Added better archiving support to the site backup. I already locally mirror all sites I link to, but now I ask Webcite to mirror everything too.
I also replaced all links to LW with Webcite versions because I have now seen multiple pages get edited for the worse. I have no idea if the cool stuff will even still be there in a year.1 I’m also sufficiently disgusted with LW that I don’t want to directly link to them at all. (Not necessarily its regulars though, but mostly the increasing weaksauceness of content and incompetence of mods/admins.)
</petty>
This. This so much.
Finished Feser’s Aquinas. Some additional comments.
Last time I criticized that even if some of the arguments for God go through, they might still not pick out a unique God. Feser actually addresses this problem in a later chapter. He argues that all perfections are identical with another (God’s goodness is God’s power is God’s knowledge etc.), which I tend to agree with, and so that all arguments pick out Pure Act (which I also agree with, assuming their correctness), and so they must uniquely pick out God. Because I’m not convinced that all potency must be unified, I’m still not quite sold on the proofs, but overall I think they work more likely than not, if you accept the premises.
This should now be the point where I say something about, as Feser likes to call it, “Aquinas’ metaphysical commitments”. Unfortunately, Feser doesn’t really argue for them2 or derive them from anything sensible (unlike, say, Leibniz). He mostly insists that if you accept these premises, some cool arguments go through and rationalistic arguments don’t, but he doesn’t give any good reason why I should accept the premises to begin with, how they work in detail or how any of the obvious criticisms on the same meta-level (or higher, natch) don’t just tear them apart. (For example, he does nothing to defend himself against Platonism, the most obvious challenge to his position.)
I checked his blog and other writing, and he doesn’t address this anywhere else either, as far as I can tell. So I’m tempted to move from “this is an introduction, and I’m just trying to get you hooked” to “read Aquinas, ok? I’m not nearly meta enough to understand this myself”. Which, I admit, is kind of a mean thing for me to say, but he’s been saying an awful lot about how the Gnu Atheists are philosophical lightweights, but he hasn’t said anything to impress me either (beyond providing a convenient scholastic<->modern translation guide).
So I’ll just read the advanced literature he recommends and bump up Aquinas on my reading list. (Although my Latin reading will stay mostly theology and poetry for some time, just because that stuff interests me more than metaphysics.)
Another point (though not as problematic) is the typical “what do you mean non-neurotypical?” bias in the section on sensations and mental imagery, e.g.:
The visual perception you have of a cat, for example, is later recalled in the mental image you have of what the cat looked like, and your imagination is also able to produce images of cats you have never seen by rearranging the elements of your mental images of things you have seen.
No, because most of the time, I don’t have mental images, but I still understand the concept of catness. I’ve also directly experienced concepts-as-such and non-conceptual things. This suggests to me that the forced unity of form and matter is either wrong, or requires a bunch of non-obvious epicycles to fix. (I also know enough jhana-heads who’d like to beg to differ about not being able to correctly visualize a 1,000-sided polygon, Feser’s favorite example of mental vagueness.)
I could also bring forth more substantial criticisms of his mental image / conceptual understanding claims, all of which seem at least contentious if not outright wrong to me, but those are much harder to communicate, and metaphysics that can’t even convincingly deal with DMT-space aren’t worth the effort.
Feser only gives a very short overview of objective3 morality grounded in teleology (not that it’s intended as more - I agree with him you should just read MacIntyre etc.), but there’s one4 thing I find really strange. He makes the (reasonable, given the assumptions yadda yadda) case that non-procreative sex is bad based on the obvious teleological argument, but… you know… he’s a Catholic. You know, that church that makes celibacy a requirement for every single ecclesiastical position. He doesn’t even mention this little tidbit5. He does say this on his blog, though:
Those who’ve taken vows of celibacy do so not because sex, love, and marriage are bad, but because although they are very good indeed, there is something even better to which they have been called, and which demands their exclusive devotion.
But that just fails the old problem of demandingness, which says that we are always required at all times to fulfill our highest moral obligations and nothing else. This is normally used against consequentialism to argue something like “assuming that reasonably-effective charity exists, you should give all your resources to charity, leaving nothing to yourself (except when it is instrumentally necessary to do otherwise)”, which strikes many folks as wrong. (It obviously isn’t because that’s just a straightforward implication of consequentialism and an expected feature of all moral theories.)
The issue here is that, assuming we all have the same human nature, all teleological demands apply to all of us in just the same way. So either the Gnostic is right and some people just are PCs and some are NPCs with different moral roles (which Catholics reject), or the need to serve God and only God is universal, making all forms of sex sinful6. In other words, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect or GTFO.
So Feser is either a heretic or advocating sin. I’m not sure what’s worse.
I’ll take a short break from Scholasticism now and go read Wearing the Body of Visions next.
Repent, heathen scum! Neanderthal cometh!
Contrarian politics is the Danbooru of insight porn. No matter how deep you dig into the endless depth, no matter how meta you go and no matter how neat it all becomes, you’ll never find the perfect embodiment of the fractal pattern, the particular that unites all fetishes in itself and synthesizes all contradictions, the one example that is an indisputable 10.
