Ethics on the one hand, and bioethics on the other are about both understanding and explaining that particular being in nature called human being; but they are also concerned, thereafter, with taking care of the human being's singularity. Already since Aristotle, the "logos" of human beings was named as "ethics". The most basic rationale is that human beings could not be understood in terms of logic unlike the physical realm.

The complexity of human beings can be quickly said as consisting of a rational stance and a non-rational one. In the first case, judgments, arguments, and the like are pivotal. In the second case, well, we come to feelings, instintcts, emotions and intuitions. To be sure, the question raised by Jim relates the two stances and the kind of (non-)interwolveness between them, as well as, I believe, the sensitiveness of... guts.

Repugnance like dignity are concepts very difficult to be fully logically sustained. Bieng in someone else' s shoes, for instance (B. Williams' argument, to mention one source). And yet, their strenght and validity lies in the inner perception or the very experience of oneself, the others, society and nature.

Not everything is to be clearly and openly put into concepts and categories, and human language is not exhausted in the predicative language, either. All in all, yeap: there is a sort of wisdom in experiencially, i.e. intuitively accepting or rejecting some sort of situations.

Simon Blackburn writes of “the moral defect of indifference to things which merit passion.” I believe that anyone who has chosen to "reject any role for emotion and intuition in moral judgment" has left the paths of wisdom. Damasio and others have conclusively demonstrated that human intellect only functions properly when emotions are aligned with cognition. Even Hume, the philosopher who supposedly divorced fact and value, valued emotion. For him, facts were ethically static and lifeless until emotion (sentiment) came into the picture. Surely the lack of an ability to feel the repugnance of certain actions or states of affairs is an indicator of anhedonia, apathy, or emotional deficit, which are all signs of dysfunction.

Ethics, as it happens, has become a sort of social engineering, namely one mode of control and manipulation over individuals ans societies. In other words, ethics (= mainstream ethics) is a strategy as well as a discourse. We should all remember the times when being a moral person was an agonistic matter; a field of life or death. Those times remain, it appears, far behind in history.

In our days, ethics has come to be used and understood exactly along the same way as theology was in the Middle Age. However, ina laic world, theology is not tenable any more, whence the concern for ethics and morallity.

That said, living a life (= lliving a good life; eupraxein) necessarily entails incorporating emotions, feelings, and Einfühlung. The point is, indeed, that ethics is a question of wisdom and not just of intelligence, being-smart, and the like.

Wisdom is something that seems to be left in the oblivion in the history of the Western world.

The idea that rational thought alone can be the basis for ethical decision making is in itself irrational. Logical thinking can only reach a meaningful conclusion when it is used along with some set of values (no matter how basic or limited in number). Life is not rationally better than death. Pleasure is not rationally better than suffering. However, if we agree on these or some other set of values we can then use logic to achieve desirable outcomes. The problem with "repugnance" or other emotional values is that not everyone shares the same feeling of what is repugnant or what it means to live a good life. There will always be a place for emotion and values, and those that claim to be free of these things are deluding themselves or attempting to delude others.

Of course, no one nowadays would pretend to argue still in favor of a universal ethic. Those languages and pretensions are over. We have reached the age of understanding a plurality of and in ethics. This is not a minor conquest.

And yet there are some basics (not universals!) concerning ethics, and human beings. Let me put it differently: transparency, democracy, freedom, dignity, equity are some values that cannot be owned by a particular party, nowadays. Well, a sound sense of wisdom cannot, either. Now, it is just a particular case that wisdom anchors or is nurtured by repugnance, as in the question above. Repugnance is a particular case here.

Thank you all for your kind and considered comments.

I am in agreement with Carlos’ comment that, “repugnance like dignity [is a] concept [that is] very difficult to be fully logically sustained,” yet “there is a sort of wisdom in experience” – a position that Bill seems to agree with (NOTE: Carlos – I may need to ask you, with my apologies, to define the term “Einfühlung”).

Dick’s remark that “life is not rationally better than death” is interesting…perhaps life is not rationally better than ‘not existing?’

I tend to agree that those who would suggest that attempts to jettison the epistemic role of emotions in human morality are whistling in the wind. There seems to me here to be something fundamentally meaningful about the idea of human dignity, for example, that simply cannot be explained by reason alone (contra Macklin et al.)

Dear Jim, Einfühlung is the german word for "feeling some else's experience from within in".

I love RG. So far I haven't seen any acid discussion. Even though sometimes there are disagreements, as it happens. The conversation are usually cordial and frank.

Dick, I am not sure I understand you when you say, "Life is not rationally better than death. Pleasure is not rationally better than suffering." Do you mean these things are incommensurable or are you saying there is no basis on which to give weight to one of them or another? If we speak from a human frame of reference (from which can never be fully detached) then what you have said seems quite contrary to our perceptions. Life is a state of being, death is the cessation of that state. Pleasure is a state of experience, as is suffering, and any human with normally functioning faculties would say that pleasure is definitely better than suffering. If I hold life to be a good (which seems axiomatic to most humans) and pleasure to be more desirable than pain (which is also axiomatic), then I am nonplused by your statement. Are you perhaps attempting to speak from a detached non-human standpoint when you say these things?

