Follow-up on intellectual property, to Catholics

Since making my post on intellectual property, I have learned a couple of things. That post is still mostly accurate, so this post will assume you have read it and make a few short corrections.

Intellectual property as a natural right

Regarding the first part, I may have been too quick to suppose that the idea that there is a natural right to intellectual property, construed as being of the same kind as the right to private property, is innovative. I have spoken with Brian Besong about the post, and he told me that Francisco Suárez had developed similar ideas as part of his defense of probabilism; he also seemed quite sure that there must have been even earlier precedents in history. That may be; at the time of the post, it was hard for me to find research materials on the topic, and it still is. No concept of intellectual property was mentioned in connection with any ancient or medieval discussion of property that I have looked into, though. If there were examples, besides, I doubt that they had any more reason than Ayn Rand to affirm the doctrine.

On the other hand, back when I wrote the post, I had no opinion on the fundamental purpose of private property. Now, I am strongly convinced that individual appropriation only serves, fundamentally, the purpose of preventing action conflicts, which happen because one same material thing cannot be used for two different purposes at the same time. Now, since it is impossible for there to be an action conflict about ideas, it makes no sense for them to be individually appropriated – if they are property in any sense, they are, by right, common property, as all things, originally, are. I had also discussed this principle with Dr. Besong, but I do not find any of our discussion worth relaying here.

Intellectual property laws are not laws

Finally, I have an addition to the third part. There is another way in which intellectual property laws, taken as civil laws, may be thought to be null and void. It turns out that Thomas says that all laws, by nature, are intrinsically ordered to the common good. So, if intellectual property laws are not intrinsically so ordered – regardless of the intentions of the lawgivers – they do not have the nature of law. Which is to say, they are actually no laws at all, and cannot bind in conscience. I believe that this fact is demonstrable in two different ways.

First demonstration

Thomas says, regarding the effects of law:

The precepts of law are concerned with human acts, in which the law directs, as stated above. Again there are three kinds of human acts: for, as stated above, some acts are good generically, viz. acts of virtue; and in respect of these the act of the law is a precept or command, for “the law commands all acts of virtue” (Ethic. v, 1). Some acts are evil generically, viz. acts of vice, and in respect of these the law forbids. Some acts are generically indifferent, and in respect of these the law permits; and all acts that are either not distinctly good or not distinctly bad may be called indifferent. And it is the fear of punishment that law makes use of in order to ensure obedience: in which respect punishment is an effect of law.

In view of the nature of law, as explained before, it seems that a law must treat these kinds of acts in these ways in order to be law; a law which commanded evil, or forbade good, would not be law. Now, what intellectual property laws have in common with each other is, that they grant the IP rights-holder the authority to freely permit or proscribe (by means of licensing or not) the production of objects embodying the productive idea in question. But production is, generically, a good action. It follows that the enforcement of this authority is always calculated to forbid a good action, which is contrary to the nature of law.

Second demonstration

Just as goodness in general is rightly divided between the virtuous, the pleasant, and the useful – with this last one existing only for the sake of the other two – I believe that the common good is rightly divided into the achievement of virtue by the populace, as conceived of by the moralists, and the general welfare as conceived of by the economists.

Now, intellectual property laws do not promote virtue. There is no reason to think they do, unless one were to hold the implausible opinion that such laws protect a natural right.

Such laws are not conducive to the general welfare either, and are in fact deleterious to it. The argument from the first demonstration also holds in economics; furthermore, economists have developed their own proofs of this proposition. One is seen in this paper, written from an Austrian School perspective; a more elaborate argument is made by this book, which is written from a neoclassical point-of-view. For these reasons, we have scientific certainty that these laws are, on balance, destructive of welfare.

Since intellectual property laws are not ordered either to virtue or to the general welfare, which are the two parts of the common good, these so-called laws are not ordered to the common good at all. Which means that they lack the nature of law, and so cannot bind in conscience.

The news

I think looking at the news is a bad idea. None of it is relevant to your day-to-day actions, and none of it ever gets brought up again after two weeks or so have passed, and yet if you pay attention to it, it takes space in your memory for a long time, just like everything else. We have limited space in our memory, and it is wasted on ephemeral news.

There are a couple exceptions I can think of. The news can be useful for making decisions to buy or sell things, and it can be useful to make decisions to leave your country, if it might be about to become worse.

Basic system of ethics

“It may be that life is only worth living, because it enables us to study metaphysics—is a necessary means thereto.” 

— G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

I have recently read the Principia Ethica, by G.E. Moore. I disagreed with the book, so I thought to write a blog post recording the ways in which I did so.

I will quote freely from the book in this blog post, so as to more clearly show my opposition; I will not bother with page numbers, since I will ensure that the quotation can always be easily found in the book by searching for it with a word lookup in the Project Gutenberg edition, which will always be used here.

0. Contents

1. The logic of desire
1.1. Desire to desire
1.2. Cause of rational desires
1.3. Meaning of good
1.4. Natural property
1.5. Prevalence of hedonism
2. Worth of things
2.1. Beauty
2.2. What ought to be
3. Worth of actions
4. Moore vs. Russell
4.1. The good, as opposed to “good”
4.2. Intuition
4.3. Emphases

1. The logic of desire

Rational desire is opposed to sensitive desire. Rational desire is the desire had by the rational appetite, i.e., the human will. Sensitive desire is a desire had by the sensitive appetite; the distinction between the concupiscible and irascible appetites is not relevant here.

1.1. Desire to desire

We do not choose what we love. More precisely, we do not choose to love anything, or to desire it; to desire or not to desire something, when we speak of rational desire, is not immediately a matter of choice.

We may say that we “desire to desire” some things, and this can be one of three things; we can have a rational desire to have a sensitive desire, a sensitive desire to have a rational desire, or we may have a rational desire to have more knowledge about something, which we have reason to expect would create in us a greater rational desire. There are probably no sensitive “metadesires” either.

1.2. Cause of rational desires

Rather, desire is caused by a certain understanding of an object; the will desires whatever is proposed to it “under the aspect of good”, which is really the same with being; the measure in which an object is understood will, therefore, determine how much it is desired.

It may be thought that this is a denial of the freedom of the will, but there is still room for free choice here. First, while it is generally irrational to choose a lesser good when a greater one is available, we sometimes do not have enough knowledge to decide that one thing is superior to another, and yet we must choose, irrationally, all the same. Second, the will may choose whether we act upon sensitive desires or resist them, and it is the willpower that solves conflicts between sensitive desires with rational ones. ¶ I believe that when Thomas said that the will “does not desire of necessity all things whatsoever it desires”, he referred chiefly to choice; I also believe that any developed account of choice must regard it as a choice of which desires to act upon, and not as a choice of what to desire.

Now, since desire is caused by understanding, and understanding can be correct or mistaken, so can desire, and in the same way. A mistaken desire is a desire that is ultimately founded on a misapprehension of fact or a fallacious inference. A correct desire is a desire that is caused by correct apprehension or sound inference.

1.3. Meaning of good

Given the fact that goodness and being are the same in reality, it is impossible, even in principle, to know that something is good without knowing what it is, and the reverse is possible only through imperfect knowledge. Given the account of desire just given, to think that something is good is to (rationally) desire it, insofar as it is good.

