Stoicism, Foundationalism, and the Structure of Ethical Knowledge
Stoicism, Foundationalism, and the Structure of Ethical Knowledge
Two posts by Grant C. Sterling. First: Stoics Yahoo Group, January 19, 2015, thread “Re: Two (Types of) Moral Premises.” Second: Stoics Yahoo Group, June 5, 2017, thread “Re: Basic Stoic Ethical Principles.” Preserved by Dave Kelly, 2026. Layer: Theoretical Core — Philosophical Commitments. Attribution: Sterling.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
Editorial Note — Dave Kelly
These two messages constitute Sterling’s most direct treatment of the foundationalist structure of ethical knowledge and the independence of foundational ethical propositions from both theology and empirical observation. The January 2015 message sets out Sterling’s taxonomy of knowledge sources and identifies self-evident necessary truths — known through rational perception rather than sensory input — as the correct account of how foundational moral propositions are known. This is the epistemological ground of the foundationalism commitment: Theorem 10 is a self-evident necessary truth apprehended through rational perception, not derived from prior premises and not imported from theology or experience. The June 2017 message establishes the independence of foundational ethical beliefs from theological beliefs through the distinction between beliefs that merely connect and beliefs that logically support one another. Stoic ethics and Stoic theology are connected — each makes the other more coherent as a whole — but neither is the logical ground of the other. Refute the theology and the ethics stands. Dissolve the ethics and the theology stands. This is the structural claim that makes Sterling’s reconstruction philosophically defensible: the six commitments do not rest on cosmological or theological foundations that have collapsed. They stand independently.
Message One: Two Types of Moral Premises — The Structure of Ethical Knowledge
Grant C. Sterling to the Stoics Yahoo Group, January 19, 2015. Thread: “Re: Two (Types of) Moral Premises.” Responding to Steve Marquis on the sources of moral knowledge.
By “moral” I meant the properties of goodness, badness (evil), virtue, vice, preferred, dispreferred, right, or wrong. None of those properties can be sensed. Some of these properties may not be fundamental — i.e., some may be defined in terms of others. I was not concerned with this distinction in that post. Any value content in one of my impressions cannot have come directly from the five senses.
The world is a certain way. We receive basic concepts from the world. (Or perhaps some are innate.) Then we make up arbitrary systems of noises, and squiggly marks, to refer to those concepts. So the words are totally arbitrary and conventional. But the basic concepts they refer to cannot be totally arbitrary, or else you would use a word and I would stare at you blankly. And the nature of reality is not arbitrary or conventional. Of course, we can also make up complex concepts based on the simpler concepts we perceive. But all words that we invent to refer to complex properties are meaningful only insofar as they are composed of simpler properties we are aware of.
If our words do not refer to anything that exists in reality, then no-one’s definitions are right. If our words do refer to things that exist in reality, then: (a) if the property is simple, the word has no definition — you cannot define, for example, the experience of yellow; all we do is conventionally agree which noise will correspond to which property; (b) if the property is complex, then whoever’s definition matches reality best is objectively right. The arbitrariness of language in no way makes truth arbitrary.
There are (at least) four sources of knowledge:
(a) Sensory experience — experiences in the mind which we take to be caused by our five physical senses.
(b) Extra-sensory experience — mystical experience, religious experience, divine revelation, pronouncements of the moral sense, clairvoyance. What all of these share is the idea that we can detect contingent truths about the external world. Since these are contingent truths, our knowledge of them will vary. If you have learned the truth of proposition ‘p’ by clairvoyance, then I cannot know that ‘p’ is true unless I also have the same clairvoyant experience. What one person has learned this way, another need not know.
(c) Rational perception of self-evidence — this is different from all the others. A self-evident truth can only be evident through itself, and so only a necessary truth can be self-evident. Knowing a truth because it is self-evident is not the same thing as learning a truth by experience, even mystical, religious, or extra-sensory experience. In the case of (a) and (b) we learn the truth because we receive some new input. In the case of (d) we received the input at birth. In the case of (c), we gain a new understanding without having new information inputted to us.
(d) Purely innate knowledge — some people think that we are simply born knowing certain truths, or at least born with them somehow contained inside us so that we only need to think in the right way to become aware of them. In principle, innate knowledge could vary — I could know things innately that you do not.
(c) is the key category. It is different from (b) because a self-evident truth is not learned through any experience, even a non-physical one. It is different from (d) because it cannot vary between persons — a self-evident necessary truth is self-evident to any rational faculty that attends to it. What is self-evident does not depend on what inputs you have received.
I think the fundamental truths of ethics are necessary, self-evident truths. Jesus was not needed to tell us the fundamental truths of Stoicism. They are necessary, self-evident truths that any rational faculty can apprehend directly.
On the is-ought problem: you can run through all the descriptive observations you want. Here is data about the psychological consequences of rape for the victim. There is data about which societies have disapproved of rape under which circumstances. Go on making all the observations you want to make. But somewhere down the line you have to start making assertions like “it is wrong to harm other people just to get pleasure for yourself” or “pain is a dispreferred indifferent, and ceteris paribus one ought not to perform actions directed towards producing dispreferred indifferents” or something like that. At some point you have to bridge the is/ought gap. And you will not bridge it with any statement about what you can see, hear, taste, touch, or smell. You can add up a million Premise 1s, but until you put in a non-sensory moral Premise 2, you will never get to a conclusion.
MORAL PROPERTIES CANNOT BE SENSED. That is the fulcrum.
Regards, Grant
Message Two: Support versus Connection — The Independence of Foundational Ethical Propositions
Grant C. Sterling to the Stoics Yahoo Group, June 5, 2017. Thread: “Re: Basic Stoic Ethical Principles.” Responding to questions about whether Stoic ethics requires Stoic theology.
