May 10, 2022

Sweeping Contingency Under the Rug (Part 4)

May 10, 2022/ Adam Johnson

A Response to the Speculative Notion that the Laws of Nature Might Be Necessary

First of all, it is interesting to note that Wielenberg seems to agree with theists that there must be a necessary foundation of some sort for the existence of objective moral principles and beliefs. For if something is necessary, then that provides the stability needed for morality to be objective as opposed to just a subjective accidental human construct. Theists argue that God provides such a necessary foundation whereas Wielenberg asks his readers to consider that the laws of nature may be necessary. He wrote that “[i]f there is no God but the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, then the fact that there is no God to put in place just the right laws for moral knowledge to arise doesn’t make us any luckier to have moral knowledge than we would be if God did exist because the laws of nature couldn’t have been any different from what they are.”54 Whether one believes that God exists or not, it seems much easier to believe that, if He exists, then He exists necessarily, that is, easier than it is to believe that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary.

Secondly, it is notoriously difficult to make the case that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, as Wielenberg readily admits.55 But even if some laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, this would not mean that the evolutionary path that led to human beings was necessary. Therefore, Wielenberg had to go even further and speculate that the evolutionary process that led to the development of human beings may itself have been necessary in some sense. He summarized this possibility as follows:

These considerations are hardly decisive, but I think they do indicate that it is a mistake simply to assume that it is nomologically possible for us (or other beings) to have evolved to m-possess radically different moral principles than the ones we actually possess. For all we know, m-possessing the DDE [a particular moral principle] is an inevitable outcome of the evolutionary process that made us capable of forming moral judgments in the first place.56

Wielenberg is forced into this remarkable speculation because he realizes that if the evolutionary process which supposedly produced human beings was contingent, if it could have occurred differently, then our moral beliefs could have turned out to be vastly different as well. Charles Darwin himself noted that if our evolutionary path were more similar that of bees, then “there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless, the bee, or any other social animal, would gain in our supposed case some feeling of right or wrong, or a conscience.”57

Wielenberg claimed that theists are not in a position to argue that the laws of nature, as well as the evolutionary path which produced human beings, could have been different based on the fact that we can easily imagine them as being different. He explained his concern as follows:

One might be tempted to argue that the fact that it is easy to imagine the laws of nature being different than they are is an indication of their metaphysical contingency. However, theists typically maintain that God’s existence is metaphysically necessary; yet it is easy to imagine the non-existence of God. Therefore, theists cannot consistently appeal to the conceivability of different laws of nature to support the metaphysical contingency of the actual laws of nature.58

He is correct; just because a person can think of other paths evolution could have taken does not mean that those paths are actually possible. On the other hand, the supposed evolutionary tree would seem to say that evolution not only could have, but in fact did sprout off in many different directions, leading to radically different organisms. Thus the only imagination required is to consider an evolutionary path that results in beings who develop cognitive faculties like ours but do not have similar moral beliefs. It is difficult to think of reasons why we should believe such paths are impossible.

What is more, Wielenberg himself seems to have regularly affirmed that human beings were produced by an evolutionary process that was contingent and accidental. He wrote that “evolutionary processes have endowed us with certain unalienable rights and duties. Evolution has given us these moral properties by giving us the non-moral properties that make such moral properties be instantiated. And if, as I believe, there is no God, then it is in some sense an accident that we have the moral properties that we do.”59 He also wrote that “contemporary atheists typically maintain that human beings are accidental, evolved, mortal, and relatively short-lived…”60 Realizing the implications of this statement, he explained in a footnote that ‘accidental’ should not be understood as a result of entirely random processes because “[a]ccording to contemporary evolutionary theory, evolutionary processes are not, contrary to popular mischaracterizations, entirely chance-driven. Rather, they are driven by a combination of chance and necessity; see Mayr 2001, 119-20.”61 It is important to note that Mayr actually stated that chance rules at the first step of evolution, with the production of variation through random mutation, and that determinism only comes in during the second step through non-random aspects of survival and reproduction based on a particular species’ fixed, or determined, environment.62 Thus, if evolution works as atheists claim, that it was driven by accidental random mutations (which Wielenberg affirms), as well as chance changes in the environment (the success or failure of other competing species, climate changes, meteorites, etc.), then it is very difficult to believe that evolution had to necessarily produce human beings just the way they are.

The suggestion that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary comes dangerously close, for an atheist such as Wielenberg that is, to another line of reasoning: fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God.63 Wielenberg himself admitted that “[t]here is… one view that might seem to require much less luck for moral knowledge than my view does. That is our old friend theism.”64 He continued by quoting the following comment by Parfit, another advocate of robust normative realism: “God might have designed our brains so that, without causal contact, we can reason in ways that lead us to reach true answers to mathematical questions. We might have similar God-given abilities to respond to reasons, and to form true beliefs about these reasons.”65 Mark Linville has even suggested a specific “moral fine-tuning argument… 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.”66

Wielenberg explained that if it is metaphysically necessary that any being capable of forming moral beliefs at all possesses only true moral beliefs, then “there is no luck at all involved in the fact that Bart [a hypothetical person used as an example] m-possesses moral principles that correspond with moral reality rather than m-possessing radically different (and false) moral principles.”67 Possibly recognizing that this may be seen as a hint of fine tuning, he followed this up in a footnote by noting that “[p]erhaps Bart is lucky to exist at all, but that is a separate issue—one that connects with so-called ‘fine-tuning’ arguments, a topic I cannot engage in here.”68

The fine-tuning debate has sparked a lot of discussion over the last couple of decades, instigating a whole host of arguments for and against it. The fine-tuning argument itself, as well as the most common argument against it, the argument for a proposed multi-verse, are both based on the strong intuition that the laws of nature are contingent. Wielenberg’s suggestion that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary would thus effectively rebut the prominent positions on both sides of the fine-tuning debate. At the very least, this should give one pause in accepting Wielenberg’s speculative proposal that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary.

Conclusion

Erik Wielenberg has argued for a position which he calls “godless robust normative realism.” Many have pushed back against positions like this with an argument that I have referred to as the lucky coincidence objection; it seems quite a lucky coincidence that our moral beliefs happen to match up with the objective moral facts postulated by the realist. Wielenberg’s response to this objection was to propose that there is a third factor at play—our cognitive faculties. He proposed that our cognitive faculties both cause moral properties to be instantiated and generate our moral beliefs, thus explaining why it is that the two correspond. I argued that his third-factor model failed to rebut the lucky coincidence objection for two reasons. First, to explain his third-factor model, Wielenberg used several concepts he borrowed from theism, concepts that seem quite out of place within the belief system of atheism. Given atheism, robust causal making and brute ethical facts seem quite fantastical. Thus I argued that atheists, if they are consistent, should reject his model. Second, I argued that he did not rebut the lucky coincidence objection because he did not eliminate contingency, he only moved it to a different location in an attempt to sweep it under the rug. I explained that there is still contingency in his model, namely, in his proposed relationship between our cognitive faculties and our moral beliefs. And where there is contingency, there is luck.

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[54] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 174.

[55] Ibid., 169.

[56] Ibid., 172.

[57] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 102.

[58] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 174.

[59] Ibid., 56.

[60] Ibid., 51.

[61] Ibid.

[62] Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 120–21.

[63] Robin Collins, “The teleological argument: an exploration of the fine-tuning of the universe” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (eds. William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland; Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 202–82.

[64] Ibid., 173.

[65] Derek Parfit, On What Matters, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 493.

[66] Mark D. Linville, “The moral argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (eds. William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland; Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 5.

[67] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 168.

[68] Ibid.

Adam Lloyd Johnson serves as a university campus missionary with Ratio Christi. He also teaches classes for Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and spends one month each year living and teaching at Rhineland Theological Seminary in Wölmersen, Germany. Adam received his PhD in Theological Studies with an emphasis in Philosophy of Religion from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2020.

Adam grew up in Nebraska and became a Christian as a teenager in 1994. He graduated from the University of Nebraska and then worked in the field of actuarial science for ten years in Lincoln, Nebraska. While in his twenties, he went through a crisis of faith: are there good reasons and evidence to believe God exists and that the Bible is really from Him? His search for answers led him to apologetics and propelled him into ministry with a passion to serve others by equipping Christians and encouraging non-Christians to trust in Christ. Adam served as a Southern Baptist pastor for eight years (2009-2017) but stepped down from the pastorate to serve others full-time in the area of apologetics. He’s been married to his wife Kristin since 1996, and they have four children – Caroline, Will, Xander, and Ray.

Adam has presented his work at the National Apologetics Conference, the Society of Christian Philosophers, the Evangelical Philosophical Society, the International Society of Christian Apologetics, the Canadian Centre for Scholarship and the Christian Faith, the American Academy of Religion, and the Evangelical Theological Society. His work has been published in the Journal of the International Society of Christian Apologetics, Philosophia Christi, the Westminster Theological Journal, and the Canadian Journal for Scholarship and the Christian Faith. Adam has spoken at numerous churches and conferences in America and around the world – Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, Boston, Orlando, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. He is also the editor and co-author of the book A Debate on God and Morality: What is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties? published by Routledge and co-authored with William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Erik Wielenberg, and others.

Sweeping Contingency Under the Rug (Part 3)

May 04, 2022/ Adam Johnson

Table of Contents

Contingency in the Relationship Between Cognitive Faculties and Moral Beliefs

It is important to note that Wielenberg describes this making relationship between cognitive faculties and moral properties, the first part of his third-factor model, as a necessary relationship, that it obtains in all possible worlds.40 This is the key difference I want to note between the first and second part of his third-factor model. While he proposes that the first part, the making relationship between cognitive faculties and moral properties, is necessary, he proposes that the second part of his third-factor model, the relationship between cognitive faculties and our moral beliefs, is contingent.

Wielenberg used his third factor model to try and show why it is not a lucky coincidence that moral properties and moral beliefs correspond; they correspond because they both come from our cognitive faculties. He summarized his strategy as follows:

Thus, there is a necessary connection between the cognitive faculties and moral rights. Those very cognitive faculties also generate moral beliefs, including the relevant beliefs about rights. The connection between the cognitive faculties and beliefs about moral rights is causal. In this way, the relevant cognitive faculties are responsible for both moral rights and beliefs about those rights, and so the cognitive faculties explain the correlation between moral rights and beliefs about those rights.41

However, including this third-factor in his model does not successfully rebut the lucky coincidence objection because his model still includes contingency, that is, the contingency in the relationship between our cognitive faculties and our moral beliefs. This contingency still leaves his model open to the lucky coincidence objection because, as Wielenberg himself admitted, where there is contingency, there is luck.42

In Wielenberg’s third factor model, he claims our cognitive faculties both make moral properties be instantiated and generate our moral beliefs. He noted that “[i]f these claims are correct, then we have explained the ‘remarkable fact’ [that moral properties and moral beliefs correspond]… it seems to me that if we can explain why (i) x causes y and (ii) x entails z, then we have explained why y and z tend to go together.”43 Assuming for the sake of argument that the first part of his model is correct, that cognitive faculties necessarily make moral properties be instantiated, his model does not avoid the lucky coincidence objection because of the contingency found in the second part, the relationship between cognitive faculties and moral beliefs. His proposed correspondence between moral properties and moral beliefs breaks down because of this difference in causal necessity. There is no good reason to think that beings with cognitive faculties like ours would have the same moral beliefs we do. In addition, we can easily imagine beings with similar cognitive faculties as our own but with radically different types of moral beliefs.

