Moral Nihilism Research Articles

Jana Pawła II apel o etyczny wymiar globalizacji

In the teaching of John Paul II’s the need of solidarity globalization is particularly stressed out as well as that of humanization of globalization processes. With the aim of doing it, one should be guided by unchanging social values: the truth, freedom, justice, solidarity, subsidiarity, love. The globalization has two faces: ▪ the benefits which it brings to the world, individual countries and its main beneficiaries, that is international corporations. ▪ negative effects which the developing countries and all people of the world experience (climatic changes, emission of harmful substances, drug addiction, moral nihilism, gradual decrease of human importance). It happens that complex processes caused by economical globalization make their way towards changing a human being into an element of a market, a bartered good or a factor devoid of meaning for decisive choices. As a consequence, a person may feel annihilated by impersonal mechanisms on a world’s scale and may gradually lose his own identity and personal dignity. Key words:

Truthiness and consequences in the public use of reason

O artigo mostra que há boas razões para questionar se abordagens embasadas na virtude sobre a questão da justiça podem adequadamente dar conta dos usos sofistas da mentira política – especialmente quando o pensamento sofista estende-se ao ponto culminante do ceticismo moral, ou para além do gritante niilismo moral e seus usos cínicos. A fim de refutar tais usos, recorre-se à mais influente discussão sobre a mentira em Kant, que se encontra em seu artigo de 1797 “Sobre o Suposto Direito de Mentir por causa da Filantropia.” Embora mantenha que o particular argumento moral kantiano contra Constant seja deficiente, o artigo argumenta que a posição especificamente política no argumento jurídico genérico de Kant é defensável. Mostra-se, portanto, que o relato kantiano das condições para a possível conformidade da política com os princípios do Direito efetivamente estabelece que um ato de mentir é passível de impeachment e categoricamente exige o impeachment e a devida execução jurídica de tal delito. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Filosofia do Direito. Filosofia moral. Kant. Mentira política.

Reconsidering Michael Polanyi's philosophy

The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was one of the first twentieth-century scientists to propose a program to resolve the internal conflict of the modern Enlightenment: scientific detachment and moral nihilism with humanist values. Stefania Jha's intellectual biography places Polanyi in the context of his time and culture, analyzes his key philosophical ideas, and explicates the application - and at times misappropriation - of his work. Polanyi's method was not laid out in his published works, and his vocabulary tends to make his writings difficult to understand. By exposing the structure of his theory of tacit knowing, and by tracing the growth of his thinking, Jha shows how the various elements of his thought are integrated. Through examination of his philosophical roots in Kant and the complexity of his evolving thought, she counteracts the popular notion that Polanyi's philosophy stands apart from the western philosophic tradition. Jha's deep analysis makes Polanyi's shift of focus from science to philosophy more intelligible, his philosophy more approachable, and the causes he championed - such as the freedom of science and cultural freedom - more understandable. Applying his notion of tacit knowing in practical directions, Jha seeks to bring the study of Polanyi's philosophy out of the specialists' enclave and into such fields as ethics and clinical medicine.

The Catholic Secondary School Climate: Forming a Culture of Nonviolence and Healthy Relatedness

In The Catholic School on the Threshold of the Third Millennium, the Congregation for Catholic Education (1998) suggests that the foremost challenge to third millennium education is a “crisis of values” that assumes the form of moral relativism, subjectivism, and nihilism. Teen violence, disengagement with others, power games, date rape, and other forms of unhealthy sexual relationships are manifestations of this crisis. One of the characteristics of the Catholic school that enables it to respond is the climate of the educating community. The Congregation states, “The educating community, taken as a whole, is”¦called to further the objective of a school as a place of complete formation through interpersonal relations” (p. 12). Fostering healthy relationships is key to the formation of young persons in our Catholic secondary schools. This article examines three questions confronting our secondary schools: How does interpersonal violence threaten both interpersonal relations and the climate of the educating community? What approaches can be used in secondary schools to contribute to a culture of nonviolence? How are healthy interpersonal relations fostered among teens in a Catholic school? We analyze these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective which draws upon research and practice fro the fields of public health, education, and psychology and the theological tradition of Catholic education, particularly moral theology.

Escape from "Ward Six": Russia Facing Past and Present

This book is a witness account of the transition in Russia, a period which represents a unique crossroads in the country's turbulent history. The author presents a kaleidoscopic view of life in Russia embracing politics, economics, literature, the arts, the Orthodox Church, various social currents and general society. Escape From Ward Six also focuses on the past - the violence and terror, the legal and moral nihilism, the destruction of the country's cultural heritage - thereby demonstrating how the country reached a historical dead-end.

