"The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well." Elias Canetti
Beyond a very limited point, neither imagination nor sympathy suffice for inhabiting another's perspective, or even sharing their imagination and sentiment.
Morality is as much about the world in which we can live as it is about ourselves.
the service of calm passions to reason
It is an important step in maturity to recognize that your value is not because God needs you but because God loves you.
All of our acts of love are dim, distorted echoes of the divine creative act. Not recognizing the imitation and creativity is a grave failing; not recognizing the dimness and distortion is at least as grave a failing.
Mathematics looks superficially as if it were the realm of clean and clear conceptual analysis, but both history and acquaintance with mathematicians show that this is potentially misleading; all these apparently clear and clean results are the results of (1) generations of mathematicians working on precisely the same kinds of problems; or (2) large cooperative communities of mathematicians arguing intensively over the matter for decades; or (3) mathematicians stumbling accidentally on the solution, often in the middle of trying to do the opposite of what the solution required; or some mix of these. In reality, conceptual analysis in mathematics is difficult and messy, with mathematicians throwing everything they can think of at it, following thousands of possible clues, filtering heaps of possible stipulations. There is no general method or systematic process for it beyond trying and trying again, using every heuristic and analogy that seems even slightly relevant.
disordered hatred of evil (e.g., losing sight of the good)
People will do extraordinarily stupid things to avoid looking stupid, and extraordinarily evil things to avoid looking evil.
We modulate our assessment of goodness and badness of consequences in light of meaning or role in context; this is true of even basic things like pleasure or satisfaction of preferences. (The failure to allow this at a basic level is a reason why utilitarianisms so often get results that people find uncanny, creepy, and unsettling.)
In order to make decisions about what we should do, we fictionalize our lives and selves, as a way to consider the options.
Intellectual fields grow out of lives; mathematics (e.g.) grows out of mathematical life.
the role of plausible fictionalization in inquiry and discovery (the 'what if', the 'Suppose we did this')
reductio ad absurdum as using fiction to prove
The wise affect everything, the good endure always.
The balance of education is in every field both to learn widely but hold to the essential.
Even mathematicians are motivated by the mathematically heroic -- to achieve the height of Gauss or such, even if only for one moment on one small thing. All intellectual fields get their power from striving for a form of heroism, some kind of greatness of deed that puts one at the pinnacle of what it is to be a human being working in that field.
LLMs get their most impressive results because they approximate the human sense of relevance by statistically analyzing vast quantities of its results.
allusion and the feeling of depth
coordinated game pairs (hide/seek; DM / rpg character)
[justice (dike) -> order (eunomia)] -> peace (eirene)
joy : charity :: order : justice
We rely on the expressiveness of music not merely to express but also to compensate for the difficulty of expressing.
When we say that one thing (A) means another (B), we do not mean that B follows from A, even with background information; we mean that A is B for a relevant interpretational purpose, that A can be interpreted as B.
formal and instrumental norms
natural and voluntary norms
spontaneous and artificial norms
omniscient third person narration as an essential part of intellectual inquiry in general (e.g., to coordinate different perspectives or appearances, or to assess mistakes and erorrs)
To learn from inquiry, we must usually narrate it.
When we compare suffering to suffering, we never do so directly outside of philosopher's constructed cases.
We understand suffering and happiness only by telling stories about them.
We do not experience singular pains as bad, but more as resistance or pushback; and we do not experience singular pleasures as good, but more as interesting. Pain and pleasure become appearance of bad and good only as they cease to be singular, momentary, and unexplained.
Once there is a definite thing, there is a definite order for it.
Sympathy, the sense of fairness, and stable all-things-considered preference are all reasons to think something has non-instrumental value.
Maximizing happiness and maximizing utility (causes of /factors contributing to happiness) should not be assumed to be the same.
Harsanyi's aggregation theorem has a problem common to arguments of its general sort: it shows that a conclusion is required by certain assumptions which are taken to be 'reasonable', but fails to involve any recognition that 'reasonable' may be had in different modes, thus providing no effective argument that these are assumptions we need to posit always rather than assumptions we may want to posit sometimes.
The categorical imperative implies that every candidate standard of success in action must be considered from the point of view of the rational person sharing standards with other rational persons in a rational community structured by such standards.
Playing with dolls and pets is part of how children understand parenting and being parented.
God as infinite valuable // God as infinite intelligible
possible relations between one fictional character (A) and another (B)
(1) incorporation (e.g., B is by authorial attribution the same as A)
(2) extension (e.g., B is a different version of A by the same author)
(3) responsive imitation (e.g., B is a version of A by different author)
(4) allusive imitation (e.g., B is different but represents A, e.g., in a parody)
Many things that make us 'feel alive' do so contrastively, by touching lightly on our mortality.
