Ep. 363: Franz Brentano’s Moral Epistemology (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 363 part 2. We've been discussing Franz Brentano's lecture the Origin of the Knowledge of Right and wrong in 1889. This has 40 some sections in it and we were up to the magical section 15.

0:27 Wes: Yeah. So you know, after in 14 telling us we need to revert to the insights of descriptive psychology in order to understand moral sanction and in particular understand how we know, how we could know right from wrong or the good from the bad. So getting into that descriptive psychology means talking about the will. And it's in 15 that because moral and immoral actions pertain to the will. And then the question is about ends. So some of our ends are means to other ends. And we know when we make choices that something is right if it fits the end in particular.

Right. If my end is satisfying my hunger, then going to the fridge might be the right end means to that I can answer that question. But ultimately that chain of connections between means and ends will come to an end. I will have an ultimate goal, right? Which for Aristotle was eudaimonia, or flourishing or happiness. There's at some point I won't be able to say why I'm doing exactly what I'm doing, because it's no longer a means to anything. It's desired for its own sake.

1:38 Seth: Yeah. So section 15. He switches the conversation. So we're not talking about right and wrong action anymore. Or at least what we would typically think of as the subject of ethical discourse, what have you, is what's the right thing to do, what's the good? So it becomes the discourse changes, first in the sense that he associates the notion of acting ethically with willing, and then secondly that he connects willing with the achievement of an end. So ultimately what this means is that it's the whole. Any ethical decision, any ethical action is a choice of ends and derivatively a means to achieve those ends.

So then it becomes a question of, okay, well, how do I choose that end? How do I adjudicate between different ends? Like and so you're not talking about being a good person, you're not talking about how do I know, acting well or acting poorly or being good. It's if you make the right choice of ends, then you will act appropriately or you will be acting appropriately and ethically. And so then returning back to how we opened the conversation about innateness, if you think about it in this teleological structure, then it's easier to understand when he says, you have to see the end essentially has something innate in it which allows you to recognize that it is the end that you should seek.

And, you know, that's basically what you're doing when you're acting ethically. And there's an emotional component, right. It makes you feel good. And there's an aesthetic component because it's more beautiful, right, than a malignant end or what have you. But ultimately, this is about willing. This is about judgment and then choice.

3:48 Wes: Yeah, we're going to get to the point where it becomes about emotions and having the right emotion in relation to an object. But for now, he's still going to be on the track of ruling out certain other explanations. So in 16, for instance, he says, okay, well, you know, how are we going to choose? How are we going to make a choice between these different final ends? And one criterion is pleasure. So we might say that we just have to go with whatever gives us the most pleasure. And he gives a very. He's a typical rejection to that, which is there are people who are martyrs and they will endure torture for the convictions with, you know, even with no hope of future reward.

There are various reasons in. Right. Nietzsche, of course, most famously goes into all of these why we don't want to say that pleasure, you know, as a psychological matter, is how people choose their ends. But also that pleasure could be moral criterion. And, you know, it's in 18 that we start to get deeper into the phenomenology. This is, you know, all to the. With the goal of explaining choice events. You'll say that the concept of the good, like other concepts, is something that ranges over concrete impressions. So we do, you know, it's not just a completely fuzzy concept like other.

Other empirical concepts will, you know, have object objects, right? Extensions of objects that belong to them. Concrete objects, right. Red things, for instance, for the concept, red. And here in the same case, it go. It's the same for the good. It's just that the concrete objects that this concept ranges over are not physical. They're psychical, they're psychological. So the concept of the good, like that of the true, emerges from concrete impressions with psychical content. He's still keeping up this analogy with truth. Right. And so we would understand truth often, you know, I think today would be understood in terms of a property of propositions which we.

I think philosophers might dispute the idea. Right. That they're. That they're psychical contents, that truth is a property of. But that's the way he's thinking about it, thinking of it here.

6:04 Seth: Right.

6:04 Mark: So this is all descriptive psychology. So it's not what should we be aiming for yet. It's just we're going to try to figure out ultimately what the good is by this is just exactly Aristotle's strategy. What are we already aiming for underlyingly? And we need some. I mean, just reading the end of 15. There must be present, however, one end which is desired above all others and for its own sake. Without this essential and final end, all incentive would be lacking. And this would involve the absurdity of aiming without a goal at which to aim. So it's sort of a mixture of the normative and the descriptive there, you know, I guess because it's a description of reasoning, a description of moral.

Of moral reasoning, of how we guide ourselves. Because he does, you know, give this example several times about the miser who, through habit, even though, you know, money is only an instrumental good, it becomes an end in itself because they're just so used to pursuing that that it becomes so that is, for them has become an essential and final end that gives them incentive. So the fact that they can be done in these defective ways, I guess, means that there's some clearer way, right? If we have not been degraded in some way to take something that should be an instrumental end and make it the ultimate end, there should be some ultimate end that we're all aiming at, which is, again, not pleasure.

