In today’s episode, two moral philosophers explore our everyday ethical choices. Are your gut-level reactions about right and wrong a signal from a higher reality—or just a chemical reaction in your brain? And if God isn’t the foundation for our morality, do our values actually mean anything?
In this throwback Veritas Forum, you’ll hear from Peter Singer, a philosopher and emeritus professor at Princeton, and John Hare, a philosopher at Yale. Drawing from their atheist and Christian worldviews, they explore where moral intuitions come from, whether morality can stand apart from religion, and how questions of happiness, suffering, and the life and teachings of Jesus shape their understanding of what it means to live well. You’ll hear both of their opening statements followed by an excerpt of their moderated discussion.
This forum was held at MIT in 2010. Thank you to the student planning team for making this event possible.
Jesus is a model for me of how human life should be—giving his life for others and reaching out to the weakest. But if it's just a model, then it produces despair because I don't seem to be able to live that way with my own resources. So it's important to me that with the model comes the power to live that way. God actually helps us to live the way God asks us to live, and God forgives us when we don't.
We don't need to regard Jesus as divine to be inspired by him, if indeed that is what we wish to be inspired by, or we could be inspired by many other morally virtuous people throughout the world, some of whom have been religious and some who have not been religious.
I am pessimistic about the degree to which most of us are committed to our moral duty when we perceive it conflicts with our happiness. And this shows there's a gap between the moral demand on us and our natural inclinations. The Christian picture is that God can help us change those inclinations.
Religion is so pervasive in human culture that it suggests that we need something more than just morality itself, because morality does not provide sufficient justification from its own resources.