As noted earlier, this point is amplified if one believes, as most atheists do, that our cognitive faculties and moral beliefs came about haphazardly through a random evolutionary process. Wielenberg does not take a position on whether all our moral beliefs can be explained in evolutionary terms but he is “sympathetic to the view that at least some of our moral beliefs can be given evolutionary explanations.”44 In particular, he sketched an evolutionary explanation of how we came to have our beliefs about moral rights.45

Consider the following refutation by analogy. If Wielenberg’s model works in the realm of moral knowledge, then it should also work in other realms of knowledge generated by our cognitive faculties, realms such as science and mathematics. Let us consider his third-factor in the context of Fermat’s Last Theorem.46 For the purpose of this analogy it is sufficient to note that Fermat’s Last Theorem is a mathematical theorem proposed by Pierre de Fermat in 1637. He claimed he had developed a proof of this theorem but such a proof was never found in any of his writings. Despite numerous attempts by mathematicians, there were no published successful proofs of this theorem until 1994. If we insert Fermat’s Last Theorem in Wielenberg’s third-factor model, the two parts of the model would be as follows:

Our cognitive faculties make the property of ‘being able to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem’ be instantiated.
Our cognitive faculties cause us to believe we can prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.

We can easily imagine beings like us who have the cognitive faculties which make them able to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, but who do not have the belief that they can. Similarly, we can easily imagine beings like us who have cognitive faculties which make them have moral properties such as rights and obligations (assuming the first part of Wielenberg’s model is correct), but who do not have the belief that they do. We do not even have to use our imagination because there are such people, that is, human beings who do not think they have moral rights and obligations. The reason that beings with cognitive faculties like ours may not have the belief that they have moral properties is that the causal connection between cognitive faculties and moral beliefs is contingent, not necessary.

Attempting to Avoid Contingency by Claiming That the Laws of Nature are Necessary

Wielenberg understands that, because his model still contains contingency, it remains vulnerable to the lucky coincidence objection. The issue under consideration is how lucky it is for our moral beliefs and objective moral facts to correspond. He noted that “because the basic ethical facts are necessary truths, if there is any luck in the correspondence between our psychological dispositions and moral reality, it must lie entirely on the psychological side of the equation.”47 Therefore, in a final attempt to remove all contingency, he spent the last few pages of his book asking his readers to entertain the idea that laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. If this were the case, he argued, then any being with cognitive faculties like ours would necessarily have moral beliefs similar to ours.48 Eliminating contingency is the only way to ultimately rebut the lucky coincidence objection.

He noted that the amount of lucky coincidence involved in having moral beliefs that correspond with objective moral facts depends on the answer to this question: “[T]o what extent do the actual laws of nature permit the emergence of species of beings that m-possess moral principles radically different from the moral principles we m-possess?”49 He began his answer to this question with the following hypothetical claim, which he calls Extreme Specificity (ES): “The actual laws of nature entail that any being capable of forming moral beliefs at all m-possess all and only the principles included in Moral Truth [all the necessarily true general moral principles, or brute ethical facts].”50 He argues that if the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary in this regard then “there is no luck at all involved in the fact that Bart [a hypothetical person he used as an example] m-possesses moral principles that correspond with moral reality rather than m-possessing radically different (and false) moral principles.”51

Wielenberg concluded that ES must be false and he admitted that “we simply lack the knowledge required to warrant a clear and confident answer” concerning ES, but he did suggest that “we may be relatively close to ES—or at least, closer to ES than some philosophers have suggested.”52 He understands that the closer we are to ES in real life, the smaller amount of luck is entailed by our having moral beliefs that correspond to objective moral facts and properties. He concluded his book by stating that “[a]s far as I can tell, a certain degree of agnosticism is called for with respect to just how lucky we are to have moral knowledge on a view like mine.”53

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[40] Ibid., 36, 145, 156.

[41] Ibid., 145.

[42] Wielenberg agreed that contingency entails luck when he noted that “Where there is no contingency, there is no luck.” Ibid., 167.

[43] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 156.

[44] Ibid., 148.

[45] Ibid., 135–44.

[46] This particular refutation by analogy was developed by Dr. Greg Welty.

[47] Ibid., 167.

[48] Ibid., 166–75.

[49] Ibid., 167.

[50] Ibid., 168. Moral Truth is the set of all necessarily true general moral principles, which, as I have noted, are what he claims are BEFs.

[51] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 168.

[52] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 169.

[53] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 175.

Sweeping Contingency Under the Rug (Part 1)

April 20, 2022/ Adam Johnson

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at Convincing Proof

Table of Contents

How Erik Wielenberg’s Third Factor Model Fails to Rebut the Lucky Coincidence Objection

Erik Wielenberg describes his view as “godless robust normative realism,” a combination of holding that “robust normative realism is true and there is no God.”1 Enoch describes robust normative realism as the view that “there are response-independent, non-natural, irreducibly normative truths… objective ones, that when successful in our normative inquiries we discover rather than create or construct.”2 Adding ‘godless’ to this, Wielenberg’s position then is that objective moral values and obligations exist, even though God does not.

In his non-theistic model Wielenberg claims that moral facts and properties are objectively real and that we as human beings can have accurate moral knowledge of these facts and properties. These types of models have been critiqued by both theists and atheists alike. One common objection against such models is as follows: If there are such things as objective moral facts and properties, and assuming they are causally inert, it would be quite a lucky coincidence if our moral beliefs happened to correspond to them. Call this the “lucky coincidence” objection. Proponents of Evolutionary Debunking Arguments (EDA’s) point out that this objection is amplified for a person if she believes that our moral beliefs have developed contingently through a haphazard evolutionary process.

The lucky coincidence objection would never have been raised if moral facts and properties somehow caused our moral beliefs. However, most proponents of robust normative realism believe that this is not the case. For instance, Wielenberg explained that “[a]n important feature of my view is that while many of the non-moral properties upon which moral properties D-supervene can produce causal effects, the moral properties themselves are epiphenomenal—they have no causal impact on the rest of reality. That aspect of moral properties makes the question of how we could have knowledge of them particularly press.”3 He summarized the lucky coincidence objection well when he noted that “if moral facts do not explain the moral beliefs of human beings, then those beliefs being correct would involve a lucky coincidence that is incompatible with genuine knowledge.”4

Wielenberg attempted to address the lucky coincidence objection by proposing that a third factor, namely, our cognitive faculties, explains why there is a correspondence between objective moral properties and our moral beliefs. He argued that human cognitive faculties do two things: they make objective moral properties be instantiated and they also generate our moral beliefs. Because moral properties and moral beliefs both stem from the same thing, our cognitive faculties, this secures a correlation between them, while also allowing for the fact that moral properties themselves are causally inert. He explained that cognitive faculties “both entail certain moral facts and causally contribute to the presence of moral beliefs that correspond to those moral facts. On that model, it is not at all unlikely that moral beliefs and moral facts will correspond.”5 He used his third-factor model to deflect criticism from several prominent EDA proponents including Gilbert Harman, Michael Ruse, Sharon Street, and Richard Joyce.6

In this paper I argue that Wielenberg’s third-factor model fails to rebut the lucky coincidence objection for two reasons. First, those who reject theism, if they are consistent, should also reject Wielenberg’s notion that cognitive faculties make moral properties be instantiated. Second, Wielenberg does not eliminate the lucky coincidence objection with his third-factor model, but only moves it somewhere else as he attempts to sweep contingency under the rug. Even if cognitive faculties do make moral properties be instantiated, the correspondence between moral properties and moral beliefs breaks down because, while his proposed relationship between cognitive faculties and moral properties is necessary, his proposed relationship between cognitive faculties and moral beliefs is contingent. And where there is contingency, there is luck.

Atheists Like Wielenberg Who Argue for Objective Morality Have to Battle on Two Fronts

Theists often argue that the existence of objective morality is best explained by the existence of God. Robert Adams, one of the most well-known contemporary proponents of this moral argument for God, has made the following argument:

Morality is objective, “certain things are morally right and others are morally wrong.”7
Objective morality is best explained by theism, “the most adequate answer is provided by a theory that entails the existence of God.”8
Therefore, there is good reason to think theism is true, “my metaethical views provide me with a reason of some weight for believing in the existence of God.”9

Similarly, William Lane Craig has been an influential voice in this conversation. He has regularly argued for the following two contentions:10

If theism is true, we have a sound foundation for morality.
If theism is false, we do not have a sound foundation for morality.

Nearly all theists agree that theism provides a more sound foundation for objective morality than atheism, though they may disagree on exactly how God provides such a foundation. Though theists may disagree on the details, an immaterial and personal God, as the ultimate source of all things, provides a much more fitting explanation for objective morality, which itself is both immaterial and personal. For instance, Baggett and Walls argue that “[t]he authority of moral obligations needs an account… Theism—entailing a loving, perfect God who commands, who knows us better than we know ourselves, who knows truly what is in our ultimate best interest, and who desires the best for us—can, we submit, most effectively provide it.”11

Interestingly enough, many atheists agree with Craig’s two contentions. Let us call such individuals ROM atheists, that is, atheists who Reject Objective Morality (ROM). Of Craig’s two contentions, the second one is heard more often from ROM atheists. Bertrand Russell wrote that “Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms…”12 Jacques Monod lamented that ““…[m]an at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.”13 Richard Dawkins wrote that:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good; nothing but blind pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.14

Michael Ruse, explained that “…Darwinian theory shows that in fact morality is a function of (subjective) feelings, but it shows also that we have (and must have) the illusion of objectivity… In a sense, therefore, morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes.”15

However, some ROM even express agreement with Craig’s first contention, that theism provides a better explanation for objective morality than atheism. J. L. Mackie wrote:

[W]e might well argue… that objective intrinsically prescriptive features, supervening upon natural ones, constitute so odd a cluster of qualities and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events, without an all-powerful God to create them. If, then, there are such intrinsically prescriptive objective values, they make the existence of a god more probable than it would have been without them.16

More recently, Paul Draper proposed that “…the probability that moral agents exist given naturalism is extremely low, much lower than it is given theism… [there] is the possibility that some ‘historical outcomes’ like the existence of embodied moral agents are much more probable on theism than on naturalism and hence significantly raise the ratio of the probability of theism to the probability of naturalism.”17

Thus, in making his case for godless robust normative realism, Wielenberg finds himself in a difficult minority position, having to argue against critiques from two sides—theists and ROM atheists. He began his book explaining that he is, in large part, responding to atheists such as Gilbert Harman, whom Wielenberg said “suggested that we ought to take seriously the possible truth of nihilism,” and J. L. Mackie, of whom Wielenberg wrote “[i]nterestingly, Mackie himself, although an atheist, suggested that theism might be able to answer his worries about the queerness of the alleged supervenience relation between moral and natural properties.”18 Wielenberg differs from ROM atheists in that he believes in the existence of non-natural moral facts and properties. He believes these properties “are sui generis, a fundamental type of property not reducible to or fully constituted by some other type of property. Contra the Thaleans, all is not water, or physical, or natural.”19 Most likely referring to ROM atheists, he admits that “some have found this sort of view to be deeply puzzling if not wildly implausible.”20

In particular, Wielenberg admits that “it is not only theistic philosophers who have found robust normative realism to be problematic. A number of contemporary non-theist philosophers charge that robust normative realism runs into trouble when it comes to accounting for human moral knowledge.”21 Sharon Street’s colorful articulation of the lucky coincidence objection below is quite memorable:

[A]llowing our evaluative judgments to be shaped by evolutionary influences is analogous to setting out for Bermuda and letting the course of your boat be determined by the wind and tides: just as the push of wind and tides on your boat has nothing to do with where you want to go, so the historical push of natural selection on the content of our evaluative judgments has nothing to do with evaluative truth… Of course it’s possible that as a matter of sheer chance, some large portion of our evaluative judgments ended up true, due to a happy coincidence between the realist’s independent evaluative truths and the evaluative directions in which natural selection tended to push us, but this would require a fluke of luck that’s not only extremely unlikely, in view of the huge universe of logically possible evaluative judgments and truths, but also astoundingly convenient to the realist.22

Street’s concern is that if there are such things as objective moral facts and properties, then it would be quite the lucky coincidence if our moral beliefs corresponded to them, given that our moral beliefs developed haphazardly through an evolutionary process which selected for survival and reproduction, not an ability to know truth correctly. While discussing the difficulty of explaining why we should think objective moral facts and our moral beliefs correspond, Wielenberg reminded his readers that robust normative realists like himself are “hamstrung in this task by the fact that there is no causal connection between moral facts and moral beliefs.”23 In response to this lucky coincidence objection, he proposed his third-factor model.

