One of the most interesting problems with any system of ethics is the twinned questions of a) what is the system grounded in and b) why should I, as an individual, care? I’m sure that most people are familiar with the old, probably apocryphal, story of a philosophy exam with one question on it - “Why?” - and of the two answers that received a 100% mark; “Why Not?” and “Because!”. And, when you get right down to it, every symbol system that attempts to answer these questions reduces down to that “Why?”. As a symbolic Anthropologist, I’ve spent most of my time looking at how these systems operate, what processes are involved and stem from them, and why we, as a species, have them in the first place. Now I’m not saying that I have the answers to these questions; I’m not ever confident that I know what questions to ask in order to formulate the questions necessary to get the answers. What I do have is a series of observations about the processes and the beginnings of an explanation that might lead to the constructing of the necessary questions.

Let me start with a simple, yet extremely powerful, distinction. When answering the question of “What is God?”, do you answer “God is…” or “God is not…”? How you choose to answer, or to approach an answer, sums up whether you are using a via positive (”God is…”) or a via negativa (”God is not…”) construction. Now, the question “What is God?” can also be reformulated as “What is reality?”, “What is truth?”, etc., and the two approaches remain the same. The key difference between them is in your epistemological stance in regards to knowledge (epistemology is just a fancy way of answering the question of “How do you know what you ‘know’?”).

Now examining an epistemological stance requires an inquiry into how people formulate thought and, for most purposes, I have found it useful to use certain distinctions made by C.S. Pierce. Pierce noted that there appear to be three primary ways in which humans formalize conception: induction, deduction and abduction. In very simplistic terms,

Induction (or inductive logic) relies on starting with observations and formulating “rules” of limited applicability based on these observations. It is “bottom-up” thinking, going from a collection of specifics to a general formulation.

Deduction (or deductive logic) is the opposite of induction. It starts from a general model and applies that model to the study and analysis of specific situations or observations. Formally, it moves from premises to a conclusion that must be “true” if the premises are true.

Abduction (or abductive logic) is tricky. As Gary Shank noted,

Abduction allows us to reason from the experience at hand, to so as to understand that experience not as a unique phenomenon, but as a meaningful case of some hypothetical rule or principle.

In effect, abduction deals with degrees of certainty and uncertainty in the inference of rules and principles (Note: it’s an extremely complex form couched in typical late 19th-early 20th century language. A very nice overview is contained in Shank and Cunningham’s 1996 paper Modeling the Six Modes of Peircean Abduction for Educational Purposes, and Shank’s 2001 article It’s Logic in Practice, My Dear Watson: An Imaginary Memoir from Beyond the Grave is a joy to read.

Now these three “forms of” or “methods for” knowing (I tend to think of them as “techniques”) have an interesting relationship to a crucial distinction that Wilhem Dilthey had made in the late 19th century. Dilthey started with an observation that

All science is experiential; but all experience must be related back to and derives its validity from the conditions and context of consciousness in which it arises, i.e. the totality of our nature.

Dilthey held that in order to fully comprehend an observation (e.g. text, art, utterance, etc.), it was crucial to use two different forms or types of knowledge: “verstehen” (think of this as “empathic undertsanding”; it is highly related to what the Greeks referred to as θυμος (thumos or thymos in English) and “erkennen” (aka “explanatory knowledge”).

Now, I brought Dilthey into this discussion because his two types of knowledge actually get back to that existential question of “Why?” at the start of this post. Verstehen is a “proof” based in “gut feeling”, something “feels ‘right’”. In effect, it is one form of the “Because!” answer and is based on emotional (actually, psycho-biological) understandings. Dilthey’s second form, erkennen, is “proof” based on a reasoned “explanation”. Now, a key point to erkennen, however, is that the “reasoning” that is applied is mutable between any of the three forms of logic - induction, deduction, abduction or any mix of them. In actual point of fact, erkennen is all about the crafting and construction of a “story” that “makes sense” to people; forms of reasoning vary with the universe of discourse of the audience as do the taken-for-granted premises and connections that internally validate a story.

And this brings us back to modes of operation; the via negativa and via positiva.

Via positiva “stories” assert an order of reality or “Truth” and tend to be predominantly deductive in their logical reasoning. A good current example of this type of thinking is available here, but there are countless other examples as well (naive beliefs about democracies spontaneously establishing themselves come to mind…). Via positiva stories have certain advantages for groups that hold them and, in fact, they do appear to be necessary for social groups to operate if, for no other reason, than that they allow at least the appearance of common understanding of signs and symbols which is the basis for inter-personal communications.

