Paradoxes drowned

This is just a pious thought that I shared with my friends the other day. What follows after the message screenshot[1] is just some elaboration upon it that I thought to do, and which is the reason this is a blog post at all. If you thought that the image that I attached to my message is pretty, and would like to see other such images, please check the “Concerning Faith of Things Not Seen” Facebook page (named after Augustine’s work of the same name); I run it, though not alone.

The Stoics were fond of saying various shocking sentences,[2] which they did believe to be literally true within their philosophy. “By a paradox is meant that which runs counter to general opinion,” as St. George Stock[3] explains it to us; the word meant something strange or incredible, which is still a sense in use today (esp. in the adjective “paradoxical”), although it has often been contracted to refer only to self-contradictory statements.

“It is perhaps these very paradoxes which account for the puzzled fascination with which Stoicism affected the mind of antiquity, just as obscurity in a poet may prove a surer passport to fame than more strictly poetical merits.” Some examples that he gives are, “Virtue is the only good”, “All faults are equal”, “Every fool is mad”, “Only the sage is free and every fool is a slave”, “The sage alone is wealthy”, “Good men are always happy and bad men always miserable”, “All goods are equal”, “No one is wiser or happier than another”, “No wise man is unhappy”.

I note that it is the same genre of things that are said in the “Admonition 5”, of St Francis of Assisi – reproduced here below, from the OLL edition of his writings. Compare the incredulity and doubt of the Greek audience of such statements with the reaction of a Christian audience to these quotes, which in my experience is usually one of immediate admiration and assent. May not a miracle have happened here?

Consider, O man, how great the excellence in which the Lord has placed you because He has created and formed you to the image of His beloved Son according to the body and to His own likeness according to the spirit. And all the creatures that are under heaven serve and know and obey their Creator in their own way better than you And even the demons did not crucify Him, but you together with them crucified Him and still crucify Him by taking delight in vices and sins. Wherefore then can you glory? For if you were so clever and wise that you possessed all science, and if you knew how to interpret every form of language and to investigate heavenly things minutely, you could not glory in all this, because one demon has known more of heavenly things and still knows more of earthly things than all men, although there may be some man who has received from the Lord a special knowledge of sovereign wisdom. In like manner, if you were handsomer and richer than all others, and even if you could work wonders and put the demons to flight, all these things are hurtful to you and in nowise belong to you, and in them you cannot glory; that, however, in which we may glory is in our infirmities, and in bearing daily the holy cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

A similar, related writing was shared by Cal when I was talking about this, which I also reproduce here. Titled “True and Perfect Joy” (De vera et perfecta laetitia), I have copied it from this website without the philological information that was attached to it.

The same [Brother Leonard] related in the same place that one day at Saint Mary’s, blessed Francis called Brother Leo and said: “Brother Leo, write.” He responded: “Look, I’m ready!” “Write,” he said, “what true joy is.”

“A messenger arrives and says that all the Masters of Paris have entered the Order. Write: this isn’t true joy! Or, that all the prelates, archbishops and bishops beyond the mountains, as well as the King of France and the King of England [have entered the Order]. Write: this isn’t true joy! Again, that my brothers have gone to the non-believers and converted all of them to the faith; again, that I have so much grace from God that I heal the sick and perform many miracles. I tell you true joy doesn’t consist in any of these things.”

“Then what is true joy?”

“I return from Perugia and arrive here in the dead of night. It’s winter time, muddy, and so cold that icicles have formed on the edges of my habit and keep striking my legs and blood flows from such wounds. Freezing, covered with mud and ice, I come to the gate and, after I’ve knocked and called for some time, a brother comes and asks: ‘Who are you?’ ‘Brother Francis,’ I answer. ‘Go away!’ he says. ‘This is not a decent hour to be wandering about! You may not come in!’ When I insist, he replies: ‘Go away! You are simple and stupid! Don’t come back to us again! There are many of us here like you—we don’t need you!’ I stand again at the door and say: ‘For the love of God, take me in tonight!" And he replies: ‘I will not! Go to the Crosiers’ place and ask there!’

“I tell you this: If I had patience and did not become upset, true joy, as well as true virtue and the salvation of my soul, would consist in this.”

[1] I thought it fitting to include in the screenshot that it happened in a “Catholic Theology” group chat on Messenger, but please do not ask to be added to it. Do become Catholic, if you aren’t yet.

[2] In a famous sentence, the SEP tells us that “it seems clear that some Stoics took a kind of perverse joy in advocating views which seem so at odds with common sense”, although “they did not do so simply to shock”. It does seem clear.

