He believed competition to be the root of all evil. And so the modern classroom, showing due deference to its father, removes all indicators of competition. Even some Christian schools, rather than delighting in excellence, God-given differences of ability, and hard work, refuse to give public praise in the form of academic awards. And the most radical schools reject grades all together. It is more than simple concern that a bad grade might discourage a child.
According to Rousseau, children are born with an innate sense of community. The children in the classroom will love each other and support one another as long as the teacher can prevent competition from destroying this natural communal sense. Everything went wrong when man began to compare himself to others.
Rousseau argued that the State should finance a national system of education to create a new brotherhood. Therefore, education is the concern of the State, not individual parents. This is certainly the prevailing view of our time and continues to be a battle for those involved in private education and home schooling.
Of course, a rather obvious contradiction stands out here. Rousseau argues that the State will save man through education and the removal of private property , yet the State is made up of institutions—which by definition will corrupt, not purify.
Indeed, Rousseau was a most contradictory writer, which should not surprise us since Rousseau also believed that man needed not just Reason but should embrace irrationality. There is no law of non-contradiction in an irrational universe. And so Rousseau never appeared the least disturbed with his many contradictions, nor did he ever attempt to reconcile them. Rousseau demanded that his mistress abandon all 5 of their children. Orphanages at that time were just as horrible as we imagine them to be, and it is highly unlikely that any of the children lived very long after their abandonment.
To assuage his own guilt especially since he too was an abandoned child , Rousseau boldly proclaimed that he abandoned his children for their own good. The State is the superior parent, he wrote. As a result, Rousseau is one of the great influences on the modern Culture of Cool. His group intentionally dressed in ways that reflected barbarism and savagery.
I gave up gold lace and white stockings…. He and his friends wore tribal beads and native pagan artifacts. They marked themselves with tribal markings, sometimes scarring themselves. They dressed all in black, put on affected mannerisms, and wore their hair in an unruly manner, meticulously styling their hair in ways that would shock and horrify onlookers. They redefined art as that which is offensive, horrifying, and confusing, and they created an idea of the artist as one who is detached and above the ordinary.
Thus the many Goth kids dressed in black, trying to shock us with their authenticity are expressing themselves in exactly the way Rousseau taught them to. As we consider the question What is Man? In an earlier post I asked, Who is the most loathsome philosopher in history? I suggested that Rousseau and Heidegger be considered top candidates.
Had he tried, Rousseau may very well have been incompetent as a father. It also included a take on religion that led to the book being banned and burned. Many people were not fans of Rousseau. The elder statesperson of French philosophy and letters at the time, Voltaire, was one notable critic. Rousseau, funnily enough, was an admirer of Voltaire, but received mostly condemnation and bad reviews in return. Then we can revise or re-conceive h : A person whose conscience is misled, ignored, or denied is or can be morally culpable because he has misused his cognitive apparatus so as to block the deliverances of conscience.
It would attribute culpability to him in an internally consistent and not implausible way. As a general proposition, I think we ought to evaluate theories not literally by the details of what their authors say, but in terms of their core elements.
Imagine, for instance, that Rousseau had taken exemplary care of his children. Would we then be justified in inferring that that vindicated his theory? Only if the core elements of the theory tended to motivate such exemplary behavior better than rival theories.
In the actual case, Rousseau neglected his children. Like Liked by 1 person. Perhaps an example of a culpably bad action done through cognitive failure would be hitting a pedestrian with your car because you were fiddling with the radio—or to be more up to date, texting. You knew exactly what you were doing, and you knew it was not what you should be doing. How psychologically realistic is this as applied to the supposed faculty of conscience?
The idea is that conscience speaks with a decisive and clarion voice. Pity the poor children!! He fails to understand, through a cognitive lapse. What is there not to get? The message is simple. How could anyone who has this message blaring in his ear not understand it?
One can ignore the voice of conscience, and one can deny it. It seems to me that these mechanisms are plenty for explaining culpable moral lapses without introducing the implausible idea that one can somehow succeed in literally not comprehending a voice that speaks audibly in plain French as opposed to ignoring or denying it. But even if we accept this idea, I think it has already been answered.
The problem with that proposal was that it requires Rousseau to be dramatically insensitive to his own moral voice, of which he must have been very conscious, since it is the core of his own moral view, and he was a moralist. It requires us to believe that he could somehow simply deny clear knowledge that he was doing something terribly wrong.