So, I disagree with Moore when he says the following:

It does seem to be true that we hardly ever think a thing good, and never very decidedly, without at the same time having a special attitude of feeling or will towards it; though it is certainly not the case that this is true universally.

No— it is true universally. And given what I said so far, generally, I disagree with Moore’s central thesis, that “good” is an indefinable, simple notion. Since there are correct desires, and the correctness of a desire is objective, “good” may be fittingly defined as “the object of correct rational desire.”

This is what is captured by saying that “the good in all its senses is the desirable, and the evil is the undesirable”, as Hastings’s Encyclopædia said. Moore correctly points out that “‘desirable’ does not mean ‘able to be desired’ as ‘visible’ means ‘able to be seen’”, but he incorrectly defines desirable as “what it is good to desire”, which is not a good definition.

Of course, if something is objectively good, then to desire it would be an object of correct rational desire; it must be noted that, given what was said, we cannot know that something is desirable without having rational desire for it ourselves.

That the good is the same as the object of correct rational desire is also betrayed, I think, by such expressions as Moore’s description of personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments as “the rational ultimate end of human action”, and Sidgwick’s expression, quoted by Moore, that some things are “only reasonably to be sought” by men insofar as they lead to either excellence or perfection. ¶ That to have the wrong desires is ultimately the result of an irrationality of the same kind as any other – either a misapprehension of objective fact or a fallacious inference – is the core of my opinion, and I believe it is strange to talk about “irrationality” when the mistake is ultimately about “intuitions” which, regarding their truth or falsehood, are totally independent of all the rest of human knowledge.

This notion of goodness perfectly passes by Moore’s famous “open question argument”. To ask whether it is good that the objects that we correctly and rationally desire are those objects and not others would end up being a question about scepticism – are there some things which it is impossible not to be misled about, because we would be perfectly justified in a wrong conclusion? If so, then, of course, we can correctly and rationally think that something is good without it being good. I think all forms of scepticism are obviously false, but I cannot show this at this time.

It helps to consider the idea of a “good man”, who always acts rightly. Given that there are correct and mistaken desires, then it is true either that the perfectly good man always acts upon correct desires, or that, sometimes, his actions are a result of mistaken desires; and the latter opinion is intolerable. So, the good course of action must always be identical with the most desirable course. If it were not, it would be fair to ask such stupid questions as, “why should we be moral?”

1.4. Natural property

Goodness, as I have defined it, and given the real identity of good and being, is probably a “natural property”, but I am not sure.

Which among the properties of natural objects are natural properties and which are not? For I do not deny that good is a property of certain natural objects: certain of them, I think, are good; and yet I have said that ‘good’ itself is not a natural property. Well, my test for these too also concerns their existence in time. Can we imagine ‘good’ as existing by itself in time, and not merely as a property of some natural object? For myself, I cannot so imagine it, whereas with the greater number of properties of objects—those which I call the natural properties—their existence does seem to me to be independent of the existence of those objects.

What the hell is he on about? I seriously have no clue.

And I think that this is unnecessary, anyway. I think that non-naturalism ought to be identified with Moore’s central thesis, that goodness is indefinable; deciding which things to call “natural” is not productive. For what it’s worth, I think that everything that exists is natural, since the universe may also be called nature, interchangeably.

1.5. Prevalence of hedonism

Moore says that the “prevalence of Hedonism” is due mainly to what he calls the “naturalistic fallacy”, which means to disagree with his opinion that goodness is indefinable. Hedonism is, in fact, more rational than Moore’s opinion, because while it is borne out of a mistake, it is less egregious a mistake than Moore’s.

The hedonist, while recognizing perfectly that the good must be the object of correct rational desires, undertakes a mistaken analysis of human action, and his error follows as a result. To repeat matter from my blog post on the passions, there are two possible analyses of desire in relation to pleasure:

A1. (a) For various reasons, men desire certain things. (b) When they attain those things, the desire is fulfilled. (c) Because of this, they are pleased.

A2. (a) For various reasons, certain things cause pleasure in men. (b) Men expect that, when they attain those things, they will be pleased. (c) Because of this, they desire them.

As I have said, “in both analyses we have various reasons leading men to desire various things and then seek them, at the attaining of which they are pleased. Neither is more compatible with experience than the other.”

However, analysis A2 is rather fitting to sensitive desires, if any, while A1 best fits rational ones. Since rational desires are caused by knowledge, and therefore have intellectual “reasons” of various kinds – since goodness is a transcendental, not a category – A1 is the only correct way to describe rational desire, and it is only that which is desired with good reason that ought to be called good. Pleasure is not always good, in this sense.

But because the attainment of our desires nevertheless pleases us, to attain the good, especially our ultimate good, will be something pleasing; and it is for this reason that the last end of man is called “happiness” even by non-hedonistic ethical theories, such as Aristotle’s and Thomas Aquinas’s.

While hedonists analyze action wrongly, at least they analyze it at all. They recognize that the good must be that which is, correctly, rationally desired, and this is commendable. Moore thinks no reasons can be given, founded in our knowledge, why we should desire some thing; the good is only postulated by the moralist, and if the ordinary actor has any knowledge of it, it is through such a made-up, ad-hoc faculty as the “moral intuition”, which was introduced by the “ethical intuitionists” that followed upon Moore’s doctrines.

I think my notion of goodness also passes by the SEP’s interpretation of the open question argument, that the notion of goodness will “at least seem conceptually open to competent users of moral terms”. With such large schools as Aristotelians and hedonists on my side, I am confident in thinking simply that the people to whom the question seems open, given my definition, are simply not competent users of moral terms. Moore and the intuitionists certainly aren’t.

2. Worth of things

It is obvious, in the first place, that we cannot say that everything natural is good, except perhaps in virtue of some metaphysical theory, such as I shall deal with later.

I believe that all being is good, and that evil is privation. This is a metaphysical theory, and I think he has not “dealt with it” so as to prove it wrong. As Moore puts it, “the question ‘What is real?’ has some logical bearing upon the question ‘What is good?’”, and, “Ethics must be based on Metaphysics”. As I said in §1.4, I think “natural”, as Moore uses it, is a vacuous term.

2.1. Beauty

Moore took exception with Sidgwick’s opinion that no one would “consider it rational to aim at the production of beauty in external nature, apart from any possible contemplation of it by human beings.” I think Sidgwick is right, if his opinion is taken to refer to beauty itself; but beauty is the appearance of which goodness is the corresponding reality. It is certainly rational to aim at making the world better in ways that will not improve the life of human beings, if doing so is possible.

But then I do not think that this means that such improvement is “not only a means to our end, but also itself a part thereof.” As Thomas correctly said, “there are certain individual goods which have not a necessary connection with happiness, because without them a man can be happy”; and these are always such goods as we may, rationally, either choose or not choose, according to our estimation of alternative uses of our time. Only man’s last end, happiness, must always be sought.

2.2. What ought to be

They profess that Metaphysics is a necessary basis for an answer to that other and primary ethical question: What ought to be? What is good in itself? That no truth about what is real can have any logical bearing upon the answer to this question has been proved in Chapter I. To suppose that it has, implies the naturalistic fallacy.

