Read this WSJ article reporting on Attorney-General Bob Barr’s speech at the University of Notre Dame, and then ask: Are these the premises shared by both left and right?
1. People need morality.
2. Morality can come only from either Church or State.
The current right then argues that the government’s doing a bad job, so we need to go back to religion.
The current left counters that religion’s been tried and failed, so we need more government programs.
If so, then it’s sad to see — in the twenty-first century — continued strait-jacket thinking driven by false premise 2.
hmm. I believe you’re preaching to the choir, Professor. Of course it’s a false alternative. But as somebody else with much less compunction asked, what is to be done? Feeling sad doesn’t seem to be productive strategy.
Morality can only come from the individuals inner-self. All other sources are superficial, will include coercion and short lived.
You seem to be misrepresenting premise 2. Is it not true that for morality to be anything binding, it must come from outside the individual self and that it is the individual who must seek it out, apprehend it, and live it out? Morality is not the invention of an individual but apprehended by him/her. If you give up that premise, don’t we slide into the contradiction of moral relativism? Is not Barr arguing that Judeo-Christian values provide the best system of morality and returning to them is to stave off the slide to relativism (which inevitably leads to tyranny)? I’m wondering, Dr.Hicks, if you are a moral realist. If you are, whence morality?
The left and the right seem to disagree on the fundamental premise of moral realism.
My alternative to the false alternative of premise 2 is the second naturalist approach outlined here: http://www.stephenhicks.org/2019/02/17/on-natural-morality-and-religious-amoralism/