STATE-OF-THE-ART ETHICS

Nato withdraws his attack on tradition--

In the end, though, I’m forced to moderate a bit - it may not be obvious that appeals to tradition cut no ice. If the ice is very thin and there’s no reason available to apply, then one can, I suppose, appeal to it directly. Further, tradition has within it all sorts or reason that is not necessarily visible to the naked eye, so one should seriously address oneself to understanding how it functions and why. It is valid to demand justification someone who opposes tradition.

but also makes the following interesting remark:

The Christian Bible has its wise and less-wise portions (and its wise and less-wise followers) and is incontrovertibly a prominent distillation of a millennium and more of Mesopotamian thought, but of course it’s not exactly state-of-the-art ethical reasoning these days.

I wonder what Nato thinks is "state-of-the-art ethical reasoning?" "State-of-the-art" suggests an analogy being progress in moral and scientific theory, yet it seems to me that the stunning failure of such an analogy is one of the major themes of modern history. In 1945, one might have lamented, "We continue to accomplish new and more amazing technological wonders, but we go on fighting and oppressing and killing one another, and technology only enables us to perpetrate our crimes more effciently, and on a more terrible scale! Technological progress is coupled with horrifying moral regression!" Nowadays I think a pretty strong case could be made that we have made significantly improvements in moral practice, and certainly great advances in moral practice have occurred since the Bible was written. But I am at a loss to imagine what the advances in moral theory have been over the sublime principles spoken by Jesus Christ. There is a tremendous amount of moral progress within the Bible, from a harsh and capricious God of the Old Testament who orders Abraham to kill his son (he withdraws the order at the last minute but wanted to be sure that Abraham intended to obey) and who seems chronically genocidal, to the lawgiving, nation-building God of Israel, to the loving God who takes flesh and suffers alongside his creatures in order to lift the world up from the abyss of sin and death into which human pride had driven us. But what in moral philosophy over the past 2000 years has surpassed the words of Jesus Christ? Alasdair MacIntyre and Bertrand Russell both see post-Enlightenment moral philosophy as finding its logical culmination in Nietzsche, whose mercilessly "heroic" doctrines underlay Nazism. I know some people look for moral systems in Rawls, Kant, Nozick, or even Marx, but does anyone really have the bravado nowadays to see these as "state-of-the-art," and Christianity as somehow passe? To hear someone (Nato, if he has time) defend this point of view would be very interesting.