Interview of Dr. Tom Morris

In this interview, I asked Dr. Tom Morris several questions about his life and ministry, his teaching and writing and speaking. Dr. Morris is a very dear soul, a brilliant philosopher, great long-time professor, dynamic speaker, and eminently gifted and prolific writer. Along with Elton Higgs, Good God was dedicated to him; he was Jerry Walls’ teacher and dissertation advisor at Notre Dame, and I have had the privilege to get to know him personally through the years. He is something of my intellectual grandfather, you could say! He’s also a dear friend. He’s been a wonderful encourager and mentor to me for many, many years, and my respect for him is boundless. Two of my prized possessions are books he sent to me some years ago, books he didn’t just sign. He drew little cartoons on the inside of each of them, personalized just for me. It was one of a plethora of gestures of kindness he’s shown me through the years. He’s likewise been a source of encouragement, inspiration, and wisdom for thousands and thousands of others. It’s my distinct honor to share this interview with Tom Morris, a great scholar and even better man. Please visit his website at TomVMorris.com, and be sure to read his daily blogs and his regular column at the Huffington Post.

-Dave Baggett

Photo by Matt Lamers on Unsplash

1. I’d love to know about the experience you mentioned in God and the Philosophers, when you were an undergraduate at North Carolina, and you experienced something of an epiphany in front of the math building. It pertained to your sense of calling. Can you describe that influence in more detail, and its impact on you then and since?

I remember the day vividly. I wish I had written down the date and time. But when it happened, I had no idea how lasting the memory or the effect would be. It was like many of the most important events of my life – I didn’t see it coming. There was no preparation that I was aware of. It just happened like a bolt from the blue. I was struck with a thought that seemed to come to me from beyond, an assurance that there’s a reason I’m here, in this life, on this earth – that I have a mission, a job to do, something important to accomplish. I had no idea what that might be, at the time, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t like I was having a premonition of my work, or career, just a powerful assurance that there’s an importance in my being alive, a specific value in my adventure. It made me feel good, and strongly confident, and somehow grounded in a sense of meaning and purpose, even though, again, I didn’t know any specifics, at that point.

And what’s odd here is that I believe we’re all alive for a purpose. That was just my moment of assurance that I had nothing to fear or worry about concerning my future. First, there would be one. And second, it would be something that I could feel good about. I would be able to serve people in some way. I did sense that deeply and powerfully, but again, without specifics. The phenomenal, keen psychological feel of the experience was unlike anything I had ever had happen to me. It was almost like a voice speaking to me, yet not with a tone or timber, heard by the ear. It was just a thought, a message with propositional content and emotional resonance that came to me suddenly and seemed to touch my spirit in the deepest way. From that moment on the sidewalk in Chapel Hill, I had a sense of meaning that went beyond anything I could explain.

1. When you were still in college, you began your first book—on Francis Schaeffer and apologetic methodology. This site, as you know, is about moral apologetics, various moral arguments for God’s existence. Do you think some of the distinctive features of morality—its authority, prescriptivity, etc.—are better explained by a religious worldview than by naturalism?

I really don’t see how naturalism can accommodate any degree of ultimate objectivity about moral principles and demands, or even about such things as rights. And the naturalist, like any of us, typically has strong moral intuitions about such things that impinge on our conduct. We may disagree about the details, but naturalists can be as morally offended, or inspired, as any of us. And they’ll have real trouble making metaphysical sense of the power they feel, the power that truly moves them, and us.

George Mavrodes, I think, once wrote a nice essay about the oddness of morality in a materalistic universe that says it all very well – or at least, it struck me that way as a young philosopher, when I first read him. [ed--“Religion and the Queerness of Morality”]

Theism roots so much so deeply in the metaphysical weave of reality in ways that naturalism just can’t do. You have to give up a lot to be a naturalist, and I don’t think most naturalists, even very intelligent naturalists, fully understand this and all its implications. They still keep a foot in the warm water that their own view can’t provide.

1. When you were a student at Yale, you bucked the system and enrolled in a number of classes in both analytic and Continental philosophy, and earned doctorates in both philosophy and religious studies. What led you to do that, and how did that breadth of study shape your work?

I was determined to leave no ultimate stone unturned. I didn’t care about the divisions in the department philosophy or in the university, or about the animosities that accompanied these divisions. I was intensely curious and wanted to be able to follow my nose wherever it might lead me. So imagine my surprise when I was once in a Kant seminar on the “other side” of the department with dancers and artists and actors and had to read books with titles like “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” and “Love and Lust” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “The Female Orgasm,” to help in my understanding of the categorical imperative and The Critique of Pure Reason. Of course, my worries about the connections were a bit assuaged when, like a ritual, we had to retreat to the professor’s office every day after class for sherry and even more cheese.

I think my work was shaped by an intellectual breadth of early acquaintance with a wide variety of modes of thought that was relatively rare in my time. I came to discover that, most typically, philosophers knew almost nothing of theology; theologians knew little philosophy; continental thinkers weren’t trained in logical precision, and analytic practitioners seemed to hardly ever sip sherry.

1. At Notre Dame your teaching was legendary. I know several folks who served as a TA for you, and to a person they confirm what a remarkable privilege it was to do so. You brought the marching band into the classroom before a final exam, and all sorts of things to make learning fun and enjoyable and memorable, without sacrificing the rigor. You won the Indiana Professor of the Year award at one point. What are the top two or three pieces of advice you’d give to teachers, guiding principles that you followed yourself?

You have to love your students first and then love what you’re teaching. Love is the moving force. That leads to connection and enjoyment and success.

I often told my TAs that philosophy is serious but that doesn’t mean it’s somber. We always had fun. I wanted the students to think of philosophy as a fun and fascinating and important way of confronting the world. Ultimately, I wanted to bring them back to the ancient view of philosophy as a way of living. And that includes laughing and loving.

I always tried imaginative gimmicks to make philosophical points vividly and memorably. And I’ve had people come up to me in convention centers all over America and say, after a talk to a financial services company, or an industry association meeting, “Professor Morris, I was in your class in 1983 when the lights all went out suddenly.” I’d reply, “Why did that happen?” And then I’d get an answer like “You were giving us a Near Death Experience and it was really vivid and so funny I remember it all these years later.”

A robot might tell corny electricity jokes in a class about artificial intelligence, or Dominoes might deliver pizzas to the class early in the morning when they weren’t even open, to illustrate something in a lecture on miracles, or I might provide a little electric guitar performance to illustrate something in the philosophy of science. My general rule was “Four minutes of craziness to gain their attention for the next forty six minutes.” We had a theme song that would play when I entered the auditorium. Snickers bars often flew through the air for good answers, or just to start the class. When people avoided sitting in the front, Burger King might cater cheeseburgers to only the first two rows. A month into the semester, we did Early Course Evaluations asking for suggestions. The next class I’d go over, the often hilarious, suggestions that my very clever undergraduates would make, and I’d actually implement some of them. They never know what would happen next.

At the end of each semester, on official final course evaluations, students would always say: “I could NEVER sleep late and miss class, because I knew that if I did, it would probably be the class everybody would talk about for the next ten years.” That’s why I never had an attendance policy. If I couldn’t make it so good they didn’t ever want to miss it, I was not doing my job, as I understood it.

1. Your work in philosophical theology greatly influenced many philosophers, including me. I remember reading your analysis of a modal version of the Euthyphro Dilemma that, at the time, opened my eyes to a whole new approach to solving the Dilemma. Much of your work focused on a particular conception of God—understood in the Anselmian sense. What are some of the reasons for the philosophical power of this notion of God?

Thanks for your kind compliment. Now, about that conception of God: Well, for one thing, it’s the most extreme idea imaginable, isn’t it? And whatever else is true of me, I’m a person of extremes. I’ve been known to find a new restaurant and love the meal so much that I would go back and eat there every night for two weeks. When I decided to start working out hard at the gym, I committed to two hours a day, every day, for the first year. I do extremes. It’s my great strength and weakness. Extremes intrigue me.

The idea of the greatest possible being, a maximally perfect individual – you can’t get any more extreme than that. It’s a sort of absolute ideal for a philosopher. And any attempt to understand and apply it has got to lead to discoveries all over the place. I found it very attractive and intriguing. I wanted to give it a new level of rigorous and creative attention, as a unifying idea of great importance for philosophical theology and then perhaps for other specialties as well. I felt like, if we understood the core idea of perfect being theology deeply enough, and logically enough, we’d get answers to problems that would otherwise be unavailable. And I think I was right.

1. What led to your leaving Notre Dame after 15 years, situated as you were as one of the brightest among a set of premier philosophers making up what was one of the best philosophy departments in the world? What do you miss most, and least, about academia?

When I was approached out of the blue by Disney to make TV commercials for Winnie the Pooh, as a philosopher, I was so surprised, and I was delighted to be reaching out beyond the classroom, especially to promote a most philosophical bear. The two network commercials I got to costar in, with the Pooh characters, brought a surprising amount of attention my way. Various area business and civic groups had been asking me to come and speak on ethics and success, and other topics for a couple of years. And I would always say yes, to build bridges between the university and the community. Then word started to spread. NBC Sports had me speak to their sponsors at every Notre Dame home football game. The Young Presidents Organization began to ask me to give talks to presidents of companies all over the world. Then, when the Pooh hit the fan, when the commercials started showing five or six times a day on all the networks, everybody got interested in this strange guy, part philosopher, and part TV pitchman.

Quickly, I published a first trade book, True Success: A New Philosophy of Excellence, and I was soon getting invitations to speak everywhere. My wife would pick me up from the airport for my morning freshman Philosophy 101 class. I’d teach, have lunch, then do a senior afternoon class, and head back to the airport for another trip and another talk somewhere in America, or beyond. As this grew in momentum, and I saw people in every business get excited about the wisdom of the ages, I began to feel a sense of calling, almost Abrahamic in nature, to leave the known for an unknown promised land where I was meant to grow and prosper intellectually in new ways. I had started all this with no clue that people actually PAID speakers. Then it became a real business. It was hard to teach full time and also serve the world in this new way. I felt I had to make a choice. I loved my students and my academic work, but felt so strongly that this was the next adventure, that I left the full professorship, the tenure, and all its guarantees for this big new challenge and joy.

Norman Kretzmann, Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell, who had been a sort of informal mentor and great encourager to me, wrote me a nice letter at the time urging me not to leave the world of philosophical theology just to go and popularize philosophy for the masses. I wrote back and told him that the new challenges were just as tough, even without requiring modal logic. If people had already figured out happiness, struggle, change, and success, there wouldn’t be a steady stream of new books on these issues. And I was going to be the first philosopher ever to bring the best rigors of analytic training to bear on such matters. I felt I had a shot at making a big difference to people’s everyday lives, not something that was even on the radar screen when penning a piece for The Philosophical Review, or The American Philosophical Quarterly. I had experienced and enjoyed serving the 126 people in the world who could read my technical work, and the 4 who actually understood it well enough to be persuaded. Of course, I’m kidding. It was more like 3. In any case, I was ready for the new assignment that I was being given.

When I resigned from Notre Dame, I wrote a long letter to the campus newspaper telling all my students that I was leaving not because I had found something more important than they were to me, but because they had prepared me for a new mission that I was being called to launch out on, and I would always appreciate and treasure the time I had with them for those many years in South Bend.

What I miss most about academia is the time I had to see my students grow in wisdom and understanding throughout a semester and beyond. What I miss least is excessively long faculty meetings, unspoken professional resentments, and the manifest irritation of certain formerly affable colleagues who had decided that, as an exuberant public philosopher, I was no longer to be greeted in the hallway, or spoken to in any way, unless absolutely necessary. They must have thought that Pooh-losophy could be dangerously contagious.

1. You describe yourself as shy. I’m sure that would come as quite a surprise to anyone who has seen you give a public lecture. How would you explain the discrepancy?

When someone moves in next door to me, it may take me six weeks or months to get the courage up to go say hello. And yet, I’ll talk freely to anyone sitting next to me on an airplane. I’m a walking paradox (one in philosophy, one in religious studies). Part of me would be happy sitting alone in my room reading and writing most of the day, and just taking breaks to talk to my wife, pat the dogs, and throw a ball to the cat to chase or disdain, depending on his mood. And then another part of me wants to be with those 5,000 people in Las Vegas, or those 10,000 in Orlando, or the 20 top executives in Silicon Valley. When this started happening, I began to realize more deeply that I really liked being around people who enjoyed and appreciated the ideas I was bringing them. And I had to get over the shyness to do the job. Of course, as a professor, I already learned a lot about how to do that. Like many performers, actors, singers, comics, and jugglers, I learned, for the sake of my audience and my effectiveness, to overcome any tendencies that would keep me from having a sort of exuberant effectiveness. And it’s always a joy.

But the two parts of me serve a purpose. The shy side encourages the scholarship and thought required to create new frameworks of ideas. The sociable showman side helps me get those ideas out into the world. Ultimately, great presentations happen where personal neediness meets the love of others amidst the joy of service.

1. Explain your vision of public philosophy. Is this a tradition that, after the likes of Emerson and perhaps James, has been neglected?

Public philosophy is just a version of public health. What would we think if all the physicians just stayed in their labs, discovering things, and talking about them among each other, but never brought those discoveries out into the world, or – worse yet – just worked on things that they happened to be interested in, whether those ideas would ever have any practical implications or not? We need basic research in science, all the sciences, without regard for payoff or practicality, but we also need applied science that aims at positive impact. I think of theoretical philosophy as immensely important, but it’s not the only sort of philosophy that deserves attention. The practical side of philosophy has been neglected for a very long time in our culture. And I think we’ve all suffered as a result. I came to realize that I was being put into a position to do something about that.

