Category: Moral Failure
-
Moral Progress: Our Tantalusian Predicament
If I drive to Santa Fe, the town stays put while I get closer and closer. Moral progress is different. A good part of the moral journey involves the recession of the destination. This morning I discovered that C. S. Lewis had had a similar thought. "No man knows how bad he is until he…
-
Moral Progress
A large part of moral progress is progress in the realization of how much you need it. So, initially at least, the recession of the goal as you approach it indicates progress toward it.
-
Moral Failure and Moral Capacity
Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. It follows that we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as…
-
“My Conscience is Clear”
You deceive yourself : you cleared it when you should have borne its burden and bite, the just tax for your wrongdoing.
-
Know Thyself!
He who knows himself know someone who inevitably in many a particular is not worth knowing. And he who knows this knows something worth knowing and someone who in at least one particular is worth knowing.
-
Inadequacy and Self Knowledge
I bemoan my faults and limitations, both intellectual and moral, but my bemoaning them shows that I am aware of them, which in turn shows that I possess self-knowledge, which is nothing to bemoan!
-
Forgive and Forget
Forgetting is the easier and more effective of the options if you can manage it. A wrong forgotten is a wrong unavailable for either forgiving or the opposite. But where is the virtue in a mere mental lapse? To forgive the unforgotten wrong — now there is the moral challenge, one rarely met, although almost…
-
The Upside of Moral Failure
It teaches humility.
-
Guilt and Personal Identity
Can I assuage my feelings of guilt over a long past misdeed by telling myself that I was a different person then? Not very well. I was different all right, but not numerically. One could try to soften strict numerical identity of a person over time by adopting a bundle theory of diachronic personal identity. …
-
Is There Anything Good About Moral Failure?
Moral failure makes us humble and it casts serious doubt on the proposition that we can appreciably improve ourselves by our own efforts whether individual or collective. Taken to heart, moral failure points us beyond the secular sphere for the help we know we need. Whether there is anything beyond said sphere, and whether help…
-
When I Recall My Moral Failures . . .
. . . I find it hard to doubt a) My strict numerical identity over time. When I regret what I did, I regret what I did, not what some other person did, and not what some earlier temporal part of me did. The fact that the passage of time does not lessen my sense…