This debate features atheist and neuroscientist Sam Harris and Christian philosopher William Lane Craig. Harris defends a theory of ethics that he takes to be both objective and scientific, while Craig defends theistic ethics. If you haven't had a chance to to watch this debate yet, it is well worth the time!
Can we make sense of the virtues in a world without God? Let’s consider the virtue of humility as a way of addressing this question. In his Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe, Erik Wielenberg develops a naturalized account of humility.[i] This account is worth considering given Wielenberg’s explicit aim of constructing a naturalized version of a virtue that is commonly thought to be uniquely Christian. Wielenberg constructs an account of humility grounded in the assumption that we know that naturalism is true. In order to do this, he first discusses a Christian account of humility. He then explores some of the similarities and differences of such an account with a naturalistic version of this virtue. After discussing these points, I offer several criticisms of Wielenberg’s view.
On a Christian analysis, according to Wielenberg, the humble person neither underestimates nor overestimates her own value or abilities, but instead recognizes that these are gifts from God. She also acknowledges her dependence on God, and knows that much of what contributes to her flourishing is not within her control, but God’s. Hence, the humble theist is grateful for her flourishing in light of this dependence, and gives credit to God. On naturalism, however, Wielenberg claims that there is also room for an acknowledgment of dependence on something outside of ourselves, because so much of what contributes to our success—psychological constitution, physical health, family background, where and when we are born, and economic factors—is outside of our control. On naturalism, these factors are not under God’s control; they are under no one’s control. Given this, no one gets the credit. Sheer chance and good fortune should receive the majority of the credit. As Wielenberg puts it, “It is the dependence of human beings and their actions on factors beyond their control—dependence that is present whether God exists or not—that makes humility in some form an appropriate attitude to have.”[ii] In either kind of universe, naturalistic or theistic, “...taking the balance of credit for one’s accomplishments is foolish.”[iii] Like the humble theist, the humble naturalist can and should acknowledge her dependence on something outside of herself, substituting good fortune for God.
Wielenberg may be right that there is space within a naturalistic view of the universe for an attitude of humility. Perhaps we should generally expect that there will be somewhat plausible naturalistic versions of many particular virtues if Christianity is true. This is because according to Christianity, the structure of reality reflects aspects of God’s nature. Given this, even if one seeks to remove God from the picture, as it were, there will still be latent theistic features of reality which can make sense of the virtues. However, if Christianity is true then a Christian account of the virtues will be superior to any account available to naturalists, and the virtues themselves will ultimately possess better metaphysical fit with our understanding of the rest of reality, both of which we should expect if Christian theism is true.
For example, and as a way to compare naturalistic humility with theistic humility, consider the relationship between humility and gratitude. Of course the Christian can be humbly grateful to God and other people, for what he and they have done on her behalf. But the naturalist, given that dumb luck and blind chance are the ultimate causes of most of the factors contributing to his success—psychological constitution, physical health, family background, where and when he was born, and economic factors—has no good reason to be grateful for these things because there is no one to be grateful towards. Even the other human beings who have benefitted our fortunate naturalist only do so primarily and perhaps solely because of dumb luck and blind chance. On naturalism, no person, human (or, of course, divine), is ultimately responsible for anything, and so it becomes very difficult to see what reasons exist for gratitude towards persons, at least. Moreover, what it means for one to be grateful towards dumb luck or blind chance is at best quite mysterious, and at worst incoherent.
As a second way to critically compare naturalistic humility with theistic humility, consider the following thought experiment. Imagine you have suffered from a serious illness for many years. The treatments are quite expensive, and your insurance company will no longer cover the treatments because the policy’s coverage has been exhausted. Consider two distinct scenarios:
Scenario 1: You are desperate to come up with the money to pay for continued treatment, and by sheer luck you find a large diamond buried in your back yard, worth enough to pay for your treatment indefinitely.
Scenario 2: A wealthy benefactor gives you the money you need to pay for your treatments indefinitely. You know this benefactor because you cheated her in a business deal many years ago.
Which scenario is more conducive to humility?
In the first scenario you are very happy and feel very fortunate at such a stroke of luck. And of course you would have no reason to be proud of what occurred, because you would deserve none of the credit for finding the diamond or for being able to pay your medical bills. Perhaps the whole situation engenders some humility, because you realize you are receiving a great benefit that you did nothing to earn. On scenario 2 you again have no reason to be proud of being able to pay for your treatment, nor do you deserve the credit for being able to pay your bills. On this scenario, however, there are reasons to be more—and more deeply—humbled. First, not only is it the case that you did nothing to deserve the money given to you, but you actually deserve not to receive the money, given the fact that you wronged your benefactor in the past and owe her money because of your own wrongdoing. Second, the action of your benefactor is magnanimous, and simply witnessing and benefiting from the act should foster humility. Third, there is the presence of rational gratitude in scenario 2, but not in scenario 1. In scenario 1, there is no one to direct gratitude towards, because no one gets the credit for your newfound wealth. However, in the second scenario you should feel deep gratitude towards your benefactor, because of what she has done for you in spite of the debt you owe her. Gratitude seems to both deepen the humility you have and provides more reason to be humble.
It will be helpful to make explicit the lessons from the above thought experiment. On theism, humans rely on a personal being who provides constant and intentional support in all aspects of our existence. In contrast to this, on naturalism we rely on mere chance and the laws of nature (or perhaps just the latter). Many of the contributing factors to individual success that are outside of our control are present because of mere good fortune. It might seem that this fact should engender humility, because we realize that we are mere recipients of good luck, so to speak. Granting this to the naturalist, the theist still has reason for a deeper appreciation of her dependence and so for a deeper humility, given her belief that we do not deserve the assistance that God gives to us. This makes the humility deeper and more profound, because while both the naturalist and the theist can accept that there are many factors that contribute to our success in life that lie outside of our control, only the theist can say that she is undeserving of this aid and deserves not to receive it because of her rebellion against God. The upshot is that while the naturalist may be able to give an account of humility, the theistic account is superior because everything that we accomplish is done with God’s active assistance. This assistance is not only undeserved, but is given even though we deserve something quite different. This in turn gives the theist a reason to be more deeply humble, even if the need and justification for this humility too often go unrecognized.
Lastly, I would like to emphasize that in a universe where the majority of the credit for any human accomplishment goes to “blind chance,”[iv] it becomes more difficult to give a sound and comprehensive analysis of any virtue and its connections to human accomplishments. It is not clear to me that any sense can be made of attributing credit to chance in this way.[v] What does it actually mean to ascribe credit to blind chance? In contrast to this, we have a clear understanding of ascribing credit to God, and there are several theistic accounts of moral development that are both coherent and cogent.
[i] Erik Wielenberg, Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 102-116.
[ii] Wielenberg, p. 112.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Wielenberg, p. 110.
[v] I owe this point to Doug Geivett.
Michael Austin is professor of philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University. His research focuses on applied ethics, the virtues, and philosophy of religion. He has published numerous journal articles and ten books, including Being Good: Christian Virtues for Everyday Life, with Doug Geivett (Eerdmans 2012) and Wise Stewards: Philosophical Foundations of Christian Parenting (Kregel Academic, 2009). He is currently working on a book dealing with the virtue of humility. He also blogs at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ethics-everyone and is on Twitter @michaelwaustin. You can see more from Dr. Austin at his website: http://www.michaelwaustin.com.
© By R Scott Smith, PhD, Biola University, scott.smith@biola.edu
There are various positions taken amongst naturalists in metaethics, and these have implications for whether or not a particular naturalist would believe we can have moral knowledge. In this short paper, first I will survey options in metaethics that various naturalists have taken and draw out those implications. Though they may differ in their metaethical standpoints, all these theorists are united around a common ontological claim – real, intrinsic, moral facts do not exist. Yet, they also think we can (and often do) know much about morality. For example, following the fact-value split, we know not only that science (i.e., today’s orthodox science, which is naturalistic) gives us knowledge of the facts of reality, but we also know that ethics and religion give us opinions, preferences, and our own constructs. But in the second section, I will take up a broader question: can we really have knowledge on naturalism? If not, then it seems naturalism would be false, for there are many things it seems we do know, including in morality. If so, then naturalism should be rejected.
I. Various Metaethical Positions for Naturalists
I. Noncognitivism: On a traditional, linguistic understanding, noncognitivists believe that moral judgments are neither true nor false. This would include two main positions, i.e., prescriptivism and emotivism (which A.J. Ayer supported). But this depiction has been criticized for at least a couple reasons by Richard Joyce, who first challenges just what a moral judgment is.[1] On his view, noncognitivism could be (1) a denial of the existence of beliefs (as mental states which could be true or false); (2) the lack of expression of a proposition (which would eliminate beliefs, which are propositions); or (3) the denial of the assertion of a belief. Overall, beliefs have no place metaethically, so there is no moral knowledge (understood as a justified true moral belief) available on this view.
Now, Simon Blackburn nuances his noncognitivism by appealing to projectivism and quasi-realism.[2] The latter is a linguistic thesis which seeks to “‘earn the right’ for moral discourse to enjoy all the trappings of realist talk,” including truth predicates in moral sentences.[3] For the noncognitivist, “stealing is wrong” really means something like “stealing – ugh!” However, for the quasi-realist, judging by the surface grammar of the sentence, it may be considered to be (or, treated as) true or false. Such sentences mimic moral realist assertions, yet do not really mean the same thing. The focus here is completely on moral discourse (a linguistic emphasis) and not about a moral property being instanced in some action (which would be a metaphysical focus) - for such things are not real. Blackburn is quite clear why: “The problem is one of finding room for ethics, or placing ethics within the disenchanted, non-ethical order which we inhabit, and of which we are a part.”[4]
But whether on Blackburn’s views, or the more traditional noncognitivist ones, there is no moral knowledge. There are no moral facts or moral judgments that can be known to be true or false. Still, that does not mean that someone like Blackburn or Ayer does not claim to know much about morality.
2. Moral Cognitivism - Subjectivist Theories: In general, cognitivists believe that moral statements are truth-apt yet disagree about the object of such statements. Of course, within this position, there has been the traditional distinction between private subjectivism and cultural relativism.
Here are two subjectivist examples. While Gilbert Harman seems to reduce moral facts to natural ones, nonetheless that does not mean that there are no moral facts. He affirms the theory-ladenness of beliefs, so that any moral beliefs we may have from making empirical observations are not due to some self-presenting, intrinsically moral property, but rather our interaction (which is conditioned by our upbringing and psychology) with just natural facts. Moral facts are mind-dependent, or our constructs; that is, in terms of a broader issue of moral realism versus anti-realism, he seems to be a subjectivist about morals (i.e., metaphysically).[5] So, we can know what moral facts are (i.e., human constructs), but we cannot know a moral reality independent of nature, for there is none.
Consider also Michael Ruse’s subjectivist ethics. For him, “the meaning of morality is that it is objective.”[6] Ruse embraces sociobiology: morality (in particular, social cooperation) just is a shared, biological adaptation. He draws upon Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene” view, and he suggests that we may speak of genes as selfish or altruistic. Yet, that is just to employ a biological metaphor, on which “altruistic” behavior is cooperative. Further, we objectify morality, but that is an illusion that has been thrust upon us by our genes, for there is no foundation for morality independent of biology. Yet Ruse also stands strongly against behaviors such as rape, female circumcision, or Hitler’s atrocities.[7] Evidently, then, Ruse believes we can know various acts to be morally right or wrong, yet he also seems to have special access to the truth about morality itself – that it is not objective but just a biological adaptation.
3. Moral Cognitivism - Error Theory: J.L. Mackie argued that, descriptively, there are widespread differences in moral views, and their best explanation is that moral judgments “reflect adherence to and participation in different ways of life.”[8] He also argued that if there exist objective moral properties, they would be entities of a very queer sort, utterly unlike anything else that exists in the physical universe, and they would require some atypical means to know them.
