The Ultimate Goal

It is often asked, What is the goal of philosophy; or for that matter thinking? If one reads my books or my blogs you will find a common theme: overcoming the distaste for deep thought. Is it because of the discomfort created by doubt, as CS Peirce suggests? Or did philosophy go horribly wrong and it really is just arguing about unanswerable questions?

It has occurred to me and it did to some philosophers in history that the only goal can be ethics and in this only active. Which means both diagnosing ethics and then doing something ethical. Reid suggests that just "thinking" accomplishes nothing and that the only goal is active. I'm not sure that's right, but like Aristotle the emphasis is on action. Reid goes so far as to say "power" requires "action." Think about that.

Isn't the focus of virtue ethics the idea of action? To do something with the intent of doing good repeatedly will make good habits and in turn a good person.

But let's back up. All that I'm really saying is that ethics is all that can be answered. Fundamental questions like :What is free will and does it exist? Cannot be answered. If we read Reid carefully we see that this is one of his first assumptions and techniques. Spending our time on questions that don't have answers distracts us from the ones that do. His model was the new scientist, like Newton, who claimed to know what, say, gravity does, but not what it is.

Do we perceive actual objects (thus "seeing" reality) or just images of possible things that have appeared in our mind? This question for Reid is both distracting and impossible. He does however believe that reality exists and that is the whole point. It can be answered, just not discussed. For Reid, we are built a certain way with external objects in mind (pardon the expression) and it would be impossible to be built that way (to "see" in three dimensions and to clear up or compensate mentally for distance and shape) if reality was not external and "real." This question can be answered in the affirmative, but not discussed at length. As Reid is famous for saying, the elaborate answers we seek offer no more information than the question itself.

For this reason, I am starting to believe that ethics is the only positive realm for philosophy. By positive of course I mean understandable. The fundamental questions are for learning, and ethics is fo growing.

This opens up a litany of other questions to be explored:

Is metaethics, in particular the question about objectivity, necessary first to start any positive knowledge?

Is politics, by association, also just as important?

And perhaps most importantly, what does philosophical ethics mean and "look" like, as opposed to the common man's view that he is "right" and "good." After all, isn't this what Socrates meant by the statement, Everyone does what they think is right?