vol VII: Notes
2019
Notes
Sunday 3 November 2019 - Saturday 9 November 2019
[Notebook: DB 84 Pam's Book]
[page 11]
Sunday 3 November 2019
The social immune system can only work if there is a clear and distinct social DNA to enable clear [differentiation] of friend from foe.
Monday 4 November 2019
[page 11]
Tuesday 5 November 2019
Trying to understand metaethics and somewhat in the fog. What we are trying to do is work out how we should decide how we should behave, on the one hand perfectly obvious with no mystery and on the other, for that very reason, hard to turn into an academic discipline. Some sorts of behaviour, like dancing, fighting, playing music and other definite and well understood skills are easy to learn in the sense that they may need a lot of practice but there is little history, but how to be a metaethicist somewhat escapes me since it assumes an interface between the facts of life and evaluative attitudes, that is what we might think about the facts of life, such as whether goodness is really a fact or a figment of our imagination.
A central problem seems to be that action is driven by desire but
[page 12]it is very difficult to discuss desire logically. I like icecream, you don't, I like hot baths, you don't, and so on. The only two fixed point I can see are desire or potential and the via negativa and the need to prevent the release of destructive potentials like falling off a cliff or starting a war, both matters of subtle detain about which there is not much to say, just to do. We are in the position of people trying to learn surgery from a book instead of just practicing. What we need for meta-ethics is an appreciation of motor skill, not intellectual skills, situations in which a body and a mind act as one, unlike like writing, where my body is simply moving a pen and my mind is hard at work trying to dream up coherent lines for the pen to write.
Wednesday 6 November 2019
The world evaluates what it wants to do without consciousness because the universe is taut with potential, like my unconscious desire to fall into a gravitational potential if I am not supported.
Thursday 7 November 2019
Almodova Pain and Glory. How Should I Live essay finished in principle. Pain and Glory - WikipediaFriday 8 November 2019
The evolutionary / biological approach to ethics and politics is beginning to look quite natural and hopefully will fit in quite naturally to the Rousseau / Rawls essay.
[page 13]
Frustrated, however, because it all seems too easy now after a lifetime of chasing an impossible dream, so off to see an escapist movies until I can dream up a new impossible problem. Maleficient: Mistress of Evil - Wikipedia
Saturday 9 November
Thomas Pogge: John Rawls Thomas Pogge: John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice
page vii: '. . . primary task is to achieve a clear understanding of [rawls's theory of social justice] - to help the reader see it as a whole and to appreciate its attractiveness, integrity, elegance and systematic unity.'
A Theory of Justice (1971) - a single basic idea: 'We citizens of a modern democratic society should design its basic rules with a public criterion of justice that purely prudential representatives of prospective citizens would agree upon behind a veil of ignorance.'
page viii: ' . . . he studied his predecessors—Hobbes, Locke Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Sidgewick and Marx—very carefully and tried to develop their best ideas in his own work.'
pag ix: '. . . one would have taken him for a visiting professor from the countryside, next to his famous and overwhelmingly brilliant colleagues Quine, Goodman, Potnam, Nozik, Dreben and Cavell.'
'What impressed me most in Rawls was the exceptional and moral honesty and thoroughness with which he pursued the development of his theory of justice. . . . Rawls sought out exactly what so many
[page 14]
avoid. Publicly in lectures and in print he tried to connect his moral commandments to one another and with various empirical and methodological commitments.'
page x: 'More admirable than even the resulting moral theory is the relentless commitment to moral reflection.'
' . . . like Rawls. I say little about transitional problems: how the ideal society could be reached from where we are now and what demands justice imposes on the transition.'
justice as fairness
To understand the moves Rawls makes in his complex argument, one must understand the moves he does not make, the objections he is trying to preempt and so on.
page 4: Two questions: 'How is it possible for an institutional order to be just, and for a human life to be worthwhile?'
page 6: Childhood experiences with race and poverty in Baltimore because of grandfather's tuberculosis.
page 8: High Church Episcopal boarding school headed by a monk of the Poughkeepsie based Order of the Holy Cross. Then Princeton 1939.
page 10: Major in philosophy.
page 11; Considered Virginia Theological Seminary to study for priesthood.
[page 15]
page 12: Left army in January 1946.
page 4: 'was prayer possible?' - Holocaust and Gods justice - God could not save millions of Jews from Hitler.
page 25: 'Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics: summarizes post-graduate work. Rawls: Collected Papers
Alpheus Mason: Free Government in the Making: Readings in American Political Thought - important views on political justice.
page 16: 1960-52 Instructor in Princeton philosophy
Fulbright in Oxford: Austin, Ryle, Hart, Berlin, Hampshire, Strawson, Grice and Har. summer with Berlin and Hampshire - Condorcet, Rousseau, Mill, Herzen, Keynes.
Began to think of justifying moral principles by reference to an appropriately formulated deliberative procedure: → original position.
page 17: MIT → Harvard 1962-1971, then on leave till 1995.
page 18: Theory of Justice 1962-1971.
page 19: Thought Vietnam War Unjust, 1967: Problems of War, ius ad bellum, ius in bello
- looking for flaws that led to war: wealth unevenly distributed and could buy political influence. Quite TJ
page 20: [thought 2-S] deferral for rich students [unjust]
page 21: Intense disagreement about Vietnam War continued at Harvard for many years. Completed TJ in 1970.
[page 16]
page 26: 'whether and to what extent human life is redeemable'
Is it possible to imagine a social world in which the collective life of human beings would be worthwhile.
. . .
