Podcast: Chad Thornhill on the Doctrine of Election and the Moral Argument

On this week’s episode, we hear from Dr. Chad Thornhill regarding the doctrine of election and some of the implications for the moral argument. Certain views of the doctrine of election might pose substantial problems for the defender of the moral argument, but Dr. Thornhill explains how, when we have a biblical understanding of the doctrine, these objections can be turned back and how a good understanding of the doctrine of election actually supports the moral argument.

Photo: “Irish United Nations Veterans Association house and memorial garden (Arbour Hill)” by W. Murphy. CC. License.

The Failure of Naturalism as a Foundation for Human Rights

(Ed. Note: At the time of writing, Dr. Menuge is the current president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society)

Introduction

Almost everyone is in favor of human rights, and many of our cultural debates depend on pitting one alleged human right against another.  Both of the major human rights instruments, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948) and the European Convention on Human Rights (1953) include the basic right to life, for the obvious reason that without life, none of the other rights can be exercised.  Yet today, it is common to claim that abortion and physician assisted suicide are also fundamental human rights.  Since the set of rights claims is inconsistent, we all need some principle that will tell us when a particular claim is (or is not) justified.   As Dave Baggett[1], Paul Copan[2] and John Warwick Montgomery[3] have argued at length, theism clearly provides such a principle.   But most philosophers are committed to naturalism.  So, can human rights be given a naturalistic foundation and avoid the need for God?

I will begin with a few remarks about the nature of human rights, and indicate the prima facie implausibility of naturalistic theories.  Then we will examine Evolutionary Ethics in more detail and show that its attempt to ground morality in natural history faces a serious dilemma.

1. Human Rights and Naturalism.

The modern idea of a human right developed as a response to Nazi atrocities in World War II and the inadequacy of appeal to the positive law of particular nations, since, in point of fact, the atrocities were legal.[4]  At the Nuremburg trials it was recognized that human beings have fundamental, intrinsic value and dignity deserving of protection, and that the state has no authority either to grant or to revoke human rights: these rights are universal (all humans have them), inherent (one has them simply in virtue of being human) and they are inalienable (they cannot be suspended or taken away).

An interesting consequence is that the obligation to protect human rights holds of normative necessity.  To be sure, a higher right can override a lower one (thus the right to self-defense may override an attacker’s right to life), but this is a case of two rights worthy of moral consideration, not one.  It cannot be said, in utilitarian mood, that one has a human right only if the consequences are good and thus perhaps that the attacker had no right to life:  rather, he had a genuine human right to life worthy of moral consideration that was overridden by a higher right to self-preservation.  Thus even though it may be overridden, the existence of a human right as a morally considerable factor is not contingent on circumstances, and this is why (at least) a prima facie obligation to protect human rights has normative necessity.

It is not hard to see why naturalism finds it difficult to ground such obligations.  This is just a special case of the general difficulty naturalists find in accounting for the existence of objective moral values and duties.   For naturalism, the entire cosmos is an unintended collection of undirected natural processes.   It is not true of any of these processes that they are (or are not) supposed to be a certain way.   Thus, on the face of it, the natural processes leading the members of a tyrannical regime to commit genocide are no different, morally speaking, from the natural processes that led Mother Teresa to care for the sick and the poor of Calcutta.   These processes simply are, and we cannot say that some are good (e.g. those protecting human rights) and some evil (e.g. those violating them).

The general problem is the well-known naturalistic fallacy.  No amount of facts about what is going on in nature imply anything about what ought, or ought not, to be going on.   Now a naturalist might embrace nihilism or some very strong version of moral anti-realism, but then they can no longer (without equivocation) claim to justify human rights claims since they do not believe human rights exist.  So what is a naturalist who affirms human rights to do?

A rather desperate suggestion is Atheistic Moral Platonism (AMP).[5]   According to AMP, it is just a brute fact that reality contains both the physical universe and a “Platonic” realm of moral universals (like justice and goodness), and so it is possible that there are objective moral obligations and duties.  However, this is highly implausible. The defender of AMP seems to have whipped out his philosophical credit card and added moral universals to the ontological cart with no serious attempt to show that the moral universals are grounded in the physical universe.[6]  And since there is no substantial relation between the physical and moral realms, there is no reason to expect that the moral universals have anything especially to do with us: why should they not protect the rights of rocks and mollusks, but be indifferent to human beings?   And even if these universals did apply to us, how could they generate obligations?  It is simply incredible that we can have moral obligations to impersonal universals like the form of the good or justice.   And this reveals a more fundamental problem: in our experience, moral obligations (e.g. to keep promises, be fair and impartial, etc.) obtain between persons, for it is persons who prescribe, persons to whom we are morally accountable, and persons whom we can wrong.

Most naturalists realize that they must show why moral values and duties are to be expected in a physical universe.   Naturalists may be either strict or broad.[7]  For strict naturalists, no teleology is operative in nature and so there are no goals (not even impersonal ones) that could ground moral obligations.  If this is how nature is, then J. L. Mackie was surely right to conclude that “objective intrinsically prescriptive features … constitute so odd a cluster of qualities and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events…”[8]  Indeed, there is no way (besides magic) that completely non-teleological processes can ground objectively binding prescriptions since there is no way the world is supposed to be.   It is not surprising then, that strict naturalists have often concluded that a non-cognitive approach to ethics is required (e.g. emotivism or constructivism[9]), and this means that any idea that we should respect and protect human rights must be an illusion.

However, broad naturalists typically claim[10] that even though teleology is absent at the level of basic particles, as more complex arrangements of these particles in physical systems develop, various higher level properties appear (e.g. consciousness, reason, free will, moral values[11]).  It is further claimed that these properties still qualify as naturalistic because they wholly depend on the physical arrangement of particles (via supervenience or emergence).   On this view, the basis for human rights is to be found in the natural, causal history of human beings: it is only because human beings developed the right kind of complexity that they have special rights.   Yet, it is precisely this claim of historical contingency that appears incompatible with the very idea of a human right.

2. Evolutionary Ethics.

While several versions of evolutionary ethics (EE) are possible, a shared claim is that the moral sense of human beings is the result of their natural history.   Since this history is contingent, it follows that our moral sense could have been different, leading us to make different moral judgments than those we actually do.  Darwin illustrates the point with a striking illustration.

If … men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.[12]

In this scenario, humans might have thought that (select) acts of fratricide or infanticide were not merely permissible, but obligatory.

But Darwin is not clear about whether these counterfactual moral beliefs would correspond to a different moral reality, and this leaves the defender or EE two options, which I call Weak EE and Strong EE.  For Weak EE, it is only moral psychology (our moral beliefs) that would be different if we had been raised like hive bees.  So fratricide and infanticide might still be wrong even if we didn’t think so.   But for Strong EE, it is moral ontology itself (what is right and wrong) that natural history explains.  And so in that case, had we been raised like hive bees, fratricide and infanticide would have been right.

Now it is certainly possible for a proponent of EE to defend either moral skepticism[13] or some version of moral anti-realism.[14]  But that would not be sufficient to show there is a genuine moral obligation to respect and protect human rights.  Our question, then, is whether either Strong EE or Weak EE is a plausible foundation for this obligation.  I submit that it is not.  Strong EE faces a serious ontological problem: if it is true, it does not seem that there can be any such thing as human rights.   Weak EE faces an epistemological problem: while it is compatible with the existence of human rights, Weak EE makes it incredible that we could know what they are.  Either way, there is no effective, practical basis for defending human rights.

A. The Ontological Problem for Strong EE.

The trouble with Strong EE is that it makes human rights unacceptably contingent.  Of course, even a theist will say that rights are contingent in some ways: they are contingent on our having been made in the image of God.  However, granted that we are so made, the theist affirms that being human is enough to secure our rights and denies that any further contingencies (such as class, race, intelligence, strength or wealth) are relevant to our value.   By contrast, on Strong EE, being human is no guarantee that we will have any particular set of rights, since our rights will also depend on the details of our natural history.  Thus, had we been raised like hive bees, (select acts of) fratricide and infanticide would have been right, and this means that (certain) brothers and female infants would not have a right to life.   If so, then any right to life such brothers and infants have (because we were not in fact raised like hive bees) is not inherent: we do not have it because we are human, but because of the way we were raised.

Now of course, a defender of Strong EE might bite the bullet and say that his view still allows us appropriate rights in the actual world, where we were not raised like hive bees.  But this move incurs several serious costs.  First, the defender of Strong EE still must deny that there is any normative necessity to our obligation to protect life.  That brothers and daughters have a right to life just happens to be the case.  And yet the only difference between these individuals and others who happen to have been raised like hive bees is extrinsic (we are, note, not assuming some ghastly genetic experiment, so that in the counterfactual case, humans actually become hive bees).  Thus, second, Strong EE seems to violate the principle of relevant difference: it says two classes of individual have different moral value without indicating a relevant difference between them.  And third, Strong EE seems to have the same problem as classical utilitarianism.  When confronted with the fact that a majority may be made happy by the genocide of a minority, utilitarians typically retort that in the real world and over time, most people are made unhappy by such atrocities.  Even if true, this would imply that had a tyrant been more effective in brainwashing or slaughtering those who disagreed, genocide would have been right.  It is surely absurd to suggest that genocide is only wrong in the actual world because of administrative incompetence!

What is more, the defender of Strong EE is in no position to claim that human rights are inalienable or necessarily universal.  This is because changes in future living conditions could affect what rights we have.  Thus, suppose some tyrant loves hive bees (he sees them as model citizens) and decides that, henceforth, we are all to be raised in similar fashion.  With a stroke, brothers and female infants lose their right to life.  So even if they currently do have such a right, it is not necessary that they do, and the state could easily engineer circumstances which revoke that right.  Indeed, more horrific scenarios are possible, reminiscent of various science fiction novels and movies, where human beings are used as living batteries, fertilizer or food, and in which no one has a right to life (or has it for very long).   More realistically, we see that societies frequently have attempted to engineer living conditions such that (they claim) some group does not enjoy (full) human rights: slavery, child labor, the caste system, forced concubines, ghettoes and apartheid.  All of these, though, are clear examples of human rights abuses, and reinforce the fact that human rights are not dependent on living conditions as Strong EE claims.

Underlying this failure of Strong EE is that it appears to confuse two notions of “good.”  Natural selection can explain the retention of characteristics that are good for an organism, community or species, in that they increase the likelihood of survival and reproduction.   But as Richard Joyce points out, the fact that X is good for Y does not imply that X is morally good.[15]  Assassination is good for removing political leaders and exterminating people in gas chambers is good for ethnic purity, but this does not make either of them morally good.   And the same point applies to the biological good.  That mosquitoes serve malaria’s biological good does not imply that mosquitoes have any moral value, and the fact that (to use one of Darwin’s examples) tribal warfare serves the biological good of a particular tribe by enhancing cooperation and cohesion within it (even if the tribal warfare violates all conditions of a just war) surely does not imply that such tribal warfare is morally good: indeed it could constitute a major human rights abuse.  And similarly, the fact that fratricide and female infanticide might be biologically good for human beings if they lived like hive bees does not imply that those behaviors would be morally good.  Thus there is a logical chasm between what serves the biological interests of a species and what is morally valuable.

A yet further problem is that once our rights are made contingent on the actual distribution of natural capacities conferred by our natural history, there is no good reason to think that only human beings, or that all human beings, have special rights.  If rights are based on our degree of biological adaptedness, then, as James Rachels points out, the humble cockroach is just as well adapted.[16]  So Peter Singer would be right to reject the claim that only human beings have special rights as “species-ism.”  And if rights are based on our natural capacities, then it will always be possible to find individuals who suffer physical and mental defects and thus do not have rights.   And in any case, natural capacities are not uniformly distributed, and this would undermine the basic equality of human rights.  Thus, since some people are naturally smarter or stronger (etc.) than others, it appears some people will have more rights than others.  Yet again, being human is not enough for naturalism: one has to be the right kind of human.  This utterly subverts the idea of human rights, rights one has simply in virtue of being human.

So, if Strong EE is true, it seems that there really are no universal, inherent, inalienable rights.  Even if there are some “rights” (e.g. conventional or contractual ones), human rights will not exist.

B. The Epistemological Problem for Weak EE.

Weak EE, as a modest thesis of moral psychology, is certainly consistent with the existence of human rights.  However, it also has nothing to do with the explanation of those rights.   On this view, had we been raised like hive bees, we would have believed that fratricide and female infanticide were right, but that would have nothing to do with moral reality.    Certainly, this view allows that we might have true moral beliefs, since what our natural history disposes us to believe might happen to correspond to moral reality.   But Weak EE surely gives no grounds for thinking we could know moral reality (including human rights) and even some reason to think that we could not.

