Morality is Not a Kind of Knowledge

How Propositionality Underwrites Linear History

If you prefer audio of this article, click here.

Perhaps the cardinal liberal myth is the myth of progress, or linear history. In some ways it’s understandable. The liberal looks around and thinks “golly gee, we sure have nicer stuff than the Victorians did—we must be better than them!” This equivocation of material and moral progress is the beating heart of liberal apologetics. At some point in your argument with the committed liberal he will pull out the old “let’s not go back to the dark ages because I don’t want to die of a toothache” trump card.

Our liberal just cannot tell the difference between morality and technics. Intuitively this seems ridiculous, but really, he’s just doing what our whole civilization has demanded of him. For thousands of years now, our civilization has demanded that we consider morality a kind of knowledge. If that is our premise, then the liberal is drawing the right conclusion.

This is why our liberal hates race science so much. The worst thing ever is the possibility that old science might be right and new science might be wrong. The fact that every serious subject matter expert acknowledges ethnic IQ disparities makes him uncomfortable and he simply ignores it. If technical knowledge is non-linear, then maybe we’re not better than then Victorians. This is his nightmare fuel.

Race science is a bit of an exception though. On the whole, science does progress. We do know more now about the world than we used to. And not even just experts. The man in the street has a vastly superior technical grasp of the cosmos than his Iron Age forefather. If morality is a kind of knowledge, does it not stand to reason that he should have a superior grasp of morality too? We need to go back and see where this idea that morality is knowledge came in.