ABSTRACT
If value or goodness is an attribute of beings in themselves, ethics will presumably have to be a cognitive discipline: claims about good and evil will be true or false according to whether the beings that are said to be good or evil really are so. But to make this claim without more ado would look suspiciously like intuitionism. It needs to be shown as the conclusion of an argument; however the premiss of that argument will also be a cognitive paradigm of ethics, but one with rather more clearly ‘naturalistic’ credentials. In this chapter I intend to defend a Spinozistic version of the cognitive paradigm of ethics as preferable to non-naturalistic ethics. In the following two chapters I will argue that the logic of Spinozan ethics pushes us beyond Spinoza’s anthropocentrism towards something closer to the theory of the good adumbrated by St Augustine. Spinoza maintained a cognitive paradigm, not only in ethics as a philosophical discipline, but in moral life itself; he held that the best way to come to lead a morally better life is by coming to have truer ideas about life. This contrasts sharply with a paradigm of ethics which has tended to dominate moral thinking for some centuries, and is most clearly exemplified by Kant: the moralistic paradigm of ethics. This paradigm is often identified with morality as such, to the extent that rejection of it is seen as at best an excuse for immorality, at worst a prescription for amorality.
