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Articles

An Answer to Pilate

What is truth? Joel Marks develops a new approach which he calls alethic deism.

“What is truth?” Pilate asked. (John 18:38)

What if anything would be lost if we stopped talking about truth? This question has come to the fore of my thinking of late as a result of my on-going experiment with giving up morality (see Issues 80 and 81 and thereafter). For what I have discovered in the case of morality is that it is surprisingly easy to live in what would normally be referred to as a moral way without thinking explicitly in terms of right and wrong and related concepts. Furthermore, I have found that I prefer living in this way and believe the world would be a better place, that is, more to our collective liking, if everybody did.

By morality I mean the presumed facts that certain actions are right or wrong regardless of whether we want to perform them or not, and similarly certain people are good or bad whether we like them or not, certain things are our duty or our desert, and so forth.

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