Empathy is not the proper emotional response to horrors.
Pain and pleasure do not aggregate; some (but not all) of the measurements of pain and pleasure do.
Description is a style of speaking, not a metaphysical status.
Being grateful to beneficiaries for accidental benefits increases the chances that similar benefits will be given intentionally; gratitude is an encouragement to beneficence.
The state has no absolute claim on obedience; it has to earn it (although this is sometimes after the fact, on credit -- i.e., the state borrows the obedience with promise that it will turn out to be worthwhile to the lender).
A problem with 'gender' in discussions is that the word is deliberately used to blur sex, social role, and membership in a community; but these do not all work the same way. And because 'gender' blurs these things, it makes it impossible to work out their proper relations.
Anything we say about someone can be said as an insult or as a compliment.
An attitude is a way of relating.
rationality as capacity for at least eventually recognizing the necessary and the obligatory
docilitas as the true epoche
We understand the goodness and badness of pleasure and pain in terms of what they motivate.
Ways to be derivatively intrinsically bad are to be instrumentally bad in an excess that is destructive, or instrumentally good in an excess that is self-defeating.
The goodness and badness of pleasure and pain are in their contribution to a life.
-- All other things being equal, we help those beasts most who can most help us.
-- All other things being equal, we help most those beasts with which we most easily sympathize.
-- All other things being equal, we most help those beasts with which we see ourselves already co-contributing in a worthwhile system.
Faith is a trust in an intelligibility not yet seen, and hope in an improvement not yet had.
Whether or not something is a mere truism depends on context.
considering the various parts of man as though they were various persons (ST 2-2.106.3 ad 1)
The oblique is the path to power.
strands of morality (Dorothy Emmett)
(1) C-strand (Custom) -- "rules of thumb, wisdom of experience, and taboos"
(2) R-strand (Reciprocity) -- "attempts to bring some rationality into customary morality"
(3) G-strand (Generosity) -- "a highly personal kind of behavior, which certainly cannot e prescribed in any set of rules, or be expected as of right"
overflow obligations
(1) 'for all one knows' cases under uncertainty
(2) analogous cases
(3) cases that are preconditions
(4) cases that facilitate primary obligation
What some people call 'empathy' is just weak emotional regulation.
kinds of direct objection
(1) alethic
--- (a) logical
--- (b) probable
(2) epistemic
--- (a) probative
--- (b) common sense
(3) pragmatic
--- (a) deontic
--- (b) prudential
(4) functional
--- (a) irrelevance
--- (b) inadequacy
displausibilization: attacking a position indirectly by refuting things with which it is imaginatively and associatively linked
the casuistries of honor and shame
Obscure and confused ideas are not different kinds of ideas from clear and distinct ideas.
Almost all entrenched political controversies arise from an attempt of everyone to avoid the real point of disagreement.
It is part of the business of the moral philosopher to give what is useful for personal advice and exhortation, because an ethics useful for neighter would obviously be defective.
Moore's argument that Casuistry is part of Ethics is quite good
Moore's Trilemma
(1) Either 'good' denotes (a) a simple and undefinable notion or (b) a compelx and thus definable notion; or (c) an unintelligible or meaningless notion.
(2) As being good is good, (b) gets us the open question argument and, in addition, gives us analyses that are sometimes obviously too complicated to allow equivalence.
(3) As we do in fact understand questions about good, (c) is not sustainable.
The line between pleasure and pain is fuzzy.
Act in such a way as does not rule out sublimity in human life.
-- broadly related to heroism, which is to act in such a way as suggests the possibility of sublimity of character
Having too many jokes begins to spoil all jokes.
A philosophical notebook is an explorer's journal: partial charts, natural-historical studies, reminders for navigation.
Pleasure and pain agree in being means to further life and aids in navigating the world.
We should take seriously and appreciatively goods we cannot maximize, that are received only as gift or that are beyond our ability to guarantee.
Since possible worlds are constructed with propositions, taking propositions to be sets of possible worlds requires either (1) that propositions not have truth values for every possible world or (2) that every proposition is the set of all possible worlds. (Any truth value has to be considered for each proposition, whether true, false, or other.)
knowledge : proposition :: extension : constructed lines
Beneficence often takes advantage of luck.
'Bayesian arguments' as often arguments from fictional conversion testimony
-- as often used, they require that the probability assessments be both subjective and objective
hypotheticals as an instrument for approximating possibilities
presumptive True -> conditionally required Diamond
genius as rationality without logical fetters
We read with other readers, including the author as reader.
skepticism as glass cannon
Every virtue has an aspiring, an achieving, and a consolidating action.
kinds of difference between waking and dreaming: substantiality, efficacy, rationality, comprehensivity, teleology, intersubjectivity