The naturalistic fallacy is not a fallacy, but simply a disagreement with Moore’s opinion; he has proved nothing. The question, “what is good in itself?”, obtains, from me, all being as an answer, insofar as it exists.

I think the question, “what ought to be?”, is meaningless in the abstract. Sure, given a certain human being, it is clear that he ought to achieve his natural end, happiness, which Thomas says is to be found in God alone; but there is no answer to how the universe ought to be as a whole. This is necessarily the case, because the created universe, as such, could always be made better; there is always a better possible world. So there is no question of which world ought to have been; the divine will was perfectly free, and rational, to have made this world instead of a better one. ¶ I also see no reason why humans cannot always make the world better, given enough time and effort; and I do not think that they ought always to improve it as much as possible, since to do this does not pertain to their last end.

Moore says that writers “seem frequently to confuse the proposition that one particular existing thing is good, with the proposition that the existence of that kind of thing would be good, wherever it might occur.” Now, given any being, its existence really would be good wherever it occurred, in one sense; but it might hinder the good of other beings. If a tapeworm materialized inside my body, for instance, its existence would be good in itself, but its existence there would deprive me of my proper function, and so be an evil to me.

3. Worth of actions

In other posts, I might say “value” to mean exclusively “economic value” or “social utility”, and even oppose it to the “moral worth” of actions; but here I follow Moore.

Moore, in various places, asserts that both an action and its consequences may have “intrinsic value”, and that an action is made better by both things. I quote at length, breaking up his long paragraph in natural places.

In asserting that the action is the best thing to do, we assert that it together with its consequences presents a greater sum of intrinsic value than any possible alternative. And this condition may be realised by any of the three cases:— 

(a) If the action itself has greater intrinsic value than any alternative, whereas both its consequences and those of the alternatives are absolutely devoid either of intrinsic merit or intrinsic demerit; or 

(b) if, though its consequences are intrinsically bad, the balance of intrinsic value is greater than would be produced by any alternative; or 

(c) if, its consequences being intrinsically good, the degree of value belonging to them and it conjointly is greater than that of any alternative series. 

In short, to assert that a certain line of conduct is, at a given time, absolutely right or obligatory, is obviously to assert that more good or less evil will exist in the world, if it be adopted, than if anything else be done instead. But this implies a judgment as to the value both of its own consequences and of those of any possible alternative. And that an action will have such and such consequences involves a number of causal judgments.

I believe that consequences are never morally relevant. Therefore, the case (a) always holds; it is always true, for any action, that “both its consequences and those of the alternatives are absolutely devoid either of intrinsic merit or intrinsic demerit.”

This may be thought to contradict my earlier account of goodness, if no attention is paid to the difference between moral good and metaphysical good. The latter is identical with being, and is what determines whether a desire is a proper or an improper term of action. The former is derived from it, but applies only to action, and regards whether the action is consistent with a given actor’s last end. A morally better action is metaphysically better, considered as an action, but it will not always leave the world metaphysically better as a whole.

So, technically, consequences may be better or worse absolutely speaking, but to use Moore’s words, there is no intrinsic merit in causing good consequences. It all depends upon the action that leads to them.

I agree with Thomas’s doctrine that the goodness of actions derives from their object, end, and circumstance. Actions are better or worse because they make the actor better or worse, and this depends on their (intrinsic, teleological) consistency with his natural end. It happens that to desire the attainment of a bad object, or of a good object in an improper circumstance, is inconsistent with the natural end of man’s rational faculties, so these matter too.

Moore gives no reason to think that consequences are relevant to action in themselves, and I can think of none. It seems irrational to consider consequences to have any moral value.

Furthermore, regardless of the kind of value we are talking about, let us not carry into ethics the errors which were already recognized as such in economics. Value, of whichever kind, is necessarily ordinal. It admits of greater and less; so, for any given three things, we desire the first more than the second and the second more than the third, and (so) the first more than the third. But regarding goodness, value, utility, desire, or virtue, there can be no unique assignment of numbers which can be meaningfully subjected to all the operations of arithmetic. There is technically no such thing as a measure of value, a sum of value, nor for that matter a product of value or average value. ¶ And this is because the soul, being simple, has no extension; subjective states, being intensive, cannot admit of any quantitative determination in extensive terms, i.e., measurement, even with perfect knowledge of all minds.

4. Moore vs. Russell

Russell gave a better, shorter, and clearer account of ethics, along the same lines as Moore, in his essay The Elements of Ethics. I recommend reading it instead of the Principia Ethica, if you still really want to be a non-naturalist. (Or maybe there is better material nowadays, now that we have Huemer and stuff. I don’t know, I haven’t read him.) But because it is more complete in this shorter space, I thought it helpful to distinguish some things that Russell affirms from some of the things that Moore affirms.

4.1. The good, as opposed to “good”

Moore says:

I do not mean to say that the good, that which is good, is thus indefinable; if I did think so, I should not be writing on Ethics, for my main object is to help towards discovering that definition. It is just because I think there will be less risk of error in our search for a definition of ‘the good,’ that I am now insisting that good is indefinable.

Moore thinks that you can never find the meaning of “good”, since he was never able to figure out non-circularly what “desirable” meant. But he thinks you can decide that certain things are good, and others not.

Furthermore, he phrases this as that you can define it. So I think he would easily allow that a moralist could postulate such general propositions as that “all pleasure is good” and “all pain is evil”. Certainly he seems to take less issue with that part of hedonism than with the idea that only pleasure is good.

While Russell admits that such a proposition could in theory be postulated, his concern with making a more complete system, rather than mere “Prolegomena to any future Ethics that can possibly pretend to be scientific”, leads him to immediately emphasize that he can think of no such proposition:

There might, as far as mere logic goes, be some general proposition to the effect ‘whatever exists, is good’, or ‘whatever exists, is bad’, or ‘what will exist is better (or worse) than what does exist’. But no such general proposition can be proved by considering the meaning of ‘good’, and no such general proposition can be arrived at empirically from experience, since we do not know the whole of what does exist, nor yet of what has existed or will exist. We cannot therefore arrive at such a general proposition, unless it is itself self-evident, or follows from some self-evident proposition, which must (to warrant the consequence) be of the same general kind. But as a matter of fact, there is, so far as I can discover, no self-evident proposition as to the goodness or badness of all that exists or has existed or will exist. It follows that, from the fact that the existent world is of such and such a nature, nothing can be inferred as to what things are good or bad. (§9¶1)

4.2. Intuition

Moore’s opinion should be rather called “non-naturalism” than “intuitionism”, since while he did speak of “intuitions”, it was in a peculiar sense:

I would wish it observed that, when I call such propositions ‘Intuitions,’ I mean merely to assert that they are incapable of proof; I imply nothing whatever as to the manner or origin of our cognition of them.

