Friday, April 30, 2021

Love-Oriented and Altruism-Oriented Epistemology

One practical epistemology is the one in which we choose to believe, and act as though we believe, the beliefs that further the project of love -- love-oriented epistemology. According to Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, love "believes all things". (Presumably love does not believe all things without exception, the exceptions being the things that, if we believe or act on them, make us go against love.) So we have some scriptural precedent for love believing in its own way.

This is similar to the practical epistemology that is altruism-oriented. Altruism assumes that reality is as it says it is in case by doing so it can take care of something that might exist. Altruism doesn't want to risk not doing good when that was possible, even if it's not 100% certain that reality, or a particular reality, actually exists, or will exist in the future.

Both of these epistemologies help to get us out of maximal skepticism / solipsism, and move us to practically believe in reason. We look to the other/beloved because there is some risk of not reaching out to help, some responsibility to the other/beloved, and some reward to reaching out to help. There is some chance that nothing is real, or that reality is non-aggregable or otherwise not amenable to rational figuring-out (and thus we can't inherently expect to be able to build a rational worldview), but we disregard / do not lean on / do not trust that possibility, and instead interact with reality in case it is real, and the reality which is pointed to by reason in case reason is valid, with a sense that there's a risk to what is not us if we don't.

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