(iPoster) Thomas Reid’s Connection of Moral Principles and Moral Experience

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory 1 (Normative)

Abstract

Political thinkers such as Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin have expressed dissatisfaction with “natural law” conceptions of justice as variously too inflexible, too dogmatic, and too abstract—disconnected from concrete experience—to serve adequately as principles for robust moral action. We evidently need some kind of stable, articulable principles for moral orientation (even if they are not always actually articulated), but for the principles to be compelling as a source of moral obligation, commitment, and action, they need to be rooted somehow in living experience. Without such a root, the principles—whether called “laws” or something else—appear as arbitrary and dogmatic. Whether because the moral experiences that once made “natural law” principles resonate have weakened or because the connections between the experiences and the principles were never adequately clarified, or perhaps were once tolerably clear but need rearticulation in a time when the original sense of the principles previously defined have been lost, an account more compelling and serviceable for people today is in order. Thomas Reid made one of the more important attempts at such an account in the modern era, and this paper takes Reid’s work as a starting point for finding a path forward.

Author

• Scott Segrest, The Citadel