I had a political argument7 with my mother about monarchism and the problem of incompetent monarchs. This time, I think I successfully got her to appreciate how different my framework is, and to get her to stop to pattern-match me as vaguely far-right, by making her understand that it’s not about replacing a broken government that mistreats its people with a more competent one which I happen to think is a monarchy, but about entirely separating the content of government from its structure, about having a completely formalized and unchangeable system of power and so leaving the people utterly apolitical, and so in fact destroying the very idea of politics-as-ideology.
I half-jokingly argued that all evil in the world (at least as far as politics is concerned) traces back to the origin of Protestantism8 and the idea that somehow people do not have a responsibility to fulfill the roles their institutions demand of them, but instead have a personal responsibility to God. That it is not the Church that is good, but the individual, and once you accept this mistaken view, you also end up with the idea that politics has to exist in people and not in institutions, and so all forms of ideology are just ways to immanentize this flawed eschaton, with the extreme ends of anarchism (the idea that each individual already embodies politics and structure is irrelevant) and fascism (the idea that people need to be transformed according to the true ideological content).
This obviously lead to the idea that to fix all this, we’d ideally have a perfectly static, perfectly disconnected power structure, an Eternal Undying Monarch (God, really, if we could drag Him back to Earth, but a God Emperor will do just fine in His stead) with His Own State Church, a system that grabs all political power forever and does in no way demand or expect any ideology of its people, but forbids them from ever becoming politically or religiously active in any form.
Belief is irrelevant, as long as you pray to the Emperor. (The exact opposite of Protestantism, according to which the Church is irrelevant, as long as you believe the right thing.)
Still, this view is, as my mother pointed out, in a sense self-contradictory because anyone proposing this change (who doesn’t happen to already be God Emperor, or a plausible candidate for it) still adopts a specific ideology, and so wishes to enact exactly what one wants to eradicate afterwards. The best one could do to maintain a certain self-consistency is to transform oneself into something compatible with the Correct Order and so shift the incentive-structure ever-so-slightly in the right direction.
The only winning move is not to play.
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Ditto TVTropes, although that site’s already so corrupted I barely recognize it these days. But replaced those links too.↩
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Speaking of unjustified premises, every few months or so I re-think Searle’s Chinese Room and I keep on swinging back and forth between “This guy is nuts! Of course the system as a whole actually understands Chinese!” and “This guy is right! Of course nothing in there has proper intentionality and so can’t understand Chinese!”, and I can’t even quite seem to convince past-me why one position is clearly better than the other, except in so far that I have a pretty good idea what premises and frameworks lead you to what conclusion.
I’ve been doing this for at least 6 years now. I doubt anything short of solving metaphysics or building AGI would really settle this for me. Given that artificial comprehension is still in the “I made fire!” phase of rocket science, I’ll stick to obscure philosophy.↩
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…except when Feser fucks up his “objective morality!” game by smuggling in his personal values, like here:
These goods are ordered in a hierarchy corresponding to the hierarchy of living things (i.e. those with vegetative, sensory, and rational souls respectively).
Substancist!↩
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Well, two. There’s also this fragment:
[…] Aquinas’s view that the intellect is metaphysically prior to the will, in the sense that […] will derives from intellect rather than vice versa.
Which is still wrong, as per Yangming. But it’s obvious that I’d say that, right?
Ok, actually three, as many (meta-)teleological points are non-local and so false (like having God as ultimate purpose, but only being able to know God a posteriori), but I don’t want to be That Guy who always brings back the same few arguments as Philosophical Hammers. At least not in public.↩
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The same applies to the hilarious section on the bodily resurrection. You can feel the man stammer his way through. “Look, I don’t know how this works or why you’d need the original body, or what that even means given all we know about biology and physics, or why your soul needs your guts back even though it’s not gonna use them for anything, or why that doesn’t seem to inconvenience any angels, just shut up, let God worry about it and accept this doctrine, ok?!”↩
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You might try to reply that there’s a difference between “non-optimally virtuous” and “sinful”, but Augustine and pretty much the entire Catholic tradition interprets “evil” as mere “absence of good”, so that difference can’t exist for the orthodox Catholic.
I also still strongly object to Feser’s construction of what the human telos is. All of his (and Aquinas’) goals that fall under “human flourishing” strike me as absurd and incredibly short-sighted. In the words of fellow Nurgelian Jonathan Wojcik, speaking about D&D’s Cancer Mage’s ability to turn into a disease:
You know what? If I could choose one magical ability to have in the real world, this would be it, and I won’t even begin to go into all the horrible, amoral, selfish things I’d do with it. It’s not like I’d have any obligation towards the traditional concepts of right and wrong once I could literally be a disease. I’d just be all, screw you, society, I’m a disease now. Cancer mages are punk as hell.
