Vitruvius wrote: ↑Fri Sep 24, 2021 10:09 am
totally amusing position, I have to say. Can your theory honestly be that the Catholic Church's (rather temporary and ineffective) silencing of Galileo caused modern technology to go awry and destroy the environment? I've found no credible historian of science who would say that's remotely right.
I'm saying it!
I find that...
implausible. Let's just say that.
You seem a bit irked. I can't imagine why. We're disagreeing, yes; but I'm not being unkind to you. I think we can be civil and disagree, can we not?
"Fear and Trembling" just screams upbeat party mix!
Oh, I see...you read the title, and think you understand the argument of it.
I read it at university. I hated it.
I don't find that surprising. The argument is for Christians, and in that context has massively positive content. I don't think somebody coming from outside that worldview would get it at all, and I'm sure it would seem frustrating, gratuitous, and of questionable purpose.
No, you don't, apparently. It's not a sad argument. It's actually pretty uplifting.
If you're a believer, maybe.
Actually, that's exactly right. Kierkegaard, unlike say, Sartre or Camus, has a Christian Existentialism. He's not interested in persuading those outside that worldview, I think. But if you understand that worldview, you find Kierkegaard very bracing and encouraging, actually. He was a very courageous loner, an an anomaly even in his own community; but he was one darn smart guy...and he sure saw some spectacular implications of the Christian worldview.
You don't have to like him. He wasn't really talking to "outsiders." But, if I can say this without offence, there's a lot there an "outsider" is just bound to miss.
Again, I ask you - how is it that philosophers have been seeking a definitive moral system applicable in all circumstances for thousands of years, and haven't managed to create one?
Oh, that's a good question, but one with a very good answer. But before I respond, I think I'd better get clear exactly what you mean. And the best way to do that is to ask you how it is you've decided there's no "definitive moral system applicable in all circumstances." What observation, thought, idea or bit of history has convinced you that that is so?
I asked you first, and I've asked you twice, and I still haven't got an answer. Why not just give me this great answer?
Well, because I don't yet understand the question. I hesitate to answer by missing your point completely.
For example, would I be right if I were to assume that you take
the disagreement between various human beings as evidence that there "is no definitive moral system"? That would be one possible reading; but it seems to me it would be uncharitable for me to take that reading (without your permission, of course) because it would be so easy to disprove. I don't want merely to knock down such a strawy version of your argument...that seems unkind...so I'm asking if you can clarify, so that I can deal with an argument you
would make, not one you
would not.
I don't think I can be more fair than that, can I?
There's a massive amount of general consensus about what's right and wrong.
Actually, there is not. If you check out the current literature, you'll discover that the agreement today among moral philosophers, sociologists, ethicists and political philosophers is that we are facing a thing called "incommensurability." What "incommensurability" entails is that different people are believing in different moral precepts; and that these precepts are so different and so opposed that it is inevitable that a "win" for one side entails a "loss" for some other moral system. And the vexed question among policy-makers today is how to deal with what they call "the fact of incommensurable pluralism."
Piaget - developmental psychology. That's what I'm talking about.
Oh. Moral Developmentalism.
I know Piaget. And in that field, you'll also want to know Kohlberg, who's probably more famous nowadays for it. But they've been debunked.
The first to do that was Kohlberg's own student, Carol Gilligan, who first showed that the K-P scheme was badly skewed against have the human population -- women -- who could never, on that scale, attain the values ranked highest. Kohlberg himself admitted that "moral development" was uneven, such that the vast majority of the population, even the males, could never attain to levels 3 or 4 morality...and thus, that even in a homogeneous population of males,
not all persons would hold to the same values or moral standards.
So if you understand Moral Developmental theory, you know that it does NOT imply moral development is universal in outcome at all. It means quite the contrary -- that moral values among people are inevitably different and conflicting, being oriented toward different ends and different views of the essential moral goals.
So no, there's no such general agreement on morals. But if there were, the interpretation might actually work against you. For it would suggest that whatever created the word encoded morals into human makeup. And that would actually be a powerful argument against that force being impersonal or unintelligent.
Work against me in what way?
In that morals are not part of the empirical world. They're values, products of mind, not of mere physiology. And if they all turned out to be the same, it would argue that there was some sort of intelligence "writing the program", so to speak, of the human mind. There would really be no other way to explain a universal moral consensus, since the odds against such a thing happening by random chance would be astronomical.
I've told you a dozen times I'm agnostic, but I at least allow - in the anthropic principle sense, that we live in a moral universe.
The so-called "Anthropic Principle" is circular. Basically, when we boil it down, it says, "We have to be in this kind of universe, because this is the kind of universe we're in." It doesn't take much to see that that is a hopeless pseudo-explanation.
There's no problem legitimating morality.
Every moral philosopher knows that's not true....One obvious example would be Jurgen Habermas's "The Legitimation Crisis." Or you could check out "The Legitimacy of the Modern Age," by Blumenberg. David Hume raised the Is-Ought problem, which is undermines secular legitimation of morals, a situation that has been rightly called "the major problem in moral philosophy of the modern age," and is related to the Naturalistic Fallacy, actually.
Habermas's legitimation crisis is about political legitimacy, not moral legitimacy.
Actually it's not. But political legitimation has exactly the same root problem that moral legitimation has: namely, the incapacity to say why we are duty-bound to accept any of its pronouncements as legitimate. Just as all governments have no more authority than they have power, morals in a secular context have no more scope than the power of those who believe in them to force their will on others. In both cases, the means to show by neutral, universal arguments that a particular political project or moral claim is absolute, necessary unconditionally, or morally obligatory simply do not exist in a secular worldview.
