[Aiwendil]

Mark12_30 wrote:

We will answer for our actions. Tolkien certainly believed this, although he was also conscious of mercy and grace. The missing peice is some elegantly stated version of "... and besides, Eru said so."

That's true; within Tolkien's world Eru is certainly the arbiter of all moral issues. But that's putting it a bit wrong. Eru's judgement is the source and the essence of morality in Arda.

Without that final say-so, Aiwendil is right; we are left with little more than the Dogpatch saw, "Good is better than evil because it's nicer." While that makes a certain abount of emotinonal sense for the individual with a healthy conscience, logically it's less than convincing.

Note that I wasn't saying that a logical basis for morality is impossible. Rather, I was criticizing the Platonic/Aristotelian view that morality is to be identified with happiness.

Mister Underhill wrote:

Obviously I’m not in a position to know the secret thoughts and hearts of the six or seven billion people on the planet, so there’s no way for me to mount a logically unassailable defense of this position.

It's not just that one can't make a logically unassaialbe defense of this view. It's rather that this view seems to depend critically on a claim that is - at best - supported only by personal anecdotes and folk wisdom.

If thousands of years’ worth of writings of the wisest men in history haven’t been able to produce a bulletproof defense of the logic of morality, I won’t be able to do it here in the context of these boards, so I won’t even try.

You make it sound as though every moral philosopher more or less agrees with Plato about this. But there are a great many who do not. Take Hume, or Kant, or Mill, for example.

I can't rule out your hypothetically immoral but perfectly happy and at peace person, but I've never met him or her.

Note that I'm not saying that there must be no relation whatsoever between happiness and morality. Perhaps it's a good approximation to say that behaving immorally makes one feel bad. But, considering hypothetical cases like this one, I think it's a mistake to assume that morality must at it's most basic level have to do with happiness.