Ethics and the Third Person -- An Introduction to the Question of Ethics
[Note: the contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, concluding chapter 30, can be found here. ] [This entry starts the 3rd Edition of Section Four, "Ethics And The Third Person", and constitutes Chapter 31, "An Introduction to the Question of Ethics"] In the previous Section of chapters, I inferred characteristics of God's relationship to Nature, and of Nature to myself in terms of its necessary properties, to account for some of the situations I find myself in. And I took as the chief example of this, the Golden Presumption itself: I can act, and thus can think; and you my reader can do these things also, and thus we can reason together. But now that I have examined the concept of causal relations, I have progressed by necessity toward the concept of personal relations. There is a personal relation involved in this very book: I am presenting to you an 'argument' for you to judge--not merely for you to react to (either arbitr