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Footnotes

[1] Erik J. Wielenberg, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 57. Other proponents of robust normative realism include Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Derek Parfit, On What Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

[2] David Enoch, “An Outline of an Argument for Robust Metanormative Realism,” in Oxford Studies in Metaethics (ed. Russ Shafer-Landau; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21.

[3] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 13–14.

[4] Ibid., 153.

[5] Ibid., 154.

[6] Ibid., 146–64.

[7] Robert M. Adams, “Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief,” in Rationality and Religious Belief (ed. C. F. Delaney; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 116.

[8] Ibid., 117.

[9] Ibid.

[10] William Lane Craig, “Opening Statement by William Lane Craig,” in Is Goodness without God Good Enough?: A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics (eds. Nathan L. King and Robert K. Garcia; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 30.

[11] David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2016), 290.

[12] Bertrand Russell, “The Free Man’s Worship,” The Independent Review 1 (1903): 416.

[13] Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (New York: Knopf, 1971), 180.

[14] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Repr. (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 133.

[15] Michael Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy (New York: Blackwell, 1986), 253.

[16] J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 115–16.

[17] Paul Draper, “Cosmic Fine-Tuning and Terrestrial Suffering: Parallel Problems for Naturalism and Theism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 41.4 (2004): 311.

[18] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, viii.

[19] Ibid., 14.

[20] Ibid., 16.

[21] Ibid., 85.

[22] Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 121–22.

[23] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 155.

Review of Christopher B. Kulp, The Metaphysics of Morality, Part 2

April 07, 2022/ Dale Kratt

Table of Contents

As I turn now to critically assess Kulp’s thinking, I note that he writes clearly, develops his position in good logical order, and also treats opposing positions briefly but fairly throughout his work. I should point out that my critical assessment comes from a distinctively theistic viewpoint, and that his work is one of several expositions of the ascending viewpoint of moral non-naturalism in the last 20 years or so.[1] Although this book has a lot of the same content as his earlier work, Knowing Moral Truth: A Theory of Metaethics and Moral Knowledge,[2] it develops the metaphysics more thoroughly than the earlier work.

Clearly, the key to understanding Kulp’s metaethical approach is in understanding his starting point for inquiry, namely, tutored, everyday, common sense moral beliefs and commitments. This is where Kulp thinks we must begin because these are foundational to our moral lives.[3] This starting point not only shapes how he proceeds in developing his metaethical account, but also shapes the wider character of that account and how he develops certain key broader themes within his account.

Metaphysics of Morality

By Kulp, Christopher B.

Kulp formulates the bedrock of such everyday common sense moral belief in terms of first-order moral propositions. He does not, for example, appeal to our experience of everyday common sense morality in terms of moral phenomenology, as is common among ethical theorists. His approach is to move from bedrock first-order moral propositions to the nature of morality and its second-order metaphysics.[4] This then is a bottom-up approach that works from bedrock first-order moral propositions to the wider and more encompassing second-order moral metaphysics.

I think that this is a worthwhile and interesting move. I agree with most of his thinking here and also agree with his critique of the various non-realist positions that he engages in a critical way. This thoroughgoing bottom-up approach, however, is not matched by an equally rigorous and logically structured top-down approach in developing the metaphysics of morality. Consequently, key questions over a range of top-down fundamental matters are given no thorough consideration in his analysis.

The most significant of these is a matter that we briefly noted in our previous review which we will now consider in a bit more detail. Recall that in Kulp’s metaphysics the moral domain is ontically distinct; it exists in a mind-independent manner. Recall also that moral properties exist as abstract entities, that they supervene on a base set of physical properties and that they are emergent properties.[5] As Kulp asserts, if there is no physical universe then no morality is possible.[6] What then of the status of the moral domain before the Big Bang?[7] Kulp answers that there was no morality before the Big Bang, nor could there have been since no physical universe existed.

Does this then mean that somehow, at the Big Bang, a mind-independent domain of abstract entities comes into existence, for example, necessary and eternal mathematical truths or mind-independent moral properties, to name just a few of the horde of uninstantiated abstract entities that must exist on Kulp’s Platonic account?

He is also firm on rejecting the idea that our moral beliefs are the result of naturalistic evolutionary forces and rejects evolutionary ethics as strongly physicalistic.[8] This way of formulating the ultimate etiology of the moral is not unusual in the case of the various versions of secular nonnaturalist metaethics.[9] However, these non-naturalist formulations raise a host of vexed questions that need to be answered given that they introduce a number of deep metaphysical challenges.

The fact that Kulp never takes theistic metaethics seriously is telling. The fact that he never works out in a rigorous manner a fully integrated top-down account to balance out his bottom-up account of metaethics is likewise telling. But even his bottom-up approach misses key elements that theism handles quite well. How does a universe such as ours, an intelligible universe, given the kind of moral rational beings that we are, come into being in the first place? Not only does Kulp not attempt to come to terms with such fundamental questions, but his mostly bottom-up oriented approach never forces him to fully confront such fundamental matters.

Moral propositions seem to be the kind of entities that require minded, knowing beings to be the meaningful and distinctive propositions that they are. They are necessarily person related.[10] Does a non-minded, impersonal, morally indifferent universe bring into being non-physical, non-natural, moral properties as abstract entities that are obviously fitted for minded, moral, personal moral beings like us? If this is the case, then how and why is this so? We can see here that the first major top-down challenge for any fully secular, non-theistic account is the existence of the universe itself; this has to be explained.

Then the second fundamental challenge for any impersonalist Platonic non-naturalism is the personal moral beings that we are, coming into being and situated in a vast impersonalist universe that includes an infinite array of uninstantiated, ontically specific, diverse, abstract entities to which we are somehow connected in multiple ways. How does an impersonal universe, truth indifferent, morally indifferent, bring into being the minded, moral persons that morality requires, and how then is abstract, propositional moral truth non-accidentally integrated and matched to moral persons like us? Obviously, some causal story must be true that accounts for the universe in which we live and the moral rational beings that we are.

Kulp offers no such causal account, but only vaguely gestures in this general direction. In this respect his bottom up approach is wholly inadequate. Also, nothing in the causal story can come from the side of abstract entities themselves since, as Kulp acknowledges, and most thinkers concur,[11] abstract entities are to be understood as atemporal, non-spatial, non-causal, non-empirical entities.[12]

We then have here another significant problem for all versions of impersonalist Platonism—the problem of exemplification of properties, and of moral properties in particular. How is it that the universe is made in such a way that abstract properties are exemplified in physical properties in precisely the ways that they are? Mere fluke or grand cosmic coincidence will not suffice here; this amounts to no explanation at all and renders the entire matter deeply problematic and mysterious. Surely this undermines Kulp’s theory.

Additionally, in the case of moral properties, merely invoking something like “emergence” will not suffice.[13] Emergence itself is problematic.[14] Also, the relations of supervenience have been questioned in a similar sort of way as emergence? It is generally understood that supervenience merely states a relation but does not actually explain the stated relations.[15] How did the relations of supervenience come to be the way that they are in the first place and how is it that they continue in just the recurrent ways that they do? How is this relation to be explained?

This matter is particularly acute in the case of Kulp’s moral metaphysic since he rightly rejects all versions of physicalism as well as moral constructivism. Kulp nowhere attempts to come to terms with the vast infinite assortment of ontically diverse abstract entities that must exist on any account like his and how these have come to exist and be integrated and exemplified in the actual world in which we live.[16] Mathematical Platonism is typically seen as the paradigm case of certainty and logical necessity and moral Platonism too easily slides into an unstated assumption that moral propositions are to be conferred a similar sort of certainty and necessity. Clearly, mathematical and moral necessities are different in some important respects.[17] The one is true by logical necessity, the denial of which generates a logical contradiction, while the other is made true as a grounded necessity, the denial of which does not generate a logical contradiction. Grounded necessity is made true given a truth condition relation that makes it true. This involves an asymmetric relation of metaphysical dependence.

In the case of Kulp’s non-naturalist metaethics, moral truth is grounded in complex abstract moral properties and facts. However, the existence of these abstract moral facts themselves, as truth makers, is ultimately left unexplained on Kulp’s account. This is therefore a fundamental metaphysical, ontological gap regarding the nature and origin of these abstracta in his account. Given the above criticisms, once again, the fact that Kulp never takes theistic metaethics seriously is telling.

Theism better explains the universe in which we live, the moral domain and the moral nature of humanity. It better accounts for the moral truth that Kulp wants to argue for. It should be pointed out that Kulp nowhere directly denies theism or argues explicitly against theism, but he clearly proceeds in such a way that God is completely irrelevant to his metaphysics of the moral.

If we take something like Kulp’s bottom up approach and work from the moral nature of humanity, there is much that the theist will agree with in Kulp’s metaethics. Theists will naturally embrace some form of moral realism, some form of moral cognitivism, some form of moral objectivism, some form of moral non-naturalism, perhaps even embracing some form of revised Platonism.[18] In this respect there is wide agreement between theists and secular non-naturalists.

Perhaps the most significant area of agreement between theists and secular non-naturalists is the shared rejection of all forms of naturalism; of physicalism as an adequate account of metaethics. In this regard there is shared consensus between theists and secular non-naturalists that naturalism cannot adequately ground and explain the moral domain and the moral nature of humanity. The theist rightly points out that for humanity to exist the life-friendly universe and all subsequent creative acts for our world to be the kind of world it is must also be accounted for.

To account for the kind of beings that we are, moral-rational beings, theism takes within its creative purview not just humanity and the moral domain, but all the following:

1. The personal creative God that freely creates the contingent universe in which we live; a fine tuned, life permitting universe and world.

2. The personal, minded God that creates complex, specified information.

3. The personal God that creates not only biological information, but information rich biological entities.

4. The personal God that creates sentient biological life and beings.

5. The personal God that creates self-knowing, moral rational beings like us fitted to an intelligible universe.[19]

Moral facts are intrinsically person relatable, that is, person-related facts. This fundamental property of moral facts must be accounted for. It must naturally and fittingly lay into the overall wider metaphysical account of the moral. Impersonalist moral Platonism cannot account for this essential property of moral facts. In a theistic account of Reality personhood is ontologically fundamental to Reality. It does not somehow mysteriously emerge from a finite, contingent, impersonal materialist universe, as must be the case on Kulp’s account. Moral facts thus flow naturally and fittingly, out of a personalist theistic account of Reality.

