God, Evil, and the Human Good (Part 2 of 2)

By Jonathan Pruitt (Thanks to Dr. David Baggett and Dr. Marybeth Davis Baggett for substantive feedback on this essay)

Evil and the Human Good

Continued from this post

How can Christians give a theodicy in light of Rowe’s argument and the specific cases he presents? The first step is to get clear on what we mean by “evil.” What is meant by the term “evil”? One way to answer is by ostension. We point to the Sue and Bambi cases and say, “Here is an example of evil.” But that does not do enough. We need to know what it is about the Sue and Bambi cases that makes them evil. Rowe will say that suffering is an intrinsic evil. The Bambi and Sue cases are evil because they involve gratuitous amounts of suffering.[1] But that just pushes the problem back a step. Why is suffering evil? What does it mean to say that suffering is evil? Perhaps Rowe could say that it is just self-evident that suffering is evil; we do not need to provide any explanation because we can just see it is the case. But this response confuses epistemology with ontology. What we want to know is not whether we are justified in taking suffering to be evil, but what makes suffering evil. Here, the naturalist faces a problem. As Mackie says, “Moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the course of events without an all-powerful god to create them.”[2] The point here is that there is no worldview-neutral way to talk about moral properties. Since evil is a moral property, it can only be meaningfully referred to from within a given worldview. Because the problem of evil is an objection aimed at Christian theism, the term evil must refer to something Christians will recognize as such.

So, then, what is the Christian view of evil? One well-accepted definition comes from Augustine: “For evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name ‘evil.’”[3] In this case, evil is a privation of goodness. On the Christian view, then, evil is not a substance on par with goodness. Christianity is not dualistic in this way. Evil is parasitic on the good. But parasitic in what way? Here Augustine is again helpful. Hick points out that Augustine thought of all God’s creation as good; Augustine “lays the foundation for a Christian naturalism that rejoices in this world… seeks to share it in gratitude to God for His bountiful goodness.”[4] Included in God’s creation is a God given telos. God makes the world and everything in it for a reason so that there is a way the world should function.[5] Augustine thinks that man’s telos is “to enjoy God as the end of all, while he enjoys himself and his friend in God and for God.”^[6] Evil occurs in every case where a man loves for their own sake things which are desirable only as means to an end, and seeks for the sake of something else things which ought to be loved for themselves. Thus, as far as he can, he disturbs in himself the natural order which the eternal law requires us to observe.^[7] It is evil when man acts in a disordered way, when he acts contrary to God’s intention.[8]This principle can be broadened so that evil, generally speaking, can be understood as disorder and malfunction.

With this view of evil in mind, let us now consider the nature of the human good and how it might help shape a theodicy. Scripture teaches us that the good for humans has to do with how God made us. For example, when Jesus was asked whether it was lawful to get a divorce, he appealed to how God made humans to justify his answer.[9] The first chapter of Genesis also shines some light on this topic. In 1:26, we are told that humans are made, male and female, in God’s image and that we are supposed to take dominion over all the earth. The biblical anthropology is very rich and drawing out all that it has to say would take a very long time. But all that needs to be accepted here is that mankind has a telos and that telos includes three dimensions. First, being rightly related to God as his image bearers. Second, being rightly related to other humans in community, and third being rightly related to the earth as its rulers.[10] That this is the biblical view is not a controversial point.

Now, in light of this biblical view of the human telos, I want to suggest the following principle:

T1: For an agent to achieve its telos, it must do so with internal integrity.

What I mean by “internal integrity” must be specified. Achieving one’s telos is not a matter of simply getting certain inputs to generate the desired outputs. In other words, being a good human person is about more than just behaving the right way or doing the right thing. It is about being a certain kind of person. This involves a transformation of the individual from one state to another. This transformation takes place through an individual’s development of character, accomplished by habituation and the practice of the virtues. Part of the human good is that humans achieve it as humans —this is not to deny the need for God’s grace as a necessary condition, but the process also requires some real element of free human participation in the process. To see why this is so, we can run a thought experiment. Suppose that very technologically advanced aliens abducted a human named Dale. They implant into Dale’s brain a microchip that will override Dale’s normally disordered desires and give him good desires. The result will be that Dale will now live as an ideal human should. But it seems there is something deficient about Dale’s story. The good for Dale is not merely that he act like a good person, but that he would actually become a good person on his own volition. It would be better if Dale would live as a good person, not because he was made to, but because he wanted to and thus, through a slow and difficult process, began forming his character to become a good person. The end matters, but so do the means to the end. C. S. Lewis makes a similar point in the Problem of Pain. Lewis points out that in the game of chess   

…you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him – if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking – then you could not have a game at all.

There is an analogy between the integrity of a chess game and the integrity of the human pursuit of their good. Humans must “play the game” on their own if winning is going to mean anything. Humans as humans must achieve their good; there is no other possible way it could be. This is what I mean by “internal integrity.” For an agent to achieve its telos, it cannot be overridden by forces outside itself; it must pursue its telos by its own volition.

Another idea implicit in the notion of internal integrity is the reality of libertarian free will. This means our choices are, at bottom, self-determined and not determined by God. God is restricted by what libertarian agents would choose to do.[11] But what reason is there to think that we actually have this power? While this is not the place to develop a full argument, I will give at least one piece of evidence. Libertarian freedom is the commonsense view. We navigate our everyday lives under the assumption that we determine what we will do. Of course, our determinative powers are limited. For instance, I cannot will that I teleport to Mars and have it happen. But within the range of my natural powers (like the power to move my arm or not), I can will to do or not do certain things. It is only when we operate according to this presupposition that things like deliberation or weighing our options make sense. We deliberate because we think we will make an important choice, not that someone else has already made the choice for us. So we should accept that we really have libertarian freedom or pay the very high cost of saying our commonsense experience is completely mistaken.

Something very important follows from T1 and the biblical view of the human good that will allow us to say something about Sue’s case. Given that the human good includes relations with other humans, it follows that God must, as a general policy, not intervene in human interactions. If he were to intervene too often, he would compromise humanity’s internal integrity and short circuit our ability to achieve our telos. This is similar to the chess game. Once too many concessions are made, there is no point in playing the game. And, given the reality of libertarian freedom, sometimes humans may do things God does not want them to do. All things considered, it is better for humans for God to allow us autonomy and the possibility of achieving our good, even if this means that we inflict terrible evils on one another. It is better for God to do this because, if were to intervene too much, he would undermine any chance for humans to attain their good.

Some might object to what I have said so far on this basis: it is unjust for God to allow Sue to be murdered so that other humans have the chance of achieving the human good.  Such an act presupposes an "end justifies the means" ethic that is not acceptable. In response, I suggest that often there is not much difference between the way a consequentialist, "ends justify the means" ethic and a a deonitc ethic actually work out. If we imagine that a person has the moral duties to tell the truth and to protect human life, then we can easily construct thought experiments that show one principle  must be compromised for the end of keeping the other. Even in deontic ethics, there is often a means/end kind of justification for what actions ought to be taken. In the often cited "Nazi at the Door" thought experiment, we are asked to consider whether it would be right for a homeowner with Jews in the attic refrain from truth telling to the Nazi inquisitor at the door. The homeowner faces a dilemma. Should she fulfill her duty to protect human life or to tell the truth? A plausible way out of the dilemma is to say that because telling the truth would likely have a terrible consequence, she should take her duty to protect human life to override the duty to tell the truth. So the homeowner would be justified in refraining from truth telling .  Consequences matter to all plausible ethical theories and simply because a bad consequence is given as a justification for some action (or omission of some action) does not make a person an unacceptable consequentialist. In the case of Sue, the suggestion is that by allowing Sue's murder to take place, God is justified because he is in a "Nazi at the door" type scenario. He cannot both save Sue and preserve the possibility of the human good, so he allows one thing to happen for the sake of protecting another.

Besides this objection, I suspect there is another objection forthcoming. Many today at least implicitly hold a view like this. Humans are autonomous and isolated from one another. Each man is a world unto himself. Whether or not he achieves his good is up to him and him alone. In fact, what counts as "good" is up to him, too. So people are like tiny ethical islands. Each person has his own rules and his own aims and so talk of the "human good" as a justification for why God allows evil will never work. There is no "human good" that includes all humans as a community. At best, there is a "human good" in the sense that there are states of affairs that some particular human desires. If people are islands in this way, then only integrity with respect to the individual needs to be maintained. God could, then, allow Sue's abuser to think he was murdering Sue without actually murdering her.

Despite the fact that so many today hold such a view either implicitly or explicitly, this is not the Christian view. Nor has it been the view of most people throughout history. The view is a rather unfortunate result of The Enlightenment. Ancient thinkers, like  Aristotle, taught us that being a truly virtuous person is impossible to do on our own. We must live in the right kind of society – a society aimed at realizing the human good. Humans as islands will never flourish. Here Lewis is again helpful. In Mere Christianity, Lewis suggests that the metaphor of a fleet of ships on a voyage toward a particular destination captures the essence of the moral life: “The voyage will be a success only, in the first place, if the ships do not collide and get in one another’s way; and, secondly, if each ship is seaworthy and has her engines in good order.” Later, Lewis adds a third part: the fleet must have a specific destination if the voyage is to be successful. Lewis concludes,

Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play.

In our secular society, it often seems as the only real moral value is the first thing, staying out of each other’s way. However, on the Christian view, like other ancient views, humans cannot just stay out of each other's way and expect to flourish. This is because of what humans are by nature. As mentioned earlier, humans are made for intimate fellowship with God, each other, and to rule over the earth. This telos cannot be realized on one's own. It requires humans to cooperate together. It also means that the human good is objective and communal. What one person does has a real effect on others. Having very briefly laid out this ancient view, I commend  it to you as true. It is more robust and makes more sense out of the world than the other view. It also better explains our actual experience. Even if we like to imagine that a person's flourishing is a matter of individual effort and ideals, history has shown us this is not the case. We are all in this together, like it or not.

Now I want to say how this view provides an advantage in explaining God's justification for Sue-like cases. If the human good is objective and communal in the way just suggested, then, returning to the chess analogy, we are all playing the same game together. Or, perhaps a better way to make the point is to say that we are all members of the same football team. We each have different roles and abilities, but we share the same goal of winning the game. And this goal cannot be meaningfully reached if the rules of the game are compromised too much. If, for example, the referee counts any progress past the fifty yard line as a touchdown for us, then we may have the highest score at the end of the game, but we haven't really won. This football analogy can also help us see why God might allow cases like Sue. We can think of Sue's abuser as a particularly bad player on the team. He never shows up for practice, he does not know the rules or the plays, and he is out of shape. On game day, he racks up penalty after penalty. He breaks the rules of the game. Now, if we want to really win the game, then we cannot also want the referee to simply overlook these penalties. The rules of the game must be enforced, even though it hurts the team. It may seem like enforcing the rules makes winning the game more difficult, but actually it is required to make winning even possible. Similarly, God may be required to allow Sue-like cases if humans want even to have the possibility of attaining their good, even though there are very bad "penalties"  associated with Sue-like cases.

That said, I want to make two important clarifications. First, I do not intend to say that human life is a game. Being human is a very serious matter indeed. My analogy of human life to a game, especially in an attempt to explain Sue-like cases, may unintentionally communicate that I do not take Sue's suffering to be very bad. That is not the case. The analogy to games is only intended to illustrate the principle of internal integrity that I have proposed. In no way should it be taken as an attempt to diminish the suffering of Sue. Second, even though the idea of the human good and internal integrity might help us make sense of why God allows even terrible evils as a general rule, we should exercise epistemic humility here. I do not mean to suggest that this is the reason God allowed Sue’s case. Alston is right; in most cases we cannot know what the actual reason is for God allowing an evil to occur. At best we can make some “theodical suggestions.”[12]

But how can T1 and the biblical notion of the human good help us make sense of a case like Bambi’s?  Here we must remember that the human good includes care of the earth. Perhaps God’s intention for human care of the earth is that we were to be so meticulous that we would prevent cases like Bambi’s from ever occurring. At first, this might seem absurd, but that may be only because we humans have strayed so far from God’s intention for us. In a world in which every human properly exercised his or her responsibility to care for God’s creation, I suspect there would be vastly fewer Bambi-like cases. And, once humans actually achieved dominion of the earth, perhaps no Bambi-like cases would ever occur. So part of the answer for why there are Bambi-like cases may be that humans continue to fail in their responsibility as care-givers of the earth. Another part of the answer comes directly from Scripture. Paul says that nature itself is “subject to frustration”[13] because “humanity’s fall into sin marred the ‘goodness’ of God’s creation.”[14] Human sin, then, is the cause of natural evil. And, given that the welfare of the earth is so closely connected with the human telos, God cannot, as a general rule, intervene in nature without compromising the internal integrity of humanity. Humans, if we ever hope to be what God intends, must willingly take on their responsibility as caretakers of the earth and its redemption and their redemption are inextricably linked.

If what I have said is correct, then God has good reason to allow Bambi and Sue cases. This undermines Rowe’s R1, and thus his argument no longer goes through. But before moving to the conclusion, let me consider two objections.

