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

WJEC / Eduqas Religious Studies for A Level Year 2 and A2 Religion and Ethics

So we have now established that general reasoning can be dangerous if it is given too much emphasis. However, the question still remains, ‘how can we ensure that moral duty succeeds?’ Prichard’s Intuitionism is very clever in the way it proposes its methodology for this and it is linked closely to epistemology. Indeed, Prichard uses Descartes’ principle of skepticism to demonstrate that moral reasoning is that which is ‘confirmed by doubt’. In other words, general reasoning is used to support and confirm what we originally recognised through intuition. We sometimes need to check the addition of our maths, even though we know our method is correct; we sometimes confirm our initial observations with a ‘second glance’. Prichard writes: ‘Just as the recognition that the doing of our duty often vitally interferes with the satisfaction of our inclinations leads us to wonder whether we really ought to do what we usually call our duty, so the recognition that we and others are liable to mistakes in knowledge generally leads us, as it did Descartes, to wonder whether hitherto we may not have been always mistaken. And just as we try to find a proof, based on the general consideration of action and of human life, that we ought to act in the ways usually called moral, so we, like Descartes, propose by a process of reflection on our thinking to find a test of knowledge, i.e. a principle by applying which we can show that a certain condition of mind was really knowledge, a condition which ex hypothesi (according to the hypothesis proposed, i.e. intuition) existed independently of the process of reflection.’ In other words, the way general thinking is used is for reflective purposes in relation to the intuition and not for evaluative purposes to build an argument or case as for what is right. In a given situation we should be intuitively aware of what the right course of action should be. We are presented with plenty of alternatives and arguments but they are there not to convince us; they are there to deflect the doubt that what we originally thought of was the correct course of action. It is almost like reverse consequentialism! Hurka observes that, ‘The stage of being moved by such skepticism is not pointless; it is an essential part of philosophical reflection. But its end-result should be a return to our original convictions, and so it is with moral duty.’ Therefore, the purpose of general reasoning is to shore up our initial intuition and not to distort it. Key quotes Modern epistemology, which begins with Descartes, is a response to the fact that we can doubt many of the things that we think we know to be true, and the theorising that follows is an effort to find a procedure by which we can demonstrate that we really do know what we think we know … Prichard thinks that similarly, modern moral philosophy’s primary aim is to find a way by which to demonstrate that what we think is our duty, really is obligatory. (Kaufman) We might, he thinks, come to doubt the truth of such insights, but the mistake of moral philosophy is to assume that such doubts can be assuaged by argument. The only appropriate response, in the moral as in the mathematical case, is that the doubts themselves are illegitimate. Reflection can serve a useful purpose only insofar as it returns us to a place in which we can recognise the self-evidence of the claims we began by doubting. (Le Bar)

Descartes was the famous philosopher you coined the term ‘I think, therefore I am’ (French: je pense, donc je suis / Latin: cogito ergo sum) and introduced the principle of doubt to confirm a truth)

DRAFT

Key terms Descartes’ principle of skepticism: that doubt can be resolved through challenge Ex hypothesi: according to the hypothesis proposed

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