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.
Some philosophers, driven by the desire to develop a more scientific approach to morality, have constructed whole systems of 'evolutionary ethics'. For such thinkers, the fact that humanity’s conscience and moral feelings are the product of evolution requires that ethics should be pursued from an evolutionary rather than a religious or even a philosophical point of view. The problem that all such schemes encounter is that there is more to ethics than following nature. Even if it can be shown that we are endowed with a particular 'natural' instinct by our evolutionary history, that observation does not get us any closer to answering the ethical question of whether it is right to follow that instinct. Presumably the instincts that incline people towards violence, theft, and adultery have evolutionary origins too. Whichever interpretation of evolutionary biology we care to endorse, it is perfectly clear (as it has been to moral philosophers through the ages) that human beings are born with the propensity both to seek their own good and also the good of (at least some) others. The question of whether the altruistic instinct, for instance, is a natural one is completely separate from the question of whether it is one that we should follow, and to what extent.
Sayfa 121 - Oxford University Press
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—...
Sayfa 212
Kant'ın Ahlak Yasasının Platon'daki Kökleri
"What would happen if everybody behaved like that?" When I do something, it is as if I were giving everyone else my permission to do the same, and I have to consider the consequences of that, not just of my individual action. The German Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), some would say the most influential philosopher of modern times, made this the basic principle of morality (though he found a rather more complicated way of stating it). We have all heard of it, we have all had it thrown at us, and here it is popping up in 400 BC.
["Herkes böyle davransaydı ne olurdu?" Bir şey yaptığımda, bu, herkese yaptığımın aynısının yapılabileceğine dair izin vermektir ve sadece kendi eylemimin değil, bunun sonuçlarını [da] değerlendirmek zorundayım. Kimilerinin modern zamanın en etkileyici filozofu olarak gördüğü, bir Alman olan Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), bunu (her ne kadar ifade etmek için daha karmaşık bir yol bulsa da) ahlaklılığın en temel ilkesi haline getirdi. İşte hepimizin hakkında duyum sahibi olduğu, hepimizin bir kez olsun kulağına çalınmış olan bu argüman MÖ 400'de pat diye çıkıverdi karşımıza.]
Sayfa 18 - Oxford University PressKitabı okudu
Plantinga'nın Natüralizme Karşı Evrimsel Argümanı Nedir? - William Lane Craig; youtu.be/DULG8BsA6so
William Lane Craig, Talbot İlahiyat Okulu'nda Felsefe profesörü ve Houston Baptist Üniversitesi'nde Felsefe profesörüdür. O ve karısı Jan'ın iki yetişkin çocuğu var. Lisede bir genç olarak on altı yaşında, ilk Hıristiyan müjdesinin mesajını