There are (at least) two ways that philosophical principles can be related to one another — I will call them “support” and “connection”. They are very different things and should not be confused, as they often are.
Suppose that I discover that my wife is having an affair. I discover multiple occasions when she is not where she says she is going to be. I find a partially written love letter hidden in her belongings. So I come to believe that she is having an affair. Now suppose that a good female friend of mine confides that her husband Bubba is having an affair. She cites similar evidence. So I come to believe this as well. Then one day it occurs to me that my wife is good friends with this woman’s husband. After a while, I come to believe that my wife is having an affair with my friend’s husband.
Notice that neither of these two beliefs relies on the other in any logical sense. I came to have the two beliefs separately, based on entirely independent sets of evidence. We can imagine a sufficient amount of evidence to say that I would be fully justified in believing either of them without the other. We could imagine my discovering one day that my wife’s lover could not possibly be my friend’s husband, and this would not in the slightest change my belief that each of them was having an affair. At the same time, if the evidence in the two cases matches up very well, I have a fuller and better understanding of the universe by combining them.
On the other hand, imagine a very different situation. Suppose I come to believe that my wife is a reptilian space alien in disguise. Upon contemplating this further, I see that I must accept that reptilian space aliens exist, that they have studied humans for some time, that some sort of effective space travel must exist for them. These beliefs are not independent of my original belief — were I to discover that I was wrong about my wife’s alienhood I would immediately abandon all these other beliefs.
In the infidelity example, the beliefs were connected. Each makes perfect sense on its own. Each was discovered independently and independently supported by evidence. Yet they are related in a way that allows them to be combined into a coherent whole. In the alien example, the new beliefs are supporting beliefs — a foundation for the belief that she is an alien. If the foundation falls, everything built on it falls with it.
My contention is that the ethical beliefs of the ancient Stoics are related to their theological beliefs in the former way, and not the latter way. They believed certain things about ethics. They believed certain things about the gods. They then connected them together. But they did not hold their beliefs about ethics because of their theology, nor did they hold their theology because of their ethics. If you had somehow convinced Zeno that fiery pneuma was not in fact a material substance or that there was no conscious mind at the heart of the universe, I do not think that he would have abandoned his belief that virtue was good. There is no obvious logical connection between these ideas. Refute Stoic ethics and you will not have made the slightest dent in panentheism or materialism. Dissolve panentheism or materialism and you will not have refuted Stoic ethics. You will of course destroy the particular connections the ancient Stoics drew — just as if Bubba is not having an affair I will delete my belief that my wife is having an affair with Bubba — but you will not refute the connected doctrine.
Connecting beliefs can strengthen both, as in my example. If there is Reason at the heart of the universe, that can enhance the idea that Reason is vital to human life. If the perfect gods control all externals, that makes it easier for me to stop thinking that any external can be evil. But there is no reason why an atheist cannot articulate the same Stoic ethical principles that a monotheist affirms. And that is precisely what I do myself. I am a theist for reasons that have nothing to do with ethics. I am a Stoic for reasons that have nothing to do with theism. But of course I connect those two views. If you convinced me tomorrow that monotheism was false, I would not take that as evidence that my ethics or my epistemology were false.
I reject the call for grounding of ethical beliefs in theology. Ethics cannot be grounded in the will of God. The Euthyphro problem shows that — divine ethics ends up becoming either arbitrary (God, for no good reason, randomly assigns “good” to kindness and “bad” to cruelty — it would have been just as legitimate had he randomly picked the opposite), or else it ceases to be divine (God applauds kindness because it is good, which means that its goodness is antecedent logically to God’s approval). Furthermore, I have never met anyone who adopted basic ethical principles because of their theology. I have never met anyone who started disapproving of cheaters, liars, rapists, and thieves because he deduced the wrongness of those actions from his theology. There is no logical connection that I have ever seen — “it is wrong, ceteris paribus, to break a promise” seems to require only that I understand what promises are and how they work, not that I understand anything about God.
So I do not ground my ethics in my theology, and I do not see any need for me to do so.
The Stoics think that we already know (basically) what Virtue is, and we already know that it is good. What we need to do is start working at eliminating the desires that obscure our vision of the true good. Telling people to be good Boy Scouts misses the point. They already know that they ought to be doing those things, but their desires lead them astray. So you cannot get someone started on the road to eudaimonia without directly confronting them with the truth that externals are neither good nor evil.
Regards, Grant
Corpus Note — Dave Kelly
These two messages together constitute the primary source material for Sterling’s foundationalist commitment. The January 2015 message establishes the epistemological taxonomy: self-evident necessary truths, known through rational perception (category c), are the foundational moral propositions. They are not learned from experience, not received through any input, and not variable between rational persons. Moral properties cannot be sensed; therefore moral foundations require non-sensory rational access. This is the precise epistemological claim that foundationalism makes in Sterling’s framework: Theorem 10 is a self-evident necessary truth, and the examination of impressions against it is an exercise of rational perception of self-evidence, not empirical inference.
The June 2017 message provides the structural claim: ethical beliefs and theological beliefs are connected, not mutually supporting. The six commitments — including the foundational value claim that virtue is the only genuine good — do not rest on ancient Stoic theology, cosmology, or physics. They stand independently. Dissolving ancient Stoic physics, as Inwood correctly observes is necessary, does not touch the foundational ethical propositions. Those propositions were not grounded in the physics. They were merely connected to it. The connections are severed by the reconstruction; the propositions remain.
Sources: Stoics Yahoo Group. “Re: Two (Types of) Moral Premises,” January 19, 2015; “Re: Basic Stoic Ethical Principles,” June 5, 2017. Author: Grant C. Sterling. Preserved by Dave Kelly, 2026.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home