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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.     NR cannot account for objective moral obligations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can Forgiveness Make Sense? (Part 2)

Author’s Note: This paper was written for and initially presented at the first annual symposium of the Society for Women of Letters (June 2022, Asheville, NC).

The Lord’s Prayer as Model and Means of Forgiveness

The Lord’s Prayer is the model that Christ offered his disciples when they asked for his instruction on how to pray. Wesley Hill’s primer on the prayer offers a helpful rundown of how the church has historically understood its import, and most of my discussion that follows is informed by that book.[1] The prayer consists of six petitions (or seven, depending on how the final section is handled). The opening three petitions center on God’s character and reign, and the others turn to the human condition, invoking God’s aid for what ails us. It’s a rich prayer, with quite a bit to unpack. But I want to focus primarily on how the full context can help us better appreciate and practice the difficult art of forgiveness.

Needy Creatures

We’ll start with the second half, the petitions aimed at the human condition. There we find Jesus acknowledging our agonizing need: our need for sustenance, both physical and spiritual; our need for grace, protection, and rescue. Regular recitation of this prayer, Hill explains, trains us to rightly envision our plight, as utterly dependent on God’s provision. Not just in the past as though God winds us up and leaves us to our own devices, but moment by moment, “this day,” we are sustained by God’s provision. What an antidote to the self-reliance enshrined in our contemporary American culture.

This reminder of who we are as God’s creatures is also a comfort as we consider the prayer’s appeal for forgiveness and deliverance from evil. Human beings are all in the same boat, we find—all, victims and victimizers alike, buoyed up only by God’s allowance. All of us are in dire need of saving from the sin that surrounds and infects us, the sin that’s “more pervasive and intractable than individual peccadilloes or improvable behaviors,” to use Hill’s language.[2] These petitions of The Lord’s Prayer strike at the very root of human corruption, the lie that tells us we are our own, that we can do as we please, and are unaccountable to anyone else. And most importantly for our purposes, the lie that the evil perpetuated against us cannot find refuge in our own hearts.

This is not to suggest a moral equivalence between large infractions and small. That bit of received wisdom often hampers our attempts at forgiveness, either asking us to minimize harm done to us or overestimating the harm we ourselves have done to others. As Cornelius Plantinga explains, “All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad.”[3] He continues, “The badness or seriousness of sin depends to some degree on the amount and kind of damage it inflicts, including damage to the sinner, and to some degree on the personal investment and motive of the sinner.”[4]

If anything, The Lord’s Prayer is realistic about the nature and extent of sin in this world and the damage it does to God’s creation. Petition VII puts a face on the evil one who seeks to devour us, infiltrating and enlisting those who give themselves over to his service. “What we need to be rescued from,” Hill says, “isn’t just the devices and desires of our wayward hearts, as real and dangerous as those are, but also the malevolence of a personal being bent on our suffering.”[5] The temptation to revenge, as gratifying as it may feel, is to turn ourselves over to that destruction. Marilyn Adams explains, “To return horror for horror does not erase but doubles the individual’s participation in horrors—first as victim, then as the one whose injury occasions another’s prima facie ruin.”[6]

In Stump’s essay that I referenced earlier, she provides some language to help us think through these gradations of guilt. There she catalogues, on a sliding scale, the damaging effects sin has on the perpetrator him or herself, to include defects to the person’s psyche, memory, and empathic capacities, and sin’s harmful and unjust consequences in the world, whether resulting from the wrongdoer’s action or inaction.

Who God Is

These details matter to the one wrestling with forgiveness. A naïve understanding that jumps quickly to reconciliation can easily leave open the door for yet more harm, to both parties. It is not good either to sin or to be sinned against. The Lord’s Prayer dispels such naivety by virtue of its portrait of God, a loving Father who invites us into holy and flourishing fellowship with him. A world infected by sin and human corruption is incompatible with the promise we have in this prayer of God’s kingdom to come and his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Whatever forgiveness is, we can be sure that it is part and parcel of the resounding victory of the prayer’s final lines: God’s kingdom, power, and glory ultimately transcend and defeat whatever now is currently arrayed against them. This is the truth that The Lord’s Prayer opens our eyes up to, and the vision that enables us to enter into the spirit and process of forgiveness, trusting no less than God himself to bring it to completion. What Weisenthal could not be, as stand-in for the Jews that the Nazi soldier harmed, Christ himself can fulfill—both as the one to bear the harm done and the one to offer the ultimate absolution.

Prayer joins us in this process. It is a rebellion, as David Wells describes it, “against the world in its fallenness, the absolute and undying refusal to accept as normal what is pervasively abnormal.”[7] The Lord’s Prayer, then, is a clear-eyed, realistic assessment of our current status against the backdrop of what should—and ultimately what will—be, given God’s nature. Hill explains, “When we pray, ‘Your will be done, on earth as in heaven,’ we are aware of how God’s will is not being done in our world. We are asking God to overcome this contradiction, to act in such a way that life on earth increasingly resembles the peaceable and joyous life of God, of heaven.”[8]

Like the Persistent Widow in Jesus’ parable, when we fully embrace The Lord’s Prayer, we refuse “every agenda, every scheme, every interpretation that is at odds with the norm as originally established by God.”[9] We confess, along with Volf, that we cannot forgive on our own steam but that on Christ’s we can and should. We affirm that God’s kingdom is victorious over any and all attacks upon it, including the ones where we have found ourselves in the line of a perpetrator’s fire. Although this affirmation takes the form of a petition in The Lord’s Prayer, it’s functioning more as an alignment, of our purposes and spirit with God’s. Through recitation of the prayer, Hill says, we are “stretching our hearts so that we may learn to desire truer, greater realities.”[10]

This greater reality is our ultimate promise: deliverance from oppression, healing, and restoration from the disfiguration caused by sin and death.[11] Healing both for harm we have done and harm done to us. It is out of God’s character that his plan for salvation, his deliverance from guilt and the death and damage of sin in all of its instantiations, comes. And this is God’s plan, The Lord’s Prayer tells us, that is already underway and available for us right here and now, even if it is not yet fully realized. Only a God who has entered in to our suffering, who has taken on human flesh and dwelt among us can provide that remedy.

Christ as Our Deliverer

In Jesus Christ, God’s own son, we find all the resources that potential forgivers need. Christ is everywhere present in The Lord’s Prayer, both as the one inviting us into fellowship and as the very bridge we walk across to approach God’s throne. Christ is also the means by which God’s will is enacted in this world, the way the curse that we labor under is reversed, how our crisis of forgiveness is resolved. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ cries out to his Abba, Father, asking that the cup of suffering and death he is about to drink be passed from him. Even still, in an agonizing act of obedience and an illuminating echo of The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus declares, “Thy will be done.”

This divine action is the paradoxical linchpin of our faith and what ultimately makes sense of forgiveness’ counterintuitive demands. Hill explains it this way:

It’s clear to us that the will of God in heaven is the perfect, eternal love of Father, Son, and Spirit, unmarred by any suffering or dying. What is less intuitive—but what Gethsemane and, later, Calvary force us to notice—is that the will of God is also the way of the incarnate Lord into the far country of our suffering and dying, where he is mocked, spit upon, strung up, and left to suffocate. That is what it looks like for the will of God to be done on earth as it is in heaven because that is the only way our earth can be saved.[12]

Our forgiveness—whether enacted or received by us—our ability to heal and be healed, rests alone on the work of Christ on the cross. And that is the promise we must cling to as we undertake our own hard work of forgiveness. There’s a suffering involved in that process, to be sure, but we can know that that suffering is not in vain. Hill again: “God must also be at work in suffering, in darkness, in torment, because only if God confronts the horror we’ve made of the world, bears it, and bears it away can the triumph of God’s love be assured.”[13]

But let me not leave you with a promise of suffering. I recognize that’s not much of a comfort. My intention instead is to leave you with a word of hope, to help us fix in our minds the beautiful reality that lies on the other side of our earthly travails. Recently, I had the opportunity to hear N. T. Wright speak at Lanier Library in Houston, with a message that draws together the various threads of my argument and underscores the hope we have in our struggles to forgive. Turning to Romans 8, Wright highlighted how our own times of trial, our own Gethsemane moments—when we, like Christ, call out to our Abba, Father (Romans 8:15)—these are the precise places in which we can perceive, and even participate in, the divine life of God himself.

Those who have faced a crisis of forgiveness will certainly resonate with Paul’s acknowledgment that we often do not know how we are to pray. In trying to forgive painful hurts, we struggle to understand how justice can be achieved or why mercy must be extended. In that moment, Paul affirms, we can be sure that “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). This co-laboring with God in our prayers of deep sorrow is the backdrop for the glorious assurance of Romans 8:28, a verse that Wright translates in this clarifying way: "God works all things towards ultimate good with and through those who love him.”[14] That’s true for our crises of forgiveness. Lament in the face of our overwhelming challenges, the times when we most keenly feel our frailty and most desperately need deliverance, is the very seedbed of the hope we cry out for.[15]

The Lord’s Prayer is really a lifeline to that hope, which will not disappoint. It’s a promise bigger than we can even imagine, although Jesus invites us to try. The petitions of The Lord’s Prayer, when we enter fully into its mindset, we recognize as pointers, pointers to the life we are made for and that God longs to welcome us into. As Hill explains, “This is what the final praise in the Lord’s Prayer means to direct us toward: there is coming a time when we will have no more need to ask God for bread, for absolution, or for rescue. All of our tears will have been wiped away, death will have been finally defeated, and the earth and its people will be at peace and thriving.”[16] And that is a promise we can cling to, a story big enough to house justice and mercy, and a power strong enough to fuel our will to forgive.

[1] Wesley Hill, The Lord’s Prayer: A Guide to Praying to Our Father (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019).

[2] Ibid., 61.

[3] Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 21.

[4] Ibid., 22.

[5] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 82.

[6] Marilyn Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2000),

[7] David Wells, “Prayer: Rebelling Against the Status Quo,” Summit Christian Fellowship, June 17, 2020, accessed May 29, 2022, https://summit-christian.org/blog/2020/06/17/prayer-rebelling-against-the-status-quo.

[8] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 42.

[9] Wells.

[10] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 45.

[11] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 34-35.

[12] Wesley Hill, “Praying the Lord’s Prayer in Gethsemane,” First Things, April 2, 2015, accessed May 29, 2022, https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2015/04/praying-the-lords-prayer-in-gethsemane.

[13] Ibid.

[14] You can find this translation in Wright’s God and the Pandemic (Zondervan, 2020). Glenn Packiam’s review of the book (found here: https://www.glennpackiam.com/post/n-t-wright-on-god-and-the-pandemic) also includes it.

[15] I’d love to claim credit for this phrasing, but it was all N. T. Wright. “Lament is the seedbed of hope” is a line from his talk that will stick with me for some time to come.

[16] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 94.

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Marybeth Baggett is professor of English and Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. She earned her PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and — along with her husband— recently has published Telling Tales: Intimations of the Sacred in Popular Culture (Moral Apologetics Press, 2021).

Can Forgiveness Make Sense? (Part 1)

Author’s Note: This paper was written for and initially presented at the first annual symposium of the Society for Women of Letters (June 2022, Asheville, NC).

The Sunflower

Simon Wiesenthal is a Holocaust survivor renowned for his role in tracking down and bringing to justice fugitive Nazis who fled at the close of World War II. While still a prisoner, Wiesenthal was one day brought to the room of a dying SS member at the Nazi’s request. The soldier wanted to unburden himself of his guilty conscience and find absolution before his imminent demise. To that end, he hoped that Wiesenthal would serve as a stand-in for the specific Jews that he had directly harmed. Forgiveness from him, the logic went, would release the Nazi from his guilt and bring him much-needed peace.

Wiesenthal chronicles this encounter in his 1969 book The Sunflower, and his account is worth reading in its entirety, including the symposium that makes up the second half of the book. It’s difficult for me to convey either the brutality of the atrocities that the Nazi describes or the pathos of his confession. Wiesenthal does so masterfully and, importantly, the author contextualizes that deathbed scene within his own day-to-day horrors of life in the concentration camp. As we well know and as the book vividly reminds us, the Nazi’s confession is a mere drop in the bucket of the hell that Hitler’s forces unleashed on those the German fascists deemed undesirable.

The book’s title refers to the sunflowers planted on the graves of Nazi soldiers to honor them, a ghastly tableau that Wiesenthal could see across the way from the camp. That tribute was a painful contrast to the indignities heaped on the many deaths that daily surrounded Wiesenthal and his fellow prisoners, and this uncanny sense of shared humanity across a gulf of inhumane difference pervades the exchange between Wiesenthal and the dying Nazi.

That meeting also upended the given power dynamic of the Third Reich: the Nazi sought something from the Jew that could not be coerced. Forgiveness would be either freely given or withheld. While the SS man disclosed his secrets, Wiesenthal grappled with how to respond: “He sought my pity, but had he any right to pity? Did a man of this kind deserve anybody’s pity?”[1] It’s clear from the exchange that the Nazi has in fact repented and fully realized his need for the peace that comes only through forgiveness. But was that enough for Wiesenthal to bestow it upon him? And what difference would forgiveness make since, as Wiesenthal notes, “[h]e was confessing his crime to a man who perhaps tomorrow must die at the hands of these same murderers.”[2]

Ultimately, Wiesenthal could not bring himself to share words of forgiveness, leaving instead without opening his mouth. The decision was almost instinctual, involuntary, and it haunted Wiesenthal for many years. He sought counsel from others when he returned to the camp, hoping they might be able to explain and perhaps even justify his visceral rejection of the dying man’s pleas. As the years wore on, he wondered if his response was, in fact, cruel. Out of this mystery and Wiesenthal’s inability to solve it, even a quarter of a century later, came this question, which he posed to notable public figures to solicit their responses: “You,” he asks, “who have just read this sad and tragic episode in my life, can mentally change places with me and ask yourself the crucial question, ‘What would I have done?’”[3]

The Dilemma of Forgiveness

The fifty-three responses that came in were all over the map, though most (thirty four in the expanded edition) argued that Wiesenthal was right not to forgive. Only ten posited that forgiveness was necessary. The other nine were uncertain. Harshest among the denials was Jewish-American writer Cynthia Ozick who condemned the Nazi, seeing even his confession as manipulation and abuse of power. “Let the SS man die unshriven,” she exclaimed. “Let him go to hell.”[4] On the other side, South African bishop Desmond Tutu put a pragmatic spin on his Christian response: “It is clear that if we look only to retributive justice, then we could just as well close up shop. Forgiveness is not some nebulous thing. It is practical politics. Without forgiveness, there is no future.”[5]

Most of us will never be in the position of either the SS officer or the Holocaust survivor, neither needing to be forgiven for such unthinkably heinous wrongs nor needing to forgive such large-scale, unimaginable atrocities inflicted upon us or upon those we love. Nonetheless, reflecting on the extreme case of guilt and injustice that Wiesenthal’s story presents and the crisis of forgiveness it evokes is still worthwhile, doubly so for those of us who claim Christianity since forgiveness is deep down at the very root of our faith.

To begin, let’s think a bit about the impulses behind the different responses to Wiesenthal’s question. Reading them, one realizes the richness of this topic and the complexity of the question that he poses. His respondents dig into the nooks and crannies of what forgiveness is, they search out what it requires, consider the implications of forgiveness or its denial, and weigh the psychological struggle involved. Even if you already have a strong sense about which response is right, I’d encourage you to withhold judgment, just for now, and sit a while with the tension. In Exclusion and Embrace, theologian Miroslav Volf brings to bear the terms of the gospel to the weighty questions of alienation and injustice. Volf’s own history as a Croatian living through the Balkan warfare of the late twentieth century informs his reflections and prevents him from regurgitating simple answers.

Volf’s preface well captures the tension that I’m asking you to consider. The book, he says there, was prompted by a question that Jürgen Moltmann asked him after a talk he gave arguing that we have a moral obligation to embrace our enemies. Could Volf embrace a četnik, one of the Serbian fighters who had so thoroughly ravaged his country and its people? To put the question on Wiesenthal’s terms, could Volf muster fellow human feelings sufficient to forgive one who had done him and those close to him such harm?

