Post by Josh on Nov 15, 2010 17:28:31 GMT -8
"When people argue and say things like, “Come on, you promised…” or “it’s not fair for you to take cuts in line”, the person saying them “ is not merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: “To hell with your standard”. Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but the could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show the other man is in the wrong.”
-C.S. Lewis
Read more: www.aletheia.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=morality&action=display&thread=608#ixzz15P9BDMgE
The thoughts I was trying to convey in my last two posts on the other thread bring me back full circle in this whole conversation to C.S. Lewis' original point:
When people argue about moral situations they instinctively argue not about their preferences but about who is ultimately right and wrong, as if there is an impartial arbiter observing them. They argue about who would be to blame or who has the moral high ground in a particular situation.
To the materialist, all this is illusory. It should be just a discussion about how person A's decisions affect person B's own values subjective to their own individual criteria.
But that's not how people naturally argue. I think observation bears out that only people who have been taught to doubt and devalue the objective aspect of their own moral instincts argue that way.
Where did this instinct come from? Is it a biological evolutionary mechanism to gain the upper hand over your opponents in an argument? I don't think so because it arguably creates more limitations and problems for the individual than it does in helping them with their opponents. Is it a societal convention? A relic from our superstitous past? Or is it part and parcel of our nature? We have ears for a purpose: hearing things outside ourselves. We have tongues for tasting the objective universe (or at least parts of it
We have a moral sense because we were made to interact morally with the outside world. Or at least that's what I think.
Mo, we're doing a good job (I think) at laying out the alternatives.
-C.S. Lewis
Read more: www.aletheia.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=morality&action=display&thread=608#ixzz15P9BDMgE
The thoughts I was trying to convey in my last two posts on the other thread bring me back full circle in this whole conversation to C.S. Lewis' original point:
When people argue about moral situations they instinctively argue not about their preferences but about who is ultimately right and wrong, as if there is an impartial arbiter observing them. They argue about who would be to blame or who has the moral high ground in a particular situation.
To the materialist, all this is illusory. It should be just a discussion about how person A's decisions affect person B's own values subjective to their own individual criteria.
But that's not how people naturally argue. I think observation bears out that only people who have been taught to doubt and devalue the objective aspect of their own moral instincts argue that way.
Where did this instinct come from? Is it a biological evolutionary mechanism to gain the upper hand over your opponents in an argument? I don't think so because it arguably creates more limitations and problems for the individual than it does in helping them with their opponents. Is it a societal convention? A relic from our superstitous past? Or is it part and parcel of our nature? We have ears for a purpose: hearing things outside ourselves. We have tongues for tasting the objective universe (or at least parts of it
We have a moral sense because we were made to interact morally with the outside world. Or at least that's what I think. Mo, we're doing a good job (I think) at laying out the alternatives.