John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.

Primary Sources:

John Finnis, Natural Law, Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp 139-156.
John Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics (Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, 1983), pp. 56-79.
Lloyd L. Weinreb, "Natural Law Without Nature," in Natural Law and Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 97-129.
John MacMurray, The Self as Agent (New York: Humanity Books, 1999) (1st Pub. 1957), pp. 17-61.
Maeve Cooke, "An Evil Heart: Moral Evil and Moral Identity," in Maria Pia Lara, ed., Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 113-130.
Terry Eagleton, Against Theory (New York: Perseus, 2003), pp. 104-105, entirety.

Supplemental Sources:

Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
Richard Eldrige, The Persistence of Romanticism (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1982).
R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study of Sanity and Madness (London: Tavistock, 1960).
Charles Larmore, The Autonomy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Joseph Margolis, The Unraveling of Scientism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007). (Stephen E. Lewis, trans.) (Celebration of eroticism from a philosopher who is solidly grounded in Catholic thought.)

I.

When discussing the possibility of truth in ethical judgments I often run into "problems of communication" with adversaries. There are some people who are simply thinking within a conceptual scheme that does not permit them to understand ideas that challenge that conceptual scheme. For example: 1) people who simply take it for granted that there is no such thing as truth, only opinions, and that this is not a matter of opinion; 2) people who are confused, without knowing it, about the concepts of "objectivity" and "subjectivity," being unaware that these are very difficult matters, about which it is good to be confused, but not good to be unaware of the confusion; and finally, 3) people whose philosophical ignorance becomes a source of pride since they are sure that they have proven -- to their own satisfaction anyway -- that because they are "scientific," they do not need philosophy.

I wish to borrow from John Finnis in formulating a response to arguments and objections that have become depressingly familiar to me as I have encountered warriors for "politically correct" forms of ethical relativism, or trendy nihilism and scientism, over the years. Finnis begins by returning to foundations, a move which is controversial for pragmatists and other anti-essentialists:

"We should not begin our response by postulating any doctrine of truth or objectivity. Instead we should see what conception of truth and objectivity is implicit in the statements of the skeptics, and in their performance in putting forward those statements for our acceptance."

Finnis is right to suggest that the denial of objectivity in ethical judgments -- or what philosophers call "ethical non-cognitivism" -- becomes self-refuting, as it is usually articulated, even by philosophers like John Mackie or Richard Rorty.

What is Mackie asserting in his own propositions? Do they have a truth-content? If so, then he is mistaken in his substantive views that there can be no such content. If not -- if Mackie's own skeptical ethical statements cannot be true -- then those views or their articulations must necessarily be false or pointless. Worse, they may be meaningless. In either case, we can disregard such statements. This is entirely distinct from the question of whether such statements are either KNOWABLY true or false with absolute certainty. It is merely to recognize that they must be one or the other (either actually or potentially true or false) to the extent that they are knowable or meaningful at all. ("Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism" and "Saying Goodbye to Richard Rorty.")

"Interesting" or "creative" will not do as a substitute for truth. When you ask your doctor whether you have cancer, do you wish her answer to be "interesting" or "creative" as distinct from "true" as opposed to "false"?

Most persons would prefer a truthful answer to such a medical question. Furthermore, at such moments in a doctor's office, even ethical skeptics and doubters of the concept of truth suddenly become adherents of a correspondence theory of truth.

When you need to find a restroom and ask a salesperson where to find one, do you wish for a "non-literal deconstruction of the concept of a bathroom"? I doubt it.

I am about to write a brief comment in response to a wonderful newspaper essay: Robert P. George, "Gay Marriage, Democracy, and the Courts," in The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2009, at p. A11.

At issue in this discussion of gay marriage is the definition of "marriage," as Professor George suggests, and also (I believe) a prior and more fundamental question from which the concept of marriage is derived: "What is a person?"

I disagree with Professor George's understanding of the gay marriage issue, both legally and morally. Furthermore, I draw on many of the same sources which Professor George admires and finds helpful in his moral thinking to arrive at very different conclusions from Mr. George. Among my sources are the works of Professor George, works which I admire and recommend to others.

Professor George and I agree on the validity and truth in certain values and concepts of rights.

We disagree about what those values require in connection with the gay marriage controversy. We both believe that it is possible to be correct as opposed to incorrect (or mistaken) in deciding this question.

Readers are invited to decide which statement -- Professor George's position or mine -- is more persuasive. ("Is there a gay marriage right?")

Lawyers looking to "split the difference" will say that a statement may not be true yet also not false. "We can settle this."

This position is fatally flawed, however, because it confuses matters of degree (knowledge of truth) for that which is categorical, namely, the existence of truth (truth in logic and ontology).

Michael Dummett's "anti-realism" (idealism) postulates that a statement may be neither true nor false, but this may confuse comprehensibleness with meaningfulness: "The green sky over England is going to a ball at Netherfield." (This statement is comprehensible without being meaningful.)

Dummett is not an ethical relativist and, at best, he merely provides a plausible basis for religious statements and other comments on non-empirical or unverifiable matters.

No, F.H. Bradley does not refute this view of truth, he supports it. You cannot leave out of Bradley's philosophy the idea of the Absolute.

When Bradley is said to refer to "degrees of truth" he is alluding to the partial knowledge of truth that we possess and not questioning the ontological status of truth, per se, nor the totality of truth that is the Absolute. It is error and not truth that is a matter of degree, and even error implies truth. Bradley says:

"Error [we read] is truth, it is partial truth, that is false only because partial and incomplete. The Absolute has without subtraction all those qualities, and it has every arrangement which we seem to confer upon it by our mere mistake. ..."

Phillip Ferreira, Bradley and the Structure of Knowledge (New York: SUNY, 1999), pp. 142-145.

All partiality of truth is and must be resolved in the Absolute and "our errors" -- therefore -- are never complete, but always "a matter of degree."

To the extent that you know something to be true that truth -- where it applies -- is as absolute as any other.

It may also be the case that you cannot know with certainty the full truth about whether there is truth or absolute knowledge concerning a specific issue, but then it would be true that you lack this knowledge.

Truth is a more pervasive and indispensable concept in rational discourse than our trendy relativists and nihilists like to admit. Truth is a word that expresses a necessary norm of assertion and belief essential to communication. Pascal Engel & Richard Rorty, What is the Use of Truth? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 14-15 and "Nihilism Against Memory."

Notice that idealistic systems make use of the Absolute as a means of allowing for the singularity of truth while challenging the claims to knowledge of thinkers or questioning "degrees" of approximation to truth in our flawed intellectual systems.

Maybe Terry Eagleton (you'll like him, he's a Marxist!) may explain this point to you if you are still having difficulties with it:

"That truths ... are absolute is of no great moment. It simply means that if a statement is true, then the opposite of it can't be true at the same time, or true from some other point of view. It can't be the case that the fish is both a bit off and not a bit off. It can't be fresh for you and putrid for me, even if putrid is the way I like it. This does not rule out the possibility of doubt or ambiguity. Maybe I am not sure whether the fish is off or not. But if I am not sure, then it is absolutely true that I am not sure. I can't be sure and not sure at the same time."