First, the atheologian might say, “All this talk of the human good and human responsibility is very noble, but couldn’t have God lessened the suffering of both Bambi and Sue and not compromise the internal integrity of humanity?” This objection presses an ambiguity in my argument, specifically the idea that God could not intervene as a “general rule.” If the rule is generally applied, then there is no reason God could not intervene in any particular case. But from this it also follows that God could intervene in Sue or Bambi’s case and not compromise human integrity. No particular case is essential to human integrity. However, if God intervenes too much, then human integrity will be compromised. So at least some evils must still be allowed. We can reason that those evils that occur must be allowed or else human integrity would be compromised.[15] So if God prevented Sue’s case or a Bambi-like case from occurring, there would be some evil equally bad or worse he would have to allow somewhere else. Therefore, this objection does not defeat the argument.

Second, the atheologian might object because, he says, I have described a morally hopeless situation. Humans, as they are now, will never develop to the point where we would prevent Sue and Bambi cases. A long list of gross human failures even from the past thirty days could be easily produced. If T1 is right, then the hope of ever realizing a just world is absurd. We are like a terminally ill cancer patient who suffers tremendous pain and has no chance of recovery. Given the hopelessness of the situation, the only good we can reasonably hope for is that doctor would give us some drug to deaden the pain. So God should realize that since humans are in such a sad state, human integrity is not worth the suffering because it will never be realized. What is the point of allowing cases like Sue’s if it will never amount to anything? But, on this point the atheologian is mistaken. We Christians have yet more to say. Our plight is not hopeless because God himself has become one of us. God has done something dramatic and heroic on the part of creatures like Bambi, even more so for humans like Sue. In the person of Jesus, God has given humanity a way to be truly human and a way to end human and animal suffering. Through Jesus, God has acted to overcome human sin in a way that does not compromise the internal integrity of humanity because Jesus is fully human. And since Jesus is incarnate and fully human, he makes a way for humans to overcome the problem of sin as humans. Apart from him, humans are unable to achieve our God-given telos. But with him, we can become what God intends. In every way, Jesus has redeemed humanity from our sin.

Conclusion

In this essay, we have seen a promising way for Christians to respond to the problem of evil. We saw that God can allow some evil if it realizes a worthwhile good and that he is limited by what is logically possible. Further, we saw that allowing humans autonomy to achieve their good is worthwhile and that this entails that God cannot, as a general rule, intervene in areas of human responsibility. Finally, we saw that God, in Jesus, has acted in a way to solve the problem of evil while simultaneously preserving human integrity.

 Notes 

[1] Rowe. 3.

[2] J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 115.

[3] Augustine, The City of God, XI, CHAP. 9.  http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120111.htm

[4] John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1977). 45.

[5]See Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (New York: Octagon Books, 1983). 132.

[6] Augustine, Contra Faustum, Book 22, chapter 78.

[7] Augustine, Contra Faustum, Book 22, chapter 78.

[8] A similar point is made by N.T. Wright in N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2006). Kindle location 343. He says that evil in the OT is understood as “idolatry” or “dehumanization.” This is consistent with the idea that evil is disorder or malfunction.

[9] See Matt 19-1-6.

[10] These three relations are inspired by a similar list mentioned in John Randall Sachs, The Christian Vision of Humanity: Basic Christian Anthropology, Zacchaeus Studies Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991). 17.

[11] Sometimes, defenders of libertarian freedom are accused of improperly limiting God. But this accusation is wrong for two reasons.  First, God is still fully omnipotent on the libertarian view. God can do whatever is logically possible for him to do. Second, to say that God chose to create agents with libertarian freedom does not mean that God has fewer options open to him at all. The opposite is true. The defender of libertarian freedom thinks that God could have determined everything; that is his prerogative. However, the defender also thinks God has the power to create finite, self-determining creatures. God has more options and not less on this view. It is the compatibilist that is, arguably, artificially limiting God’s power.

[12] William Alston, “The Inductive Argument from Evil,” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington, ID.: Indiana University Press, 1996).103.

[13] Romans 8:22

[14] Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI.: Eerdmans, 1996). 515.

[15] This response is inspired by a similar discussion in David  Baggett and Walls Jerry L., Good God : The Theistic Foundations of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 144. Here they discuss an analogy from Peter van Inwagen aimed at showing that if God intervenes too much, he will defeat the law like regularity in a world.

Photo: "Struggle for Life" by Harpagornis

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. 

Link: Matthew Flannagan Discusses the Euthyphro Dilemma with Skeptics

Dr. Matthew Flannagan provides some great insights on the Euthyphro Dilemma in a podcast over at Skepticule. Flannagan explains the difference between ontology and epistemology in relation to the dilemma. Flannagan is on for about the first thirty minutes of the podcast. If you like, you can stick around after that and hear the skeptical evaluation of Flannagan's presentation.

Link: Glenn Peoples and Stephen Law on the Evil God Challenge

Over at Unbelievable?, there is a great discussion between Christian philosopher Glenn Peoples and  atheist philosopher Stephen Law on the "Evil God Challenge." The objection raised in the challenge is that we have as much evidence to believe in a good God as an evil one. Peoples responds with a moral argument. You can listen to the discussion here. Photo: "Angry Gods" by deanoakley. CC License. 

Review of A Beautiful Mind

Marybeth and I sat down last night after visiting with my mom in rehab and watched A Beautiful Mind again. I’d seen it once before, having read the book on which the movie was based by Sylvia Nasar, a challenging but rewarding read. Marybeth had seen the movie three times already. We both wanted to watch it again, and we were glad we did. What a truly remarkable movie. We knew it was, but MB and I were both struck anew by just how remarkable it was this time around. Not only the acting—Jennifer Connelly is great and Russell Crowe simply outstanding—but the direction, the music, the choreography, the writing; every part of the movie is top notch. Definitely worth watching more than once.

I won’t get into it much here, but the movie provides ample fodder for a range of fascinating and fundamental philosophical questions: What is real? What is knowledge? But my thoughts here will dwell less on philosophy than the humanness of the film. The Nash character—a real-life mathematician who suffered from severe mental illness yet who still managed ground-breaking achievements in game theory and differential geometry, enough to earn a Nobel Prize—begins as a socially awkward misanthrope. His brusqueness and bluntness tend to be off-putting to those around him, who he acknowledges don’t care for him much. As his mental illness grows, he retreats increasingly into his own delusional world, interacting with a range of characters we eventually discover only he can see. His breakdown brings to a halt his work and puts a horrible strain on his marriage.

Deliverance comes not by getting healed of the disease but by a prodigious effort of cognitive discipline, a “diet of the mind” that refrains from indulging certain appetites. It’s a long road back, with plenty of bumps to overcome, humiliations to endure, indignities to suffer, and a particularly intractable thorn in his flesh all the while. Helping sustain his resolve is the unconditional commitment and love of his wife, whose suffering may have been nearly as intense as his; but her faithfulness and fidelity provide a model of what a marital commitment through the worst of times might look like. The Connelly-played wife admits at one point to a friend her frustration, her guilt at considering leaving, her rage at John and even God; but despite it all, she sticks with him and sees him through, even at the risk of her own safety.

The abstruse and analytic Nash’s proposal to her, before his schizophrenia had become obvious, is couched in the most dispassionate and empirical of terms—a request for measurable confirmation of her long-term commitment and the like. She jokingly responds about her need to recalibrate her girlish, romantic expectations, but accepts his proposal and loves him despite what were already his obvious idiosyncrasies and lack of social graces. It is this image of the man she married, warts and all, that sustains her commitment when his condition changes into something barely recognizable, a vision she said that transformed both him and her. That particular speech is just one of a plethora of powerful moments in the film featuring writing that is, well, beautiful.

Early on, too, Nash thinks of relationships with those of the opposite sex mainly in terms of an exchange of bodily fluids. All the Platonic pleasantries and niceties are but a necessary prerequisite to the real thing. Usually his forthrightness on this score is effective at eliciting smacks from women, but in the case of the woman who married him, she could see something else about him; and her love for him is as authentic as it proves transformative.

As a young man Nash is competitive, with a desire to stand out, be remembered, and make a difference. His attitude toward women is impersonal and dehumanizing; his mentality about teaching is that it is nothing but a waste of his time. People are distractions or means to ends or competitors to overcome. Despite his prodigious mathematical abilities, clearly his humanity needs tweaking, and Ron Howard’s direction and the powerful screenplay succeed in showing how the tragedies and pain to ensue, more than can hardly be imagined, ultimately prove effectual in making the great mathematician into a great person.

After battling his demons and disciplining his mind, Nash not only learns to cope. He begins to teach again, this time with a genuine affection for his students and a newfound sense of the importance of the vocation. (As a student he hadn’t even attended classes himself, a sign among other things of his insularity and isolation.) After earning the accolades he’d always yearned for by being granted the Nobel Prize for his work on equilibrium (not what most mathematicians insist was his considerably more impressive work on manifolds), he has stopped thinking in terms of one-upmanship or winning. He is moved to appreciate unexpected honors rather than demanding them as what he deserves. He grows to appreciate his colleagues as friends and collaborators rather than competitors. Rather than viewing women merely as sexual objects, he acquires a much deeper and more authentic understanding of relationships. In his acceptance speech of the Nobel, he celebrates the undying love of his wife as more important than numbers and reasons and the reason he’s there.

Even his understanding of mathematics seems to take on a more human touch near the end of the story. He’s overheard telling students that, contrary to what others may tell them, mathematics is art. Early in the film, his girlfriend (later his wife) admitted to being an artist herself. Her influence on him is profound, even in this. Throughout the process of his painful healing, numerous times he can be seen holding in his hand the handkerchief that she had given him on that early date, and again he extricates it from his pocket after his final speech and gives her a wave with it. The movie is a success story against all odds, a gripping narrative of mental illness, the story of a prodigy and tortured genius, but ultimately it’s a love story, and testimony of love’s power to overcome and to endure.

Argument for God from Moral Intuitions

I think that, if our moral intuitions are to be regarded as true, then God is the best explanation for those moral intuitions being present. Not only that, but I think that the best explanation for those moral intuitions being true is God’s action in our lives. So, the argument would go as follows:

1. If our moral intuitions are true, then God is the best explanation of this fact.

2. Our moral intuitions are true.

3. Therefore, God is the best explanation of this fact.

4. If God is the best explanation of moral intuitions, then He exists.

5. Therefore, God exists.

(3) and (5) are logically entailed conclusions. What do we make of (1)? We should only deny this if we think that while our moral intuitions are true, there is a better explanation. Notice this claim is much more modest than saying that God is the only explanation of moral intuitions being true. All we are claiming is that, for however many explanations there are, God is the best one. Without getting into a lengthy discussion as to what makes a good explanation (though that is surely important here), let’s cover some of the features. First, an explanation needs to fit all the facts. Let’s consider the facts: God’s creating in us a sense of moral knowledge (moral intuition) is certainly possible (it’s not unknown, or even unlikely, for example, that God possesses this power). It also seems likely that God (taken to be the monotheistic God of perfect being theology) would ensure that our moral intuitions are generally reliable. Why would he do that? Simply because an all-good God would want to ensure creatures made in his image generally had the opportunity to do the good (and thus, to be significantly free moral agents). This is not possible if they can’t very well even recognize the good. In a sense, God has told us, via our conscience and moral intuition, what is good and thus what we ought to do.

Second, the explanation needs to be relatively simple. It won’t do, for example, to claim that the best explanation of our moral intuitions being true is seventeen gods—at least not without argument. One God is simple enough (after all, the entire “God-of-the-gaps” charge is based at least secondarily in how simple it is).[1] Competing explanations won’t cover it as well as a theistic one: for instance, it just seems fortuitous that these moral intuitions turn out to be true. For instance, animals don’t need true moral intuitions in order to survive, so the mere postulated fact that evolution occurs and we are here isn’t a sufficient explanation for why we have moral intuitions and they are true. So it seems (1) is a pretty good candidate to keep around.

Perhaps an opponent will then bite the bullet and reject (2). “You’re right,” he may say. “God is the best explanation of moral intuitions being true, but I’ve got news for you: they aren’t.” There are two different objections that can be presented to the second premise. The first objection is to claim that moral intuitions aren’t always true. They’re false sometimes, and, in some cases, plenty of times.[2] But the response back can be two-fold: first, in (1), we just mean generally true, not universally. Second, simply because some intuitions are wrong sometimes, it doesn't follow that they are all suspect.[3]

The next objection is that all moral intuitions about moral facts fail because all moral facts are false. That is to say that there just are no objective moral values or duties, and so any intuitions about this are illusory. Now this is entirely consistent with a naturalistic account of obtaining a sense of objective moral values (or moral intuitions). However, while it is consistent, it is wildly counterintuitive (literally!). Most people cannot shake the feeling that certain things (e.g., racism, homophobia, beating up the elderly, bullying, torturing babies, etc.) really are wrong, and their moral intuitions are not deceiving them. One might suspect that even the objector does not really believe that nothing is really wrong. But then it will follow that God is the best explanation of our moral intuitions being true.

It seems to be an obvious truth of logic to infer that if God is the explanation of moral intuitions being true, then he exists. In any case, I don’t know what it would mean to claim that God is such an explanation, but he doesn’t exist! If that’s the case, we have an epistemic variant of the moral argument for God’s existence that can be used.

[1] Consider, in fact, that people often say that naturalism is sufficient to account for the way the world is, and thus a God is wholly unnecessary—in short, naturalism is a simpler explanation for the way the world is (so the charge goes).

[2] There are a great many people, for example, that claim to intuit homosexual behavior as permissible, whereas many others intuit it as impermissible. One set of intuitions, if this is true, is definitely false (as a whole).

