Philosopher Thaddeus Kozinski takes up these questions in his very interesting article in today’s Public Discourse. His bottom line: “am I saying that only an ethics rooted in the divinely revealed truth of creation-as-gift and creator-as-love can coherently and adequately make sense of the universal experience of ought? Indeed I am, though I think that purely philosophical explanations are similarly indispensable.”
I’m just lifting elements of his argument. You should really read the whole thing.
We all have had the experience of ought, of something that, at least in a subjective sense, renders our imminent action morally relevant, so that what we are about to do or not do is more than a mere question of what will be pleasing to us, socially beneficial, psychologically comfortable, or useful for some plan of action. … What seems right also seems good, and if it did not, it would not seem right; indeed, it could not be right at all. Thus, the good and the right seem correlative and inseparable in experience, though Read more…
I wanted to revisit the article on Hume’s defense of marriage. There was some good stuff buried deep in the link:
Contrary to what some romantics may think, marital happiness and conjugal human love cannot be sustained by amorous or infatuating passions, Hume says, since they are by nature unstable and fleeting. “Amorous love,” he says, “is a restless and impatient passion, full of caprices and variations—arising in a moment from a feature, from an air, from nothing, and suddenly extinguishing after the same manner.” Whatever its value may be, no marriage can be sustained by it. Read more…
from Yahoo News:
France’s top court refused Wednesday to allow French citizenship for 10-year-old twin girls born to a surrogate mother in the United States, in a ruling that affirmed France’s legal ban on surrogacy.
In a case straddling international legal rights and bioethics, the Court of Cassation ruled a California county went too far by ruling that a French couple are legally the twins’ parents.
Keep reading…
“Surrogacy is also banned outright in most European countries, including Germany, Spain, Finland, Italy, and Switzerland. But the French have articulated the reasons for this rejection most eloquently”: Read more…
Bored to Death is the title of an article by philosophy professor Russell Snell. He talks about boredom as the “stance toward the world most evident in the historical and social space of contemporary Western life.”
Many of us no longer find the world beautiful, or good, or of worth, and since the world and the things of the world are quite worthless in themselves, they bore us. Of course, since we too are inhabitants of this world without worth, we find almost no worth in other persons either, or in ourselves. At the same time, many find this boredom impossible to give up—we like this stance, we like the boredom—because the meaninglessness of the world allows us to treat it and others and ourselves exactly as we wish. We are free! Since the world, for us, does not have the weight of glory, we owe it nothing and can do with it precisely as we wish. But a culture of freedom without truth, a culture where freedom is unchecked by the good of being, ends up as a culture of death. Our bored culture is a culture actively engaging in a revolt against limits, place, order, and we are willing to harm and kill our world, each other—especially the weakest among us—and ourselves in a pique of freedom.
I would take it one step further: not only are we willing to harm and kill our world, and one another, we are willing to kill ourselves. I have often wondered whether the increase in suicide, especially among the young, is related to this theme. Nothing has any meaning, including our own existence. We keep telling the young that nothing matters, and some of them are believing us…..
I write this post with trembling hands. You see my recent post on a particularly execrable high school play has inspired a histrionic conniption over at Good As You. There’s even a threat to report me to the Southern Poverty Law Center. I quake to think of what they’ll do to me.
You see, Mr. Good as Me (he doesn’t say what he’s as good as me at doing, though) and I have a vastly different worldview. My own worldview is derived from the ancient Jewish sources. It is one that asserts that life has a higher purpose. It looks at human life and human happiness in a vastly different way than modern people do.
I would presume that Mr. Good as Me looks at life in a more typically modern way. Here’s an article that describes the viewpoint. Read more…
How many of you are long-in-the-tooth enough to remember when pro-’choice’ folks ridiculed anyone who warned that legalizing abortion-on-demand would lead to things like euthanasia… and sex selective abortions… and aborting the handicapped… or euthanizing the handicapped?
Well this article, about “well-known Brazilian pro-abortion activist and anthropologist Debora Diniz” justifies all those fears, if you ask me.
Debora Diniz:
Subhumans are those whose lives are bound to ‘fail’—as Dworkin, a liberal American jurist who studies abortion, explains—or those for whom, to say the least, the concept of life is inadequate. Subhumans are extreme human otherness, those not expected by the miracle of procreation. Read more…
Ethos: the source’s credibility, the speaker’s/author’s authority
Logos: the logic used to support a claim (induction and deduction); can also be the facts and statistics used to help support the argument.
