"Repay to the living that it is they find themselves owing the dead"

coberst

“Repay to the living that it is they find themselves owing the dead”

This phrase is part of an article “Coming to Terms with Vietnam” documented in Harpers by Peter Marin, Dec. 1980. http://www.harpers.org/archive/1980/12/0024455

"All men, like all nations, are tested twice in the moral realm: first by what they do, then by what they make of what they do. The condition of guilt, a sense of one's own guilt, denotes a kind of second chance. Men are, as if by a kind of grace, given a chance to repay to the living that it is they find themselves owing the dead.""

This quotation rang my bell on the first time that I read it and has continued to resonate for me each time that it comes to mind.

Morality is, I am convinced, one of the most important concepts in human existence. It is vitally important and, I suspect, almost completely mystifying to the average Joe and Jane. It certainly is mystifying to me.

Understanding the meaning of this concept is vital for our welfare as a species and I am convinced that we must do a better job of comprehending its meaning.

I think it would be worth while to analyze the above quotation in an effort to develop a meaningful comprehension of aspects that make up morality. But there are many important moral aspects within this quotation and I think we must focus upon only one at a time. I would like to examine, in particular, the phrase “repay to the living that it is they find themselves owing the dead”

Cognitive science, often in the form of cognitive semantics, provides us with a means for comprehending the nature of morality.

Cognitive science has discovered that “the source domains of our [linguistic] metaphors for morality are typically based on what people over history and across cultures have seen as contributing to their well being”.

Morality is primarily seen as a concept that focuses upon enhancing the well-being of others. Cognitive analysis revels that we comprehend morality “based on this simple list of elementary aspects of human well-being—health, wealth, strength, balance, protection, nurturance, and so on”.

“Well-Being is Wealth is not our only metaphorical conception of well-being, but it is a component of one of the most important moral concepts we have. It is the basis for a massive metaphor system by which we understand our moral interactions, obligations, and responsibilities. That system, which we call the Moral Accounting metaphor, combines Well-Being is Wealth with other metaphors and with various accounting schemas.”

Our moral understanding is often manifested in commonly used metaphors. To do bad to someone is like taking something of value from that person. To do good to someone is like giving something of value to that person. “Increasing others’ well-being gives you a moral credit; doing them harm creates a moral debt to them; that is, you owe them an increase in their well-being-as-wealth.”

We are dealing with moral considerations much as we do with financial matters. We maintain a mental balance sheet upon which we record debits and credits of moral dimensions.

Morality is about many things and one thing morality is about is reciprocation, which means paying back to others what we owe to them because of something good they did for us. On the flip-side of that is something we call revenge. Revenge is about our feelings that if Mary Ann does something mean to me then I owe her something mean back.

Morality is partly about our moral accounting system. We seem to have a moral balance sheet in our head and we are often careful to pay back ‘good with good’ and ‘bad with bad’.

Ideas and quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh”—Lakoff and Johnson

Do you think that it is possible to make a moral payback to John, who died in the war, by doing a moral good such as helping the nation to become a better democracy?

coberst

I copied this from the Internet

12/1980. Dealing with guilt.
"Coming to Terms with Vietnam," by Peter Marin, Harpers, December 1980, 41-56. "The real issue, to put it bluntly, is guilt: how, as a nation and as individuals, we perceive our culpability and determine what it requires of us. We must concern ourselves with the discovery of fact, the location of responsibility, the discussion of causes, the acknowledgment of moral debt and how it might be repaid -- not in terms of who supposedly led us astray, but in terms of how each one of us may have contributed to the war or to its underlying causes. The 'horror' of war is really very easy to confront; it demands nothing of us save the capacity not to flinch. But guilt and responsibility, if one takes them seriously, are something else altogether. For they imply a debt, something to be done, changed lives -- and that is much harder on both individuals and a nation, for it implies a moral labor as strenuous and demanding as the war that preceded it." (Includes a survey of films and fiction) [SFX]

Joe1919

Morality is, I am convinced, one of the most important concepts in human existence."

To some extent, you have giving the answer to your own question, as when we think of morals as merily a concept, we are reducing morals to merily a human construction, something that exists only in our minds. This is like saying,"morals has no real content".(anti-realism) and perhaps thinking that morals is really only, in the end, a matter of taste or how we feel.(boo-horrah).

This is one of the difficulties of the anti realism of our modern world. We can consider almost everything as a concept and unreal, God, Time and even Money can be said to have no real value because all can be reduced to concepts or human representations. They can all be said to not exist.

I have no answer.

coberst

Joe1919 wrote: »

Morality is, I am convinced, one of the most important concepts in human existence."

