Abstract
Moral objectivism is the thesis that we can and should attempt to see and treat things as they are, and not only as they seem to us to be. Those who reject Platonism must find it difficult to defend the notion that we can in fact see things as they are, or that we ought to. Humanism, as an outgrowth of objectivism, is therefore in disarray. We must either return to a traditional and more Platonic picture of the world and our obligations or else accept the dissolution of that visionary synthesis, and appeal instead to chance-bred, mammalian sentiments to defend whatever we can salvage of our moral order. The likeliest source of insight is the domestic scene, which proves itself to embody a Platonic vision.
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Notes
C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (London: Bodley Head 1945), 411; see my ‘Orwell and the Anti-Realists’, Philosophy 67 (1992), 141-54.
Some utilitarians (realist and non-realist alike) will insist that their theory cannot possibly license things like that; others (more courageously) will agree that it can. None can prove their case by abstract calculation, but the latter do at least make a distinctive contribution to moral reasoning. I make no secret of my conviction that utilitarianism, in all its forms, is a bankrupt theory, but this is not my present concern. Those who read this paper as an ‘attack upon utilitarianism’ are confused.
R. Bulmer, ‘Why the cassowary is not a bird’, Man 2 (1967), 5–25 (discussing the taxonomy preferred by the Karam people of New Guinea). Other Karam folk-taxa include flying birds and bats (yakt), dogs, pigs, rats from homesteads and gardens (kopyak), frogs and small marsupials and rodents other than kopyak (as), tadpoles, weevils and snails. I doubt if our own folk-taxonomy is much more rational. This is not to accept Locke’s judgement that all species are merely nominal, that ‘being a cassowary’ is only fitting an arbitrary description, given in Essay 3.6.34.
D.A. Dombrowski, The Philosophy of Vegetarianism (University of Massachusetts Press: Amherst 1984), 129, summarizing R.Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press: Princeton 1979), 182-92. Words within square brackets are my own summary of what conventionalism must mean.
Rorty, op.cit., 190.
R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press: Oxford 1976); E.O.Wilson, On Human Nature (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass. 1978).
W. James, The Principles of Psychology (Macmillan: London 1890), vol.1, 288f; see my From Athens to Jerusalem (Clarendon Press: Oxford 1984), 133 ff.
See God’s World and the Great Awakening (Clarendon Press: Oxford 1991), 196 ff.
See my ‘Mackie and the Moral Order’, Philosophical Quarterly 39 (1989), 98-144.
Proverbs 12.10.
Politics 1. 1252a 24ff.
See my ‘Utility, Rights and the Domestic Virtues’, Between the Species 4 (1988), 235-46.
G. Berkeley, Collected Works, A.A. Luce & T.E. Jessop, eds. (Thomas Nelson: Edinburgh 1948), vol. 3, 129.
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Clark, S.R.L. (1998). Objectivism and The Alternatives. In: Morscher, E., Neumaier, O., Simons, P. (eds) Applied Ethics in a Troubled World. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 73. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5186-3_17
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