Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 9)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part IX, Prescriptive Realism

David Baggett

Hare finishes the first chapter of his book by laying out prescriptive realism as it connects with the concessions he’s listed (E1-3 and R1-3). He returns to the example of Peter and Sue. Peter judges that the relationship with Sue is worth saving and that this is what God wants from him. The judgment is not merely a report that he feels pulled towards reconciliation, but it expresses his acceptance of norms that prescribe that kind of response to his situation. He is judging that the situation deserves this kind of response.

There are three elements here: first, the initial construal of his situation as calling for reconciliation; next, the concern that is taken up into the construal; and then the endorsement of the construal in his judgment. He is claiming in this judgment a Kantian kind of objectivity (E1). He is judging that people like him should respond to this kind of situation in this kind of way.

He is also attending to the situation in a way that involves self-discipline, an “unselfing,” since his natural inclinations tend towards giving up (R1).

In making the judgment he is also claiming objectivity in a different sense, claiming that he is responding to a pull by the relationship that is really there outside his present imperfect attempts at evaluation (E2).

But this pull is not independent of him in the sense that it would be there whether he is there or not. This kind of pull is from relationships in which humans are embedded, and would not be there without them (R2). Suppose Sue is not a religious believer. Peter and Sue can still agree that reconciliation would be good, even though Peter will identify God’s call here and Sue will not. Prescriptive realism is not itself committed to theism.  

Finally, when Peter endorses the feeling of pull, he is endorsing not just his feeling on this particular occasion, but the whole set of norms that prescribe the kind of response (E3). In saying that God wants him to be reconciled, he is not merely claiming to report God’s mind, but claiming to be part of a structure that he accepts, a structure in which God calls people to the same kind of faithfulness that God has, and in which living that way is consistent with their happiness.

God’s call comes to Peter, Hare is supposing, through the pull of the relationship with Sue. In the same way magnetic force cn come to an iron ring through other iron rings that are attracted to the original magnet. This is Plato’s image in Ion 536a. So there are three levels of the analysis: first, the cosmic, where we talk about the call; next the level of the human species or the community, of nature or second nature, where we talk about the kind of felt response the norms prescribe; and last the individual, where we talk about the initial response and the endorsement by the agent himself, the endorsement not only of the particular attraction but of the whole structure in which people are attracted in this way.

Hare hopes to have shown that this three-level analysis also gives us promising conceptual space for an account of God’s authority in human morality. Roughly, we can say that God created us with an emotional and affective make-up, such that we feel the pull of God’s call. But value judgment is more than just feeling such a response; it requires us to endorse or to refuse to endorse this response. Unfortunately, we are now in a condition in which the response, both immediate and reflective, is skewed by self-preference. Having identified the source of the pull towards the good, however, as God’s call, we are now in a more promising position to identify when it is in fact operative. To this Hare turns in Chapter 2.

Part 8


Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 8)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part VIII, Norm-Expressivism

David Baggett

Allan Gibbard denies the new-wave realist claim that value properties have causal effects on the world, but he does think that a causal process operates in the world to produce our affective response mechanisms, and that this causal process results in our good. This is what Hare calls the “third expressivist concession.” Gibbard thinks that the moral emotions such as guilt and resentment are themselves the fruit of a beneficent causal process, though the process is not benevolent because it is not personal (it is evolutionary). The emotions are good for us because they enable coordination, broadly conceived.

His view is that evolution selected in favor of affective dispositions in us which promote coordination, and hence the human goods that are available only through coordination. In particular, evolution gave us specifically human kinds of anger such as outrage and resentment, and it gave us the feeling of guilt, which is an adaptive response to anger because it invites reconciliation, and thus promotes cooperation instead of conflict between the parties. In the case of such emotions, Gibbard thinks that it is good for us that we have them. This is the first kind of causal process he discusses, the process by which we have been given through the emotions a route to coordination.

A second kind of causal process connects these emotions to the stimuli to which they are responses. Gibbard wants to find an account of practical rationality in a broad sense, which will give us the kind of objectivity we want. For an agent to judge that her action is morally reprehensible, he says, is for her to express her acceptance of norms that impartially prescribe, for such a situation, guilt on the part of the agent and resentment (or anger) on the part of others.

There is an important truth here that prescriptive realism can incorporate. The truth is that a value judgment endorses not just the particular response but the whole causal network of typical situation and emotional response to the situation invoked by the evaluative term. When judging something to be wrong, she is expressing her acceptance of the whole structure in which she is embedded, in which people respond in this way to this kind of action. What Gibbard has added is the widening of the scope of the evaluation to include this whole structure.

Hare wants to do something different from Gibbard, but faithful to the concession as just formulated. He’s going to give a Kant-style argument for what he will call a “postulate of prudence,” that an agent has to assume that the world is such that her evaluation of something as good to pursue is consistent with her happiness. The connection with Gibbard is that Gibbard uses evolution as a substitute or improvement on the doctrine of providence, but the realist implications are the same in either case.

The argument for the postulate of prudence proceeds by pointing out how many assumptions are required by an evaluation of something as good to pursue. Hare will mention five: (1) I have to assume that the good I pursue can be achieved. My emotions and desires have to be coordinated with the way the world is such that my basic concerns fit at least roughly what the world allows. (2) I have to assume that the good I aim at is possible as a result of my effort. (3) I have to assume that I can will my good not merely at the moment but consistently. (4) The goods I pursue are at least by and large consistent with one another. (5) I have to make assumptions about other people, that what they evaluate as good to pursue is at least roughly consistent with what I evaluate as good to pursue.

When Hare adds these five assumptions together, and supposes the world is such that they are all justified, then he will have postulated, when one evaluates something as good to pursue, this evaluation and pursuit is consistent with one’s happiness. But there are challenges to such a moral postulate. In the face of the ever-present possibility of a pessimistic outlook, we need a kind of realist faith, that the world and we ourselves in it are in fact governed in such a way that these five assumptions are legitimate, and our pursuing some good is consistent with our happiness.

We can then interpret the hints of fit we get as signs of the truth of a larger picture in which the good is, so to speak, more fundamental than the evil. There’s no inconsistency between such a faith, realist though it be, and expressivism as Hare’s defended it. What expressivism adds is that in an evaluative judgment I have to put that faith into practice in my decision about when to endorse and when to withhold endorsement.

Part 7

Part 9

Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 7)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part VII, New-Wave Realism

David Baggett

The third realist concession is related to the fact that Moore argued that it was fallacious to identify value properties and non-value properties. The new-wave argument, for example that of David Brink, is that the failure of property identity does not follow from the failure of meaning identity. The “third realist concession” is that a value term and a descriptive term that do not mean the same can point to the same causal property.

Brink denies what he calls the semantic test of properties, which is the claim that synonymy is a test of property identity. His move relies on developments in the theory of meaning and reference. Putnam’s thought experiment about Twin Earth can help explain this. Suppose a world much like Earth except that the oceans and rivers are filled with a liquid that looks and tastes like water but is actually not water, but XYZ. The property being water is identical with the property being composed of H2O molecules, even though the terms “being water” and “being composed of H2O molecules” are not synonymous.

