Social Ethics Questions - Genius Papers

Some Historical Origins of the Philosophical discourse on Ethics

The love (philo) of wisdom (sophy) and its attainment through character-building habit (ethikos)

What makes possible the development and organization of a complex society?

The production of a social surplus—shared surplus goods and surplus time for higher order activities together.

What qualities are required to generate and share a social surplus?
A socially creative nature whose productive activity is oriented toward the end of meeting new needs (creativity and community).

In the pre-capitalist period the economy was understood as inherently moral:

Production was collectively done by and for the community:

Social surplus was developed not only for times of need but for perfecting the community as an end in itself—i.e., to maintain social solidarity and give it higher cultural expressions.

Temple institutions were founded originally as storage facilities for accumulating, regulating, and distributing society’s surplus – hence they were already institutions of social

“The Temple serves as an expression of the objective memory and ethical standard for the direction of the economy. Exchange is not to be based on market prices, profits, economic advantage, supply and demand, subjective desires, or marginal utility. Rather, economics is simply a means to maintain the all-important social solidarity that integrates the community for its common efforts and pursuit of happiness. Grace, gift-giving, and hospitality, rather than chrematistics [money making] and money accumulation, are the foundation for economic exchange among citizens in the market.”

McCarthy, “Aristotle on the constitution of Social Justice,” p. 37

With the division of labor these centralized institutions eventually lost sight of their original function and consolidated into the hands of unproductive priests and kings, serving their private ends of luxury consumption and warfare.

The social body of primary producers generating the surplus (peasant village communities made up 80% of population) were forced to pay tribute.

The irrational expenditure of the social surplus on luxury consumption and warfare however led to unstable and contradictory forms of society.

However, as village communities of primary producers developed their productive powers and social solidarity, they recognized their own value and power as creative agents and began to resist the palatial-temple complexes.

In Greece peasant village communities and warrior aristocracies eventually joined to topple monarchies.

The big shift came from the fall of Bronze Age Mycenaean Greece with its society organized around palatial states and monarchical rule

This led to greater freedom in organizing the new Greek city-states (polis) without a monarchy.

Society was made up of two contending classes: the village community of primary producers and the warrior aristocracy.

Solon (c. 638 BC), one of the first democratic founders, helped push Athens toward higher social formations beyond the war of landlord against peasant and toward the growth and cultivation of free labor beyond debt bondage:

As Plutarch later commented about Solon, he reformed society by investing the “crafts with honour” as he “turned the attention of the citizens to arts and crafts.”

The work and the life of the primary producers was then becoming dignified to the point that their role as laborers did not exclude them from the role of governing.

Wisdom of the Good: This improvement in the life, status, skills and productive technologies of laborers meant that there was a growing recognition, from below, of the objective standards of excellence for creating a more just society.

The first appearance of the word Sophos is associated with this technical skill and productive excellence. The word Sophos in Greek originally meant wisdom in terms of practical use.

Homer refers this wisdom to craft know-how, the Sophos of wood-working or the Sophos of the harp or lyre, etc.

This wisdom of objective standards was now recognized as universally available to all who learned the knowledge and practiced the skills necessary.

Sophia as wisdom therefore first emerges, not from increased trade, but rather from innovations in production and its advancement of productive knowledge of those objective standards of excellence for perfectly crafting something:

The ethical term of the “good” (agathos) first came to refer, then, to the excellent fulfillment of a social role or practical function

After the Homeric period, wisdom of what is good in the city-state eventually expanded into wisdom about how to craft well a holistic life, how to become a well-rounded citizen of the polis.

This meant that the expanded sense of wisdom and the Good within the philosophical discourse on ethics came from reflection on how to rationally distribute the social surplus toward more excellently realizing human potentials.

