Faces of morality

[Carl G.]

What other forms can morality take, besides the codes of conduct and the imperatives? Where else could we find it?

[Richard Meyer]

In ideas, approaches to ideas and problems. Most men think that human beings have access to knowledge, to certainty. Some philosophers even use this presupposition as an argument, sometimes it even causes a paradigm shift: when they reach a point that suggests that human beings don't have the means of understanding a problem, they immediately think: "We couldn't know things this way, therefore this approach must be wrong." and they switch paradigms. A lot of them start using the idea of God this way.
This, to me, is morality in its purest form.

Also, the way a lot of philosophers choose the premises that they build upon is of a moral nature.

[Enjolras]

What other forms can morality take, besides the codes of conduct and the imperatives? Where else could we find it?

Timely question for me as I’m writing a dissertation on it. Taking the question to my home turf, in International Relations there are two dominant approaches to morality “Realists” which finds a law in nature which it is moral to follow, and the “Liberals” who find a law in human nature superior to that of nature-nature.

In both cases for me fall short, as what individuals who claim to be moral are actually doing is interacting pitched at a law detached from an-other, with the “other” and their “becoming”; devalued. It is a certain tension between the singular other, and universal law.

Where else could we find it?

This is key, as it suggests that morality is something that can be owned or possessed of a subject sure of itself and executed in specific situations whose specificity is erased by merely unfolding a programmatic rule.

Against a ‘moral order’, a ethics based approach differs as it is more sensitive to the local conditions which means a promoting of knowledge, an opening for information that either gets ignored or reduced in a “rule” based approach. It is less something that can be found, more a way of being.

I realize that sounds pretty vague, but it is by nature not something that can be gathered together to view separate from a particular situation. I find it a more dynamic approach, which extends the range of response to a given situation which can only be a good thing.

Spinoza has been something of a revelation for me in this regard, which I am still digesting.


Enjolras.

[Richard Meyer]

"When Nietzsche questions the most general presuppositions of philosophy, he says that these are essentially moral, since Morality alone is capable of persuading us that thought has a good nature and the thinker a good will, and that only the good can ground the supposed affinity between thought and the True. Who else, in effect, but Morality, and this Good which gives thought to the true, and the true to thought? ... As a result, the conditions of a philosophy which would be without any kind of presuppositions appear all the more clearly: instead of being supported by the moral Image of thought, it would take as its point of departure a radical critique of this Image and the "postulates" it implies. It would find its difference or its true beginning, not in an agreement with the pre-philosophical Image but in a rigorous struggle against this Image, which it would denounce as non-philosophical.

Difference and Repetition