Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 4)

John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part IV, Humble Platonism

David Baggett

In this section, Hare discusses the first concession on the realist side: that of Iris Murdoch, a Platonist about ethics who moves some distance from Moore. The concession is that human beings are by nature selfish. Hare calls this “the first realist concession.” It’s a concession to subjectivity in that she recognizes that accurate moral perception needs obedience, a selfless attention, a pure heart, but a root inclination of ours is to favor ourselves unjustly. She is a Platonist about value, but with an Augustinian rather than a Platonist view of the heart.

Murdoch refers to the “fat relentless ego,” which corrupts our nature at its root. It means that our access to the good is always precarious and incomplete, and we are always fatally prone to self-deception. It also motivates her central objection to prescriptivism, which is that if the will is corrupt in this way, then it can’t be the creative source of the good.

She reads Kant in a way with which Hare disagrees. But as she sees it, Kant has abolished God and made man God in His stead. Murdoch sets up a contrast between pride and humility. The existentialists and Anglo-Saxon heirs of Kant (such as Sartre and R. M. Hare in England) make the human will the creator of value, which was previously seen as inscribed in the heavens. Murdoch thinks this is merely a surrender to self-importance.

What we need to recover, she says, is the sense of value as a magnetic source outside our wills, to which our wills respond if we are disciplined in virtue and especially in the virtue of humility. There’s a freedom that comes from humility involving selfless respect for reality. An example for Murdoch, as for Moore, is the contemplation of something beautiful, which can have the effect of “unselfing” the contemplator, so that she attends entirely to the object.

The Good, Murdoch says, unifies our fragmentary experiences of value into a whole that transcends us. It is a “magnetic center,” to which we feel the attraction but which we never reach.

An aspect of Murdoch’s view that’s hard to square with her talk of a “magnetic center” is that she holds that human life has no external point or telos. She thinks Christianity panders to us by claiming to give us a guarantee that the good will in the end prevail. But the effect of her denial is to make the Good completely inert, contrary to Plato, for whom the human world is neither aimless nor self-contained. The Forms for him, and especially the Form of the Good, have a causal role as well as an epistemological one.

Aristotle is not wrong to say that we do naturally pursue such things as power and prestige, but he is wrong to argue that because we naturally pursue them they are good. If we try to argue to the character of the good from the character of our emotions and desires, we are likely to fall into this danger that Murdoch identifies as mistaking the fire for the sun, or mistaking self-scrutiny for the discovery of goodness.

Murdoch says that humans are by nature selfish, and she therefore holds that our evaluative knowledge is precarious and incomplete. For Murdoch, the process of apprehension is one of lifelong obedience, mortification, and self-discipline. The reason this is needed is our tendency to self-indulgence, and the attendant corruption of even our reflective processes by self-gratifying fantasies.

But neither Kant nor the prescriptivists are creative anti-realists in the way Muroch proposes, Hare claims. Prescriptivism, he thinks, is more correctly seen as an additional reason for the humility Murdoch extols. Our evaluations involve the experience of the magnetic force Murdoch describes, and then an endorsement of this response. Recall how Moore distinguished between something cognitive, something noncognitive (like an emotion), and separately from both of these, the judging that a thing is good.

Hare thinks this is essentially right, though he supplements it with Robert Roberts’ account of emotion understood as a concern-based construal, a “seeing-as.” To see something as bad requires caring about what’s at stake. So there’s the seeing-as, the caring, plus the judgment that endorses them. Without the endorsement, emotion is not what Hare calls a full-blooded value judgment.

Returning to Murdoch’s humility, separating the construal, the desire, and the endorsement enables us to see how expressivism can give us an additional reason for humility. Because of our selfishness, the construals and desires present in emotion are biased towards the self. But value judgment according to the expressivist also requires endorsement, and our selfishness will also incline us to endorse what is not impartially good. The central expressivist point is that to make a value judgment is not merely to respond to something out there in the world, but to endorse or deliberately to withhold endorsement from such a response. What we are inclined to endorse will depend on our fundamental reflective loyalties.

