Maverick Philosopher

Moral Progress: Our Tantalusian Predicament

If I drive to Santa Fe, the town stays put while I get closer and closer. Moral progress is different. A good part of the moral journey involves the recession of the destination. This morning I discovered that C. S. Lewis had had a similar thought. 

"No man knows how bad he is until he tries very hard to be good." (Mere Christianity, 124)

Allowance made for  a bit of exaggeration, our moral predicament is describable as Tantalusian.  Remember your Greek mythology?

Tantalus (Ancient Greek: Τάνταλος Tántalos), also called Atys, was a Greek mythological figure, most famous for his punishment in Tartarus: for trying to trick the gods into eating his son, he was made to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, with the fruit ever eluding his grasp, and the water always receding before he could take a drink. (Wikipedia)

Something of a stretch, but a tantalizing conceit that I couldn't resist. 

Moral Progress

A large part of moral progress is progress in the realization of how much you need it. So, initially at least, the recession of the goal as you approach it indicates progress toward it.

Moral Failure and Moral Capacity

Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. It follows that  we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as much as we are capable of.  So James 'Whitey' Bulger and I are equal in that we both sin, when we do, only to the limit of our capacity. It is just that his capacity is vastly greater than mine. I am a slacker when it comes to sin.  I have never murdered anyone because he knew too much, dismembered and disposed of the body, enjoyed a fine dinner, and then slept like a baby. Bulger did this to a beautiful young woman, the girlfriend of one of his pals when girl and pal broke up. "You're going to a better place," said the pal to the girl right before Bulger did the deed.

A while back I re-viewed* portions of the 1967 cinematic adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Can I take credit for not being a thief and a murderer when I simply don't have it in me to do such things? Instead I do things so paltry it seems absurd to confess them, the confessing of which is possibly indicative of an ego-enhancing moral scrupulosity, a peccadillo if a sin at all.

On the other hand, the harder you strive for a high standard, the more of a moral wretch you perceive yourself to be.

The moral life is no easy life either morally or intellectually.  That is to say: it is hard to live it and hard to think clearly and truly about it and what it entails.

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*The pedant in me would have you note the difference between review and re-view.

"My Conscience is Clear"

You deceive yourself : you cleared it when you should have borne its burden and bite, the just tax for your wrongdoing.

Know Thyself!

He who knows himself know someone who inevitably in many a particular is not worth knowing. And he who knows this knows something worth knowing and someone who in at least one particular is worth knowing.

Inadequacy and Self Knowledge

I bemoan my faults and limitations, both intellectual and moral, but my bemoaning them shows that I am aware of them, which in turn shows that I possess self-knowledge, which is nothing to bemoan!

Forgive and Forget

Forgetting is the easier and more effective of the options if you can manage it. A wrong forgotten is a wrong unavailable for either forgiving or the opposite. But where is the virtue in a mere mental lapse? To forgive the unforgotten wrong -- now there is the moral challenge, one rarely met, although almost all of us deceive ourselves in this regard.  We try to forgive, and we may succeed for a time, but then, in an unguarded moment, the memory of the offender obtrudes, and suddenly the thought is front and center: That asshole, that worthless piece of crap!  Such thoughts do not evince forgiveness.

What advice do I give myself? Guard the mind! But even the monks in their monasteries, far from the world and its provocations, are not very successful at that.

We aim at ideals the realization of which is beyond the reach of our own efforts.  One might conclude from this that there must be a Source of help beyond the human-all-too-human. For 'ought' implies 'can': what I morally must do, I must be able to do, if not by my own power, then with the assistance of Another. So there must be this Other.

Or one might conclude that because there is no Other to render assistance, we are crazy to torment ourselves with the contemplation of ideals, which, being unattainable by us, cannot count as ideals for us.

The Upside of Moral Failure

It teaches humility.

Guilt and Personal Identity

Can I assuage my feelings of guilt over a long past misdeed by telling myself that I was a different person then?  Not very well.  I was different all right, but not numerically.

One could try to soften strict numerical identity of a person over time by adopting a bundle theory of diachronic personal identity.  (Roughly, a person at a time is a bundle of mental data; a person over time is a bundle of these bundles.)  But even if such a theory were otherwise in the clear it is difficult to square such a theory with what appears to be a non-negotiable datum:  I and no one else did such-and-such 30, 40, 50 years ago; I am the source of that misdeed; I could have, and should have, done otherwise.  We convict ourselves in memory knowing that the one who remembers is strictly the same as the one who did the deed.

The mystery of the self!

Is There Anything Good About Moral Failure?

Moral failure  makes us humble and it casts serious doubt on the proposition that we can appreciably improve ourselves by our own efforts whether individual or collective. Taken to heart, moral failure points us beyond the secular sphere for the help we know we need.  Whether there is anything beyond said sphere, and whether help is available there, are further questions.

When I Recall My Moral Failures . . .

. . . I find it hard to doubt 

a) My strict numerical identity over time.  When I regret what I did, I regret what I did, not what some other person did, and not what some earlier temporal part of me did.  The fact that the passage of time does not lessen my sense of guilt is evidence that I am strictly the same person as the one who did the regrettable deed, and also that I am not a whole of temporal parts, but a substance, an endurant in contemporary jargon, wholly present at every time at which it exists.

b) The freedom of the will in the 'could have done otherwise' sense.  My sense of moral failure entails a sense of moral responsibility for what I have done or left undone.  Now moral responsibility entails freedom of the will. 

c) The absoluteness of moral demands.  

There are arguments against all three points. And there are arguments that neutralize those arguments. The philosophers disagree, and it is a good bet that they always will.  So in the end you must decide which beliefs you will take as guideposts for the living of your life.  My advice is that you won't be far off if you accept the above trio and such of their consequences as you can bring yourself to accept.

The first two, for example, support the immaterial and thus spiritual nature of the self. The third points us to God.

What if you are wrong?  Well, you have lived well!  For example, if you treat your neighbor as if he is not just a bag of chemicals but an immortal soul with a higher origin and and an eternal destiny, then the consequences that accrue for him and you will be life-enhancing in the here and now, even if the underlying belief turns out to be false.

Understand what I am saying. I am not saying that one should believe what one knows to be false because the believing of it is life-enhancing. I am saying that you are entitled to believe, and well-advised to believe, that which is life-enhancing if it is rationally acceptable or doxastically permissible.