It is virtually universally agreed amongst epistemologists (whether internalists who demand we can see why our belief is true, or externalists who are satisfied provided we are in fact reliably connected to the truth) that it is impossible to know that p if one is only right by accident in believing that p.  Thus, if I look at a broken clock that says 7:30 and it is 7:30, my belief is true, but I do not have knowledge because I was only right by accidental coincidence.   A natural explanation of what went wrong here is this: the fact that it was 7:30 had nothing to do with why the clock said 7:30, and hence nothing to do with why I believed that it was 7:30.

Unfortunately for Weak EE, if it is true, then we are in a precisely similar situation regarding our moral beliefs.  For on that view, natural history is causally relevant to our moral beliefs, but does not account for moral reality.  So if we had been raised like hive bees we would think fratricide and infanticide were right even if they were not.  And, it could be that we think fratricide and infanticide are wrong (because we were not raised like hive bees) even though they are right.  But now suppose that our belief that fratricide and infanticide are wrong happens to be true.  Still, it is not knowledge, because what made us believe this has nothing to do with why our belief is true.

Notice that internal conviction of certainty is of no avail.  Suppose we were to meet a tribe of humans raised like hive bees.  They would be just as convinced that we were wrong, holding back out of superstitious ignorance from our sacred duties of fratricide and infanticide, as we would be convinced that their behavior was morally abhorrent.  Thus the best that Weak EE could hope for is that we are right by the fortunate accident that we were raised a certain way.

But then of course, one must also ask how likely it is that our beliefs would track moral reality if Weak EE is true.  We have already seen that there is no logical connection between biological adaptedness (what is biologically good for an individual or species) and the moral good.   If so, and given the vast number of possible natural histories we might have had, it seems highly unlikely that our belief-forming mechanism would be apt for moral truth.

This is not merely because of the well-known general problem for naturalism, that biologically useful beliefs do not have to be true.  In the case of beliefs about physical reality, the naturalist can at least offer some sort of causal theory of representation that connects the physical state of affairs with a belief, and it is not wholly implausible that having true beliefs about some local aspects of the physical environment would be adaptive.  Matters are wholly different with moral beliefs since moral values are not physical items with which a creature’s body and brain could causally interact (at least, not on any naturalistic view of causation).  As J. P. Moreland points out, “value properties are not empirically detectable nor are they the sorts of properties whose instances can stand in physical causal relations with the brain.”[17]  So even if moral values are out there in the world, naturalistic evolution has no credible account of how our belief-forming mechanism could be formed and honed so that we could come to know what they are, making moral skepticism the most reasonable option.  In fact, matters are even worse, as Richard Joyce points out.  On naturalistic assumptions, we would have the moral values we do because they are biologically useful even if no objective moral values have ever existed![18]  So if the explanation of our moral faculties and beliefs does not even depend on the existence of moral values, it surely follows that we cannot know them if they do exist.

So if Weak EE is true, even if there are human rights lying around somewhere, we can never claim to know what they are (indeed, for similar reasons to those given above, we cannot even have evidence of their existence and character).  This is as good as useless in justifying human rights and adjudicating competing human rights claims.

Conclusion

It is not difficult to see that the dilemma for Evolutionary Ethics is but one instance of a general problem for Naturalistic Ethics.  Given only the contingencies of naturalistic causation, there is no way to ground claims that hold of normative necessity.  Just like the authority of deductive logic, the authority of fundamental moral obligations depends on a kind of normative necessity that does not depend on, or reduce to, the contingent interactions of humans with their physical environment.  Indeed, we can run a precisely analogous argument to the argument against EE above if the naturalist appeals to individual learning history rather than the natural history of the species.   If we believe in real obligations, like those to respect and protect human rights, we should abandon naturalism.

Notes

[1]For example, see David Baggett and Jerry Walls’s, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[2]See Paul Copan, “Ethics Needs God,” in eds. J. P. Moreland, Chad Meister and Khaldoun Sweis, Debating Christian Theism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 85-100 and “Grounding Human Rights: Naturalism’s Failure and Biblical Theism’s Success” in ed. Angus J. L. Menuge, Legitimizing Human Rights: Secular and Religious Perspectives (Farnham, UK; Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 11-31.

[3]See John Warwick Montgomery’s The Law Above the Law (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishing, 1975) and Human Rights and Human Dignity (Dallas, TX: Probe, 1986).

[4]John Warwick Montgomery, The Law Above the Law, 24.

[5]An example of this sort of view is provided by Erik Wielenberg, “In defense of non-natural, non-theistic moral realism,” Faith and Philosophy 26:1 (2009) 23-41.

[6]See the critique of Wielenberg in Paul Copan’s “Grounding Human Rights: Naturalisms’s Failure and Biblical Theism’s Success,” 13-14.

[7]See Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro’s Naturalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008).

[8]J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 115.

[9] Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies 127:1 (2006): 109-66.

[10]An exception is Thomas Nagel [Mind and Cosmos (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)], who attempts to build teleology into nature at a foundational level.  Arguably, though, this natural teleology then stands in the same need of explanation as all of the “remarkable” phenomena (consciousness, reason and morality) which it is invoked to explain.  Otherwise, it suffers many of the same problems as AMP, since there is no reason to think the teleology is especially concerned with us, and nor is it the sort of thing to which one could have a moral obligation.

[11]See, for example, Larry Arnhart’s Darwinian Natural Right (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998) and Darwinian Conservatism (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2005).

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

[13]Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson, “Moral Philosophy as Applied Science,” Philosophy 61: 236 (1986): 173-92.

[14]For example, Sharon Street defends the idea that there are no moral facts, but that moral truths derive from a process of reflective equilibrium.  This is no use for defending human rights as those who gathered together to plan the “final solution” for the “Jewish problem” reached reflective equilibrium.

[15]Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 170.

[16]James Rachels, Created From Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 70.

[17]J. P. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei (London: SCM Press, 2009), 149.

[18]Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality, 183.

Photo: "Broken" by hjhipster. CC License. 

On Psychopathy and Moral Apologetics

Support Acts 17 videos on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3615911 http://www.acts17.net I'm David Wood. Lots of people have been asking me how I became a Christian, because I sometimes mention that I'm a former atheist but I usually don't share much of my story.

Editor's Note: The whole video is well worth watching, but you can find Wood's comments about the moral argument around 23 minutes into the video. Also, we would like to thank The Gospel Coalition for highlighting Wood's story. 

When David Wood was a boy, his dog was hit by a bus and died. Although his mother was terribly upset, he was not. He figured it was just a dog, now it’s dead, end of story. A few years later when a friend of his died, his response was largely the same. He didn’t feel any particular regret or remorse, but at the same time, largely owing to the very different responses of others, he sensed that maybe he should. Not everyone emotionally impaired in such a way turns violent, but he did. In years to follow, he extended his emotionally dead and unempathetic take on those around him by engaging in some horrifying acts, like brutally attacking his father with a hammer until he thought him dead (he wasn’t). Wood was convinced that right and wrong were fictions to be discarded at will and that the apathetic universe couldn’t care less how anyone acts.

The absence of empathy that Wood seemed to exhibit as a young boy is often indicative of psychopathy or sociopathy. Although sometimes these categories are treated interchangeably, some insist that there are crucial clinical differences between them. For example, some (like Chris Weller) suggest that, though both psychopaths and sociopaths tend to lack fear and disgust, sociopaths are more likely to be found holed up in their houses removed from society, while a psychopath is busy in his basement rigging shackles to his furnace. Psychopaths are dangerous, violent, cruel, and often sinister. Showing no remorse, they commit crimes in cold blood, crave control, behave impulsively, possess a predatory instinct, and attack proactively rather than as a reaction to confrontation.

In contrast, upbringing may play a larger role in a child becoming a sociopath than those diagnosed as psychopaths. Sociopaths project an appearance of trustworthiness or sincerity, but sociopathic behavior is actually conniving and deceitful. Often pathological liars, sociopaths are manipulative and lack the ability to judge the morality of a situation—not for lack of a moral compass (like we find in psychopaths), but because of a greatly skewed moral compass. Despite their differences, both psychopaths and sociopaths can wreak quite a bit of havoc and do much damage in people’s lives.

Since Wood was (1) remarkably unempathetic from such a young age, (2) seemingly lacking a sense of right and wrong rather than having a merely skewed sense of morality, and (3) engaging in extremely antisocial and violent behavior, perhaps this would suggest that he was more a psychopath than a sociopath. Since this is not my area of specialty, though, I am doing nothing more than offering my untutored guess. Yesterday the Gospel Coalition posted an article about Wood called “What Sociopaths Reveal to Us about the Existence of God.” For present purposes, we needn’t worry with the exactly right psychological diagnosis, but it bears pointing that, if anything, Wood seemed to be riddled with the more congenital, more entrenched, more debilitating of the two mental disorders, which is instructive. Wood wasn’t at all inclined to believe he should refrain from hurting others for fear he would thereby violate their “intrinsic value,” since this was a notion he scoffed at as a young man, thinking people were just biological machines for propagating DNA inhabiting a speck in a vast, empty, meaningless universe. For Wood was also, as a young man, an atheist, but this piece is not about his atheism. It’s rather about this mental phenomenon of psychopathy/sociopathy and its bearing on moral apologetics—and vice versa.

What does any of this have to do with the moral argument for God’s existence? Atheists Sam Harris and Erik Wielenberg, both well-known and outspoken atheists, think that the existence of psychopaths, in the clinical sense of the term—by some estimates making up as much as one percent of the population—poses a challenge to theistic ethics generally and divine command theory more particularly. In Sam Harris’s debate with William Lane Craig, Harris pointed out one potential connection between psychopathy and moral apologetics, but we can dispense with it fairly quickly. (Harris also devotes a section of his book The Moral Landscape to the issue of psychopathy, thinking it provides a case study of dissection of conventional morality.) In the debate Harris pointed out that psychopaths manifest an inability to distinguish between true moral claims and commands from authority. They tend to think that moral rules are just arbitrary impositions by someone in charge. Interestingly, Wood himself now admits that for years this was his own view—that for years he was willing to give up everything for the sake of a false freedom from the control of others he despised. At any rate, casting a moral theory of obligations as rooted in divine commands as an arbitrary morality of “authority,” Harris ambitiously argued that there is a psychopathic core to divine command theory—not a compliment to his theistic interlocutors.

As this site has emphasized repeatedly, divine command theory, rightly understood, is not at all an effort to render morality arbitrary, nor does it unintentionally accomplish such a feat de facto. Of course there is the occasional radical voluntarist (sometimes dubbed an Ockhamist, though writers like Lucan Freppert and Marilyn Adams have argued this is unfair to Ockham), but most mainstream divine command theorists don’t embrace anything so scandalous. No, God has reasons for the commands he issues—reasons tied to the nature and telos he’s given to us and, most ultimately, to his own perfect and essentially loving character.

Setting aside that arbitrariness misunderstanding, though, the even more egregious misstep of Harris’s is the suggestion that submitting to moral authority is psychopathic for equating morality with a presumed authority. This is a rookie mistake. Morality, particularly moral obligations, is authoritative—this is what Anscombe pointed out when she talked about the verdict- and law-like nature of moral obligations, what Richard Joyce means when he refers to the punch and clout of moral duties, what Mackie was pointing to when discussing the “queerness”’ of morality; part of what it means to reject objective morality is to deny that such prescriptively binding obligations exist. This shows there’s nothing question-begging about insisting on this aspect of morality; someone can deny objective morality, but such authority is precisely part of what they are denying. Psychopaths are not denying that morality possesses such authority, but rather insisting that morality, invested with such authority, doesn’t exist. Clearly such authority just is part of morality classically construed—whether morality is real or not. So acknowledging such authority is no evidence that those doing so are mentally unstable; such authority is rather one of those important moral facts in need of adequate explanation. The moral argument, especially in its long (abductive) game, wishes—carefully, patiently, and systematically—to make the principled case that theism, better than the plethora of secular moral theories on offer taken individually or in any particular combination, can provide the better explanation of such authority. The recognition of a true and legitimate authority hardly qualifies as psychopathic. Harris’s charged rhetoric here is strategically hyperbolic and borders the conversationally uncooperative.

Let’s turn now to the more serious objection to moral apologetics on the basis of psychopathy that Erik Wielenberg raises. He broaches the topic of psychopathy in his book God and the Reach of Reason. In the context of discussing C. S. Lewis’s moral argument for God’s existence, Wielenberg writes, “Perhaps more problematic for Lewis’s argument than variation in the deliverances of conscience is the fact that some people apparently lack a conscience altogether. Psychopathy (sometimes called ‘sociopathy’) is a personality disorder characterized by, among other things, the absence of the capacity to experience various emotions, including empathy, love, and guilt.” An interesting characteristic of psychopaths, experts tell us, is that they know the difference between right and wrong in some sense. Or they at least recognize that others view certain acts as right or wrong and can use such language appropriately. But such words hold no purchase for psychopaths, because they don’t care about morality. Wielenberg quotes psychologist Robert Hare, who’s studied psychopathy for over a quarter of a century: “They know the rules but follow only those they choose to follow, no matter what the repercussions for others. They have little resistance to temptation, and their transgressions elicit no guilt. Without the shackles of a nagging conscience, they feel free to satisfy their needs and wants and do whatever they think they can get away with.”

