Vicesimus Alter Stele

Ethical Decisions

1) "Life is governed by a multitude of forces. It would be smooth sailing, if one could determine the course of one's actions only by one general principle whose application at a given moment was too obvious to need even a moment's reflection. But I cannot recall a single act which could be so easily determined." (M. K. Gandhi, All Men are Brothers, 1960)

2) The scholar Mencius, writing a century after Confucius' death wrote: "The tendency of man's nature to good is like the tendency of water to flow downwards. There are none but have this tendency to good, just as all water flows downward... If men become evil, that is not the fault of their original endowment. The sense of mercy is found in all men; the sense of shame is found in all men; the sense of respect is found in all men; the sense of right and wrong is found in all men... Charity, righteousness, propriety and moral consciousness are not something that is drilled into us; we have got them originally..." The trick is to create a society that brings out the best in its members.

3) Confucianism: "Do not unto others that you would not they should do unto you."

Jainism: "In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self."

Zoroastrianism: "That nature only is good when it shall not do unto another whatever is not good for its own self."

Taoism: "Regard your neighbor's gain as your own gain and regard your neighbor's loss as your own loss."

Islam: "No one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself."

Hinduism: "Do not to others, which if done to thee, would cause thee pain."

Sikhism: "As thou deemest thyself so deem others. Then shalt thou become a partner in heaven."

Judaism: "What is hurtful to yourself, do not to your fellow man."

4) "...If certain experiences constantly tempt us to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance, this simply shows that by these words we don't mean nonsense, that after all what we mean by saying that an experience has absolute value 'is just a fact like other facts' and that all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions... I see clearly... not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance. That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence.

"For all I wanted to do with them [absolute expressions of value] was to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it." (Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Lecture on Ethics," 1930) (See verse 16 below.)

5) The Buddha was not interested in discussing unnecessary metaphysical questions which are purely speculative and which create imaginary problems. He considered them as a "wilderness of opinions." Of course he did not have access to most of the information that is contained in Frame of Reference either. Possibly his life would have been easier.

6) Kant distinguished objects and events as they appear in our experience from the reality, calling the sensory data "phenomena" and the reality "noumena." What we know is the phenomena. Thus the study of the senses, the mind and moral consciousness fell into the philosophical study called phenomenology. "It was the task of phenomenology to develop a list of categories embracing whatever can be included in the widest possible meaning of 'to be' ...since Husserl employed the term in the early 1900's, it has become the name of a way of doing philosophy..." The most interesting phenomena to study seem to be those perceptions of abstract concepts such as: adoration, abhorrence, belief, anger, curiosity, comfort, possessiveness, disgust, confusion, angst (as in existential angst), irritation, drowsiness, hallucination, learning, jealousy, hate, greed, grief, relaxation, pride, powerfulness, hunger, spirituality, impotency, numinous, respect, symbol recognition, worship, humility and the list can continue. Most of these are internal perceptions associated possibly with an object but most often a result of an event or happening. Consider the love one feels for a spouse or a child offspring, compared to how one might feel toward a random person off the street or to someone else's child. These are the food of poetry, and both the physical and the emotional situation in which we find ourselves is the essential context for ethical decisions. (see verse 10)

7) "John Stuart Mill in England and Christoph Sigwart in Germany, sought to show that statements in logic and mathematics are no less empirical than statements in the sciences... the relation of logic to psychology is comparable to that of learning theory or abnormal psychology [as a sub-set] to psychology as a whole. [or ]...logic is related to psychology as surveying is to geometry or accounting to arithmetic [a user discipline] ...Phenomenological statements are to be nonempirical. (Not derived from scientific induction.)" (Richard Schmitt, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967) The distinction of the kind of mental process going on when one is using logic or mathematics compared to feeling the abstract concepts (verse 6), seems obvious. Logic and mathematics involve following rules and definitions, using prescribed symbols in a certain way, some of which may correspond to physical objects, such as numbering verses ordering. This kind of activity is in a sense trivial, subject to following well known rules that can be duplicated by others. But when we solve the problem, or complete the proof, we feel a sense of triumph which is not trivial. Having a sensation of joy, for example, has to do with an entirely different set of issues, such as early childhood training, education, freedom, safety and many other interrelated mental associations. Imagine having a sense of joy listening to a stand-up comedian telling jokes. How much data is necessary to appreciate any one joke, and what goes into spontaneously laughing and enjoying the joke? And imagine the confusion, even embarrassment for someone who doesn't get the joke. Phenomenological statements are in this case personal, if honest these are objective and often consistent from one person to the next, but not necessarily. Explaining the joke to someone is essentially an activity of phenomenology.

How important to our ethical lives are these issues? Clearly being able to explain how we feel, and why in the simplest possible way, does have to do with moral conduct. First choosing which issues have moral weight and then applying acceptable rules, is the essence of ethical decision making. The obscure analysis of Mill above shows (Yawn!) why intellectual effort has less influence on action than emotional motivation.

8) "The transition from external conformity to life of inner realities (Tariqat, the way or inner path of spiritual advancement) involves two steps: 1) freeing the mind from the inertia of uncritical acceptance based upon blind imitation and stirring it to critical thinking; [Frame of Reference is to aid in this process.] and, 2) bringing the results... into practical life. In order to be spiritually fruitful, thinking must be not only critical but creative. [Create life as Art.]

