Michael Flynn, In the Belly of the Whale

 Introduction

Opening Passage: From the Prologue:

All this happened a great long time ago, by which we mean not merely that it was long ago but also that it was great. It was an age of drama and romance, of farce and adventure. Everything was bigger; everything was grander. Heroes were more heroic, lovers more lovely, traitors more treacherous, conflicts more conflicted. There were spaceships bigger than mountains. There were spaceships that were mountains.

People dared greatly, and so, failed greatly. At times, they even achieved greatly. This is the story of one of their achievements. (p. 3)

Summary: In the days of glory of the Audorithadesh Ympriales, four great ships were sent out from earth to colonize the stars -- Red Dwarf, Whale, Indiaman, and Big River. Of these, the vast Whale was built out of a hollowed-out asteroid and kitted with the best that the empire had to offer, a hundred Frames long and fifty Decks high, filled with an entire ecosystem to last for the many generations it would take to make the twelve light-year trip to Tau Ceti. It had two crews. The first is the Blue Crew under the in-captain, whose concern was the maintenance of the internal organization of the ship, so that when it would arrive at Tau Ceti, there would be sufficient numbers and resources for a sustainable colony. The second is the Gold Crew, under the go-captain, whose concern was navigation and propulsion.

Tens of thousands of people within a speeding asteroid-ship make a city, and an artificial city at that. The creation and composition of a society from scratch is a common fantasy, but it always suffers from one obvious flaw: we ourselves are not starting from scratch, but from the societies in which we find ourselves. The great Planners of the Audorithadesh Ympriales who planned out the expedition structured the society of the Whale on the principles they knew, as an idealized version of the society in which they lived, even if adapted for the peculiarities of spaceflight. As an aristocratic empire, they could not but give the internal constitution of the Whale society an aristocratic tinge. The Departments of Blue Crew, like Air, Water, Maintenance, and Eugenics, over time effectively became fiefdoms governed by feudal lords.  The society also has begun developing the pathologies of a feudal society, with aristocratic Commanders living well on the backs of lesser crew, demanding protection money and skimming benefits off of anything they can, while acting on behalf of their own Houses at the expense of the good of the Whale as a whole. For instance, at the beginning of the story, the Commanders of Air and of Water are attempting to unite their Houses by marrying their heirs to each other; as Air and Water are already extremely powerful Departments, unifying them threatens to upset the political balances among the different Houses. This is one line of the story, starting off a series of events that will destabilize the society. The Gold Crew, meanwhile, while its nature forces a greater emphasis on merit and achievement, is distant from everyone else; to the Gold Crew, everyone else is just cargo.

The abuses and isolated nature of the aristocratic Houses has led to an increasing amount of discontent among the rest of the population. The second line of the story is that a Mutiny is brewing, as a conspiracy, the Brotherhood, has begun plotting a coup.

In planning across generations, it is also inevitable that the unforeseen will happen. The story takes place eighty years after the Burnout, when about one-tenth of the ship underwent a series of major malfunctions, killing large numbers of people and resulting in part of the ship being avoided by almost all of the rest of the population.This is part of the solution to a puzzle: a man has turned up dead who is not recognized by any of their systems. This is a third line of the story, as we begin to learn by this that the area of the Burnout is not actually uninhabited; there are at least two societies living in the Whale. Civilization is finally going to be faced with its barbarians.

There is perhaps a fourth line, although it seems to have only limited development. Astrogation (Gold Crew) has discovered anomalies that indicate the possible existence of 'tubes' or 'channels' through space that could lead to shortcuts of a sort across vast regions of space. As the Whale has something like eight centuries to go in its journey, this has potentially important ramifications, although the new discoveries also represent significant unknown dangers.

This is a tale of a society collapsing into bloody revolution and attempting to reform in the face of it. It works very well as such, although I think in many ways it would be improved by greater development. All of the lines of the story are well written and full of fascinating aspects; all of them interact in important ways, so that the book works as a unity; but each line seems to move very quickly. The impression this gives -- which may well be right -- is of a first book of a series of two or three books; things are begun that are not fully followed through. This is not a fatal flaw, by any means; the story works well enough on its own, and I particularly liked the tale of 'Lucky' Lutz interwoven throughout, a story of a Marine having greatness thrust upon her very reluctant and unwilling command capability. But many of the things merely gestured at here fit into the larger literary universe of which it is part (the Spiral Arm series) in such a way that some of the through-lines can be dimly anticipated. This makes a good side-tale for In the Lion's Mouth, which takes place in the successor of the society that the Whale will obviously plant on Tau Ceti, and seeing how the society in In the Lion's Mouth began is also interesting.

