the difference between the laws of kashruth (kosher laws) and injunctions against murder or theft is not obscure.
Not quite sure how that enters into the picture.
more advanced peoples, such as the Greeks and Jews, there were rules of hospitality that embraced the stranger, and the first systematic attempts at ethical universalization.
I didn't say it hadn't been tried, I said that the attempts have been irregular and have been applied on a limited and selective basis.
one cannot have a comprehensive ethical doctrine without some notion of the ends of man, and that those are subject to dispute.
Since it is impossible to know "the ends of man", or even to know if there are any, doesn't that make it a little bit difficult to have a comprehensive ethical doctrine? Isn't it more practical to base an ethical doctrine on the pursuit of behaviour which observation and experience indicate is conducive to the development of a peaceful and prosperous society?
If you are right, and survival is the only "imperative", than expediency is all that is left.
I said that survival is the only inherent imperative. I did not say it was the only imperative. We have the capacity to select our own imperatives; if we select peace and prosperity as our goals, than we will create moral codes which conduce to those ends. And expediency is critical. The whole evolution of morality has paralleled the expanding definition of expediency. We moved from thinking about what is immediately expedient for the individual to what was expedient for the family, for the clan, for the community, for the nation, and maybe, someday, for a community of nations. Our definitions of expediency have gathered longer and longer time horizons. All of these have changed our thinking on morality immensely.
If, on the other hand, the end of man is to exalt his dignity as the image of God, then the emphasis will be on respect and mutual aid.......
If humans agreed on what God is and what God wants, that would be true. Unfortunately, that generally hasn't been the case. I suspect that a moral code based on long-term expediency for the largest possible number of people is more likely to emphasize respect and mutual aid for all than one based on any unknowable assumption about God. The latter system is just too likely to dissolve into sectarian conflict. |
