Let’s think through this in terms of dispositions and the fundamental perspectival relationality that’s a necessary component to all things. No special axe to grind. Let’s just stroll through it, D.

PART I: Being responsibly human

We’re experiential centers of freely disposing personal relationality, right? That is, we’re relatively autonomous persons who possess the capacities (rational, emotional, volitional) for enjoying the highest, most “important” (“importance” in Whiteheadian terms) form of perspectival sociality—love. Such relationality entails an “order” to it which is essentially the “accountability” Jeff and I have been talking about. This is what determines that there are consequences for choices. This is all metaphysically the case, not an incidental or contingent aspect of the coming into being of creaturely love. We should try to spell out in dispositional terms why this is the case. Forget forgiveness for the moment. Let’s first get clear on the dispositional nature of loving relationality vs its negation—unloving misrelationality—and also what is it about a dispositional ontology that makes “accountability” and “consequences” a necessary feature of lovingly creaturely becoming. If we do this, my guess is we’ll be in a position to say, “Oh, so THAT’S what forgiveness is.”

Creaturely loving sociality comes into being (and it must come into being for contingent creatures; we don’t exist necessarily) through the free and responsible exercise (self-disposing) of our wills. We self-dispose toward or away from the highest form of valuation possible—loving, relational, personhood. Self-disposing involves (1) our perceiving ourselves and the world in a particular relation to one another, (2) our assigning some value or importance to the relata (the persons or objects perceived in the world, including ourselves) and the relation, and consequently (3) our choosing, or disposing ourselves, toward or away from these perceived relata in the interest of some perceived value or interest.

Free choice is always purposeful, and that means it’s always relational. A rational and free choice is a choice to relate for some perceived purpose. Even when we misrelate, we do so for some perceived gain, if only for physical pleasure or temporary benefit. It follows that in sinning, or in misrelating, we first must sufficiently misperceive. But for us to be accountable for our misrelating, it must also be the case that there’s enough truth to our perceiving, enough of an accuracy in our perceptions, to make possible our properly relating. So we must also sufficiently perceive. And there you have it—epistemic distance. To be accountable for our actions, the perceptions that explain our actions must be partly accurate and partly inaccurate (not sure inaccurate is the right word, but it'll do). We must be able to perceive our way rationally into rightly AND wrongly relating.

To be human then, is to “self-dispose” or to freely choose to relate in the interest of perceived values.

So far so good?

Tom

(To come: PART II: What it means to rightly and wrongly relate.)

Post Edited (TGB) : 1/30/2007 10:26:52 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Exousia) : 1/30/2007 11:43:25 AM (GMT-6)

PART TWO: What it means to ‘relate’ and ‘misrelate’

OK, I have almost no idea where to go from here! Let’s try this…

Given what we said in Part 1, human being consists in freely relating or misrelating and enjoying or suffering the consequences. Yes, there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t affect the relational, personal quality or becoming that define our characters (like what color socks I wear tomorrow, whether I wash my left or my right armpit fist, stuff like that), but we’re not concerned with that. We want to focus on the relating and misrelating that contribute to the development of who we become.

What’s it mean to properly ‘relate’? Again, given what we said human being is, it’s not too difficult so say. We properly relate when we choose to affirm the value or importance of ourselves and others (and the wider creation). We rightly relate when we recognize the value of those persons and objects we perceive and make affirming their value an expression of our value.

So essentially we’re self-disposing relationally and evaluatively. That means we’re defining ourselves not just with respect to our relations, but even more interdependently, in/with/by our relations. I want to say something like “we ARE our relations” and not just “we are IN relationship.” More specifically, we self-dispose rightly when we decide to act assertively, that is, to assert something by acting, namely, the value of things. But to say something has “value” is to say it has “value in relation to me,” and that amounts to saying it has “value to me,” and that amounts, I think, to saying, “the experience of my own value depends on perceiving, affirming, and celebrating the value of other things.”

That’s rightly relating as far as I can tell. It’s orienting, directing, determining, choosing to affirm and celebrate my own value by affirming the value of others. We do that by promoting the existence and well-being of all things, and we do that by calling all things to the fulfillment of their eschatological ends—unity with God, faith in Christ, and life in the Church.

Misrelating is the negation of all this. Where rightly relating is valuing others at expense to one’s self, misrelating is essentially valuing one's self (or attempting to do so) at the expense of others. One has to misperceive to misrelate. But it’s only misrelating IF the misperception is sufficiently willful. In other words, you don’t misrelate by accident, by failing to affirm the value of a thing because you mistook its value.

Gotta go. American Idol is on.

