Frances to Michael... Your suggestion is attractive, that "art moralizes nature and nature demoralizes art" and perhaps also for me that "culture moralizes nature and nature demoralizes culture" and perhaps further that "society moralizes nature and nature demoralizes society" which thus goes to tribal and national societies as well as institutional and industrial groups in societies.
If nature demoralizes human cultural acts, then in effect nature renders culture without any ethical basis whatsoever, which is an acceptable conclusion in my opinion. No act in nature is ethically bound, thus any natural act is without morality, and nature will further demoralize any cultural act, and make any extreme cultural act immoral. This premise presumes that an extreme cultural act can be unnatural. The fated purpose of objects in nature is to evolve in the direction of a good end goal by the designed process of dispositional tendencies, but nature does not harm or help objects in this quest, including organisms of life that act for purposes of survival. An act may have value to an organism if the act merely satisfies a need, but this need not entail any ethical condition of morality at all. If for example a normal mature dog passes by a human baby who is drowning in a pond, no ethical or moral blame can be assigned to this dog or its act. On the other hand, if a normal adult human does so then this is inferred to be an immoral act, because it is an unnatural extreme. If the human however is proven a deranged lunatic, then their act of negligence has no more moral significance than any other natural catastrophe that might befall the baby, such as even being attacked and drowned by the dog. Nature thus has demoralized these bad acts. Under the norm of ethics, the leaping range of moral acts in nature and culture is thus either amoral or demoral or immoral. It is my guess that such acts might best be held as a behavioral means to a utile end, which behavior would include some conduct or deed. Only normal human acts in culture can be made unnaturally extreme and so immoral, because nature will demoralize them as bad and thereby "make" them immoral. This inclined "making" is good, because it corrects wrong routes that deviate from disposed traits, which bents are right and best. The bad and wrong acts of humans can furthermore in the unnatural perverted extreme go on to even be wicked and evil. The task now supposedly is to find out how ethic concerns might impact on aesthetic and artistic concerns, such as the psychic concerns of subjective antirealists. Michael wrote... Frances Kelly wrote: > To say that "art moralizes nature and nature demoralizes art" is > to also say that "culture moralizes nature and nature demoralizes > culture" both of which imply that the making of a nation takes > the natural tendency for humans to group together into an > unnatural immoral extreme. In other words, anything based on > nationalism and patriotism and tribalism is naturally wrong and > bad and even evil. "Unnatural immoral extreme"? How in the hell did you make that leap?