Russell, since he could not leave the question of cognition unaddressed, was much happier to affirm the existence of a peculiar ad-hoc faculty for morals, as intuitionists would. Conveniently, he thought that this faculty could learn about both of the features of action that Moore thought were morally relevant, that is, their intrinsic value and the value of their consequences:

In judging of conduct we find at the outset two widely divergent methods, of which one is advocated by some moralists, the other by others, while both are practised by those who have no ethical theory. One of these methods, which is that advocated by the utilitarians, judges the rightness of an act by relation to the goodness or badness of its consequences. The other method, advocated by intuitionists, judges by the approval or disapproval of the moral sense or conscience. I believe that it is necessary to combine both theories in order to get a complete account of right and wrong. (§12¶3)

4.3. Emphases

Russell also goes at length on other things, in which it is not as easy to confuse him with Moore, since Moore simply did not talk about them. If you read only The Elements of Ethics, as I recommended, it is better simply to suppose that the only thesis of the Principia Ethica is that which is in the second section of Russell’s essay, that goodness is indefinable; the rest, at least in Moore’s book, is unimportant decoration.

The emphasis placed by Russell on the related assertion that there are positive evils, and therefore the denial of the privation-of-good doctrine, is worth noting here, though. Moore simply takes it as a matter of course throughout the Principia Ethica that there are certainly very many things which are “positively bad.” Russell, on the other hand, thought to spend more time refuting the absence-of-good doctrine, even taken as something about “the good” rather than as about “good”.

And by “refute”, I do not in this case mean “prove wrong”, but rather simply to “deny”, or more accurately, to whine about it:

The notion that non-existence is what is meant by ‘evil’ is refuted exactly as the previous definitions of ‘good’ were refuted. And the belief that, as a matter of fact, nothing that exists is evil, is one which no one would advocate except a metaphysician defending a theory. Pain and hatred and envy and cruelty are surely things that exist, and are not merely the absence of their opposites; but the theory should hold that they are indistinguishable from the blank unconsciousness of an oyster. Indeed, it would seem that this whole theory has been advanced solely because of the unconscious bias in favour of optimism, and that its opposite is logically just as tenable. We might urge that evil consists in existence, and good in non-existence; that therefore the sum-total of existence is the worst thing there is, and that only non-existence is good. Indeed, Buddhism does seem to maintain some such view. It is plain that this view is false; but logically it is no more absurd than its opposite. (§10¶5)

Russell misunderstood the theory, of course. Pain is always a sign of some evil, either in reality or in sensation; but given that there is evil in reality, it is rather a good thing to feel it, as Thomas says about sorrow. This could not possibly allow that pain is identical with nothingness, since in that case it could never be good; and the evil of which it is a sign is certainly an absence, if truly an evil. The other examples, being vices, are plainly analysable as the absence of virtues. It is simply irresponsible to dismiss the theory like Russell did, and I hope no one does that nowadays.

Sorrow, as such

Thomas Aquinas wrote (S.T., I-II, 39, 1, c.):

A thing may be good or evil in two ways: first considered simply and in itself; and thus all sorrow is an evil, because the mere fact of a man’s appetite being uneasy about a present evil, is itself an evil, because it hinders the repose of the appetite in good. Secondly, a thing is said to be good or evil, on the supposition of something else: thus shame is said to be good, on the supposition of a shameful deed done, as stated in Ethic. iv, 9. Accordingly, supposing the presence of something saddening or painful, it is a sign of goodness if a man is in sorrow or pain on account of this present evil.

The text goes on to belabor the last point, so you might go read it if you don’t get it. Note that the original translated text said “response” instead of “repose”, which was almost certainly a misspelling, so I have corrected it (Latin: quies).

The problem is the first point. Sorrow is certainly good when had regarding an evil object, and certainly evil when had regarding a good object. Regarding moral good and evil, at least, we know that there is none in any of the passions in themselves; it all depends on whether they are in accordance with reason. So, regarding metaphysical evil, why does Thomas consider sorrow an evil “in itself”?

This is important because Thomas was in favor of the privation theory of evil, so he thought that evil is privation, that is, an absence of good. It is not something present; it is non-being rather than being; it is nothing. How could sorrow be like this? We all know it is something present, and besides, if it weren’t, it couldn’t be a good when had regarding a proper object.

Thomas explains that sorrow is evil “because the mere fact of a man’s appetite being uneasy about a present evil, is itself an evil, because it hinders the repose of the appetite in good”. This is a rather opaque sentence, and so it is easy to ignore it, and go on to believe that sorrow is itself a privation, which would be an error. Having thought about it, I have written an explanation of it, which should drive away this error.

Joy and sorrow

Consider joy. Joy is good when had regarding a good object, and evil when had regarding an evil object. In this respect, it is the opposite of sorrow.

But in this other respect it isn’t: some measure of joy is always appropriate, because there is always some good object present, while there is not always some evil to be regarded. The soul could always, at least, enjoy its possession of its own faculties; conversely, there is not always some evil at which its sorrowing would be appropriate.

Thomas’s point is probably that, since sorrow is able to drive away joy, it can drive away even the measure of joy which it is always appropriate for the soul to have. Since sorrow deprives us of this good, it is an evil.

Since the joy which sorrow drives away is something extrinsic to the sorrow itself – a different movement, with a different object –, sorrow is not itself a privation. It is, rather, at least when had regarding a proper object, a good which is incompatible with another good.

Why then did Thomas say that sorrow is evil when regarded in itself? Because this consideration is independent of the object of the sorrow. Sorrow, of its intrinsic nature, drives away joy, which joy is always naturally there in some measure. Regardless of whether sorrow is had at a proper or an improper object, it always deprives the soul of a good. So, while it is not intrinsically a privation, it is always privative of something extrinsic. It is evil rather consequentially than essentially; it is always evil-producing.

It may be doubted whether this is always really the case. I was discussing this with my friend Anton, and he thought that sorrow, “at least in a mentally strong person”, is compatible with the natural measure of joy. At any rate, the notion that sorrow is always consequentially evil is probably what Thomas meant.

Pleasure and pain

What was said above may apply analogously to pleasure and pain, considered as bodily analogues of joy and sorrow. I have two considerations to add regarding this application.

First, the opinion that sorrow is compatible with joy “in a mentally strong person” may be difficult to apply analogically to some cases of pleasure and pain, since it might be physically impossible, at least in some cases, for the body to feel both pleasure and pain in the same part.

Second, and more importantly, while the body is certainly also always in possession of itself, it is controversial whether it always feels pleasure in its natural state.

It seems that Speusippus thought that it does not, and pleasure would then only be a perceptible process toward the natural state. Plotinus seems to have said something similar when he defined pleasure as “the knowledge of a living being that the image of soul is again fitting itself back in the body.” (4.4.19)

While Aristotle did say something similar in the Rhetoric (1369b33–35), he argued against this opinion in the Nicomachean Ethics, (1152b25ff) where he thought that pleasure is either identified with the “unimpeded activity” of the natural state (Book 7), or supervenient upon this unimpeded activity (Book 10). See the linked paper by Robert Scott Stewart for an explanation of this difference.

Disregarding this last distinction, Aristotle’s opinion in the Nicomachean Ethics would seem to mean that there is a natural, baseline level of pleasure that the body feels when it enjoys the unimpeded use of its natural faculties, which would be most perfectly analogous to the previous considerations about joy in the soul. Pain would, then, similarly, be consequentially evil, insofar as it deprives us of this natural pleasure. But the other opinion, held by Speusippus, also seems possible.

