Moral Truth Research Articles

Metamorality without Moral Truth

Recently, Joshua Greene has argued that we need a metamorality to solve moral problems for which evolution has not prepared us. The metamorality that he proposes is a utilitarian account that he calls deep pragmatism. Deep pragmatism is supposed to arbitrate when the values espoused by different groups clash. To date, no systematic appraisal of this argument for a metamorality exists. We reconstruct Greene’s case for deep pragmatism as a metamorality and consider three lines of objection to it. We argue that, in the end, only one of these objections seriously threatens Greene’s position. Greene has to commit to the nonexistence of moral truth in order for his argument for the need of a metamorality to get off the ground. This, however, leads to a tension in his overall argument for deep pragmatism: ultimately, it casts his rejection of antiutilitarian moral intuitions into doubt.

‘S’éclairer en dedans’: Rousseau and the Autobiographical Construction of Truth

ABSTRACTThe objective of this article is to shed light on how Rousseau’s autobiographical writings – not only the Confessions, but also the Dialogues and the Rêveries – bring out the peculiar conception of his philosophy of truth, which, far from counterpoising itself to the philosopher’s autobiographical narrative, finds in it its preferred means of expression. The point of departure for the analysis is the fourth Promenade in the Rêveries. In addition to presenting an important taxonomy of lies, this work takes shape ‘negatively’ – that is, through a defensive attitude from Rousseau – a true theory of autobiographical fiction. At the heart of this theory is an unprecedented distinction within the notion of truth. Alongside effectual truth, exalted by other philosophes and inevitably opposed to fiction, is a moral truth. The autobiographical narrative represents Jean-Jacques’ preferred means of access with respect to the second type, which the philosopher dedicated his entire existence studying – as indicated by his favourite motto, vitam impendere vero. Here resides the intrinsic philosophical dimension of autobiographical narration: in it fiction does not only give access to truth, but has the function of constructing it.

Fede e ragione in Manzoni dal 1817 alla Morale cattolica

In 1810, following his conversion, Manzoni returns to the Italian city of Milan, where he abandons himself to the spiritual guidance of Monsignor Luigi Tosi, recommended by Eustace Degolo, a Jansenist abbot. The former receives a letter from the latter in 1817, informing him on how Manzoni managed to escape a great danger: he found himself caught in a spiritual crisis that almost led him to an act of heresy. Manzoni, getting away from Tosi, attempts at selling out all his possessions in Milan in order to move to Paris (France), where he would stay with a friend of his, Claude Fauriel, for Manzoni laments for open-minded discussions he used to have with Fauriel in the French capital. At the same time, he finds the reactionary Catholic atmosphere in Milan appalling and disappointing in terms of his liberalism hued with Enlightenment and patriotic ideas. Still, Manzoni does not undertake the aforementioned journey that year and Manzoni abandons the idea of living in Paris and, what is of ultimate significance, he manages to struggle through the crisis that separated him from sacraments for a while. As a result of this struggle in 1817, there emerges his book entitled Observations on Catholic Ethics ( Morale cattolica ), an apologetic piece of prose conceived in order to refute Sismandi’s Histoire des Republiques italiennes au Moyen-Age , especially those sections in which this Calvinist scholar criticises Catholicism relying on a Machiavellian political tradition directed against the Roman Catholic Church. Reading Manzoni’s Observations on Catholic Ethics helps us understand the depth of crisis the author finds himself in, to realise that it originates from the criticism of the Catholic church from liberal and Enlightenment positions, represented by Sismondi himself. In addition, this work reveals the answer Manzoni used to give to both liberals and himself. It can be narrowed down to an ambitious and painstaking reconciliation concept: a complex agreement between ratio and faith, between moral truth and Catholic truth, between history and religion. Reading this work helps us understand Manzoni’s poetics in terms of its founding ideas as well, as depicted in A Letter to Mister Chauvet ( Lettre a Monsieur Chauvet ), but it also shows us the prodromes of the works to follow, such as The History of the Infamous Column ( Storia della colonna infame) or the comparative essay entitled The 1789 French Revolution and the 1859 Italian Revolution.

Literary Eyewitnesses: The Appeal to an Eyewitness in John and Contemporaneous Literature

This essay supports the thesis that the Beloved Disciple is a purely literary character employed as a literary device of authentication recognisable during the late first and early second centuries CE. As evidence, three works are thoroughly compared with the Fourth Gospel in regard to their eyewitness appeals: Philostratus’Life of Apollonius of Tyana(a biography), theWonders beyond Thuleby Antonius Diogenes (a historiographical novel) and theDiary of the Trojan War(a revisionary history) attributed to Dictys of Crete. All three works are roughly contemporaneous with the Fourth Gospel and offer important insights into the sophisticated use of an eyewitness as a literary character to guarantee the (spiritual and moral) truth of a narrative.

