Quote:
Originally Posted by TimMason
Without God, a natural morality has no foundation. This is because in nature we find all kinds of behaviours that we would be unwilling to regard as morally good: we find animals that lay their eggs in the living bodies of other animals, we find animals that eat their young, we find animals that do a variety of unpleasant and disgusting things in order to survive and proliferate. How can we assume that the sub-set of behaviours that human beings engage in is morally superior to the behaviour of a prying mantis or a pig? Only if we assume, like Thomas Aquinus, the existence of a transcendent being who, for whatever reason, favours our species, can we explain our moral superiority to others and regard morality as being 'in nature'.
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Of course you are right - in the sense that without some transcendental foundation for human morality there is no transcendental foundation for human morality! But that there is no transcendental foundation for human morality does not show that there is no foundation whatever for human morality.
There is another sense of "natural", and that sense is concerned with what this brain/body system we refer to as human is like and how it interacts with its environment. I'm not claiming to know what a naturalised ethical system would look like, simply that there are grounds for the possibility of such a system.
It may be possible to think about ethical sense in a way analogous to aesthetic sense. Our aesthetic sense seems to be grounded in certain features of our cognitive architecture - what we ascribe aesthetic value to turns out to be grounded in that which our cognitive equipment finds meaningful in various ways. There is no claim that aesthetic sense needs some transcendental underpinning in order to be valid. In that sense it is human bound - but we are humans and it is human aesthetics that we are concerned with, not kangaroo aesthetics or Martian aesthetics. In just the same way it is human morality that we are concerned with; that human morality has application only to humans is not a weakness or a problem, but a design feature.
The search for transcendental underpinnings for anything will only lead, and lead only, to skepticism if one of our premises is that there is no possibility of experience of, knowledge of, or engagement with the transcendent.