[3] One cannot show a possible area of knowledge to be unreliable just by showing one error (or even a few more): simply because some people reason incorrectly, it wouldn’t follow that no one reasons correctly!

Photo: "Lake Crescent Sunset" by Kevin Dooley. CC License. 

Podcast: Dr. Gary Yates on the Character of God and the Problem of the Canaanite Conquest

On this week's episode, we have an in depth conversation with Dr. Gary Yates concerning what the Old Testament says about the goodness of God. One of the main aims is to turn back objections that are often raised in light of the Canaanite Conquest. By the end of the conversation, Dr. Yates explains how an honest reading of the Old Testament is compatible with character of God we see revealed in Jesus.

Photo: "Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon" by John Martin. Public Domain from NGA.GOV. 

Saving Wasted Virtues: Heaven and the Ground of Morality

I

At the outset of his chapter “The Suicide of Thought,” Chesterton made the ironic observation that the modern world, in some ways, is far too good.  Indeed, the modern world, as he saw it was “full of wild and wasted virtues,” an inevitable result when a religious scheme is shattered.[1]  When this happens, it is not only the vices that are let loose and create havoc.

But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly,

and the virtues do more terrible damage.  The modern world is full of the

old Christian virtues gone mad.  The virtues are gone mad because they

have been isolated from each other and are wondering alone.[2]

A generation later, in The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis echoed this point in criticizing those who depart from traditional morality (which he called the Tao) and offer new systems or ideologies in its place.  All such new systems, Lewis maintained, “consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess.”[3]

While Lewis’s diagnosis is similar, his prescription for moral health and integrity is significantly different.   He prescribes a dogmatic belief in objective value and a commitment to the Tao as having absolute validity.  Indeed, the principles of the Tao must be accepted as obviously rational, just as one takes the axioms of geometry to be self-evident.[4]  Most interesting, for our purposes, is that Lewis goes on to emphasize that his argument does not depend on theistic assumptions.  Though acknowledging his own Christian convictions, he made it clear that he was not offering an indirect argument for Theism.  He insisted that he was “simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the values of Practical Reason as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become skeptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more ‘realistic’ basis, is doomed.”[5]   While leaving open the possibility that morality implies a supernatural origin, Lewis was prepared to hold that morality can be sufficiently grounded for anyone who can see the obvious rationality of the principles of practical reason.

Lewis’s fully developed argument has considerable force, but I do not share his confidence that traditional morality can stand alone without Theistic grounding. And here I claim Chesterton for an ally.  He suggests a different solution to the moral confusion that results when “wild and wasted virtues” are let loose in our society.   At the end of the chapter I cited above, he observes that Joan of Arc combined in her person virtues advocated by figures as diverse as Nietzsche and Tolstoy.  While they were “wild speculators” who did nothing, she actually did something.  “It was impossible” Chesterton remarked, “that the thought should not cross my mind that she and her faith had perhaps some secret of moral unity and utility that has been lost.”[6]

His thoughts inevitably turned to a larger figure, namely, Christ Himself, and Chesterton noted that Christ combines virtues that moderns can only see as opposed to one another.  Most interestingly, he observed, altruists denounce Christ as an egoist whereas egoists denounce his altruism.  Chesterton concluded with the following memorable line

There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect the

fragments.  There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped arms and leg

walking about.  They have torn the soul of Christ into silly strips, labelled

egoism and altruism, and they are equally puzzled by His insane magnificence and His insane meekness.  They have parted His garments

among them, and for His vesture they have cast lots; though the coat was

without seam woven from the top throughout.[7]

Chesterton’s example here is particularly well chosen, for the dilemmas posed by egoism and altruism have been particularly troublesome for moral philosophers for over a century now, and remain vexing to this day.  In what follows I want to argue, following Chesterton’s suggestion, that we need the resources not only of Theism to resolve these difficulties, but distinctively Christian doctrine as well, particularly the doctrine of heaven.

II

Although the problem of egoism and altruism emerged much earlier,[8] let us begin our examination of it with a landmark in moral philosophy by one of Chesterton’s contemporaries, namely, The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick, a work that went through seven editions between 1874 and 1907.  Sidgwick identified as the greatest moral problem of his time what he called the “Dualism of Practical Reason.”[9]  This dualism arises because of a possible conflict between what may serve the happiness of a given individual, on the one hand, and what would serve the happiness of the larger universe of sentient beings.   As a utilitarian, Sidgwick believes the ultimate good is happiness, or what he also calls desirable consciousness for sentient beings.

Consider the case of an individual who is called upon to sacrifice his own happiness, perhaps even his life, for the happiness of others.  Now if we judge it to be a reasonable thing for him to do so, then it might be argued that we are assigning a different ultimate good for the individual than for the rest of sentient beings; whereas their good is happiness, his ultimate good is conformity to reason.  While Sidgwick admits the force of this argument, he nevertheless maintains that it may actually be reasonable for an individual to sacrifice his own good for the greater happiness of others.  It is at this point that Sidgwick identifies the Duality of Practical Reason in his footnote.  There he acknowledges that it is “no less reasonable for an individual to take his own happiness as his ultimate end.”

Sidgwick goes on to observe that in earlier moral philosophy, particularly the Greeks, it was believed that it was good for the individual himself to act sacrificially even when the consequences as a whole are painful to him.  While he attributes this belief partly to certain confusions, it is also important to recognize that he also recognizes it is partly due to a “faith deeply rooted in the moral consciousness of mankind, that there cannot be really and ultimately any conflict between the two kinds of reasonableness.”[10]

Sidgwick returns to this unresolved difficulty in the final pages of his book.   Significantly, he identifies one clear way of resolving it that he rejects, namely, by assuming the existence of God and divine sanctions that would be sufficient to assure it was always in our best interests to be moral.  He rejects this assumption, defended most notably in the modern period by Kant, because he does not believe it is strictly required to ground “ethical science.”  In his view, later adopted by Lewis, the fundamental intuitions of moral philosophy are as independently self-evident as the axioms of geometry, and therefore need no grounding from theology or other sources.  But while our moral duty is intuitively obvious, it is, unfortunately, not equally evident that the performance of our duty will be suitably rewarded.  Admittedly, we feel a desire that this be the case not only for ourselves, but for all other people as well.  However, our wish for this to be so has no bearing on whether it is probable, “considering the large proportion of human desires that experience shows to be doomed to disappointment.”[11]

Now even if this desire is doomed to disappointment, this gives us no reason to abandon morality according to Sidgwick, but it does mean we must give up the hope of making full rational sense of it.  Our moral duty is still binding on us despite the fact that it makes no rational sense how this can be so when duty conflicts with self-interest.   In his final paragraph, Sidgwick tentatively offers some brief epistemological reflections on whether we might be rationally justified in believing in the ultimate convergence of morality and self-interest even if this belief cannot claim philosophic certainty.  But what is still clear at the end of the day is that the issue remains unresolved for him.

What Sidgwick recognized as the profoundest problem of moral philosophy in his day has only intensified in later generations.  In much twentieth century moral philosophy, the conflict was stated in terms of egoism versus altruism, and morality was often defined in terms that exclude egoism.  Moreover, this view remains widespread as moral philosophy advances into the twenty-first century.  As a representative of twentieth century moral philosophers, consider the words of John Rawls in his widely influential work A Theory of Justice: “Although egoism is logically consistent and in this sense not irrational, it is incompatible with what we intuitively regard as the moral point of view.  The significance of egoism philosophically is not as an alternative conception of right but as a challenge to any such conception.”[12]

While this conflict has been taken for granted for some time now, it is important to reiterate that it is sharply at odds with how morality has been conceived by most moral philosophers in the greater part of human history.  As David Lutz has observed, it was the view of “the multitude” or “the many” that virtuous living might be in conflict with self-love, but moral philosophers forcefully argued just the opposite.  But now, the view of “the multitude” has become the view of most moral philosophers.  As Lutz sees it, “this change in how we think about our lives is both significant and regrettable.”[13]

Surely the consequences for how we live our lives and for society at large are significant indeed.  The issues here are too pressing to be confined to the halls of academic debate, because they touch on all aspects of our common life.  It is no surprise that these debates have worked their way into popular culture and conversation.  A vivid instance of this occurred in the late 1980’s, a tumultuous time in American cultural history, during which a series of highly publicized scandals rocked a number of American institutions including government, business, the military and the church.  Time magazine did a cover story on ethics the title of which was simply, “What’s Wrong.”   In the concluding paragraph of the article, the author noted a profound ambivalence in the American soul, even as the nation aspired to restore some sense of moral integrity: “the longing for moral regeneration must constantly vie with an equally strong aspect of America’s national character, self indulgence.  It is an inner tension that may animate political life for years to come.”[14]  The tension that the author notes is, of course, another variation on the unresolved problem Sidgwick bequeathed to his successors.    Moreover, events since that time, only the most notorious of which involve the Clinton administration, have certainly vindicated the prediction that this tension would continue to animate political life for years to come.

In an accompanying essay, Time probed the roots of our moral disarray.  Again, it is interesting that the essay ends by grappling with the familiar issue of the relationship between morality and self-interest.  After citing ethicists who believe that it is possible both to be ethical and to get what we want at least most of the time, the essay observes that this is an optimistic solution which only lays bare the heart of the problem, namely, the nature of human desires.  The final sentences of the essay leave us with this prospect for moral renewal:

If Americans wish to strike a truer ethical balance, they may need to re-examine the values that society so seductively parades before them: a top job, political power, sexual allure, a penthouse or lakefront spread, a killing on the market.  The real challenge would then become a redefinition of wants so that they serve society as well as self, defining a single ethic that guides means while it also achieves rightful ends.[15]

The question this obviously raises is what could motivate such a redefinition of wants.  Some convincing account needs to be given of goods that clearly surpass things like top jobs, political power, sexual allure and so on.  The question is what sort of goods would not only be of surpassing value but would also be such that in choosing them one is not forced to decide between one’s own ultimate interest and that of others.

When this choice is forced upon us, that is, when altruism is pried apart from self-interest, it is very revealing to note that it is inevitably distorted in the process.  Indeed, here is a graphic illustration of  “wild and wasted virtues” isolated and wandering alone. Consider two extreme claims about the nature of self-sacrifice that are current in contemporary thought.  On the one side are those who maintain that the only real gift is one that expects nothing in return.  Thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida hold that the highest gift is a sacrifice of one’s life for others, a sacrifice that is ultimate and uncompensated.  Indeed, it is the very finality of death that endows morality with seriousness and makes it truly possible.  The hope of life after death on this view is problematic for ethics.  As John Milbank concisely describes this view, “Death in its unmitigated reality permits the ethical, while the notion of resurrection contaminates it with self-interest.”[16]

On this view, altruism has been stripped of any vestige of human self-interest and raised to truly heroic proportions.  This account of altruism takes moral sacrifice far beyond anything that traditional moralists imagined could be required or reasonably expected of human beings.  These thinkers demand that humans be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice without the support of the sort of moral faith that more traditional moral philosophers, such as Kant, thought necessary to make sense of morality.

By sharp contrast, there is another very different view of altruism current in contemporary thought, namely, that of some influential sociobiologists and evolutionary theorists.  These thinkers attempt to account for altruism in terms of naturalistic evolution, where it poses an obvious problem.  The problem stems from the notion of natural selection, which maintains that traits that reduce reproductive advantages will be eliminated.  Altruism is a double-edged sword in this regard, for not only is it a disadvantage to those who practice it, but it is also an advantage for those who are on the receiving end of it.  So it seems that those who are altruistic would sacrifice themselves out of existence in the unforgiving competition for survival and reproductive advantage.  And yet, altruistic behavior of various kinds continues to be exhibited and highly admired in the human race.  The question of how to account for this fact remains.

Sociobiologists have developed a number of different theories to meet this challenge, some of which can explain at least certain forms of altruistic behavior with a fair degree of plausibility.[17]  It would take us too far afield to discuss these in detail, but one thing in particular is striking about some of these theories, namely, the role that deception plays in them.  One such theory focuses on the recipients of altruistic behavior and suggests that behavior of that sort is produced by the skillful manipulation of those recipients.   Altruistic actions such as adoption, organ donation, and even radical human sacrifice have been explained in terms of manipulation of various social instincts by those who benefit from such activity.

In a similar vein, altruism is also explained as a matter of elaborate self-deception.  This account begins with the recognition that reciprocity is central to human society and the further observation that the optimal position is to cheat the system for personal advantage when one can get away with it.  Successful cheaters, however, must obviously avoid detection.  And one way they can do this is to engage in impressive displays of sacrificial behavior.  When cheaters are detected, ever more creative and costly exhibitions of altruism must be invented to persuade others of one’s sincerity.   Here is where self-deception enters the picture.  If we are to be successful in our self-serving manipulations, we first need to deceive ourselves into believing that we really do care about others and that morality rightly obligates us to do so.  Otherwise, we would never treat others well enough to accomplish our purpose of manipulating them.  Moreover, we will be most persuasive in this regard if our real intentions never enter our minds as conscious thoughts.   Thus, our altruistic displays mask our real purposes not only from others but even from ourselves.

Writing from a similar perspective, Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson maintain that nature has made us believe in a disinterested moral code according to which we are obligated to help others.  “In short, to make us altruistic in the adaptive biological sense, our biology makes us altruistic in the more conventionally understood sense of acting on deeply held beliefs about right and wrong.”[18]   Since we have been wired by evolution to believe in moral obligation, we are not being insincere or hypocritical when we endorse it.  It is because we consciously believe in morality in this sense that it works as well as it does and serves it reproductive purposes.  But the element of deception remains, as the following remarks by Ruse and Wilson indicate.