[3] Not canonized; his first name was “St. George”. Full name “St. George William Joseph Stock”.

Titles to interest

This blog post is meant to define a new extrinsic title to legitimate taking of interest, in view of the Catholic doctrine on usury. I begin with some quotations that are helpful to my purpose. If you are not familiar enough with the doctrine to follow what is said, try checking the Catholic Encyclopedia on usury and interest.

6. Leo X, in the Fifth Council of Lateran, 1515, ruled that – “usury is properly interpreted to be the attempt to draw profit and increment, without labour, without cost, and without risk, out of the use of a thing that does not fructify.” In 1745, Benedict XIV wrote in the same sense to the Bishops of Italy: “That kind of sin which is called usury, and which has its proper seat and place in the contract of mutuum, consists in turning that contract, which of its own nature requires the amount returned exactly to balance the amount received, into a ground for demanding a return in excess of the amount received.” Mutuum, be it observed, is a loan for a definite period, of some article, the use of which lies in its consumption, as matches, fuel, food, and, in one respect, money. We shall prove this to be properly a gratuitous contract. (s. iv., n. 4, p. 254.)

7. Usury then is no mere taking of exorbitant interest. There is no question of more or less, but it is usury to take any interest at all upon the loan of a piece of property, which

(a) is of no use except to be used up, spent, consumed:

(b) is not wanted for the lender’s own consumption within the period of the loan:

(c) is lent upon security that obviates risk:

(d) is so lent that the lender foregoes no occasion of lawful gain by lending it.

8. When all these four conditions are fulfilled, and yet interest is exacted upon a loan, such interest is usurious and unjust. And why? Simply by reason of the principle that we laid down before, speaking of private exchange (n. 3), a principle that is thus stated by St. Thomas:

“If one party is much benefited by the commodity which he receives of the other, while the other, the seller, is not a loser by going without the article, no extra price must be put on. The reason is, because the benefit that accrues to one party is not from the seller, but from the condition of the buyer. Now no one ought to sell to another that which is not his, though he may sell the loss that he suffers. He, however, who is much benefited by the commodity he receives of another, may spontaneously bestow some extra recompense on the seller: that is the part of one who has the feelings of a gentleman.” (2a 2ae, q. 77, art. 1, in corp.)

— Joseph Rickaby, S.J., Moral Philosophy, 2.5, §5

It is in view of the conditions laid out by Leo and by Fr. Rickaby that moralists have often explicitly recognized certain legitimate “extrinsic titles” to interest, as explained below:

“Loss occurring (damnum emergens) and profit ceasing (lucrum cessans) are the two great titles to interest, as interest is understood today, a return owed without fault of the debtor.” If one could have made a profit with one’s money instead of loaning it (and can prove it!) then this becomes a legitimate title for interest. If I were going to purchase an orchard, but made the loan instead, the lender might also owe me the profit I lost from not owning the orchard. This title would become much more important as commercial centers and opportunities for investment became prevalent. Much later, it might even come to include the cost of one’s labor in making the loan (a just wage for bankers). “In the eyes of the Church, the most important and legitimate one [excuse], held that usury could be considered a salary, a remuneration for labor (stipendium laboris).”

— Fr. Gary L Coulter, The Church and Usury, ch. 3

Less commonly, some people have recognized inflation as a legitimate title to interest, so that a lender could lawfully charge an interest rate to cover the rate of inflation. Germain Grisez mentions this, in passing, in a passage quoted by Fr. Coulter:

Those who deposit or lend can fairly charge for various other factors: costs incurred in making and administering the loan, the risk of non-payment, probable inflation, taxes, the foregoing of other legitimate uses to which the money otherwise would be put, and so on.

— Germain Grisez, Living a Christian Life, vol. 2 of The Way of the Lord Jesus (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1993), 834

If someone were only familiar with the three titles just mentioned before – damnum emergens, lucrum cessans and stipendium laboris –, allowing for inflation could seem strange. It certainly did in the (rather extreme) opinion of the late Zippy Catholic. As my friend Calvin Engime once told me:

I used to accept inflation as a title to interest because Germain Grisez said it is one, but I don’t see the reason for this. It comes back to: what would have happened if you hadn’t made the loan? The money would still have declined in value while sitting in your pocket, and why should the borrower have to compensate you for that?

If someone were to object to Cal’s opinion by saying that the money could be invested to prevent its decline in value, Cal would certainly point out, correctly, that this fact could not be a reason for inflation as a title to interest, but only for lucrum cessans, which he does not dispute. So, is there any reason for Grisez’s statement?