Fans of the "Colbert Report" say: "Well, what if I don't think the fish is putrid and you do? There may be no truth to the matter, only different opinions."

This statement reflects both a logical and linguistic difficulty for the befuddled skeptic. Whether you think the fish is rotten is a knowledge question (as is your opinion of the matter), but whether the fish is, in fact, a "bit off" is a metaphysical question concerning the status of reality that may be resolvable scientifically if you can define "rotten" with sufficient specificity. ("Marku Gabriel's 'Neo-Existentialism' and the 'New' Realism.")

"Aha," says the skateboarding philosopher, "I don't recognize this distinction because what I do not know simply does not exist (for me!)."

The skeptic is converted to personal idealism or (I think) solipsism. Let us examine this move.

First of all, there goes science and the objectivity of the empirical world; second, rather than a conversion to idealism this position amounts to an acceptance of absolute solipsism. What exists and is real or true, depends on me, for me. This is to reduce metaphysics to epistemology. For a defense of the continuing validity of metaphysics, see James W. Felt, Coming to Be: Towards a Thomistic-Whiteheadian Metaphysics of Becoming (New York: SUNY, 2001) and W.H. Walsh, Metaphysics (London: Hutchinson, 1963). These are post-Kantian defenses of metaphysics and "internal metaphysical systems" that grow out of the Kantian Critical Theory. Hans-Georg Gadamer's fusion of Hegel and Kant is one good example. For another, see Juan Galis-Menendez, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004). (Paul Ricoeur's Hegelian-Kantianism.)

None of the foregoing claims is altered by the quantum revolution's postulates concerning sub-atomic reality and the problem of reconciliation with Einstein's physics. In fact, in what follows, the opposite contention is argued by me: In our new intellectual reality hermeneutic claims become more and not less plausible. ("Dialectics, Entaglement, and Special Relativity" and "The Return of Metaphysics.")

I begin my response to this popular skepticism by focusing on the objective component in idealism and phenomenology, the things that you must already know in order to express even your doubts about truth -- like the meaning of your words in a language, a language which is a social entity with a history and a complete metaphysics.

You will find the external world or truth already in you and yourself in the external world even if that world is never -- for you -- entirely distinguishable from yourself as a perceiving and knowing agent. You may well discover other interesting things and entities in language and thought, like ethical awareness and, perhaps, God. (See "Is it rational to believe in God?" then "David Stove's Critique of Idealism" and "G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")

The skeptic says that the proposition "no ethical statement is true" is a statement about ethics and not an ethical statement. It certainly is an ethical statement in that: 1) it reflects a value-judgment concerning the separation of facts and values which is a value-laden distinction in philosophy dating from the modern movement's attempts to understand nature as distinct from values scientifically; also 2) in the sense that the statement is subject to moral assessment.

A division of "is" from "ought" already constitutes a moral position and also a position concerning morality which must be moral per se.

By modern movement, I mean the philosophical project of modernity from Descartes to Kant, at least, focusing on what Spinoza called "the unaided powers of reason."

The separation of fact from value is reflective of a very particular world view and "values" associated with modernity, as I have indicated, originally intended as an escape from religious controversies in the emerging sciences of nature. This division of the conceptual landscape was aimed at exalting the "independence of reason." Steven Toulmin is eloquent on this point, so is Roberto Unger.

The distinction of "is" from "ought" is a value-laden notion that has been challenged by feminists and others as "logocentric" because it privileges a "phallic" conception of reason by denying due consideration to the cognitive importance of emotions or memories as well as intuitions in intellectual and social life. ("A Commencement Address by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham-Clinton.")

The centrality of emotions is essential to our concepts of objective truth. This was not an insight that could be developed in the Western world until the correctives to the rationalism of the Enlightenment began to emerge with the Romantic movement. Rick Roderick, Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: St. Martin's, 1986), pp. 106-136 and Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 46-80, pp. 148-168.

From the strong conception of reason to dialogical understandings of reason we are driven to current controversies concerning language and the possibilities of communication. Habermas is especially interesting as the inheritor of both Enlightenment skepticism and Romantic aspirations. ("Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy.'")

The consequence or implication of saying "no ethical statement is true" is that all moral judgments -- including "intolerance is bad" or the "Holocaust was evil" -- can be no more than a statement of preference or "taste," and not matters subject to assessment in terms of truth or falsity, and this claim is tacitly asserted to be true, which is both inconsistent and false.

I continue to find such claims not only self-contradictory, but also unpersuasive, freighted with hidden value judgments that are falsely described as "neutral" and "objective" when they are neither unbiased nor true.

I appreciate that people may have no interest in philosophy and (consequently) inadequate views or understandings of these questions as well as failing to see the complextities or difficulties to which they lead.

I cannot accept that persons who are, essentially, philosophical illiterates will be allowed to dictate terms and concepts to others with some slight knowledge of philosophy, such as myself, who must accept their incoherent locutions simply on the basis of political power.

I do not have political power. I am not in a position to hack into the computers of politicians and lawyers in New Jersey or Florida. However, I am not going to alter my views on the Cuba issue or concerning New Jersey's political corruption because people deface my writings. The merits in my arguments (if any) will not be altered by these tactics nor by censorship, not even by threats to "assassinate me." Plagiarizing my writings will not convince me that my writings are no good. In fact, finding my words in print in The New York Review of Books under another person's name suggests that the writings are good. ("'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

A more modest position that says "ethical judgments" may be more or less persuasive without being either true or false runs into severe problems in logic. What makes such judgments "persuasive" or "preferable" will involve "truthful" criteria -- that is, "values" of beauty, cogency, elegance, or economy -- which is to accept the omnipresence of ethics or valuing.

Also, ultimately, this judging must appeal to the reality of objective criteria (or truth) as a determinant of better as opposed to worse ethical judgments. If we give up the word "judgments" or make all judgments equal (which is the same thing), then we are left only with "preferences," I believe, lacking objective or valid criteria to distinguish them.

Everything goes. All views or opinions are equal as distinct from (possibly) being equally worthy of respect. Tolerance of disagreement is also an ethics. Just ask yourself: Why be neutral or objective? Why respect differing opinions?

The answer to these questions will have to do with valuing those qualities of neutrality and objectivity. The rejection of ethics is ideological and trendy. However, this rejection is self-defeating and self-contradictory.

Hitler's opinion that all Jews should be killed would not be worthy of respect because it is based on the negation of equality or respect for others.

Why should I respect the person who denies respect to others? Must I respect even that person's humanity? If so, why? ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script" then "The Audacity of Hope.")

The people debating these issues against little old me, all by myself, at "The Philosophy Cafe" (MSN) did not comprehend these distinctions so they simply asked lots of friends to join them in destroying my discussion forum. It was unacceptable for someone like me to prevail in debate. No doubt it still is. Perhaps this explains why I am denied access to my MSN group and many other crimes committed by N.J. authorities against me. More difficult to understand is the apparent willingness of American authorities to protect these criminals or unethical persons. ("The Invicta Watch Company" and "The Invicta Watch Company Caper.")

My intelligence and articulateness, such as they are, were categories of guilt to be punished by "anonymous" attackers at that Internet site.

