Constructivism and Moral Arguments for God: Exploring the Foundations of Moral Truth

Dr. Christian Miller, AC Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, delivers an insightful lecture on the intersections of constructivism and moral arguments for the existence of God. Dr. Miller, whose work is extensively supported by Templeton Grant projects, engages deeply with contemporary ethics and the philosophy of religion, examining the nature of moral truths through the lens of constructivism versus moral realism.

In his exploration, Miller presents a sophisticated discussion on whether moral truths are merely human constructs influenced by societal and individual responses, or if they exist independently of our constructions. This critical analysis is framed around a philosophical dilemma akin to the Euthyphro dilemma in religious ethics, challenging the foundational aspects of how moral truths are determined and their implications for philosophical theology.

The lecture is essential viewing for philosophers interested in the latest debates in metaethics and the philosophy of religion. Miller's nuanced approach not only elucidates the complex dynamics between human cognitive processes and moral normativity but also probes the potential impacts of these theories on classical moral arguments for the existence of God. His presentation is a significant contribution to ongoing philosophical discussions and is poised to stimulate further scholarly dialogue and inquiry.

The Persuasive Power of the Moral Argument (Podcast ft. David Baggett)

Frm the SAFT Podcast:

Ever wondered why we can't find any human who has kept the moral code to the letter? Where do we get the sense of guilt and shame from? And why is it that the most rational thing to do is not the most right thing to do? Wondering how these observations add up? Join us as the world's leading expert on the moral argument walks us through on how to use these realisations about morality to point towards God.

The Problem of Evil and the Moral Argument

Houston Christian University hosted a conference on the Moral Argument in March 2023.

This conference is based on a forthcoming Oxford University Press book co-edited by David Bagget and John Hare on the moral argument. It includes 27 chapters covering theistic ethics, secular ethics, moral realism, and alternatives. The book inspired the conference, which was organized by Dave and John at HCU. Around 20 contributors accepted the invitation, resulting in this two-day event.

The conference features three Gifford lecturers, two of whom are present, and three former presidents of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Speakers have come from various places, including England, New Zealand, California, Florida, Yale, and the United States Naval Academy, representing diverse religious backgrounds.

The central theme of the conference is a discussion about the foundations of ethics, with a focus on the idea that ethical truth is transcendent, authoritative, sacred, and divine. Moral arguments for God's existence are rooted in this concept, emphasizing the objectivity and prescriptivity of morality.

In this lecture, Paul Copan argues that far from undermining the rationality of belief in God the problem of evil, actually reinforces the moral argument for theism by highlighting the inadequacy of atheistic and naturalistic explanations for the moral dimensions of our world. The theistic perspective, with its emphasis on divine justice, redemption, and the ultimate resolution of evil, is presented as offering a more satisfying account of the human condition and our longing for meaning, goodness, and justice in the face of suffering and evil.

The Colorado Court Decision: A Test Case for Arguing Well

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

Philosophy emphasizes that an intellectual virtue of great importance is the cultivation of excellence at attending to evidence. Such a venture resides at the heart of the rational enterprise, which has as its goal nothing less than truth itself. Truth-seeking and rationality are vital to our humanness, and to practice thinking well is an eminently valuable habit to develop. As we are headed into what promises to be a contentious election year, it may be useful to bring to bear these philosophical insights on a pressing but vexed social issue and to consider how they can support our mission to be salt and light for a world in desperate need of both.

Acknowledging the Challenge

Suppose now that we take up the recent Colorado Supreme Court decision that Donald Trump is unfit for the presidency as a test case for practicing this virtue. I think this a worthwhile effort. The analysis to follow will strive to avoid deriding ideological opponents as perverse, that is, arguments of derision that go after the holders of opinions rather than opinions themselves. It will also assiduously attempt to steer clear of an assortment of other informal logical fallacies, from false equivalences to ad hominems, question begging to non sequiturs, red herrings to straw men, poisoning the well to confirmation bias.

The effort presupposes that it is still possible to have rich intellectual discourse between people of good will who hold strongly opposed convictions, including political convictions. It may not be easy, but it is at least possible. And since sometimes the people we are disagreeing with are family and friends, it’s worth trying to get better at. I say this as one who’s often hit the wrong note, pushed too hard, been needlessly abrasive, and so forth. I’m likely to fall into a few of these traps in this very essay, so forgive me in advance. That the almost lost art of mutually respectful, robust civil discourse remains feasible is something of a tenet of (hopefully principled) faith animating this analysis. Admittedly this belief resides more comfortably within a modern than a postmodern context. Also, and importantly, the approach does not assume that a stance of complete neutrality is necessary, or even possible, but it at least aims for what objectivity is realistically practicable to achieve. It resists the cynical view that there is nothing but subjectivity.

Part of what makes this recent Court decision challenging to use as a test case is that all around it swirls rhetoric about the distorting influence of the worst sort of partisanship. It also involves moral judgment calls, and for those who uphold strict dichotomies between facts and values, invoking categories of morality can seem to some anything but neutral or objective. As one who thinks there are objective moral facts—torturing kids for fun is objectively wrong, for example—I’m not averse to incorporating axiomatic moral convictions into the discussion, and I don’t think doing so compromises objectivity, but rather presupposes it. Truth telling is (at least generally) good. Lying is (at least usually) bad. Kindness is a virtue. Love beats hate. And so on.

As for partisanship, it seems the best course of action is to assess each accusation of warping partisanship on its merits. Not every partisan is a rabid partisan; not every politician or jurist simply follows the script of their preferred political party. On occasion, at least, politicians rise above partisan rancor and attain the status of diplomats and statesmen. Some put their love of country above their political affiliations. The Founding Fathers could foresee the acidulous effects of rabid partisanship, and warned about it from the inception of the nation. They at least hoped it could be held enough in check that it wouldn’t destroy the country. I harbor the same hope. One of the telltale signs of the worst form of partisanship is the inability to conceive of oneself as ever problematically partisan, and a corresponding inability to see political rivals as anything but problematically partisan. This will not be part of my modus operandi.

Laying out the Case

So with all that said, let’s consider the Colorado decision. By a vote of 4 to 3, the finding of the High Court in Colorado was that Donald Trump, for being guilty of insurrection on and before January 6, 2021, is disqualified for public office. The decision was based on a clause in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that says that people are ineligible to hold any federal or state office if they took an oath to uphold the Constitution in one of various government roles, including as an “officer of the United States,” and then engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States or aided its enemies. The Colorado court recognized the significant import of the decision, and included a “stay” that awaits further review by the Supreme Court of the United States. Several other states are considering similar cases, and with the prospect of different states arriving at different conclusions, a Supreme Court adjudication seems both needed and likely.

To begin with, then, there are two conceptually separable issues: (1) whether or not Trump was guilty of insurrection, and (2) even if so, whether the Supreme Court should interpret the Insurrection Clause as applicable to Trump. The lower court decision in Colorado illustrates the potential disconnect between (1) and (2). In that earlier decision, it was accepted that Trump was guilty of insurrection. Nevertheless, questions arose about the applicability of the Clause to Trump. As a result, the case failed, before it was appealed to the State Supreme Court.

Why did the lower court argue that the Clause did not apply to Trump, despite that they thought he had engaged in insurrection? A reading according to which “officer of the United States” did not include the president. Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post rejects that reading as implausible, and affirms the state Supreme Court for rejecting it. She writes, “It defies logic to believe that the framers of the amendment meant to exclude former Confederate soldiers from all offices but the most important and the Colorado Supreme Court was correct to disagree with this interpretation.” The High Court deemed that interpretation inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section Three.