At least Aquinas got mindfucked out of it when he had his mystic experience. Feser still needs the Gnostic clue-by-four.↩
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This should not be taken as an endorsement of this or that specific (meta-)position, but merely an attempt to get my head out of the reality tunnel of mainstream (European) politics, including one or two common contrarian levels beyond that (most importantly communism and nationalism).↩
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While I mostly blamed Luther in our debate, I’m well-aware that the core ideas of the Protestant attractor trace back much further. I could’ve just as well blamed Marcion, but one should fight one crackpot battle at a time.↩
Your mother's argument is basically that given by reformists and other reactionaries to revolutionaries, so it is not surprising to see it also being given to counterrevolutionaries, or rebooters, or restorationists, or whatever term Formalism end up giving to its seminal organs. Plato also knew of it, but it didn't worry him because he was the Plato:
"Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making our citizens believe in it? "Not in the present generation, he replied; there is no way of accomplishing this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale, and their sons' sons, and posterity after them."
The problem is one present only in the transient, rather than the steady state, and you say that worrying about problems for transients [i.e. solving problems which exist in individuals who are going to die soon and thereby tidy things up anyway] is the fault of the present system. The point is to recognise that, yes, this generation would forever be unassimilable and would require some fun historiography to fit into the narrative but so what? This is surely on the same level as thinking that "we should overthrow democracy with the ballot box" is a mindfuck too far.
No, the real problem with our generation is the steady-state, institution-level problem -- what to *do* with the founding gods who stood with one foot in isegoriac chaos and one in Kallipolis? You don't want to make them *too* compelling or dissidents will take them as a sort of sanctioned example of rebellion [hello 1776] but you probably don't want to make them too vague either, or your system will have dangling threads at the beginning which even a child could use to unravel everything. You don't even have the excuse of a nuclear war wiping out all records about the world before the One State, which works reasonably well in stories.
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I think you miss the most important part of Feser's argument in re the priesthood, namely that it is a *vocation*. God does not extend the specific grace of a vocation to the priesthood to everybody, and if God does not will it of somebody, how can it be good for them to do it? [In fact, this is pretty clearly a Protestant error when you look at it like that -- that of universal priesthood. i guess under such a system, then "be a priest" *would* be part of the human telos. but it isn't, so it isn't.].
This is not the same as the PC/NPC distinction because both laymen and priests are PCs -- it is just that some of us are clerics [duhhh] and some are whatever. Any sense in which the Church denies that priests do not have a "different moral role" to laymen is some specialised one which I do not get, so you'll have to explain better why this confuses you. It's like kings -- obviously God does not call everybody to be a king, and indeed non-kings behaving like kings is sinful. But at the same time, nobody except Christian Anarchists [best anarchists] reverses the cry of the multitude and says "We have no king but Christ!" and thinks they are being orthodox about it. Priests and laymen, kings and subjects, men and women, black and white, wise and foolish, all have the end of loving God, but there is no reason why everybody has to do this in exactly the same way, which is the logical sequel to your argument.
Re: priests.
I don't see how this helps at all. It's not like there just happen to be different roles that need to be fulfilled, but which are all of equal moral worth, and so I can be a butcher and you're a baker, and we are equally virtuous either way.
A priest *rejects* an important human telos by being celibate, so to justify this they have to fulfill an *even higher* telos. But all humans have (allegedly) the same human nature, and it is purely this nature which defines our teloi, so it must be the case that a priest and a non-priest have exactly the same obligations (although they may choose different-but-equivalent ways to fulfill them).
So it can't be the case that some are chosen and some aren't, unless God *changes* a priests fundamental nature. Instead, we should all try to become priests (or monks, if all administrative positions are full). That doesn't mean everyone already is an authority, but that everyone *should try to become one*.
In other words, if you say "I'm going to marry, have children and won't become a priest/monk", you're denying that serving God (in these ways) is better than having a family, which clearly contradicts the justification for celibate priests.
There may be all kinds of instrumental reasons to have celibate priests, but you can't argue procreative sex is a universal human telos and then have humans who knowingly and virtuously reject it. Either they are committing a sin by being celibate, or everyone else is for serving a lower telos.
(Universal celibacy is of course exactly what the early Church taught (including sexless marriages), but it went out of fashion when they became too big.)
>It's not like there just happen to be different roles that need to be fulfilled, but which are all of equal moral worth, and so I can be a butcher and you're a baker, and we are equally virtuous either way.I don't know, isn't that a pretty good description of the world, especially the mediaeval one? There's a very clear and heirarchical distinction, of course, between Those Who Work and Those Who Pray (as well as Those Who Fight), with the strong ruling the weak. But the Christian teaching is that each of these *is* of "equal moral worth", in some sense. Everybody dies and is judged by the same judge under the same laws on the same day in the same place, all stripped naked before the Throne on Doomsday, all rewarded with eternal life in Paradise or punished with eternal damnation in Hell. It's just that different parts of the law apply to different people because people sin in different ways depending on their station in life.
>So it can't be the case that some are chosen and some aren't, unless God *changes* a priests fundamental nature.Isn't that preciely the point of the Sacraments, in this case that of Holy Orders and Matrimony? The bishop anoints you and henceforth you are a priest after the Order of Melchizedek... forever and permanently. You marry somebody [Matrimony, remember, uniquely among Sacraments is bestowed by the wife to the husband and vice versa, not by the priest] and so each of you are now husband and wife... forever and permanently. No sex is supposed to be happening outside of Matrimony anyway -- this is probably an important point although I can't quite work out why.