Wielenberg notes that there may be an odd individual here and there who doesn’t know the moral law, just as we find a few people color-blind or tone deaf. Robert Hare, too, uses color-blindness to explain psychopathy:

The psychopath is like a color-blind person who sees the world in shades of gray but who has learned how to function in a colored world. He has learned that the light signal for “stop” is at the top of the traffic light. When the color-blind person tells you he stopped at the red light, he really means he stopped at the top light. . . . Like the color-blind person, the psychopath lacks an important element of experience—in this case, emotional experience—but may have learned the words that others use to describe or mimic experiences that he cannot really understand.

Wielenberg argues the existence of psychopaths poses a problem for Lewis’s moral argument for God’s existence. Lewis argues that human conscience is a tool that God uses to communicate with us. “More precisely,” Wielenberg writes, “conscience is a tool that God uses to get us to recognize our need for Him.” Christianity tells people to repent and promises forgiveness; Lewis thus writes it “has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness.” Since psychopaths are unable to feel they need forgiveness—and psychologists estimate that about four percent of human beings are psychopaths (at least in the West)—Wielenberg asks where this leaves roughly one in twenty-five human beings? Has God abandoned them? This is how Wielenberg argues that the phenomenon of psychopathy undermines the premise of Lewis’s argument that says “the Higher Power issues instructions and wants us to engage in morally right conduct.” Why would God allow so many to lack the emotional equipment essential for engaging in morally right conduct? Wielenberg admits this may not be a decisive objection, owing to the possibility of a justification for psychopathy that lies beyond our current understanding, but he suggests it’s a phenomenon that does not fit very well with Lewis’s overall view.

In response to Wielenberg, I would point to the rest of Wood’s story. If his story were unique, this tack could be accused of being merely anecdotal, but it is one of many stories of remarkable personal transformation. Constructing his worldview to correspond with his flat and lifeless emotional perception of reality, Wood began to think that all of life was pointless. At the same time, he would try to hold his worldview together whenever occasional doubts crept in, until he finally realized that if life was pointless, so too was his effort to hold it all together. And then, he says, life offered him an alternative. In prison he ran into a Christian who was willing to defend his convictions rather than cower in silence or run for cover when Wood issued his usual barrage of insults and challenges. And the believer, named Randy, challenged Wood in return, forcing him to articulate his convictions, at which point Wood recognized something for the first time: “Things that made perfect sense when unquestioned seemed silly when questioned.” Questions of why the disciples would risk death to testify to the resurrection of Jesus or how life could emerge from lifelessness now began to plague Wood’s mind.

In an effort to refute Randy’s faith and consolidate his own, Wood began reading the Bible. He was refraining from eating at the time—long story—and found in scripture that Jesus was the bread of life. He wanted escape from his imprisonment, and read that the Son of God can set us free. He was painfully sick at the time, and read that Jesus was the resurrection and the life. Over and over again he was startled to find Christ to be the answer he was seeking. He spent time reading the books on apologetics Randy had given him, and gradually his secular worldview began to crumble. The design argument and the argument for the historicity of the resurrection began to make more sense to him, and then the moral argument began to speak to him as well. Heretofore he’d held two beliefs at the same time—that humans are meaningless lumps of cells, AND that he was the best, most important person in all the world—and the realization dawned on him how inconsistent these were. A best person, he began to see, required an objective standard of goodness. He went from thinking himself the best person in the world to the worst, and then realized that if his earlier assessment of morality was wrong and there really was an objective standard of goodness and rightness, he was in trouble.

At this point he recognized, without anything much emotional going on in him, what John Hare calls the “moral gap.” Either he was irremediably selfish and sick and there was no hope, or there was someone, or Someone, who could help. He knew he, riddled with his psychological, spiritual, and moral maladies, couldn’t help himself. Who could? Gradually he came to think that only God could do it, and Jesus, the One God raised. Eventually, beaten down, desperate, barely able to know how, he prayed for forgiveness. His was a dramatic conversion, which happens on occasion. Instantaneously, no longer did he want to hurt anyone, and, perhaps even more importantly, he had the strange sense that he’d known the truth all along.

Wood’s moral sense was damaged but not beyond repair. The grace of God and the use of his other faculties (like that of reason) enabled him to understand that he did indeed have moral obligations after all. So perhaps the feelings that psychopaths lack are not necessary in order to recognize the reality and authority of morality. A psychopath is a person who doesn’t feel appropriately about his actions, but reason still leads to moral law. So psychopaths are not incapable of recognizing the moral law, they just lack the right emotional responses to it. Thus they are disadvantaged, but not in a way that precludes knowledge of the moral law. So Wielenberg may be operating on a mistake, namely, the conviction that to be morally responsible one has to have the right moral feelings. Perhaps having moral feelings is not a necessary condition for being morally accountable and that having these feelings is just a gift from God to aid in the moral life. Wielenberg, therefore, may be treating conscience in an overly narrow sense. Perhaps he thinks of conscience as morally appropriate feelings that guide us to right action, but why not include among the faculties of conscience the deliverances of reason? In which case, if our feelings fail us, we are not without a conscience, but just without some of the faculties a healthy conscience would have.

Today Wood runs an apologetics ministry (Acts 17 Apologetics), and he says that, though God created the universe, he created human beings in a special way, imbuing them with his image. Wood realizes now that true freedom is deliverance from his earlier desire to turn against his Creator. Echoing C. S. Lewis, he says he now believes in Christianity as he believes in the Sun—because by it he can see everything else. Wood perhaps didn’t have the advantage of most: a well-functioning conscience and active capacity for empathy, which God can indeed and often does use to draw people to himself. Lewis was right about that, but perhaps overstated the case, because God has other resources besides. People don’t fall through the cracks if God is a God of love. Augustine once wrote that God bids us do what we cannot, that we may know what we ought to seek from him. In an important sense, we are all morally sick to the core and in need of healing that only God can provide; we all need to become not just better men and women, but new men and women. Contra Wielenberg, despite his deficiency Wood was still able to apprehend the truth, recognize the possibility he was wrong, throw himself on God’s mercy, and emerge from the darkness into the light. And for a person who underwent such radical transformation, these words from Ezekiel 36:26 seem poignantly apt: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

Photo: "The Return of the Prodigal Son" by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. National Gallery of Art. Public Domain. 

Interstellar and Partiality

Christopher Nolan’s latest film Interstellar tells a sweeping story, speculating on potential widespread destruction and human potential in the face of such prospects. Despite its scope, it also zeroes in on individual concerns, using the protagonist and his family as the vehicle for considering important ethical questions. One such question centers on the tension between particular and more general moral judgments.

In an early critical scene, Cooper, the main character played by Matthew McConaughey, must decide whether or not to embark on an incredibly ambitious space mission. This mission requires leaving his children behind and risking never seeing them again. But his success in this endeavor could allow for survival of the entire human race, which has few options. A scientist involved in the mission encourages his participation, appealing to Cooper’s obligations to mankind: “You can't just think about your family,” Doyle says. “You have to think bigger than that.” Cooper’s response suggests that he recognizes his responsibility involves both the particular and the universal simultaneously: “I'm thinking about my family and millions of other families.”

One could not blame Cooper had he participated in the mission solely out of a desire to ensure his own family’s survival. But as the above quote suggests, he is also motivated by broader concerns. It seems rather unlikely, in light of Cooper’s character, that he would have refrained from the world-saving mission if he did not have his own family to save. Nevertheless, the fact remains that there is something unmistakably particular and concrete about his driving motivation.

And this particularity is emphasized through the touchingly depicted relationship Cooper has with his daughter Murphy. Despite his visceral aversion to leaving her behind, and his arduous effort to part on good terms, he feels compelled and likely obligated to leave. This tension—between duties to his daughter and his duties to the rest of humanity—raises an interesting question: is Cooper morally obligated to complete this mission, a mission for which he is the best qualified? Even if the mission is a success and he returns, it’s likely that his children will be considerably older. Does he have a duty to leave them behind? In light of all that’s at stake, perhaps he does, but if this is so, it shows something interesting. Parental obligations have their limits. Partiality is permissible, but not sacrosanct.

In the ethics of Immanuel Kant, a person is to follow the categorical imperative, which tells us to act only on those principle we can will to become universal laws. And the principles, or maxims, on which we are to act are to be expressible in universal terms, singular references (like to family) having been expunged. Kant, however, departed on this score from a number of other important ethical thinkers, like Aristotle, who thought that moral judgments are always made in the context of family or polis. Kant’s insistence that such particular terms be replaced with universal ones is an interesting claim, but one that leaves many dubious.

Various feminist thinkers, for example, have emphasized that morality is to be understood in more particular terms than Kant would allow. On their view, moral determinations are to be made in the arena of our relationships, as we take into account all the various concrete details and particular specifics of the richly contextualized circumstances in which we find ourselves. We shouldn’t be guided by universal and abstract moral principles bereft of reference to those we know, those with whom we have cultivated lasting relationships.

They have a point, of course, which makes understandable the protagonist in Interstellar being motivated most of all by a desire to save his own family. But he’s also confronted with a truly universal challenge: the planet is slowly dying, and time for rescue is short. The survival of humanity depends on a successful mission. And this crisis, it seems to us, renders unworkable a desire to care only about his own family. Although most of us won’t find ourselves in so dire a situation, we live in a much smaller world than we used to. We’re aware of human needs that go beyond those of our immediate family, close friends, and nearby neighbors. Because of technological advances, we know about innumerable global needs. If there’s a tsunami in Japan, we can watch it in real time. If there are refugees in the Middle East, we can read tweets about them instantaneously. This makes it less permissible to be indifferent to the needs of strangers. Of course, we care most about our close family members and friends, but this doesn’t license indifference to others beyond those confines. In fact, we can become so fixated on privileging and prioritizing our loved ones that that very partiality can become perverse.

Recently, we read an article about how so many college-aged kids of today’s generation are experiencing a hard time growing up and assuming responsibility. One of the reasons for the phenomenon, it was suggested, is overly protective parenting. Parents are supposed to make their children feel loved and special, no doubt, but parents also have to teach their children that disappointments are inevitable; that, though undeniably valuable, they are not more objectively valuable than others; that achievement requires work; and that failure requires ownership of responsibility. In his examination of Kantian ethics, The Moral Gap, John Hare explains the psychological challenges children face upon realizing they are not the guide of their parents’ moral compass: “It can be a startling lesson for a child who has been the apple of his mother’s eye to discover that his mother is not willing to put pressure on his teacher to get him into a tem, or even to make a scene in the shop to get him the last remaining construction set of the kind he wants for Christmas.” Yet as most parents know, protecting fragile psyches from such hard truths to avoid their kids from experiencing pain is to confer them permission to remain children, if not infantile.

Neglecting the responsibility to impart these truths, however sober, to their children is a recipe for disaster and perpetual adolescence. Rather than an expression of love, it’s to privilege the particular to the neglect of broader truths applicable to everyone. One is implicated in an objectionable form of extreme partiality when her judgments fail to be qualified and regulated by universal truths. C. S. Lewis depicts this insight in a brilliant scene from The Great Divorce, where a mother has so fixated on her son that her “love” becomes idolatrous, blinding her to the fullness of reality in which he exists. Sadly, her extreme particularism costs her paradise and is tantamount to choosing darkness over light.

So the feminists have their points to make, but it’s a mistake to swing the pendulum toward partiality to the exclusion of what remains true for the whole of humankind. Close personal relationships are particularly vulnerable to corruption, or even abuse, when they’re not guided by sound moral principles that apply universally. Every evil in this world is the distortion of something primordially good—wives whose selfless service gets cruelly taken for granted, a healthy sense of self that transforms into pride. Partiality is permissible, but not sacrosanct. Particular obligations obtain, but don’t vitiate more general ones.

Photo: "Hubble Helps Find Smallest Known Galaxy Containing a Supermassive Black Hole" by NASA Goodard Space Flight Center. CC License. 

The Husbandry of God

How can I contain this word from the Lord?

His light has pierced my being

And sown in single seed

Both glory and shame.

Content was I

To wed in lowliness

And live in obscurity,

With purity my only dower.

Now, ravished with power,

I flout the conventions of man

To incubate God.

In lowliness how shall I bear it?

In modesty how shall I tell it?

What now shall I become?

But the fruit of God's planting

Is His to harvest.

No gleaner I, like Ruth,

But the field itself,

In whom my Lord lies hid.

                                                --Elton D. Higgs

                                                      (Dec. 8, 1980)

Photo: "Annunciation. Icon by Andrey Rublev. 1430s" by paukrus. CC License. 