Since the actual physical universe both has a beginning and is fully contingent, the theist takes issue with Kulp’s affirmation that the physical is both necessary and sufficient for the moral to exist.[20] It is neither. On a theistic account, the living God, a personal, infinite, necessary moral being grounds and manifests the moral domain in and from himself, has freely created humanity to be like himself as regards moral rational being. This God therefore adequately explains the kind of universe in which we live, the moral domain, and the personal dimensions of our existence and the fact that these are integrated and matched from the top down in a necessary sort of way. If the physical universe did not exist the moral domain would still exist–in the living, personal, necessary God. There is thus no need to posit the infinite horde of abstract entities that Kulp’s non-naturalism must posit for his non-physicalist account to succeed.[21]

Theism works equally as a fully integrating top-down explanation of things as well as a comprehensive bottom-up approach that explains the varied particulars of our moral lives; from the Grand Story to the particular story of our everyday, common sense, tutored moral beliefs and commitments.

On the whole, Kulp’s work is commendable and should be read by all who are interested in an accessible exposition of moral non-naturalism. For the theist there is much to agree with in his work. It is clear, well written, and generally well argued. His reviews of the various non-realist metaethical positions are also very useful even though generally brief. But at times Kulp too easily glosses over big issues that he either merely stipulates on, too briefly comments on, or fails to follow through on the logical implications of his own metaphysics. All this taken into consideration, theistic metaethical thinkers should fully engage his work.

[1] For example, see David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013); Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 2005); Erik J. Wielenberg, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014); Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

[2] Lexington Books, New York, 2017.

[3] Kulp, Metaphysics of Morality, 6.

[4] Ibid., 8–9.

[5] Ibid., 126.

[6] Ibid., 124.

[7] I fully recognize the problem of using the temporal term “before” in reference to the beginning of the universe. In Perfect Being Theism God is eternal and therefore there is no problem here since God is creator even of our temporal dimensions of time that begin with our physical universe.

[8] Kulp, Metaphysics of Morality, 61.

[9] Each non-naturalist thinker earlier cited formulates his position of the ultimate historical development of the moral in a similar way to Kulp. Each of these thinkers however has attempted a response to the problematic issues raised by evolutionary debunking arguments and other various critiques, whereas Kulp has not. For an overview of debunking arguments, see Guy Kahane, “Evolutionary Debunking Arguments,” Noûs 45, no. 1 (March 2011): 103–125. For an overview of Plantinga’s arguments, see Andrew Moon, “Debunking Morality: Lessons from the EAAN Literature: Debunking Morality,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (December 2017): 208–226; Daniel Crow, “A Plantingian Pickle for a Darwinian Dilemma: Evolutionary Arguments Against Atheism and Normative Realism,” Ratio 29, no. 2 (June 2016): 130–148.

[10] Stephen E. Parrish, Atheism?: A Critical Analysis, 2019, 168–171.

[11] Gideon Rosen, “Abstract Objects,” ed. Edward N. Zalta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: The Metaphysics Research Lab, Spring 2020); Sam Cowling, Abstract Entities (New Problems of Philosophy) (New York: Routledge, 2017); Bohn, God and Abstract Objects (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

[12] Kulp, Metaphysics of Morality, 157.

[13] Ibid., 126. See for example Olivier Sartenaer, “Sixteen Years Later: Making Sense of Emergence (Again),” Journal for General Philosophy of Science 47, no. 1 (April 2016): 79–103. J.P. Moreland effectively brings out the problems with emergence in his critique of Eric Wielenberg’s “godless normative realism.” See chapter 11 in William Lane Craig, Erik J. Wielenberg, and Adam Lloyd Johnson, A Debate on God and Morality: What Is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties? (New York: Routledge, 2020).

[14] Pat Lewtas, “The Impossibility of Emergent Conscious Causal Powers,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95, no. 3 (July 3, 2017): 475–487. As Lewtas points out, part of the challenge to any view of emergence comes from what is known as “causal closure of the physical.” If a truly emergent property has causal powers emergent from, over and above, the physical properties of the entity in question this is not easily reconciled with causal closure of the physical, i.e. that all causal powers are strictly physical powers that come from within the physical system.

[15] Jaegwon Kim, “Supervenience As a Philosophical Concept.” Metaphilosophy 21, no. 1 & 2 (April 1990): 1–27.

[16] William Lane Craig, God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism, First edition. (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2016), 18, 41.

[17] For a useful analysis of this see Michael B. Gill, “Morality Is Not Like Mathematics: The Weakness of the Math‐Moral Analogy,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 57, no. 2 (June 2019): 194–216.

[18] John M. Rist, Real Ethics: Reconsidering the Foundations of Morality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John M. Rist, Plato’s Moral Realism: The Discovery of the Presuppositions of Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012). Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). For a good overview of theistic ethics, see David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); David Baggett, The Moral Argument: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). For another exposition, see John E. Hare, God and Morality: A Philosophical History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007); John E. Hare, God’s Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Note that I include within theistic ethics the natural law tradition as well, see for example Mark C. Murphy, God and Moral Law: On the Theistic Explanation of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Craig A. Boyd, A Shared Morality: A Narrative Defense of Natural Law Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007).

[19] A naturalist account of the universe and life has difficulty with all of these necessary precursors to the existence of humanity. See Stephen C. Meyer, The Return of the God Hypothesis: Compelling Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God (New York: HarperOne, 2020).

[20] Kulp, Metaphysics of Morality, 126.

[21] It should be pointed out that Kulp nowhere addresses the view that abstract moral properties might possibly be classed as “naturalistic” yet non-physicalistic. This issue is raised by William J. FitzPatrick, “Ethical Non-Naturalism and Normative Properties,” in New Waves in Metaethics, ed. Michael Brady (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011), 7–35. Theists have proposed various ways to understand the nature and relation of abstract objects relative to God. See Paul M. Gould, ed., Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects, Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy of Religion (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014). I espouse a divine conceptualist position wherein these are not autonomous abstract objects but eternal ideal objects in the mind of God. See Stephen E. Parrish, The Knower and the Known: Physicalism, Dualism, and the Nature of Intelligibility (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2013).

March 09, 2018

John Hare’s God’s Command, 8.4.2, “Philip Kitcher”

March 09, 2018/ David Baggett

Hare thinks Kitcher’s book The Ethical Project is ideally suited to the purposes of the present chapter. He argues for a pragmatist naturalism that is governed by the principle “No Spooks,” including God, but also a realm of values, faculties of ethical perception, and “pure practical reason” (in Kant’s phrase). Although Kitcher’s book isn’t an argument against God’s existence, he does briefly give two reasons for denying the existence of God. They are (first) that not all religions can be true because they contradict each other, and there is no core set of doctrines holding them all together, and (second) that the methods by which people reach religious belief are unreliable. Hare’s book has, in addition to pointing out overlaps between the Abrahamic faiths, defended a view of general revelation according to which all human beings get enough revelation of the divine nature to be without excuse if they reject God, even though they do not all have an innate sense of a single God.

In general, it doesn’t follow from the fact that some set of beliefs contains beliefs that contradict each other that they are all false, any more than disagreements across time about scientific claims show that all scientific claims are false. As to the claim about the unreliability of the methods by which humans reach their religious beliefs, Hare’s argued that the methods are natural to us, though not infallible. He’s also written about some of the ways internal to theology for correcting some of these beliefs. So we can’t settle the question of whether the communication with that divine being is reliable independently of a view about the existence of that being. In any case, the important question for the present chapter is not the truth of atheism but what follows for ethics from the assumption that God does not exist.

Kitcher starts from a distinction between different types of altruism. The most important for understanding the ethical project is “psychological altruism,” which differs from “biological altruism” and “behavioral altruism.” Psychological altruism involves the intention to promote what are taken to be the wishes or the interests of others. Kitcher suggests that ethics arises as a means of reducing psychological-altruism failure. In the kinds of groups that we can imagine our first human ancestors to have formed, it was crucial for survival to be able to trust each other not to defect from the various forms of cooperation that constituted their way of life.

One key step in this development is what Kitcher calls “normative guidance,” which is defined in terms of the ability to apprehend and obey commands. He makes the reception of supposed divine commands central to the development of ethics, even though he thinks there is no transcendent being to give such commands. He makes it clear that he thinks fear is the central original motivation, the fear of divine punishment. Unless there were sanctions for disobedience, fear could hardly be central to the initial capacity for normative guidance. This fear then gets internalized as conscience, and the commanding voice seems to come from within, initially and crudely as the expression of fears.

Hare notes a difficulty here. On the supposition that our original human ancestors were hunter-gatherers, it’s important to notice that the hunter-gatherer societies that we know about do not, on the whole, have moralizing high gods. After various principled exclusions, out of over 1250 societies, 23 societies are left in the sample (among those early hunter-gatherers), and of these only one has “moralizing high gods,” the Yahgan or Yamana. Hare thinks this matters because it suggests that worship of the divine is much older than what the narrative about an “unseen enforcer” implies. The idea that humans invented gods in order to enforce the law has a long tradition behind it, but the anthropological evidence doesn’t support this. The societies that didn’t have moralizing high gods may have had “enforcers,” but equally some emotion other than fear of punishment may have been the primary emotion involved in their religion. Something like awe or respect or reverence is a good candidate. This would make ancient religion more continuous with our own. We would then need to ask what accounts for this phenomenon. An encounter with God is one explanation, though not the only one. What is remarkable in Kitcher’s account is the absence of any recognition, especially for educated people, of the human desire for the divine. It’s striking that a central desire of so many of the world people both educated and not, and both now and in our history, is here excluded.

Another reason for worrying about making fear of punishment central to religion is that this makes it contradictory to think, in Kant’s phrase, of “recognizing our duties as divine commands.” Kant gives an argument in the Groundwork that we can’t base our duties on fear of divine punishment. But this is quite different from respecting God as the head of the kingdom of ends, who can maintain the system in which good is rewarded and evil is punished. The moral agent needs the state to punish, but not because her moral motivation is fear of punishment. Rather, she values freedom, and values punishment as a “hindrance to the hindrances to freedom.” The moral agent is to aim at the highest good (union of virtue and happiness), and this requires the belief that the system by which virtue is consistent with happiness is in place and the apparent disproportion of virtue and happiness that we experience in this life is not final. Hare, then, wants to distinguish two different motivations. One is fear, because punishment can force the costs of free-riding above the costs of cooperation. The other (more satisfactory to the Kantian) is hope: a belief in punishment is part of a belief in a world morally governed. There is a difference between being motivated by a fear of divine punishment and being motivated by love of justice, which is a system that divine punishment maintains.

When Kitcher comes to consider concrete cases where ethical decision is influenced by religious faith, he is concerned to deny that these cases involve anything like ethical “insight.” He has two reasons for saying this in the case of Quaker John Woolman’s realization about the wrongness of slavery. One is that Woolman is reflecting on the New Testament and not directly on experience, and the other is that he doesn’t mention the name of the slave whose sale “afflicted” his mind. But neither reason is persuasive.

Having accepted that divine command theory may reflect a deep fact about cultural competition, Kitcher rejects it. He has four main objections. The first is Plato’s argument from the Euthyphro. The main problem here is that he has not considered the versions of divine command theory that navigate between the horns of Plato’s dilemma. Mackie had already seen how to do this, and there are excellent versions in Adams and Evans. A second objection is that we get an infinite regress if we ask, “Why should we obey a divine command?” Recall Scotus’s answer is that God is to be loved (and so obeyed) is knowable from its terms (and so does not require prior justification).