To some extent, you have giving the answer to your own question, as when we think of morals as merily a concept, we are reducing morals to merily a human construction, something that exists only in our minds. This is like saying,"morals has no real content".(anti-realism) and perhaps thinking that morals is really only, in the end, a matter of taste or how we feel.(boo-horrah).

This is one of the difficulties of the anti realism of our modern world. We can consider almost everything as a concept and unreal, God, Time and even Money can be said to have no real value because all can be reduced to concepts or human representations. They can all be said to not exist.

I have no answer.

Reality comes in two forms: one is the thing-in-itself that Kant speaks of and that we cannot know, the second is the reality we create in our brain. The reality we create in our brain must have some degree of coherence with the thing-in-itself or we become toast.

Joe1919

As human beings, we do , to some extent construct and build our own values and realities. They may not always be a 'thing in itself' behind these realities. So its possible that what we think has value may have no value, or less value than we thought it had. This can happen to, for example money or house values, which can crash or loose value overnight. Of course, in these paticular economic examples, a 'thing in itself' may exist (gold posibly backing money or bricks and mortar backing property) but these may not necessarly correspond in value to our percieved values and then, as you say, we are in trouble.
The problem with moral value is trying to reinforce these values with a 'thing in itself' to use your (and Kants) language. But it can be difficult to identify and quanify this 'thing in itself',( or even prove its existance) be it goodness, utility, pleasure, happiness, virtue or what it means to be a human being, as people tend to have different opinions.
However, I'm not a relativist and I do believe there is a core of human value that people can agree on and hence some degree of realism can be applied to moral and ethical issues.

coberst

Everything we perceive is dependent upon our biological nature and reality has meaning only in what our sense and perception biology provide us. Real for me is only what I perceive to be real.

Someone said that objectivity is shared subjectivity; this phrase resonates for me; really. What we can say about reality is based upon our shared objectivity, it does not say anything significant about reality in-it-self, except in its constancy, but it is significant in that we humans share it universally; it is reality-for-humans

Each different comprehension of a situation provides a commitment to what is real about a situation. Each such real commitment is a version of a commitment to truth.

The arts and the sciences endeavor to discover and communicate to the world the meaning of reality. There came a time in the evolution of the human psychic when we became semantic creatures; we discovered the power of symbolic representation of events. Art focuses on the inner reality of the subject whereas science focused on the reality that was external to the subject.

“From this traditionalist standpoint information and the perception of meaning in the information is the central content of both arts and sciences. Hence when we speak of progress in the arts and sciences we can really refer to only one thing, namely that progress is taking place as long as the sum total of meaningful artistic and scientific statements waxes.” “The Coming of the Golden Age” by Gunther Stent

What we mean by “real” is what we need to postulate conceptually in order to be realistic, i.e., in order to function successfully to survive, to achieve ends, and to arrive at a workable understanding of the situation we are in. (Example—“verb”, “concept”, “image schema”, “energy” “charge”—none can be directly observed but play a crucial role in our understanding). “Philosophy in the Flesh”


If we could list all the things that all normal humans share we could then say anything out side of this container of objectivity is subjective. Perhaps the container of objectivity contains 1000 things and we found one thing in a particular situation that was out side this container. Then would the matter under consideration to be objective or subjective?

I would be inclined to say that the difference between objective and subjective is a matter of degree. Some things would be very, very, subjective whereas some things might be only somewhat slightly subjective. I think that we might recognize that everything is subjective to some degree.

Joe1919

Thinking in terms of Realism and Absolutism is probably not that popular today. Yet there is probably nothing more real or absolute as the certainty of our own death and suffering. Schopenhaur & Dostoevsky argues that suffering is to some extent, as the greater force, is the source and cause of our consciousness. (the buddhist's say life is suffering). Certainly, we can not understimate suffering and death. It underpines a lot of our thinking and laws, as the states 'legitimate' (Weber) use of power and force is the ultimate means of enforcing law. War settles all disputes.
Yet as human beings, we try to rise above the negativity of death, war, force and suffering. We use our imagination and intellect to build concepts and ideas, such as Justice and Law to avoid death and suffering. We should try to use the "unforced force of the better argument" (Habermas) to settle arguments rather than the gun.
We try to focus on happiness rather than the avoidance of suffering, but in our focus on happiness, we have raised happiness from being a goal in life, to that of being an entitlement, something that we are entitled to without thought or effort. And we are puzzled and confused when we are not happy. We think were sick and go to the doctor, thinking that that our unhappiness is caused by some "chemical inbalance" (this is really only one step ahead of the ancient Gallenic idea of balancing the four humours and resulting idea of bloodletting).
There are always tensions in life, the tension between our own interests and others (societies) interest,between our expanding ego's and the necessary suffering and repression to keep our ego in check, between good and evil.