Worth noting is that in his review of Hare’s book, Thomas Williams thinks that, though moral realism is a position in moral ontology, Hare’s account of moral expressivism is (potentially) a position in moral semantics, psychology, or epistemology, so they’re not really in the same domain of question. Williams thinks the “concessions” Hare discusses involve further confusion between questions of different types. So the whole framework of the discussion, Williams argues, is vitiated from the outset by Hare’s failure to keep distinct kinds of question separate. And, inevitably, the story of the particular “concessions” that each side is said to have made to the other involves further confusion between questions of different types.

One such confusion, Williams thinks, can be seen in Hare’s discussion of this “first realist concession”: Iris Murdoch's concession that human beings are by nature selfish. Contra Hare, Williams asserts that it is no more a concession to subjectivity about morals to say that our moral perception might be obscured by perverse desire than it is a concession to subjectivity about astronomy to say that our perception of the moon might be obscured by clouds. The ontological question is one thing; the epistemological question is quite another.

I suppose I read Hare’s concessive point as an effort to texture the discussion by pointing to elements of both ontology and epistemology, all of which are needed for a more robust analysis. Likewise in Hare’s problematizing of Murdoch’s reading of prescriptivism and Kant.

Part 3

Part 5

Mailbag: How do you define the good?

Hi. I had a quick morality question for you. I hope that’s okay. I’ve been working with students at the local college campus, discussing morality. I’m wondering how do you define “the Good”? I’ll usually say something like “the Good is that which conforms to the nature and will of God.” What do you think?

Dave

Hi Dave! Thanks for the note. Your question is of course such a great one, and it is one of the hardest ones. Let me say a bit why I find it so devilishly difficult. Of course folks use “good” in nonmoral evaluative ways all the time—like "my computer is good." Thomists though want to put this sort of teleological consideration into the center of their ethical theory. Something is good to the extent it fulfills its function, or something like that, they will say.

Likewise with human beings, though morality enters the picture more explicitly with us, and if we are made by God and for intimacy with Him and others, then loving God and neighbor is what our purpose is. Thus, to the extent we do such things, we are (morally) good.

I don’t think that’s terrible. It probably has a lot going for it. But there has to be more, it seems to me, because of an example I think Wolterstorff comes up with: a serial killer’s “purpose” is to kill lots of people. So he’s a good serial killer if he does. But there is nothing moral about such goodness. So we have to ask not just whether someone or something performs his or her or its function or purpose, but whether the function or purpose is itself good. At that point a purely teleological account of the good seems to require something more deontological.

So regarding moral goodness in particular, what constitutes the standard or ground of moral value? To me the best account we have is the Christian God, owing to his nature. Of course our naturalist friends who are objectivists on such matters usually point to something like human flourishing. And there is some truth in that, it seems to me. This is what makes disambiguating these partially divergent/overlapping views onerous. As a Christian I’m convinced we were meant for flourishing, eudaimonia, shalom, joy, etc. But the question then becomes, what does that look like for us as humans? And the answer to that query invariably rides on what is ultimately real. If we are mere collocations of atoms and nothing else, our highest fulfillments are likely reducible to naturalistic items. But moral langauge and logic and phenomenology, to my thinking, all point beyond categories that naturalism alone can manage.

So I’m inclined to think the joy and telos for which we were designed requires more than that. So even if I were to agree that what's “good” for us is our flourishing (or something in that vicinity), it still points to something likely transcendent—something, I suspect, like the beatific vision. It seems to me the point is this: we cannot simply speak of what’s good for us and think we’re done; that very question drives us to ask what is good in and of itself.

Now, certain of our experiences are good intrinsically—like our friendships. But what is the ground of such intrinsic goods? Again, I don’t see how we avoid metaphysics if we really want to be thoughtful about it, and to me the best explanation seems likely to be classical theism. The nature of such a God seems to be at the front and center of what “the Good” is. This puts me in the theistic Platonist camp, but of course one can be a Christian without buying that. But it’s where I tend to go. Like you, I’m inclined to say that things are good to the extent they partake in or resemble the ultimate good. That is what makes sense of the value of friendship—it resembles God’s loving nature. At least that’s how I see it.

Christian theology makes even more fine-grained the analysis, since we know God’s nature to be Trinitarian—an eternal dance of other-regarding love. So this makes great sense of love being at the center of things, and of loving God and neighbor capturing all the laws and prophets. We are invited to participate in the love that functions at the foundation of reality and always has.

