(January 13, 2017 at 6:08 pm)bennyboy Wrote:(January 13, 2017 at 4:50 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Since I'm really only interested in raising the issues in an intelligent and respectful way, a way that might even reveal areas of broad agreement, maybe a fairly nuetral motion would be something like:
Do purely secular means supply satisfactory moral principles?
Hmmm. . . are you going to argue in the negative?
For this question, yes.
I would first argue that secular ethics are not satisfactory. There is an obvious subjective judgement built into the question - a value judgement of whether the resulting ethics generally conform to liberal Western values.
I would then argue that certain ways of reasoning about ethics do indeed produce satisfactory results but that they ultimately rely on non-secular premises.
(Although, it would be interesting to play a "bizzaro world" version in which I argue in the negative. Another time perhaps.)