Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Causal/Moral

For some time now, I've been looking for a pangrammatical homologue for moral experience (for technical reasons, I do not say "the concept of morality"). Ethics is easy: epistemology (ethical/epistemic). But what is to morals as knowledge is to power, as epistemology is to ethics? Or another way of putting it: what is to epistemology as morality is to ethics? I've hit on causality as a possible answer.

The experience of causal order in our pursuit of knowledge is homologous to the experience of moral order in our pursuit of power. Causality is rooted in a kind of material custom, just as morality is rooted in social custom. Causality is the habit of the world. Morality is the habit of history.

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