Arguments for environmental regulations

The proper form of an argument for environmental regulations would be the following:

1. If the climate changes in the ways A,B,C, this will be the cause of a cost of $X to the economy.
2. If the regulation D is implemented, this will prevent the climate from changing in the ways A,B,C, and therefore prevent the cost of $X.
3. Regulation D will impose a cost of no more than $Y to the economy, which is less than $X.
4. Therefore, regulation D will cost less to the economy than the events that it would prevent, and is overall beneficial to it in that respect.

This would be the proper form if there were non-charlatans in the field, who are interested in the truth. It would have to include defenses of the three premises, of course. This form of argument cannot be found anywhere in the literature, as far as I know.

Opinion on human affection

My opinion is that love is different from sexual attraction, and separable from it. Couples in “romantic relationships” tend to have both; friendships tend to involve only the former; and sometimes, only the latter exists. People who have neither have nothing for each other. Which is to say, there are not many kinds of love, or anything else besides these two things.

Both admit of degrees, so that you can have a lot of love and a little sexual attraction, or the reverse. A “romantic relationship” without sexual attraction is just a very close friendship. To “like” someone is just to have a small degree of love.

People can probably have different sexual orientations, but I think that, most likely, everyone can have love for both sexes. For instance, children can have love for both of their parents, and people are generally able to have friendships of either sex, although they often have more friends of one sex.

Sexual attraction is purely bodily, but love is not purely spiritual. Love is composed of two things. The first is goodwill, i.e., “to will the good of the other”, which is purely spiritual. The second is compassion, which, like all other passions, is an action of the body upon the soul. It may be possible to have only one of these two components for someone, but I doubt it.

Curiosities of the threefold division

While researching stuff to make my compilation post on the threefold division, I found various curious things about it which I thought to talk about, but I didn’t want to interrupt the compilation, which was already a big post by itself. So I made a post with this curious stuff I found. I found almost all of this material while making the previous post, but couldn’t put it together nicely until now.

In this post, I will cite things that were quoted in that other post by merely saying the name of the author. If you are curious about something I mention here, look it up in the other one.

0. Contents

1. Confused origin
2. Plato united philosophy
3. Theoretical, productive, and practical
4. Augustine saw the Trinity in it
5. Roger Penrose and primacy
6. Random things I found

1. Confused origin

Where did it begin, after all? The compilation post did not make this obvious, and it was not obvious to me when I was done with it.

Plato

It seems that some of the ancients, especially Neoplatonists, thought that the division came from Plato. In the compilation post, you can see this claim made by Cicero, Sextus Empiricus, and Eusebius. Augustine makes this claim, but he was probably following Cicero – or so says a footnote I saw once somewhere.

However, I have not found it explicitly anywhere in Plato’s works, insofar as I have read them (not completely); nor is any citation of his works given when the division is attributed to Plato.

I have seen two contemporary writers characterize Plato’s theory of forms as saying that the forms are divided into these three kinds. The first is John Messerly, who writes in this summary that “there are physical, mathematical, and moral forms”. The second is John Dillon. In his paper “The Platonic Forms As Gesetze”, he writes:

We have here what is generally regarded as the first clear assertion of the “classical” Theory of Forms, such as is given fuller development in the Phaedo, Republic, and Phaedrus, according to which the ‘Forms’ of all ethical, mathematical and natural concepts are viewed by the human soul in a previous, disembodied state of existence, where they exist eternally and immutably, quite independently of either minds or physical objects, and are merely ‘recollected’ in this life, with varying degrees of accuracy, in response to suitable stimuli.

So we see that Dillon divides the forms into “ethical, mathematical and natural”. There may be a ground for the division in Plato, but I am not sure where it is. More on Plato in relation to this division in section 2.

Aristotle

Aristotle gives us the earliest clear and explicit statement of “physical, ethical and logical” as a division of something. But it is not a division of philosophy or of the sciences, but of kinds of propositions, and it is in his logical work called the Topics. He does not use this for the sciences, unless we characterize his own division of the sciences – into “theoretical”, “productive”, and “practical” – as correlative with it, on which see section 3.

The Stoics

The division is most clearly associated with the Stoics. It is given in a characterization of Stoic doctrines by Pseudo-Plutarch, in a description of Chrysippus by Plutarch, and in a description of the Stoics by Diogenes Laërtius; and it is found explicitly in Seneca, as well as other Stoic sources, especially when you take into account its association with the three Stoic “disciplines” of “assent, desire and action”, as explained in the paper by Christopher Fisher. Ramelli calls it “the typical Stoic tripartition of philosophy”, and it really is typical of them.

But given what we know from above, it is strange to say that it was an invention of the Stoics. Cicero was very influenced by the Stoics, but he attributes it to Plato. I don’t know. They definitely took it and ran.

2. Plato united philosophy

Some Platonists, wishing to gain honor for Plato, claimed that Plato united the three parts of philosophy, which were merely scattered and separate inquiries before him. The Platonists Atticus and Aristocles, as cited by Julia Annas, said something to this effect. Apuleius also made this claim, saying that he took “philosophy of nature from the Pythagoreans, logic from the Eleatics, and moral philosophy right from the source of Socrates”. Diogenes Laërtius, in an analogy with the development of tragic drama, says that “in early times [philosophy] discoursed on one subject only, namely physics, then Socrates added the second subject, ethics, and Plato the third, dialectics, and so brought philosophy to perfection”. 

I think that the claim is probably sound. It is proved from the facts that Plato discoursed on all three subjects, and that no one did so before him – that everyone before Plato had only talked about one or two of the subjects.

That no one did so before him seems clear enough, as far as I can tell. The Presocratics, as a general rule, seemed to only talk about “physical”/“natural” topics. Socrates, especially when counting only what can most safely be ascribed to “the historical” Socrates, only seemed to care about ethics, as the ancients agree in saying. Logic, which may have existed previously with the Eleatics or the geometers, was not combined by either of them with moral philosophy. Indeed, it seems that, before Plato, it was much more common to merely state moral opinions without argument.

That Plato himself did discourse on all three subjects is best illustrated by the ancient division of his works which claims some of them as logical, some as physical, and some as ethical or political, with some other ones being ‘zetetic’. Sir Alexander Grant says that in Plato, “Logic has no separate existence; there is only a dialectic which is really metaphysics.” But the peculiar attention that he paid to definition and division (e.g., in the Phaedrus) seems to constitute a treatment of logic, though its existence may be said to not be “separate.”

It may also be denied that logic, when not “in use” in ethics or physics, is a part of philosophy rather than, for instance, being only an art. This opinion was popular with Scotists, if I remember correctly. And it was the opinion of the Platonist Olympiodorus, in his Introduction to Logic (17,32–7):

Logic is a tool when considered as empty schemata, as when I say: ‘from two universal affirmations a universal affirmative conclusion follows’. But it is a part when used together with the things themselves, as when I say: ‘the soul is self-moving, what is self-moving is immortal, therefore the soul is immortal’, and again, ‘everything just is good, everything good is noble, therefore everything just is noble’.

