Christopher Hallpike

Do We Need God To Be Good?

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The great question of God and Morality might seem to be a discussion for moral philosophers and theologians, into which the anthropologist should not intrude, but in fact we bring two essential kinds of insight to the debate. The first is that all our experience and training involve the study of the morality of real people in all the complexity of human nature and the rich texture of their life in society. Moral philosophy, however, has mostly ignored human nature and human society, and regarded itself as essentially about the analysis of concepts-duty, good, right, ought, moral and so on. Such concepts are thought to have an independent existence like those of logic, unrelated to any specific culture and without a history, and the business of philosophy is to discover the true relationships between these basic ideas. "Is the right or the good the more fundamental ethical concept?"; "Do we have an intuitive knowledge of goodness?"; "Are value judgments essentially different from judgments of fact?" and, of course, there is the famous Naturalistic Fallacy. While some modern moral philosophers have emphasised the importance of social life, generally speaking, however, moral philosophy is conducted at a level of abstract speculation, and its examples and anecdotes from ordinary life are no substitute for empirical verification and that immersion in the facts expected of the social sciences. If the first of our qualifications is the intensive study of real people in actual societies, primarily by fieldwork, the second is that our work is also comparative and therefore most of the societies it has studied are non-Western. Moral philosophers, however, are also remarkably ethnocentric, and treat the conceptual landscape of their narrow social world-usually Western middle class academia-as a universal aspect of human thought. In the vast body of ethnographic works on non-literate peoples, however, one will not find that human rights, individualism, moral obligation, duty, or justice are central concepts in anyone's moral thinking. Philosophers have also been completely indifferent to how and why moral concepts have developed historically. So, someone who traces the development of the moral vocabulary in English soon discovers that such "timeless" concepts as "ought" and "duty" have a history and that in past ages they were not understood as they are now, partly because the organization of society was different. As the reader will discover, I am not advocating a shallow relativism here, but simply stressing that an understanding of moral systems needs an understanding of their social and cultural context. (I have written a special study of the development of moral ideas in Ethical Thought in Increasingly Complex Societies. Social structure and moral development, 2017.)

---

Hinweis: Dieser Artikel kann nur an eine deutsche Lieferadresse ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Authors Sphere Inc.
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 28. Oktober 2024
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 216mm x 140mm x 13mm
• Gewicht: 308g
• ISBN-13: 9798230931805
• Artikelnr.: 72558263