The majority of the State Supreme Court agreed with both (1) and (2). That is, they agreed that Trump engaged in insurrectionist behavior on and before January 6, and that the Clause properly applies to him. As a result, they arrived at their conclusion. The case had been brought to court by a number of conservatives, but all the judges in the case had been appointed by a Democrat, which inevitably raises issues of the role of partisanship in all of this. But what we see from the start is that the picture is a bit messy, since the case was brought by conservatives. And analysis of the decision is also complicated. Whereas many conservatives are likely to disagree with the decision, just as many liberals are likely to support it; even still, no small number of conservatives support the decision, and some liberals resist it.

To offer but a smattering of examples, conservative legal analyst (and strong Never Trumper) Robert George thinks the Supreme Court decision a bad one, while a plethora of liberal legal analysts have chimed in to support the decision. At the same time, though, conservative analyst and former federal judge J. Michael Luttig has supported the Court’s decision, while liberal analyst Ruth Marcus rejects the decision and thinks the Supreme Court should do so as well, and do so unanimously. Generally, though, at least, those of a more conservative political persuasion resist the decision, while those more on the political left accept it.

By way of disclosure, I tend toward the political right on a great many issues. In fact, I voted for Trump twice. Nevertheless, I have come to agree that he is unfit for the office of the presidency, and—though I admit that I am not a trained lawyer—the case that the Insurrectionist Clause applies to Trump seems a good one to me.

Establishing Ground Rules

But if we are to have a fruitful conversation about this question, we cannot and must not simply ask for a person’s political affiliation and then chalk up their stance to that, either for purposes of agreeing or disagreeing. We—all of us—need to insist on looking carefully at the evidence. A real danger lurks here, and many in our contemporary moment are increasingly falling into a perspectivalist trap, where everything becomes irremediably subjective and attributable to (say) one’s prior political convictions. Such a movement toward a relativistic stance spells doom for rich civil discourse and meaningful engagement. As challenging as it may be, we have to do better, and the only way forward is by encouraging a scrupulously honest appraisal of the evidence that we have at our disposal. We all may retain our blind spots, but all the more reason we must learn to really listen to one another. (All the more so when we consider that the animus among at least some in the populace is likely because they feel ignored, discarded, sidelined, trivialized, and the like.) 

A move that seems out of bounds right out of the gate is to dismiss the Colorado Supreme Court as motivated by nothing but political partisanship. Perhaps they are, though it seems rather unlikely, but perhaps. Perhaps they are not. Conjectures either way are not particularly evidential. What good reason is there to think that they are problematically partisan? Remember that the case was brought by conservatives. Is that not relevant? Cherry picking evidence is not a good intellectual habit. Nor is casting shade on people’s political motivations without considering the evidence. What good reasons are there for thinking the State Supreme Court in Colorado was politically motivated? That their decision is unpopular among many conservatives is not a good reason. What evidence did they adduce in their majority decision? That is where we need to direct our attention first. Simply to dismiss them and cast aspersions on their motivations is presumptuous, uncharitable, and an instance of ad hominem. In our contentious political moment, we have to do better than that.

The Court appeared soberly aware of the import and potential impact of their decision. The majority wrote, “We do not reach these conclusions lightly. We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.” The charitable move here is to take them at their word, assume their good faith, and examine the case they make and the reasons for their decision. Using their presumed motives to avoid doing so is hardly conducive to civil discourse and borders intellectual dishonesty.

Regarding (2), we already saw that they rejected the lower court judge’s view that the Clause did not apply to Trump. To my thinking, this seems right. I agree with the majority view here and with Ruth Marcus as well. If someone wishes to demur, they should make the case that the presidency is a legitimate exception to the Clause. If the Clause applies to lower offices, it seems logical that it would apply all the more to the highest office of all. Perhaps there is some good reason to reject such a notion, but if so, what is it? And what is the argument for the exception? As for me and my house, I see little reason at this point to be skeptical about applying the Clause to Trump.

Considering the Evidence

Which leads to the bigger question: Was Trump guilty of insurrection? Once more, the way to answer this question is by careful examination of the evidence. I have not, admittedly, read the 800-page report by the January 6 Commission. I did, however, recently read cover to cover Liz Cheney’s 370-page book about January 6 and what happened before and after it, and I found the case for Trump’s insurrection to be strongly compelling.

Once more, by way of anticipation of a knee-jerk response to this disclosure, it is simply out of bounds to dismiss the findings of the Commission by dubbing it as partisan-motivated. Marco Rubio, for example, has repeatedly denounced the insurrection, saying it was “inexcusable,” “disgusting,” “unpatriotic,” and “anti-American anarchy.” However, regarding the Commission, he followed the talking points of several of his conservative colleagues, saying on Face the Nation, “That commission is a scam. I think it's a complete partisan scam. And I think anyone who committed a crime on January 6 should be prosecuted and, if convicted, put in jail.”

Here Rubio’s skepticism about the Commission echoed that of Trump’s and others of his ilk: that the Commission was partisan and cannot be relied on to give an accurate picture of January 6. But of course assertion is not argument. So what is the argument or evidence that the Commission was problematically partisan and thus unreliable? One recurring motif is that, save for Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, all the other Republicans were summarily dismissed from the Committee. Now, I’m no Washington insider and I wasn’t there to witness what happened. But this is a matter that seems easily answered. Did that happen or not? It’s a quite simple empirical question.

Cheney’s account was that Pelosi had the right of refusal for any Republican nominees to the Commission, and she refused two or three, including, not surprisingly, Trump sycophant Jim Jordan. Other Republicans she accepted. Republicans then had the option to replace those who had been rejected. But instead they withdrew altogether, claiming, falsely, that they had been summarily dismissed. I see no reason not to believe Cheney’s account, and a number of reasons to be skeptical of Trump’s. Besides which, the notion that a group made up predominantly of Democrats cannot be trusted to do their job with integrity seems, once more, to be little more than ad hominem. What good reason is there to think that those who would say such a thing are not the ones who are problematically partisan? What were the Republicans afraid the Commission would find? In light of what the Commission did find, I think we know.

If someone has genuine evidence that the Commission was unreliable, they should be forthright with what that evidence is. Positing possibilities isn’t establishing plausibilities. At least be as forthright as the Commission was in painstakingly chronicling the events of that day and what led up to it. Personally, I do not see how anyone can read Cheney’s book and listen to one heartbreaking story after another and not be deeply grieved over what happened. Nor how they could still say with a straight face that Trump did not foment an insurrection designed to reverse a lawful election.

There is a legitimate way to call into question the results of an election in this country. File lawsuits and take it to the courts. No one denied Trump’s freedom to do so, and he did. And he lost. He lost 60 of 61 cases. He lost impressively, spectacularly, and prodigiously. Then, having lost, he resorted to a panoply of efforts to reverse the election illegitimately. Read Cheney’s book and count the ways. Then he enlisted his zealous supporters, having whipped them into a frenzy, to engage in what was sure to devolve into a violent protest at the Capitol, and for more than three hours did nothing to stop it. This despite numerous desperate pleas for help from those on Capitol Hill trying to run for cover. Arguably, he instead threw gasoline on the fire with his infamous tweet calling Pence a coward while knowing the crowd was on the hunt for his Vice President. That there were not more fatalities that day was a grace, and a testament to the bravery of patriots fending off the misguided crowd who thought they were doing Trump’s bidding.

Interestingly, though Trump was free to pursue legal cases to reverse the election results, some are insisting that the Colorado court decision is the move of a “banana republic.” It’s an effort, we’re told, to disenfranchise half the country. This is hyperbolic and simply false. The tactics that Trump has followed, especially around January 6, resemble the machinations of dictators the world over. The Colorado court decision is measured, principled, and based on the rule of law. America is a constitutional republic, and the case is following its constitutional course. How it is adjudicated in the Supreme Court, if they choose to take the case, remains to be seen and is impossible to predict. But just as Trump had every right to challenge the election in court, so too those who brought this civil case in Colorado had the right to have their day in court. A banana republic hardly features a court, with some fear and trembling, offering their decision and admitting they are moving into uncharted waters and that their decision is subject to review by a higher court. Such dismissive rhetoric is laughably hyperbolic.

