Another way to talk about the triad is to express it as kinds of problems — or dimensions of a problematic situation:

• A moral problem involves values: Why does this situation matter?
• A practical problem involves behavior: What actions are possible in this situation and what are the consequences?
• A theoretical involves cognition: What is this situation on the whole and in part? What is essential to this situation, what are its constituent elements, how do the elements relate to one another and to the whole of the situation?

These problem dimensions are deeply interrelated. A change in any one of dimension changes the others.

The moral modifies the practical: If something has no moral significance, we lack all motivation to respond to it, or even to examine it. We only think about and act upon situations with some direct or indirect moral significance. When something has moral significance we are intrinsically compelled to respond to it.

The moral modifies the theoretical: Whatever it is that makes a situation matter to us is also what makes us regard some facts and features of the situation intensely significant and others negligible. (Consider “media bias.”)

The practical modifies the moral: Our practical responses to a situation change the situation, and reveal new aspects of it. Just as importantly, our practical response to a situation can also change us, or it can reveal new aspects of ourselves to ourselves. Whether the change is actual or perceptual, and whether concerns us or the situation as a whole, doesn’t matter: the moral situation is now a different one. A situation might escalate or resolve, or we may gain new insights into the situation. We might become worn down to the point of unconsciousness, or become hyper-alert. We might become so caught up in a situation that “we are no longer ourselves” or we might orient ourselves to the situation and figure out how to be more authentically ourselves in it. Or we might have new insights into our own moral responsibility which change how we relate to the situation. In all these cases the moral situation has essentially changed. (Think about what happens to soldiers over the course of a war.)

The practical modifies the theoretical: Besides the obvious fact that practical action is the primary way we learn (we make discoveries), our practical aims determine what we see and how we see. We concentrate on different things in our environment, and different characteristics of things stand out, depending on what we are trying to accomplish. We see through a functional lens. (When we are baking a cake, the fact that a bag of flour can serve as a doorstop doesn’t occur to us, but when we need to hold a door open, it becomes obvious.)

The theoretical modifies the moral: What we know and do not know about a situation can drastically change its moral meaning. (This is why we feel manipulated if someone omits facts when trying to persuade us of something.)

The theoretical modifies the practical: The relevant facts of a situation determine how we respond to it. (Missing facts are one major source of mistakes.)

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My belief:

Our culture has gotten extremely good at generating theoretical and practical knowledge, and at coming to agreements on theoretical and practical matters — where moral agreement already exists.

However, when moral agreement does not exist and the moral disagreement manifests as theoretical and practical disagreement — this is precisely how moral disagreement shows itself — we try to treat the disagreements as theoretical or practical, because that is where we have our best success.

This is our age’s characteristic way of fucking up.

We are happy to theoretically acknowledge differing perspectives — in terms of “I have my taste and interests, you have yours.”

We are also more or less comfortable with treating morality as either a matter of belief (as essentially theoretical) or of obedience to laws (as essentially practical) — but we are deeply resistant to understanding morality as something greater and irreducible to theoretical or practical truth. (Think about getting into Heaven. You have to have believed the right facts and disbelieved falsehoods. You have to have done the right actions and refrained from the wrong ones to get in.)

Few of us, however, have actually moved our intellectual bodies from one part of reality’s room to another and seen what actually happens to what we see.

We have not inhabited multiple moral perspectives.

This is a whole different order of practical knowledge from the simple acquisition of new skills and new experiences we call “being experienced.”

Consequently, we are unaware of how different moral perspectives modify theoretical and practical reality. We lack the theoretical apparatus to conceptualize or discuss morally-rooted theoretical disagreements, and we have no constructive practical response to morally-rooted practical disagreements. We see what we see — and we assume we are seeing reality as it is, while the other is looking through subjective goggles and seeing things in a distorted, self-interested, and possibly depraved way.

And we congratulate ourselves that we know nothing but what our blameless, sinless, moral way of life has shown us. And when others have been blameworthy, sinful and immoral — whether they’re a criminal, lawyer, liberal, fascist, hypocrite, scribe or pharisee — it is to our credit that we lack firsthand knowledge of what it was like to be that way. We can read the law, recognize what is evil, and throw rocks to our heart’s content.

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Very few people have practiced the spiritual nomadism advised by Nietzsche and seen for themselves that rigid adherence to moralistic law preserves the delusion that we possess morality, and is often upheld precisely for the sake of preserving that delusion.

Fact is, we are horrified at the possibility that the world we look at through our own moral perspective — our own knowledge of good and evil — does not give us an unconditioned God’s-eye-view of reality.

We remain completely unreceptive to the importance of disagreements in showing us our own limitations and orienting us to what is greater than ourselves, and the source of all moral significance — value — or to use a thoroughly-abused word: love.

This is the kind of insight philosophy gives us, but we hate philosophy because it is this kind of insight we do not want. Philosophy shows us how invisible our ignorance is, and it makes us permanently humble and prepared to discover that we are wrong where it never occurred to us wrongness or rightness could even exist.