Here is a somewhat corrected version of my reply to Terry. Best, S
I have little place for ethics in such a system as I have. I see ethics as secondary to the willed application of values to the making of decisions. To me the question is what are the ontological values. My pragmatic answer came in the 1970s when a colleague and I taught a group of teenagers the Gospel of Mark (the text of which I had turned into songs) and saw the actual results of this process in events in their lives and those related to them. I concluded that the ontological values can be described by the words tolerance, democracy, helpfulness and that the overarching value in which these rest is non-idolatry. I feel these are a reasonable approximation of the active, accessible realities that - when activated by individual will - create history. Insofar as history is a vale of tears it is because we do not honor these values. Non-idolatry incidentally is the basis of scientific method IMO. "The good" and "justice" are descriptions of the goals of living, but the values I have named can be explicitly willed by the individual. Insofar as they are understood and willed together, they create a somewhat iconoclastic sort who is pragmatic and at the same time actively promoting tolerance, democracy and helpfulness. All of the movers of history on the just and good side have cleaved to these values. Since individuals do possess will and this the freedom to embrace these values, they can be spread by ... identifying them and activated in a process that certainly can include reason but also involves what we call passion or commitment or conscience or even impulse. When I resigned from my fraternity at Williams in 1958 it was the result of a triad 1. My experience of racial unity 2. The resistance of St. Anthony Hall to considering an applicant from Jamaica and 3. My resignation when I was told, If I believed "that", I did not belong there. This helped set off a train of events which led to the removal of fraternities from Williams. Such an event resides in the realm of willed values not ethics. Ethics would be the consideration of what course of action would yield up whatever one designated as the goal of ethics - the good, justice. In other words, ethics is secondary to the exercise of willed values which is essentially impulsive. It is a corrective exercise. *ShortFormContent at Blogger* <http://shortformcontent.blogspot.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
