[fecklessyouth]

I don't think it's an accident that a modern, secular framework hasn't arisen to replace traditional religion. For what resources could a framework draw upon? The founding principles of the Enlightenment have stricken notions of "value," "good," "bad," and "purpose" from the realm of knowledge. Modern rationality is anti-teleological. It precludes any exploration of first causes. When constrained by the epistemological standards of empiricism, theorizing about such subjects is impossible. For before it produced modern standards of scientific proof, it was a rebuke against Aristotle and Aquinas, whose methods represented the most fruitful exploration of "value," good," etc. Modernity's absence of such a framework is a feature, not a bug.

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has written in far more depth about this change. Anyone who's concerned with modernity's apparent difficulty in handling "meaning of life" questions would be advised to discover how exactly we landed in this situation:

http://www.amazon.com/After-Virtue-Study-Moral-Theory/dp/026...

[randallsquared]

MacIntyre's work was incredibly interesting to this layman. The main point I took away from it is that earlier moral theory asserted that the moral good was the same as in the sense of "this is a good chair". Looked at this way, the ancients had much simpler answers for moral questions than we do, because they all boiled down to "is this person fulfilling their purpose by this action?". Virtue ethics, which he's famously associated with, then brings back that question, with an intermediate step of "what are the traits of a person who is fulfilling their purpose as a person?", as a way of reducing the original question to a heuristic than can be applied to situations.

Where I think this has a problem is that people may disagree about the purpose of a person, or people in general. Just as a chair's purpose is most clearly set by the chair's builder, talking about a person's purpose intuitively implies a person's builder, or "Builder", if you will. A rock shaped by water and accident to look like a chair may serve as one, and so be a good chair, but being a good chair doesn't have any apparent bearing on whether it's a good rock. Without design and intent, purpose is a little fuzzy. Hence (I believe), MacIntyre became religious a while after writing _After Virtue_.

So, even though virtue ethics, if accepted as better than consequentialist ethical theories, makes moral questions simpler, it seems a bit arbitrary with regard to the actual answers, and two virtue ethicists might disagree on which are the important virtues without either being more correct than the other. Without a creator, virtue ethics is on only slightly firmer ground (in my opinion) than consequentialism, but with a creator, it provides strong moral guidelines while not requiring that those guidelines apply to the universe at large, or to said creator. That is, for a virtue ethicist, believing in a creator god grounds moral theory for humans in a way that neither deontology nor consequentialism can.

[throwupper247]

Losing focus and wondering about the start of the train of thought, stackoverfloing while recursing is a first order intrinsic problem.