Autorytet Apostołów w kościele pierwotnym w świetle drugiego listu św. Piotra

The present article undertakes an analysis of texts in which the author of the Second Epistle, acting against the teachings of false prophets, reveals the authority of the Apostles in the community of the Church. First in the foreword to his letter (2P 1,1), Peter calls himself a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, which means that he belongs to the group of people most closely connected with the Savior. Further on, Peter states that he and the other apostles are eyewitnesses of the majesty of Jesus Christ, which was revealed to them during His transfiguration on the “sacred mountain” (1,16-18). Finally, he commands Christians that they should be faithful to the apostolic teachings of St. Paul, because it is the foundation of true faith and morality, and thus is a safe path to salvation (3,15-16).

The role of practice and habituation in Socrates’ theory of ethical development

ABSTRACTThe goal of this paper is to challenge the standard view that Socrates of the early Platonic dialogues is an intellectualist with respect to virtue. Through a detailed analysis of the educational theory laid out in the early dialogues, it will be argued that Socrates believes that the best way to cultivate virtues in his interlocutors is not to convince them of ethical truths by way of reason and argument alone, but to encourage them to participate in the practice of virtue. Habit and practice are essential to the cultivation of virtue because they mould the desires and dispositions of the agent and promote a kind of knowledge that cannot be achieved discursively – craft-knowledge. Only when agents have achieved craft-knowledge can they be counted on to act virtuously on every occasion; and craft-knowledge can only be achieved by way of practice and habituation.

Right versus left: How does political ideology affect the workplace?

SummaryUnderscored by perceived moral truths and at times punctuated by hypocrisy, political ideology is a deeply held conviction for many individuals, affecting their behavior. In an organizational setting, conflicting political ideologies may lead to a number of undesirable outcomes. This Incubator calls for further study into this important individual trait.

Plato’s Minos and the Euthyphro

Abstract At the start of Plato’s Minos an anonymous comrade argues that the variability of law according to time and place undermines the claim that it conveys moral truth. But by the end he has accepted Minos as the greatest of lawgivers because of his education by Zeus. How does he manage to slide so quickly from the moral laxity of conventionalism to the moral absolutism of divine revelation? Guided by this question, the author considers how the two divergent parts of the Minos form one whole, and so what Plato suggests is the common basis to conventionalism and piety. Plato’s Minos thus ends up having an unexpectedly close relationship to his Euthyphro.

Towards Cognitive Moral Quasi-Realism

There is a long-standing discussion concerning the nature of moral discourse. Multiple views range from realism—according to which moral discourse is closer to scientific discourse than to fictional discourse—to anti-realism—according to which moral discourse is rather closer to fictional discourse. In this paper, I want to motivate a novel anti-realist account. On this view, there are no moral properties or truths, neither mind-independent nor mind-dependent ones (i.e., anti-realism). However, moral cognition results from the use of higher order cognitive abilities with enough resources to grant moral discourse with all the features of a realist talk (i.e., cognitive quasi-realism). I defend this view based on empirical evidence on human moral development and by showing that the resulting account can meet the demands of robust moral realism. The paper concludes by placing the proposed view within the metaethical landscape by comparing it against other forms of anti-realism, most significantly against expressivism.

Apologia Ad Hominem

This essay explores the apologetic value of arguments for faith that are built upon premises accepted by the skeptic—the kind of argument originally denoted by the term ad hominem. I illustrate the apologetic efficacy of ad hominem argument by working with the premise of ‘factuality.’ The skeptic supposes that facts may lead to scientific inferences but not to metaphysical ones compatible with religious faith. But, by examining the meaning of factual knowledge more closely, I undertake to show that it necessarily leads to conclusions about moral truth and freewill that lie outside the limits presupposed by skeptics. I conclude by considering how this argument type enables apologists to circumvent what Eric Voegelin has called modernity’s “prohibition of questions,” its tendency to rule out arguments for faith on procedural grounds.

