Yet another consequence of our noxious addiction to nonhuman flesh:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/28
Update:
4.30.09: On the assumption that humans are generally too dim-witted to understand the difference between contracting a disease through the consumption of pigs and creating a disease in the process of raising pigs for consumption, the WHO decides to stop using the term "swine flu":
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/30/swine-flu-gets-new-name-b_n_193772.html
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
(L) Elite Exceptionalism
The current "torture debate" is mostly a fiction of the (mainstream) corporate media:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/24-0
Update: 4.30.09
Guilty-as-anyone-could-be Condoleezza Rice nervously invokes a variety of Nixonian Presidential exceptionalism ("If George W. Bush authorized it, then it can't be illegal"):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/condi-rice-pulls-a-nixon_b_193379.html
Update: 5.1.09
Here's an intriguing study:
A recent national survey finds that the more frequently Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support torture. Furthermore, those not affiliated with any organized religion are least likely:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/30/religion.torture/
Update: 5.9.09
Of course, elite exceptionalism is an instance of "American exceptionalism" ("when we do it, it's different or better"):
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/08-16
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/24-0
Update: 4.30.09
Guilty-as-anyone-could-be Condoleezza Rice nervously invokes a variety of Nixonian Presidential exceptionalism ("If George W. Bush authorized it, then it can't be illegal"):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/condi-rice-pulls-a-nixon_b_193379.html
Update: 5.1.09
Here's an intriguing study:
A recent national survey finds that the more frequently Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support torture. Furthermore, those not affiliated with any organized religion are least likely:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/30/religion.torture/
Update: 5.9.09
Of course, elite exceptionalism is an instance of "American exceptionalism" ("when we do it, it's different or better"):
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/08-16
(AP) Marx on Fetishism
From K. Marx, Capital, Volume I, chapter 3:
From where, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labourpower by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally, the mutual relations of the producers within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products. A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
From where, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labourpower by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally, the mutual relations of the producers within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products. A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
(PM) Kivy on Davies
A review of Davies' book Musical Meaning and Expression by Peter Kivy, perhaps the second biggest fish in this small pond:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2346/is_n416_v104/ai_17633500/?tag=content;col1
In this mid-'80's work, Davies anticipates his most recent conclusions concerning the intrinsic properties of music:
Davies, like a growing number of us, locates the musical emotions "in" the music, as heard features of it. His version of the account is laid out in Chapter 5, the conclusion being, in brief, "that expressiveness can be an objective property of musical works, though, obviously, the emotions expressed are not felt by the music ... just as a willow can be sad-looking, or a person's face happy-looking, music can present an expressive appearance in its sound (without regard to anyone's felt emotions)" (p. 277).
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2346/is_n416_v104/ai_17633500/?tag=content;col1
In this mid-'80's work, Davies anticipates his most recent conclusions concerning the intrinsic properties of music:
Davies, like a growing number of us, locates the musical emotions "in" the music, as heard features of it. His version of the account is laid out in Chapter 5, the conclusion being, in brief, "that expressiveness can be an objective property of musical works, though, obviously, the emotions expressed are not felt by the music ... just as a willow can be sad-looking, or a person's face happy-looking, music can present an expressive appearance in its sound (without regard to anyone's felt emotions)" (p. 277).
(AP) Piper on Fetishism
Adrian Piper claims that we errantly fetishize art objects if we see them as unique, their spatio-temporal locations and histories not amounting to a full-fledged "identity, and their putative power to influence us a mere reflection of our own displaced capacities. Human beings, that is, are alone inherently creative, "alive," and non-reproducible.
Her complaint with fetishism is Marxist in spirit (as he applies the concept to commodities and economic "laws"). But the impulse to fetishize in aesthetics (as in human sexuality and religion), while clearly an epistemological and metaphysical error (the object of our fetish does not in fact possess the properties we ascribe to it), is relatively harmless. We oftentimes willingly submit to exaggerated or false accounts of the nature of art objects in order fully to appreciate their aesthetic dimension. (We "lose" ourselves in a novel, for example, tacitly attributing to its characters and setting more reality and power than they possess.)