Whether the Clause will be applicable to Trump or not remains to be seen, but this is the messy way the judiciary in this country works. Cases are brought before judges. Verdicts are issued. Appellate courts can be appealed to. Some cases make it to state Supreme Courts. And some go all the way to the Highest Court in the land. Unlike Trump, though, the plaintiffs in the Colorado case are perfectly willing to abide by the decisions of the Court—whether they agree with them or not.

Examining Counterarguments

Now, some push this line: in order for the Clause to apply to Trump, he needs to have already been convicted of insurrection. From what I understand, this is not true. Either there is an established answer, or it’s a matter that needs further clarification in the law. But again, I am under the impression that the answer is that prior conviction is not necessary. Legal analyst Norm Eisen writes, “The 14A does NOT require a conviction for Trump to be disqualified—it merely asks courts to determine whether he committed insurrection.” So this argument seems to fail.

Another reason some give to think that Trump did not commit insurrection is that, if he had committed it, he would have already been convicted. But of course this is not necessarily so. Whether such a thing happens depends on a great many contingent political factors. Of course Trump has been brought to court for an incredibly high number of alleged offenses, and certain of his cronies have been brought to court for their assistance of him in various nefarious adventures, and several convicted. That Trump has not yet been convicted of insurrection is not good evidence that he shouldn’t be or that he won’t be. This is an ongoing story, and there is good reason to think that he will in fact, at long last, get his just desserts for the way he subverted the Constitution and illegitimately attempted to reverse a legitimate election. Note, too, that the Clause employs a disjunction: insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution. The January 6 Commission, for its part, made the case he did just that. That the DOJ has been slow to follow through is arguably as attributable to wanting to dot all their I’s and cross all their T’s as it is to not having a case. The case can be found in the Commission’s report, many would argue.

And this is exactly why the Colorado decision, to my thinking, is a good thing. It will force the issue. Based on the evidence, which needs to be studied carefully, was Trump guilty of insurrection and/or rebellion, or not? The case that he was has been made quite forcefully. Ignoring the evidence does not make it go away. Intellectual honesty demands attentiveness to the evidence.

Others wring their hands over the Colorado decision for this reason: It’s a problematic move because it carries the risk of disenfranchising half the nation. I have a hard time taking this one seriously, in all honesty, because it was Trump who strove assiduously via every mechanism, judicial and nonjudicial, he could think of to reverse the results of a legitimate election. Trump is the one who tried to disenfranchise. We learn more details of this scheme every day, with a new recording of him pressuring Michigan officials coming to light just today. The Colorado Supreme Court took on a case brought to them by a number of conservatives, looked at the law, and came up with their determinations, knowing they were subject to further review. That’s how it works in this country. That’s how it should work. And then the court decisions need to be abided by, a lesson Trump does not seem to recognize.

If Trump was guilty of insurrection, then the Clause in question says he should not be on the primary ballot. That is a fact. That the preponderance of prospective Republican voters would vote for Trump does not alter that fact. Neither can they vote for someone under 35 or for others outside the scope dictated by the Constitution. Perhaps some might wish to eliminate such clauses, but if so, their beef is less with the Colorado Supreme Court than with the Constitution.

Some are concerned what the effects of a ban on Trump to run in some or all states would look like. They are concerned about potential violence. And surely this is a concern, especially the more we move away from being a nation of laws. The Colorado judges have already been inundated with a barrage of death threats—pretty obviously an appeal to force, yet another fallacious maneuver, and a scary one. The nation may be approaching a crossroads where they need to decide whether capitulation to the mob trumps the rule of law. The most vitriolic and aggressive of Trumpians (hopefully a small minority) have already shown themselves ready and willing to engage in gross violence to support his narrative, irrespective of the paucity of evidence for its truth. Demonization of enemies and toxic rhetoric has considerably changed the complexion of the political landscape. Trump seems to have a knack for tapping into discontent and channeling it to destructive ends.

What the majority in the Colorado Supreme Court found was this: “President Trump did not merely incite the insurrection. Even when the siege on the Capitol was fully underway, he continued to support it by repeatedly demanding that Vice President Pence refuse to perform his constitutional duty and by calling Senators to persuade them to stop the counting of electoral votes. These actions constituted overt, voluntary, and direct participation in the insurrection.”

Finally, the vote was 4 to 3, which means there were three dissenting opinions. Some think that, if Trump sees victory in the Supreme Court, one or more of these avenues may be his path to the win.

Analyzing Divergent Perspectives

Ruth Marcus considers this one the most interesting: Justice Carlos Samour Jr. said that barring Trump from the ballot without legislation from Congress implementing Section 3 violates Trump’s due process rights, especially because Trump has not been charged with insurrection. “More broadly, I am disturbed about the potential chaos wrought by an imprudent, unconstitutional, and standardless system in which each state gets to adjudicate Section Three disqualification cases on an ad hoc basis,” Samour wrote. “Surely, this enlargement of state power is antithetical to the framers’ intent.”

Marcus thinks this a good reason for the Supreme Court to step in. As do I. Somehow, though, she also takes it to be a reason for the Supreme Court to strike down the decision. I do not. The evidence and the evidence alone should determine whether or not the Clause applies to Trump. The Supreme Court can make a decision that ensures state uniformity, but the content of the uniformity should be a function of the evidence alone.

In this connection, Samour raised the question of whether Section 3 is “self-executing.” Here, the justices have the benefit of a decision by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase in 1869—the year after the 14th Amendment was ratified—that Section 3 requires enabling legislation.

Marcus is of the view that “there is no world in which the justices are going to empower states to throw Trump off their ballots. Given that, the court should keep in mind: This is a moment it should aspire to be the unanimous court of Brown v. Board of Education, not the splintered, party-line body of Bush v. Gore.”

I’m not sure why she’s so convinced that Trump won’t be removed from the ballot. I hope it’s because she thinks the evidence points in that direction, and not capitulation to mob rule. The question seems to be a good one: If Trump is guilty of insurrection, should he be removed from the ballot? Someone might argue the answer is “no,” but I hardly think that’s the obviously right answer. We need arguments to this effect. Either deny for principled reasons that Trump is thus guilty, argue the Constitution should be changed, or admit that, in virtue of his actions, he should be disqualified.

Conservative legal analyst George Conway has a quite different take on this issue of whether Section 3 is self-executing. He admits that this argument comes closest in the dissents to a federal law issue that should give someone pause. Again, it’s the claim that the Clause can’t be enforced unless Congress passes a law detailing how. Conway replies, though, that all one needs to do is what any good originalist or textualist would do and look at the wording of the Clause. Although Section 5 of the Amendment gives Congress the power to enact enforcement legislation, nowhere does the Amendment suggest that such legislation is required. And Conway goes on to give highly counterintuitive implications of insisting on such a requirement.

Conway also debunks Samour’s claim that Trump was deprived of due process by the proceedings in the district court. There was a full-blown, five-day trial with sworn witnesses and lots of documentary exhibits. “And Samour’s suggestion that Trump was denied a fair trial because he didn’t have a jury is almost embarrassing: Any first-year law student who has taken civil procedure could tell you that election cases are not even close to the sort of litigation to which a Seventh Amendment jury-trial right would attach.”

