Sunday, January 27, 2013

Bookforum Omnivore - Is Morality Rational?

Here is an interesting collection of links from Bookforum's Omnivore blog on morality, examined from a variety of angles.


Is morality rational?

JAN 25 2013 
9:00AM


Here is a little bit from the title essay, Is Morality Rational by Michael Hauskeller (it's only a two-page rebuttal to his critics):
I have no problem with minimal rationality. In fact, I occasionally use it myself. What I maintain is not that moral arguments cannot, or should not, be rational in that sense, but rather that the premises on which moral arguments rest cannot be, in a strict sense, rationally justified. Certain conclusions may follow logically from certain premises, but those premises are not themselves founded on logic or are self-evidently true in the sense that it would be irrational or clearly unreasonable to contest their validity. And although I accept the need to maintain minimal rationality, I also believe that it is easy (and potentially dangerous) to overestimate the importance of it. In moral philosophy whether a conclusion follows logically from certain premises is less important than whether those premises are really as unobjectionable as they tend to be presented as. More often than not, emphasising the “minimal rationality” of an argument serves to conceal the weakness of its premises. 

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