|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
A Discourse on Morality
| Article
# : |
11005 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1993 |
2,802 Words |
| Author
: |
Lloyd Eby
Lloyd Eby has worked in film and video since 1970 and has
published articles on the interaction of film and religion.
With René Berger, he coedited the book Art
and Technology (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1986).
He is assistant senior editor in the Currents in Modern
Thought
section of The World & I. |
THE MORAL SENSE
James Q. Wilson
New York: The Free Press, 1993
313 pp., $22.95
Of late, moral theory has taken a battering. Many people have lost confidence in speaking about ethics or morality, and most college students now profess a thoroughgoing ethical relativism, denying the possibility of any rationally defensible universal ethics. Moral discourse seems to have become either unfashionable or stridently partisan. Why has this happened? Almost certainly because of what we have learned from influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectuals who have expounded on the topic.
Leading English-speaking philosophers of ethics, such as Richard Rorty and Alasdair Maclntyre, have now concluded that (1) there is no universally valid answer to such fundamental moral questions as "Why not be cruel?"; (2) talk of virtue is now passé; and (3) the existence of widely differing, incompatible, and even incommensurable ethical views has so fragmented ethical investigation as to have rendered impossible the search for ethical consistency or universality. Earlier in the twentieth century, the influence of positivism in philosophy led to widespread acceptance of the conclusion that ethical statements, instead of stating anything about the world outside the observer, were merely expressions of the commentator's emotion and without any evidential or other import, much like saying "Ugh!" or "Wow!" after tasting a new food. Kantian-type ethical views based on universally willable rules and on disinterested duty, and consequentialist or utilitarian-type theories based on maximizing happiness for the greatest number of people, have both foundered on seemingly insurmountable philosophical flaws.
The sciences, too, have seemed to undermine the possibility of genuinely normative ethical discourse or investigation. Charles Darwin seemed to prove that we are the product of a competition for survival among what the contemporary Darwinist Richard Dawkins has called "selfish genes" acting on material circumstances, and that morals or ethics is entirely utilitarian and self-centered. Sigmund Freud seemed to demonstrate that we are shaped by repressed sexual and other impulses leading to guilt and that we should overcome this guilt if we are to flourish. Karl Marx seemed to show that we are the product of material-economic forces and that society with its ideologies and moral views and principles--what Marx called the superstructure--is merely an expression of those underlying economic circumstances.
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