In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed of on us by our genes to get us to cooperate.  It is without external grounding.  Ethics is produced by evolution but not justified by it, because, like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves a powerful purpose without existing in substance.[19]

The illusion lies in the fact that we are naturally inclined to believe morality has an objective grounding and this illusion is what makes morality effective.  The illusion also explains why ordinary people do not view morality merely as a means of survival, or the promotion of our genes, or worse, as an elaborate form of manipulation and self-advancement.

III

Now then, let us turn to consider how distinctively Christian resources can help us save these wild and wasted virtues.  To get right to the heart of the matter, let us note that Sidgwick’s “Dualism of Practical Reason,” which fossilized in the twentieth century as the conflict between egoism and altruism, is simply dissolved on Christian premises.  Indeed, it is an impossible dilemma from a Christian standpoint.  The fundamental reason for this is that the ultimate good for all persons is an eternal relationship with God.  To enjoy this relationship, we must trust and obey God, even when it is costly and difficult.

At the forefront of what God requires of us is that we love others selflessly, but paradoxically, our own self-interest is best served when we do so.  We should distinguish then, between self-interest and selfishness.   One is acting selfishly when he promotes his interests at the unfair expense of others.  Christian morality, like most secular morality, would reject this sort of behavior as wrong.  But there is nothing wrong with acting out of self-interest since all rational creatures naturally and inevitably desire their own happiness and well being.   To love another person is to promote his happiness and well being.  The same thing that makes it right to promote these for other persons makes it right to desire these for oneself as well.  For all human beings share essentially the same nature and are alike valuable to God as creatures he loves.

Learning to love selflessly is what transforms us and prepares us to enter the fellowship of the Trinity.  So as we love in this fashion, we are being prepared to experience our own highest joy and satisfaction.  Consequently, the conflict between acting for our own ultimate good and that of others simply cannot arise.  But this assumes that the highest goods are not those mentioned above in the Time article, namely, things like a top job, political power, sexual allure, a lakefront spread, and so on.  Recall that that article suggested that we needed a redefinition of our wants so that they would serve society as well as self.  Well, I am arguing that the only sorts of goods that will fit the bill in a convincing fashion are heavenly ones.  If naturalism is true, the goods of this life are the only ones available, and it is a Utopian dream to think that we can consistently act in such a way as to promote these goods both for ourselves and for others.

Recognition of this reiterates the point that selfless actions are not easy on the Christian account of things.  For it requires profound faith in God to resist the seductive temptation to believe that the only goods, or the most desirable ones, are those of this life.  To sacrifice such goods for the sake of others is to trust that Trinity is ultimate reality, that giving is reciprocal and mutual in the end.

Because Trinitarian love is the deepest reality, the notion of altruism as ultimate sacrifice with no expectation of compensation is at best a distortion of the aboriginal truth about reality.  At worst, the notion that such utter disinterest represents a higher or more admirable standard is pagan hubris.  As previously observed, this view is represented in current thought by such writers as Levinas and Derrida.  Similar notions were expressed by the Stoics in antiquity, and in the modern period Kant is no doubt the high water mark of philosophers who worried that morality would be contaminated by any element of self-interest.  While Kant believed we must postulate God and immortality to make rational sense of morality, as noted above, he insisted, incoherently in my view, that this could not affect our motivation without corrupting its moral value.

In Christian thought, resurrection and immortality are not afterthoughts, nor are they  postulates to salvage morality from irrationality.  They are integral to the grand claim that ultimate reality is reciprocal love.  Christ’s resurrection, no less than his giving his life as a sacrifice for our sins, is a picture for us of the eternal dynamic of divine love.  It is life, not death--as Levinas and Derrida contend--that gives morality substance.  As John Milbank puts it, “resurrection, not death, is the ground of the ethical.”[20]

Consider in this connection the book of Hebrews, which presents a theologically rich account of how Christ offered his life as a sacrifice to save us from our sins.   In two passages particularly relevant to our current discussion we are informed not only that Christ yielded obedience to the one who could save him from death, but also that it was for the joy set before him that he endured the cross.[21]   Thus, the consummate sacrifice that gives meaning to all others according to the book of Hebrews gives no credence whatever to the pagan notion that the finality of death is necessary for ultimate sacrifice.  To the contrary, the ultimate sacrifice in human history, the sacrifice that saves the world, was given in faith that joy will triumph over death.

In commending Christ as a model in this regard, this passage is encouraging Christians who suffer for their faith to do so with confident hope that the God whose nature is love will reciprocate their costly obedience.  Self-interest in this regard is a straightforward component of Christian moral motivation.  Indeed, it is a rather obvious implication of the logic of Trinitarian belief.  For we cannot harm our well being by obedience to God, just as we cannot promote it by selfishness.

Indeed, there is no other way to be happy and to find the fulfillment we desire than by obedience to God.  Thus, there is no parallel problem on the Christian view to the one posed for naturalism by those who choose, often successfully, to cheat the system.  God cannot be deceived or cheated in any way, so moral parasites are completely out of the question on this view.   It might make rational sense to think that cheating could successfully serve one’s ultimate well being on naturalistic assumptions, but that could never be the case given Christian beliefs. This observation further confirms the power of Christian theology to account not only for why morality is objectively binding upon us but also for why any reasonable person should want to obey it.  It provides a rationally persuasive and winsome account of moral motivation that nothing in secular morality can emulate.

Before concluding this section, let us return for a moment to Sidgwick and recall that he rejected the notion of theistic sanctions for morality, confident that morality could stand on its own.   As Alasdair MacIntyre put it, he held that at the “foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements for the truth of which no further reason can be given.” [22]  MacIntyre goes on to argue that it was this sort of intuitionist view that undermined any claim to objectivity and prepared the way for the emotivism of twentieth century moral philosophy.  Subsequent moral philosophy, not to mention the moral confusion of our culture, has surely shown that Sidgwick’s faith was not well founded and that morality needs a better grounding than he or his heirs have provided.  I have been arguing that the theism he rejected, particularly in its orthodox Christian forms, along with its teleological account of human nature and happiness remains the most viable resource for resolving the problems we have inherited from him.

IV

Before concluding, let us hear from Chesterton again.  In his discussion of the “Paradoxes of Christianity” he noted that “Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.”  He goes on to give this as an example: “One can hardly think too little of one’s self.  One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.”[23]

This comment points us to the very end of his book where he notes the irony that modernism is emancipated in seeking pleasure in this life, but ultimately despairing because it does not believe there is any final meaning in the universe.

 The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but

sad about the big ones.  Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it

is not native to man to be so.  Man is more himself, man is more manlike,

when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.[24]

Christians follow one who obeyed God, even unto death, because of the joy set before him.  Therein lies not only the foundation of morality and the salvation of wasted virtues, but our very humanity.

Notes:

[1] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Image, 1959), 30.

[2] Orthodoxy, 30.

[3] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2001), 44.

[4] The Abolition of Man, 40; 73.

[5] The Abolition of Man, 49.

[6] Orthodoxy, 44.

[7] Orthodoxy, 44-45.

[8] For helpful historical analysis, see David W. Lutz, “The Emergence of the Dualism of Practical Reason in Post-Hobbesian British Moral Philosophy,” Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Notre Dame, 1994.

[9] Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962), 404, note 1.

[10] The Methods of Ethics, 405.

[11] The Methods of Ethics, 507-508.

[12] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 136.

[13] “The Emergence of the Dualism of Practical Reason in Post-Hobbesian British Moral Philosophy,” 8.

[14] Walter Shapiro, “What’s Wrong,” Time, May 25, 1987, 17.

[15] Ezra Bowen, “Looking to Its Roots,” Time, May 25, 1987, 29.

[16] John Milbank, “The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice,” First Things 91 (March 1999), 34.

[17] For a helpful discussion of these theories, see Jeffrey P. Schloss, “Evolutionary Accounts of Altruism & the Problem of Goodness by Design” in Mere Creation, ed. William B. Dembski (Downers Grove, Il: Intervarsity Press, 1999), 236-261.

[18] Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics,” in Religion and the Natural Sciences: The Range of Engagement, ed. James E. Huchingson (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), 310.

[19] “The Evolution of Ethics,” 310.

[20] “The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice,” 38.

[21] Hebrews 5:7; 12:1-3.

[22] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Second Edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 65.

[23] Orthodoxy, 95.

[24] Orthodoxy, 159.

Photo: "Heaven Above" by Jochemberends. CC License. 

Link: Dr. Matthew Flannagan on God, Ethics, and Divine Commands

Over at the Tentative Apologist, you can listen to a discussion with Dr. Matthew Flannagan on  what skeptics would call the "abhorrent" commands of God. Flannagan explains how to make sense of a good God and  the testing of Abraham, Joshua's conquest, as well as how to respond to cases of people claiming to justify crimes by an appeal to a divine command.  Click here to listen.   

Are All Atheists Unbelievers?

In a recent online debate with an atheist, I was arguing that folks involved in such debates need to work hard to maintain a respectful attitude with their dialogue partners. It is easy and tempting to fall into contention and animus, and so all the more important to guard against it. My atheist friend challenged me with Psalm 14:1, which declares that the fool says in his heart there is no God. His suggestion was that my commitment to be respectful in dialogue was at odds with this biblical revelation, which, as applied to him, an atheist, was rather less than respectful.

Faced with this challenge, I responded along such lines as these: Although it's true that the Bible features some verses to suggest that there's a serious issue going on with atheists, I don't think this means that in a discussion today with an atheist, a Christian is obliged to think his interlocutor a fool. The Bible features quite a number of teachings, after all, including to love one's neighbor as oneself. This seems to imply, among other things, giving them the benefit of the doubt, being patient, hoping for the best for them, building friendships with them, paying heed to their perspectives, interpreting them charitably, listening to understand and not just critique. This is where I think it makes great sense prima facie from a biblical perspective to treat atheists as intellectually honest and authentic, sincere searchers for truth. They may not all be, but surely many of them are, at least in my experience.

Beyond that, isolated verses need to be understood contextually, which can take some serious investment of time—and I’m far from an exegete. Nonetheless I might identify a few mitigating factors as we interpret and apply such verses. On a biblical perspective, God is thought of as the source of reality, the locus of value, life and light and more besides. The true "unbeliever" would be, I might suggest, in light of this, not one who simply entertains intellectual doubts about the existence of a personal God, but one who rejects all that the biblical writers thought God represented—and to do so at the level of the heart. To reject God would include rejecting light—deep convictions about rightness and wrongness, for example, issuing in corrupt actions. On the classical picture of God, aspects of which came into clarity later but were built on solidly biblical ideas, as opposed to the idea of a mere contingently existing demi-god or Demiurge, God is the Ground of Being; his being and goodness are interchangeable. To deny God's being is to deny goodness itself, both metaphysical and moral.

This is all obviously relevant to the question about how God and morality are related, and relevant in numerous senses—ontological, epistemic, performative. If one takes God as the foundation of moral truth, the locus of value, the Ground of Being, to deny God is naturally to be interpreted as rejecting foundational truths, axiomatic moral ones among them. As one commentator discussed Psalm 14:1: “This is hardly to be understood of a speculative denial of the existence of God; but rather of a practical belief in His moral government.” So to someone shaped by such an understanding, a worldview according to which God functioned thus foundationally, what would be the natural way to characterize, say, someone vicious and altogether corrupt who rejected moral strictures or constraints altogether? It might be natural, frankly, to dub such a person an "unbeliever." More than natural, it might be the most accurate way to put it, as part of what true atheism entails is just such moral corruption. This is, again, not to say all professing atheists are this way, or even will inevitably be this way; rather, quite to the contrary, it is to suggest that exactly because plenty of atheists are not this way, it may take more than intellectual metaphysical speculations of atheism to qualify as true unbelief.

The point is that this language about unbelief can't simply leap the huge hermeneutical gap and be applied today with complete casualness. I am not inclined to see such verses as applying to someone like my internet interlocutor: a self-professed humanist with a deep concern for others, a love for humanity, a passion for reducing suffering in the world. I could be wrong, but I see such values as rooted in God, and his embrace of such values as a disqualification for being a full-fledged unbeliever. That he wouldn’t agree isn’t relevant; if he’s right, I’m wrong, of course; but if I’m right, he’s wrong—and not the skeptic he thinks he is. Maybe being an unbeliever is less a binary question than a continuum; or maybe it is a binary issue, but the point of no return requires more than voicing intellectual doubts about God’s existence.

As another commentator put it, “We ought . . . carefully to mark the evidence on which the Psalmist comes to the conclusion that they have cast off all sense of religion, and it is this: that they have overthrown all order, so that they no longer make any distinction between right and wrong, and have no regard for honesty, nor love of humanity. David, therefore, does not speak of the hidden affection of the heart of the wicked, except in so far as they discover themselves by their external actions.”

So, from my perspective—and this is the argument I’m trying out—I don't see my friend as having fully "rejected God," as I see (rightly or wrongly) many of those values to which he remains adamantly committed as rooted in God. Likewise with the biblical writers, for whom God represented ultimate reality and, as such, true unbelief would include such a thing as rejection of moral light. The Bible needs to be read and interpreted and applied carefully and sensitively and with profound discernment, according to sound principles of exegesis and hermeneutics. Folks have misinterpreted it before, and if someone were to interpret it today to suggest that dismissing all professing atheists as evil and foolish (more so than the lot common to men), I would respectfully suggest that he is not being sufficiently attentive to sound principles of interpretation. Intellectual speculative denial of God’s existence may not be enough to make one a true unbeliever in the sense of Psalm 14:1.