“No, I cannot,” Volf finally answered, “but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.”[6]

While writing Exclusion and Embrace in an attempt to work out this struggle, Volf confesses, “My thought was pulled in two different directions by the blood of the innocent crying out to God and by the blood of God’s Lamb offered for the guilty.”[7] Herein lies the tension: “How does one remain loyal both to the demand of the oppressed for justice and to the gift of forgiveness that the Crucified offered to the perpetrators?”[8] To opt for one felt a betrayal of the other, either to further disenfranchise the already oppressed or to disavow his faith. Even worse, the longer Volf sat with the tension, the more it seemed that God was at odds with himself, at once delivering the needy and restoring the wrongdoer. Just what kind of toxic, dysfunctional family is God trying to make?

Can these two apparently irreconcilable divine actions somehow align? Surely the God who loves the wronged party also loves the one who hurt him, but mustn’t love of one require punishment of the other? Many of our doubts about the demands of forgiveness stem from our own psychological and imaginative limitations, which makes one wonder whether a rational case for our obligation to forgive matters if it’s simply impracticable for us to carry out.

Scripture’s Mandate

And yet scripture calls us time and again to forgiveness, even going as far as to bind our own forgiveness to the forgiveness we offer others. We see this link explicitly articulated in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant in Matthew 18 and in The Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13, Luke 11:2-4). “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us,” so the fifth petition of the prayer goes. As C. S. Lewis explains in his classic Mere Christianity, “There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.”[9]

A world without forgiveness, as Bishop Tutu noted, is unimaginable. This side of Eden, sin—and the death it entails—sadly is a persistent presence, at least that’s the case while we wait for God’s kingdom to reach its crescendo and bring to consummation the victory Christ inaugurated on the cross. Ever since Cain, human beings harm each other daily—in big and small ways. Lamech’s attitude to such mistreatment that we find in Genesis 4 makes a certain kind of sense: “I have killed a man for wounding me,” Lamech boasts to his wives. “[A] young man for striking me. If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold.”[10] On human terms, payback for wrongs is logical, necessary even. But who wants to live in a vortex of infinite vengeance, bound forever to lex talionis?

By contrast Jesus’ vision of unlimited forgiveness laid out in Matthew 18—seventy times seven—sure seems more appealing. But might it also feel, at least for some, like a burden, even for far more commonplace hurts than Wiesenthal experienced? Wouldn’t boundless forgiveness simply invite yet more harm? Wouldn’t unending grace exacerbate power imbalances and force the already exploited into deeper levels of oppression?

I confess that this is the burden I personally carried when I came up against my own crisis of forgiveness some years back. Someone I counted as a close friend had thoroughly betrayed me. To use Lewis Smedes’ rubric of the difficult cases of forgiveness, the hurt this person caused me was three-fold: personal, unfair, and deep.[11] No easy Band-aid could fix the problem. Compounding the suffering I endured in the wake of that betrayal was the support my friend garnered from mutual acquaintances who saw my grief and withdrawal from the relationship as the fruit of bitterness and a failure to forgive. The next few years proved a crucible for my faith as, much like Volf, I had to grapple existentially with the dilemma of forgiveness noted above. I didn’t have many resources to help and certainly could have used Smedes’ book, Forgive and Forget, as well as others I’ve more recently found. Instead, voices that flattened out forgiveness—seeing it as either anathema or a piece of cake—only made that process more difficult. Smedes frames the challenge this way: “Forgiving is love’s toughest work, and love’s biggest risk. If you twist it into something it was never meant to be, it can make you a doormat or an insufferable manipulator.”[12]

Love and Forgiveness

Sometimes a word can obscure the complexity of the reality behind it, and my personal experience tells me that’s often the case with forgiveness. I’m drawing my definition of forgiveness from an essay by philosopher Eleonore Stump, where she says forgiveness is an entailment of love, a human obligation.[13] Love, according to Aquinas, is two-fold: (1) a desire for the good of the other and (2) a desire for union with the other. Because these desires are located only within the person harmed, they can be accomplished without any action on the wrongdoer’s part. But Stump is quick to note that desire alone is not sufficient for the realization of the other’s good or for actual union with him or her. Another human agent is involved, and that person’s will and external circumstances may prevent those desires from coming to fruition. It is not good, for example, for either party to remain in a position that gives license for bad behavior to anyone involved. For that reason, forgiveness and reconciliation can, indeed, come apart. Ignoring this distinction is one of many ways that the concept of forgiveness can be watered down.

Before we turn to some more theological considerations, consider first some useful insights Smedes offers in his practical guide to forgiveness. First of all, Smedes emphasizes that forgiveness is a process, at least that’s the case for forgiveness of people who caused us personal, unfair, and deep hurt. Entering into that process requires uncompromising honesty. We cannot forgive harm that we do not acknowledge. As Smedes explains, “There is no real forgiving unless there is first relentless exposure and honest judgment. When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.”[14]

Smedes also acknowledges that forgiveness sometimes involves specialized cases—forgiving people who have died, for example. Life’s vagaries and vicissitudes preclude any one-size-fits-all approach that we might try to impose. The road to forgiveness, we find when we embark upon it, is unique to the harm done and to our current conditions. That is not to say we are thus on our own. We can certainly find solace and guidance in the testimony of others who have traveled their own paths of forgiveness, and his use of such stories is one of the best features of Smedes’ book.

When we undergo a crisis of forgiveness, it’s important then whose voices we listen to because of the many pitfalls that lie on that road. Even Christian voices, as previously noted, can sometimes unwittingly make the task of forgiveness much harder by thinning the concept out. I suggest that we see shades of this diminishment whenever the fifth petition of The Lord’s Prayer is isolated from its broader context and—intentionally or not—when it is launched as an accusation toward those who have been harmed. For all the reasons noted above, we need a bigger story of justice and mercy, one that reveals their inextricable link. We find that story in the full context of The Lord’s Prayer, through its bracing description of the human condition, its astonishing portrayal of the God who longs to liberate us, and its audacious plan for our salvation.

[1] Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Revised and Expanded ed. (New York: Schocken, 1997), 52.

[2] Ibid., 53.

[3] Ibid., 98.

[4] Ibid., 220.

[5] Ibid., 268.

[6] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996), 9.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Revised and amplified ed. (New York: Harper, 2001), 116.

[10] Unless otherwise noted, all biblical passages referenced are in the English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001) biblegateway.com, accessed May 29, 2022.

[11] Lewis Smedes, Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve (New York: HarperOne, 1996).

[12] Ibid., xvi.

[13] Eleonore Stump, “The Sunflower: Guilt, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation,” in Forgiveness and Its Moral Dimensions, ed. Brandon Warmke, Dana Kay Nelkin, and Michael McKenna (New York: Oxford UP, 2021), 172-196.

[14] Smedes, 79.

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Marybeth Baggett (associate editor) is professor of English and Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. She earned her PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and — along with her husband— recently has published Telling Tales: Intimations of the Sacred in Popular Culture (Moral Apologetics Press, 2021).

Defusing the Euthyphro Dilemma

Editor’s note: Adam Johnson has graciously allowed us to republish this article. Find the original publication here.

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How a Concretist Position on Properties Salvages Divine Simplicity

Why salvage divine simplicity? Consider the Euthyphro Dilemma, often presented as a rebuttal to the moral argument for God’s existence. In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates asked “Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?”1 The dilemma can be restated in monotheistic terms as follows: Either 1. Morality is based on God’s commands; thus, He could have arbitrarily commanded any heinous act and it would be morally right, or 2. Morality is based on necessary truths that even God cannot change; thus morality is independent of God and out of His control.2

In order to avoid both horns of the dilemma, theists have proposed that morality is dependent upon God’s nature in such a way that He could not command something that violates His moral nature.3 Robert M. Adams’s version of the Divine Command Theory is an important contemporary example of grounding morality in God’s nature. He explained that “[t]he part played by God in my account of the nature of the good is similar to that of the Form of the Beautiful or the Good in Plato’s Symposium and Republic. God is the supreme Good, and the goodness of other things consists in a sort of resemblance to God.”4 His view is Platonic in the sense that “[t]he role that belongs to the Form of the Good in Plato’s thought is assigned to God, and the goodness of other things is understood in terms of their standing in some relation, usually conceived as a sort of resemblance, to God.”5 This is not a new idea; in the first chapter of Monologion, Anselm argued that there must be one thing through which all good things are good, and that it alone is supremely good.6 Aquinas wrote that “Nothing… will be called good except in so far as it has a certain likeness of the divine goodness.”7

If morality is dependent upon God’s nature in this way, then both horns of the Euthyphro Dilemma are avoided. First, His commands would not be arbitrary because they would have to be consistent with His moral nature. Second, morality would not be independent of God, but dependent upon Him, that is, upon His moral nature. However, this proposed solution agrees with the Euthyphro Dilemma that morality is based on necessary truths that God cannot change or control, that is, truths concerning His moral nature. Baggett and Walls noted that “a careful distinction between questions of dependence and control allows an answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma that can serve as an important component of any thoroughly theistic metaphysic with a strong commitment to moral realism… Moral truths can be objective, unalterable, and necessary, and yet still dependent on God.”8 They concluded that “if such dependence or even identity obtains or is even possible, then the Euthyphro Dilemma is effectively defused and the moral argument for God’s existence accordingly gains strength.”9

However, this proposal concerning God’s moral nature raises a whole host of knotty questions. If we claim that something is morally good if it images God in a morally pertinent sense, then in effect we are discussing God’s nature, that is, His properties—and in particular, His property of moral goodness. But what is God’s nature? Is it ontologically prior to God Himself? Would such a notion violate God’s aseity? Is God dependent upon His nature? If not, then what is God’s relationship to His nature? If God is not able to choose His nature, does this violate His sovereignty? Some have criticized this solution to the Euthyphro Dilemma because it raises these additional difficulties. Atheist Erik Wielenberg argued that Christians inconsistently critique his model of ethics for positing unexplained necessary connections while they themselves also posit unexplained necessary connections, that is, between God’s moral nature, His commands, and His other attributes.10 Thus it behooves us as Christians to provide a fuller explanation of how God’s moral nature provides the foundation of objective morality, to fill in the details of our model as much as possible.

How is divine simplicity pertinent to this conversation? Interestingly, while critiquing the idea that an appeal to God’s nature solves the Euthyphro dilemma, Wielenberg wrote that “any theist who rejects the doctrine of divine simplicity seems committed to the existence of necessary connections between some of God’s attributes. Unless such theists can adequately explain all such connections, they, too, cannot consistently wield P1.”11 P1 is Wielenberg’s summary of the critique often leveled at his model by theists—“P1: Any approach to metaethics that posits logically necessary connections without adequately explaining why such connections hold is unacceptable.”12 Later he surmised that “…on a sufficiently strong doctrine of divine simplicity… there isn’t a necessary link between the divine nature and God issuing [a command] that needs explaining so perhaps a theist of this sort can consistently wield P1. [I]f sense can be made of it [divine simplicity] and if it is plausible it does seem to allow the theist to avoid having to explain lots of necessary connections between distinct divine attributes and actions.”13

In a similar critique of the notion that God’s moral nature solves the Euthyphro Dilemma, Jeremy Koons argued that the proposed solution just pushes the dilemma back one level beyond God’s commands to His nature: Is God’s moral nature good because He has it or does He have it because it is good?14 The resulting dilemma is as follows: Either 1. If God’s moral nature is good because He has it, then no matter what type of nature He had, even a heinous one, it would be considered good, or 2. If God’s moral nature is based on necessary truths that even God cannot change (He just has the nature He has), then His moral nature is independent of God and out of His control. Interestingly, without developing the idea fully, Koons merely mentioned that “[a]n alternate solution to the Euthyphro problem… requires embracing some potentially contentious notions, such as that of divine simplicity…”15

Here then are two critics of the standard answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma, that morality is grounded in God’s moral nature, who suggest that divine simplicity might be a possible solution to their critique. However, Koons is correct in noting that this notion is contentious; in fact, many theologians today have rejected divine simplicity. Thus, in this paper, in order to defuse the Euthyphro Dilemma and strengthen the moral argument for God’s existence, I will argue that taking a concretist position on properties allows us to salvage the key concepts of divine simplicity which are pertinent to this Euthyphro conversation. I will begin by first explaining what it means to take the position that properties are concrete objects.

And Now for Something Completely Different: Properties as Abstract Objects

In Does God Have a Nature? Alvin Plantinga tackled the issue of God’s relationship to His properties and argued that God has a nature which is not identical with Him.16 In this book he connected God’s nature with abstract objects as follows:

…if the number 7 or the proposition all men are mortal exist necessarily, then God has essentially the property of affirming their existence. That property, therefore, will be part of his nature. Indeed, for any necessarily existing abstract object O, the property of affirming the existence of O is part of God’s nature… God hasn’t created the numbers; a thing is created only if its existence had a beginning, and no number ever began to exist… [they] are necessary beings and have been created neither by God nor by anyone else. And of course the same goes for other necessarily existing abstract objects.17

He continued by noting that “[f]rom this point of view, then, exploring the realm of abstract objects can be seen as exploring the nature of God.”18 He concluded his book as follows:

(70)     Necessarily 7 + 5 = 12
(71)     It is part of God’s nature to believe that 7 + 5 = 12.
…is there a sensible sense of ‘explain’ such that in that sense (71) is the explanation of (70)… Or could we say, perhaps, that what makes (70) true is the fact that (71) is true? …Could we say, perhaps, that (70) is grounded in (71)? If so, what are the relevant senses of ‘explains,’ ‘makes true’ and ‘grounded in?’ These are good questions, and good topics for further study. If we can answer them affirmatively, then perhaps we can point to an important dependence of abstract objects upon God, even though necessary truths about these objects are not within his control.19

To summarize then, Plantinga described abstract objects as beings that exist necessarily, are uncreated, had no beginning, and the truths of which are not within God’s control, though they might be dependent upon Him in some way. This is a common theistic view of abstract objects; one additional characteristic many assign to them is that they are non-causal, that is, they cannot enter into the causal chain of events. But should properties be thought of as abstract objects?

Plantinga himself recognized the problems with such a position. He wrote that “if he [God] has aseity, he depends upon nothing for his existence and character; and if he is sovereign, everything depends upon him. Abstract objects seem to compromise both…”20 While discussing God’s properties as abstract objects, he noted that God “seems to be somehow conditioned and limited by these properties, and dependent upon them.”21 According to Plantinga, these concerns make up the best argument for nominalism. He explained that:

…we have been speaking only of his [God’s] own properties; but of course there is the rest of the Platonic menagerie—the propositions, properties, numbers, sets, possible worlds and all the rest. If these things are distinct from God, if they exist necessarily and have their characters essentially, then there is a vast and enormous structure that seems to be independent of God… That this swarm of Platonic paraphernalia infringes on the sovereignty of God is the best argument I know for nominalism.22

What would such a nominalism look like? According to Plantinga, the nominalist claims we should get rid of the “Platonic horde of propositions, states of affairs, numbers, sets and the like—in a word, abstract objects… So perhaps the truth is there are only concrete objects—God, other persons, and physical objects such as stars, trees and protons. ‘Concretism’ would be a more accurate if less euphonious name for this position than the usual ‘nominalism’: the claim that everything is a concrete object.”23

It should be noted that Plantinga rejects concretism because he argues that it does not solve, in his opinion, the key problem with abstract objects—that they seem to violate God’s sovereignty. He argued that even concretism results in many truths that are not in God’s control.24 However, William Lane Craig, a prominent critic of abstract objects, argued that the key problem with abstract objects is not that they violate God’s sovereignty, but that they violate His aseity. The term aseity comes from a Latin word meaning ‘of itself’; as Richards explained, it means that God “exists from and of himself and does not depend on anything outside himself for his nature or existence. Everything else, in contrast, depends upon God for its existence.”25

Christians have traditionally believed that God is a self-existent being that does not exist through, or in dependence upon, anything else; He is the sole ultimate reality. Craig argued that if there are abstract objects which are, like God, uncreated and eternal, then God is not the sole ultimate reality. Craig maintains therefore that the idea of abstract objects is a serious challenge to orthodox theology because it makes God out to be just one of a vast number of eternal and uncreated beings. He wrote that “[i]nsofar as these abstract objects are taken to be uncreated, necessary, and eternal, contemporary Platonism also comes into conflict with the traditional doctrines of divine aseity and creation.”26

The issue of God and abstract objects is critically important when it comes to the moral argument for God’s existence. For example, atheist Erik Wielenberg claims that moral truths exist as brute facts, thus concluding that morality can be real and objective even if there is no God. His description of these brute facts makes them sound very similar to abstract objects:

…my version of non-theistic robust normative realism has an ontological commitment shared by many theists: it implies the obtaining of substantive, metaphysically necessary, brute facts… Such facts are the foundation of (the rest of) objective morality and rest on no foundation themselves. To ask of such facts, “where do they come from?” or “on what foundation do they rest?” is misguided in much the way that, according to many theists, it is misguided to ask of God, “where does He come from?” or “on what foundation does He rest?” The answer is the same in both cases: they come from nowhere, and nothing external to themselves grounds their existence; rather, they are fundamental features of the universe that ground other truths.27

If Christian theologians are not careful, their promotion of abstract objects may do more harm than good. For instance, they might unknowingly be promoting a position that grounds morality in properties which are abstract objects, while positing God just as a being that exemplifies the moral properties in question. The consequence of such a position, as seen in Wielenberg’s work, is that it eventually views God as an unnecessary hypothesis.