Kings work similarly, although I don't know if anointing kings even counts as a sacramental -- I still think you should explore that parallel more to work out why you're not equally convinced that the reasoning leads you to believe that everyone should try to be king.
Here's the relevant part of the Summa, btw: http://www.newadvent.org/su
fff, i meant http://www.newadvent.org/summa...
something on the website chokes explorer after a while, so i have taken to writing these responses in notepad, which also leads to fucked up linebreaks and things like the above. sorry about that.
There's a difference between having different roles and working towards a different telos. A king or baker or whatever isn't morally different, they just do a different job. They still have (and should act upon) the telos of eating good food, of being kind, of receiving the sacraments, of reproducing, and so on.
So if it were just about "I'm running the Church and you don't", like with a king, there wouldn't be a problem. But a priest actively ignores an inherent telos. This could only be morally right if they substitute *at least* an equal telos. But in fact the Church teaches that they even substitute a *higher* telos.
This does not apply to a king. A king isn't sacrificing their ability to fuck for the good of the people. The king is still doing plenty of that. But a priest isn't, and so this higher telos must be inherent in human nature, and so it applies to everyone. If being-a-king were a genuine higher purpose, then yes, we should all strive to become kings.
It doesn't matter if some procedure is necessary to unlock this telos first, as you're still meta-obliged to then acquire this change and with it the new telos. I mean, it follows straightforwardly from Aquinas' construction of God as Goodness Itself that everyone is always obliged to *become* God, or at least get as close as possible for a contingent creature.
So I looked up Aquinas himself on the matter:
> As Augustine says (De Bono Conjug. xxii), "the chastity of celibacy is better than the chastity of marriage, one of which Abraham had in use, both of them in habit. For he lived chastely, and he might have been chaste without marrying, but it was not requisite then." Nevertheless if the patriarchs of old had perfection of mind together with wealth and marriage, which is a mark of the greatness of their virtue, this is no reason why any weaker person should presume to have such great virtue that he can attain to perfection though rich and married; as neither does a man unarmed presume to attack his enemy, because Samson slew many foes with the jaw-bone of an ass. For those fathers, had it been seasonable to observe continence and poverty, would have been most careful to observe them.
In other words, modern priests are celibate *because they suck*. Aquinas agrees that everyone should always serve God, but that unfortunately most folks are so full of suck, they couldn't pull this off without getting rid of the distractions of sex and wealth.
A *true* saint would be able to fuck as much as they wanted (respecting marriage etc. of course).
Aquinas also agrees that the contemplative life is strictly better for everyone, and you suck even worse if you aren't (becoming) a saint:
> Objection 1. It would seem that the active life is more excellent than the contemplative. For "that which belongs to better men would seem to be worthier and better," as the Philosopher says (Top. iii, 1). Now the active life belongs to persons of higher rank, namely prelates, who are placed in a position of honor and power; wherefore Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xix, 19) that "in our actions we must not love honor or power in this life." Therefore it would seem that the active life is more excellent than the contemplative. [...]
>
> I answer that, Nothing prevents certain things being more excellent in themselves,
whereas they are surpassed by another in some respect. Accordingly we
must reply that the contemplative life is simply more excellent than the active: and the Philosopher proves this by eight reasons (Ethic. x, 7,8).[...]
>
> Yet in a restricted sense and in a particular case one should prefer the active life on account of the needs of the present life. Thus too the Philosopher says (Topic. iii, 2): "It is better to be wise than to be rich, yet for one who is in need, it is better to be rich . . ."
So basically, God is merciful in offering purification (even if only a limited one) to worthless scum, but everyone really should be devoted entirely to God and everything less than that is just a crutch for NPCs. So by accepting lesser teloi, you're not strictly speaking sinning in so far that you're still acting in accordance with God's will (or the option wouldn't exist), but you *are* meta-sinning by not *being* God's will.
Feser, incidentally, by refusing even the dumbed-down contemplative path of the modern church, admits to living in severe (albeit not mortal) sin. Very lame indeed. Mormons would kick his ass so hard.
That sounds about right. The Church is nothing if not compassionate to the sucky, even to the detriment of the excellent, with the excuse that nobody excellent is at all likely to come along again. Marriage as well as priestly celibacy exists because we suck
I think discouraging thoughts about meta-sin might be part of the Jesus containment strategy.
I don't think "meta-sin" corresponds to anything in orthodox thought -- acting in accordance with God's will is as high as it goes and is difficult enough. CEVving doesn't even come into the picture because, come on, look how gross and sinful and incapable of doing anything good unless God gives you grace to do it you are. be *realistic*!
And making it *obligatory* to game the vocation system breaks my head. Is that even possible? Vocations come explicitly from God -- it's supposed to be a delicate matter tested and worked out during formation as to whether or not you have one and what the nature of it is. How are you supposed to game God, of all people, into unlocking a vocation to the priesthood for you when it takes a hierarchy years to become fairly sure about it when there's a regular non-gamed kind? Only by trying to get privileged access to him, but by then you've torn open the seals that the Church has constructed for your own safety and then you're a Protestant or worse!
