nature, pleasing rhetoric and anthropological fact
Posted by kit on 2026-February-6 07:53:19, FridayIn reply to Re: Values in a materialist universe posted by diogenes on 2026-February-6 05:18:00, Friday
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Thank you for your generosity - I appreciate the opportunity to argue these points among friends. Among friends, however, I am often quite vehement in argument, and I hope you will forgive me if my tone is in places intemperate in what follows. I think you have misunderstood what I'm arguing here on several points. Firstly, I do think your morality requires justification, precisely because I don't think morality can possibly be a matter of individual preference or idiosyncratic taste in the way that you seem to suggest (at least, not if it is to be "morality" in any meaningful sense). Moral judgments are always social -- even if they are social in the curious, crepuscular way that BoyChat provides a moral society for the outcasts of our culture. Without a community of some sort for boylovers, there wouldn't even be a moral language to articulate the ethics of boylove (whatever that might mean). On our own, we are just perverts tossed about by inarticulate and meaningless desires. And not only is justification of morality possible, I would suggest that it is urgently necessary. There are so many pathological, amoral dissidents in our age (I won't embarrass them by naming them all here) that "morality" - if it is to mean anything at all - appears to be in urgent need both of definition and of defence. To be absolutely clear, I utterly reject Hume: yes is and ought are totally, inextricably, self-evidently related. I'm a little surprised I even have to make this explicit. How could you possibly think I would think otherwise? Hume is wrong. Here and always. If I ever agree with David Hume about anything, I hope somebody will have the decency to strangle me with a sporran. I am not sure quite why you require me to bridge a gulf of which I deny the very existence. Obviously I cannot do so, any more than I can require you to swim the raging torrent between Fleet Street and the Strand. Also, to clarify further, I do not accept your interpretation of the so-called Euthyphro Dilemma. (Nor, I think, would Plato have accepted it.) You say: God commands what is good, but this is not a mere tautology; therefore, the good is independent of what God commands. But Christians, who have been well aware of the Euthyphro for as long as Christianity has existed, do not find themselves wriggling on the tines of this supposed dilemma at all. It is not that a standard of goodness can exist independently of God, but rather that nothing at all conceivably exists independently of God. Goodness is of the very nature of God, and so all that is created from God is by its nature good and true and beautiful as well. This follows onto your next point: it is of course not that I argue, as you suppose, that "pain is an illusion." That - at least in its crudest from - would be a singularly discomfiting Gospel and a very bleak prescription indeed. How mad do you think I am? My point is not that pain is an "illusion," but that in ontological terms it manifests a failure of created relatity - a gaping wound in what is truly real. My point is an ontological, not a phenomenological one. This would likely seem abstract to the sufferer (and I would hardly try to impress it on him), but to the tranquil philosopher or to the theologian the point should be relatively clear: not that we don't experience evil as real (much less that we could just think our way out of it if we tried hard enough), but that what we rightly experience as evil doesn't properly belong to the world in the way that love and goodness and peace do. So this is where I indeed disagree with you: evil is not, in fact, "as real as good." Quite the contrary, nothing that is not good is truly real. And that (I take it) is where Christian values come from, and David Hume "and most analytic philosophers ever since" can suck a sausage. If all this seems odd or peculiar or muddle-headed to you, it might be because Analytic Philsophers (Peace Be Upon Them) have been singularly dismissive of the Platonic tradition since about 1641. You argue that human beings are social aniamals. A venerable argument indeed: ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον! But - to be frank - I don't see any particular reason to believe you. The Greeks, after all, who gave us the idea of humankind as a "political animal" also gifted us an example of singularly dysfunctional societies founded on continual competition and the destructive pursuit of personal glory. Again, I put it to you: your idea of human nature and human societies is singularly optimistic. I do not think that the misery and wretchedness of history bears it out. Who is being blind to the reality of evil now? I emphatically do not think that "the moral dimension of human behaviour is natural," (on the contrary, it is always "supernatural"), but I also do not think that "logical justification for moral behaviour is ... only possible on a religious basis. Or at least, it depends what you mean by "religious." I certainly do not think you necessarily need a sense of God to have a "justification for moral behaviour." But "logical"? In truth I think there is no "logic" at all outside of theological language, so I can politely acknowledge your justifications without having to accept that they have the slightest validity. Nor do I think, as you suppose, that without religious insight "humans would be rationally compelled to engage in a life of murder and rapine," though indeed without "religion" (broadly construed!) there is certainly nothing that could possibly prevent unregenerate humankind from this. And even with the gft of "religion", humanity has certainly been - as Hillary Clinton might put it - "a hard dog to keep on the porch." "Religion" is not exactly what I'm talking about here (it's a completely meaningless word), but this is the language you are using so I'll try to meet you half-way. Anyone who uses other language seems to risk standing accused of being "muddle-headed" - the worst crime for analytic philosophers (except when they do it)! Maybe Dworkin's tepid, godless "religion" makes the grade for this final stand against nihilism, but this is a last-ditch defence of old men armed with brooms and callow boys defending themselves with school satchels. Finally, you say: "The onus is on you to show both that ethics has a metaphysical ground, and that this ground (in contrast to Dworkin's claim) must be theistic. " The first point I take to be axiomatic: as we like to say, "wherever your treasure is, there your heart will be also." That is, whatever view of ethics you decide to privilege (and I must admit I am utterly unpersuaded by yours) will open a window onto whatever it is you imagine to be real. Your seems to me to be a complete fantasy land: both ethically (I am sorry to say, because in many ways I like it) and ontologically. To answer your second point, I certainly do not think that a coherent ethics "must be theistic". Far from it. My deep admiration for Nietzsche and for his haunting ethical vision should dispel this illusion. Ethics most certainly does not have to be theistic. But if you choose a godless ethics, you have to live with whatever frightful shades emerge from it. You may have to sleep with terrifying dreams. |
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