Philosophy, Religion, and the Laws of Nature
WHY IS IT THAT nearly every question of this kind — i.e., on the nature of morality — quickly accrues more than 100 answers on online forums? Are these questions so easy that anyone at all can answer them? But, okay, I’ll give it a try too.
I think that philosophers know as little about ethics, in the absence of science, than they do about anything else. Rather, the reason philosophers make free, at present, with their ethical pronouncements is the same as the reason the Church made free with its astrodynamical pronouncements in the 17th century. The reason is that science has not yet investigated the subject with rigor.
Philosophy doesn’t gather facts about reality within itself, whether we are speaking about physics or about ethics. It is as blind for one as it is for the other. Nobody is privileged to choose what is moral. Nature has its own standard for morality, and that standard is survival. What does not exist is worthless. An improper moral system that causes its own destruction via the deaths of its practitioners is worse than worthless; like a disease, it has a net cost, a negative worth.
What philosophy does is concoct logically self-consistent narratives, which might or might not be the truth. Philosophy and science inform each other: Philosophy informs science about correct procedure, and science tells philosophy what the discovered facts are and which of its narratives has been disqualified from being truth.
A philosopher who does not engage with science is blind to reality. He forever spins conjectures that he has no way of checking. He gets into arguments with other similarly blind philosophers who insist that their conjectures are superior to his, and none of them really know what the truth is because none of them has indulged in experimental verification. Their arguments are so much hot air.
You know the old saying among atheists: “As science advances, God retreats,” meaning that once experiment has revealed the true nature of a part of existence, the older theological explanations quickly seem obsolete — if not outright ridiculous. After three or four hundred years of trying to refute a scientific explanation that is informed by empirical testing, while at the same time having their increasingly contrived alternatives either disproved or shown to be rather suspiciously untestable, the theologians adopt the scientific explanation, grudgingly at first, but after a generation they are pretending that they had never thought differently.
Ethics is like that. Philosophers may claim to have knowledge about ethics because they believe it to be subject to their choices. Some philosophers may believe that they can create ethics by simply making their preferences known. On the contrary, I say. Those philosophers are wrong. Nature constrains the truth about ethics to the same degree that it constrains the truth about gravity. This truth is something to discover. It isn’t something to be decided.
When you discover the truth about ethics, you might not like it. You might wish that it were something else. But it will be the truth, nevertheless. The approval of the philosophers isn’t required.
On an online forum, someone asked me, “If I’m not for freedom, it means I’m for non-freedom. Is this possible? Wouldn’t it violate some basic principle like the survival instinct?”
To that, I replied in a comment:
You can hold freedom as a good thing, without holding it to be the best thing. As a value, freedom is positive and has its place in a hierarchy of values. But it probably isn’t the highest value in a proper moral system. There are values higher than freedom. There might come a time when you will have to choose between values, such that you must let freedom go, in order to keep what is better.
That answer is, of course, incomplete. But I had to think on it a while, and now I’m ready to answer at more length. Some of what I’m about to present I’ve said before. But I said it fairly well before, and it is relevant now, so here and there I’ll be repeating myself.
The idea that truth is like the rain — carving many channels in the mud, such that there’s “my truth” and “your truth” and “their truth” — is wrong. There is only the truth, and any opinion in conflict with it is simply false. Truth is discovered; it is not decided. It doesn’t matter how many people hold a false opinion, nor what their cultural norms are: It remains a false opinion.
Consider the difference in how mankind answers two questions:
(1) What is the nature of the god(s)?
(2) What is the nature of the electromagnetic field?
The first question is a religious question, and, since mankind does not really have any knowledge about gods, the answers that men have come up with — and have enshrined as “scripture”…
Read more:
https://nationalvanguard.org/2022/03/philosophy-religion-and-the-laws-of-nature/
