07.16.09

Kant, ethics, and ‘common ordinary morality’

Posted in Evolution, atheism, ethics at 1:30 pm by nemo

Do Atheists Borrow Religion’s Morality?

These proponents of religious morality are overconfidernt of their position. I see no reason, in principle, why atheism can’t be as moral as anything else. But, historically, it didn’t work that way, and, what is more, figures like Nietzsche misled immense numbers of secularists into thinking that morality was finished when Christianity was finished (if it was/is finished??).
Standing up to Nietzsche seems beyond the capacity of most secularists/atheists, and his perspective, which is false, is the background music to discussions of religion and morality.

The obvious and simple answer here lies in the work of Kant, whose ethics in and of itself may or may not function (it has been attacked ad infinitum by such as Rorty et al.) as hoped, but whose strategy in broad strokes points to the likely resolution of the question of ethics, in a way that neither the atheist (in the case of the New Atheists, not atheists in general) nor the religionist can manage.
However, confusion arises here: Kant is not a moral prophet, but a philosopher probing a possible way to clarify or understand ‘common ordinary morality’, that is, attempting a descriptive discourse of morality as we find it.
Where does this come from? To say evolution seems the right response, as long as it is not Darwinian evolution. Darwinism tries to fake an ethical behaviorism based usually on pseudo-altruism generated by natural selection.
But that is not morality. Positivistic science, please note beyond the silence of Darwinists on this point, cannot allow an ethics in principle, since such a thing requires free will, which science forbids.
In fact, the task proposed by Kant is merely a broad indication of something we can’t complete, since we don’t understand our own moral behavior, and neither religious nor scientific approaches have succeeded in describing, let alone explaining the ‘common ordinary morality’ that arises in man, in a complex interaction between innate and social determinants.

Atheists who wish to estabish a moral foundation have an ally in Kant, whose incomplete formulation remains the most significant, but they must be clear how they deal with that phantom Nietzsche whose seeming destruction of morality surely confirms the fears of religionists in the moral pretenses of atheism.

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