All these years have made me realise, there are four things in life you can't get too bogged down in: forever, morality, virtue, and life and death.
Insistence can sometimes be a virtue. But if you insist too much on 'forever', your fear of losing someone will blur your vision; if you insist too much on 'morality', it will just become a stubborn obsession, most things are not so black and white; if you insist too much on 'virtue', you will become conceited, and try to change the rules to suit your values; if you insist too much on 'life and death', you're dwelling on the insignificant, and you would just be living a second-rate life.
There are just some things that ought not to be questioned, ought not to be dwelled upon. What's done is done, whether it was right or wrong matters not. Wouldn't you rather think about the future?
Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work. Economics is above all a science of measurement. It com- prises an extraordinarily powerful and flexible set of tools that can re- liably assess a thicket of information to determine the effect of any one factor, or even the whole effect. That’s what “the economy” is, after all: a thicket of information about jobs and real estate and bank- ing and investment. But the tools of economics can be just as easily applied to subjects that are more—well, more interesting.
Even this approach, however, rests on an implied philosophic base, which was voiced occasionally by certain party members. Thanks to these men, Germany’s “secular, bourgeois liberals” can be said to have stood for something intellectually distinctive. What they stood for was eloquently expressed a year before his death by the sociologist Max Weber, a major influence on the social sciences in Germany and one of the Democratic party’s most illustrious founders.
In 1919, a group of students at the University of Munich, agitated by the Weimar Assembly debates and shaken by the violence in the country, invited Weber to address them. The students wanted guidance; they wanted this famous scholar-scientist to tell them what political system to endorse, how to judge values, what role science plays in the quest for truth. “Weber knew what was on their minds,” writes Frederic Lilge. “He also knew that a distrust of rational thought was already abroad, a feeling which at any time might assume alarming proportions.... He therefore decided to impress upon his young audience from the outset the need for sanity and soberness of mind....”They must not, Weber told the students, be taken in by religious dogmatists, or by irrationalist charlatans, left or right, who pretend to offer solutions to the world’s problems. The fact is, he explained, there are no solutions. Certainty is unattainable by man, knowledge is provisional, values are relative, scholars are merely specialists doing technical jobs detached from life, science has nothing to say about morality or politics—...
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Buddhism differed radically from Shinto in a number of ways. First, it was a
“revealed” religion. It had a definite founder in the person of Shakyamuni Siddharta, a prince of the Sakya clan in what is now Nepal. Second, it was concerned with personal morality, salvation, and the afterlife. Third, it was a world religion, in the sense that its message was deliberately aimed at all humankind, not at a specific nation or culture.
Perhaps we should forget about morality, and think about myth, fantasy, appetite, and desire – everything we can safely enjoy on stage, in fiction, on screen; everything that has to be excluded or at least tempered in the rational everyday lives we try to lead ‘outside’. We could add to this Freud’s argument that what appeals to us about great characters on stage is precisely their enormity. All the sex and violence they commit – all their ‘errors’ – act out for us the desires and fears we have to repress. Of course tragic characters are primitive, barbaric, monstrous. They represent all that we have had to overcome in the cause of culture and civilization.
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Genuine morality is doing what is right regardless of what we may be told; religious morality is doing what we are told. Religion’s power gives us strong reasons to do what we’re told.
Kant’s entire system of morality is based upon a rejection of Hume’s claim. For Kant, reason is what makes us capable of morality to begin with.
What exactly does it mean to say that morality depends upon God’s will? Perhaps we mean that God invented morality, just as Samuel Morse invented the telegraph. If Morse had not willed the telegraph, it would not have existed, and thus the telegraph depended upon Morse for its very existence. But the dependence specified in divine command theory must be much stronger than this. Once invented, the telegraph operates independently of Samuel Morse’s will. What divine command theory holds is that God’s will is necessary and sufficient in determining the content of morality – it actually defines it.
At the same time, however, I am reluctant to call a chimpanzee a “moral being.” This is because sentiments do not suffice. We strive for a logically coherent system and have debates about how the death penalty fits arguments for the sanctity of life, or whether an unchosen sexual orientation can be morally wrong. These debates are uniquely human. There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves. The great pioneer of morality research, the Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck, explained that moral emotions are disconnected from one’s immediate situation. They deal with good and bad at a more abstract, disinterested level. This is what sets human morality apart: a move toward universal standards combined with an elaborate system of justification, monitoring, and punishment.
