Posted by: TimBlack
The problem of 'improvement' - 05/22/06 04:45 PM
I've been thinking recently about some of the new 'virtue theory' problems, which I seem to find with meditation-based philosophies and Eastern tradition.
If you don't know what Virtue Theory is, it's a kind of post-Ayer and Hare theory which rejects the non-Realist claims of Emotivism and Prescriptivism and attempts to resurrect the virtue elements of Platonic and Aristotelean moral theory. The theory, simply put, is that experience of trying to be 'good' makes us more and more 'good'. Now, the problems with this theory come under two main categories:
1) The theory is essentially vacuous - since it places importance not on acts but individuals, it fails to define what constitutes a 'good' action. While this is understandable if we look into Moore's intuitionism (in a nutshell, you can't have a bucket of goodness, or beauty. Moore said that 'you knew it when you saw it', but this is unsatisfactory because people have different intuitions), it means that we need either a consequentialist (ie. Utilitarianism) or deontological (ie. Kant's Categorical Imperatives or Divine Command Theory) basis to virtue theory.
2) This is the one I want to deal with. If you don't KNOW the truth, or what's good, already, how do you know that you're getting closer to it. Imagine you're blindfolded, and left in the middle of the african savannah. You've got to walk to Johannesburg. So you start walking off in a particular direction, but you don't really know where you're going, do you? You might say, "I'm covering ground so I must be going in the right direction", but this is patently untrue. In the same way, if we don't know what we're aiming for in meditation and 'bettering' ourselves, how do we know we're going in the right direction. Surely, we can't claim to be 'improving' unless we know what we're improving towards, and if we know what we're improving towards, surely we're already there?
I know that this has echoes of the criticisms of Richard Rorty's Redescriptivism, so I won't bore you with more chatter.
So, the question is: if you don't know the actual goal, how do you know you're getting there? Are we all marching off to Cairo when we're aiming for Johannesburg?
Discuss
If you don't know what Virtue Theory is, it's a kind of post-Ayer and Hare theory which rejects the non-Realist claims of Emotivism and Prescriptivism and attempts to resurrect the virtue elements of Platonic and Aristotelean moral theory. The theory, simply put, is that experience of trying to be 'good' makes us more and more 'good'. Now, the problems with this theory come under two main categories:
1) The theory is essentially vacuous - since it places importance not on acts but individuals, it fails to define what constitutes a 'good' action. While this is understandable if we look into Moore's intuitionism (in a nutshell, you can't have a bucket of goodness, or beauty. Moore said that 'you knew it when you saw it', but this is unsatisfactory because people have different intuitions), it means that we need either a consequentialist (ie. Utilitarianism) or deontological (ie. Kant's Categorical Imperatives or Divine Command Theory) basis to virtue theory.
2) This is the one I want to deal with. If you don't KNOW the truth, or what's good, already, how do you know that you're getting closer to it. Imagine you're blindfolded, and left in the middle of the african savannah. You've got to walk to Johannesburg. So you start walking off in a particular direction, but you don't really know where you're going, do you? You might say, "I'm covering ground so I must be going in the right direction", but this is patently untrue. In the same way, if we don't know what we're aiming for in meditation and 'bettering' ourselves, how do we know we're going in the right direction. Surely, we can't claim to be 'improving' unless we know what we're improving towards, and if we know what we're improving towards, surely we're already there?
I know that this has echoes of the criticisms of Richard Rorty's Redescriptivism, so I won't bore you with more chatter.
So, the question is: if you don't know the actual goal, how do you know you're getting there? Are we all marching off to Cairo when we're aiming for Johannesburg?
Discuss