The recognition of the dignity of laborers along with a greater understanding of the objective and universally available rationality for perfecting labor and productive technology as socially useful activities for the common good, led to two broad shifts:

Demythologization of nature:

The more effective the technical skill and technology, and the more knowledge is gained from their rational planning, the more natural causes are known and transparently understood in a rational rather than a magical or mystical way

“Rational” for the Greeks meant something other than our modern sense of instrumental rationality and its subject/object dualism for dominating nature. Rather it meant how to cultivate the inherent potentials in something for their highest form—how to fulfill something’s purpose.

this enabled the primary producers, equipped with this rational knowledge, to see themselves as active agents with rational causal powers rather than subordinates to magic rituals, mythical deities, or blind fate.

This led to greater reflection, from the common people below, on what it meant to be a free person in terms of collective and individual self-determination: hence the robust Greek concept of freedom based on the newfound experience of peasant liberation.

Democratizing of culture:

This demythologizing consciousness gave rise to a recognition that the rational development of a democratic society objectively required cultivating the rational excellence of all citizens, not just the aristocratic elite at the top.

Just as the objective standards of excellence within a craft skill were universally available to all, it was now recognized that so too were the objective standards of excellence for crafting the good life together.

Culture as the means by which to cultivate human excellence then was no longer the exclusive domain of the wealthy, but became guided by a universal end of egalitarianism and its higher wisdom of social organization:

“technical and economic developments [led to] … the restructuring of social life in its entirety to make it accord with communal and egalitarian aspirations.” (Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought p. 74)

Ethics in Greece began as a discourse reflecting on those objective standards of excellence and their necessary conditions—e.g. rational distribution of surplus for free education/culture—for creating a society of mutual self-realization:

It was realized that a democracy required the cultivation of language and reasoning skills in order for everyone to equally deliberate together in a non-manipulative way (rule by rational appeal to a common good rather than by the sheer force of the strongest, might-makes-right)

Ethics began as the realization that there are objective standards of excellence for becoming a free-person—for cultivating agency.

The word ethics itself—ethikos—refers to practices or habits for educating and cultivating a desire for universal truth and justice—the common good that unites all.

It was the educational practice of building up rational powers and social virtues of solidarity around a common good in which all equally share, in order to keep arbitrary private interests and authoritarian power from ruling over all.

Sophistry: With the rise of a new emerging middle class of merchants and new money, there arose an ethos of individualistic commercialism which pushed market relations as an end in itself (rather than the market as a means to serving society as a whole)

In Athens especially, this led to increasingly antagonistic forms of individualism and inequality which increasingly lost sight of any common good.

This divisive context was exploited by the rise of private for-profit schools of rhetoricians called Sophists.

The Sophists were a movement of private teachers that met society’s collective demand for cultural training by teaching students enough knowledge of various subjects and political skills to give them the appearance of mastery and wisdom.

They denied universal truth and justice and reduced the common good of humanity to a matter of mere conventions relative to the majority rule or market values of any particular place—everything could be bought.

Their often-unexamined presuppositions about what it means to be human:

Everything is a matter only of appearances, and the facts of appearances differ according to every individual perspective

since facts are merely how they happen to appear to this or that individual, their meaning is relative, with no possibility for a true or false judgment of the appearances

There is no shared rational standard but only differing conventions of rhetoric for how to assert one’s perspective and individual preferences

There is no shared human nature oriented to a common good:

Human nature is pre-moral and pre-social: the notions of “humanity” and “human society” indicate nothing other than an aggregate of self-seeking individuals

This means prior to social relations there is supposedly a pure individual, like a freely floating atom: but has such an individual human ever existed?

With no common nature, reason, or good, each individual can only choose between differing conventions for purely arbitrary reasons that cannot be objectively justified.

This means there is no way to determine whether something is more or less true to realizing our normative form of human nature: no possible critique of oppressive dehumanization.

From this view, then, ethics can only appear as an imposition of arbitrary rules

The object of the Sophists schooling was to teach rhetorical persuasion to individuals, teaching techniques for manipulating whatever the prevailing conventions happen to be in order to win debates and gain political power over the masses.

Instead of learning how to reason substantively about the universal interest of the common good, students learned to mask private interests in ethically-sounding rhetoric:

they trained for how to be an effective/impressive speaker rather than a good reasoner.

Because courses were taught for a hefty sum of money, the appearance of wisdom/excellence and its political power of persuasion was now available only to the wealthiest members of society.

