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.
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.
