Mike Scoles wrote:
> If I wanted students to take this route, I would send them to church!
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> > My position is simply that hitting children is immoral.
> > If all the research in the known universe failed to demonstrate any
long-term
> > negative effects, I would still feel the same way.
This looks like a difference between a "consequentialist" and a
"nonconsequentialist" notion of ethics. Mike seems to hold an ethic that
says that the morality of an act is completely a function of its
consequences. Nancy apparently believes otherwise (if I'm not putting words
into people's mouths). As far as I know, there are still ethicists of both
flavors among those who make a career thinking about this stuff.
While I doubt that Mike really believes this, his response implies that
ethics (or at least nonconsequentialist ethics) are exclusively the realm of
religion. I think this is an almost universal assumption, and I think it's
completely wrong. In fact, by surrendering the ethics discussion to
religion, we seem to be giving up on making progress understanding ethics.
Most of the discussion will (by sheer force of numbers and money) be driven
by Christian ethicists, who (as far as I know) place the source of ethics in
a mythical divine being. This comes as close as anything I know to being a
universal assumption (again, within our Christian culture, at least): that
morality is somehow imposed from above by some conscious being. People
sophisticated enough to understand that we don't need such a being to
explain the diversity of species nonetheless fall into the parallel
creationist-thinking trap when it comes to ethics.
I believe that there are universal rights and wrongs (and no, I have no
idea what they are), but that we don't need to posit a divine conscious
being to support those rights and wrongs (a supposition that would beg the
question anyway). I believe that our chance of ever making progress
understanding ethics depends utterly on our willingness to stop making the
assumption that ethical standards are necessarily imposed by some kind of
divine conscious being.
So shoot me... :)
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
