1. I was listening to Dennis Prager on the radio, and he referred to this NYTimes piece by a secular philosopher, called "Why Our Children Donāt Think There Are Moral Facts." http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.co...ildren-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/?_r=0
2. Most children who weren't brought up in a religious household, with a clear recognition of God, fail to recognize the difference between moral facts, and opinions.
While the author of the article bemoans, as do most of us, that"the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture" he fails to grasp the reason for this situation..
3. ".... if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that itās wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?.... many college-aged students donāt believe in moral facts."
4. While raising an excellent point, our philosopher misses the brass ring, here: "What I didnāt know was where this attitude came from. Given the presence of moral relativism in some academic circles, some people might naturally assume that philosophers themselves are to blame."
5.He may not know the provenance.....but I know where the view originates. The proximate roots of this view can be traced to the anthropologist Franz Boas, who, in an effort to study exotic cultures without prejudice, found it useful to take the position that no culture is superior to any other. Thus was born the idea of cultural relativity.
The idea spread like wildfire through the universities, catapulted by the radical impetus of the sixties. ready and willing to reject "the universality of Western norms and principles."
Bawer, "The Victim's Revolution"
a. The more fundamental inception was the French Revolution, which threw out God and religion.
Without the concept of God who sets the rules of morality.....every moral fact is no more than an opinion.
b. "Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized by his students. Boas first articulated the idea in 1887:
"...civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes."[1] ....
https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/t...elativism.html
6. Our philosopher seems shocked to find that the Enlightenment ideas, those of David Hume, have been accepted, wholesale, in society.
" When I went to visit my sonās second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:
Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.
Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes."
You can see where this leaves 'God' or 'religion.'
7. In the West, the dichotomy between empirical truth and morality, or values, began with the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, impressive as it was, so much so that many thinkers elevated empirical science to the sole source of truth.
a. Empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge is derived from the senses: what we see, hear, hold, weigh, and measure. Where, then do we find moral truths? Clearly, under such a definition, values and morals could not be truths, but simply emotions, feelings.
b. Empiricist philosopher Hume reasoned this way: if knowledge is based on sensations, then morality, too, must come from sensations, i.e. pain or pleasure, or, as he put it, a matter of ātaste and sentiment,ā Hume claims then, that moral distinctions are not derived from reason but rather from sentiment.
Hume's Moral Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
This view reduces morality to personal taste: āWhatever works for you.ā
2. Most children who weren't brought up in a religious household, with a clear recognition of God, fail to recognize the difference between moral facts, and opinions.
While the author of the article bemoans, as do most of us, that"the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture" he fails to grasp the reason for this situation..
3. ".... if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that itās wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?.... many college-aged students donāt believe in moral facts."
4. While raising an excellent point, our philosopher misses the brass ring, here: "What I didnāt know was where this attitude came from. Given the presence of moral relativism in some academic circles, some people might naturally assume that philosophers themselves are to blame."
5.He may not know the provenance.....but I know where the view originates. The proximate roots of this view can be traced to the anthropologist Franz Boas, who, in an effort to study exotic cultures without prejudice, found it useful to take the position that no culture is superior to any other. Thus was born the idea of cultural relativity.
The idea spread like wildfire through the universities, catapulted by the radical impetus of the sixties. ready and willing to reject "the universality of Western norms and principles."
Bawer, "The Victim's Revolution"
a. The more fundamental inception was the French Revolution, which threw out God and religion.
Without the concept of God who sets the rules of morality.....every moral fact is no more than an opinion.
b. "Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized by his students. Boas first articulated the idea in 1887:
"...civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes."[1] ....
https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/t...elativism.html
6. Our philosopher seems shocked to find that the Enlightenment ideas, those of David Hume, have been accepted, wholesale, in society.
" When I went to visit my sonās second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:
Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.
Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes."
You can see where this leaves 'God' or 'religion.'
7. In the West, the dichotomy between empirical truth and morality, or values, began with the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, impressive as it was, so much so that many thinkers elevated empirical science to the sole source of truth.
a. Empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge is derived from the senses: what we see, hear, hold, weigh, and measure. Where, then do we find moral truths? Clearly, under such a definition, values and morals could not be truths, but simply emotions, feelings.
b. Empiricist philosopher Hume reasoned this way: if knowledge is based on sensations, then morality, too, must come from sensations, i.e. pain or pleasure, or, as he put it, a matter of ātaste and sentiment,ā Hume claims then, that moral distinctions are not derived from reason but rather from sentiment.
Hume's Moral Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
This view reduces morality to personal taste: āWhatever works for you.ā