A Postcard from the Volcano: Reflexivity in Stevens and His Critics

A Postcard from the Volcano:Reflexivity in Stevens and His Critics Christopher Patrick Miller What do human beings really know about themselves? . . . Does nature not remain silent about almost everything, even about our bodies, banishing and enclosing us within a proud, illusory consciousness, far away from the twists and turns of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream and the complicated tremblings of the nerve-fibers? . . . Given this constellation, where on earth can the drive to truth possibly have come from? —Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense" FOLLOWING UP on my epigraph, I would like to ask, "Where on earth do our critical concepts come from?" And how, in our critical responses, do we remain responsive to the ways thought and feeling emerge from the particular material conditions a literary object constructs and tests "in the act of finding / What will suffice" (CPP 218)? For a philosophical poet like Wallace Stevens, critics often find the concepts or tropes they are looking for in his poems. Reading his work amounts to proving how a line or a figure, say, displays features of Immanuel Kant's transcendental subject and, by an act of translation, validates Kant's conclusions about epistemology in another form of language. What goes unasked is whether Stevens mirrors Kant's premises or conceptual groundwork in the construction of his poems. The line of questioning I wish to pursue in Stevens's poetry parallels the sequence above in which Friedrich Nietzsche, addressing the false universality of moral truths, builds a "constellation" of nerves, natural processes, and rhetorical gestures in which a non-moral "truth" could be situated and subjected to dialogue. The conditions for what we might call a more emergent, reflexive truth are never given; rather, they are aspects of a persistently open question—perhaps the question of Nietzsche's philosophical method—precisely because his method makes the "subject" of thinking, what reflexivity is supposed to refer knowledge back to, a continuous object of scrutiny. A creator becomes a creature of what he or she creates: "In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material, [End Page 207] fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day: do you understand this contrast?" (Beyond Good and Evil 344). Nietzsche's method is aimed directly at calling the autonomy of any rational authority into doubt, precisely because exclusive claims to "reason" have historically led to static notions of "virtue," or knowledge for its own sake, instead of a reckoning with the lived differences of our social world. The signatures of Nietzsche's style—complex impersonations, rhetorical inversions, and moralistic satires—dramatize the ways in which "knowledge" and "self" are not transparent, expressive objects but non-identical processes that mediate each other. Though disparate in tone and content, Stevens's poems stage a similar doubt that neither the person capable of thinking about a shared reality—a "truth"—nor the material conditions in which particular truths emerge are categorical givens. Instead, Stevens tasks his poems with establishing the sufficient conditions in which reflexive thought can happen, such that sounds, images, or parts of speech appear as alive to each other as the flow of a river against its banks. In "Of Modern Poetry," his most frequently cited self-conscious dramatizing of how poetry works, he parallels the problem of describing a poetics with the question of how to make the particularity of a life visible or audible. To be "living," to "learn the speech of the place" from which lyrical utterances are spoken (CPP 218), the poem gathers a series of seemingly extrinsic conditions—that its speech "may / Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman / Combing. The poem of the act of the mind" (CPP 219). Rather than resolve this drama within a single subjective reality, the multiplying preposition "of" provides a sort of syntactical pivot for a non-identical series of worldly orientations. Definitive or probing gestures—such as "the act of finding," "to think about war"—give rise to a series of conditional imperatives rendered through steep enjambments: "It has to face the...

Non-Naturalist Moral Realism and the Limits of Rational Reflection

ABSTRACTThis essay develops the epistemic challenge to non-naturalist moral realism. While evolutionary considerations do not support the strongest claims made by ‘debunkers’, they do provide the basis for an inductive argument that our moral dispositions and starting beliefs are at best partially reliable. So, we need some method for separating truth from falsity. Many non-naturalists think that rational reflection can play this role. But rational reflection cannot be expected to bring us to truth even from reasonably accurate starting points. Reflection selects views that are coherent and conflict-free, yet there is no reason to think that the non-natural moral truth must be like this. Inasmuch as we seek coherent, conflict-free, ethical viewpoints, that suggests that our goal is not non-natural truth at all.

REVIEW: A real inspiration for the next generation of NZ journalists

A Moral Truth: 150 years of Investigative Journalism in New Zealand, edited by James Hollings. Auckland: Massey University Press. 2017. 448 pages. ISBN: 978-0-9941-4158-3TWO executions 40 years apart; the country’s worst aviation disaster; people wrongly imprisoned; the plight of tenants in slum housing; the pollution of our waterways; health scandals resulting in deaths; corporate scandals, sometimes likewise; and so much more. They are all examples of the investigative journalism to be found in this book, in fact 33 fascinating examples.

Nietzsche Or Aristotle? Reflections on Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue

Nietzsche Or Aristotle? Reflections on Alasdair MacIntyre's <i>After Virtue</i>

Moral Sentimentalism in Counterfactual Contexts: Moral Properties Are Response-Enabled

According to moral sentimentalism, there are close connections between moral truths and moral emotions. Emotions largely form our moral attitudes. They contribute to our answerability to moral obligations. We take them as authoritative in guiding moral judgement. This role is difficult to understand if one accepts a full-blown moral realism, according to which moral truths are completely independent of our emotional response to them. Hence it is tempting to claim that moral truths depend on our emotional responses. I outline a problem for this view: we are adamant that, if our moral sentiments were different, things would be the same, morally speaking. Moral truth does not seem to counterfactually depend on moral sentiments. I show how this independence can be reconciled with the role of moral sentiments in guiding our moral outlook. I draw on Yablo’s distinction between response-dependent and response-enabled properties. I propose that moral truths are response-enabled: their supervenience base does not include anything about our emotions. Hence they do not counterfactually depend on changes in our emotional response. However, their factual supervenience base being naturally ineligible, it is ultimately our response that enables them to play their role as an independent moral compass.