Heh. Still, this kind of setup is the default for any bureaucracy. Complex rules that channel most people into useful roles (or at least limit the damage they cause) and provide a minimum challenge any aspiring sociopath trying to get ahead has to overcome (so you only get the competent ones). Because the Catholic game is more metaphysical, I was unsure if playing by the rules is actually what the Church believes, or if it's just the same (useful) sucker's game. I now lean towards the latter.
However, gaming God isn't particular unusual. Molinists do it all the time. You probably wouldn't want to build an institution around that skill, though.
I suspect that "how moral ought I to be" is the ethical question most people most want an answer to.
As far as I know, that question can't be addressed by any current ethical theory. But I don't read much moral philosophy. Your mention of "demandingness" made me go off and read TFWA. Not much there... Is there something else I should read in this general topic area?
I'm actually planning to write about this. Presumably after I am dead.
What, in particular, has led you to lean to the latter? Because it has always seemed to be the former to me, but then if it's a sucker's game and requires some black-shirted, purple-mantled hierarch whispering in your ear and giving you a slim Jesuit pamphlet to relieve you of the delusion, I would say that, wouldn't I?
Having read the wikipedia article on Molinism and having attempted to read the Catholic Encyclopedia article on same [which seemed more interested in explaining why it is not heretical despite saying proddy sounding things about grace], it doesn't leave me with any idea on how I could actually use my free will to game God, even if it is clear that it sets up an extra timeless-information-flow arrow that means it could be done *in principle*. If I follow it right, then all the /scientia media/ existed in the mind of God *before Creation* and so is uncreated. At first, this looks like the sort of thing that timeless theorists should laugh at, but I think the problem is worse than that. God is obviously not simulable by us, but he also doesn't have any [Roko basilisk-style] hooks on which we can pull except those that he tantalisingly and graciously throws into Creation [that is, Christ, his Church and the Holy Spirit] and there is no reason that I can see to believe that these hooks are connected in any *rationally useful* way to the divine and uncreated computations that went into producing the corpus of the scientia media.
Has anybody that you know of actually tried to elucidate any? Because given the nature of the hooks and the very unilateral nature of them, it seems to me they would all reduce to some realisation of "be Christlike", "obey and trust the Church" and "be open to the wisdom of the Spirit". This is all very similar to what the suckers are told, anyway, and so any sophistication would have to involve uh... [fuck, Hofstadter already took "superrational"] praeter-rational game theory. Possibly Aquinas got a primer on PR game theory beamed into his soul during his breakdown, but if so then it seems to be the first rule of PR game theory that you don't talk about PR game theory. Maybe it is what occupies the blessed souls in Heaven?
@0f7cd721f600a9fc064b14c0f7e93882:disqus
Robert M. Price always says how inerrantists tend to assume that any mysterious bible passage will eventually be clarified in the final bible seminary in Heaven. So yeah, maybe they'll also have a game theory class. :)
The idea behind Molinist blackmail is that God first checks what you'd freely do in a certain situation, and if He likes the result, He creates you. But right now you do in fact exist. So whatever it is you're gonna do next, *God approves*.
Molinists typically don't emphasize this (for obvious reasons), and it doesn't generalize (because only you yourself have incommunicable evidence of your own existence - everyone else could be God trolling you with p-zombies), and finally, God might still try to coerce you into certain decisions (by offering rewards, say), but ultimately, given that you exist, anything you do logically determines the content of God's will.
(This is similar to transparent versions of Newcomb's paradox.)
What makes me distrust the Catholics is that I think that the true Church (if such a thing is possible) would not have compromises or "better than nothing" deals. It would be aimed directly at saints and would not be of instrumental, but terminal value. The Catholic church might be useful (I currently think they are), but it doesn't seem to me right now that they are a direct reflection of God's will, even if I agree with their own assumptions.
@Meaningness:disqus
I wonder if the question isn't "How moral should I be?", but "How much should I listen to moralists?". In other words, "morality" is perceived as something like a political domain, something you can be more or less active in.
This is fundamentally already an anti-realist understanding of morality. Morality, as that-what-one-should-do, is by construction that which is most important, regardless of the specific content. That's why the demandingness objection is fake - of *course* you're required to do what is best. The only reason to object to that is by rejecting the hypothetical, i.e. either by assuming that there's no actual morality and I'm just putting arbitrary demands on you, or that my moral theory is incorrect and makes some wrong, or something like that. But if you know what-is-best-and-required, duh, you're better gonna do that. Anything else is just incoherent.
(The demandingness objection sounds to me like this: "What's the shortest path on this graph from A to B?" "This one here." "But that sucks! I want to go that way and still have it be the shortest path!" "...")
I think MacIntyre's sociological account in After Virtue is basically correct about why modern moral theory and popular discourse still uses old moral realist language, but actually deeply assumes and acts as if anti-realism were true.