Photo: "Cross section of a trees' roots" by A Escobar. CC License. 

Video: Theist Trent Dougherty and Atheist Erik Wielenberg Discuss C.S. Lewis

In this video, Christian philosopher Dr. Trent Dougherty and atheist moral realist Dr. Erik Wielenberg have an irenic and thoughtful discussion on the thought of C.S. Lewis.  Topics covered include the moral argument, the problem of evil, and the argument from reason. The conversation was hosted by Baylor University.

Missing the Point: Why Functional Accounts of Ethics are Consistent with Anti-Realism

This paper will make the case that attempts to explicate the concepts of ethics in essentially functional ways while retaining the traditional language and categories of morality is a mistake, confused at best, disingenuous at worst. The intention is not to take on all versions of naturalistic ethics, but just those that I am characterizing as functional in this delimited sense: secular analyses that cash out the significance of moral categories like moral freedom, responsibility, authority, intrinsic goods, categorical obligations, and objective truths with concepts distinctly thinner than such thick language connotes, concepts easily enough measureable, empirically analyzable, and consistent with naturalism and evolutionary moral psychology, but concepts, so I will argue, that simply do not capture what ordinary speakers tend to mean by moral discourse. I will begin with phenomenological reasons for this critique, and then move on to make a few metaphysical and epistemic points that bolster the analysis and that will enable me by the end to make a few remarks on moral motivation relevant to the matter of whether or not morality needs religion.

A word on that last point first. The notion that morality needs religion generally or God specifically might amount to the suggestion that without God there can be no objective morality, a premise that sounds quite a bit like one of the famous premises of William Lane Craig’s favored version of the moral argument for God’s existence: “If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist.” I tend instead to favor an abductive variant of the moral argument, an inference to the best explanation, which begins with axiomatic moral facts, at least alleged ones, identifies a pool of explanation candidates, attempts to narrow the field by an application of principled criteria, and infers to the best explanation as the likely true explanation. Even if theism provides the best explanation of morality, however, best doesn’t mean only. So a successful abductive case does not provide warrant for so strong a claim as Craig’s that atheism implies the absence of moral values and duties.

Obviously it cannot be my intention to lay out the whole of this abductive argument, in part exactly because such an argument counsels patience. What is called for is that each individual explanation candidate, or at least each general approach, be carefully assessed to show how it stacks up to the theistic variant under consideration.[1] The only way anyone could try to level all the naturalistic explanations in one fell swoop is by offering quite general critiques of naturalism, some of which are quite powerful, but this is an attempt which often leaves more questions unanswered than answered. So my approach here is different: not to pretend to do anything so ambitious as that, but simply to scrutinize just one sort of version of naturalistic ethics, namely, these functional accounts of moral concepts and categories, paradigmatic examples including Frans de Waal’s take on moral obligations and John Shook’s analysis of moral truth.

An additional reason not to defend Craig’s more ambitious premise is that, if Anselmian theology is true, a world in which God does not exist is an intractably impossible world, for God’s existence is necessary—indeed, God is nothing less than the ground of being itself. So stipulating the features of such an atheistic world can on reflection seem just about as hopeful as identifying the features of a world in which twice two is five. But if we are going to give secularists the chance to construct a workable moral theory, we have to be willing to see them try to use the resources of this world alone in their efforts to build their case. If classical theists are right, and this indeed is a world that God created and inhabited with creatures made in his image, it would be unsurprising if naturalistic ethicists, using the resources of so remarkable a world, are able to make progress in moral theory; indeed it would be very surprising if they did not. Among the implications of this, in my estimation, is that secular and naturalistic ethicists seem well within their epistemic rights to show some tenacity in the matter when, as their efforts invariably will, they encounter challenges, as all moral efforts of explanations do. And the defender of theistic ethics as the better explanation than any and all naturalistic theories needs to take the work of secular ethicists with the utmost seriousness—but one at a time, which is my approach today.

Before beginning, allow me to say a word about moral phenomenology—construed as encompassing, among other things, both the logic, grammar, and semantics of morality on the one hand as well as the what-it-is-like features of moral experience on the other—which together give us excellent reasons to be open to the possibility of objective moral values and obligations. “Objective moral values and obligations” refer to moral values and duties that apply to rational human persons irrespective of whether they correspond with the felt desires or preferences of those persons. Such phenomenological deliverances are in principle defeasible, but if we take the logic and language of morality seriously, along with those features of moral phenomenology such as the felt requiredness or prohibitedness of certain actions, it is certainly no epistemic stretch to remain quite open to an objective morality.[2] In that case, though, what sort of objectivity is needed (1) to make substantial revision of our moral language unnecessary—to capture, in other words, at least the essential meaning of our inherited moral language to make its continuing use ingenuous—and (2) to warrant rational belief that our feelings of, say, moral obligation sufficiently correspond with actual obligations—in other words, that our sense of moral obligations reasonably tracks moral truth?

The Bonobo and the Atheist

Let us begin with the primatologist Frans de Waal’s recently published The Bonobo and the Atheist, subtitled “In Search of Humanism Among the Primates.”[3] De Waal’s preferred understanding of morality is bottom-up. Using a variety of examples, he argues that animal tendencies to prosociality, altruistic behaviors, community concern, and aversions to inequity suggest that the operation of such moral building blocks in primates reveal that morality is not as much of a human innovation as we like to think. As evidence for his contentions, he points to instances of animal empathy, even bird empathy—and the fact that mammals give and want affection and respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs. It is particularly the bonobos who show, especially in contrast with chimpanzees, that our lineage is marked not just by male dominance and xenophobia, but also by a love of harmony and sensitivity to others. He resists the depiction of animals as primarily vicious and self-centered; just like us, he writes, monkeys and apes strive for power, enjoy sex, want security and affection, kill over territory, and value trust and cooperation. We have a psychological makeup, de Waal writes, that remains that of a social primate.

He thinks the weight of morality comes not from above, but from inside of us. In a Humean spirit he thinks reason to be but the slave of the passions; we start with moral sentiments and intuitions, which is where we find the greatest continuity with other primates. To de Waal’s thinking, morality is created in day-to-day interaction, grounded in emotions, which often escape the neat categorizations of which science is fond. Such an approach to ethics comports, he argues, with what we know about how the human mind works, with visceral reactions arriving before rationalizations, and with the way evolution produces behavior. He is hesitant to call apes or even bonobos moral creatures, but he definitely thinks what we call morality among human beings finds its origin in our evolutionary history. What distinguishes human morality from the prosociality, empathy, and altruism of other primates (traits that stand in contrast with a Hobbesian analysis of nature) is our capacity as humans to reflect about such things, build systems of justification, and generalize morality into a system of abstractions. But the book leaves a nagging question hanging: Hasn’t de Waal completely, albeit deftly, changed the subject? What he is referring to as “morality” does not seem to be any set of moral truths at all, but rather moral beliefs and practices. Although he identifies some necessary additions to animal behavior to arrive at “morality,” what he adds does not seem to be even nearly enough.

Consider moral obligations, which typically are thought to provide distinctive and authoritative reasons to perform an action or refrain from one. A moral obligation, particularly ultima facie ones among them, ought to be obeyed; it has authority, punch, clout, prescriptive power. In an effort to account for moral obligations, de Waal employs one of the following strategies: he either (1) eschews their importance, arguing that moral feelings provide better moral reasons to act than do obligations; or (2) does not try to explain moral obligations at all, but merely our feelings or sense of moral obligations. His first strategy goes hand in hand with his effort to hint at the emaciated nature of moral motivation when all that is motivating a person is a sense of moral obligation. He rightly sees, contra Kant, that in some sense it is better to be motivated by higher moral impulses, like love. True enough, and nearly every virtue theorist would agree. This provides no liberation from the need to explain the existence of moral obligations themselves.

His second strategy explains how primates, and especially human beings, experience a feeling or sense of moral obligations. But evolutionary explanations of a feeling of obligation or a tendency to use the language of moral obligation do nothing to provide an explanation of moral obligations themselves. If a sense of obligations and the language of obligations are enough, then moral obligations themselves need not exist at all. De Waal has not provided anything a moral anti-realist or even hardened amoralist cannot already provide, and he has instead fallaciously conflated feeling obligated with being obligated.

A thoroughly naturalistic effort to explain why we may well feel obligations or use the language of moral obligation seems eminently possible. Expunged of categorical oughtness, though, is what is left over enough to qualify as morality? Have we explained enough? Explanatory scope and power demand that all of the salient features of morality be explained, and explained well, by a theory before we dub the explanation a good one or the best. De Waal has simply left anything like categorical moral oughtness out of the picture without so much as an acknowledgement. Again, if he is content with an instrumental analysis of reasons to perform certain prosocial actions, then why use the language of morality at all? He is hard pressed to come up with anything more principled than an admission that traditional moral language carries with it more clout than prudential language. Meanwhile he continues to use the thick language of morality, moral obligations, and the like while simultaneously emptying the relevant concepts of those distinctive features of morality that imbue moral language with its presumed force and binding authority. His concepts are thin, while his language remains thick and rich. Moral anti-realists can just as effectively speak in terms of behaviors that comport with prevailing preferences or even nearly universal human emotions. What has de Waal added to the case that such moral skeptics are unable to affirm, and thus what reason is there to think that the functionalist account he has provided has given a naturalist any reason to abandon moral anti-realism, be it the amoralism and abolitionism of Joel Marks or the moral fictionalism of Richard Joyce?[4]

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

Finally, just because naturalistic evolution can explain why we have some of the moral concepts we do, why we have a natural inclination to behave in certain prosocial or empathetic or altruistic ways, how does it follow that evolution has explained morality? To the contrary, naturalists need to take with great seriousness a challenge like that posed by Sharon Street or Richard Joyce: If evolution can explain why we have the moral concepts we do in a way that makes no reference to their truth, then what reasons do naturalists have to take morality seriously?[5] If reproductive advantage accounted for the selection of those behaviors that issued from moral convictions rather than the truth of those convictions, naturalistic evolution gives us reason to think our moral beliefs lack truth, most likely, lack justification, most certainly. Besides, don’t they have all they need when they point to certain behaviors that stir in most human beings strong feelings, positive or negative, and then letting nature run its course? Why the additional need to hold so tightly to distinctively moral language that carries bigger implications than they can explain?

So to reiterate: a moral realist needs to render substantial revision of our ordinary moral language unnecessary, and to provide an account that warrants rational belief that our feelings of, say, moral obligation sufficiently correspond with actual obligations. De Waal’s study, intriguing at points as it is and as enjoyable a read as it is, fails on both scores.

John Shook’s Ethics

Unlike de Waal, John Shook is trained in philosophy. I had the privilege of dialoguing with him recently at the University at Buffalo on God and ethics; the topic of the dialogue was “Right, Wrong, and God: What Best Explains Morality?” At the event he gave me his book entitled The God Debates: A 21st Century Guide for Atheists and Believers (and Everyone in Between), a Wiley-Blackwell publication from a few years ago. Philip Clayton says Shook’s book “lays out the questions, controversies, and schools of thought with amazing clarity, gradually building his case for a ‘staunchly naturalistic yet faithfully ethical humanism.’” When we turn to the pages of the book, however, and specifically his discussion of morality, we find little warrant for such a glowing commendation.

Shook’s naturalistic account of moral truth comes in the context of his response to a view he rejects, namely, that the truth of moral rules requires the existence of a supernatural reality to explain their truth. He offers his own analysis in terms of what naturalism proposes—as if all naturalists are on the same page, an obviously dubious assumption, but at any rate he writes, “According to naturalism, there are no absolute moral truths. But morality is not simply subjective, either; most of morality consists of culturally objective truths, and the rest is indeed subjective.”[6] He defines objectivity here in this way: “An objective moral truth is made true by the natural fact that a society of people share a common culture which includes that accepted truth among its social rules.”[7] Such objective truths, on his depiction, remain relative, but to societies, not to any individual person. “Because cultures make most moral truths true, these moral truths are only relatively true, even if some people within that culture actually believe that some moral truths are absolutely true.”[8] Shook affirms objectivity in this limited sense, but distinguishes it from absolutism, which is, as he puts it, objectivity plus infallibility, never possibly different or wrong. Shook thinks that, according to naturalism, there are no such infallible or unchangeable moral truths.

He adds that “Naturalistic accounts of morality presently emphasize the evolutionary origins of moral instincts and the cultural pressures guiding the moral development of humanity,” citing, among others, Richard Joyce’s 2006 book The Evolution of Morality.[9] Shook adds, “Like the capacity for other kinds of knowledge, the human capacity for moral feelings and knowledge is part of our species, but moral rules can take diverse complex forms across cultures.”[10]

Shook advances the case that culturally objective morality is objective because such morality is independent of whatever any individual person wishes morality to be; he cites as a good analogy a country’s laws. “Laws are valid because they are politically objective: the law is not whatever any person wants it to be.”[11] Culturally objective moral rules are never fixed, final, or perfect, moreover. “The people of a society can change their culture’s morality after ethical thinking. Individuals can disagree with a culture’s morality, of course, by appealing to a different morality or to a higher ethical standard,” such as an ethical ideal.[12] Although such ideals themselves are not absolute moral truths, the fact that there tends to be some convergence on certain moral truths in concentrated populations is no more surprising than the way that civilizations converged on a few principles of wise agriculture. The best explanation for such convergence, he additionally argues, is entirely naturalistic.

