So I've gotten as far as Moral Realism. I believe that there are basic moral principles of what ought to be, independent of our belief in and adherence to them. If certain things ought to be, then it seems reasonable that we should try to find these things out and to do them, and establish a society which fosters adherence to these moral truths.
The first question that we might ask, then, is how we might try to find out these moral truths. The first thing that comes to mind, being a scientist, is to observe the world around me and see if I can figure anything out from that. But I quickly get stuck. I can't see any way of looking around and figuring out what ought to be simply from what is. In fact, this is Hume's point, the "is-ought problem" is the fact that we don't know a way to figure out the way things should be simply from the way things are. We always have to appeal to something more.
The next thing that comes to mind is to look at where I got Moral Realism in the first place. There were two basic sources that I appealed to: First, God, which I focused on primarily, coming to a conclusion which we might summarize as "God's morality establishes an objectively preferred morality." The second source is the apparently innate nature of morality, the fact that everyone seems to have a conscience, and it's very hard to ignore or get rid of. Again, I focused less on this because I believe that God makes a stronger case for Moral Realism, but this seemingly innate sense of morality does give us some information about morality. There could be more ways to learn about morality than these, but these are the two that are apparent to me at this stage of reasoning.
As to how we may learn what is right, we may first note that, by the "God is always right" rule (I don't know if I've explicitly stated this before, and I haven't done a real treatment of the nature of God, but the rule follows simply from the omniscience of God, which I will have to consider at length in some later post), whatever God says on the subject of morality must be true. Thus, if we ask God what is right on some subject and get an unambiguous answer, we may have confidence in this. Now, not everyone believes that they may receive such clear and distinct information from God, and so this channel of information is not necessarily open to everyone (for you cannot utilize a tool until you know that you have it). This makes us turn to the other source for morality I mentioned above. However, we have no a priori reason for supposing that the innate sense of morality must be accurate. In fact, there are some contradictions to be found in what is believed to be moral in different societies, so that we may be sure that one society or another must be in error. However, even though people seem capable of twisting, silencing, or corrupting morality from this evidence, there are two important correlations which make me believe that a person's conscience is worth trusting: First, there seems to be a fairly strong correlation in the moral sense of different people and cultures, for the points on which they agree tend to be far more numerous than those on which they disagree. If we had nothing else to go on, then this might be an indication that the innate moral sense was at least our best guess for what is right, and that its answers would usually be at least self-consistent. The second correlation is even more important, however: It is the correlation between the innate moral sense and what God has told me directly. As such, there is an apparent correlation between the sense of what is right and what is actually right. This can give us confidence that our honest moral belief built from careful reflection on what our innate moral sense tells us is probably a very good approximation for what is right. Finally, one last advantage which the human conscience has: Whereas some people call on God and receive specific answers from Him, everyone has a conscience, so this can be regarded as a universal way of figuring out what is at least approximately right, even for those who do not believe in God.
So we do have ways of determining what is right: We can ask God and, if He does not give us specific guidance, we can trust that our consciences are at least likely to give us approximate moral truth. It remains to utilize these channels to ascertain moral truth, and then to act on this moral truth. Learn what is right, then do it. I see little more that needs to be said on the subject of personal ethics, unless it were to begin to outline moral truths. However, I will not do that. I think that I will leave personal ethics here, and turn to ethics as it relates to society, beginning my treatment of political philosophy in my next post.
Title: Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
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