Magical Thinking

(an addendum to “The Genesis of Morals”)

Moral thinking is magical thinking. Morality, as I have argued, is in the end (and the beginning) an offshoot of our desire that everything turn out all right in “the end.” At first we relied on God to do this. Hence prayer. And hence too the more firmly we were convinced of God’s existence, the more we were assured of victory.

But even so-called (and supposedly) secular moralists hold onto the same kind of thinking. For what is “It’s the right thing to do” if not an invocation to the powers of the universe to support our cause? Otherwise we need merely say, “This is what I (or we) want.” But a soupçon of superstition instills in us the strengthening belief that the right shall prevail. Why? For secularists the answer can no longer “officially” be that God will bring this about. Hence their answer is “Because it ought to.”

            And then when they try to make sense of this, a multitude of “theories” arise … each more absurd than the last … for nonsense cannot be made sense of. But the resistance of the moral “ought” to definitive analysis is simply attributed to the “perennial” nature of philosophical questions … without supposing for a moment that this very perennialism might indicate that the philosophers are dealing with a chimera.

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