Brink is chiefly interested in defending the identity of goodness with a natural property, roughly human flourishing and what produces this. Hare prefers a supernatural property—recall Mackie’s point that objective prescriptions did make sense when people believed in a divine lawgiver. The question at issue is whether to accept the proposal, following the new-wave realists, that being good is the same property as being commanded by God, even though “good” and “commanded by God” do not mean the same. (Hare admits here that “right” would be the better term to use, but he’s following Moore here.)

Hare thinks a version of Moore’s open question argument still applies even after the changes in the philosophy of meaning and reference that he’s described. In a Moral Twin Earth case, those in Twin Earth might use “good” to commend, but what they commend is something different. Hare thinks that an essential function of the term is retained, even though the criteria of application are different. The controlling function of a term like “water” is to give the natural kind, not the phenomenal meaning. But surely we would say that the inhabitants of Twin Earth are using “good” in the same way as us, namely to commend, but with different beliefs and theories about what is good. An essential function of “good” is to commend. Within a value judgment, the function is to endorse a commendation.

The Moral Twin Earth case shows us that, unlike in Twin Earth, the underlying structure (e.g., being commanded by God) does not in the case of “good” give us a sufficient base for the use of the term, since we also need to know if what is being called good is being commended. When we call something good we are not merely pointing to the causal property but expressing some act or disposition within what Hare calls the orectic family.

The divine command theorist can point to the underlying structure of a thing’s being commanded by God, and can claim that many people use the term “good” without understanding the structure. There is a property that the use of term “good” points to, namely, the experienced causal property that Murdoch calls “magnetic”; but using the term “good” in a judgment is not merely pointing to this property, but endorsing the attraction. When we experience this force as a call and endorse our attraction to it, we are judging that the force is a call that deserves our obedience.

Hare considers a merit of DCT to be that it can account for the ways in which theists and non-theists both do and do not use the term “good” (and other value terms) in the same way. They are both using the term for an essential function, which is to commend. Moreover, they are both using the term in a value judgment to endorse an attraction toward something. But the believer identifies what it is that is attracting or pulling her as God’s call, and the non-believer does not.

Corresponding to the phenomenal definition of water will be the definition of “good” as “the most general term of commendation.” But unlike the case of “water,” this will be an essential function of the term. Our practical lives of drinking, washing, and swimming correspond to our practical lives of advising, approving, and admiring. In both cases there’s an underlying structure, but people can use the terms “water” and “good” without knowing this structure, and many people do. If the believer is right, the non-believer will in fact be picking out this causal property when she correctly calls something good, even though this is not at all her intention.

We are responding to something that is already there, a felt causal force. But to say that the structure would be good whether commended or not is, if we read it one way, a mistake in philosophical grammar. It does not make sense to say that something is good that is not evaluated as good. It’s tempting to say something is good if it’s fit to be commended, but this in itself is a term of evaluation.

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Part 8

Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 6)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part VI, Disposition Theory

David Baggett

The second realist concession is that values do not have to be seen as real independently of general human dispositions to respond to them in a certain way in appropriate circumstances. McDowell’s view of color is that an object’s being red should be understood as its having the disposition to look red to us in appropriate circumstances. Here we have a new account of objectivity. We could correctly call color, on this view, subjective and objective.

We can make an analogy with values. We can understand an object’s having value as its having the disposition to produce responses of a certain kind in us in appropriate circumstances. Values can be called subjective and objective with equal correctness, in the same way as colors.

McDowell also wants to deny the strict distinction between cognitive capacities and non-cognitive ones like desire, and hence to deny that “pure facts” and values can always in principle be disentangled. (Altham coins the term “besire.”) The central cases are content-full (“thick”) value terms like “gentleman.” McDowell proposes that we can only know how to apply a value concept through a criterion if we are inside the evaluative framework or the form of life that places value on it. Then our confident use of the value concept is natural to us; it becomes “second nature” by enculteration and habit. McDowell wants to deny that seeing the value in this kind of case has to be distinguished as a desire rather than a belief, something non-cognitive rather than something cognitive, a state of the will rather than of the intellect. He thinks we should see values as being there in the world, making demands on our reason, but not there in the world independently of our dispositions to be moved by them.

But this raises a relativistic challenge. Remember Mackie’s concern about variability in ethical belief, which he attributes to people being involved in different ways of life. McDowell tries to answer this by appeal to Aristotle, but if our second nature is allowed to be culturally variable, then values tied to second nature will be culturally relative and may be corrupt. The problem in Aristotle is systematic. He thinks he has a culturally mediated human universal. But his view of the chief good for human beings includes as components both power over others and prestige, both of them competitive goods. It is this, not just his application of the view to women and slaves, that is objectionable to a supporter of altruism or even impartial justice.

Aristotle isn’t wrong to say we aim at such competitive goods, but he’s wrong to derive from our naturally aiming at them the conclusion that they are good. He doesn’t make Murdoch’s (and Kant’s) concession about the corruption of human nature both at the individual level and at the level of the group. From the perspective of altruism or impartial justice our nature, including our second nature, is radically liable to endorse what is not good. So second nature does not provide the kind of guide to moral truth that McDowell needs.

On Hare’s view an evaluative judgment involves some state like a motivation, or a desire, or a concern, because the function of the judgment is to endorse or withhold endorsement of some such state. The notion of endorsement he presses acknowledges a magnetic center, in Murdoch’s term, and on the agent’s side, a sense that there is an “I” who has developed a consistent position to take in normative discussion.

Part 5

Part 7

Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 5)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part V, Error Theory

David Baggett

The second expressivist concession is made by the error theory of J. L. Mackie. Hare says that although the prescriptivist is right to stress the prescriptivity of value language, he is wrong about what ordinary people mean when they use the value terms. Mackie’s view is that ordinary value judgment does not merely claim to be “objective” in a Kantian sense; it also claims to pick out features that are parts of the fabric of the world, and are there independently of us. This is the second concession. But he goes on to argue that nothing can be both prescriptive and objective in this sense at the same time. This is why his theory is an error theory.

The reason why we fall into this error is that we project or objectify. As Hume says, the mind spreads itself on external objects. Mackie says that we have the experience of desiring things, and calling “good” what satisfies the desires. But we reach the notion of something being objectively good, or having intrinsic value, by reversing the direction of dependence here, by making the desire depend on the goodness, instead of the goodness on the desire.

Mackie thinks the idea of objective prescriptivity did make sense when people believed in a divine lawgiver, who both existed independently of us and gave us authoritative commands. But this belief has now faded out, and the idea of objective prescriptivity deserves to fade with it. Whereas Mackie rejects objective prescriptivity, Hare makes it the center of his view.

Mackie gives two main arguments why nothing can be both prescriptive and objective in his sense at the same time. The first is the argument from relativity, that people’s moral beliefs are just too different from each other for us to think they have a single source in some objective good. The second argument is that objective prescriptivity makes values into a very odd kind of entity. Mackie finds such things metaphysically peculiar. Plato’s Form of the Good both tells the person who knows it what to do and makes him do it. What is mysterious is not so much that the good authoritatively tells a person what to do, or that it causally makes a person do something, but it is the conjunction of these two powers in a single item that mystifies him. How can the telling and the making (overriding motive) go together in this way?

