What is morality?
We are discussing no small matter, but how we ought to live.
Socrates, in Plato’s REPUBLIC (ca. 390 bc)
KİTAPLA İLGİLİ YAZIM VE PROJEM. GAYE DİLEK GEZER
KİTAPLAR ÖLMESİN (DON’T LET THE BOOKS DİE)
Sadece canlılar mı ölür, peki ya kitaplar? Kitapların da bir ruhu yok mudur?
Kitap sektörünün ve yayıncılığın zor günler geçirdiği günümüzde, acilen bir şeyler yapılmazsa eğer kitaplar ölecek ve kültür büyük bir darbe görecektir. Kitapların ölmesi demek, toplumun hafızasının ölmesi demektir ki bu
The Seductive Process
Phase One: Separation—Stirring Interest and Desire
1-Choose the Right Victim:
Everything depends on the target of your seduction. Study your prey thoroughly, and choose only those who will prove susceptible to your charms. The right victims are those for whom you can fill a void, who see in you something exotic.
xiiiKitabı okudu
Morality to wield, or just to own?
Howard: I mean, morality for Eddie is like — what? — like — what? you know — it’s like some terribly worthy old urn, some terribly worthy old urn that’s wrapped up in some towels in his back closet. Well, it’s got a few chips in it, one has to admit, and it is rather ugly, really, if you bother to look at it, and it’s too heavy to lift, and in its style of course it’s totally out of keeping with everything else in the house, so, well, you know, it can’t be used — but ten times a day he has to exclaim, ‘Oh yes, that urn, it’s my great possession, my greatest treasure.’ I mean, it has no function in his own life — none at all — but he loves to have the feeling, ‘Oh yes, this is mine. I’m the sort of person who would own such a thing.’
Bazı ahlâkî yargılarımız biyolojik evrim ürünüdür.
The brain, like the rest of the body, takes time to grow, so I am not arguing that morality is present at birth. What I am proposing, though, is that certain moral foundations are not acquired through learning. They do not come from the mother’s knee, or from school or church; they are instead the products of biological evolution.
It is true that Kant insisted, following Rousseau, that a capacity for rational self-direction belonged to all men; that there could be no experts in moral matters, since morality was a matter not of specialised knowledge (as the Utilitarians and philosophes had maintained), but of the correct use of a universal human faculty; and consequently that what made men free was not acting in certain self-improving ways, which they could be coerced to do, but knowing why they ought to do so, which nobody could do for, or on behalf of, anyone else. But even Kant, when he came to deal with political issues, conceded that no law, provided that it was such that I should, if I were asked, approve it as a rational being, could possibly deprive me of any portion of my rational freedom. With this the door was opened wide to the rule of experts. I cannot consult all men about all enactments all the time. The government cannot be a continuous plebiscite.
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
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.
