My Frustration with Ethics
Ethics is at once my favourite and least liked area of inquiry, especially ethics courses. One such course was an ‘introductory’ Bioethics course I took last year; a course which familiarized and focused on Utilitarianism, Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and Virtue Ethics in relation to the ‘problems’ of Bioethics. The problem is that ethics as it’s currently practiced is impossible, and it frustrates me. The result is that I’ve taken to reading books on ethics (and virtue) and the outlook looks fairly bleak.
It was a common requirement of my Bioethics course to examine different issues from the perspectives of at least two moral theories. I usually chose Utilitarianism and Kant’s Categorical Imperative (I think now I would run to Virtue Ethics first). The problem that makes ethics impossible is that there doesn’t seem the possibility of consensus — by this I mean progress, or one ethical formulation being superior … (Read more)
The Myth of Moral Relativism
Peter Kreeft warns that relativism is the single most important issue of our age; for the society that adopts relativism, collapse is not too far behind. The question is then why has the West adopted, by and large, this philosophy of relativism? The reason, says Allan Bloom, is that “the relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it.… Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness — and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face various ways of life and kinds of human beings — is the great insight of our times“1. Tolerance necessarily requires moral relativism.
As my title would suggest, I believe there is a significant … (Read more)
Morality as a fiction
Over the past couple of days I’ve been writing a post on relative and absolute morality (and it’s been very slow in coming, I’m having some difficulty writing it… Or in wanting to write it) and I encountered the following quote by Mussolini which I thought was very interesting (it was brought to my attention by Peter Kreeft in one of this lectures). In any case, I don’t think relativism necessarily leads to fascism (though I imagine if not fascism then something equally worse), however, Mussolini’s words should still worry us.
Everything I have said and done is these last years is relativism, by intuition. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology, and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he … (Read more)
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