Must non-cognitivists engage in Babylonian orgies?
Posted by diogenes on 2025-May-6 05:15:13, TuesdayIn reply to I can't resist posted by LaudateAgno on 2025-May-5 21:06:00, Monday
|
"To condemn evil as evil, to believe evil exists, is to invoke and to appeal to the greater reality of an absolute Good that opposes and condemns that evil. Make that appeal, and there you are, pointing your thumb to a greater God beside you." You slide from good to absolute Good and from absolute Good to God, as if there is no difference between them. God in orthodox Christianity is a person, or rather three persons. God has personality and agency. In the Bible he acts in all sorts of ways. Good, on the other hand, is an adjective. To say that Good spoke to Job is like saying that Felinity plays a game of football. I do not find your assertion of identity between all these concepts intelligible. I certainly do make moral judgements, and I don't see why I shouldn't. I don't see why my philosophical belief that my moral judgements are no more than the expression of my passions should entail that I shouldn't have these passions. Of course, the independence of ethics from meta-ethics is a philosophical issue that has been much disputed. A. J. Ayer (with whom I agree on these issues) once had the following exchange with the philosopher A. C. Ewing: My views on moral philosophy had undergone no fundamental change since I first published Language, Truth and Logic, though I did devote more care to their development in an article entitled ‘On the Analysis of Moral Judgements’ which I published in Horizon in 1949, after previously delivering it as a lecture to a Cambridge undergraduate society. One of the distinctions which I drew was that between meta-ethics (the theory of the status of moral judgements) and ethics proper and I argued that disagreement in the sphere of meta-ethics made very little difference to people’s moral conduct. When the mild Dr Ewing, the only senior philosopher in my audience, contested this assertion, I basely resorted to an argumentum ad hominem. ‘Surely, Dr Ewing,’ I said, ‘if I were to persuade you of the truth of my contention that ethical judgements are not cognitive, you would not engage in Babylonian orgies.’ ‘Yes I would,’ he replied without hesitation, bringing the house down to my discomfiture.  |
Follow ups: