Religion & Ethics: Content from Across the ABC




Date/Time 29 Dec 2014 2:28:47pm
Perhaps we could pose Aristotle and Nietzsche's respective questions to these groups. If they aren't disposed to the questions I wouldn't coerce them. So you bring out how before we can understand other traditions we ought to understand our own. MacIntyre is trying to bring out the causes of the paralysis in our particular moral discourse.

Our choice is as simple as the choice between Aristotle and Nietzsche. For a people to communicate effectively there has to be a minimum amount of agreement on philosophical essentials. I'll expand:

"For MacIntyre, shared moral evaluation and understanding is extremely limited, if not impossible altogether, in the absence of a shared tradition of practical rationality, including a common reservoir of theological, philosophical, ethical, and anthropological concepts, and common virtues and goods attained in and through the various practices—especially the architectonic practice of politics—that constitute a shared tradition. This is why we have so much moral disagreement in our public discourse." [Kozinski]

Obviously I don't share your historical methodology as you apply it to Christianity. Disinterested ancient historians overwhelmingly make clear Christian origins are remarkably well documented, in the order of hundreds of times better attested than any other ancient phenomenon. Now that doesn't get a person to faith but it does mean we have to take what is recorded seriously. In our era we have the added authority of the testimony of the best and brightest in many different times and places throughout history forbidding us from concluding that the spiritual is an illusion.

Aristotle and Jesus aren't in conflict with respect to the natural law. Jesus affirmed the order that Aristotle detected in nature, while at the same time He corrected mistaken understandings of nature's law that had become customary. MacIntyre makes the crucial point that unless we recognise that nature is legislative as our basis for moral discourse (as virtually all humans who ever lived have done) – we are left with Nietzschean 'Triumph of the Will'.

As for Aristotle being an atheist, it would be an advance if atheists admitted of the 'unmoved mover' that Aristotle reasoned to from nature. And as for reductionism, a tremendous weight would be lifted off our institutions if Aristotle's philosophy of nature was the one considered reductionistic! - afterall modern philosophy defines itself essentially by its reduction of Aristotelian final and formal causes to efficient and material ones alone (the mechanical philosophy ). This metaphysical error occurred almost imperceptibly during the 17thC scientific revolution.

So John, with respect, I think you have it exactly backwards. Our task is to recover the wholistic Aristotelian philosophy of nature that we jettisoned. In doing this we recover huma