I don’t here presume to be able to adjudicate these finer-grained aspects of jurisprudence. But I do think telling that Conway finds all of the various dissenting arguments weak. Whether the Supreme Court will or not, I have no idea. But why not give them a chance to look at the evidence for themselves and make their determination? I won’t reiterate Conway’s analysis of the other dissenting views, but his conclusion was this: “The dissents were gobsmacking—for their weakness. They did not want for legal craftsmanship, but they did lack any semblance of a convincing argument.” If nothing else, this makes me think that casual dismissals of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision are hasty.

Finally, what is remarkably illuminating and indicting is that not one of the dissenting opinions challenged the district court’s factual finding that Trump had engaged in an insurrection.

So where does that leave us? I hope the Supreme Court chimes in eventually and makes its decisions. Whatever those decisions are, they should be abided by. Not because they are sure to get it right, but because this is what it means to live in a nation of laws. Of course civil disobedience is an option, but the sanguine rapidity with which some make recourse to violence when they do not get their way is a recipe for anarchy like we saw on January 6. It marks a collapse of civil discourse, and it does not bode well.

Moving Forward

Should Cheney’s views be dismissed by conservatives because, after all, she takes a “progressive” stance on some issues? I know that may sound strange, but I’ve heard such an argument, which seems like a non sequitur, ad hominem, and red herring rolled into one. Unless such a stance somehow relates to her work on the Commission, its relevance is unclear. Should we refrain from holding Trump’s feet to the fire because Biden has been allowed to get away with bad mistakes? That seems nothing but an elaborate false equivalency. I am no fan of Biden, but as far as I know, he has not fomented an insurrection that threatened the institutions of our country as Trump has. Is the Colorado decision the first step toward a banana republic? I hardly think so, as it’s a legitimate case brought before a state Supreme Court and the decision is subject to further judicial review. Such overblown rhetoric does nothing to advance the discussion, and teeters at the brink of an unprincipled slippery slope argument. Does the fact that the judges in the case were appointed by a Democrat undermine their authority? Not at all; that’s just poisoning the well and flagrant ad hominem.

I don't claim to have the definitive answer and plenty of people can disagree with me. But I have tried here to clearly map out what my reasoning is, to highlight the evidence I am relying on, and to make plain my priorities and values that have directed my pursuit of the truth of the matter. In doing so, I hope that I have modeled the intellectual and emotional skills necessary for wrangling a complex and charged issue, providing a framework for further engagement, and setting a tone for productive conversations to follow.

Let’s lower the volume, lessen the bombast, reduce the dogmatism, attenuate the demonization of opposing sides, and together let’s be attentive to the evidence. Let’s criticize viewpoints more than people. Let’s cultivate better listening habits. Let’s not take every criticism of our own viewpoint as a personal attack. None of this can guarantee that we’ll resolve every dispute to everyone’s satisfaction, which would be quite a mean feat. But it’s our best bet to think rationally, argue well, follow the evidence, show due regard for the truth, and value those with whom we disagree.

And let’s try to learn as much as we teach. If no amount of evidence can convince someone, that’s a paradigmatic example of patent irrationality—and there’s too much of that already, on both sides of the aisle. We can and should do better.

Naturalism and Normativity: Cornell Realism - Daniel Bonevac

Houston Christian University hosted a conference on the Moral Argument in March.

This conference is based on a forthcoming Oxford University Press book co-edited by David Bagget and John Hare on the moral argument. It includes 27 chapters covering theistic ethics, secular ethics, moral realism, and alternatives. The book inspired the conference, which was organized by Dave and John at HCU. Around 20 contributors accepted the invitation, resulting in this two-day event.

The conference features three Gifford lecturers, two of whom are present, and three former presidents of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Speakers have come from various places, including England, New Zealand, California, Florida, Yale, and the United States Naval Academy, representing diverse religious backgrounds.

The central theme of the conference is a discussion about the foundations of ethics, with a focus on the idea that ethical truth is transcendent, authoritative, sacred, and divine. Moral arguments for God's existence are rooted in this concept, emphasizing the objectivity and prescriptivity of morality.

This lecture is from Dr. Daniel Bonevac, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, semantics, and philosophical logic. Dr. Bonevac has authored several books, received prestigious awards, and published articles in notable philosophy journals. He will be presenting on "Naturalism and Normativity: Cornell Realism."

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

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: Moral Realism, God's Commands, and Human Autonomy

By Hare, John E.

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)

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.

God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands, and Human Autonomy: Moral Realism, God's Commands and Human Autonomy

By Hare, Mr. John E.

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)

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.

God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands, and Human Autonomy: Moral Realism, God's Commands and Human Autonomy

By Hare, Mr. John E.

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.

 Part 6

Part 8

Mailbag: What about Horrendous Evil?

My question concerns, years ago when Christopher Hitchens told the true story of Elizabeth Fritzl, the woman who was imprisoned for almost 24 years I think it was, and was brutally raped by her own father. Hitchens argues that an all loving, all powerful God does not exist because something atrocious like that happened. He “invites us to imagine how she must have prayed for God to help” and no help came.

I am a follower of Christ but this does pierce my heart. How do you answer that? I know we could say “well we have free will, God allows free will” or “an atheist can’t say it was wrong because they have no standard to appeal to because there is no God.” Those answers seem alright but they still don’t sit well with me. I feel like I need something a little more.

Caleb

Hi Caleb. The story of Elizabeth is awful, to start with. No sugarcoating that. It's truly horrible, not the way the world ought to be.

On its face it seems an instance, perhaps an intractable one at that, of the problem of evil.

But let's think for a moment what it means to say it's not the way the world ought to be. That makes sense in a world that's broken, but it doesn't make much if any sense in a world that just is, a world that we shouldn't expect to be any different.

On a secular view of the world in which, ultimately, reality is made of complex collections of atoms operating according to inviolable causal laws, why expect anything to be any different from how it is? I can't think of any good reason. In that scenario, the likelihood is that everything that happens is causally determined to happen just as it does. So to say, "The world ought to be different" doesn't make a lick of sense. This isn't to say that atheists can't see horrible injustices or don't care about them or don't have the intuition that the world ought to be better. Of course they can and do, but the resources at their disposal as atheists are severely limited to make good sense of such things.

The very category of moral evil is hard to accommodate on their worldview. The world is as it is, and there should be no expectation it's anything different. 

On a Christian understanding of things, we know the world is broken. We know it's not yet the way it ought to be. We know real tragedies take place. We also know that God is in the process of putting the world right. 

I don't claim to know all the reasons why God sometimes intervenes but often doesn't to put a stop to evils sooner. There's quite a bit of mystery there. But nowhere in biblical teaching do I find a promise that God will spare us from even quite horrific things in this world. He promises to be with us, that we can trust him, but that doesn't mean we can expect him to answer every prayer as we'd like in the time frame we desire.

The point about Elizabeth is of course generalizable. Ever so many things in this world fall short of how it ought to be. But here's one line of consideration to bear in mind—though I do not even remotely pretend this is all that needs to be said. Suppose that God were to intervene every time something horrific was about to happen. Consider what seems intuitive enough: children shouldn't be mistreated.

Now imagine what the world would be like if God were to intervene every time a child was about to be mistreated. Bad and abusive parents would be stopped every time they were intent on inflicting harm on a child. Parents irresponsible in feeding their kids and meeting their needs would be stopped from doing that somehow. If a child were dropped from the top of tall building—well, either that wouldn't be allowed, or God himself would somehow break the children's falls. Etc.

My point is that the world would be a very different place. Interventions by God would quickly prove to be ubiquitous. And remember we've identified just a few examples of grievous wrongdoings in this world.

As a Christian I take heart that God is good and can be trusted ultimately to defeat the worst of evils that this broken world doles out.