Favorite Passage:

"You rely on history. But how reliable are records from back in the Dark Ages?"

Venables wondered if his friend was serious. "We call them 'dark' because we cannot read many of their records, not because the people suddenly became stupid and ignorant. They were written with operating systems that soon became obsolete."

"Really? I had always though it ws because they fought a great war. Two of them."

But Venables tossed his head. "Many scholars believe there was only one 'Great War,' not two. To fight a second one so shortly after the first really would have been 'stupid and ignorant.' They think the tale -- what has survived of it -- was reduplicated. Probably different authors told it. They call them the J-version, for Jurman, and the E-version, for English."

"Those were the Doish and the Anglics in Yurp?" Organson folded his hands on the table and presented Venables with an attentive look.

"The two versions are much the same, as you would expect if they were drawing on a common source. A small country in the middle of Yurp fights the rest of the continent -- and holds them off for four or five years."

"That hardly seems likely," Organson said. (p. 164)

Recommendation: Recommended. I would actually recommend reading this after In the Lion's Mouth, although it mostly stands up quite well on its own.

*****

Michael Flynn, In the Belly of the Whale, Caezik SF & Fantasy (Rockville, MD: 2024).

Sonnet Variations XVII

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 23

As an unperfect actor on the stage,
an incompleteness haunts my play of part;
no balanced shade adorns my semblant rage,
and words delivered lack both life and heart.
I often misremember words to say,
I stumble in the ceremony's rite,
fatigue disables skills that they decay,
and rarely do I hit the note I might.
My stage is life; no flowered eloquence
pours forth the feeling of my human breast;
I stammer thanks in shoddy recompense
and pass from scene to scene, heart unexpress'd.
-- In what script are my lines and actions writ?
I cannot improvise with untaught wit.

Dashed Off XIX

 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

Sonnet Variations XVI

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 22

My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
no matter that my youth is out of date.
My sins are reasons that my eyes behold
a seeming age, that I might expiate,
and know that I must each day give to thee
a contrite, ardent, and devoted heart;
already thou hast given such to me
and to return requires skill and art.
Of weary years we are so wary,
when they are but remembrance to our will
to be not so reluctant or chary
in seeking good or casting off the ill.
-- We treasure more the thing that must be slain,
as youth must be, that youth may live again.

Sonnet Variations XV

 Sonnet Variation: John Donne's "Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?"

Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay
into the crumbling ruin of waste and haste?
As hermit seems to wither by his fast,
his softness somehow lost to yesterday,
my works seem all to ruin in their way
and rust like nails upon the waters cast.
Shall child of God be doomed to loss and waste?
But all these years and days serve but to weigh
The value of the coin received from thee.
Though fools may whine and then complain again,
let such disgrace be far away from me;
in aging days may I my hopes sustain.
-- And later, changed and banked by God's own art,
I'll wear with grace a tried and tested heart.

On 'Expected Moral Value'

 Bruce Blackshaw has an article, Applying Pascal's Wager to Procreation (PDF), that exhibits some of the absurdities that arise from a too-simplistic understanding of Wager-like arguments. Some of this is, perhaps, due to the fact that Blackshaw equivocates between two different kinds of argument -- Pascal's Wager in the proper sense and the Port Royal variant, the latter being distinguished by explicit introduction of hell as a worry. It is also complicated by the fact that Blackshaw makes an assumption that seems to be increasingly common that hell is to be understood as "eternal conscious torment". This is a phrase I've always found peculiar; "eternal conscious torment" as opposed to what? Eternal unconscious torment? Eternal conscious mild annoyance? It is, in any case, contrary to the assumption of Blackshaw and a number of others (Blackshaw particularly singles out Kvanvig as his source), not a part of most of the Christian tradition on the subject, which has focused on poena or punishment, which is a much more wide-ranging term than 'torment', has typically denied that hell necessarily involves torment (e.g., in various doctrines of limbo), has historically been open at least to the possibility that any punishment of hell might admit of respite (e.g., in popular legends according to which the damned have respite-periods -- legends according to which, in C. S. Lewis's phrase, the damned have holidays, and which have never been treated as heretical), and has always recognized that the damned can have darkened intellects to an extent that it's unclear how much of their punishment would have to be 'conscious' in any sense like what we would usually mean by such a term. That hell is not temporary, is not a mere state of unconsciousness, and is not pleasantly rewarding can all be accepted as traditional, but these are three distinct things, not to be jumbled together.