Summary of Chapter 5 of John Hare’s The Moral Gap

This chapter will continue to discuss the problems in the current philosophical literature that arise from failing to recognize the existence of what Kant called “radical evil.” It will focus on a “the strength-of-desire principle.” This is the principle that we can satisfy the requirements of justice by giving initial preference in moral discussion to the stronger of two desires, independently of whose that desire is. Hare begins by raising an objection to the principle, namely, that it can’t account for the importance we give to the centrality of a desire in a person’s life. Then he’ll discuss responses to the objection. He won’t answer the objections beyond trying to show that they don’t account for radical evil.

According to the strength-of-desire principle, if two people are in competition for some good, and the first desires the good more strongly than the second, the good should be awarded to the first, other things being equal. Singer embraces such a view. Hare wants to propose that it’s unfair to give this weight to how much a desire is felt. There are some people who simply feel their desires very intensely. Hare calls them “Triggers.” Others know at least roughly how important it is to their lives as a whole and that their various desires be satisfied, even though they are felt less strongly. Hare calls these “Eeyores.” The principle discriminates in favor of Triggers. The principle encourages people to have as many strong desires as possible, which means that it encourages the development of the kind of person who makes life less happy for other people.

The first utilitarian response is “minimalist” in taking “strength” in the strength-of-desire principle to be a measure of either intensity or the tendency to action. “Intensity” is taken phenomenologically, as a matter of internal experience. Hare’s assuming a correlation between intensity of desire and tendency to action (though he realizes it doesn’t always obtain). Sometimes the principle’s application seems eminently fair. But sometimes it is unfair, but the minimalist can say we need to look at the whole set of desires that each party has. So perhaps one person’s desire is weaker, but more integrated with other desires. Some less intense desires may be central in the sense of being backed up by higher order desires; and some more intense desires may not be so central. The minimalist can give greater weight to desires that have purchase over other desires in the way central desires do.

But Hare says this move by the minimalist to accommodate the sense of unfairness of applying the principle fails. Adolescents are living through a period of maximum potential desire-satisfaction and aversion-avoidance. Contrast them with the “fifty-year-old” whose motivational structure has this feature: the desires and aversions are flattened out but connected with each other into a more coherent pattern. There can still be strong commitment, but it is more to the structure as a whole than in an adolescent, with more tolerance for the frustration of individual desires. Hare thinks that if we could wave a magic wand and accommodate all the desires and aversions of the adolescent or fifty-year-old, the minimalist would say we must prefer the adolescent. The adolescent’s aversion to boredom, for example, will be far greater than the fifty-year-old’s. The very connectedness that provided the initial minimalist response about centrality also makes boredom for the fifty-year-old more tolerable.

The fifty-year-old also recognizes that there are many different kinds of links between lower-order and higher-order desires, so is more able to tolerate the frustration of a number of desires because of the link with her higher-order desires. This again leads to privileging the adolescent’s perspective, but it wouldn’t be fair to discriminate against fifty-year-olds in this way.

The minimalist might say that the fifty-year-old’s desires should trump after all because the adolescent desires tend to be so frustrated. But Hare says that even if this is right it’s only because of contingent features of the adolescent’s situation. Hare wants to draw a distinction between desires I identify with and desires I do not. The apostle Paul distinguishes between two sets of desires he has: there are the desires produced by sin, and the desires which he identifies as what he wants. One way to make the distinction is to point to the difference between authority and power. Those with authority are entitled to obedience even if they do not receive it. Those with power do receive it, even if they are not entitled to it. The person I want to be and thus the desires I want to have can be authoritative for me, even if they are not the most intense or the most likely to lead to action (the most powerful). The law of sin may still have some power, but it no longer has authority—there’s been a decisive shift from the old man to the new man, even though there may still be habits left over from the old way of life.

So here is one way to characterize what it means to identify with a desire: regarding the desire as sinful. Sin is a nature, a large-scale pattern of desires. In the fifty-year-old, potentially anyway, there’s a coming to terms with oneself—which can be seen as a measure of wisdom and maturity. Recognition of good and bad. The bad can be recognized without being endorsed. She sees herself more as a whole more than she once did. She doesn’t blame faults on isolated desires or traits of character but on the whole package turned in the wrong direction. Because she sees more of the connections between her desires, she can see how complicated and pervasive are the influences of both sin and good. So there’s such a thing as (1) acknowledging desires, (2) endorsing them, and (3) identifying with desires. To identify with desires is to acknowledge them and not want to change them or have them changed. It’s stronger than acknowledging but weaker than endorsing it.

Hare’s point so far is that the minimalist can’t rescue the strength-of-desire principle from the charge of unfairness by appealing merely to the distinction between higher-order desires and lower-order ones. We need an account of what it is for a desire to be central. Even if we could provide an account of identification and endorsement, we would still not know what centrality meant; for centrality requires, in addition, that one find the object of the desire important to life as a whole. We can’t get to the idea of importance simply by adding up the number of decisions controlled. That would be more a measure of power than authority.

Decision theorists have a variety of ways to get a person’s preference ordering, by asking, for example, what she would sacrifice for what else. But this alone doesn’t make for centrality, either. There are too many different ways in which people prefer things.

The second view Hare considers is what he calls “the naturalist view,” because of its reliance on a view of human nature. Griffins’ Well-Being is an example. On this view we should assess the strength of desires not in the sense of felt intensity, or tendency to action, but in a sense supplied by the natural structure of desire. Griffins starts with a list of what makes human life good. He sets up a list of prudential values, which he calls the “common profile.” Autonomy, deep personal relations, accomplishment, etc. arranged in some hierarchy. The strength of a desire can be measured by the relative place of the desire in this hierarchy, which can be described as the natural structure of desire and the informed preference order. Hare thinks this preserves the strength-of-desire principle (interpreted in the naturalist way) and overcomes the objection from unfairness.

But he thinks there are objections, including that the list is parochial, or if expanded incoherent. Too much left out, like communal values and religious ones, or power and prestige. If the list is added to, the possibility of conflict arises.

The second objection: The list is too benign. It omits goals we actually have and which control much of our behavior, but which are not consistent with living morally. Power and prestige, for instance. We have all sorts of ignoble motivations. We shouldn’t be misled in constructing the list of prudential values by the names that people offer for them. Consider for example the abusive relations that have been tolerated in the name of deep personal relations. The root problem is the naturalist approach that reads these various values off our nature—some might be good and some bad, and radical choices might be called for. But how is this possible? (The question we saw earlier in the book.)

The third view Hare considers is the Rationalist View. Hare says we need a view that allows centrality to be considered in moral decisions alongside strength of desire in the minimalist sense, but which does not depend on too benign a view of human nature. Central desires need to be given weight independently of the desires’ intensity or tendency to lead to action, if we are going to avoid discriminating against Eeyores. But nature as the naturalist construes it doesn’t give us the notion of centrality we need. Here Hare wants to focus on a view of centrality that focuses on identifying with a desire (one of the three ingredients mentioned earlier). His interlocutor is the rationalist view of Susan Wolf (in Freedom within Reason). On this view, there is a kind of “deep” identification with a desire, or ownership of it, which allows us to hold a person responsible for an action which comes from such a desire, and thus enables us to apportion deep praise or blame to the action. We can apportion such praise and blame if we can determine whether the person whose desire it is possesses the ability to act in accordance with Reason.

Acting on a desire that bypasses my will is an example of not acting on a desire deeply mine. Hare here relies on the Humean (and Calvinist) compatibilist tradition, which distinguishes between necessity and compulsion. To value something, on the view that deeply identifying with a desire requires its going through one’s will, is to think it good or to think there is some reason to want it. Alternatively, to value something is to endorse the desire for it. Not all desires are endorsed. Endorsing or valuing is more than acknowledging a desire. We can value things inauthentically in some sense, so more needs to be said. The rationalist makes this move: She says that the agents in such cases of inauthentic valuing are not able by their own powers to act or choose in accordance with Reason. Reason means this: whatever faculty or set of faculties are most likely to lead us to form true beliefs and good values. The idea is that an agent is responsible for a decision if it is made in light of all the reasons there actually are for doing and for not doing it. The rationalist could say that an agent deeply identifies with a desire if the object of the desire is something she values and at the time of her valuation she is able to act or choose in accordance with Reason in this sense.

Hare’s contention is that the rationalist’s account does not allow for radical evil. Wolf exaggerates our natural capacities to live a moral life. Wolf tweaks her view to suggest that what is necessary for being responsible is that we recognize and appreciate a set of reasons sufficient to show which action or choice would be right. (But I’m still not responsible if the reasons I entertain for an action are not sufficient to show the action would be right.)

Note, Hare says, that the failures allowed on this account are cognitive failures or deficiencies of time. Hare’s already suggested that cognitive failures can be a product of moral failures. An agent’s own moral failings can cause her to be blind to certain moral considerations (or reasons for action). What considerations a person is open to depends in part on what sort of person she has allowed herself to become. The rationalist position is that a person is responsible for an action only if at the time of performance she possesses the ability to act for the sake of the reasons there are in favor of the action and against it. But a person can get into bad habits; and when she does, she can become insensitive to some of the considerations there are against an action. She gets used to seeing things the way it becomes in her interest to see them. But Hare insists she’s still responsible, and she’s owned those desires. This is true, he says, despite her inability to do otherwise, that she “can no longer act or choose on the basis of the reasons there are against her pattern of action.”

And there aren’t just failings from deterioration. Some failings start at the beginning. We may have grown up ignoring certain considerations. Considerations of cultural blindness should be a cause for hesitation about our moral capacities—think slave owners a few centuries back. Kant, contra these rationalists, would say we can’t overcome evil propensities on our own, despite faintly hearing the call of the moral law. On Kant’s view, we can nevertheless hold people responsible even if they can’t themselves overcome the desires which obscure the call of duty. They deeply own their desires. How to combine realism and accountability? The rationalist insists that the responsible agent must be able to act and choose by her own powers in accordance with Reason. But this is too optimistic, Hare says. What we need is a theory which both allows that morality is possible for us, and does not exaggerate our natural capacities. One theory of this kind is that the morally good life is possible for us, but not by our own devices.

The rationalist’s strategy for understanding responsibility is to move back from desiring to valuing (because not all desiring is deeply owned), and then to move back from valuing to Reason (because not all valuing is deeply owned). Hare thinks the rationalists have stopped too soon, for the faculty that leads us to form our beliefs and values doesn’t reliably track the True and the Good. Even if such a thing as Reason exists, our access to it is unreliable. Even in those in which a faculty for Reason survives, we shouldn’t go on to say that for these folks accountability means that they can by their own devices act and choose in accordance with it. This does not fit with the experience of the overwhelming difficulty, even in the best of circumstances, of leading a morally good life.

State of the Site

This term marked the start of MoralApologetics.com. It is a website the vision for which had been in my head for a while, but I am not the most technologically or social media savvy person, to put it mildly, and I was rather riddled with fear about getting the project underway. I didn’t really know the first step about purchasing a domain name or setting up a web page. With reticence and tentativeness, sometime late summer or so, I asked for help from Facebook, and several folks generously volunteered. I availed myself of an offer by former star student Delia Ursulescu, who really got the early ball rolling. I am so very grateful to her for getting us over the first major series of hurdles. And then Jonathan Pruitt, a student in the Ph.D. in theology and apologetics program here at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, enthusiastically came onboard with great energy and a head full of innovative ideas on how we can move the site forward. He’s been my Managing Editor ever since, my right hand man, and rumor has it a middle-of-the-night conspirator in a trip to IHOP for a nocturnal podcast. My English professor wife has also helped immensely with editing and has been, as always, a faithful source of support, encouragement, and inspiration. In the three or four months we’ve been up and running, the website has really taken off. We’ve garnered nearly half a thousand Facebook likes, and we’re just starting to attract Twitter followers, a more recent initiative. Gary Habermas wrote a nice blurb for our site, and FB nods have come from no less than public philosopher Tom Morris (formerly from Notre Dame) and apologist extraordinaire William Lane Craig (from Reasonable Faith). We were delighted to see a talented writer and friend, Corey Latta, come onboard early on to write for us, and we’ve been able to assemble a growing team of theologians, philosophers, Old and New Testament Bible scholars, and literary experts to write for us and generate podcasts—from Biola to Houston Baptist to Liberty, from coast to coast and lots of places in between, not to mention from all around the world. Two brilliant New Zealanders who do cutting-edge work in the area of theistic ethics, Matt Flannagan and Glenn Peoples, have been generous enough to share their work, and Angus Ritchie in England promises something soon. We’re currently in the middle of a writing contest along three different dimensions: philosophy, Bible, and literature. My dear friend and undergraduate mentor Elton Higgs has written poems the site has featured. It’s been just great fun.

We want to continue to showcase and highlight the terrific work getting done by a broad array of scholars and thinkers on topics related to the powerful apologetic resource morality provides. The topic is so rich and fertile and multi-faceted it’s going to take contributions from a range of disciplines to do it justice. We’ve only just begun. Potential to build a cumulative, multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary moral apologetic is great, and the time is right.