So I think we can safely say, with good sense, that Plato united the three parts of philosophy. If we accept the threefold division as “the true” division of philosophy, this adds credence to the idea that Plato invented philosophy, which some people wish to deny, although the SEP accepts it.

3. Theoretical, productive, and practical

While we are finding the threefold division across various places, with so many combinations of the names “physical”, “logical”, “ethical”, “rational”, “moral”, “natural”, “real”, “mathematical”, etc., it may be tempting to associate it with other things.

Some of these things are sound. St. George William Joseph Stock, whose first name was actually “St. George”, says that the division is grounded on that “philosophy must study either nature (including the divine nature) or man, and if it studies man, it must regard him either from the side of the emotions or of the intellect.” This is probably true. We might choose to say “the will” rather than the emotions, but besides this, he has probably drawn its ground correctly.

Some of these things are questionable, and may be thought sound or unsound from different points of view, as when Augustine associated it with the three persons of the Trinity, on which see section 4.

Some of these things appear sound at first, but aren’t. And I think this is the case with Aristotle’s division of philosophy into theoretical, productive, and practical. Although it is a division of philosophy, and the terms seem similar and related, it is simply not drawn the same way.

If we were to relate the terms, it would seem that theoretical pairs with logic, practical with ethics, and productive with physics. But all of the philosophy of nature, as well as theology, went, for Aristotle, into the theoretical part.

Productive sciences would include poetics and rhetoric, which would probably simply have no place in the usual threefold scheme, being relegated into the arts rather than the sciences. If they went anywhere, they would seem to have the most affinity with logic, not with physics.

4. Augustine saw the Trinity in it

Augustine related the threefold division to the Trinity. It seems that the Father would relate to physics, the Son to logic, and the Holy Spirit to ethics. I did not find this relevant enough to make it clear in the original post, but I do think it is important enough to be noted in this one.

The most relevant passages would be from the City of God, 8.4 and 11.25; I did quote from the former in the compilation, but not at enough length for this to be clear. It takes quoting at some length to show the point, and I decided not to burden people with this; you can check the book if you want. Here, I will quote from a couple of commentators who talked about the subject.

He also points out that instruction in rhetoric teaches men to discuss three kinds of questions: whether something is, what it is, and how it is and whether it is to be approved or disapproved (Ep. 11, 4; De div. quaest., q. 18; Conf., X, 10, 17). It is doubtful that the rhetorical formula was the sole basis of the insight, for it was long in coming and was probably suggested by biblical passages like Romans 11, 36 and Wisdom 11, 21. But a formula like this, or, again, Varro’s division of philosophy into natural, logical, and ethical (C. Faust., XX, 7; De civ. Dei, XI, 24-28), was important because it furnished his Trinitarian doctrine a reference point in general philosophical knowledge and encouraged him in his belief that all finite actuality is a reflection of the Trinity.

— Eugene TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian, pp. 120–121

Plato’s speculations even bear the mark of the Trinity, since he divides philosophy into its three parts (natural, logic, and ethics): “Plato is said to have been the first to discover and promulgate this distribution, and he saw that God alone could be the author of nature, the bestower of intelligence (intelligentiae dator), and the kindler (inspirator) of love (amoris) by which life becomes good and blessed” (CD 11.25; see also Conf. 7.9). Plato’s understanding of God implicitly hints at the Trinity insofar as both Plato and Christianity affirm God as the first cause of existence, as the cause of intelligence and intelligibility, and the mover of all things to God through love. Augustine does not conclude that natural reason could know that God is triune, however.

— John von Heyking, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, p. 181; note that it uses “CD” to abbreviate Civitate Dei.

The neo-platonic reditus is in Trinitarian fashion radicalized, since the play of Trinitarian light across created shadowy trinities show them to be emanating perpetually forth from themselves, but always beyond themselves, into the full brilliance of the Trinity. It is for this reason that Augustine has to rein in his tongue lest he falsely ascribe conscious knowledge of the Trinity to Plato, whose threefold division of philosophy into natural, logical and ethical Augustine finds to have a deeply Trinitarian resonance.

— Jeffrey Biebighauser, Augustine and the phenomenological tradition, p. 280 (PDF page 281; the link goes directly to the PDF)

5. Roger Penrose and primacy

Roger Penrose, in his book The Road to Reality, defends an opinion according to which there are three “worlds”: a Platonic mathematical world, the physical world, and the mental world.

This is plainly the threefold division. It may not seem so to some people, because of the unique words used. But it was common in various of the divisions of philosophy and of the sciences to write “mathematical” instead of “logical” or “rational”, probably because of the close relation between logic and mathematics; this may be seen by inspecting the compilation post. “Moral” or “ethical” philosophy/science, to premoderns and even the early moderns, included all mental phenomena; much of what was called “moral philosophy” by the Scottish Enlightenment would be called “social science” today.

Penrose has stumbled upon the threefold division, and doesn’t seem to notice it. I have not read his whole book, but I have leafed through it, and he does not seem to acknowledge that he has predecessors in drawing this division. What became most famous with regard to his division were his figures 1.3 and 1.4, which I have reproduced here.

These figures were famous mostly because Penrose does not believe that any of the worlds is “primary”, or that there is any hierarchy between them, but rather that their dependence is cyclical. As he says in the book (p. 1029), his opinion is that

each of three worlds—Platonic-mathematical, physical, and mental—has its own kind of reality, and where each is (deeply and mysteriously) founded in the one that precedes it (the worlds being taken cyclicly). I like to think that, in a sense, the Platonic world may be the most primitive of the three, since mathematics is a kind of necessity, virtually conjuring its very self into existence through logic alone. Be that as it may, there is the further mystery, or paradox, of the cyclic aspect of these worlds, where each seems to be able to encompass the succeeding one in its entirety, while itself seeming to depend only upon a small part of its predecessor.

The ancients drew various orders and hierarchies to the division, as the compilation post shows us. It seems to me that the orders of study that were most concerned with being systematic have gone with either logic–physics–ethics, or logic–ethics–physics. But we are told by Sextus Empiricus, soon after the quoted passage, that there were ancient examples who began with physics and with ethics too.

That said, Penrose was not the first to draw no hierarchy between the parts of the division, either. Julia Annas says (pp. 110–111), citing a 1979 paper by Pierre Hadot, that the Stoics saw no hierarchy when they defended the division, and that this is shown by the metaphors that, according to Diogenes Laërtius, they used to explain it:

What is interesting about the enthusiastic Platonist use of what may originally (pace Xenocrates) have been a Stoic way of looking at philosophy is that it brings with it a characteristic position about the structure of philosophy. The tripartite view is non-foundationalist; no part has primacy in that it forms the basis for the others, and there is no set hierarchy of the parts. Just this is what makes the Stoic tripartite view distinctive. The metaphors the Stoics use for philosophy bring out the idea that the parts are interdependent; the unity of the whole depends equally on the contribution of all the separate and very different parts. Philosophy is a living being, logic being the skeleton and muscles, ethics the flesh and blood, and physics the soul. (Or physics is the flesh and blood, and ethics the soul.) Or: Philosophy is an egg, logic being the shell, ethics the white, and physics the yolk. Or: Philosophy is an orchard, logic being the wall, physics the trees, and ethics the fruit. Obviously, there is a certain amount of arbitrariness as to which part of philosophy is identified with which part of an egg, or an animal, or whatever. What is important is to get across the idea that, in their distinctively different ways, the different parts of philosophy are mutually interdependent. The yolk, white, and shell of an egg don't form a hierarchy, but they do need to hold together in a distinctive and mutually interdependent way, or you no longer have an egg. Similarly with a living thing, whose parts are all necessary in a mutually interdependent way to its continued function as a living thing.

