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2/21/2018 6:53 pm  #11


Re: What have you changed your mind on?

Greg wrote:

I was once an atheist, materialist/naturalist, moral anti-realist. Now I'm a Catholic.

I used to find neo-Thomist apologetics more respectable than I now find it. I am now in considerable sympathy with the opening paragraphs of Elizabeth Anscombe's paper "Faith" (collected in Faith in a Hard Ground). A sample:

The passing away of these opinions is not to be regretted. They attached the character of 'rationality' entirely to what were called the preambles and to the passage from the preambles to faith itself. But both these preambles and that passage were in fact an 'ideal' construction--and by 'ideal' I don't mean one which would have been a good development of thinking, if it had occurred in an individual; I mean rather 'fanciful', indeed dreamed up according to prejudices: prejudices, that is, about what it is to be reasonable in holding a belief.

I am less confident about the precise structure ethics should take. I am more confident than I was a few years ago that almost all writing on natural law ethics is quite bad. I am more committed to a variety of more provisional claims about action, the nature of the good, obligation, etc., but I approach most questions in applied ethics unsystematically. I am more inclined to think that, in a large number of cases, there is no standard for the good course of action outside of what the virtuous person would recognize.

 
I’d be interested in hearing more about why you think most natural law writing is bad.

I disagree with some of the things they write on a few specific issues, but I think it has more to do with lack of adequate knowledge of specific specialized fields. Generally, I find the general natural law approach sound.

Of course, I could be wrong.

 

2/21/2018 8:48 pm  #12


Re: What have you changed your mind on?

@ Dry and Uninspired

I sympathize a lot with your journey. Craig also introduced me to philosophy of religion and, most importantly, the relevance of philosophy in the modern age contra cultural trends like scientism. Habermas has some good work. Have you read Michael Licona's work on the resurrection? He's a student of Habermas and has a very hefty book employing a similar historical  method to Habermas'.

 

2/21/2018 8:49 pm  #13


Re: What have you changed your mind on?

Dry and Uninspired wrote:

I’d be interested in hearing more about why you think most natural law writing is bad.

I disagree with some of the things they write on a few specific issues, but I think it has more to do with lack of adequate knowledge of specific specialized fields. Generally, I find the general natural law approach sound.

Of course, I could be wrong.

I am a natural lawyer of some sort; I just think the literature is generally bad. I suppose I should say that I think that the new natural lawyers are wrong but that most other natural lawyers respond to them unsuccessfully.

For one thing, I don't think there is a general (or "classical", or "old") natural law approach. You can find a lot of people who disagree vehemently with the new natural lawyers' reading of Aquinas who disagree with each other almost as substantively but do not acknowledge it. Most writers say very little about what the first principles of the natural law are and how they fit into a more naturalist reading of Aquinas.

I think the same about the topic of intention. I think the new natural lawyers are incorrect in how they distinguish the intended from the foreseen, as do most other people writing on the topic. But the theories others offer as alternatives tend to be terrible and to be subject to easy counterexamples unless one makes them obscure enough that they cannot be applied.

This is the sort of distorting effect which the new natural lawyers have on the literature. Those who oppose them frequently just focus on opposing  them. You will nowhere find Feser asking what we should think about the differences between Flannery, Brock, and Jensen. He does not register any recognition that there are debates among non-new natural lawyers (though he will sometimes mention on his blog when one of these authors is publishing a new book). He often refers simply to the "traditional natural law approach" as though there were consensus as to what that is.

 

2/22/2018 8:30 am  #14


Re: What have you changed your mind on?

Mysterious Brony wrote:

@DanielCC

Who do you think provides the best defenses or formulations of the moral argument? Lately, I've been thinking about the moral argument. Any recommended works would be of great appreciation. 

Alas no, at the moment I am reading R.M. Adams' Finite and Infinite Goods which has interesting things to say about necessary a postiori relations between God and goodness. I am using 'Moral Argument' in a very wide sense though as to cover any argument from the existence of value properties qua value properties ('Axiological Argumen't might be a better term as I would also include arguments from beauty).
 

 

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