As I say, there's ever so much more ground to cover. The problem of evil is a big discussion, needless to say. If you haven't read Eleonore Stump's and Marilyn Adams' books on the subject, I'd encourage it. Clay Jones has also done good work on all this stuff, as have others, but those are a few tips for further reading anyway.

Best,

Dave

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

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.

God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands, and Human Autonomy: Moral Realism, God's Commands and Human Autonomy

By Hare, Mr. John E.

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)

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?

God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands, and Human Autonomy: Moral Realism, God's Commands and Human Autonomy

By Hare, Mr. John E.

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 4)

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

David Baggett

In this section, Hare discusses the first concession on the realist side: that of Iris Murdoch, a Platonist about ethics who moves some distance from Moore. The concession is that human beings are by nature selfish. Hare calls this “the first realist concession.” It’s a concession to subjectivity in that she recognizes that accurate moral perception needs obedience, a selfless attention, a pure heart, but a root inclination of ours is to favor ourselves unjustly. She is a Platonist about value, but with an Augustinian rather than a Platonist view of the heart.

Murdoch refers to the “fat relentless ego,” which corrupts our nature at its root. It means that our access to the good is always precarious and incomplete, and we are always fatally prone to self-deception. It also motivates her central objection to prescriptivism, which is that if the will is corrupt in this way, then it can’t be the creative source of the good.

She reads Kant in a way with which Hare disagrees. But as she sees it, Kant has abolished God and made man God in His stead. Murdoch sets up a contrast between pride and humility. The existentialists and Anglo-Saxon heirs of Kant (such as Sartre and R. M. Hare in England) make the human will the creator of value, which was previously seen as inscribed in the heavens. Murdoch thinks this is merely a surrender to self-importance.

What we need to recover, she says, is the sense of value as a magnetic source outside our wills, to which our wills respond if we are disciplined in virtue and especially in the virtue of humility. There’s a freedom that comes from humility involving selfless respect for reality. An example for Murdoch, as for Moore, is the contemplation of something beautiful, which can have the effect of “unselfing” the contemplator, so that she attends entirely to the object.

The Good, Murdoch says, unifies our fragmentary experiences of value into a whole that transcends us. It is a “magnetic center,” to which we feel the attraction but which we never reach.

An aspect of Murdoch’s view that’s hard to square with her talk of a “magnetic center” is that she holds that human life has no external point or telos. She thinks Christianity panders to us by claiming to give us a guarantee that the good will in the end prevail. But the effect of her denial is to make the Good completely inert, contrary to Plato, for whom the human world is neither aimless nor self-contained. The Forms for him, and especially the Form of the Good, have a causal role as well as an epistemological one.

Aristotle is not wrong to say that we do naturally pursue such things as power and prestige, but he is wrong to argue that because we naturally pursue them they are good. If we try to argue to the character of the good from the character of our emotions and desires, we are likely to fall into this danger that Murdoch identifies as mistaking the fire for the sun, or mistaking self-scrutiny for the discovery of goodness.

Murdoch says that humans are by nature selfish, and she therefore holds that our evaluative knowledge is precarious and incomplete. For Murdoch, the process of apprehension is one of lifelong obedience, mortification, and self-discipline. The reason this is needed is our tendency to self-indulgence, and the attendant corruption of even our reflective processes by self-gratifying fantasies.

But neither Kant nor the prescriptivists are creative anti-realists in the way Muroch proposes, Hare claims. Prescriptivism, he thinks, is more correctly seen as an additional reason for the humility Murdoch extols. Our evaluations involve the experience of the magnetic force Murdoch describes, and then an endorsement of this response. Recall how Moore distinguished between something cognitive, something noncognitive (like an emotion), and separately from both of these, the judging that a thing is good.

Hare thinks this is essentially right, though he supplements it with Robert Roberts’ account of emotion understood as a concern-based construal, a “seeing-as.” To see something as bad requires caring about what’s at stake. So there’s the seeing-as, the caring, plus the judgment that endorses them. Without the endorsement, emotion is not what Hare calls a full-blooded value judgment.

Returning to Murdoch’s humility, separating the construal, the desire, and the endorsement enables us to see how expressivism can give us an additional reason for humility. Because of our selfishness, the construals and desires present in emotion are biased towards the self. But value judgment according to the expressivist also requires endorsement, and our selfishness will also incline us to endorse what is not impartially good. The central expressivist point is that to make a value judgment is not merely to respond to something out there in the world, but to endorse or deliberately to withhold endorsement from such a response. What we are inclined to endorse will depend on our fundamental reflective loyalties.

Worth noting is that in his review of Hare’s book, Thomas Williams thinks that, though moral realism is a position in moral ontology, Hare’s account of moral expressivism is (potentially) a position in moral semantics, psychology, or epistemology, so they’re not really in the same domain of question. Williams thinks the “concessions” Hare discusses involve further confusion between questions of different types. So the whole framework of the discussion, Williams argues, is vitiated from the outset by Hare’s failure to keep distinct kinds of question separate. And, inevitably, the story of the particular “concessions” that each side is said to have made to the other involves further confusion between questions of different types.

One such confusion, Williams thinks, can be seen in Hare’s discussion of this “first realist concession”: Iris Murdoch's concession that human beings are by nature selfish. Contra Hare, Williams asserts that it is no more a concession to subjectivity about morals to say that our moral perception might be obscured by perverse desire than it is a concession to subjectivity about astronomy to say that our perception of the moon might be obscured by clouds. The ontological question is one thing; the epistemological question is quite another.

I suppose I read Hare’s concessive point as an effort to texture the discussion by pointing to elements of both ontology and epistemology, all of which are needed for a more robust analysis. Likewise in Hare’s problematizing of Murdoch’s reading of prescriptivism and Kant.

Part 3

Part 5

Dr. Phil Tallon Outlines the Problem of Evil in 5 minutes

In this short video from Houston Theological Seminary, Dr. Tallon explains the basics about the problem of evil.

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

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.

God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands, and Human Autonomy

By Hare, John E.

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)

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).

God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands, and Human Autonomy

By Hare, John E.

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

The Paradox of Moral Tolerance: Exposing Normative Relativism's Blind Spot

One does not have to look far to notice that the moral beliefs of individuals vary widely. For some, abortion is a morally thoughtful venture on the part of the mother. For others, it is regarded as the abhorrent murder of a human being. For some, homosexuality and transgenderism are beautiful expressions of one’s authentic self. For others, these practices are considered defamatory to the body and disrespectful to human dignity. Of course, there are many intricacies to these moral considerations, but ultimately, these views and many others seem to stand in stark contrast to one another.

How do we best handle this disparity of moral viewpoints? A common way is to adopt the universal principle of moral tolerance. Moral tolerance refers to the capacity or willingness of one to respect and coexist with the moral beliefs, values, and practices of others which one personally disagrees with or finds objectionable without interfering with the beliefs, values, or practices themselves. The principle of moral tolerance, in this way, is rooted in open-mindedness, empathy, and respect for individual autonomy, allowing for a peaceful coexistence of diverse moral viewpoints within a pluralistic society. Its aim is to foster social harmony and cooperation by promoting a moral climate of understanding and courteous dialogue rather than contemptuous condemnation.

Adopting the universal principle of moral tolerance seems like a reasonable way to handle the diversity of views we encounter. Even though some of our moral beliefs conflict, we should nonetheless respect the autonomy of one another to hold such beliefs. The desire for social cohesion through moral tolerance is one of the most prominent motivations for adopting the moral theory known as normative relativism (NR).

NR holds that the truth of a moral proposition is relative to the belief of a given individual.[1] What makes a moral proposition (i.e., that “homosexuality is good” or “homosexuality is bad”) true is whether one believes it to be so. The belief in these moral propositions, then, makes them substantively true for that individual, and the individual therefore has an obligation to act in accord with them.

