wordfailure

Hello Philechat,

Doesn't pragmatism still require ideals? This seems to be one of the things the Christians may have right, at least functionally. In purely descriptive terms, we generally act in our own best interests at least to some degree, at some cost to others. For example, we're often forced to make some practical choices in regard to feeding our families, keeping employees employed, or other responsibilities. Perhaps it can't be otherwise. But without some idealized moral or ethical guidelines don't we lose any means for evaluating and balancing actions? Seems to me that otherwise we fall into self-indulgent justifications, such as "life is hard", "everyone does it", and "survival of the fittest". Don't we also face a necessity to consider who's interests are to be practically addressed, and relative values of particular interests? Observationally it seems that pragmatism is a fact of life. I'm just wondering if it gets us off the hook anywhere ethically speaking. This is by no means intended as criticism-- just thinking around this. Perhaps here, as well as in science, art, history, and most everywhere else, ideals serve serve as endpoints on a graph to plot our behavioral X's on?

ex-xian

I'll repond more in depth later. Try to find "After Virtue." Most college libraries should have a copy.

philechat

Yes, and there is where "virtue" comes in--I maintain that ideals are strictly subjective, however, and I hold that what people believe to be "virtuous" would be different according to their temperament and experience. We all work toward our "goal" pragmatically, whereas our goals are subjective. Every decision must impact positively and negatively other people, and therefore we assign values to each effect we would make with our decisions (par example, increasing piety would not be important to me, and the goals of the religious people would be negatively affected if I make decisions against religious sensibilities).

wordfailure

This originally caught my eye because It seems that perhaps there ought be more realistic assessment of ones own actions as regards ideal versus actual behavior. But then many of us, I think, have a tendency to adjust our standards to match our behavior. Anyway, your comment originally struck me as something like "Try to be a virtuous person, but do what you must do." The language, specifically "I like..." and "believe in..." left me wondering if you were saying that virtue ethics and pragmatism most accurately reflect reality or
that you are most comfortable with them.


I agree that ideals are subjective, but don't think they are arbitrary. They reflect the impact and effects of culture on individual brains, (culture and brains both being of objective nature.) In other words, they are effects of objective causes.

But I didn't intend to make a big fuss over a casual remark. Please feel free to let this slide if you wish. I'm just trying to get a little better focus on my own inquirey.