I think there is, and I submit that it lies in the second condition laid out by Fr. Rickaby in the first quote from above, that the property loaned, being something consumed in use, “is not wanted for the lender’s own consumption within the period of the loan.” The difference between inflation, as a title to interest, and lucrum cessans, is that the inflation title represents foregone consumption, in an economic sense, as opposed to production, which is represented by lucrum cessans.

The inflation-title is the compensation for the decline in your power to consume, because you could have chosen to buy something instead of making the loan, and by making the loan you have delayed this consumption to a time when your money is worth less; it is only right that you be compensated for doing this, since it lowers your quality of life to some extent, and you do it only for the sake of making the loan.

This is fair enough, and certainly correct, but it is not usually seen because loans are usually made out of stored “savings”, which the lender did not mean to spend consumptively (as opposed to productively) any time soon. If the money was unlikely to be spent, anyway, why should there be compensation for the decline in value that it would have suffered while not being spent?

The answer is that, regardless of whether the money will be spent or not, it remains that, in a fundamentally uncertain world, there is always some usefulness to having cash holdings, because the probability that some desire to use it consumptively will arise is never zero. While holding cash, the saver enjoys the potential to consume whenever he wants, if he happens to want it, and this potential is itself useful. If it were not, then he would, of course, spend his cash instead of holding it, either productively or consumptively.

The service that money renders does not consist in its turnover. It consists in its being ready in cash holdings for any future use.

Money is never “idle.” It always renders to somebody the only service that it can render, namely being a part of a man’s cash holdings.

Cash holdings are sometimes greater and sometimes smaller with the same individual. But nobody ever has cash holdings greater than he wants to have. If he thinks that his cash holdings are excessive, he invests the surplus either by buying (producers’ or consumers’ goods) or by lending it. (Time deposits are one method of lending money.) [...]

— Ludwig von Mises, On the Velocity of Circulation

Now, once we acknowledge the usefulness of this potential to consume, which is undeniable, we have done more than explain the title of inflation. This is where my new legitimate title to interest comes in; I shall call it the potentiality title, or title of potentiality, after the potential to consume. I will explain it next.

There is no reason why only the decrease in the potential to consume due to inflation should be admitted as a legitimate title to interest. The potential itself, being useful, is of different usefulness to different persons, according to how they rate their probability of desiring to consume in the future. This can only be evaluated according to the lender’s foresight regarding opportunities to consume.

So, plainly, it is legitimate that the lender charge interest on a loan in order to be compensated for his loss of potential to consume, since this loss lowers his quality of life to some extent, and he incurs it only for the sake of making the loan. Because of the nature of the usefulness of the potential, the precise just rate of this interest can only be determined with knowledge of the lender’s mind. Which should allow almost any numerical rate to be justified, effectively; the exception would be when there are reasons to suspect the lender of allowing his estimation to be influenced by unjust motives.

To some people, this may seem like a rash conclusion. It may ease their minds to consider these facts which Cal told me about before, in an earlier conversation:

Up to the 19th Century, the burden was on anyone who had collected interest on a loan to affirmatively demonstrate that it was justified, or else he could not be absolved unless he made reparation of what he had taken. Then some theologians advanced the theory of “title of civil law,” according to which the fact that the civil law permitted a certain rate of interest was sufficient title to it, independent of any other claim. The Holy See ruled that, pending a definitive judgement on the legitimacy of this opinion, those who put it into practice were not to be disturbed, at least as long as the rate of interest is not flagrantly excessive, and there the matter has pretty much stood ever since.

Now, not only does this other theory also allow almost any effective rate of interest to be morally justified – at least in most countries, which tend to permit almost any interest – it is also much less reasonable. For it claims that a lawmaker can turn a natural injustice into a just act with the mere stroke of a pen; whereas my opinion of the title of potentiality does no such thing, but explains the justice of the act on the basis of the undeniable fact that it is useful to hold cash for the reason that it gives someone the potential to consume in the future. So, if the conclusion regarding the “title of civil law” was not too rash to be put into practice, then much less so is my conclusion, which is a much more reasonable one.

