Any god other than reason is a false idol. Even the best arguments for a god (such as Aquinas’ and Plantinga’s) come from rational argument, not the mere insistence that such a deity exists and we must obey it. Reason is all we have to navigate the world. If one prefers to be irrational and inconsistent, fine, but they should not expect to be taken seriously. And no deity is necessary for this (nor could mere insistence of a deity compel one to be moral, in absence of rational belief in this being.) Those who think a deity is necessary for morality discredit libertarianism and water down morality, and quite frankly deserve to burn in the fires the scientistic atheists set up for them. I have no mercy for them.
This is self-contradictory. You say reason can’t rise to the level of morality then you go and show how it can! You use moral terms like “should” and “shouldn’t”. But then you contradict yourself again when you revert to the claim that reason can’t tell him why he shouldn’t violate rights. Your position is incoherent. What is this at the end about the same consequences for all? So you’re a consequentialist on morality? You are aware that there are other approaches to morality, right?
I’d say it’s a rather weak and hypocritical “morality” that can only get people to do the right thing and refrain from the wrong thing out of fear of punishment and hope for rewards in the afterlife. It’s a rather cheap motivation. It also devalues life in this world. And it is a rather blind view: there are plenty of things about life in this world that provide a much richer motiviation to be moral.
I agree that such a view devalues life in this world and ignores the incentives that exist in this world for being moral.
You’re reading into my argument. I did not say that the carrot and the stick.are the basis for morality. I said that ultimately, reason in an existential world cannot tell you why you should respect the rights of others. In such a world, the person intent on murder occupies the same plane as his victim.
That’s a remarkable statement from someone posting on the internet forums of an institute founded by a Catholic Christian.
I find it remarkable that people who frequent these sites don’t know enough about Mises to know that he was no doctrinaire, but a firm believer in reason.
I know all that. The Church Fathers believed in reason too. Is that some sort of justification for why the people who founded and run the Mises Institute should be burned at the stake? That seems rather, well, doctrinaire.
I think the conversation is very interesting (burnings aside!). I’m an agnostic and don’t much like revealed religion, but I think Byzantine has a point.
It seems to me that Morality can’t be reduced to religion, but I think it can’t be deduced from reason either. People usually behave in a civilized manner and that’s not because they read Rand…or are Christians.
Can’t that assertion be dismissed off hand ?
I agree that the only moral code that makes sense is one based on reason, wich implies “equal [negative]freedom” for all. However, there are two kind of people who don’t quite fit that view.
There are people who can sound rational most of the time, but would argue, for instance, that “libertarianism is OK with WMD used against civilians, because it shortens wars”. And there are people who perhaps are not very bright and yet would never morally sanction that sort of atrocity.
What I’m trying to get at is, How do rationalists explain that some people choose evil ? Is such a choice rational ?
edit : sorry! should have been
"Can that assertion be dismissed off hand ? "
Byzantine - if you could provide me with a quotation where either Mises or any other Austrian founding father said God is necessary for reason to have binding force, I’ll concede your point.
BTW, I am a deist personally. I just do not think positing the existence of a deity is a necessary component for a binding moral system.
Lew and Jeff are both Catholic Christians and as such believe in the Christian God as the source of morality. So when you start firing up the straw bales, please spare them some consideration. And the word of the esteemed von Mises is hardly the be all and end all of the matter.
In the absence of God as the source of morality, we’re left with existence. We can use reason to promulgate a fundamental right to one’s own property, but reason alone can’t tell us why that right must be honored. In the first place, if it’s in your self-interest to steal the property of others, then there is no rational reason why you shouldn’t. In the second place, whether it’s objectively in your self-interest or not, you can always just choose to be irrational. Now, you can also choose to be immoral, and the theist is not setting himself to the task of constructing a “binding” moral system; any system is always entirely dependent on human choice to be moral or not. But what the theist is saying is that theft is objectively immoral because an infinite and omniscient God has declared it so. Reason certainly complements this process as when, for example, some corrupt bishop says God told him to take your property anyway.
This doesn’t change anything. There is nothing about this that causes people to be more moral then if they reject that god is the source. Declaring that one should be moral because a god says so isn’t going to cause people to be any more moral then giving any other reason to be moral. You have not established why “because god says so” causes people to be more moral then if they hold a different reasoning for being moral. It is utter nonsense to think that if someone rejects this reasoning that they have no other possible reasoning to be moral. I do not require an argument from authority to act morally, and I personally find the insinuation that I cannot be truly moral in the absence of a rationalization from religious authority to be insulting and demeaning.
“Because god says so” doesn’t tell us why the right must be honored anymore then any other rationalization. It’s contingent on one’s belief in such a god in the first place. “God” could be replaced with any other authority (state, science, whatever) and it works just as the same so long as the person one is trying to convince believes in that authority. Of course, I reject that arguements from authority can be a sufficient justification for moral premises. So “because god says so” holds no more weight for me then “because the president said so” or “because highly esteemed individual X said so”. It’s just an arguement from authority, not a rational explainaton as to why one should act morally. It just begs the question or avoids an actual rationalization.
So basically, the theist has no means of compelling moral obedience, but has an objective way of saying what is and isn’t moral - much like the rationalist or Aristotelian have. So wherein lies his perceived advantage? He still has to provide a whole contingent of arguments for this ontology, presumably even more so than either the rationalist or the Aristotelian.
You are right about the fact that Voegelin adopts a largely Platonic philosophical perspective, but you’re wrong to call him a conservative, a defender ex officio of the cultural status quos, an anti-philosophy type or to try to picture his scholarly reflections on metaphysics as some sort of religious eulogies for Christianity.
He explicitly wrote somewhere (don’t remember where) that conservatism as a political movement is a retrograde, backward looking, failed from the start and gnostic political philosophy.
