Theism or Atheism: The Great AlternativeCohen, Chapman
Religion
Theism or Atheism: The Great Alternative
Cohen, Chapman
Atheism; Theism
But in saying that the essence of morality is unreasoning I do not mean
that it is unreasonable. All I mean is that it can receive a reasonable
justification, and that no matter how lofty the development it has its
basis in the fundamental conditions of associated animal and human life.
We may surround the subject with a vague and attractive idealistic
verbalism, but we come back to this as a starting point. The love of
family, with all its attendant values, rests upon the fact of crude
sexual desire, refined, of course, during the passing of many
generations, but dependent upon it all the same. Remove the sexual
desire and the family feelings are inexplicable. Thus, the _reason_ for
the existence of the sexual instinct is race preservation, but the end
has been achieved in a quite unreasoning manner. In the animal world at
large there is certainly no conscious desire for the production of
offspring, nor is there with the mass of human beings. There is the
desire to gratify an impulse, and very little more. And for the
strengthening of an instinct there need not be, nor is there, any
consciousness of its social value. All that is necessary is that it
shall be useful. Natural selection attends to the rest.
This will, I think, supply an answer to the contention that secular
ethics can supply a "must," but not an "ought"; that is, it may show
that an individual should act in accordance with his inclinations, but
in cases where these clash with the social well being, it can supply no
reason why the former should give way to the latter.
The argument rests upon a dual confusion. First, the moral "ought" is no
more than an organised and conscious form of "must," and not something
distinct from it. One may test the matter by taking a case. A man says,
I ought so to work as to promote the general welfare of society. If we
seek to find the source of this feeling we come ultimately upon the
feeling of tribal solidarity in virtue of which certain tribes survive
in the struggle for existence. It is gregariousness struggling into
consciousness. The moral "ought" is an idealised form of the primitive
tribal "must." And the "must" of primitive life is encouraged and
developed because it is one of the conditions of survival.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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