Addendum, 2023-11-05

I have recently been reading Rothbard’s Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, volume 1, where §4.8, on Lessius and de Lugo, points out that the former had a similar theory, the title which he called “carentia pecuniae” (charging for lack of money). As Rothbard describes it, having cited Lessius’s work De Justitia et Jure (1605) as his source:

But that is not all. For Leonard Lessius contributed his own, new and powerful, weapon against the usury ban: a new ‘title’ or justification for interest. The new justification – prefigured only by the neglected Summenhart – was carentia pecuniae: charging for lack of money. Lessius pointed out quite cogently that the lender suffers the lack of his money, the lack of his liquidity, during the term of the loan, and therefore he is entitled to charge interest for this economic loss. In short, Lessius saw perceptively that everyone derives utility from liquidity, from the possession of money, and that being deprived of this utility is a lack for which the lender may and will demand compensation. Lessius pointed out that unexpected situations can and do arise which could be met far more effectively if one's money were in one's possession and not absent for a period of time. Time, in short, can and should be charged for, for that reason, ‘for it can never be obtained that the merchants do not value a long-term concession higher than a short-term one’. And those who are deprived of their money ‘value more the lack of their money for five months than the lack of it for four, and the lack of it for four more than three, and this is partly because they lack the opportunity of gaining with that money, partly because their principle is longer in danger...’.

Furthermore, Lessius points out that bills of exchange, or rights to future money, are always at a discount compared to cash. This discount is, of course, the rate of interest. Lessius explains: ‘This is a matter of common experience in that money provides the means to a multitude of things which those rights do not provide. Therefore they may be bought at a lower price’. Lessius also notes that merchants and exchangers daily determine the ‘price of the lack of money’ on the Antwerp Bourse, averaging about 10 per cent; and foreign exchanges, of inestimable value to the economy, would perish if such prices could not be charged.

Thus, for Lessius, the price for a lack of money is established on organized loan markets. But to the extent that a loan market exists, there is no need to justify each merchant's loan on the basis of his particular opportunity cost or deprivation of funds. That price, which becomes the just price, is set on the loan market. As Lessius puts it:

Moreover, any merchant seems able to demand this price... even though there is no gain of his that stops because of his loan. This is the just price for the privation of money among merchants; for the just price of an article or obligation in any community is that which is put upon it by that community in good faith for the sake of the common good in view of all the circumstances... Therefore, even if through the privation of money for a year there is no gain of mine that stops and no risk of capital, because such a price for just causes has been put upon this privation, I may demand it just as the rest do.

With carentia pecuniae, therefore, Leonard Lessius delivered the final blow to smash the usury prohibition, while unfortunately still retaining the prohibition in a formal sense. It is no wonder that Professor Noonan, the great scholar of the scholastics on usury, holds Lessius to be ‘the theologian whose views on usury most decidedly mark the arrival of a new era. More than any predecessor he would probably have felt completely at ease in the modern financial world.’ [John T. Noonan, Jr, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 222.]

Bicodicism

This blog post has the aim of coining a word for a thing I have sometimes seen.

Some people, chiefly liberals and libertarians, will sometimes speak as though law and morality operate under entirely different principles. Not only is it different for something to be illegal and immoral, but these things are actually thought to be unrelated by nature, so that the disconnection between them is right and good, and would also exist in a more perfect legal system.

More specifically, they seem to think that some acts are intrinsically legally permissible or impermissible, and that these acts are different from the acts which are intrinsically morally permissible or impermissible. The legal code and the moral code may overlap, but there can be no general proposition about whether immoral things can or must be illegal, or vice-versa.

As this doctrine is believed, only the legal code may be enforced by the courts; the moral code, if the speaker is a Christian, is only enforced in the day of Judgment.

I have coined the term bicodicism for this idea; plainly, the name derives from the opinion’s belief in “two codes” or codices.

Bicodicism may be contrasted, for instance, with the opinion of Thomas Aquinas, who thought that all immoral acts could, in theory, be forbidden by law, but human law rightly allows some immoral acts because it is not possible for the majority to abstain from them; which is a practical reason, rather than a reason of principle.

A bicodicist might, instead, say that some acts are immoral but are legally permissible, because people have a legal right to do them. This is different from mere legal positivism because the bicodicist regards this as a correct state of the law, and may even find it to be immoral, or against ‘the principles of law’ (or some such phrase), to change the law to forbid the immoral act.

Lysander Spooner plainly stated a bicodicist doctrine in his famous pamphlet Vices are Not Crimes, where he defined some acts as vices and some as crimes, claiming that only the latter are passible of legal prohibition. Spooner’s definition of a crime has nothing to do with whether an act is in fact forbidden by the laws, so that his doctrine is not positivist.

I note that it is not necessary for someone to adopt bicodicism in order to be a liberal or a libertarian. For supposing that a man believed in Thomas’s doctrine as I have stated it, but also believed that acts which do not harm others are never possible for the majority to abstain from – or supposing that he thought that there are always overwhelming practical reasons for the sovereign not to forbid such acts – then he would certainly agree with the common liberal and libertarian doctrine, that acts which do not harm others should always be tolerated by law.

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.