Please pray for the site and the impact it can have, and as you feel led, contribute something. Moral arguments are here to stay; in fact, they’re catching on and gaining momentum. They’re deriving strength from top-notch analysis and imaginative work, both fiction and nonfiction. We hope to feature work by the Paul Copans and J. P. Morelands, but the site isn’t just pitched to scholars and Ph.D.’s. We want folks from a broad array of backgrounds and educational experience to catch this shared vision. Some essays or blogs or podcasts are pitched at higher levels than others, but there’s something for everyone. We want the site to be a microcosm of the body of Christ—with lots of members, lots of different moving parts, plenty of diversity, but all of us working together in the same direction, to accomplish together what we couldn’t have accomplished on our own. We want to play a leading role in helping moral apologetics do the work we know it can in bringing attention to the moral features of this world that serve as a signal of transcendence, a powerful piece of evidence for a good and loving God: the locus of value, the Source and Goal of our best moral impulses, the one who invested this world with its sacramental significance; who promises to be with us through every trial, forgive us every sin as we turn to Him in faith and repentance, and who has the resources to wipe away every tear, redeem every suffering, and put this world aright.

Blessed Advent Season to you all!

Dave Baggett

Photo: "waterplace condo tower" by J. Nickerson. CC License. 

Morality and The Recalcitrant Imago Dei

The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (Veritas)

By Moreland, J. P.

The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (SCM Press, 2009) is a concise, deep, challenging, and wide-ranging critique of philosophical naturalism. In it, philosopher J.P. Moreland argues that there are several aspects of reality which naturalism is unable to account for, while theism can: consciousness, free will, rationality, morality, value, and a substantial human soul. The arguments are controversial and many will disagree, but I would urge anyone who has the time and inclination to read and think about this book, if you are interested in comparing the explanatory power of naturalism compared to theism with respect to these issues. If Moreland is right, and I think he is, theism has more explanatory power regarding many central aspects of human persons. I don't agree with everything in the book, of course, but the case is very well made.

Rather than summarizing the entire book, I will focus on the last chapter which is entitled "Naturalism, Objective Morality, Intrinsic Value and Human Persons." Moreland begins the chapter by noting three features of the moral order:

1. objective, intrinsic value and an objective moral law;

2. the reality of human moral action; and

3. intrinsic value and human rights.

His claim is that these features of moral reality fit very well within a theistic worldview. By contrast, some naturalist philosophers believe that naturalism yields defeaters for these aspects of moral reality. Moreland alludes to naturalists John Bishop and Michael Ruse as examples of such philosophers. (As a side note, other philosophical naturalists, such as Erik Wielenberg, disagree, and contend that the foregoing can fit within a naturalistic metaphysical framework. But Moreland's points count against a naturalist view which seeks to accommodate such non-natural properties within its ontology if he's right that these features have better metaphysical fit within a theistic framework.)

Moreland offers an argument that the following features are defeaters for a naturalistic worldview. To fully appreciate and evaluate his argument of course requires reading the chapter in the book, but I'll give a quick summary of his points.

1. The existence of objective moral value: If the universe starts with the Big Bang, and over its history we find the arrangement of microphysical entities into increasingly complex physical compounds, how does value arise? How can a naturalist, as a naturalist, embrace non-natural, objective values?

2. The nature of the moral law: The moral order presents itself imperatively, that is, as something which commands action. The sense of guilt one feels for falling short of the moral law is best explained if a good God is the source or ultimate exemplification of that law. As Moreland puts it, "One cannot sense shame and guilt towards a Platonic form" (p. 147).

3. The instantiation of morally relevant value properties: Even if a naturalist allows for the existence of some Platonic realm of the Forms, the naturalist has no explanation for why these universals were and are instantiated in the physical universe.

4. The intersection of intrinsic value and human persons: How is it that human beings are able to do as morality requires, and that such obedience to the moral law also happens to contribute to human flourishing? Theism has an obvious answer to such questions related to human nature and the intentions and design of God, but it is not clear, and is far from obvious, how naturalism would account for this.

5. Knowledge of intrinsic value and the moral law: Given that such values are not empirically detectable and cannot stand in physical causal relations with the brain, how is it that we could know such things? Evolutionary explanations fall short because of what is selected for in evolutionary processes on naturalistic versions of evolutionary theory.

6. An adequate answer to the question, "Why should I be moral?": Both naturalists and theists can respond, "Because it is the moral thing to do." But beyond this, when thinking about the question outside of the moral point of view, the issue becomes why is it rational to adopt the moral point of view rather than an egoistic one? According to Moreland, this is a problem for the naturalist. But the theist can offer a variety of reasons to adopt the moral point of view--the moral law is true; it is an expression of the non-arbitrary character of a good, loving, wise, and just God; and we were designed to function properly when living a moral life.

The rest of the chapter includes a discussion of the value of human beings and human rights, which I'll leave to the interested reader to explore. The book is worth the price, and I highly recommend it for those inclined to do the work of reading and considering the arguments it contains.

Book Excerpt: Fierce Convictions by Dr. Karen Swallow Prior

Here’s a moving excerpt from Dr. Karen Prior’s Fierce Convictions. A vital aspect of moral apologetics involves the power of God to transform lives, but such transformation is not just at the level of the individual. Whole societies have been radically transformed by the faithful witness and changed lives of followers of Christ, which is an evidential consideration for the truth of Christian theism. In this light, enjoy this selection from Dr. Prior’s recent book about Hannah More, and if it sparks your interest, by all means read the whole book!  

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, Christians in the British Empire were just beginning to turn their efforts toward widespread evangelism of unbelievers. In the middle of the 1780s, William Carey, later known as the father of modern missions, was beginning to develop a sense of the Christian’s duty to bring the gospel to all places. Missions had not been an emphasis of the Church of England since its inception during the tumultuous era of the Reformation. But in 1792 Carey would publish his famous missionary manifesto, a pamphlet titled, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. This work helped form the basis for the kind of global missionary work that continues to this day. As evangelization emerged at this time as a focus for the practice of the Christian faith, those beginning to think about it generally had their sights set on bringing the Gospel to faraway lands like Africa and the West Indies—not the remote villages right there at home. But this was exactly where Hannah More would concentrate her efforts.

As it turns out, there were similarities between the faraway lands and the villages close at hand, particularly in their spiritual and intellectual states. Over the next several years, More and her sister Patty sojourned upon hills and fields, on foot and on horseback, knocked on doors and butted heads with landowners, cajoled, begged, bribed, ate and fed—all in the attempt to bring Christian doctrine to bear in unreached and uncivilized pockets of the world: the villages right outside the doorstep of More’s rural home outside England’s seaport city of Bristol.

The conditions of the villages were deplorable. Shocked at what they found, the sisters recorded their findings in their journals.

The poverty was crippling. The work—for those who had it—among the laboring class in these villages usually was in mining, stone quarrying, glass manufacturing, or farm labor. Earnings usually amounted to a mere shilling a day.[1] The poverty in one village was so great that “a single cup of broth cannot be obtained for there is none to give, if it would save life,” More reported.[2] “I am ashamed of my comforts when I think of their wants,” she said.[3]

The immorality they found in the villages also shocked them. Patty More described Nailsea, a village filled with laborers in the glass-houses and mines, as “abounding in sin and wickedness.”[4] The people lived in tiny cottages outside the glass factory. Inside where the furnaces blazed, “the swearing, eating and drinking of these half-dressed, black-looking beings, gave it a most infernal and horrible appearance.”[5] No wonder the village inhabitants called the place “Little Hell.” In Shipham, efforts to hold morning and evening prayers failed because, Patty More said, “not one could read’ but alas! every one could, and did, swear.”[6] Patty wrote of one hamlet that it was “so wicked and lawless, that they report thieving to have been handed down from father to son for the last forty years.” Where the churchwardens themselves feared to tread, they instead sent “two nervous women, really for the above reason of personal fear.”[7]

The abandonment of these villages by the church had devastating effects. Cheddar had been without a resident clergyman for decades, and the results were dramatic. Two thousand poor villagers lived under the virtual rule of several farmers. More reported after their first gathering of all the parents of the parish before the school’s opening that it was “a sight truly affecting.” They were “poor, miserable, and ignorant,” and More witnessed there “more ignorance than we supposed existed anywhere in England.”[8] The villagers they encountered were as uneducated “as the beasts that perish,” More wrote, “intoxicated every day before dinner [the mid-day meal], and plunged in such vices as make me begin to think London a virtuous place.”[9] In another parish, the clergyman was reported to be in a state of intoxication six times a week and often “prevented from preaching by black eyes, earned by fighting.” More said of the same village, “We saw but one Bible in all the parish, and that was used to prop up a flower-pot.”[10] The village had no resident minister and there was “as much knowledge of Christ in the interior of Africa as … in this wretched, miserable place,” Patty More lamented.[11] Such neglect by the state-assigned clergy was rampant. Rectors who collected tithes but neglected their parishes were all too common. In one village where they began a school, More was outraged that the clergyman had “claimed the tithes for fifty years, but had never cathechised a child or preached a sermon for forty.”[12] In at least one case, the village had no curate and the farmers told the Mores that although they had the right to appeal for one, they did not “for fear their tithes should be raised.”[13] No wonder some of the fiercest opposition More would face would come from some of the clergy. In one village, the laboring men were so feared that “no constable would venture to arrest” one, “lest he should be concealed in one of their pits, and never heard of no more.”[14] The sisters were warned not to even enter the village, “lest our persons should be endangered.”[15]

Many had no knowledge of the Christian faith whatsoever. A girl in one village, “a beautiful young creature about eighteen,” More said, was “deeply afflicted with a dropsy.” Upon hearing the gospel explained to her, the girl exclaimed, “Oh! Jesus Christ will be very unreasonable if He expects anything of me, for I never heard of Him in my life.”[16] Indeed for a young woman among them to get married in possession of “a fair reputation” was, the sisters said, “an event rare indeed in these villages.”[17]

Spirits in the village were so downtrodden that no one could believe that the “two ladies” who had come to inquire about starting a school would actually do so. After a meeting with the villagers in Yatton about opening a school, Patty More reported, the church bells “were set a-ringing, and the whole village seemed all gaiety and pleasure.” When the school opened the following week, one hundred and thirty children came.[18] More wrote to John Newton, “It is grievous to reflect, that while we are sending missionaries to our distant colonies, our own villages are perishing for lack of instruction.”[19]

Yet the More sisters’ attempt to alleviate such oppressive conditions received far from universal acclaim. Rather, the sisters were met with suspicion by both the rich and the poor. The wealthy feared that educated members of the underclass would strive beyond their station, and the poor, understandably, distrusted the motives of the sisters.

The Mores were savvy enough to know that they couldn’t just descend into a village from out of nowhere with grand plans for what would dramatically alter the status quo by changing community conditions for poor and rich alike. The sisters knew they would need local support and cooperation. They began their inquiries concerning Cheddar by chatting with a penniless rabbit catcher who lived nearby. The man, it turned out, was a Quaker and, upon learning what the women hoped to do, “was visibly struck at the prospect of doing good” in the village. “A tear rolling down his rough cheek seemed to announce there was grace in the heart,” Patty More wrote in her journal.

“You will have much difficulty,” the old man warned them, “but let not the enemy tempt you to go back; and God bless your work.”[20]

His words proved prophetic. In establishing not one but over a dozen Sunday Schools, More and her sister encountered much difficulty and many temptations to give up. Yet, they persevered, and their efforts did indeed seem to be blessed by God. Because of the widespread success and influence of her schools, some have credited More with teaching her nation to read.

Notes:

[1] Mendip Annals: Or, A Narrative of the Charitable Labours of Hannah and  Martha More in Their Neighbourhood: Being the Journal of Martha More. London: James Nisbet and Co., 1859. Reprint, 64.

[2] William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More.  2 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834. I 397.

[3] Roberts I 397.

[4] Mendip Annals 42.

[5] Mendip Annals 62.

[6] Mendip Annals 48.

[7] Mendip Annals 167.

[8] Mendip Annals 22, 23.

[9] Mendip Annals 18.

[10] Mendip Annals 19.

[11] Mendip Annals 15-16.

[12] Mendip Annals 29.

[13] Mendip Annals 18.

[14] Mendip Annals 28.

[15] Mendip Annals 67.

[16] Mendip Annals, 32.

[17] Mendip Annals 84.

[18] Mendip Annals 40.

[19] Qtd. in Mendip Annals 31.

[20] Mendip Annals 14.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcement: Theistic Ethics Workshop at Wake Forest University

The organizers of the first annual Theistic Ethics Workshop encourage abstract submissions for our inaugural meeting at the Graylyn Conference Center (www.graylyn.com) on the campus of Wake Forest University. The workshop will be held on October 8-10, 2015, and details can be found here: http://users.wfu.edu/millerc/Theistic%20Ethics%20Workshop

Authors of accepted abstracts will have all their expenses covered, including travel. This workshop is being supported by generous funding from the Thomas J. Lynch Funds of the Wake Forest University Philosophy Department. Please direct any questions to millerc@wfu.edu.