Deontological Originalism: Moral Truth, Liberty, and, Constitutional 'Due Process'

Deontological Originalism: Moral Truth, Liberty, and, Constitutional 'Due Process'

A educação na era da responsabilidade e da ética: desafios a um futuro mais digno

Vivemos em tempos de redefinições. Antigas verdades e certezas no campo da ética e da moral, não mais sustentam nossas esperanças e não mais acalentam nosso sonho de um mundo mais justo e desenvolvido. As muitas guerras, fratricídios e genocídios, o stress e a violência urbana, a destruição ambiental e moral em meio a um mundo em que as coisas estão ao alcance das mãos, são exemplos claros de que precisamos mudar profundamente nosso modo ver, sentir e agir. Vivemos em tempos onde a cada dia nos damos conta de que não é possível prosseguir com a forma desrespeitosa, espoliativa e egoísta que vem ameaçando a vida como um todo. Em resposta a tudo isso, a educação tornar-se, aos poucos, instância critica de promoção de um novo modo de ser, mais do que transmissora de dados e costumes antigos que em muitos casos estão atrelados à violência. Nisso ultrapassa o papel de gestora cognitiva de um aprendizado linear e simplista de conhecimentos, para se fazer espaço de abertura, discussão, troca e relação. Este texto trata exatamente dessa nova configuração da educação e de seu alinhamento com a ética e com uma possibilidade alternativa de leitura do humano, isso como forma de se concretizar a perspectiva de um modo de ser mais justo à vida como um todo.Palavras-chave: ética, educação, sentido do humano, Levinas.

Moral property eliminativism

This paper argues that there is significant motivation for contemporary ethicists to affirm a view I call “moral property eliminativism.” On this eliminativist view, there are no moral properties, but there are moral truths that are made true by only nonmoral entities. Moral property eliminativism parallels eliminativist views defended in other domains of philosophical inquiry, but has gone nearly entirely overlooked by contemporary ethicists. I argue that moral property eliminativism is motivated by the claim that there cannot be differences in moral truths without differences in nonmoral ontology—a claim widely endorsed by contemporary ethicists. Engaging with a variety of ways whereby one might resist the motivation I cite for moral property eliminativism, I argue that alternative contemporary metaethical views tend to purchase moral properties at the price of unnecessary theoretical complexity.

The Charter Is Not a Blueprint for Moral Conformity

Canadian jurisprudence is earnest in supporting diversity and religious freedom. It is in the context of the same-sex marriage debate, that commitments were made by Canadian political leaders, and by the S.C.C. in both the TWU 2001 and Reference cases to support diverse views on marriage and political liberation. TWU deserves its accreditation because of the following points: first, state “neutrality” requires the Canadian state to respect and conditionally defer to the morally laden belief systems of religious associations rather than to assume, as some seem to interpret the term, a commitment to no moral position(s). Such deference is not absolute, but should be extended absent an infringement of traditional health and safety concerns of the state. When TWU takes the position that traditional marriage is a moral truth, the state must, with the boundaries of health and safety, respect and protect it, even though it might not agree. Second, there is no law against TWU’s practice of traditional marriage. Thus, it is hard to argue that to limit marriage to its traditional mode within a voluntary community somehow threatens the health or safety of others. Third, the concept of “Charter values,” such as equity or pluralism, cannot properly mean the elimination of Charter rights, such as freedom of religion, speech, and association. Justice Campbell, was correct to note that the Charter cannot be the moral blueprint for our society, as the state has no secularizing mission. The Charter is not a sword to enforce state ideology but, rather, a shield to be used to protect individuals and groups from the state.

Accounting for ethics: towards a de-humanised comparative approach

In rejecting the ultimate authority of proceduralised ethics and instead emphasising the ongoing complexity of ethical manoeuvring, writing on ethics-as-process often presents the individual researcher as the authentic locus of ethical practice. This article seeks to distance from such humanist tendencies. It aims to shift attention away from the experience of the ethical researcher to consider, rather, the fixing of ethical stances in accounts of activity. Arguing for a comparative approach to the empirical, accounts of two different activities are examined: online research and online media consumption. A framework for describing the anchoring of ethical positions across these texts is introduced, one that challenges the achievement of ethical ‘security’ in research. It is argued that claims that the researcher is an authentic point of access to an ethical truth must give way to a consideration of the modes by which ethical claims are made.