On the Duties of Intellectuals to Truth: The Life and Work of Chemist-Philosopher Michael Polanyi

The ArgumentMichael Polanyi (1891–1976) is placed in the ongoing Enlightenment-reform tradition as one of the first twentieth-century scientists to propose a program to correct the gravest internal conflict of the modern Enlightenment project of radical criticism: scientific detachment and moral nihilism in conflict with humanist values. He held that radical criticism leads not to truth but to destructive doubt. Only the inclusion of the “personal element,” the judicial attitude of reasonable doubt and the acknowledgment of belief in the regulative principle of truth can overcome this end. Freedom — to reason, to criticize the method of doubt, and freedom of scientific thinking — is a precondition to reach truth. His epistemology of nonsubjective personal knowledge has redefined scientific knowing and objectivity as grounded in tacit knowing. Debate is continuing on objectivity and freedom versus the social duty of science. Polanyi's Hungarian correspondence highlights his commitment to truth and the contemporary cultural-political situation of Jewish intellectuals.

Lyotard's Postmodern Ethics and the Normative Question

By normative I mean the age-old question Why should I be moral? To ask this question is to ask for justification of morality's claims on us, or for justification of the obligations of morality. The first systematic attempt to answer this question was made nearly 2500 years ago by Plato when it was put to him by Glaucon. The fact, if it is fact, that there is still no satisfactory answer to this question after 2500 years, that moral skepticism, even nihilism, is still serious threat, is, to paraphrase Kant, scandal of moral philosophy. As if out of fear of an outbreak of the scandal, or perhaps in an attempt to contain it, many philosophers have recently revisited the normative question and tried to answer it. Notable recent efforts include Michael Smith's The Moral Problem and Christine Korsgaard's Sources of Normativity.1 The history of philosophy shows clearly enough that the posed by the normative question is vexing. It is also true that failure to address the is scandalous. To avoid the scandal, or to counter moral skepticism, we need to tackle the from many different fronts. Philosophers such as Smith and Korsgaard belong to the camp, and their answers to the normative question form parts of the analytical front in the battle against skepticism. The question is whether some advance can be made on moral problem from the front. At first sight, it would appear that, if anything, Continental philosophy is facet of the rather than something that might hold an answer to it. One element of Continental philosophy in particular, namely postmodernism, is often characterized as philosophy that advocates all kinds of nihilism, including moral nihilism insofar as it has anything to say at all about moral questions.2 This is not the place to defend postmodernism, or more accurately philosophy, against such characterization.3 It is sufficient to point out that there is in the writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard, someone most often associated with postmodernism, line of ethical thought coherent and robust enough to be called an ethics. I have defended this claim elsewhere.4 The aim of this essay is to show that Lyotard's ethics is capable of answering the normative question. A summary of the key features of Lyotard's ethics is given in Section I. In Section III discuss how we can extract from it an answer that might satisfy the moral skeptic who wants to know why he or she should be moral, why he or she should stand under some moral obligations. I Three themes stand out in the writings of Lyotard: the death of metanarratives, the differend, and the sublime. A metanarrative is metadiscourse containing universal rules and principles to which we can appeal to resolve dispute that may arise between the or (petits recits) in which different people are engaged. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard defines postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.5 Thus, in the condition, metanarratives, or metadiscourses, have lost their authority and it is no longer possible to appeal to rules and principles that apply across discourses as source of legitimation. In the condition, there are no universally valid rules and principles. There are only language games, or small discourses, each defined by its own set of rules. In the absence of universally valid metadiscourses, conflict between language games cannot be resolved by appealing to universal rules. Thus, either conflict remains unresolved, or it is dissolved into totality dominated by one of the discourses in conflict. Lyotard calls this kind of conflict the differend, defining it as a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of rule of judgment applicable to both arguments.6 If the condition means the death of metanarratives then the differend is its effect. …

Taking the ‘Error’ Out of Ruse‘s Error Theory

Michael Ruse‘s Darwinian metaethics has come under just criticism from Peter Woolcock (1993). But with modification it remains defensible. Ruse (1986) holds that people ordinarily have a false belief that there are objective moral obligations. He argues that the evolutionary story should be taken as an error theory, i.e., as a theory which explains the belief that there are obligations as arising from non-rational causes, rather than from inference or evidential reasons. Woolcock quite rightly objects that this position entails moral nihilism. However, I argue here that people generally have justified true beliefs about which acts promote their most coherent set of moral values, and hence, by definition, about which acts are right. What the evolutionary story explains is the existence of these values, but it is not an error theory for moral beliefs. Ordinary beliefs correspond to real moral properties, though these are not objective or absolute properties independent of anyone‘s subjective states. On its best footing, therefore, a Darwinian metaethics of the type Ruse offers is not an error theory and does not entail moral nihilism.

