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Breakthrough

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I believe I've made a breakthrough in my development of a personal moral philosophy.


It involves the acknowledgement that one of my favorite essays of William James, the fellow for whom this blog is named, is at best seriously flawed. A crucial piece is missing. Further, I have decided that the best available supplier of that missing piece may be a philosopher who was a contemporary of James, but hardly a friend or pragmatist colleague. The philosopher G.E. Moore.


Well, I suppose we can consider this part of what is implied in the word "Refreshed" in the title of this blog.


In The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, James writes that various "marks and measures of goodness" have been brought forth by philosophers, without any of them giving rise to consensus.


"Thus, to be a mean between two extremes; to be recognized by a special intuitive faculty; to make the agent happy for the moment; to make others as well as him happy in the long run; to add to his perfection or dignity; to harm no one; to follow from reason or flow from universal law; to be in accordance with the will of God; to promote the survival of the human species on this planet, -- are so many tests, each of which has been maintained by somebody" as the test.


A little later, he says that the least bad of these is the production of happiness (he here is conflating without further comment two of the items on his original list), yet in order not to "break down fatally" this test has to be given a certain spin. He spends much of the rest of the essay spinning it the way he regards as best.


I have come to believe that there is no non-trivial sense of the "production of happiness" in which it works as an underlying mark or measure of goodness. There is an underlying mark or measure of goodness, though, and it is one upon which we can build using other Jamesian ideas.


Further, this underlying mark might well be called 'recognition by a special intuitive faculty,' one of the proposed marks James explicitly rejected.


G.E. Moore's moral philosophy involves such intuitive recognition, and I'll continue with this point tomorrow.


Maybe once we clear all this up we'll be able to get back to the trolley problem, which would justify the train tracks at the top of this entry.
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