How to Be a Nominalist Without Being a Nominalist

One concern that might be raised against concretism is that it entails a rejection of universals. Unfortunately, the term “nominalist” has been used to describe someone who rejects abstract objects, and it has also been used to describe someone who rejects universals. While it is possible for someone to adopt both forms of nominalism, this is not necessarily the case. For instance, Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra explained, using the Aristotelian realist as an example, that a person can deny abstract objects and still affirm universals.28 To avoid this confusion, Craig prefers to call his position against abstract objects ‘anti-realist’ instead of nominalist.29

How could one affirm universals while believing that only concrete objects exist? The category of concrete objects is not limited to just physical objects, nor is it limited to just particulars. First, a concretist views non-physical objects such as angels, thoughts, and God as concrete objects. Second, while describing concretism (though he uses a different term for it), Paul Gould wrote that such a position “is not to be understood necessarily as the rejection of properties, relations, propositions, possible worlds, and so on, rather, what is required of those who believe in such entities is that they think of them as concrete objects.”30

For an example of a position that rejects abstract objects but affirms universals, Craig described a person who identifies universals as thoughts in someone’s mind yet considers those thoughts to be concrete objects.31 That is the position that I am advocating for in this paper, with the added proviso that the mind in question is God’s—thus I affirm a concretist interpretation of Divine Conceptualism. Robert Adams notes that divine conceptualism achieves two of our deeply held intuitions—that truth exists beyond our human minds and that truth seems to be something that can only exist in minds.32 It should be noted that Craig himself rejects divine conceptualism, though he sees it as the “most promising concretist view” and admits it is his “fallback position.”33 As an anti-realist, he rejects that abstract objects are real as well as the concretist interpretation of divine conceptualism (which he classifies as another form of realism).34

Should God’s thoughts be considered as abstract or concrete objects? Greg Welty, a proponent of divine conceptualism, laments that “the abstract/concrete distinction is in disarray, ontologically speaking.”35 However, he continued by noting that “…if divine ideas are ‘concrete objects,’ then my position is that abstract objects functionally speaking are concrete objects ontologically speaking.”36 In other words, God’s thoughts (as concrete objects) can play the functional role people often assign to abstract objects. Welty described this interpretation of divine conceptualism as follows:

It would be a version of nominalism [towards abstract objects that is] insofar as the divine concepts are (presumably) concrete entities, perhaps mental events (images, dispositions, or intentions). An advocate of this interpretation of TCR [Theistic Conceptual Realism] could hold the traditional nominalist view that the only things which exist are concrete substances. But insofar as the thoughts of one concrete substance in particular (God) satisfy the functional concept of universals, this is a nominalism that concedes, interestingly enough, that universals really exist. And so this interpretation of TCR would still be a realism about universals, insofar as the divine concepts exist independently of any human cognitive activity, and would exist even if there were no human thinkers at all. Indeed, they would exist even if there were no concrete substances in existence (besides God, of course).37  

As a reminder, the motivation for taking the position that God’s thoughts are concrete objects, rather than abstract objects is twofold: to protect God’s aseity, as discussed above, and to salvage divine simplicity, as discussed below.38   

What Divine Concepts Cannot Do

While I have shown how properties can be considered as concrete objects in the mind of God, this cannot be the case for all properties. The exceptions I have in mind are God’s essential properties. I affirm that all other properties, besides God’s essential properties, are ideas in the mind of God.39 But why could God’s essential properties not also be properties that merely exist in God’s mind? The problem with such a position is that it runs into the bootstrapping objection. The bootstrapping objection is most well known as a problem for Absolute Creationism.

Absolute Creationism is yet another position on God and abstract objects which maintains that God created all concrete objects and all abstract objects (including all properties).40 Many have rejected Absolute Creationism because it ends up being viciously circular. The circularity comes into play when one recognizes that some properties must exist prior to God’s creation of them, for instance, God’s property of being able to create properties. As Craig and J. P. Moreland explained, “God cannot coherently be said to create his own properties, since in order to create them, he must already possess them.”41 Gould noted that “[m]any (including myself) think this [bootstrapping] problem fatal for the absolute creationism of Morris and Menzel.”42

Though the bootstrapping objection is most well known as a problem for Absolute Creationism, it also presents a problem for the divine conceptualist who claims that all properties are ideas in God’s mind. Divine Conceptualism runs into the bootstrapping circularity as well because some properties must exist prior to God conceiving of them, for example, God’s property of being able to conceive of properties.43 Jay Richards explained the problem for Divine Conceptualism as follows:

…the bootstrapping problem rears its ugly head again… this would entail, for example, that God is all-powerful just because, from eternity, God has reflected on the fact that he is all-powerful. But clearly for this to be possible, God would have had to have the Property P01 of being able to think his omnipotence into existence. But perhaps, one might retort, God also thought that property into existence from eternity. Well, then he would have had to have another property P02, and off, once again, goes an infinite regress.44

The bootstrapping objection does not have to be the death knell for concretism however. A concretist can view some properties as ideas in God’s minds and other properties as essential properties of God Himself. The important notion for the concretist is that all properties are concrete, not that they are all ideas in God’s mind. Though they note that such a distinction among properties might appear ad hoc, Craig and Moreland describe a similar position as follows: “Perhaps… [someone] might maintain that all the properties that God exemplifies as part of his nature—for example, being loving, being powerful and so on—do not exist… as do other properties. Rather, as a brute fact, God, along with his nature, simply exists a se. Other properties, such as being red, are sustained by God, either by his intellect, will or in some other way.”45

Before we turn to the topic of simplicity, it is worth noting something that was only briefly mentioned above; a concretist also understands God to be a concrete object. For example, Richards describes God as “the one necessarily existing, personal, concrete being and causal agent.”46 Within Adams’ metaethical model, he is explicit that “[i]f God is the Good itself, then the Good is not an abstract object but a concrete (though not a physical) individual. Indeed it is a person, or importantly like a person.”47  

Salvaging Divine Simplicity

Simplicity was the standard position among Christian theologians from at least as early as Augustine up through the early modern era. Simplicity, as understood by these theologians, should not be thought of as a property of God, but rather as the way God is related to His properties. That is why Thomas Aquinas began his discussion of God’s attributes by first explaining divine simplicity.48 Today however, the doctrine of simplicity has fallen on hard times; many contemporary theologians have flat out rejected it. For instance, Plantinga wrote that “…the simplicity doctrine seems an utter mistake.”49 Even Adams, whose entire metaethical model is built around the idea that God is the Good itself, wrote that “…the extreme doctrine of divine simplicity… which grounded much medieval thought about the otherness of God, offers much too formal a conception of that otherness… and I think it can be given up without insult to the divine transcendence.”50

Why has divine simplicity been thrown on the trash heap? I will argue below that the most common reasons given for the rejection of divine simplicity stem from the mistake of viewing properties as abstract objects instead of concrete objects. If one takes a concretist view of properties, then one can affirm the essential elements of divine simplicity while avoiding the absurdities that result from trying to affirm both ‘simplicity’ and ‘properties as abstract objects’. In order to do this I will use Richards’ list of eight senses of divine simplicity that appear in Christian theology.51

1. All divine properties are possessed by the same self-identical God.

2. God is not composite, in the sense that he is made up of elements or properties more fundamental than he is. He has no external cause(s), such as Platonic Forms.

3. God’s essence is “identical with” his act of existing.

4. All God’s essential properties are coexstensive.

5. All God’s perfections are identical.

6. All God’s properties are coexstensive.

7. God’s essential properties and essence are (strictly) identical with God himself.

8. All of God’s properties are (strictly) identical with God himself.

Senses (1) and (4) are relatively uncontroversial aspects of simplicity that nearly all theologians affirm, even if they reject other senses of simplicity. Sense (1) merely affirms that the divine attributes refer to one and the same being, an uncontroversial statement about God’s unity. As for sense (4), William Mann explained that all that is being affirmed here is that “…it would be impossible for any being to instantiate the attribute being omniscient, say, without also instantiating the attribute being omnipotent, and vice versa.”52

Richards and I both reject (6) and (8), but doing so has little to no implications for applying simplicity to the Euthyphro Dilemma. The issue here has to do with the distinction between God’s essential properties and His contingent properties; someone who affirms (6) and (8) makes no such distinction, which I believe is a mistake. As Richards explained, Aquinas held that God did not have any contingent properties (sometimes referred to as accidental properties) because he viewed them as potentialities and did not want to assign any potentiality to God.53 However, claiming that God has no contingent properties violates God’s divine freedom because it entails that everything God does, He must do necessarily.54

I will discuss Richards’ (2) by itself because it seems to be the key motivation behind divine simplicity and, as I see it, the heart of the doctrine. The rest of the senses discussed below, though more difficult to understand and explain, are only possible implications from this proposition. As a reminder, sense (2) is that ‘God is not composite, in the sense that he is made up of elements or properties more fundamental than he is. He has no external cause(s), such as Platonic Forms.’ This sense of simplicity asserts that God is not dependent on anything outside Himself. A concretist can easily affirm this assertation while someone who views properties as abstract objects struggles to do so. Those who have a strong ontological view of abstract objects tend to think of properties as metaphysical parts, causing the artificial worry that God is a composite being dependent upon such parts.  

As opposed to a position like Plantinga’s, which views properties as abstract objects, a concretist can more clearly, and with less qualifications, say, along with Jay Richards, that “[t]here is no abstract essence that in any way precedes God’s concrete actuality.”55 This allows the concretist to maintain, again, along with Richards, that “God’s essence and properties are not parts of God, however, but fundamental facts about him.”56 In other words, the concretist has less difficulty saying that God ontologically ‘comes first’ before His properties. The advantage to the concretist here is well articulated by Richards when he wrote that “…by defining these things minimally as facts or truths… I think I have circumvented most of the problems that a more strongly Platonic view of abstract entities poses for God’s sovereignty and aseity.”57

Some theologians who reject simplicity acknowledge that the motivations behind it, such as this sense (2), were commendable. For example, Baggett and Walls wrote that “…while we retain the prerogative to refrain from affirming divine simplicity, we think it important to capture the insight inspiring it and to affirm God’s perfection and supreme ontological status.”58 Ronald Nash also rejected simplicity but noted that it “…resulted from attempts to avoid two extreme movements that were considered threats to Christian theology during the Middle Ages: extreme realism (or hyperrealism) and nominalism.”59 He explained extreme realism as the “tendency to take properties like wisdom and goodness and hypostatize them into existing entities. With respect to the properties of God, the problem was obvious. If the properties or attributes of God are hypostatized existents, then God is a composite being… This effectively made God’s nature a construct of more basic building blocks, namely, the hypostatized attributes.”60 This is an artificial problem, a problem resulting from the mistake of viewing properties as abstract objects.

Alternatively, Nash explained that nominalism had the advantage of “eliminating in one fell swoop all of the problems raised by the extreme realists. It is no longer possible to think of God as composed of parts (viz., the attributes) since the ‘parts’ do not exist.”61 That is, they do not exist in the ontologically heavyweight sense that extreme realists maintain. Unfortunately Nash himself affirmed “the existence of a whole host of abstract objects that… exist eternally and necessarily, including properties, relations, propositions, states of affairs, and numbers.”62 He dismissed nominalism because it rejected universals, but, as I explained above, a concretist can be a nominalist concerning abstract objects while still affirming the existence of universals.  

Addressing the Most Difficult Senses of Divine Simplicity

Richards’ (3), (5), and (7) all have to do with the ‘identity absurdities’ that supposedly result from divine simplicity.63 I will address them one at a time and contend that such absurdities mostly result when one views properties as abstract objects instead of concrete objects. First let us consider ‘(3) God’s essence is “identical with” his act of existing.’ By definition, for all finite contingent beings, existence is a contingent property; it is possible that they might not have existed at all. Thus all contingent beings, such as human beings, apples, the planet Saturn, etc., are a composite of essence (their essential properties) and existence. However, God, as a necessary being, necessarily exists and therefore for Him, existence is an essential property. Richards notes, colloquially though instructively, that “[w]e cannot get the daylight between God’s essence and existence as we can with finite creatures.”64 God is not composed of existence and essence but is simple in the sense that existence is an essential property for Him. Adams wrote that “…the most plausible form of the doctrine of divine necessity is the Thomistic view that God’s existence follows necessarily from his essence but… we do not understand God’s essence well enough to see how his existence follows from it.”65

Now let us consider ‘(5) All God’s perfections are identical.’ Plantinga explained this implication of simplicity is the first of two reasons he rejects this doctrine; he wrote that “…if God is identical with each of his properties, then each of his properties is identical with each of his properties, so that God has but one property. This seems flatly incompatible with the obvious fact that God has several properties.”66 One who views properties as abstract objects may claim that those who hold to divine simplicity can only speak as though God has one property, not several. Yet, as Plantinga says, we clearly think of God, and describe Him, as having several properties. Divine simplicity by itself does not result in the absurd notion that we can only speak of God as having one property. This absurdity only arises if one tries to combine ‘divine simplicity’ with the position that ‘properties are abstract objects.’ However, Richards explained that this criticism “against speaking of divine properties in the plural may stem from insufficient care in avoiding the connotation that properties are physical parts.”67 In other words, viewing properties as abstract objects gives them the connotation of being metaphysical parts, and trying to combine this with divine simplicity causes the absurdity Plantinga pointed out.

On the other hand, a concretist who holds to Divine Conceptualism maintains that we can consider God’s properties separately because God eternally ‘abstracts’ them by reflecting on the concrete actuality of His own being. Richards’ explanation of this worth quoting in full:

God’s being precedes the discrete universal properties, though universals eternally exist and are relevantly distinct, in the sense that God eternally abstracts them by reflecting on his own being. When we say that Socrates is wise, the claim is meaningful and true because of this prior act of God abstracting the concept of Wisdom by reflecting on the concrete actuality of his own being, one aspect of which is perfect wisdom. God’s eternal thought also allows us to speak much more easily about God, using the language of properties and essences. It is God’s intellectual activity that makes our intellectual and linguistic activity possible, not only in everyday contexts but also in theology.68

In addition, while defending divine simplicity, Brian Leftow responded to Plantinga’s critique here as follows: “Omniscience is or supervenes on that state which is God’s knowing what He does. Omnipotence is or supervenes on that state which is God’s having the abilities He has. The terms “omniscience” and “omnipotence” of course carry distinct senses, but what reason is there to find it odd that God satisfies them in virtue of the same inner state?”69

Now let us consider ‘(7) God’s essential properties and essence are (strictly) identical with God himself.’ Plantinga explained this supposed implication of simplicity is the second of two reasons he rejects this doctrine:

…if God is identical with each of his properties, then, since each of his properties is a property, he is a property… This view is subject to a difficulty both obvious and overwhelming. No property could have created the world; no property could be omniscient, or, indeed, know anything at all. If God is a property, then he isn’t a person but a mere abstract object; he has no knowledge, awareness, power, love or life.70  

Notice Plantinga’s assumption lurking in the background, the assumption that properties are abstract objects. It is this assumption which leads him to the conclusion that the doctrine of divine simplicity results in the absurd view that God is “a mere abstract object.” Because a concretist rejects the notion that God’s properties are abstract objects, she can thus embrace simplicity while avoiding this absurdity.