This meant democracy was sliding into an oligarchy since it was the few individuals at the top who had the most money and time to polish their skills for manipulating the masses.

Philosophy arose, after Socrates, as largely an effort to challenge sophistry and rationally recall the objective standards of excellence by which humanity could universally flourish.

With Socrates, Plato, and then Aristotle, they sought to offer free education in every discipline, with emphasis on learning how to reason about a universally shared common good that challenges the arbitrary oligarchies of the marketplace.

Against the commercialism and rhetoric, they sought universal wisdom as knowledge of the whole, inquiring about the common good that underlies or unites all human activities.

Socrates (c. 469 BC): against sophistry he continually argued that just as each craft has objective standards of excellence for fulfilling its specific activity, there must be an ultimate standard of excellence for socially coordinating these activities toward a good society:

“if you want to have a man taught cobbling or building or smithing or riding, you know where to send him to learn the craft: some indeed declare that if you want to train up a horse or an ox in the way he should go, teachers abound. And yet, strangely enough, if you want to learn Justice yourself, or to have your son or servant taught it, you know not where to go for a teacher.”

Quoted in Xenophon, Memoribilia, (IV, 4.5)

Socrates was famous for highlighting the difference between good and bad relativism – the awareness of relativism is only the beginning of the human quest to unite our diverse perspectives into a greater whole of integrated complexity.

To claim relativism is to already imply things differ in relation to (all things are relative to) something more: to claim all things are relative to private subjective perspectives is to already contradict this point of view, since one would need a sense of things and other perspectives beyond their own private perspective to make such a claim:

Thus, to claim there is absolute relativism without a greater whole is to utter a self-contradiction:

if all viewpoints are absolutely different and unrelatable then they all become equally absolute in themselves with no reason to dialogue.

If one were totally absorbed in one’s own private perspective, they wouldn’t even know this much.

Moreover, if such relative viewpoints become absolute in themselves that means they no longer differ according to their varying relations to a greater whole since there is no greater whole, but rather absolute nothingness.

but if all positions are equally positioned over nothingness, then none are more true or false than any other

thus, all differing positions would collapse into the opposite of relativism: absolute sameness with no relative differences or diversity.

Rather to claim that viewpoints are relative, is to presuppose that they are relative to something more, which means it implies that all viewpoints are a part of a greater whole:

thus, the recognition of relativism—if it is not to be self-contradictory—is at the same time a consciousness that there is more to reality beyond our limited viewpoints: we understand ourselves as relational participants in a larger process which can only be known through cooperative dialogue.

Historically, such unreflective contradictory relativism has typically been the viewpoint of middle- and upper-class privilege: living in a bubble of private wealth and consumerism habituates people to think that there is no greater whole, no social dependencies, no cooperative qualities, no common good, but rather reality is like a meaningless marketplace in which we are all just private consumers out to get our own.

The schools of Plato and Aristotle, following Socrates, continued ethics as a matter of freely educating about the objective nature of those universal principles of justice, goodness and truth guiding the political organization of an increasingly diversified society toward a greater whole.

They were some of the first to point out the contradictions to democracy when it rejects reasoning about the common good and instead pursues only individualistic commercialism and its schools of sophistry:

A key feature of Aristotle’s thought is in recalling that the economy is naturally a social activity oriented to the ethical aims human self-realization, serving the objective ends of creating a society of mutual flourishing.

He was one of the first to critically recognize that once this relationship is reversed and society is bent to serve the market and private profit, democratic society inevitably regresses into an oligarchy.

On Aristotle’s terms the sophist’s notion of the human is an abstraction not true to reality. He begins instead with the notion of human nature as inherently social and uniquely purposeful

he then elaborates what it is that makes us distinctively human animals (do we have distinctive needs and capacities beyond base biology?) and enquires about the objective conditions necessary by which to realize our highest form.

Discourse on ethics then began, not as a private affair simply about individual character or merely about rule following and obeying the law, but as a public dialogue about the common good and social justice required for realizing humanity’s distinctive qualities in a society of mutual flourishing.