But in any case, Pascal's Wager (and variants, like that of Port Royal) is about the possession of practical reasons for believing in the absence of definite proof, and (at least in Pascal himself) an argument for the practical value of looking for theoretical reasons for believing. Blackshaw, however, wants to extend the equivocation, claiming that a closely analogous form of reasoning "can also be used to calculate the expected moral value of actions." This is simply an error; Blackshaw is, first, leaping from Pascal's Wager (already equivocally conceived) to decision theory in general (not every use of decision theory is particularly like Pascal's Wager), and then assuming that decision theory is the proper formal representation of moral value. As Blackshaw has set up the matter, the decision-theoretical matrices only consider consequences, which means that even at the most generous assessment the ethics being assumed has to be entirely consequentialist. They are applied, however, to a wide variety of people (primarily theists, but Blackshaw correctly recognizes that his argument if valid would also apply to some nontheists -- in fact it would, if correct, apply to anyone who does not have in hand a proof that there is no "eternal conscious torment"), and people are very often not consequentialists. (This contrasts as well with Pascal's Wager, which is applied to agnostics, not theists, and is given in a context in which it is not in fact assumed that consequences are fundamental, only that they are at least one of the things that needs to be considered. Pascal is very much not arguing that the Wager is the best reasoning on the subject, and denies that it is in itself definitive; what it does instead is show that the kind of agnostic with which Pascal is concerned is ignoring practical reasons that at least ought to be considered.) Even many consequentialists, however, do not have a form of consequentialism in which moral value is entirely determined by expected value in the decision-theoretical sense; Blackshaw, basing his claim on comments by Zhao, claims that "many philosophers" have such a theory, but one should be skeptical of such a claim, and I would imagine there are relatively few. In any case, it creates a problem for Blackshaw's argument, in that in trying to move from decision theory to moral theory, he has had to make assumptions that require a highly controvertible, and generally not accepted, moral theory.

Part of the issue is that decision theory does not tell you what you must do, in any sense of 'must' -- you only apply decision theory when you are already assuming that there are several options open. What it tells you is, given a set of goals already in hand and truths already known, how different options fare as strategic paths with respect to those goals. Or in Pascalian terms, it identifies possible loss, possible gain, and what is at stake, given the assumptions about the situation that are being made. But this just tells you how to get what you want out of a wager in an established game; it does not tell you whether you should want that or not. The bridge between the two questions of strategy and of goal is not decision-theoretical at all, but ethical; and the ethics that Blackshaw has to assume in order to make any argument at all is a very narrow one that would be widely regarded as inadequate even to basic moral questions. (I haven't even gotten to 'the Asymmetry', the specific moral thesis that Blackshaw uses to come up with 'expected moral value', which despite Blackshaw's following Mahan in regarding it as "very intuitive" is itself highly controvertible.)

Sonnet Variations XIV

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 17

Who will believe my verse in time to come
will have recognition of high deserts?
Unless you scribe the letters on a tomb
more fair than Taj Mahal in all its parts
so that a thousand years before all eyes
the lines should shine with reflected graces,
to claim eternal fame would be but lies;
few words last before angelic faces.
So all my verse shall move from youth to age,
and one day cease to live on human tongue;
but foolish it would be therefore to rage
when for a little while it is a song.
-- Though all be eaten by that monster, time,
yet meanwhile it is good to have a rhyme.