But I had few role models in our time. What Emerson and James accomplished in their time gave me a sense that it can be done, and to great effect. And of course, there were other philosophers who had reached out to a broader audience, like Mortimer Adler, who was actually more of a historian than a philosopher, and Bertrand Russell, who maybe shouldn’t have reached out at all. Sartre and Camus had made their splash, as it was, but a lot more was needed, and in a different direction, adumbrating a different sort of worldview. Pascal had inspired me, as had Kierkegaard. But rather than jokingly jabbing Jesuits or hilariously harpooning Hegel, I decided to focus on another set of issues. Give me another 200 years to work in practical philosophy, and I think I’ll get it right. But even now, it’s the most satisfaction I’ve ever felt on any intellectual pursuit, although figuring out the incarnation and tracing the implications of perfect being theology were pretty much fun, too.

1. Tell us about your eight-part novel series—how it happened, what it’s about. Is this something you planned to do, or did it catch you by surprise?

This is definitely the wildest, most unexpected story of my life. In February 2011, I woke up, had toast, jam, and coffee for breakfast, and, before I could get out of my chair to go work on a book about how to deal with change, one of the greatest changes and adventures of my life suddenly began. I started to see, as if in my mind's eye, a vivid movie. It was something like the most amazing daydream of my life.

In an instant, I was watching and listening to an old man and a young boy, who were sitting under a palm tree in the desert and talking about life. Their conversation was really great, so I ran up the stairs to my study and began to type as fast as I could, to catch up and keep up. I then put a short essay on The Huffington Post with the first rough version of that initial conversation. People reacted quickly and with great enthusiasm. "What is this?" "Is this the beginning of a book?" I honestly didn't know what it was.

The movie then continued to play, most days, on and off, for almost four years. The result is, so far, eight completed books that have not yet been shown to publishers. A former student of mine who is now a famous thriller novelist saw the first two books when they were freshly written, and said right away, "This is The Alchemist Meets Harry Potter Meets Indiana Jones!" I hope so.

Watching this inner movie and writing it all down has has been the pinnacle of my experience as a philosopher. The things I've seen and heard and learned by viewing this mysterious movie go beyond anything I've ever read or discovered in more normal, ordinary ways.

Three weeks after the movie began to play, and well before I realized that I was in the process of writing a book, and, of course, long before I knew it would be the first of many books, I woke up one day and had an almost equally unusual mental vision, where I saw something new, again, almost like in a dream.

It was clearly a book called The Oasis Within. Noticing a banner across the top of the front cover in this surprising morning vision, I realized right away that it said, "Over Three Million Copies In Print." So, I responded to that by saying, "Ok, then. I'll write this book." And the big adventure began.

The series is set in Egypt in 1934 and 1935, a place and time about which I knew almost nothing when all this started. But after 2 or 4 or 6 hours of writing, I’d google stuff that I saw – a certain kind of snake, a specific men’s wristwatch, a car of a particular make, and was amazed to discover, time after time, that these things were in fact in Egypt in 1934 or 1935. I heard characters call out each others’ names – Arabic names I didn’t know – and those I checked out turned out not only to be legitimate names, but most often perfect for the characters. It’s fiction, but all the research that novelists do before writing, I didn’t have to do at all. I just wrote what I saw and heard. I never made up a plot point, or a conscious decision about what should happen. I watched. I listened. I wrote.

In the end, it’s a series about life, death, meaning, friendship, the secrets behind everyday events, and the extraordinary power of a well-focused mind. It’s about love and commitment and redemption. It’s about good and evil and folly and wisdom. It’s about what moves people to chart their way in one direction rather than another. It’s about inner peace, inner power, and the role of this world in a much bigger scheme of things. It’s about dreams and difficulties, and triumph and ultimate reality. How could that not be fun to write!

The publication of this first book, which is something like a conversational prologue to the series of action and adventure stories that go on to reveal a deep and ancient philosophical worldview that's uniquely powerful for the twenty-first century, will be announced at my website, www.TomVMorris.com when it's available. I don’t even have a fiction agent for it yet. So wish me luck!

1. What would you say is the integrating theme—or themes—of your entire career, spanning your time in academia, your work as a public philosopher, as an essayist and novelist, and your future goals?

My overall theme is helping people think through the most important ideas there are, with conceptual precision and concrete imagination.

My future goals are to keep doing it, and discover more new things that I can share with excitement and great satisfaction.

Photo: "Happiness" by C. Roengigk. CC License. 

On Playing the Man: Personal Reflections on Polycarp

Photo by Connor Dugan on Unsplash

Apologetics is all logos, and mind, and cerebration, and ism. And theology, apologia’s paterfamilias, conceptualizes and constructs new theories about God. If it’s very good theology, it recalls those older ideas from which the theories are built. I confess, as one who toils in both apologia and theologica, I find myself and my fellow thinkers a tad tiresome. Who are we, after all, that we would presume to argue on God’s behalf? What could I say to move a man’s mind closer to his Maker? Apologetics can be a presumptuous field full of ambitious intellectuals. I’m pressed to publish new material, to articulate anew at annual conferences. We say a lot, we apologists, maybe too much. I would distrust the apologist who didn’t doubt an old diatribe or regret not having a bit more reticence on occasion. And I suspect apologists and theologians are professional pundits and theatergoers critiquing God’s moving picture show.

In moments of clarity, I’m reminded that apologetics is, was, more.  I know myself involved in something greater. Apologists were the gospel of the crucified Christ embodied. Rationalizers and reasoners who bannered all truth as God’s. Defenders of the faith, I must remember, whose arguments weren’t vetted by editors or tenured peers but by persecutors and oppressive government officials. This is the apologetic tradition. I’d hold suspect any modern defender of the faith whose entire life was spent in the safe arena of academia, whose creed never faced the sword, or whose apologia didn’t determine living another day, if he didn’t feel just a tinge of sheepishness for all that theorizing so far behind the frontline.

Like the die-hard patriot who refuses to enlist, I’ve certainly let my theological arguments venture out beyond the truth of my life. And I might better know my place if I looked back to my greater kin. The authority from which I speak might gird me up if I leaned against it a little harder. If I could incarnate my ideas with more muscle and enflesh my Christian apologia so that it ran vein-long through me as it did my fathers in the faith.

Suppose, like Polycarp second-century Bishop of Smyrna, my case for God from the moral law or whatever defense for the historical validities of the Gospels I may make came from the same Christ-held-center that caused the apologist to say, “It must needs be that I shall be burned alive,” when his defense would cost his life. Sought, arrested, and led into a stadium for fatal interrogation, Polycarp heard what seems to me the apologist’s call, a voice from heaven saying “Be strong, Polycarp, and play the man.” Play the man. Would I, too, as one who defends the faith of Christ, who stands in the line of Polycarp?

When pressed by the Roman magistrate to consider his frail old frame and swear the genius of Caesar and “revile the Christ,” Polycarp replied, “eighty-six years have I been His servant, and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” An apologetic from testimony laden with as much keen logic as poignant pathos, Polycarp deals in reason and reciprocation. Polycarp’s response—my life proves that I’ve been treated well by God, so why should I not return my faithfulness to him?—is a sound defense in itself, but how much more coming from one whose best defense for the faith was his mere presence? Polycarp could play the apologist only because he played the man.

It seems to me, when reading Polycarp, that modern apologetics is at stake. My role as an apologist is at stake. What else should define my call, if not some Polycarpian paradigm? Indeed, if I, with mere degrees and books and a couple dozen conference papers, might wrap rhetorical wit the way Polycarp did, as a deflection against heresy premised by the apologetic of my life, then I might occasionally move to a defense beyond a regurgitated designer theory of the universe’s fine-tuning or an armchair deconstruction of naturalism. I might be more than a professional apologist, more than scholar, as Polycarp was more.

When the Roman magistrate commanded the Smyrnan Bishop to turn away from his fellow Christians, often accused of atheism because they denied Roman gods, and dismiss his kin’s faith by saying, “Away with the atheists,” we’re told that Polycarp answered, “with solemn countenance looked upon the whole multitude of lawless heathen that were in the stadium, and waved his hand to them; and groaning and looking up to heaven he said, ‘Away with the atheists.’”

An essential apologetic employs rhetorical wit in service to the Savoir. Polycarp knew no other kind. So he stands as, and so I’m reminded of, the Christan apologia’s beau ideal. It’s the old idea on which the western church was founded: that idea of a faithful disciple learned in the scriptures and sharp in thought, a living and breathing proof of Christ. No superfluous theologizing here. Only lived apologetics. A breathed bastion for the gospel. That’s the old idea.

Perhaps some modern apologetic publications would have more teeth if they were written to uphold the tradition of Polycarp, the “puller down of the gods,” as he was called. To pull the gods down so that the world might see Christ unobstructed. That we would have Polycarp’s strong shoulders able to topple over the statues of unorthodox thought. Modern apologetics as pulling down false gods. That’s the tradition in which I toil. I’m beginning to remember.

When threatened to be thrown to wild beasts—and if that wasn’t vile enough—to be burned, Polycarp said: “You threaten that fire which burns for a season and after a little while is quenched: for you are ignorant of the fire of the future judgment and eternal punishment, which is reserved for the ungodly. But why do you delay? Come, do what you will.” Polycarp’s pitting temporality against eternality and positing that life is best lived for the latter . . . that has teeth.

It’s all very romantic, I guess, and some esteemed colleagues might object to such a lofty, even unnecessary, return. Why should any western apologist want to champion Polycarp as anything more than a mythic figure? An antiquated model. Don’t we tend to see the first apologists as Thors and Herculeses and Beowulfs, really, trapped in distant hero tales? How unsettling, now in 2015, to meditate on my line of work in the light of Polycarp’s death. Polycarp died by fire and dagger in front of frenzied masses, while some apologists live by speaking to safe rooms of moderately hostile audiences, for goodness’ sake. I write this to recall the history in which I stand in hopes that I might remember to play the man when I play the apologist.

God, that we would be more romantic. That we would rehearse the myth when the times call for it. That we would pray Polycarp’s prayer when our backs are to the posts of the unbelieving world, “O Lord God Almighty, the Father of Your beloved and blessed Son Jesus Christ, through whom we have received the knowledge of You. . . . I bless You because You have granted me this day and hour, that I might receive a portion amongst the number of martyrs in the cup of Your Christ. . . . You that art the faithful and true God. For this cause, yea and for all things, I praise You, I bless You, I glorify You, through the eternal and heavenly High-priest, Jesus Christ, Your beloved Son, through Whom, with Him and the Holy Spirit, be glory both now and ever and for the ages to come. Amen.”

Podcast: David Baggett on the Love of God and the Doctrine of Election

This week we will be talking again with Dr. David Baggett, co-author of Good God and professor of apologetics at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, about the doctrine of election and the love of God. Besides the main topic, we will hit on a number of related issues, like love and the necessity of free will, and the role that philosophy ought to play (if any) in interpreting the Bible. Most of this discussion takes place with a critique of Calvinism. Because conversations like these can be so divisive, Dr. Baggett wanted to give a brief statement to explain his motivation and to set the tone for the discussion. Here's the statement:

I hope nothing here causes any discord or division; they’re just some reflections I have about the nature of God as essentially loving and what that seems to imply, and to my thinking they comport with the best biblical exegesis available, though I don’t claim to be a biblical scholar. To me this focus on God’s essentially loving nature seems a crucial part of moral apologetics, but I really do sincerely hope that those who may disagree with me on some of these issues don’t take any offense. It’s surely not intended. Christians of diverse stripes agree on much more than what they disagree about, and as Lewis once said, sometimes one of our disagreements is the importance of our disagreements. At times I’ve overstated the differences, and regret that, but here it’s my intention just to lay out how I see things, how some of the pieces fit together, and folks can do with it as they will. And if they disagree, that’s fine. There’s mental space and ample prerogative to do so, and I won’t be offended. But irrespective of our differences, as believers we all need to learn to love one another, and I only hope what I say here contributes to that rather than detracts from it. These discussions are important, but we’ve got to strive to avoid their becoming needlessly divisive.

Photo: "God's Open Door Church (air conditioned) by Tom Hart. CC License. 

The Inadequacy of a Naturalistic Virtue Ethic (Part 2 of 2)

Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash

Objections to Teleology

One of the main concerns is the role that teleology plays. According to Foot, individuals have a telos; they are meant for thriving as a member of a certain species. But it is unclear what this really could mean in a naturalistic world. To say something has a telos means it has a purpose essentially. Alasdair MacIntyre suggests that insofar as a virtue ethic is teleological, it requires “at least one central functional concept, the concept of man understood as having an essential nature and an essential purpose or function.”[1] Having a purpose, and having it essentially, means that a thing has a purpose by its very nature. One obvious way to say that teleology is both genuine and morally significant is to say that a thing was made by a person with certain intentions and purposes. An artist might design and paint a picture with the intention of bringing happiness (a moral good) to others. It is the artist’s intention that gives the painting moral significance. But the naturalist cannot say that humans are relevantly like paintings.  It does not make sense to say that nature “intended” an animal for something any more than it makes sense to say that a puddle of water was intended to fit in the hole it finds itself. This is because we normally think of teleological properties like being meant for X or being intended for Y as irreducibly mental properties. And the only thing we know that can have intentions or meanings is a mind. However, human beings are not the product of any mind, on naturalism, but of matter and the laws of physics. The same amount of intentional care that went into making puddles fit holes went into making us biologically fit for life; granted, there is more sophistication to the latter, but, on naturalism, the amount of intentional care is the same. That being the case, it stretches language beyond the breaking point to say that, on naturalism, we are intended or meant for anything.

Perhaps this objection can be turned back by means of clarification. What then does Foot mean when she says there is a way humans should be? To get that answer, we first have to know what she means by “human” and, second, what she means by “should.”