It may be that Piper would not count these as legitimate examples of fetishism in art (because we are at least partly aware of our impulse to fetishize). At any rate, the very idea of fetishism seems to lose much of its force when transferred from the life-and-death realm of political economy to the highly subjective world of art.
Her complaint with fetishism is Marxist in spirit (as he applies the concept to commodities and economic "laws"). But the impulse to fetishize in aesthetics (as in human sexuality and religion), while clearly an epistemological and metaphysical error (the object of our fetish does not in fact possess the properties we ascribe to it), is relatively harmless. We oftentimes willingly submit to exaggerated or false accounts of the nature of art objects in order fully to appreciate their aesthetic dimension. (We "lose" ourselves in a novel, for example, tacitly attributing to its characters and setting more reality and power than they possess.)
It may be that Piper would not count these as legitimate examples of fetishism in art (because we are at least partly aware of our impulse to fetishize). At any rate, the very idea of fetishism seems to lose much of its force when transferred from the life-and-death realm of political economy to the highly subjective world of art.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
(AP) Dickie on Defining an Open Concept
I suggested last time that Dickie offers the following intensional definition of art in response to Weitz's claim that art is indefinable-because-open:
Art (Dickie) = Artifactuality (Af) + Institutional Recognition (IR)
where the institution is the "artworld;" artifacts include all of the deliberate material (and perhaps cognitive) products of human activity; and where recognition occurs as any person functioning as a member of the artworld confers on some artifact the (descriptive and evaluative) status of "artwork."
Dickie presents his definition of art as open-yet-definable (Af and IR are necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for anthing to count as a work of art). I suppose that the raison d' etre of all such (intensional) definitions is to expose the essence of works of art, allowing us to distinguish works of art from all other things. Yet, failing as he does to offer any criteria for either membership in the artworld or proper (objective) institutional recognition or assessment, anyone and for any reason can confer on any human artifact the status of "artwork." It seems as though Dickie's definition of art is no more exclusive than the simple claim that all artifacts are works of art, so long as someone intends them to be. That is, Dickie's definition is equivalent to the rather unhelpful-because-excessively-inclusive "Intentionality Thesis" (art exists whenever someone intends it) applied within the realm of the artifactual. In short:
Art (Dickie) = I-sub-a (where a is anyone) + Af.
Hence
Art (Dickie) = Af + IR = I sub-a + Af.
Capturing as well (by eliminating from both expressions Af) the fact that
IR = I sub-a (that is, institutional recognition is equivalent to the intentionality thesis).
Art (Dickie) = Artifactuality (Af) + Institutional Recognition (IR)
where the institution is the "artworld;" artifacts include all of the deliberate material (and perhaps cognitive) products of human activity; and where recognition occurs as any person functioning as a member of the artworld confers on some artifact the (descriptive and evaluative) status of "artwork."
Dickie presents his definition of art as open-yet-definable (Af and IR are necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for anthing to count as a work of art). I suppose that the raison d' etre of all such (intensional) definitions is to expose the essence of works of art, allowing us to distinguish works of art from all other things. Yet, failing as he does to offer any criteria for either membership in the artworld or proper (objective) institutional recognition or assessment, anyone and for any reason can confer on any human artifact the status of "artwork." It seems as though Dickie's definition of art is no more exclusive than the simple claim that all artifacts are works of art, so long as someone intends them to be. That is, Dickie's definition is equivalent to the rather unhelpful-because-excessively-inclusive "Intentionality Thesis" (art exists whenever someone intends it) applied within the realm of the artifactual. In short:
Art (Dickie) = I-sub-a (where a is anyone) + Af.
Hence
Art (Dickie) = Af + IR = I sub-a + Af.