Ultimately I suspect we can effect a sort of rapprochement between Platonic and Thomistic accounts of the good, since we have been made in God’s image. What is best for us (loving relationships with God and others) and most conduces to our joy depends on what is most ultimately real and good in and of itself (God himself, indeed Trinitarian love).

Note, though, that this isn’t so much a “definition” of goodness as something else. I agree with Moore that we can’t define it. I still suspect, and think there’s good reason to believe, God is in some sense constitutive of it. That is more analysis than definition. And since God’s ineffable, this account has the advantage of rendering ultimate goodness, too, beyond our ken in ineliminable respects, necessitating what Adams calls a “critical stance” toward any other (likely deflationary) rival account of the good.

So, yes, hard question!! But in a nutshell that’s what I’m inclined to say. Thanks for the question.

djb

A Few Reflections on Schopenhauer

A Few Reflections on Schopenhauer

David Baggett

Arthur Schopenhauer’s work had a big influence on Friedrich Nietzsche, especially the latter’s Birth of Tragedy. The similarities between them are numerous, not least the parallel between Schopenhauer’s will and representation, on the one hand, and Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Apollinian, on the other. Both also saw suffering residing at the heart of the human condition, and art as the key to whatever redemption of which we’re capable as human beings. Both came, it would seem, to reject the existence of God; Nietzsche’s bold proclamation of Schopenhauer’s atheism (in The Gay Science) has been critiqued by some for lack of evidence, but it’s generally agreed that many of the implications of Schopenhauer’s depictions of reality are atheistic. At the least God would have been rendered, to paraphrase Laplace, an unnecessary hypothesis.

Much of Schopenhauer’s training in philosophy focused on Plato and Kant in particular, and the latter provided the tools for his metaphysical position, the first of the two big ideas of his magnum opus. Kant’s so-called transcendental idealism wielded a huge influence on Schopenhauer, who was born the same year Kant published his Second Critique. The world and our existence poses a riddle, Schopenhauer thought, in light of the human subjectivity in which we’re trapped. The world as it is in itself is not the world as it appears to us; as a result, everything we experience is mediated by the perceiving subject. We can’t know things as they are in themselves; rather, we can know only our transcendental cognitive framework and the representations it makes possible.

Rather than directing his attention, like Kant did, to what the subject imposes on experience, Schopenhauer instead sought to observe more closely how the subject may be tied intimately with the underlying nature of the world. He looked for an essential homogeneity between the subject and object, and thought the body provided such a link between the inner and outer. The body is not just a spatio-temporal object (something experienced outwardly), but also something we experience inwardly, subjectively, namely, the will. The actions of our bodies are manifestations of our wills.

Schopenhauer even thought that the world as a whole is fundamentally will, offering examples like the following: “The one-year-old bird has no notion of the eggs for which it builds its nest; the young spider has no idea of the prey for which it spins its web; the ant-lion has no notion of the ant for which it digs its cavity for the first time. The larva of the stag-beetle gnaws a hole in the wood, where it will undergo its metamorphosis, twice as large if it is to become a male beetle as if it is to become a female, in order in the former case to have room for the horns, though as yet it has no idea of these. In the actions of such animals the will is obviously at work as in the rest of their activities, but is in blind activity.”

Interestingly, such obviously goal-directed tendencies interwoven throughout nature don’t lead Schopenhauer to affirm teleology in the world, but to deny it. The will in question is characterized as “will without a subject.” Such an interpretation is possible, but it by no means strikes me as obvious or the best explanation. A clear alternative is presupposed in Proverbs 6:6-8: “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provides her meat in the summer, and gathers her food in the harvest.” The Bible in fact is replete with lessons about moral or metaphysical truth drawn from garden-variety features and operations of the world. Examples of seemingly teleological instances of the world are an odd choice to drive home a point denying its reality.

Here’s another example Schopenhauer offered: “Let us consider attentively and observe the powerful, irresistible impulse with which masses of water rush downwards, the persistence and determination with which the magnet always turns back to the North Pole, the keen desire with which iron flies to the magnet, the vehemence with which the poles of the electric current strive for reunion, and which, like the vehemence of human desires, is increased by obstacles.” Here he seems to adduce examples of stable natural laws, which, I suppose, can be thought of as evidence of God as a needless hypothesis; but I’m not convinced it’s a good inference. The sort of argument that can be teased out here conspicuously and presciently resembles the suspicion of many today that science and faith are fundamentally at odds, but this seems to be a mistake. Let’s consider just one reason why this is so.