Sonnet Variations XIII

 Shakespearean Variations: Sonnet 14

Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck;
I have no talent for astronomy,
in observer's skills I have no luck,
nor telescope of stellar quality;
but if you know the stars, then pray do tell
of precession and of the solar wind,
and every planet's path calculate well,
and trace the wonders that such viewers find;
shall not I from such miracles derive
the endless depths of human skill and art,
which in the human mind are grown and thrive,
catching light from skies to which we convert.
-- And I too from this shall prognosticate
that mind shall not be plumbed by any date.

Sonnet Variations XII

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 8

Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?
The music of the spheres themselves is joy;
the planets beat their steady tones most gladly,
and nothing can their metronome annoy.
'Tis true, there can be sorrow in some sounds,
but this is sorrow only of the ear;
the heart will joy in tears, though this confounds
the fools who cannot paradoxes bear.
Souls delight in playing to another;
societies form by such ordering;
lullaby is the speech of the mother;
and all the world exists as it does sing.
-- Then let us sing together, one on one,
for without singing love is known of none.

The Kantian Summum Bonum

 Samuel Kahn has a nice discussion of Kant, On the Philosophical Incoherence of a Duty to Promote the Highest Good (PDF). Kahn is certainly more familiar with the details of the relevant texts than I am, but I am still inclined to think that his argument misses something. In trying to say what this is, I will stay at a fairly general level.

In the Kantian approach to ethics, all ethics is grounded on the necessary moral law, which is a categorical (i.e., unconditional) imperative that reason gives to itself, just by being reason. Since it must be necessary and unconditional, the moral law cannot depend in any way on anything contingent or conditional. This includes human nature and human happiness. Moral law is the standard to which rational beings must hold themselves, even if doing so leads to nothing but misery -- and even if it is literally impossible for a human being to meet that standard. What is more, it is a standard that must be respected in itself, and therefore cannot be correctly upheld unless it is upheld for its own sake, and not for the sake of anything contingent or conditional like happiness.

So far, so good. Human beings, however, are not pure rational spirits; we are animals, and therefore our actions necessarily depend at least to some extent on incentives and pleasures that are united in happiness. Teach an animal that acting will lead to nothing at all but misery, always, at all times, and the animal will stop being motivated to act in that way; indeed, the animal may literally just lay down and die if there is no other option. Our motivations are more complex than this, but as animals we run into the same problem: there is a point beyond which motivation gets very difficult, and a point beyond which it is simply impossible for us.

Given this, one can raise a serious question for Kantian ethics. How are human beings able to live under moral law at all? The latter is unconditional, perfect, and to be done only for its own sake; human action, however, is conditional, imperfect, and done for the sake of happiness. Whether we can conform to moral law does not affect moral law in the slightest, because it is not conditional on our abilities; but whether we can motivate ourselves to do what moral law requires is very obviously conditional on what we take our abilities to be.

We can sharpen this by identifying three motivation problems in particular:

(1) Human action is conditioned by prior causes; perhaps the universe is deterministic and we are determined to violate the moral law.

(2) Human action requires training and development to reach its peak; perhaps life is too short and we will never have enough to time to train and develop in the way following the moral law requires.

(3) Human action is motivated by happiness; perhaps the world is structured in such a way that it is impossible for us to be both moral and happy.

These three in particular are chosen by Kant because they happen to be cases in which Kant's broader philosophical approach gives a peculiar result: Kant doesn't think we have the theoretical resources to determine the solution to these problems. He doesn't think we can either prove or disprove that we have the ability, or the time, or the motivational ground, to live under moral law. Kant's handling of this peculiar situation is famous. Since we cannot prove on theoretical grounds, we must postulate on practical grounds. In particular, since moral law imposes an unconditional requirement to do certain things, and moral law is reason itself giving law to itself, it is always reasonable to assume for practical purposes whatever needs to be assumed in order to be able to motivate ourselves to act as moral law requires. Kant usually calls this something like 'rational faith', but he occasionally refers to it as hope, and I think this is probably the less misleading way to understand it. To try to do something, you don't need proof that it is possible, you just need good reason to hope that it is.

The postulates Kant proposes for the three above motivation problems are Free Will, Immortality, and God, respectively. Again, Kant doesn't think we can prove that any of these three truly exists; but he thinks that moral law requires us to do certain things such that, if we are to motivate ourselves to do what moral law requires, we must hope that at least something like these things truly exist.

