ellauri097.html on line 449: Recently a caller to the radio told me about a conversation he’d had about homosexuality. The caller made the teleological argument, that looking at what the natural functions of the male and female reproductive organs are for, we can draw certain conclusions about how they should properly be used. The person he was talking with challenged his argument that you can’t get an “ought” from an “is”. The challenger seemed to be saying that just because it is that way in nature doesn’t mean that we can derive a moral rule from it. The caller asked if the challenge was incorrect and how to respond to it.
ellauri097.html on line 451: On the principle the challenger is correct in describing the is-ought fallacy. But rather than working against the teleological argument, that principle works against a common argument in favor of homosexuality, which is, if homosexual interests are natural to someone, they are therefore morally acceptable. That is an example of an is-ought fallacy.
ellauri097.html on line 461: Let’s look at the teleological argument based on function. The teleological argument isn’t about just the way a thing works, but the way a thing is intended to work – purpose. My pen functions a certain way. It doesn’t just function that way by accident. It was intended by someone to function with a purpose. For those who are not familiar with this, teleology means ‘end.’ A telos is ‘end’ as in ‘goal.’ Something is intended for a purpose and it’s used for that purpose.
ellauri097.html on line 465: With that as a foundation, let’s look at whether the teleological argument against homosexuality suffers from the is-ought fallacy.
ellauri097.html on line 477: The appearance of design suggests genuine design. The appearance of teleology suggests genuine teleology, and so examples of teleology in the natural realm point to the existence of God. That’s what a teleological argument for God’s existence amounts to - the argument from design. So the teleology, to me, is evidence for God, and that entails certain moral obligations to the God that created with purpose.
ellauri097.html on line 479: Let’s just say somebody says, “I don’t believe that.” I say, okay, you’re welcome to not believe it, but then you can’t argue teleologically. In fact, you can’t even argue that if it’s natural, it’s okay, because you’re arguing a certain teleology: that if you find it in nature, that means it’s morally acceptable. You can’t help yourself to the teleological argument if you don’t believe in God.
ellauri097.html on line 483: It really is an issue of consistency of worldviews here, as you can see. But I think a more precise understanding of the teleological argument and the is-ought fallacy helps us to answer the original challenge the caller had.
ellauri117.html on line 608: Maxa-Shaftesburyn (1621-1683) pojanpoika, 3. Earl of Shaftesbury (1671—1713) oli mieltä että: Hobbes had set the agenda of British moral philosophy (a search for the grounding of universal moral principles), and Locke had established its method (empiricism). Shaftesbury’s important contribution was to focus that agenda by showing what a satisfactory response to Hobbes might look like but without giving up too much of Locke’s method. Shaftesbury showed the British moralists that if we think of moral goodness as analogous to beauty, then (even within a broadly empiricist framework) it is still possible for moral goodness to be non-arbitrarily grounded in objective features of the world and for the moral agent to be attracted to virtue for its own sake, not merely out of self-interest. In Shaftesbury’s aesthetic language, the state of having the morally correct motives is the state of being “morally beautiful,” and the state of approving the morally correct motives upon reflection is the state of having “good moral taste.” Shaftesbury argues that the morally correct motives which constitute moral beauty turn out to be those motives which are aimed at the good of one’s society as a whole. This good is understood teleologically. Furthermore Shaftesbury argues that both the ability to know the good of one’s society and the reflective approval of the motivation toward this good are innate capacities which must nevertheless be developed by proper socialization.
ellauri164.html on line 43: In the introduction to his Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie in 1874, Wundt described Immanuel Cunt and Johann Friedrich Herbart as the philosophers who had the most influence on the formation of his own views. Those who follow up these references will find that Wundt critically took to the cleaners both these thinkers’ ideas. He distanced himself from Herbart's science of the soul . Wundt praised Cunt's rejection of a "rational" psychology deduced from metaphysics, but he argued against Cunt's epistemology as well as Cunt's category theory and his flabby position on teleological explanations in his publication Was soll uns Kant nicht verkaufen? (1892).
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