Abstract
So there is no possible ethics without mythical and imaginary components; as soon as we want to rationalize ethics it seems that we cannot help but leaving remains aside. But there must be an agreement on what is called mythical aspects of ethics. Sometimes, the matter is to assign to ethics tasks that are impossible to realize; for instance when one promotes a medical follow-up fo every patient through out their existence. Another figure of mythic or imaginary could be the awkwardness in the presentation of treatments or in the choice of a treatment that can promote the imaginary idea that a treatment is better than another, without the least objective reason. Lastly, there is an ultimate meaning of imaginary of which the positivity is more admissible: decisions -those of the patient as those other doctor- are always taken with an uncertainty. The Bayesian calculus, that we prefer among the calculations in decision models, does not compel the actors to one position rather than another; it only points with which chance to be right we make or have made this choice rather than another in given circumstances. The decisions have been staged by the ancient Greek theater whose myths are constitutive elements of ethics in conjunction with the rationalization by the calculus we have spoken of.
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Notes
- 1.
To generalize, they thought that the Ancients were worth more than us and that they knew what was true, because they lived closer to the gods.
- 2.
We will come back to this point at the end of the text.
- 3.
It was given by Professor D. Sicard to President Hollande on 18th December 2012, and was entitled Penser Solidairement la Fin de Vie < Thinking about the End of Life in Solidarity> [22].
- 4.
Pr Sicard was not the only contributor to the report and took care to be guided by a committee in drafting it.
- 5.
It is difficult here not to recall the words of Socrates, who in The Republic, ([19] 406 c-e, 2013, p. 301), asserts with Asclepius that ‘knowing that a function has been assigned to each and everyone of those who are well governed in the state which they are obliged to perform, and that no one has the time throughout their life to fall ill and be treated, something would be absurd among the working classes, but which we don’t see among the rich and those who are apparently happy’. Moving on at once to economic considerations, Socrates shows that caring for oneself all the time is a pleasure for the rich, which is quite harmful to the city!
- 6.
It is especially noticeable in Aristotle, even in his Physics and Metaphysics. The συνεχές, the continuous, cannot be artificial in Aristotle. It is reserved for nature, as underlined in Metaphysics book Δ, 4: ‘All things are said to grow which gain increase through something else by contact and organic unity (or adhesion, as in the case of embryos). Organic unity differs from contact; for in the latter, case there need be nothing except contact, but in both the thing which form an organic unity there is some one and the same thing which produces, instead of mere contact, a unity which is organic, continuous and quantitative (but not qualitative)’ (1014 b 22–26) ([3], p. 221).
- 7.
One does not really know.
- 8.
I am making a distinction here between the certainty that an event will happen (or has happened) and the certainty of the probability that it will occur (or has occurred), which implies that that probability lies between two values – as is the case in Bayes’ probabilities, which are subjective chances of being right in expecting that the probability of the happening of an event lies between any two degrees that can be named. [5]
- 9.
- 10.
Bayes [5] poses his problem in the following terms: When one only knows little about an event or a series of events, for example whether it occurred n times and did not happen m times, n and m not being large numbers, what chance of being right does one allocate a value to a probability that one decides about that event or series of events? Bayes gave a general solution to that problem which was in a way the reverse of Bernoulli’s [7], who asked, from the moment one has a very important number of events at one’s disposal. How many of them must be taken into consideration to appreciate their probability with a margin of error that suits one.
- 11.
This was the meaning of the thesis E. Coumet presented in his memorable article, ([9], pp. 574–598).
- 12.
The decisive text of Aristotle, Poetics, is quoted at length in the conclusion to this Chapter: see p. 98 below.
- 13.
What about the truth or falsity of judgments concerning an event planned in the future, which has not happened yet, and may never happen? Should one systematically say that the judgment is wrong if it asserts the existence of an event which, as will appear, will not have happened? Can it retain, in these circumstances, some truth?
- 14.
These endless corrections are made from the observations of some and the elaboration, by the most theoretical among astronomers, of ‘small equations’ which correct the big one – established by Newton – without changing it radically.
