The Philosopher Justice

I am not a Christian, I am a philosopher.  That being said, it strikes me that to understand what morality is, it helps to begin with the story of the Garden of Eden.  First of all, the story of Eden is a myth of origin;  and to understand something complex like morality we could start by using our imagination instead of analysing it to death, as we philosophers have done for two and a half thousand years.  Interestingly, no one knows where morality came from or how it came about.  Many, many philosophers since Plato, and he lived and wrote 2400 years ago, have been fascinated by the topic of morality.  They have many theories about what it is, but they have never come to an agreement. In contrast, science is younger than philosophy;  it is only 500 years old;  but the thing about science is that even if scientists have disagreements, they eventually come around to agreeing on the main subjects.  This has not happened with the concept o...

If I were to posit one question that sums up my philosophical inquiry it would be this:  “What makes humans different from animals?” For me, it is the single most important question to ask.   Philosophy in its Western form comprises three main parts, which are conveyed to us by the three Greek words:  Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Ethics. In my opinion, (and it’s probably a minority opinion), Ethics is the most important of these three, precisely because it is at the heart of what makes humans distinct from animals.  But the subject of ethics is most troublesome to grapple with.  Where does ethics or morality come from?  This was never an easy question, but nowadays it seems so much more complicated to answer, because our society has so many overlapping jurisdictions.  This is why it is hard to know whether a particular rule is a moral rule, an obligation, or merely a convention. For instance, the Mosaic rule against making images of a deity - c...

From an outsider’s point of view, this whole philosophical  edifice of  “theories of truth” looks an awful lot like a Tower of Babel, rather than the furtherance of knowledge.   I think I have a remedy for all this  disparate theory building - what philosophy needs to do with the concept of “truth” is to go back to basics.   The problem with contemporary philosophy is that it is too fixated on the meaning of philosophical concepts, and "truth" is the number one example of this. For what we get in this Babel of truth theories is a circle of metaphors representing all the different meanings that truth has for us.    Presumably, truth comes from somewhere, it has an origin, just as language has an origin.  We, of course, have little or no evidence of this origin to go on.  Perhaps anything I say concerning this origin is baseless speculation owing to  the paucity of evidence.  Perhaps, but in my optimistic way of  ap...

Charles Justice, Truth Investigator.  I’m a PA , a Philosophical Anthropologist and I study Truth full time so the rest of you don’t have to.  “Truth” -  What is it?  How does it work? Where did it come from?  - Lately I’ve been particularly motivated to answer these questions because of the events and circumstances surrounding the  2016 U.S. Presidential election.   Exhibit A:  Kovitch and Rosenstiel, 2014, The Elements of Journalism , third edition:  " The desire that information be truthful is elemental…. the evidence suggests its innate...Out of necessity, citizens and societies depend on accurate and reliable accounts of events.   They develop procedures and processes to arrive at what might be called  “functional truth”.   Police track down and arrest suspects based on facts.  Judges hold trials.  Juries render verdicts.  Industries are regulated, taxes are collected, and laws are made.  We...

What makes human systems different from other living systems?  Only humans follow rules that are collectively agreed to.  These rules create a social reality that  can only be maintained by collective  action.  I call this social reality - Normativity .   My passion is to seek to understand the nature and origin of normativity.  My intuition is that all forms of normativity, including language, originate from its most basic form - morality.  The fundamental fact about normativity is that it is a drawing  of a boundary.  A line between good and evil, right and wrong, or true and false.  This boundary is not already there in reality like the boundary between water and land;  It is one that is created by the agreement of a group of human beings. In order to sustain this boundary humans must be able to agree on a difference, and actively maintain that difference by regulating their own behaviour. We accept certain beh...