7:29 Wes: Yeah, we should, you know, just to kind of foreshadow what it is we're aiming at here is we're aiming at section 23, where he's going to say an object is good when it's rightly loved. So we do get this reduction in a way to intentional acts and the quality of intentional acts. Just as, you know, when a judgment is true, it affirms something rightly. An object is good when it is rightly loved. So there's something about qualitative. There's something about properties of intentional acts that are going to be important here. But it starts with in 18, right?

Giving us this idea that there, the concept of the good is going to emerge from concrete psychical content and then saying in 19, psychical phenomena are intentional relations to objects, right? They have this property of aboutness, whether those objects are real or not. And then in 20 saying, just as sensory qualities differ in kind, like in color or sound, right, where there are different sensory modalities, so do we have intentional relations and mental acts also differ in kind. Right. Some of them are judgments, some of them are emotions, some of them are ideas.

And then he's going to drill down on the emotion part, which he takes ultimately to boil down to love or hate or inclination and disinclination. So it's interesting here because we're going to be doing right, this domain, the analogy of truth that he's trying to point to, belongs to the domain of judgment. And the really interesting idea here is that we can get something similar in the domain of emotion. So just as we can say, talk about truth for judgment, we can talk about truth for, or at least rightness.

9:13 Mark: Right.

9:14 Wes: Appropriateness.

9:15 Mark: Yeah, yeah. So he almost sounds, he's very much a student of so called modern philosophy, right. Descartes and Hume, those folks. And just like what are the fundamental mental contents? And even though it seemed like somebody like Reid was saying that, no, those guys are really reductionist. And the whole point of phenomenology is to not be reductionist in this way. But at least Brentano is going to be reductionist enough to say, look, there are three fundamental classes of things in the head. Ideas, which include impressions. But it's just like if I think of horse, I'm not saying a horse exists.

I'm not making any propositional content about it. So just distinguishing between ideas and then judgments about those ideas. And many philosophers have made that distinction. But then adding the third one to say, well, they're also emotions or passions again about those ideas because they have aboutness still. And making some, some sort of comparison between judgments and passions. Well, that's interesting because usually a passion is just, well, that's just an idea, right? It's just, it actually just goes in the first category. If you're Hume, I believe it's not.

It doesn't have propositional content. But he wants to say this is a more sophisticated. Although I think it's, you know, it's in Aristotle too. I think we've many times in this podcast talked about, like Bob Solomon, our professor, his big emotions theory was that this distinction between reason and emotions is very overblown, that actually every emotion contains propositional content, so that some of them are appropriate and some are not appropriate. So jealousy is not just, oh, I just have a feeling of jealousy. No, it's like I think that somebody Is, you know, being unfaithful to me.

And I. And it's appropriate for me to act this way in response to that. So it has all this stuff that's built into that.

10:59 Wes: So we're get.

10:59 Mark: We're seeing that presaged here.

11:01 Wes: Yeah. These should remind ourselves again that love and hate are intentional acts and have intentional objects. So love and hate is about intentional objects. And does that mean it's about ideas? As in. Right. This is some kind of early modern philosophy thing where our relationship is to our own ideas. Later phenomenologists, of course, would not want to say that that's the whole point of an intentional object is to say, no, this isn't just about right. When I say I love something. Love is not directed towards some content of my own consciousness. It's the actual object in some sense, that I'm loving or hating. But Husserl, you know, from what I read in Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy, he's a little unclear on what intentionality is and what the intentional object is in particular. It's something that became more focused with later phenomenologists.

11:56 Mark: Did we say that Reid uses intentionality as a proof of the external world?

12:01 Seth: Right.

12:02 Wes: Maybe somebody else more. You mean. What do you mean? Reid Reed did Thomas Reid.

12:08 Mark: I thought one of his things was the fact that I hear something, that we inevitably have the belief that it is not merely there is a component that is in our head. There's the idea that I'm hearing, but that it also presents itself as being correlated with. There was a sound out in the world, there was an activity out in the world, a motion in the world, something that caused that idea in my head. So right there, Cartesian skepticism doesn't even make any sense because the very act of having a mental state that has aboutness, that has intentionality, means to us that there's an external world. I'm not saying that everybody uses intentionality like this, but that I thought was a recent example of somebody who did, who was a realist because of intentionality.

12:56 Seth: I think what he said was sensation itself carries with it already a notion of existence, like it's existence. The existence of the thing is implied in the experience of the thing without the need to go through a conceptual proof.

13:12 Wes: Yeah, he says we can know. I'm just looking at my read notes. He says we can know that we're not a brain in a vat. Not that he uses that example, but we can't say why.

