The ideas that I will be discussing in this post and in the following one are without a doubt Taylor's most complex and difficult for me to grasp. He seems in some ways to take back some of the things he had stated earlier in his account however, I think that it all can be taken together as a coherent whole. I will do my best to explain his ideas in what follows.
Taylor understands compassion to be something that is morally good. Moreover, he sees compassion as a form of love and thus it is love which bestows the moral quality of goodness. Conversely, malice is a form of hate and it is hate that bestows the moral quality of evil/badness. To explain love and hate, Taylor determines that there are two basic emotions elation and dejection and that it is their relations to oneself and others that produces love and hate. For example, elation at the suffering of another is the form of hatred that is malice and dejection at the suffering of another is the form of love that is compassion. The following is a diagram:
---------------one's own suffering-----------------
--------------/-------------------\----------------
-------------/----------------------\--------------
-----masochism------------------resentment-----
----------/---------------------------\------------
---------/-----------------------------\-----------
--elation-------------------------------dejection---
-------- \------------------------------/-----------
---------\-----------------------------/-----------
-----malice----------------------- compassion-----
----------\---------------------------/------------
-----------\-------------------------/-------------
----------------another's suffering-----------------
However, this only covers one aspect of morally significant love and hate and Taylor believes that there are two others. Compassion, for example, is only felt when another is suffering yet surely feelings of love exist in cases where no one is suffering. The following are two more diagrams showing this:
---------------one's own fortune-------------------
--------------/-------------------\----------------
-------------/----------------------\--------------
-----gratitude------------------ self-abasement---
----------/---------------------------\------------
---------/-----------------------------\-----------
--elation-------------------------------dejection---
-------- \------------------------------/-----------
---------\-----------------------------/-----------
-----conjubilation------------------- envy---------
----------\---------------------------/------------
-----------\-------------------------/-------------
----------------another's fortune------------------
---------------one's own being---------------------
--------------/-------------------\----------------
-------------/----------------------\--------------
-----self-love-------------------- self-hatred------
----------/---------------------------\------------
---------/-----------------------------\-----------
--elation-------------------------------dejection---
-------- \------------------------------/-----------
---------\-----------------------------/-----------
-----absolute love--------------- absolute hate-----
----------\---------------------------/------------
-----------\-------------------------/-------------
----------------another's being--------------------
At this point, Taylor wants to draw particular attention to what he calls absolute love which is simply elation as a result of another's being. The other can be a person or anything else for that matter (i.e. animal, pebble, sunset, etc.) but what is important here is that it is not dependent on ever changing states, like the sufferings and fortunes of another, but on one's very existence. Another factor that makes this love important is that only human beings are capable of having it and thus Taylor calls it the Love of Man. Taylor believes that this form of love, absolute love, is the greatest good and he comes to believe this to be the case in a similar fashion to the way he determines compassion to be morally good. In other words, it is deemed to be so because it is simply felt to be so. There could be some trouble here in that what if some others did not feel it to be so. However, in Taylor's defence, has anyone ever thought love to be a bad thing?
Once he has established that the greatest good elation at the sheer existence of things, or absolute love, Taylor moves on to discuss how this seems to contradict with his earlier explanation of good and evil. Earlier, Taylor had stated that the good was simply what was sought and the evil was that which was shunned. Taylor maintains this view, however also believes that absolute love is the greatest good for man. How can this be if it is possible, which it is, that one may seek the opposite of absolute love. To this Taylor says that absolute love is the ideal and greatest good because it satisfies all the needs that humans have as human beings (not, obviously, as animals) and thus that one who seeks something else will eventually realize that he has sought after the wrong thing. I guess the idea here is that everyone desires what Taylor concieves as absolute love. Although one may not realize that he desires this, he actually does. I do not know what to think here, this just needs discussion.
Given that love is what truly matters in morality, a further problem for moral rules/principles arises. Rules are meant to apply to actions however, love is a passion/feeling and thus is something which, unlike actions, can not be controlled by a person. I can choose to raise my arm or follow some rule or another but I can not choose how I feel about it. Thus, the concept of duty can have no place in morality as it involves performing those actions which are required by rules but, since it is a feeling/passion not actions that are of central importance to morality, rules and duty go out the window.
For Taylor, the proper aim of morality is not to discover one's duty and then perform it, but rather to find the greatest good and then attain it. Thus, the question is not "what should I do", but rather "what should I be". In asking "what one should be" an appeal to rules would be utterly unhelpful as such a question deals not with rules but with aspirations. What one should be is what one should aspire to be and that, according to Taylor, is quite simple: the ultimate aspiration is to be a loving human being. A loving human being is not deemed good because of what he does or produces but simply because of what he is which is something that all people, Taylor believes, see to be good. Taylor thinks that asking why such a person is good is simply to misunderstand what has been said.
In the end, Taylor understands this ultimate aspiration to be the aspiration to be a perfect human being. This he sees as something which is most likely impossible and moreover is not just something that someone can just do. Essentially, it is a way of being (or a feeling toward the world) that none could understand as anything other than supremely good.
I am still thinking about this. There is a certain appeal that it has but I am not sure...
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2 comments:
Independently of everything else, why is love supposed to be 'supreme' rather than just good? It seems to be a deep feature about people that they want to know things, for instance. So why isn't the search for knowledge even considered as a possible good thing? Of course if there is more than one genuinely good thing then conflicts are possible and one needs to try to figure out which to choose, i.e. use reasons, something Taylor doesn't seem to like. - It seems pretty 'high handed' to just drop, eg. duty from ethics. Does Taylor think there aren't any real duties? Or that someone full of absolute love will somehow automatically do his or her duty all the time?
From what I understand, he does not think that there are duties outside of laws and customs. He would likely say that one should typically do what it is there duty to do as a result of these laws and customs so long as this duty does not conflict with the good. For example, a doctor should not refuse to perform an abortion on an ectopic pregnancy just because he has, as a result of being hired, signed a contract stating that he would not perform them.
Taylor does not have a problem dropping duty from ethics because he thinks, like Kant, that both duty and love can not both have a place in ethics. Either something is good because it is done from duty or because it is done from love. Kant drops love, Taylor drops duty. His reasoning is that duty really does not play a role in our moral judgments, i.e. condemning evil and praising good, whereas a loving heart seems to play such a role.
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