Nascent Thinker | Contemplations Along The Way

Moral Foundations #1

Over the past cou­ple of days I had a pleas­ant con­ver­sa­tion with a math­e­mati­cian (actu­ally, a Ger­man math­e­mati­cian, if that makes any dif­fer­ence) con­cern­ing the foun­da­tions of morality–what are they? And one thing that was even­tu­ally brought up was my the­ist lean­ings, and his a-theist lean­ings. I, of course, was accused of being a moral abso­lutist and unable to make any mean­ing­ful moral state­ments. I in turn pres­sured him to pro­vide a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the exis­tence of moral­ity apart from our per­cep­tions (does our belief in moral­ity cor­re­spond to some­thing in real­ity). To make mat­ters “worse,” we were approach­ing the ques­tion — and each other — with com­pletely dif­fer­ent pre­sup­po­si­tions. As near as I could tell, his was a con­ti­nen­tal phi­los­o­phy (which would make sense, I suppose).

In hav­ing this dis­cus­sion, two things occurred to me. The first is that there is a lot of com­mon ground in this “moral … (Read more)