In responding, the naturalist faces an immediate difficulty. The naturalist cannot even say “there is a way humans are” without controversy because such a statement presupposes certain views about the nature of the category of species and thus what the term human actually means. Specifically, Foot argues that “human” is a real metaphysical category.[2]  Species in general must refer to real metaphysical categories if Foot’s system is going to work because it is by appeal to these categories that she can say what counts as specifying conditions. If the category of species were only fictional, contingently assigned to living things by human animals, then no meaningful norms can be grounded in them. So then, Foot needs there to be a genuine “human nature” to ground her theory. However, David Hull thinks naturalism cannot provide a way to account for this. Hull argues that in light of the impersonal, atomistic world of naturalism, there is no space for metaphysically robust concepts like “human nature.”[3] He says,

The implications of moving species from the metaphysical category that can appropriately be characterized in terms of "natures" to a category for which such characterizations are inappropriate are extensive and fundamental. If species evolve in anything like the way that Darwin thought they did, then they cannot possibly have the sort of natures that traditional philosophers claimed they did. If species in general lack natures, then so does Homo Sapiens as a biological species. If Homo Sapiens lacks a nature, then no reference to biology can be made to support one's claims about "human nature." Perhaps all people are "persons," share the same "personhood," etc., but such claims must be explicated and defended with no reference to biology. Because so many moral, ethical, and political theories depend on some notion or other of human nature, Darwin's theory brought into question all these theories. The implications are not entailments. One can always dissociate "Homo sapiens" from "human being," but the result is a much less plausible position.[4]

The upshot of this is that even having the term human refer to a class of things which share the same nature will not work on naturalism. Human only refers to a nominal way of grouping animals by their traits. However, by human Foot means a real metaphysical category. The trouble is that there is no way for naturalism to ground that meaning.

This also undermines Foot’s normative concept of “should.” To see why, let us consider what Foot means by the locution “should.” It is worth quoting her at length on this:

What, then, determines the truth of the teleological propositions…? We start from the fact that it is the particular life form of a species of plant or animal that determines how an individual plant or animal should be: the Aristotelian categoricals give the ‘how’ of what happens in the life cycle of that species. And all the truths about what this or that characteristic does, what its purpose or point is, and in suitable cases its function, must be related to this life cycle. The way an individual should be is determined by what is needed for development, self-maintenance, and reproduction: in most species involving defence, and in some the rearing of the young.[5]

Thus, by should Foot means individuals ought to exhibit the features which constitute the ideal for their species. But, the argument above has been that Foot can only consistently use species in a nominal way. Species do not really exist, on such a worldview; therefore, there is nothing to make teleological propositions true. From that it follows that there is no way a thing should be. All that naturalism allows for is descriptions of how things are. There is no such thing as a categorical moral “should.” (There are instrumental shoulds, presumably.)

Objections to Eudaimonia

But for the sake of the argument, let us grant Foot that humans have a telos so that there is a way a human should be and that moral evaluations follow from that. Still, what constitutes the ideal is a complete accident of physics. The ideal is further contingent on some arbitrary selection of a specific moment of time in human evolutionary history. What is ideal now could change in the future and it will change if Darwinism is correct. The result is that what is morally repugnant now may not be in the future. This is the view that Angus Ritchie calls “strong evolutionary ethics.”

The fact that the good is contingent on a species also leads to other puzzles. For example, if we suppose that Star Trek’s Borg were a real species, we could not disagree that their assimilation of other species was good for them as Borg, even if it were bad for us as humans.[6] Or, as Angus Ritchie has pointed out, the good for a cancer cell is in direct conflict with the good for a human. In cases of Borg and cancer, there are contradictory goods. And if the survival of cancer cells isn’t an intrinsically good thing, why is the survival of human beings, on this analysis? The fact that Foot distances herself from utilitarianism makes the challenge all the more pressing.

This at least seems like a problem. Intuitively, we think that the good is a trans-species thing. Part of the problem is that the term “good” is so slippery. In one sense, it is obvious and uncontroversial that if there is such a thing as Borg nature, then there is a good for Borg. But our intuitions about the moral good are such that this good cannot be totally determined by the way a species is. This good is supposed to be objective and necessary. It does not depend on anything, especially accidents of nature. So if the good for Borg or cancer is a real, moral good, it is because it stands in the proper relation to the moral good.  Foot thinks the intuitive problem is due to confusion about what we mean by “the good.”[7] According to her, goodness can only be determined by references to species; there is no good outside of that. However, the Borg and cancer puzzles show that there are real problems with identifying the good with the biology of a species.

Objections to the Role of the Virtues

Another problem with virtue in Foot’s theory arises from the conjunction of the role of the virtues and the implications of her naturalist ontology of human persons for human freedom. Aristotle says virtues are those practices that we “choose indeed for themselves (for if nothing resulted from them we should still choose each of them), but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, judging that by means of them we shall be happy.”[8] Virtues both lead to happiness and constitute it, but they are also intentional practices, chosen for good reasons.  Aristotle’s concept of the virtues presupposes a certain view of human persons, namely that they possess at least the power of rationality and volition.

But is such a view at home in a naturalist worldview? Perhaps not. There have been serious challenges to the naturalist’s ability to have confidence in human reason. For example, Alvin Plantinga has powerfully argued that the conjunction of naturalism and atheistic evolution undermines the possibility that humans actually have reliable cognitive faculties. Evolution, after all, is not aimed at producing reliable ways of knowing, but only survival through replication. But there are also concerns about the naturalist account of volition or human freedom. Mark Linville and Angus Ritchie have given similar arguments more delimited to moral cognition in particular.

One view of human freedom is called libertarianism. On this view, a person has the power to choose between alternatives. If presented with the choice of eating either Lucky Charms or Raisin Bran for breakfast, Susan, by her choice, determines which cereal she will eat. The word determines is important here. The libertarian thinks that humans actually act upon the world; they are the ultimate cause of their own actions. (Source theorists assign primacy to this aspect of free choices—that the agent in question is the source of the action—rather than the ability to do otherwise; on occasion, such as after an individual has formed a good enough character, choosing not to help someone in need might become a practical impossibility, without the agent’s freedom being impaired; a source analysis would make good sense of this.) So if Susan chooses Lucky Charms over Raisin Bran (the only rational choice!), the cause of the choice is Susan herself. However, this view of human freedom is problematic for naturalists precisely because a libertarian free will is generally thought to require an immaterial soul.[9] John Searle says that “our conception of physical reality simply does not allow for radical [libertarian] freedom.”[10] And naturalist John Bishop admits, “Agent causal relations do not belong to the ontology of the natural perspective.”[11]

Instead of thinking as humans as unified, immaterial souls, naturalists tend to hold that humans are (highly complex) collections of atoms and molecules. There is nothing special about the parts that make up humans. The laws of physics that operate in the world operate the same way on the parts a human body. This is why Daniel Dennett says, “according to naturalism, “we can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, and growth.”[12] Susan’s choice of Lucky Charms is determined by the physical interactions of the parts that make her up, and environemental factors functioning deterministically, and not by Susan herself—in the sense that would satisfy most source theorists. In fact, Dennett thinks that though most people imagine they have a libertarian free will, there is no “I” that steers a human; “the little man in the brain” is illusory.[13] Along these same lines, Sam Harris says, “What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, a mystery—one that is fully determined by the prior state of the universe and the laws of nature (including the contributions of chance).”[14]

However, some naturalists think that despite the fact that our actions are determined by physical laws, human freedom still exists. The view that determinism and free will are consistent is called compatibilism. Usually “freedom” is not understood to mean “to exercise volition between two alternatives,” but “to do what one desires.” A free action is still caused, but in the right sort of way. Susan desired Lucky Charms and so she does what she desires to do, even if she could not have done otherwise except in a counterfactual sense. Or, as naturalist Sam Harris puts it, to say one could have done otherwise “is an empty affirmation.”[15]

Now let us return to what Aristotle said about the virtues. He said that a person will practice the virtues because they are judged to be good and to bring about a desired end. This works easily with a libertarian, common sense understanding of free will. But it is more difficult to say that a person practices the virtues because she thought it was a good idea on naturalism. She may indeed think it was a good idea to do, but such thinking plays no causal role in her action. Harris and Dennett think that we tell ourselves a fictional story about why we make the choices we do (I chose to exercise because I think it is good for me), but these are only stories, useful fictions. The real reason has only to do with brain chemistry. Other naturalists speak in terms of reasons as causes, and wish to retain room for what they dub genuine deliberation—but to my thinking this is rather difficult to square with the deterministic implications of a naturalistic world, at least at the macroscopic level. At any rate, onsider what it  means for a virtue ethic if naturalists like Dennett and Harris are right. It follows that persons cannot direct their lives toward a certain end. Instead, they are only directed by nature. Practicing the virtues may be a good thing to do, but we cannot be any more (or less) virtuous than nature has determined us to be. It is also difficult to see how a person could be held deeply culpable for failing to be virtuous or be deeply praised for being virtuous. After all, she could not have done anything besides what she in fact did. Ascriptions of praise and blame, at least intuitively, seem to require that a person could have done otherwise, at least most of the time. Deterrence and rehabilitation are categories that can be explicated on naturalism fairly well, but not anything like retributive justice or giving people their just desserts.

Such reflections do not show that a virtue ethic and naturalism are, in fact, incompatible. However, they raise questions about how comfortable the fit really is. If we want to be virtue ethicists and naturalists, we will have to lower our expectations about what counts as virtuous activity. It cannot be, as Aristotle said, an action chosen by an agent for good reasons that is both a means and end of human flourishing. (Indeed, most naturalists have already abandoned conceptions of formal and final causes so central to Aristotle’s paradigm.) Instead, we must incorporate the compatibilist idea that humans are determined by nature so that they could not do otherwise. Then virtue ethics becomes more about describing what happens to lead to happiness, rather than actually pursuing it. Ethics becomes predominantly descriptive rather than prescriptive. This, to my thinking, seems a rather deflationary kind of ethic. If we want to retain Aristotle’s more robust ethic, we will likely have to adopt a worldview besides naturalism that better explains the role of the virtues.

Conclusion

Earlier I said that for a virtue ethic to be successful it must  explain three facts: (1) that humans have a telos, (2) that achieving the telos is the highest moral good for a human, and (3) that the way to bring about that telos is through the practice of the virtues. In light of the objections raised above, it seems that a virtue ethic requires a set of metaphysical commitments that naturalists do not have the resources to make. Therefore, the NVE is not well grounded. If you want to be an intellectually satisfied virtue ethicist, you should look for a more promising worldview than naturalism.

Notes: 

[1] Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue : A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 69.

[2] Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, 36.

[3] David L. Hull, The Metaphysics of Evolution, Suny Series in Philosophy and Biology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). 73.

[4] Ibid., 75.

[5] Foot, 33.

[6]  Gary Watson expresses a similar objection: “An objective account of human nature would imply, perhaps, that a good human life must be social in character. This implication will disqualify the sociopath but not the Hell's Angel. The contrast is revealing, for we tend to regard the sociopath not as evil but as beyond the pale of morality. On the other hand, if we enrich our conception of sociality to exclude Hell's Angels, the worry is that this conception will no longer ground moral judgment but rather express it.” See Gary Watson, "On the Primacy of Character," in Identity, Character, and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology, ed. Owen Flanagan and Amelie Rorty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 462-3.

[7] Foot, 36.

[8]Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapter 7. W.D.  Ross translation.

[9] J. P. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imgao Dei. 44. There are other, non-theistic ways, of trying to explain how a human can have libertarian freedom. One possibility is pan-psyhcism. On this view, the universe itself has latent mental powers. When put in the right combination, minds occur. Another option is emgergentism. According this view, an entirely new substance emerges from certain physical arrangements. These theories, if true, might allow for libertarian freedom. But, it is not clear that either one deserves the title of “naturalism.” Both are also highly controversial, and for good reasons, such as their relatively obscurantist elements.

[10] John Searle as cited in J. P. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei, 44.

[11] John Bishop as cited in J. P. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei, 46.

[12] Daniel Clement Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1st ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991). 33.

[13] Daniel Clement Dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 30.

[14] Sam Harris, Free Will, 40.

[15] Sam Harris, Free Will, 37.

The Inadequacy of a Naturalistic Virtue Ethic (Part 1 of 2)

Photo by Niko Soikkeli on Unsplash

In this essay, my aim is to show that naturalism does not provide an adequate ground for a virtue ethic. In order to that, I will first say what a virtue ethic is, then how a naturalist might construe a virtue ethic, and finally give some reasons to think such efforts likely fail.

The Features of a Virtue Ethic

Linda Zagzebski provides a concise definition of virtue ethics: “Traditional Aristotelian virtue ethics makes the concept of virtue dependent upon the more basic concept of eudaimonia – happiness or flourishing. Eudaimonia is in turn dependent upon the idea of human nature, understood as teleological.”[1] This definition can be broken down into three essential parts: teleology, eudaimonia, and the virtues.[2] If these parts are essential to a virtue ethic, then any theory claiming to be a virtue ethic must account for all three of these.

In order to account for the telos of human nature, a theory must say how it is that humans have genuine purpose.

When Aristotle uses eudaimonia he has in mind the ideal or best kind of life possible for a thing. Aristotle thought of eudaimonia as the chief end of man, the good under which all other goods are subsumed. Theories of virtue connect eudaimonia with the human telos so that living up to one’s telos counts as the highest good possible for a human.  Thus, an adequate virtue ethic must say how achieving the human telos, if there is one, counts as good for humans.

A virtue is a means of achieving one’s end, but it is simultaneously bound up in the end itself. By practicing a virtue, a person both helps to bring about eudaimonia and participates in it. If the ideal for humans includes compassion, then by being compassionate we ought to bring ourselves closer to the human ideal. If compassion does not have this means/ends relation to eudaimonia, it does not count as a virtuous activity.

Here is the upshot:  if virtue ethics is correct, then there are at least three facts in need of explanation: (1) that humans have a telos, (2) that achieving the telos is the highest moral good for a human, and (3) that the way to bring about that telos is through the practice of the virtues.

Naturalistic Virtue Ethics (NVE)

The next move is to consider what the naturalist has to say about these facts.

The first issue is whether naturalism allows for teleology in a human. For a thing to have a telos, it must be designed or intended for something. Typically, we think that if something is designed or intended, it was made by a person. That is because in commonsense language these terms imply someone with a mind who does the designing and intending.  This is why Richard Dawkins emphasizes that life has merely the appearance of design.[3] This fact alone might seem to prevent naturalists from assigning a telos to humans since no person designed humans. However, as Colin Allen points out, some naturalists think that Darwinian evolution provides a way for naturalists to talk about genuine “design” without reference to a personal designer.[4] The thought is that nature through the process of evolution really does design life. (Angus Ritchie refers to naturalistic evolution as “quasi-teleological.”)

