COMMENSAL ISSUE 105


The Newsletter of the Philosophical Discussion Group
Of British Mensa

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Number 105 : February 2001

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ARTICLES
January 2001 : Roger Farnworth

CELESTE AND CELESTINE - PROLOGUE TO ETHICS

Celeste is a guardian angel whose sole task is to guide Celestine into the path of virtue. Celeste is able only to incline Celestine whose free will can never be overruled. Celestine always moves against the gradient. Her early life does not concern us here but can be read in novellas sold under plain covers. Celeste has total knowledge of all Celestine's thoughts and behaviour. On the heavenly internet she also has total knowledge of the thoughts and deceptions of her suitors. Celeste is in the perfect position to advise Celestine on the most appropriate moral rules to follow in order to effect virtuous consequences. Celestine takes a drugs overdose and enters a vegetative state. Her doctor is about to switch off the life support system. What should Celeste do?

Celestine is oblivious to all Celeste's promptings. Because Celeste's sole task in life is to save Celestine from the perdition, which has so far been merited, Celeste decides to over- rule Celestine's free will and to raise Celestine's arm. The doctor sees the arm raised, decides to continue life support and Celestine eventually fully recovers.

Celeste has performed her first moral act. Previously she had only proffered moral rules. For a brief moment she has entered the motivational system of Celestine. She has lived and acted. What has experience added to her knowledge of ethical action? Previously she had only possessed total verbal objective information. The addition is both non-verbal and subjective.

The non-verbal components of moral action are the feeling of the body, the feel of consciousness, and emotions. This is new experience prior to the mental processing that results in such statements of recognition as "I am happy and in love". These sensations feed into and generate an imaginative construction of a situation which moral action resolves. There may or may not be introspective verbal fragments to state motive or intention, but such words would be epiphenomena of a process in which they were not necessary. As the procedure is not a sequence of thoughts it can not be rational or knowledge based. It could not be accessed by the all knowing rational observer in the form of Celeste. There may also be components invisible to actor and observer which may be termed unconscious. Lest it be thought that the imagined situation were akin to behaviour and equally known through description consider the slide projectionist who announces that the next slide is of a cat catching a mouse. If he then finds he has lost the slide the audience will never experience the image however much he describes the scene. Imaginative insights are fundamentally non-verbal. If either such insights are the prelude to and determinants of action or if action is so precipitate as to dispense with prefiguring the situation then all moral action is as non-verbal as the situation that generated it.

It may be said that Celestine's actions are determined by her past rather than her imaginative projection of the future. Memories are recollected in the present, becoming subjective, selected and figured. This version of the past feeds into the imagined situation, weighting its elements with varied importance. When she raised Celestine's arm Celeste's new knowledge was of qualities. She realized that felt qualities orchestrated by the imagination are the necessary precursor of moral action.

The philosophy of identity is as central to ethics as the agent is to moral action. Identity will be approached through Hume's image of the bundle of perceptions. The image will be used to constitute the moral agent. When a moral situation is confronted it is seen as composed of sheaves of current perceptions and memories. The sheaves are bound by the event horizon which is fixed for a moment then shifts. An imaginative loop has been formed. It has no context. Within the loop is the agent's identity. Participants in the moral situation are as much part of the agent's personal world as all other felt percepts. The energies of the loop are it's non-verbal components of feelings and emotions. At one point these sensations become strong enough to provoke conviction and commitment and consequent moral action. Unless the non-verbal imagination is at work there is no moral action. Ethics is an imaginative activity.

The comprehensive embrace of the loop removes the need for an explanation of altruism. Within our personalized version of a moral situation the snapshots of others are integral to its construction. Their situation and options are explored through imagination. Because we inhabit the same imaginative loop we will be for others when compassion arises and for ourselves on other occasions according to the inchoate and natural flow of feeling. When we see a child suffering we do not think we just act. We do not ask whether the maxim of our action can be expressed as a universal law, nor do we ask if our act provides the greatest happiness to the greatest number. Both considerations of consequence beyond the immediate concern and duty are in practice irrelevant. They would only be considered in the very different non-moral task of judging after the event, of reflecting on the real world rather than participating in it.

As a result of her intervention Celeste perceives her actions in clear distinction from Celestine's. She pictures their activities taking place in adjoining rooms. In her room she receives intelligence of Celestine through words on a tape from a telegraphic machine. She then looks up the correct course to chart using a moral almanac. She prints and posts the recommended action through the letter box to the adjoining room. The procedure is concerned only with the production of the practical application of moral rules. She is not herself involved in any moral activities or understanding. A machine could do the job. She is inert but influential as gravity from mass. Celeste now believes that her room is situate between the advocacy of heaven and the moral domain of earth. She is in limbo. The moral law is a permanent vegetative state. It is an epiphenomenon of the moral domain. Itself value-free, value is conferred upon it only by what appears to be assent. However, as the non-verbal cannot read, the moral laws become action only by prompting and propagating their own re-creation as wishes and the intention of action. Now that the rules of reason are seen to have lost their imperative power their strange attractor is the will to power ranging from the gentlest act of kindness to the defiance of the state.

When Celestine recovered she married the doctor whom she believed had saved her life. She then took a degree in philosophy and wrote a dissertation on the need for assent and the vegetative state which she saw as an image of passive acceptance of the moral law. Formerly she had seen her guardian angel as occupying a room adjacent to her own. It was the command headquarters and she had failed to carry out its missions. She now shrank Celeste to a screen within her own room, an enclave within her imaginative loop. The moral guidelines that appeared on the screen were no longer imperative or sacred in origin or requiring belief. The screen text could not transfer to personal text except by non-verbal processing. This involved valuing. This is not the rational process of evaluation but the creation of value through conferring emotion. She had once seen the moral law as operating in an ideal world. She now saw morality as an integral part of uncertainty. Contingent constraints such as fear, illness, depression, exhaustion, power of opposition, powerlessness before the inevitable and the imperative of survival, were the medium in which morality was cultured. It was organic, nourished by feelings, and emotion. It was not the stage direction of a drama but is the imagination of the drama which results in conviction and commitment.

Roger Farnworth



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