Capturing as well (by eliminating from both expressions Af) the fact that
IR = I sub-a (that is, institutional recognition is equivalent to the intentionality thesis).
(PM) Reviewing the Reviewer
After yesterday's discussion, it may be helpful to review these comments from the reviewer:
I do think, however, that Davies -- not unlike other writers in the area -- is perhaps too quick in treating the analogy between language and music. Noting a semantic deficit along with a conjoined ambiguity concerning syntactic rules on the musical side of the analogy, he dismisses the modeling of music on language summarily. But this kind of conclusion -- a "thus music is not a language, q.e.d." kind -- prevents what at least this reader would like to have seen here among the other riches: a writer of Davies' intellectual clarity and cogency grappling not with only one formulation of the analogy, but rather with a good number of the very many ways in which the analogy can come into play. The fact that music is not a semantic system the coherence of which is ordered by syntactic rules should not blind us to the fact that there is such a thing as melodic coherence as an (perhaps rough, but potentially nevertheless illuminating) analogy to the much-discussed unity of the proposition. There are antecedent-consequent melodic structures that function, in thematic terms, dialogically. There are analogues to syntactic rules that function as coherence-preservers -- and this itself would be wide ranging, from diatonic harmony to serial ordering. There are thematic analogies to Wittgensteinian language-games, where a given move is made possible by prior ordered moves within the circumscribed limits of the game. There are structural analogues in composition to metaphorical restatement in language beyond Goodmanian issues of exemplification. There are deep analogies between our ways of speaking about aspects or parts of language that directly mirror our ways of speaking about music (shown in Davies' own insightful discussion of transcriptions, where he rightly concludes that transcriptions are of independent value in their own right even where we have the original to hand precisely because the transcription functions as a commentary on the original.) There are countless intricate ways -- far more intricate, and I think far more interesting than the rather blunt semantic-syntactic point -- where the analogy between the arts and language misleads (and has historically misled) aesthetic theory. And there are very many more such avenues for explanation that are prematurely closed by the semantic-syntactic point. (And of course that point itself is not as bluntly factual as it may seem -- music, as no one would dispute, can and has often been representational, also in numerous ways, so the link between mimetic content and semantic function deserves at the very least mid-length shrift.) Moreover, the characterization of language upon which the semantic-syntactic point is based is itself highly reductive and oversimplified: language does countless things, and again it would be a considerable pleasure to see a thinker of Davies' gifts treat these matters fully. Writing of the problem of musical ontology, Davies says: "The totality of musical works from culture to culture and from time to time do not have any single ontological character. Some musical works are thick with properties, others are thinner -- some works include the performance means as part of their essential nature, and much more besides, whereas others are more or less pure sound structures" (p. 77). Should we expect the primary "home" of meaning -- language -- to be any less diversified?
To say "To understand a musical utterance is not to know whether that utterance is true or false" (p. 125) is to imply that language is fundamentally a matter of knowing whether a given utterance is true or false. That is a misstep in one of two ways or both: if we do, following Davidson, want to proceed on the belief that an understanding of linguistic meaning will follow, and be dependent upon, a theory of truth, Davies' claim is in trouble. It would be a matter of knowing the truth conditions for an utterance as the determinant of its meaning and not its truth value. Or it is, in a larger frame of reference, a misstep to proceed on the reductive and essentializing belief that language is composed wholly, or even foundationally, of "utterances", where these are regarded as uniform propositional assertions of the "The cat is on the mat" kind. Here, incidentally, one should ask how rarely, and in what particular sense-determining circumstances, we actually call something in the vast sea of human speech an "utterance". And once that is clarified, the presumed intelligibility of the generalized concept of utterance at work here is very much called into question. Davies says next "We do not regard musical utterances as subject to truth-conditions" (here the very use of the phrase "musical utterances" suggests certainly the fittingness and perhaps the value of the kind of music-language inquiry I am recommending), which seems true enough. But that is, if not like a reductive picture of language, certainly like real language -- much of it we do not hold as explicitly subject to truth-conditions. He continues the phrase with "or as meeting standards of assertive correctness or incorrectness of use". We do have remarkably clear senses of correct and incorrect uses -- think of the incorrectness of parallel fifths in the harmonization of a chorale melody, or of the expansion of what we tellingly call a harmonic language by breaking rules of correctness, as Debussey explicitly did, or of P.D.Q. Bach's hilarious stylistic fractures where a blues fights its way out of a fugue, behaving in the end rather like the