There are far more people on the planet today who are ready, willing and able to analyse 'the human condition' than there have been at any other time in history, and a quick Google search will bring them up in vast quantities. But the nice thing about university education in the modern world is that it is producing people who can actually DO things, and solve problems rather than merely talking about them.

When only 5% of the population goes through tertiary education, then it can afford to focus on the eternal verities and leave the useful work to everyone else; but when 45% do, that's no longer possible -- society just can't support that many philosophers. Just be grateful that people who go to uni can a) do what they want to do and b) learn something useful.

There is something disarmingly honest in the comment by Jon J that the university does more now because it doesn't have to think about things. I note he doesn't say what things he does, but I am sure if asked to he would give examples of the output of modern science. He wouldn't mention thermonuclear weapons, for example. The problem with his argument, is that as science is amoral it relies on the morality of the practitioners and universities provide no instruction as to what moral actually means. Indeed as pointed out in the article, in the social sciences and humanities, it is expressly taught that morality is merely subjective feelings: ergo, the moral principles that moved a man like Churchill were in no way superior to thise of Hitler. Jon J needs to solve that problem rationally rather than merely assuming, like the good man he is, that that it was RIGHT to conduct a war against the Nazis.
Jon J's brief statement actually sums up the multiversity particularly well. "Leave me to go about my business doing things: healing the sick, killing infants, cloning sheep or cloning humans - just so I can satisfy my curiosity."

This is a good article and does articulate an ongoing discussion in the Humanities and Social Sciences. But I am not sure how we are to view morality objectively. Objective theories of morality only hide the politics behind it. I am skeptical of those who argue for an objective moral code because they often have ulterior motives. For example, the "progressive left" claim to be the harbourers of Human Rights, but beneath this claim is a whole heap of political wheel barrows; many shared hatreds against the capitalist order, a shared hatred of Christianity, a belief in a patriarchal order where women and gays are subjugated. What we find is that the "progressive left", when analysed, have a deep-seated hatred of Western history and Western values, and are not aspiring to an objective universal order (whether they believe they are or not), but are enacting revenge on the past. This is not to say the conservatives appeal to the universal. They are in fact honestly ethnocentric; that each culture/civilization has its own moral order that grows organically from the people within it.

But back to the original topic: how do we understand objective morality? If morality should not be from our passions, then where does it originate? David Long uses the term "reason", which is how man did indeed view itself before Hume inverted the equation to "reason being a slave of the passions". But isn't reason also something of the mind, and not something "out there" in an objective sense? I am also not sure how reason can be an objective faculty of the mind, particularly in regards to moral issues, because reasoning is a process of the mind; the mind will process information/data/sense impressions. This processing itself is called "reason", isn't it?

Anyway, I am willing to be proven otherwise.

Aristocrat poses a number of problems: eg, "how can morality be understood objectively?" and "isn't reason something of the mind?"
He states: Objective theories of morality only hide the politics behind it; which is not unlike what the German Hans Kelsen says in his work on legal positivism; ie words to the effect that ideology is used to hide the unstated interest of the majority/minority.
The second question above exemplifies the modern distinction between mind and body - ie., looking to the physical organ instead of the faculty. Reason is the faculty that humans possess which permits understanding. Human speech, logos, makes that understanding objective. Morality is not an extension of the mind; it is the result of the understanding of reason. The fact that a moral issue can be articulated and understood by others, the fact that the grounds of the opinion by which certain moral choices are made can be examined and shown to be unreasonable or inconsistent with the stated principle is evidence of the objective nature of morality.
The assumption which is obvious to anyone who thinks about it, is that people make every choice with a view to what they think is good.
Once the Greeks had discovered nature and therewith a fixed human nature, they could show what was good for human beings according to their nature. That is why a return to Aristotle is crucial to the future of the university and to civilisation as the perfection of the truly human.

David Long, it is a shame that your fine, important article only generated ten comments. That in itself is more a comment on the average intelligence and education of the OLO crowd and the narrow spectrum of their interests than on you.

Surely the question of what are we and how we should live our short lives is the most important question of all. Yet articles endlessly discussing the existence or non-existence of god on OLO often get nearly a hundred comments.

As the world hastens towards nuclear war and human extinction the questions posed by the Ancient Greek Philosophers are even more important to the man in the street yet they are ignored. The population is too busy deciding what they'll buy next from Harvey Norman, worshiping America and its warmongering capitalist system, and sport.

Anyway David Long, know that I appreciated your article and wished it had received the attention it deserves!

Very kind words, David G. The connundrum with capitalism is that it is consistent with the liberty of the individual - even though it makes the same theoretical assumptions about man as communism.
Communism has all but disappeared but its inability to provide the resources needed for living, let alone living well, is evidence indeed of its theoretical failure (not to mention its practical failure). Significantly, in our capitalist society, the regualr market crashes and losses of income, savings and assets are all evidence of the weaknesses in capitalism. Given the common assumptions of the two 'isms' it is not entirely unexpected.
The political problem is to retain sufficient bathwater to bathe the baby witout drowning it,
Perhaps a better distinction in terms of public policy can be made as between free enterprise and private enterprise, the latter being private property acquired with moral restraint, something that neither the wolves of wall street nor those of the City possess.