Craig and Moreland explain that those who view properties as abstract objects run into the difficult “…problem of the causal or explanatory priority of God relative to abstract objects… Some contemporary Christian philosophers have appealed to divine simplicity as a solution, for if God is identical to his properties, they are not explanatorily prior to him. But the classical doctrine of divine simplicity never envisioned making God identical with his properties as the Platonist construes them, for that would be to turn God into an abstract object.”71 However, if one does not, with the Platonist, construe properties are abstract objects, then one is not forced into the absurd conclusion that God is an abstract object.

While defending Robert Adams’ notion that God is The Good against the charge that this results in the implausible notion that God is identical to some abstract object, Baggett and Walls note that there is a “recurring debate among Plato scholars as to whether the Forms are best understood as archetypes, properties, or universals on the one hand, or standards, paradigms, or exemplars on the other.” They point out that Adams’ approach, thinking of God functioning as the exemplar of Goodness makes “better sense of God constituting Goodness, in the sense of being its exemplar, perfect standard, ultimate paradigm, and final source.” By viewing Plato’s Forms this way, as concrete instead of abstract, “…a person like God might function more paradigmatically as the ultimate Good than would some abstract principle or impersonal truth.” The result is that “[t]he tension between person and universal, or substance and property, is thus avoided.”72 In fact, Leftow, in his defense of divine simplicity, makes the case that, even though God is a person, He may play the functional role people often assign to abstract objects.73

Conclusion

God is a weighty topic, to say the least. As finite creatures, there is a limit to how much we can understand, and explain, God and His properties. However, the more implausible or incoherent a position is, the more strikes against it, all else equal. In that regard, broadly speaking, this paper is an attempt at the coherence of theism, that is, an attempt to show how theism is metaphysically intelligible and does not entail any logical contradictions. In particular though, in the context of trying to defuse the Euthyphro Dilemma, I argued that taking a concretist position on properties allows us to salvage the key aspects of divine simplicity. Certainly this is not the last word concerning simplicity; for instance, one large controversial issue that I left outstanding was how simplicity can be reconciled with the Trinity. However, I believe, along with Richards, that “we are now in the neighborhood of preserving the essential core of the doctrine of divine simplicity,” at least the core that is pertinent to the Euthyphro Dilemma.

Footnotes

[1] Plato, Euthyphro, 9e.

[2] For a brief summary see C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014), 89–91. For a fuller treatment see John Milliken, “Euthyphro, the Good, and the Right,” Philosophia Christi 11.1 (2009): 145–55.

[3] William Lane Craig, “The Most Gruesome of Guests,” 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), 171–73.

[4] Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; repr., 2002), 7.

[5] Ibid., 14.

[6] Anselm, “Monologion,” in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works (eds. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans; Oxford World’s Classics, New York: Oxford University Press), 5–82.

[7] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I, Chapter 40.

[8] David Baggett and Jerry Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 91.

[9] Baggett and Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, 93.

[10] Erik J. Wielenberg, “An Inconsistency in Craig’s Defence of the Moral Argument,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4/4 (2012): 65–74.

[11] Erik Wielenberg, “Reply to Craig, Murphy, McNabb, and Johnson” (presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Boston, Mass., November 20, 2017), 14. Forthcoming in Philosophia Christi.

[12] Ibid., 11.

[13] Erik J. Wielenberg, personal correspondence.

[14] Jeremy Koons, “Can God’s Goodness Save the Divine Command Theory from Euthyphro?,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4.1 (2012): 177–95.

[15] Ibid., 194.

[16] Alvin Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), 10.

[17] Ibid., 142-143.

[18] Ibid., 144.

[19] Ibid., 145–46.

[20] Ibid., 68.

[21] Ibid., 6.

[22] Ibid., 35–36.

[23] Ibid., 65.

[24] Ibid., 89.

[25] Jay Wesley Richards, The Untamed God (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 15.

[26] William Lane Craig, God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3.

[27] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 38.

[28] Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, “Nominalism in Metaphysics,” ed. Edward N. Zalta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nominalism-metaphysics.

[29] Craig, God Over All, 8.

[30] Paul M. Gould, “Introduction to the Problem of God and Abstract Objects,” in Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects, ed. Paul M. Gould (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 12.

[31] Craig, God Over All, 8.

[32] Robert Merrihew Adams, The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 218.

[33] Craig, God Over All, 51, 206.

[34] Ibid., 72.

[35] Greg Welty, “Theistic Conceptual Realism,” in Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects, ed. Paul M. Gould (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 94.

[36] Ibid., 95.

[37] Greg Welty, “Truth As Divine Ideas,” Southwestern Journal of Theology 47.1 (2004): 59–60.

[38] For a dialogue about whether or not Thomas Aquinas should be considered a concretist in this regard, see J. Thomas Bridges, “A Moderate-Realist Perspective on God and Abstract Objects,” Philosophia Christi 17.2 (2015): 283. See also William Lane Craig’s response 292-293 and Bridges response back to Craig 309-310, 312.

[39] Of course there are incidental properties that humans conceive/create such as hipness, or the property of scoring a touchdown. However, these should not be considered universals.

[40] See Thomas V. Morris and Christopher Menzel, “Absolute Creation,” American Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1986): 353–62. Christopher Menzel, “Theism, Platonism, and the Metaphysics of Mathematics,” Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987): 365–82. For a fuller treatment, see Brian Leftow, God and Necessity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[41] William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2003), 505.

[42] Gould, “Introduction to the Problem of God and Abstract Objects,” 10.

[43] Craig and J. P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 506.

[44] Richards, The Untamed God, 245. In a footnote Richards thanks Greg Welty for helping him see this point clearly.

[45] Craig and J. P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 505.

[46] Richards, The Untamed God, 95.

[47] Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 42.

[48] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 3.

[49] Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature?, 47.

[50] Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 52.

[51] Richards, The Untamed God, 217.

[52] William E. Mann, “Simplicity and Immutability in God,” in The Concept of God, ed. Thomas V. Morris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 256.

[53] Richards, The Untamed God, 234–35.

[54] Craig and J. P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 525.

[55] Richards, The Untamed God, 95.

[56] Ibid., 18.

[57] Ibid., 246.

[58] David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2016), 56.

[59] Ronald H. Nash, The Concept of God: An Exploration of Contemporary Difficulties with the Attributes of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1983), 86–87.

[60] Ibid., 87–88.

[61] Ibid., 88.

[62] Ibid., 96.

[63] For an interesting argument that these identity absurdities are actually erroneous implications resulting from of a misreading of simplicity, “carried into the present by contemporary defenders of simplicity who mistakenly take the traditional identity claims of, say, Thomas to mean strict identity” that is, a Leibnizian view of identity which the medieval theologians did not use, see Richards, The Untamed God, 217, 224, 227, 232, 248.

[64] Ibid., 222.

[65] Adams, The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology, 209.

[66] Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature?, 47. The two reasons Plantinga gives here for rejecting simplicity represent well the most common reasons people give for rejecting this doctrine. For a fuller treatment on objections to divine simplicity, see James E. Dolezal, God Without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness (Eugene, Or.: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 11-29.

[67] Richards, The Untamed God, 241.

[68] Ibid., 247.

[69] Brian Leftow, “Is God an Abstract Object?,” Nous 24 (1990): 598.

[70] Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature?, 47. 

[71] Craig and J. P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 505.

[72] Baggett and Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, 94.

[73] Leftow, “Is God an Abstract Object?,” 581–98.

Bibliography

Adams, Robert Merrihew. Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; repr., 2002.

———. The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Anselm. Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works. Edited by Brian Davies and G. R. Evans. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Contra Gentiles.

———. Summa Theologica.

Baggett, David, and Jerry Walls. Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Baggett, David, and Jerry L. Walls. God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Bridges, J. Thomas. “A Moderate-Realist Perspective on God and Abstract Objects.” Philosophia Christi 17.2 (2015): 277–85.

Craig, William Lane. God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

———. Is Goodness without God Good Enough?: A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics. Edited by Nathan L. King and Robert K. Garcia. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009.

Craig, William Lane, and J. P. Moreland. Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2003.

Dolezal, James E. God Without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness. Eugene, Or.: Pickwick Publications, 2011.

Evans, C. Stephen. God and Moral Obligation. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Gould, Paul M. “Introduction to the Problem of God and Abstract Objects.” Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects. Edited by Paul M. Gould. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

Koons, Jeremy. “Can God’s Goodness Save the Divine Command Theory from Euthyphro?” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4.1 (2012): 177–95.

Leftow, Brian. God and Necessity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

———. “Is God an Abstract Object?” Nous 24 (1990): 581–98.

Mann, William E. “Simplicity and Immutability in God.” The Concept of God. Edited by Thomas V. Morris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Menzel, Christopher. “Theism, Platonism, and the Metaphysics of Mathematics.” Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987): 365–82.

Milliken, John. “Euthyphro, the Good, and the Right.” Philosophia Christi 11.1 (2009): 145–55.

Morris, Thomas V., and Christopher Menzel. “Absolute Creation.” American Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1986): 353–62.

Nash, Ronald H. The Concept of God: An Exploration of Contemporary Difficulties with the Attributes of God. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1983.

Plantinga, Alvin. Does God Have a Nature? Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980.

Plato. Euthyphro.

Richards, Jay Wesley. The Untamed God. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003.

Rodriguez-Pereyra, Gonzalo. “Nominalism in Metaphysics.” Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nominalism-metaphysics.

Welty, Greg. “Theistic Conceptual Realism.” Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects. Edited by Paul M. Gould. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

———. “Truth As Divine Ideas.” Southwestern Journal of Theology 47.1 (2004): 56–68.

Wielenberg, Erik. “Reply to Craig, Murphy, McNabb, and Johnson” presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Boston, Mass., November 20, 2017.

———. “An Inconsistency in Craig’s Defence of the Moral Argument.” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4/4 (2012): 65–74.

———. Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Can a Divine command theory account for the objectivity of moral requirements? Brink and Appraiser Independence

Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at MandM. It has been posted here with permission of author.

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David Brink has objected to a divine command theory of ethics by contending such theories cannot vindicate the objectivity of ethics. Brink begins by defending a particular conception of the objectivity of ethics and then argues that a divine command theory fails to meet that conception.  Brink writes:

Our commitment to the objectivity of ethics is a deep one. Ethics is objective just in case there are facts or truths about what is good or bad and right or wrong that obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers. A commitment to objectivity is part of a commitment to the normativity of ethics. Moral judgments express normative claims about what we should do and care about. As such, they presuppose standards of behavior and concern that purport to be correct, that could and should guide conduct and concern, and that we might fail to accept or live up to. Normativity, therefore, presupposes fallibility, and fallibility implies objectivity. Of course, this presupposition could be mistaken. There might be no objective moral standards. Our moral thinking and discourse might be systematically mistaken. But this would be a revisionary conclusion, to be accepted only as the result of extended and compelling argument that the commitments of ethical objectivity are unsustainable. In the meantime, we should treat the objectivity of ethics as a kind of default assumption or working hypothesis [1]

 He continues:

…Ethical subjectivism is one way to deny ethical objectivity. It claims that what is good or bad and right or wrong depends on the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers. But voluntarism is just subjectivism at the highest level. If God exists and is both omniscient and perfectly good, then his approval – if only we could ascertain it – would be a perfectly reliable – indeed, infallible – indicator of what was good or right. This is what naturalism claims. But voluntarism implies that God’s attitudes play a metaphysical, not just an epistemic, role in morality; his attitudes make things good or right. This is a form of subjectivism about ethics. But then the supposition that morality requires a religious foundation, as voluntarism insists, threatens, rather than vindicates, the objectivity of morality.[2]

The argument can be summarised as follows:

[1] Our commitment to morality presupposes that moral requirements are objective

[2] Moral requirements are objective just in case there are facts or truths about what is right or wrong that obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers.

[3] If divine command metaethics is true, facts about right and wrong depend on the attitude of an appraiser.

The conclusion is that a divine command theory fails to vindicate and instead contradicts a presupposition of our commitment to morality. 

This argument is invalid to see why consider the definition of objectivity Brink proposes in [2]; “Ethics is objective just in case there are facts or truths about what is good or bad and right or wrong that obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers“[3]. Central to his definition is the idea that objectivity involves appraiser independence. The truth of a moral judgement does not depend on the attitude of the appraiser.

However, there are two ways one can understand the notion of appraiser independence here, which correspond (loosely) to different accounts of objectivity in meta-ethical literature. One way is that truths about what is right and wrong obtain independently of the beliefs and attitudes of actual human appraisers. i.e. appraisers like you and I who are imperfect reasoners with limited information, subject to biases and make errors and mistakes.  

Chris Meyers expounds an understanding of appraiser independence along these lines. Meyers states that moral truth is objective when it’s “truth is independent of any particular appraisers or appraisals, but not independent of appraising generally”[4]…

The truth of a moral judgment is determined not by our actual judgments – which might be arbitrary, biased, or otherwise irrational – but on the judgments we would hypothetically make under ideal circumstances. An act is wrong, for example, if it would be prohibited by principles regulating interpersonal conduct that would be freely agreed to by rational agents in ideal conditions.

This understanding of appraiser independence distinguishes the attitudes and beliefs of actual human appraisers and the attitudes and beliefs that an appraiser would hold in ideal conditions: conditions of full information, flawlessly rationality, impartiality, etc. Moral judgements are subjective when facts about what is right and wrong depend on the attitude of actual human appraisers towards those judgements. 

This understanding of objectivity is associated with constructionist accounts of morality. However, it is also implicit in the writings of moral realists who account for moral facts in terms of the attitudes of ideal observers or facts about what communities or individuals would rationally desire or endorse under conditions of full information. [5]

The second understanding of appraiser independence is that moral judgements are objective just in case truths about right and wrong obtain independently of what any appraiser thinks. This would include actual human appraisers, but also idealized agents, hypothetical ideal observers or even God.

These two different understandings of “appraiser independence” help us see Brink’s argument’s subtle flaw. Suppose we adopt the first understanding of appraiser independence. Brink’s argument becomes: 

[1] Our commitment to morality presupposes that moral requirements are objective 

[2] moral requirements are objective if and only if facts or truths about what is right or wrong obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of any actual human appraisers. 

[3] If divine command metaethics is true, facts about right and wrong, depend on the attitude of an actual human appraiser. 

Taken this way [3] is obviously false. Divine command metaethics does not make facts about right and wrong depend upon an actual human appraiser. It entails that moral facts depend on God’s attitudes. Brink is aware of this fact. He argues that divine command metaethics is “subjectivism at the highest level” because “God’s attitudes play a metaphysical, not just an epistemic, role in morality; his attitudes make things good or right” Moreover, in the very same paragraph, Brink states that: “If God exists and is both omniscient and perfectly good, then his approval – if only we could ascertain it – would be a perfectly reliable – indeed, infallible.” So, God, would be a person who appraises under ideal conditions.  He is not an appraiser like you or I: an imperfect reasoner with limited information, subject to biases, and makes errors and mistakes. 

For this reason, I think it is best to read Brink as adopting the second understanding of appraiser independence in his argument. Hence we should read the argument as:

[1] Our commitment to morality presupposes that moral requirements are objective 

[2] moral requirements are objective if and only if facts or truths about what is right or wrong that obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of any human or ideal appraisers. 

[3]If divine command metaethics is true, facts about right and wrong, depend on the attitude of an ideal appraiser. 

Given Brink’s own meta-ethical views, this seems to be a much more plausible interpretation of his intent. This reading of the argument also makes [3] true. Divine command theories do entail that facts about right and wrong depend on the attitude of an ideal appraiser. In this respect, it is similar to ideal observer theories, constructivist theories and various forms of response-dependent realism. All of which account for moral facts in terms of the responses of appraisers under ideal conditions. 

