Righting

Major phases of righting correspond to reaching’s progression through the interesting, the important, and the transcendent, but the order can be contemplated in reverse: from the highest thinkable height of principled participation in divine order to the height of reasonable generality to the height of specific occasions of righting demand. Attending to the responsible motivations at each height of righting yields a well-differentiated account of “moral sense.” The sequence of moral heights can be interpreted as a chain of dependence either from the bottom up—received morals resting on natural sociability, rational ethics resting on received morals, spiritual demands resting on ethics and morals—or from the top down—spiritual demands backing ethics, which backs morals, which backs sociability. In life, these sequences are not guaranteed to be harmonious within themselves or with each other, though harmonizing them is an ideal.