Is there any logically established ethics that goes beyond (long-term rational [integrate over lifespan], egoist) prudence?
- No
Is there a lot of content to (long-term rational, egoist) prudence?
- Yes
What are two of the biggest not- (to me) immediately obvious consequences of an inductive, social-human-nature informed prudential ethic?
- Virtue / Habit / Patterned behavior (as opposed to one-off actions)
- Reputation
If it makes you feel any better...this is one that the professional philosophers got right in Greece in 500BC. The core of Greek ethics was a rational self-interest, with heavy awareness of man a social animal. Aristotle did a pretty good job handling this one...and then the Christian church spent at least 1600 years trying to find an alternate path.
The entire Indian subcontinent's metaphysics of reincarnation, built off an epistemology of meditation...also plays in the self-interest space...just long-term rational prudence. But with a reincarnation assumption/conclusion, your long-term rational assessment changes.
The Chinese "religions" of Confucianist and Taoist thought occurred in a state of much heavier state/central control. I'd speculate (wildly) that they are also effectively prudential ethics...in a different pre-existing social milieu.
The Abrahamic faiths, when interpreted through theistic philosophers (Feser, etc.), do not sound to be prudential...but if you listen to someone (anyone?) who isn't a professional philosopher...the ethics are effectively prudential ethics, with a loving but vengeful god having threatened semi-infinite after-death consequences.
In short...99+% of the world population accepts a prudential ethics...with opinion differences about post-death results of various actions.
Posts
4 comments:
You might as well call them 'survival' ethics. All major systems being so because of natural selection.
But as similar as they are they are also very different. And that's the interesting part, isn't it?
Spandrell,
They're called egoist or prudence ethics rather than 'survival ethics' because there is still a lot of room to disagree over the details of the goal. Is the goal 'survival' as you say, or 'flourishing/eudaimonia', as the Aristotelians say? Probably some of both with variation based on circumstance.
AFAICT, there's not THAT much disagreement over the consequences of a given metaphysics. Almost all of the ethics disagreement is over what the metaphysics is. IF you start without a supernatural, almost everyone agrees at a 90+% level.
Confucians don't have a supernatural, and they're ethics are the farthest from individual flourishing that I can think of.
Nothing in common with modern individualistic atheism.
1. I misread your comment...the first two times. Resetting...You are correct that confucianism is (a) non-theistic, and (b) AFAIK, mostly a survivalist ethic.
2. I do not suspect that Aristotle would dispute that under confucian conditions, one should act largely confucian...because the confucian conditions were harsher.
3. As such...I think social context matters a lot...and outside of social context, the primary dispute in ethics is a metaphysical dispute over what happens to the "soul". If the soul is material and dies with the body, then material prudence of one sort or another is the obvious answer. If the soul is immaterial...and we can discern something about it's future state...only then do we get non-obviously materialist prudential ethics.
That's the spread of the commonly agreed ethics that don't demand a
Post a Comment