Justification, Scepticism, and Nihilism

Sinnott-Armstrong's paper principally defends our inability to justify, philosophically, normal moral claims. In particular, we cannot justify them against other claims, especially the claim of moral nihilism. Moral nihilism is the doctrine that there are no moral obligations (for anybody to do anything). This thesis ‘does not lie in meta-ethics. It is a universally quantified substantive moral claim’ (p. 219). Sinnott-Annstrong makes it clear that he does not actually believe this doctrine (p. 217), but he believes that it is coherent, and that a variety of strategies philosophers might attempt all fail to disprove it. And because of this, ordinary claims to obligation are philosophically unjustified.

On Nietzsche, Postmodernism and the New Enlightenment

In spite of Nietzsche’s enormous and apparently ever-increasing influence, it is notoriously difficult to spell out the essence and precise implications of his position. This is evidently due partly to his poetic and rhetorical style; but in my view there is a more important reason than this. I would maintain that his thought, when taken as a whole, is rather like a carpet which cannot be laid straight unless you cut off one or other of two bits. To make Nietzsche consistent, you have to reject or downplay one of two elements in his thought. If you reject one, what you get is cognitive and moral nihilism; if you reject the other, you end up with what I want to call the new enlightenment. In these respects the postmodernists, as represented at any rate by Michel Foucault, are Nietzsche’s true successors.When in nihilistic mood, Nietzsche seems to imply that it is true that there are no truths, that it is really morally good to act as though there were no such thing as moral goodness. In the course of considering this self-destructive tendency of one strand of Nietzsche’s thought, Walter Kaufmann remarks that consideration of problems like these was not Nietzsche’s strong suit. Now the basis of the new enlightenment is epistemological, and turns on theses and arguments which directly address such problems. These may be summarized as follows: (1) Denial that our judgments are ever true is self-destructive (is it supposed to be true that we never speak the truth?); and so is denial that we ever have good reasons for our judgments (do we have good reasons for this particular judgment?).

Zur Geschichte und aktuellen Situation der Ethik in der Sowjetunion

Developments in Soviet ethics have been largely, but not exclusively, determined by the official ideology. Since 1917 philosophers have debated four successive models of morality. In the first, morality was regarded as tool of the exploiting classes and thus was superseded by communism. This attitude in fact fostered moral nihilism and anarchism. In the second period of ethical reflection, morality was contrued as a social, class-relative, phenomenon, conceived in utilitarian terms. With respect to Communist morality whatever serves socialism as defined by the Communist Party acquires the force of a moral imperative. It is important to understand whether this perspective is true to Marx's views. Whereas classical ethics assumed an extraworldy foundation for morality Marx adopted the humanist, immanentist perspective, according to which morality has a pragmatic sense as an ideal, the goal of activity. Soviet ethical theory of the Stalin era did not deviate from this perspective, for which reason ethics as a professional science was entirely subordinated to Party decrees about socialism as an ideal. In the third period beginning in the mid-fifties, a new view came to the fore which was codified in the 1961 Party program: moral values are now regarded as having a specific quality, social development involves a moral dimension, and moral values exhibit an all-human import. During this period the leading issue among philosophers is the question of the essence and specificity of morality as distinct from other forms of social consciousness. Just prior to the era of perestrojka beginning in 1985 a fourth model emerged which in fact prepared in most essential respects the actual new thinking in morality. The matters under consideration had to do with the ‘global’ dimensions of moral problems given the common experience and fears of humanity. For this reason morality was now seen as superseding politics. Presently, this reorientation has not only enabled abandoning attitudes favoring class morality, but thrown into relief the tragic consequences of this attitude within Soviet history.

Instruction, Rationality and Learning to be Moral

Abstract Moral education programmes which concentrate exclusively on the process of developing critical thinking skills are criticized for their one‐sided and incomplete conception of the rational enterprise. Rational moral thinking calls for both criticism and conformity to standards, and critical thinking is vacuous and impotent until it is linked with the prima‐facie intuitions which constitute a moral way of life. The fostering of rational moral behaviour, therefore, requires, in addition to the development of critical skills, an element of instruction and attention to moral content. Moral instruction is a necessary component of moral education programmes, and can help educators to promote rational morality and encourage pupils to avoid the extremes of moral bigotry and nihilism.