But the error theorist also claims that our moral discourse trades upon institutional (and thus socially constructed) facts, not brute, physical facts. Institutional rules guide our actions and speech, so moral judgments (which are beliefs) that profess to be real and institution-independent instead are infected with error. Why? There are no intrinsic moral facts. So for the error theorist, there is no room for moral knowledge, for there is nothing truly moral to be known. Yet, we may know much about moral discourse, that such talk does not reflect a predication of real moral properties.
4. Moral Cognitivism - Ethical Naturalism: On this last set of views, moral statements are about moral acts, or objects thought to have moral value. But here, moral facts can be reduced to natural ones which can be studied by science. On such a view, we can infer that such naturalists think we can have “moral” knowledge, since we can have knowledge of natural facts via science. Yet, of course, such knowledge would not be of intrinsically moral facts.
The Cornell Realists (Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, and David Brink) offer a variation. For them, all our observations (scientific, ethical, etc.) are theory-laden and are justified in light of their coherence with one’s whole web of beliefs. But this need not result in thoroughgoing anti-realism. For them, there are moral explanations of natural facts, and when we do this, we bring to bear our presupposition-laden background beliefs. So, for these realists, claiming that there are no moral facts lacks independent rational force against a realist’s web of beliefs. Thus, it seems we could have moral knowledge on this view, but again, it would not be of some intrinsically moral facts.
In sum, there is a spectrum of positions amongst naturalists in metaethics, resulting in different answers to the question, can we have moral knowledge? Some are confident that we can, while others are not. Yet they all seem to think there is much we can know about morality and moral discourse. Now, let us turn to examine the prospects for these (and other) knowledge claims on naturalism.
II. The Prospects for Knowledge on Naturalism
In general, given naturalism’s ontology, it seems that since only real natural facts exist in a mind-independent way, all other facts are human constructs. This line of thought fits with John Searle’s distinction between the brute facts of the physical world and the constructed facts of social reality.[9] Similarly, when addressing the reality of intentionality, Michael Tye avers to the reality of physical facts, yet explains the mental as a way of describing, or conceiving of, the physical.[10] Others seem to follow this same kind of pattern, such as David Papineau, Fred Dretske, and William Lycan.[11] Indeed, it seems to be a reasonable move, for on naturalism, the only intrinsic facts are physical ones. All else that we experience in reality (whether involving relationships, social life, economics, politics, business, sports, ethics, entertainment, or more) are due to how we conceive of, or talk about, the physical.
Daniel Dennett takes a similar line of argumentation. If we are consistent as naturalists, it means that while real brains and real physical patterns of forces exist, nonetheless things like mental states, intentions, and meanings are just attributions, or interpretations, we make from having adopted the intentional stance.[12] That stance is merely a tactic we adopt to help us predict behavior, and not to posit the “existence” of a variety of other “real” entities. For instance, consider the examples from Star Trek™, where Mr. Spock plays chess with the Enterprise’s computer.[13] For Dennett, both Spock and the computer are mechanisms, without any real intentions. Still, to help us predict what move Spock will make at a given stage in the game, we adopt the intentional stance, in which we attribute to him the intention to checkmate his opponent; thus, likely, he will make a given move. We treat the computer similarly, in that it “intends” to checkmate Spock and thus we predict it will make such-and-such a move.
For Dennett, these attributions of intentional states (and beliefs, desires, intentions, thoughts, etc.) are useful, shorthand ways of talking. They enable us to predict efficiently and reliably the behavior of intentional systems, which are systems that are amenable to treatment from this tactic.[14] It is more efficient than developing a lengthy, cumbersome description using the language of neuroscience.[15]
Now, while Dennett denies the reality of mental entities and their content, he does affirm the objective reality of physical patterns in the real world that we can detect.[16] However, Dennett also realizes that though these objective patterns are real, they always fall short of perfection. Therefore, there always will be uninterpretable gaps. Why? Here, Dennett draws upon Quine’s indeterminacy of radical translation[17] and extends it to the “‘translation’ of not only the patterns in subjects’ dispositions to engage in external behavior (Quine’s ‘stimulus meanings’), but also the further patterns in dispositions to ‘behave’ internally.”[18] Dennett realizes that there always will be such gaps entails that it is “always possible in principle for rival intentional stance interpretations of those patterns to tie for first place, so that no further fact could settle what the intentional system in question really believed.”[19]
Besides Quine, Dennett also appeals to Donald Davidson, who explains this principle in terms of its application to belief: “If there is indeterminacy [of meaning or translation], it is because when all the evidence is in, alternative ways of stating the facts remain open.”[20] Now, Dennett sees that Quine demonstrated the indispensability of intentionalistic discourse, yet for them such talk is not grounded in real mental states. So, Dennett uses Quine to support his own denial of the reality of mental entities and content: “Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation is thus of a piece with his attack on essentialism; if things had real, intrinsic essences, they could have real, intrinsic meanings.”[21]
So, if there were such essences, then meanings (along with other intentional states) could be determinate. There could be a single, correct answer to questions such as, What was Spock really intending to do when he made that move in chess? Or, what does Spock really believe about the moral status of Starfleet’s “prime directive”?[22] But Dennett thinks it is futile to think we can match up “mental” entities with their physical correlates. In principle, these patterns are capable of being interpreted variously from the intentional stance, and those interpretations could tie for first place. There are no deeper facts (i.e., essences) to give a determinate answer to the question, “What does it mean?”
Yet, with the language we use to describe the physical and behavioral traits of living things and other objects,[23] we take as real the entities referred to by that language. This is because we believe there are brute facts in the real world, something which can be described accurately from the standpoint of the Darwinian, materialistic story.
However, let us consider a comment Dennett makes in passing about his own views’ implications. He observes that Samuel C. Wheeler draws insightful connections between Derrida, Quine, and Davidson. Per Wheeler, Derrida provides “important, if dangerous, supplementary arguments and considerations” to the ones that Davidson and other Quinians have put forth.[24] As Wheeler notes, “For Quinians, of course, it is obvious already that speech and thought are brain-writing, some kind of tokenings which are as much subject to interpretation as any other.”[25]
Since there are no essences, there are no representations that are intrinsically about anything. Moreover, since natural selection itself is unrepresenting, there cannot be any “natural signs,” something that intrinsically would represent something else. Now, this means that for Dennett, we are left with events of “taking as,” in which we take (interpret, conceive of) some input as something else.[26] There is no room, it seems, for any aspect of the world as it is in itself to come before us and be known as it is, apart from how that input has been conceptualized.
Likewise, if any event of “taking as” cannot intrinsically represent something, then it too must be taken to be something else. Of course, that taking also must be taken as something else, and so on to infinity, it would seem, without any way to get started with these takings. As Willard argues, “Either there is going to be at some point a ‘taking as’ which does not itself represent anything (even what is ‘taken’) – which certainly sounds like a self-contradiction and is at best unlike the instances of ‘taking’ featured in Dennett’s explanations – or there is going to be an infinite regress of takings.”[27]
Now, clearly, this conclusion would apply to those things we would consider on naturalism to be our constructs, such as mental entities, morality, religion, and much more. But it also would hold for those aspects of the materialistic, real world Dennett takes to be objective. If everything that can be known (or even thought about, processed, etc.) by the brain is the result of a process with nothing but takings, since nothing is immediately given to us, then it seems there is no room for Dennett’s “brute facts” to be exempt from Derrida’s point: everything is a “text” which needs interpretation. The so-called “brute facts” also are conceptualizations, the result of the “raw stimulus” having been “cooked” by the brain’s distributed processes. Even the so-called “raw stimulus” is a taking (of something, but what we do not seem to know) as something else.
Now, it makes sense that there must be some raw stimulus; no one who takes the need for interpretation seriously, at least whom I know, denies that there is a real world. But, like all else, the raw stimulus, and even the so-called “objective” patterns, also must be takings of some things as such. They too are conceptualizations, every bit as much as anything else. Even the so-called “facts” of the objective, materialistic world of the natural sciences, would be just interpretations.
If so, then on what rational justification can Dennett privilege the third-person, objective, materialistic, Darwinian view of the real world? On his view, the language of materialism, cognitive science, etc., would be just as subject to Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation as the language of folk psychology. This is because the language of materialism is a brain-writing, which is a token, and therefore would be as much in need of interpretation as any other facet of existence.
Thus, when all the “facts” are in, there still will be alternative ways of stating them, in addition to the language of materialism and cognitive science. And, since there are no essences, there will be no deeper facts to settle any disputes that would arise. Therefore, applying Dennett’s own logic, in principle, it will always be possible for rival interpretations to tie for first place.
Now, this issue seems to arise not just for Dennett, but also for other naturalists as well, for the problem surfaces precisely because there are no essences to determine the facts of the matter. And it is not a problem just for in the areas of ethics or religion; it seems to be a problem in principle for naturalism. Without essences, it seems there would be an endless series of interpretations, without any way to get started, even with the so-called “brute facts.”
Now, this regress of interpretations may not seem problematic to some. After all, we do experience real trees, brains, moral situations, and the like. So, perhaps the ubiquity of interpretation may simply imply that while we do experience objects in reality, our access always is interpreted access.
At first glance, this reply may seem to alleviate the problem. For when we make observations of, say, a gas at a certain temperature and pressure, we still do need to interpret those observations. This is all well and fine; I have no desire to underestimate the importance of interpretation. However, that is not my point; rather, it is that without essences, there is no way to gain any “foothold” onto reality and begin to know it. An interpretation always is of something, but here, at every step, it seems that “something” ends up being another interpretation, without a way to access reality itself and even start.
III. Implications
Without essences, there are no intrinsic constraints on what is intentional or mental. Thus, we seem utterly unable to have any knowledge if the ontology of naturalism were true. The same implication applies to morality; at best we are left with a beginningless series of interpretations, such that there is no way to gain any foothold on reality, to even begin to conceive of something as moral. This means that there is no place for knowledge about morality, or of moral discourse, or even whether a particular action is moral or immoral. Also, on the fact-value split, we think we can know the facts of reality through naturalistic science, and that the deliverances of ethics and religion are just opinions. But these claims also become impossible to know on naturalism.
Indeed, every claim to knowledge becomes impossible to know, for there is no way to escape the relentless regress of interpretations. This condition simply is the natural result of rejecting the existence of essences, and it applies in morality because of the specific rejection of intrinsic moral properties, or facts. Without them, naturalism is unable to give us any moral knowledge, or knowledge about morality, despite the contentions of its expositors.
Yet, descriptively, the fact remains that many people who are naturalists do know several things, including in the field of ethics. For instance, Ruse contends vigorously that rape is wrong. Peter Singer knows it is wrong to treat animals cruelly. Those who appeal to the problem of moral evil as evidence against God’s existence know that injustice and genocide are wrong.
But these cases of moral knowledge should make us pause, for if naturalism were true, we could not them. So, it seems that a different ontology, which includes the reality of essences, must be true.
Notes
[1] Richard Joyce, “Moral Anti-Realism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism, accessed March 21, 2013.
[2] E.g., see his Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Spreading the Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
[3] Richard Joyce, “Projectivism and quasi-realism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism, accessed March 21, 2013 (emphasis in original).
[4] Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 49.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Michael Ruse, “Evolution and Ethics: The Sociobiological Approach,” in Ethical Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Louis Pojman, 4th ed. (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2002), 661.
[7] Ibid.
[8] J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 36.
[9] John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995).
[10] Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind (Cambridge, MA.: Bradford Books, 1995).
[11] For Papineau, see his Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), and Thinking about Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). See also Dretske’s Naturalizing the Mind: The 1994 Jean Nicod Lectures (Cambridge, MA.: Bradford Books, 1995). For Lycan, see Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA.: Bradford Books, 1996).
[12] These attributions “are interpretations of the phenomena,” and they serve as a “heuristic overlay.” See his Daniel C. Dennett, “Dennett, Daniel C.,” A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind: Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, ed. Samuel Guttenplan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 239.
[13] Star Trek and related marks are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc.
[14] See Dennett, “Dennett, Daniel C.,” 239.
