We don’t need ethics experts to tell us what the right thing to do is. We feel it in our bones. Our conscience screams out to us and demands we make the ethical choice. But doing the right thing is often synonymous with doing the difficult thing. And so, we deceive ourselves, claim our conscience is merely the voice of our own bias and choose the easy way out instead, writes Gordon Marino.
Kierkegaard did not offer anything approaching a systematic ethics; nevertheless, the Danish firebrand was, a matchless moral phenomenologist, a master at describing what we are up against in ourselves when we try to walk our talk about the likes of justice, equality, and love.
Kant, with whom Kierkegaard is often in deep dialogue, believed all reasonable beings can discover the moral law within themselves and in that sense, he believed that moral knowledge is universally distributed. Kant, the sage of Konigsberg, was even open to the possibility of aliens possessing the rational capacity to be subjects of the moral law, sadly enough, however, he was dubious about the rational status of people with a different hue of complexion.
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