Hare proposes that we lose the sense of strangeness Mackie felt if we separate the two features of “objective prescriptivity” he combined together. Hare thinks both features (the telling and the making) operate in a value judgment, but at different moments. And this will enable him to mark out a middle ground between expressivism and realism. On this middle ground we can say, first, that there is a “magnetic” or “repulsive force” attaching to things that is itself part of the fabric of the world (this is Mackie’s making). We are given motivation by certain features of what we experience. By “motivation” Hare means desire and concern and emotional attraction and repulsion in general. The search for a single simple property here to explain all such experience is probably a mistake, and has led to a bogus sense of mystery about what this property could possibly be. There may be many qualitatively different complexes of “magnetic” or “repulsive” properties in the thing and different qualities of response in us.

Value judgment expresses, on Hare’s view, not just an affective response, but separately the element that he calls endorsement (Mackie’s telling). To judge something good is not just to report the magnetic force, but to judge that the thing deserves to have that effect on us. We are deliberately submitting to what we are claiming as authoritative. Endorsement is an autonomous submission.

A good analogy here is Kant’s remark that we should recognize our duties as God’s commands. Submission to God’s commands can be autonomous if God’s authority is seen to make possible a kingdom of ends in which all members are respected as ends in themselves. We can acknowledge autonomously the force of some value recognized as external to us.

Murdoch’s postulation of a magnetic center is germane here. To endorse a response to some felt attraction is to acknowledge a consistency between this magnetic force and the force of the Good as a whole. Endorsement is expressed most clearly in the judgment that the emotion or desire fits the situation that occasioned it (which distinguishes endorsement from the way those in the Milgram experiments were in the grip of a norm without full-fledged endorsement). An agent can endorse or withhold endorsement at different stages of reflective distance form her initial affective response.

Prescriptive realism is like the other forms of expressivism in that it insists on the prescriptive character of moral judgment. Standardly I am, in making such a judgment about an action, telling myself to do something, and expressing my will. But the view is also realist, in that it holds there is a pull from outside me that I acknowledge in such a judgment. Most of the realists Hare refers to in this chapter deny themselves this middle ground, embracing a more rigid dichotomy between cognitivism and noncognitivism. As Hare sees it, such a dichotomy is arbitrary.

 Part 4

Part 6

Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 3)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part III, Prescriptivism

David Baggett

John Hare introduces prescriptivism as the first concession on the expressivist side of things. The representative discussed is John’s father R. M. Hare (RMH), a longtime professor at Oxford. RMH’s prescriptivism preserves the emotivist distinction between moral judgment and statement or assertion, but he insists that this distinction is consistent with the objectivity of moral judgment. It was important for RMH to find a way of talking about morality that allowed both disputes about questions of moral value and then rational agreement about them.

His idea was to hang on to the kind of objectivity that Immanuel Kant described. The idea is that the person making the moral judgment can abstract from any partiality towards herself, by eliminating all references to individuals, including herself, from the judgment. If moral judgments, like scientific laws, are always about a type of situation, then she is not allowed in making such a judgment to make essential reference to herself.

This is what Hare calls “the first expressivist concession,” that morality is objective in this Kantian way. RMH also emphasizes that moral judgment is prescriptive, expressing the will. He observes that not all utterances that have the surface grammar of assertions are in fact to be analyzed as such. He calls “descriptivism” the mistake of being misled by the surface grammar into thinking of evaluative judgment as a species of assertion.

Prescriptivism is helpfully seen as a response to Moore’s claim that goodness is indefinable. He thinks Moore did not see clearly what he needed to see about the word “goodness.” Namely, we use the word “good” to commend. To commend something is always to commend it for having certain characteristics, which give us what RMH calls the “criteria” of the judgment. RMH introduced into 20th century discussion the term “supervenience” to describe the relation between commending something and the facts on which the commending relies.

Value properties supervene on non-value properties and that means that things have their value properties because they have the non-value properties they do. For example, a strawberry is good because it is sweet. But the value property is not the same as the non-value property, and ascribing the second does not entail ascribing the first.

Now, prescriptions can conflict. If two people disagree about the criteria for goodness in strawberries, they can agree that a strawberry is sweet and disagree about whether it is good. Two people can make opposite prescriptions about the same subvening base.

Moreover, prescriptivism allows for the disputes to be rational. The prescriptivist account of moral judgment requires a kind of rational screening of what we are thinking of doing. We can think of this screening as required for endorsement from a particular vantage point, what Hare calls the position of the archangel, who has complete information and complete impartiality. It’s not that we in fact occupy this position, but this is the vantage point we are trying to approximate in making moral judgments. This is how we can be rational in our moral decisions. The archangel is a model of objectivity in the sense that the prescriptivist wants to preserve it.

 Part 2

 Part 4

Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 2)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part II, 1.1 (Platonism & Emotivism)

David Baggett

The first chapter of John Hare’s God’s Call is entitled “Moral Realism,” and here Hare wishes to present an account of the twentieth-century history of the debate within the Anglo-American philosophy between moral realists and moral expressivists. Moral realists emphasize the reality of value properties such as moral goodness, a reality which is in some sense independent of our attempts at evaluation. (Hare’s focus in the chapter will be on values more broadly and not moral values in particular.) Moral expressivists emphasize the role of moral (or value) judgment in expressing the will or emotion or desire. He will end up with a kind of merger of the two approaches.

Hare construes the debate as a whole in terms of a structure in which both sides have made progressive concessions until there’s a synthesis of sorts. That point of merger is Hare’s own position of “prescriptive realism,” a view that preserves, he claims, the surviving merits on both sides. He argues that we will also have a position that will help us understand God’s role in human morality.

The least concessive realist option is Platonism, so Hare begins with G. E. Moore’s 1903 Principia Ethica. Intrinsic goodness is, Moore thinks, a real property of things, even though it does not exist in time and is not the object of sense perceptions. Moore aligns himself with Plato. Goodness is objective, in the sense that it is there independently of us (though not in space and time).

Moore thinks his predecessors have all committed the “naturalistic fallacy” of trying to define this value property by identifying it with a non-evaluative property. But whatever non-evaluative property we try to say goodness is identical to, we will find that it remains an open question whether that property is in fact good—whether the property in question is natural or supernatural. If the questions are different (one open, one closed), then the two properties can’t be the same. Intrinsic goodness, Moore says, is a simple non-natural property and indefinable. To say that it is non-natural is to distinguish it both from natural properties (like producing pleasure) and supernatural ones (like being commanded by God).

How can humans have access to non-natural properties? Moore thinks we can know what is good by a special form of cognition, which he calls “intuition.” Access is not based on an inference or argument, but it is self-evident (though we can still get it wrong, just as with sense perception). Moore thinks that the way to determine what things have positive value intrinsically is to consider what things are such that, if they existed by themselves, in absolute isolation, we should yet judge their existence to be good. He thought the most valuable things are certain states of consciousness like the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.

Moore thinks that usually our wills join together organically the cognition or intuition of goodness and something non-cognitive like a desire. Besides the cognition and emotion, there’s also the judgment of taste—that something deserves to cause the emotion.