The problem, however, is that for this argument to be valid, the word “objective must have the same meaning in premises [1] and [2]. Consequently, we must read premise [1] as claiming that our commitment to morality presupposes that moral requirements are appraiser independent in the sense Brink defines in premise [2].

However, there doesn’t appear to be any reason for thinking that our commitment to the objectivity of morality commits us to this stronger conception of appraisal independence. Note again the argument Brink gives for [1]

Ethics is objective just in case there are facts or truths about what is good or bad and right or wrong that obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers. A commitment to objectivity is part of a commitment to the normativity of ethics. Moral judgments express normative claims about what we should do and care about. As such, they presuppose standards of behaviour and concern that purport to be correct, that could and should guide conduct and concern, and that we might fail to accept or live up to. Normativity, therefore, presupposes fallibility, and fallibility implies objectivity.[6] 

Note the inference here; Brink concludes that normative judgements assume that moral facts are appraiser independent. Why? Because normative judgements presuppose that “we” can fail to accept and live up to moral judgements. “We” are “fallible” and can make mistaken moral evaluations. Because “we” are fallible in this way that facts about what is right and wrong must be independent of the moral beliefs and attitudes of appraisers. 

This inference is valid if the appraisers in question are actual human appraisers. i.e. appraisers like you and I: imperfect reasoners, who have  limited information, are subject to biases, and make errors and mistakes. If “we” can have mistaken moral attitudes and beliefs, then correct moral judgements are independent of our attitudes and the attitudes of beings like us who share these limitations. But the argument is a non sequitur if Brink the appraisers in question include agents that appraise in ideal conditions. The fact, “we” can have mistaken moral attitudes and beliefs entails that correct moral judgements are independent of our attitudes. It does not entail that correct moral judgment is independent of appraisers’ attitudes who don’t make those mistakes. Ex hypothesis: agents who appraise under Idealised conditions, are not subject to the kind of biases, errors, and mistakes we are. 

I think this problem will afflict any attempt to argue that divine command metaethics does not account for the objective nature of moral judgements. Reasons for thinking morality is objective are typically based fallibility of the appraisers in question. The fact that individuals and societies can make mistaken appraisals. That history demonstrates reformers have pointed out flaws in our moral thinking and correctly advocated change against the tide of social pressure. That we think certain actions are wrong even if everyone approved of them. That societies have made progress in their judgements over time. That moral disagreement involves contradicting judgements other appraisers make and pointing out flaws in their reasoning or facts missed. That we don’t consider the appraisals made by racists and anti-Semites as correct as those made by people who advocate benevolence and charity. These features of moral discourse point to the fact that human appraisers are fallible: fallibility implies that the moral evaluations I make and what is wrong are distinct things and not always co-extensive. However, these features of our discourse do not presuppose that the truth of moral judgements is independent the attitudes of those who appraise under ideal conditions. They do not support the strong appraiser independence needed to justify the claim that God’s commands are not objective facts.

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Does Darwall’s Morality of Accountability Require Moral Realism? (And Would It Be Strengthened by Adding God to the Story?)

What Makes Something Morally Good or Bad? Erik Wielenberg’s Theory (Part 2)

Editor’s note: Adam Johnson has graciously allowed us to republish his video series, “What Makes Something Morally Good or Bad?” Find the original post here.

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Erik Wielenberg has proposed an atheistic theory of where morality comes from. He claims that God is not necessary in order to have objective morality by which humans are required to live. Wielenberg’s theory has three main components: First, it is not a materialistic theory, meaning that it does not assume that the physical world is all there is. Second, Wielenberg’s theory proposes the existence of “brute ethical facts” that exist outside of nature which ground moral values and obligations. Third, Wielenberg says that these facts become applicable to human beings by something he calls the “making relationship,” whereby facts about circumstances in the world cause moral facts to become applicable to certain situations (to be instantiated). This lecture explains the main concepts of Wielenberg’s theory and also examines some objections to his theory.

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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.

Mormonism and the Moral Argument

Many moral apologists hold that the moral argument ultimately points beyond mere theism to the truth of Christianity in particular. Such a view is held by David Baggett, Jerry Walls, H.P Owen, and C.S. Lewis. But if that’s the case, then we should discover that Christianity really does explain the moral facts, facts about moral value, moral knowledge, and moral rationality, better than not just secular atheistic theories, but alternative religious explanations as well. Today, I give some suggestions about why Christianity is a better explanation than Mormonism.

Some may be perplexed that I would draw such a sharp distinction between Christianity and Mormonism. Isn’t, after all, Mormonism just another Christian denomination? In that case, it might be like saying Methodism better explains the moral facts than does Catholicism. Such confusion is understandable, especially given that in recent memory, the LDS church, the largest of many different restorationist Mormon denominations, has seemingly tried to represent themselves as just another Christian denomination, even officially dropping the “Mormon” moniker in 2018.[1] They now wish to be known simply as the “Church of Jesus Christ.” So, to make the distinction clear, it will help to lay out, briefly, a few key facts about the Mormon religion.

Mormon Theology and Metaphysics

Most know that Mormonism is a religion founded by Joseph Smith, who claimed to be a prophet, seer, and revelator. Smith claims that “God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him in a grove of trees near his parents’ home in western New York State when he was about 14 years old.”[2] Smith went into the woods to pray, partly to find out which church he should join, frustrated by the “war of words and the tumult of opinions” among the Christian denominations.[3] Smith wanted to know which church was right, but in the grove he learned that none were. A few months later, Smith claims that he was visited by the angel Moroni, who directed him to the location of some buried gold plates, which contained an account of “the former inhabitants of this continent” and “the fullness of the everlasting Gospel.”[4]

Later, Smith supposedly found and translated these golden plates, the resulting work being the Book of Mormon. Christian critics of the Book of Mormon note that despite its unusual provenance, its “theology is largely orthodox in nature.”[5] However, Smith had started a new religious movement, one that would evolve and develop new doctrines, largely supported by its commitment to ongoing revelation. Through continued revelation and inspired translations, Smith would build upon the mostly benign theology of the Book of Mormon and would include, infamously, the doctrine of plural marriage (polygamy) among others.

I suspect that most with at least a passing awareness of Mormonism know these basic facts, but many are not familiar with some of the more exotic teachings of Prophet Joseph. In the late 1830s and into the 1840s, Smith produced a “translation” of some Egyptian papyri. Smith claimed that the documents he bought from traveling salesmen Michael Chandler was actually a lost, first person account from Abraham himself, about his days in Egypt.[6] In this “Book of Abraham,” we learn that there are eternally existent “intelligences” (3:18). God is said to dwell in the midst of these; these intelligences were “organized” before the making of the world (3:22-23). The Book of Abraham is clear that all human beings are organized from these eternal and pre-existing intelligences. Such a view raises important questions about God’s relation to these intelligences. Are they, though eternal, nevertheless ontologically dependent upon him in some way?

Fortunately, in 1844 Joseph Smith would answer this question directly in a sermon given shortly before he died. In his “King Follet Sermon,” Smith proclaimed that “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!” He adds that God is “like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man.”[7] Smith provides further detail, explaining how God came to be God: “We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see… He was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ Himself did; and I will show it from the Bible.”[8]

LDS scholar Richard Bushman says that in this sermon, Joseph taught that “God was one of the free intelligences who had learned to become God.” Bushman adds that this interpretation is “obvious.”[9] Bushman further comments that Joseph Smith’s “words evoked a hierarchy of gods, succeeding to higher stations of greater glory as kingdoms are presented to them and as rising souls below them ascend to godhood… He [God] is their teacher, not their maker.”[10] Additional clarification and endorsement of this doctrine was given by later church president and prophet, Lorenzo Snow, who said, “As man is God once was, as God is man may be." A church produced magazine comments on this couplet that “it is clear that the teaching of President Lorenzo Snow is both acceptable and accepted doctrine in the Church today."[11]

The moral argument is an argument for the existence of God. Proponents of the moral argument understand this God to be the only God, eternally existent, the ground of all that exists, singular, and that there is none other like him. Many moral apologists adopt a broadly Anselmian understanding of God as the Greatest Conceivable Being, the sort of being that possesses all great making properties in a maximal way. He is all good, all powerful, and all knowing. This point is critical and not merely incidental to the moral argument. God must be maximally great, and therefore sui generis, or else God cannot be the explanation of morality.

The Problem of God’s Goodness

Plato’s famous Euthyphro Dilemma can highlight the difference between Christian monotheism and Mormon theology.[12] Plato argued that either the Gods love what is good or something is good when it is loved by the Gods. If the Gods love what is good, then morality doesn’t need the Gods. We can have morality without appeal to the Gods. We simply love the good and we will be moral. But if something is good just because it is loved by the Gods, then morality is arbitrary and irrational. Christian moral philosophers like David Baggett have argued that theism can “split the horns” of the dilemma. One can identify the good with God, so that morality depends on God but is not arbitrary. Theists can also think of moral obligations as identical to God’s commands so that what is morally right is determined by God.

However, such an option is not available to Mormons. Since the person they call “God” is an uncreated intelligence, and the same kind of thing as all other persons, he cannot be identified with the good. No finite and concrete thing like an intelligence would rightly fill that role. If we pose the Euthyphro dilemma to the Mormon, the answer can only be that God loves what is holy. God is simply an exalted man and cannot be the ground of what is moral. Therefore, on the Mormon view, objective morality would exist whether God exists or not.

Certainly, the Mormon God may issue commands to us, but why should we obey them? And the Mormon God may even be good; he might have a perfected moral character, but he cannot identical to the good; he is not Anselm’s Greatest Conceivable Being. He is, as Smith said, an exalted man. He is not the creator of human beings, merely their organizer.

In my view, this issue about the Mormon God’s relation to the good is the central challenge to morality on a Mormon view of the world. But there are other formidable issues. I want only to mention two more.

The Problem of Moral Knowledge

First, there is the problem of moral knowledge. On the Christian view, God is omnipotent and makes the world ex nihilo. He has meticulous control over the world and over the creation and development of our minds. Since he is good and capable, it is natural to think he would make us to know moral truth. However, on the Mormon view, we have always existed as “intelligences” and God’s power is limited. He can form us, but does not create us. Our minds, in particular, seem to exist from eternity past as “intelligences.” Why think, then, that our cognitive abilities are able to discern moral truth? If we are able to know moral truth, one possibility would seemingly be that it is an inexplicable, brute fact about our status as uncreated intelligences. Intelligences just know what is moral and that is the end of the explanation. This would not be a satisfying explanation of how we can rationally have moral knowledge.[13]

The Problem of Moral Rationality

Second, there is the problem of justice and of the ultimate reconciliation between happiness and morality. Kant, in his moral argument for theism, argues that we must presuppose that God exists if for no other reason than to guarantee that justice is ultimately done. God judges, rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. And he has the power to balance the scales in the final judgment. However, the Mormon God, limited in power and subject to the eternal laws of the universe, cannot guarantee the ultimate victory of good over evil. How things work out in the end are beyond his control. Certainly, we can grant that the Mormon God, as an exalted man, may have, relatively speaking, a tremendous amount of power. But not all power and not all knowledge. As Joseph Smith said, God is subject to the eternal laws of the universe, including the principles of exaltation and eternality of matter.[14] It would seemingly be a happy coincidence that God, given his limitations, was able to bring about the ultimate harmony of morality and happiness. Even if obedience to the Mormon God could, somehow, count as fulfilling our moral obligations, it remains to be seen how the moral life can be ultimately rational.

In conclusion, then, I want to reiterate I intend this short essay to be merely suggestive, one that probes potential issues with the Mormon worldview considering morality. I think these three issues, related to the goodness of God, moral knowledge, and moral rationality, are likely indicative of some serious shortcomings in Mormonism’s explanatory power regarding the moral facts and they give us at least a prima facie reason to think that Christianity better explains the moral facts.

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[1] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/mormon-is-out-church-releases-statement-on-how-to-refer-to-the-organization?lang=eng

[2] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/first-vision-accounts?lang=eng

[3] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/pgp/js-h/1.5-20?lang=eng#p5

[4] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/pgp/js-h/1.5-20?lang=eng#p5

[5] Carl Mosser, “And the Saints Go Marching On” in The New Mormon Challenge.

[6] However, it is very likely that the papyri had nothing to do with Abraham and were a collection of well-known texts. These have since been translated by Egyptologists and no connection to Abraham is evident. Cf. https://coldcasechristianity.com/writings/how-the-book-of-abraham-exposes-the-false-nature-of-mormonism/

[7] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1971/04/the-king-follett-sermon?lang=eng

[8] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1971/04/the-king-follett-sermon?lang=eng

[9] Richard Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 534.

[10] Bushman, 535.

[11]The comment was made in 1909, but reprinted in 2002. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2002/02/the-origin-of-man?lang=eng 

[12]Some LDS scholars argue that LDS doctrine is not polytheistic. They say such a term is “pejorative, inaccurate, and inappropriate.” Cf. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Mormonism_and_the_nature_of_God/Polytheism#Question:_Are_Christians_monotheists.3F

Note, however, that the FAIR explanation of monotheism seems to be functional rather than ontological. They are monotheists because they worship one God. However, this would be, at best, an idiosyncratic use of the terms monotheistic and polytheistic. The article further incorrectly defines “social trinitarianism” as the denial that the Trinity is one substance. They also try to argue that the Christian doctrine of theosis, which has some biblical basis, is the same as the one taught by the LDS church. That is also simply incorrect; orthodox Christians have never taught that human beings can become God in exactly the same way as God is God, even if they held that there is some mystical union between a human person and the divine.

[13] There are potentially some other explanations for grounding moral knowledge, which I consider here.

[14] https://abn.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1971/04/the-king-follett-sermon?lang=eng

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The Managing Editor of MoralApologetics.com, Jonathan has been a vital part of the Moral Apologetics team since its inception. Currently, he serves as adjunct instructor of philosophy for Grand Canyon University and Liberty University. Prior to these positions, he was ordained as a minister and served as spiritual life director. He is the author or co-author of several articles on metaethics, theology, and history of philosophy. With a Master’s in Global Apologetics and a graduate of Biola’s Master’s program in philosophy, he is currently in the throes of finishing his doctoral dissertation in which he extends a four-fold moral argument from mere theism to a distinctively Christian picture of God. Jonathan, his wife Sara, and their two children presently live in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Ecological Apologetics

Ecological Apologetics

Caleb Brown

Air travel cultivates appreciation for nature. That I am sitting in a metal tube, bumping elbows with strangers and developing neck strain all fade as I open my window to the blinding beauty outside. Trans-Pacific flights reveal lonely cargo ships, barely visible in the vast blueness that swallows the world. Trans-continental flights survey the barren crags and mesas of the southwestern deserts. From this high up, patterns sifted from the soil by flowing water draw the eye with artistic precision.

Shorter, lower flights allow intimate interaction with aerial terrain. On a hopper from Dallas to Colorado Springs, my propeller plane banked and wove its way through glowering thunder banks. On the way from Charlotte to Gainesville miles of farmland sprouted plumes of smoke that rose and then flattened upon encountering wind. They seemed to be gargantuan, flagged pins on the only real map.

But what did these pins mark? Was the farmers’ attempt to clear their land and produce food harmful as well as efficient and artful? What are the consequences of vaporizing tons of carbon-based plant life through combustion? What, for that matter, is the ecological impact of the flight that enabled me to see what these farmers were doing?

We revel in the beauty of nature, and we must use nature to survive. Both of these truths will not let us leave it alone; they will not let us leave nature natural. Even to experience nature, a pleasure that makes us feel more alive and more human, we must enter it and thereby change it.

There is whimsy and power in human smallness before nature—the gentle curve of a foot-path enhances the grandeur of a mountain. The orange streak of a fragile jetstream lit by a dying sun deepens the purple cast over the Blueridge Mountains. But frail footpaths and ephemeral jetstreams breed the sterile flatness of parking lots and runways.

Perhaps parking lots have their place. But the intuition that the natural world is something good, and therefore is something that must be treated carefully, is undeniable. It strikes us at 32,000 feet and when looking into the eyes of a puppy, when contemplating the cruelty of some humans to that sweet nose and those clumsy paws.