Much worse has been done to me by persons who "disapprove" of my ethics even as they insist that all values are relative and there is no truth in moral judgments.

Perhaps these geeks and hirelings are responsible for some of the censorship efforts I struggle against every day. As I say, I have known such things before in my life. I expect to experience them again. ("Neil M. Cohen, Esq. and Conduct Unbecoming to the Legislature in New Jersey" and "The Long Goodbye.")

Hostility in reaction to my independence and presumption in thinking for myself (or just for thinking), reinforces both of those qualities in me. I like thinking. So should you. Don't let anyone convince you that power determines truth.

I will not accept your demeaning characterizations of me at this point in my life. I am not a slave. I am not a laboratory animal. I am far more ethical than many (or most) of the people in New Jersey who presume to judge my "ethics." I will not accept vandalisms or suppressions of my writings. The destruction or theft of my personal property will not stop me from writing. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "How Censorship Works in America.")

If you are a nihilist then at least have the courage to defend the value judgments that you make. Defend your decision to avoid conventional values by "valuing" unconventionality. Admit honestly that a value judgment is what the rejection of value judgments happens to be. Skepticism about ethics is an ethical stance. In my opinion, nihilists and skeptics make very bad value judgments (especially if they happen to be ethics officials or lawyers and judges), which is also a value judgment that I am making. The point being that valuing or judging, is what "persons" do just as they cannot help breathing. ("Law and Literature" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")

Next the skeptic claims that separating fact from value is not a value judgment, but only a description of what is the case. Yet it turns out, as Iris Murdoch (Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals) and others have argued, that any attempt at "pure" descriptions of any human situation will involve value judgments from the outset. The choice to privilege "facts" (objective) over "values" (subjective), involves contested assumptions about the scope of those concepts -- objective versus subjective -- together with the "valuing" of the distinction in the first place. (See "Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Philosophy of Science.")

There is no such thing as value-neutral description. And value judgments are not, because of this, unavoidably or strictly subjective "emotional" judgments or preferences.

Our descriptions are no less true if we recognize their contextuality. The reality may be something between those extremes such as a form of INTERPRETIVE -- as distinguished from INSTRUMENTAL -- rationality. ("Ronald Dworkin's Jurisprudence of Interpretation.")

Judging, valuing, praising or admiring and expressing dislike are an inescapable part of being a person, as I say, which is why persons who deny reality and truth in ethical reasoning get upset when their inconsistencies or problems in their statements are pointed out to them.

Ethics is pretty much coextensive with human life because persons, as free social agents, are also "automatically" or "naturally" moral subjects. To the extent that you surrender your moral capacity you are surrendering your humanity. This you must never do. ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")

The rejection of ethics results from the idea that everyone's opinions are equal (why?), therefore, all ethical judgments are entitled to the same respect or lack of it (why?), because these are simply matters of taste (why can't matters of taste be either right or wrong?).

Each of these assumptions involves philosophical premises and values that are unrecognized and/or undefended.

At each stage in the nihilist argument there are value judgments being made which must be made by skeptics. There is a logic to any substantial philosophical position which will make some dialectical evolutions necessary to that discourse. If you adopt one of these positions then certain conclusions and developments will follow. Abandonment of the concept of truth and embrace of ethical nihilism will lead to some very unpleasant places in the intellectual landscape. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

What understanding of subjectivity/objectivity is Mackie adopting and on what grounds is he doing so?

In Mackie's writings and in the works of most ethical skeptics these matters are glossed over or are simply unrecognized.

This "glossing-over" results, partly, from a false understanding of rationality as exclusively instrumental rationality, or from misapplying the methods of science to humanistic inquiries.

There is also interpretive rationality.

Ethical thinking, though often highly rigorous, is simply not like scientific thinking. But it is still thinking. For some people, this "unscientific" quality is sufficient to make ethical reasoning less than objective. However, we can hang ethical relativists with their own rope, since (on the basis of their own premises) this judgment is also a less than objective value judgment. It is a judgment which may be no less or more cogent -- which is usually far less persuasive -- than many others.

Rationality and scientific rationality are not coextensive terms since the former covers more territory than the latter. You may be rational in ways that have nothing to do with science. For example, great artists may possess a genius at empathy that allows for understandings (interpretations) of very different persons in distant cultures, including persons in cultures that the interpreter does not presume to know (instrumental). Emotive genius may not involve testing the urine samples of others. ("The Art of Melanie Griffith" and "The Art of Robert Downey, Jr.")

A crucial distinction is established in the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition between knowledge and understanding. We all come to understand much more than we know or can say. I see the color "red." My faculties of sight are subjective. Yet what I see, others with normal faculties (like mine), will also see. People will and must agree on what is red, so that labeling something green as red, will fail to deceive a person who is not color blind and who understands the meaning of the words used to designate relevant colors within a discourse. Agreement is not just "arbitrary."

Likewise, it is not that "good" is what people agree to call "good," but that people will agree to call "X" good because it is good, because there are excellent reasons to regard "X" as good, so that normally intelligent persons will be persuaded, rationally, to do so.

The analogy to legal reasoning should be obvious. Some judicial opinions will be more persuasive than others because they are better reasoned than others, more accurate interpretations of the materials at issue, thus yielding more just, cogent, or "correct" results. Judgments of value in ethics are not all that different for persons with an "average" sense of right and wrong, whatever that is. For this reason, most of us will agree that, say, the Holocaust was evil. (Compare "Marcanton Macri, Esq. Arrested For Drug Possession in New Jersey" and "N.J.'s Luis A. Capazzi, Esq. Steals $1.1 Million From Clients" with "Albert Florence and New Jersey's Racism" and "America's Holocaust.")

Daniel Dennett, a self-described "Darwinian fundamentalist," says that "beliefs" can be studied scientifically. This is true. It is also irrelevant to whether beliefs are true. The belief that science is the only means of acquiring knowledge even with regard to matters that are not subject to empirical verification or as to which falsification is impossible (for example, the question: "Is there a God?"), is, I think, one irrational and non-scientific belief that may be studied scientifically, as a kind of ideology. We can learn from people who hold such beliefs (Sam Harris?) why and how they hold them. However, we cannot discover, scientifically, whether this belief is valid or true, true logically or philosophically.

I think that we can reason about ends -- as does Finnis -- but we can only do so if we are honest about establishing a conception of universal human nature. In order to escape Hume's predicament (Hume insisted that "we cannot reason about ends"), we need Kant and something like the universal aspects of the human psyche. Perhaps a Chomsky-like shift of attention from the Kantian categories to language (or Jung's archetypes which constitute a foundational language of languages) might do the trick. I will set aside that discussion for now. ("Mind and Machine" then "John Searle and David Chalmers On Consciousness.")

To focus on a pure external conception of objectivity is to ignore the reality of the complex interiority of persons, equating us with lower animals who may be amenable to understanding in such externalist (behaviorist) terms. I doubt the accuracy of this exclusively scientific approach even when it is about non-human animals. An experience or knowledge may relate, "inherently" (as a friend used to say), to the human realm of feelings while being fully objective as well as true. This is because of the rich complexity of human subjectivity which enhances and does not diminish our capacity for objective understanding of our fellow creatures, human and non-human alike, through interpretation as well as scientific knowledge. In fact, our scientific knowledge also needs to be interpreted if it is to be meaningful. ("Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")

Totalitarianism of every kind must deny the autonomy, equality, and dignity of persons; totalitarianism must place truth at the service of "instrumental" goals; totalitarianism (of all varieties) must also deny the inviolability of rights.