The least concessive expressivist position is that of A. J. Ayer’s 1936 Language, Truth, and Logic. Ayer starts from a logical positivist criterion for meaningful statements, which entails that ethical statements are not meaningful, a view Hare obviously rejects. To get at what he thinks we are doing in making ethical judgments, Ayer focuses on the non-cognitive ingredient in evaluation that Moore identified. Ethical judgments merely serve to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker. The function of the ethical words is merely “emotive,” meaning that they are used to express feeling about certain objects, not to make any assertion about them.

Ayer says this account is a kind of subjectivism. It is not the kind of subjectivist view that sees moral judgments are reports of our feelings, but as expressions of our feelings. Ayer departs from Moore in having to admit that we don’t really disagree about questions of value. On Ayer’s view of moral judgment, “Eating people is bad” and “Eating people is good” do not express propositions at all, and therefore can’t express inconsistent propositions. The most Ayer can say is that when we think we are disputing questions of value, we are actually disputing about the non-evaluative facts of the case that lie behind our attitudes.

 Part 1

Part 3

Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 1)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part I, Introduction

David Baggett

In the introduction of this book, Hare points out that there will be three chapters, corresponding to the three lectures he gave at Calvin College in 1999. Taken together, the chapters are after an account of God’s authority in human morality.

In this book Hare will defend what he calls “prescriptive realism,” which is the view that when a person judges that something is good, he is endorsing (from inside) an attraction (from outside) which he feels towards it. But even if there is some call from outside, why bring God into it? Is the appeal to God redundant, or worse (corrupting our notions of morality by tying it to self-interest in a problematic way)? Finally, does this talk of God threaten our autonomy—turning us into children trying to please our father? Hare will undertake addressing these questions.

In the first chapter Hare gives a selective history of a sustained debate within Anglo-American philosophy over the last century between moral realists and moral expressivists. Moral realism is the view that moral properties such as moral goodness are real. Moral expressivism is the view that moral judgments are orectic. This is a Greek term that covers the whole family of emotion, desire, and will. Expressivism locates the role of moral judgment as expressing some act or disposition that belongs within this family.

Hare thinks that theists in particular have good reason to consider these questions that pertain to how objectivity and subjectivity are related in value judgment. For they want to say that value is created by God and is there whether we realize it or not. In that sense value is objective, and we feel pulled towards some form of realism. But we also want to say that when we value something, our hearts’ fundamental commitments are involved. In that sense our valuation is subjective, and we feel pulled towards some kind of expressivism. We have to find a way of saying both of these things together, and Hare is going to try to suggest a way. [Hare’s project bears a resemblance to Dooyeweerd’s view that for every modality there is a law side and a subject side—but he was approaching things from the vantage point of German idealism. Hare’s will be a different philosophical tradition.]

The second chapter harkens back to the Middle Ages and in particular to the divine command theory of John Duns Scotus. Hare’s interested in the connections Scotus forged between God’s commands, human nature, and human will. Hare will try to show that a Reformed version of a DCT of moral obligation can be defended via Scotus against natural law theory as well as contemporary challenges. He thinks it will become apparent how such a theory fits the account he gives in the first chapter. One theme will be that after the Fall our natural inclinations are disordered, and we can’t use them as an authoritative source of guidance for how we must and must not live.

In the third chapter, Hare moves to what he sees as a key juncture between the medieval discussion and our own times, namely, the moral theory of Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century. Kant has given us a central text that’s been taken in modern moral philosophy to refute divine command theory. It’s a text about human autonomy. Hare will attempt to show that Kant is not in fact arguing against the kind of divine command theory Hare wants to support. Hare will discuss what Kant means by saying that we should recognize our duties as God’s commands, and he will defend a notion of human autonomy as appropriation.

Throughout the book Hare will be trying to do philosophy through its history. He thinks just doing the history ends up being unfaithful to what makes the history important in the first place. And just doing the philosophy ends up making half-baked references to the history in which the topic is in fact embedded. Somehow we have to do both at the same time, and Hare will attempt to do that here, despite the limitations of a short book—by plucking what he considers are three moments from a larger history and three thoughts abstracted from a larger framework.

 Part 2

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 3

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The previous blog ended on the note of discussing what can be realistically expected of arguments for the Christian faith. Recall that Campolo, at the end of the first chapter of the book he co-wrote with his son Bart, had written, “The world doesn’t need any more theological polemics or debates about the truth of Christianity, and this book certainly isn’t trying to be either of those,” despite that he immediately added that he always does try to make his best case for following Christ.

On the surface there seems to be a potential tension between Campolo’s claims: that we have no need for theological polemics or debates about the truth of Christianity, on the one hand, and that he nevertheless feels compelled to make the best case he can for following Christ, on the other. Perhaps what explains the apparent tension between these claims is that Campolo is intentionally casting polemics and debates with a negative connotation, but this is worth pointing out because not everyone construes polemics or debates in a negative way, nor should they.

Debates held with mutual respect and a commitment to rigor can be a highly effective way to foster substantive dialogue; in some ways, Campolo’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, there is an undeniable element of debate contained within this book. Each Campolo is making his case, after all, explaining his convictions, pointing to evidential considerations to make them plausible, underscoring perceived weaknesses of opposing views, and the like. This is essentially what a debate involves. That it can be done civilly and, in this case, even lovingly, with as much commitment to listen as to talk, only shows that debates need not be an unfriendly and inherently negative activity, nor need be construed in that way. If speaking the truth is love has primacy, each participant in a debate of this nature, in a real sense, should be rooting for his opponent. We wrestle not against flesh and blood.

For many readers of the Campolo book, after all, while deeply appreciating the irenic tone of the volume and the model the discussion provides of how to disagree agreeably, may well also be genuinely interested in weighing the relative merits of both sides in their own efforts to discover the truth and achieve greater clarity. Debates may be more pointed and adversarial than plenty of other dialogical exchanges, but they can surely serve useful purposes. Some might suggest we don’t need less of them (much less no more of them!), but a great many more, at least done well and right. I suspect the resistance to debates among many is because they often tend to be more about projecting appearances of victory and orchestrating mic drop moments than a genuine, mutual, and humble quest for the truth.

Likewise with polemics. In fairness it is likely Campolo was intentionally exploiting the common depiction of polemics as largely adversarial and predominantly confrontational. But colloquial employment of the locution doesn’t determine the essence of the referent. Lexical definitions themselves often don’t provide as penetrating insight into a word’s meaning as does careful conceptual analysis. Polemics in the realm of theology might pertain to arrogating or appropriating, say, a secular thought pattern, category, or story to a Christian application; or in the realm of dialectics, polemics often pertains to fine-grained discussions about which specific theology might be most in evidence—in an effort, for example, to adjudicate between Christian or Islamic theology. Since Bart by his own admission considers secular humanism his new religion, a polemical component to the discussion is practically unavoidable. This is a perfectly legitimate and valuable exercise with little to no hint of any intrinsically negative implications. The aversion plenty of kind-hearted persons to interpersonal conflict is laudable, but it shouldn’t mean we don’t see the value of iron sharpening iron. Not all ideas are equally good or defensible, penetrating or veridical. Of course in practice, as Tony and Bart admit, conversations of substance about significant differences calls for an abundance grace to keep the wheels turning.