I think there's also a confusion going on about the *content* of morality, which most people already have a pretty good idea about and are unwilling to change (say, something like secular humanism, or post-1950's biblical fundamentalism), and the meta-ethical theory about *how* and *why* certain things are normative.
The problem is that most debate flows from content to meta, like "I believe everyone has the same human rights. Now what theory could I adopt that would give me universal rights? Ah, deontology!". But by doing so, you're already assuming that you have a morality oracle in your head, and then what's the point of the theory? It's like saying, "I believe these things exist. Now what model of the world could I adopt that would make these things real?".
I'm not quite sure what the moral equivalent of "looking at evidence" is (although I know what Yangming has to say about it, namely that you observe your innate sense of objective morality, but I'm suspicious of any such account because people tend to derive that what their society already believes anyway; ditto God). But regardless, the *theory* has to flow from meta to content, and requires a (sufficiently) solved metaphysics first. Aristotle and Aquinas derive morality directly from teleology, which they get through their ontology. Kant derives it from universal logical truths. There are problems with their specific approaches, but the direction is correct.
If such a theory exists, the answer to "How much should I follow this theory?" would be necessarily "Entirely.", just as the hypothetical physical Theory of Everything is entirely accurate about reality.
I have some reasons to believe that moral realism is correct and such a theory exists, but unpacking (or even just fully understanding it on my side) is gonna take some time. :)
(I wonder if that's a general rule, let's call it Hegel's Law, which says that every theory will expand until it contains a complete solution to metaphysics wrongly derived from questionable first principles.)
Also, if you don't finish your romance novel first, I swear I'll write a really shitty fanfic, claim it's based on a draft you've send me right before your death, but replace the tantric morals with a big final chapter about how the Consensus was right all along. You've been warned.
Molinist blackmail is actually better than that, since in principle you can blackmail God into changing the past (because God knows your necessaries of freedom before She actualizes any states of affairs, while you get to choose right now what your necessaries of freedom are.) Let's say God really wants your worship and you really want to stop genocide. Easy solution! Precommit to (fix the necessary of freedom for) worshipping God iff the Holocaust didn't happen. Then, go read mainstream historians and weirdo Holocaust deniers, following through with your precommitment based on your conclusions. If (as in this toy example) God's utility function consists just of whether you personally worship Her, then you should discover the right-wing cranks are right, have retroactively prevented the Holocaust, and become history's third best person ever (after Jesus and the person who subjunctively prevented the Great Exploding Snake Plague.)
This is just, like, the tip of the iceberg in terms of how fucking weird the consequences of Molinism are, but I suspect no one other than you and Newsome has really thought it through much. This may be in part because folks like Feser are invested in an image of Thomism (not that Molinism is specifically Thomist, but you know, it basically is in the relevant sociological sense) as "common-sensical" even if also subtle and learned. (Chesterton's "eggs are eggs" and all that.) But of course no ontology is going to look anything but fuckin' weird if you've put any effort into making it coherent; and Catholics have been too busy, I think, defending what they see as the embarrassing surface weirdness of the doctrine to even look at the deep weirdness of its game theoretic implications.
(You seem to speak as if there's a core of philosopher-kings in the Church who secretly consider all this stuff, but you might be doing it as a joke. Who knows?)
Re: politics: I think you're chasing a crazy dream. I mean, I know you know you are (so am I), but I don't think the distinction between a politicized and depoliticized society is really something you see in history. As far as I can see every society regardless of its economic or political structure or legitimating ideology features 1) normal political conflict, with ideological correlates, between different fractions of the broad ruling class(es) (bishops and princes, court and landlords, financial and industrial capital, and so on) and 2) exceptional moments of mass political participation. I mean, democracy is pretty obviously an intraelite compact not to kill each other. There's voting and arguing on message boards, and maybe by depoliticization you mean reducing that, but lol who cares. There's stuff like gender politics that are fought over biopower but I don't see how that could not exist (although it may not be "politics" in the sense that you care about.)
Eliezer once said that the good thing about democracy wasn't that the people's will is revealed or whatever, but that if the rulers fuck up bad the people can replace them. This is true but also true for any system. (The reason the Soviets couldn't get prices right wasn't because of any dumb stuff like the calculation problem, but because if they didn't massively "underprice" (from the perspective of the geeks) bread and housing and stuff they got strikes and riots.) If democracy is an intraelite compact not to kill each other, then its distinguishing feature is that the sternest rebuke a politician faces is higher pay as a lobbyist, rather than Mme Guillotine.
Sharia tries to crowdsource depoliticization by saying Okay Jerks Here's a Bunch of Rules And They Explain Everything DON'T CHANGE ANY OF THEM Not One Letter I Mean It and lolololol, look how that turns out. (Ah, but you already mentioned Protestantism...) Alternatively, and obviously, just look at the Catholic Church and ignore the laity entirely... it's ideal-typical totalitarianism with vertical command structures and approved readings lists and uniforms and oaths... and also All Bureaucratic Power Plays And Ideological Contestation All The Time. It's all politics and good hedonic investments like charity and concentration practice and singing in groups.
