Thursday, February 16, 2012

Will, Relativism, Universalism

At IV, xxxv. of the Ethics, Spinoza asserts that "men, insofar as they live in obedience to reason, necessarily do only such things as are necessarily good for human nature, and consequently for each individual man", thereby refuting the suggestion, previously proposed here, that he is a Relativist, and, instead, demonstrating his anticipation of Kantian Universalism. The position also seems to commit him to the judgment that a quantitatively similarly donation from a richer and a poorer person is equally 'generous'. In contrast, here, the locus of evaluation is personal Will, i. e. the extent of one's exertion with respect to antecedent conditions. Hence, according to this Relativism, for example, how 'generous' an act is is a function of one's capacity to donate, and not at all of the performance of another. In any case, the above passage still seems to override Spinoza's earlier Subjectivistic definition of 'X is good' as 'I desire X'.

No comments:

Post a Comment