Context can usually make clear whether one means by polemics its denotation or connotation, and it’s fairly obvious that Campolo was gesturing toward the latter. Fair enough. I’m not trying to strain for gnats here or be unduly nitpicky. Still, my point is this: contending for the truth ineliminably involves, by turns, both apologetics and polemics, rightly understood and properly practiced. To say we need more of neither in a book preoccupied with the propriety or lack thereof of believing the truth claims of Christianity strains credulity at least a little.

By Campolo, Tony, Campolo, Bart

I considered perhaps trimming the present point a bit for fear of belaboring, but then thought the better of it, because I think there is an important point to emphasize here. Even etymologically “polemics” is connected to war, so this might be thought to confirm the fraught connotations of the term, but we can go to war with people or with ideas. Clearly Tony is not at war with his son, but there is a clash and conflict of worldviews here, and that’s okay. It shows we don’t have to make it a battle between persons; we can keep the conflict at the level of ideas, which is practically a lost art in our cultural moment. Seeking to root out bad ideas is a noble and needed venture, and thoroughly biblical. 2 Cor. 10:4-5 says this: “The weapons of our warfare are not the weapons of the world. Instead, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We tear down arguments and every presumption set up against the knowledge of God; and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” And in fact Tony, to my thinking, marvelously models this approach throughout the volume.

Allow me now to back off from the specifics here in order to deal with the more pressing and general question all of this broaches: the relative importance of reasons and rationality in Christian conviction. Again, Campolo himself tries to make the best case for following Christ, as he does impeccably throughout this book. Still, perhaps what he’s getting at in distancing himself from any overly strident model of discourse here are what he recognizes to be some limitations to reason, limitations that reason itself might help us grasp. Perhaps these words by Campolo a few sentences later confirm this reading: “While I understand that Bart’s faith probably won’t be restored by my arguments, I hope they at least help him stay open to what ultimately must be the work of the Holy Spirit.” And of course he also hopes his arguments will model for other Christians a way to keep the communication lines open with nonbelieving loved ones, a way that is both wholly loving and respectful without compromising the gospel.

For help in understanding both the purpose and limits of reason and rationality when it comes to matters divine, let’s briefly consider a few points from John Wesley’s sermon entitled “The Case of Reason Impartially Considered.” Having taught Greek, logic, and philosophy at Lincoln College at Oxford, Wesley was clearly a man who took argument seriously, and he lamented when anyone under-appreciated reason. Here is what he wrote near the end of this sermon to such people:

Suffer me now to add a few plain words, first to you who under-value reason. Never more declaim in that wild, loose, ranting manner, against this precious gift of God. Acknowledge “the candle of the Lord,” which he hath fixed in our souls for excellent purposes. You see how many admirable ends it answers, were it only in the things of this life: Of what unspeakable use is even a moderate share of reason in all our worldly employments…. When therefore you despise or depreciate reason, you must not imagine you are doing God service: least of all, are you promoting the cause of God when you are endeavouring (sic) to exclude reason out of religion. 

Wesley says more in that vein, and it is most inspiring, but in fact at least half of the sermon is directed at those who over-value reason, assuming it is replete with powers of which in fact it’s quite bereft. Specifically, Wesley points out three central realities that reason alone cannot generate or guarantee, contra those in his day (and ours) who so lionized the power of reason as to form expectations that go beyond its capacities. First, reason cannot produce faith. “Although it is always consistent with reason, yet reason cannot produce faith, in the scriptural sense of the word. Faith, according to Scripture, is ‘an evidence,’ or conviction, ‘of things not seen.’ It is a divine evidence, bringing a full conviction of an invisible eternal world.”

Interestingly, while discussing this first point, Wesley spoke of a personal confirmation of this limitation of reason. He tells of having heaped up the strongest arguments that he could find, in ancient or modern authors, for the existence of God, and then finding there was still room for doubts that reason is powerless to quench. He challenges readers to do the same, setting all our arguments for God in an array, silencing all objections, and putting all their doubts to rest. The result is that they may repress their doubts for a season, but “how quickly will they rally again, and attack you with redoubled violence.” This does not show that faith is irrational or unprincipled, but rather that reason alone is not its ultimate source or locus. Can reason alone, for example, illumine what happens after the grave, satisfying our curiosities and banishing our fears? Hardly. The best unaided reason can do is suggest that death is, as Hobbes put it on the precipice of shuffling his mortal coil, “a leap in the dark,” whatever bravado we might wish to project to conceal our intractable existential angst.

Second, reason alone cannot produce hope in any child of man—scriptural holiness, that is, by which we “rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” Where there is not faith, there is not such hope; and since reason is impotent to produce the former, likewise the latter. At most but a lively imagination or pleasing dream resides within rationality’s lonely grasp.

Third, reason, however cultivated and improved, cannot produce the love of God, for it can produce neither faith nor hope, from which alone such love can flow. It is only when we “rejoice in hope of the glory of God” that “we love Him because He first loved us.” Cold reason can produce merely fair ideas, drawing a fine picture of love, but “only a painted fire.” Beyond that reason alone cannot go.

Some other resultant limitations of reason include virtue and happiness. Those without the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love can experience pleasures of various kinds, but not the sort of happiness for which we were made—merely shadowy dreams of ephemeral pleasures fleeting as the wind, unsubstantial as the rainbow, lacking satisfaction.

“Let reason do all that reason can,” concludes Wesley. “Employ it as far as it will go. But, at the same time, acknowledge it is utterly incapable of giving either faith, or hope, or love: and consequently, of producing either real virtue, or substantial happiness. Expect these from a higher source, even from the Father of the spirits of all flesh. Seek and receive them, not as your own acquisition, but as the gift of God…. So shall you be living witnesses, that wisdom, holiness, and happiness are one; are inseparably united; and are, indeed, the beginning of that eternal life which God hath given us in his Son.”

Campolo and Wesley, both of them, recognized the importance of reason and its limitations, and depicted faith as a gift of God. In subsequent posts we will have occasion to speak in more detail about what each of them means by this, and whether or not their views converge. But for our next post, we will move on to Chapter 2: Bart’s story of his deconversion, how he left.

           

Response #1 to Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo

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The name Tony Campolo invokes quite a bit of nostalgia for me. Like many church kids, I grew up watching the animated Christian sociologist/evangelist, always struck by his humor and energy, his insight and erudition. While attending Asbury Theological Seminary in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, a friend and I read several of his books together, each in turn, taking the time to discuss them together as we did. Occasionally we may have balked a bit at some of what we read, a rhetorical flourish, something a tad hyperbolic here, a hint of needless iconoclasm there; but for the most part we enjoyed his passion, personality, and prodigious gifts a great deal.

This made it all the more fun when we were able to see him speak in person outside Lexington, Kentucky before I left that area for good. If memory serves, he spoke in the same church where my seminary graduation would be held pretty soon thereafter. I still remember how he effortlessly held the capacity crowd in his hand on the day he spoke. His charisma was contagious, and I distinctly remember thinking that if he misused his considerable gifts he could do real damage. I have often said that he’s one of the three most gifted communicators I have ever seen (along with James Robison and Tom Morris).

