thoughtlessness

Such a cumbersome word. But still, in English at least, it hardly conveys any radical failure of character; it's more akin to being absent minded or careless. But what is this 'being absent' and is it actually possible that someone couldn't care for someone else whatsoever? I couldn't give a fig?

A thought came to me. And can it, must it, also be for someone. To put it the other way around, and less extremely: is thoughtlessness the inability to think of anyone but oneself?

"Morality is a matter of thinking clearly and then proceeding to outward dealings with men."*

Is it though? Is reason/thought about sifting through the evidence, being logically consistent, and then acting? Reason tells us what the ends are (or the means to those ends, whatever they are) and then the will moves us to act. Is that how it is? And if we take those ends as simply 'given', is that not a form of thoughtlessness?

The whole language of preference and choice seems suspect. Why? Because it appears that it's all a mere matter of pleasure or desire and we'd like to think that action, right action, is about sound judgement. In short, can pleasure be a reason?

Strange that this post should tally with the last, in particular the view about kindness and "clear thinking". What is meant by 'and' here?

My two cents.

Thinking is not the same as understanding (or, if you like, understanding is a particular and distinct way of thinking). Being clever or 'intelligent' is not necessarily the same thing as being educated or wise. God knows, you've seen many people who are formally very intelligent but still, in some respects, idiots. Also, that understanding is not always gained from books or thought, but from life and experience: music, art, love, friendships and many other things:

The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding

(Aristotle or Iris? It doesn't matter).

*=

"On this view one might say morality is assimilated to a visit to a shop. I enter the shop in a condition of totally responsible freedom., I objectively estimate the features of the goods, and I choose. The greater my objectivity and discrimination the larger the number of products from which I can select. (A Marxist critique of this conception of bourgeois capitalist morals would be apt enough. Should we want many goods in the shop or just 'the right goods')"

---Iris M.