“David, your writing is always inspirational,” begins the first comment on David Hart’s The Desirist’s Unsatisfiable Desires , today’s first “On the Square” article,. The commenter is responding, I think, to Dr. Hart’s insights into the moral life, offered through a reflections on a prominent philosopher’s “conversion to the blindingly obvious” fact that
Of course if there is no God, then there can be neither moral right nor moral wrong in any objectively real sense. The “Good as such”—the source and end of moral truth, the highest object of the rational will, which has the power to unite the longing for truth with the imperative to act in this way or that—is found nowhere within nature. Not even those who believe in “natural law” imagine that it is.
Go be inspired. Unless you’re an atheist or relativist of some sort, in which case, go be challenged.
