Philosophy Now Forum

Ethics and Logic
Britain is a part of the world in which ethics is summed up in terms of freedom or of sentiment notably ‘love’. Put those together uncritically and the outcome is obvious.
There are in fact several strands to ethics that affect the outcome according to the mix and omissions.
There is individual empathy and human sentiment or its lack.
There is individual logic or its lack.
There is also quite essentially the same as expressed by society.
Altruist society needs both empathy and its rational use, both by individuals and in the way society is organised. It may be possible to create an altruistic form of society simply by logic, but in a very mechanical form.
Any number of individuals with human feelings and empathy, if it is taken in isolation as in ‘love your neighbour’ has all the makings of folly. A society of individuals open to corruption by the few, and little more than a flower-power indifference to all social responsibility. Individualism as pure logic without human feeling or empathy, would be a very attenuated logic and the outcome barely conceivable.
Most of human history has been society held together by a certain logic of authority. Society as an organisation under the law, with any human feeling and empathy devolved to individual relationships. For such an organisation to become ‘human’ it is intrinsic that central authority and allegiance must be weakened, and ‘freedom’ encouraged.

You make a lot of pints here. Hard to know where to start. You seem to see an opposition between freedom and government authority in your final sentence. If so, is it not traditionally argued (Hobbes, Locke, Mill et al) that without the imposed order and retraining powers of government, there can be no freedom. Are you opposing that view? Another general point in relation to logic and ethics - an ethical decision has to be freely chosen, or willed, to be ethical (in my opinion). So, if you could show that an ethical decision was as unavoidable as, say, the fact that 2 plus 2 = 4. it would no more be ethical than if you were forced at knife point by Islamic State to convert.

you can't get an ought from an is

-Imp

Supposing freedom means being able to walk around without anyone telling one what to do. And go where one wants. Limited by a clear publicly available law, rather than by arbitrary persons. What more would ‘freedom’ mean?

Now, what is rational altruism? Supposing it was to make the doctrine of rational utility a law. So that if someone had a house, realizing that a second house added less utility to themselves, than to someone who was without a house, they would refrain from buying a second house until everyone had at least one.

I think with regard to Dorothea’s objection, one could juxtapose positive law, the actual law, to norms, taken as what people really think by way of habit custom or conviction. What someone does by their own norm is free.