Recognizing A Fuller Range of Moral Distinctions (part 1 of 2)

In the course of discussions bearing on -- or even just straying into -- moral matters, you'll often hear people involved in them invoking and using a rather limited range of moral terms and concepts.  It can be ordinary everyday conversations between friends, family or co-workers.  At the other end of the scale, it might be talking heads corralled into boxes to debate each other with sound-bites on the television screen.  It can even be an Ethics class, or some other class straying into that territory

The most commonly used terms and concepts are the permissible, the obligatory, or the prohibited.  There's a host of synonyms available for these.  You can even describe them through terms like: what's allowed, what's required, and what's not allowed.  These are indeed important for moral life, decision-making, and development -- but where, I'd like to argue, a lot of people go wrong in in thinking that these three classifications provide an adequate range for the moral distinctions we need to make.

Rational Limits on Pursuit of Pleasure

I've been researching and writing the follow-up post to my Thanksgiving-time reflections on gratitude -- digging into corners and crannies of texts I've run through previously but hadn't reread recently -- portions of writings of Cicero, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, David Hume, Thomas Aquinas, and Adrian Peperzak.  Rather than attempt to draw all those varied threads into one knot, or at least braid at this time, I've decided today to write instead about one of the several topics I'll be discussing tonight at the first in a new series of philosophy-centered events:  Philosophy Eats.  Tonight, it's Hedonism on the menu, both figuratively -- I'll be giving a talk and then leading a discussion -- and quite literally -- the chef and owner of Global Palate, Jessica Winchell, has assembled an amazingly aphrodisiac set of courses.

One of the matters I mean to bring up -- but not to go into full detail about -- has to do with setting rational limitations on the pursuit of pleasure, as well as one the avoidance of pleasure's contrary or opposite, pain.  There are hedonists, of course, for whom there are no restraints upon pleasure-seeking -- the popular conception associating hedonism with the adage "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die" -- but in point of fact, most hedonists (and certainly those who thought enough about it to leave behind some coherent moral doctrine) don't act according to such an extreme, and likely short-lived, interpretation of that basic idea. 

How to Almost Get Moral Dispositions Right

This week, in two face-to-face installments, supplemented and supported by a variety of handouts, summaries located in our Course Management System, and even two lecture videos from previous Ethics classes (#1 and #2), I've been leading my students through the dully dry, compendiously ennumerational, Victorian-tinged prose of Jeremy Bentham's classic moral treatise Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation -- an exercise in demonstrating to them that a book ought not be judged by its cover, nor even by the style of its author -- that the merit of ideas remains to some degree independent of, unindexed by wordcraft, mode of arrangement, ease enabled or rather interest sustained in the reading.

Bentham is well worth the effort of wading through his preferred means of presentation:  seemingly interminable enumerations and exhaustive examples aiming at every step at making the same point -- Utilitarianism has covered every bet, examined every possible case, encompassed every exception or objection (suggestive of a dialogical panopticon).  Why?  Because the ideas conveyed are sound -- at least if not pushed too far -- and eminently worth thinking through, wrestling with, wrapping one's head around.  And today, they were Bentham's notions of intention, motive, and disposition.