It has been some years now since I have read any of his work, but I recently purchased his latest book because the topic was irresistible. His son Bart has lost his faith, after having served in ministry for many years. And the evangelical father and humanist son have written a book together, called Why I Left, Why I Stayed, a friendly conversation on the topic of Christianity published by HarperOne. I had had an interest in the book for a while, and finally ordered it, then read it through pretty quickly.

As I read the engaging and irenic dialogue, it spurred a lot of interest within me and served as fodder for a good deal of reflection. So the thought occurred it might be worth the trouble to blog a bit about each of the chapters. Tony and Bart take turns writing chapters, so the first chapter is by Tony, the second by Bart, and so on. In subsequent posts I will take each chapter in turn and discuss its contents, sharing some of my own reflections the chapter inspired as we go.

The nature of their close relationship makes for compelling reading. So often it’s hard for people of diametrically opposed worldviews to remain civil while discussing their deep differences. Tony and Bart are determined to do so because of their long and close familial relationship, and because it’s important to find good models of such difficult conversations, it’s worth considering for that reason alone. As the culture wars have ramped up, suspicions of those with whom we disagree have elevated to often alarming levels, exacerbating and intensifying the chasms and divides between those with conflicting perspectives. The casualty of such tensions is often substantive dialogue, which is a real shame. This book can help serve as a partial corrective to this lamentable state of affairs and a better way forward.

As the Preface notes, the Campolos are not unusual; many Christian parents are struggling, both emotionally and spiritually, because their children have left the Christian faith. So often the result is one of tension, acrimony, and alienation, and they hope to show a better way. “Hopefully,” they jointly write, “this book models a graceful way to process what has become an increasingly common crisis, while also serving as a safe forum for those struggling with doubts and questions about the Christian faith.” They aim to heed the apostle Paul’s advice to be kind, tender-hearted, and forgiving to one another, and this is laudable indeed.

The poignant Foreword to the book was written by Peggy Campolo, husband to Tony and mother to Bart. Although she’s heartbroken that Bart has lost his faith, she’s also proud of him for being authentic and transparent about his convictions, especially in light of the painful price they have exacted. She retains the belief that God is still involved in Bart’s life, just as God was, by her own admission, at work within her for a long time before she realized it.

One last preliminary: I am intrigued by the more social scientific tenor of much of the conversation. Tony has a PhD in and a career teaching sociology, and he often brings to bear insights from a range of thinkers—from Durkheim to Heidegger, from Freud to Maslow—with whom I don’t interact very much. This adds a texture and richness to the conversation I find enjoyable and enlightening. Obviously, I cannot help but reflect on what they talk about from my own background and professional training in analytic philosophy, but I think the resulting interdisciplinary nature of the conversation should prove both interesting and illuminative.

If folks decide to read along, I might suggest you get a copy of their book and read each chapter with me as I go along. Doing so would probably enhance your enjoyment and ability to add to the conversation.

Book Review: What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense

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Introduction

In this review I summarize and engage What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense (hereafter, WIM) by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George.[1] Here are a few general comments before I present a more focused discussion below. First, I found the book immensely helpful as a logical argument in service of an apologetic for the traditional view of marriage (hereafter, TVM), even though it was tough reading at times simply because of the design of the work as a legal brief. The challenge was not that the book is unnavigable due to a lack of clarity or poor writing quality, but that I had to stretch my mind to think in the closely argued and sometimes tedious manner of legal parlance, though I did find the stretch quite enjoyable once I adjusted my expectations. Further, I had to remind myself (and a classmate!) that this book was not intended to provide a biblical or theological argument in favor of TVM, at least not explicitly, though the authors certainly provide implicit arguments for the value of general revelation and natural theology, which are both part of the Christian message. So, the apologetic benefit was primarily the role it serves in bolstering the traditional view of marriage through philosophical argumentation without appeals to special revelation. The book is nothing short of impressive simply as an example of the giftedness of the authors, especially Girgis, whose work on the book and in other contexts related to the TVM discussion reminds me that apologists come from varied backgrounds and sometimes appear in cultural and intellectual contexts that some in the church are tempted to conclude are territories long ago lost to the enemy. I have in mind here Girgis’ academic circumstances at Yale and Princeton, neither one a bastion of Christian orthodoxy or cultural conservatism, and yet, there he is defending the TVM.

Summary and Engagement

The authors begin by stating that, “What we have come to call the gay marriage debate is not directly about homosexuality, but about marriage. It is not about whom to let marry, but about what marriage is.”[2] Given the timing of the book’s release (pre-2015 and the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States), I find something poignant about these words, especially since most of my experience as a pastor regarding the TVM debate has centered more on homosexuality and less on marriage. Only now have I and other Christian leaders realized we may have had our guns trained on the wrong target, missing the opportunity to focus on marriage and make a positive apologetic argument about it because it was too easy to pick-off the low-hanging fruit of homosexuality through a negative apologetic engagement with the more extreme advocates of same-sex relationships. It appears the enemy’s diversion was somewhat successful, especially as the Christian army now scrambles to reorient itself to the new realities it faces amid its waning influence on Western culture. Not that I have lost hope, but the task before us is daunting and fraught with difficulty, which makes WIM’s insight about the need to focus on the nature of marriage all the more pertinent.

            Thus, to help focus the discussion on marriage, the authors distinguish between two views of marriage: the conjugal view and the revisionist view. The conjugal view “is a vision of marriage as a bodily as well as an emotional and spiritual bond, distinguished thus by its comprehensiveness, which is, like all love, effusive: flowing out into the wide sharing of family life and ahead to lifelong fidelity.”[3] The revisionist view offers “a vision of marriage as, in essence, a loving emotional bond, one distinguished by its intensity—a bond that needn’t point beyond the partners, in which fidelity is ultimately subject to one’s own desires. In marriage, so understood, partners seek emotional fulfillment, and remain as long as they find it.”[4]

            There are at least two striking differences between these views. First, the revisionist approach to marriage—though sharing with the conjugal view an emphasis on the place of a loving bond within marriage—reduces to something that is ultimately subjective and impermanent, based on an emotional fulfillment that is sometimes ephemeral and at least given to wax and wane according to the challenges faced by the couple. Second, whereas the conjugal view implicitly entails a heterosexual understanding of marriage based on its emphasis on bodily union and family sharing, the revisionist view does not require any specific expression of human sexuality since the focus of the marriage becomes emotional fulfillment and nothing specifically procreative.

            These differences in understanding what marriage is provide the opening that advocates of same-sex relationships took advantage of in making their case for gay marriage by reducing the discussion to something that is both real and helpful for a relationship, i.e., the emotional bond, and around which a rallying cry was easy to develop: Who are you to tell me who I can and cannot love? The approach worked and an entire cultural norm has been changed, making sexuality and gender fluid constructs of little consequence in the rush to defend the value of emotional bonds as the locus of the marriage definition. As the authors of WIM labor to make clear, the problem is that the revisionist view introduces an intractable instability into its new definition of marriage. When emotional fulfillment becomes the determiner of permanence there is nothing permanent about marriage—feelings change, and relationships begin and end accordingly.