Critical and creative thinking leads to spiritual preparation by cultivating those qualities that contribute toward the perfection and balancing of the mind and the heart -- and the release of unfettered Divine Life." (Meher Baba, Discourses, 1967)

9) Alcoholism has been recognized as a scourge since the earliest recorded history. Greeks were familiar with the destructive force of drinking, but did not describe this in terms of pathology, choosing to admonish heavy drinkers to more temperate ways. The Romans, in the writings of Seneca and Pliny, describe the psychological and physical effects of chronic intoxication. The deterioration they observed is similar to modern problems: memory loss, identity confusion, narcissistic self-indulgence, antisocial behavior, [inability to make ethical decisions] impaired speech and vision, distended stomach, halitosis, quivering, vertigo, insomnia and early death. The alcoholic beverage of choice for both the ancient Greeks and Romans was wine, customarily diluted with water. Beer was looked upon as a swinish potation better left to barbarians. Certainly other hallucinatory drugs have similar, more long lasting, and often unintended consequences.

10) During the progress of Frame of Reference, the reader may have noticed more than one referral to this verse. Those sources describe the 'criteria' of how to make ethical decisions. Not so many years ago I developed "The Cubed Rubric." This device in the shape of a square cube with six sides, is intended as a puzzle, with the outcome or solution being an ethical decision, named Virtue. The six sides are the six criteria that may have drawn the reader to this verse:
- Freewill: is described as a 'pre-condition' of virtue.
- Language: in several 'possible' ways relates to discussions of virtue and ethics.
- Character: is 'necessary,' as in politics, to introduce and sustain moral conduct.
- Context: "noumena" are the physical circumstances, and the things other people do, that mitigate for or against virtue for us.
- Moral Codes: The habits, culture, etiquette and laws that give us the rules to follow.
- Teleology: a god's command may be 'sufficient,' or we might accept life as art.

Suffice it to say, that when we make judgments about the virtue of any action or pass a judgment in a court of law, we have to consider the above. These are all considered in our decision making process, even though often we take one or more aspects of virtue for granted. The puzzle was also designed to stimulate discussions about virtue between parents and children. Each day of the year a child could pick a topic to discuss by following the instructions on "The Cubed Rubric."

11) "Does perception of a god, as infinity, based on intuition, make it reality? ...Jack couldn't accept that... it was just as likely the inspiration that sprang from intuition could be childhood conditioning or worse, arbitrary or capricious. There had to be a rational explanation for any event [or ethical decision] or how could you say it was not arbitrary, capricious, or invented? The highest form of insult to an idea would be to call it arbitrary or random, without reason or sense, senseless, nonsense. So how would you show that God exists? Especially if He were connected to infinity in a way that human mortals are not? That 'existence' is not the same as ours, so the word 'exist' in that question doesn't make sense in that very different context of infinity. We are in that instance using, forcing, the same word [existence] to stand for two different concepts in [our one] the same context. This is a simple but too common mistake [a fallacy of logic]. To ask such a question and to make an explanation is to speak nonsense.

"You can most certainly talk about such questions [and make ethical decisions] that connect inevitably to infinity with rational language. But, you have to be particularly careful that you don't simply end making up nonsense. It was therefore best to be quiet and say nothing and just try to feel. Just try to calmly appreciate the mystery... That's what the best religions did, celebrate the mystery in life and nature in many different ways." (IJ, Jack and Lucky, 1993)

Some religions teach enlightened ethical concepts based on many years of effort to improve the human condition. As long as they do not base their teachings on the convoluted, self-serving motivation of some charismatic cult leader, they may be a positive influence for society.

12) In 1992, December 6th to be precise, a notable historical monument dating to the 16th-century was destroyed by an angry mob of religious, Hindu, zealots. This 'ethical decision' was both a revenge for the presumed destruction of 11th-century temple built on the same site, and as part of the regional religious and political strife of the 20th-century. The important Islamic mosque, the Babri Masjid, at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, northern India, constructed by the Moghul prince Babur, was torn down by Hindu fundamentalists. This location in Ayodhya is considered the location in the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, where the deity/hero Rama was presumed to have been born.

Excavations in 1975-76 did not report medieval finds, but in June of 1992 stone carvings were allegedly uncovered 3.6 m. (12 ft.) underground at the site and these were calimed to have been from the earlier destroyed temple. "Encouraged by politicians of the influential Bharatiya Janata Party, Hindu fundamentalists proceeded to raze the mosque to the ground... This act naturally angered the Muslim population of India... much of the argument has centered less on the morality of destroying a major monument of the 16th-century, [belonging to the minority] than on the quality of the archaeological evidence -- apparently weak -- for the alleged 11th-century temple to Rama... the argument became centered on the claims that the 'Aryans' depicted in the Hymns of the Rigveda, the earliest texts at the root of the Hindu tradition, were indigenous to India. The contrary and indeed conventional view, [is] that an Aryan invasion took place at the end of the Indus Valley civilization around 1800 BC..." (Renfrew and Bahn, The World of Archaeology, 1991) Too often our ethnic biases and ethical discussions resonate on the dome of religion to become destructive action.

13) The Judaic admonition to be righteous, compassionate and, above all, help one's fellow man is called tsedakah, righteousness. This is the closest word for 'charity' in Hebrew or Yiddish; for Jews never separated charity from duty -- that is, from moral and religious obligation. Deuteronomy 15:11 says, "There will always be some Israelites who are poor and in need, and so I command you to be generous to them." Maimonides analyzed and rated the different forms of tsedakah. The highest form, he said, is to help someone to help himself; after that, to help a man anonymously and secretly. Poverty doesn't go away in developed societies, we simply keep shifting the definition.

14)

(Nineteen)

Give up sainthood, renounce wisdom,
And it will be a hundred times better for everyone.
Give up kindness, renounce morality,
And men will rediscover filial piety and love.
Give up ingenuity, renounce profit,
And bandits and thieves will disappear.
These three are outward forms alone; they are not sufficient in themselves.
It is more important
To see the simplicity,
To realize one's true nature,
To cast off selfishness
And temper desire. (Lao Tzu)