Through the slow grind of evolution, nature settles (at least for a time) on certain designs or life-forms. Naturalist virtue ethicists invoke the concept of a “species” at this point.[5] A chimpanzee is a species that has a certain suite of natural abilities and characteristics endowed by eons of adaptations. These abilities, like the ability to see, are the result of a series of biological processes. When the processes operate as they should, a healthy chimp will be able to exercise all these abilities without defect. Foot puts it this way: “We start from the fact that it is the particular life form of a species of plant or animal that determines how an individual plant or animal should be.”[6] The should is defined by reference to kind or species which counts as the norm.  A hammer is a kind of thing that normally drives nails. Defective hammers break when driving a nail, or otherwise fail to perform its normative function. Defective chimps cannot see. This account takes the designation “chimpanzee” to refer to a real, in some sense normative, category; species carry with them normative constraints and implications. The result, as Thompson puts it, is that living things can be judged as “defective or sound, good or bad, well-working or ill-working, by reference to its bearer’s life-form or kind or species.”[7]

However, granting that Foot and the other proponents of a NVE are correct about teleology only gets them so far. Thompson admits that teleology by itself has no moral qualities.[8] A wrench is for turning bolts, but that does not mean when wrenches turn bolts there is any moral goodness around. So we must have a reason for thinking that the teleology in a human person actually is able to ground the good.

Foot’s first step is to point out that humans have a unique faculty that other animals do not: the will.  The will is a function of being human in the same way sight or hearing is. With a will, humans are able to act from intentions; this makes humans uniquely moral animals. This allows Foot to make evaluative judgments about the will of an individual: “Similarly, it is obvious that there are objective, factual evaluations of such things as human sight, hearing, memory, and concentration, based on the life form of our own species. Why, then, does it seem so monstrous a suggestion that the evaluation of the human will should be determined by facts about the nature of human beings and the life of our own species?”[9]A human’s choice to murder is a bad choice because it does not conform to the norm for humans. Conversely, good choices are those that correspond to the norm.

But this does not yet get us to explanation of the moral good for humans. In order to get at that explanation, Foot makes a distinction between different kinds of evaluations. There are different kinds of evaluations we can make about living things. “This kangaroo is defective because it has too few legs” is one kind of evaluation. But we can also evaluate the choices of human beings. “Harry’s choice to steal from his mom was bad” is another kind of evaluation. The reason Harry’s choice was bad was because it did not conform to the norm for a human.  Foot thinks that bad here also has a moral sense because it is an evaluation of Harry’s voluntary choice.[10] In other words, what makes the evaluation a moral one is just that it is an evaluation of Harry’s willful action.

However, we still want to know the substance of the good for humans. Foot’s first step in making the connection between bare teleology and the moral good for humans is to show that the norm for human beings includes a complex psychology and robust social interactions. Foot thinks that “human beings need the mental capacity for learning language; they also need powers of imagination that allow them to understand stories, to join in songs and dances—and to laugh at jokes. Without such things human beings may survive and reproduce themselves, but they are deprived.”[11] Foot adds that it “matters in a human community that people can trust each other, and matters even more that at some basic level humans should have mutual respect.”[12] The reason these things matter is because they contribute to the success of a human being as a human being. So the human good consists of a certain desired state of mind and community.

With the substance of the human good fleshed out, Foot can now give an account of the virtues. For Foot, an act is virtuous when it is rationally and successfully performed in light of one’s humanness. To be virtuous is to be an ideal human. So virtues like “justice” and “compassion” are morally good because they are constitutive of the natural norm for human beings. They generate the right state of mind and community.

In light of this, we can see how Foot accounts for the facts of virtue ethics. Humans have a telos because they are members of a species that has certain norms. Foot’s ethic is eudaimonist because living successfully as a human counts as the highest possible good for humans. And the virtues play the right structural role. But is this a successful account?

Tomorrow I will offer objections to a naturalistic account of virtue.

Notes: 

[1] Linda Zagzebski, “The Incarnation of Jesus and Virtue Ethics,” in The Incarnation, ed. Davis, Kendall, and Collins (New York: Oxford, 2002), 326.

[2] Katva uses a similar taxonomy: “Virtue ethics has then a tripartite structure: (1) human-nature-as-it-exists; (2) human-nature-as-it-could-be; and (3) those habits, capacities, interests, inclinations, precepts, injunctions, and prohibitions that will move us from point one to point two.”  Kindle location 576.

[3] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker : Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: Norton, 1996). 21.

[4] The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2009), s.v. "Teleological Notions in Biology."

[5]See Michael Thompson, "The Representation of Life," in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory : Essays in Honour of Philippa Foot, ed. Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn(1998). 27. See also Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 219. And Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 24.

[6] Foot. 33.

[7] Thompson. 29

[8] Michael Thompson, "Three Degrees of Natural Goodness (Discussion Note) " Iride, (2003). 2.

[9] Foot. 24.

[10] See ibid. 71.

[11] Ibid. 43.

[12] ibid. 48.

Photo: "Many Species. One Planet. One Future." By N. Jois. CC License. 

Podcast: David Baggett on Four Ways God Best Explains Morality

On this week’s episode, we have a lecture by David Baggett entitled, “Four Ways God Best Explains Morality.” Dr. Baggett begins by assuming the position of moral realism, the idea that there are various moral facts in need of explanation: moral values, moral obligations, moral knowledge, the convergence of virtue and happiness, and the reality of moral transformation. He then explains why theism generally and Christian theism particularly provides a better explanation of these facts than does naturalism.

Photo: "God is Love" by C. Clegg. CC license. 

Mark Linville’s Argument from Evolutionary Naturalism, Part IV

Darwinian counterfactuals, ethical nonnaturalism, and theism

The nonnaturalist has a ready reply to the argument from Darwinian counterfactuals. For he might wish to maintain that certain natural properties bear a necessary relation to the moral properties that they exemplify, regardless of any evolutionary possibilities. But nonnaturalists who are also metaphysical naturalists seem to have problems of their own in the face of such Darwinian counterfactuals. How is it that unguided human evolution on earth has resulted in just those moral beliefs that accord with moral verities? As Gould has argued, everything about us, even our very existence, is radically contingent. If we were to rewind the reel, it’s highly unlikely evolution would again attempt the experiment called Homo sapiens. The Dependence Thesis in the hands of the nonnaturalist seems highly improbable. A sort of moral fine tuning argument is suggested. The theist may have an advantage just here. For, on theism, as Santayana put it, the Good is also nature’s Creator.

The theist, like the nonnaturalist, is in a position to say why there is a necessary connection between certain natural properties and their supervenient moral properties. Adams, for example, suggests theistic Platonism, so can account for why nobody could exhibit Hitler’s qualities without being depraved and an affront to God’s nature. But the theist also has an account of the development of human moral faculties—a theistic genealogy of morals—that allows for something akin to Street’s “tracking relation”: we have the basic moral beliefs we do because they are true, and this is because the mechanisms responsible for those moral beliefs are truth-aimed. The theist is thus in a position to explain the general reliability of those considered judgments from which reflective equilibrium takes its cue. Certain of our moral beliefs—in particular, those that are presupposed in all moral reflection—are truth-aimed because human moral faculties are designed to guide human conduct in light of moral truth.

Humean skepticism or Reidean externalism?

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Linville reads Hume as a skeptic across the board, not just in ethics. His ethical views were part of a seamless whole that includes his discussion of the beliefs of common life. In each discussion—causality, substance, personal identity—he aims to show both that the belief in question is without any epistemic credentials and that relevant human propensities explain the belief without making any assumptions about the truth of the belief. From a Humean perspective, we lack positive reasons to accept either the dependence or independence thesis. His is a variety of epistemological moral skepticism, so it resembles AEN.

Reid countered Hume by common sense. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher but casting out a devil, as Chesterton put it. There is no set of premises more certainly known from which such beliefs follow. Hume is right: the beliefs of common life are not endorsed by reason, but, instead, are the inevitable by-products of our constitution. But Hume is mistaken in inferring from this that such beliefs are, therefore, without warrant. Why, after all, trust the rational faculties to which Hume appeals, but not trust the faculties responsible for our commonsense beliefs? Both come from the same shop, and Reid thought the shop was God’s creation.

Reid thought the commonsense beliefs that arise spontaneously and noninferentially given our constitution are warranted even though they fail to measure up to the exacting standards of epistemic justification assumed by foundationalists after the Cartesian fashion. These days we say such beliefs are properly basic. A belief is properly basic just in case the faculty through which it is acquired is functioning as it ought. Plantinga puts it this way: a belief is warranted just in case it is the product of a belief-producing mechanism that is truth-aimed and functioning properly in the environment for which it was designed. This account accommodates those perceptual, memorial, testimonial, and even metaphysical beliefs that are the guides of common life and, closer to our purposes, are among the fund of native beliefs with which we begin in theory assessment. Even closer to our purposes, such an account accommodates those moral beliefs employed in reflective equilibrium.

Reid appealed to a set of “first, or ‘self-evident’ principles” of morality discerned through faculties that he thought were wrought in the same shop as reason and perception. Just as there is no reasoning with the man who, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, is convinced that his head is a gourd, neither is there advantage in engaging in moral argument with a man who fails to recognize self-evident principles of morality.

There are moral principles to which we should “pay homage,” as Norman Daniels puts it. We pay such homage when we utilize them as data for the construction of moral theories or as a kind of court of appeal in assessing them. But our confidence in these constitutional beliefs is wisely invested only in the event that we have reason to believe the faculties responsible for them to be truth-aimed. Reid’s theism provided him with such a reason; the moral faculties were forged in the same shop as our other cognitive faculties. They are designed by God for the purpose of discerning moral truth. “That conscience which is in every man’s breast, is the law of God written in his heart, which he cannot disobey without acting unnaturally, and being self-condemned.”

Mark Linville’s Argument from Evolutionary Naturalism, Part III

Epistemological arguments and the Dependence Thesis

Linville has been arguing that AEN provides an epistemological argument for moral skepticism, to show that our moral beliefs lack warrant because the mechanisms responsible for our moral beliefs appear to be fitness-aimed, rather than truth-aimed. If our best theory of why people believe P doesn’t require that P is true, then we lack good grounds to believe P is true. This much resembles an argument by Gilbert Harman.

Harman’s so-called “problem with ethics” is that moral facts, if such there are, appear to be explanatorily irrelevant in a way that natural facts are not. According to Harman, we need not suppose that over and above such natural facts about Hitler as his monomania and anti-Semitism there is a moral fact of Hitler’s depravity. Nor must we appeal to his actual depravity in order to explain our belief that he was depraved. Harman may thus be viewed as arguing in his own manner that we have no reason to believe that the best explanation for our moral beliefs involves their truth. We have no good reason to think that the causes of those beliefs are dependent on whatever would make them true.

Sturgeon has replied first by noting that moral facts are commonly and plausibly thought to have explanatory relevance. Both Hitler’s behavior and our belief that he was depraved are handily explained by his actual depravity, and this is in fact the default explanation. Sturgeon follows the method of reflective equilibrium, a method employed in both science and ethics, which begins with certain considered judgments, and with the assumption that our theories, scientific and otherwise, are roughly correct, then moves dialectically in this way between plausible general theses and plausible views about cases, seeking a reflective equilibrium. Sturgeon notes that, whereas he allows for the inclusion of moral beliefs among the initial set, Harman does not. But he argues there’s no non-question-begging justification for singling out moral beliefs as unwelcome in the initial set while allowing those of a scientific or commonsense nature.

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Sturgeon’s approach invokes the supervenience of moral properties on natural properties. On standard accounts, if some moral property M supervenes on some natural property (or, more likely, some set of natural properties) N, then it is impossible for N to be instantiated unless M is also instantiated. In all worlds in which Hitler believes and acts as he did, his depravity would supervene on such properties and be instantiated; he couldn’t have had those properties without being depraved. Harman, by denying this, tacitly assumes there are no moral facts or properties, which is of course the point at issue.

Sturgeon’s appeal to reflective equilibrium is crucial in his reply to Harman. Brink goes to some length to argue that Harman fails to demonstrate any explanatory disanalogy between the scientific and moral cases. Linville finds Sturgeon’s reply successful. Sorley once said the true beginning of metaphysics lies in ethics. He thought that holding off on ethics until the task of worldview construction was complete would result in an artificially truncated worldview, and that moral ideas would be given short shrift. The exclusion of moral experience seemed arbitrary. Harman seems to be following in the tradition Sorley criticized. Harman’s results are achieved only by begging the question against the moral realist.

But even Sorley would in principle admit that the initial “ethical data” must prove to be compatible with everything else that is included in our final interpretation of reality. In fact, the same year Sorley delivered the Gifford Lectures, George Santayana published Winds of Doctrine, in which he complained that Bertrand Russell’s then-held moral realism was the result of Russell’s “monocular” vision. Santayana said Russell didn’t look and see that our moral bias is conditioned and has its basis in the physical order of things. Eventually Russell abandoned his moral realism, crediting these very arguments. AEN suggests following Santayana’s advice, and bearing in mind Sharon Street’s worry: “If the fund of exhaustive judgments with which human reflection was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate influence…then the tools of rational reflection were equally contaminated, for the latter is always just a subset of the former.” What we require is some assurance that our original fund is not contaminated. So, what reason have we for supposing that the mechanisms responsible for those judgments are truth-aimed, that the Dependence Thesis is true?

Santayana suggested that if God exists and has fashioned the human constitution with the purpose of discerning moral truth, then we have reason to embrace the Dependence Thesis. But neither Russell nor Santayana was a theist. Moral realists need to give an account of moral beliefs that would lead us to suppose that they are reliable indicators of truth. Quine offers such a story with a Darwinian spin to inspire confidence in our ability to acquire knowledge of the world around us. Natural selection is unkind to those whose behaviors stem from either false beliefs or profound stupidity. We should expect our cognitive faculties to be truth-aimed and generally reliable given such selection pressures.