I will now turn to this idea of interpretation and interpretive rationality as expressive of our freedom. "Inviolability of rights" means that, say, free speech rights have intrinsic value and are not to be violated because you dislike or disagree with another person. ("Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")

II.

Interpretation thrives between description and evaluation, being objective and yet with an evaluative component, so that it is also subjective.

The wall dividing subjective from objective reasoning or awareness collapses in what phenomenologists describe as the "immediacy of apprehension."

Understanding is concerned with meanings. Knowledge is about facts. We need both knowledge and understanding. Truth is about facts and meanings.

At this point the mysteries of intuition become relevant. ("What is magic?")

Whitehead's discussion of symbolic reasoning is an example of the sort of objectivity that is useful in theological/aesthetic and scientific analysis:

"... Hume criticised [sic.] causality by saying that every effect is quite distinct from its cause, and so is not necessarily linked to it. Whitehead replies: In the case of grasping a 'meaning,' cause and effect are not merely 'linked' -- they are one."

Colin Wilson, "Phenomenology as a Mystical Discipline," Philosophy Now, July/August, 2006, at p. 15, p. 18. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.")

Think of the continuity in a movie: Is one scene "connected" to the next? Are scenes separable? Or is the entire film a single entity indistinguishable from any one scene? Is your life not the totality of episodes in it as a meaningful whole?

The reality of memories is "perceptible" from the "point of view" of the agent of recollection as well as the fact of what is recalled. ("What is memory?")

Quantum mysteries merge with hermeneutic aesthetic theory and postmodernist political theory.

A person has a subjective and objective existence, an unobservable inner life together with an empirical existence as a material body in the world.

We participate in both human realms (subjective/objective) in reasoning and ethical life.

This is not a form of dualism, but a recognition of the "dual aspects" of persons as spiritual or moral subjects in a shared empirical or "objective" empirical reality.

This is to underline the complexity of human experience or "being-in-the-world." ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch On Freedom of Mind.")

Notice that the whole story of any human life must include others. A biography is incomprehensible without, at least, detecting the most important others in that life as they are remembered by the subject. The word "magic" is a metaphor for this presence of others within one's identity, as in Shakespeare's Sonnets where the Dark Lady and beautiful friend (even the reader!) are presences in the text. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")

R.D. Laing and other existentialist psychologists and psychoanalysts -- as well as many philosophers -- speak of "experience" as the unity of inner and outer states in the subject that is quite distinct from mere behavior. Theologians speak of the soul as this unity.

The terms used are less important, I think, than grasping the point about the need for such unity in human life. If the word "soul" is a problem, substitute another word. How about "identity"? (Again: "What is it like to be plagiarized?")

Can we say that truth is a "dual aspect" phenomenon? No, but we can say that knowledge of truth is a dual aspect kind of thing. You may reasonably believe or claim to know that X is so; I may just as reasonably contend that X is not so. The truth of the matter is not altered by our disagreement, of course, even if this truth is never known with certainty by either one of us.

However, if we discard the concept of truth entirely we will be in deep trouble when irrationalists and totalitarians appear in our philosophical discussions. ("Is truth dead?")

Totalitarianism always begins by discarding truth in favor of expediency. Philosophical truth, as a goal, cannot be set aside for the sake of a "five year plan" of material convenience or political correctness. ("On Bullshit.")

To disclaim truth is to abandon any possible criterion by which to resolve ultimate questions universally. Without truth we make theoretical disputation pointless in science or philosophy aside from diversion.

I am aware that these are controversial statements. I am also aware that they were once, not so long ago, deemed unproblematic.

We are then -- having abandoned truth -- without intellectual resources in our discussions of value against the "enemies of man and woman." This is unwise, unnecessary, antiphilosophical, or just plain stupid.

Cognitivism is compatible with both Christian and Hebrew ethics, also with forms of Islamic ethical thinking, and non-religious ethics derived from Aristotle, Aquinas or Kant, Hegel or Husserl, Bradley or Ricoeur, Marx or the pragmatists.

Among American thinkers, I would make use of the works of Royce and Blanshard, Rawls and Nozick, West and Davis, Grene and Dworkin, also John Searle. Please find and read the works of Mary Whiton Calkins or Errol E. Harris and C.A. Campbell or moral realist John McDowell.

Today on "Good Morning America" writer Norah Vincent discussed her book describing what she learned from her experience of living "as a man in U.S. society." Ms. Vincent's effort is not, strictly speaking, a scientific experiment. It is more like a phenomenological-hermeneutic exercise which succeeds in communicating her interpretations of the male experience from a shared human perspective.

Whatever else the book may be it sounds like a fascinating philosophical essay that is also a journalistic report.

Ms. Vincent's "behavior," whether she is dressed as a man or woman, is observable. Yet her "experience" and the meaning of that experience (for her) is NOT observable.

Ms. Vincent's experience is a matter of interpretation that she describes to us, truthfully.

Ethical and aesthetic judgments are certainly not mere "emoting," although "feeling" (to the extent that we are still capable of it in America, even in New Jersey) is not irrelevant to the faculty of judgment with regard to values since feelings are also "cognitive." See the metaphysics of F.H. Bradley as expressed in Appearance and Reality.

Feelings and intelligence yield truths about human subjectivity -- truths that are shared so that they become objective, because they have to be, at least for persons. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")

Ms. Vincent is a person who discovered what it is "like" to behave and be treated as a "man" (who is "masculine"?), while remaining a woman, independently of inherited notions of "femininity." It is her humanity, her status as a person, that allows for her understanding of this complex social behavior and its possible meaning(s) in our society. Through imagination and reflection Ms. Vincent can "know" or "understand" what it is like to be a man in contemporary America. ("A Doll's Aria" and "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

Please read "Master and Commander" and "Metaphor is Mystery," then decide which of those works is a philosophical essay as distinct from a short story. The key word in the foregoing sentence is "distinct." What issues arise concerning language and the world, "words and things," masculine and feminine? Is it possible to "think away" fact from value, word from thing, masculine from feminine? If not, why not?

Umberto Eco speaks of postmodernist culture's production of "Open Works" that serve multiple purposes in differing genres and disciplines. ("Sherlock Holmes and The Case of the Missing Author" and "Sinbad's Excellent New York Adventure.")

The conclusion that "Metaphor is Mystery" and "Master and Commander" are short stories is correct and true; the conclusion that both works are philosophical essays may also be true. The truthful categories of short story and essay are not mutually exclusive.

This sort of insight -- to which I have been led by Jacques Derrida and other teachers in my life -- is important to my response to Professor George on the "gay marriage issue." To say that there is ethical truth is not to deny the complexity and difficulty of achieving that truth. Ethical cognitivists, like Professor Finnis, simply remind us of why the effort is worthwhile. (Again: "Is there a gay marriage right?" then "Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")

It is a mistake to begin discussing the gay marriage issue with the definition of marriage. Let us ask the prior question of whether persons are essentially moral subjects worthy of respect -- requiring love and self-defined, autonomous relationships, as they need food and shelter, education and health care when sick -- within "unbreachable zones of entitlement."