So Shook concludes that “since the theologian cannot provide any clear example of an actual absolute moral truth, and naturalism can explain why cultures have culturally objective moral truths, premise 1 of the argument from morality should not be accepted as true.”[13] What I propose to do is, first, discuss the issue of absolute moral truth, and, secondly, discuss the adequacy of Shook’s own functional account of morality.

By “objectivity” Shook means the opposite of “subjectivity,” so he considers himself qualified to use the phrase “objective moral truth” to refer to a reigning, widespread cultural moral conviction. He wishes to insist that what such objectivity rules out is assignment of primacy to personal whim when it comes to morality, but at the same time he is not suggesting that a particular culturally objective moral truth cannot be mistaken. There is a sense in which such a truth can be insufficiently enlightened or workable, and in time, owing to pressure exerted by individuals or groups within the society, such truths are liable to be replaced by other ones. What constitutes lack of enlightenment or workability has nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of morality. Rather, it is a matter of the extrinsic nature of morality. That is to say, moral truths are truths in virtue of fulfilling certain instrumental purposes—perhaps something along the lines of rules that serve to maximize social harmony or human flourishing.

“Objectivity” is multiply ambiguous, so Shook, having defined moral objectivity in the sense he does, may well be right that naturalism can account for “culturally objective moral truths” thus defined. The real tension has to do with whether his definition is preferable and justified, on the one hand, or misleading and unprincipled, on the other. Setting aside the charge of begging questions by his defining objectivity as he does, it is worth stressing that his particular way of using the term is, if not inappropriate, at least rather idiosyncratic. For someone who puts so much stock in avoiding the whim of personal preference when it comes to morality, he seems to have few qualms about privileging his highly personal definition of moral objectivity that, in truth, simply leaves behind most all of the connotations that people tend to associate with the term. One wonders why he continues to insist on using the phrase “objective truth” at all, when admitting that they can change, and one cannot help but conjecture that it is to project the impression of holding on more tightly to nonnegotiable moral convictions than his view actually allows. To treat moral objectivity in the sense he does, particularly while conjoining it with the category of truth, borders the disingenuous. For “culturally objective truths” on his view would be indistinct from “culturally objective beliefs.” But belief and truth are not the same, a point Shook readily concedes when it comes to whims of individual preference, and he even admits that some widespread cultural moral truths are or can be wrong. What is clear is that he is not talking about truth here at all, but simply belief. Beliefs can be false. Truths cannot. To borrow language because of its comforting implications and connotations without the ability to stand behind the language strikes me as an instance of bad faith.

If there are no objective moral truths, then the language of truth should be abandoned or treated as a useful fiction, not redefined or watered down to refer simply to beliefs while the language of truth is retained to project the impression that the account has more substance than it actually does. Now, Shook has done some work in pragmatism, and perhaps he wishes to depart from something like a correspondence theory of truth and opt instead for a pragmatist one. However American, there remains something deeply problematic about continuing to use “truth” language knowing it is likely that most people will interpret the locution along correspondence lines if in fact one means something very different.

On the issue of whether even pragmatists can rationally exclude considerations of correspondence altogether, consider this short passage from the great American pragmatist William James. When pressed on whether a belief in an existent could be rightly dubbed true if the entity in question did not exist, James wrote that the “pragmatist calls satisfactions indispensable for truth-building, but I have everywhere called them insufficient unless reality be also incidentally led to. If the reality assumed were canceled from the pragmatist’s universe of discourse, he would straightway give the name of falsehoods to the beliefs remaining, in spite of all their satisfactoriness. For him, as for his critic, there can be no truth if there is nothing to be true about. Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre.”[14]

Shook’s challenge to the advocate of moral apologetics is that she provide an example of an “absolute moral truth,” a universal, unchanging moral truth. So can the advocate of the moral argument adduce an example of a moral truth that is both objective in the more robust sense and necessarily true? It would certainly seem so. It is wrong for human beings, everywhere and for everyone, to rape women indiscriminately for the sake of providing a public spectacle. It is wrong for us, everywhere and for everyone, to torture children for the sheer fun and delight of it. In truth, the objectivity and necessity of such moral truths is so beyond debate that the burden here is on the person who would wish to posit the existence of an exception. Most naturalists still insist that they agree wholeheartedly, often adding indignantly, “And I don’t need God to tell me this.” Shook’s skepticism about necessary moral truths, in this sense, already shades in the direction of anti-realism in ethics. If someone is a moral anti-realist, or some sort of radical skeptic, then such a person, including Shook, should simply give up the language of objective moral truth. If someone is not willing to say that it is not possible that child torture for fun could become morally obligatory, such a person seems confused if he is unwilling to jettison language of moral objectivity. Equivocating on the language of objectivity is not enough. Perhaps the person should simply admit that he is a moral skeptic. For such a person to hold on to the language of morality is an expression of nostalgia, an example of Nietzsche’s prediction that atheists would take their time to come to terms with the radical implications of their view. It is a profoundly misguided maneuver to do what Sartre said atheists did too often: eliminate God from the equation and act like it is business as usual, when it is not.

In a discussion of what best explains morality, if a person cannot explain either that or why a moral truth like the wrongness of child torture for fun is necessarily and objectively wrong, then his worldview, or at least his particular variant of it, seems fatally flawed. It is lacking in explanatory scope and explanatory power. He needs to resort to ad hoc redefinitions of standard terms to avoid the unpalatable implications of his view. This is not a good explanation of morality. It is an evasion of what it is that needs explanation, and it is unprincipled.

Shook’s language of infallibility, absolutism, and eternality seems to be a thinly veiled effort to poison the well, as it were, to saddle believers in classically objective and authoritative morality with pejorative labels intended to repulse listeners and readers. But it does nothing to advance his case, “objectively” speaking. What is actually needed for the moral case is moral realism, the existence of objectively true moral principles that are binding, prescriptive, and authoritative across the board. The denial of such principles is tantamount to anti-realism. Shook is careful to avoid the charge of subjectivism in ethics, but the problem is worse than that. He is a skeptic, whether he realizes it or not, who cloaks his true identity with language designed to conceal it—from himself or others, it is unclear. In fact, more often than not, he uses language that obfuscates and misleads more than it illuminates and enlightens.[15]

A discussion of moral “rules” and watered-down moral “truths” has the actual effect of distracting the reader from aspects of morality that Shook is understandably lacking in resources to account for—such as the existence of genuine moral obligations. In an effort to explain morality, and particularly to best explain morality, all the major parts of morality need explanation. And most all of us are inclined to see as an ineliminable part of morality the existence of binding, prescriptive, authoritative obligations—which we morally ought to perform and are morally blameworthy for failing to do so. Even virtue ethicists who speak less in terms of obligation than character formation and the virtues still presumably think we ought to pursue a life of character, integrity, and virtue. Aristotle certainly did not seem to abandon the concept of moral obligations altogether, nor do most people; but moral obligations, if they exist, do not derive their authority from our taking a poll. If they exist, they obtain irrespective of our willingness to live by them or take them seriously—and this applies on both the level of the individual and culture. Torturing children for fun is something we have an obligation not to do, either individually or culturally, presumably. It is a moral fact, and what many would consider to be an ineliminable and nonnegotiable one at that.

So, like de Waal, Shook fails to satisfy either constraint imposed by moral language and phenomenology for a reasonably realist moral perspective; he equivocates on important moral categories like moral truth by talking about belief, avoids the language of moral obligations almost altogether, replaces moral authority with moral instincts; and, in the light of challenges to moral realism posed by the likes of Street, Marks, and Joyce, naturalists all, he says nothing at all. When pressed on this, he arrogates to the cause of naturalism the clarity of certain moral intuitions that all of us are able without any difficulty to apprehend, thereby conflating issues of epistemology and ontology. In truth he does nothing to account for moral obligations, moral authority, moral guilt, moral responsibility, or moral truth—all necessary ingredients that go into meaningful moral judgments. Nor does he so much as seem aware of the need to do so, attributing my dissatisfaction with his answers to my misguided quest for certainty. It is not certainty that is the goal, however, but rather explanatory sufficiency.

Final Thoughts

To sum up, we have seen, phenomenologically, that we have reason to take the possibility of moral realism seriously. But it would seem the concepts of morality need to be robust and thick enough to hold the weight of our moral experience and language, or else we should effect a revision in our use of language and our understanding of moral reality, for these are profoundly misleading if they are so radically nonveridical. Functional naturalistic accounts of morality from de Waal’s characterization of moral obligations as reducible to our sense of obligations to Shook’s equation of moral truth with widespread moral belief—and these are just the tip of the iceberg of such deflationary analyses that leave out the most interesting and important features of morality—fail to capture ideas rich enough to justify ongoing thick moral language. Their analyses are consistent with thoroughgoing moral anti-realism save for the nonfictional use of moral language, but it is just this that renders their language either confused or disingenuous. They appropriate with abandon the language while they, without explanation, jettison what is most interesting and instructive about morality. It is hard not to conjecture that fear of superstition has led to moral emaciation and desiccation; but the wild truth of morality is not so easily domesticated by such deflationary accounts.

Their biggest philosophical mistake, in my estimation, is an inference from the findings of evolutionary moral psychology to a weak version of moral realism, because this inference, rather than predicated on a reliable tracking mechanism, simply leaves out of the picture the need for any such tracking relation to be acknowledged, much less specified. My point could be taken as a specific application of a more general discursive strategy aimed at naturalism per se by the likes of Al Plantinga, J. P. Moreland, Vic Reppert, and others, notably the old Oxford don C. S. Lewis, to the effect that naturalism has a notoriously hard time accounting for such realities as cognition, deliberation, rationality, free will, consciousness, and the like.[16] I have intentionally delimited such a challenge to functional naturalisms with respect to morality in particular, where to my thinking the distinctive features of morality—its authority, its clout, its obligatoriness, intrinsic value—render these functional accounts doomed. Such deflationary analyses employing their thin concepts conjoined with traditional thick moral language obfuscate the fact that they by sleight-of-hand have simply bypassed the need to explain how it is our moral language tracks moral truth. Their thin concepts do justice neither to moral language nor moral experience, fail to correspond to the referents of ordinary moral language, and, finally, introduce a motivational problem that heretofore has gone unmentioned, and with this, after one penultimate point, I will finish because it bears most directly on the theme of this conference.

Both de Waal and Shook largely think that something like Christian faith at its best reflects with a fair degree of accuracy solid ethical content, but that, to one degree or another, it is possible to disentangle the moral content from religious foundations and see it stand on its own feet. Shook is more sanguine than de Waal about expressing such confidence. This is relevant at least to mention at this juncture because here the operative issue pertains to moral content—inalienable rights if such there be, essential human equality, and so on—as well as our access to such content, which are at least intriguing to consider for a moment. Without belaboring it or claiming this to be my own considered view, it is worth noting, in contrast with our confident functionalists, Nietzsche’s diametrically opposite view of the matter from Twilight of the Idols. Speaking of, appropriately enough in this context, the English, here is what he had to say:

Christian morality is a command, its origin is transcendental. . . . it is true only on condition that God is truth—it stands or falls with the belief in God. If the English really believe that they know intuitively, and of their own accord, what is good and evil; if, therefore, they assert that they no longer need Christianity as a guarantee of morality, this in itself is simply the outcome of the dominion of Christian valuations, and a proof of the strength and profundity of this dominion. It only shows that the origin of English morality has been forgotten and that is exceedingly relative right to exist is no longer felt. For Englishmen morality is not yet a problem.[17]

The motivational problem, in a nutshell, is this: such functional analyses water down moral categories while exploiting the authority-laden language of morality. Embedded at the heart of such analyses are seeds of its destruction. For invariably rationality will declare that the sturdy foundations of morality necessary for providing adequate reason and motive to be moral and to take morality with the seriousness it deserves have been lost. That plenty of such naturalists—like de Waal and Shook—remain wonderful people eminently better, in my estimation, than their worldview and faithful in their commitment to humanistic impulses with which many of us heartily concur and resonate is not in dispute. The question is whether such naturalists can sustain their moral commitments by anything more than sheer dint of effort, force of will, or personal predilection. Morality’s authority goes beyond preference, biological dispositions, and nostalgic sentimentalism. That functional naturalists can choose to be committed humanists psychologically is of course possible; that there is any intrinsic, binding, authoritative moral reason for us all so to live and to love our neighbor as ourselves is not something such naturalists have the resources by which to assure us—particularly, it would seem, when the dictates of self-interest and morality are at radical odds or, more broadly, when a commitment to morality appears prohibitively costly. Nietzsche’s prediction will likely prove right that such sentimental naturalists will be slow to come to this realization. I lament this, though, less than when they so steadfastly refuse to consider the possibility of a better explanation of classical morality and its authority robustly construed—an explanation involving not only the myriad resources of this enchanted world that they love to study with such passionate zeal and meticulous detail, but also its Creator who imbued it with its meaning and significance and to whom it points for those willing to discern its signals of transcendence.

[1] My own operative theology is an Anselmian and classical picture of theism.

[2] Classic historical works in moral phenomenology include Wolfgang Kohler’s Place of Value in a World of Facts (New York: Liveright, 1938), and Maurice Mandelbaum’s Phenomenology of Moral Experience (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1955).