[15] Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 3rd printing (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1990), 233-34. Even in a “golden age” of neuroscience, we still will need the language of folk psychology.
[16] Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 40 (emphasis in original).
[17] Quine explains: “To expect a distinctive physical mechanism behind every genuinely distinct mental state is one thing; to expect a distinctive mechanism for every purported distinction that can be phrased in traditional mentalistic language is another. The question whether … the foreigner really believes A or believes rather B, is a question whose very significance I would put in doubt. This is what I am getting at in arguing for the indeterminacy of translation.” See his “On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation,” Journal of Philosophy LXVII (1970), 180-81, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 40.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid. (emphasis in original).
[20] Donald Davidson, “Belief and the Basis of Meaning,” Synthese Vol. 27 (1974): 322, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 41(bracketed insert mine).
[21] Ibid., 319, note 8 (emphasis mine).
[22] The prime directive is Starfleet’s order to not interfere with the internal development of an alien planet’s culture. Often, it is treated as absolute, yet episodes explore if it could be overridden in certain cases.
[23] For example, see W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1960), 221, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 342.
[24] Samuel C. Wheeler III, “Indeterminacy of French Interpretation: Derrida and Davidson,” in E. Lepore, ed., Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 477, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 40, note 2.
[25] Wheeler, 492, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 40, note 2.
[26] Compare Dallas Willard, “Knowledge and naturalism,” in Naturalism: A Critical Analysis, ed. J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig (New York: Routledge, 1999), 40.
[27] Ibid., 41.
Photo: "Brown Skua flies over wary Gentoo Penguins" by L. Quinn. CC License.
Author’s note to readers: This paper was written for a panel presentation, “Finding the Theistic Foundations of Morality,” at the 2014 American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting. Because my presentation is the last of the panel—allowing me to elide a number technical issues and nuances already covered and, instead, to focus on ending the panel on a provocative note—I have opted to write in a manner more punchy and less technical than normal.
In this paper, I argue that naturalists cannot defensibly affirm as objectively good or superior any social or political desiderata. They also cannot defensibly condemn any social or political harms as objectively bad or inferior.[1] In addition, I contend that practically living out naturalism may be classicist and corrosive, especially with respect to the vulnerable members of society.
Before turning to the body of the paper, a few definitions are in order. While naturalism isn’t the easiest view to define,[2] I think it is safe to distinguish between ‘narrow naturalism’ and ‘broad naturalism.’[3] Narrow naturalism holds that (a) nature is all that exists and (b) nature itself is whatever will be disclosed by the ideal natural sciences, especially physics. Broad naturalism also holds that nature is all that exists but that nature itself is whatever will be disclosed by the natural and human sciences—not just physics but psychology, sociology, and the like as well. It thus affirms the emergent reality of consciousness, intentionality, valuing, and so on.
Ontological foundations
Having established some basic definitions, I now turn to the body of the paper. I’ll first focus on the ontological resources of naturalism. Since my colleagues have already done the heavy lifting, I’ll limit myself to a summary of some main ideas from my point of view. While there are a variety of ways to think about the matter, one way is to observe that, on narrow naturalism, nature itself is typically regarded as amoral because there are no ‘goodness’ or ‘rightness’ particles or forces (or groups of particles or forces). There are no ‘oughtness’ particles or forces (or groups) either. There are just brute particles and forces—fermions and bosons—describable by physics. As one narrow naturalist puts it, “In a world where physics fixes all the facts, it’s hard to see how there could be room for moral facts.”[4] As such, there are no objective moral facts (or ‘moral values,’ as I will call them). That is, there are no real, intrinsic, mind-independent moral values—about fairness, justice, equality, etc.—which are irreducible to, or not identical with, physical facts.
Broad naturalism, on the other hand, affirms the emergent reality of values, including moral values like fairness, justice, social stability, and the like. As such, humans’ subjective experience of good, moral, and right values are not reducible to, or identical with, say, the complex biochemical and structural features of the human brain. On typical formulations of this view, the human mind is something qualitatively different than the human brain. The human mind emerges from the complexity of the brain; one emergent complexity is the ability to form, maintain, communicate, and apply values. However, on this view such values are not ontologically independent of the human brain. In a real sense, their existence depends upon the existence of a physical brain. If human brains ceased to exist,[5] so would moral values. Thus, on this view moral values are not objective—that is, they do not exist independently of human brains and minds. While subjective experiences of valuing are real enough, objective moral values themselves are not. I might be passionate about a state that protects civil liberties, but the value of liberty is itself no more real than the tooth fairy.
Political Implications
In light of this result, it follows that naturalists cannot defensibly affirm any political state or political philosophy as objectively good (or superior), nor can they defensibly condemn any political state or political philosophy as objectively bad (or inferior). For example, naturalists cannot reject Hitler’s Third Reich as objectively wrong and affirm representative democracy as objectively superior. Recall that according to narrow naturalism, there are only physical particles and forces, all of which are amoral. So, one elaborate arrangement of fermions and bosons—say, a social and political system organized according to Nazi principles—is no more or less moral than another array of fermions and bosons, including one arranged according to the principles of democracy. These two (collective) states of affairs are distinguished exhaustively and exclusively by the spatio-temporal differences of their constituent particles and forces. Neither is ‘good’ and neither is ‘bad.’ Neither is ‘morally better’ nor ‘morally worse.’ Fermions and bosons just are.
In the case of broad naturalism, on the other hand, persons may value representative democracy more than Nazism. Nonetheless, democracy is no more objectively good than Nazism. On broad naturalism, it’s true that people’s experience of valuing democracy is qualitatively different than the corresponding subvenient physicality of their brains. But without any mind-independent status to morality, their experience of valuing democracy is no more objectively correct than someone else’s experience of valuing Nazism. Even if every person past, present, and future valued democracy over tyranny, this valuing would not count one iota toward the objective moral superiority of democracy over tyranny. Quite simply, there are no objective values. Accordingly, broad naturalists, like narrow naturalists, cannot affirm a ‘good’ political order as objectively superior to a brutal order.
The implications of this result are troubling. For example, naturalists who lean towards political conservatism, such as political scientist Larry Arnhart, have no real basis to affirm universal human desires—for things like friendship and justice—as the objectively correct basis for social and political order.[6] So, too, naturalists who favor a Rawlsian approach have no real basis to affirm the objectivity of the “principle of equal liberty” or “the principle of difference” nor the legitimacy of the veil of ignorance or the original position.[7] The same is true about negative judgments: Rawlsians have no grounds to attack conservatives, and vice versa. Something similar can be said for any naturalist who wishes to affirm the objective correctness (or objective wrongness) of the core normative principles of Locke’s Second Treatise or Hobbes’ Leviathan or Rousseau’s Social Contract or even James Carville’s It’s the Middle Class, Stupid! Thus, from the right to the left, naturalism decimates the objective moral status, positive or negative, of any political system or philosophy.
This result holds not just at a macro-level of political states or philosophies, but also at the micro-level of particular social and moral causes. Narrow and broad naturalists cannot affirm that women have reproductive rights, the rich ought to pay higher taxes, gays and lesbians have the right to marry, and that climate change ought to be countered. Likewise, naturalists cannot condemn rapacious capitalism, marriage inequality, pro-life legislative coercion, systemic racism, and so on. Naturalist Alex Rosenberg drives this point home: “We have to acknowledge…that many questions we want the ‘right’ answers to just don’t have any. These are questions about the morality of stem-cell research or abortion or affirmative action or gay marriage or our obligations to future generations.” We may want answers but, as Rosenberg concludes flatly, “There are none.”[8] In the end, none of a naturalist’s favored positions are objectively correct or superior to their opposites. And no views are objectively bad or inferior, either. All that’s left standing are either particles and forces or subjective experiences.
An Objection
Of course a critic might point out that broad naturalists, at least, can still affirm, say, democracy over fascism as a matter preference. As long as this is true, they can live out meaningful, good lives supportive of democratic principles even if they have no objective basis to regard democracy as (in fact) superior.
By way of reply, it is true that any naturalist can live a certain lifestyle that most of us would regard as good and virtuous, say, one supportive of democracy. But so can a person who thinks he’s an eggplant but that all eggplants have special abilities as well as moral obligations to support representative government. Nearly anyone can live a good life in the limited sense of consistently acting in ‘good’ ways. But that’s not the issue.
The issue is whether naturalists have—on their own grounds—any ability to hold that, say, one political system is objectively better (or worse) than another, and that people ought to support the superior system. They do not have such grounds. Indeed, even a broad naturalist (who has more resources than a narrow naturalist) is in a pickle when he says he can live a good life. He can’t coherently call his life “a good life” in any objective sense. All he can really say is that he lives a certain way that he prefers, and this way happens to be preferred by a number of others.[9] That’s it. Like turtles, it’s just preferences all the way down.
Before closing, I have two more brief notes about living out naturalism in a practical way. The first is an observation; the second, a criticism. First, it is arguable that living this worldview may be a classist luxury, by and large. That is, this lifestyle is viable only for those of privilege. Because naturalism does away with objective moral values, living this view means that one must not take traditional moral and social norms as given but rather substitute one’s own personal perspective (or the prospective of one’s self-identified group). Doing so generally includes complex assessments of social expectations (not obligatory norms), combined with personal introspection and discovery of “what I really want” (or what my group “really wants”), which are negotiated and re-negotiated with one’s friends, peers, colleagues, associates, sub-cultures, and culture. All of this requires leisure time, wealth, verbal ability, education, and the like. But those who lack wealth, education, leisure time, and so on often do not have the wherewithal to engage in such negotiations. A single mom working two jobs, taking care of two kids, slaving through housework, struggling to parent, and collapsing on the couch at night simply doesn’t have the bourgeois luxury to spend two hours over cocktails with a cadre of professional friends discussing just how to maintain her “independence” in the face of archaic social expectations. Practically living out naturalism is, by and large, a plaything of the wealthy and privileged. Again, this is not a criticism per se but an observation. It is noteworthy because some naturalists who see themselves as marginalized or as fighting established powers—“check your privilege,” they tell us—don’t seem to realize just how fortunate they are.
Second, by way of a criticism: practically living a naturalistic view may be corrosive, primarily to the vulnerable. (By ‘the vulnerable,’ I mean those in the bottom tier educationally, economically, politically, socially, professionally, and/or psychologically—individuals, say, who never finished high school, are poor, come from deeply dysfunctional families, have drug addictions, ongoing depression, or the like.) Naturalists who constantly chip away at traditional social and moral norms end up helping to erode the very moral and social capital that traditionally help the disadvantaged. For example, in part under a ‘progressive’ assault, the sacred bond of marriage has become weaker (or less valued) over time. But marriage not only helps single, poor women, it also helps children.[10] Kids who are born out of wedlock, victims of divorce, or raised in single-parent homes are more likely to suffer from a range of difficulties than kids raised in two parent homes.[11] In trying to fight ‘those on top,’ naturalists inadvertently harm ‘those on bottom.’
In conclusion, then, narrow and broad naturalists cannot defensibly affirm or deny the objective goodness or superiority (or the objective badness or inferiority) of any political state, political philosophy, or position on any social or moral topic. And, as I have just noted, living out this view seems to be a classicist privilege and a corrosive stance against the vulnerable. None of this is to say naturalism is false, of course, but only that it comes at a very high cost indeed. Thank you.
Endnotes
[1] I assume throughout the paper that, for a person (or persons) to defensibly affirm social or political desiderata as ‘objectively good or superior’ or to defensibly condemn social or political harms as ‘objectively bad or inferior,’ there must be actual (or real) objectively good or superior (or objectively bad or inferior) social and political desiderata (or harms). (See below for my informal definition of ‘objective.’) But for those who disagree with this assumption, I can make a similar argument easily enough—namely, that, on naturalism, there simply are no objectively good or superior social or political desiderata nor are there any objectively bad or inferior social or political harms. The end result is much the same. My fundamental claim is metaphysical (there are no objective moral values given naturalism) although for stylistic reasons, I highlight epistemological elements (naturalists cannot defensibly affirm social or political desiderata as ‘objectively good or superior,’ etc.). I trust the reader will understand my (metaphysical) meaning throughout the paper.
