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Trivialization of moral experience
Thursday 30 October 2008
The BBC´s director general is meeting the corporation´s governing body to discuss lewd phone calls made on comic Russell Brand´s Radio 2 show.
Mark Thompson will brief the BBC Trust on a preliminary inquiry into how the calls made with Jonathan Ross to actor Andrew Sachs came to be broadcast.
Brand has resigned from Radio 2 and Ross has been suspended. I see this whole episode as an example of what Brian Hebblethwaite, Life Fellow of Queens´ College, Cambridge, calls the trivialisation of moral experience. In his book ´In Defence of Christianity´ he argues that one of J.L. Mackie´s main arguments for the subjectivity of morals in his book ´Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong´ was ‘the argument from queerness’. Objective values are very queer entities. So they are, from a naturalistic perspective. But given the pressures to admit them, pressures which we have seen articulated by Kant, Murdoch, and MacKinnon, we are driven to question the naturalistic perspective. Hebblethwaite argues that a theistic metaphysics makes most sense of these otherwise queer facts. Ironically, Mackie admits this hypothetically—that is, if we could embrace theism, which Mackie himself could not. But the unacceptability of naturalism, its trivialization of moral experience, should make us look again at the question of the coherence of theism, too easily dismissed by Mackie. I shall say more about this in my blog tomorrow.
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