13:21 Mark: So I don't think that Brentano goes that far because we've already Said that he distinguishes between. Just because you can't help but believe that there's something out there doesn't mean. Right, right. That's, that's one of the lower, the instinctual, as opposed to knowing that you're having the sensation that is actually apodictic, that's actually self evident. But I still thought that he was maybe a realist in a way that Husserl, who explicitly, you know, following straight on Brentano, makes this jump of the intentional. You know, in fact, let's just, just look at the intentional act as something that has two poles to it.

It has the noesis, which is sort of the, the subjective pole and the noema, the objective pole. So it has an object, but is the object just something that's in my head or is it something in the world? I, Husserl am not even going to tell you. We're going to set that aside. We're just going to describe. So it was an ongoing question for me. Is, is Brentano, in his notion of intentionality, is he presaging that? Is he trying to bypass that whole metaphysical issue? Because he says, I'm a psychologist, come on. Of course we live in a real world with minds, but you know, so

14:26 Wes: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, you know, it gives us a quote from one of his other books, which basically implies, and this is how the encyclopedia article puts it, that the intentional objects towards which you are directed as part of the psychological act, it is something mental rather than physical. But then it goes on to, you know, argue about the complexities of that. So I think with Brentano, it actually turns out to be unclear. Okay, for good reason. Right? Because it is, it's Right. Are we going to get into the whole Platonic realm of propositions that aren't in the head, but they're not physical? You know, it's just that whole mess.

15:00 Mark: And since I already name dropped Bob Solomon when we were studying under him, he said even the Husserl literature is just filled with like, is Husserl a realist or is he an idealist? Does intentionality implied, like does. Is the phenomenological reduction that sets aside those questions, Is that a temporary measure? Like, you know, Descartes doubt so that he can just describe stuff, or is it just the permanent, Is it some way of just permanently putting those ideas? And Solomon is just like, I just can't even keep up with that literature. It's just so basic.

15:32 Wes: Just brings us back to insoluble philosophical problems every time. And let's just leave that aside, don't worry about that. What is reality? I think of Brentano, though, as quite very much a realist, it seems, and he's obviously very. Something I didn't know about Brentano before, you know, reading about him and then reading. Reading this, which is that he's very scholarly and knows a lot about the history of philosophy and not just early modern philosophy, but scholastics, for instance. So you get a lot of different interesting influences from both ancient and early modern and medieval philosophy coming together in Brentano.

And you can see how in a way there's kind of. There's almost this scholastic kind of taint, maybe that's the wrong word to the whole concept of intentionality. It sounds very much like a medieval sort of idea. But we ought to do some real medieval philosophy soon. But in this case, yeah, we have. In 21, we're right, just as in judgments we affirm and deny, in emotions we love or hate. And then in 22 we get this extension of the law of non contradiction. Emotions can be right or wrong. So ideas can't be right or wrong, but judgments can and emotions can.

So the same principle between love and hate, pleasure and displeasure, one is right and the other is wrong. And then we get to 23, the object is good when rightly loved.

17:02 Mark: It seems to say that he's saying at the end of 22 that for. For any given idea, it's objectively right to love or hate it. If that's at least a note that I had made, which seemed a little too far, that there seems like there are many morally neutral ideas, but in any case, at least some of them, you should want it to exist or want it to not exist. You should want to choose it, you should want to choose against it.

17:25 Wes: Well, what he says is, yeah, if we have a choice between. In 22, if we have a choice between two different emotions, love and hate, then something like the law of non contradiction is at play. It's one of them is going to be right. That is, I had that. This is the way I interpreted 22 as well. Just as in the proposition must be either true or false, just as we can't affirm two opposing judgments the same thing with emotions. He directly makes that analogy.

17:58 Seth: Well, and Mark, you pointed us to the footnote associated with this section about the theory of truth. And even as I was reading it before you sent that note, I made a note myself and I put in, I was like, correspondence. And then sure enough, he explains in that footnote to that section, agreement is regarded as A kind of identity. Right. That this is the wrong way to think about agreement. It's like what I mean here by agreement is to be appropriate, to be in harmony with, to suit or to correspond. So the rightness of a judgment is. He says, and this goes back to what we were just talking about with Reid.

Whether I say an affirmative judgment is true or its object is existent, whether I say a negative judgment is true or its object is non existent. In both cases I'm saying one and the same thing. It's essentially one and the same logical principle. So with respect to this notion of rightness or fit, it's a type of correspondence in the sense of the way we think of a correspondence theory of truth about judging that something is true or false or exists or doesn't exist. Right.

19:08 Mark: There is a fittingness or appropriateness of this emotion with that thing. That's like the fact that the existential statement.

19:15 Seth: Right.