Prima facie, NR appears to provide an ideal basis for moral tolerance by justifying each individual’s moral beliefs in virtue of the beliefs themselves. After all, given the disparity of moral viewpoints, who’s to say one individual’s moral beliefs are more valid than another’s? NR validates the moral beliefs of each individual and thus creates a level ground, ripe for moral tolerance. This serves as a prominent motivator for adopting such a theory. Upon closer examination, however, this motive seems built on a fractured relationship between moral tolerance and NR. This deep-rooted incoherence is what I will call the paradox of moral tolerance.

The paradox of moral tolerance: Moral tolerance is a prominent motivator for adopting NR but is ultimately unaccounted for by the theory.

Despite its apparent merits, moral tolerance—properly understood—is logically impossible on NR. For if Agent 1’s moral belief is not morally false or opposed to Agent 2’s moral belief in a substantive way, then there is nothing for Agent 1 to tolerate. Furthermore, for moral tolerance to be successful in handling the disparity of moral viewpoints peacefully, we would need to universalize the principle, allowing individuals to hold one another accountable to it. However, universal moral tolerance would imply an objective exception to NR which falsely elevates the principle of tolerance above that which is accounted for by the theory.[2]

The argument from the paradox of moral tolerance can be hashed out in the following way:

1.     NR cannot account for objective moral obligations.

2.     The notion of universal moral tolerance implies an objective moral obligation.

3.     Therefore, NR cannot account for universal moral tolerance.

 What might the proponent of NR say in response to this argument?

 One could imagine the normative relativist attempting to sidestep the argument by replying that, even if the principle of moral tolerance is not universal, one ought to be tolerant of the moral beliefs of other individuals if their own moral code accounts for it. However, we might respond by asking what it is they are tolerating. Tolerance, in this sense, requires that one’s views are opposed by their counterpart in a substantive way. If each individual defines morality for himself, as NR affirms, then what exactly is one tolerating? We might run the argument as follows:

1.     Moral tolerance requires the moral beliefs of individuals to conflict in some substantive way.

2.     On NR, the moral beliefs of individuals might be different, but do not conflict in some substantive way.

3.     Therefore, moral tolerance is not possible on NR.

But can't the normative relativist simply say that some moral truths, even if they are not objective, must be obeyed to allow for social cohesion? That is, tolerance towards other individuals’ moral beliefs is not an objective moral principle but must be adhered to in order to maintain some form of a social contract which keeps us from chaos. It seems this, again, holds tolerance as the tacit exception to the theory itself. The language of “must be obeyed” in this context would imply an objective moral obligation. However, on NR, according to what basis must these moral beliefs be respected, and on what basis is social cohesion more morally desirable than chaos?

Another reply the proponent of NR might give to the argument from the paradox of moral tolerance is one based on the nature of the justification of moral beliefs on NR. Because Agent 2’s moral beliefs are often different from Agent 1’s moral beliefs—at least to some extent—yet are justified in virtue of Agent 2’s beliefs in and of themselves, these differing principles are necessarily tolerated. In other words, we recognize that those who hold beliefs which differ from our own are justified in doing so, and thus we exercise moral tolerance necessarily. However, there is a distinction to be made between what is different and what conflicts in some substantive way. Just because a belief is different does not mean it conflicts in this manner. For example, if I believe that I have brown hair and my friend believes he has blonde hair, I do not have grounds to “tolerate” his belief, for our beliefs do not conflict in a substantive way—tolerance would seem to require this sort of conflict. To elucidate this concept, moral tolerance would require that Agent 1’s moral belief, “A is good” conflict Agent 2’s moral belief, “A is bad” in some substantive way. But on NR, Agent 1 would define what is good in virtue of his own belief, so even though Agent 1’s belief might be different than Agent 2’s, it would not conflict with Agent 2’s belief in some substantive way, and thus tolerance would not be possible.

One last objection we might consider from the normative relativist is that the assertion of relative morality does not imply that there are no moral obligations. Furthermore, there is no need for the proponent of NR to affirm tolerance as a universal principle to hold others accountable for tolerance, for it is possible that all individuals could independently assert tolerance as a moral principle regardless. But the argument from the paradox of moral tolerance does not claim that normative relativists have no moral principles to abide by. In fact, according to NR, one ought to act in accordance with their own individual code. And it is logically possible that all individuals could affirm the same moral code, which happens to promote the principle of moral tolerance, but do so relatively. We might imagine, however, a possible world where one individual deviates from this code by revoking tolerance as a moral principle without violating the code itself, for their beliefs determine it. Moral progress or regress would not be made by the individual in this possible world, just a change in their moral landscape. The mere potentiality for intolerance to become morally permissible in a possible world where everyone believes tolerance to be a moral principle reveals the inability for NR to account for the universal obligation of such a principle, or any moral principle for that matter.

I believe there is potential for the argument from the paradox of moral tolerance to be extended beyond the scope of NR to other moral anti-realist theories. When I consider anti-realist theories here, I mean any theory which does not identify goodness even minimally with nonmoral properties, such as in weaker forms of moral realism. Anti-realist theories, then, would refer to only those theories which use goodness in a predicative sense to refer to that which is true about an individual’s own dispositions or the dispositions of the culture in which they abide. It is also worth noting that the argument from the paradox of moral tolerance seems to have utility for both cognitivist and non-cognitivist theories, as I say, IFF they don’t affirm an identity relation between goodness and a nonmoral property or affirm goodness as a mind-independent property. Lastly, the purpose of this argument is not meant to undercut anti-realist theories entirely or even NR but is rather meant to reveal how one of the more attractive underlying motivations for adopting such theories—namely, moral tolerance—is unaccounted for by previous anti-realist commitments, with particular attention drawn to NR.

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[1] “Individual” could also be considered a culture or society, as with normative cultural relativism. For the sake of simplicity, however, I use the term “individual” throughout this article.

[2] On NR there is also no inherent basis for equality (which seems to undergird the principle of tolerance) other than that which we have constructed on our own, though this is a separate—yet related—discussion.

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Hunter Kallay is a Ph.D. student at the University of Tennessee and holds a MA in Apologetics from Houston Christian University. His primary interests include moral epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion. In his spare time, he enjoys fitness, sports, and exploring new restaurants.

The Inherent Disorder of Social Media Friendships

Editor’s note: This article is republished with permission of the author. The original article is available here.

I want you to think back to childhood and remember when you met one of your best friends. You may not remember all the exact words, but you might be able to recall the situation. Maybe you were in the same classroom and got partnered up for some activity. Maybe you were at recess and were part of the same kickball game. Perhaps your parents were friends already, so you met at some party or event.

Your first interaction was very surface-level. I do not mean that in a derogatory fashion. That is how most relationships start. It is a low-stakes situation; you talked about drawing a picture, playing a game, or what was for dinner when you were a kid. Even as an adult, when someone new starts to work in your office, you ask about their last job, their family, or talk about the weather. You do not dive right into their hopes, dreams, fears, and vulnerabilities. That would be incredibly awkward and would be considered prying by most people.

Now I would like you to consider a conversation you may have had with your best friend or inner circle of friends recently. Perhaps you started talking about things that were much more personal or even controversial. You might have talked about political or religious matters. You might have talked about problems you are having with your job or family. You may have disclosed an area in which you are struggling. Because these people have proven themselves to be your closest friends and you have a relationship already built, you probably felt comfortable opening up without fear of ridicule or antipathy. A more developed relationship allows for a greater level of emotional intimacy.