He believed, on the other hand, that the Western civilisation is in a deep spiritual (or cultural, if you prefer) crisis, something not uncommon for thinkers and writer across the political and philosophical spectrum in inter-war Europe, but he repeatedly emphasised that the only exit for this is the emergence of a new “cosmion”, of a new underlying spiritual order of society. Moreover, his trilogy, “Order and History” as well as “The Political Religions”, tell the story of many other “Old World” “cosmions” ( Egypt, Old Israel, Classical Greece) of which Christianity is only the latest, dying “cosmion”, and he specifically states that he abstracts from analyzing other non-European cultural spaces.
He was a philosopher in his own right and highly read who fused Plato, Heidegger, elements of Wittgenstein , Georg Simmel, Gadamer and phenomenology (particularly in his theory of consciousness, see “Anamnesis”) in a titanic effort to arrive at a deeper and more unified understanding of man, history, societies and their evolution. Maybe he failed, maybe he reached a dead-end or incorrect conclusions, but his quest is of outstanding grandeur.
He not only believed that a reactionary Christian spirituality is a wrong solution to the spiritual crisis of the age (just as the Greek-Roman religion could not match the revolutionary spiritual richness and vigour brought by the Christian faith at the end of the classical world) but he was not a religious man himself, but rather an agnostic intellectual who enjoyed a life of reflexion and occasional reading while taking a bath with a glass of champagne besides him.
As to Voegelin’s concept of reason, he adopts the Platonic concept of “nous” which is anchored in the transcendent reality of the Being unlike the Aristotelian reason which is grounded in the immanent “teleos” of things and Being. The comparison with the modern, Hobbesian and Humean concept of instrumental and calculative reason is totally off-track. Finally, his use of words with religious connotations like God, divine and so on must be understood not as refering to religious categories, but primarily to philosophical concepts in the vast tradition of Platonic metaphysics and ontology.
Here’s a pretty good essay on Voegelin thought and its relation to Christianity that might prove useful to those interest:
Glenn Hughes, Eric Voegelin and Christianity, October 1, 2004
I think you are right, however, I’m using the word “Conservative” in a special sense.
Generally there are only two directions, Left and Right i.e. dream-world vs. reality. Libertarianism is that part of the Right-approach, that part of the reality-based approach that mainly deals with mechanisms, systems. There is the other approach that mainly looks at the roots of good, reality-based mechanisms, roots in culture, religion, generally in human thinking, and I’m calling that Conservativism because there isn’t a better word for it.
Conservativism as a politiical movement is bullshit (OTOH it’s often the lesser evil of the two f.e. Reagan, Thatcher. Note: in today’s America I think there is a special situation, Obama is a lesser evil than McCain - warfare is a bigger problem now than welfare. However in the UK the Tories are the lesser evil in every possible sense.)
But there is this group of intellectuals, who had little to do with Conservative politics, like Voegelin, Burke, Oakeshott, Aurel Kornai, Roger Scruton, Theodore Darlymple and the whole http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/ staff. Or John Kekes who is my current favourite, http://www.deepleafproductions.com/utopialibrary/text/kekes-conservatism.html
which could be mapped almost sentence by sentence to Human Action, it’s just that he is using a different vocabulary, the vocabulary of the philosopher, the cultural anthropologist, not the economist. I’m calling them Conservative even though Burke was an Old Whig, the Social Affairs Unit explicitly denies being a traditionalist because they think modern traditions suck and the old ones are forgoten (I agree) - but how else should I call them?
BTW congratulations. I didn’t really expect to find anyone who knows something about Voegelin on the Internet as his writings are extremely hard to understand, I’ve read The New Science of Politics half a dozen times and I’m just still scraping at the surface.
BTW I’m not a Christian myself (I’m Buddhist) but I respect Christianity because it adopted classical philosophy.
You don’t really get it - it’s not about a deity at all - Christianity was quickly taken over by people like Thomas Aquinas who were basically classical philosophers and used the deity as mainly as a methaphor.
I have a riddle for you which I will explain later on. This is just an example of the actual and very important phenomena which I will explain later on.
Edmund Burke wrote his Thoughts and Details on Scarcity in 1795, which is as a good justification for the free market as anyone could wish for at that time. That was 50 years before Bastiat and 5 years before Say. Economics didn’t really exist as coherent science, whatever existed of it was studied by few peop and Burke clearly wasn’t one amongst them. He wasn’t too interested in economics, this is pretty much his only economical writing. He clearly did not study much economics. So - how the hell did he figure out then that the free market is a good thing?
I’ll explain it later on and also explain why is it extremely important but please try to make a guess on how might he figured it out.
In “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Rothbard argued that the classical liberals were the original Left and that libertarianism is really on the Left too. The original Right were the conservative monarchists and plutocrats who resisted free markets and liberalism.
I think you didn’t read me carefully enough. I didn’t say he was anti-philosophy. I said he was anti-system (i.e., against system-building in philosophy) and that this and his philosophical ideas tended to result in rather conservative, status quo positions in the realm of practical politics. He was no radical and he criticized radical politica movements (including libertarianis). By Christianize Plato, I didn’t mean that he is a denominational Christian of some type, but I think it is undeniable that he tended to Christianize Plato and Platonize Aristotle.
Who made this comparison? I don’t think I did.
No, by imposing Christian categories onto Plato and the Greeks (even if he’s using them philosophically rather than theologically, which I don’t buy: he didn’t employ the vulgra Christian conception of them, but he didn’t use them strictly philosophically) he was Christianizing Plato. The categories are anachronistic.
That’s what your argument implied.
I have yet to see an actual argument for your assertions.
What does being on the same plane (whatever that means; what other planes are there?) have to do with it?