Plantinga has challenged such stories with what he calls “Darwin’s Doubt.” The connection between fitness-conferring behavior and true belief might not be so certain as Quine suggests. If Plantinga is correct, then evolutionary naturalism is saddled with a far-ranging skepticism that takes in much more than our moral beliefs. Despite Plantinga’s many ingenious examples in which adaptive behavior results from false beliefs, many people just find the link between true belief and adaptive behavior plausible. And in any event the moral and nonmoral cases appear to be significantly different.

The core of Street’s paper is her “Darwinian Dilemma” she poses to value realists like Sturgeon. Our moral beliefs are fitness-aimed. Are they also truth-aimed? Either there is a fitness-truth relation or there is not. If not, and evolution has shaped our basic evaluative attitudes, moral skepticism is in order. If there is a relation, then it is either that moral beliefs have reproductive fitness because they are true (the “tracking” relation), or we have the moral beliefs that we have simply because of the fitness that they have conferred (the “adaptive” link account). Adaptive link leads to constructivism. The moral realist needs a tracking account, but Street thinks fitness following mind-independent moral truths is implausible. A tracking account of paternal instincts would have to say more than that the behavior tends toward DNA preservation—something like the instincts were favored because it’s independently true that parents ought to care for their offspring. Nonnaturalists have the worst deal in light of the causal inertness of moral properties on their view. Ethical naturalists have a better time at it, but why not just eschew realism and go with an adaptive account?

A dilemma similar to that urged by Street comes from another consideration of Darwinian counterfactuals. Sturgeon thinks moral terms rigidly designate natural properties. If justice picks out some natural property or properties, we might expect an ethical naturalist to conclude that moral judgments if true are true in all possible worlds. But Linville writes that to insist that our moral terms rigidly designate specific earthly natural properties to which human sentiments have come to be attached appears to be an instance of what Judith Thomason has called metaphysical imperialism.

Sturgeon dialogued with Gibbard, who argued for expressivism. Sturgeon’s reply is that perhaps our ancestors called bargaining outcomes just because they really were. But is this so? The bargaining situation Gibbard had envisioned involved a cast of characters who were self-interested individualists. In such a situation, there was pressure in the direction of equitable arrangements. But imagine a different set of initial conditions—like lupine bargainers. If justice supervenes on certain natural facts, these will essentially include facts about the psychological constitution of the respective bargainers. It seems to Linville that the most plausible explanation is that such counterfactual moral beliefs are formed as the result of selection pressures that are themselves in place due to the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape—contingencies that are morally indifferent. While ethical naturalists in those worlds no doubt argue for the supervenience of the moral on the natural, the efficacy of moral explanations, and the existence of corresponding moral facts, we should, Linville thinks, regard them as mistaken. If the moral beliefs of the actual world have also taken their cue from predispositions that were fitness-conferring, then it is hard to see why our own ethical naturalists are in any better position so to argue.

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Mailbag: On the Morality of God's Judgments in Ezekiel

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From the Mailbag: Dr. Baggett, I've read your co-[written] book with Dr. Walls on the moral argument and have found it to be very helpful for solidifying my belief in God. I understand that by definition, we should trust our moral intuitions and due to that, we can rule out portraits of God that violate those baseline intuitions (e.g. God commanding rape). I see possible and probable interpretations of the genocide texts via Paul Copan that leave my moral intuitions intact, but I'm not sure how this would work for other texts. Consider Ezekiel 5:10 and 26:8. It seems there that God's direct punishment leads to cannibalism of children and the killing of young daughters (ESV). As the parent of three young girls I can't square this with my basic moral intuitions. How would you recommend proceeding?

By the way, thanks so much for your work. I understand if you're not able to answer this due to time restrictions. If you don't have time, do you mind pointing me in a fruitful direction?

Keith Brooks

Thanks for the question, Keith! For illumination on these matters I turned to my colleague, Old Testament professor Dr. Gary Yates. Here’s his reply:

These are direct punishments from God, but the OT prophets do distinguish between God using these enemy armies to carry out his judgments and the culpability these nations have for the moral atrocities they commit when carrying out these judgments. We can see this in Isaiah 10:5-15, where Assyria is the “rod of Yahweh’s anger,” but the intent of the Assyrians is not to carry out God’s intentions or to act in the kinds of humane ways that God demands. The intent of the Assyrians is to “destroy” (10:7) and to usurp God’s sovereignty (10:15). We see the same thing in Jeremiah’s oracle against Babylon in Jeremiah 50-51. The Lord uses Babylon as his “hammer” to strike the earth, but the Babylonians were actually only carrying out the evil intentions of their own hearts (Jer 50:11, 29, 33). The Lord uses the evil actions of the Assyrian and Babylonian armies to accomplish his purposes, but he does not compel them to perform their evil actions. They do them of their own accord and out of their own sinful and corrupt motivations. The prophets always make the case that the Lord will temporarily use these nations to judge Israel but then he would then hold them accountable for their crimes (see also Jer 25)—could he really do this if he had simply compelled them to kill, rape, and pillage? The atrocities of siege, starvation, cannibalism, and military defeat are highlighted in the prophets for two reasons—1) the Lord was motivating repentance by showing the people how terrible the judgment would be if they refused to repent; and 2) these were the specific covenant curses that the Lord had warned would come against Israel if they were not faithful to the covenant he had made with them as his chosen people (cf. Lev 26; Deut 28).

Two other points to consider that might help here. In Genesis 9, God establishes the Noahic covenant with all humanity which calls for severe punishment on those who shed blood (Gen 9:5-6). Isaiah 24:1-5 teaches that God will judge the world for violating the “everlasting covenant” (24:5). Since this covenant is with all nations, and since there is reference to bloodshed in Isaiah 26:21, the covenant in view here is the Noahic covenant. God will judge all nations for their violence and bloodshed in the final judgment. Passages like Amos 1-2; Habakkuk 2; and Nahum 3 also indicate that God’s judgment of nations (like Babylon and Assyria) is based on the fact that they have committed crimes that involved bloodshed against other nations and peoples. If God is directly responsible for the bloodshed and other acts of violence, then he is directly violating his own covenant.

The other point is that OT law expressly forbade Israel from practicing the kinds of atrocities against non-combatants that we are talking about here. When waging war outside of the land, they were not to kill non-combatants (Deut 20). They were given explicit instructions as to what to do with female prisoners of war that they wished to take as wives, and observance of these guidelines would have protected against wanton rape and abuse of females (Deut 21:10-13). God’s concern for widows and orphans reflects his concern for the oppressed. When we see Israel taking female captives for sexual purposes at the end of Judges (from their own people), the point there is that the Israelites are acting more like Canaanites than the kind of people that God designed them to be. In sum, we have to look at passages like these from Ezekiel 5 and 10 that you have pointed out in light of the whole canon and in light of the explicit moral commands and structures that God has put in place. I hope this helps.

Dr. Gary Yates

Photo: "Mailbox" by J. Rozler.  CC License. 

Podcast: Dr. Brian Scalise on the Doctrine of God and the Ethics of Love in Islam and Christianity

This week on the podcast, we are continuing a discussion with Dr. Brian Scalise. Dr. Scalise has written his dissertation on the different views of God in Christianity and Islam. Important differences for our view of love and ethics follow from the different views of God in each religion. When we build a worldview from the notion that God is absolutely one with no distinction, as in Islam, we get a deficient ethic and view of love. The Christian trinity, on the other hand, provides a robust foundation for a substantive morality and understanding of love. Since God is one nature with three persons, it turns out that God essentially loves others. And it is this key difference that we will be exploring this week. Dr. Scalise will help us see the implications of this difference by pointing out that the highest command in Christianity is to love the Lord while, in Islam, the highest command is to submit to Allah. We’ll also touch briefly on Islam and the Euthyphro Dilemma. Photo: "Islam" by E. Musiak. CC License.

Mark Linville’s Argument from Evolutionary Naturalism, Part II

AEN and “greedy reductionism”

The first premise (if EN is true, then human morality is a by-product of natural selection) is widely rejected. Plenty suggest that the sociobiological assumptions of an argument such as AEN have been “widely discredited,” guilty of a “greedy reductionism.” Some ideas are just better than others. The point applies forcefully in our assessment of AEN. The argument, as stated, seems to assume that our “moral beliefs” have an evolutionary explanation. We have various moral beliefs, but it’s implausible to think that any fairly determinate belief has somehow been fashioned at the genetic level and then lodged, intact, within the human brain. Further, do all of these traits find their explanation in the selection pressures that were at work when we came down from the trees? Isn’t it possible that certain moral beliefs are widespread because they simply make sense? Our evolution may have provided us with the intellectual tools needed for building cathedrals, playing chess, and drawing up social contracts, but might not these activities be more or less autonomous as far as the genes are concerned?

Perhaps greedy reductionism is an extreme to avoid, but Linville suggests another extreme to avoid is the idea that natural selection has had nothing to do with the distribution of widespread moral beliefs. To appeal to natural selection to explain incisors and libidos but to exclude the deepest springs of human behavior from such an account would seem rather a tenuous position to hold. Moral behavior is not the sort of thing likely to be overlooked by natural selection because of the important role that it plays in survival and reproductive success. The notion we’re born entirely a blank slate, completely malleable, seems wrong—and tantamount to denying any validity to evolutionary psychology.

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If instincts refer to basic predispositions, drives, or programs, then humans have instincts, but the more interesting of these are, by and large, “open instincts” or “programs with a gap.” The gap, where it exists, leaves it to the intelligence—rational reflection and culture in general in the case of humans—of the individual or the species to fill in the details. Migratory waterfowl come equipped with a basic drive to follow the sun south in the winter, but the programming itself need not specify the details of the itinerary. The development of ethical precepts of which Kitcher speaks may well be the result of careful deliberation and rational reflection, but perhaps these are in response to proclivities that come with our programming.

Sharon Street distinguishes between basic evaluative tendencies and full-fledged evaluative judgments. The latter include our specific moral beliefs that might be formulated as moral principles or rules, and they may be explained by appeal to a variety of influences, cultural and otherwise. The former are “proto” forms of evaluative judgment that are unreflective and nonlinguistic impulses towards certain behaviors that seem “called for.” She argues that “relentless selection pressures” have had a direct and “tremendous” influence on our basic evaluative tendencies and these, in turn, have had a major, but not necessarily overriding, indirect effect on our actual moral beliefs or full-fledged evaluative judgments.

If such programming and predispositions provide our basic moral orientation, then it is within their scaffolds that all moral reflection takes place. Our reflective beliefs about the duties of parenthood or of friendship, for instance, arise from more basic parental and altruistic drives that predate and are presupposed by all such reflection. While this evolutionary account provides a role for reason, that reason is in effect, to borrow from Hume, the slave of the passions. Those passions, Street’s basic evaluative tendencies, are almost certainly not cultural artifacts.

Human culture is responsible for great accomplishments that assuredly are not the direct product of our evolution. And these may well include complex systems of moral precepts. Perhaps human social contracts are good tricks in that they solve problems posed by some combination of genetics plus environment plus intelligence. Rationality is employed, but it is an instrumental rationality.

Linville is now in a position to revise his claim in the first premise. Human morality is a product of natural selection in that a fundamental moral orientation—Street’s basic evaluative tendencies and Midgley’s “programming”—is in place because it was adaptive for our ancestors given the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape. The program provides general directives or tendencies. The gap allows room for rational reflection regarding our moral beliefs, but their very rationality is conditional or hypothetical: given the program that has been bequeathed to us by our genes, some policies are better than others. The program itself is precisely as it is due to its adaptive value given the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape. However big the gap, it’s found within the scope of our programming that is directly explained by appeal to natural selection. Moral reasoning would then appear to be means-end reasoning, where the ends have been laid down for us by natural selection.

So, counterfactually, had the programming been relevantly different, so would the range of intelligent choices. There may be some forced moves through evolutionary design space, but Darwin did not think that any determinate set of moral precepts or dictates of conscience was among them. Darwin says, for example, if we’d been raised in the same conditions as hive bees, our unmarried females would think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and nobody would think of interfering. Here we’re being asked to imagine a world in which our fundamental moral orientation (Midgley’s open instincts) is different. Darwin appears to countenance the possibility of a species that is prompted, even on reflection, to behave in ways that are inequitable and, from our standpoint, unjust. If rational and moral reflection takes its cue from a more primitive predisposition, then have we any reason for supposing that such reflection, the product of culture, would inevitably settle on equitable treatment?

If humans as a species have come to regard equitable arrangements as fair or just, then perhaps this is only because their initial programming was wired as it was given the circumstances of human evolution. We have the actual moral orientation that we do because it was adaptive. Had the circumstances been different, some other set would have conferred fitness. Is there any plausible reason to suppose that such a moral orientation is adaptive because its resultant moral beliefs are true?

Of course, Linville writes, one might reply to this line of argument by insisting that a wedge be driven between Street’s “basic evaluative tendencies” and her “full-fledged moral judgments.” Following Dennett and others, might we not suggest that, with the advent of culture it became possible for us to “snap” Wilson’s “genetic leash” and strike out on our own? Perhaps, then, morality is autonomous, engaging in reflection that is independent of the drives of human nature.

Linville thinks such a reply implausible. Our considered judgments regarding various duties and the like find their wellspring in our psychology, which appears to be what it is because of the circumstances of evolution in each case. So Linville thinks there’s reason to accept the first premise of AEN. This leaves us with whether or not there’s any reason to suppose that there is a relevant dependence relation between the processes of belief formation and the would-be truth makers for such beliefs. To sharpen the question: Is there reason to suppose that the belief-producing mechanisms of our moral beliefs are truth-aimed? Is there a plausible defense of the Dependence Thesis available to the naturalist?

