According to the CCSSO teacher of the year, Sydney Chaffee, education is a matter of social activism. Teachers are to be facilitators, “thought partners” who let students “grapple with complex, hard issues” without “necessarily giving them the right answers.” Students are not formed, informed, or reformed by teachers; instead “students make choices” and the aim of the school is to “encourage students to articulate their own opinions, not to coerce them into agreeing with us.” It is the students who do the forming; teachers merely help them get where they want to go. Here is her vision: “School has to be bigger. It has to mean more than ‘I teach…
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On Law and Justice
If you were to find yourself in court accused of performing an action that you think is morally permissible–good, even–but against which there is a law, how would you react? Most likely, even if everyone in the room thought otherwise, you would think an injustice was being carried out. Imagine being led from the courtroom to undergo lashing, imprisonment, or even death when in your mind you had done nothing wrong. I’m sure most people’s stomachs would be in a knot. You’d be angry and incensed for good reason. The reason, I suggest, is that legal codes of particular governing authorities are beholden to a higher law. Now, perhaps you…
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Why Christians Use the Bible in Moral Arguments
What is the point of citing Bible verses when making moral arguments? Since not everyone believes the Bible to be true or authoritative, surely we need to make arguments based on something else, something we have in common. But Christians use the Bible all the time. Why? To get to an answer, one has to consider a range of issues in ethics. Once one has reasoned through these questions, it becomes clear why many Christians find that the Bible has an essential role to play in most moral reasoning. Thus, when engaging in moral debate, we often use the Bible. The first relevant issue is whether moral statements are translatable…
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On Moral Relativism
Cultural Relativism is the view that “Normality…is culturally defined” (Ruth Benedict). More precisely, cultural relativists hold to MR: (MR) There is no moral principle which necessarily applies to everyone, everywhere, and at every time For the cultural relativist, the source of moral principles is the conventions given by a group of people who make up a culture. The argument for such a view is: What is normative is culturally determined What is moral is normative Therefore, what is moral is culturally defined There are a couple of reasons why one might hold to such a view. First, the following is true: “Beliefs about what is right and wrong vary from culture…
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Hard Work Does Not Always Pay
Though it is generally true that those who work hard will earn a living, the sweat of your brow has no necessary connection with the contents of your wallet. The value of your labor does not determine its price. What determines the price of something is the amount someone is willing to pay for it. Nor is there are moral connection – without a voluntary agreement to pay for someone’s labor, work itself does not obligate anyone to pay for it.
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Language Use and the Existence of God
Natural human language-use entails moral obligations, specifically objective obligations between persons. All of these obligations are routinely broken (see Twitter). These obligations are both objective and social. They depend on being objective and not merely an expression of a particular preference or culture. They also depend on the existence of a social context composed of more than one person. As Nicholas Wolterstorff claims, “speaking is, through and through, a normative engagement.” Wolterstorff suggests three norms and provides examples: (i) speech should be related rightly to the mental state of the speaker. If the speaker asserts something he ought to believe it. If the speaker promises something, he ought to intend to fulfill…
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On Desire
Dissatisfaction is a mental state induced by not getting what one wants. Desire is also a root of evil. As James puts it, “each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:14-15). There are at least two proposals on the cultural table for dealing with desires. Neither way works. The first way is to attempt to remove desires from the inside. This is the way of ‘enlightenment’ – coming to believe a new truth – there are no such things as desires. They appear real, but…
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On Tidying Up
If I order the physical things in my house and country in just the right way, will I bring about spiritual order, peace, and harmony? In a word: No. The problem is that it gets things backwards. We don’t fix a spiritual problem by manipulating physical things. It doesn’t work that way. Even if we instituted a global government and were all forced to march in lockstep, keep immaculate homes, and never express a negative emotion, we would not deal with our underlying problem. In fact, we’d only make the problem worse. Our problem is spiritual and it requires a spiritual solution. The problem is disorder or lack of harmony but…