A third objection is from horrible commands such as the commands to kill Isaac or slaughter the Canaanites. Abraham’s situation is quite different from ours. He points to Wolterstorff’s claim that the stories might be fictional, and to Baggett and Walls’ discussion in Good God. The fourth objection is that religion leads to hierarchy of an oppressive sort, and so undermines what Kitcher takes to be our initial situation of equality. But Hare argues that such a hierarchy can’t be essential to religion (for it wasn’t a feature of the religion of hunter-gatherers). Religion, just like any social phenomenon, can be used for violent and oppressive purposes, but also for peacefulness and inclusion. We can add that the corruption of the best is often the worst.

Kitcher’s answer to the normative question is that humans have throughout history had an ethical project whose method can be idealized in a certain way, and that we need to appreciate how central the ethical project is to human life. But the skeptic may ask why he should be bound by the rules emerging from this project. Why adopt any ethical tradition? Kitcher’s answer to the normative question belongs in the same family as Greene’s (“We can grasp the principles behind nature’s machines and make them our own.”) The ethical project is central to human life, as we observe it, but so is self-preference. Our nature as evolved is a mixture. That is exactly why we need ethics; we are best by psychological-altruism failure on all sides.

The most important point may be that Kitcher thinks that ruling out any false beliefs about the natural world means that any modification of ethical practice invoking the commands of an allegedly transcendent being would rightly be rejected and excluded from the outset. Religious conviction, which is to say most people’s conviction, does not even get into the conversation. But surely, Hare counters, what we need are the conditions for settling disagreements on these central concerns without assuming religious grounds don’t even make the threshold for conditional mutual engagement. Kitcher’s account of ethical method would be a great deal more plausible, and more consistent with his overall pragmatism, if he allowed that religious disagreements could be consistent with conditional mutual engagement in this way.

February 23, 2018

John Hare’s God’s Command, 8.3.4, “Paul Bloom”

February 23, 2018/ David Baggett

This subsection is about a different kind of anti-realism, namely, anti-realism about God. It examines the question whether evolutionary psychology gives us any reason to doubt the existence of God. Since the claim that it’s irrational to believe in God is a presupposition of much of the literature Hare’s been considering, he thinks it’s worth discussing.

Bloom says that religion emerges as a by-product of certain highly structured systems that have evolved for understanding the social world. Another term sometimes used here is that religion is a “spandrel effect,” where the spandrel is the space (sometimes decorated) between the outer curve of an arch and the angle formed by the moldings enclosing it, so that the spandrel does not itself bear weight. Religion would be like the ability to understand calculus, not itself emerging because of adaptive claims, but made possible by faculties that did emerge in this way. Bloom says he’s trying to explain universal religious belief here, not those that vary from one culture to another, and not religious rituals.

There are two tendencies with which humans have evolved that are relevant here. The first is what Justin Barrett calls a “hypersensitive agency detection device” (HADD). Our tendency to find agency around us has no doubt arisen for survival reasons: “Better to guess that the sound in the bushes is an agent (such as a person or tiger) than assume it isn’t and become lunch.” The second tendency, less firmly established, is that we implicitly endorse a strong substance dualism of soul and body, of the kind defended by Plato and Descartes, and that this endorsement is a by-product of our possession of two distinct cognitive systems—one for dealing with material objects, the other for social entities. These tendencies might produce a belief that there is a supernatural agent behind natural phenomena and that this agent like our own souls is spiritual and not bodily.

Hare considers what the theological implications would be of Bloom being right about these two side effects. We can generally explore why people form the beliefs they do without that settling the question whether the beliefs are true. But in this case, the origins of the belief would cast its truth into question. Not unlike Freud’s argument that it would be irrational to believe in something just because one desperately wanted for it to be true.

So what is the bearing on the rationality of religious belief of the claim that there is an explanation of such belief from the two side effects? We should ask what kind of psychological explanation would resist being incorporated into a larger, more comprehensive supernaturalistic explanation, and whether the present explanation is one of these. It’s hard to give a general account, but perhaps this much is true. A psychological explanation of some phenomenon would resist such incorporation if it postulated a kind of causation of that phenomenon that would be inappropriate for God to employ. But there is no reason to think that it is inappropriate for God to use randomness, in the sense in which this is part of evolutionary theory. There is no reason to think that God would not allow us to acquire our basic cognitive capacities by random mutation plus natural selection.

So far this is a merely defensive maneuver. But perhaps more can be said. Following Justin Barrett’s work, we might suggest that the hypersensitive agency detection device is a form of access to religious belief that fits our nature well. In this book Hare has been arguing that the moral law, though it can’t be deduced from our nature, fits that nature well. Now we can suggest the same about our theistic belief acquisition. Barrett links the agency detection device with a set of subsystems designed to carry out particular tasks important for our survival. Concepts that are “minimally counter-intuitive” given the operation of these subsystems will seem plausible, and will be easily remembered and transmitted. This does not mean that these subsystems always yield true beliefs. We can’t deduce the truth of a belief from its deliverance by one of these subsystems. But these beliefs fit our nature, as constituted by these systems, exceedingly well.

For example, belief in a super-knowing god may be natural, helping account for children being “intuitive theists.” Barrett also suggests plausibly that the connection between God and moral concerns is intuitive as well. In other words, the theist can legitimately hold that God chooses means for our access to divine command that are not inappropriate but entirely fitting to our nature, the kind of means that we would expect creatures with cognitive subsystems like ours to use. Hare says we should conclude that at least from the evidence marshalled in the present section, there’s no demonstration that belief in God is irrational.

February 16, 2018

John Hare’s God’s Command, 8.3.3, “Sharon Street”

February 16, 2018/ David Baggett

In 2006 Sharon Street published an article, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” which has been the subject of a considerable literature in reply. Her argument relies on the primary claim that our normative dispositions—that is, our dispositions to form certain normative beliefs rather than others—are (largely) selected because they have some natural property. For example, perhaps they contribute to reproductive success by promoting certain kinds of cooperation. But from the perspective of realism, accepting this claim defeats our epistemic entitlement to our normative beliefs, because we will come to be aware of the unlikely reliability of the processes that shaped those beliefs.

This is the Darwinian dilemma: the realist has either to deny the primary claim or to concede that her “normative judgments are, by her own lights, irrational.” She’s not arguing for skepticism or for the impossibility of ethical knowledge. Rather, she is trying to show that, if there is to be ethical knowledge, it has to be understood on an anti-realist model. Her point is that all that natural selection needs is our beliefs in the normative facts, not the normative facts themselves. If our normative and theological beliefs are largely the product of our evolutionary history, fitness-enhancing beliefs about morality and gods will be adopted, regardless of whether they are, in the realist sense, true or false. Even if a particular belief is false, it may promote genetic propagation.

This is the challenge. But there is a good response to it. Even if we grant that natural selection has given us normative belief-forming dispositions that are not truth-tracking, and that have in fact given us a mixture of “nasty” belief-forming dispositions and corresponding behaviors alongside other “nicer” ones, and even if we grant that therefore our normative beliefs are unreliable to the extent that they are given to us by natural selection, nothing follows about how many of our normative beliefs are formed in this way.

Consider the analogy with mathematical beliefs. To what extent do we have the ability to track truths about non-linear algebra? The point is that, even if we get our cognitive equipment from evolution, we can use that equipment to reach beliefs that are independent of adaptive value. It remains possible that cultural evolution has been operating to refine our normative stance in a truth-tracking way. If we use the phrase “cultural evolution” loosely, we can make the point that admitting a significant initial effect of biological evolution on belief formation does not license the conclusion that natural selection is the sole force in all our belief formation thereafter.

The initial effect of natural selection is still relevant, because, if we were given cognitive equipment that was hopelessly and permanently vitiated, then we could not hope to use this equipment to discriminate subsequently between the beliefs in the initial mixture that we should endorse and the ones we should reject. We would be, so to speak, fatally handicapped. But there is no reason to think our situation is hopeless in this way.

Are our current normative disposition all simply products of natural selection and not (partly or wholly) products of experience, reflection, and reasoning guided by moral reality as such? This is a metaphysical question, not one proper to science in its own domain. Ruse’s recognition of this separates him from Mackie. We need to distinguish the claims of science and the claims of “scientism,” which is the attempt, as Ruse puts it, to make science say everything. Metaphysical naturalism claims baldly that there is nothing beyond physical reality, but this is a claim that requires philosophical justification and is not within the proper sphere of science. Street’s argument does not give us any reason to believe that metaphysical naturalism is true.

Image: Australopithecus Afarensis, Lucy. C. Lorenzo. CC License.

February 02, 2018

John Hare’s God’s Command, 8.3.2, “Michael Ruse”

February 02, 2018/ David Baggett

Michael Ruse is an anti-realist, in some ways like Mackie, but in other ways different. He thinks ethics is an illusion put in place by natural selection to make us good cooperators. Ruse is a moral skeptic. He does not think the sense of right and wrong has a justification at all. It’s an illusion foisted on us by our genes, like a mirage in the desert.

Yet Ruse is quite optimistic that our moral lives will not be affected by the kind of skepticism he endorses. Hare is skeptical of this, thinking we surely need some kind of justification for morality to answer the “normative question” of the first chapter. Not everybody is consistently moved by the forces of natural selection to cooperate in the way morality requires. Moral obedience is fragile. We do find precursors of the moral sentiments in our non-human ancestors, but we also find defection, and we have inherited both of these tendencies. We are by nature, in this sense, a mixture. But this means we need support from our cultural sources not only for our beliefs about what morality requires, but for our beliefs about why we should comply with it, or endorse it, why it’s valid as a demand on us. There’s evidence in the psychological literature that the force of the moral demand can be undermined by teaching, as Ruse does, that objective morality is an illusion. Saying that ethics is an illusion put in place by natural selection to make us good cooperators is likely to have the same undercutting effect as an egoist ethical theory has on economics students, particularly when morality might call for a sacrifice.

But is it just an unfortunate truth that morality is an illusion? What arguments does Ruse have for his skepticism? He has basically two, and they are versions of the same arguments we saw in Mackie. But here is the irony. Ruse ought not to accept either of them any longer because of differences from his mentor that he has come to have in other parts of his theory.

First, the argument from relativity. Ruse’s form of the argument makes a significant shift from the factual to the counterfactual. Ruse embodies a pendulum swing away from Mackie back to human universals, encoded in our genes (with environmental triggers). He appeals to what he calls “our shared psychological nature,” which includes a sense of right and wrong. So his argument from relativity is counterfactual. We could have had a quite different morality if our evolutionary history had been different. Since evolution could have taken a different path, there can’t be an objective set of values that lies behind our moral practice.

But for a divine command theorist this is not a successful objection. God could use evolution to produce the kind of creatures God wants to have, and this does not deny “random” mutation of the kind that Darwinian evolution proposes. Ruse concedes this, and agrees that a Christian can, consistently with science, “be committed to a form of what is known as the ‘divine command theory’ of metaethics.” But then the fact that humans could have evolved differently does not give us reason to think there is no objective value. Perhaps God willed us to evolve to recognize the values there actually are, and gave us commands to supplement the limits of this evolutionary history.

Ruse’s version of the argument from queerness is similarly undercut by his later concessions. He doesn’t use the term ‘queer’ but he does insist that it’s biological theory that requires us to take the skeptical position about justification. At the causal level, he thinks what’s going on is probably individual selection maximizing our own reproductive ends, and there’s no room here for objective rightness and wrongness. But Mackie was an atheist who thought theism was a “miracle.” Ruse, on the other hand, aims to expose the over-reaching character of some contemporary militant Darwinism that wants to turn science into metaphysics and to make science the arbiter of all truth. Darwinism, he holds, should not try to say everything. Whether there is or is not a God Ruse says he does not know, and science doesn’t tell him. Such claims go beyond science. He says in light of modern science someone can be a Christian and that he sees no arguments to the contrary.

