Matthias Haase

Practically Self-Conscious Life

Neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism suggests that the sense of normative terms like “ought” and “good” as they appear in ethical discourse is to be elucidated in terms of the relation in which a living individual stands to the life-form or “species” of which it is an exemplar—in our case: the human life-form. A theory of this form has to provide a story about questions such as: What enables us to distinguish the different kinds of life within the theory? What makes them, despite those differences, all sorts of natural goodness? And where, in relation to those continuities and discontinuities, is the account of practical reason to be situated? In this paper, I investigate how a developed ethical naturalism has to conceive of the relation between the genus concept life and the concept of the specific kind of life characteristic of us: rational or practically self-conscious life. I argue that there is a deep ambiguity with respect to this question in the account Philippa Foot presents in Natural Goodness. An ambiguity that covers a dilemma. A properly developed ethical naturalism would have to develop the concept of reason out of the reflection on life.

Leben und Anerkennen: Michael Thompsons praktischer Naturalismus

Eine Ethik wird kaum ohne den Begriff des Lebens auskommen. Schlieslich sollen ihre Regeln fur unser Leben gelten. Dies lasst jedoch die Frage offen, welche Rolle der Begriff des Lebens in der Ethik spielt. Eine vertraute Antwort lautet: Die Moral gilt fur den Menschen, aber ihr Geltungsgrund ist nicht der Mensch betrachtet als Naturwesen. Der Begriff jener biologischen Art, Spezies oder Lebensform zweibeiniger Tiere, die wir sind, ist demnach empirisch, nicht praktisch oder ethisch. Die besonderen materiellen Bedingungen unseres Lebens liefern nur das Material fur das moralische Uberlegen.

Die Wirklichkeit meiner Tat

Abstract The power to act intentionally is a power to change the world. It differs from other powers to affect change in that the change is of a particular kind. It is a change through thought. Paradigmatically, it begins with the negation of what is as not as it is to be and the setting of an action concept as to be realized. The pursuit of the end is the realizing of the concept. If all goes well, the process culminates in my knowledge that my deed is done. The power to act is, in this sense, the power of reason to change the world according to its concept and to recognize this change as its works. The traditional name for this form of cognition is “practical knowledge”. In the contemporary literature this notion is mostly discussed under the question how the agent knows, what she will do or what she is doing. This goes together with the tendency to conceive of practical knowledge under the title of self-consciousness in the sense of the transparency of thought. The paper argues that this is a mistake. The notion of practical knowledge is not intelligible as long as one focuses only upon the prospective perspective of intentions for the future or intentions in action and leaves knowing what one has done aside. With my knowledge of my done work a kind of self-consciousness enters the scene whose object is not myself, but another in which I see the reality of my will