For myself, it is easier to believe that he did not have clear knowledge. There was no clear voice. There is no such thing as an infallible, oracular voice of conscience. There is only a mush of moral feelings and intuitions, which come to us from various sources, innate, personal, and social, and which do not provide clear guidance. This was obviously an important moral issue. Rousseau would have had to do quite a lot of very determined radio-fiddling to keep his mind away from the voice of conscience in this case.
It is easier to think that he lacked clear principles for thinking about the matter which is close to the way he himself represents the case, actually. Obviously no such specific predictions are possible. Abandoning his children is only the most horrific example. He would have done better, as a moralist and as a person, to hammer out some clear moral principles and instill them into his life and conduct.
Maybe if we had equally revealing memoirs from Aristotle and Aquinas and Locke and Hume and Kant, we would see that his life was really typical. I found this post quite stimulating. Perhaps there is some confusion between a certain motivational or character-wise evaluation of specific actions, of the person overall and objective evaluation doing what is actually morally appropriate or correct in a situation?
And this is broadly a failure of moral agency of the moral character and attitudes of the agent — it is just not the specific failure of having the right basic attitudes toward the right basic elements. If only being a morally good person were as easy as getting the basic aims and attitudes toward the aims right! I think non-marginal cases of all being aright with the agent moral-character-wise, but ignorance or strong personal motivations intervening to produce morally inappropriate or incorrect action are sort of rare.
This may not speak much to your central points — this comment is as much a related thought on what I take to be the relevant substantive issues in moral theory. The way I understand conscience in Rousseau, it is very like the general will in his political philosophy.
Both are the only source of right and wrong in their domains, the only legitimate authority, and infallible though capable of being misled—and indeed not necessarily even very bright. A group from newly independent Corsica invited Rousseau to perform this service for Corsica, and Rousseau seriously considered trying it, but the deal fell through. None of this is supposed to reduce the authority, the legitimacy, or the infallibility of the general will.
The counselors are only bringing the horse to water, as it were. It is still up to the horse to drink or not. I am not exaggerating. The effect of this doctrine is to add yet another degree of freedom to a mechanism that is already essentially constraint free. There is no independent check on the judgment of the general will, so in principle it can always be right. It seems like it must be, actually. It is the only standard. By what means will we ever know it was wrong? And yet it can be wrong after all.
Sorry, I mean misled. Evidently the criterion of being misled is that the general will comes later to regret some judgment it made earlier. This must be the criterion, since no other criterion is available. All this applies equally to conscience, I think. The general will takes up only matters of general policy, not of particular detail.
Also whatever principles of political right might be derivable from the general will must be put into practice for a particular people, in a particular geographic location, in a particular time, with a particular geopolitical context of neighboring states, and so forth.
So the best constitution can differ greatly from one situation to another. It seems to be the same with morals. The deliverances of conscience concerning right and wrong can be somewhat different in different social and historical contexts. Nonetheless, the fundamentals are universal across times and nations, he says. So, as you say, conscience may be better at articulating basic values and precepts than at deciding particular cases.
That is what it amounts to, right? Without thinking about it quite explicitly, it was in the back of my mind when I wrote my post that I meant to deny that we can separate moral status from performance in this way.
These are not compatible facts. Everyone is a mixed bag of character strengths, and everyone performs variably from one occasion to another. I suffered not from a strong but mistaken sense of what was right but from lack of principle. It it had been, I would have been much more likely to do what I should have in these cases. I do not mean to say that wrong actions are never the result of being misled. The news lately has given us several examples of murders committed by people who apparently thought, under the influence of their ideological beliefs, that they were doing something good.
But this is relatively rare. Very few cases from my own life are cases of being misled in anything like this way I can only think of one offhand. Usually we do not do wrong thinking we are doing right. Rather we do wrong without clear and ingrained principles to keep us on the right path, and usually without thinking too much about what we are doing from a moral perspective.
That strikes me as both false and morally destructive. I would certainly agree that neither conscience nor the general will can function as a criterion of moral rightness.
Every theory has liabilities of that sort. And every ethical theory has some distinctive liabilities. It may not be possible to know the frequencies at all. So, since nearly everybody thinks they mean well nearly all the time and Rousseau certainly exemplifies that! They supply substantive principles and hold that any well brought up person Aristotle or any rational person Kant or any benevolent person Bentham should see and follow them. True, application of their principles can be difficult sometimes.
One interesting point you raise here about the misapplication of general principles flourishing, universalization, etc. He goes into great detail with particular moral principles, of justice for example, and the various virtues that make a life well lived.
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