To be consistent, though, Ruse should say the same of objective morality. Mackie’s argument from queerness required the premise that anything that has causal relations with the world must be accessible to science. Ruse at least sometimes now wants to deny this, and if he denies it then the foundation of the argument from queerness disappears. There’s a tension in Ruse’s thought that can be resolved by rejecting the skeptical hold-over from the less generous views of his mentor.

Here is a general principle worth emphasizing. Antagonism to realist claims in ethics or theology that made sense against the background of a thoroughgoing reductive empiricism makes no sense once that kind of empiricism is rejected.

Image: "Australopithecus sediba" by B. Eloff. Courtesy Profberger and Wits University who release it under the terms below. - Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10094681

January 19, 2018

John Hare’s God’s Command, 8.3.1, "Evolution and Anti-Realism"

January 19, 2018/ David Baggett

This section explores whether evolutionary psychology gives us a reason to be anti-realists, either about value or about God. The first of these forms of anti-realism rejects the view described earlier as “prescriptive realism.” According to prescriptive realism, when we make moral judgments we are both expressing some attitude of the will or desire and claiming that evaluative reality is a certain way independently of our judgment, so that our judgment is appropriate to it. The second part of this, the realism, is at stake in the present context. Mackie, Ruse, and Street will be covered. The second form of anti-realism is about God, and the fourth part of this section, concerning Paul Bloom, will focus specifically on this.

8.3.1 “John Mackie”

We begin with John Mackie’s argument in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. His first sentence is, “There are no objective values.” He was Humean (like Haidt), and thought our tendency to believe in objective value results from what Hume called the mind’s “propensity to spread itself on external objects” together with the pressure of our sociality. He proposed an error theory, “that although most people in making moral judgments implicitly claim, among other things, to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false.” In other words, Mackie conceded that realists are right about what moral language means, but he held that nonetheless what people mean when they make moral judgments is always false.

He conceded if DCT were true then moral judgments that claim objective prescriptivity would also be true, but he was an atheist and thought DCT false. He was also opposed to Kant’s universalism, and behind this to the biblical commandment “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This is simply impracticable, and inconsistent with human nature, he thought, because “a large element of selfishness—or, in an older terminology, self-love—is a quite ineradicable part of human nature,” and it’s doubtful any agency could effect the fundamental changes that would be needed to make practicable a morality of universal concern.

Mackie offered two arguments against realism, which he called the “argument from relativity” and the “argument from queerness.” The first says moral views are too diverse for us to suppose plausibly that we are all receptors of the same objectively prescriptive values beaming down to us. They rather seem to reflect participation in different ways of life.

But in reply, Hare says on DCT it’s unsurprising to find substantial variation in the reception of divine commands. First, in Kant’s language, we are born under the evil maxim, so that we have, in addition to the predisposition to good, the propensity to evil. The closer a faculty is to our heart or will, the more likely the faculty is to be distorted in its perceptions by the preference for our own happiness over what is good in itself, independently of its relation to ourselves. There are manifold ways in which it’s possible to get value perceptions wrong, and so there is manifold variety in moral views.

The contrast with color perception is interesting here. Though there are marginal differences in how different people split up the spectrum, there’s large-scale agreement.

Second, what God commands one set of people, or one person within a group, may be different from what God commands another.

A third important point is that Mackie may have been wrong about the amount of variety. The pendulum seems to have swung back within evolutionary psychology to the acknowledgment of human universals. It’s surprising in fact how much agreement there seems to be on basic principles between cultures, though the details and application of these principles vary substantially.

The argument from queerness is that the objectively prescriptive values that realism proposes and their effects on us are very strange things, not easily related to any kind of causation we know about within science. The simpler explanation is a subjectivist one. The notion of something objective in the world like rightness and wrongness is, in Mackie’s terms, “queer,” by which he meant inexplicable by scientific theory. He accepted that it might make sense if we believed in a God who was prescribing, but science acknowledges, in his view, no such thing.

Hare adds that Mackie was right to point out that a theist has less reason than an atheist to be an anti-realist about value. A divine command theorist already believes in a divine spiritual person outside normal science. She will still have valid questions about how a spiritual being communicates with material beings like us, but she will be less inclined to think such communication is impossible.

January 12, 2018

John Hare’s God’s Command, 8.2, “Evolution and Reducing the Moral Demand”

January 12, 2018/ David Baggett

The first way of thinking about the relation between evolution and morality is that evolution shows the idea of impartial benevolence to be utopian. 8.2.1 covers the views of Herbert Spencer and Larry Arnhart.

8.2.1 “Herbert Spencer and Larry Arnhart”

Here Hare looks at two attempts to oppose a Kantian or universal morality on the basis that it is unrealistic for our present condition, given our evolutionary endowment. Herbert Spencer is now deeply unpopular because of the use that was made of his eugenic ideas in the twentieth century. For Spencer, as Michael Ruse puts it, what holds as a matter of fact among organisms holds as a matter of obligation among humans. The relevant fact about organisms is the struggle for existence, and the consequent weeding out of the less fit, Spencer says.

He disparages efforts of those who advocated in the name of a universal humanitarianism for intervention by the state to counteract the effects of the unregulated market in 19th century Britain. In Germany this idea of the law of struggle was taken up, notoriously by Hitler in Mein Kampf. National Socialism took up also the idea of encouraging the natural order by which imbecile and unfit parts of the population are eliminated, and the highest form of life flourishes. Spencer didn’t think this natural order of struggle was permanent. He was a Lamarckian, not a Darwinian, and he thought that there would be human progress through the inheritance of acquired characteristics, so that the lower forms of human life most given to violence would decline, and we would end with universal peace. Still, in our current situation, he thought that we should let the order of nature weed out the unfit also in human society, since we are part of nature.

The particular application to eugenics and laissez-faire economics is not the important thing for our present purposes, but the general principle that we should follow our biological nature. Chapter 4 argued against what it called “deductivism,” the principle that we can deduce our moral obligations from human nature. The present principle is a species of deductivism, telling us that we can tell how we ought to live by looking at the nature of organisms in general, since we are organisms. The trouble with this principle is that the nature of organisms in general, and human nature in particular, contains characteristics that, when promoted in human society, produce evil as well as good by Kantian and utilitarian standards. To say this is not so much to argue against Spencer as to display some of the consequences of his view, and the same is true of Larry Arnhart. (Both thinkers seem to be aware of this.)

This deductivism is clearly displayed in Arnhart’s Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature, a work Hare earlier compared with Foot’s Natural Goodness. The governing principle of Arnhart’s book is that the definition of the good as the desirable (as in Aquinas) means that the good is what is generally desired, or what most people in every society throughout our time on earth have in fact desired. Arnhart claims that evolution has given us these desires because of their adaptive value, and he lists twenty of them. The claim is not that these desires are universal, because there can be defective individuals who lack them. But the principle of his book is that only if a desire is general in the above sense, or is a specification or application of such a desire, is its fulfillment good. The normative theory that results is one, he claims, that enables us to understand human nature within the natural order of the whole. He intends a contrast here with Christianity, which invokes the supernatural in explaining how we should live. And he faults Darwin for having been misled by the prevailing universal humanitarianism of his time into a utopian yearning for an ideal moral realm that transcends nature, a yearning that contradicts Darwin’s general claim that human beings are fully contained within the natural order. Arnhart doesn’t deny that humans have a natural sympathy for others, but, though sympathy can expand to embrace ever-larger groups based on some sense of shared interests, this will always rest on loving one’s own group as opposed to other groups. Arnhartian morality will always be, in the language of Chapter 3, self-indexed.

The important point for present purposes is that the list of twenty natural desires doesn’t include disinterested benevolence or the love of the enemy, and therefore the theory can’t say that the fulfillment of such desires or preferences is good. It’s significant that Aristotle is Arnhart’s philosophical hero, to whom he continually appeals. Aristotle thinks an admirable human life usually requires wealth and power and high status, and he may be right about the desires we’re born with, but it doesn’t follow that he’s right in his inference that the fulfillment of this ranking is good. The thesis of Hare’s book has been that “following nature” in this way is not a good alternative to following Kantian or Christian morality.

January 05, 2018

John Hare’s God’s Command, 8.1, “The Story”

January 05, 2018/ David Baggett

This first section tells a story about the origins of our morality. The story is just a story, not history or science. The story is not, however, merely fiction. The aim is to embed elements of the essential structure of the story at the beginning of Genesis about the Garden of Eden in an account whose details are mostly drawn from contemporary (non-theological) anthropology. It is still a story or myth, telescoping what a scientific account would spread over hundreds of thousands of years. The story does not mention God, but the fifth section of the chapter suggests that a storyteller who did mention God would provide a satisfying addition from an explanatory point of view. We can see the story as one that an anthropologist might tell her children, or as a Kant-like translation of the biblical story “within the boundaries of mere reason.”

Once upon a time there lived in Central Africa a group of apes. They were different from the groups of apes who lived around them, and they recognized this difference. For one thing, they seemed to be able to think of themselves as a group, and to think of what helped them as a group and what harmed them as a group. They would regularly meet together, and they sometimes had a kind of experience together when they met that also separated them from the other apes. They had an experience of everything belonging together, not just their own group, but everything. And it all seemed to them good and beautiful. Their assemblies gave them great joy and also a sense of awe, and they came to organize their lives together around them. They were able at these times to forget what kept them apart from each other, and to rejoice in what kept them together. Because of their new kind of unity, they were able to invent new cooperative ways to find food, and find new places to live that could sustain their form of life.

There arose among them a symbol for this goodness and beauty they had discovered, and a symbol of how the enjoyment of it distinguished them from the other apes in the old lands. They found themselves refraining from a particular kind of fruit, and this restraint was connected with their distinctive new form of life. Eating this fruit had been typical of the old way, the way of their ancestors, and they now needed to separate off their new way, connected with their new capacities and their new assemblies. They came to think of the fruit as forbidden by their common life, even though there was no reason (other than the symbolic connection) for refraining.

One day, when food was scarce, the elders of the group saw other animals eating the forbidden fruit, and they felt weariness with the restriction and a desire to go back to the old ways. They decided to eat the fruit themselves. This was a decision different in principle from eating the fruit in the old life, even though it was a decision to eat the same food, because it was now a decision against the authority of the common standard for their lives that they had accepted.

When they had made this decision, they found consequences that were natural but unexpected. One was that they lost the joy in their assemblies together. They also found their sexual lives changed. Before, they had been so conscious of what held them together as a group that they had not needed to protect themselves from each other, though they protected themselves and each other against common enemies. Now, they found themselves hiding from each other or fighting each other. The power of their common life waned, and competition increased for what each controlled individually. That included their food, but also their own bodies. They started to hide their bodies from each other by covering them, and to feel a new emotion of shame when they were uncovered.

Finally, the fighting and the competition between them got so bad that they were not able any longer to trust each other in the way required for the cooperation in finding food that they had discovered in their new place. Without this cooperation their lives there became unsustainable, and they were forced to leave. However, they kept with them the memory of how it had been, and the aspiration to return to it. They became in this way divided, each internally in their hearts, between the desire to protect what belonged to the individual and the desire for the common good that had been shared between them.

