Caleb > Recent Status Updates

"When Congress passed a series of new regulations starting in the mid-1960s, corporations barely fought back. Had corporations then built up the lobbying presence they have now established, it seems almost inconceivable that much of the social regulation that passed during that period would have become law."

This view of action explanation and motivation has historically been of considerable importance. It lies at the heart of scholastic action theory’s appeals to formal causation. In scholastic action theory, the goal or object of an action is seen as giving it content and psychological definition and thereby intelligibility. Put in Aristotelian terms, the object is understood as providing form for the action’s matter.

If the functional is ethical, the ethical is also functional, an effect of the functionality of a certain practice / set of norms.

'Human life is represented in the myth of Sisyphus, who was doomed eternally to roll up a hill a vast stone that would always fall back just as he was about to reach the top. The dignity of life derives from mankind’s continual perseverance in projects for which the universe affords no foothold or encouragement' (MacIntyre, 1967: 150).

A form of life, Jaeggi maintains, can thus be criticized in light of its “history of problem-solving attempts.” The “rationality”—indeed, the “success”—of a form of life can be measured in light of its capacity to address its problems and to learn from its history of problem solving.