Bare Bones

Not far behind the barn, lying in the snow, whose bones are these, and who left them here? Haunting questions for dog and human alike.

I woke this morning, believe it or not, with ideas from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book already wrestling around in my mind like wakeful puppies who’d had enough sleep. (Yes, Sarah needed to get outside, too.) In the fourth chapter of EXPERIMENTS IN ETHICS Appiah discusses modules, or modes, of moral response (the difference in term depending on whose theory is being referenced). Modes identified by, for example, psychologist Jonathan Haidt are six or more in number, and here is Haidt’s taxonomy as presented by Appiah:

(1) avoidance or alleviation of harm
(2) fairness and reciprocity
(3) hierarchy and respect
(4) purity and pollution
(5) in-group/out-group boundaries
(6) awe and elevation

For me these call to mind almost instantly the schemata (his term) identified by philosopher Mark Johnson (METAPHORS WE LIVE BY, with George Lakoff; THE BODY IN THE MIND.. Johnson believes, and I tend to agree with him, that while these basic structures take on different garb from one culture to another, they themselves are universal and arise from embodied experience. A glance at the list is enough to see how easily each translates to a simple visual representation: the first a perfect circle threatened with loss; the second a set of balanced scales; third a ladder; fourth a marked circle; fifth two or more circles; sixth a representation of higher and lower levels without the ladder joining them. That’s rough. The point is only how simple a sketch is necessary to make sense of the ideas.

One of the most interesting in its historical evolution is that of hierarchy. Appiah claims that the development of democracy took the respect originally due (that word is a clue) to social superiors and made it the appropriate response (à la Kant) to all human beings. “As topsy-turvy as it sounds, then, a great deal of egalitarian rhetoric speaks the language of hierarchy.”

Sarah was good on her leash this morning, having had a training session with Marcia yesterday at the bookstore, and you can bet I kept her on that leash, what with coyotes barking and yipping not far to the north. She heard them and was very interested. Some kind of doggie-schema in her little puppy mind was telling her that those sounds came from beings somewhat like herself. She wasn’t sure they were friends but not sure they weren’t, either, and that’s where the danger lies for a non-wild pup.

Looks like a sunny day ahead.