I spent a portion of this last weekend thinking about Epictetus and Epicurus and how they attempted (& succeeded) in engaging their peers and later generations in pondering life, morality, death, reason etc. While they are of no fault, I believe that societies have used the idea of a moral code to provide a checklist of “you ought not do” or “shall nots”. Like so many other things, teaching morality has been taught using negative concepts. As long as you don’t commit any of the acts on the list, then you’re okay. Anything else goes. For true success, a means needs to be readily available in order to choose the best course of action and this requires a positive concept in regard to morality. To teach and practice good moral conduct/values should be a positive way of being and of living a life. A moral code shouldn’t be a heavy weight on one’s shoulders but an affirming, guiding principle that assists in showing the way; it should be like a beacon of light. And one should form a habit of referring to his/her moral code in present tense. I believe to keep in all current and present in one’s mind as in “I am honorable” is in itself a meditative practice of sorts.
Once the concept of moral conduct becomes ingrained it sets forth a pattern of ethical conduct. While there are indeed some ethical and moral concepts common to all people, it may be that still other ways and means of conduct are particular to each individual in each time and place. By careful examination of one’s nature and experiences, one can ultimately recognize and cultivates an ethical goal which suits his needs.
The following quote by Ayn Rand is applies:
Man’s essential characteristic is his rational faculty. Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—his only means of gaining knowledge---
In order to sustain its life, every living species has to follow a certain course of action required by its nature. The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.
Further on she writes:
The virtue of rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action…It means a commitment to the principle that all of one’s convictions, values, goals, desires and actions must be based on, derived from, chosen and validated by a process of thought.
It’s true that one either act on reason or whim. Personally, I’ve done both and do believe that the times I acted on whim and everything turned out okay was a struck of luck on my part. Most of the time the action based on whim took up a lot of valuable time and put me off my planned path. Unfortunately, it sometimes took years to get back to what I believe matters.
One important example of using your own rationale, wisdom or whatever you want to call it concerns medical advice and/or decisions. Logic told me a few years ago that my thyroid was malfunctioning even though my doctor told me everything was fine. It was not. I had a diseased thyroid and it really needed to come out. How did I find this out? By reading medical books and paying attention to what my body was telling me. So although a physician stated one thing, I used my own mind and reason to figure out what was wrong. It went to another doctor who valued my intuitiveness and persistence.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hi Peggy,
ReplyDeleteI tend to agree that most people tend to learn their ethics as sets of discrete rules without any central principle (theoretical or practical) to guide them. While most people do, however, seem to have some reasonably consistent moral intuitions, most aren't particularly versed in expressing them. Many cite religion as the fundamental source of their ethics, but when pressed can't answer why religious codes seem so fundamentally out of step with modern democratic legal systems, nor can they typically address what seem serious ethical contradictions within the instructions of the faiths themselves.
Using rationality as the basis for right conduct, or, as Rand might have it, the valuable work of living, is a compelling choice, but not one without its own problems. Certain societies have determined that genocide is in their rational best interests, yet all but the most dedicated moral relativist claims that such actions are, nevertheless, morally abhorrent. So ultimately, what are we left to appeal to?
As a practical note, by the way, you can set aside blocks of text to quote in your posts by highlighting the text and then clicking the button with the quotation mark on your toolbar when you are composing. Give it a try.
The virtue of rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a profound claim, and might possibly be true if rightly understood, but it is certainly not self-evident. For one thing, people with strikingly different values can claim to be equally "rational," so that what reason discovers is good and true and beautiful may vary greatly... For another, experiences of these very things may change your sense of them, even of your sense of reason (e.g. whether it is a neutral instrument or an interested participant) and of its power. (Montaigne will question the power of reason to reform our natures, insisting that too ambitious a program of self- or other-reform leads to tyrannical reason and cruelty.)
Does becoming more rational imply becoming more aware of the limits of what we do and can know, how judgment is shaped by our particular history with regard to values, and in what ways our actions arise more from our natures or being, rather than from a clear and well-articulated set of reasons?
P.s. The ancients tended to believe in "reason" in part because they thought it apprehended universal values, and that very process changed the person... To discover order and beauty in the cosmos ("rationality" in nature), to discover and work to create justice in society, to discover the pattern of a just and good life, and to bring those principles to one's own life ("rationality in one's 'soul'") -- this was the work reason was meant to achieve in the world and in the development/rational transformation of the human person. In modern times, we have begun to question whether reason can attain to knowledge of these things ...
ReplyDelete