WJEC/Eduqas RS for A2/Yr2: Religion and Ethics (DRAFT)

T1 Ethical Thought

So the question remains, ‘how do we know and come to identify what our duty is?’ Bradley’s solution in My Station and its Duties was that this ‘knowledge’ had a physical basis and a clear scientific explanation. Naturalism and science: evolutionary ethics Key quote If naturalism be true, ethics is not an autonomous science; it is a department or an application of one or more of the natural or historical sciences. (Broad) In terms of the Naturalistic claim that meta-ethical statements can be seen in scientific terms, Naturalism no longer remains exclusively in the domain of philosophy. Bradley recognised this in My Station and Its Duties when he acknowledges the role of nurture through upbringing, psychology and social behaviour when he writes: ‘If we suppose the world of relations; in which he was born and bred never to have been then we suppose the very essence of him not to be. If we take that away, we have taken him away, and hence he now is not an individual in the sense of owing nothing to the sphere of relations in which he finds himself but does not contain those relations within himself as belonging to his very being, he is what he is, in brief so far as he is what others also are.’ Bradley also acknowledges the process of evolution but views the whole ‘process’ through the notion of ‘self-realisation’: ‘Evolution must evolve itself to itself, progress itself forward to a goal which is itself, development being out of nothing but was in, and bring it out, not from external compulsion, but because it is in’. It is true that Naturalism therefore opens itself up to the field of scientific enquiry and it is no surprise then that there has been an explosive interest in the last 40 years in explaining ethics from a scientific perspective whether it be biological or psychological. Key quote Whence morality? That is a question which has troubled philosophers since their subject was invented. Two and a half millennia of debate have, however, failed to produce a satisfactory answer. So now it is time for someone else to have a go … Perhaps [biologists] can eventually do what philosophers have never managed, and explain moral behaviour in an intellectually satisfying way. ( The Economist ) Charles Darwin once wrote: ‘An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.’ This is a quite amusing but also an interesting and insightful quotation. If animals can make decisions based upon experiences of what is pleasure and pain, then in light of Naturalism this then surely begs the further question ‘what can we learn from other species about the nature of ethics?’ The theory of evolution or ‘ natural selection ’ as Charles Darwin termed it, opens up the possibility that as we have evolved as a species physically, then our knowledge and understanding of our own behaviour has also evolved. Morality too, then, changes and ‘evolves’ – not always for the better one may add – and certainly the picture of ‘progress’ as Bradley saw it was more akin to a biological understanding of what the process of evolution involves. Biologically speaking, human beings have evolved as apes and within the ape species from some distant pre-ape / pre-human relative. As part of the ape family our closest relatives are the other great apes (orangutan, gorilla, chimpanzee and

Key quote This Hegelian account of the

moral life, in which the self is fully realised by fulfilling its role in the social organism which grounds its duties, is clearly one which greatly attracted Bradley, and he seems never to have noticed the implicit tension between the metaphysical account of the self as necessarily social and the moral injunction to realise the self in society. (Candlish)

DRAFT

Bradley understood evolution as part of the process of self-realisation.

Key quote Personal morality and political and social institutions cannot exist apart and (in general) the better the one, the better the other. The community is moral, because it realises personal morality; personal morality is moral, because in so far as it realises the moral whole. (Bradley)

Key terms Natural selection: Darwin’s theory of evolution Nurture: upbringing

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