[2] In fact, Michael Rea claims that “there is no clear answer to the question of what it means to be a naturalist.” Michael Rea, “Naturalism and Material Objects,” in Naturalism: A Critical Analysis, ed. William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland (New York: Routledge, 2000), 110.
[3] Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, Naturalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 2008). Cf. David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
[4] Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (New York: Norton, 2011), 94-95.
[5] Or, the brains of some other physical creature of sufficient cognitive complexity.
[6] Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1998). Larry Arnhart & Ken Blanchard (ed.), Darwinian Conservatism, second edition (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2009).
[7] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Belknap Press, 2005). “The principle of equality” holds that each person is to be granted the greatest degree of liberty harmonious with a similar level of liberty for everyone. “The principle of difference” holds that practices producing inequality among individuals are acceptable only if they work to the advantage of disadvantaged people, and that positions of privilege must be open to everyone.
[8] Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide, 96, emphasis added.
[9] Undoubtedly, a number of others disagree with his preferences. All that’s left to settle the matter is force, fraud, or moving away.
[10] For example, Emma Green, “Wealthy Women can Afford to Reject Marriage, but Poor Women Can’t,” The Atlantic, January 15, 2014. As for children: Hyun Sik Kim, “Consequences of Parental Divorce for Child Development,” American Sociological Review, vol. 76, no. 3 (June 2011): 487-511. Toby L. Parcel, Lori Ann Campbell, and Wenxuan Zhong, “Children’s Behavior Problems in the United States and Great Britain,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, vol. 53 no. 2 (June 2012): 165-182. Toby L. Parcel, Lori Ann Campbell, and Wenxuan Zhong, “Children’s Behavior Problems in the United States and Great Britain,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, vol. 53 no. 2 (June 2012): 165-182. N. Glenn, S. Nock, and L. J. Waite, “Why marriage matters: Twenty-one conclusions from the social sciences,” American Experiment Quarterly 5 (2002): 34–44. G. E. Weisfeld, D. M. Muczenski, C. C. Weisfeld, and D. R. Omark, “Stability of Boys’ Social Success among Peers over an Eleven-year Period,” In Interpersonal Relations: Family, Peers, Friends, edited by J. A. Meacham (New York, NY: Karger, 1987). B. Defoe, Why There Are No Good Men Left (New York: Broadway Books, 2003). G. R. Weitoft, A. Hjern, B. Haglund, and M. Rosen, “Mortality, severe mortality, and injury in children living with single parents in Sweden: A population based study,” Lancet 361 (2003): 289–95. S. Rhoads, Taking sex differences seriously (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004). W. B. Wilcox, Why Marriage Matters: Thirty Conclusions from the Social Sciences. A Study from a Team of Family Scholars Chaired by W. Bradford Wilcox (New York: Institute for American Values, 2011). P. Wilcox Rountree and B. D. Warner, The State of Our Unions 2011: Marriage in America (Charlottesville, VA: The National Marriage Project, 2011). M. Parke, Are Married Parents Really Better for Children? (Washington, DC: Center for Law and Social Policy, 2003). S. R. Aronson and A. C. Huston, “The mother-infant relationship in single, cohabiting, and married families: A case for marriage?” Journal of Family Psychology 18 (2004): 5–18. P. Fomby and A. J. Cherlin, “Family instability and child well-being,” American Sociological Review 72 (2007): 181–204. M. Gallagher and L. Waite, The Case for Marriage (New York: Random House, 2000). J. T. Cookston, “Parental supervision and family structure,” Journal of Divorce and Remarriage 31 (1999): 107–27. Some of the data: “Children from divorced homes suffer academically. They experience high levels of behavioral problems. Their grades suffer, and they are less likely to graduate from high school. Kids whose parent’s divorce are substantially more likely to be incarcerated for committing a crime as a juvenile. Because the custodial parent's income drops substantially after a divorce, children in divorced homes are almost five times more likely to live in poverty than are children with married parents. Teens from divorced homes are much more likely to engage in drug and alcohol use, as well as sexual intercourse than are those from intact families…. They are also more likely to suffer child abuse. Children of divorced parents suffer more frequently from symptoms of psychological distress. And the emotional scars of divorce last into adulthood.” See Amy Desai, “How Could Divorce Affect My Kids?” available at http://www.focusonthefamily.com. See also Jann Gumbiner, “Divorce Hurts Children, Even Grown Ones,” Psychology Today, October 31, 2011. For an opposite view, see Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld, “Is Divorce Bad for Children?” Scientific American, vol. 24, no. 1. Yet even Arkowitz and Lilienfeld conceded that kids of divorce are more likely to suffer a range of difficulties than kids raised in two-parent homes. LaVar Young reports on children born out of wedlock: “Fragile families [in which parents are not marriage at the time of the child’s birth] are shown to have harsher parenting practices and fewer literacy activities, and children of such families produce lower cognitive test scores and a have a higher incidence of aggressive behavior. Furthermore, previous research demonstrates that children who live apart from one of their parents at some point in their childhood are twice as likely to drop out of high school, twice as likely to have a child before age 20, and one and a half times as likely to be out of school or work by their late teens or early 20s.” LaVar Young, “Fragile Families: Most Children Born Out of Wedlock Aren't OK,” Huffington Post, June 6, 2011.
[11] Ibid.
Photo: "Dachau Nazi concentration camp's main gates reading "arbeit Macht Frei" meaning "through work one will be free". Dachau, Germany" by Zoriah. CC License.
Chapter 2 dealt with one sort of moral faith—that virtue is possible—and Chapter 3 now deals with another: that virtue and happiness are deeply consistent. This is another moral gap that needs to be closed. This faith makes it possible for a person to combine her built-in desire for her own happiness with a commitment to morality. It requires that we postulate the existence of a being “who assigns not only the proper outcome to our good conduct, but also to our good dispositions whatever reward seems adequate to His good pleasure.” Hare notes there are two parts to this idea.
First, we believe that this being orders the world in such a way that we are often enough successful in our attempts to do good to make it worthwhile persevering in the attempt. Second, we believe that this being rewards our fundamental orientation to the good with happiness, so that we do not have to do evil in order to be happy.
This introduces the antinomy of practical reason—the apparent contradiction that the highest good is possible and that it isn’t. But what is the highest good? Happiness proportional to virtue; the more virtue, the more happiness, and the less virtue, the less happiness. What is virtue? For Kant, it is “the firmly grounded disposition strictly to fulfill our duty.” What is happiness? For Kant it’s lives as wholes that are happy or unhappy. Happiness for Kant is the maximum satisfaction as a whole of our needs and desires as rational but finite beings, creatures of need and not merely rational or moral agents.
Hare notes two interpretations of the highest good. The first, the less ambitious sense, is a world with a system in place in which virtue results in happiness. The second, the more ambitious sense, is a world in which everyone is virtuous and everyone is happy. Hare will try to argue that living morally requires believing in the possibility of the highest good in the more ambitious sense, and the actuality of the highest good in the less ambitious sense.
Is the highest good even coherent? If the good is to be motivated solely by respect for the moral law, why should happiness come in at all? If our end is not just virtue, but virtue conjoined with happiness, is not the purity of our respect for the moral law corrupted? Here Hare suggests a parallel in the Christian life, where following Christ should be done for its own sake, even though doing so is also recognized as conducing to our deepest joy.
Hare’s supposition is that it’s possible that some things can be pursued both for their own sakes and for their beneficial consequences. Perhaps I need to be able to foresee my own happiness as consistent with everything I desire, but not that I have to desire everything else at least partly as a means to my own happiness.
What is all-important to Kantian morality is whether the incentive provided by the agent’s happiness is subordinate to the incentive provided by the moral law, or vice versa. It’s okay for an incentive for happiness to be there, but it must take a back seat to the primary call of duty. (It may well be unavoidable that an incentive for happiness is there, emotional and finite creatures that we are.)
Hare thinks that the moral life requires believing in the possibility of the highest good. Hare think this follows from a number of assumptions necessary for a fully reflective living of the moral life.
Assumption #1: The moral good aimed at by action is possible.
Assumption #2: The moral good I am aiming at is a possible result of my attempt to produce it.
Assumption #3: It is possible for me know that the moral good I am aiming at is produced, when it is produced, by the means I have planned.
Assumption #4: I myself can will what is morally good.
Assumption #5: (Concerning everyone else) The moral good they aim at is possible. (social analogue of #1)
Assumption #6: The moral good they are aiming at is a possible result of their efforts to produce it. (social analogue of #2)
#7: It is possible for them to know that the moral good they are aiming at has been produced by the means they have planned. (social analogue of #3)
#8: It is possible for them to will what is morally good. (social analogue of #4)
Hare notes three ways to derive the social analogues:
Assume that what makes things reasonable for me makes them reasonable for everyone.
Morality requires equal respect, and equal respect requires the assumption that all other human beings are capable of willing the good.
Because of the social obstacles to virtue, there are social conditions for the attainment and maintenance of virtue. Possibility of individual virtue requires the possibility of virtue-building and virtue-sustaining congregation.
From 1-8 Hare infers Assumption #9: Possibility of what Kant calls “the Idea of self-rewarding morality,” which says morality does its own rewarding. A world filled with people pursuing virtue and concerned with the welfare of others would be a world filled with happiness.
The highest good in the ambitious sense is a possibility, Hare argues: A world in which righteousness and peace kiss and people are not merely happy, but desirous of things consistent with the moral law.
What about the highest good in the less ambitious sense? Here the new assumption is simply that the virtue of a person results in that person’s happiness. Believing in the actuality of the highest good in the less ambitious sense requires me to believe that my virtue will be rewarded whether (roughly) everyone else is virtuous or not.
Hare wants to argue that we do ordinarily think that we will be happiest if we try to be moral; or that we at least think that being moral has a higher chance than any other strategy. Does this require others to be moral? No, Hare says. For the belief that being morally good is consistent with long-term happiness has been held by people who lived in societies in which they were persecuted and exploited.
Whatever else I desire, as a human being I am bound to desire my own happiness, and I will need to be able to foresee this happiness as consistent with my basic choices. As a human moral agent I have to believe that my continued well-being is consistent with my living a moral life as best I can.
If we are to endorse wholeheartedly the long-term shape of our lives, we have to see this shape as consistent with our own happiness. In a world in which there are many rational agents who have willed not to live by the moral law, I can’t rely on the virtue of others to get me from my virtue to my happiness. So I have to believe that there is in operation a system in which my virtue is rewarded without it.
The antithesis says the highest good in both senses is inachievable. Why might we think the highest good in the less ambitious sense is not rationally thought to be true? One reason: consider that experience suggests that the world seems not to reflect in any way the good man’s striving to bring about goodness in it. Another reason: lack of fit between virtue and happiness is not something we could confirm or disconfirm by experience. (So not knowable a priori.)
Because of so many people trying to be virtuous and yet overwhelmed by evil, a case can be made that life is tragic and human life just is vulnerable to evil. What’s Kant’s solution? He brings in the possibility that the relation between virtue and happiness is mediated by an intelligible Author of nature. Our failures to understand what is happening to us do not license the conclusion that the impact of chance is uncontrollable. Kant rejects the inference from our limitations to the denial of a moral order. He’s “limiting knowledge to make room for faith.”
Hare suggests that belief in moral order is needed; whether this requires moral orderer is another question. A moral argument for the existence of God needs to examine whether there are other ways to back up a moral order.
Those who think the problem of evil is intractable often lose moral faith. But Hare notes that many go through painful ordeals without losing faith in either morality or God. Hare: “The structure of the moral argument is that as long as reason in its theoretical employment cannot rule out the legitimacy of moral faith, reason in its practical employment requires it. If moral faith is possible, then it is necessary.”