This Kantian language of rights is based on equal dignity and respect for all persons.

From this different starting point, drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Jefferson, Marshall, Brandeis, Rawls, Brennan and many others (I believe) that a sound legal-moral argument may be developed in favor of marriage- and relationship-autonomy as well as pluralism, mandating society's recognition of gay marriage rights.

To violate the fundamental rights of one person or disfavored group (say, intellectuals and artists, minorities or prostitutes) is, potentially, to violate the rights of every person in a community. ("Protecting Sex Workers.")

My right to determine my loving relationships depends upon the same right existing and being recognized in my gay and lesbian neighbors. ("'The Adjustment Bureau': A Movie Review" and "'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")

Please understand that I am suggesting a Judeo-Christian-Islamic and ethical cognitivist rationale for gay marriage rights protected under First Amendment (equal respect for RELIGIOUS-ETHICAL views and expressions) as well as privacy, due process, liberty, and equal protection doctrine in U.S. Constitutional law.

Furthermore, underlying this legal argument is a moral philosophy that dates from the ancient Greeks until today. I have not seen anything like such an argument set forth by proponents of gay marriage rights arguing before American appellate tribunals. (An amicus brief filed before the U.S. Supreme Court by Ronald Dworkin on the gay marriage issue is required reading for law students: "Ronald Dworkin On Law as Interpretation.")

Your dislike for homosexuals (or for my opinions) does not license your violations of my rights of expression and copyright protection by inserting "errors" in my writings.

Your dislike of homosexual relationships cannot be the basis for denying same-sex lovers the right to marry. (Last time: "Is there a gay marriage right?")

The philosophical foundations of this epistemology and ethics may be traced to Wollstonecraft (Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Maria) and Kant (Critique of Judgment), Hegel and Bradley, down to Husserl and Sartre as well as De Beauvoir and Weil, also America's pragmatists enter the dialogue in the form of Dewey and James, Rorty and West. Nothing in philosophy is radically original. Hence, the importance of history for philosophers. ("A.J. Ayer's Critique of Collingwood's Metaphysics.")

Now try the same approach when thinking about ethics. Try making use of imagination and empathy -- in addition to analytical faculties -- to project yourself into the plight of the Other.

"The universality of literary reference" -- and of any personal encounter or meeting -- "is only that it is about each individual that reads the text at the moment that individual reads it, [you are a text,] and it contains an implied indexical: each work is about the 'I' that reads the text, identifying himself not with the implied reader for whom the implied narrator writes, but with the actual subject of the text in such a way that each work becomes a metaphor for each reader: perhaps the same metaphor for each. ... The work finds its subject only when read." ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

Arthur C. Danto, "Philosophy As/And/Of Literature," in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 155. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom" and "'The Prestige': A Movie Review.")

Think of ethics from a social as well as personal standpoint, at the same time, less as a mathematical problem or the practical task of applying formulas, rules and principles (which will be necessary eventually) to figure out what is best or "good" in each instance than the challenge of understanding people -- understanding why their pain causes them to hurt others or themselves -- through intuition and empathy. Rely on intellect, but also on feelings in the quest for goodness and justice. My "intuition" is that you will not be able to avoid doing so. Actors and all artists will be helpful to us in meeting these challenges. (Once more: "Judith Butler and Gender Theory" and "'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")

"Now, if you are sitting opposite [to] me, I can see you as another person like myself; without you changing or doing anything differently, I can now see you as a complex physical-chemical system, perhaps with its own idiosyncracies but chemical nonetheless for that; seen in this way, you are no longer a person but an organism. Expressed in the language of existential phenomenology, the other, as seen as a person or seen as an organism, is the object of different intentional acts. ["Regard" for Heidegger.] There is no dualism in the sense of the coexistence of two different essences or substances there in the object, psyche and soma; there are two different experiential Gestalts: person and organism."

R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (London: Tavistock, 1960), p. 21. ("'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")

What you may do to persons is different from what you will feel no compunction in doing to "organisms" or "objects." ("'Westworld': A Review of the T.V. Series.")

An empathetic approach will be the most fruitful path to understand criminals. This is not to suggest that punishment is inappropriate. These so-called "emotionally rich" epistemological foundations in the human sciences are dismissed because they are associated with many women artists (Virginia Woolf) and feminist philosophers, both male and female (Iris Murdoch, John Fowles).

Compare Mary Whiton Calkins, "Contemporary Philosophical Systems: The Issue Between Pluralist and Monistic Personalism," in The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (New York & London: MacMillan, 1917), pp. 397-456 with Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Kensignton, 1976), pp. 78-96 ("Freedom and Liberation").

What is non-relative for these feminist philosophers is freedom. Freedom is understood in somewhat different ways by feminist philosophers allowing for emotions to be taken seriously as engines of transcendence in the task of comprehending the Other. ("Pieta" and "The Soldier and the Ballerina.")

Literature and all drama may be helpful in illustrating these ideas for persons whose interests are not didactic, but who are highly intelligent and concerned with ideas as they are lived.

We are losing what is personal in our interactions with others -- empathy and sympathy as aptitudes or attitudes -- in an effort to achieve an impossible neutrality or scientific efficiency that is undesirable in the human realm of social interactions, including adjudication or politics.

I believe that this problem of increasing depersonalization is systematic and expresses itself in legal relations, political elections, culture, romance, therapy and family relations. ("American Doctors and Torture" and "American Lawyers and Torture.")

I am still astonished at the presumption of persons who would, happily, act on my life (regardless of my wishes or consent) in order to make alterations to my values and behavior they deem desirable as though I were an inanimate object or a pet dog. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

Disdain for the autonomy of persons is an accepted feature of the world views of many self-proclaimed "social scientists" when it comes to the lives of persons assumed to need their "helpful" instructions. Just under the surface of fancy opinions and polite attitudes in New York, one often encounters profound and vicious racism from some surprising sources. ("Barack Obama and the 'New Yorker'" and "Skinny People Dressed in Black.")

Feminist communitarianism in the form of Judith Butler (Gadamer) or Drucilla Cornell (Derrida) seeks a new starting point for ethical reflection in the fundamental bonds that tie us together in families, social groups, nations.

Republican Mary Anne Glendon develops these themes from a more Aristotelian rather than Kantian or Hegelian direction by expressing doubts about the "lone rights-bearer." Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991), pp. 68-71. (Criticizing Kant.)

Contemporary Kantians see Kant as more of a communitarian thinker than people realize, i.e., John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

Humanistic Marxists -- like Angela Davis -- have been fighting this battle for recognition of "other-regarding emotions" in our political thinking at least since the sixties. It is an open question why these communal values are so popular with women who are philosophers regardless of their politics. Philosopher John MacMurray writes:

"Speech is public. It is at once thought and action, or rather a unity of which 'mental' and 'physical' activity are distinguishable [and] separable aspects; and as a result it establishes communication, and introduces the 'you' as a correlative of the 'I.' For if the 'I think' [science, as understood in "scientism"] logically excludes the second person, the 'I say' [literature, philosophy, art, legal reasoning, therapy, religion, recollection, adjudication] makes the second person a logical necessity. The 'I say' is logically incomplete. To complete it we must formulate it as follows: 'I say to you; and I await your response.' ..."