[3] Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (New York: Norton, 2013).

[4] Shook even adduces Joyce as a shining example of a naturalistic ethicist, inexplicably enough.

[5] Sharon Street (2006), “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies, 127: 109-66.

[6] Ibid. 112.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 113. See Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). Also see Richard Joyce, The Myth of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). What makes Shook’s reference to Joyce so surprising is Shook’s apparent ignorance of the fact that Joyce is a moral anti-realist, or at least an agnostic on the question of whether there is objective moral truth.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 115.

[14] William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism,” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1909, 1975), 106.

[15] Here is another example of it. The universality of absolute morality that Shook eschews pertains to the issue of applying to all human moral agents, not just those in a particular culture or period of time. However, almost as soon as he broaches universality as a prerequisite for classically objective morality, he changes the topic to the issue of universal agreement, and he spends no small amount of time pointing out that we can find no such thing. Of course we cannot. That issue is not what is in dispute. If we asked people the world over to perform the calculation of multiplying two huge numbers, we would not find universal agreement on the answer to that question, either, but that does not give us cause for concern. Lack of universal agreement is completely unrelated to the issue of universal authority. Again, belief is one thing, and truth is another.

[16] See, for example,  throw in Nagel, along with mention of review essay

[17] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, tr. Anthony M. Ludovici (New York: Barnes and Noble, (1888) 2008), 46-47.

Photo: "Day 7 | Off Target" By Rgmcfadden. CC License. 

“Living Life All the Way Up”: Hemingway’s Moral Apologetic from Absence

Within the pages of a literary text lies a cosmos, each chapter hosting a world citizened by people of faith and doubt. Here, authorial intention, cultural representation, imagination, characterization, and realism constellate in textual code and the symbol, in diction and device, in tropes of verisimilitude, and in themes of selfhood and otherness to generate a moral worldview. Twentieth-century modernist literature—to which I’m drawn and in which I specialize—marks both a seismic shift in worldviews as well as a kaleidoscope of worldview itself. In modernism, there are many moral paradigms, but common to them all is the centrality of the self. Among Modernism’s writers, Ernest Hemingway stands as one of the movement’s most exemplary figures, an author unparalleled in illustrating the absence of the spiritually other as the heart of the self’s plight. Hemingway’s works demonstrate the mores of modernism, those themes of self-isolation, spiritual laceration, and nihilistic morality that defined a “lost generation,” as Gertrude Stein labeled it. In Hemingway’s works, humanity struggles to find and recover itself from those emotionally fragmented relationships that populate a bleak existential reality.

As an interpreter of literature whose lens is utterly Christian, I find Hemingway’s writing a complexly fascinating representation of an unredeemed reality, a worldview that betrays its need for the very divine presence it resists. I’m stricken by Hemingway’s recreation of a refractory human condition defined by a morality that reaches for transcendent spiritual meaning with a closed fist. Yet, reach it does. While Hemingway’s fictive worlds are populated with the emotionally wounded, the physically derelict, and the spiritually lost, they promote a resistance to Christian truth that yet resonates with a profoundly apologetic acknowledgement of that truth’s reality. Here, I’ll take a brief glance at Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises to draw out that veiled apologetic.

This novel, Hemingway’s earliest and whose title is taken from Ecclesiastes 1:5, captures humanity’s perennial moral dilemma: man’s attempt to find purpose and meaning in a world seemingly bereft of absolute truth but full of fractured communities. The Sun Also Rises has no God to speak of—at least not an active, immanent, or apparent one—nor any other authority placed above man except that which derives from man. Yet it is precisely an absence of God that haunts the novel, creating a modernist apologetic of misplaced desire for greater life meaning. True to its titular source, The Sun Also Rises decries human longing without divine fulfillment. The novel’s world is that of the self in painful void of the theologically other. The reader sees no God, though feels the need for His presence.

Jake Barnes, the first-person narrator of the story, is written as a wounded individual—physically, emotionally, relationally, and spiritually—whose experience in the Great War has left him physically marred and desexualized. Jake loves Brett (Lady Ashley), who feigns reciprocated love for Jake but resists giving herself to him because of his sexual impotence, even refusing to live with him due to fear of her own infidelity. Both Jake and Brett are part of a larger social circle of morally flawed characters, caught in lives of debauchery. After a series of promiscuous affairs, Brett rejects Jake for another suitor, leaving him in a state of dejection. Through such a mercurial myriad of relational instabilities, the reader follows Jake, the novel’s self-referential “I,” as he approaches life significance with a mercenary understanding that moral meaning was a tradable commodity bought and sold in the market of experience. No higher good matters in Hemingway’s modernist morality. All one can do in life is live it, and there is no room for meaning beyond existence and experience.

In a particularly telling scene, Jake, while in an insomniac state, expresses his view of moral dealings with others as “[n]o idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values.” He continues,

You gave up something and got something else. Or worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. . . . Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what is was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it.

Jake’s practical existentialism exchanges any kind of spiritually underpinned or absolutist morality for a rather bleak pragmatism. Jake cares not for meaning but for social functionality. This passage immediately follows Jake’s bitter response to his relational despairs with Brett Ashley. Jakes says, “To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Brett Ashley.” Here Jake operates along the lines of his own isolation in which his relational distanced proximity to others determines, in part, his estimation of self-worth and morality.

In Jake’s melancholic world of self-enclosed morality—a virtual display of vanities upon vanities—beliefs do not shape man’s moral makeup. Instead, self-protection reigns. If Jake cannot have Brett, then he will damn her. And while the novel features sparse solitary acts of “rightness,” as in Jake’s compensating the prostitute for her wasted evening, each gesture proves to be of no real consequence—yet another dimension of the novel’s display of meaninglessness.

For Hemingway, moral positioning takes place in relation to the community, or lack of, as opposed to God or a higher authority. Pre-modern models of authority would have certainly shown the importance of understanding life in relation to transcendent meaning rather than an inward-turned existentialism as seen in The Sun Also Rises. Buried within the self, however, and twisted up with that inward turn rests a cautionary tale of life without the sacred. As a Hemingway-esque sun of moral emptiness rises on the novel’s broken characters, an apologetic from the absence of God appears. Modernist morality shores the fragments of wounded morality against the ruins of the human condition, revealing and arguing for the need for divine presence.

Absent any divine presence, characters futilely search for moral meaning in a murky society of modernist selves, a world of wounded egos in relationship with other wounded egos. It’s remarkable how often Hemingway’s common theme of broken relationships opens up into a consideration, albeit cynical, of existential virtue with an ever-present realization that life can, indeed, be wasted. Like many other early- to mid-twentieth-century modernist authors who lived through and wrote intently about death, Hemingway draws on this imagery to communicate the ecclesiastical futility of life, bringing this message to the forefront of the novel as death looms over the characters.

Jake is a wounded veteran who has seen and nearly experienced death. Romero, a matador, exemplifies death by characterization and vocation and embodies modern man’s nearness to death. Hemingway uses this character to overemphasize death, drawing on the metaphor of bullfighting to demonstrate its vitality and its symbolic significance of fully living life. “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters,” Jake says. Cohn, another example of modernist morality, is consistently portrayed as lifeless throughout the story: from his passive role in relationships, “I rather liked him and evidently she led him quite a life,” to his losing fight with Romero that essentially killed whatever spirit that remained in Cohn. The novel’s worldview of self-centered morality includes its characters’ perpetuating dismal fates, symbolic deaths, and self-destruction.

Cohn is a most interesting example of this bleak perpetuation. A product of both tradition and severe codependence on women with much stronger personalities than his own, Cohn admits what he sees as his existential problem to Jake, “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.” Cohn seeks adventure in traveling to foreign places in hopes to find meaning and fulfillment, to which Jake replies, “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” Cohn is the quintessential modern man, lacking meaning and purpose in his world, and vainly searching for a “lived life.”

Highly impressionable, Cohn’s experiential and emotional capacity depends on his falsely constructed ideas of reality, primarily derived from books and the women who have ruled him. Jake observes, “Several women had put themselves out to be nice to him [Cohn], and his horizons had all shifted.” Jake even attributes to the writing of Mencken Cohn’s inability to enjoy Paris. Cohn’s easily swayed romantic notions of women and wandering are partly pursuits of “purification,” as Hemingway writes it. By fleeing to new places and experiencing new dynamics of community, Cohn seeks a kind of self-cleansing. Man’s search for higher meaning takes a thematic turn, when Jake warns Cohn to not seek new geographic places as a way to finding one’s meaning in life. In a conversation between the two about travel from France to Spain, Jake depicts France as a corrupt country, a place where value is determined by money, “Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. . . . If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money.” Jake contrasts this with Spain, where financial value and exchange are minimized in light of the celebratory mode of carefree living. In Spain, “[e]verything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta.” Jake and his expatriate community move spatially in attempts to move meaningfully. In the end, their attempts to find meaning by experience and adventure are tainted by the presence of their “selves.” The idea that Jake initially set up of not getting away from self by going to different places still holds up; no matter where they go, there they are. The self is omnipresent.

What ties Cohn to Hemingway’s modernist presentation of morality is the character’s lack of perception concerning what is valuable and true. Cohn’s is a blind romantic sentimentality. Indeed, Cohn’s moral imperceptibility lends itself to the modern mold of meaning without an absolute point of reference, a fixed standard beyond the self. That self, ever sprawling out in empty relationships, simultaneously closes back in on itself in condemnation (cf. Charles Williams’s Descent into Hell). If there is one word spoken by the characters in The Sun Also Rises that define human relationships, it is the word “hell.” For Hemingway, “hell” becomes an anti-theology, both denying the possibility of and affirming a pitiful desire for a transcendent adverse reality. Jake Barnes, Cohn, Romero, Lady Brett—indeed, all of the novel’s characters—cast their lives and the lives of those around them into a damned state. Brett describes her love for Jake as “hell on earth.” Jake wishes women, Brett specifically, to go to hell. Another character, Bill Gorton says, “road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs.” Robert Cohn tells Mike Campbell to go to hell in a fit of jealousy and then says he feels “like hell, naturally.” Jake and Bill say of Cohn, “Oh, to hell with him! He spends a lot of time there. I want him stay there.” Brett tells Jake, “I feel like hell” as she confesses her love for Romero the matador. In a passage where Cohn hits Jake, “hell” is used six times, four of which in the form “go to hell.” After an apology to Jake, Cohn confesses, “I’ve been through hell. . . . It’s been simply hell.” When Cohn leaves Paris, Jake says, “[T]o hell with Cohn,” but goes on to say repeatedly, “I feel like hell.” Finally, at the novel’s end, in a final conversation between Brett and Jake, Brett exclaims, “I’ve had such a hell of a time.”

The great irony of modern morality is that the hellish, unfulfilling feast of relationships proves to be precisely the greatest desire of the modern man. Hell, a term used often in the context of community, spreads through the “herd” of wounded society. In a moment in the novel when Jake talks about steers and the vulnerability of a lone steer, Bill promptly exclaims to Mike, “Don’t you ever detach me from the herd.” Morality in modernism centers, if it can indeed truly be centered, on the herd, the community of the flawed. As impossible as it may be for Hemingway’s heroes to relate to one another in a healthy and fulfilling fashion, it is even more impossible for them to live without relating to one another. There is no room for true individualism in Hemingway’s moral prescription. The novel denies ultimate fulfillment of meaning and truth but assumes man’s innate desire for them through relationship. If higher life meaning exists, it must be sought, though vainly, in the herd.

Characters in The Sun Also Rises define themselves by their relationship to the herd, but as the herd is a mere extension of the self—the reflexive modernist “I”—engagement in the socio-relational ultimately terminates in the self. The frustrated attempt to move beyond the self is where the novel’s apologetic lies. The novel readily raises questions of God and His role in life meaning, indefinitely suspending those questions in its characters’ desire for, but disbelief in, the transcendent. In the closing dialogue between Jake and Brett, she says, “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. . . . It’s sort of what we have instead of God.” To which Jake replies, “Some people have God. . . . Quite a lot.”

The tumultuous love affair between Jake and Brett concludes with them sitting in a cab together. While “God” has been convincingly displaced in the novel, leaving only the self and other selves to regulate morality, His unaccepted presence haunts the world of the text. In fact, a rare acknowledgement of God hosts one of the novel’s most honestly intimate moments: “We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. . . . ‘Oh, Jake,’ Brett said, ‘we could have had such a damned good time together.’ . . . ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” In the world of The Sun Also Rises, divinely authored moral meaning crumbles under the weight of broken life experience. Exemplified by a distinct displacement of transcendent meaning and the presence of fractured community, the meaning of morality proves as perishable as the self. The transparently dismal hope of a good life found in the wounded community of Hemingway’s world betrays a wantonly fraught human desire for the divine. Without God, the human condition remains bound to a hellish expression. Unless one ascends past the meaninglessness of selfed morality, like Solomon himself, one can’t live life “all the way up.” But isn’t it pretty to think so?

Photo: "hope" by Forest Wander. CC License

Link: Dr. Karen Swallow Prior on "What we lose by choosing death with dignity"

Photo by Chris B on Unsplash

Dr. Karen Swallow Prior has a new essay up at Think Christian. Using insights from literature, Dr. Prior provides thoughtful comments on suffering, the meaning of life, Brittany Maynard, and the Christian worldview.