Brian Cutter notes that there are two sides to the human capacity for science: “The first is the fact that the universe is intrinsically intelligible—that nature is structured in a way that admits of rational comprehension…. The second … is that our actual cognitive equipment, such as it is, allows us to discern the broad lineaments of nature, to plumb the deep structure of reality at levels well outside those relevant to life on the savannah. Both of these facts seem much more like what we should expect if Christian theism were true than if naturalism were true. The first fact fits comfortably with the theistic idea that the universe has its source in a Rational Mind, and is really quite surprising on the opposite assumption. And the second fact accords nicely with the Christian doctrine that human beings are made in the image of God, where bearing the image of God has traditionally been supposed to involve, among other things, the possession of an intellectual nature by which we partake in the divine reason.” (See his chapter in Besong and Fuqua’s Faith and Reason.)

On such a view both the existence of stable natural laws and our ability epistemically to access them count evidentially more in favor of theism than atheism, a personal universe rather than an impersonal one. Although an atheist, Schopenhauer may not have altogether been a naturalist, though, because he thought that through art, and music in particular, we can in some sense gain a measure of equanimity in face of the invariable suffering and futility of our lives. Suffering is the norm, he thought, and despite our subjective feelings of willing, we’re not actually free; the sense that we are free is mere appearance.

But rather than leaving us there, Schopenhauer’s second big idea pertained to what we can do in the face of such pessimism. We shouldn’t abandon life itself, but willing in general. Denying the will is the cornerstone of his ethics and aesthetics, and Nietzsche was most struck by Schopenhauer’s aesthetic deliverance from willing. It would seem that Schopenhauer’s notion of will was inextricably tied to notions of futility, of striving, of deficiency, and of suffering. With aesthetic contemplation, he thought, the subject is no longer regarding the object—a beautiful song, for example—in relation to its will. Rather, the object enchants the subject by virtue of its beauty, and as long as it does so the subject’s will is annulled.

In such a situation we find the object beautiful for what it is rather than for its functional capacity, what it does, so willing isn’t needed. The subject thus transcends time and space to realize the eternal realm of a Platonic Idea, and has himself thereby realized his own eternity.

Leaving aside how on earth this shows our “eternity,” two thoughts occur to me here, and with these I’ll end this short analysis. First, his understanding of willing seems flawed, if not idiosyncratic. I don’t feel unfree when I can’t help but recognize objective beauty, or feel the force of a lovely argument whose conclusion is inescapable, or at least eminently reasonable. I rather seem to feel at my most free in such cases. Attentiveness to evidence, apprehension of the lovely, feeling the force of the good—none of these annul my freedom. My freedom most consists in my capacity for just such things!

Just as I don’t see the most salient feature of faith, rightly understood, to be epistemic deficiency, I don’t see the most distinguishing feature of freedom, rightly understood, as existential deficiency. Long before Enlightenment construals of such concepts foisted themselves on us there were traditional understandings of them expressed in quite different terms. The truest freedom, on those more ancient foundations, is to live as we were meant to live; to love the true, the good, and the beautiful because they’re worth loving; freedom from the shackles that would preclude us from becoming fully humanized. So it seems the right goal is not the annulment of our freedom, but its fulfillment, its maximization, which is consistent with constraints to prevent expressions of agency that vitiate rather than conduce to abundant living.

And second, Schopenhauer’s openness to a Platonic paradigm is tantamount to a tacit admission of the inadequacy of naturalism to account for his intuitions here. A personal God strikes me as a better explanation than impersonal Platonic Forms floating in metaphysical limbo; but, while not Christian, Platonism remains eminently congenial to a traditionally theistic understanding of the world. “A Platonic man,” George Mavrodes once wrote, “who sets himself to live in accordance with the Good aligns himself with what is deepest and most basic in existence.”  

---

With his co-author, Jerry Walls, Dr. Baggett authored Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. The book won Christianity Today’s 2012 apologetics book of the year of the award. He developed two subsequent books with Walls. The second book, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning, critiques naturalistic ethics. The third book, The Moral Argument: A History, chronicles the history of moral arguments for God’s existence. It releases October 1, 2019. Dr. Baggett has also co-edited a collection of essays exploring the philosophy of C.S. Lewis, and edited the third debate between Gary Habermas and Antony Flew on the resurrection of Jesus. Dr. Baggett currently is a professor at the Rawlings School of Divinity in Lynchburg, VA.