Pathos: the emotional or motivational appeals; vivid language, emotional language and numerous sensory details.
Located here.
A recent blog comment by “RuthRocks” triggered a memory from a speech class I took several years ago. The speech professor taught us about ethos, pathos, and logos, and that comment reminded me that pathos was my weakest of the three. Ruth Rock’s comment was clearly an appeal to pathos, and I thought it was an excellent appeal: Read more…
Matthew Franck writes today about how we have lost the moral vocabulary to even talk about what’s wrong with incest.
natural hierarchies, duties, and trusts are shattered by incest, even between “consenting adults.” But the recent discussions of this matter reveal how decayed is our moral vocabulary for considering it, how nearly lost is any understanding that our various loves have their natures and purposes, which must be respected if those loves are to conduce to our happiness. Only such decay can account for the failure to grasp that a man cannot be a father to his lover, or a lover to his daughter…. Read more…
Here is a thoughtful article by Friend of Ruth, Rev. Dr. Dale Kuehne. He starts with this example, to illustrate how morally unglued we are becoming:
I recently had a discussion with a Middle School student in which s/he shared that s/he was bi-sexual.
Having done a fair amount of research on sexual orientation, my reading of the scholarly literature tells me that a person won’t fully understand their sexual orientation until their late teens or early 20’s. Hence, I was surprised to hear such a discovery from someone of such a young age.
When I thanked the student for trusting me with such an intimate revelation, I asked how s/he had come to this self-understanding? Read more…
Dr. Stuart Schneiderman has a new column out about same sex “marriage.”
What is a funeral when no one died? It is theatre. What is a dinner where you go through the motions of eating without there being any food? It is pantomime.
Same-sex marriage is a fiction. Even if everyone believes that the fiction is real– or be too afraid to say otherwise– that does not make it less of a fiction. The world does not become flat just because everyone says it is. In many ways the strangest part of the current debate over same-sex marriage is how little of it involves rational argument. Read more…
Over at the Public Discourse Ryan Anderson and Sherif Girgis, young proteges of Robby George, respond to Prof Andrew Koppleman’s claim that marriage is nothing but a social construct. They get the better of Prof Koppleman, but there is one point I would add, for the benefit of the libertarians who come around this site.
It is clear from the context that Prof Koppleman believes that all human institutions are mere conventions, constructed for convenience. Therefore, he believes human institutions can be reconstructed at will. My point to the libertarians is that they would never accept this argument with respect to the market, or the right to private property. Read more…
Albert Mohler weighs in on the incest controversy that we have already discussed on this blog. I want to add one point that I haven’t seen anyone raise. People seem to think that the “ick” factor is not significant because it cannot be entirely explained on rational grounds. (Mohler’s quote from Wm. Saletan is to this effect.)
But we should not entirely dismiss the “ick” factor. To say that incest is “icky” is to say that it is unthinkable. That is what taboos are supposed to do: take a given behavior off the table, to make that behavior completely unworthy of consideration by any decent person.
Why? Because if people start asking themselves, “gee, would sex with my father really be so harmful in this particular case?” or “could I get away with sex with my daughter in this particular case?” Read more…
So this morning, I’m reading the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review on the treadmill at 24 Hour Fitness, “Who’s Afraid of Original Meaning?” by George Thomas of Claremont McKenna College. I won’t pretend that I understand the twists and turns of his argument about why Scalia’s interpretation of Original Meaning isn’t as original as it should be. Part of the argument is about the incoherence of the Court’s concept of “fundamental” rights. I care about this, because the opponents of natural marriage want to say that marrying the person of your choice is a “fundamental right.”
George Thomas (no relation, I assume to Clarence) sees the incoherence of the Court’s position on “fundamental” rights.
