not quite sure if i follow your referral to the 'cartesian ego'. perhaps you'd care to explain what you mean in a more detailed manner
Sure. What I meant, specifically up above, was that it parallels the kind of thought that has been repeated consistently since Descartes: "I do not know what is out there that might be causing what is within me but I know what is within me." Thus, "i wish you to be punished for these acts. i will support those that would give this punishment as far as it seems reasonable to me. … but for all this i cannot say and believe that you are evil."
If calling that Cartesian is unhelpful, I can call it an ego, as long as we don’t start thinking it’s Freudian.
The description of why we punish, as a satisfaction of our essentially a-rational feelings, really makes all the difference in the world, though, in terms of when punishment takes place. If those urges are not susceptible to any standard external to those same urges, then the best we can do is try to live with them. Do not supress them, because they might grow to be something less desireable, but if you can avoid them, then certainly do not create them.
To claim an external standard is not to claim that the external standard is immediate, so it is true, as you say, that a religious person can never be apodictically certain that she is carrying out God's will. It isn’t quite true, however, that for Platonic Christians like Augustine, though, that it isn’t God but only the individual who does good when good is done. That’s a little convoluted. What I mean is that for Christians who deal in the logic of participation of God, the individual only does good insofar as his will and God’s are in harmony. The distinction between the two is only very clear when the individual does not do what is good. This is relevant outside the theistic context if one were to concede some kind of reality to moral ideals, which might be the cause of human moral feelings rather than the after-the-fact irrational justifications for those feelings. If those ideals precede the moral feelings, or even the moral judgments we impose on ourselves individually ("I shall not murder"), then the question becomes the degree of separation between the ideal and its effect. There are basically three options.
1. The ideal is identical with its effect. In other words, we are deceiving ourselves that one causes the other and may as well speak of only the effects.
2. The ideal really does cause the effect, but we can tell with apodictic certainty what the ideal is by its effect. I.e., "I have an urge to punish you for killing my brother, therefore it is right to do so." Or, with more sophistication, "the law of reciprocity which I have reasoned out beforehand dictates that it is right to punish you for killing my brother, and therefore it is right to do so."
3. The ideal causes the effect (and therefore is different from it), but we see the ideal through the cause, so to speak, "through a glass darkly." |