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 1/31/2007 6:21:52 AM (GMT-6)

Just to summarize 1 and II:

A human being is a relatively autonomous, sentient, self-determining center of perspectival sociality. I’m doubling up items perhaps, but just to get clear.

Relatively autonomous: We don’t exist necessarily. We’re contingent beings. And though much about us is determined by factors outside our will, much about us is determined freely by us. We’re relatively free or autonomous.

Sentient: A being is sentient (in the widest sense) if it consciously and rationally apprehends itself and the world.

Self-determining: At least libertarianly free in some respects. It freely self-disposes or becomes.

Perspectival socialty: I mean a human is a perceiving center of relations, or a relating perceiver, a perceiving relator. We self-dispose, that is, determine our becoming in relationship to the world, on the basis of our perspective (our apprehensions and valuations of ourselves and the world). We “perceive” in that we are conscious of our own individual existence in the world. But our perspective is irreducibly social. We perceive ourselves in relation to other persons and objects in the world. To be human, then, is to (a) perceive ourselves and ourselves in the world, to (b) attribute value to ourselves and the world and the relationship between the two, and to (c) self-dispose in ways we believe will increase what we value and decrease what we devalue.

This last a-c might be said of lower animal life forms to some extent. What’s really unique about human reason, emotions, and volition? It’s just a guess (which makes this all pretty hopeless in terms of a metaphysic I suppose), but what makes the combination of these elements uniquely human is, very simply, the apprehension and appreciation of beauty or value for its own sake AND the intensity of experience that this produces. We are appreciators, evaluators of aesthetics. We are aestheticians (yes, it’s a word). This makes us unique. This is what I’m trying to say in Parts I and II. We ‘evaluate’ ourselves and the world. We apprehend the inherent value of a thing and appreciate it (or not). And we understand that this appreciation defines our meaning and value in the world.

The point of it all, as Whitehead said, is “the perfection of importance.” It’s intuitive and undeniable. It’s what makes humans unique.

Animals, though they may possess a measure of reason, emotion, and volition, do not appreciate value for value’s sake, I don’t think. Hartshorne, however, a prize-winning ornithologist besides being a world-class philosopher, postulated in his 1973 Born to Sing that birds sing not only because of the instinctual communicative survival function it serves, but essentially because they enjoy it. They possess a rudimentary aesthetics. Wild, eh? It wouldn’t surprise me, though I think we’re right to suppose that human being is a more profound experience of value because of the accountability that characterizes it.

Later,

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 1/31/2007 2:29:08 PM (GMT-6)

PART III(A): Dispositional accountability

OK, so how would a dispositional ontology work out an objective accountability? In terms of what we’ve said so far, what IS accountability and what grounds accountability?

We’re freely self-disposing centers of experience endowed with the reason, emotion, and volition necessary to determining ourselves with respect to the beauty and value of our relationships. We apprehend, evaluate, and then actualize. We are this way because God is perspectival sociality and he’s created us to be like him.

What is accountability then? The first thing that strikes me is the suffix which is common to other dispositions—flexibility, ductility, malleability, pliability, fictility, docility, and other such dispositions.

So let’s start by assuming that “accountability” is itself a disposition?

Exousia, wanna define “disposition” for us?

Comments?

Post Edited (TGB) : 1/31/2007 3:20:04 PM (GMT-6)

PART III(B): Dispositional accountability

What are we saying when we say persons are accountable? Aren’t we just saying that there are consequences to the choices we make? But what are we saying in dispositional terms when we say this? It looks to me like we’re just affirming what dispositions are. Dispositions mediate between possibility and actuality. So when we self-dispose, we become the place/event/cause of some transition of possibility to actuality, we determine ourselves relationally.

It’s just nature of causation that a certain correspondence obtains between possibility and actuality. That is, it’s true for whatever is actual that it was possible that it become actual. Similarly, it’s true for whatever is possible that it may become actual. Causation (whatever it is), is that which moves via some disposition from possibility to actuality. So for every action, there is a corresponding reaction. For every choice, there is a corresponding coming into being of some actuality, some state of affairs.

Accountability seems to me just to be a subset of this. Accountability says that for every self-disposing choice to move toward value or away from value, to actualize some possible value or to devalue someone or something, there are consequences—for the chooser and for the chooser’s relations.

We want to focus on the consequences that rightly relating (i.e., self-disposing Godward) and misrelating (i.e., self-disposting selfward) have for the chooser, the one doing the self-disposing.

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 1/31/2007 6:08:12 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Exousia) : 2/1/2007 2:23:17 AM (GMT-6)