Many of my close friends have very different political and religious beliefs than I do. We talk about these things from time to time, and we disagree, but we have a friendship already built. We already like each other, so our relationship is resilient enough to handle the disagreement. It is almost like a pyramid; we have a base of things that we enjoy doing together, so the structure survives.

However, when I think about these friends with whom I have substantial disagreements, none of our friendships really started talking about these areas of disagreement. I don’t know what would have happened if we had jumped right into a debate the first time we met. Maybe we would have gotten sick of each other and never talked again. Maybe we would have gotten extremely frustrated and just decided to go our separate ways rather than finding time to find other areas of common interest. Perhaps you are different from me, but I don’t tend to run headfirst into conflict if I can help it. I’m not afraid of conflict, but I would rather sit around and laugh and enjoy people’s company than always fight with them. I am willing to have good-natured conflicts with people I like because I understand that, at the end of the day, despite our disagreements, we can still be friends.

I think that we all understand that this is the natural way relationships ought to develop. It feels right to us intuitively. Even in a romantic relationship, you begin by casually going out with someone, and ideally, that relationship develops more and more intimacy until it becomes a lifelong marriage. Although there are reality shows that have people get married in thirty days, most of us would be uncomfortable with becoming that close to someone so quickly.

“Whether the relationship is platonic or romantic, there are levels of disclosure depending on the proximity of that relationship.”

Social media turns this dynamic upside down, and I believe that this is one of the reasons why social media tends to become so toxic.

Many of us view social media as an outlet for our thoughts and opinions. Because we view our walls as a place for self-expression, we tend to share things that are important to us. We don’t normally talk about the boring things that begin relationships. Although I have posted about extreme weather conditions before, I rarely post about something like that. I am much more likely to post about something I feel is really important and want other people to know about. In other words, I tend to post about things much closer to the deeper parts of my being, the things that are much more personally significant.

The people who see my Facebook posts range from my best friends to people I hardly know. Perhaps you could criticize my tendency to accept Facebook friendships from people I do not know, and there is a case to be made for not doing that. However, I have been involved in public ministry projects like An Unexpected Journal. If people want to connect with me and if it helps spread the word about good projects, I don’t like to turn people away very often.

You can see the problem with this dynamic almost immediately. I sometimes share very personal thoughts and core beliefs with a group of people who hardly know me. To use the imagery from the beginning of this piece, I am having a conversation with a bunch of new acquaintances that I should be having with my close friends.

When one of these people I barely know takes issue with one of my closely held beliefs that I have decided to share because I believe it is important, I have very little investment in wanting to maintain that friendship. After all, this is not one of my close friends that I am going to want to hold onto, despite my disagreement. If we picture a scale, there is nothing on the side of good times and good memories to offset the frustration that comes with conflict and ideological contradiction. Therefore, I might tend to lash out. I might tend to want to slam that ridiculous belief. After all, that person came after my beliefs on my wall; I have to show my friends that my way is the right way.

Escalation is inevitable in this situation. The conflict escalates until we have toxicity. We are quick to blame so many different things, but I hope you understand that the model of social media friendship is disordered.

“We live in a world that ought to be ordered, and with disorder ultimately comes chaos. Social media brings our acquaintances to a level of relational intimacy that ought to be reserved for our closest friends. ”

No wonder we get so frustrated with people and talk about other people trolling our page. I don’t know anyone who calls their friend a troll, but I know many people who accuse their Facebook “friends” of trolling them. Would your friend troll you? Not one of your best friends, even if you disagree with them, because you know them on a deeper level than just as an Internet provocateur.

You might be wondering how to handle this problem. You might be wondering what we can do to reorder friendships appropriately in the social media age.

First, I think private messages are great. Yes, I still post things publicly, but a great deal of my social media activity takes place on Facebook Messenger. I talk to people about all kinds of things. Some are serious; some are not. Some are controversial, while some are bland. Having this kind of correspondence friendship is superior to debating on public walls. I find there is less grandstanding. I also find that I can approach my friendships in the proper order. Am I talking to someone I barely know? I talk about surface-level things. I get to know them and develop a friendship that might develop into a closer friendship. Am I talking to someone I have known for several years? We can talk about heavier things, understanding that our friendship will survive even if we disagree. Rather than broadcasting our every thought, private messages are a great way of utilizing social media to associate with people on the appropriate relational level.

Second, we need to decide if we want to be public figures. Some people are called to be public intellectuals. They want to put their ideas out there. If you want to do that, you need to be comfortable with the fact that some people will not agree with you. You can’t be offended that people decide to troll you. Being a public intellectual is not for you if your skin is thin. If you are actively trying to promote ideas, then on some level, you are working as a public intellectual (insert joke about a lot of us being more or less intellectual than others, which is true).

That being said, being a public intellectual is also different than developing friendships. If you are a public intellectual, you develop a following. Your followers are not the same as your friends. I would argue that public intellectuals still need to develop friendships in the same order as I have outlined above. I have a feeling that if you went out to dinner with Patrick Deneen, you might not dive into a deep political debate the first time you met. You would probably get to know each other and might become friends. You might ideologically disagree with him and enjoy his company as a friend. Robert George and Cornel West are rather famous for this, as were Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Even public intellectuals make friends in the order I suggested, even though because of their platforms, many people just yell about them.

As a result, if you want to be a public figure, recognize that you still need to follow the formula to make friends. Your friends are going to be those you build a relationship with, not those who idolize or despise you.

Finally, treat social media for what it is. With its fundamentally flawed friendship order, it cannot do the job of making friends for you. It is not well suited for that. However, I have developed some amazing friendships with people I have never met in person. Social media has helped me facilitate that. I am not going to sit here and say that you cannot make friends on social media. That would be demonstrably false in my life and probably in yours. Nevertheless, we became friends in the proper order. We chatted about basic things, realized we had areas of common interest, developed our friendship more deeply, and became great friends in the process who were able to talk about all kinds of things without threatening the existence of that friendship.

We live in a world that is desperate for friendship, and we look for it on social media. However, suppose we do that without considering the true development of friendships. In that case, we will be frustrated when they continually burn out due to getting too deep too fast.

*NOTE*

I have been wrestling with this conception of social media friendship for some time and would love to hear your experiences and stories. I am considering expanding this theory into a book-length treatment, but that is in a very early stage. If you think it would be interesting, I would love to hear some encouragement to motivate me to start working.

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About Dr. Schmoll

Dr. Zachary D. Schmoll earned his Ph.D. in Humanities from Faulkner University after defending his dissertation entitled, Great Men? Considering Chesterton and Belloc’s Role in the History of the Distributist Movement. He also earned his M.A. in Apologetics at Houston Baptist University and was an Honors College Scholar while double majoring in Business Administration and Statistics at the University of Vermont.

Schmoll is honored to have served as the Managing Editor of An Unexpected Journal from its inception until the end of 2022. An Unexpected Journal is a quarterly publication that seeks to demonstrate the truth of Christianity through both reason and the imagination to engage the culture from a Christian worldview. What began as an informal discussion among friends about the need for a journal of cultural apologetics has developed into a respected publication that has received contributions from some of the most important scholars in the field.

Within the field of cultural apologetics, Schmoll's main research interest is the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. Specifically, he is interested in studying Samwise Gamgee as Tolkien's "chief hero," the role of the supernatural in Tolkien's legendarium, and the importance of community chiefly in the Shire but also throughout Middle-earth. Some of his other research interests include the work of G.K. Chesterton, the role of Christianity in the public square, and the development of Western Civilization from Athens and Jerusalem.

Schmoll lives in rural Vermont where he enjoys power soccer, bonfires, and, sadly, the Philadelphia Phillies.

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

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.]

God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands, and Human Autonomy

By Hare, John E.