The incoherence of intergenerational justice

Contemporary theories of justice fail to recognize that the concepts constitutive of our political practices ‐ including ‘justice’ itself‐ have historically mutable meanings. To recognize the fact of conceptual change entails an alteration in our understanding of justice between generations. Because there can be no transhistorical theory of justice, there can be no valid theory of intergenerational justice either ‐ especially where the generations in question are distant ones having very different understandings of justice. The upshot is that an earlier generation cannot aspire to act justly toward a later distant generation whose members’ understanding of justice differs radically from theirs. Conceptual change and incommensurability render the very idea of intergenerational justice incoherent. Even so, such radical relativism need not entail moral nihilism.

Does Philosophy Need Literature?

Response and Rejoinder DOES PHILOSOPHY NEED LITERATURE? a critical response by Hugh Mercer Curtler In the second issue of this journal,1 Jesse Kalin argues most provocatively that "philosophy needs literature" because the latter is capable of "rehearsing and exhibiting," as philosophy is not, "the moral construction of one's own life, namely that part of it in which concern and value" are involved (p. 182). Two of John Barth's novels— The Floating Opera and The End of The Road—are used as examples and, according to Kalin, provide evidence for his thesis that philosophical novels present a certain kind of philosophical material in the only way it can be presented. More specifically, Kalin claims that these two novels (1) are both about nihilism, (2) advance the philosophical argument that nihilism is false, and (3) present this argument in a way it could not otherwise be presented. In Kalin's words, "the philosophical argument of these two novels cannot be presented in the normal non-literary mode exemplified by the essay and journal article" (p. 178). I shall examine each of these claims in turn. To say that Barth's novels are "about" moral nihilism is either trivially true or wrong-headed. If Kalin means that the novels "have to do with" moral nihilism, this is^ certainly true but not very significant. We might also say The End of The Road is about illegal abortion, the delights of teaching in a community college, or the trials and tribulations of a bachelor in a small town in Maryland. It appears, then, that Kalin has something more in mind; namely, that the point of the novel is an examination of moral nihilism. That this is indeed Kalin's intention would seem apparent from the second claim listed above: that Barth's novels argue that moral nihilism is "false." I shall examine the question ofwhether these novels "argue" the falsity of moral nihilism in a moment, but first I must raise an objection to the prior claim that such is the point of the novel. A novel does not make a point; it makes a great many points, it 110 Hugh Mercer Curtler111 provokes thought and raises questions, it suggests possibilities, it states truths (plural), and above all else it presents dramatically. That is to say, insofar as the novel is a work of art it does these things, and it is primarily a work of art. In terms of the contents of the novel, what we find is a host of images, thought fragments, figures, suggestions, hints, bits and pieces, and —if the novelist is a good one, like Barth—some valuable insights. If the novelist is a great one, then the insights are profound and worthy of repeated examination and reflection, although we may not always be able to make out precisely what the novelist has said; the novelist is a master of disguises and sleight of hand. The way of saying things is for him quite often more important than what is said. It is clear I share with Kalin very few assumptions about the nature of literature, or poetry, and its relationship to philosophy. With regard to his central claim that the "argument" of Barth's novels is (1) philosophical and (2) incapable of being presented in another form, I shall argue that because (2) is true (1) must be false. To prepare the way, I shall begin with a brief examination of the nature of "argument" as it applies in our present context. Kalin states that the argument presented by Barth in the novels is a "literarily advanced exhibitionary argument" (p. 180). What does it mean, though, to say the novel "argues" at all? Kalin surely does not contend that Barth is arguing philosophically in the manner of, say, Gilbert RyIe or even Kalin himself, hence his characterization of the argument as "exhibitionary." Barth's "argument," we must assume, seeks to persuade rather than to prove in any narrow logical sense of that term. Persuasion, in turn, is intuitive rather than reasoned, as suggested by Kalin's insistance that the argument cannot be separated from its literary form. As Kalin would have it, the novelist creates a...