There are few, if any, arguments that can answer the questions raised by Brittany Maynard’s decision. But perhaps literature, in embodying the paradoxes of human existence in the same way that human beings embody the paradox of decaying life, can go where law, logic and theology fear to tread. Literature shines light upon the mysteries of our humanity, and in so doing, shows how much more mystery lurks.

You can read her work here. 

Order and Justice: Mystery Novels as an Apologetic for an Objective Moral Order

Mystery novels, taken as a whole, reflect at a deep level the truth of the Christian worldview. And yes, I mean mystery novels in general, not “mystery novels by Christian writers.”

Here’s why.

In any normal mystery novel (notice that I am omitting weird literary or experimental ones; those are the exceptions that prove the rule), certain ingredients are essential:

1. A crime.
2. An investigation of the crime.
3. A resolution of the crime.

All three conditions point ineluctably toward a moral universe, one in which right and wrong, good and evil, have objective meaning. Let’s consider each point.

1. A crime. In order for a mystery novel to be satisfying, the crime needs to be something recognizably wrong, not something that is merely illegal. For instance, building an office block in contradiction to the city’s zoning requirements is illegal, but in itself is not wrong. The investigation and fining of the culprits would be dull, to say the least. But what if the builders bribed a city employee to make fake permits? What if the architect was blackmailing the mayor into turning a blind eye? What if the people who started to investigate turned up dead? Corruption, blackmail, and murder are crimes, not against some statute created by a bureaucrat, but against the moral order. These things are wrong – and so we have a crime worthy of a mystery novel.

Murder is the gold standard, as it were, of mystery novels, because lethal violence against a human being means violence aimed at destroying a being made in the image of God, one who bears the imago Dei. Murder is objectively worse than, say, stealing the Crown Jewels. That is also why murder that includes torture or degradation of the victim is worse than simple murder.

However, murder seems to be losing some of its ability to shock and disturb in a culture that is saturated with visual images of violence and death, and that is losing its hold on the dignity of the human being. After all, the reason murder is murder, and not just killing, is that human beings have special dignity from being made in the imago Dei, the image of God. So if murder is losing its edge, how is a mystery writer to provoke that desired frisson of moral outrage, so that the reader will eagerly await the unmasking, capture, and punishment of the villain? My completely unsystematic and unscientific sampling of mystery novels suggests that child victims are ever more “popular.” In our jaded culture, we may not be moved by the death of an adult, but we are not so degraded (yet) as to be able to shrug off the death of a child. And in a culture that has become blasé about adultery and homosexuality, one of the few things left that can raise a genuine sense of moral outrage is child molestation. At least so far.

1. An investigation of the crime. As human beings, we are free to make moral choices – which means we can, and indeed must, be held accountable for those choices. In a materialistic world, there would be no point in investigating a murder. The murderer was acting in the way that the bouncing around of his molecules determined he would act, and the victim was acting in the way his molecules determined he would act, and the intersection of the two yields one of them being returned to his component molecules. So what? In a materialistic world, bound by determinism, a murder victim would be no different from the victim of a natural disaster. To investigate means to look for an active agent in a crime; to find the person whose free moral action caused the criminal event to take place.
2. A resolution of the crime. The most satisfying resolution to a mystery is for the criminal to be found and punished. The fact that we find a resolution necessary in a mystery novel points toward the moral reality of justice. It is not enough to know what happened; we want justice, not just on an intellectual level, but on a visceral, intuitive level. A mystery novel satisfies precisely when it provides for justice; when it does not, we are left unsettled, unsatisfied.

In some mystery novels, we desire mercy for the criminals – but even that points, again, toward a deep recognition of the moral structure of the universe. Only if justice is the basis for our relationships can mercy enter the equation, for mercy is precisely that which is not deserved but granted, setting the demands of justice aside. Without justice, there can be no mercy, only arbitrary decisions about who is punished and who is not.

In this way, any well done mystery novel points to the existence of a transcendent moral order, of good and evil, right and wrong, justice and mercy grounded not in the passing whims of a culture but in the eternal being of the Creator.

Image: Sherlock. M. Fortsch. CC licsense. 

Podcast: Dr. Leo Percer on Moral Epistemology and the Character of God

In this week's podcast, we hear from Dr. Percer about the relationship of faith and reason in the context of the moral argument. Dr. Percer offers some tremendous insights on being made in the image of God and how we can have moral knowledge as well as how the Bible portrays the character and goodness of God.  

Photo: "Bible" by C. Zlelecki. CC License

Samuel James on "Brittany Maynard, Rachel Held Evans, and Not Giving Up"

Samuel James offers a thoughtful discussion on how to make sense of pain and despair in a world created by a good God. To make his point, James shines a light on the thinking of Brittany Maynard, who has chosen to end her own life rather than die from terminal brain cancer, and Rachel Held Evans, who views the God of the Old Testament as diabolical. You can find the essay here.

If the life of faith is anything, it is the holding of two truths in tension. The first truth is that pain and suffering and are real and grievous. The second truth is that hope has the final word in history and must be held onto. Despair’s temptation lies in its promise to relieve the tension, to grant rest to the one weary of waiting on God. It’s a temptation not just in seasons of cancer, but in seasons of spiritual crisis too.

Photo: "Life" by Ragesh Ev. CC license. 

Dr. Karen Swallow Prior on Hannah More, the Christian Worldview, and Creation Ethics

Dr. Karen Swallow Prior discusses her book, Fierce Conviction: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More - Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist, in this insightful, four part video series. Dr. Prior explains how Hannah More's Christian convictions motivated her to care for animals. Because of her Christian worldview, More realized the value and worth of God's creation. In these short videos, Dr. Prior reminds us that a complete Christian ethic includes not only care for others, but care for of all creation.  Dr. Prior's discussion of worldview also helps us see how Christianity makes sense out of the world.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Photo: "Mountains Majesty" by S. Harwood. CC license

Pagan Setting, Christian Virtues: Christian Character in Beowulf

The epic poem Beowulf dates to around the 8th century AD. We don’t know the name of the poet; indeed we don’t even know for sure if the poet composed the entire poem himself, or adapted and Christianized an existing, pagan oral poem. (For the record, I hold with the first theory, of original composition by a thoroughly Christian poet.) Loosely, the poem recounts the adventures of Beowulf, a young hero who comes to the rescue of the Danish king Hrothgar, whose people are being terrorized by the murderous attacks of the monstrous Grendel. Subsequently, Beowulf deals with Grendel’s mother and then, after the passage of much time, with a dragon.

There’s so much rich material in Beowulf that I hardly know where to begin, so I’ll just say this: the poem provides rich material for reflection on sin and virtue, with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon serving as powerful images of envy, anger, and greed.

When I read Beowulf, I am reminded that within my heart lives a little Grendel; when I feel lonely, how easily that turns to envy. And Grendel shows that envy turns to violence, whether the violence is outward as in the poem, or inward in the form of vicious thoughts or self-loathing. And I recognize the wisdom of the Desert Fathers, who knew that the deadly thoughts, or what we call deadly sins, can only be successfully fought by the cultivation of the corresponding virtue, with God’s help.  Just as Unferth in the poem redeems himself from his envy of Beowulf’s achievements by the generous act of giving Beowulf a sword to use in the fight with Grendel’s mother, so too I can turn away from envy by the acting out the virtue of kindness – having gentleness toward myself, acknowledging my own weakness, and toward those whom I love.

I’m also reminded of the danger of pride and the need for humility – a constant theme throughout the poem. Beowulf is not falsely humble: he recognizes and acknowledges that he has great gifts, and he uses them to do good work. I, too, can acknowledge that I have gifts, but like Beowulf I must always keep it very clearly in mind that these gifts come from God and are not my own. Beowulf keeps it real for me: he does pretty well with handling the temptation of pride, but he still slips up. He fails, and falls. And yet he’s still a hero.

For men, Beowulf has a particular value. The character of Beowulf is both virtuous and manly, which is a vision much needed today when our culture seems to send conflicting signals about manhood, including ambiguity about whether men are necessary at all, or about how men should behave toward women. Beowulf is confident, yet gracious; he is a man of action, and also one who freely shows his emotions.

In Beowulf, those attitudes of the heart that lead toward sin are shown for what they truly are: ugly, hateful, destructive things. And those attitudes of the heart that lead toward God are shown as attractive and desirable.

Beowulf shows that you can shout Christian truth loud and clear, even in a poem that never mentions the name of Christ, not even once. But even though the name of Christ doesn’t appear in the poem, I would say that the person of Christ certainly does: for Beowulf himself is a Christ-figure in many respects, for in the end we see that Beowulf lays down his life for his people.

A monster-fighting, sword-wielding Christ-figure? Now there’s an image of Christ that will resonate with different people, and on a totally different level, than “lowly Jesus, meek and mild” – and still be true to the Gospel. What a fruitful way to talk about virtue, and the imitation of Christ!

A Sketch of a Moral Argument Cumulative, Abductive, and Teleological

Three features of moral apologetics are particularly powerful means, individually and collectively, to make the case for God’s existence. The first is its cumulative potential. Cumulative case arguments in apologetics typically conjoin arguments like the teleological, cosmological, and historical arguments—or some such combination. Such cumulative cases are great, but here I mean a cumulative moral argument in and of itself. The most common sort of moral argument puts the focus on moral facts like moral values and duties, and perhaps under the penumbra of such concepts fall a constellation and cluster of other important moral dimensions in need of explanation like rights, agency, ascriptions of responsibility, human dignity, an human equality; but in addition to such facts, think also about something like moral knowledge. This expands the focus from metaphysics and ontology to moral epistemology, and thinkers like Mark Linville, Angus Ritchie, J. P. Moreland, and R. Scott Smith have done an admirable job fleshing out this aspect of moral apologetics.

What Kant referred to as “moral faith” broached two other features of morality: whether achieving the life of virtue is possible, and whether, even if it is, it’s consistent with happiness. John Hare puts a great deal of emphasis on these aspects of moral apologetics. The Moral Gap, for example, discusses both; the notion of the “gap” that God enables us to cross is all about our need for moral transformation and, especially, God’s grace and assistance to meet the moral demand, something we can’t do otherwise. The second part of moral faith, pertaining to the ultimate correspondence of happiness and virtue, has to do with nothing less than the ability to believe the moral life is a fully rational enterprise—a solution to what Sidgwick called the dualism of the practical reason. Classical Christian theism impeccably and best sustains both of these aspects of Kantian moral faith, and thus these additional aspects of morality allow for two additional variants of moral apologetics. Put all four parts together—moral facts, moral knowledge, moral transformation, and moral rationality—and the result is a powerful cumulative moral argument for God’s existence.

In addition to being a cumulative case, it’s arguably preferable for numerous reasons to advance an abductive moral argument. An abductive case is an inference to the best explanation. This form of argument need not deny that other alternative explanations of the range of moral facts (just discussed) are entirely deficient with nothing to add to the discussion. Numerous among them may well be able to do some measure of explanatory work. Consider the world in which we live. Especially if theists are right that this is a rich, fertile world imbued with all sorts of value and significance, and populated by creatures made in God’s image and invested with a range of powerful epistemic faculties, theism would predict that the resources of this world will provide powerful insights into its ubiquitous moral features. It would be altogether surprising if it were otherwise. The reason that morality provides evidence for God is not that the world alone can explain nothing about morality, but rather that the world and theism together can provide the considerably better explanation of those realities. An abductive case builds on the common ground shared by believers and unbelievers alike and invites a conversation about what can better explain the full range of moral facts and can explain them robustly, without domesticating them, watering them down, or subtly changing the subject.

My preferred approach to moral apologetics also features a strong recurring theme of teleology. If theism is true, and we have been created for a reason and purpose, we have been imbued and invested with a telos: a goal or aim. This makes excellent sense of the ontology of both goodness and oughtness. God as the ultimate Good, and the one in whose image we have been created, is both the source and goal of our lives and, ultimately, of any goods we enjoy.

Teleology also facilitates the acquisition of moral knowledge. So long as the operative meta-narrative of the human condition is that we’re pushed and pulled around by the ineluctable forces of the material world, we are hard pressed to maintain confidence in our belief-formation processes to reliably track the truth, moral or otherwise. But if God designed us in such a way that our cognitive apparatus puts us in touch with reality and makes real knowledge possible, then we can take the deliverances of our deliberations and reflective processes veridically.

Teleology functions at the foundation of Kantian moral faith as well, bolstering the two variants of moral apologetics resting on its foundation. If God created us for fellowship with him—to love God with all of our hearts and souls and mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves—we simply have far better reason to think that total moral transformation is possible. If this world is all there is, and the resources of naturalism exhaust the tools at our disposal, morality seems to stir a desire within us that can’t be satisfied, a thirst that can never be quenched. For this life and world will end without anyone ever having achieved a state of moral perfection. But if Christianity is true, then our desire to be delivered entirely from every last vestige of sinfulness and selfishness is no futile pipe dream, but an intimation of things to come, an echo of eternity, when all is set right, all tears are wiped away, and we will be changed entirely to conform with the One who made it possible. And in that state, if Christianity is true, we will find our deepest joy—when holiness and happiness not merely conjoin or cohere, but kiss and consummate. This was God’s intention and our God-invested telos all along.

So, construct a powerful, patient abductive moral apologetic, wrapped with a robust teleology that encompasses every part of the cumulative case for God’s existence, and you’ve got the makings for a formidable argument indeed—one that can illumine the mind, stir the heart, and move the will.

Photo: "Construction" by A. Levers. CC License.