words as we do, and sentence as we do, because of grammar, which is language about language within a language.
liberal arts as sources of status functions
Human beings live by activating classifications and the world adapts to our actions in activating them.
Institutions may or may not be regularities in behavior and may or may not be agreed to by all members of a society. We see this in the cases of residuated institutions, erratically changing institutions, and controversial innovations. Universally agreed-to regularities of behavior do tend to become institutions, however.
Equilibria accounts of social institutions presuppose social institutions; otherwise we can't get the matrices, payoffs, and costs. Thus they are better for lookinga t stability and instability of such institutions than at accounting for them.
Regulative rules presuppose classifications and tehrefore in a sense presuppose constitutive rules for these classifications; but classifications are in a sense both constitutive and regulative.
Guala and Hindriks's rule-based account of institutions runs into the problem that our rules are in many cases just not that specified; it's an analogous problem to Searle's declarations that have never been declared, in that it assumes that a very aware and deliberate set of choices are the paradigmatic causes of institutions, and the unaware and nondeliberate cases are just primitive versions of those. We can have institutions whose rules are in dispute or flux, or not considered by those involved, or could be different in different populations.
Searle tends to conflate status and status functions.
There are clearly share dattitudes for and against things that fall short of norms; they are common in aesthetics.
values as
(1) features of things
(2) taken as objects
(3) insof ar as they are related to desire/aiming-at
(4) and as such taken as objects
(5) that may themselves be related to desire/aiming-at
Values, as values, may exemplify other values.
It is necessary that there are contingent truths --> It is necessary that there are causal powers
religio to Crhist, filial piety to the holy Virgin, observantia to the saints
the moral debt incurred by the gift of the sacraments
In every culture, builders and artisans tend to develop standard proportions to facilitate making.
ritual bloodletting & kingship among the Maya
the fiduciary obligations of the Church with respect to the treasury of merit
charity-informed chastity as 'school of the gift of the person' and 'promise of immortality'
Like investments, almsgivings need to be diversified in kind to do the most consistent good.
empires as state networks, different kinds of centrality in those networks
The good act is that which is to an object inasmuch as it conforms to reason.
divine remote objective presence in intellect
Guala's rules-in-equilibrium theory of institutions is hopelessly equivocal about what rules actually are.
Smit et al. err by not grapsing that incentives are often social statuses and always have an 'X counts as Y in C' structure.
-- They also err in not recognizing that one can have inappropriate incentives, conflicting incentives, and nonuniform incentives -- like incentives to vandalize, incentives both to do and not to do something, and incetnvies to cross the border and also not cross the bordere. They are right, however that incentivization is a way of creating social entities.
-- note that they have to retreat to prima facie, for-the-most-part incentives.
-- The big gap is that they don't really consider how people know *what* is incentivized.
money in the real world vs money in accounting-world
God communicates goodness to creatures, but the excellence of his goodness is beyond all creaturely capacity.
Beauty is being on which the mind can dwell restfully.
It is inconsistent with our conception of beauty to say that each mind perceives a different beauty; beauty is something that can be shared with others.
Human beings treat almost everything like either a person or an artifact or a manipulable resource.
collective action: cooperation of individuals in pursuing unfied effect
joint-action: coordination of indivdiuals in light of shared goals
team reasoning: collaboration of individuals in practical deliberation about collective action
group agency: action of group as group such that the group-level description of the action is not reducible to the individual-level description
