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             Private esthetics and public ethics

     Concerns about what I must do and about what society,
what government should do, have at least three roots:
1) I recognize myself as actor or agent, and I understand
that the quality of who I am is reflected in, if not
determined by, the quality of what I do. Hence I am concerned
to act "virtuously", i.e. to act in such a way that I will
prove myself to be who I am.
2) I recognize my life to be beset by dangers. I survive by
avoiding or mitigating these dangers. I want to live in a
society which similarly reduces such dangers to a minimum.
3) I recognize my dependence on other persons and I
understand that their interests and mine should coincide, and
that I protect my own interests by championing theirs.

     Public ethics unavoidably entails rules or laws.  Laws
are conceptual, verbal formulas that become effective only
when applied to specific situations.  Those situations differ
vastly one from the other, and the law has the effect not of
determining the quality of the action in issue, but of
creating the appearance that actions done under widely
different circumstances in fact conformed to a specific
standard.  The legals system surely has an effect in
controlling individual action and its aggregate effects.  But
these effects do not (necessarily) correspond with the design
of the laws that provoked them.  Legislation is uniquely
amenable to an empiric approach, in that one may pass a law,
measure its consequences, and thereupon modify that law to
bring its consequences more into line with what one had
intended.

     Whereas legislation, public ethics, functions in a realm
of concepts and verbal definitions, private ethics reflects
and addresses the individual's perception and action in a
specific situation. The presumption to anticipate such
perceptions and actions is incongruous. The retrospective
conceptualization of this ethical situation is unavoidably
approximate only.  I do not believe explicit instruction for
individual action is possible. Neither is its retrospective
evaluation.

     If one accepts the conclusion that the formal
prescription, description and adjudication of individual
action in a specific situation is an incongruous postulate,
then perhaps it is wise to reserve for the evaluation of
individual action a specific adjective, and to refer to
esthetic rather than ethical valuation.

     The premise is that individual action cannot have
ethical value or meaning; and that the meaning and value of
individual action is determined by intuition and is therefore
referred to as esthetic.  Such redefinition obviously solves
some problems while creating others.

     Esthetically determined action may be construed as the
resultant of the configuration of the agent and the
configuration of the situation; and these configurations in
fact are not determinable except empirically in consequence
of the action. Thus, quite abstractly one might postulate a
certain given situation and study the responsive actions of
different individuals, and thus develop at least a
statistical estimate of what that situation entailed.
Conversely one might postulate a given individual acting in
the face of a spectrum of situations, and thereby acquire
statistical estimate of his or her characteristics. Although
it may seem surprisingly mundane, stock market transactions
provide an interesting model of the cognitive process. One
individual's stock portfolio is a statistical index of his
investment style. The price of a stock reflects valuations on
the part of many individuals.  In few other situations are
the characteristics of esthetic valuation so well defined.

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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
