With Good Reason: a debate on the foundations of ethics
By Mark Vernon on Saturday, December 15 2012, 10:10 - Events - Permalink
I took part in a discussion about moral realism with Angus Ritchie and Julian Baggini at the LSE a week or so back, now online as a podcast.
I tried to talk about the moral imagination and moral emotions that draw us on a process of moral discovery, rather than whether there are moral facts. I feel that to ask that question up front is to put the cart before the horse, and leads to a rather dry debate, oddly disconnected from life.
Iris Murdoch's notion of the 'wider horizon' also appeals, her sense that the moral life stands beyond and before us, and is therefore transcendent. In this sense, morality is objective; that the good, beautiful and true is not made by us, but sought by us, and even seeks us.
Comments
Wish I could do my crosswords without feeling that I should instead be striving to evolve to a higher level of consciousness. Should I consider that those doing sand mandalas are morally superior to cruciverbalists? So it is that I sometimes want to say, "Out damn conscience, out!"
Interesting. In discussion, I'd like to see an intersection of moral realism and Newtown.
Reality and human understanding is entirely subjective. Morality and by extension moral action is always a subjective process from the inside out.
The wider horizon is that everything and everyone is in one way or another inter-connected, even instantaneously.
The negative exploitation and killing of human beings by human beings violates the heart in one and all.
The negative exploitation and killing of non human beings by human beings violates the heart in one and all.
The negative exploitation, and progressive degradation, and potential destruction of the fundamental order of the natural environment on which all Earth-life depends violates the heart and directly threatens the life of one and all.
There is no absolute other-power causing things to happen
Countless beings and forces both visible and invisible are causing things to happen.
This is a cause-and-effect cosmos.
The pattern of the cosmos is itself the totality of all causes and effects.
There is no single anything in charge.
Every thing is in charge.
Every one, or space-time located apparently separate point of view, is in charge, as both cause and effect, moment to moment in space-time.
Every one is having an effect on all others, and every one is suffering from the effects of all others.
Unfortunately the only acceptable form of legitimate knowledge in this time and place is defined by the paradigm of scientism. Such knowledge has created a way of being for human beings that is a non-particpatory, abstract, anti-psychic and anti-magical approach to life that actually operates by creating an artificial separation in what is truly a seamless Unity. Unfortunately, the installation of the scientific method as the only acceptable method of knowing about the phenomenal world has been a cultural disaster of the first order, for it enthrones the very error that is human egoity: doubt.
Although they like to pretend otherwise all of the usual advocates of old-time religion are just as much convicted of this unity denying doubt filled paradigm.