While people differ over where, precisely, this intuition points, and what, exactly, it should lead us to do, members of nearly every demographic and tradition acknowledge that the natural world is good and that our treatment of it is not a neutral matter. Regardless of what is felt to be the right way to treat nature, the conviction that wrong ways exist and have been practiced is nearly universal.

This moral intuition is deep and widespread, but how it meshes with other widespread beliefs is not clear.

If we all got here through the survival of the fittest, why should we be concerned about the wellbeing of non-human species? Certainly, the general wellbeing of the biosphere is important for the wellbeing of humans, but cruelty towards domesticated pets does not impact the survival of humanity. If anything, nurturing these pets diverts resources that could be used by humans. To say that caring for these pets increases our psychological wellbeing is simply to restate in psychological terms our moral intuition that the wellbeing of animals is important.

If mass-extinction events are part and parcel of evolution, then why do we have a moral duty to avoid them? Perhaps, by avoiding mass-extinction events, we are preventing evolutionary progress. How would we feel if primates had thwarted our emergence?

Naturalistic evolutionary attempts to explain our moral intuitions generally attribute them, like everything else about us, to a highly sophisticated sense of self-interest. Our moral intuitions towards nature developed because they are, in the end, best for our own survival, or at least for the propagation of our genes. But even if a sufficiently nuanced evolutionary mechanism could produce these instincts, it cannot explain why it would be wrong for us to act contrary to them. We regularly engage in activities, from eating Oreos to choosing Netflix over exercise, that reduce our health and, through epigenetics, reduce the fitness of our descendants. But if reducing our evolutionary fitness in these ways is not wrong, why would disregarding our survival-driven instincts towards nature be wrong?

It seems that naturalism can only explain the psychological phenomena of our moral intuitions towards the natural world by reducing them to mere instincts. It cannot give these instincts the moral weight we know they possess. Pure naturalism cannot explain our knowledge that the natural world is valuable and that abuse of this world is wrong. It takes something more than naturalism to explain what we know about nature.  

But not any type of supernaturalism will do. The trick is to find a way of explaining the value of nature without reducing it, as naturalism does, to something that is unable to ground our moral intuitions. Supernaturalisms that link the spiritual world too closely to the natural world risk reducing the value of the natural world to the worth and power of the spirits that inhabit nature: “The tree is the home of the god, so it is sacred,” or, “I will treat this tree carefully because the spirit that lives in it will make my children sick if I don’t.” Viewpoints like these do not reflect a feeling that the natural world has value in and of itself. Rather, they render it valuable merely by association.

But I think Classical Theism might be a type of supernaturalism that can ground our moral intuitions. Because Classical Theism posits a God who is distinct from nature, it does not reduce the value of nature to that of spirits who inhabit it. Under Classical Theism, to say that the value of the natural world comes from God does not reduce nature’s value to something else, because everything comes from God. God-given value is as inherent, as intrinsic, as real in and of itself as anything in the world. God-given value is not a reality that we can, like our genetic instincts, transcend and ignore.

Many portray our treatment of the natural world as the moral issue of our day. It is certainly one of them. But why is it a moral issue? It seems that naturalism cannot explain the moral significance of nature. Something more is needed. Classical Theism might be this something.

The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg (Part One)

The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg

Matthew Flannagan

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at MandM.org.nz.

Recently, Erik Wielenberg has developed a novel objection to divine command meta-ethics (DCM). DCM “has the implausible implication that psychopaths have no moral obligations and hence their evil acts, no matter how evil, are morally permissible” (Wielenberg (2008), 1). Wielenberg develops this argument in response to some criticisms of his earlier work. One of the critics he addresses is me. In some forthcoming posts, I will respond to Wielenberg’s arguments. In this post, I will set the scene by explaining the argument and the context in which it occurs. Subsequent posts will offer criticism of the argument

1. Wielenberg’s New Argument from Psychopathy.

Wielenberg calls his new argument the Psychopathy objection. The Psychopathy objection is the latest move in the contemporary debate between Wielenberg and his critics over the defensibility of divine command meta-ethics. By divine command theory, Wielenberg has in mind the divine command meta-ethics (DCM) defended by Robert Adams (1999) (1979), William Lane Craig (2009), William Alston (1990), Peter Forrest (1989) and C. Stephen Evans (2013). This version of DCM holds that the property of being morally required is identical with the property of being commanded by God.

In previous writings, Wielenberg has pioneered the promulgation objection to divine command meta-ethics. (see Wielenberg (2005), 60–65; Morriston (2009); Wielenberg (2014), 75–80). According to this objection, a divine command theory is problematic because it cannot account for the moral obligations of reasonable unbelievers.

In making this argument, Wielenberg takes for granted the existence of “reasonable non-believers” people whom “—have been brought up in nontheistic religious communities, and quite naturally operate in terms of the assumptions of their own traditions.” Similarly, “many western philosophers, have explicitly considered what is to be said in favor of God’s existence, but have not found it sufficiently persuasive.” Wielenberg assumes many people in these groups are “reasonable non-believers, at least in the sense that their lack of belief cannot be attributed to the violation of any epistemic duty on their part.” (Wielenberg (2018), 77)

Wielenberg argues that if the property of being morally required is identical with the property of being commanded by God, then these people would have no moral obligations. Seeing reasonable non-believers clearly, do have moral obligations it follows that, DCM is false. 

Why do reasonable non-believers lack moral obligations, given DCM? Wielenberg cites the following exposition of the problem from Wes Morriston:

Even if he is aware of a “sign” that he somehow manages to interpret as a “command” not to steal, how can he [a reasonable non-believer] be subject to that command if he does not know who issued it, or that it was issued by a competent authority? To appreciate the force of this question, imagine that you have received a note saying, “Let me borrow your car. Leave it unlocked with the key in the ignition, and I will pick it up soon.” If you know that the note is from your spouse, or that it is from a friend to whom you owe a favor, you may perhaps have an obligation to obey this instruction. But if the note is unsigned, the handwriting is unfamiliar, and you have no idea who the author might be, then it is as clear as day that you have no such obligation.

In the same way, it seems that even if our reasonable non-believer gets as far as to interpret one of Adams’ “signs” as conveying the message, “Do not steal”, he will be under no obligation to comply with this instruction unless and until he discovers the divine source of the message. (Morriston (2009), 5-6)

I have responded to Wielenberg both in my book and in a recent article. I argued that Morriston’s argument contains a subtle equivocation. In the first line above, he expresses a disjunction. A person is not subject to a command if he does not know (a) who issued it, or (b) that it has an authoritative source. The example he cites, the case of an anonymous note to borrow one’s car, is a case where neither of these disjuncts holds. The owner of the car knows neither who the author is, nor whether its author has authority. We can illustrate this mistake, by reflecting on examples where, a person does not know who the author of the command is, but does recognize that it has an authoritative source.

Consider two counter-examples I offered, first:

Suppose I am walking down what I take to be a public right of way to Orewa Beach, New Zealand. I come across a locked gate with a sign that says: “private property, do not enter, trespassers will be prosecuted.” In such a situation, I recognize that the owner of the property has written the sign, though I have no idea who the owner is. Does it follow I am not subject to the command? That seems false. To be subject to the command, a person does not need to know who the author of the command is. All they need to know is that the command is authoritative over their conduct. (Flannagan (2017), 348)

A second counter-example I provided was; 

Suppose, for example, that an owner of one of the beachfront properties in Orewa puts up a sign that states “private property do not enter, trespassers will be prosecuted” and that John sees the sign and clearly understands what it says. He understands the sign as issuing an imperative to “not enter the property.” John recognizes this imperative is categorical and is telling him to not trespass; he also recognizes this imperative as having authority over his conduct, he also recognizes that he will be blameworthy if he does not comply with this imperative. However, because of a strange metaphysical theory, he does not believe any person issued this imperative and so it is not strictly speaking a command. He thinks it is just a brute fact that this imperative exists. Does this metaphysical idiosyncrasy mean that the command does not apply to him and that he has not heard or received the command the owner issued? That seems to be false. While John does not realize who the source of the command is, he knows enough to know that the imperative the command expresses applies authoritatively to him and that he is accountable to it. (Flannagan (2017), 351)

In the first example, I am aware of the command but do not know who issued it. Despite my ignorance of the source of the command, I know it is authoritative over my conduct, and hence can be said to be subject to it. In the second example, John does not believe he is being commanded. However, he discerns the imperative expressed by the command and is aware both that it authoritatively applies to him and that he is accountable for performing it. A person who doesn’t believe in God can be subject to his commands if he discerns the imperative the command expresses and percieves its authority. 

Craig, (2018) Evan’s (2013) and Adams (1999) have raised similar counter-examples. In a dialogue at the University of Purdue between with Wielenberg Craig responded by citing my second example and discussed is subsequently on his podcast. Evan’s gives a similar counter-example. He imagines a person walking on the border between Iraq and Iran, who perceives a sign warning him to stay on the path. Because he is on the border, he does not know whether the Iranian or the Iraqi governments posted the command, yet he knows some government has issued it. (Evans (2013), 113-114) Adam’s argues: “We can suppose it is enough for God’s commanding if God intends the addressee to recognize a requirement as extremely authoritative and as having imperative force. And that recognition can be present in non-theists as well as theists.” (Adams (1999), 268) These examples all suggest that reasonable believers can be “subject to God’s commands” without believing or knowing that God exists.

In his most recent work, Wielenberg (2018) appears to concede the problem. He concludes that a reasonable unbeliever does not need to recognize moral obligations as God’s commands to be subject to them. However, he suggests this response to the promulgation objection raises a deeper worry. Wielenberg suggests that, behind the responses of Evan’s, Adam’s, Craig and myself is a “plausible principle” which he labels R.

(R) God commands person S to do act A only if S is capable of recognizing the requirement to do A as being extremely authoritative and as having imperative force. 

R enables the divine command theorist to claim consistently that a reasonable non-believer has moral obligations. However, Wielenberg contends this comes at a cost; this is because when conjoined with DCM, R implies that Psychopath’s lack of moral obligations. 

According to Wielenberg “the mainstream view of psychopaths in contemporary psychology and philosophy” which is that lack “conscience and are incapable of grasping the authority and force of moral demands”. Wielenberg states, “According to principle (R) above, since psychopaths cannot grasp morality’s authority and force, God has not issued any commands to them, and so DCT implies that they have no moral obligations” (Wielenberg (2018), 8) 

Wielenberg summarises his argument as follows:

The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory

[1] There are some psychopaths who are incapable of grasping the authority and force of moral demands. (empirical premise) 

[2] So, there are some psychopaths to whom God has issued no divine commands. (from 1 and R) .

[3] So, if DCT is true, then there are some psychopaths who have no moral obligations. (from 2 and DCT). 

[4] But there are no psychopaths who have no moral obligations. 

[5.] Therefore, DCT is false. (from 3 and 4)

In the next few posts, I will criticise this argument. In my next post, I will argue that the argument is crucially ambiguous in some of its key terms. In a subsequent post, I will argue that these ambiguities undermine the argument.

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Notes:

Adams Robert Divine Command Metaethics Modified Again [Journal] // The Journal of Religious Ethics. – Spring 1979. – 1 : Vol. 7. – pp. 6-79,.

Adams Robert Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics [Book]. – Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999.

Alston William Some Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists [Book Section] // Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy / ed. Beaty Michael. – Notre Dame  : Notre Dame University Press, 1990.

Craig William Lane Debate: God & Morality: William Lane Craig vs Erik Wielenberg [Online] // Reasonablefaith.org. – February 23, 2018. – 8 10, 2019. – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iVyVJAMiOY.

Craig William Lane This most Gruesome of Guests [Book Section] // Is Goodness Without God Good Enough? A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics / ed. King Robert K Garcia and Nathan L. – Lanthan: : Rowan and Littlefield Publishers Inc, 2009.

Evans C Stephen God and Moral Obligation [Book]. – Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013.

Flannagan Matthew Robust Ethics and the Autonomy Thesis [Journal] // Philosophia Christi. – 2017. – 2 : Vol. 17. – pp. 345-362.

Forrest Peter An argument for the Divine Command Theory of Right Action [Journal] // Sophia. – 1989. – 1 : Vol. 28. – pp. 2–19.

Morriston Wes The Moral Obligations of Reasonable Non-Believers: A special problem for divine command meta-ethics [Journal] // International Journal of Philosophy of Religion. – 2009 . – Vol. 65.

Wielenberg Erik Divine command theory and psychopathy [Journal] // Religious Studies. – 2018. – pp. 1-16.

Wielenberg Erik Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless [Book]. – New York : Oxford University Press, 2014.

Wielenberg Erik  Virtue and Value in a Godless Universe [Book]. – Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2005

Robert Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, Chapter 10 Obligation, Part III: Social Requirement

Chapter 10, Obligation, Part I: Sanctions and the Semantics of Obligation

Chapter 10, Obligation, Part II: Guilt

The role that our moral discourse marks out for obligation obviously has other features besides its relation to guilt. One of them is that obligations constitute reasons for doing that which one is obliged to do, and reasons for refraining from doing that which it would be wrong to do. One problem about the nature of obligation is to understand how it grounds reasons for actions.

As a nonconsequentialist Adams is skeptical that obligations are always happily attuned to the value of expected results. We think we may be obliged to tell the truth and to keep promises even when we do not expect the consequences to be good, and when we have no idea what the consequences will be. What would motivate us to do such a thing?

Adams, in accord with Rawls (and more recently Evans), argues that the idea the conscientious agent has good enough reason for her action simply in the fact that it’s the right thing to do seems too abstract. If we are to see the fact of having an obligation as itself a reason for action, we need a richer, less abstract understanding of the nature of obligation, in which we might find something to motivate us. According to social theories of the nature of obligation, having an obligation to do something consists in being required (in a certain way, under certain circumstances or conditions), by another person or a group of persons, to do it. So one reason or motive for complying with a social requirement is that we fear punishment or retaliation for noncompliance. What other motives does this account open up?

An alternative suggestion Adams wishes to pursue is that valuing one’s social bonds gives one, under certain conditions, a reason to do what is required of one by one’s associates or one’s community (and thus to fulfill obligations, understood as social requirements). The reason Adams has in mind is not one that arises from a desire to obtain or maintain a relationship, but rather that I value the relationship in which I see myself as actually having, and my complying is an expression of my valuing and respecting the relationship. This is a motivational pattern in which I act primarily out of a valuing of the relationship, rather than with the obtaining or maintaining of the relationship as an end.

A morally valid obligation obviously will not be constituted by just any demand sponsored by a system of social relationships that one in fact values. Some such demands have no moral force, and some social systems are downright evil. A moral conception of obligation must have resources for moral criticism of social systems and their demands. But Adams thinks there’s a premoral conception of obligation in which we can see social facts as constituting obligations independently of our moral evaluation of those facts.

It will be particularly important if we believe (as Adams thinks is plausible) that the actions of commanding, demanding, and requiring can’t be understood or identified apart from their tendency to create obligations. This is to avoid circularity. A premoral conception of obligation, on the other hand, identifies a kind of sociological fact, closely connected with such linguistic (and social) events as commanding, which can be used in explaining the nature of moral facts of obligation. So Adams claims.

There are cases of commands and presumed obligations that aren’t genuinely moral cases of obligation. Yet the people in question have the concepts of command and obligation that serve them effectively in describing their social system and living within it, and that we could use as anthropologists to describe the system. To be sure, we who do have a conception and practice of moral critique of our social systems wish to distinguish such cases as institutional or official cases rather than bona fide cases of obligation and duty, but Adams thinks the fact remains that much of our understanding of social and linguistic systems depends on our grasp of premoral conceptions of obligation.

To say a conception of obligation is premoral is of course not to say that it is totally nonnormative. Most of the persons within the social system in question still need to regard the indicated obligations as providing reasons for compliance. A conception of moral obligation, however, will insist on better reasons for complying. It will impose a certain kind of critique of reasons for complying.

Adams will next try to show that a system of human social requirements can go some distance toward meeting this requirement although, in the end, he believes the moral pressure not to make an idol of any human society pushes us toward a transcendent source of the moral demand. Several aspects of the relational situation are important to the quality of our reasons for complying with social requirements, and are relevant to the possibility of such requirements constituting moral obligation.

