This begins to sound suspiciously like moral relativism, though, and yet very few of the ancients would fall under that category (except the Sophists, the precursors of both modern lawyers and of radical postmodernists…).
#A UNIVERSAL TIME CODE HOW TO#
Rather, the ancient Greeks and Romans were far closer to the mark: ethics has to do with how to arrive at as harmonious social interactions as it is humanly possible, and this can be done in a variety of different ways, which is why Socrates at one point said that what goes in Athens does not go in Sparta, and vice versa. Rejecting - rightly - any divine inspiration on the matter, Kant arrived at what he thought was a universal logic of morality, his famous categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Kantian deontology (i.e., duty-based ethics) has all sorts of specific problems, well known to philosophers, but the most fundamental one is that moral philosophy is nothing like physics. And he thought he could do that by sheer force of reason. Kant wanted to put moral philosophy on the same firm footing that Newton had provided for natural philosophy (what we today call science, though at the time it was mostly physics). And that’s not a good thing, unfortunately.
#A UNIVERSAL TIME CODE CODE#
Indeed, the modern, especially Western, secular conception of morality as having to do with a universal code of behavior, with Right and Wrong (note the capitalization) is a recent phenomenon, mostly to be traced to the Enlightenment and particularly to the figure of Immanuel Kant. “…ethics has to do with how to arrive at as harmonious social interactions as it is humanly possible.” So “morality” is concerned with people’s characters and how we interact with each other in society. The Latin word refers more properly to the habits and customs of a people, while the Greek one is related to the idea of character. “Morality” comes from the Latin moralis, the word used by Cicero to translate the Greek êthos. Setting aside interesting discussions on the nature of mathematics and logic and whether even their tenets are truly universal or not, morality isn’t even in the ballpark. To begin with, if by “universal” we mean that morality is like the laws of physics, or like mathematical theorems, or perhaps like the laws of logic, then forget it. Of course, much depends on what one means by “universal,” so let’s try to parse things out a bit. Then again, that doesn’t mean that anything goes, a la moral relativism. No, there is no such thing as a universal morality, and it is somewhat surprising that people are still asking this question in the 21st century.
0 kommentar(er)
