{"id":2658,"date":"2013-01-27T11:30:08","date_gmt":"2013-01-27T16:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/?p=2658"},"modified":"2013-01-27T11:30:08","modified_gmt":"2013-01-27T16:30:08","slug":"charity-and-oops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/2013\/01\/27\/charity-and-oops\/","title":{"rendered":"Charity and OOPs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Given an Object Oriented Ontology<\/a> ethics can present a problem.*<\/a>\u00a0 It is not obvious how to fit ethics into an object oriented view: even if objects have ethical properties, ethics itself has to be considered just as arbitrary as any other property.\u00a0 One could, of course, hold some Deontological, Consequentialist or other ethical viewpoint, but this position would have to be justified on other grounds, since O.O.O. is silent on the matter.\u00a0 Hence having ethics as an ad hoc ontological addition is a problem because it shows that Object Oriented Philosophy is inherently lacking an important part of human experience.<\/p>\n

To achieve a more comprehensive viewpoint, while still being object oriented, a different ethical strategy must be taken.<\/p>\n

Consider that the objects of our reality are both overdetermined and underdetermined (overmined\/ undermined in Harman-y terms<\/a>).\u00a0 This means that no matter how we think about our reality, there are multiple underlying phenomena and multiple overarching phenomena that can be understood to govern every part of our world.\u00a0 Often this is used to develop an argument supporting O.O.O.<\/a>, but I want to develop a different consequence.<\/p>\n

By permanently securing multiple fundamental reasons for every phenomenon, no single reason has ultimate sway.\u00a0 We must, in principle, be ontologically humble.<\/p>\n

This means that however much we learn about ourselves, there will always be more, multiple explanations, theories, and phenomena; we are forever interesting to ourselves.<\/p>\n

To live with the expanding enormity of human experience, while never being able to fully come to terms with it, then we must forever re-explain and rediscover those unknown parts of ourselves.\u00a0 To do this we need charity<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 Charity for others, charity for ourselves, and charity for that which we do not understand, because we already know we do not fully understand. Having charity — extra time, patience and effort — when we explore (speculate on?) our reality lets us extend our experience into the unknown (the chaos, if you will), even in the face of theories that should completely determine phenomena.\u00a0 This gives us the opportunity to explore ourselves, others and other ways of life, to find new objects and phenomena, and new ways to be charitable, ad infinitum.<\/p>\n

Therefore the same dilemma that Object Oriented Philosophy presents as its ontological support, also yields support for a concept of charity.<\/p>\n

Charity, as described, has ethical teeth.\u00a0 Determining the charitable thing to do in a given situation tracks, at least to my mind, a typical normative ethical stance.\u00a0 Like deontology it can be seen as having space for moral indifference and praiseworthiness: not all acts are governed by charity, though certain actions can be seen as especially charitable.\u00a0 Also it has built in brakes.\u00a0 The principle of ontological humility prevents us from naively applying our personal understanding of charity to others, which means it would be wrong, for example, to donate one person’s organs (without their permission) to save others.<\/p>\n

Granted, more work will have to be done to flesh out these ideas, but my hope is that this outline shows that charity can provide a promising start to an integrated ethics within Object Oriented Philosophy.<\/p>\n

————————<\/a><\/p>\n

* I’m not sure how it happened, but my metaphysics has lead me to a similar position as the Object Oriented Philosophers, at least ontologically.\u00a0 So for the course of this post, I’m wearing my Object Oriented Philosopher Hat.\u00a0 My apologies if the arguments above are unique to my theories and not OOP in general, though this post makes me suspect I am not that far off<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Given an Object Oriented Ontology ethics can present a problem.*\u00a0 It is not obvious how to fit ethics into an object oriented view: even if objects have ethical properties, ethics itself has to be considered just as arbitrary as any other property.\u00a0 One could, of course, hold some Deontological, Consequentialist or other ethical viewpoint, but this position would have to be justified on other grounds, since O.O.O. is silent on the matter.\u00a0 Hence having ethics […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,19,25,26],"tags":[291,106],"class_list":["post-2658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-metaphysics","category-ontology","category-philosophy","tag-ethics","tag-object-oriented-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}