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

Saving Moral Knowledge: A Debunking Argument and Theistic Alternative

Immanuel Kant famously said, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe … the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”[1] Regardless of one’s religious background or political standing, there are some fundamental acts which seem inherently wrong, independent of human opinion. We might imagine the murder of nineteen innocent school students in Uvalde or the kidnapping and raping of two teenage girls at knifepoint in the Bronx. It seems quite difficult to avoid our conviction that such acts are wrong. The underlying concern, however, is whether we can trust these moral convictions to be accurate and thus be counted as genuine knowledge. For if we cannot possess moral knowledge, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain moral realism. For to save moral realism, one must first save moral knowledge

Let’s begin with defining what moral knowledge is. Knowledge exists in a variety of forms. We might consider competence or know-how knowledge, such as how to juggle, or acquaintance knowledge, such as knowledge of a person, like Adam knowing Eve. However, these forms of knowledge are not of core relevance to the discussion of moral knowledge. Rather, the focus here is on propositional knowledge; for example, our knowledge that one added to one is two or that the United States of America is a country. More specifically, the relevant concern is with moral propositions. These would be statements such as, “Torturing children for the fun of it is morally bad,” or “Helping those in need is morally good.” Moral realism affirms that such moral propositions are objectively true or false in the same way that the statement, “one added to one is two” is objectively true or false. The question is, if these moral facts exist, how might we know them? There are two criteria necessary for any account of moral knowledge to fulfill:

1.     Objective moral truth exists.

2.     Humans have the capacity to acquire moral truths to some extent.

Regarding C1, if we are to have moral knowledge—knowledge of true mind-independent moral propositions—objective moral truth must exist. If we forfeit moral realism, then moral knowledge of this sort is rendered irrational and this discussion need not be had. Yet, a contribution to the debate over moral realism is not my prerogative here, as I am most concerned with the reliability of our moral convictions for knowledge given the affirmation of C1. On C2, granted that we might not all agree on what moral truth is, we must believe that our epistemic capacities provide room for improvement over time (e.g. through rational argument or through the refinement of our sensibilities). For this reason, it seems only fair that an account of moral knowledge does not require a full acquisition of moral truths, but rather a tracking which to some extent reflects the moral order. In other words, we might not know all moral truths that exist, but we can agree and track some of them—those which are more obvious, like, “torturing children for fun is morally bad.” Given these criteria for moral knowledge, it becomes clear that to possess knowledge of this sort, we need an explanation for why we have the capacity to acquire mind-independent moral truths, at least to some extent.

We might consider two possible explanatory accounts for this asymmetric dependence relation between our moral convictions and mind-independent moral truths:

1.     Natural explanation

2.     Supernatural explanation

On one hand, we might consider a natural explanation. As I use the term “natural,” I mean it in the way Democritus understood it—simply all that exists are “atoms in the void.” Natural explanations of moral knowledge are explanations which attempt to fulfill or deny the criteria for moral knowledge using purely natural, nonpurposive theories. I will consider evolutionary naturalism (EN) as the belief-producing method here, which is widely accepted by prominent naturalistic philosophers.[2] On the other hand, we might consider supernatural explanations of moral knowledge which attempt to fulfill the criteria for moral knowledge by appealing to a purposive story via a supernatural agent or abstract entities. Here, I will discuss how asserting the existence of a supernatural agent might explain our moral knowledge. As Mark Linville says, “Both the evolutionary naturalist and the theist may be found saying that certain of our moral beliefs are by-products of the human constitution: we think as we do largely as a result of our programming. Whether such beliefs are warranted would seem to depend upon who or what is responsible for the program.”[3]

To begin, let’s turn to a natural explanation. The first thing to consider when assessing a natural explanation is that when I use the term “evolutionary naturalism,” I am not addressing evolution as a scientific theory but rather the idea that evolution was a natural, non-purposive process consisting of purely natural events. When discussing EN, it is important to understand the driving force of belief-development: natural selection. Natural selection is rooted in the concept of random mutation. The idea here is that if we assume the genes of a species undergo “random”[4] mutations, selective pressures will ensure that, in the long run, those mutations which are conducive to the survival and replication of the species will prevail. Here comes the kicker … according to evolutionary biology, the fact that moral beliefs are correct has no influence on their selective potential. The determining factor, rather, is their conduciveness to the flourishing of the species. This sets the stage for my debunking argument against evolutionary naturalism as an explanation for moral knowledge. The debunking argument can be formulated as follows:

Premise 1:       Our moral convictions were naturally selected for via their adaptiveness, not their truth value.

Premise 2:       If (1), we don’t hold our moral convictions because they are true, but because they are adaptive

Conclusion:     Therefore, we cannot trust our moral convictions to be true.

The idea here is that even if our moral convictions about mind-independent moral facts are accurate, these beliefs cannot be counted as knowledge in virtue of the undercutting, potentially misleading nature of EN. It seems the most plausible alternative, given this debunking argument, is to abandon EN as an explanation for moral knowledge and accept the necessary conclusion that knowledge of such moral truths, if they exist, is rendered impossible. Sharon Street concludes, “If the fund of evaluative judgments with which human reflection began was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate influence … then the tools of rational reflection were equally contaminated, for the latter are always just a subset of the former.”[5] This seems to be the case on EN, for the proponent of such an alternative is left concluding that even if some act is objectively wrong, such as the torturing of innocent children, we would never be able to know!

Now, let’s turn to the alternative explanation. Is the supernatural, agent explanation (AE) any better at accounting for moral knowledge? Upon reflection of the debunking argument, it seems so. The proponent of AE might avoid the assertion of P1 of the debunking argument by appealing to a purposive evolutionary story or avoid the implications of the debunking argument by proposing some version of agent revelation.

P1 asserts that our moral beliefs were selected for via their adaptiveness, not their truth value. But given a purposive evolutionary story, we might imagine that the agent in question would have guided us towards true moral convictions so that our convictions would not be aimed merely at adaptiveness, but at truth. Therefore, P1 would be inaccurate. Even if it is granted that our moral beliefs were aimed merely at adaptiveness and not truth, however, it would seem the proponent of AE could avoid the inference from P1 to P2 by inserting some theory of agent revelation—the idea that the agent in question communicated to us directly via our conscience or used special revelation to allow us to apprehend these moral facts—to avoid debunking concerns. Therefore, the proponent of AE can pick his avenue to avoid these debunking challenges in a way the naturalist cannot. Thus, given the debunking argument I have laid out, it seems AE provides a firmer foundation for moral knowledge than EN.

This conclusion has not meant to prove the existence of God, let alone the Christian God. Rather, my conclusion is meant to show that knowledge of mind-independent moral facts is better explained by a supernatural explanation, AE, than by a natural explanation, EN.  My hope is that this abductive analysis will serve as a firm foundation for the moral argument for God’s existence and reveal the shortcomings of naturalism to the willing and searching so they might discover a worldview consistent with their moral convictions. For the theist, I hope this argument strengthens their intellect and broadens their concept of our good God.

Notes:

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956 [1788]), 166.

Linville, Mark. “The Moral Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2012) 415.

Street, Sharon. “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 125.

[1] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956 [1788]), 166.

[2] Proponents include Michael Ruse, Sharon Street, Richard Dawkins, Alexander Rosenburg, Richard Joyce, Daniel Dennett, among others.

[3] Mark Linville, “The Moral Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2012) 415.

[4] “Random” in such a context can be traditionally defined as: without special interest towards the benefit of the host organism.

[5] Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 125.

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Hunter Kallay is a Ph.D. student at the University of Tennessee and holds a MA in Apologetics from Houston Christian University. His primary interests include moral epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion. In his spare time, he enjoys fitness, sports, and exploring new restaurants.