Sunday-School Morality

[coberst]

Sunday-School Morality

Where, in American culture, is the domain of knowledge that we would identify as morality studied and taught?

I suspect that if we do not quickly develop a science of morality that will make it possible for us to live together on this planet in a more harmonious manner our technology will help us to destroy the species and perhaps the planet soon.

It seems to me that we have given the subject matter of morality primarily over to religion. It also seems to me that if we ask the question ‘why do humans treat one another so terribly?’ we will find the answer in this moral aspect of human culture.

The ‘man of maxims’ “is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality—without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.” George Eliot The Mill on the Floss

We can no longer leave this important matter in the hands of the Sunday-school. Morality must become a top priority for scientific study.

[Moontanman]

I agree coberst, morality is far too important to left in the hands of any religion. all Judea/Christian/Muslim religions always say we are right and if everyone would follow our view the world would be a great place but until then we'll struggle, fight and even go to war to show how much better our views really are. Religion has in the past been a source of much good and much evil. We as a civilization need to get past religious squabbling and go forward with out the superstitious clap trap of the past. Religion has become nothing but a source of conflict, fear, and guilt. Changing this to a more humanistic approach should be a priority of the human race. Sadly I fear this change would be resisted as fiercely as any religion and again lead us to conflict, I have no way to resolve this problem in the short term.

[HydrogenBond]

There are two side to human nature. We have a rational side and an irrational side. Subjectivity and irrational impulses are two aspects of the irrational side. The higher the ratio of irrational to rational the more morality is needed in the form of commands since logic may not be possible for internal self censor. Such laws try to doing the thinking for you.

For example, if someone has the irrational impulse to jump off a bridge, their own rational side would look at terminal velocity and the pancake affect and over ride the irrational impulse. There is no need for moral law here, since this can be done internally, with logic and common sense. If people started to get so irrational that they were jumping off the bridge by the dozens each day, since reason is not checking the impulse, we may need to post "thou shall not jump off the bridge". In this case, instead of reason, a simple one liner is use, which even an irrational person can muster.

There are other types of irrational impulse, that is not as dangerous or can even be innocuous. In this case, we can use reason to check the impulse or justify the impulse. For example, the pervert has an impulse to do the odd thing. They may justify this using the logic of an Epicurean philosophy. Or they may decide to use the reasons of different philosophy and check this impulse. To each his/her own.

This former is one hazard of a purely rational approach to morality. If the rational system increases the ratio of irrational, using good reasoning, there is less internal rational censor, in proportion to the irrational.

If you look at religious morality it tries to check all irrational even innocuous irrational. The only irrationally allowed focuses on the faith. The irony is an irrational system is being used to check the irrational, resulting in fewer ways to rationalize the irrational. In terms of history it helped to shift the ratio closer to reason, since it reduced the ratio of irrational. Reason has opened up more access to irrational since former irrational things which were not allowed are now more allowable. Many of these irrational are innocuous, but it may have increased the ratio of irrational.