increasingly unruly and badly-behaved speaker in Plato's Symposium. And on the positive side, we indeed take a distinct pleasure (as Michael Krausz has investigated at length) in the sense of rightness, the sense indeed of correctness, that some works convey; in such cases, are not standards of "assertive" correctness met, and handsomely so? Prematurely closing the avenue, Davies concludes the passage with: "In respect of its meaning, music cannot usefully be compared to a language" (p. 125). And with that blockade to further reflection on the topic installed, he can then later in the book say, falsely, that "There are no plausible equivalents in music to . . . propositional closure" (p. 174). If, to take only one of countless possible examples, the closure provided in the mature classical symphony composed in sonata-allegro form, where the thematic material of the exposition is presented, those two themes treated in the development section, and then -- once those dialogical implications have been worked out -- recapitulated where we in a sense know them for the first time and then logically and satisfyingly closed with the coda, is not a plausible equivalent to propositional closure, nothing is. (Of course that could be Davies' point -- that the music is not language, but that is only trivially true. Nothing else not language is language either -- the point concerns the illuminating analogies and comparisons (which he surely knows, since he is otherwise allergic to trivial truths throughout this book and is after all speaking of "plausible equivalents".) Davies also refers to language, generically, as a linguistic system, which it is not. One can devise systems out of little parts of language which can then work, well . . ., systematically. Codes, similarly, are parasitic on language, and are thus not revelations of its essence: code-breakers are not translators, nor, for that matter, are native speakers (contra the language-of-thought model). All of these considerations hold relevance for our understanding of musical meaning, but one will never clarify, much less initially recognize, their significance by starting with a caricature of language. Similarly, verbal creativity, rightly understood, could show us something about musical creativity and improvisation. Why close this off? But of course, no book can do everything at once, and what this book does do it does very well indeed.
I do think, however, that Davies -- not unlike other writers in the area -- is perhaps too quick in treating the analogy between language and music. Noting a semantic deficit along with a conjoined ambiguity concerning syntactic rules on the musical side of the analogy, he dismisses the modeling of music on language summarily. But this kind of conclusion -- a "thus music is not a language, q.e.d." kind -- prevents what at least this reader would like to have seen here among the other riches: a writer of Davies' intellectual clarity and cogency grappling not with only one formulation of the analogy, but rather with a good number of the very many ways in which the analogy can come into play. The fact that music is not a semantic system the coherence of which is ordered by syntactic rules should not blind us to the fact that there is such a thing as melodic coherence as an (perhaps rough, but potentially nevertheless illuminating) analogy to the much-discussed unity of the proposition. There are antecedent-consequent melodic structures that function, in thematic terms, dialogically. There are analogues to syntactic rules that function as coherence-preservers -- and this itself would be wide ranging, from diatonic harmony to serial ordering. There are thematic analogies to Wittgensteinian language-games, where a given move is made possible by prior ordered moves within the circumscribed limits of the game. There are structural analogues in composition to metaphorical restatement in language beyond Goodmanian issues of exemplification. There are deep analogies between our ways of speaking about aspects or parts of language that directly mirror our ways of speaking about music (shown in Davies' own insightful discussion of transcriptions, where he rightly concludes that transcriptions are of independent value in their own right even where we have the original to hand precisely because the transcription functions as a commentary on the original.) There are countless intricate ways -- far more intricate, and I think far more interesting than the rather blunt semantic-syntactic point -- where the analogy between the arts and language misleads (and has historically misled) aesthetic theory. And there are very many more such avenues for explanation that are prematurely closed by the semantic-syntactic point. (And of course that point itself is not as bluntly factual as it may seem -- music, as no one would dispute, can and has often been representational, also in numerous ways, so the link between mimetic content and semantic function deserves at the very least mid-length shrift.) Moreover, the characterization of language upon which the semantic-syntactic point is based is itself highly reductive and oversimplified: language does countless things, and again it would be a considerable pleasure to see a thinker of Davies' gifts treat these matters fully. Writing of the problem of musical ontology, Davies says: "The totality of musical works from culture to culture and from time to time do not have any single ontological character. Some musical works are thick with properties, others are thinner -- some works include the performance means as part of their essential nature, and much more besides, whereas others are more or less pure sound structures" (p. 77). Should we expect the primary "home" of meaning -- language -- to be any less diversified?