19:15 Wes: Except that he has this weird desire to reduce propositions to existential statements. So when you say the man at the very end of the section, a man is learned, that's the correlate of the statement, there exists a learned man. It sounds like he doesn't. He's not going to like a correspondence theory, the type of theory that, you know, early Wittgenstein and Russell will propose, where you get facts out there that correspond. Right. And correspond in structure to the structure of predicate sentences. He likes objects. It sounds a little, a bit like medieval nominalism. And it's a natural intuition.

19:55 Mark: Right.

19:55 Wes: We want to say objects exist, not these object, property, fact things that are hard to take account of. Yep. But, yeah, so, but when he says the rightness. So the rightness of an affirmative judgment belongs to the existence of what is judged of affirmatively. So how do we make a parallel to that in emotions? The rightness of love would belong to. Has something to do with the goodness of the thing that's rightly loved.

20:23 Seth: Well, he says that at the. He gives a formulation of that at the end of 23. We call something good when the love relating to it is right. That which can be loved with a right love, that which is worthy of love is good in the widest sense of the term. So the fittingness or the correspondence or the appropriateness here has to do with worth.

20:44 Mark: Right. It sounds so circular. It sounds, you know, it's good because it's worthy. The love is appropriate because the thing is worthy of love. But what is that based?

20:54 Seth: Anything?

20:54 Mark: No, it's just that's the fundamental category. Somehow we are able to grasp, just like we're able to grasp, you know, the fittingness of two concepts or a geometrical theorem or arithmetic theorem we can grasp.

21:06 Wes: But he can always come back at us with the analogy of truth, right? And logical axioms and say we're in the same predicament. There.

21:13 Seth: There is a kind of commonsensical interpretation of this or that where it makes some kind of sense. Like if you said to me, oh, God, I'm so in love with this person, and I met this person and they just exhibited a ton of really negative traits, right? Like, I might not cash it out as this person is not worthy of love. And so your love is wrong or misguided or misplaced. But I might say that there's a misfit, what your experience of love for this person is. We would use different psychological terms now. Like, you know, we would say like, oh, you know, this is not a healthy relationship, or this is codependent or whatever. But the idea would be there's a mismatch. It doesn't fit.

22:00 Wes: You're not a good fit for me. There's not a rightness property going on here.

22:05 Seth: And I think he thinks, you know, like, you know, if you're like, ah, I really love mountain biking, right? We would be like, okay, well, there's a sense in which I guess that's a healthy and appropriate activity to love. But then what if you're obsessed to the point where you're constantly getting injured and you're out there every single day doing 100 miles or something, and you're like, okay, there's a misfit here. The level, the intensity of your love is somehow mismatched for the item. So my point is, we do have a language, in a sense, an intuitive, commonsensical way of thinking about these things that I can map onto what he's saying.

22:44 Wes: But I think that's all means and reasoning. That's all hypothetical reasoning. It's not about final ends, right? So if we talk about, you know, biking too much, right? We're just. We're talking about means and ends, and we're saying something like health or something higher than that is the ultimate end. And in this case, he's trying to figure out how we distinguish between final ends where that means end reasoning is not going to be available to us. We're not going to be able to choose a final end based on something further. And in fact, right, we're supposed to love everyone ultimately in some broad sense, right?

We're supposed to have brotherly or neighborly love towards everyone. I think he's concerned with universal moral truths that apply to everyone and for which the objects are always the same for everyone. And then the question is right, what does he mean by an object? Because I think objects are often acts right so not necessarily right. It's not that just like Led Zeppelin 2 is worthy of love. And if you don't see that then go to hell. Even though that's very true. But it's that right. So what is my relationship to a particular potential act that I might take?

All objects being something like all objectives. If I'm going to harm someone then I can't love that object or objective or act. I can't rightly love that. And we stuck. You know in 25 he's acknowledging this problem once again. We always kind of flip back to the epistemological problem because we can't just rely on habit and some sort of internal introspection of an ordinary sort to figure out which objects are worthy of love. Because we can be habituated, he says in 25 to love the wrong things. And the way that happens is we start to think of desires that originally aimed at something because it's a means to an end through habit that gets inculcated.

And then what was once a means to an end becomes an end in itself. And the example is the miser who wealth is for security but he just comes to fetishize it in a big way. And it's the just the hoarding of money becomes an end in itself. And so just because we love something he's going to say in 25 doesn't mean that it's worthy of love. So then again the question is how we distinguish. And in 26 we get this, this analogy between self evident judgments like the law of non contradiction or the incorrigibility of perception or apperception and figuring out what has inherent rightness.

And it sounds like intuition. We get there by intuition of some sort. It's almost like Descartes clear and distinct ideas.

