The Philosophy of Good Weather
This morning as I drove to work, the announcer on the breakfast radio show gleefully announces that he can promise "good" weather today, a relief from the miserable weather of the past five days.
[stop at red lights. Watch pedestrian cross]
But why is it good when its sunny? Why is it bad when its raining? We've just come out of a very long period of drought. The water catchment areas are low - we are surely in dire need of lots of water - especially in the drier parts of the country.
But of course it's really obvious why we think it is good to have sunny weather. It feels warm, don't like being wet, we find it easier to do the things we either want to do or even have to do. We all know from our experience - and its probably built into our genes by evolution - that sunny weather is "good". There are many reasons why wet weather in a particular case might be good too, or why sunny weather in a particular case might be bad, but we can still justify the description of sunny weather as "good", as "true".
[I wish this car in front would hurry up]
This unremarkable announcement by the DJ reminded me of philosophical discussions of the nature of truth, morality, good and evil. (I know, I should have been concentrating on the road).
Why do we say something is good or true or moral or bad or false or immoral? Is it because God has made it so? Is there a universal good, truth or morality out there for us to discover? Is God on our side or on their side? Is Islamic Truth just as good as Christian Truth or Buddhist Truth? Is Western Culture just as good as Eastern Culture?
[Damn. Just missed the green lights. Oh well, just wait]
There is a common charge bandied about which says if you don't believe in some sort of absolute standard (eg universal human rights or Truth) then you must be a "relativist", and this is a very bad thing, because then you cannot judge good things from bad things; you must think that all cultures are equal, all actions are morally equivalent, with nothing to say one is "better" than the other.
In the end, this interpretation is silly. Just like we know that sunny weather is good, or that poison is bad for us, we know that some actions are good or more moral than others. We know that some cultures are better than others. Just like with the weather, there are exceptions, disagreements, different circumstances where things can be judged differently. For example, several thousand years ago, no-one (at least in significant numbers) challenged the use of slaves. Only a few hundred years ago, the USA fought a civil war where this was a key issue between the North and South. Yet today does anyone doubt that slave keeping is immoral?
[Ahh.. green at last]
I don't say that all actions are morally equivalent. I am saying that I don't believe we need justify their morality or goodness by reference to some essential truth or universal reality that we are converging on. We justify it by our experience as a human race, by the whole of our history (including religion and science and politics), by discussion and argument and agreement. Of course its easy to get agreement in the whole human race about the goodness of a sunny day (with the exception perhaps of the Innuit?). Its not so easy to get agreement amongst all humans about whether we should make war on some nation or not. But we should try. And we should learn from our experiences.
[park car and walk to railway station].
best regards
Vergil
