Anti-Climacus

QUOTES FOR THE EVENING: First, on account of it having been Ash Wednesday:

"Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritence."

Today's more substantive thoughts have run to the question of moral exemplarity. There's a line of thought (or so I'd argue) that says people tend to focus more on man's capacity for evil, and tends to overlook or discount people who do good. So far as that goes, I'd agree--I'm just not sure it gets you very far. The problem, it seems to me, is that when you give certain people who do good acts an outsized moral status (making them into exemplars or cases to be studied and understood), you begin to suggest there's something unusual or heroic in what they do, which at least opens the possibility that others will think similar moral action is the realm of those who are, in some way, different from the normal run of people.* A person who acts morally just does what is expected of them. This thought led me back to Maugham, in The Painted Veil:

"'Good-bye, God bless you, my dear child.' She held her for a moment in her arms. 'Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that it is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.'"

*There's a Grotius dimension to this, as you might expect. I'm inclining at the moment to the view that Grotius claims that there is in fact one set of morals that give normativity to all of one's actions: a prince has the same moral responsibilities as a citizen--the difference in what those responsibilities entail is just a function of their differing roles.