Hare wraps the chapter up with these two points: (1) Moral faith is consistent with some doubt about whether your continued well-being is consistent with your trying to live a morally good life; and (2) Moral faith does not require believing that all your present preferences for the future will be secured if you try to live a good life.
Angus Ritchie versus Angus Menuge. They both have awesome accents, and they’re both brilliant Christian philosophers. But they take interestingly different positions on the question of moral knowledge for naturalists. Let me briefly explain why, then lay out a third possibility that relies a little on both. Any way you slice it, naturalism loses.
Angus Ritchie is the author of From Morality to Metaphysics. In that book, he affirms that moral knowledge is possible, even for naturalists. Knowledge, he assumes, requires justification, good reasons to consider the propositions in question to be true. Justification for moral claims comes, he thinks (roughly following David Enoch), from their “deliberative indispensability.” We can’t help but assume certain moral assumptions as reliable in the inevitable process of our moral deliberations. Ritchie resonates with the approach of those employing a method of reflective equilibrium by which we take our moral starting points not as infallible, but as innocent until proven guilty. So Ritchie doesn’t infer that on naturalism there is a lack of justification for moral convictions; to the contrary, he affirms that moral beliefs, on naturalism, at least on occasion, are adequately justified. Perhaps he would even think, then, that on naturalism there is moral knowledge. If we construe of knowledge claims as justified true beliefs, it would seem likely that Ritchie would affirm moral knowledge on naturalism.
The problem for naturalistic moral ethics, as Ritchie sees it, is not a lack of moral knowledge, but lack of an explanation for how we can have knowledge. In light of the limited resources at their disposal as naturalists, what they can’t provide is an explanation for how moral knowledge is possible. On the assumption that the naturalists in question embrace a sufficiently robust moral ontology, their doing so introduces an explanatory gap between those truths and what they can explain about our ability as human beings to grasp those truths. Their naturalism is epistemically deficient when it comes to morality—not in virtue of naturalism entailing a lack of moral knowledge, but rather in terms of a naturalistic explanation of such knowledge. He writes, “We must not confuse an anti-sceptical [sic] argument which justifies the trust we place in our faculties with one which explains their accuracy.”
Angus Menuge, in contrast, after identifying prima facie reasons to be skeptical of naturalism explaining objective moral truth, distinguishes between two sorts of evolutionary ethics (EE). Strong EE dictates that moral ontology itself would be different had evolution played out differently. If, for example, we had been raised to kill our brothers and sisters or children, then such behaviors would have been morally right. Weak EE, in contrast, says it’s only moral psychology (our moral beliefs) that would be different if we had been raised like hive bees. Let’s set aside Strong EE as it holds no realistic hope of sustaining objective moral facts. Let’s direct our attention to Weak EE instead.
Menuge suggests that Weak EE faces an intractable epistemic challenge. It gives us no grounds to think our moral beliefs are true. For they would be formed for reasons potentially quite unrelated to their truth. To make his point, he uses an example of looking at what turns out to be a broken clock, unknown to you. It reads 7 p.m., and suppose that it’s indeed, by sheer coincidence, 7 p.m. No knowledge results, though, since your reason for thinking it’s 7 o’clock has nothing to do with its actually being 7 o’clock.
Menuge writes, “Unfortunately for Weak EE, if it is true, then we are in a precisely similar situation regarding our moral beliefs. For on that view, natural history is causally relevant to our moral beliefs, but does not account for moral reality. So if we had been raised like hive bees we would think fratricide and infanticide were right even if they were not. And, it could be that we think fratricide and infanticide are wrong (because we were not raised like hive bees) even though they are right. But now suppose that our belief that fratricide and infanticide are wrong happens to be true. Still, it is not knowledge, because what made us believe this has nothing to do with why our belief is true.”
Whereas Ritchie seems to affirm the consistency of naturalism and moral knowledge, Menuge denies it. Both think that naturalism faces intractable challenges to account for moral knowledge. Whereas Menuge thinks naturalism is simply inconsistent with moral knowledge (at least in the case cited), Ritchie thinks naturalism is consistent with it, but deficient in explaining how such knowledge is possible.
On the assumption that Menuge, like J. P. Moreland and Scott Smith, is denying that naturalism is consistent with objective moral knowledge claims by taking naturalism to be a rebutting defeater of moral knowledge, perhaps the reason for his doing so is that he is skeptical that naturalism is consistent with moral justification. When he writes that “Weak EE gives us no grounds to think our moral beliefs are true,” it sounds as if he’s denying that moral justification is consistent with Weak EE. He acknowledges the possibility of moral truth claims, but thinks that on naturalism we would believe in them only accidentally—like the person who forms a true belief on the basis of seeing a faulty clock. If Menuge’s suggestion is that, in either case, it’s the requirement of justification that goes unsatisfied, then Menuge and Ritchie part company. Ritchie would be affirming the possibility of moral justification and knowledge on naturalism, whereas Menuge would be denying both, despite that they agree that naturalism is in trouble here.
And there is yet a third way naturalism makes mischief, which we can see by splitting the difference. Suppose that Ritchie is right that naturalism is consistent with moral justification, but that Menuge is right that moral knowledge is precluded by naturalism. This confluence of conditions would yield yet another possibility: something like a Gettier Moral Counterexample. For on naturalism we could have a justified true moral belief, but not moral knowledge. Think again of the clock case, which, incidentally, is much like Bertrand Russell’s prescient Gettier-like counterexample predating Gettier. Suppose the clock in question is a clock that, in your experience, has always been reliable in the past. You look up and see the time, form the belief that’s the right time, and suppose indeed it is. But unknown to you, the clock is broken. So you arguably have a justified true belief, but presumably not knowledge. Might there be something analogous for naturalism and moral knowledge? Justified true moral belief without knowledge? Perhaps.
Why think moral knowledge would be precluded, despite the justified true belief? For this reason: just as in the clock case, the reasons for the beliefs being true would be a coincidence. Even if this isn’t enough to preclude at least some form or measure of justification—a matter on which perhaps there’s legitimate room for rational disagreement—it is clearly enough to preclude knowledge. So even if we assume this is a naturalistic world in which objective moral truths obtain (a big assumption, but not my current target), and even if justified true moral beliefs obtain on naturalism, moral knowledge could well still be beyond our reach.
What we have seen here, then, are three different ways naturalism seems to face a challenge from the direction of moral knowledge. Naturalism (a) is consistent with moral knowledge but can’t explain it with its resources (if Ritchie is right); or (b) is inconsistent with moral justification and thus moral knowledge (if Menuge is right); or, even if it’s consistent with both moral realism and justified true belief, is nonetheless (c) inconsistent with moral knowledge because of a Gettier-like moral counterexample. What naturalism seems confronted with is the charge of either failing to be consistent with moral knowledge or, even if it’s consistent with moral knowledge, explaining moral knowledge with the resources at its disposal.
The Battle of the Angi over moral knowledge inevitably results in another loss for naturalism.
Photo: "chess game" by L. West. CC License.
Over at Matthew Flannagan's website, Flannagan provides some great interaction with a writer from The Secular Outpost, Jason Thibodeau. Thibodeau raises a classic objection to Divine Command Theory, the "arbitrariness objection." Put simply, the objection is that if what is right is determined by God's commands, then God could command morally repulsive acts and we would be obligated to do what seems morally repulsive. Flanagan does an excellent job responding to Thibodeau's formulation of the objection. Also, there are a number of helpful links to some of Flannagan's other works if you're interested in digging a little deeper.
In this week's episode, we sit down with Dr. David Baggett to discuss the nature of moral facts. Moral facts play an important role in all moral arguments, but they are especially important in Baggett's abductive approach since he suggests that these facts are best explained by the existence of God.
By Paul Rezkalla The Moral Argument for the existence of God has enjoyed a long tradition of defense from theistic philosophers and thinkers throughout the history of Western thought…and a long tradition of misunderstandings and objections from even some of the most brilliant minds. In its abductive form, the moral argument seeks to infer God as the best explanation for the moral facts about the universe. One popular formulation is as follows:
Moral facts are best explained by God’s existence.
Moral facts exist.
Therefore, God exists.
Here are five of the most common objections to the argument and why, in my view, they are not insuperable.
1. “But I’m a moral person and I don’t believe in God. Are you saying that atheists can’t be moral?”
The moral argument is not about belief in God. Rather, the argument usually deals with grounding and substantiating objective morality. If God does not exist, then objective morality becomes much more difficult to explain. Sure, atheists can be moral. In fact, I know several atheists who are more moral than some theists! Religious leaders in the New Testament were among the biggest detractors and critics of Jesus. The issue of belief is not pertinent. The argument instead highlights the fact that there must be a sufficient basis for there to be objective morality. God, in light of the distinctive features of morality, can be argued to be their best explanation.
2. “But what if you needed to lie in order to save someone’s life? It seems that morality is not absolute as you say it is.”
We need not talk about absolute morality here. There is an important difference between absolute and objective. Absolutism requires that something will or must always be the case. For the record, such moral facts exist—like the inherent badness of torturing children for fun. But nothing so strong is called for here. Objectivity simply means (human) ‘mind-independent’ or ‘judgment-independent’. When I argue for objective morality, I need not argue that it is always the case that lying and killing are wrong; the moral argument I’m sketching does not defend absolute morality. Rather, it contends that there is a standard of morality that transcends human opinions, judgments, biases, and proclivities.
Suppose that some nation today decreed that every one of its brunette citizens would be tortured to death simply for being brunette; it would still be the case that it is wrong to torture brunettes to death simply for being brunette.
The statement, “It is wrong to torture brunettes to death simply for being brunette” is true, regardless of whether or not anyone believes it to be true. This is what is meant by objective.
3. "Where’s your evidence for objective morality? I won’t believe in anything unless I have evidence for it." Well, many would suggest that the evidence for objective morality is ubiquitous. If by ‘evidence’ you mean incontrovertible proof beyond any shadow of doubt, such an evidential standard is simply unrealistic and beyond our ken for nearly everything except a few beliefs internal to our own heads. After all, how do you know with absolute certainty that you are not a brain in a vat being electrically stimulated by a crazy scientist who wants you to think that all of this is real? You could be in the matrix, for all you know (take the blue pill)! How do you know with complete assurance that you weren’t created a couple minutes ago and implanted with memories of your entire past life? How could you possibly prove otherwise?
See where this is going? Denying the existence of something on the basis of, “I will not believe unless I have completely sure evidence for it” leaves you with solipsism, at best. We believe in the reality of the external world on the basis of our sense experience of the external world. And we are justified in believing that the external world is real unless we have good evidence to think otherwise. There is no way to prove with utter certainty that the external world is real, or that the past wasn’t created 2 minutes ago and given the appearance of age. Similarly we have no good noncircular evidence for the reliability of testimony or the reliability of induction, and these are just a few examples we could adduce. And yet we all believe that the external world and the past are real. In the absence of defeating evidence, we are justified in trusting our experience of the external world. In the same way, I think it’s plausible to suggest by parity in reasoning that we can know that objective morality exists on the basis of our moral experience. We have access to moral facts about the universe through our moral experience. Unless we have good reason to distrust such experience, we are justified in accepting the reality of the objective moral framework that it presents us with.
Despite how resistant we might be to accepting the truth of moral objectivity, no one really denies that there are some moral facts (except psychopaths and some sociopaths). Take the following scenario: In 1978 a fifteen year old girl was walking to her grandfather’s house when a man offered to give her a ride. She got in the car with him. He then kidnapped her, raped her repeatedly, hacked off her arms at the elbows with an axe, and left her to die. Although she survived, she was terrorized by this traumatic event. Her attacker served only eight years in prison and told her during the trial that one day he would be back to finish the job.
Now answer the following question: Was this act wrong?
If yes, you believe that there is at least one moral fact in the world.
If no, you face a fairly formidable burden of proof. There’s theoretical space for skepticism, but it’s hardly the obvious position to take.
4. "If morality is objective, then why do some cultures practice female genital mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and other atrocities which we deem unacceptable?’
