Morality and scientific naturalism
overcoming the conflicts
pp. 81-104
in: Jeremiah Hackett, Jerald Wallulis (eds), Philosophy of religion for a new century, Berlin, Springer, 2004Abstract
A book titled Prospects for a Common Morality was motivated, say its editors Gene Outka and John Reeder, by the paradoxical fact that at the same time that a "remarkable kind of cross-cultural moral agreement about human rights" has emerged in the practical world of international affairs, the intellectual world reflects "an apparent loss of confidence in any such consensus [about] any notion of a common morality that applies and can be justified to persons as such" (1993: 3). This loss of confidence reflects a growing conviction that late modern moral philosophy has failed to justify any universal moral norms or rights. For example, Alasdair Maclntyre having asserted with respect to the idea of "rights attaching to human beings simply qua human beings" that "there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns" says that the best reason for asserting this is "of precisely the same type as the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no witches and . . . no unicorns: every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed" (1981: 67). By "every attempt," Maclntyre means every attempt within what he calls "the Enlightenment project" of providing a "an independent rational justification of morality," with "independent" meaning independent from religious ideas (1981: 38, 48).1 It is this tradition that I am calling "late modern moral philosophy."