Philosophy Needs Literature: John Barth and Moral Nihilism

Jesse Kalin PHILOSOPHY NEEDS LITERATURE: JOHN BARTH AND MORAL NIHILISM Examples of philosophy in the novel range from the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky on the one hand to those of De Sade, Lewis Carroll, and Robert Pirsig on the other. Philosophers themselves have acknowledged such literary works as having a place in their enterprise and have taken them as examples for philosophical analysis, used them to illustrate and amplify philosophical positions, and have even excised portions of them to be treated as philosophical arguments in their own right. Still, philosophers have tended to regard such instances of philosophy, insofar as they are literature and are framed in a literary rather than merely discursive mode, as philosophically supplementary and dispensible. The standard view is that philosophy via literature makes certain matters more easily grasped, especially for beginners, and that it makes philosophy more entertaining and less unremittingly abstract, but nothing more. The philosophical content embodied in a novel in no way depends on the novel itself and can always be expressed without philosophical loss in the ordinary, non-literary manner of the essay or journal article. Literature, while frequently useful, is for the purposes of philosophy an inessential luxury. I shall argue that this view about the relation of literature to philosophy is mistaken and that philosophical content is dependent at least sometimes on the literary form in which it is expressed. Some novels, for instance, advance a philosophical argument that has a substance which cannot be conveyed by ordinary discursive means. This is the case with two ofJohnBarth's novels—TheFloatingOperaand The Endofthe Road—and it is through a discussion of them as instances of such argument that I will develop this thesis. Before beginning, however, it should be noted that for the purposes of this essay, "literature" and "literary form" are to be understood as necessarily involving the creation and extended development of characters and their interrelationships with one another. This is a restriction on the ordinary sense of these terms, but it has 170 Jesse Kalin171 the merit here of clearly distinguishing the literary from the non-literary, which is essential for the claim that some types of philosophical argument can be fully presented only in a special, non-discursive form. Both of Barth's novels are about moral nihilism. In the first, Todd Andrews, the narrator of The Floating Opera,1 provides an explicit argument to establish that one has no reason to continue living. On the basis of this argument, he decides to kill himself and the novel is his account of what happened and why he changed his mind. Andrews's grounds for his suicide are five propositions (pp. 238-243): 1.Nothing has intrinsic value. Things assume value only in terms of certain ends. 2.The reasons for which people attribute value to things are always ultimately arbitrary. That is, the ends in terms of which things assume value are themselves ultimately irrational. 3.There is, therefore, no ultimate "reason" for valuing anything, including life. 4.Living is action in some form. There is no reason for action in any form. 5.There is, then, no "reason" for living. Still, there is no suicide in the novel. The immediate cause of this is an accident. A workman enters the showboat's galley where Todd has gone and turns off the gas before it can take full effect. With this interruption of his plan, Todd experiences a strange paralysis of will which leads him to modify his nihilistic argument. "It was not that I decided not to speak, but that, aware in every part of me of the unjustifiable nature of action, and completely subject as I was then to the operation of my reasoning, I simply could not open my mouth" (p. 264). His original conclusion had been wrong, for if there really was "no ultimate reason for valuing anything," this lack of reason would apply to suicide as well. Proposition 5 should really read: 5'. There is, then, no "reason" for living (or for suicide), (p. 270) Moral nihilism, therefore, is the position that there is no reason to do anything, and its practical consequence is inertial inaction. Insofar as one is...

V—Moral Nihilism

Journal Article V—Moral Nihilism Get access Neil Cooper Neil Cooper Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 June 1974, Pages 75–90, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/74.1.75 Published: 17 July 2015