To speak any word is to enter a community. Language creates a social space. ("Markus Gabriel's 'Neo-Existentialism' and the 'New' Realism.")

The concept of a "person" -- or even the reality of persons -- implies the logical necessity of the other, both for good and ill. This is to suggest that language is a kind of lived metaphysics and ethics or dialectic. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")

This is the point at which Christianity and Marxism meet. Utterance of the first word by a characteristically human being (homo sapient) implied, immediately, the reality of the other, also morality, aesthetics and spirituality, social reality. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Indiana: Notre Dame, 1984), pp. 244-264 ("Justice as a Virtue"), develops MacIntyre's ideas from Marxism and Christianity (Indiana: Notre Dame, 1968).

Roberto Mangabeira Unger explains what it means to live in history -- to live with or as the other -- in The Critical Legal Studies Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 112-115. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")

Fundamentalists about science may have some emotional reasons for their beliefs. If so, then we may discover striking similarities between such people and religious fundamentalists. It may be that "true believers" have more in common than what separates them regardless of whether their version of fundamentalism happens to concern God or science. Incidentally, I might have used quotations from Martin Buber to establish this point. Belief in the reality of morality is ecumenical and pretty universal. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist.")

Please see John MacMurray, Reason and Emotion (London: Faber & Faber, 1935), pp. 37-45 and Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Kensignton, 1985), pp. 52-84.

Compare Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (Indiana: Notre dame, 1982), with postscript commenting on the 1959 text, with Fred R. Dallmayr, "Dialogue and Otherness: Theunissen," in Critical Encounters: Between Philosophy and Politics (Indiana: Notre Dame, 1987), pp. 209-225 ("Omni tempore diligit amicus et frater in angustiis ...")

I bring my wife breakfast in bed because she is sad or unhappy. I cheer her up by making her smile or feel better. Much has been intuited, or learned, by both of us in that ordinary human situation ("cheering up time"), much that is true for us individually. Also, much that is true of that new metaphysical entity known as "us" -- ourselves as a couple and/or community -- is learned or absorbed by each of "us" through relating to one another.

We are individuals. We are also members of communities, including the communities created by our relationships. Entanglements. It is through our closest relationships (dialectics) that our truest selves or identities are forged and allowed to emerge. That is why she needs me; it is also why I need her. This is the meaning of "family."

Notice that use of any word, as I have noted, requires a community or "family" of fellow language-users. There are no private languages. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Think about gay marriage again. What are we saying to gays and lesbians, our brothers and sisters, when we refuse to recognize or respect their "true" self-chosen loves and identities? What are we making these persons into when we happily recognize the marriages of their heterosexual neighbors, but not their own? Think of the "n-word." ("Is Western Philosophy Racist?")

Are gays and lesbians "less than persons"? ("Ape and Essence" and "Persons and Personhood" then "The Naked Ape.")

In order for you to deny any group of PERSONS their right to marry, I contend that you will be denying (and have to deny) their status as persons. If gays and lesbians are not "persons" then might they be made into slaves or denied all other human rights?

Dehumanization is a very slippery slope. I can understand the experience of slavery. It is very dangerous when we begin to deny the status of "persons" to any individual or group of people, in any way, shape, or form. This conclusion follows logically and dialectically, objectively, because it is true: All persons have the right to marry their chosen partners and lovers. If anyone is denied this right, because of ontological status or gender of chosen partner, then it must be denied to all other persons in society. Otherwise, we will create hybrid categories of human beings some of whom are only "semi-persons" -- 2/3 of a person, perhaps?

It is but a single step from this classification of some of us as "sub-human" to enslavement and concentration camps. (Please read Gore Vidal's great essay "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star.")

These human or "communicative truths" (you may refer here to the work of Jurgen Habermas, R.D. Laing, Martin Buber, and others) cannot be found at the bottom of a test tube. Are they unreal? Or are they any less true because I discover them in the way that I acquire or discover any social truths for that matter? I interpret a woman's "signs" rather than looking for her mood under a microscope. This is called "hermeneutics." Her feelings and communications are still pretty real, and known to be real by me, especially when I happen to love her. Since we (the members of my family and I) are ordinary human beings, like other people, who are probably not all that different from our neighbors in our ways of constructing intersubjective truths I expect that others will feel what I feel. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review" and "The Art of Robert Downey, Jr.")

My guess is that this sort of process is pretty universal. Everybody worries about "cheering up" those they love. Thus, our family truths are likely to be objective because they are widely shared by many different kinds of persons since they are necessary to human flourishing.

Universality in a non-threatening sense just for you, that is, universality that is understood in your terms by you. This allows us to understand the arts and forms of worship of distant cultures that are made by persons, like us, as our own expressions. ("Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism" and "Cornel West on the Universality of Human Nature.")

Most of us are also good at recognizing such objective truths in larger social settings and adjusting to them. Adjustment cannot be forced upon persons. Adjustment is distinguished from control. Notice that this point is not about mere agreement. No show of hands is called for. It is how we become students, commuters, lawyers, philosophers, boy or girl scouts, and so on.

Theater is helpful again. How does an actor "become" Ophelia? In fact, it is how Ms. Vincent became a "man" in our society and her discovery of what it MEANS to be a man in America. You cannot become Ophelia, I think, if you do not know what it "means" to be this character or who she is. You must identify and understand before making judgments. Judgments can prevent your identification with a person especially one that you can not and do not understand. (Again: "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

Masculine or manhood may be very differently understood in other cultures. This will not alter the objectivity of the concept in our culture, abstractly, nor invalidate its concrete applications in relative contexts. This duality in our conceptual architecture matches the dual aspects of our natures as persons. ("What you will ...")

Truth is not altered by being denied for whatever reasons. Social scientists deprived of their "studies" and "lab reports" are apt to become frustrated at this point, but it is just this humane aptitude or capacity for empathy and discernment that they are losing in their cultivation of an inappropriate form of scientific objectivity, that is, inappropriate when attempting to communicate with and understand persons. The key word in this last sentence is "persons."

I believe that this concept of empathy is part of what Justice Sotomayor meant by a "Wise Latina's" perspective on the plight of poor women of all colors or underprivileged people of all kinds. One would hope that a person who has suffered certain indignities or slights in a life of struggle would have a greater appreciation of how such injuries are felt by victims. No freed slave should become a slave owner. No Jew should become Dr. Mengele. ("An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli" then "Albert Florence and New Jersey's Racism.")

Skeptics say: "Yes, but those truths or intuitions are only 'subjective' -- which means unreal or not as important as scientific truths -- and therefore cannot be discussed." After all, such critics shrewdly point out, "not everyone sees things as you do."

