No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Expiration of Morality*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2009
Extract
Has Alexander Pope's prediction, made a quarter of a millennium ago (1742), come true in our own day?
No one who has lived through the last thirty years is unaware of the spectacular alterations of behavior norms that have occurred in most Western societies. It is not merely that everywhere incivility and crime are on the increase, that there are more and more violations of moral standards which nevertheless continue to be acknowledged. Rather, we witness the relaxation or disappearance of the standards themselves. What was bad becomes permissible or even a positive good.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1994
References
1 It was a prediction: the present tense is “vatic.”
2 I am not here either affirming or denying that evolution can produce a tendency to selfsacrifice in the phenotype.
3 Of course, much fibbing is tolerated and even required in every community. I have in mind only Donald Davidson's (and Kant's) point that if lying becomes the rule rather than the exception, communication breaks down. Religious and political discourses present special problems in this regard.
4 Moreover, the rights that any human being has just by being a member of a community are to be treated by others in ways that respect these necessary conditions for viable association. They are the only rights antecedent to establishment of the state, and include the “unalienable rights” of the Declaration of Independence. Possession of these rights is the respect in which “all men are created equal”—and the only respect; Jefferson subscribed to nothing so absurd as physical, mental, or moral egalitarianism. See Flew, Antony, “Equal Value: Or Equal Rights to Equal Liberties?” Cogito, Spring 1990, p. 27.Google Scholar
5 This is substantially the. answer of Protagoras in Plato's dialogue of that name.
6 Magic also. The distinction is superficial, being merely that the priest entreats, the magician commands.
7 Kierkegaard, Søren A., Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Lowrie, Walter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 64.Google Scholar
8 Herodotus III 38.
9 Fogelin, Robert, Philosophical Interpretations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 249.Google Scholar
10 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and EvilGoogle Scholar, Section 195; On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay.
11 Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, ch. 6, 1106b36.Google Scholar
12 Socrates, ' “I will obey the god, not you [Athenians]”Google Scholar (Plato, , Apology, 29D)Google Scholar is no real exception. The obedience in question was to a particular specific command, viz., “Pursue your mission.”
13 Consider, e.g., the Pope's recent “pardon” of Galileo.
14 Stevenson, Charles L., Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), pp. 24, 97, and passim.Google Scholar