The first postulate, Freedom, gets the best discussion in Kant, being in some sense the very foundation of Kant's ethics considered as a human ethics. The second and third postulates involve more tangled issues, and Kant himself seems to struggle sometimes with giving a precise characterization of what he means. Kahn holds that the reasoning Kant uses with respect to the third postulate involves an incoherence, and that this leads Kant to reformulate the problem that the postulate requires.

A world characterized by the non-accidental unity of virtue and happiness is what Kant calls the summum bonum, or highest good of human life. In the summum bonum, we are fully motivated to be fully moral; in the summum bonum we can be both perfectly happy and perfectly good, in such a way that we are happy because we are good and able to follow through on our moral choices because in doing them we are happy. We must aim at this summum bonum because moral law itself requires us to do so. It is important to keep in mind that Kant thinks we can never rightly choose to be moral because it makes us happy; virtue has to be the cause of happiness, not vice versa. The subtle point that takes some work to keep clear here is that we must choose to be moral only for its own sake but that we can do so because we don't have to worry about moral life making us ultimately and irreversably miserable.

Kahn's argument is that Kant does not find a way to navigate this subtlety, and that attempts to improve on Kant's own handling either cannot succeed or can only do so if some key pillar of Kant's philosophy breaks:

But now, without taking a stand on the precise nature of the highest good, the mere fact that it is supposed to include both an agent’s moral perfection, P, and something else, which is not equivalent to P, can be used to note that the content of the highest good exceeds the commands of morality, for the commands of morality end precisely with an agent’s moral perfection. From this it follows that any duty to realize the highest good, or even to promote it, is incoherent.

What I think this misses is that the moral law requires moral perfection, but in so doing it in fact also requires us to do what is necessary for moral perfection. Now, a connection between human happiness and moral perfection as such does not need to exist, because moral perfection is in terms of moral law, which does not depend on human beings in any way at all. But the moral perfection of a human being requires that something with human limitations act consistently in accordinance with the moral law, and this means that human beings need the two to be coordinated.  The moral law requires human beings to act as if human beings can be morally perfect, which requires us to act as if human beings, whose motivation is tied to happiness, can be motivated to be morally perfect. In human moral perfection, virtue (our human disposition to morality) and happiness (our human motivational ground) cannot be at odds.

The case is analogous (and, I think, related) to the case of maxims. The moral law as Kant conceives it requires us to act according to maxims that are consistent with an unconditional standard; but this does not mean that maxims themselves include only unconditional things. In fact, all maxims have aspects that are entirely contingent and conditional; this is why Kant holds that the maxim involves in some sense the 'material' of the action that must be given 'form' by moral law. Rather, conditional things are included in maxims in such a way that our action involving them will conform to an unconditional standard. Likewise, the moral law itself does not involve human happiness; but it requires human agents to act in ways to which human happiness is important. The two are related in that moral law is not affected by human happiness, but moral law makes requirements on maxims, which in human beings are affected by human happiness. 

The postulate of God is the practical assumption that there is a cause that makes the summum bonum possible, so that it is in fact possible for human beings with human motivational conditions to achieve moral perfection. If we didn't hope that there was at least something like this, this would effectively be giving up on our ability actually to achieve moral perfection -- and giving up on your ability to achieve a state required by a standard is always a problem for motivating yourself to follow the standard. This isn't usually a problem, since we would usually just use a different standard; but this is not an option with moral law, which is an unconditional standard. To act as moral law requires us to act, to be as moral law requires us to be, we must keep alive the hope that we can do so.

Sonnet Variations XI

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 7

Lo, in the orient when the gracious light
of dawn brings fiercest joy to opened eye
and rubies and gold are poured upon sight
with treasures fit for highest majesty,
the dew may be fresh on grassy hill,
the crown resting on both youth and great age,
and likewise ripple on lake cold and still,
the new and ancient alike in pilgrimage
of time thus looking on the solar car
and both enriched by dawning of the day.
So too the human soul; old its depths are
and yet its face is infant in a way,
and both look up to sun from dawn to noon,
and both are crowned like a king's precious son.