But idunno. Maybe you see all of this as obvious and that's why we'd need God On Earth for it to work. (But popes never actually exercise the right to be infallible, so what's a bigger budget going to do? They've been running a tidy surplus for years!)
(Also: I still don't know what moral realism being true, at least in the sense that you talk about it, would even *mean.* But perhaps (or perhaps not "perhaps" but definitely because all the cool kids are touting it) I should read After Virtue.)
Also - and sorry for continuing to spam you with all these - the obvious solution to your priestly teloi dilemma (within the crazy Muflax paradigm) is that duh, the original Christians were right and the human telos involves celibacy (it's not the Father, the Son, and the Grandson, people) but the eschaton doesn't appear to be immanetizing soon, and maybe that's a good thing because this project here looks like it might take a long time, so let's go Tolstoy's Grand Inquisitor on these bitches and give them a fake morality suited for maintaining civilization and propping up our project instead of becoming perfect like the Father - it's for the greater good, and anyway there's no such thing as moral luck so it's not like we're harming them.
Ehhh... I don't see how Molinism is so strong that you can recover "whatever I do next, God approves" from it any more than you can *already*. The usual problems of theodicy are still THERE -- everything always *was* happening according to God's plan, and God always *was* using evil, by definition that which God does not approve, to do good. I definitely do not see how you can recover "...and therefore we can prove that sinning in this way so as to produce *that* greater good is optimal, so go thou and sin". I get the idea but I don't see any possible way to apply it, or even if there *is* a winning strategy in Molinist game theory for... well, who is it who wants to increase the amount of sin in the world and make Heaven work harder at producing happy endings while showing a callous disregard for the souls that are damned in the process? [Scripture suggests not]
Look, an Authority:
http://thecenterfortheological...
“MOLINISM DOES NOT PROVIDE AN EXPLANATION as to why God created a world in which it was possible for sin to enter, but IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO DO SO. Molinism is a defense, not a theodicy. A theodicy is an attempt to explain why God ordained the world He did. A defense is much more modest, simply attempting to demonstrate that it is logically consistent to believe that a good and sovereign God can purpose to create a world like ours. Molinism accomplishes this” (Kenneth Keathley, “Salvation and Sovereignty: A Molinist Approach.” Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2010, page 163).
---
Your conception of saints is far too optimistic -- you basically want a Church which works for Jesuses and you only get one of those per Creation. Saints compromise all the time and you only have to look through any hagiography to see this. Even the highest saints are sinful wrecks of human beings; it's the result of living in a fallen world.
I think this is partly why I find the LW idea of precommitments and their liberal use hilariously... what's the word... hubristic? Yeah sure, it works great for agents who are rational ultrasmart fusion-powered vajraminds who would rather explode the universe [which, of course, they can do armed only with MIND BULLETS] than break their code of honour, but humans will both fail to stick to their promise to pay you back for buying them dinner *and* think this is perfectly honourable! (And I don't even want to get into how being able to both inspect *and* tinker with your your necessaries of freedom is even less realistic than being able to inspect and tinker with your utility function [and, of course, it's an insultingly crude caricature to say that Catholic God gets utils only from human worship -- that's just what Protestant Atheist God, and so, a fortiori, Rationalism-cluster gods want]) The truth is shitty, and so "the true x" will be shitty.
If your point is that none of this is, like, useful, then that ship has long since sailed, hasn't it? If you're writing about how a clever 16th century metaphysical hypothesis allows you to subjunctively blackmail subsistent being into changing the past you've proooobably moved beyond beliefs-as-attire to beliefs-as-elaborate-Haloween-costume-projects-you'll-throw-away-before-ever-actually-wearing-them-but-enjoy-stitching-anyway.
@de17b7145e66e6dcfedb894063c6e8b0:disqus
Heh, yeah, I did consider mentioning the Molinist skill of rewriting reality entirely, but its effectiveness depends on your ability to know the mind of God. If you don't quite know what God wants, you can't blackmail Him very well. Without a fully developed theology, a Molinist only knows that their own existence is something God holds dear. If you're wrong, you might end up getting trolled by the Almighty and He's allegedly vindicative as fuck.
And even if you do figure out how to up the stakes, you'll still have to improve your ability to actually precommit and be infinitely stubborn.
The road to heaven is a giant game of Chicken.
(And I don't think anyone besides post-rationalists and a bunch of crazy people really thinks about this, but the church sometimes seems organized *as if* they did. After all, that's just taking the anti-donatist position up one meta-level. If a holy sacrament works even in the hands of a sinful priest due to God's grace, the Timeless Church will get to enact its game theory even with confused theologians thanks to the Trolly Spirit.)
@de17b7145e66e6dcfedb894063c6e8b0:disqus
While Papal Infallibility is *an* example of the kind of absolute, ideology-ending power I mean, I don't think it's a *good* example.
The first time the Pope tried to grab absolute power, it broke the church in two. Then when they used actual infallibility, they settled a dispute that was literally over for nearly two millennia (outside of Protestantism).