25:20 Mark: So I had name dropped Williamson before in thinking that there's an externalist aspect to this that actually loving something and it's being worthy of love. There's always going to be a potential division between those two. So something like the world of experience and the world of reality something. But I shouldn't. The way that I presented that before made it sound like I'm a skeptic. I'm only really skeptic about saying that it's incorrigible. That's the thing that I have an issue with here, whether he should actually be saying that, because Williamson's way out of that is to say that normally our epistemic, our beliefs are true.

And when we define one as an error, as perverse, we define it in terms of the truth, right? We also read the Nyayas that had the same view. And so likewise, ethically, the way that Brentano describes this is yes, a miser can have the natural final ends perverted so that their he's valuing something that really is only valuable as a means, as an end in itself. But we see that that is a perversion because in most cases it is uncontroversial. If you're really going to argue is ignorance really better than knowledge? Like just nobody's going to take that argument seriously.

So it just. There's a common sense ends up being the thing that saves us from skepticism.

26:38 Wes: But we know that there are, right with the exam, the cannibalism example, we know that there are, he thinks, cultural differences where one can say one culture has got it wrong and the other has got it right. And then if you ask for a criterion of that sort of thing, we're just kind of stuck with this idea of intuition, although, you know, maybe there's something better to be said about it as we go forward. But in 27, he's going to tell us that love and hate or pleasure and displeasure can be grounded in reason or not. He contrasts blind versus grounded in reason, blind being non conscious and something like, you know, it could be procedural knowledge, it could be habit, it could be impulse, something like that.

So often we can through habit to, you know, learn to be pleased or with the wrong thing or displeased with the wrong thing. But if we base our pleasure or displeasure or our love and hate on our on, if we give it a rational basis, then it will be directed towards the right thing. And this is where we get distinction between higher and lower and forms of pleasure. And this is going to become really important because we're not going to be able to reduce everything to one form of pleasure, as in hedonism, and then make kind of utilitarian calculations.

Ultimately what he's going to want to say is that there are higher and lower forms and that's how we can distinguish between better and worse ends. And reason is the way to get there. So for instance, you know, when he gets into this question of higher pleasure in 27, one paradigmatic example is the pleasure in knowing or the desire to know. We take that right As a pleasure that's higher than say the pleasure of eating. We take it as more akin to our rational nature. So when Aristotle says desire then you know, by human beings, by nature, desire, knowledge, he's saying something quite, you know, more profound.

It might look kind of prosaic and ordinary thing to say, it's just listing one of the things we desire. But there's something very important about that particular desire as a higher form of desire. And you know, and later on you'll say, you know, some philosophers, right, ancients will say that truth seeking and the highest form of activity or contemplation might be the most ethical act of all knowledge might be the end all, be all, something he rejects. But, but it's important anyway. It illustrates this higher, lower distinction.

29:06 Mark: So do you think that maybe this whole lecture is just recontextualized? John Stuart Mill, right. That's where we get the higher and lower pleasures from. And he does, Brentano does end up humming down on something like the principle of utility and ruled utilitarianism. He's going to end up talking about rights as something that are not fundamental. But are there, you know, protections of us from each other for the greater social good? There's so much that it just seems like it lines right up with Mill that both of them are accurately reporting on again what called common sense. But that's always a tricky term because does common sense, you know, what's common sense in one society might be different than in another. So it's not, you know, take a survey and that's common sense. It's, it's appealing to some common sense. If you're clear headed and paying attention to the relevant facts.

29:59 Wes: Yeah, the common good is ultimately going to become the standard. And this is where he thinks we can get one kind of clear criterion for distinguishing between goods. Right. Because if it's just good for me and not for others, then that's less good than something that's good for everyone. There's a summative kind of procedure we can engage in to make a choice between such final ends, which is clear and intuitive.

30:21 Seth: That was the part I didn't understand. How he got there like that was to me we were like do, do, do, do, do. And then you know, in section 35 it's like, oh love thy neighbor and the greatest good for the greatest number. Even though I felt like he took a swipe at Bentham in one of the sections, like he's not full on buying into the utilitarian project. And again, remember the context for this is. He's talking to a bunch of legal scholars or jurists. So it's, you know, it's really like what's the ethical system or what moral principles should underlie public policy or law making, not necessarily law enforcing. And you know, ultimately it's weird because it feels like he's doing something completely different and then he just ends up sounding a lot like Mill and Bentham and such.

31:08 Wes: Well, yeah, except that we don't get this kind of fungibility in terms of the calculus. So what I mean by that is. Right. In 28, he's going to say there are plurality of goods and we have to choose between different goods as well as between good and bad. And how do we do that? So now we have to get into this concept of what's better. And he entertains the idea that betterness is a matter of what is loved with more intensity, which he rejects or

31:34 Mark: that is worthy of love with more intensity. Right. Because you might think that, like, if this is better, I should love it more. But then God is so much better than everything that if you believe in God, then you would like, hate everything else.