            The outcome, and one that becomes more obvious as the societal implications of the revisionist view work their way into everyday life, is that “any remaining restrictions on marriage [become] arbitrary” and “genuine marital union” is lost along with the culture dependent upon it.[5] At this intersection of culture and the revisionist view of marriage there are a number of pernicious implications, and this is where I find what I think is one of the most compelling aspects of WIM’s argument. The authors identify several outcomes from the revisionist view of marriage: spousal well-being declines; child well-being declines; the possibility diminishes for substantive friendships between those of the same gender; religious liberty is infringed for those holding the conjugal view of marriage; and the state’s role expands to intrusive levels.[6]

            There is a sense of clarity and foreboding that build as the authors make their case across the seven chapters of WIM: clarity regarding exactly what marriage is and what the revisionist view entails, and foreboding regarding the seeds of destruction sown by the revisionist redefinition of marriage adopted by the Supreme Court in the years following the publication of WIM. The authors make a penetrating and prescient statement in their concluding chapter, explaining that “there is no neutral marriage policy.”[7] Nor is there anything neutral about the conjugal and revisionist views of marriage, and this is the point of WIM—marriage is not some inconsequential ad hoc societal construct that one may take or leave based on preferences. “Almost every culture in every time and place has had some institution that resembles what we know as marriage…. Marriage understood as the conjugal union of husband and wife really serves the good of children, the good of spouses, and the common good of society.”[8]

Relevance for Apologetics

At this point I would like to highlight that the Christian apologist can learn a few valuable lessons about apologetics from WIM’s approach. First, regarding apologetic methodology, what WIM’s authors provide is a cumulative case approach to the discussion of same-sex marriage. Notice how their case builds based on clear definitions, well-thought out implications, and appeals derived from the positive and negative conclusions warranted by the discussion. Rather than a merely deductive approach, there is a certain appeal in the abductive build-out of the argument for the conjugal view of marriage; a certain let-this-sink-in-for-a-moment momentum that has a potentially powerful epistemic effect on all sides of the discussion. Christians concerned about this topic would do well to follow this pattern, especially in our increasingly affect-driven, truth-claim-suspicious culture.

            Second, by delineating the negative effects resulting from the revisionist view, the authors of WIM heed the biblical command to “answer a fool according to his folly” (Prov. 26:5) as they expose the unavoidable outcome of redefining marriage according to emotional fulfillment.[9] This aspect of the argument pairs nicely with WIM’s positive articulation of the conjugal view and its definition of marriage as “a comprehensive union of persons.”[10] In this regard the authors of WIM also obey the Bible’s command “do not answer a fool according to his folly” (Prov. 26:4), as they make their strong case for the conjugal view. Thus, there is a certain apologetic flow to the presentation in WIM, moving from challenging the revisionist view by articulating the conjugal view, and then teasing out the implication of the revisionist view for individuals and culture.

             Third, and this is more of an ecclesial and less apologetic observation, as Girgis explains in a presentation to church leaders about the topic of same-sex marriage, the church has the answer that the revisionist definition seeks to address.[11] The church is the community in which meaningful emotional bonds can and should be formed, and the church has a special calling to those who think they can only find this type of relationship in same-sex marriage. It is the church that gives special significance to the ultimate and mystical meaning of marriage as an eternal bond between Christ and his bride, and it is within the context of the church that all other relationships have a place that is also ultimate and mystical, though marriage need not be redefined for these relationships to be enjoyed.

Conclusion

Sadly, since the publication of WIM, the revisionist view of marriage has won the day in the United States and the implications are staggering. Ironically, the very ones most concerned to see their welfare affirmed and their relationship freedoms enshrined will only continue to find that they are attempting to fetch water from a dried-up well. Thus, the views of the authors of WIM are as important now as ever, and the conjugal view of marriage can and should be explained, defended, and sought to be restored to the culture so dependent upon it. God, help us.

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T. J. shares a passion for the moral argument(s) and brings much to his new post. He is, in his own words, a “mere Christian with genuine fascination and awe for the breadth and depth of God’s gracious kingdom.” He became a Christian in 1978, and began pastoral ministry in 1984. He has worked as a youth pastor, senior pastor, church planter, church-based seminary professor, a chaplain assistant in the Army, and a chaplain in the Army National Guard. A southern Illinois native, T. J. is a graduate of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale with a BA in Political Science; Liberty University with an MAR in Church Ministries, an MDiv in Chaplaincy, and a ThM in Theology; Luther Rice College and Seminary with an MA in Apologetics; and Piedmont International University with a DMin in Pastoral Counseling. He is currently writing his dissertation on crisis leadership in the epistle of Jude for the PhD in Leadership at Piedmont, as well as pursuing a PhD in Theology and Apologetics at Liberty, hoping to write his dissertation on some aspect of the intersection of moral apologetics and the pastorate. He is the author of several books, including God Help Us: Encouragement for Evangelism, and Thinking of Worship: A Liturgical Miscellany, as well as journal articles on liturgics, pastoral counseling, homiletics, and apologetics. He and his wife have five children. T. J.’s preaching may be heard at www.sermonaudio.com/fellowshipinchrist.

Notes


[1] Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George, What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense (New York, NY: Encounter Books, 2012), Kindle.

[2] Girgis, Anderson, and George, Kindle location 70.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Girgis, Anderson, and George, Kindle location 78.

[5] Girgis, Anderson, and George, Kindle location 162-169.

[6] Ibid., Kindle location 162-193.

[7] Ibid., Kindle location 1369.

[8] Girgis, Anderson, and George, Kindle location 1411-1419.

[9] Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are taken from The Holy Bible: New King James Version (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1982).

[10] Girgis, Anderson, and George, Kindle location 371.

[11] Sherif Girgis, “Better together: Marriage and the Common Good,” Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, podcast audio, August 23, 2016, https://erlc.com/resource-library/erlc-podcast-episodes/better-together-marriage-and-the-common-good.

Robert Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, Chapter 10 Obligation, Part III: Social Requirement

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Chapter 10, Obligation, Part I: Sanctions and the Semantics of Obligation

Chapter 10, Obligation, Part II: Guilt

The role that our moral discourse marks out for obligation obviously has other features besides its relation to guilt. One of them is that obligations constitute reasons for doing that which one is obliged to do, and reasons for refraining from doing that which it would be wrong to do. One problem about the nature of obligation is to understand how it grounds reasons for actions.

As a nonconsequentialist Adams is skeptical that obligations are always happily attuned to the value of expected results. We think we may be obliged to tell the truth and to keep promises even when we do not expect the consequences to be good, and when we have no idea what the consequences will be. What would motivate us to do such a thing?

Adams, in accord with Rawls (and more recently Evans), argues that the idea the conscientious agent has good enough reason for her action simply in the fact that it’s the right thing to do seems too abstract. If we are to see the fact of having an obligation as itself a reason for action, we need a richer, less abstract understanding of the nature of obligation, in which we might find something to motivate us. According to social theories of the nature of obligation, having an obligation to do something consists in being required (in a certain way, under certain circumstances or conditions), by another person or a group of persons, to do it. So one reason or motive for complying with a social requirement is that we fear punishment or retaliation for noncompliance. What other motives does this account open up?