To say "To understand a musical utterance is not to know whether that utterance is true or false" (p. 125) is to imply that language is fundamentally a matter of knowing whether a given utterance is true or false. That is a misstep in one of two ways or both: if we do, following Davidson, want to proceed on the belief that an understanding of linguistic meaning will follow, and be dependent upon, a theory of truth, Davies' claim is in trouble. It would be a matter of knowing the truth conditions for an utterance as the determinant of its meaning and not its truth value. Or it is, in a larger frame of reference, a misstep to proceed on the reductive and essentializing belief that language is composed wholly, or even foundationally, of "utterances", where these are regarded as uniform propositional assertions of the "The cat is on the mat" kind. Here, incidentally, one should ask how rarely, and in what particular sense-determining circumstances, we actually call something in the vast sea of human speech an "utterance". And once that is clarified, the presumed intelligibility of the generalized concept of utterance at work here is very much called into question. Davies says next "We do not regard musical utterances as subject to truth-conditions" (here the very use of the phrase "musical utterances" suggests certainly the fittingness and perhaps the value of the kind of music-language inquiry I am recommending), which seems true enough. But that is, if not like a reductive picture of language, certainly like real language -- much of it we do not hold as explicitly subject to truth-conditions. He continues the phrase with "or as meeting standards of assertive correctness or incorrectness of use". We do have remarkably clear senses of correct and incorrect uses -- think of the incorrectness of parallel fifths in the harmonization of a chorale melody, or of the expansion of what we tellingly call a harmonic language by breaking rules of correctness, as Debussey explicitly did, or of P.D.Q. Bach's hilarious stylistic fractures where a blues fights its way out of a fugue, behaving in the end rather like the increasingly unruly and badly-behaved speaker in Plato's Symposium. And on the positive side, we indeed take a distinct pleasure (as Michael Krausz has investigated at length) in the sense of rightness, the sense indeed of correctness, that some works convey; in such cases, are not standards of "assertive" correctness met, and handsomely so? Prematurely closing the avenue, Davies concludes the passage with: "In respect of its meaning, music cannot usefully be compared to a language" (p. 125). And with that blockade to further reflection on the topic installed, he can then later in the book say, falsely, that "There are no plausible equivalents in music to . . . propositional closure" (p. 174). If, to take only one of countless possible examples, the closure provided in the mature classical symphony composed in sonata-allegro form, where the thematic material of the exposition is presented, those two themes treated in the development section, and then -- once those dialogical implications have been worked out -- recapitulated where we in a sense know them for the first time and then logically and satisfyingly closed with the coda, is not a plausible equivalent to propositional closure, nothing is. (Of course that could be Davies' point -- that the music is not language, but that is only trivially true. Nothing else not language is language either -- the point concerns the illuminating analogies and comparisons (which he surely knows, since he is otherwise allergic to trivial truths throughout this book and is after all speaking of "plausible equivalents".) Davies also refers to language, generically, as a linguistic system, which it is not. One can devise systems out of little parts of language which can then work, well . . ., systematically. Codes, similarly, are parasitic on language, and are thus not revelations of its essence: code-breakers are not translators, nor, for that matter, are native speakers (contra the language-of-thought model). All of these considerations hold relevance for our understanding of musical meaning, but one will never clarify, much less initially recognize, their significance by starting with a caricature of language. Similarly, verbal creativity, rightly understood, could show us something about musical creativity and improvisation. Why close this off? But of course, no book can do everything at once, and what this book does do it does very well indeed.