Mark Linville’s Argument from Evolutionary Naturalism, Part I

Nietzsche had the insight that those, like George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), who think they can have morality and moral duty without a religious foundation are deluded. “They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality.” Nietzsche thought there are no moral facts, precisely because there are no theological ones. The moral argument takes Nietzsche’s assertion as one of its premises: if there is no God, then there are altogether no moral facts. But contra Nietzsche it also urges that we have, in our moral experience, good reason to suppose that there are indeed moral facts.

Such arguments come in numerous forms—without a lawgiver there’s no moral law, prudential considerations, requirements of moral knowledge—but Kant’s is one of the more sophisticated: If there’s no God, then the moral law makes objective demands that are not possibly met, namely, that the moral good of virtue and the natural good of happiness embrace and become perfect in a “highest good.” But then the demands appear to be empty, and in the face of such an antinomy, we might come to think of moral requirements as null and void. For Kant, though God is not the author of the moral law, he is required as a sort of Director of the screenplay. If death is the end, he also argued morality wouldn’t seem to matter as much as it should.

Linville’s argument will instead focus on this: theists can, where naturalists can’t, offer a framework on which our moral beliefs may be presumed to be warranted. In particular, the naturalist’s commitment to a Darwinian explanation of certain salient features of human psychology presents an undercutting defeater for our moral beliefs taken as a whole. This argument is thus chiefly epistemological in nature, and seldom strays from the discipline of metaethics.

Wilson and Ruse have suggested ethics to be an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes in order to get us to cooperate. The pressures of natural selection, on their view, have had an enormous influence on human psychology, including the hardwiring of epigenetic rules, widely distributed propensities to believe and behave in certain ways, which have developed through the interaction of human genetics and human culture. Such rules give us a sense of obligation because of their adaptive value, not because they detect any actual moral obligations. Objectivity in morality is illusory, a useful fiction. Ruse thinks Darwin’s theory complements Hume’s subjectivism.

On Hume’s view, belief in objective moral properties is at best unwarranted, and talk of them is in fact meaningless. The only fact of the matter we find in moral judgments is an object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in ourselves. The mind, as Hume put it, has “a great propensity to spread itself on external objects,” so that the subjective feelings that, given our constitution, result from such contemplation of some act, are mistaken for perceptions of objective properties of the act itself.

Let’s call the combination of naturalism and an overall Darwinian account of the origin of the species evolutionary naturalism (EN); according, then, to one like C. S. Lewis, on EN, the dictates of conscience are little more than an aggregate of subjective impulses which, although distributed widely throughout the species, are no more capable of being true or false than a vomit or a yawn.

An argument—call it the argument from evolutionary naturalism (AEN)—thus emerges from such considerations:

1. If EN is true, then human morality is a by-product of natural selection.
2. If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, then there are no objective moral facts.
3. There are objective moral facts.
4. So, EN is false.

This isn’t an argument for God, but for the falsity of EN. Also, naturalism doesn’t entail Darwinism, but Darwinism seems to be the only game in town. Linville’s primary focus will be to consider objections to the first two premises. He realizes there are plenty of anti-realists out there, but wishes to focus on realists who try to ground their realism in EN. One might object to the first premise by denying that natural selection is solely or even partly responsible for the emergence of human morality. And the second premise might be accused of a common fallacy by moving so quickly from an account of the origins of human morality to the assertion that its claims to objectivity are false. What might the evolutionary naturalist say about the possible connections between the workings of natural selection and the truth of our moral beliefs?

AEN and the genetic fallacy

The second premise initially appears to be guilty of the genetic fallacy; identifying the source of a belief is generally not evidence of its falsity. But sometimes identifying the origins of a belief is relevant to a consideration of its truth, as in cases where it can be shown that the explanation of someone’s belief is epistemically independent of whatever would make the belief true. (Like forming a belief about the number of people in a room by a random drawing.)

Might we offer a similar evolutionary argument for moral skepticism? Sober suggests it’s a tall order because we’d have to identify the processes of moral belief formation and the would-be truth-makers for moral beliefs, and then show such processes and truth-makers to be independent. Call this the Independence Thesis.

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Of course the Independence Thesis doesn’t entail that morality is an illusion, but merely that our moral beliefs are probably false. But we need not argue for the falseness or probable falseness of our moral beliefs. Nor is it necessary to argue for the truth of the Independence Thesis. It is one thing to suggest that there are positive reasons for asserting epistemic independence, and quite another to say we lack any reason for thinking that a relevant dependence relation obtains. We would have a reason for thinking there is such a relation just in case the best explanation for a person’s having a given belief essentially involves the truth of that belief. It seems that a plausible Darwinian yarn may be spun in such a way as to offer a complete and exhaustive explanation of our various moral beliefs without ever supposing that any of them are true.

It was no background assumption of the evolutionary explanation of our moral beliefs that any actual moral rightness or wrongness existed in the ancestral environment. When we look at the animals, we explain their behavior and the impulse toward their behavior by appeal to adaptiveness. Moral properties are not included in the cast of characters. On a Darwinian story, conscience is what arises in a social creature once the social instincts are overlain with a sufficient degree of rationality.

Arguably, given an evolutionary account of human moral beliefs, there is no reason for thinking that a relation of epistemic dependence obtains, and so, given an evolutionary account, belief in moral facts is unwarranted. If our moral beliefs are without warrant, then they do not amount to moral knowledge. Linville thus modifies (2) in AEN to

(2*): If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, then there is no moral knowledge.

An evolutionary account serves to undercut whatever warrant we might have had for our moral beliefs, and if they lack warrant, they are not items of knowledge.

Wilson and Ruse think Darwinism poses a rebutting defeater for our moral beliefs, as well as for moral realism itself. Linville instead thinks the proponent of AEN might back off from the stronger claim that Darwinism entails that there are no moral facts, speaking instead of whether we are warranted in our ordinary moral beliefs. In this way AEN becomes an epistemological argument for moral skepticism. As Richard Joyce observes, the conclusion that our moral beliefs are “unjustified” is “almost as disturbing a result” as an argument for the actual falseness of those beliefs.

On the suggestion that Darwinism presents us with an undercutting defeater for moral beliefs, (3) becomes

(3*): There is moral knowledge,

and this takes us to the conclusion that

(4) EN is false.

What we lack is some reason for thinking that the adaptiveness of a moral belief depends in any way on its being true. Linville turns the tables on Sober. Instead of Sober’s suggestion that the AEN defender must show that moral beliefs are independent of any truth-makers, perhaps the onus is on those who assert dependence. Why, given EN, should we suppose the world to include anything more than natural facts and properties and our subjective reactions to those properties?

Photo: "Charles Darwin" by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE. CC License. 

Did God Really Command Genocide? By Paul Copan and Matthew Flanagan: An Overview

For Christians who take the scriptures seriously, perhaps no other passages are as difficult to explain as those in which God commands the destruction of entire populations of innocent persons.  We are told, for example, in Joshua 10:40, “Thus Joshua struck all the land, the hill country and the Negev and the lowland and the slopes and all their kings. He left no survivor, but he utterly destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.”[1]  I Samuel 15:2-3 reads, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he set himself against him on the way while he was coming up from Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”  In addition there are the imprecatory psalms such as Psalm 137 in which we read, “O daughter of Babylon, you devastated one, How blessed will be the one who repays you with the recompense with which you have repaid us. How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones against the rock” (vs. 8-9).  Certainly such passages are difficult to read, much less to explain

In recent years these passages, located primarily in the conquest narratives of the Old Testament, have become fodder for a host of critics of Christianity.  For example, atheist Richard Dawkins refers to the God of the Old Testament as “a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser,”[2] among other charges. Similar charges have been made by other critics and atheist philosophers such as Raymond Bradley, Wesley Moriston, Randal Rauser, Michael Tooley, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.  All of these authors wonder how Christians can worship a God who would cruelly and brutally reign down death and destruction on the innocent, extinguishing entire civilizations.

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Christian apologists Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan (hereafter C&F) have taken up the challenge of explaining these difficult passages in their new book Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the Justice of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2014).  This is not new territory for either of them.  Paul Copan has written several articles and an earlier book, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2011), and Matt Flanagan has presented papers at numerous conferences on topics in Christian ethics. In the posts that follow I am going to offer a summary of each chapter of their book. This one is an overview of their whole project.

C&F begin with an introduction, placing the discussion in its current setting.  They cite a number of critics who have raised the actions and commands of the God of the Old Testament as a primary reason for rejecting the existence of the biblical God.  Answering such objections is the purpose of the present volume.  They then provide an outline to the book, which they divide into four parts.

Part One is titled, “Genocide Texts and the Problem of Scriptural Authority.”  In this section of the book they set up the problem by introducing the Crucial Moral Principle, “It is morally wrong to deliberately and mercilessly slaughter men, women, and children who are innocent of any serious wrong doing.”  This principle seems to be violated by God’s commands located in the genocide passages.  C&F take up the issue of the authorship of Scripture and examine what it means to say that the Bible which contains these commands is the Word of God.  They also discuss the question of the distinction between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New.

In Part Two, titled “Occasional Commands, Hyperbolic Texts, and Genocidal Massacres,” C&F begin by addressing the question, “Does the Bible actually command us to kill innocent people?” In this section they discuss the question of what it means to be innocent as well as the hyberbolic language employed in these biblical texts in comparison to other ancient near eastern war texts.  They also examine the legal question of displacement as a form of genocide.  They conclude that “genocide” is not an accurate term to describe these biblical events as the pagan nations were not “utterly destroyed” at all.

In Part Three, C&F move on to the question, “Is it Always Wrong to Kill Innocent People?”  Here the authors concentrate on an understanding of divine command theory based on the commands of a good and just God.  They spend a number of chapters dealing with standard objections such as the Euthyphro dilemma and conclude with a discussion on God’s commands to kill others as an exemption to the Crucial Moral Principle. They also delve into the question of why we should not believe someone who claims today that God “told” him to kill other innocent human beings.

In the final part of the book, C&F expand the discussion to a more general conversation about “Religion and Violence.”  They address the oft-raised charge that religion is dangerous because it causes violence and contrast the Old Testament context with the modern Islamic call for jihad, which are often lumped together.  They also look back at the Crusades and answer the objection that the text of Joshua inspired them. They conclude with a discussion of pacifism, based on the words of Jesus to turn the other cheek and how just war can be defended in light of such commands.

Copan and Flannagan provide much to mull over and examining their arguments is a worthwhile endeavor for those puzzled over these passages and questions.  We will begin with our next post by looking at chapter one.

[1] All quotations NASB

[2] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mufflin, 2006), 51

Photo: Joshua's Victory over the Amalekites. Painting by Nicolas Poussin. Public Domain. 

Podcast: Dr. Brian Scalise on the Theological Implications of Love in Islam and Christianity

Photo by Ali Hegazy on Unsplash

In this week's episode, we hear from Dr. Brian Scalise.  Dr. Scalise's dissertation " involved analyzing trinitarian monotheism vis-a-vis unitary monotheism. This comparison looked specifically at Islam, Trinity, and human relationships." The subject of the discussion is the the theological implications for love in both Christianity and Islam. Specifically, we look at what follows from each religion's view of God. What does Allah's absolute oneness mean for love? And what does the Christian Trinity tell us about love?

On this week's podcast, we hear from Dr. Brian Scalise. Dr. Scalise is an adjunct professor at Liberty University. He teaches New Testament Greek and recently taught an intensive to graduate students on Islam. A few weeks ago on the podcast, Dr. Scalise explained the difference a Trinitarian versus Unitarian understanding of God makes for our understanding of love. This week, we're going to be returning to that topic. In this lecture, Dr. Scalise carefully explains why the Christian Trinity provides an account of love that is richer and fuller than what is possible from an Islamic perspective.

Interview with Jerry Walls

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In this interview for MoralApologetics.com, David Baggett interviews his dear friend, former teacher, and collaborator, the one-of-a-kind, iconoclastic Dr. Jerry Walls, a leading and prolific Christian philosopher and professor of philosophy of religion at Houston Baptist University. Questions canvass Dr. Walls’ education, early interest in philosophy, his graduate work at Princeton, Yale, and Notre Dame, his interest in eschatology, and other book projects in which Walls is engaged.

1. When were you first drawn to philosophy?

The first time I can recall becoming really fascinated by philosophy was one summer in high school when I was bored and looking for something to read, and picked up a book my dad had bought at a second hand book store by Francis Schaeffer entitled Pollution and the Death of Man.  It was a book about ecology, which, frankly, did not interest me much.  But I was fascinated by how he analyzed the issues in the ecology debate in terms of basic presuppositions and worldview.   During the next several years, I read all of Schaeffer’s books as they came out, and that is how I was first introduced to things like epistemology and came to see that Christianity makes big truth claims about ultimate reality, and is among other things, a philosophy that provides answers to all the big questions.

1. When did you become interested in issues of the afterlife, especially hell?

Well, I was raised in Knockemstiff, Ohio, and “hellfire and damnation” was often preached about in my little country church, especially during revivals.  Listening to the sermons at Bethel Chapel, there was no doubt that issues of life and death were at stake in how one responded to the gospel.  I was converted at age 11 in response to a sermon on the text, “there is but one step between death and thee.”   Several years later, I went to Princeton seminary, and many students as well as faculty were dubious about the idea of hell, and some rejected the afterlife altogether.   The clash between my religious formation and my formal theological training was existentially riveting for me, and provoked me to think seriously about heaven and hell and whether there really are good reasons to believe in them or not.  After graduating from Princeton, I went to Yale Divinity school, where I wrote a master’s thesis on hell, and I have been thinking and writing about these issues ever since!

1. Is it true you were a teenage preacher?

Yes, I preached my first sermon when I was thirteen, and had preached well over a hundred sermons by the time I graduated from high school.

1. Tell us about your education at Princeton and Yale and Notre Dame. Who most influenced you among your teachers, and how?

