Reason and Morality

Abstract

IN A profoundly beautiful but disturbingly perplexing passage in the Bible, God speaks darkly our knowledge good and evil. The narrative runs follows: And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, 'Of every tree the garden thou mayest freely eat: but the tree the knowledge good and thou shalt not eat it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.' Knowledge good and we are told, will open our eyes and we shall be gods. Possessing such knowledge, man would become wise. In the biblical narrative there is even the anxiety that man might well take hold of the tree life and eat thereof and live forever. The temptation to be as gods, knowing good and evil, is not only the temptation Faust, but also man's perennial moral predicament. God cast Adam and Eve from the garden for eating the forbidden fruit. Moral knowledge is essential for wise action; yet knowledge the secrets the springs good and evil may bring us, so some have felt, in league with the Devil. Every age reads its myths differently. Modern man is heir to the perennial moral predicament, but he is heir to it in a unique manner. The secrets nature are increasingly ours, but the secrets good and evil remain hidden. Modern professors physics would not dream using the works Kepler, Galileo, or Newton textbooks, but in moral philosophy the student goes back much farther to read Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, whose works are read not museum pieces but real sources wisdom about how we should act, live, and die. The situation is further complicated by the fact that we seem to be gaining knowledge good and evil from another quite different source. Psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, social psychologists, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists are slowly winning this knowledge human nature. Specialists from these disciplines, working singly and in interdisciplinary teams, are slowly amassing reliable predictive knowledge about man and his place in nature. The skeptic might well remark that human nature is too complicated ever to be put in a formula. But we are slowly gaining testable knowledge the nature the exceedingly complicated animal we call the human animal. With the sense fallibility and the modesty that is always a part true science, some knowledge why we act we do is being garnered. Part modern man's moral pre-