Re: What could make morality objective?
Posted: Sun Oct 13, 2024 8:10 pm
Ah, yes, Henry faces an ancient problem all legislators and lawmakers face; that of qualifying their morality and their rules with something more, something heavier and more imposing than their own authority. Without this qualification, their rules and prohibitions aren't as easily accepted by the governed. A king is just a man, like me, to hell with his rules, etc.
What a civilization needed was a logical ground and foundation for morality and ethics that had more muscle than a single priest or emperor's opinion. It had to be either a secular materialistic positivistic grounding like something Hobbesean of that sort or an idealism of some variety that grounded morality in platonic and aristotlean-like virtue facts and forms.
Note that the positivistic stage beginning maybe with Bacon opened up the alternative philosophical theories of ethics that would take the place of religious platonism and fill the gap left by Democritean materialism's killing and removing god.
Kant, for example. The first yuge philosophical endeavor to make objective morals without being able to rely on the decree of a god to do it.
What a civilization needed was a logical ground and foundation for morality and ethics that had more muscle than a single priest or emperor's opinion. It had to be either a secular materialistic positivistic grounding like something Hobbesean of that sort or an idealism of some variety that grounded morality in platonic and aristotlean-like virtue facts and forms.
Note that the positivistic stage beginning maybe with Bacon opened up the alternative philosophical theories of ethics that would take the place of religious platonism and fill the gap left by Democritean materialism's killing and removing god.
Kant, for example. The first yuge philosophical endeavor to make objective morals without being able to rely on the decree of a god to do it.