October 08, 2014

The Bonobo and the Atheist

October 08, 2014/ David Baggett

The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, by Frans de Waal. Norton, NY, 2013. The well-known primatologist Frans de Waal, author of nearly a dozen books, has produced a new one. Very well written, full of memorable turns of phrase, and eminently accessible, one of the more interesting features of the book is its recurring use of art and literature, particularly the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. It also poses a challenge to the idea that morality needs God or religion. Much of the book assumes a tacit battle between science and religion, particularly fundamentalist Christianity, although he thinks the conflict is less a battle about what the truth is than what are going to do with it: appropriate it or avoid it. Much of what he seems to be battling involves trite repetitions of the Dostoyevsky-inspired Karamazov hypothesis, kneejerk religious rejections of widely supported scientific insights, and a 1970’s-styled characterization of social Darwinism as entailing an abrogation of ethics—what de Waal dubs the (Thomas) Huxley-inspired “veneer theory.”

His resistance to the religious hypothesis, though, is markedly different from the New Atheists. He finds arguments about whether God exists to be uninspiring and uninspired, and the New Atheists unoriginal, gratuitously acrimonious, and filled with unrealistic confidence in the outcomes and potential of science and with dogmatism rivaling the most rabid of fundamentalists. Mindful of the missteps science has made—from the eugenics movements to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments to handing the tools of mass destruction to advocates of genocide—he is reticent to invest in science the same sort of enthusiastic and unconditional support as do Dawkins and Harris. He shares with them, though, the conviction that morality needs neither God nor religion, although he sees that religious motivations can be ennobling; and he thinks that he and his secular cohorts need to realize the need to engage in more than religion-bashing. He would rather explore what makes religion so prominent, and he recognizes that efforts to replace it wholesale and emulate its inspiration-conferring role have generally failed. The aspect of religion to which he seems most averse is its reinforcement of a top-down understanding of morality. His preferred understanding of morality is, quite to the contrary, bottom-up.

Using a variety of examples, he argues that animal tendencies to prosociality, altruistic behaviors, community concern, and aversions to inequity suggest that the operation of such moral building blocks in primates reveal that morality is not as much of a human innovation as we like to think. He asks why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for a livable society, is built into us? Since social norms preceded religion, this is evidence to suggest that morality does not need religion. Religious motivations to conduct ourselves morally came after the tendencies were already there, reinforced by a long evolutionary process. As evidence for his contentions, he points to instances of animal empathy, even bird empathy—and the fact that mammals give affection, want affection, and respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs. It is particularly the bonobos who show, especially in contrast with chimpanzees, that our lineage is marked not just by male dominance and xenophobia, but also by a love of harmony and sensitivity to others. He resists the depiction of animals as primarily vicious and self-centered; just like us, he writes, monkeys and apes strive for power, enjoy sex, want security and affection, kill over territory, and value trust and cooperation. We have a psychological makeup that remains that of a social primate.

So his effort to identify the foundations of morality differ not just from those of theistic ethicists who point to the commands or character of God, but also to rationalistic Kantian efforts to root morality in reason and to utilitarian principles admitting of all manner of counterintuitive implications and susceptible to a myriad of counterexamples. He thinks the weight of morality comes not from above, but from inside of us. Following Hume, he thinks reason to be but the slave of the passions; we start with moral sentiments and intuitions, which is where we find the greatest continuity with other primates. Sentiments alone are not enough, though; de Waal adds that what sets human morality apart is a move toward universal standards combined with an elaborate system of justification, monitoring, and punishment. To de Waal’s thinking, morality is created in day-to-day interaction, grounded in emotions, which often escape the neat categorizations of which science is fond. Such an approach to ethics comports, he argues, with what we know about how the human mind works, with visceral reactions arriving before rationalizations, and with the way evolution produces behavior.

The book marks a fundamental debate concerning what ethics is, and thus what is in need of explanation. He is hesitant to call apes or even bonobos moral creatures, but he definitely thinks what we call morality among human beings finds its origin in our evolutionary history. What distinguishes human morality from the prosociality, empathy, and altruism of other primates (traits that stand in contrast with a Hobbesian analysis of nature) is our capacity as humans to reflect about such things, build systems of justification, and generalize morality into a system of abstractions. But the question the book left me with was this nagging question: Hasn’t de Waal simply changed the subject? What he is referring to as “morality” does not seem to be any set of moral truths at all, but rather moral beliefs and practices. Although he identifies some necessary additions to animal behavior to arrive at “morality,” what he adds does not seem to be enough. What is left out of the picture is highly important to what most people mean when they talk about morality. Now, it’s true that “morality” sometimes is meant to refer exclusively to moral beliefs and practices, rendering on occasion issues of truth largely irrelevant. But in a book attempting to explain morality, disambiguating between truth and practice has got to be an important part of the analysis. Rather than disambiguating, however, de Waal seems, either intentionally or inadvertently, to exploit the ambiguity and thus conceal the potential equivocation and sidestep the most challenging and interesting aspects of ethical theory.

Consider moral obligations, which typically are thought to provide distinctive and authoritative reasons to perform an action or refrain from one. A moral obligation, particularly ultima facieones among them, ought to be obeyed; it has authority, punch, clout, prescriptive power. In an effort to account for moral obligations, de Waal employs one of the following strategies: he either (1) eschews their importance, arguing that moral feelings provide better moral reasons to act than do obligations; or (2) does not try to explain moral obligations at all, but merely our feelings or sense of moral obligations, exploiting equivocation on “obligations.” His first strategy goes hand in hand with his effort to hint at the emaciated nature of moral motivation when all that is motivating a person is a sense of moral obligation. He rightly sees, contra Kant, that in some sense it’s better to be motivated by higher moral impulses, like love. True enough, and nearly every virtue theorist would agree. But this provides no liberation from the need to explain the existence of moral obligations, which at least at this stage of our moral development are ineliminable and most certainly capture what most ordinary speakers believe. That we should often be motivated by something other than moral obligations is very likely true, but that does nothing to explain away moral obligations or the need of ethical theory to account for them. His second strategy explains how primates, and especially human beings, experience a feeling or sense of moral obligations. But evolutionary explanations of a feeling of obligation or a tendency to use the language of moral obligation do nothing to provide an explanation of moral obligations themselves. If a sense of obligations and the language of obligations are enough, then moral obligations themselves need not exist at all. De Waal has not provided anything a moral anti-realist or even hardened amoralist cannot already provide, and has instead fallaciously conflated feeling obligated with being obligated.

De Waal’s attempt to consign God to irrelevance in explaining morality is understandable in light of his watered-down account of what morality is all about. A thoroughly naturalistic effort to explain why we may well feel obligations or use the language of moral obligation seems eminently possible. But at what point is the move from “is” to “ought” effected? De Waal thinks this Humean concern is overblown and not the problem many think it is, so there’s hardly a need to invoke God to solve it. The move from is to ought, he argues, is something that animals living by a prescriptive code have already done. What he means to suggest, I think, is that oughtness should be construed in an instrumental way. Animals by nature want to mate and survive, and relative to such “desires” some behaviors are better than others, more conducive to meeting those goals than others. Likewise human beings, as social creatures, want to live in harmony with one another, which introduces prescriptive constraints and instrumental oughts, and it’s perfectly appropriate to call these moral constraints, and sometimes even moral obligations. Again, a naturalistic account can explain these mechanisms just fine, so no God required. (His interest in discussing the role of religion more than God may help explain why he never much broaches a role for God in explaining morality beyond that of a cosmic law enforcer. He seems blithely unaware of the vast philosophical literature on the subject, including that, since Locke, few divine command theorists have put the main focus on God as moral muscleman.)

Again, though, the fundamental question looms: What is morality? Expunged of categorical oughtness, is what is left over enough to qualify? Have we explained enough? Explanatory scope and power demand that all of the salient features of morality be explained, and explained well, by a theory before we dub the explanation a good one or the best. De Waal has simply left anything like categorical moral oughtness out of the picture without so much as an acknowledgement. Again, if he is content with an instrumental analysis of reasons to perform certain prosocial actions, then why use the language of morality at all? He is hard pressed to come up with anything more principled than an admission that traditional moral language carries with it more clout than prudential language. But this is disingenuous, to my thinking. He intentionally uses the thick language of morality, moral obligations, and the like while simultaneously emptying the relevant concepts of those distinctive features of morality that imbue moral language with its presumed force and binding authority. His concepts are thin, while his language remains thick and rich. Moral anti-realists can just as effectively speak in terms of behaviors that comport with prevailing preferences or even nearly universal human emotions. What has de Waal added to the case that such moral skeptics are unable to affirm, and thus what reason is there to think that the functionalist account he has provided has given a naturalist any reason to abandon moral anti-realism or even amoralism?

De Waal seems simultaneously underambitious and overambitious. He is underambitious in his characterization of morality, settling to cash presciptivity out in terms of prevailing expectations rather than objective authority, settling for an account of a sense of obligations rather than obligations themselves, and for empathic behavior rather than empathic motivations. He is overambitious, at the same same, and for related reasons, in characterizing advanced nonhuman primates as engaging in normative judgments that serve as precursors to morality. While it undoubtedly seems true we can use the language of oughtness for advanced primates in predictive and instrumental senses, the evidence to suggest that they have anything like a sense of categorical oughtness is a case yet to be made.

My biggest reservation of all of de Waal’s analysis and approach is his argumentative strategy that infers some weak form of moral realism from the findings of evolutionary moral psychology. If evolution can explain why we have some of the moral concepts we do, why we have a natural inclination to behave in certain prosocial or empathetic or altruistic ways, so the argument goes, then evolution has explained morality. To the contrary, however, naturalists need to take with much greater seriousness a challenge like that posed by Sharon Street or Richard Joyce: If evolution can explain why we have the moral concepts we do in a way that makes no reference to their truth, then what reasons do naturalists have to take morality seriously? Don’t they have all they need when they point to certain behaviors that stir in most human beings strong feelings, good or bad, and then letting nature run its course? Why the additional need to hold so tightly to distinctively moral language that carries bigger implications than they can explain? De Waal obviously thinks the question of God’s existence is uninteresting; what is even more surprising is that someone who writes whole books about morality seems uninterested in the objective truth of morality as well.

Image: Bonobos, CC BY 4.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50736382

October 08, 2014

Review of Angus Ritchie's From Morality to Metaphysics

October 08, 2014/ David Baggett

From Morality to Metaphysics: The Theistic Implications of our Ethical Commitments, by Angus Ritchie, Oxford University Press, 2012, 198 pages.

In this excellent and tightly argued book, Angus Ritchie offers a moral argument for theism, or at least a vital piece of a bigger argument to that effect. Theism, he argues cogently, explains the human capacity for moral cognition better than various secular rivals. For his pool of alternative candidates, he canvasses the field of meta-ethics. In this way he cuts to the heart of much of the contemporary ethical debate, and in so doing he highlights a serious and systemic problem facing secular positions that attempt to accommodate our pre-theoretical moral commitments. He also sketches a teleological and theistic alternative that he argues avoids such objections that prove intractable to the secular theories.

In my estimation Ritchie’s work is one of the more important books written in ethics in recent years. In terms of building a moral apologetic, it does three central tasks: it presses the distinction between justification and explanation of moral truths (a recurring and integrating motif of the book); it takes secular alternatives seriously enough to engage them with real seriousness (at sufficient length with arguments suitably generalizable); and spells out the theistic alternative (though a bit briefly, inviting others to extend the discussion). Despite its lamentable number of distracting typos that should have been fixed in editing, and its failure to discuss Railton, Joyce, or Parfit, I recommend this book with enthusiasm. I have every confidence it will be an important contributor to the resurgence of interest in moral arguments for God in both natural theology and popular apologetics.

