Moral Philosophy and Virtue | Ep.8
Moral Philosophy is the wholistic study of man. Through a study of man one is again seeking to continue studying God, but form a different angle. We know from scripture that man is created to live in community and fellowship with God. This is apparent in Genesis when the Bible says that God walked in the garden with Adam (Genesis 3:8). Through philosophy one examines what it means to live in community with God and man. We are studying the relationships that humans develop.
One big human relationship is found in the way we learn. In moral philosophy, knowledge becomes a part of the student. He must attain knowledge and wrestle with it before he can say he truly know it. Modern technology poses a problem to this way of thinking, because now everyone has almost limitless knowledge at their fingertips. The struggle to attain knowledge has been lost. Today, knowledge is quickly attained and just as quickly forgotten. People today tend to see knowledge as power, but this is a fault of enlightenment thinking. Knowledge should stem from a desire to know what is true, and not from a desire to dominate. Seeking and obtaining knowledge is “tuning” oneself to reality.
Moral philosophy can in many ways be linked with the field of psychology. However, modern psychology is not quite what the greeks had in mind when studying philosophy. In fact, in many ways it hinders what moral philosophy seeks to do. Martin Seligman, a former president of the American Psychological Association, said that modern psychology comes with three major costs. First he says psychology forgets to talk about people’s responsibility for their actions. Second by working on mental illness doctors forget about making people’s interesting or even happy. Thirdly, psychology focuses so much on keeping people from being miserable that it forgets to check if they are actually happy.
This third cost is one that is quite easily payed. One often confuse pleasure with happiness. However, anyone who has every ever eaten an exuberant amount of sweets knows that pleasure does not mean happiness. The vast amounts of sweets are quite pleasurable, but they make one miserable after eating.
Moral philosophy seeks to study man with the goal of helping do what he was designed to do the best that he can do it. By learning what his desires are and what is true and good he learns to orient himself toward truth, beauty, and goodness.
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Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education
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