Heather:\u00a0 Thus spurred, I took another look at Brooks’ column. The dubious stuff is down towards the end.<\/p>\n
The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality\u00a0\u2026 challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved\u00a0in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That is just really bad writing\u00a0\u2014 though of the kind that anyone who writes much for a living commits once in a while. He seems to\u00a0mean that the New Atheists are trying to put morality on a rational basis\u00a0\u2014 a sort of “moral calculus” in the style of Leibnitz\u00a0(? was it Leibnitz? I can never keep my philosophers straight). That’s not what they’re up to at all, though. Their objection to religion is not so\u00a0much rational as empirical<\/em>. And Brooks seems not to grasp that you can reason about<\/em> emotions\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n
The New Atheists are<\/em> “challenged” by current human-nature studies, but only because they are all lefties, yoked to the “blank slate”\u00a0\u00a0model of human personality and the Boasian “psychic unity of mankind” anthropological framework. They are not\u00a0challenged in their atheism, only in their leftism. The political Left is all about social engineering; and the results coming out of the human\u00a0sciences tell us that social engineering is mostly futile.<\/p>\n
Brooks again:<\/p>\n
Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about\u00a0harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not\u00a0ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual\u00a0responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in\u00a0itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Why would the evolutionary approach make it “hard to appreciate” that “most people struggle toward goodness”? If goodness\u00a0\u2014 restraint, respect, self-cultivation, etc.\u00a0\u2014 is what makes social life work, natural\u00a0selection will take care of seeing that most of us strive towards goodness as an end. That’s our social nature, part of our human nature. It is\u00a0perfectly consonant with the evolutionary approach. Likewise with the emotions he’s talking about there. It’s no more surprising that moral\u00a0behavior brings forth happy feelings than it is that sexual intercourse does so. They both keep the species going.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Heather:\u00a0 Thus spurred, I took another look at Brooks’ column. The dubious stuff is down towards the end. The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality\u00a0\u2026 challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved\u00a0in a war of … Continue reading