Ryan Johnson, the author of Deleuze, a Stoic, concurs (p. 7):

While the order of philosophical topics remained a problem to which different Stoics offered different responses, they almost all agree that the three parts are integrated. For the Stoics, ‘no part [of philosophy] is separated from another, but the parts are mixed’ (DL 7.40). In order to explain the exact nature of this mixture, the Stoics compare the tripartite integration of philosophy to various things. [...]

The passage goes on to give the metaphors, but they were all mentioned in the Annas quote, as well as by Diogenes Laërtius himself in the compilation post. Johnson also gives this table, which is pretty neat:

If not for these commentators, I would not have noticed that the Stoics were communicating a lack of hierarchy when they gave these metaphors, but that does seem to be their meaning, or at least a very plausible interpretation of it. Johnson goes on at length about the egg and the Stoic division, drawing relations to Deleuze that would probably be interesting to someone who has actually read any Deleuze.

So Dr. Penrose’s new opinion seems to be, in at least one respect, the Stoic mainstream.

6. Random things I found

Here go other things which were less worth noticing.

Grammar

It seems that the division was used by some grammarians. I don’t know whether these writers are very important, but they illustrate the fact:

4. Adverbial proposition of causality. We have here the numerous and complicated relations of the ground, consequence, and purpose: 1. The real ground, or cause; 2. The moral ground, or motive; 3. The logical ground, or reason ; 4. The possible ground, or condition; 5. The adversative ground, or conception; 6. The ultimate ground, or purpose. But as the real, moral, and logical grounds express simply the logical relations of thoughts, such propositions properly belong to the co-ordinate form, and they take the form of the subordinate proposition only in an abnormal way. [...]

— Review of A Grammar of the English Language by Samuel S. Greene; reviewer unknown

The factitive, however, expresses the kindred effect and contains the principal idea of the thought expressed and has the principal accent. In German it is nicely distinguished by special forms of the objective relations, mostly after prepositions. It seldom agrees with the passive object, the verbs werden, bleiben, heissen, nennen, and schelten, forming the only exceptions, (i. e. take the factitive without prepositions). According to the action expressed, this relation may be classified under three heads: real, moral and logical.

— Sylvester Primer, On the Factitive in German, p. xxvii (PDF p. 3)

13. The new philology distinguishes three kinds of causal relations; viz: the real ground; as, ‘he went to London, being carried thither;’ the moral ground; as, ‘he went to London, wishing to engage in business there;’ and the logical ground; as, ‘he went to London, being seen there by many persons.’ Such distinctions bring grammar into harmony with logic.

This point, I believe, is not noticed by Mr. Morell.

— Josiah W. Gibbs, Philological Studies, p. 12

Attributes of God

This Greek Orthodox website claims that the attributes of God

have been divided into natural, logical and ethical attributes. Under the natural attributes three things are implied: that He is ever-present, eternal and almighty. Under the logical attributes, all-knowledge and all-wisdom. Under the ethical attributes, holiness, righteousness and love. All the three are interrelated and arise since the finite being of humanity is not able to grasp the substance of God as a unique oneness. It follows therefore that the classification is conventional.

I was unable to confirm this from any theologian of note; the article does not give citations for it.

Islamic

It seems that medieval Islamic authors, such as al-Farabi, used the division sometimes, or something similar. I have not yet found any primary quotes in English to support this, but I have found one Islamic book that seems to be drawing on such sources:

Philosophy is sometimes used in a broader sense whereby it is coterminous with knowledge. Obviously, since knowledge encompasses every awareness that reflects reality and has cognitive worth, in its general sense, philosophy even comprises the empirical and natural sciences. Therefore, in a general division, knowledge or philosophy is divided into theoretical and practical branches.

Theoretical wisdom (al-hikma al-nadhariyya) or philosophy is the inquiry of things, which exist irrespective of the human will and conduct. This section of philosophy bears numerous divisions. Its chief sections are as follows:

The higher wisdom (al-hikma al-‛ulyā), also called the first philosophy (al-hikma al-ūlā). It is this branch of knowledge to which the term philosophy is applied in its specific sense. Since higher philosophy is also concerned with the cognition of the Necessary (al-Wājib), it is called theology (Ilāhiyāt).

The middle wisdom (al-hikma al-wustā), also called mathematics.

The low wisdom (al-hikma al-sufla). This section of knowledge comprises the natural and experimental sciences.

Natural sciences are concerned with the inquiry of physical things. Mathematics studies things that have intermediate corporeality (al-tajarrud al-barzakhī), that is, although they lack physique, they do have quantity. The first philosophy, the discipline to which the current applications of philosophy and hikma is exclusive, is the inquiry of absolute reality. Its predicates are those accidents of absolute reality, which precede its division by the various mathematical, natural, moral, and logical delimitations.Practical wisdom (al-hikma al-‛amaliyya) analyzes things that exist because of the human will. It is further divided into three kinds: ethics, home economics, and public administration.

This division of knowledge that al-Fārābī and other Islamic philosophers have elucidated its details, illustrates that philosophy, in its general sense, has never been a single discipline. It has had a wide application by which it subsumed many diverse disciplines. As for the first philosophy, or philosophy in its specific sense, it is a particular branch of knowledge that has never encompassed other disciplines. Therefore, the much celebrated opinion that philosophy used to encompass every branch of knowledge and the empirical sciences separated from philosophy as they gradually evolved, lacks foundation.

If by philosophy its general meaning is meant, it has never been a single discipline with a specific subject of inquiry. And if it’s specific meaning is in view, then it has never included other disciplines. However, if it is meant that with the empirical sciences’ advance, rational and incorporeal methods of knowledge became obsolete and experiential perspectives replaced metaphysical views, it is a valid statement. Nevertheless, except for their intellectual universals (al-kulliyāt al-‛aqliyya) that are not subject to experiment, natural sciences were founded on experiment from the beginning.

— Āyatullah Abdullah Jawādī Āmulī, A Commentary on Theistic Arguments (PDF)

Bakunin

I think it’s funny that Bakunin uses this division in his God or Labor. The division is so traditional and ancient, and he uses it for such an impiety as the following.

Against the creed of the theologians I set these propositions:

1. That if there wore a God who created it the world could never have existed.

2. That if God were, or had been, the ruler of nature, natural, physical, and social law could never have existed. It would have presented a spectacle of complete chaos. Ruled from above, downwards, it would have resembled the calculated and designed disorder of the political State.