All the best,

Christian Miller (Wake Forest University) Mark Murphy (Georgetown) Christopher Tucker (William and Mary)

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The Fall and Rise of the Moral Argument

In light of the millennia of the history of philosophy that we have behind us, it was only recently – setting the last few decades aside – that the moral argument slipped out of the mainstream. In the first half of the twentieth century C. S. Lewis could refer to the moral argument with some confidence, and it may well have been the most common of the major arguments for God’s existence at the time.

While today most Christians philosophers might look favourably on the moral argument (with the occasional noteworthy exception like Richard Swinburne), it has certainly fallen out of favour among the philosophical community – in spite of what I take to be its strength – bearing in mind of course that in the English-speaking world the general population outside of academia was once much more Christian than today. Where did it go? Why, in the mid twentieth century, did the moral argument slip out of sight?

Part of the explanation may well lie in the ascendancy of other arguments for God’s existence. In particular, first-cause arguments were given a huge boost by scientific discoveries centred around big bang cosmology and fine tuning arguments were assisted by scientific progress in general, especially in physics and astrophysics. These facts significantly changed the apologetic landscape. But other than that, was there a new ground-breaking critique of the first premise of the basic moral argument: that moral facts point to the existence of God? In fact there was not. What then?

What happened, at least in philosophical circles, was the rapid rise in a fairly trendy European anti-realism about ethics – although like many trends, it was not to last. A group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle as they met at the University of Vienna starting in 1922, came to exercise a great influence over what followed in mid-twentieth century analytic philosophy. It represented a radical critique of a great deal of what had gone on in philosophy up to that point. In particular it proclaimed “the elimination of metaphysics,” laying a new set of ground rules for what did and did not count as a meaningful proposition. The thought of the Vienna Circle was introduced to the English-speaking world largely by A. J. Ayer in Britain, principally in his book Language, Truth and Logic, published in 1936. Advocating logical positivism, the movement declared that unless a proposition was either analytically true (true by definition) or could – in principle at least – be empirically verified, then it was literally nonsense, and not a real proposition at all. With this verificationist cudgel in hand, the movement sought to lay waste to both metaphysics and moral realism. Moral claims, they realised, were neither true by definition nor empirically verifiable, even in principle. Hence, moral claims were deemed to be not propositions at all, but expressions of will, emotion or something else. To talk about moral facts was regarded as mere nonsense.

In making this move, the moral argument was robbed of its force. The moral argument appealed to God as the grounding of moral facts, but if there simply were no moral facts after all (or if it was gobbledegook to speak of them), the appeal to God would become irrelevant. Here was an escape from the moral argument, and hence an ally to any philosopher who might have worried that God might still somehow be needed to account for moral truths, and hence the rapid growth of the friendship between atheism and moral anti-realism is perfectly understandable – and observable. After noting the historical fact that theistic outlooks tend to adhere to moral realism, philosopher (and atheist) Graham Oppy observed:

As a further matter of historical fact, one of the main motives for the development of non-realist meta-ethics has been the desire to give an adequate atheistic account of the nature of the good. Thus many subjectivist, projectivist, and error-theoretic accounts of the good were developed in the context of atheistic enquiries.1

Thus, the widespread influence of the Vienna circle and logical positivism saw an eclipse of moral realism and hence of the moral argument. Philosophy of religion was consumed with entirely different issues for a number of decades. This is illustrated by the way in which the now classic work edited by Antony Flew and Alasdair McIntyre in 1955, New Essays in Philosophical Theology, talk of falsification and meaningfulness took centre stage. But things did not end there. The fact is that today virtually nobody would want to be known as a sympathiser of logical positivism. Before long people began to ask the obvious question, namely whether or not the tenets of logical positivism were themselves true by definition or empirically verifiable, and the equally obvious answer – no – dealt a blow that logical positivism would never recover from. By its own principles, the rule of logical positivism had to be deemed , not false, but literally meaningless! Now the dogma had to be reduced to some friendly advice; a suggestion of sorts that there was no particularly compelling reason to embrace. There was no barrier to thinking that propositions about God, about metaphysics, and about objective right and wrong, were meaningful after all – and who knows, many of them may well be true.

With the fall of logical positivism came a resurgence of interest in the grounding of ethics. But logical positivism had emboldened non-believing ethicists to pursue their vision of the good (or lack thereof) without reference to God, since God could be dispensed of without the need to account for moral facts (so many may have thought). Even with a return to moral realism, that same boldness remained. God was gone from the picture, and in a kind of historical forgetfulness, people had lost track of why God had been important. Never mind those awkward details – we’re atheists, we know there’s a right and wrong, so let’s get on with it and talk about right and wrong! While there has been a return to ethical realism, there has been no desire to return to the problem created by ethical realism in the first place.

A proponent of the moral argument for theism can take some heart from this turn of events. In fact, this return to realism has seen a new wave of literature about God and morality, discussing the dependency of moral facts on God Robert Adams, John Hare, John Rist and others have published top-notch works on meta-ethics and philosophy of religion, pressing the secular outlook on morality in precisely this way. Rist’s comment is on the mark when he observes that although we all seem to believe that morality is a reflection of the way things are, there is a steadfast refusal to discuss the underlying structure and basis of morality itself:

There is reason to believe that… the theoretical crisis about moral foundations underlies many of the more immediate personal and political decision-making, and that the confusion in much contemporary moral debate depends in part on a systematic unwillingness outside academia – and often within it – to look squarely at this crisis.2

There is an increasing awareness of the existence of the crisis, as seen in the willingness of some published ethicists to acknowledge the historical association of morality with God and to offer their own reasons for not accepting the association as legitimate (some of which are addressed in my forthcoming article on the epistemological objection to divine command ethics in Philosophia Christi). But the bottom line is that with the major shift in mid to late twentieth century philosophy has come fresh opportunity for theists in philosophy. As illustrated by the new wave of literature and the new direction taken by philosophers of religion (a movement that some have yet to catch up with), the moral argument is back on the table.

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Four Problems with Naturalistic Evolutionary Ethics

Gargan, the caveman, lived for only one purpose: producing offspring. His sole purpose in life was to propagate his DNA by any means necessary. Brutality and selfishness are simply the tools of the trade to accomplish the life mission bestowed upon him by natural selection, making Gargan a mean character with no regard for any creatures, human or otherwise, around him.

This caricature of evolutionary morality is becoming increasingly outdated as new methods of observing and studying mammalian behavior shed light on behavioral tendencies. Humans are social mammals, and as such, we depend on each other’s cooperation to survive. Thus, there is a kind of proto-morality that can be observed even among chimps, bonobos, and other primates. Some species of primates understand and live by the laws of reciprocity and fairness, engaging in tit for tat and giving favors in exchange for future favors. Frans deWaal points out that Chimpanzees “build a social economy of favors and disfavors to food to sex and form grooming to support in fights. They seem to maintain balance sheets and develop expectations, perhaps even obligations, hence their negative reaction to broken trust” (The Bonobo and the Atheist, 129). This complex system of interaction is interesting scientifically, but it suffers from some deep problems when applied to conversations about morality and normative ethics.

1. Naturalistic Fallacy

Defining that which is “good” as that which is “natural” commits what G. E. Moore called the naturalistic fallacy: “To argue that a thing is good because it is natural or bad because it is unnatural…is therefore certainly fallacious: and yet such arguments are very frequently used.” “All that the Evolution-Hypothesis tells us is that certain kinds of conduct are more evolved than others” and what this leads to, say some, is the “definite view that better means nothing but more evolved; or even that what is more evolved is therefore better.” Once we collapse “goodness” into “naturalness,” we have no standard by which to measure the moral status of human behavior. In order for human behavior to be subject to evaluation, “goodness” has to mean something more than merely “that which is natural.” Moore also points out that: “The value of the scientific theory, and it is a theory of great value, just consists in showing what are the causes which produce certain biological effects: whether these effects are good or bad it cannot pretend to judge.” A recent study has demonstrated a link between the genetic mutation that inhibits the production of Monoamine Oxidase A (an enzyme that catalyzes dopamine and seratonine) and both lower levels of empathy and higher levels of aggression. Another study has shown that males with less white matter in their brains are more likely to experience and express pedophilic tendencies. If “goodness” and “naturalness” are synonymous, then it would follow that male aggression and pedophilia are good, but we all agree that this is not the case. We subject human behaviors and tendencies to moral scrutiny by a standard that exists beyond human behaviors and tendencies (we do it no other way!).

1. Is-Ought Fallacy

The evolutionary sciences only tell us what is the case about evolutionary history, primate behavior, human psychology, etc. They do what science is meant to do: describe the natural order of things. Hence, by virtue of what science is, it merely describes behavior, but it cannot prescribe behavior. As David Hume pointed out, there is an epistemic and normative gap between that which is the case and that which ought to be. Deriving an ought from an is seems difficult, if not impossible. Science, the careful, methodical observation of the world, can only describe human behavior. It cannot prescribe moral behavior. While scientific results and discoveries can offer interesting and even relevant insight into ethical questions, science is not the arbiter of ethics. And as with the naturalistic fallacy, we run the risk of endorsing immoral oughts simply because we observe some immoral behavior that simply is. A recent anthropological survey of human ancestors in the Pleistocene era has suggested that male-on-female rape was exceedingly common. Due to various factors, females began to recognize and implement their role as sex monopolizers, and this in turn led to an increase in rape. This detrimental exchange of behaviors was soon phased out by natural selection, but for some time it was the norm. It still goes without saying that rape, whether then or now, is morally reprehensible regardless of circumstances. If it is true (and it is) that rape is, always has been, and always will be wrong, then we can condemn natural states of affairs that favored rape and concede that we cannot derive an ought from an is.

It is also interesting to note that humans seem unique in that there is a moral dimension to our behavior. Rape among humans is not merely forcible copulation. Forcible copulation takes place regularly in the animal kingdom with ducks, sharks, dolphins, and bedbugs. Bedbugs and other invertebrates actually practice what is known as “traumatic insemination” as the ordinary means by which they copulate. With human beings, forcible copulation is termed “rape” because we recognize that human behavior is saturated with moral status, whether good or bad. Male lions sometimes kill cubs, but they do not murder. Fighter ants use aphids as forced laborers, but they do not practice slavery. Young bottlenose dolphin males have been known to corner a single female and take turns forcibly copulating, but they do not commit rape. Murder, slavery, and rape are immoral acts that are only possible among humans because of the unique ability of human actions to carry moral status.

1. Arbitrary Moral Values

The values and tendencies that humans hold are contingent upon the specific kind of social mammals that we are. Had the tape of evolutionary history been rewound and played once again, we might have a completely different set of moral values and tendencies –on what Angus Menuge calls “strong evolutionary ethics.” Darwin himself noted this conclusion: “If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.” Michael Ruse also paints a stark picture: “We are what we are because of contingent circumstances, not because we necessarily had to be as we are. Suppose, instead of evolving from savannah-living primates…we had come from cave-dwellers. Our nature and morality might have been very different. Or take the termites…they have to eat each other’s feces…had humans come along a similar trail, our highest ethical imperatives would have been strange indeed.”

1. Evolutionary Science Undermines Justification for Moral Beliefs

Imagine that when you were a child, a scientist gave you a pill that caused you to believe that George Washington was the first president of the U.S.A. Imagine also that this pill caused you to forget that you ever took such a pill. Finally, imagine that the same scientist finds you again late in life and confesses to you that you were part of this experiment of which you were unaware. He tells you that your belief that George Washington was the first president was solely the product of a pill. If you had never researched the topic for yourself, you would not be justified in continuing to believe that George Washington was the first president, right? The only reason you had that belief was the pill that was given to you. But now that you have knowledge about the pill, you cannot honestly say that you have good grounds for believing that George Washington was the first president.

The same is true of evolutionary science and what it tells us about ethics. We are learning now, more than ever, that human beings are social animals with tendencies built in to us over the course of evolutionary history that allow us to function well together in groups. We have tendencies to take care of our children, our spouses, etc. We have tendencies towards reciprocity, altruism, and empathy. The problem however is that coming to know that these tendencies are inculcated into us by evolutionary processes geared towards maximizing survivability and reproduction actually undercuts our justification for believing that these moral tendencies are true and binding for us. In the same way that once you find out that your George Washington belief is solely the product of a pill, you no longer have good reasons for continuing to believe it to be true, understanding that “morality” is merely a set of evolutionarily-ingrained tendencies also undermines our justification for moral beliefs and actions. “Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends (Ruse and Wilson 1985)” and it “is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes” (Ruse 1986).

Photo: "Two apes share a moment" by Indo_girl2010. CC license. 

