The difficulty of arguing for an objective morality is not necessarily an argument against the validity of such a pursuit, since moral anti-realism, in its different forms, is also difficult to argue for. Furthermore, there is a sense in which we feel quite strongly, more so than we do for our taste in music, say, that morality is objective, and that one can be wrong about it. This feeling is almost as strong as the conviction that the chair exists, despite there being no inarguable philosophical argument in its favour.

But it must be confessed that the nature of moral objectivity, if it is not just an illusion, is very different from the fact of Newton’s laws or of 2 and 2 equalling 4. I would instead argue for what I call an evolutionary moral pragmatism, which aims to render the metaethical question of objectivity and subjectivity irrelevant, and strives rather to find the objectively best morality under certain conditions and based on certain premisses which are taken to be reasonable and easily agreed upon, in the same way that the objectively best medical operation is one which most effectively cures the given ailment, regardless of one’s eccentric taste for a different kind of success.  There is nothing in medicine that can impel a doctor to undertake an operation correctly other than the possibility of losing his job, an outcome which medicine itself cannot render undesirable. [Read more →]

Is theft really so bad? Perhaps, but only if ownership is so good.

In the last discussion, it did not appear to take too long, or require too much marshalling of evidence, to conclude that no moral system can sustain the instinct to murder: either the species dies out, or the instinct does. However, it turns out that this instinct may be the only one that can be dealt with so summarily, since it is the only one that deals directly with survival. When dealing with theft, we are instantly confronted with a problem of definition. The connotations of the word “theft” are too strong to use without question. It would perhaps be more accurate to think of theft as one kind of taking, and specifically one which implies the existence of, and tacit social agreement to, the idea of ownership. [Read more →]

I just took a look at Sam Harris’s now-slightly-infamous TED talk (above), and had a little flick through a subsequent piece in the Huffington Post, and was rather interested in what he had to say. Interested, because I had thought it was the cast-iron consensus among educated peoples to speak of morality in relative terms, or at the very most to concede that it is such a difficult subject that we can’t reasonably hope to get to the bottom of it. Even if this were the correct view, I have always thought it a somewhat frustrating one—if you cannot prove you are right, on what basis can you assert that you are right? Clearly, relativists must think this too, but opt for a different route at the fork. [Read more →]

Can art ever be truly timeless? It’s an almost universally accepted idea we have of great art that if it is truly great, it will “stand the test of time”. What does that mean, exactly? Simply that it still appears just as fresh, insightful and powerful as it did when it was first created. The point we can infer from that is that these great works of art are not slaves to fashion, but strike somewhere near the heart of human nature, which is unchanging over thousands of years—a fact which we know primarily from the classics. When we read an old play that is a relic more than it is a classic, that is usually because the artist was so seduced by some particular artistic fashion that was sweeping his part of the world at the time, that he forsook a true depiction of human nature in its favour. That seduction must be strong, because proportionally speaking, the amount of classics the world has produced is close to nil. [Read more →]