An alternative suggestion Adams wishes to pursue is that valuing one’s social bonds gives one, under certain conditions, a reason to do what is required of one by one’s associates or one’s community (and thus to fulfill obligations, understood as social requirements). The reason Adams has in mind is not one that arises from a desire to obtain or maintain a relationship, but rather that I value the relationship in which I see myself as actually having, and my complying is an expression of my valuing and respecting the relationship. This is a motivational pattern in which I act primarily out of a valuing of the relationship, rather than with the obtaining or maintaining of the relationship as an end.

A morally valid obligation obviously will not be constituted by just any demand sponsored by a system of social relationships that one in fact values. Some such demands have no moral force, and some social systems are downright evil. A moral conception of obligation must have resources for moral criticism of social systems and their demands. But Adams thinks there’s a premoral conception of obligation in which we can see social facts as constituting obligations independently of our moral evaluation of those facts.

It will be particularly important if we believe (as Adams thinks is plausible) that the actions of commanding, demanding, and requiring can’t be understood or identified apart from their tendency to create obligations. This is to avoid circularity. A premoral conception of obligation, on the other hand, identifies a kind of sociological fact, closely connected with such linguistic (and social) events as commanding, which can be used in explaining the nature of moral facts of obligation. So Adams claims.

There are cases of commands and presumed obligations that aren’t genuinely moral cases of obligation. Yet the people in question have the concepts of command and obligation that serve them effectively in describing their social system and living within it, and that we could use as anthropologists to describe the system. To be sure, we who do have a conception and practice of moral critique of our social systems wish to distinguish such cases as institutional or official cases rather than bona fide cases of obligation and duty, but Adams thinks the fact remains that much of our understanding of social and linguistic systems depends on our grasp of premoral conceptions of obligation.

To say a conception of obligation is premoral is of course not to say that it is totally nonnormative. Most of the persons within the social system in question still need to regard the indicated obligations as providing reasons for compliance. A conception of moral obligation, however, will insist on better reasons for complying. It will impose a certain kind of critique of reasons for complying.

Adams will next try to show that a system of human social requirements can go some distance toward meeting this requirement although, in the end, he believes the moral pressure not to make an idol of any human society pushes us toward a transcendent source of the moral demand. Several aspects of the relational situation are important to the quality of our reasons for complying with social requirements, and are relevant to the possibility of such requirements constituting moral obligation.

  1. Morally good reasons will not arise from just any social bond that one in fact values, but only from one that is rightly valued—that is, from one that is really good. How much reason one has to comply with the demands of other people will depend in no small part on the value of one’s relationship with them. If the relationship is with a community, the individual’s attitude toward the community and her participation in it make a difference to the value of the relationship. But the community’s attitude toward the individual is at least as important. Where community prevails, rather than alienation, the sense of belonging is not to be sharply distinguished from the inclination to comply with the reasonable requirements of the community. A “community” is a group of people who live their lives to some extent—possibly a very limited extent—in common. To see myself as “belonging” to a community is to see the institution or other members of the group as “having something to say about” how I live and act—perhaps not about every department of my life, and only to a reasonable extent about any department of it, but it is part of the terms of the relationship that their demands on certain subjects are expected to have some weight with me. And valuing such a relationship implies some willingness to submit to reasonable demands of the community—as an expression of one’s sense that one does belong and one’s endorsement of the relationship.

  2. Our reasons for complying with demands may also be affected by our evaluation of the personal characteristics of those who make them. Normally we have more reason to comply with the requests and demands of the knowledgeable, wise, or saintly.

  3. How much reason one has to comply with a demand depends not only on the excellence of its source and of the relationship or system of relationships in which the demand arises, but also on how good the demand is. Is the demand good and the sanctions implied in the demand appropriate? It also involves evaluation of the relational history of the demand itself. Does the making of the demand affect the relational situation for the better or for the worse? And what’s the wider social significance of the demand? It is particularly important that the demand, and the social system of which it forms a part, should be good in ways that fall under the heading of fairness.

  4. An objection might be that if we have the values of actions and demands, we don’t need the actual social requirements to explain the nature of moral obligation. But Adams thinks this is mistaken, because it matters that the demand is actually made. It is a question here of what good demands other persons do in fact make of me, not just of what good demands they could make. It’s fashionable in ethical theory to treat moral reasons and moral obligations as depending on judgments about what an ideal community or authority would demand under certain counterfactual conditions. But Adams is skeptical. First, he doubts that the relevant counterfactuals are true, partly because they seem to be about free responses that are never actually made. Secondly, he doesn’t think he cares much about whether these counterfactual conditionals are true because they’re motivationally weak. By contrast, actual demands made on us in relationships that we value are undeniably real and motivationally strong. The actual making of the demand is important, not only to the strength, but also to the character, of the motive. Not every good reason for doing something makes it intelligible that I should feel that I have to do it. Having even the best reasons to do something doesn’t amount to having an obligation to do it. But the perception that something is demanded of me by other people, in a relationship that I value, does help to make it intelligible that I should feel that I have to do it.

Social requirement theory can explain the connection with guilt, which is a main ground of obligation, and the reason-giving force of obligations—big advantages of the theory . Another test it passes pertains to its answers to what in fact is obligatory. It needn’t entirely agree with our pretheoretical opinions; a theory has for one of its purposes the task to challenge some of those opinions. But a theory can be quickly rejected if most of the obligations it assigns to us are to perform actions that have always been regarded by most people as wrong. There is a limit to how far pretheoretical opinion can be revised without changing the subject entirely. This poses no problem for social requirement theory.

Given that the role of moral obligation is partly determined by the obligations we actually believe in, it seems also to be part of the role of moral obligation to be recognized. Rightness should turn out to be a property that not only belongs to the most important types of action that are thought to be right, but also plays a part (perhaps a causal part) in their coming to be recognized as right; similarly for wrongness. This too comports with social requirement theory, for on any plausible moral sociology, actual social requirements play a large role in our coming to hold beliefs about moral obligation, and Adams thinks it plausible to suppose that our belief formation is sensitive to the values of relationships and demands that should play a part in a social requirement theory.

Adams admits such a theory is on weaker ground when it comes to objectivity as a feature of the role of moral obligation. I may wrongly think I have an obligation that I do not have. We’re not inclined to censure Huckleberry Finn for acting contrary to his erring conscience in not turning in a runaway slave. The question that arises at this point for a social theory of the nature of moral obligation is whether it is too subjectivist. Does it make it too easy for a society to get rid of its obligations by changing its demands? On social requirement theory developed so far, a society would be able to eliminate obligations by just not making certain demands, and that seems out of keeping with the role of moral obligation.

This isn’t just a disturbing theory. Moral reformers have taught us that there have been situations in which none of the existing human communities demanded as much as they should have, and things that were morally required were not actually demanded by any community, or perhaps even by any human individual in the situation. In this way actual human social requirements fail to cover the whole territory of moral obligation.

Where demands are made, they sometimes conflict, both as between different social groups and within a single society. Often, both sets of demands and relationships can manifest some degree of goodness, but a flawed goodness.

These are all reasons for thinking, as most moralists have, that actual human social requirements are simply not good enough to constitute the basis of moral obligation. More could be said, but for theists it’s somewhat unnatural to confine ourselves to that apparatus, since a more powerful theistic adaptation of the social requirement theory is available.