In the twentieth century, everything once held in high esteemhuman nature, science, truth, objective knowledge, art, philosophy, religion, m0rality-had to be debunked. Psychologists sought to show that Man, once considered 'the rational animal', was fundamentally irrational. Freudians found us filled with lust and socially destructive impulses; Marxists found human history dominated by greed and exploitation; sociobiologists found all aspects of human life dominated by 'selfish' drives to reproduce. All three groups found human beings massively self-deceived and considered such supposedly spiritual pursuits as art, religion, and philosophy to be covers for something shallower and far less noble than they appear. Many have remarked on how tiny and insignificant humanity is, how foolish we once were to think ourselves the center of the universe, and how ignorant and helpless we are. Many philosophers, who had once seen their discipline as a rational pursuit of fundamental truths about the nature of reality and our place in it, now denied that philosophy could tell us anything of such truths, if such truths even existed. One influential school of thought declared that philosophers could do no more than discuss how people use words, and that metaphysics, theology, and ethics were all 'meaningless'. Other philosophers declared that there is no such thing as truth, that we can never know it, that we are fundamentally irrational, and/or that objectivity is impossible. American intellectuals attacked what were once their country's most revered forebears-such as Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington-as hypocrites, bigots, and exploiters; they attacked the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution similarly. And Western intellectuals attacked Christianity more than any other religion. Modern thinkers have sought to tear down their own society's heros, its religion, its philosophy, its economic and political system-in short, its values.
I do not plan to explain all the intellectual developments mentioned in the preceding paragraph; I rely on the reader's familiarity with contemporary intellectual culture to recognize most of what I have just mentioned. Nor do I plan to discuss their intellectual merits-in some cases, the attitudes may have been justified, while in others they were not. My point here is that, whatever else may be said about them, all those cultural developments have at least one thing in common: cynicism. Western culture of the past fifty years must be among the most cynical cultures in world history. And that thoroughgoing cynicism has made the widespread acceptance of ethical intuitionism impossible in our culture, whatever the intellectual merits of the theory. A culture that insists that humans are fundamentally selfish and ignoble will never accept any account of moral motivation. A culture that declares the notions of truth, knowledge, and objectivity delusory will never accept my account of moral knowledge. And a culture that seeks to tear down all values will never accept moral realism. Subjectivism, non-cognitivism, and nihilism have been popular, in short, because they offer the modern mind the perverse pleasure of debunking morality.
- Michael Huemer. Ethical Intuitionism. pp.242-243