Well, as I said above, Princeton was rather diverse in its theological commitments, and posed a number of challenges to my evangelical background.  We had a student group made up of evangelical students at Princeton called the Theological Forum, and I was President of the group.  Some of my best learning came from this group.  We had a number of notable speakers, including John Stott and Cornelius Van Til (who had not, I believe, been back at Princeton until we invited him) and others.  (One of the students who was in our group by the way, was Bart Ehrman, who was still an evangelical at the time.)  But the most memorable speaker was Alvin Plantinga, who we were able to get because his brother Neal was doing his PhD at the seminary at the time.  It was the first time I had met Plantinga and he gave a lecture in which he dismantled the theology of Gordon Kaufman, the Harvard theologian who labored under Kantian strictures concerning what we can say about God.  It was both a gutsy and a galvanizing talk, and an enormously encouraging breath of fresh air and it elevated the enormous respect I already had for Plantinga.  As for my teachers at Princeton, I learned a lot from Diogenes Allen, though he was a difficult personality and I did not have much of a relationship with him.

At Yale, where I did a one year STM, I worked almost exclusively with Paul Holmer, whose main interests were Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, though he also wrote a little book on C. S. Lewis. Holmer was a delight to work with and he encouraged my interest in the doctrine of hell. Holmer was very dubious of what he called the “bright chatty” sort of students, and I remember when I first met him and told him I wanted study with him, he was reserved until he asked me what I was interested in.  When I told him I wanted to write about hell, he immediately got excited and encouraged me to come to Yale.

Notre Dame was simply an ongoing intellectual feast and was by far the greatest educational experience of my life.  I had the privilege of taking courses with the very best people who did philosophy of religion, starting with Plantinga, and including Fred Freddoso, Tom Flint, and Phil Quinn.  I did a reading course with Quinn, by the way, on divine command ethics, a foreshadow of our work together.  Quinn, of course, wrote an important book on divine command ethics.  Plantinga’s courses were extremely stimulating and mentally challenging and you always left feeling like your brain had just had a strenuous workout that pushed you beyond your limits.  But my most influential teacher at Notre Dame was my mentor Tom Morris, who was something of a force of nature with all the interesting stuff he was producing at the time.  I learned a lot from him not only about how to do philosophy, but also how to teach, and that still influences everything I write.

1. How did you end up writing not just about hell, but also about heaven and even purgatory?

Well, after writing about hell, I came to see that heaven poses its own distinctive issues that deserved addressing.  Moreover, heaven was almost entirely ignored by philosophers at the time so I wrote a book entitled Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy.  I wrote a chapter on purgatory for the heaven book, having become convinced that a version of the doctrine makes theological sense for Protestants as well as Catholics.  I had no thought of writing more about purgatory at the time, but again, further reflection led me to see that it too poses distinctive issues that deserve discussion.  I was fortunate to receive a Research Fellowship in the Notre Dame Center for Philosophy of Religion for the 2009-2010 academic year and I wrote the book that year.

1. How big an influence has C. S. Lewis been on you?

In short, it has been incalculable.  I vividly recall the first time I read The Great Divorce, a book that has had a profound influence on all of my thinking about the afterlife.  I was at Yale working on my STM thesis on hell, and struggling to make sense of how eternal hell can be compatible with the perfect love and goodness of God.  I remember reading that book into the early morning, and finishing it before I went to bed.  What was stunning to me was the way Lewis made moral and psychological sense of how human beings can prefer evil, how they can choose to remain in hell, even if given every opportunity to repent and embrace the love of God.  That recast how I thought about hell, and it would eventually help me to think more clearly about heaven and purgatory as well.

1. You’ve published with Oxford University Press, but you can also write very accessible books. Should more philosophers try to write books for wider audiences than just fellow philosophers? Why isn’t it done more?

Well, the best and most interesting philosophy deals with big issues that matter to every thoughtful person.  Even if the immediate issues we are writing about are highly technical, if they really matter, it is because of their connection to bigger questions and concerns.   I wish more academically accomplished philosophers would keep these big issues in mind and attempt to write books that address them for a wider audience.   Such books, of course, are not a substitute for academically rigorous books, and should not be mistaken for them but they play an absolutely vital role in communicating the central ideas of philosophy to the broader culture.  Not everybody can do this, but those who can should, in my view.  The failure to do this has the effect of marginalizing philosophy and even trivializing it in contemporary culture.  The vacuum of course, has often been filled by popular books that are superficial and often poorly informed.  And many philosophers accordingly shy away from writing popular books because they do not want to be identified with such superficial books.  Moreover, such books gain little recognition in the academy, and may even hurt your reputation.   But the solution, I think, is for more philosophers to try to do both, to write serious books but also write books that communicate the central ideas in an accessible but responsible fashion.  If we fail to do that, we should hardly be surprised if philosophy is seen as increasingly irrelevant to the overwhelming majority who lack our specialized training.

1. Tell us about your most recent book on heaven, hell, and purgatory.

Well, in short, it is my attempt to distill the central ideas of my academic trilogy into a more popular form for a broader audience. The book explores heaven, hell and purgatory in light of the big philosophical issues like the problem of evil, the nature of personal identity, the ground of morality, and the really big one: the very meaning of life.  I attempted to write it in such a way that any thoughtful reader who would like to understand these issues better could read it with appreciation.  I will be interested to see if I have succeeded.

1. What other book projects are you involved in?

Lot of things.  I just wrote a long essay on purgatory for a new Four Views of Hell book that is forthcoming.  My son Jonny and I have a book of essays coming out shortly entitled Tarantino and Theology.   Another book I am excited about is Two Dozen or So Theistic Arguments, which I am co-editing with Trent Dougherty.  It is based on Alvin Plantinga’s famous paper of that title, and will explore each of his arguments, several of which are new ones that have yet to be developed.  A colleague here at HBU and I are working on editing a collection of essays on issues in sexual ethics.  Another book I am co-authoring is Why I am not A Roman Catholic.  I am co-authoring this one with Ken Collins, a church historian.  Not to mention a history of the moral argument I am co-authoring with Bag.   So it looks like I’ll be busy for a while.

1. Why do you think the book you and I are wrapping up, the sequel to Good God, is important?

Well, it deals with huge issues of urgent practical concern, just for a start!  Contemporary culture is morally confused to put it mildly, and seems increasingly bereft of moral foundations.    Christian theism provides not only a rationally powerful, but also an existentially appealing account of moral truth that beautifully answers to our deepest yearnings for ultimate meaning.   We advance in this book an abductive moral argument that brings together an array of powerful considerations that have not, so far as we know, been advanced in this fashion.  These considerations, taken together, provide a powerful case that God makes sense of the crucial features of morality far more convincingly than secular alternatives.

Photo: "Conversation" by John St John. CC License. 

Summary of Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation, Chapter 3, Part 1: The Relation of Divine Command Theory to Natural Law

Is divine command theory (DCT) in tension with natural law (NL) or virtue theory (VT)? Evans says no—that, rather, these theories are consistent, offering complementary answers to different questions. The mistake of thinking them inconsistent, he thinks, comes from looking for one, comprehensive theory to account for all of ethics. Radical voluntarism commits such a mistake. It’s true the theories in question can conflict, but they need not. Their central insights, so argues Evans, are consistent. On his view, DCT rests on a natural law theory and points toward a virtue theory.

Most natural law theories have been theistic, though there are exceptions, like Philippa Foot’s. Evans is most interested in the question of the place of divine authority in a religiously grounded ethic. So he will look mainly at natural law theories that include a place for God. But does natural law include God essentially? Raising the question reminds us that some say natural law theory makes ethics autonomous. Grotius makes such a claim—that much of ethics would be the same whether or not God exists. Mark Murphy’s book Natural Law and Practical Rationality is a natural law account in which God plays hardly any role despite that Murphy is a theist.

Evans next makes note of what he calls Murphy’s surprising pivot. In a later work, God and Moral Law: On the Theistic Explanation of Morality, Murphy makes a vigorous attempt to show the role that God might play in explaining morality. In this book, Murphy argues that God’s relation to morality should be conceived as a form of “concurrentism,” analogous to the role God plays in sustaining the laws of nature on some accounts.

Evans thinks this fascinating but entertains reservations about this approach. One concerns the fact that Murphy tries to show how God is important in explaining the whole of morality and not just moral obligations. In the process Evans doesn’t think Murphy does justice to the distinctive characteristics of moral obligations. A second worry concerns Murphy’s requirement that God explain morality “immediately.” Murphy claims that if God is not the immediate ground of morality, then we will have a problem of “divided loyalties,” in which finite goods can become rivals of God. This can happen, Evans thinks, but recognizing a finite good as good is not itself idolatry, and Evans suspects this requirement that God explain morality immediately is too strong, because it’s not consistent with God using various  means to establish morality. Evans suspects if Murphy’s requirement is indeed too strong, then Murphy’s criticisms of both natural law and theological voluntarism fail.

The approach Murphy takes in God and Moral Law is one which assumes the truth of theism and then asks in what way God can explain morality. The book gives a central place to God as explanans, without completely ignoring the explanandum (the moral facts which need to be explained). But Evans admits his approach is devoid of apologetic value. In contrast, Evans sees his own project as having apologetic value. He wants to argue that someone who reasonably accepts the existence of morality might be brought to see the reasonableness of believing in God as the explanation of a part of morality, namely  moral obligations.

Evans thinks Murphy’s claim in his earlier book that a natural law ethic is not consistent with God’s playing a foundational role in ethics fails because it depends on the too-strong requirement that God be the immediate ground of morality. Evans figures a natural law theory of rationality requires some metaphysical underpinning, and that a theistic metaphysic seems to the job better than any other. The role God plays in giving the natural world a structure in which things have natures that determine what is good for them is important. It may be possible to develop a natural law ethic without God as part of the story, but when God is part of the picture the story seems far more complete and satisfying. But he agrees with Murphy that to give a satisfying account of morality as a whole we need God to play a more central role than simply as the creator of natural kinds that determine the good. God’s having additional roles to play will be a better natural law ethic than one that confines God to the role of simply being the one who determines what is actually good by his decisions about what to create.

Murphy (in his earlier book) describes natural law as an account of “practical rationality,” which has two main goals: to show that actions have a point or purpose, such that they are worth performing, and to help us make decisions about worthwhile actions. Both goals are accomplished by providing an account of what is good. NL theories assign priority to the good. To understand the point of actions and to know what actions are reasonable, we must know what is good.

It’s obvious, though, that such an abstract first principle by itself does not give us guidance with respect to specific actions. Usually natural law theorists offer an account of goods that are universally and naturally good, and most have done so by offering an Aristotelian-inspired account of the good for humans in terms of what completes or perfects human nature, or that enables human flourishing. (Not all have done so; consider Hobbes’s egoism.) Some other natural law theorists have defended a more Platonic account of the good, which sees some things, such as knowledge or beauty, as just good in themselves, apart from reference to human nature. But most natural law theorists have explained the good for humans in terms of human nature, and Evans takes this as a defining characteristic of a natural law theory.

One dispute among natural law theorists is between derivationism and inclinationism. Derivationism says that our knowledge of what is good derives from our understanding of human nature, since one can’t grasp what perfects or completes human nature without an understanding of that nature. Inclinationism is the view of one like Finnis that says knowledge of basic good is something that is immediate and self-evident and something that is internal to the life of practical reason. Evans happens to find Murphy’s “real identity thesis” plausible that says the insight we have into the good through our inclinations and the knowledge we have about human flourishing through our understanding of human nature represent two alternative ways of grasping the same goods. Evans assumes that a natural law theory is one that holds that those goods are in some way determined by our nature, such that if human nature were fundamentally different, what would be good for humans would be fundamentally different as well.

Typical goods for humans would include: Life, health, knowledge, beauty, friendship, other social goods, fulfilling work and activity, psychological goods such as “inner peace” or self-integration, practical reasonableness, and in some cases religion.

Although natural law prioritizes the good over the right, as does utilitarianism and other forms of consequentialism, a NL theory differs from most forms of utilitarianism in that it does not assume that rationality demands simply that goodness be maximized. NL calls for a reasonable response to the goods people encounter or could encounter. This means the NL theorist, like a Kantian, can argue that there are some types of actions that are always inappropriate or unreasonable, and thus there may be general rules or principles that rule out some kinds of actions absolutely. If human life is a basic good, then murder, understood as the intentional destruction of innocent human life, may be viewed as intrinsically wrong.

Now, how does Evans argue a divine command theory rests on a natural law account? DCT presupposes some theory of the good. Evans thinks natural law provides it, even though Evans recognizes other alternatives, like Adams’s Platonic account of the good. But at least one form of DCT could rest on natural law. Evans thinks, beyond that, that natural law is especially well-suited for this purpose.

Consider the obligations of parents—incurred by their becoming parents. They hold partly because of certain truths about human nature, truths with normative implications, not purely conventional. Why is this the case? A natural law ethic provides a plausible answer. According to a natural law ethic, human life is a good, and thus humans who decide to bring new human life into the world are bringing a good into the world. But we can’t care for ourselves when very young. Parents who bring children into the world but do nothing to see that those children grow up and flourish thus take an unreasonable stance towards a basic good. The obligations that parents incur by becoming parents thus hold partly because of certain truths about human nature, truths with normative implications. Similarly, the obligations children have towards their parents hold partly because of the truth of a normative principle such as “It is good to feel and express gratitude towards the giver of a gift.”

DCT sees the relationship of creature to creator as a distinctive kind of social relationship that carries with it certain obligations. DCT requires God possess legitimate authority, so that his commands establish obligations for his human creatures. But it is clear that some normative principle or principles must be the basis of this authority. For a DCT to be plausible there must be some reasonable answer to the question, “Why should a human being obey the commands of God?”