Monday, April 06, 2009
(PM) Morality defined
An excerpt from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on morality that matches fairly well today's class discussion:
On all accounts of morality, it is a code of conduct. However, on ethical or group relativist accounts or on individualistic accounts, apart from avoiding and preventing harm, morality has no special content or features that distinguishes it from nonmoral codes of conduct, such as law or religion. Just as a legal code of conduct can have almost any content, as long as it is capable of guiding behavior, and a religious code of conduct has no limits on content, all of the relativist and individualist accounts of morality, have almost no limit on the content of a moral code. However, for those such as Hobbes, (Leviathan and De Cive) who hold that morality is a code of conduct that all rational persons would put forward for governing the behavior of all moral agents, it has a fairly definite content. Kant, in accordance with the German word “moral” that is used to translate the English word “morality,” regards morality as applying to behavior that affects no one but the agent, but most of the behavior that he discusses is behavior that affects other people. Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, and most other non-religiously influenced philosophers writing in English limit morality to behavior that, directly or indirectly, affects others.
The differences in content among those philosophers who use “morality” to refer to a universal guide that all rational persons would put forward for governing the behavior of all moral agents are less significant than their similarities. For all of these philosophers, such as Kurt Baier, Philippa Foot, and Geoffrey Warnock, morality prohibits actions such as killing, causing pain, deceiving, and breaking promises. For some, morality also requires charitable actions, but it does not require a justification for not being charitable on every possible occasion in the same way that it requires a justification for any act of killing, causing pain, deceiving, and breaking promises. Both Kant and Mill mark this distinction by talking of duties of perfect obligation and duties of imperfect obligation. For others, morality only encourages charitable actions, and no justification is ever needed for not being charitable. Rather, being charitable is encouraged but not required; it is always morally good to be charitable, but it is not immoral not to be charitable.
On all accounts of morality, it is a code of conduct. However, on ethical or group relativist accounts or on individualistic accounts, apart from avoiding and preventing harm, morality has no special content or features that distinguishes it from nonmoral codes of conduct, such as law or religion. Just as a legal code of conduct can have almost any content, as long as it is capable of guiding behavior, and a religious code of conduct has no limits on content, all of the relativist and individualist accounts of morality, have almost no limit on the content of a moral code. However, for those such as Hobbes, (Leviathan and De Cive) who hold that morality is a code of conduct that all rational persons would put forward for governing the behavior of all moral agents, it has a fairly definite content. Kant, in accordance with the German word “moral” that is used to translate the English word “morality,” regards morality as applying to behavior that affects no one but the agent, but most of the behavior that he discusses is behavior that affects other people. Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, and most other non-religiously influenced philosophers writing in English limit morality to behavior that, directly or indirectly, affects others.
The differences in content among those philosophers who use “morality” to refer to a universal guide that all rational persons would put forward for governing the behavior of all moral agents are less significant than their similarities. For all of these philosophers, such as Kurt Baier, Philippa Foot, and Geoffrey Warnock, morality prohibits actions such as killing, causing pain, deceiving, and breaking promises. For some, morality also requires charitable actions, but it does not require a justification for not being charitable on every possible occasion in the same way that it requires a justification for any act of killing, causing pain, deceiving, and breaking promises. Both Kant and Mill mark this distinction by talking of duties of perfect obligation and duties of imperfect obligation. For others, morality only encourages charitable actions, and no justification is ever needed for not being charitable. Rather, being charitable is encouraged but not required; it is always morally good to be charitable, but it is not immoral not to be charitable.
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