1. Morally good reasons will not arise from just any social bond that one in fact values, but only from one that is rightly valued—that is, from one that is really good. How much reason one has to comply with the demands of other people will depend in no small part on the value of one’s relationship with them. If the relationship is with a community, the individual’s attitude toward the community and her participation in it make a difference to the value of the relationship. But the community’s attitude toward the individual is at least as important. Where community prevails, rather than alienation, the sense of belonging is not to be sharply distinguished from the inclination to comply with the reasonable requirements of the community. A “community” is a group of people who live their lives to some extent—possibly a very limited extent—in common. To see myself as “belonging” to a community is to see the institution or other members of the group as “having something to say about” how I live and act—perhaps not about every department of my life, and only to a reasonable extent about any department of it, but it is part of the terms of the relationship that their demands on certain subjects are expected to have some weight with me. And valuing such a relationship implies some willingness to submit to reasonable demands of the community—as an expression of one’s sense that one does belong and one’s endorsement of the relationship.

2. Our reasons for complying with demands may also be affected by our evaluation of the personal characteristics of those who make them. Normally we have more reason to comply with the requests and demands of the knowledgeable, wise, or saintly.

3. How much reason one has to comply with a demand depends not only on the excellence of its source and of the relationship or system of relationships in which the demand arises, but also on how good the demand is. Is the demand good and the sanctions implied in the demand appropriate? It also involves evaluation of the relational history of the demand itself. Does the making of the demand affect the relational situation for the better or for the worse? And what’s the wider social significance of the demand? It is particularly important that the demand, and the social system of which it forms a part, should be good in ways that fall under the heading of fairness.

4. An objection might be that if we have the values of actions and demands, we don’t need the actual social requirements to explain the nature of moral obligation. But Adams thinks this is mistaken, because it matters that the demand is actually made. It is a question here of what good demands other persons do in fact make of me, not just of what good demands they could make. It’s fashionable in ethical theory to treat moral reasons and moral obligations as depending on judgments about what an ideal community or authority would demand under certain counterfactual conditions. But Adams is skeptical. First, he doubts that the relevant counterfactuals are true, partly because they seem to be about free responses that are never actually made. Secondly, he doesn’t think he cares much about whether these counterfactual conditionals are true because they’re motivationally weak. By contrast, actual demands made on us in relationships that we value are undeniably real and motivationally strong. The actual making of the demand is important, not only to the strength, but also to the character, of the motive. Not every good reason for doing something makes it intelligible that I should feel that I have to do it. Having even the best reasons to do something doesn’t amount to having an obligation to do it. But the perception that something is demanded of me by other people, in a relationship that I value, does help to make it intelligible that I should feel that I have to do it.

Social requirement theory can explain the connection with guilt, which is a main ground of obligation, and the reason-giving force of obligations—big advantages of the theory . Another test it passes pertains to its answers to what in fact is obligatory. It needn’t entirely agree with our pretheoretical opinions; a theory has for one of its purposes the task to challenge some of those opinions. But a theory can be quickly rejected if most of the obligations it assigns to us are to perform actions that have always been regarded by most people as wrong. There is a limit to how far pretheoretical opinion can be revised without changing the subject entirely. This poses no problem for social requirement theory.

Given that the role of moral obligation is partly determined by the obligations we actually believe in, it seems also to be part of the role of moral obligation to be recognized. Rightness should turn out to be a property that not only belongs to the most important types of action that are thought to be right, but also plays a part (perhaps a causal part) in their coming to be recognized as right; similarly for wrongness. This too comports with social requirement theory, for on any plausible moral sociology, actual social requirements play a large role in our coming to hold beliefs about moral obligation, and Adams thinks it plausible to suppose that our belief formation is sensitive to the values of relationships and demands that should play a part in a social requirement theory.

Adams admits such a theory is on weaker ground when it comes to objectivity as a feature of the role of moral obligation. I may wrongly think I have an obligation that I do not have. We’re not inclined to censure Huckleberry Finn for acting contrary to his erring conscience in not turning in a runaway slave. The question that arises at this point for a social theory of the nature of moral obligation is whether it is too subjectivist. Does it make it too easy for a society to get rid of its obligations by changing its demands? On social requirement theory developed so far, a society would be able to eliminate obligations by just not making certain demands, and that seems out of keeping with the role of moral obligation.

This isn’t just a disturbing theory. Moral reformers have taught us that there have been situations in which none of the existing human communities demanded as much as they should have, and things that were morally required were not actually demanded by any community, or perhaps even by any human individual in the situation. In this way actual human social requirements fail to cover the whole territory of moral obligation.

Where demands are made, they sometimes conflict, both as between different social groups and within a single society. Often, both sets of demands and relationships can manifest some degree of goodness, but a flawed goodness.

These are all reasons for thinking, as most moralists have, that actual human social requirements are simply not good enough to constitute the basis of moral obligation. More could be said, but for theists it’s somewhat unnatural to confine ourselves to that apparatus, since a more powerful theistic adaptation of the social requirement theory is available.

Robert Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics, Chapter 10, Obligation, Part II: Guilt

Chapter 10, Obligation, Part I: Sanctions and the Semantics of Obligation

Chapter 10 Obligation, Part III: Social Requirement

In this section of the chapter, Adams emphasizes that moral obligation can’t be understood apart from its relation to guilt. If I voluntarily fail to do what I am morally obligated to do, I am guilty. I may appropriately be blamed by others for my omission, and ought normally to reproach myself for it, in some degree. Perhaps I may incur some just punishment for it.

The presence of obligation in a moral system divides actions into three classes which can be distinguished precisely in terms of guilt. If an action is morally wrong, one is guilty if one does it. An action that is morally optional can be either done or omitted without guilt. But if an action is morally required, or obligatory, one is guilty if one omits it. Examining the nature of guilt will help us understand how moral obligation depends for its role on a broadly social system of relationships.

The word ‘guilt’ is not properly the name of a feeling, but of an objective moral condition that may rightly be recognized by others even if it is not recognized by the guilty person. Feelings of guilt, though, may reasonably be taken as a source of understanding of the objective fact of guilt to which they point. We do not have the concept of guilt merely to signify in a general way the state of having done something wrong.

It is true that one is not guilty, however unfortunate the outcome, for anything that was not in some way wrong. But there are two other typical features of wrong action that are responsible for much of the human significance of guilt. One is harm that one has caused by one’s (wrong) action. It is wrong to drive carelessly, and no less wrong when one’s lucky enough to avoid an accident, but the burden of guilt one incurs is surely heavier when one’s carelessness causes the death of another person than when no damage is done. (Harm caused to other people is not a feature of all guilt, however. One can be guilty for a violation of other people’s rights that in fact harmed no one.)

A more pervasive feature of guilt is alienation from other people, or (at a minimum) a strain on one’s relations with others. If I am guilty, I am out of harmony with other people. This feature is central to the role of guilt in human life. It is connected with such practices as punishing and apologizing. And it makes intelligible the fact that guilt can be (at least largely) removed by forgiveness. The idea that guilt consists largely in an alienation produced by the wrong is supported by the fact that the ending of the alienation ends the guilt.

This should not surprise us if we reflect on the way in which we acquired the concept, and the sense, of guilt. In our first experience of guilt its principal significance was an action or attitude of ours that ruptured or strained our relationship with a parent. There did not have to be a failure of benevolence or a violation of a rule; perhaps we were even too young to understand rules. It was enough that something we did or expressed offended the parent, and seemed to threaten the relationship. This is the original context in which the obligation family of moral concepts and sentiments arose. We do not begin with a set of moral principles but with a relationship, actual in part and in part desired, which is immensely valued for its own sake. Everything that attacks or opposes that relationship seems to us bad.

This starkly simple mentality is premoral—we need to go on and learn to distinguish between cases when we’re actually guilty and when we’re not. In grasping such a distinction we must learn to make some critical judgments about the moral validity of the demands that people make on us. Nevertheless, Adams believes it isn’t childish, but perceptive and correct, to persist in regarding obligations as a species of social requirement, and guilt as consisting largely in alienation from those who have (appropriately) required of us what did not do.

Some moralists hold that in the highest stages of the moral life (perhaps not reached by many adults) the center of moral motivation is transplanted from the messy soil of concrete relationships to the pure realm of moral principles; and a corresponding development is envisaged for the sense of guilt.

It is certainly possible to come to value—even to love—an ethical principle for its own sake, and this provides a motive for conforming to it; but this way of relating to ethical principles has more to do with ideals than with obligations. To love truthfulness is one thing; to feel that one has to tell the truth is something else. Similarly, failing to act on a principle one loves seems, as such, more an occasion of shame than of guilt. Merely violating a principle, without alienating anyone, is likely more a reason to feel ashamed or degraded than a reason to feel guilty. It’s also significant that insofar as my reaction arises from my personally valuing a principle, it may not matter very much whether the principle is moral or aesthetic or intellectual. But aesthetic “guilt” doesn’t make much sense. Guilt is not necessarily worse than degradation, but they are different. And a main point of difference between them is that, in typical cases, guilt involves alienation from someone else who required or expected of us what we were obligated to do and have not done, or who has been harmed by what we have done and might reasonably have required of us not to do it. (This is of course not to deny that shame often accompanies the complex reaction to things of which we judge ourselves to be guilty.)

Summary of Chapter 4 of John Hare’s The Moral Gap

This chapter marks the beginning of the second part of the book, dealing with human limits and various attempts in contemporary moral philosophy to make sense of morality given these limits. The first part of the book asked, with Kant, how we can become other men and not merely better men? Kant refused to exaggerate our powers or reduce the moral demand to fit our powers. This chapter (and the next) will deal with the first of these strategies: exaggerating our powers. This chapter will look at some recent utilitarian writing to illustrate this strategy of puffing up the capacity. To eliminate the gap some utilitarians puff our capacities to godlike proportions to live the moral life. Shelly Kagan does this in The Limits of Morality. He makes the claim that if all our beliefs were vivid, including especially our beliefs about the interests of others, we would tend to conform to the impartial standard that utilitarian morality requires.

For a utilitarian, the moral demand is that we are to perform those acts which can reasonably be expected to lead to the best consequences overall, impartially considered. The moral demand, Hare wishes to stress, is far higher than most people are comfortable with. On utilitarianism, a great deal of the expenditure entailed by our current standard of living would be forbidden. The price of a movie ticket, given to famine relief, could do much more good. Some might think that this construal of the moral demand is too great for human nature to bear. This aspect of the utilitarian demand concerns the demand for impartiality between persons, but there are other demanding features of the utilitarian principle, like the need to resist the human tendency to give more weight to the agent’s own interests than the utilitarian principle allows.

Kant put such a point negatively: our initial condition (before the revolution of the will) is one of preferring happiness to duty. In our initial condition, our own interests tend to have more motivational force for us than the utilitarian principle allows. We are prone to give more weight to our own interests, just because they are ours, than we should, on utilitarianism. Now, if it’s the case that I ought to do something, it must be the case that I can do it. This does not mean merely that I must be able to do it if I want to do it, but that I must be able to want to do it. Kant thinks we’re under the sway of our desires as a whole (before the revolution of the will), so the desire to do my duty will not have the requisite force to overcome my other desires. It’s not clear, then, that I am able to want most of all to do my duty; at least, it is not clear that I am able to do so regularly. If it’s not the case I can, it’s not the case I ought, and Practical Reason, which prescribes a life of duty, will not be practical or prescriptive for me. Impartiality, for the utilitarian, is in the same predicament as Practical Reason is for Kant.

How might a utilitarian reply? One reply is to say that humans do in fact have the resources to empower themselves to live by the moral demand. Hare calls the proponent of this view “the optimist.” The optimist points out that prudence counsels that we not (generally) privilege what we want now over what we’ll want in the future. The optimist claims that I can be moved by the thought of what prudence would prescribe, even if I am not presently moved equally by the future interest. By attending to the future interest, I can make the belief about it more vivid. The optimist then returns from prudence to morality, saying we can say the same thing about morality. We have a bias towards our own interests, but morality is still binding on us. We can be motivated by the thought of what we would be motivated by if our beliefs about the interests of others were as vivid as our beliefs about our own interests. The optimist makes a counterfactual claim: If my beliefs were vivid, I would tend to conform to the impartial standpoint.

Hare, though, asks if this counterfactual is true. The optimist claims it is. It’s easier to sacrifice my own interests for others as I acquire more vivid beliefs about their interests. This can be true, for example, when I form a close and long-lasting relationship with someone. And we can be moved towards our duty by imagining in detail the plight of the people we are affecting by our decisions. There’s moral power in vividness.

But Hare doesn’t think the counterfactual true. Vividness might capture the idea of degree of clarity and distinctness attending a belief we hold. Or it might pertain to the degree of wholeheartedness with which we care about the belief, or the degree of importance we attach to it. We can be quite clear about someone’s pleasure, but not care about it much at all. The counterfactual is about cognitive shortcomings. Increased tendency towards impartiality doesn’t necessarily result from greater clarity, and even if it did, it wouldn’t necessarily result in an overall tendency towards impartiality. It’s not just an increase that’s needed, but that the tendency to impartiality becomes greater than half. And this is supposed to apply to everyone, but there are misanthropic people who are either indifferent to the interests of others or enjoy causing them distress. Love of power, envy, fear, resentment are often operative even in families where awareness of the needs of others is great. Often, too, there’s a willful blindness; folks choose not to be vividly aware of the need for, say, famine relief. Another strategy is rationalization in terms of some normative principle which takes the appearance of objectivity, but derives its motivational power for him from its convenience as a disguise for self-interest. Induced crisis might be yet another strategy. There may be an underlying bias which has numerous techniques of self-persuasion at its disposal. And if we stop thinking of vividness as a cognitive matter, but a matter of caring, one may simply not care about morality enough, even if one recognizes that morality calls for a certain response.

How would the optimist respond? He might stress that most of us have some motivation to overcome our bias towards our own interests. Most don’t endorse the pull to self-interest. But Hare thinks this inadequate. For there may be an endorsement by the agent to the pull of self-interest after all. We may convince ourselves we’re being altruistic or something like that without actually being so. Second, can we try to do what we know we will never be able to do by our own efforts? Nothing more than marginal improvement may be able to be realistically envisioned; there has to be a point in trying. But impartiality as it is construed by the utilitarian principle requires no bias towards the agent’s own interests. This is like trying to jump to the moon, and recognizing this we see it’s futile to try to do it if more than marginal improvement is the goal.

Does this mean we shouldn’t try to achieve it? The Christian tradition counsels perfection after all. But this is possible by God’s gift of grace, not by our striving to achieve it. So utilitarianism has a problem if it’s suggesting an exaggeration of human capacities. Hare adds this at the end: “Utilitarianism could be construed as a theory, like Kant’s theory in the Groundwork, about what our lives would be like after such a revolution [of the will]; but then the theory needs a supplement about how human beings can get to the position in which the demand of the utilitarian principle can be lived.”

Summary of Chapter 3 John Hare's The Moral Gap

Chapter 2 dealt with one sort of moral faith—that virtue is possible—and Chapter 3 now deals with another: that virtue and happiness are deeply consistent. This is another moral gap that needs to be closed. This faith makes it possible for a person to combine her built-in desire for her own happiness with a commitment to morality. It requires that we postulate the existence of a being “who assigns not only the proper outcome to our good conduct, but also to our good dispositions whatever reward seems adequate to His good pleasure.” Hare notes there are two parts to this idea.

First, we believe that this being orders the world in such a way that we are often enough successful in our attempts to do good to make it worthwhile persevering in the attempt. Second, we believe that this being rewards our fundamental orientation to the good with happiness, so that we do not have to do evil in order to be happy.

This introduces the antinomy of practical reason—the apparent contradiction that the highest good is possible and that it isn’t. But what is the highest good? Happiness proportional to virtue; the more virtue, the more happiness, and the less virtue, the less happiness. What is virtue? For Kant, it is “the firmly grounded disposition strictly to fulfill our duty.” What is happiness? For Kant it’s lives as wholes that are happy or unhappy. Happiness for Kant is the maximum satisfaction as a whole of our needs and desires as rational but finite beings, creatures of need and not merely rational or moral agents.

