poolerboy
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I once came across this insightful friar who was discussing morality and art and how Western culture, in abandoning important classical and medieval thought for understanding things, led to an elimination of Aristotle's formal and final causality (a thing's essential structure and its purpose or destiny, respectively) retaining only what is material (what it's made of) and what is efficient (how it got that way). In the arts, for example, Thomas Aquinas defined it as recta ratio factibilium, meaning right reason in regard to the making of things. An artist, like Michelangelo, would survey the world to see its forms and structures (which, as the friar would put it, God the creator had purposefully made) and then he or she would try to mimic those forms in what was to be produced. The "right reason," then, became the grasp of the essential structure of things. But with the arrival of modernity there was—and still is—a huge distrust and indeed rejection of it with an emphasis on efficient causality (again, where things come from). You see this clearly in modern art in how the externalization of the subjectivity of the artist becomes what is important; that something is "creative" or that it is "expressive" of the artist is now what is of great import. (Watch this video to experience pseudointellectualism firsthand in the area of modern art.) The lowest point for art can be summarized in an expression by the Dadaist painter Marcel Duchamp who said famously that whatever the artists spits is art.
For Aquinas, morality was recta ratio agibilium; to wit, right reason in regard to the doing of things. In the pre-modern era people would ask what the purpose of an act would be when attempting to answer questions on morality. An act of legislation, for example, would have to be viewed, then, with the finality or purpose of its reason for being there, which in this case was ordered toward justice and societal well-being. Thus anything which may deviate away from this, like the promotion of good toward the legislator or some private interest, becomes a moral "wrong." Today, however, ethics is about what "I" determine to be right; it wraps one in their own ego much like a modern artist. So if something is expressive of my desires or sense of identity, that is what is now seen as good because there is no final cause to be investigated objectively. That's why you often hear people today say something along the lines of: "Well who are you to tell me what to do?" In other words, I gotta be me; I express my own identity. For someone who retains formality and finality in things like art and morality, they become an explorer and the phenomenon to be explored an objectively empirical one.
Of course the purpose of an act, as particularly stated by this friar, is likely his subtle and indirect way of attempting to push for religious morality (namely Catholicism) which argues, as one example, that homosexuality is wrong because it moves away from the purpose of the procreative act of sex. This is why I think morality has to be grounded in human and animal well-being as a finality or axiom. Our behaviors relate to how we affect each other, not whether we go against natural finality. Otherwise, once you begin to attenuate this word in meaning it becomes invariably obtuse and susceptible to arbitrary concerns no doubt guided by primal instincts and reactions, like disgust, which can place an emphasis on one purpose (like procreation) while hiding others (like pleasure and fulfillment). Imagine applying this to every aspect of our lives. We would have to deem things like chewing sugarless gum as immoral because it is not using our mouths as conduits toward the final purpose of nutrition. There are several "finalities" to any given thing or act and to focus merely on one unfairly biases the conversation in favor of your ideology.
Establishing objective morality in an open-ended way without regard to confirming one's own religious biases, is not that difficult a task. As Sam Harris has said in his book The Moral Landscape, one merely has to acknowledge that in the evaluation of human behaviors as "right" or "wrong," we must undoubtedly refer to conscious entities—that is, anything that is sentient and has sensory experience. That we categorize human behavior in our interaction with fellow humans and even animals demonstrates our concern for their well-being. Now we have two axiomatic criteria—conscious creatures and well-being—which establishes objective morality. How do those things establish its objectivity? Well, because well-being is not a matter of personal opinion or preference. Imagine, for instance, the worst possibly misery for everyone. This is by definition "bad;" there is nothing conceivably worse since the term captures it. Surely there are right and wrong ways to avoid said misery, and surely there are better, more efficient methods of avoiding it than others. Such a task is an empirical one; that is to say, it will depend upon evidence about states of the world and of our brains. Thus science, broadly construed, is a pragmatic tool in the pursuit of answering these questions. Religion, by contrast, seeks to double-down on conviction and confirmation bias. Supposedly religiously-epistemic tools like "faith" lead only to credulity. If faith is a trust that is imparted onto someone or something giving the believer the feeling of truth, sans evidence, this can and has been applied to virtually anything for which the believer feels affirmed. Nearly all religions and their faithful operate as though they have arrived at moral and supernatural truths and most all of them use "faith" to get to that deep-seated conviction, but it is impossible for all of them to be simultaneously true, given their incompatibilities. Thus, faith has to be jettisoned in favor of epistemic tools like reason and evidence which promote skeptical inquiry and a sounder path toward moral objectivity.