31:45 Wes: Right? Yeah, that's an interesting argument. Yeah.

31:48 Mark: Be indifferent to everything else. Let's say that.

31:51 Wes: Yeah, but I mean, what he's going to come to is that it's not a matter of there's no scale whether it's the amount of pleasure or the degree of intensity. It's really about choices. So there's a. At the end of 30, he'll say it's more analogous to true and false. Right. It's not a spectrum. One thing is preferable to another. And it's more like a difference in kind than a difference in degree. The better is the one that's preferable, the one that's preferred with. Right.

32:20 Seth: Preference.

32:21 Wes: And then in 31, he's going to give us a way. The summative method for determining that.

32:27 Mark: Can we just focus on that just for a second? Yeah. What did you think about. Because he's using this analogy of belief. Well, beliefs are true or false, propositions are true or false. But loves are not just appropriate or not appropriate, but there's. It seems like there are degrees. And so you've just given like. No, no, actually it is. It is more binary than that. But did you buy that? It seemed like there was something shifty going on there that I didn't quite approve of.

32:54 Wes: Well, what he wants to say is, you know, between two different alternatives, one is genuinely preferable.

33:02 Mark: Not always.

33:03 Wes: Maybe, you know, you know, maybe there's two equally preferable things. This is. Yeah, the law. Yeah. One would have to ask about the law of excluded middle. But let's leave that aside.

33:13 Mark: Or just that he, you know, as he points out the, the apples and oranges thing, that if two types of pleasure are just so different, he does want to say like, well, the, the summative thing shows us that we want to be well rounded. We want, we can't just completely rule out one of them in favor of the other if they're both goods. Right. So the desire to knowledge and beauty, for instance, you wouldn't want to just completely choose one of them and completely exclude the other because actually you'd need both of them together to, you know, better serve the common good. That if we keep in mind the overall, what we're overall aiming at, then these individual goods will line up before we.

33:49 Wes: Yeah. Before we get to the common good. Right. So we're.

33:51 Mark: Okay.

33:51 Wes: He gives an example of making a distinction between. Or what's preferable, listening to a Beethoven symphony or smoking certain number of cigars. And his point is that these are differences in kind. One is a higher form of pleasure and one is a lower form of pleasure. And you're not going to get anywhere by saying, well, a cigar is one unit of pleasure And Beethoven is 10 units of pleasure. And so Beethoven is 10 times more preferable than the cigar. That's what he's rejecting. He's going to say there is a almost binary true, false choice between those two things. And that's all we can say about it, is that one of those is preferable to the other. We're not going to analyze it into quantities.

34:31 Mark: It sounds like economics though. Like in terms of the choice, worthiness, like you're at the opera now, you're enjoying the opera. You're enjoying your philosophy book. How many orgasms would it take for you to throw all your philosophy books away?

34:45 Wes: Right? So it's. Yeah. And there's, there's no amount. Just kidding. But yet then that's where we get the summative method. Because when we're making these choices, right, we're choosing good over bad. We're choosing a good thing over its non existence. And then we get into these part whole relations, Right. We're choosing something that is wholly good to something that's a mixture of good and bad. And very importantly, we prefer the whole good to a part of the good. Right. This summative method, it really does give us an interesting way to distinguish what's preferable and that's why he gets the common good.

Right? What he. Ultimately, if the good of the whole is better than the good of the part, that means my individual preferences, my individual good is subordinate to the good of the many, to the common good. That's the principle. This is, you know, where he starts sounding like Mill. But he thinks he has a. A good principle for getting us there, which is that the good of the whole is more than the good of the part. But I'd like to point out again, we can't get anywhere unless we're assuming certain what I would call atomic goods that can add up to more, you know, that can be greater when they're added up to a lesser good.

And he's not telling us. He's still not telling us. And I don't think there is a way for him to tell us which atomic good is preferable over another.

36:05 Mark: I think I had a misreading that was interesting that to quote him. This is in section 31. Aristotle has already called attention to the fact that in the case of the good, the sum is always better than the separate parts which together make up its sum. Which could just be saying the sum is more than any one part. I read it as the sum, the overall good is better than even all of the parts added together, that there's an emergence, a greater good.

36:31 Wes: Yeah, that's true.

36:33 Mark: I'm not sure if he's saying that or not, but I like it.

36:35 Wes: Yeah, I mean, the whole is more than the parts. We know that. Right. And that's just the phenomenon of emergent properties.

36:41 Mark: I know you wanted a cat for your birthday, but instead I'm just going to give you the foot right now. And then I'll give you another foot and eventually you'll have the whole cat.

