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Morality for Humans
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Many people believe that the only way to avoid a vicious, dog-eat-dog moral relativism is to affirm eternal and universal moral values and principles, values whose source must lie in something that transcends the finiteness and vicissitudes of human existence. I was nurtured and educated in just such a transcendent, absolutist view, but over the years, and with much emotional and intellectual turmoil, I lost my conviction in the moral fundamentalism that underlies this perspective. The more I studied the nature of human concepts, understanding, and reasoning, the more I came to recognize profound problems with the picture of experi- ence, thought, and value presupposed by views of morality as transcendentally grounded. My engagement with cog- nitive science research on human meaning, conceptualiza- tion, and reasoning led me to the realization that our values, including our ethical standards and ideals, emerge from our embodied, interpersonal, culturally situated habitation of our world, and not from some transcendent realm.
Surprisingly, this realization did not lead me to moral relativism, but rather to a conception of moral standards as relatively stable, but always provisional and corrigible, norms. Moreover, it brought me to an understanding that the key to intelligent moral inquiry is an imaginative pro- cess of moral deliberation by which our experience is re- constructed to achieve growth of meaning and enriched possibilities for human flourishing.
MARK JOHNSON - Personal Name
1st Edtion
3: 978-0-226-11354-8
NONE
Morality for Humans
Management
English
2014
USA
1-274
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