Consider, for a moment, the right to travel. This right is not enumerated in constitutional text and yet it has been held to be a fundamental right. Curiously, the Court held it to be a privilege of citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment in one of the few cases that rested on that clause since the Slaughter-House Cases. But the Court showed little interest in breathing life into privileges and immunities, or situating the right to travel in a larger context. Rather, the Court’s protection of the right to travel was more consistent with selectively protecting rights it deems fundamental. Rights that are as deeply rooted in history and tradition as the right to travel, but that touch on economic issues, for instance, have been erased from constitutional protection. And other rights, such as the right to privacy, have been deemed to be fundamental, but with little explanation of the scope or foundation of “privacy.” Thus private choices that deal with contraception or abortion are said to be fundamental. Read more…
I have been reading the new book, Never Enough, by William Voegeli at Claremont McKenna College, with great interest. His theme is that the advocates of the welfare state have never been able to give a coherent account of the proper size and scope of their ambitions. How much assistance to the poor is enough?
I think he is correct about the “Progressive” economic agenda. But I believe there is an even more insidious and destructive part of their agenda: their revision of what we might call the “sexual constitution.” The radical forms of feminism, as well as the destruction and redefinition of marriage, are part of restructuring the fundamental rules of engagement between women and men, and between adults and children. I have come to the conclusion that the Left’s inability to define limits is no accident.
My thesis is that the impossibility of achieving the agenda is precisely its appeal to the Left. In economics, it is impossible to eliminate all income differences in even a partially free market, since the huge variation in personality, abilities and behaviors that are normal among human beings are precisely the basis for differences in income. Yet, if the Radicals are able to create a moral urgency around “equality,” they will have justified an unlimited amount governmental power.
The feminists have insisted that any difference between men and women are the results of unjust discrimination and hence must be eradicated. The government must “do something,” to eliminate these differences. However, since men and women really are different, Read more…
I am pleasantly surprised by this statement from Cardinal Mahoney of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Cardinal Mahoney is not usually known for making strong statements on what are usually considered “social conservative” issues. “Social justice” issues, yes. But life and marriage– not as much. So listen to this:
Today it was announced that U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn R. Walker has ruled that Proposition 8 which was enacted by the People of California is unconstitutional. His decision fails to deal with the basic, underlying issue–rather he focused solely upon individual testimony on how Prop 8 affected them personally. Wrong focus. Read more…
Philosophy professor and prolific author Dr. Ed Feser has a lenghthy post on the Prop 8 overturn. I’m just picking out some highlights. I suggest you read the whole thing. The dialogue in the comments is worth looking at also.
1. Judge Walker’s decision, he tells us, is based on the principle that the state ought not to “enforce ‘profound and deep convictions accepted as ethical and moral principles’” or to “mandate [its] own moral code.” But that is, of course, precisely what Walker himself has done. …What we’re seeing here is just one more application of the fraudulent principle of “liberal neutrality,” by which the conceit that liberal policy is neutral between the moral and metaphysical views competing within a pluralistic society provides a smokescreen for the imposition of a substantive liberal moral worldview, on all citizens, by force…. Read more…
No, I didn’t write it. Someone who calls herself Jane Galt wrote it. It is really, really good. I will just quote the beginning. You should really read the whole thing. Here goes:
A really, really, really long post about gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the otherUnlike most libertarians, I don’t have an opinion on gay marriage, and I’m not going to have an opinion no matter how much you bait me. However, I had an interesting discussion last night with another libertarian about it, which devolved into an argument about a certain kind of liberal/libertarian argument about gay marriage that I find really unconvincing. Read more…
I want to thank Ari Mendelson for finding and posting this very important 22 minute video on the history of political correctness. And I want to thanks the Free Congress Foundation for making this.
This video is important to the Ruth Institute because it shows the connection between Marxism and the Sexual Revolution. Marxism has failed as an economic ideology, but it’s adherents have not given up. In fact, this video shows that some Marxists realized as early as the 1920’s that capitalism was a successful economic system. Therefore, the working class was not likely to rise up against the capitalist class. (Listen especially around the 6 minute mark.) These Marxist theorists began looking for another class to play the revolutionary role that traditional Marxism had assigned to the working class.
They found the answer to that dilemma in what we would now call the Sexual Revolution. Read more…
Ed Feser has a provocative article about scientism, which he defines this way: Scientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science. His critique is that Despite its adherents’ pose of rationality, scientism has a serious problem: it is either self-refuting or trivial.
Take the first horn of this dilemma. The claim that scientism is true is not itself a scientific claim, Read more…
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