There can be two responses given here:
The first response is that even though not all cultures share the exact same moral facts, most embrace the same, underlying moral values. For example, there are certain tribes that practice senicide (authorized killing of the elderly) due to their belief that everyone in the afterlife will continue living on in the same body that they died with. Thus, in order to ensure that those in the afterlife are capable of hunting, swimming, building houses, etc., the elderly are killed before they become too old to take care of themselves. This act is done with the well-being of the elderly in mind. The moral value that most of us hold would suggest that “the elderly are valuable and must be taken care of,” is also accepted by these tribes, even though their construal of the nonmoral facts diverges from our own.
The second response is that some cultures do, in fact, practice certain things that are straight up morally abominable. Cultures that practice infanticide, female circumcision, widow burning, child prostitution, and the like are practicing acts that are repulsive and morally abhorrent. The fact that we realize the difference in how certain cultures treat their women, children, and elderly and are outraged at immoral practices is evidence that we believe in objective morality. A man’s decision to have his 6-year old daughter circumcised or sold into prostitution is no mere cultural or traditional difference that we should respect, uphold, or praise, or even cultivate an attitude of impartiality toward; rather these are atrocities that need to be advocated against and ended. The existence of multiple moral codes does not negate the existence of objective morality. Are we to condone slavery and segregation simply because they were once allowed under our country’s moral code? Of course not. We condemn those actions, and rightly so.
Take the example of Nazi Germany: the Nazi ideology consented to the slaughter of millions, but their actions were wrong despite their convictions to the contrary. Tim Keller summarizes this point succinctly:
The Nazis who exterminated Jews may have claimed that they didn’t feel it was immoral at all. We don’t care. We don’t care if they sincerely felt they were doing a service to humanity. They ought not to have done it. We do not only have moral feelings, but we also have an ineradicable belief that moral standards exist, outside of us, by which our internal moral feelings are evaluated.
Simply because a society practices acts that are contrary to what is moral does not mean that all moral codes are equal. Moral disagreements do not nullify moral truths, any more than people disagreeing on a mathematical calculation negates an objectively right answer.
5. "But God carried out many atrocities in the Old Testament. He ordered the genocide of the Canaanites." For starters, this isn’t really an objection to the moral argument since it does not attack either premise of the argument. It’s of course an interesting issue regarding the moral character of the God of the Bible, and for those interested, this site recently posted a new book by Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan; we encourage you to take a look. Beyond that, we can say this: by making a judgment on God’s actions and deeming them immoral, the objector is appealing to a standard of morality that holds true outside of herself and transcends barriers of culture, context, time period, and social norms. By doing this, she affirms the existence of objective morality! But if the skeptic wants to affirm objective morality after throwing God out the window, then there needs to be an alternate explanation for its basis. If not God, then what is it? The burden is now on the skeptic to provide a naturalistic explanation for the objective moral framework—an explanation that explains all that needs to be explained without changing the topic, watering down the categories, or reducing the significance of morality.
This chapter is entitled “God’s Supplement,” and Kant will appeal to God’s assistance to close the gap between the high moral demand and our limited natural capacities. As a pure rationalist, Kant uses Christian doctrines, but tries to translate them within the “pure religion of reason.” Hare will eventually argue that this translation project fails.
Kant thought revelation can be held to include the pure religion of reason, but at least the historical part of revelation can’t be included in the pure religion of reason. Hare sees a parallel with Kant’s treatment of ethics here: the pure religion of reason, because it is universal like the pure principles of morality, has to be shorn of all reference to individuals and particular times and places.
Kant himself was not closed to special revelation; the pure rationalist can accept special revelation; nevertheless Kant did not think its acceptance is without qualification necessary to religion. We can and should believe various religious propositions, Kant thought; we just can’t claim to know these things. It wasn’t that Kant was, in the ordinary sense, an agnostic about God. He thought there are good moral grounds for theistic belief—Kant had a narrow sense of knowledge as “grasping the infinite through the senses.”
Kant thought a person who already understands the claims of duty will find the teachings of Christianity worthy of love, even though they are not objectively necessary. “[Christianity] is able to win itself the hearts of men whose understanding is already illuminated by the conception of the law of their duty.”
Perhaps owing to his Pietistic background, Kant shows in his work a primacy on practice over theory in the life of faith, a distrust in natural inclinations, and a vision of a world-wide moral and spiritual renewal. In this light, perhaps his polemic was against what he saw as a corruption of Christianity rather than against Christianity itself. Hare counsels to avoid hearing Nietzsche in Kant’s work louder than Luther.
For Kant a “mystery” was an object of reason that can be known from within adequately for practical use, and yet not for theoretical use. Theoretical reason can’t give him what he needs in order to make sense of the moral life, and the central Christian doctrines in their traditional forms are beyond his reach as a philosopher, in his estimation. Among things inscrutable are the original predisposition to do good, the subsequent cause of the propensity to evil, our re-ascent from evil to good, the divine assistance which makes this possible, and how the ethical commonwealth is translated into actuality. There’s thus inscrutability in creation, fall, redemption, and the second coming.
Kant tried an experiment of seeing whether he could use the doctrines about these focal points as mysteries, that is, as capable of being known from within adequately for practical use. It’s an experiment of translating items in the outer circle of revelation into the language of the moral concepts. The overall aim is to make ‘scrutable’ as much as he can the core of the traditional faith. We may have to believe that supernatural assistance is available, even though we can’t use this belief in theoretical or practical maxims.
Why is belief in divine assistance necessary? The problem is this that we encounter: how can be become other men and not merely better men—as if we were already good but only negligent about the degree of our goodness? Kant was profoundly skeptical we can do away with out sinful inclinations on our own. The problem is too deep.
A revelation of the will is called for. All of us, on Kant’s view, start off with our wills subordinate to the evil maxim which tells us to put our happiness first and our duty second. We are thus corrupt in the very ground of our more specific maxims, all of which take their fundamental moral character from this one. Our happiness comes first, duty second; this needs reversal, which we can’t effect on our own.
If such a revolution is our duty, it must be possible, since ‘ought implies can’. But it’s not possible on our own, since a propensity to evil is radical and inextirpable by human powers, “since extirpation could occur only through good maxims, and cannot take place when the ultimate subjective ground of all maxims is postulated as corrupt.” The result is an antinomy, an apparent contradiction, which is solved by appeal to a “higher, and for us inscrutable, assistance.”
Kant divides divine assistance into work of the Father, Spirit, and Son. Each person of the Trinity answers to a different difficulty arising within practical philosophy. Singular reference is removed by thinking of God the Son as humanity in its moral perfection, the Holy Spirit as the good disposition which is our comforter, and God the Father as the Idea of Holiness within us.
Regarding God the Father, three things must be held together: first, God is just and not indulgent; second, rational but finite beings never reach, at any point in their infinite progress, to holiness of the will; and third, God gives us (rational finite beings) a share in the highest good which is only justly given as a reward for holiness. How can they hold together?
Kant appeals to the world of experiences versus the world of things in themselves. After the birth of the new man, the heart, as seen by God, is “essentially well-pleasing to him”—even though all we can ever experience is gradual improvement, infinitely extended. God judges us as a completed whole “through a purely intellectual intuition.” Intellectual intuition in Kant’s doctrine is productive—God isn’t passive, he makes it so. When God looks at us, he sees his Son, because he is imputing to us his Son’s righteousness. Luther’s influence on Kant on such scores is obvious.
God the Son is translated as humanity in its moral perfection and God the Father as the Idea of holiness (the idea of a morally perfect life). The work of God the Spirit concerns primarily our present experience, while the work of God the Father concerns our fitness for future reward. Hare thinks Kant was attempting to provide a doctrine of the assurance of salvation. As we can’t see our disposition directly, we can see it only indirectly via actions. If there’s an improvement in those, we can hope there has been a revolution in our inner disposition.
Another troublesome triad arises; consider the tension between these three propositions: (1) God is just, not indulgent; (2) We humans have all lived under the evil maxim; and (3) God gives us a share in the highest good which is justly given only as a reward for holiness in an entire life.
Kant’s solution maintains all three, once more, by means of the distinction between the world of experience and the world of things in themselves. Vicarious atonement plays an important role in the Christian account, but two problems attend it before it can enter the domain of reason. The first is the objection to historical reference, and the second is that there is no transmissible liability for evil, which could be handed over to another person like a financial indebtedness. Hare will take up the second point in a later chapter.
What Kant does is translate God the Son as the new man, humanity in its complete moral perfection. The new man suffers sacrifices (remorse, self-discipline, reparation) vicariously, on behalf of the old man, who properly deserves them. It is thus, as in the traditional doctrine, the innocent who suffers. What God sees (by intellectual intuition) is revolution; what we experience is reform. We can’t see by introspection into our own hearts. We experience merely the outworking of the revolution in a gradual process of reformation which, Kant thought, we will not at any time experience as complete. We are still sinners so we’re still capable of subordinating duty to the inclinations, even though we’re moving in the direction of not being able to do so (which is holiness).
Hare considers Kant’s translation project a failure overall. Hare thinks it doesn’t give Kant “mysteries” which allow him to solve the antinomy within practical reason produced by the moral gap. In large part Kant’s failure pertains to his affirmation of the Stoic Maxim, which says a person must make or have made herself into whatever, in a moral sense, whether good or evil, she is to become. But this stands in rather obvious tension if not patent contradiction with the other part of Kant’s moral system that said supernatural assistance is needed. His failure was to show how we can appeal to such assistance given the rest of his theory, and in particular given the Stoic maxim. He had to show that he can appeal to such assistance given the rest of his theory. This is what he failed to do.
One illustration of the failure can be seen considering the work of God the Father. If the notion of extra-human assistance is retained, now Kant has additional resources to show the possibility of a revolution of the will, but can’t continue to insist on the Stoic maxim. If divine assistance is rejected, how can our fundamental disposition come to be characterized by the Idea of holiness as instantiating humanity in its moral perfection? How is this possible given the radical evil of our nature?
The reason for Kant’s failure? When he came to the project of seeing whether the doctrines of Christianity lead back within pure rational religion he carried this out in a way that does not make reference to extra-human assistance. This was true of all of these things: election, call, atonement, justification, assurance, and sanctification.
The incoherent result? Kant’s own account within the pure religion of reason assumed that we can by our own devices reach an upright disposition; but Kant was not justified, in his own terms, in supposing that we can do so. What produces this result is that Kant has subtracted from the traditional understanding of God’s work in salvation any mediating role for anything that is not already human.
In a famous essay by Alvin Plantinga, he argues that Christian philosophers should do philosophy as Christians. Christian philosophers have their own concerns, problems, and methods, and they need not run on the tracks the rest of the philosophical community has laid. This is not to say, of course, that Christian philosophy happens in a vacuum. Plantinga suggests Christian philosophers engage and take seriously the philosophy and ideas of others, but not at the expense of developing and defending a truly Christian philosophy. Christian philosophers ought to be breaking new ground and moving both the Christian and philosophical world along in the process. As an example of an area where Christian philosophers could be working on their project, Plantinga suggests the area of ethics:
These, then, are my examples; I could have chosen others. In ethics, for example: perhaps the chief theoretical concern, from the theistic perspective, is the question how are right and wrong, good and bad, duty, permission and obligation related to God and to his will and to his creative activity? This question doesn't arise, naturally enough, from a non--theistic perspective; and so, naturally enough, non-theist ethicists do not address it. But it is perhaps the most important question for a Christian ethicist to tackle.
Plantinga's point is that when doing moral philosophy, Christian philosophers should not confine themselves to working within the paradigm given to them by their peers. That paradigm is not even asking the right questions in the first place. Instead, they should seek to develop a moral philosophy that arises from Christian commitments.
At the end of his essay, Plantinga says,
We who are Christians and propose to be philosophers must not rest content with being philosophers who happen, incidentally, to be Christians; we must strive to be Christian philosophers. We must therefore pursue our projects with integrity, independence, and Christian boldness.