It seems to me like they stumbled upon absolute power, were unsure of its potential and found they had wiped out Tokyo by accident, so to speak, and then became extremely cautious about doing this kind of thing ever again. The next time they set it to one of the lowest power settings imaginable (settling a dispute that had no living in-church adherents for many generations).
It seems to me that no organization, religious or otherwise, is currently powerful enough to actually enforce any strong dogma or end doctrinal debates, even if you disregard any long-term stability and just pull a Stalin.
I don't see any way you could get anything close to a formalistic government short of having an actual God Emperor (with the help of a real mandate of heaven, FAI, huge shoulderpads, whatever). This is a minor practical flaw, yes. Some low-growth, farmer-like societies might make it easier (arguably why Catholicism ever worked to begin with), but in a pre-Hansonian era and without some big Singleton, it won't work, sure.
(I'm not particularly committed to that view anyway. I just find it sufficiently alien to think about so I can understand more realistic proposals through its lens. Progressivist dynamics make more sense to me from a vaguely Moldbuggian perspective, even if I don't agree with Moldbug's counter-reformation. (Or maybe I do. Eternal hipster uncertainty!))
However, the reason I have a problem with the Catholic church is not that it is imperfect (anything short of God is), but that it doesn't seem *oriented towards* God, but something halfway.
The ideal Church shouldn't be donatist and pretend all its member are already saints, or only saints need to bother signing up, or something like that, but it should aim at turning everyone *into* saints. At the end of the process, everyone should be Jesus or you're just doing it wrong. But if you, like the Catholics, accept that your administration is so corrupt they need non-Jesus-y crutches to even function, what are you even doing, like seriously?
(The straightforward Gnostic interpretation would be to think of the Catholic church as the exoteric layer of the real Church, meant mostly to make life easier for (existing and upcoming) chosen ones, and then there's a real esoteric Church that doesn't need these childish "historical Jesus" stories and this "morality" nonsense, and can just talk to God Himself about the details.
The equally-straightforward problem with this interpretation is that everyone of course thinks *they* are the chosen ones and you're stuck with Protestantism and everyone-but-us-sucks mystery cults.
The best solution, if you accept something like this interpretation, might be to pull a Tantra and just grab all the guns, bitches and bling for yourself, but teach everyone else to Obey The Hierarchy, i.e. you never explicitly establish an esoteric layer and just depend on the chosen ones to figure out its existence for themselves.
Soteriological darwinism!)
@0f7cd721f600a9fc064b14c0f7e93882:disqus
The blackmail is a bit deeper because you don't just sin in the name of God (which is pretty neat but a bit douche-y), but you logically fix what even constitutes a sin.
Because God is Goodness Itself, nothing He does can be sinful or less-than-optimally-good. But He created you, so your life as a whole must be optimally good (or at least part of the optimal good). (This is just a form of "best possible world" theodicies.)
Craig for example is very explicit about this view and argues that God created the world in which the greatest number of people will eventually freely choose God. I think he's not quite modal-realist and all-the-implications-crazy about this, and that in a more coherent construction of Molinism, *all* existent (non-p-zombie) beings will eventually find God (or whatever the goal of morality is).
But you exist! So now *no matter how you choose*, your life (as a whole) is not mortally sinful. In other words, your will and the will of God are necessarily logically connected, and you control one side of the pair, so *you can steer God's will*. That's pretty neat, I think.
The best possible world necessarily exists (due to God's perfect goodness), so just changing its shape isn't immoral or harmful. (Otherwise there'd be a standard of meta-goodness, an impossible even better world which God failed to make possible, which is just a contradiction.) But you can still (partially) control what this best possible world actually looks like, by bullying (and in a sense changing) God. Punk as fuck.
I completely agree about how weak human precommitment actually is and that the more complex game-theoretic exploits of Molinism (or just game theory in general) are incredibly hard, if not impossible for human minds. But I like that Molinism implies that stubbornness is one of the most important meta-virtues because it can determine the content of the other virtues!
The exoteric Church on Earth is just one part of the Church, though -- the Church Militant. There are not one, but *two* esoteric states of the Church, the Church Penitent and the Church Triumphant. The Church Penitent, in Purgatory, is pretty much exactly what you are saying is missing in the Church -- an ecclesiastic facility that turns anybody who is even *remotely* capable of being a saint into one. Nobody has managed to make it interesting, though, which I agree is a problem for Catholicism.
Molinism is cool, but there's a much more orthodox interpretation than "stubborness" which also sidesteps the "but come on, people are shit" problem. It's just faith [along with hope and charity]. In the Church, specifically. Very likely you and Christ make shitty dancing partners because he's Jesus and you're a cruciform sack of shit who can't play praeterrational game theory weighing him down, but if his Bride can keep Herself from flailing around like an idiot, then beauty can happen. And this, of course, does not even count as bullying; it's just the Power of the Keys.
Right, the Church Triumphant is kinda-but-not-quite the thing I mean when I talk about the Timeless Church (or just capital-C Church). I'm just not convinced that the Catholic church is actually the proper Church Militant, and even if it is, I'd kinda like to join the Church Triumphant directly. Skip middle management and all that.
*shrugs* Who doesn't? The Fall sucks.