Forms of Irrationality in the Eighteenth Century

Forms of Irrationality in the Eighteenth Century George Rosen COMPLEXITIES AND AMBIGUITIES For THOSE SATISFIED by a simplistic tag, the eighteenth cen­ tury continues to remain the "Age of Reason.” Under closer and more penetrating scrutiny, however, the homogeneity which the designation seems to imply dissolves. Homogeneity was no more characteristic of the eighteenth century than of any other histori­ cal period. Behind the seemingly serene certitude of the smile of reason lurked complexities and ambiguities that cannot be reduced to any simple pattern or slogan. The siecle des lumieres was as much the critic of reason as its apostle. Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88), who repudiated all rationalistic abstractions and in­ sisted on the primacy of sense experience and imagination, was the contemporary of Richard Price (1723-91), an uncompromising rationalist for whom ’'reason ... is the natural and authoritative guide of a rational being.”1 Yet to view these divisions in the con­ sciousness of the period simply as unrelated polar antitheses is equally superficial and misleading. Both reason and feeling were recognized as springs of human behavior in the eighteenth cen­ tury, and contemporaries were aware that there were complicated and intricate reciprocal relations between them. As Pope put it in the Essay on Man\ Two Principles in human nature reign; Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain,.. . Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul; 255 Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century Reason’s comparing balance rules the whole . . . On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail Reason the card, but Passion is the gale.2 But when a rupture of the relations between the head and the heart led to a fundamental rift, the ensuing gap opened a way for the emergence of the dark, the weird, and the demonic—in short, the ir­ rational—from the depths of the eighteenth-century psyche. In this sense there is a closer connection than appears at first glance be­ tween the tears of Goethe’s Werther and the stratagems of Laclos’ Valmont. Both exemplify forms of irrationality arising out of a separation of emotion and reason leading to an exaggerated em­ phasis on the waywardness of feeling or on insensitive rationality as a basis for personality and interpersonal relations. Illustrative of another facet of the emotional climate of the eigh­ teenth century and its imaginative peculiarities is the cult of mel­ ancholy, which distinguishes the later decades of the period, and to which the pleasures of horror were added.3 The latter tendency reached certain psychological extremes toward the end of the eighteenth century and during the early nineteenth century, espe­ cially in France before and during the Revolution. It was an emo­ tional climate which expressed the moral nihilism of men who threw off the bounds and obligations of humanity and sought for extremes of experience in the morbid developments possible to the human psyche.4 As one examines the culture of the eighteenth century, it is evi­ dent that such instances are not unique and isolated; they are indic­ ative of the psychological make-up and modes of behavior of in­ dividuals and groups in relation to the larger structure of social and cultural life. Historical periods are characterized by different sen­ sibilities, that is, modes of feeling shared in varying degree by those living at a particular time. An awareness that the personal and the public interpenetrate within the framework of society must underlie any endeavor to understand these psychological characteristics. Individuals and groups cannot be divorced from the larger institutions within which they carry on their lives, since it is within this framework that their psychologies are formulated. 256 Symposium*. Forms of Irrationality The way in which an individual in a given historical period per­ ceives his world, the feeling he has about it, depends on his inter­ ests, beliefs, and values, on the intricate connections between his inner life, his life pattern, and the specific social and cultural con­ ditions which he encounters in his environment. This character­ istic mode of perceiving and feeling, which I call sensibility, is an expression of the way in which the personality integrates these di­ verse elements. Such relationships are as complex for groups as they...

The Revival of Classical Political Philosophy: A Critique

Perhaps no single individual has had as much impact on the discipline of political science during the past several years as has Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago. Both he and his disciples (and they are disciples in the “classical” sense) have engaged in a full scale attack upon the premises underlying the contemporary study of politics.Strauss argues that these premises are illfounded and self-contradictory, and, if taken seriously, lead to moral nihilism. He contends, further, that another set of premises, those of “classical natural right,” which treat man in terms of his natural end and his relation to the “mysterious whole,” are capable of providing a more adequate foundation for the study of politics.

Ethical Relativity and Political Theory

'T IS a cunous and disconcerting fact that theories of ethical relativity have been used to justify both totalitarianism and democracy. The logical , ipositivists who incline towards relativism in ethics have been accused of encouraging moral nihilism and of thus providing a basis for fascism. On the other hand, writers like Kelsen, Radbruch and others both in England and America have argued that the real justification for democracy lies in the idea of toleration, and this implies, in their view, an empirical and relativist outlook both in the theory of knowledge and in ethics; while the authoritarian attitude finds its natural support in what is described as an absolutist view of knowledge and morals. It is this somewhat paradoxical situation that I would like to consider in this lecture. Historically there seems to be little justification for either claim. The defenders of democracy have not, on the whole, been ethical relativists. The philosophical radicals in England, for example, were adherents of an empirical theory of knowledge and, no doubt, they claimed to base their ethical theory on the basis of experience. But they cannot be called ethical relativists, since they certainly sought to establish general principles of conduct which were to be the basis alike of moral and legal rules. They believed in democracy because they believed it to be the forrn of government most likely to conduce to general happiness. Neither Green, nor Hobhouse, nor Mill, who must be regarded as the best exponents of liberal thought in England, can by any stretch of imagination be considered ethical relativists. On the other hand, it would not be difficult to point to philosophers who favoured a Positivist view of knowledge and morals who were on the side of absolatism in their political views. Such, for example, were Auguste Comte and Hobbes. Again, while it is true that much in Nazi and Fascist literature employs the language of ethical relativism, it is equally true that those who originated logical positivism in its modern form and their supporters in England and America are very far