Plantinga's incredible work in epistemology and the problem of evil have demonstrated that Plantinga is in no way a hypocrite; he has taken his own advice. Plantinga's work is not only distinctively Christian, it is also just excellent philosophy by anyone's lights. For example, in his work on the logical problem of evil, Plantinga has done what few philosophers have ever done: persuade almost all those who started out disagreeing with him that they were wrong. Because of his excellent Christian philosophy, Plnatinga has been a major contributor to the revival of Christian philosophy so that now Christian philosophers have a greater opportunity to follow his advice. As Christian ethicists and moral philosophers do their work, they too ought to take Plantinga's advice and perhaps they can continue to turn the philosophical world upside down. Or, perhaps it best to say that when Christian philosophers really act like Christian philosophers, they won't so much as turn the world upside down as right-side up.
If you'd like, you can read all of Plantinga's "Advice to Christian Philosophers" here.
Photo: "St. Paul Preaching in Athens" by Lawrence OP. CC License.
Over at Baker Publishing's website, you can pick up a copy of Paul Copan and Matt Flannagan's new book, Did God Really Command Genocide?. Copan and Flannagan are leading the way in providing substantive responses to objections raised against the goodness of God in light of the Old Testament conquest narratives. While you wait for the book to arrive, you can listen to lectures by Flannagan!
Matthew Flannagan, "Can God Command Evil? The Problem of Apparently Immoral Commands"
By David Baggett I have found a recent trend among a number of naturalistic ethicists and thinkers to be both interesting and mildly exasperating, but most of all telling. Both one like John Shook, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York—and someone with whom I recently dialogued at the University at Buffalo—and Frans de Waal, author most recently of The Bonobo and the Atheist (to adduce but a few examples) seem to be gravitating toward functional categories of morality. Talk of belief and practice replaces talk of truth; references to moral rules exceed those of moral obligations; and prosocial instincts supplant moral authority. What is interesting about this trend is that the resulting picture is entirely consistent with the view of complete moral skeptics, even amoralists.
Take Joel Marks, for example, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of New Haven. A former Kantian ethicist, he has decided that the category of morality lacks an objective referent. He’s written a few books about it, but an op-ed in the New York Times encapsulated his view in succinct fashion. In brief, although he has retained his aversive feelings toward, say, animal suffering, he has grown altogether skeptical that his feelings point to moral reality. He still fights for a world more to his liking, but he has come to think that morality has precious little to do with it, because there is no such thing. Marks is an amoralist—a very nice fellow, from all accounts, but someone who has given morality up. Resonating with Marks are such naturalists as Sharon Street and Richard Joyce, who have insisted that an evolutionary development of our moral sense, on a naturalistic picture, gives us little reason to think that our moral beliefs and convictions correspond with moral truth. Rather they evolved to produce behaviors that conduced to reproductive advantage.
But then de Waal and Shook come along and insist, largely without argument, that, to the contrary, the success of evolutionary moral psychology to account for our feelings of empathy, altruism, and prosociality is not only consistent with morality, but sufficient to account for it. To project the appearance their argument works, though, they need to engage in some subtle sleight of hand, replacing categories of moral authority with moral instincts, categorical obligations with malleable rules, objective truths with shared beliefs. But in the debate about moral foundations, classical theism can account for the full range of moral truths in need of explanation, without watering them down or subtly replacing them with functional analyses—from intrinsic goodness to categorical oughtness to genuine moral agency. To the extent that our naturalist friends like de Waal and Shook appear to be retaining the thick language of morality to capture ideas thin enough that complete moral skeptics could endorse them, there appears something deeply confused at best or disingenuous at worst about their approach, fortifying my growing conviction that soon enough the real moral debate will feature classical theists on one side and moral anti-realists on the other.
Michael Shermer’s article “Religion and Politics…and Science” attempts to present a narrative of religion becoming obsolete in the political sphere the same way he thinks it’s becoming obsolete in the scientific realm. HIs reason for thinking it’s becoming obsolete from politics may be due to his neglect of moral theory. As a consequence, his campaign misses the mark and his celebration seems premature.
Shermer sets out his thesis like this: “I argue that morals and values can be established and defended through science and reason.” Interestingly, however, this is actually not a political claim but an ontological one. Moral ontology is central to any moral theory because it addresses the question of the foundations of moral truths. Shermer claims that atheism provides an adequate basis for morality but overlooks most of the hard challenges of spelling out how.
The challenge naturalists face in providing such a foundation for ethics is formidable. Many secular ethicists remain undaunted by the challenge, though, offering a variety of naturalistic attempts at ethical foundations. An evolutionary biologist may theorize that our DNA and the evolutionary development of human beings produced such behaviors that end up facilitating some type of cooperation for survival, rewarding those with such adaptive behaviors with a higher chance of survival. This assessment of our biological origins may be correct. But even if this is right, this account of the genesis of various behaviors would not illuminate anything about moral ontology.
According to the grand naturalistic narrative, the universe came into existence several billion years ago with no explanation, then the earth formed, then life on earth. So what is there within the atheist’s story and resources that can function as an objective moral reference point to ground, explain, or otherwise make sense of value judgments? Even many atheists are gradually coming to admit that objective, authoritative moral facts would be strange entities in a purely physical world.
If atheism is true, humans are complicated arrangements of elements from the periodic table. Naturalists are hard pressed to account for our intrinsic worth if this is true. Values of any kind are hard to account for. Richard Dawkins, at least at this time, agreed. “There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference. . . . We are machines for propagating DNA. . . . It’s every living object’s sole reason for being.”
In this light, the paragraphs of Shermer’s recent piece that are most interesting for present purposes start when Shermer begins to argue that the principles of the Declaration of Independence “were in fact grounded in the type of scientific reasoning that Jefferson and Franklin employed in all the other sciences in which they worked.” Shermer cites the famous statement that certain truths are “self-evident” as an example. Shermer imagines that this “self-evident” reference is actually produced from scientific reasoning. He points out a quote from Walter Isaacson, who cites an edit made by Franklin. “By using the word ‘sacred,’ Jefferson had asserted, intentionally or not, that the principle in question—the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights—was an assertion of religion. Franklin’s edit turned it instead into an assertion of rationality.” Shermer seems to conflate rational with scientific.
It is true that self-evident truths are not assertions of religion. Nor are they assertions of science, as Shermer suggests. There is nothing scientific about them. Scientific knowledge is an a posteriori venture while self-evident knowledge is a priori. (Robert Audi gives an empirical account of moral intuitions rooted in our feelings, but the point is that value judgments must rely on more than purely scientific claims.) Reasoning draws from both at any given time. And the sort of self-evident truths the founding fathers referenced were moral truths: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Self-evidence is how we come to know something and leaves open the question of what makes the truth in question true. Our having been made by God in His image and for His purposes provides a powerful explanation for human equality; what the ground is for Shermer’s conviction in such a self-evident truth remains in need of explanation. To say the answer is “reason” is more assertion than argument, and rather unprincipled at that.
As David Bentley Hart argues persuasively in Atheist Delusions, the idea that humans have equality—a notion that most people in the past have vociferously rejected—is historically based in the Judeo-Christian tradition and its emphasis on God’s having stamped His image on all people. And because people are His image bearers, no one is more morally valuable than any other; all of us are equal in moral worth and possess great inherent dignity, value, and worth. On the other hand, if atheism is true, what good grounds are there to believe that human beings are essentially equal? Or that they possess inherent dignity and worth? It is no coincidence that societies without such sturdy convictions are much more likely to engage in the grossest of human rights violations. So Shermer was right in this sense, only in reverse: there are indeed, ultimately, large political repercussions for a lack of strong metaphysical foundations for morality. Most atheists are better than their worldview, and nowadays most would strongly affirm their belief in essential human equality. Whether they know it or not, though, this is due to our religious heritage. Equality remains part of the air we breathe in the West, but it came from an anthropology informed by robust theism. But as Nietzsche predicted, the rejection of belief in God will likely, in time, make its presence felt, perhaps even calling into question reasons for treating others equally.
Shermer seems less interested in promoting science as in preaching scientism. Christianity, contrary to a negative stereotype some try to perpetuate, is, at least at its best, in fact interested in promoting science. A diverse range of thinkers, including Stanley Jaki, has chronicled the role the Christian worldview played in promoting a dispassionate scientific analysis of the empirical world. Most of the first scientists were Christians and theists. Newton closely studied the Bible and claimed to know that a logical God made the universe in an orderly way, thus providing the basis by which experiments could be carried out and provide predictions; in contrast, atheism and science are neither historically nor inherently linked. And there is nothing in Galileo’s writing to suggest he was not a Christian. Dennis Alexander’s book Rebuilding the Matrix provides an interesting read on this score. From the beginning, the scientific enterprise has needed the Christian worldview. Scientific thought depends upon certain assumptions about the world and Christianity. As the famous philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it, Christianity made it acceptable to have “faith in the possibility of science” which came prior to the development of actual scientific theory. One obviously need not be a Christian to be a scientist, but Christian philosophy facilitated the scientific enterprise.
Part of Shermer’s recurring mistake here is eminently understandable. Atheists can apprehend moral truths as clearly as anyone, but they are mistaken when they assume that what they apprehend is explicable and articulable with the resources of their worldview. As they are not inclined to reject either commitment, they tacitly assume they are consistent, when in fact they are not—or at the least atheism fails to provide the most effective explanation of objective moral facts and humanistic ideals.
In light of the obstinacy with which Shermer pushes his point and assumes what is not in evidence in his battle against theism, one wonders whether his rejection of theism is rooted in rationality. Thomas Nagel, an atheist professor of philosophy and law at NYU, is a rare example of a transparent atheist on this point, writing, “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”
Shermer may be of the same mind, but without admitting it.
Photo: "We hold these truths to be self-evident" by P. Lloyd . CC License.
On this week's episode, we hear from David Baggett regarding the Euthyphro Dilemma. Dr. Baggett provides an excellent summary and a compelling response to this classic problem for theistic ethics.
John Hare’s The Moral Gap provides what we can call a “performative” version of the moral argument for God’s existence. Hare teaches at Yale and is the son of famed philosopher R. M. Hare, whose work John interacts with quite a bit in his own writings. In a series of extended blogs, I intend to go through Hare’s Moral Gap chapter by chapter to give folks who aren’t familiar with it an exposure to the sorts of arguments the book contains. This is not a critical review, just a quick and cursory summary of salient content. The book is about the “gap” between the moral demand on us and our natural capacities to live by it. It identifies what secularists attempt to do in the face of such a gap, and the way theism and Christianity offer powerful and better resources to close the gap. The book is much inspired by the writings of Immanuel Kant, an important influence on Hare.
The first chapter is entitled “Kant and the Moral Demand,” and it argues that Kant was vividly aware of the moral gap, both because he considered the moral demand to be very high and, as one influenced by the Lutheran pietistic tradition, recognized that we are born with a natural propensity not to follow it. Hare begins his analysis by laying out some key features of a Kantian ethical system, starting with the Categorical Imperative (CI). In this chapter Hare discusses the first two versions of the CI: the Formula of Universal Law, and the Formula of the End in Itself. The Formula of Universal Law says act only on maxims you can will as universal law. A maxim is the subjective principle of an action. To say the principle is subjective is to say that it’s the prescription made by the subject from which the action follows.
Kant talks as though each action has exactly one maxim from which it follows. This raises a problem concerning the level of generality of various maxims. A potential problem for Kant’s analysis is that for each action there may be ever so many maxims of varying levels of generality, some of which may be universalizable, some of which may not be. Hare bypasses this concern altogether by pointing out that Kant thought that there are, in the end, only two maxims: the good maxim and the bad maxim. All actions come from one or the other. The Good Maxim subordinates all desires to duty, whereas the Bad Maxim subordinates duty to the desires. For Kant duty trumps; in fact only those actions motivated by respect for the moral law, on his view, contains moral worth. So take suicide, a potential action whose maxim might look something like this: “From self-love I make it my principle to shorten my life if its continuance threatens more evil than it promises pleasure.” Such a maxim is bad, and thus suicide, on Kant’s view, is always wrong. Why such a maxim fails the test of universality is something we’ll consider in more detail in a moment. Good maxims are specific enough to give guidance, general enough to be taught to children, and exceptionless.
