Morals Not Knowledge

"Academics have long claimed that the relationship between religion and science concerns knowledge of the physical world, and that conflict ensues because religion has one way of knowing and science another. For example, it is claimed that to find the age of the Earth religious people look to holy scripture and scientists look at the age of rocks. This book shows that this is indeed true among the elites who focus on this debate. However, contrary to the assumptions of elites and public discourse in general, that same relationship and conflict does not exist between religious citizens and science. This book shows that regular religious people in the U.S. are at most in conflict over a few fact claims with science, and that this limited conflict does not lead to conflict with scientific claims writ large. More importantly, American religion has changed since the 1960s, de-emphasizing knowledge claims about the physical world, and becoming more focused on social relationships and thus morality. This book shows that any religion and science debate in the public is not about scientific claims about nature, such as the age of the Earth, but rather about morality - and opposition to the morality implicitly promoted by scientists"--Provided by publisher.

Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.

Using recontructive ideas available in classical Indian original works, this book makes a departure in the style of modern writings on Indian moral philosophy. It presents Indian ethics, in an objective, secular, and wherever necessary, critical manner as a systematic, down-to-earth, philosophical account of moral values, virtues, rights and obligations. It thereby refutes the claim that Indian philosophy has no ethics as well as the counter-claim that it transcends ethics. It demonstrates that moral living proves that the individual, his society and the world are really real and not only taken to be real for behavioral purposes as the Advaitins hold, the self is amoral being a non-agent, moksa is not a moral value, and the Karmic theory, because of involving belief in rebirth, does not fuarantee that the doer of an action is also the experiencer of its results, contrary to what is commonly held, and Indian ethics can sustain itself even if such notions are dropped. Rajendra Prasad calls Indian ethics organismic because, along with ethical concerns, it also covers issues related to professions, politics, administration, sex, environment, etc. Therefore, in one format it is theoretical and applied, normative and metaethical, humanistic and non-humanistic, etc., of course, within the limits of the then cognitive enquiry.

This Festschrift seeks to honor three highly distinguished scholars in the Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan: William K. Frankena, Charles L. Stevenson, and Richard B. Brandt. Each has made significant con tributions to the philosophic literature, particularly in the field of ethics. Michigan has been fortunate in having three such original and productive moral philosophers serving ob its faculty simultaneously. Yet they stand in a long tradition of excellence, both within the Department and in the University. Let us trace that tradition briefly. The University of Michigan opened in 184l.lts Department of Literature, Science, and the Arts at first resembled a typical American college ofthat period, with religious and ethical indoctrination playing a central role in course offerings. But when Henry Tappan, a Presbyterian clergyman and Professor of philosophy, became President in 1852, he succeeded in shifting the emphasis from indoctrination to inquiry and scholarship. Though he was dismissed for his policies in 1863, Tappan's efforts to establish a broad and liberal curriculum prevailed. Michigan was to take its place among the leading educational institutions in this country, and to achieve an international reputation as a research center. Several past philosophers are worthy of mention here. George Sylvester Morris, an absolute idealist, joined the Department in 1881, having served from 1870 as Chairman of the Department of Modern Languages and Literature. He assumed the Chairmanship of Philosophy in 1884.

Based on an unfinished manuscript by the late philosopher Dallas Willard, this book makes the case that the 20th century saw a massive shift in Western beliefs and attitudes concerning the possibility of moral knowledge, such that knowledge of the moral life and of its conduct is no longer routinely available from the social institutions long thought to be responsible for it. In this sense, moral knowledge—as a publicly available resource for living—has disappeared. Via a detailed survey of main developments in ethical theory from the late 19th through the late 20th centuries, Willard explains philosophy’s role in this shift. In pointing out the shortcomings of these developments, he shows that the shift was not the result of rational argument or discovery, but largely of arational social forces—in other words, there was no good reason for moral knowledge to have disappeared. The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge is a unique contribution to the literature on the history of ethics and social morality. Its review of historical work on moral knowledge covers a wide range of thinkers including T.H Green, G.E Moore, Charles L. Stevenson, John Rawls, and Alasdair MacIntyre. But, most importantly, it concludes with a novel proposal for how we might reclaim moral knowledge that is inspired by the phenomenological approach of Knud Logstrup and Emmanuel Levinas. Edited and eventually completed by three of Willard’s former graduate students, this book marks the culmination of Willard’s project to find a secure basis in knowledge for the moral life.

The celebrated theorist Tzvetan Todorov offers here a thought provoking study of the complex relationship between 'ethics' and 'history'. In exploring such issues as how one practices and assesses equality among different societies, Todorov confronts topics ranging from the conquest of America and nineteenth-century colonialism, to democracy and conflicts of the Self versus the Other.