Ethical Determinacy
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I would like to put forward that instead of thinking of ethics in terms of means versus ends, instead think in terms of event versus patient/agent AND eventual/subject-ual determinacy as such.
Key Terms: Agent - Someone morally responsible for a situation. Patient - Someone morally worthy of consideration but not responsible for a situation. Determination - The way things are selected out of the world in distinction. Means- How something is done. Ends- Why something is done. End in itself- Something done for its own sake rather than exterior one
It is traditionally thought means and ends are a strict divide, however this is only the case when we consider the determinacy of an event or agent/patient is strictly divided along one line on the side of means and ends rather than existing in a wider constitutive spatio-temporal determination. For example hurting a person for the sake of another goal could be considered wrong from the standpoint of determination that separates the person from the goal (making someone exercise to the point they hurt a lot as an example that will be followed up on), but if we instead determine the person in some sense as intrinsically bound with the goal “hurting” the person (exercise effects their health and cultivation as being with a single life connected to the potentials of the future) may actually be treating them as an end in themself rather than a means. Thus the important metaphysical delineation is not simply the ground of metaphysical facts or fictions but the determinacy of the very things we measure against said facts or fictions.
Potential types of ethical determinacy:
I think what I will call ethical determinacies (how we parse out an event or thing from the world to measure it by values) include political-historical determinacies of the following categories (though this list may not be exhaustive): 1) a ethical rationalism that precedes from a transhistorical measure of form that then latches onto content from the top down, - deontology and personalistic virtue ethics are somewhat close to this 2) an atomistic empiricism resting on ahistorical measure of content from the bottom up, - consequentialism usually belongs here 3) a dialectical empiricism made from historical determination with a particular formal structure or movement of content and its tendencies extended (or perhaps projected) in time particularly rather than space, historical praxis of say Marxism and a may more politicized extended virtue ethics can go here 4) an arational empiricism where a content is chosen arationally from no prior formal structure or direction as a kind of revelation - divine revelation, moral intuitionism to some degree fits here.