Evans suggests that once more a natural law ethic provides a plausible explanation of why the requisite normative principles hold. There are several principles that could explain or justify divine authority. Appropriate gratitude for all of his gifts is one such principle, as God as creator and sustainer is ultimately behind all the gifts of human benefactors. A second way divine authority could be justified is to appeal to the goodness of a relation to God. Aquinas considered this the highest good possible for a human person, the beatific vision the culmination of this good. One always has some reason to satisfy someone one wants to have a good relation with. A plausible answer to the purpose of God’s commands is that God through his commands wants to help his human creatures be transformed in their characters to make it possible for them to know God truly, relate to God properly, and achieve their deepest joy made possible by this relationship. A third possible normative principle that might justify divine authority is the claim that God, by virtue of his creation of humans and the natural world, has a rightful claim to be the owner of that created world and everything in it, including human beings. God would certainly qualify as the owner of humans on Locke’s principles of mixed labor and such. Murphy resists such a notion, saying people can’t rightly be owned. But Evans isn’t convinced, since though human slavery is always wrong, God’s in a wholly different category. There’s no degradation involved here, God’s our creator, he loves us, etc. Evans thus concludes that a natural law ethic is not a rival ethical view to a DCT, at least from his perspective, but rather a plausible foundation for a DCT account of moral obligations.

But is there room in NL for DCT? Why might a NL theorist think that a DCT is unnecessary? Evans thinks one reason is a failure to appreciate the distinction between the discretion thesis and the modal status thesis discussed earlier. Even Scotus, who affirmed the discretion thesis, held that some of what God commands is necessary. It’s possible to affirm that this is true for all of God’s commands, affirming only the modal status thesis. Nevertheless, given the power of the Anscombe intuition about the distinctive character of moral obligations, it still seems plausible that something important is left out by the natural law theorist who does not bring God’s commands into the story. It would still seem God’s commands, even if we reject discretion, add an important dimension to the moral character of what he commands. His commands would furnish powerful new reasons for performing various acts. One may hold then that the content of what God commands is determined by the created natures he has chosen to give things, but still hold that what one might call the preceptorial force of the morally right is due to God’s commands.

Given the normative principles that undergird a claim that God has divine authority, it seems odd for a theistic natural law theorist to hold that God’s commands add no new moral character to what is commanded. The DCT’ist certainly can acknowledge that we may have good reasons to perform those acts that are our moral obligations, even if God had not commanded them. The defender of a DCT just insists that those reasons do not capture everything that is required for an act to be a moral obligation.

Finnis argues no divine command is needed for natural law, but the ‘ought’ he describes sounds much like the “Aristotelian ought” rather than the ‘ought’ of moral obligation. Evans thinks Murphy’s account of obligations also shows the inadequacy of such an approach (NL without DCT). Murphy gives a powerful argument that the popular subjectivist accounts of the good (preference theories) are unsatisfactory, and gives a plausible account of the basic goods that give human beings reasons for actions. So far, so good, but the trouble arises when he tries extending this to moral obligations, which he terms the most fundamental practical sense of ought, which is that “A ought to X if and only if A, whose practical reasoning is functioning without error, decides to X.” This is clearly not the moral ought, since it implies that what an agent ought to do is fundamentally shaped by such subjective factors as what the agent actually decides. So Murphy introduces another sense of ‘ought’: “A morally ought to X if and only if it is not possible that A, whose practical reasoning is functioning without error, decide to Y, where Y-ing and X-ing are incompatible.” Murphy claims this is sufficiently close to the moral ‘ought’.

Evans remains skeptical. First, on Murphy’s view the fact that a person morally ought to perform some act does not imply that the person ought to perform the act; nor does the fact that a person morally ought not to perform some act imply that the person ought not to perform the act. This is because the agent’s actual decision must be factored into the second type of ought but not the first. This violates the overriding character of moral obligations.

Secondly, there’s a difference between kinds of goods: “agent-relative” goods and “agent-neutral” goods. Roughly, an agent-relative good is a good that is good for some particular agent, while an agent-neutral good is one that is good simpliciter, without any specification of the particular person the good is good for. Murphy argues that though the fundamental goods humans pursue are agent-relative, those goods can general agent-neutral reasons for action. Murphy wants to argue that the fact that something is good for someone else can make action on my part to advance that good intelligible. But it’s one thing to show that altruistic actions are reasonable, and quite another to show that they are morally obligatory. On Murphy’s view, it’s fully rational for an agent to be a “quasi-egoist” who chooses to act only on the basis of a life plan, “the ends of which are all agent-relative goods.” Murphy admits he wishes he could defend a more stringent principle of impartiality as a requirement of practical reasonableness, but confesses he can’t.

Murphy also argues there’s no universal requirement that humans act justly, for two reasons. First, on his account the requirements of justice hold only within communities, and for any given person, there will be many other persons who do not belong to that individual’s community. Second, there is no rational requirement that anyone belong to a community, “or indeed to pursue an agent-neutral end of any sort.” This would mean, among other things, we’d have no obligations to folks starving in some other part of the world. [Recall Hare made mention of this as a problem for certain ethical theories.]

Evans thus thinks—owing to the loss of the overriding nature of obligations, the difference between showing altruistic actions to be reasonable versus showing them to be morally obligatory, and the loss of the universality of moral judgments—that NL that makes no use of divine authority will have difficulty making sense of the special character of moral duties. Nor is there, as far as he can see, any good reason why a theistic natural law theorist should neglect this important resource.

Photo: "Moses, Gloucester Cathedral." By Steve Day. CC License. 

Summary of Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation, Chapter 2: What is a Divine Command Theory of Moral Obligation?

How might God provide a foundation for moral obligations? One way is to understand moral obligations as divine requirements. Evans defines divine requirements for humans simply as God’s will for humans insofar as that will has been communicated to them. He will speak of God’s expressed requirements as divine commands—and these will be understood expansively. Evans will pursue the question of how God might provide a foundation for moral obligations by exploring the viability of what is generally called a divine command account of moral obligations.

A divine command theory might say that divine commands are identical to moral obligations. This would be an identity divine command theory. Another way to explain the connection is to suggest that divine commands cause moral obligations to come about. This is a causal divine command theory. Evans is inclined to embrace the identity version.

Divine command theories are accounts of moral obligations specifically, but not all moral facts, like moral goodness. Adams and Evans predicate their divine command theories on a theory of the good—Adams a theistic Platonic account, Evans a more theistic natural law view. Hare presupposes more of an Aristotelian view of the good, while not rejecting Platonic views altogether.  Some theory of the good is needed, though, since part of what makes God’s command binding is that God is himself essentially good.

Part of the motivation of divine command theory is the Anscombe intuition that implies there’s something distinctive about obligations. To say I have a moral obligation to X is not simply to say I have a reason to X, or even to say I have a decisive reason to X. Rather, an obligation is a distinctive kind of reason, with several important features. Among such features is it brings closure to deliberation, there’s someone who has a right I do X, and who’s rightly disappointed in me and blame me if I fail to do X. It’s to be liable to a kind of claim someone has on me, a claim with a binary, verdict-like character, and it either holds or it doesn’t. Obligations are aimed at the good, but not reducible to the good.

Adams accommodates such insights by defending a social theory of obligations. It’s an attempt to explain moral obligations by situating them in relation to obligations in general, from legal to social to family obligations. All of these duties result from particular social institutions and relations in which persons participate. If God exists and is a genuine person, then the relation between creature and creator is a genuine social relation, and like other such relations, carries with it distinctive obligations. Most religious believers see this relation to God as one in which God rightly has authority over them. This authority might be explained in various ways (God’s ownership rights, gratitude owed to God, the goods which a relation to God makes possible, etc.), but however it’s to be explained, the thought is that God has a rightful claim on humans such that they have good reasons to obey his commands.

The claim isn’t that “moral obligation” and “divine command” have the same meaning, but rather that the two expressions refer to the same reality.

Next Evans lists several ways in which seeing moral obligations as divine commands helps make sense of this kind of obligation. Evans draws both on Adams and his own material from the first chapter. One important feature of moral obligations is that they are objective, in the sense that they are the kind of thing that people can be mistaken about. An adequate account of moral obligation should be able to explain how people can have true and false beliefs about their moral obligations.

A second important feature of moral obligations is that they provide compelling reasons of a distinctive kind for actions, of the kind discussed in the earlier chapter. For example, simply not wanting to discharge a duty doesn’t get one off the hook.

A third feature is that an account of moral obligations should not only explain why we have reasons to perform our moral duty; it should also explain that we should be motivated to do so.

Finally, an adequate account of moral obligations should help us understand the universality of morality. Evans thinks morality is universal in at least two ways: All humans are subject to the claims of morality; no one is so “special” that he or she gets a free pass and can ignore those claims. Also, some of our moral obligations extend at least to all human persons (maybe also to, say, animals).

Evans thinks the strengths of a divine command theory are apparent when judged by these criteria. Moral obligations can be objective in relation to human beliefs and emotions, since there will be a fact of the  matter about whether God has given some particular command, as well as about the content of the command. So we can see why people can be correct and mistaken. Second, we can understand why moral reasons are overriding in character. We can also explain the motivating power of moral obligations. A moral theory should explain why duties are motivating, but should not imply that people are always motivated to do what is morally right. Divine command theory doesn’t preclude other moral motivations. And we can understand why moral obligations are universal on DCT, in both senses identified above.

Does God have some discretion about what he commands? How tight is the connection between the good and the right? Does God have discretion? Scotus held that at least some of the commands of the Decalogue could have been otherwise. He divided the Decalogue into two sections or “tables,” and held that while the commands of the first table are those that God necessarily issues, those in the second table could have been different. Scotus, Hare, and Adams defend some discretion. Aquinas, though, would say that, given our nature, God’s commands are determined, fixed, in this world as he fashioned it.

Here Evans distinguishes between the modal status theory and the discretion thesis. The discretion thesis is that God has some choice about what he commands. The modal status thesis says an act that God commands acquires a particular moral status in part by virtue of his command. The more central point for Evans is the modal status thesis. Nonetheless, in a case where obedience to God alone is the reason for one choice over another, one’s devotion to God would be most clearly shown.

Evans opts for a divine command theory over a divine will theory because morality would be impossible unless God’s will is somehow expressed in such a way that it can be known. But expressions of God’s will become God’s requirements.

God’s commands don’t have to take the form of imperatives. There’s good reason not to think this should be limited to special revelation, which has only a limited range. Other possibilities include natural law, the magisterium of an ecclesiastical body, specific commands God might communicate to individuals in some way, examining our natural inclinations, and listening to our conscience.

In terms of conscience, does this commit Evans to ethical intuitionism? No, many who deny intuitionism still rely on ethical intuitions themselves or at least regard them as having some epistemic weight. The notion of conscience is by no means limited to western philosophy or western culture. Gyekye claims that something very much like the notion of conscience plays a central role in the ethical thinking and practices of traditional African cultures. Such examples can be multiplied.

If God reveals his commands to humans through conscience and other natural means, this means that his role in morality may be somewhat “hidden” or at least not perfectly transparent to many humans, which has certain implications: If God’s commands are promulgated through conscience and other forms of general revelation, then a divine command theory rejects the claim that one must be religious to be moral, and it rejects the claim that one must be religious to have reasonable moral beliefs.

Stout argues that morality comes from the laws and customs of societies. But Evans says that, though we can gain knowledge of morality by reflection on social practices, that doesn’t mean that those social practices can adequately ground morality. What is lacking is an account of the authority of the norms that are embedded in our social practices. Stout fails to provide a plausible account of his own as to how moral truths can possess the objectivity and transcendence he sees it as having.

In a later chapter Evans will critique alternative metaethical views on offer to explain obligations, but he points out that their existence demonstrates recognition of the need to give some account of why there should be moral obligations.

Photo: "Commandments" by James Perkins. CC License. 

Link: Interview with Matthew Flannagan on the Ethics of the Old Testament

Dr. Matthew Flannagan, co-author of Did God Really Command Genocide: Coming to Terms with  the Justice of God, discusses the Old Testament conquest narratives and other ethical issues (including slavery, sexual ethics, and the binding of Isaac) in the Old Testament on Insight. If you have questions about the morality of the Old Testament, this interview is well worth watching.  Follow this link and you will find Flannagan's episode on the right as indicated in the screenshot below.  

Photo: The Conquest of the Amorites (watercolor circa 1896–1902 by James Tissot). Public Domain. 

Link: Does Humanism need God? A Debate with Angus Ritchie vs Stephen Law

One of our contributors, Angus Ritchie, recently debated atheist philosopher Stephen Law on whether "atheistic humanism can account for the human dignity, morality and reason it espouses." Ritchie, along with co-author Nick Spencer, wrote an essay defending the idea " that Christians ought to be more aware – and more proud – of their humanist credentials, rather than allowing humanism to become a cipher for atheism. Were it not for Christianity, they argue, the core ideas of humanism would simply not have developed in Europe." You can listen to the debate over at Unbelievable?.

Photo: "The Good Samaritan" by Lawrence OP. CC License. 

Podcast: Dr. Fred Smith on Worldview and the Implications for Morality

This week we’ll be hearing from Dr. Fred Smith. Dr. Smith is not only a tremendous scholar, but he is also an excellent communicator. He is able to make very complex ideas easy to understand. And I think you’ll agree with that assessment as you listen to what he has to say. The topic of discussion of this week has to do with worldview and its implications for ethics. Dr. Smith has spent a significant amount of time thinking about how worldviews shape us and he has recently published a book, Developing a Biblical Worldview.

In this first part of a two part series, Dr. Smith will explain exactly what a worldview is and then give some examples of how worldview shapes a person’s understanding of morality. In order to do that, Dr. Smith will give a thumbnail sketch of a variety of worldviews, including naturalism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Mormonism and show how these worldviews seem to generate a deficient view of morality.

This week we are continuing a conversation with Dr. Fred Smith. Dr. Smith is a professor at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary and has taught courses on world religions. He also has a special interest in worldview and culture. Recently, he published a book, Developing a Biblical Worldview: Seeing Things God’s Way. If you’re interested in what Dr. Smith has to say about worldview today, you might check out the book for a more in-depth discussion.

Last week, we discussed the nature of worldview in general and raised moral difficulties created by various non-christian worldviews. This week, we’ll be hearing Dr. Smith’s response to some objections raised to the Christian worldview and Dr. Smith will help us to see how the Christian answer to the worldview questions (Who we are? Where are we? What is wrong ? And what is the answer?) will help us turn back objections to the Christian worldview.

Photo: "Tower Optical binocular" By Ellie. CC License.