Ritchie offers an inference to the best explanation (IBE); his argument is that classical theism better explains objective moral ontology and epistemology. His primary argument for the moral objectivism in need of explanation is its deliberative indispensability. Humans are committed to moral norms for much the same reason we believe norms underwrite practices indispensable to human thought and action in the arena of theoretical reasoning. It is impossible to engage in moral deliberation without taking oneself to be aiming at a normative truth that goes beyond personal preference or cultural custom.

Among the secular explanation candidates of moral cognition Ritchie considers are those provided by Blackburn, Gibbard, Korsgaard, and the early Scanlon, who argue that our fundamental moral convictions can be accommodated without objectivism; and those of Foot, Crisp, and the later Scanlon who seek to combine a fully objectivist account of moral norms with no purposive agent or force. What all of these secular accounts have in common is their systemic flaw. In the case of the less objectivist theories the concessions made to reductionism leave them unable to do justice to our most fundamental moral convictions; those that accommodate the pull of objectivism generate an ‘explanatory gap’. The book’s central contention is that all secular theories that do justice to our most fundamental moral convictions go on to generate an insoluble ‘explanatory gap’ that consists in their inability to answer the following question: How do human beings, developing in a physical universe which is not itself shaped by any purposive force, come to have the capacity to apprehend objective moral norms?

Secular (nonteleological) theories only escape the explanatory gap by failing to vindicate our pre-philosophical moral commitments. The gap arises when the following commitments are combined: (1) Robust moral objectivism, (2) secularism, and (3) the belief that humans, through the exercise of their normal belief-generating and belief-evaluating capacities, are able to apprehend the objective moral order. While secular theories can explain humans’ acquisition of moral sensibilities and practices of reasoning, this does not tell us why those practices and sensibilities have the property of tracking the truth.

Regarding cognitive capacities (perceptual, theoretical, practical), three questions can be asked about their genesis and justification: (1) What is the justification for our faith in their reliability? (2) What is the historical explanation of their development? And (3) what is theexplanation for their capacity for tracking truth? It is just because Ritchie takes the fundamental convictions that emerge from reflective equilibrium to be justified (to have non-accidental correlation with objective moral norms) that the third question arises. So Ritchie stresses the importance that we not confuse the demand for an explanation for the reliability of our moral beliefs with the demand for a justification of our trust in the human capacity to acquire and modify our moral beliefs in a way that tracks truth.

In terms of what sort of explanation is needed, what is most promising, he thinks, is a teleological form of explanation that explains a particular event or state of affairs by showing that it is either (1) part of the end-state which a system brings about or (2) part of the means by which a system brings about the end-state. To be an intelligible account, the teleological explanation will also have made it intelligible why the system yields the outcome and of the means by which the system is capable of generating those outcomes and why it tends to generate them.

Ritchie’s overall claim is that it is legitimate to raise questions of explanation with respect to the truth-tracking quality of humans’ moral faculties because we see in natural selection a way in which explanation can be answered for our truth-tracking capacities for theoretical reasoning and with respect to the physical world. The ability to track truth is selectively advantageous in those cases (unless Plantinga is right, which should prove no comfort to naturalists). Natural selection is the obvious candidate for an explanation of the development within humans of truth-tracking capacities regarding fundamental principles of deduction, IBE, and induction. It is highly probable that we will be better able to survive if we can come to true beliefs. So natural selection offers a story of how humans come to have truth-tracking capacities for theoretical reasoning; likewise for both physical perception and theoretical reasoning.

No such correlation is plausible in the moral case. On the account given by evolutionary biology, it is not the fact that moral beliefs are correct which leads to them being selected for. Rather, it is the fact that they are conducive to the flourishing of the collective. There is no guarantee that the qualities which lead to multiplication will have any other excellence about them. Any value system based on survival, replication, and pleasure alone is inadequate. If there is not a less obvious way in which moral valuations promote survival, replication, and pleasure, then they’re spandrels, lacking any direct connection with genetic survival and multiplication. Unless we have a wider teleological account, we have no reason to suppose that these valuations have any non-random connective with that moral order.

Beyond such a prima facie case, Ritchie turns to specific meta-ethical theories, beginning with quasi-realism (‘QR’). Gibbard respects what Blackburn calls the ‘realist-seeming grammar’ of practical deliberation, but they both seek to minimize its metaphysical implications. Both respond to an impulse to both reductionism and objectivism. They want to offer the best of both worlds while avoiding objections. Moral quasi-realism is designed to avoid the following kind of morally obnoxious counterfactuals:

(CF) If we approved of torturing the child it would be a good act,

while keeping the ontology to a minimum. In moral deliberations, we judge desires and the prevailing attitudes of our society by a standard which is independent of those desires and attitudes.

QR claims that (CF) should be read as a statement within ethics. They deny that it need be taken as a higher-order, metaethical assertion. When we consider counterfactuals, they insist, we cannot help but evaluate them from within our commitments. And as such, all decent people will obviously reject (CF). Blackburn insists that we have no conception of the nature of an independent order of reason. Ritchie disagrees, insisting that the existence of objective norms of theoretical reasoning shows that we do have a conception of what ‘an independent order of reason’ would be.

Ritchie thinks QR can answer various objections, but that it runs into difficulty when it has to account for the provisionality with which all human beings hold their ethical views. We simply do not regard moral truth as being fixed completely by our current views. In its efforts to accommodate such an objection, QR faces two challenges: tying morality too closely to current beliefs, precluding progress, or tying it to whatever we come to believe, thus introducing problematic counterfactuals.

The early Scanlon tried to accommodate the pull of reductionism by stressing rational procedures rather than an ontologically distinct moral reality, using the meta-ethics of Korsgaard. Korsgaard says the procedural moral realist thinks there are correct answers to moral questions because there are correct procedures for arriving at them. Thus she tries to secure objectivity without ontological commitments. Ritchie responds that both Blackburn and Korsgaard locate moral value in a feature of the agent’s attitudes, but these only make sense as responses to an external order of value. Unlike Kant, Korsgaard says the way we choose between the different candidates for universalizable moral norms is an agent’s existential commitments. What, though, about someone who’s a member of the Mafiaso? In one sense this produces obligations, but Korsgaard says the Mafioso should, given sufficient reflection, come to see that obedience to the honor code is the wrong law to make for himself. Ritchie argues that agents’ valuations only have the wider implications her argument requires if they are understood as responses to an objective order of value. Korsgaard may disapprove of his existential choice, but it is hard to see why (on her account) the Mafiaso’s settled choice threatens his grip on himself as having any reason to do one thing rather than another, and with it his grip on himself as having any reason to live and act at all.

Later Scanlon moved toward a more objectivist position, describing himself as a ‘Reasons Fundamentalist’, contrasting the position with Korsgaard’s. Reasons Fundamentalism (RF) insists on the irreducible character of normativity. Scanlon has answered justification, but not of explanation of reliability. Once more, secular accounts fall foul of our most fundamental moral commitments, or in vindicating them they generate an explanatory gap.

Likewise Foot’s theory using ‘Aristotelian categoricals’ is trapped in this dilemma: we can define ‘good’ naturalistically, in which case it is reduced to that which enables the species to replicate and perhaps increase in complexity, but then what we call good we do not have good reason to promote. Or define ‘good’ to include evaluative judgments, but then we have gone far beyond anything those ‘Aristotelian categoricals’ could justify. To make this choice is to concede that the idea of ‘flourishing’ is itself heavily moralized, and there is no longer any sign of a purely biological story of natural normativity from which morality might emerge.

McDowell wants to defend moral realism. Instead of seeking to ground ethics in a non-moralized account of the natural world, McDowell urges Foot to acknowledge that ethical reasons are themselves part of any adequate account of nature. Ritchie insists, though, that there remains an explanatory question which McDowell is unwilling to answer, which is distinct from justificatory issues. Unless McDowell is urging a return to a fundamentally purposive account of the universe, the question of how we explain (rather than justify) the reliability of our belief-generating and belief-correcting processes will arise for him in a way it did not for Aristotle—who, incidentally, contrasted the natural not with the supernatural but the artificial.

Ritchie argues that theistic and teleological explanation is better than nomothetic explanation that is given in terms of causal laws. Natural selection has led to resistance of teleology. Natural selection can’t offer the explanation of our capacity for moral cognition, however, and nomothetic explanation is also unsuited to task. Teleological explanation accounts for an event or class of events by laws in terms of which an event’s occurring is held to be dependent on that event’s being required for some end. A paradigmatic teleological explanation involves a goal G of objective worth, the agent knows this to be so, the agent pursues G because of its value, and the agent has the power through X-ing to bring G about.

Theism explains the truth-tracking nature of human moral capacities by God’s understanding the value of such a state of affairs and intentionally bringing it about. Such an account avoids the explanatory gap, and the problems cited (raised by Rice and Hume) are far from intractable. A theistic explanation of the emergence of moral knowledge also need not conflict with a version of the theory of natural selection. All that the theist needs to add to the account given by evolutionary biology is the claim that the world is providentially ordered so that the interaction of the quasi-teleological process of natural selection and of the spandrel-like features it generates yield an outcome which enables human beings to apprehend that which is of objective value.

At this juncture the book left me slightly disappointed, but only because I had grown accustomed to seeing more. I could imagine a critic saying “God made it happen because he knew the value of its happening” does not so much explain as beg the question that God has or could. Although I might know that something happening in my head is making my hands type right now without my being able to explain that mechanism, the appeal to divine intentions to account for the truth-tracking ability of our moral faculties requires further analysis. It remains, in a sense, a promissory note and framework in need of fleshing out. If contemporary work on the moral argument is going to rival in quality the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments, more articulation of theism’s epistemic narrative of moral cognition is essential—particularly to answer the challenge posed by Harman and Joyce. Joyce, for example, echoes the case that the success of evolutionary moral psychology provides a stiff challenge to naturalistic ethics by explaining the formation of our moral beliefs without reference to their truth. Unlike Ritchie, though, he adds that “if the naturalist cannot make her case, Harman’s challenge seems to make non-naturalism and supernaturalism obsolete. . . . if moral naturalism fails non-naturalism and supernaturalism are sunk. Thus non-naturalism and supernaturalism suffer most in this argumentative fray.”[1]Although it is not clear why Joyce insists on this, beyond an earlier reference to parsimony, what is clear is that positing the possibility and, even more so, plausibility of a teleological explanation rooted in divine intentionality—however hopeful such a move promises to safeguard what ordinary speakers believe about morality—remains in need of careful articulation and strong cumulative evidential support in this emerging dialectic.

Throughout his excellent book, Ritchie is at pains to stress that theism is the most satisfying explanation of the human capacity for moral cognition. Theism can explain it simply better than the rivals can. As such he’s been doing philosophy as an autonomous enterprise to show the power of apologetic argument. Our moral commitments pull us to a supernatural source for our knowledge of what is good and evil. Philosophy, he argues and demonstrates, has a significant part to play, in helping us respond to the important and legitimate worry that the faith journey may be an exercise in wish fulfillment rather than a response to a genuine reality. Philosophy can create the intellectual space for an encounter of the heart. Apologetic arguments can show that unless our thought is open to the supernatural there are a number of correlations which are, by its own lights, inexplicable. Such arguments remind us of our need for God; they call us to humility rather than hubris.

[1] Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), p. 210

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