Hume however, was downright wrong. He says:
"In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence."
You've got the right quotation. Good.
I'm not friend of Hume, obviously: but I have to give him credit for this much -- that if secularism were true, Hume would be dead right. There is no link between an "is" statement and an "ought" that can be explained.
Then how can he explain the ubiquity of this way of thinking?
That's merely an "is" fact. Or, to put it another way, "It IS the case that many people believe in some (different) kinds of morality." But does the fact that they believe some kind of morality go even one step towards showing that they OUGHT to? No. Is there any reason, based on the fact that they presently believe in some (different) kinds of morality that they MUST CONTINUE to do so? No.
Hume can easily tell the story another way. He can say, "Suppose morality is like the flat earth theory -- a thing that fools once believed, and which, like the flat-earth theory, maybe even had some survival value for them; why should we moderns now continue to delude ourselves in that way? Are we not now more scientific? Are we not now smarter than to imagine we owe it to keep going with the foolish imaginings of he past?"
It's not, of course, that I believe Hume would be right to say that. But it would put a heavy burden on any secular moralist to prove that Hume's new version was not the truth. One couldn't simply retort, "Well, that's what people think!" Hume would laugh, and say, "Yes, fools think all kinds of things. But we need not be fools, need we?"
If human beings are imbued with a moral sense,
If humans are "imbued" with a moral sense, and that moral sense is any more reliable than the once-universal belief in the flatness of the earth, then that fact in itself needs a causal explanation. What a strange thing if billions of human beings should find that, regardless of heritage, lineage, circumstances, society, time, and all other factors, every human being was mysteriously programmed to believe in exactly the same moral precepts! It would be more odd than if a casino wheel landed on "00" a billion times in a row. And it would be just as hard to explain as a product of evolutionary time-plus-chance, would it not?
...we establish the facts, and draw moral implications from the facts.
Facts aren't "moral." They're just
facts, if we live in a morally-indifferent universe with no God. They're cold, they're hard, and they imply nothing beyond themselves. Hume was right about that.
The point is simple, though, really: "evolution" is an "is" description. It does not imply an "ought." People evolving up from the primordial ooze have no duty to follow mindlessly and contrary to their own interests, some impulse from the dawn of time, even if we adorn it with a title like "morality."
No. It implies a sense of ought and ought not.
What is the "it" in your sentence? "Evolution"?
Well, let's see that. Let's put together a simple syllogism, linking Evolution as a presupposition to any moral claim. Let's take, for example, "Thou shalt not murder" -- that's probably as close to an uncontroversial moral claim as we can get, right? If you don't like it, choose another...such as an interdiction of adultery or theft, maybe. You pick it.
Please now, show me how Evolution means it's wrong for us to murder (or whatever).
I'm not an atheist, so Dawkins isn't relevant.
I'm not quoting him as an authority. I was merely pointing out that the thing I said, that the Creation suggests the Creator, is something so obvious that even an outright Atheist like Dawkins admits its true.
He's not saying it's true. He's saying it's a reasonable thing for human beings to have concluded.
That makes the point I was defending. All I said was that Creation suggests the Creator. You denied it did. I pointed out that even somebody so Anti-Theistic as Dawkins concedes it does. And you, as you said, are not as extremely opposed to Theism as Dawkins. You're more agnostic, and so ought to be more open to that admission than he -- not less -- one would think.
In fact, I can see you don't know what a "social contract" actually is.
That's low!
I'm not being "low." It's evidently true, and I needed to point it out because you accused me of conforming to a "social contract." I don't know how I could dismiss that alllegation without correcting the misunderstanding you articulated.
And then, when I point out the fact that "social contractarianism" is a mere heuristic, and not one Theists believe, you actually say,
I know.
Well, if you knew that, then it's very hard to see why you made the allegation in the first place, surely. You are then admitting you know you were blaming something I couldn't possibly believe for the existence of my beliefs. That doesn't make a ton of sense.
Look, I get that you're somewhat urgent to find a way to dismiss what I'm saying. And I take that without ire. I understand that it's easy, even natural, to resort to something
ad hominem, such as "Well, his parents were Christians, so he must be indoctrinated, and therefore, what he says can never be right anyway," or "He's in thrall to some sort of indoctrination from the social past," or something like that. It allows one to dismiss
in toto that which one finds difficult to address or refute
In detail. I get that.
But it's worth considering this:
the truth of a speaker's utterance is not dependent on the character of the speaker. If I shout "Fire" and you say, "Yeah, well, I don't believe you," that does not tell you whether or not your house is actually on fire. You might burn anyway. You should check, and establish the truth of my outcry independent of your assessment of me.
To put it another way, even the Devil has to tell the truth sometimes. A lying lawyer, being deliberately deceptive, has to tell a lot of truth, in fact, in order to make his lies the less detectable. So were I nothing but a fount of lies and indoctrination, that would still not tell you which of my particular claims were true, and which were lies. You would still need good reasons for accepting or rejecting any proposition I offered, or you would be at risk of dismissing something true on nothing more than the shaky grounds that you didn't trust the speaker.
Which you can do. If you don't trust me to say what I believe or report what is true, there's probably little point in us talking at all, of course. But I'm hopeful, as I said above, that we can be mutually respectful and hear each other out. And I'm optimistic you can see the fairness of that.
Not a bit, actually. I'm actually quite skeptical of "experiences." I know they can be induced by all sorts of means. And I have a great understanding of this phenomenon we call "postmodernity," and have little sympathy with it, in most regards. For one thing, I'm far more committed to the existence of objective truth and objective morality than any postmodern account would allow. And there are other differences.