Podcast: David Baggett on 7 Important Distinctions for the Moral Argument

On this special IHOP (yes, as in "International House of Pancakes!") edition of the podcast, we sit down with David Baggett who helps us understand seven important distinctions to make when articulating and defending the moral argument. There's a lot going on in this podcast, so here is a handy chart from Good God that will help make it more clear:

Video Debate: "Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural?" William Lane Craig vs. Sam Harris

This debate features atheist and neuroscientist  Sam Harris and Christian philosopher William Lane Craig. Harris defends a theory of ethics that he takes to be both objective and scientific, while Craig defends theistic ethics. If you haven't had a chance to to watch this debate yet, it is well worth the time!  

The Responsibility of the Christian Writer

As an apologist and academic who works in the field of imaginative and literary apologetics, and as a working poet, I often think about what it means to be a Christian writer. I believe it’s a serious vocation; writing is a gift and a calling, and it can be a form of ministry -- but often not in quite the way that Christians think. My musings on the subject have led me to think that the Christian writer has a threefold responsibility.

First, the Christian writer is called to live so fully in right relationship with the true and living God, the most holy Trinity, that inviting a reader to share the writer’s perspective will mean sharing (in some way) in that living relationship,

Second, the Christian writer is called to trust fully in the power of the Holy Spirit: that God can, does, and will work through literature to reach the hearts and minds of readers. Writing that is aggressive in presenting explicit apologetic argument or doctrinal concepts is often writing that lacks a confident faith in the power of the Spirit. Remember that it was through the pagan Norse myths that God first began to call C.S. Lewis to Him, and that Lewis was at a deep level oriented toward God by the fantasy novel Phantastes, which, although written by a devout Christian, lacks any overt Christian or even theistic elements whatsoever. Readers can, and do, recognize Christian truth that’s presented subtly; they can be nourished, challenged, and drawn deeper by stories and poetry that have a gleam of truth, that awaken longing, that hint at the mysteries of our faith. Explanation is not always necessary; sometimes exploration is best.

Third, on the basis of that deep trust, the Christian writer is called to write to the glory of God, creating beauty and seeking to express truth at a deep level, so that the work becomes a locus of potential encounter with the living God not through any explicit maneuverings on the author’s part, but through pointing to the truth that is at the core of all truths: the one true and living God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

As apologists, evangelists, teachers, preachers, and pastors, we can make literature an important part of our ministry work. By celebrating art and literature, as well as reason and arguments, we honor the God who is both Truth and Beauty. By offering multiple ways to approach and encounter the living God, we respect the uniqueness of each human being made in God’s image.

What the writer leaves implicit, teachers, parents, and apologists can tease out and make explicit in response to questions. When the poet helps the reader recover clear vision, we can show how to live in the light of the insights gained. And when the storyteller creates a longing for more than this world can offer, we can point toward the One who alone can satisfy all longing.

Photo: "Written in  Gold" by Anonymous. CC License. 

Video: "The Call of God" Sermon by David Baggett

Two important parts of a complete ethical theory are moral transformation and moral faith. An ethical theory needs an account of how we can be morally transformed into a good person; it must actually be possible to lead a moral life. And we need an explanation of how it is that leading a moral life is actually conducive to our own happiness; we need moral faith. In this sermon, Dr. Baggett discusses the call of God and how to live in light of one's calling. In the process, he hits on these themes of moral transformation and moral faith. So if you're interested in understanding how a Christian theory of ethics can be fleshed out in a practical way, this sermon is well worth your time!  

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1xDFu1tchM[/embed]

Photo: "The Prophet Jeremiah" by I. Scott. CC License. 

Humility, Naturalism, and Virtue

Can we make sense of the virtues in a world without God? Let’s consider the virtue of humility as a way of addressing this question. In his Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe, Erik Wielenberg develops a naturalized account of humility.[i] This account is worth considering given Wielenberg’s explicit aim of constructing a naturalized version of a virtue that is commonly thought to be uniquely Christian. Wielenberg constructs an account of humility grounded in the assumption that we know that naturalism is true. In order to do this, he first discusses a Christian account of humility. He then explores some of the similarities and differences of such an account with a naturalistic version of this virtue. After discussing these points, I offer several criticisms of Wielenberg’s view.

On a Christian analysis, according to Wielenberg, the humble person neither underestimates nor overestimates her own value or abilities, but instead recognizes that these are gifts from God. She also acknowledges her dependence on God, and knows that much of what contributes to her flourishing is not within her control, but God’s. Hence, the humble theist is grateful for her flourishing in light of this dependence, and gives credit to God. On naturalism, however, Wielenberg claims that there is also room for an acknowledgment of dependence on something outside of ourselves, because so much of what contributes to our success—psychological constitution, physical health, family background, where and when we are born, and economic factors—is outside of our control. On naturalism, these factors are not under God’s control; they are under no one’s control. Given this, no one gets the credit. Sheer chance and good fortune should receive the majority of the credit. As Wielenberg puts it, “It is the dependence of human beings and their actions on factors beyond their control—dependence that is present whether God exists or not—that makes humility in some form an appropriate attitude to have.”[ii]  In either kind of universe, naturalistic or theistic, “...taking the balance of credit for one’s accomplishments is foolish.”[iii] Like the humble theist, the humble naturalist can and should acknowledge her dependence on something outside of herself, substituting good fortune for God.

Wielenberg may be right that there is space within a naturalistic view of the universe for an attitude of humility. Perhaps we should generally expect that there will be somewhat plausible naturalistic versions of many particular virtues if Christianity is true. This is because according to Christianity, the structure of reality reflects aspects of God’s nature. Given this, even if one seeks to remove God from the picture, as it were, there will still be latent theistic features of reality which can make sense of the virtues. However, if Christianity is true then a Christian account of the virtues will be superior to any account available to naturalists, and the virtues themselves will ultimately possess better metaphysical fit with our understanding of the rest of reality, both of which we should expect if Christian theism is true.

For example, and as a way to compare naturalistic humility with theistic humility, consider the relationship between humility and gratitude. Of course the Christian can be humbly grateful to God and other people, for what he and they have done on her behalf. But the naturalist, given that dumb luck and blind chance are the ultimate causes of most of the factors contributing to his success—psychological constitution, physical health, family background, where and when he was born, and economic factors—has no good reason to be grateful for these things because there is no one to be grateful towards. Even the other human beings who have benefitted our fortunate naturalist only do so primarily and perhaps solely because of dumb luck and blind chance. On naturalism, no person, human (or, of course, divine), is ultimately responsible for anything, and so it becomes very difficult to see what reasons exist for gratitude towards persons, at least. Moreover, what it means for one to be grateful towards dumb luck or blind chance is at best quite mysterious, and at worst incoherent.

As a second way to critically compare naturalistic humility with theistic humility, consider the following thought experiment. Imagine you have suffered from a serious illness for many years. The treatments are quite expensive, and your insurance company will no longer cover the treatments because the policy’s coverage has been exhausted. Consider two distinct scenarios:

Scenario 1:  You are desperate to come up with the money to pay for continued treatment, and by sheer luck you find a large diamond buried in your back yard, worth enough to pay for your treatment indefinitely.

Scenario 2:  A wealthy benefactor gives you the money you need to pay for your treatments indefinitely. You know this benefactor because you cheated her in a business deal many years ago.

Which scenario is more conducive to humility?

In the first scenario you are very happy and feel very fortunate at such a stroke of luck. And of course you would have no reason to be proud of what occurred, because you would deserve none of the credit for finding the diamond or for being able to pay your medical bills. Perhaps the whole situation engenders some humility, because you realize you are receiving a great benefit that you did nothing to earn. On scenario 2 you again have no reason to be proud of being able to pay for your treatment, nor do you deserve the credit for being able to pay your bills. On this scenario, however, there are reasons to be more—and more deeply—humbled. First, not only is it the case that you did nothing to deserve the money given to you, but you actually deserve not to receive the money, given the fact that you wronged your benefactor in the past and owe her money because of your own wrongdoing. Second, the action of your benefactor is magnanimous, and simply witnessing and benefiting from the act should foster humility. Third, there is the presence of rational gratitude in scenario 2, but not in scenario 1. In scenario 1, there is no one to direct gratitude towards, because no one gets the credit for your newfound wealth. However, in the second scenario you should feel deep gratitude towards your benefactor, because of what she has done for you in spite of the debt you owe her. Gratitude seems to both deepen the humility you have and provides more reason to be humble.

It will be helpful to make explicit the lessons from the above thought experiment. On theism, humans rely on a personal being who provides constant and intentional support in all aspects of our existence. In contrast to this, on naturalism we rely on mere chance and the laws of nature (or perhaps just the latter). Many of the contributing factors to individual success that are outside of our control are present because of mere good fortune. It might seem that this fact should engender humility, because we realize that we are mere recipients of good luck, so to speak. Granting this to the naturalist, the theist still has reason for a deeper appreciation of her dependence and so for a deeper humility, given her belief that we do not deserve the assistance that God gives to us. This makes the humility deeper and more profound, because while both the naturalist and the theist can accept that there are many factors that contribute to our success in life that lie outside of our control, only the theist can say that she is undeserving of this aid and deserves not to receive it because of her rebellion against God. The upshot is that while the naturalist may be able to give an account of humility, the theistic account is superior because everything that we accomplish is done with God’s active assistance. This assistance is not only undeserved, but is given even though we deserve something quite different. This in turn gives the theist a reason to be more deeply humble, even if the need and justification for this humility too often go unrecognized.

Lastly, I would like to emphasize that in a universe where the majority of the credit for any human accomplishment goes to “blind chance,”[iv] it becomes more difficult to give a sound and comprehensive analysis of any virtue and its connections to human accomplishments. It is not clear to me that any sense can be made of attributing credit to chance in this way.[v] What does it actually mean to ascribe credit to blind chance? In contrast to this, we have a clear understanding of ascribing credit to God, and there are several theistic accounts of moral development that are both coherent and cogent.

[i] Erik Wielenberg, Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 102-116.

[ii] Wielenberg, p. 112.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Wielenberg, p. 110.

[v] I owe this point to Doug Geivett.

---

Michael Austin is professor of philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University. His research focuses on applied ethics, the virtues, and philosophy of religion. He has published numerous journal articles and ten books, including Being Good: Christian Virtues for Everyday Life, with Doug Geivett (Eerdmans 2012) and Wise Stewards: Philosophical Foundations of Christian Parenting (Kregel Academic, 2009). He is currently working on a book dealing with the virtue of humility. He also blogs at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ethics-everyone and is on Twitter @michaelwaustin. You can see more from Dr. Austin at his website: http://www.michaelwaustin.com.

The Inability of Naturalism to Explain Moral Knowledge

© By R Scott Smith, PhD, Biola University, scott.smith@biola.edu  

There are various positions taken amongst naturalists in metaethics, and these have implications for whether or not a particular naturalist would believe we can have moral knowledge. In this short paper, first I will survey options in metaethics that various naturalists have taken and draw out those implications. Though they may differ in their metaethical standpoints, all these theorists are united around a common ontological claim – real, intrinsic, moral facts do not exist. Yet, they also think we can (and often do) know much about morality. For example, following the fact-value split, we know not only that science (i.e., today’s orthodox science, which is naturalistic) gives us knowledge of the facts of reality, but we also know that ethics and religion give us opinions, preferences, and our own constructs. But in the second section, I will take up a broader question: can we really have knowledge on naturalism? If not, then it seems naturalism would be false, for there are many things it seems we do know, including in morality. If so, then naturalism should be rejected.

I. Various Metaethical Positions for Naturalists

I. Noncognitivism: On a traditional, linguistic understanding, noncognitivists believe that moral judgments are neither true nor false. This would include two main positions, i.e., prescriptivism and emotivism (which A.J. Ayer supported). But this depiction has been criticized for at least a couple reasons by Richard Joyce, who first challenges just what a moral judgment is.[1] On his view, noncognitivism could be (1) a denial of the existence of beliefs (as mental states which could be true or false); (2) the lack of expression of a proposition (which would eliminate beliefs, which are propositions); or (3) the denial of the assertion of a belief. Overall, beliefs have no place metaethically, so there is no moral knowledge (understood as a justified true moral belief) available on this view.

Now, Simon Blackburn nuances his noncognitivism by appealing to projectivism and quasi-realism.[2] The latter is a linguistic thesis which seeks to “‘earn the right’ for moral discourse to enjoy all the trappings of realist talk,” including truth predicates in moral sentences.[3] For the noncognitivist, “stealing is wrong” really means something like “stealing – ugh!” However, for the quasi-realist, judging by the surface grammar of the sentence, it may be considered to be (or, treated as) true or false. Such sentences mimic moral realist assertions, yet do not really mean the same thing. The focus here is completely on moral discourse (a linguistic emphasis) and not about a moral property being instanced in some action (which would be a metaphysical focus) - for such things are not real. Blackburn is quite clear why: “The problem is one of finding room for ethics, or placing ethics within the disenchanted, non-ethical order which we inhabit, and of which we are a part.”[4]

But whether on Blackburn’s views, or the more traditional noncognitivist ones, there is no moral knowledge. There are no moral facts or moral judgments that can be known to be true or false. Still, that does not mean that someone like Blackburn or Ayer does not claim to know much about morality.

