Start Talking

Samuel Johnson has a quote where he says that silence quickly propagates itself. Wikipedia says that normative refers to ought to or should tenses. I happen to have thought that normative meant normal or referring to forms outside of general experience. So normative ethics refers in this idea to ethics that does not refer to any individual person, but the ethical conduct of everyone and exists outside of everyone.

Dr. Johnson says silence propagates itself. I keep telling myself that the best philosophy is two parts descriptive and one part prescriptive. There is a real, dare I say, philosophical struggle in the sciences, like Sociology, as to when their findings should be prescriptive. It almost seems unscientific to have a motive of helping the world when doing science. But because we know the Motive Fallacy, i.e. that motives do not change the truth or falsity (or in this matter the actual help or science of something), we know that this is not the case.

Philosophy can be perscriptive, as in telling everyone what to do, what they should do, as in this previous definition of normative ethics. It can also be descriptive, telling us what already is. Hey, because as we say, "We're hardly sure about anything."

Silence propagates itself, it makes itself. This rings true for me because one time I was in the car with my friend Nick and he was outrageously furious at me. Looking back, I have no idea why. I had picked him up from the airport and after a few accented monosyllabic sentences ("No!" "Why?!") we drifted into painful silence, like a room with too much heat.

Another part of this aphorism (saying) is prescriptive: start talking. Watch out for silence. There's stuff to talk about. There's things to say. Things need to be said. Start talking.