esk@wucs.UUCP (Eric Kaylor) (10/05/84)
From: bmt@we53.UUCP ( B. M. Thomas ) [quoting someone else first] >>Actually, if we are no more than self-replicating chemical masses, then there >>is, as yet, absolutely no basis for not stepping on our fellow man, with the >>possible exception that it is frequently not in our own best interests. And >>yet, one intuitively feels that there *should be*. Great philosophers have >>wrestled repeatedly with this problem, and have drawn varying conclusions. >>But the very fact that Kant, Nietche [sp], or Sartre can come up with such >>wildly differing answers suggests that there in fact is no answer. > >Indeed, the only possible solution to the question, if you categorically >reject, as all evolutionists do at the outset, what we Bible-thumpers >arrogantly call divine revelation. I can assure you that many of us in our >unbelieving days wrestled with the same questions and lost, as have the >aforementioned scholars and philosophers. The disagreement of the philosophers is evidence only that the problem is both complex and important. (Besides, is there anything philosophers don't disagree on?) Divine revelation may help answer the question, but not to explain why it is that there *is* an answer. If there is an answer, it is possible in principle for us to know without God's help (though perhaps not in practice). As Socrates asked Euthyphro, when Euthyphro defined the good as "what the gods approve": Is a thing good because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is good? Two millenia later, the score remains SOCRATES: 1 EUTHYPHRO: 0. Followups to net.philosophy, please. --Your friendly neighborhood ethical cognitivist, Paul V Torek, ihnp4!wucs!wucec1!pvt1047 Please send any mail directly to this address, not the senders. Thanks.