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Changes in Thought Patterns in Science, Philosophy, and Ethics
If it cannot be measured is it real?
Postmodern ethics and the rule of will
Though the intellectual revolution called the Enlightenment is often taken to be entirely without untoward consequences, it is hard to deny that the Enlightenment was the trigger of the breakdown of a moral consensus that had endured for a millennium and that that breakdown is at the heart of our inability to agree about issues of life and death, sexuality, and, most recently, business ethics.
A key component of that change in outlook is the abandonment of the idea of purpose in nature. First laid out by Aristotle and embraced by the Church, the view of a purposeful nature prevailed for millennia, only to be rejected in the modern period.
The impact of this change upon ethics was immediate and profound: if man and his nature (e.g., his sexuality) have no established purpose then life and the body may be used as we see fit. And with the twentieth century windfall of undreamed-of ways to live, afforded by technology, that logic has been taken to heart by our culture.
Yet these new ways of living have profound consequences. One result of our new understanding of nature is the hastening of a deeper moral unravelling that is just now carrying us beyond modern ethics (shaped by the Enlightenment) into postmodern ethics (which defends what even the Enlightenment recoiled from). It is important to understand this change: for Americans to see how deeply postmodernism conflicts with the philosophy that defined America as a nation, and for physicians to understand the deep tensions that are now surfacing in their work around the notion of will that is central to postmodernism.
These two series of lectures will trace the sequence of changes in ideas that have led science to scientism and philosophy from moral law to the rule of will. We ask three principal things: why this change took place; what the current culture achieves by these distinct changes in our thinking; and what we are paying for that departure from our tradition.