- 15.
For, as the messenger tells the queen, Atossa, ‘a Hellene, from the Athenian host, came to [her] son Xerxes and told this tale: that, when the gloom of sable night should set in, the Hellenes would not hold their station, but, springing upon the rowing benches of their ships, would seek, some here, some there, to preserve their lives by stealthy flight. But Xerxes, on hearing this, not comprehending the wile of the Hellene nor yet that the gods grudged him success, straightway gave charge to all his captains to this effect’ ([1], I, p. 141).
- 16.
So many politicians launch elections campaigns that seem so impossible to win that one would not bet a cent on them, but end up winning!
- 17.
Even though Villani never mentions his fondness for, or indeed makes explicit reference to the Bible. Everyone knows the story of the paralytic who lies in wait for the stirring of the water, though no visible sign has triggered it. There is an explanation for that phenomenon, which, then, is no more than quasi-miraculous, in an equation that Villani takes care to translate into a vernacular language: ‘Imagine that you are walking in a forest on a peaceful summer afternoon. You stop by a pond. Everything is calm, there is not a breath of wind. Suddenly, the surface of the pond starts convulsing, everything is agitated in a great whirlpool. And then, one minute later, everything is calm again. […] The Scheffer-Shnirelman paradox, [which is] certainly the most surprising result of the whole fluid mechanics [upon which Euler’s equation rests], proves that such a monstrosity is possible, at least in the world of mathematics’ ([24], p. 98). John’s words about the water miraculously troubled by an angel before the impotent man in the pool of Bet-ghes’da thus receive ([8] John, 5, 2–6), two millennia later, some particular endorsement from the mathematician, even though not for the reasons he might have foreseen.
- 18.
What is at stake is to know – when one does not have much information about events or subsequences of events – what the chance of being right is when one grants them some probability that is arbitrarily situated between two degrees. Bayes expresses it the following way: ‘Given the number of times in which an unknown event has happened and failed: Required the chance that the probability of its happening in a single trial lies somewhere between any two degrees of probability that can be named’ ([5], p. 26).
- 19.
As imprudently used by Richard Price, who presented the work of Bayes [5] – who died before finishing his Essay – before the Royal Society. The lottery framework cannot mislead once one has the other framework, that of the table and the ball. However, being too little concerned with its singularity, it could not have allowed the invention of the solution to Bayes’ problem.
- 20.
Galileo had that beautiful word storia, story, to refer to that type of narrative which stages a conceptualisation. Quoting from Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems [13], F. Balibar reminds us in Galilée, Newton lus par Einstein, ([4] note 21), that the storia at the time of the Italian Renaissance referred to a painting or a sculpture in several episodes; for example, the doors of the baptistery in Florence.
- 21.
‘Emotions of hope and fear <Spes et Metus affectus > cannot exist without pain. For fear is pain, and hope cannot exist without fear; therefore these emotions cannot be good in themselves, but only in so far they can restrain excessive pleasure’ (Ethics, Part IV, Prop. XLVII).
- 22.
In Appendix VIII of Chrestomathia, Bentham [6] showed that the nature of the accompaniment that the myth is in relation to concept is only segmentary. The theory of fictions, born on the neck of Pandora’s phial, has always remained a theory of edges or limits: ‘how is fiction produced?’ and ‘how is it removed?’ are its main questions.
- 23.
In that sense, one could relate the movements of gods to those of stock exchanges which, on the market, in the modern and contemporary era, worsen disappointments and exaggerate successes.
- 24.
As Aristotle recalls in Poetics, ([2] VI, 1450 a 20).
- 25.
Poetics, ([2], IX, 1451 b 1–10, p. 35).
- 26.
What we are saying here about the idea of progress could very well be said of many other ideas to which we are equally attached in quite a mythical way: Democracy, human rights, the federalism of European States, and many other values fall into this category.
- 27.
Mauss stresses this feature in The Gift. [17]
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Cléro, JP. (2021). Imaginary, Myth and Concept in Medical Ethics. In: Reflections on Medical Ethics. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 138. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65233-3_5
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