Mailbag: A Question on Atheistic Moral Realism

  Dear Dr. Baggett,

I'm a Christian from Malaysia that has been interested in philosophy for the past few years now, and I have a burning question about the moral argument that I hope you'd be able to help me with.

Why can't the naturalist posit that moral laws are normative in nature just like the laws of logic are? I think J. S. Mill took this approach. Both the laws of logic and morality are prescriptive; the laws of logic prescribe how we ought to think if we want to be reasonable, while moral laws prescribe how we ought to behave if we want to be morally good.

The naturalist can claim that just as the law of noncontradiction can exist without having a logical lawgiver, moral laws can exist without the need for a moral lawgiver.

I think I got this from the moralapologetics website where Trent Dougherty interviewed Wielenberg on the issue. Was hoping you could help because something *feels* wrong about this response; it shouldn't be that simple. Yet I can't seem put my finger on what exactly is wrong with this response to the moral argument.

Regards,

Declan

Hi Declan,

Thanks for the question. It's a good one. Here are a few thoughts at least. Some do indeed argue that moral facts aren't significantly different from other normative facts--be they logical or epistemic or even aesthetic. All of these normative standards do share some things in common alright. Both logic and morality, for example, as you note, are prescriptive--the former for theoretical rationality, the latter for practical rationality.

Philippa Foot once argued even the standards of etiquette are more than hypothetical imperatives because they too prescribe certain behaviors even for those indifferent to etiquette. But the contextual relativity of such standards, and their lesser gravity, still seem to distance etiquette from morality, at least until they start shading into one another.

Logic's a bit of a tougher case than etiquette because it has greater gravity. But I think Wielenberg's unwillingness to see a significant difference between logical and moral norms is a mistake. It may well be the case that all genuine norms have their locus in God--reflecting aspects of His nature--His rationality, His beauty, His goodness, etc. J. P. Moreland argues that to be so in his work. I'm quite open to this because it makes sense that, as Plantinga once put it, necessary truths may well best be thought of as reflections of God: thoughts God thinks, owing to who He is, in this and all possible worlds (modal realities).

Nevertheless, despite whatever all the various norms may hold in common, moral ones seem distinct in an important sense. Both logical (and epistemic) and moral norms may all be both authoritative and prescriptive and unavoidable, but moral norms are, additionally, the sort of standards whose violation should make us feel guilty. I don't think of such guilt merely or primarily as a feeling (another way my view is a bit different from Wielenberg's). I see it as an objective moral condition. It's not that the violation of every moral norm results in guilt; not every moral norm is a duty; some are values. But the neglect of some values, anyway, violates a moral duty, and in such cases we are guilty. I don't generally see violations of logical or epistemic norms in the same way.

"Oughtness" may apply to them all, but this shows an important way oughtness locutions can be variously construed. Usually it's only the moral ought whose violation properly generates guilt. We often use ought language to point to prescriptions that don't attain to the level of obligations. As in etiquette. In the case of logic, the normative standards do give us reasons to make some sorts of inferences and refrain from others. And sensitivity to such reasons is good--expansively construed. Robert Adams says sensitivity to good reasons is a form of excellence, and I agree. But the violation of constructive dilemma or modus tollens doesn't, or shouldn't, generate guilt, a need to be forgiven, or alienation from others that forgiveness can fix--features of shirking moral obligations all.

I think Wielenberg, Parfit, McGinn, Enoch, and others put the cart before the horse. It's true that norms are connected with reasons, but moral obligations possess distinctive features. By my lights, we don't find reasons to act and then presume we have explained moral obligations. Rather, moral obligations themselves give us compelling reasons to act. Inverting this has been one of the ways a number of secularists have watered moral obligations down, neglected one of their most important distinguishing features, and mistakenly acted as though moral obligations can be explained merely by adducing a certain set of normative reasons to act. Acting and thinking rationally does not constitute a full explanation of moral belief and practice. Morality carries extra clout and punch, which needs accounting for.

Hope that helps!

Blessings, Dave

Photo: "Mail" by T. Johnston. CC License.