36:49 Wes: Right, but. Right. The living human being is more than the foot plus the arm plus all the other body parts. It's this living organized thing. There's the form, right. Which is what makes it more than the sum of the parts. And likewise. Right. The ethical correlate of that is it's goodness is more than just the sum of the goodness of the parts. So human being is, you know, an arm is good for throwing, right. And a leg is good for kicking. What a human good being is good for is more than summing up all those different goods in the same way. Yeah.

So he's taking a variation on that, which is to say we at least know the whole is more than the good. Its goodness is more than the goodness of each part summed together. But Right. That implies that the good of any part is less than that of the whole. And so we can make those choices. There are insoluble cases. Right. He's going to say he's going to draw this distinction in 32 between insight and love. So can we say which is better, knowledge or love? Plato might want to say it's better than any other virtue, but we might not want to. In any case, it's not.

I think he thinks it's not a solvable problem, but it's not going to be. You'll say these failures are not disadvantageous. It's not a problem for his project

38:02 Mark: because it's not a solvable problem in the abstract. But in terms of. Of living, you know, incorporating both those things because they're for the overall good. Yeah, let's get.

38:12 Wes: Well, 35. He'll say, yeah, we have to do both and we have to harmonize summation. That our method of summation kind of gets rid of the problem because the practical good embraces everything.

38:24 Mark: They just read the quote on the important proposition follows from the proceeding that the province of the highest practical good embraces everything which is subject to a rational operation. Insofar as a good can be realized in such matter, not merely the self, but also the family, the town, the state, the whole present world of life, even distant future times may here be taken into account. All this follows from the principle of summation of the good to promote as far as possible the good throughout this great whole that is manifestly the right end in life toward which every act is to be ordered, that is the one, the highest command on which all the rest depends.

38:59 Wes: Self devotion and on occasion self sacrifice are therefore duties. An equal good, wherever it be, and therefore in the person of another also is in proportion to its value and therefore everywhere equally to be loved. And jealousy and malignant envy are excluded. So this is the part I think, Seth, you thought was fishy. This is where we make this transition to the common good, which he thinks his principle summation gets us to. But yeah, what we get is.

39:24 Seth: Seems like a big leap.

39:25 Wes: Self sacrifice. Right. We get to Christian virtues like self sacrifice and love thy neighbor via his method, which I think he thinks is a pretty good result.

39:36 Mark: And he even a little later explains why love thy neighbor and love God actually are the same thing. Because what is God except just. Is just. Just thinking. It sounds actually very Feuerbachian to me of just, you know, projecting.

39:51 Wes: I should find the actual quote, God's properties. Yeah, I mean human properties on the gun but this is right straight out of Spinoza. This is the Tractatus, right? Spinoza said love thy neighbor and love of God are the same. It's one of his naturalistic reductions.

40:05 Seth: Yeah, he actually there is a footnote to this section where he says it is necessary to be on one's guard against drawing from the principle of love, our neighbor, to the conclusion that each has to care for every other individual in the same degree as for himself. Self, which, far from conducing towards the universal good, would rather essentially prejudice it. And he says, you know, if we found out there were human beings on Mars, we would wish them good. Right. But we ought not to strive after their good in the same manner as for ourselves. And I thought, oh, well, here's your response to Singer.

But, you know, it also then I think, just how do you avoid the utilitarian calculus here? I guess the way you avoid it is you're going to be making choices about ends, and there's going to be some form of self evidence in your choices about which ends are the right ones to pursue in any given context at any given time. And I guess there's also, because this is an epistemological question, there has to be some form of virtue inculcation and education. You can't assume that everybody. There has to be some pedagogical program that's associated with this, you know, so you're not going to be doing a utilitarian calculus, but you are going to be making a choice that just by recognition of the innate worthiness of the end that you choose, you'll naturally be doing the best thing for the, you know, the greatest number or the most conducive for the whole.

And so any, again, any failure to do that is a failure of reason or education and not a failure of character or sentiment.

41:46 Mark: Just saying that this is warmed over John Stuart Mill, because he is a utilitarian. But he takes away the idea of utility calculus, all the comparisons, all the summative is qualitative and choice worthiness between things. So you can't add. Even though he calls it summative. You can't literally add things together in a way that you could then calculate the right thing to do.

42:08 Wes: Well, except by saying the good of the common good is greater than the good of the one.

42:12 Mark: Yes, yes. Yeah. So qualitative things you can absolutely say like that. But in terms of, like that whole thing of. Well, if killing one person would bring pleasure to a great many, how much pleasure, like, you just. It doesn't admit of that Sort of calculations at all. And I, I probably Mill doesn't admit either. I would sort of. But Brentano explicitly does not admitted that. Yeah, I found the quote about God. It's the bottom of page 36 and when it is said love God above all else. And Aristotle also says that God is much rather to be called the best than the world as a whole. Here also there's a special application of the law of summation for how else do we think of God than is the sum of all that is good raised to an infinite degree? So it's just papering over. Yeah, the group, the general good and God are the same thing. For practical purposes.