Wrong and irrelevant. I come to know all truths by the same subjective process of knowing, with the same mind and language that I use to know human truths. And it is usually the human truths that are more important to us. Example: "It's a girl!" There is a literal or factual truth found in that statement, there is also a MEANING or human truth relevant to context which cannot be seen on the surface of the statement, but it is quite real. ("S.L. Hurley on Reasons, Beliefs, and Voluntary Actions.")

The statement ("It's a girl!") has one meaning if mother and father are both fifteen years-old; another if it is made to a successful thirty-five year-old husband of a woman who has been artificially inseminated. I can think of any number of other contexts in which the meaning of the statement alters, dramatically, without changing the words, while shifting completely the emotions to which it is likely to give rise, including some in which the phrase is used ironically, so that it does not refer to a human child at all.

A gorilla gave birth in the San Diego Zoo and the attendant shouted, "It's a girl!" This shout "communicated" to listeners that it was a female gorilla that was born. Everyone laughed. Why?

Ask any good actor about how many ways a line can be said. The response will have to do with the emotional meaning(s) of the scene, which the director, writer, and actors wish to emphasize. An actor's response may well resemble a lawyer's response: "What do you want the words to mean?"

I am not sure of what is an "inhuman" truth. After all, scientific truth seems as human to me as any other kind of truth. It may be better to speak of literal truth. Let that go for now.

My critics say: "Yes, but science is objective!"

So are we. That's why we came up with science. We need science to understand nature. But we can also play naked "Twister" on the week-ends. We can also create "different" (eventually) equally objective and shared realities, in art for example, including linguistic realities.

The latest science suggests that we create even the meaning of the empirical "reality" that we experience.

From quantum mechanics in nature to mirror neurons in society, selves and worlds are mutually constitutive. This is NOT a denial of truth. This is a defense of truth. Have you been to a good movie lately? An unresolved philosophical question is "What is a movie or cinematic work?" No movie exists until it is seen, as a movie, by at least one person. No human identity exists until it is shared and confirmed by another person. Any human identity can be disconfirmed by others.

These aesthetic or ethical truths ("marriage"?) in which we must live are not known scientifically. We have inner lives. Hence, we speak of the "community" of the text, or of communal aesthetic experiences ... or of a single touch that is freighted with meaning. Theater is a "community of a text." Movies, paintings, novels -- all may be described in such terms. Feelings are relevant to this subjective-objective "knowing," in the human realm by means of intuitions or sensitivity. (See the ITV series "Lost in Jane Austen.")

A movie (like any complex work of art) is a magical object whose identity changes with the recipient of the work. This tension in a cinematic works is explored in films themselves. ("The Last Tycoon" and "The French Lieutenant's Woman.")

My Titanic is not necessarily the movie you saw. Great films and masterpieces of all sorts in the arts explode with meanings that are radically different for different viewers. Perhaps the number of possible interpretations of a great film are as various as the persons seeing that film. A great actor will create a character that some will like, others hate, still others will be puzzled and uncertain in their judgments including (possibly) the actor him- or herself as an audience member. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")

This "invitational" or ambiguous quality in works of art is deliberate and increases the power of artists and works of art.

You are also a "text" or work of art.

Your meaning changes with the observer of your actions and for the participant in dialogues with you.

This is how it should be since such a "hermeneutics of freedom" in interpretations allows for full development of our status as persons fashioning identities "for" one another. ("'Unknown': A Movie Review" and "Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.")

Intuitive knowing is as important in politics and law (not just the arts), as more scientific kinds of rationality. We can get "lost" in a movie and not just a book. We can also be lost within (or share in) the subjectivity of another person -- including a fictional character. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")

Maybe the same is true in medicine -- psychiatry, especially -- where concepts take on a life of their own. Michael Polanyi has noted that, even scientific knowledge, is PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE.

Going to the movies, accordingly, is like playing naked Twister. ("Has Science Made Philosophy Obsolete?" and "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author" then "Nihilists in Disneyworld.")

I am sitting in a subway train heading downtown. I notice a woman speaking to herself, twisting to her right side, gesturing with her left hand as though it contained a sewing needle, opening her right palm. She is communicating a complex "meaning." Someone pulled her hair, someone was sewing, why the open right hand? This woman was acting, dancing, expressing something important to her inner-life.

I hope an expert is struggling to unravel and decode this message. Such unraveling is a hermeneutic exercise which must be based on a willingness to "play" with this poor woman.

She was "acting" a part -- or reacting -- on the basis of an early life experience.

More afflicted persons are seen walking the streets of this city than ever before as a result of policies of "repopulating patient groups." Every person is a text written in a language intended to be deciphered by you. People want to be understood. Simone Weil says: Pay "attention" to suffering human beings because their messages are for you. Paul Ricoeur adds that their messages are you.

All art is about playing. This playing is often a very serious business. People who denigrate the intelligence of women tend to dismiss such forms of knowing or understanding. Yet intuition and humane wisdom is essential in literature, philosophy, law, psychology and in achieving happiness in life. ("David Stove's Critique of Idealism" and "David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women.")

Improvisational play also helps in science or politics. Do not be afraid of this word "playing." Nurturing, care, identification or empathy are knowledge words. My scholarly references are to the works of D.W. Winnicott and Jean Piaget, Charles Rycroft and Richard Wollheim's aesthetics.

Responses to such statements from adversaries have been based on accusations that I am insufficiently "masculine." I do not agree. Besides, how we understand masculinity and femininity is part of what is contested in this philosophical position. Calling me a "woman" does not lead me to run for cover. I regard such an accusation as a compliment even as a heterosexual male.

Time to insert another "error" in this essay? ("Thoughts of a Domestic Revolutionary" and "Let's Hear it for the Boys.")

"We are concerned with personal activities, with the agency of the Self. In this context, action and thought," Professor MacMurray insists, "both imply rationality."

What is the difference between a wink (eros, interpretive) and a blink (sex, instrumental)? One is a biological event; the other is a communicative gesture or action. Science will help us to understand a blink; interpretation (which will include feelings) will help us to understand a wink.

If we can put the two together -- instrumental thought (science) and interpretative rationality (philosophy, art, politics, therapy, law) -- we have a better chance of understanding people than if we discard one form of inquiry or the other. Eros is the realm of interpretation; sex is the realm of science.

The tendency in American psychology is to reject and discard intuition and empathy as "unscientific." The results of doing so will be tragic, if they are not tragic already.

A reviewer in Sunday's Times failed to understand Colin McGinn's similar point in a new book about cinema, calling Professor McGinn's fascinating observations "twaddle." It is in, fact, the review that may be so described. I plan to write about this soon. ("Colin McGinn on Movies and Minds.")

I set aside the daunting question as to which of these activities is more rational, science or naked "Twister." Both can be more fun than a barrel of monkeys, I guess, like chess or doing one's taxes. Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (New York & London: Pantheon, 2005), pp. 58-205.

Next, the skeptic says: "O.K., but those 'inner truths' cannot be tested or shared because they are merely 'subjective'."

To which I respond: "Nonsense. Sure they can be shared. They are shared all the time. We just pretend that they're not."

We intuit the feelings of others. We navigate a world of human intentions, meanings, beliefs and values. This Lebenswelt of human meanings ("intentionality") is the conceptual jungle in which we really live as much as the concrete jungles that we also navigate in what is laughingly known as "empirical reality" or the "real world" in order to get to work every day.

