He approaches this task through an in-depth examination of the beginning of Pirkei Avot, raising topics such as: the sources of ethics, power and persuasion, elitism and democracy, educational philosophy, study and action, freedom and coercion, and more. There follow essays on a variety of related themes, including charity and fellowship, law and ethics, styles of religious observance, and the centrality of humility in Jewish life. Maggid Books is honored to bring these hitherto unpublished essays to a long-awaiting public.
morality essays
First, most systems of morality are inherently totalising. Adhering to them consistently is impossible, and so each system is forced into incoherence by setting arbitrary limits to its own scope. Second, our preoccupation with morality distorts the force of our reasons to act, by effecting among them a triage that results in some reasons being counted twice over. Third, the intellectual acrobatics invoked to justify this double counting commit us to insoluble and therefore idle theoretical debates. Fourth, the psychological power of moral authority can promote deplorable systems of evaluation as easily as good ones. And fifth, the emotions cultivated by a preoccupation with morality encourage self-righteousness and masochistic guilt.
In short, many things are neither legally compulsory nor forbidden. But morality is not so restrained: a system of morality can, like God, claim total authority over every action and even every thought. Such a totalising system would seem oppressively intrusive. Yet the leading theories of morality can mitigate their overreach only by setting arbitrary limits to their own relevance.
And it works: the threat of hell (though not the promise of heaven) turns out to be a good motivator. Without God, however, the moral terrorism that relies on hell loses some leverage. And anyway, most moralists are reluctant to equate morality with fear of punishment. Still, morality hardly retreats. The most commonly defended systems of morality, when taken to their logical conclusion, extend their tentacles to every choice. Just as venial sins can be forgiven, so in practice some acts are exempt from moral scrutiny. But that is only in virtue of ad hoc intellectual acrobatics with which moral systems insulate themselves from their more repugnant implications.
In the end, then, in each moral system, some space is typically protected from the tyranny of totalising morality only by making arbitrary concessions about realms of life that are deemed insufficiently important to need controlling. The price paid is inconsistency.
Perhaps, given our fallible nature, inconsistency in a moral system is a defect we must live with. But that would still leave the institution of morality open to my second charge: the double counting of some reasons.
As the philosopher Joel Marks has argued before me, to renounce morality is to wake up to the fact that in every choice we are governed by desires. Some desires are for something we just want for itself; others are for ways or means of satisfying those. All constitute or are grounded in reasons to act. Those reasons can be almost exactly those that move a moralist. I merely forgo that added layer of pseudo-reasons that lets some of them count twice. I have perfectly good reasons for my desire not to cause harm, not to act unfairly, or to be kind. These reasons derive both from my first-order reasons and from my reflection on them. They matter not because of morality, but because I care.
People always emphasize morality all over the world. While a lot of people have different considerations for what is wrong and what is right, a lot of people have loosened their morality cords over the years. A lot of things are now acceptable in the society while a long time ago they were forbidden.
Good morals will always develop better generations to come. But when morality keeps getting diluted, the generations to come will not have a clear distinction between right and wrong. How long before other generations start to live like wild animals in human flesh?
Good morals preserve the world. When we uphold morality, there will be no problems such as violence, dishonesty, hatred, abuse at any level, disregard for others, human trafficking, murder, and so on.
These essays represent Hare's thinking on a range of contemporary issues in political morality, including political obligation, terrorism, morality and war, rights, quality, and the environment. Three of the essays are previously unpublished.
The CUNY Ethics and Morality Essay Contest is funded by an endowment gift of $100,000 to the City University of New York by Dr. K. York Chynn and his wife Noelle Chynn. This annual award is intended to promote and stimulate thinking by college students at CUNY about the topic of ethics, morality, and virtuous behavior in their lives.
Nietzsche opens by expressing dissatisfaction with the English psychologists who have tried to explain the origin of morality. They claim to be historians of morality, but they completely lack a historical spirit. Their theories suggest that, originally, people benefiting from the unegoistic actions of others would applaud those actions and call them "good." That is, initially, what was good and what was useful were considered one and the same. Over time, these genealogists suggest, we forgot this original association, and the habit of calling unegoistic actions "good" led us to conclude that they were somehow good in and of themselves.
Other essays questioned whether well-being is a concept that can be used to measure or rank moral systems, customary practices, etc., objectively. Although the authors pursued this question in a variety of ways, most did not deny that whatever might be encompassed by the concept of well-being is of some relevance when we try to evaluate or influence moral systems. They did, however, see various limits to how far we can employ the concept. Unfortunately, this brief report is not the place for me to try to settle the issues.
To be fair, The Moral Landscape addresses some of the problems that arise here, though of course many entrants to the competition argued that it does so inadequately. Again, complex issues surfaced in the essays, as they do in the book itself, and they will need to be explored on another occasion.
This unique collection of essays has two main purposes. The first is to honour the pioneering work of Cora Diamond, one of the most important living moral philosophers and certainly the most important working in the tradition inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second is to develop and deepen a picture of moral philosophy by carrying out new work in what Diamond has called the realistic spirit.
Many philosophers believe that normative ethics is in principle independent of psychology. By contrast, the authors of these essays explore the interconnections between psychology and moral theory. They investigate the psychological constraints on realizable ethical ideals and articulate the psychological assumptions behind traditional ethics. They also examine the ways in which the basic architecture of the mind, core emotions, patterns of individual development, social psychology, and the limits on human capacities for rational deliberation affect morality.
Soloviev's written work is extensive, and Wozniuk faced difficult choices in assembling this collection. I believe that he made an excellent decision when he devoted half of the book to two parts of Soloviev's work which are important, never before translated, and generally overlooked even by students of Russian intellectual history. The first of these is the "Sunday Letters," a collection of twenty-two short newspaper essays published in 1897 and 1898. In these short pieces, Soloviev commented on Russian social and political life from the point of view of a Christian intellectual. For example, he criticized the government for the forced Russification of non-Russians and the religious persecution of the non-Orthodox, and he argued in favor of academic freedom and an expanded public role for women. The second work was first published in 1897 under the title Law and Morality: Essays in Applied Ethics. In this book, which was intended to complement Justification of the Good, Soloviev laid out his theory of the relationship between morality and criminal law: "law is the coercive requirement of the realization of a certain minimal good or of an order that does not allow a certain extreme manifestation of evil" (p 148). Here he also argued that the death penalty was not only useless in deterring crime, but also "spiritually harmful" to society because it was "a profane, inhumane, and shameful act" (p. 179). 2ff7e9595c
Comments