Although I'm a very different person now than I was when I first fell in love with his ideas, I'm still very drawn to his idea that right and wrong are knowable through reason, and that most of the time we know them and our failure to do what's right is our own desires clouding our judgment. His idea that behaving morally is a duty that we can't ever completely avoid makes a lot of sense to me. And I like the way tying morality to reason means that we can't escape it -- it's not something that comes down to us from God who we can defy, or society, or tradition -- it's something in us and we'll always know it's there, whether we choose to pay attention or not. There's a little snippet I can't go find right how that I want on my tombstone when I die, something like: Two things compel my immediate reverence: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
I do think his ideas are in some ways as dangerous as they are awesome though. First, they're pretty unavoidably ableist -- if morality is a matter of reason, and our possession (not the right word but I've no time) of the moral law is what gives us infinite worth, what about someone who can't reason? What is she? Not Good Implications.
And second, seeing morality as absolute and as a duty that we always must follow -- well, that's a very good way of delineating the light side of our nature, but what about the dark? It shouldn't surprise you that I believe that we have to find ways to safely nurture both, without using that as an excuse to harm or wrong others. And I think following this without full self-awareness, as I once did, is a recipe for unbalancing yourself and becoming sanctimonious and life-denyingly rigid.
But I still love the attempt to understand right and wrong, and to ground it in ourselves, and to remind us that most of the time we know right from wrong. I like it because it reminds me to be firm in my convictions and to trust my judgment -- and to see a part of me (and everyone else) as inherently sacred and of infinite worth.
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Although I'm a very different person now than I was when I first fell in love with his ideas, I'm still very drawn to his idea that right and wrong are knowable through reason, and that most of the time we know them and our failure to do what's right is our own desires clouding our judgment. His idea that behaving morally is a duty that we can't ever completely avoid makes a lot of sense to me. And I like the way tying morality to reason means that we can't escape it -- it's not something that comes down to us from God who we can defy, or society, or tradition -- it's something in us and we'll always know it's there, whether we choose to pay attention or not. There's a little snippet I can't go find right how that I want on my tombstone when I die, something like: Two things compel my immediate reverence: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
I do think his ideas are in some ways as dangerous as they are awesome though. First, they're pretty unavoidably ableist -- if morality is a matter of reason, and our possession (not the right word but I've no time) of the moral law is what gives us infinite worth, what about someone who can't reason? What is she? Not Good Implications.
And second, seeing morality as absolute and as a duty that we always must follow -- well, that's a very good way of delineating the light side of our nature, but what about the dark? It shouldn't surprise you that I believe that we have to find ways to safely nurture both, without using that as an excuse to harm or wrong others. And I think following this without full self-awareness, as I once did, is a recipe for unbalancing yourself and becoming sanctimonious and life-denyingly rigid.
But I still love the attempt to understand right and wrong, and to ground it in ourselves, and to remind us that most of the time we know right from wrong. I like it because it reminds me to be firm in my convictions and to trust my judgment -- and to see a part of me (and everyone else) as inherently sacred and of infinite worth.