Does it strike you as reasonable?
6. Name two things (persons, objects, experiences, etc.) in your life that you consider intrinsically valuable. Name three that are instrumentally valuable.
7. How do your feelings affect the moral judgments you make? Do they determine your judgments? Do they inform them? If so, how?
8. What is the logic behind the principle of universalizability? Cite an example of how the principle has entered into your moral deliberations.
9. How does racial discrimination violate the principle of impartiality?
10. What is the “dominance of moral norms”? Does it strike you as reasonable? Or do you believe that sometimes nonmoral norms can outweigh moral ones? If the latter, provide an example.
9. What are the premises in the arbitrariness argument against the divine command theory? (p. 11)
10. Does the principle of impartiality imply that we must always treat equals equally? Why or why not? (p. 8)
Discussion Questions
1. Do you think that morality ultimately depends on God (that God is the author of the moral law)? Why or why not?
2. Do you believe that you have absorbed or adopted without question most of your moral beliefs? Why or why not?
3. Formulate an argument against the divine command theory, then formulate one for it.
4. Give an example of how you or someone you know has used reasons to support a moral judgment.
5. Identify at least two normative ethical questions that you have wondered about in the past year.
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14 Á PART 1: FUNDAMENTALS
the case that some of the most so-called abstract con- cepts are intimately related to the most profoundly relevant human experiences. In fact, it’s been my expe- rience that virtually any question can be plumbed Socratically. Sometimes you don’t know what question will have the most lasting and significant impact until you take a risk and delve into it for a while.
What distinguishes the Socratic method from mere nonsystematic inquiry is the sustained attempt to explore the ramifications of certain opinions and then offer compelling objections and alternatives. This scrupulous and exhaustive form of inquiry in many ways resembles the scientific method. But unlike Socratic inquiry, scientific inquiry would often lead us to believe that whatever is not measurable cannot be investigated. This “belief” fails to address such paramount human concerns as sorrow and joy and suffering and love.
Instead of focusing on the outer cosmos, Socrates focused primarily on human beings and their cos mos within, utilizing his method to open up new realms of self-knowledge while at the same time exposing a great deal of error, superstition, and dogmatic non- sense. The Spanish-born American philosopher and poet George Santayana said that Socrates knew that “the foreground of human life is necessarily moral and practical” and that “it is so even so for artists”— and even for scientists, try as some might to divorce their work from these dimensions of human existence.
Scholars call Socrates’ method the elenchus, which is Hellenistic Greek for inquiry or cross-examination. But it is not just any type of inquiry or examination. It is a type that reveals people to themselves, that makes them see what their opinions really amount to. C. D. C. Reeve, professor of philosophy at Reed College, gives the standard explanation of an elenchus in saying that its aim “is not simply to reach adequate definitions” of such things as virtues; rather, it also has a “moral refor- matory purpose, for Socrates believes that regular elenctic philosophizing makes people happier and more virtuous than anything else. . . . Indeed philoso- phizing is so important for human welfare, on his view, that he is willing to accept execution rather than give it up.”
method of inquiry as “among the greatest achieve- ments of humanity.” Why? Because, he says, it makes philosophical inquiry “a common human enterprise, open to every man.” Instead of requiring allegiance to a specific philosophical viewpoint or analytic tech- nique or specialized vocabulary, the Socratic method “calls for common sense and common speech.” And this, he says, “is as it should be, for how many should live is every man’s business.”
I think, however, that the Socratic method goes beyond Vlastos’ description. It does not merely call for common sense but examines what common sense is. The Socratic method asks: Does the common sense of our day offer us the greatest potential for self- understanding and human excellence? Or is the pre- vailing common sense in fact a roadblock to realizing this potential?
Vlastos goes on to say that Socratic inquiry is by no means simple, and “calls not only for the highest degree of mental alertness of which anyone is capa- ble” but also for “moral qualities of a high order: sin- cerity, humility, courage.” Such qualities “protect against the possibility” that Socratic dialogue, no matter how rigorous, “would merely grind out . . . wild conclusions with irresponsible premises.” I agree, though I would replace the quality of sincerity with honesty, since one can hold a conviction sin- cerely without examining it, while honesty would require that one subject one’s convictions to frequent scrutiny.
A Socratic dialogue reveals how different our out- looks can be on concepts we use every day. It reveals how different our philosophies are, and often how tenable—or untenable, as the case may be—a range of philosophies can be. Moreover, even the most univer- sally recognized and used concept, when subjected to Socratic scrutiny, might reveal not only that there is not universal agreement, after all, on the meaning of any given concept, but that every single person has a somewhat different take on each and every concept under the sun.
What’s more, there seems to be no such thing as a concept so abstract, or question so off base, that it can’t be fruitfully explored [using the Socratic method]. In the course of Socratizing, it often turns out to be