The CI tests maxims; if a maxim meets the test, the action that follows from it has moral worth; if the maxim doesn’t meet it, the action lacks moral worth. What is the test? Hare thinks the clearest account of the Formula of Universal Law is that it requires willingness to continue subscription to the maxim of an action even if all individual or singular reference is excluded from it. This isn’t how Kant himself put it, but Hare thinks it captures the gist of what Kant was after. In considering the performance of an action, I identify the maxim underlying the action, excluding the specifics such as the fact that I’m the one considering the action for myself, and I ask a question like this: Is this maxim an appropriate prescription for anyone and everyone in relevantly similar circumstances? If not, the action should not be performed. We’ll consider a few ways in which a maxim can fail this test in a moment.
The second formulation of the CI is the Formula of End in Itself. This version of the CI declares you should act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end. Other persons serve as a moral limit on our actions. Treating humanity as an end in itself is, for Kant, respecting our capacity for free and rational choice; it’s respecting autonomy. To treat another human being as merely a means is to ignore the other as a center of agency. Some, like Korsgaard, seem to push this Kantian idea in the direction of affirming the intrinsic value of persons; for Kant the focus was more specifically centered on agency, which entails that coercion and deception, for obvious reasons, represent rather paradigmatic violations of the principle. Kant even goes further to suggest that, so far as possible, we are required to share the ends of others, which is reflective of, among other things, a deeply communal aspect of his ethical theory.
Adherence to the CI avoids two sorts of self-contradiction, namely, contradiction in the conception, and contradiction in the will. An example of the former might be this: Consider a scenario in which you need a loan, but to get the loan you have to promise to repay it in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, you know you won’t be able to do so. But you want the loan nonetheless and are tempted to lie about repaying it in order to secure it. Lying would be wrong in such a case, Kant says, because it would be based on a maxim that can’t be universalized because it implicated you in a contradiction in the conception. By lying you’re acting on a maxim that, if everyone in relevantly similar circumstances were to follow, would potentially destroy the very institution of money-lending on which you’re depending to get the loan. So you want the institution to be there, but by following a maxim that if universally followed would destroy the institution, you don’t want it to be there. This is a self-contradiction.
The other form of contradiction is a contradiction of the will, which results from, for example, systematically denying assistance to others. There’s logical space for doing this that there isn’t in the loan example, but there is still a contradiction of sorts at play. For, again, Kant saw that we are deeply communal beings who rely and depend on each other all the time. Invariably there will be times when you need the assistance of others; but if everyone were to refrain from helping others, the help you’ll eventually need won’t be forthcoming. If you want the help to be available, yet affirm a maxim that would prevent it, as in this case, you’re implicated in a contradiction of the will. When a maxim falls prey to either form of contradiction, it’s unable to be consistently willed as a universal law. It implicates one in a contradiction and is thus irrational and immoral.
At this point in the chapter Hare spends time discussing the views of his father, who was much influenced by Kant. R. M. Hare thought that moral judgments, to qualify as such, need to be universalizable, prescriptive, and overriding. He also distinguished between intuitive and critical levels of moral thinking. Our intuitions are liable to mislead us on occasion, as critical reflection shows, but even our critical reflection can mislead us because it optimally requires complete information and complete impartiality—the perspective of the “archangel.” The position of the archangel is also taken to be the position of God—though the elder Hare had lost his faith along the way. Still, it’s only judgments at the critical level of the archangel (or God) that are overriding; thus there’s a gap between the divine and human capacities, for we are afflicted with all manner of deficiencies in our moral reflections, from lack of knowledge or impartiality to lack of sensitivity and sympathy. God, either real or hypothetical, would presumably not be similarly disadvantaged.
In Kant too we find poignant recognition of such a gap, for as we engage in moral deliberation we continually encounter the “dear self,” an inflated sense of our own interests and concerns, resulting in an unbridgeable chasm between ‘ought’ and ‘can’. The result is that morality, in its full critical form, is, first, something I ought to be practicing; second, something for which my natural capacities are inadequate (except by approximation); and third, something that I should treat as the command of some other at least possible being who is practicing it. On this picture, morality has three parts: 1. The moral demand; 2. Our defective natural capacities (lack of sensitivity, sympathy, etc.); and 3. The possible being (the authoritative source of the demand). Hare suggests this structure is a holdover from Christianity: Belief in a perfect and infinite moral being, whom we imperfectly resemble, and who created us to resemble him more than we do.
One result of such a structure is that it produces a constant and inevitable sense of failure of a variety of sorts. We fail by caring more for ourselves than others, we show failures of patience, failures of impartiality, etc. This makes the desire to avoid guilt a primary moral motivator, though love the moral law is the nobler moral motivation than the desire to avoid subjective feelings of guilt. We desire to close the gap between what we do and what we ought to do. Yet we seem to be under a demand too great for us to meet without God’s grace to transform us.
Hare identifies three strategies for addressing the gap from a secular perspective: 1. Produce a naturalistic substitute for God’s assistance; 2. Exaggerate our sense of what we can accomplish, so as to fit the demand; and 3. Reduce the demand so as to fit our capacities. A Christian solution will instead be God’s assistance to enable us to do what we can’t do on our own. Augustine says, “God bids us do what we cannot, that we may know what we ought to seek from him.” So the principle of deontic logic that ‘ought implies can’ may need tweaking; we may well be responsible for meeting a demand we can’t meet on our own resources, if there are additional resources outside of ourselves we can and should use that enable us to meet the demand.
Hare ends the chapter by suggesting that believers should value Kant, rather than seeing his work as opposed to their own convictions. Hare will offer criticisms of Kant, but nonetheless thinks there are resonances with Christian thought. For example, Christians should recognize Kant’s three-fold nature of morality: an original predisposition to do good, an innate propensity to evil, which can be overcome by a revolution of the will which requires divine supplement. Hare suggests that what we have here is quite analogous of the tripartite structure of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. Like Kant, too, believers should recognize the need for moral faith, which has two parts: faith in the actuality of virtue and in the consistency of happiness and virtue, both of which require belief in God’s work on our behalf.
Photo: "Mind the Gap" by Lisa. CC License.
Dr. Matthew Flannagan provides some great insights on the Euthyphro Dilemma in a podcast over at Skepticule. Flannagan explains the difference between ontology and epistemology in relation to the dilemma. Flannagan is on for about the first thirty minutes of the podcast. If you like, you can stick around after that and hear the skeptical evaluation of Flannagan's presentation.
Over at Unbelievable?, there is a great discussion between Christian philosopher Glenn Peoples and atheist philosopher Stephen Law on the "Evil God Challenge." The objection raised in the challenge is that we have as much evidence to believe in a good God as an evil one. Peoples responds with a moral argument. You can listen to the discussion here. Photo: "Angry Gods" by deanoakley. CC License.
I think that, if our moral intuitions are to be regarded as true, then God is the best explanation for those moral intuitions being present. Not only that, but I think that the best explanation for those moral intuitions being true is God’s action in our lives. So, the argument would go as follows:
If our moral intuitions are true, then God is the best explanation of this fact.
Our moral intuitions are true.
Therefore, God is the best explanation of this fact.
If God is the best explanation of moral intuitions, then He exists.
Therefore, God exists.
(3) and (5) are logically entailed conclusions. What do we make of (1)? We should only deny this if we think that while our moral intuitions are true, there is a better explanation. Notice this claim is much more modest than saying that God is the only explanation of moral intuitions being true. All we are claiming is that, for however many explanations there are, God is the best one. Without getting into a lengthy discussion as to what makes a good explanation (though that is surely important here), let’s cover some of the features. First, an explanation needs to fit all the facts. Let’s consider the facts: God’s creating in us a sense of moral knowledge (moral intuition) is certainly possible (it’s not unknown, or even unlikely, for example, that God possesses this power). It also seems likely that God (taken to be the monotheistic God of perfect being theology) would ensure that our moral intuitions are generally reliable. Why would he do that? Simply because an all-good God would want to ensure creatures made in his image generally had the opportunity to do the good (and thus, to be significantly free moral agents). This is not possible if they can’t very well even recognize the good. In a sense, God has told us, via our conscience and moral intuition, what is good and thus what we ought to do.
Second, the explanation needs to be relatively simple. It won’t do, for example, to claim that the best explanation of our moral intuitions being true is seventeen gods—at least not without argument. One God is simple enough (after all, the entire “God-of-the-gaps” charge is based at least secondarily in how simple it is).[1] Competing explanations won’t cover it as well as a theistic one: for instance, it just seems fortuitous that these moral intuitions turn out to be true. For instance, animals don’t need true moral intuitions in order to survive, so the mere postulated fact that evolution occurs and we are here isn’t a sufficient explanation for why we have moral intuitions and they are true. So it seems (1) is a pretty good candidate to keep around.
Perhaps an opponent will then bite the bullet and reject (2). “You’re right,” he may say. “God is the best explanation of moral intuitions being true, but I’ve got news for you: they aren’t.” There are two different objections that can be presented to the second premise. The first objection is to claim that moral intuitions aren’t always true. They’re false sometimes, and, in some cases, plenty of times.[2] But the response back can be two-fold: first, in (1), we just mean generally true, not universally. Second, simply because some intuitions are wrong sometimes, it doesn't follow that they are all suspect.[3]
The next objection is that all moral intuitions about moral facts fail because all moral facts are false. That is to say that there just are no objective moral values or duties, and so any intuitions about this are illusory. Now this is entirely consistent with a naturalistic account of obtaining a sense of objective moral values (or moral intuitions). However, while it is consistent, it is wildly counterintuitive (literally!). Most people cannot shake the feeling that certain things (e.g., racism, homophobia, beating up the elderly, bullying, torturing babies, etc.) really are wrong, and their moral intuitions are not deceiving them. One might suspect that even the objector does not really believe that nothing is really wrong. But then it will follow that God is the best explanation of our moral intuitions being true.
It seems to be an obvious truth of logic to infer that if God is the explanation of moral intuitions being true, then he exists. In any case, I don’t know what it would mean to claim that God is such an explanation, but he doesn’t exist! If that’s the case, we have an epistemic variant of the moral argument for God’s existence that can be used.
[1] Consider, in fact, that people often say that naturalism is sufficient to account for the way the world is, and thus a God is wholly unnecessary—in short, naturalism is a simpler explanation for the way the world is (so the charge goes).
[2] There are a great many people, for example, that claim to intuit homosexual behavior as permissible, whereas many others intuit it as impermissible. One set of intuitions, if this is true, is definitely false (as a whole).
[3] One cannot show a possible area of knowledge to be unreliable just by showing one error (or even a few more): simply because some people reason incorrectly, it wouldn’t follow that no one reasons correctly!
Photo: "Lake Crescent Sunset" by Kevin Dooley. CC License.
Over at the Tentative Apologist, you can listen to a discussion with Dr. Matthew Flannagan on what skeptics would call the "abhorrent" commands of God. Flannagan explains how to make sense of a good God and the testing of Abraham, Joshua's conquest, as well as how to respond to cases of people claiming to justify crimes by an appeal to a divine command. Click here to listen.
Subscribe to the NEwsletter
“The message of the gospel—God’s act of forgiveness and salvation in Jesus—is rooted in hesed. Hesed describes the disposition of God’s heart not only toward His people but to all humanity. The love of God extends far beyond duty or expectation. His forgiveness of sin fulfills a need that is basic to all other needs in the relationship between human beings and God—the restoration and continuation of fellowship with God in Jesus Christ. God’s hesed manifested in forgiveness makes a relationship with Him possible. That forgiveness comes to us freely as a gift from God based on the sacrificial act of Christ.”
Browse the Archives
MoralApologetics.com is a function of the Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Christian University