Hare notes two interpretations of the highest good. The first, the less ambitious sense, is a world with a system in place in which virtue results in happiness. The second, the more ambitious sense, is a world in which everyone is virtuous and everyone is happy. Hare will try to argue that living morally requires believing in the possibility of the highest good in the more ambitious sense, and the actuality of the highest good in the less ambitious sense.

Is the highest good even coherent? If the good is to be motivated solely by respect for the moral law, why should happiness come in at all? If our end is not just virtue, but virtue conjoined with happiness, is not the purity of our respect for the moral law corrupted? Here Hare suggests a parallel in the Christian life, where following Christ should be done for its own sake, even though doing so is also recognized as conducing to our deepest joy.

Hare’s supposition is that it’s possible that some things can be pursued both for their own sakes and for their beneficial consequences. Perhaps I need to be able to foresee my own happiness as consistent with everything I desire, but not that I have to desire everything else at least partly as a means to my own happiness.

What is all-important to Kantian morality is whether the incentive provided by the agent’s happiness is subordinate to the incentive provided by the moral law, or vice versa. It’s okay for an incentive for happiness to be there, but it must take a back seat to the primary call of duty. (It may well be unavoidable that an incentive for happiness is there, emotional and finite creatures that we are.)

Hare thinks that the moral life requires believing in the possibility of the highest good. Hare think this follows from a number of assumptions necessary for a fully reflective living of the moral life.

Assumption #1: The moral good aimed at by action is possible.

Assumption #2: The moral good I am aiming at is a possible result of my attempt to produce it.

Assumption #3: It is possible for me know that the moral good I am aiming at is produced, when it is produced, by the means I have planned.

Assumption #4: I myself can will what is morally good.

Assumption #5: (Concerning everyone else) The moral good they aim at is possible. (social analogue of #1)

Assumption #6: The moral good they are aiming at is a possible result of their efforts to produce it. (social analogue of #2)

#7: It is possible for them to know that the moral good they are aiming at has been produced by the means they have planned. (social analogue of #3)

#8: It is possible for them to will what is morally good. (social analogue of #4)

Hare notes three ways to derive the social analogues:

1. Assume that what makes things reasonable for me makes them reasonable for everyone.

2. Morality requires equal respect, and equal respect requires the assumption that all other human beings are capable of willing the good.

3. Because of the social obstacles to virtue, there are social conditions for the attainment and maintenance of virtue. Possibility of individual virtue requires the possibility of virtue-building and virtue-sustaining congregation.

From 1-8 Hare infers Assumption #9: Possibility of what Kant calls “the Idea of self-rewarding morality,” which says morality does its own rewarding. A world filled with people pursuing virtue and concerned with the welfare of others would be a world filled with happiness.

The highest good in the ambitious sense is a possibility, Hare argues: A world in which righteousness and peace kiss and people are not merely happy, but desirous of things consistent with the moral law.

What about the highest good in the less ambitious sense? Here the new assumption is simply that the virtue of a person results in that person’s happiness. Believing in the actuality of the highest good in the less ambitious sense requires me to believe that my virtue will be rewarded whether (roughly) everyone else is virtuous or not.

Hare wants to argue that we do ordinarily think that we will be happiest if we try to be moral; or that we at least think that being moral has a higher chance than any other strategy. Does this require others to be moral? No, Hare says. For the belief that being morally good is consistent with long-term happiness has been held by people who lived in societies in which they were persecuted and exploited.

Whatever else I desire, as a human being I am bound to desire my own happiness, and I will need to be able to foresee this happiness as consistent with my basic choices. As a human moral agent I have to believe that my continued well-being is consistent with my living a moral life as best I can.

If we are to endorse wholeheartedly the long-term shape of our lives, we have to see this shape as consistent with our own happiness. In a world in which there are many rational agents who have willed not to live by the moral law, I can’t rely on the virtue of others to get me from my virtue to my happiness. So I have to believe that there is in operation a system in which my virtue is rewarded without it.

The antithesis says the highest good in both senses is inachievable. Why might we think the highest good in the less ambitious sense is not rationally thought to be true? One reason: consider that experience suggests that the world seems not to reflect in any way the good man’s striving to bring about goodness in it. Another reason: lack of fit between virtue and happiness is not something we could confirm or disconfirm by experience. (So not knowable a priori.)

Because of so many people trying to be virtuous and yet overwhelmed by evil, a case can be made that life is tragic and human life just is vulnerable to evil. What’s Kant’s solution? He brings in the possibility that the relation between virtue and happiness is mediated by an intelligible Author of nature. Our failures to understand what is happening to us do not license the conclusion that the impact of chance is uncontrollable. Kant rejects the inference from our limitations to the denial of a moral order. He’s “limiting knowledge to make room for faith.”

Hare suggests that belief in moral order is needed; whether this requires moral orderer is another question. A moral argument for the existence of God needs to examine whether there are other ways to back up a moral order.

Those who think the problem of evil is intractable often lose moral faith. But Hare notes that many go through painful ordeals without losing faith in either morality or God. Hare: “The structure of the moral argument is that as long as reason in its theoretical employment cannot rule out the legitimacy of moral faith, reason in its practical employment requires it. If moral faith is possible, then it is necessary.”

Hare wraps the chapter up with these two points: (1) Moral faith is consistent with some doubt about whether your continued well-being is consistent with your trying to live a morally good life; and (2) Moral faith does not require believing that all your present preferences for the future will be secured if you try to live a good life.

Watering Down the Categories

By  David Baggett I have found a recent trend among a number of naturalistic ethicists and thinkers to be both interesting and mildly exasperating, but most of all telling. Both one like John Shook, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York—and someone with whom I recently dialogued at the University at Buffalo—and Frans de Waal, author most recently of  The Bonobo and the Atheist  (to adduce but a few examples) seem to be gravitating toward functional categories of morality. Talk of belief and practice replaces talk of truth; references to moral rules exceed those of moral obligations; and prosocial instincts supplant moral authority. What is interesting about this trend is that the resulting picture is entirely consistent with the view of complete moral skeptics, even amoralists.

Take Joel Marks, for example, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of New Haven. A former Kantian ethicist, he has decided that the category of morality lacks an objective referent. He’s written a few books about it, but an op-ed in the  New York Times  encapsulated his view in succinct fashion. In brief, although he has retained his aversive feelings toward, say, animal suffering, he has grown altogether skeptical that his feelings point to moral reality. He still fights for a world more to his liking, but he has come to think that morality has precious little to do with it, because there is no such thing. Marks is an amoralist—a very nice fellow, from all accounts, but someone who has given morality up. Resonating with Marks are such naturalists as Sharon Street and Richard Joyce, who have insisted that an evolutionary development of our moral sense, on a naturalistic picture, gives us little reason to think that our moral beliefs and convictions correspond with moral truth. Rather they evolved to produce behaviors that conduced to reproductive advantage.

But then de Waal and Shook come along and insist, largely without argument, that, to the contrary, the success of evolutionary moral psychology to account for our feelings of empathy, altruism, and prosociality is not only consistent with morality, but sufficient to account for it. To project the appearance their argument works, though, they need to engage in some subtle sleight of hand, replacing categories of moral authority with moral instincts, categorical obligations with malleable rules, objective truths with shared beliefs. But in the debate about moral foundations, classical theism can account for the full range of moral truths in need of explanation, without watering them down or subtly replacing them with functional analyses—from intrinsic goodness to categorical oughtness to genuine moral agency. To the extent that our naturalist friends like de Waal and Shook appear to be retaining the thick language of morality to capture ideas thin enough that complete moral skeptics could endorse them, there appears something deeply confused at best or disingenuous at worst about their approach, fortifying my growing conviction that soon enough the real moral debate will feature classical theists on one side and moral anti-realists on the other.

Summary of Hare's The Moral Gap (Part 1)

John Hare’s The Moral Gap provides what we can call a “performative” version of the moral argument for God’s existence. Hare teaches at Yale and is the son of famed philosopher R. M. Hare, whose work John interacts with quite a bit in his own writings. In a series of extended blogs, I intend to go through Hare’s Moral Gap chapter by chapter to give folks who aren’t familiar with it an exposure to the sorts of arguments the book contains. This is not a critical review, just a quick and cursory summary of salient content. The book is about the “gap” between the moral demand on us and our natural capacities to live by it. It identifies what secularists attempt to do in the face of such a gap, and the way theism and Christianity offer powerful and better resources to close the gap. The book is much inspired by the writings of Immanuel Kant, an important influence on Hare.

The first chapter is entitled “Kant and the Moral Demand,” and it argues that Kant was vividly aware of the moral gap, both because he considered the moral demand to be very high and, as one influenced by the Lutheran pietistic tradition, recognized that we are born with a natural propensity not to follow it. Hare begins his analysis by laying out some key features of a Kantian ethical system, starting with the Categorical Imperative (CI). In this chapter Hare discusses the first two versions of the CI: the Formula of Universal Law, and the Formula of the End in Itself. The Formula of Universal Law says act only on maxims you can will as universal law. A maxim is the subjective principle of an action. To say the principle is subjective is to say that it’s the prescription made by the subject from which the action follows.

Kant talks as though each action has exactly one maxim from which it follows. This raises a problem concerning the level of generality of various maxims. A potential problem for Kant’s analysis is that for each action there may be ever so many maxims of varying levels of generality, some of which may be universalizable, some of which may not be. Hare bypasses this concern altogether by pointing out that Kant thought that there are, in the end, only two maxims: the good maxim and the bad maxim. All actions come from one or the other. The Good Maxim subordinates all desires to duty, whereas the Bad Maxim subordinates duty to the desires. For Kant duty trumps; in fact only those actions motivated by respect for the moral law, on his view, contains moral worth. So take suicide, a potential action whose maxim might look something like this: “From self-love I make it my principle to shorten my life if its continuance threatens more evil than it promises pleasure.” Such a maxim is bad, and thus suicide, on Kant’s view, is always wrong. Why such a maxim fails the test of universality is something we’ll consider in more detail in a moment. Good maxims are specific enough to give guidance, general enough to be taught to children, and exceptionless.

The CI tests maxims; if a maxim meets the test, the action that follows from it has moral worth; if the maxim doesn’t meet it, the action lacks moral worth. What is the test? Hare thinks the clearest account of the Formula of Universal Law is that it requires willingness to continue subscription to the maxim of an action even if all individual or singular reference is excluded from it. This isn’t how Kant himself put it, but Hare thinks it captures the gist of what Kant was after. In considering the performance of an action, I identify the maxim underlying the action, excluding the specifics such as the fact that I’m the one considering the action for myself, and I ask a question like this: Is this maxim an appropriate prescription for anyone and everyone in relevantly similar circumstances? If not, the action should not be performed. We’ll consider a few ways in which a maxim can fail this test in a moment.

The second formulation of the CI is the Formula of End in Itself. This version of the CI declares you should act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end. Other persons serve as a moral limit on our actions. Treating humanity as an end in itself is, for Kant, respecting our capacity for free and rational choice; it’s respecting autonomy. To treat another human being as merely a means is to ignore the other as a center of agency. Some, like Korsgaard, seem to push this Kantian idea in the direction of affirming the intrinsic value of persons; for Kant the focus was more specifically centered on agency, which entails that coercion and deception, for obvious reasons, represent rather paradigmatic violations of the principle. Kant even goes further to suggest that, so far as possible, we are required to share the ends of others, which is reflective of, among other things, a deeply communal aspect of his ethical theory.

Adherence to the CI avoids two sorts of self-contradiction, namely, contradiction in the conception, and contradiction in the will. An example of the former might be this: Consider a scenario in which you need a loan, but to get the loan you have to promise to repay it in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, you know you won’t be able to do so. But you want the loan nonetheless and are tempted to lie about repaying it in order to secure it. Lying would be wrong in such a case, Kant says, because it would be based on a maxim that can’t be universalized because it implicated you in a contradiction in the conception. By lying you’re acting on a maxim that, if everyone in relevantly similar circumstances were to follow, would potentially destroy the very institution of money-lending on which you’re depending to get the loan. So you want the institution to be there, but by following a maxim that if universally followed would destroy the institution, you don’t want it to be there. This is a self-contradiction.

The other form of contradiction is a contradiction of the will, which results from, for example, systematically denying assistance to others. There’s logical space for doing this that there isn’t in the loan example, but there is still a contradiction of sorts at play. For, again, Kant saw that we are deeply communal beings who rely and depend on each other all the time. Invariably there will be times when you need the assistance of others; but if everyone were to refrain from helping others, the help you’ll eventually need won’t be forthcoming. If you want the help to be available, yet affirm a maxim that would prevent it, as in this case, you’re implicated in a contradiction of the will. When a maxim falls prey to either form of contradiction, it’s unable to be consistently willed as a universal law. It implicates one in a contradiction and is thus irrational and immoral.

At this point in the chapter Hare spends time discussing the views of his father, who was much influenced by Kant. R. M. Hare thought that moral judgments, to qualify as such, need to be universalizable, prescriptive, and overriding. He also distinguished between intuitive and critical levels of moral thinking. Our intuitions are liable to mislead us on occasion, as critical reflection shows, but even our critical reflection can mislead us because it optimally requires complete information and complete impartiality—the perspective of the “archangel.” The position of the archangel is also taken to be the position of God—though the elder Hare had lost his faith along the way. Still, it’s only judgments at the critical level of the archangel (or God) that are overriding; thus there’s a gap between the divine and human capacities, for we are afflicted with all manner of deficiencies in our moral reflections, from lack of knowledge or impartiality to lack of sensitivity and sympathy. God, either real or hypothetical, would presumably not be similarly disadvantaged.

In Kant too we find poignant recognition of such a gap, for as we engage in moral deliberation we continually encounter the “dear self,” an inflated sense of our own interests and concerns, resulting in an unbridgeable chasm between ‘ought’ and ‘can’. The result is that morality, in its full critical form, is, first, something I ought to be practicing; second, something for which my natural capacities are inadequate (except by approximation); and third, something that I should treat as the command of some other at least possible being who is practicing it. On this picture, morality has three parts: 1. The moral demand; 2. Our defective natural capacities (lack of sensitivity, sympathy, etc.); and 3. The possible being (the authoritative source of the demand). Hare suggests this structure is a holdover from Christianity: Belief in a perfect and infinite moral being, whom we imperfectly resemble, and who created us to resemble him more than we do.

One result of such a structure is that it produces a constant and inevitable sense of failure of a variety of sorts. We fail by caring more for ourselves than others, we show failures of patience, failures of impartiality, etc. This makes the desire to avoid guilt a primary moral motivator, though love the moral law is the nobler moral motivation than the desire to avoid subjective feelings of guilt. We desire to close the gap between what we do and what we ought to do. Yet we seem to be under a demand too great for us to meet without God’s grace to transform us.

Hare identifies three strategies for addressing the gap from a secular perspective: 1. Produce a naturalistic substitute for God’s assistance; 2. Exaggerate our sense of what we can accomplish, so as to fit the demand; and 3. Reduce the demand so as to fit our capacities. A Christian solution will instead be God’s assistance to enable us to do what we can’t do on our own. Augustine says, “God bids us do what we cannot, that we may know what we ought to seek from him.” So the principle of deontic logic that ‘ought implies can’ may need tweaking; we may well be responsible for meeting a demand we can’t meet on our own resources, if there are additional resources outside of ourselves we can and should use that enable us to meet the demand.

Hare ends the chapter by suggesting that believers should value Kant, rather than seeing his work as opposed to their own convictions. Hare will offer criticisms of Kant, but nonetheless thinks there are resonances with Christian thought. For example, Christians should recognize Kant’s three-fold nature of morality: an original predisposition to do good, an innate propensity to evil, which can be overcome by a revolution of the will which requires divine supplement. Hare suggests that what we have here is quite analogous of the tripartite structure of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. Like Kant, too, believers should recognize the need for moral faith, which has two parts: faith in the actuality of virtue and in the consistency of happiness and virtue, both of which require belief in God’s work on our behalf.

Photo: "Mind the Gap" by Lisa. CC License.