RE: What is GOOD?
March 4, 2013 at 7:54 pm
(This post was last modified: March 4, 2013 at 7:56 pm by Neo-Scholastic.)
Empathy and reason are the means to a achieve a desired end, not the end in themselves.Within the naturalist paradigm both empathy and reason are happy by-products of an indifferent evolutionary process. Human reason serves as a fancy set of claws and fangs. Empathy perhaps a type of protective herd behaviour. They're about survival nothing more, nothing less. Reason and empathy are morally neutral means of survival. They do not conform to any higher moral standard.
Within naturalism that is...And if naturalism is your assumption then it is inconsistent to say that either empathy or reason allow us to rise above our animal nature. Rise above? To what? Either the answer is within naturalism, which it isn't since all that matters is survival, or they, empathy and reason, converge on a specific end, which implies that evolution is teleological, something excluded from the neo-Darwinist paradigm
The question, I think, we must ask ourselves is this. What is the ultimate goal? What is the good that we hope to attain by applying reason and listening to empathy. And what is it that makes it good? Apart from the means, empathy and reason, what is the desired end?
Within naturalism that is...And if naturalism is your assumption then it is inconsistent to say that either empathy or reason allow us to rise above our animal nature. Rise above? To what? Either the answer is within naturalism, which it isn't since all that matters is survival, or they, empathy and reason, converge on a specific end, which implies that evolution is teleological, something excluded from the neo-Darwinist paradigm
The question, I think, we must ask ourselves is this. What is the ultimate goal? What is the good that we hope to attain by applying reason and listening to empathy. And what is it that makes it good? Apart from the means, empathy and reason, what is the desired end?