Via negativa “stories”, on the other hand, assert that one can never truly know “Truth” or, at least, describe / communicate it; at best, one can communicate approximations (or probabilities). This is the difference between saying that something “will happen” and that something “may happen”. Via negativa stories are rarer than via positiva stories, and are usually communicated as either paradoxes or injunctions against certainty. One of my favorite examples of the later is from Oliver Cromwell when he said “I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think ye may be mistaken”, while a more modern example of the former comes from FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency where a number of “paradoxes” are listed (section 1-148 to 1-157).

Both via positiva and via negativa stories (and mindsets!) also have their disadvantages. Via positivia mindsets, when taken to extremes, produce a perception in people that anything that disagrees with their conceptualization of “Truth” is not only wrong but “Evil” and should / must be eliminated. Hypertrophied via positiva stances produce fanatics who are incapable of accepting any other perception of “reality” or “Truth”. Via negativa mindsets, when taken to extremes, produce a perception in people that “nothing” is “real”; that there can be no de facto “objectivity” (actually, a commonality of agreement about “reality”), and that since all perceptions are equally (in)valid nothing may be said to be worth more than anything else. Hypertrophied via negativa mindsets, when taken to extremes, are quintessentially nihilistic and self (as opposed to Other) destroying.

As the old saying goes, we are caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea; at least if we assume that we, as individuals, must take a hypertrophied stance. Speaking personally, I reject the necessity of such a step, even though I find myself increasingly taking a via negativa stance simply because many of the debates and discussions I have been involved in are dominated by oft opposing via positiva stances such as the debate on the engagement between Anthropology and the Military.

To my mind, one of the hallmarks of civilization has been the development of social and cultural mechanisms that allow for the presumption of “good will” on the part of those who disagree with each other. This is very much a part of the concepts in social contract theory. And, while I disagree with some of the specifics of it, I would argue that it is, at its core, correct. Now, many of the problems I have with social contract theory derive from assumptions about the nature of specific aspects of any given “contract”. Personally, I would argue that the concept of a “social contract” is valid IFF two conditions are met:

1. The maintenance and negotiation of that contract is viewed as an ever shifting process of negotiation, and
2. The grounding of the universe of discourse surrounding that negotiation stems from our best understandings of reality rather than the imposition of an assertion of reality.

I would argue that such conditions allow a group of people the optimal balance between the “certainty” of via positiva stances with the uncertainty of via negativa stances. Or, to use terms from a different universe of discourse, such conditions allow for optimal adaptability in the face of shifting environments.

These conditions, however, require the acceptance by people holding via positiva stances that they must accept the process of negotiation even if the specific results of such a negotiation are radically opposed to their particular stance (an example of this is the pro-choice vs. the pro-life debate). They also require that people holding via negativa stances accept the negotiations and the imposition of situational assertions of “reality” as “True” even when they are not true (an example of this is the political position that all people are equal before the law vs. the biological reality of difference that shows up in the question of drinking and driving and establishing a “universal” blood alcohol content that politically defines being “incapacitated”).

In political terms, at least in the Canadian political context, the acceptance of these conditions is the hallmark of a “professional” politician, while the rejection of these terms is the hallmark of an amateur. This is not to say that “professional” politicians may not hold strong, via positiva stances - many of them do. The difference between professionals and amateurs lies in their willingness to accept that the results of the process of political debate may go against them now, but shift in the future. As Otto Von Bismark noted, “Politics is the art of the possible”.

Which, in my usual roundabout way, brings me back to ethics and systems of ethics. Our personal ethical systems derive from our epistemological stance, our modes of operations, our views of “reality” and whatever symbol system(s) we use to express them - our personal “grounds of being”. But our actions (including inaction) are judged as “ethical” or “not ethical” not through our personal ethical systems but through the social contracts of our groups (it’s why I tend to term Codes of Ethics as “moral” rather than “ethical” systems) or, in other words, as a result of politics. If we accept Bismark’s dictum that politics is the art of the possible and shape our social actions in accordance with it, then we are, whether we know it or not, acting to increase the survivability of our group during at time of rapid change. If we reject Bismark’s dictum, and if history is any guide (and I think it is), then we are decreasing our groups survivability.