For Aquinas, morality was recta ratio agibilium; to wit, right reason in regard to the doing of things. In the pre-modern era people would ask what the purpose of an act would be when attempting to answer questions on morality. An act of legislation, for example, would have to be viewed, then, with the finality or purpose of its reason for being there, which in this case was ordered toward justice and societal well-being. Thus anything which may deviate away from this, like the promotion of good toward the legislator or some private interest, becomes a moral "wrong." Today, however, ethics is about what "I" determine to be right; it wraps one in their own ego much like a modern artist. So if something is expressive of my desires or sense of identity, that is what is now seen as good because there is no final cause to be investigated objectively. That's why you often hear people today say something along the lines of: "Well who are you to tell me what to do?" In other words, I gotta be me; I express my own identity. For someone who retains formality and finality in things like art and morality, they become an explorer and the phenomenon to be explored an objectively empirical one.
Of course the purpose of an act, as particularly stated by this friar, is likely his subtle and indirect way of attempting to push for religious morality (namely Catholicism) which argues, as one example, that homosexuality is wrong because it moves away from the purpose of the procreative act of sex. This is why I think morality has to be grounded in human and animal well-being as a finality or axiom. Our behaviors relate to how we affect each other, not whether we go against natural finality. Otherwise, once you begin to attenuate this word in meaning it becomes invariably obtuse and susceptible to arbitrary concerns no doubt guided by primal instincts and reactions, like disgust, which can place an emphasis on one purpose (like procreation) while hiding others (like pleasure and fulfillment). Imagine applying this to every aspect of our lives. We would have to deem things like chewing sugarless gum as immoral because it is not using our mouths as conduits toward the final purpose of nutrition. There are several "finalities" to any given thing or act and to focus merely on one unfairly biases the conversation in favor of your ideology.
Establishing objective morality in an open-ended way without regard to confirming one's own religious biases, is not that difficult a task. As Sam Harris has said in his book The Moral Landscape, one merely has to acknowledge that in the evaluation of human behaviors as "right" or "wrong," we must undoubtedly refer to conscious entities—that is, anything that is sentient and has sensory experience. That we categorize human behavior in our interaction with fellow humans and even animals demonstrates our concern for their well-being. Now we have two axiomatic criteria—conscious creatures and well-being—which establishes objective morality. How do those things establish its objectivity? Well, because well-being is not a matter of personal opinion or preference. Imagine, for instance, the worst possibly misery for everyone. This is by definition "bad;" there is nothing conceivably worse since the term captures it. Surely there are right and wrong ways to avoid said misery, and surely there are better, more efficient methods of avoiding it than others. Such a task is an empirical one; that is to say, it will depend upon evidence about states of the world and of our brains. Thus science, broadly construed, is a pragmatic tool in the pursuit of answering these questions. Religion, by contrast, seeks to double-down on conviction and confirmation bias. Supposedly religiously-epistemic tools like "faith" lead only to credulity. If faith is a trust that is imparted onto someone or something giving the believer the feeling of truth, sans evidence, this can and has been applied to virtually anything for which the believer feels affirmed. Nearly all religions and their faithful operate as though they have arrived at moral and supernatural truths and most all of them use "faith" to get to that deep-seated conviction, but it is impossible for all of them to be simultaneously true, given their incompatibilities. Thus, faith has to be jettisoned in favor of epistemic tools like reason and evidence which promote skeptical inquiry and a sounder path toward moral objectivity.