Bill, of course life is better than death and pleasure is better than pain. What I am saying is that those are values are cannot be derived solely from logic. Values are about what we want, logic can only tell us how to get what we want and how we can balance what we want with what other people people want. So I am not dismissing these basic human values, I am simply pointing out that we have them, they ARE important, and logic alone can never replace them.

I think the claims of the theories universalisable passed away sobr all ethical life. May be retained for biotética so fully justified. Experts really fall into the trap of expertise, which places arbitrary dimensions for the analysis of human experience. Pretender today disqualified for example, the role of sign language, which is based on interjections as an expression of moral sentiments, has no place in a world mediated by the audiovisual. The advancement of neuroscience refutes such experts as they try to apply modern philosophers and the primacy of reason. If sleep of reason produces monsters, dreams of reason, also occurs. And dangerous because they carry a seal of approval that declares "rational".

Thank you for the definition Carlos. Much obliged. I agree with respect to R.G. I find it useful to obtain feedback on ideas from like-minded thinkers and find that most people here are very considerate. If you do run across an unfortunate exchange or two (as I have), you may wish to just move on to a different post.

I think Bill has perhaps heard me quote Gordon Allport before, but:

“[W]e must expect a lively spirit of controversy to prevail…Our censure should be reserved for those who would close all doors but one. The surest way to lose truth it to pretend that one already wholly possesses it.” (Becoming, 1955, pg. 17).

Dick,

I found your exchange with Bill quite interesting and I agree that values and logic can make for strange bedfellows. However, as a biologist by training, I tend to see human values as intrinsically tied to our capacity for reciprocal altruism (e.g., the selective advantage that they provided for our Pleistocene ancestors.) I suspect that our emotional responses (such as 'repugnance') are examples of such evolved capacities, inculcated by culture. So while I'm not sure that 'wisdom' is the proper term here (with apologies to Kass), I do think that such reactions have a normative explanation, but do not necessarily provide a normative justification.

Ubaldina - welcome to the discussion. Could I ask you to please elaborate on your comment vis-a-vis the role of sign language and its relevance to moral sentiments? This seem to me to be an intriguing notion...

Hello Dick,

Okay, now I understand what you mean. This response is not "push back" or a refutation of what you have said, rather it is a statement of a different perspective. So, I am not looking for you to defend what you've said, I am expressing how my point of view differs from your own.

I know that Hume is supposed to have divorced fact and value, "is and ought". I don't really think that was his intent. In fact the Enquiry makes clear what some passages in the Treatise called into question. I believe Hume was keenly aware of the sources of motivation in human thought and action. His point was that facts alone are inert apart from sentiment or feeling, and that humans (as "valuers") combine both reason and sentiment to think about what matters to them. I don't think our logic is like that of a Turing Machine. I think it is a systematic way of thinking and of explaining thought, devised by a species which is inescapably both rational and emotional at the same time. Thus talk of "logic alone" is, to me, talk of something of which we are not fully capable. That I may wish to try to be impartial in matters of justice and adjudication seems wise and praiseworthy, but that I should try to be purely logical in matters which demand an ethical response seems (to me) to be an exercise in unintended self-deception. Because we are human the business of valuing will always be a mix of logic and sentiment. I don't want to say these values exist a priori, so much as I wish to say that I believe that in humans logic and sentiment combine in a unified manner to create a world freighted with value.

When all is said and done, we are probably saying much the same thing in a different way.

I agree Jim. That is one basic reason why I move to another question. One more reason is that many times arguments start cycling around, repeating claims over and over again, just re-phrasing, without any real move forwards.

I want to stress the core of the question raised early on. It is about wisdom, and mainstream science as well as mainstream philosophy have lost their track vis-à-vis wisdom. Either because of "journal impacts", or else because of networking and the like.

Wisdom as such is something that cannot be taught and, moreover, should not be taught. Wisdom can only be learnt from within - following (wise) examples…

Bill, I think your perspective is a good one... and I agree with it. My point was simply to point out although we have in our modern society raised logic, intellectualism, and science to a high degree, should never delude ourselves to believe that that they can function independent of our values. So going back to the original question about the "wisdom of repugnance," and whether there is a place for emotion or intuition in our morality... the answer has to be YES.

Bill and Dick,

I think that you are both precisely correct. Bill's point about the conventional tendency to misread Hume is important - Haidt once said that Hume raised passions from a "slave to a respected assistant" if one looks towards his later, more mature "Enquiries". My interest here was sparked by Peter Singer's practical dismissal of intuitions as mere "residue" of our evolutionary history in his influential 2005 article, "Ethics and Intuitions" - a work he based largely on recent findings in cognitive neuroscience (Note: I am attending a seminar by Joshua Greene - whom Singer cited extensively - tomorrow afternoon here in Boston).

Ubaldina, I agree with you. Ethics is not a universality. It is in the particular: meeting, language and acting that we can find the ethics.

I recently published the essay, "Transhumanism, Post-Humanism, and Human Technological Enhancements: Wither Goes Humanitas?" in Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts, Volume 8, No. 2, Fall 2013, on the Theme of The Future of Humanity and the Question of Post-Humanity. The Link to this introductory essay and seven other essays on or about Transhumanism/Posthumanism is available at: http://www.bu.edu/paideia/existenz/contents-current.html. NB. I discuss Max More's transhumanism, as well as critiques by Leon Kass and Michael J. Sandel. Thank you for visiting the website of the Karl Jaspers Society of North America.