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Sunday, February 21, 2010

I do my best thinking when I am going to sleep. So many profound thoughts have been forgotten because I didn’t write them down before falling asleep, or just upon waking, for that matter. If only I could hook up something to my brain that would record my thoughts while I was I am in that state, I would have a much more detailed and complete account of my thoughts. Maybe eventually that technology will be available. Maybe I should be the one to pursue inventing it.

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I was thinking about my conversation with Billy Rodriguez (a family friend) today, about Hume’s ethics. He mentioned a statement made by Hume about the impotence of reason in dealing with moral judgments, presumably in defense of religion, in response to a previous post I had made quoting Hume about sense experience being more reliable than the testimony of religious scriptures.

I made a pretty extensive explanation of Hume’s ethics to him, but that may have not been the best response. I don’t like to feel as if I’m intellectually bowling people over, or putting a heavy burden on them to sift through my writing to find the meaning, but I feel like that’s what I do too often. I would like to be more concise, but there just seems to be too much to say.

Anyway, the background information on Hume’s ethics may have been helpful, or even necessary to understanding the context of his statement about reason not relating to moral judgments, but I did have a new thought about it, which I didn’t state in the original reply.

If reason were truly impotent in determining ‘right’ from ‘wrong’, then we’d have no cause to assent to religious propositions about moral truth. We could accept some moral judgments and reject others, but not because they come from God or some religious authority. To reach this conclusion, we have to reason that God, or at least that religious scripture, is the source of moral truth, and use reason to defend that claim. Dismissing reason as playing some part in moral judgments would surely make the ability to determine moral truth or falsity impossible, as it cuts off any hope for justification as to why a statement is true or false.