43:03 Wes: Yeah.

43:03 Mark: It's a different idea, it's a different intentional content.

43:06 Wes: He also mentions Aristotle's response to the question of whether the good is transcendent or imminent. And it's in typical Aristotle style, both. Right. So in the Unmoved Mover it's transcendent, but in the world order it's imminent. So I thought that was really interesting. I mean it shows you. This is one of the things I really love about Brentano is how well versed he is and connected he is to the history of philosophy, which you often lack. You know, it comes up lacking in analytic philosophers.

43:35 Seth: But.

43:36 Wes: But I think, you know, just to kind of round this out, he's moving towards the law. He wants to, to get back to the law. That was the whole point of this lecture. And at 37, once we know that the highest good is the common good, we know we need a division of labor for that common good. The common good requires that we live together in a polis. That's what the whole division of labor comment is getting at. Because we do better when we're cooperative. You know, one person is doing another thing and another is doing another and we can put our work together and have a better life.

But if we're going to do that, then we need the law. And we also need. Right. What Mill called social coercion. That's what he gets at in 38, where we get. We get morality, in other words. And that's enforced not by the law necessarily, but by reputation, by people approving or disapproving of you, by certain social factors.

44:28 Mark: Well, I think we should wrap up. I mean we've got to the climax of here. We've mentioned the stuff that comes after this in terms of the over determination of law. Historically we sort of. That was all front loaded in our intro. There's certainly enough room, I should mention so. Right. It's a 45 page lecture, but it's a 200 plus page book. And so a lot of it is just these footnotes that we've occasionally referred to that he just, he's like, oh, I barely changed the lecture. I just tweaked it very slightly to put it for publication. But every time he ran into something that he wanted to comment on, then he would write these increasingly long footnotes.

So some of them are like three page essays on adjacent topics. So there's just always more to go into. And I didn't even look at the actual appendices where he's addressing specific other philosophers that were relevant here, you know, his contemporaries.

45:16 Wes: Yeah, this was the first thing that was translated into English from Brentano. And I think that was, it was that way for a long time. And so for Anglo philosophy, it was the, was the thing that was on, the only thing that was being commented on for a while his, his ethics before his, you know, descriptive psychology was translated. But I wanted to mention one other thing which I know we mentioned it before, but the. I really like his idea of this kind of convergent evolution between what the lower impulses will give us ethically and then what he thinks of as this higher sensitivity to the good.

Right. The lower impulses, he says in 45, can lead to unethical conduct, but they can also ground ethical conduct due to instinctive force of habit. So, you know, we'll talk about the tyrant and how the tyrant has to look out for the people and, you know, for their own survival, let's say. So they get habituated into certain behaviors. But ultimately the larger point is that luckily, before we ever see the light of reason, we are just naturally habituated into ethical behavior. And even right in the ancient, ancient times, laws that are foundational, so they may not be motivated by sensitivity to the good, but they're there ever before we ever get to this level where we can think about it more deeply.

46:38 Seth: I guess I wanted this to close as strongly as I felt like it. It opened. You know, there's a sense in which I feel like this is yet again some philosopher pretending to use, you know, reason and what have you to sneak in Christian ethics, you know, magically. It always ends up, it always ends up, you know, love thy neighbor or the Golden Rule or whatever it is, you know, and you're like, oh, okay, so reason brought us back to the same 19th century Christian values that, you

47:08 Mark: know, it's just natural.

47:10 Seth: It's just natural.

47:11 Mark: It's just common sense.

47:12 Seth: But, you know, then and in the end, the very last. I think it's the last paragraph or at least the last section, he says, like, oh, and by the way, we do need to cultivate. We didn't. You know, habit is important. We do need to cultivate good character and virtue. And it's like, okay, so, you know, we need to cultivate virtue for people to make these judgments about what the correct end or the fitting or worthy end is. They need to have good character, and they need to have good education, and we need to have this kind of society. It's like, what did he actually bring to the table?

If in the end, you know, you're just saying, like, yeah, well, we kind of need, you know, Aristotle and Mill. We can do without Kant, but ultimately we're taking a sort of, like, virtue utilitarian approach. And what I've done is I've just given you a little intentional framework that helps clarify the mechanism of choice. Okay. I guess it's not the big bang that I was hoping for.

48:09 Mark: Well, luckily, we're just starting to talk about this, so next time we'll talk about Max Scheler's The Nature of Sympathy, directly influenced by what we talked about today. Feel free to reach out to us peltiallyexaminedlife.com or comment on the blog post associated with this at partially examined life.com or message us through Patreon or Twitter or Facebook or however you want. Thanks, everybody. Good night.

48:33 Seth: Good night.

48:33 Wes: Good night. Thank you.