Platonism and Enchantment
Part 5, Antirelativism
In Part 2 of this series I mentioned Hume's Dictum, that you cannot get an ought from an is. That is, you cannot extract a moral imperative from a material description of reality. Existence, from a purely materialistic perspective, is morally and ethically inert. Stare at the Periodic Table as long as you want, but it won't provide you with any moral guidance.
In short, materialism implies moral relativism. Since a material description of reality cannot provide us with any moral warrant, these must be selected for ourselves. In Plato's dialogues, this view was defended by Protagoras who famously declared that “man is the measure of all things."
According to Lloyd Gerson, Platonism rejects this moral relativism. Platonism is antirelativist. According to Platonism, "goodness is a property of being."
In many ways, your view of being determines your degree of enchantment versus disenchantment. Materialists deny that goodness is a property of being. You can't locate goodness in the Periodic Table.
Platonists, by contrast, affirm that goodness is a property of being. Christianity, of course, agrees with the Platonism in this regard, can be viewed as a species of Platonism, in that Christians believe that "God is love." Being itself is grounded in goodness. The Logos, made historically visible in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, is the fabric holding the cosmos together.
I would argue that this conviction, that goodness is a property of being, is the most enchanting conviction of all. Christians confess an ontology of love. Righteous moral action is not subjective, arbitrary, or relative. Rather, goodness traces the moral grain of the universe. Goodness is a property of being. And because of this, love is a method of scientific discovery as powerful as any telescope or microscope.
Great word! Riffing off the word "grain": Goodness does more than trace the moral grain of the universe, it *is* the moral grain/seed of the universe.
Note: It's not terribly clear that Hume held to the "ought-is gap". He mentioned it once in his treatise on human nature which he wrote in his twenties and then goes on to derive oughts from ises. And he never brings it up in a future work.