[lbo-talk] The misuse of political movements for essentially relig ious ends

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Dec 23 17:19:13 PST 2015


You begin by assuming what is to be argued. "The Good" does not exist, nor does "The Evil." They have no foundation.

Carrol

-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of JOANNA A. Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2015 7:03 PM To: lbo-talk Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] The misuse of political movements for essentially relig ious ends

This is where it feels that we're playing with words because the realms of the good are discontiguous. And why suppose the good must be immutable?

That's why Buddhism is the only thing that has ever made sense to me, because it admits change.

So, ultimately, Lenin and Buddha are right: we have to be as radical as reality.

Joanna

----- Original Message -----

Well, I would go further and argue that not even religion can ground morality even if we do posit the existence of gods because that would take us into the famous Euthyphro Problem which was first outlined in Plato’s dialog with that name (see: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html

Classical theism attempted to solve the problem of providing a foundation for morality by taking God as the foundation. God is the ultimate law giver. But that raises the old question as to whether something is right because God commands it or whether God commands it because it is right? If we opt for the latter, then the commandments of God cannot be the ultimate foundation for morality because there must exist a logically independent morality which we use to judge the rightness of God's commandments. If we opt for the former position, then we risk reducing the proposition that God's commandments are right,to a mere tautology.

A.J. Ayer, for example,in his book "The Central Questions of Philosophy" made that very point, first quoting from Bertrand Russell – "Theologians have always taught that God's decrees are good, and that this is not a mere tautology: it follows that goodness is logically independent of God's decrees. Ayer, himself, then went on to state that, "The point that moral standards can never be justified merely by an appeal to authority, whether that authority is taken to be human or divine. There has to be the additional premiss that the person whose dictates we are to follow is good, or that what he commands is right, and this cannot be the mere tautology that he is what he is, or that he commands what he commands."

Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant http://www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math

---------- Original Message ---------- From: Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com> To: LBO <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] The misuse of political movements for essentially religious ends Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2015 17:50:24 -0500

I fully and enthusiastically agree. That's one thing that drives me batty about a certain breed of atheist ideologues (but by no means all atheists): their insistence that you don't need religion to tell right from wrong. Well, of course you do! Otherwise you're just talking about personal preference, which is fine as far as it goes, but will hardly convince anyone of anything.

The really lazy ones fall back on crude moralistic challenges. "But don't you think that *genocide *is wrong?" Who knows what they even mean. They certainly don't seem to!

My favorite reactionary (who's sharper than a lot of would-be revolutionaries), David Bentley Hart, has written about this at length:

"The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche. How much more immediate and troubling the force of his protest against Christianity seems when compared to theirs, even more than a century after his death. Perhaps his intellectual courage—his willingness to confront the implications of his renunciation of the Christian story of truth and the transcendent good without evasions or retreats—is rather a lot to ask of any other thinker, but it does rather make the atheist chic of today look fairly craven by comparison.

"Above all, Nietzsche understood how immense the consequences of the rise of Christianity had been, and how immense the consequences of its decline would be as well, and had the intelligence to know he could not fall back on polite moral certitudes to which he no longer had any right ..."

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/believe-it-or-not

On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 5:27 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


> Just a side note: my objection to ethical arguments does not apply to
> those whose ethical principles are grounded in religion. In that case
> the ethical arguments have a ground. But when atheists insist that
> politics must have an ethical grounding in mid-air (that is nowhere)
> they reduce politics to mere gut feeling. Ethics as their own ground
> is deeply seated bourgeois ideology.
>
> Carrol
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

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