3. That moral law is a moral, logical and real law, only in so far as it emanates from the needs of human society.

4. That the idea of God is not necessary to the existence and working of the moral law. Far from this, it is a disturbing and socially demoralizing factor.[...]

Quote added 2021-12-16 — He also says something that sounds similarly evocative in his God and the State: 

We recognize, then, the absolute authority of science, because the sole object of science is the mental reproduction, as well-considered and systematic as possible, of the natural laws inherent in the material, intellectual, and moral life of both the physical and the social worlds, these two worlds constituting, in fact, but one and the same natural world.

Titles

I do not know the relevance of these publications to the division, since I have not read them, but they contain the keywords in their very titles, and I thought to mention them, since I found them while researching.

• Eckehart Köhler, On Neurath’s Writings on Logic, Ethics and Physics
• Richard Montague, Logical necessity, physical necessity, ethics, and quantifiers
• John Corcoran, The Inseparability of Logic and Ethics

And, most tenuously,

• Sheryle Bergmann Drewe, The logical connection between moral education and physical education

Et cetera

This section will just have every other quote that I had gathered while researching for the main compilation post, but decided not to feature in it. It is ordered from most to least interesting.

If one leaves theology out of account, one may say that the hierarchical relation of the special sciences and philosophy is of Aristotelian origin. The Aristotelian origin comes out in the very notion of a science which aims at unity, and in the relation between the sciences and philosophy. Since the latter rests upon the former, it remains in permanent contact with the facts and is anchored to the very rocks of reality. The Aristotelian inspiration appears finally in the inner articulation of philosophy itself. During the first centuries of the Middle Ages the Platonic division of philosophy into physics, logic, and ethics was for a long time in force. The thirteenth century definitely rejects it or rather absorbs it into new classifications. Compared with Aristotle—the most brilliant professor that humanity has ever known—Plato is only a poet, saying beautiful things without order or method. Dante was right when he called Aristotle “the master of those who know.” But to know is before all things to order: sapientia est ordinare: the mission of the wise man is to put order into his knowledge. Even those who do not accept the ideas of the Stagyrite acknowledge his kingship when it is a question of order or clearness. [...]

— Maurice de Wulf, The Teaching of Philosophy and the Classification of the Sciences in the Thirteenth Century, pp. 369–370

Philosophy was defined by the Stoics as ‘the knowledge of things divine and human’. It was divided into three departments; logic, ethic, and physic. This division indeed was in existence before their time, but they have got the credit of it as of some other things which they did not originate. Neither was it confined to them, but was part of the common stock of thought. Even the Epicureans, who are said to have rejected logic can hardly be counted as dissentients from this threefold division. For what they did was to substitute for the Stoic logic a logic of their own, dealing with the notions derived from sense, much in the same way as Bacon substituted his Novum Organum for the Organon of Aristotle. Cleanthes we are told recognised six parts of philosophy, namely, dialectic, rhetoric, ethic, politic, physic, and theology, but these are obviously the result of subdivision of the primary ones. Of the three departments we may say that logic deals with the form and expression of knowledge, physic with the matter of knowledge, and ethic with the use of knowledge. The division may also be justified in this way. Philosophy must study either nature (including the divine nature) or man; and, if it studies man, it must regard him either from the side of the intellect or of the feelings, that is either as a thinking (logic) or as an acting (ethic) being.

— St. George William Joseph Stock, A Guide to Stoicism (added 2021-08-01)

Burt’s interpretation of Augustine, though often enlightening, is frequently excessively Aristotelian, in both substance and terminology. The very division between speculative and practical philosophy, which serves as background to the book’s title, bespeaks a division first found in Aristotle, but never in Augustine. Would not a division into physical, logical, and ethical be more Augustinian? Aristotelian aphorisms, not Plato and Platonism, regularly provide intellectual background for Burt in understanding Augustine’s thought. Several chapters begin with summaries of philosophia perennis. Such recapitulations can be a useful magisterial tool and, doubtless, Augustine contributed greatly to the Western philosophic endeavor. But how much of this acquired wisdom does Burt read back into Augustine? [...]

— Frederick Van Fleteren, review of Augustine’s World, by Donald Burt

Designed in an especial manner for the People, though adapted for all classes, the work will be found to comprise those subjects on which information is of the most importance; such as the more interesting branches of science—physical, mathematical, and moral; natural history, political history, geography, and literature; together with a few miscellaneous paper which seem to be called for by peculiar circumstances affecting the British people.

— William and Robert Chambers, Chambers’s Information for the People, preface

The Ballet [Comique de la Reine] was a musical drama with dancing set in an elaborate recreation of the island of Circe. The surviving text associated with the performance presents four allegorical expositions, based explicitly on Comes’ work: physical or natural, moral, temporal, and logical or interpretive.

— Wikipedia on Natalis Comes; I was unable to verify this

Physical, mathematical and moral are the three kinds  of truth prevalent in the world, and each is a standard  for its own type, and each differs from the other. What is physical truth? It is truth or evidence made patent to one of the five senses, such as the sight, hearing, smelling, tasting or touching. These are the five senses of the human mind. And by the use of them we reason the truth or falsehood of certain material ideas. The great failure with the Infidels in England, that I have seen, was this, that they take the physical test and apply it to the moral subject. So with the mathematical test; and because the moral does not agree with the physical or mathematical, they say that it is not true. 

— The Underwood-Marples Debate

Before I begin this Chapter, I shall take Notice, that there are three sorts of Philosophy, viz. Natural, Moral, and Rational. The natural Part (which I here treat of) relates to the World: The Moral, to the good or ill that concerneth Man’s Life: And the Rational Part is Discourse and Disputation, grounded on Reason. And as it may be necessary to make some Mention of the Great Author of this World, I presume first to give you the Opinions of the greatest Men on the Consistence or Essence of the Almighty.

— Giles Jacob, The Country Gentleman’s Vade Mecum, p. 108

Sovereign Lord, thank You for creating the physical, mathematical and moral laws of the universe that give us order. Teach me what is right, and enable me to live by it.

— prayer in this devotional by LivingTruth.ca

Now it is clear at the outset that the president is “empowered to act individually” only in very exceptional instances and those exceptional instances are indicated explicitly in the Constitution. This is a natural, logical and ethical corollary to the general principle adopted by the Constitution that the president is “non-accountable.” Simply put, if the president is non-accountable, he/she has to be “powerless,” or share his/her powers with other “accountable” parties like the prime minister and the ministers.

— H. Levent Köker, Erdoğan’s presidency and the Constitution

In political idealogy, it is very important to consider stoicism. If a system is research from 3 corners: physical, logical and moral grounds, it is call stoicism.

(1) Physical check; Does the Burmese constitution physically show the sign of turning toward Democracy?

(2) Logical check: The Constitution approves a military role more than a civilian one. The regime said Burmese democracy is nearly complete. But, more and more politicians are behind bars. Is this logical?

(3) Democracy based on freedom of speech. If freedom of speech is violated every time, how can Burma democracy stand up for moral test?

If Obama’s administration does not consider stoicism to fix Burma or the world, it will end up empty and getting nowhere.

— “Tom Tun”, in this random 2009 Internet comment. I just thought it was neat and funny how he laid it out.