An example is the cultural space that we share with others when we see a movie which is what Professor McGinn's new book is about. Another example is going to a ball game at Yankee Stadium, or family dinner on Thanksgiving Day, or what happens in courtrooms anywhere in America. These are dynamic communities. Professor Putnam speaks of "internal realism" which may also be related to these issues. Context-sensitive truths emerge within traditions or practices. These truths are fully objective and invitational as well as participatory.

The Constitution of the United States of America provides us with a communal identity as a nation.

Unconstitutionality tears at the fabric of this community. ("Why U.S. Courts Must Not Condone Torture.")

Every audience is a "community" that includes performers. Part of what every performer does is to observe fellow performers on stage. Performer and audience are "roles" that are exchanged all the time in theater or cinema, also in the creation of selves. Compare Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author (New York: Dover, 1998) with Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (New York: NYRB, 2002).

In Pirandello's play "characters" are invited to construct their "author" (reader) and in Handke's essay the reader is invited to assist the author in constructing the identity of Handke's dying mother. The meaning of both works is invitational and still true. This aesthetic provides a strong analogy to human ethical life and to the mysteries of the universe. My goal in trying to find a space to write a novel in peace is to create a text that will invite the reader to share in the project of creating a self with the author and his character. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

Finnis is aware of philosophers, such as David Wiggins, who have sought to establish connections between meaning and truth, connections not only in linguistic propositions but between the concepts. Hence, the writings of Robert C. Solomon -- who is an existentialist and a Leftist-liberal-"pinko," so you radicals can relax -- on the "cognitive value of emotions" also become relevant to this discussion, along with much of the work of Martha Nussbaum. Most importantly, see the writings of R.D. Laing and John MacMurray, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir. (I was saddened to learn of Robert Solomon's recent death.) Finnis says:

" ... any project of explaining away intention and the understanding of it, or meaning and the understanding of it, or truth and the assessing of it, is a manifestly arbitrary and self-refuting project. [emphasis added] The world in which we intend, mean, and assert true and false propositions, just is unimaginably more [strange,] i.e., diverse in its fundamental aspects, qualities and relationships, than it appears (we must suppose) to a cat that notices a bowl of milk and drinks it." ("Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")

One result of our prevalent denigration and ignorance of feelings, which is related to sexism (women are concerned with feelings, right?), and the crucial role of feelings, as I have said, in knowing -- especially in legal reasoning and politics -- is the atrophy of emotions and impoverishment of personal relationships and inner life. This is often a cause of human suffering. Autism has become a social condition. Take a look at the statistics concerning family life, divorce, child abuse and so on. Sociopathy becomes an epidemic. ("Behaviorism is Evil" and "The Torture of Persons" then "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

Much more important than gender or the sexual-orientation of prospective parents is whether and how much parents love their children. Why are courts afraid to ask that question? It does not seem "objective" enough? People will lie? Judges are uncomfortable with emotions?

Ask the question anyway. Look at the litigant in the eyes and just ask: "Do you love this child whose custody you are seeking?" Then make your judgments about the reply that you receive. No book is going to tell you how to interpret that answer. That's why judges need discretion, folks. A frightening truth to contemplate is that we need judges to wield discretion and lots of it. Gulp, this may even true in New Jersey!

Speaking in such terms is misleadingly thought of as "unscientific" and not "objective" in courtrooms and universities. Nevertheless, it is crucial that we do so. Yes, ethical reasoning involves intellection and mastery of evidence, relevant literature and statistics, along with reflection on experience. Feelings and moral sentiments that make our human realities meaningful are never irrelevant to such reasoning or cognition. We must always wonder about the effects of our words and actions on others, about their feelings and responses to us. You cannot refute these arguments or make unethical conduct acceptable by hacking into my computer and defacing this text, again. Creating a noisy or disruptive environment in which I must write my works will not stop me. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "What is it like to be tortured?")

Slandering me or fabricating absurd charges against me is somewhat pointless by now. Threatening letters may be more pointless. There is no insult of me that has not been spoken behind my back to friends and relatives. Insults have little effect on me. The OAE is expected to continue posting insults and "background reports" of me on-line. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")

Thinkers from Thomas Reid to F.H. Bradley, and many others may be mentioned in support of these ideas. I have been reading Walter Pater, whose advice to journey through life burning with a "hard and gem-like flame" in quest of beauty and love meant a great deal to me when I was younger.

Despite suffering occasional burns I still feel that flame. I have no regrets about my passions.

The conclusions that we arrive at in legal and ethical reasoning are not un-objective, because others, who reason in good faith (over time) are bound to come to the same conclusions, together with us, establishing a community. We may always argue before the court of public opinion. What we must not do is resort to violence. Violence is not "therapy." Censorship -- or any destruction of the necessary creative work of others -- is a form of violence upon the "person" of another human being.

I believe that moral knowledge is cumulative and progressive. It is always, ultimately, communal. Real science is communal, too. Emotional reasoning is not arbitrary, as I say, but highly objective and also has a truth-content. Ronald Dworkin's comments on American Constitutional jurisprudence come to mind. Yes, Ron, there is a "right answer," even in "hard cases." The trick is to figure out what it is.

The Framers of the American Constitution and its best interpreters express a guarded optimism or "good feeling" about humanity, a confidence that -- over the long haul despite mistakes -- we will get things right, or at least that we will find better interpretations and solutions every day by applying the grand principles of the law (like free speech) to the conflicts and dilemmas of sociability in this complex society.

The Framers opted for reasonableness over rationalism in the quest for truth and justice. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")

Why would one bother to be a judge or devote a lifetime to the study and practice of a discipline and profession that are deemed "impossible" or "meaningless"? Should judges believe that they are devoted to a doomed and absurd enterprise while being expected to do their best work? Nihilism is unlivable. Nihilism is ultimately paralyzing. ("Money is the meaning of life," lawyers say.)

This cautious optimism is dismissed, with a smile, as my naive "Americanism."

Maybe it is. If so, then it is this, perhaps, "childish" hopefulness that I still find inspiring and romantic in the American project of self-governance for which I do not apologize. I still find it possible to hope. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution" and "A Commencement Address by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham-Clinton.")

" ...we must say that it is scientistic, not scientific, to impose on the quest for knowledge the restriction that knowledge is only of that which can be regarded impersonally, externally, naturalistically. Our concern is to come to know what is so, to attain an accurate view. The proposed restriction extends the postulates of the methods of the natural sciences into fields of inquiry where those methods in fact block or obscure any accurate view."

Finnis concludes:

" ... our own human experiences are not altogether private; on the contrary, ... they are intersubjectively available" -- this does not mean only by agreement -- "we can know what is the quality of each other's experiences. I would add that we likewise can know what in fact are, and what it is like to have, each other's perceptions, beliefs, doubts, aspirations, disinclinations, intentions, decisions, regrets. Yet all of these are thoroughly subjective, and would have no place in the world if the world is just as it is conceived 'objectively,' [understood] naturalistically or scientistically. Thus, someone who seeks to limit the range of reason to what can be known with that kind of objectivity, is himself lacking in objectivity."