2. Moral Cognitivism - Subjectivist Theories: In general, cognitivists believe that moral statements are truth-apt yet disagree about the object of such statements. Of course, within this position, there has been the traditional distinction between private subjectivism and cultural relativism.

Here are two subjectivist examples. While Gilbert Harman seems to reduce moral facts to natural ones, nonetheless that does not mean that there are no moral facts. He affirms the theory-ladenness of beliefs, so that any moral beliefs we may have from making empirical observations are not due to some self-presenting, intrinsically moral property, but rather our interaction (which is conditioned by our upbringing and psychology) with just natural facts. Moral facts are mind-dependent, or our constructs; that is, in terms of a broader issue of moral realism versus anti-realism, he seems to be a subjectivist about morals (i.e., metaphysically).[5] So, we can know what moral facts are (i.e., human constructs), but we cannot know a moral reality independent of nature, for there is none.

Consider also Michael Ruse’s subjectivist ethics. For him, “the meaning of morality is that it is objective.”[6] Ruse embraces sociobiology: morality (in particular, social cooperation) just is a shared, biological adaptation. He draws upon Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene” view, and he suggests that we may speak of genes as selfish or altruistic. Yet, that is just to employ a biological metaphor, on which “altruistic” behavior is cooperative. Further, we objectify morality, but that is an illusion that has been thrust upon us by our genes, for there is no foundation for morality independent of biology. Yet Ruse also stands strongly against behaviors such as rape, female circumcision, or Hitler’s atrocities.[7] Evidently, then, Ruse believes we can know various acts to be morally right or wrong, yet he also seems to have special access to the truth about morality itself – that it is not objective but just a biological adaptation.

3. Moral Cognitivism - Error Theory: J.L. Mackie argued that, descriptively, there are widespread differences in moral views, and their best explanation is that moral judgments “reflect adherence to and participation in different ways of life.”[8] He also argued that if there exist objective moral properties, they would be entities of a very queer sort, utterly unlike anything else that exists in the physical universe, and they would require some atypical means to know them.

But the error theorist also claims that our moral discourse trades upon institutional (and thus socially constructed) facts, not brute, physical facts. Institutional rules guide our actions and speech, so moral judgments (which are beliefs) that profess to be real and institution-independent instead are infected with error. Why? There are no intrinsic moral facts. So for the error theorist, there is no room for moral knowledge, for there is nothing truly moral to be known. Yet, we may know much about moral discourse, that such talk does not reflect a predication of real moral properties.

4. Moral Cognitivism - Ethical Naturalism: On this last set of views, moral statements are about moral acts, or objects thought to have moral value. But here, moral facts can be reduced to natural ones which can be studied by science. On such a view, we can infer that such naturalists think we can have “moral” knowledge, since we can have knowledge of natural facts via science. Yet, of course, such knowledge would not be of intrinsically moral facts.

The Cornell Realists (Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, and David Brink) offer a variation. For them, all our observations (scientific, ethical, etc.) are theory-laden and are justified in light of their coherence with one’s whole web of beliefs. But this need not result in thoroughgoing anti-realism. For them, there are moral explanations of natural facts, and when we do this, we bring to bear our presupposition-laden background beliefs. So, for these realists, claiming that there are no moral facts lacks independent rational force against a realist’s web of beliefs. Thus, it seems we could have moral knowledge on this view, but again, it would not be of some intrinsically moral facts.

In sum, there is a spectrum of positions amongst naturalists in metaethics, resulting in different answers to the question, can we have moral knowledge? Some are confident that we can, while others are not. Yet they all seem to think there is much we can know about morality and moral discourse. Now, let us turn to examine the prospects for these (and other) knowledge claims on naturalism.

II. The Prospects for Knowledge on Naturalism

In general, given naturalism’s ontology, it seems that since only real natural facts exist in a mind-independent way, all other facts are human constructs. This line of thought fits with John Searle’s distinction between the brute facts of the physical world and the constructed facts of social reality.[9] Similarly, when addressing the reality of intentionality, Michael Tye avers to the reality of physical facts, yet explains the mental as a way of describing, or conceiving of, the physical.[10] Others seem to follow this same kind of pattern, such as David Papineau, Fred Dretske, and William Lycan.[11] Indeed, it seems to be a reasonable move, for on naturalism, the only intrinsic facts are physical ones. All else that we experience in reality (whether involving relationships, social life, economics, politics, business, sports, ethics, entertainment, or more) are due to how we conceive of, or talk about, the physical.

Daniel Dennett takes a similar line of argumentation. If we are consistent as naturalists, it means that while real brains and real physical patterns of forces exist, nonetheless things like mental states, intentions, and meanings are just attributions, or interpretations, we make from having adopted the intentional stance.[12] That stance is merely a tactic we adopt to help us predict behavior, and not to posit the “existence” of a variety of other “real” entities. For instance, consider the examples from Star Trek™, where Mr. Spock plays chess with the Enterprise’s computer.[13] For Dennett, both Spock and the computer are mechanisms, without any real intentions. Still, to help us predict what move Spock will make at a given stage in the game, we adopt the intentional stance, in which we attribute to him the intention to checkmate his opponent; thus, likely, he will make a given move. We treat the computer similarly, in that it “intends” to checkmate Spock and thus we predict it will make such-and-such a move.

For Dennett, these attributions of intentional states (and beliefs, desires, intentions, thoughts, etc.) are useful, shorthand ways of talking. They enable us to predict efficiently and reliably the behavior of intentional systems, which are systems that are amenable to treatment from this tactic.[14] It is more efficient than developing a lengthy, cumbersome description using the language of neuroscience.[15]

Now, while Dennett denies the reality of mental entities and their content, he does affirm the objective reality of physical patterns in the real world that we can detect.[16] However, Dennett also realizes that though these objective patterns are real, they always fall short of perfection. Therefore, there always will be uninterpretable gaps. Why? Here, Dennett draws upon Quine’s indeterminacy of radical translation[17] and extends it to the “‘translation’ of not only the patterns in subjects’ dispositions to engage in external behavior (Quine’s ‘stimulus meanings’), but also the further patterns in dispositions to ‘behave’ internally.”[18] Dennett realizes that there always will be such gaps entails that it is “always possible in principle for rival intentional stance interpretations of those patterns to tie for first place, so that no further fact could settle what the intentional system in question really believed.”[19]

Besides Quine, Dennett also appeals to Donald Davidson, who explains this principle in terms of its application to belief: “If there is indeterminacy [of meaning or translation], it is because when all the evidence is in, alternative ways of stating the facts remain open.”[20] Now, Dennett sees that Quine demonstrated the indispensability of intentionalistic discourse, yet for them such talk is not grounded in real mental states. So, Dennett uses Quine to support his own denial of the reality of mental entities and content: “Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation is thus of a piece with his attack on essentialism; if things had real, intrinsic essences, they could have real, intrinsic meanings.”[21]

So, if there were such essences, then meanings (along with other intentional states) could be determinate. There could be a single, correct answer to questions such as, What was Spock really intending to do when he made that move in chess? Or, what does Spock really believe about the moral status of Starfleet’s “prime directive”?[22] But Dennett thinks it is futile to think we can match up “mental” entities with their physical correlates. In principle, these patterns are capable of being interpreted variously from the intentional stance, and those interpretations could tie for first place. There are no deeper facts (i.e., essences) to give a determinate answer to the question, “What does it mean?”

Yet, with the language we use to describe the physical and behavioral traits of living things and other objects,[23] we take as real the entities referred to by that language. This is because we believe there are brute facts in the real world, something which can be described accurately from the standpoint of the Darwinian, materialistic story.

However, let us consider a comment Dennett makes in passing about his own views’ implications. He observes that Samuel C. Wheeler draws insightful connections between Derrida, Quine, and Davidson. Per Wheeler, Derrida provides “important, if dangerous, supplementary arguments and considerations” to the ones that Davidson and other Quinians have put forth.[24] As Wheeler notes, “For Quinians, of course, it is obvious already that speech and thought are brain-writing, some kind of tokenings which are as much subject to interpretation as any other.”[25]

Since there are no essences, there are no representations that are intrinsically about anything. Moreover, since natural selection itself is unrepresenting, there cannot be any “natural signs,” something that intrinsically would represent something else. Now, this means that for Dennett, we are left with events of “taking as,” in which we take (interpret, conceive of) some input as something else.[26] There is no room, it seems, for any aspect of the world as it is in itself to come before us and be known as it is, apart from how that input has been conceptualized.

Likewise, if any event of “taking as” cannot intrinsically represent something, then it too must be taken to be something else. Of course, that taking also must be taken as something else, and so on to infinity, it would seem, without any way to get started with these takings. As Willard argues, “Either there is going to be at some point a ‘taking as’ which does not itself represent anything (even what is ‘taken’) – which certainly sounds like a self-contradiction and is at best unlike the instances of ‘taking’ featured in Dennett’s explanations – or there is going to be an infinite regress of takings.”[27]

Now, clearly, this conclusion would apply to those things we would consider on naturalism to be our constructs, such as mental entities, morality, religion, and much more. But it also would hold for those aspects of the materialistic, real world Dennett takes to be objective. If everything that can be known (or even thought about, processed, etc.) by the brain is the result of a process with nothing but takings, since nothing is immediately given to us, then it seems there is no room for Dennett’s “brute facts” to be exempt from Derrida’s point: everything is a “text” which needs interpretation. The so-called “brute facts” also are conceptualizations, the result of the “raw stimulus” having been “cooked” by the brain’s distributed processes. Even the so-called “raw stimulus” is a taking (of something, but what we do not seem to know) as something else.

Now, it makes sense that there must be some raw stimulus; no one who takes the need for interpretation seriously, at least whom I know, denies that there is a real world. But, like all else, the raw stimulus, and even the so-called “objective” patterns, also must be takings of some things as such. They too are conceptualizations, every bit as much as anything else. Even the so-called “facts” of the objective, materialistic world of the natural sciences, would be just interpretations.

If so, then on what rational justification can Dennett privilege the third-person, objective, materialistic, Darwinian view of the real world? On his view, the language of materialism, cognitive science, etc., would be just as subject to Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation as the language of folk psychology. This is because the language of materialism is a brain-writing, which is a token, and therefore would be as much in need of interpretation as any other facet of existence.

Thus, when all the “facts” are in, there still will be alternative ways of stating them, in addition to the language of materialism and cognitive science. And, since there are no essences, there will be no deeper facts to settle any disputes that would arise. Therefore, applying Dennett’s own logic, in principle, it will always be possible for rival interpretations to tie for first place.

Now, this issue seems to arise not just for Dennett, but also for other naturalists as well, for the problem surfaces precisely because there are no essences to determine the facts of the matter. And it is not a problem just for in the areas of ethics or religion; it seems to be a problem in principle for naturalism. Without essences, it seems there would be an endless series of interpretations, without any way to get started, even with the so-called “brute facts.”

Now, this regress of interpretations may not seem problematic to some. After all, we do experience real trees, brains, moral situations, and the like. So, perhaps the ubiquity of interpretation may simply imply that while we do experience objects in reality, our access always is interpreted access.

At first glance, this reply may seem to alleviate the problem. For when we make observations of, say, a gas at a certain temperature and pressure, we still do need to interpret those observations. This is all well and fine; I have no desire to underestimate the importance of interpretation. However, that is not my point; rather, it is that without essences, there is no way to gain any “foothold” onto reality and begin to know it. An interpretation always is of something, but here, at every step, it seems that “something” ends up being another interpretation, without a way to access reality itself and even start.

III. Implications

Without essences, there are no intrinsic constraints on what is intentional or mental. Thus, we seem utterly unable to have any knowledge if the ontology of naturalism were true. The same implication applies to morality; at best we are left with a beginningless series of interpretations, such that there is no way to gain any foothold on reality, to even begin to conceive of something as moral. This means that there is no place for knowledge about morality, or of moral discourse, or even whether a particular action is moral or immoral. Also, on the fact-value split, we think we can know the facts of reality through naturalistic science, and that the deliverances of ethics and religion are just opinions. But these claims also become impossible to know on naturalism.

Indeed, every claim to knowledge becomes impossible to know, for there is no way to escape the relentless regress of interpretations. This condition simply is the natural result of rejecting the existence of essences, and it applies in morality because of the specific rejection of intrinsic moral properties, or facts. Without them, naturalism is unable to give us any moral knowledge, or knowledge about morality, despite the contentions of its expositors.

Yet, descriptively, the fact remains that many people who are naturalists do know several things, including in the field of ethics. For instance, Ruse contends vigorously that rape is wrong. Peter Singer knows it is wrong to treat animals cruelly. Those who appeal to the problem of moral evil as evidence against God’s existence know that injustice and genocide are wrong.

But these cases of moral knowledge should make us pause, for if naturalism were true, we could not them. So, it seems that a different ontology, which includes the reality of essences, must be true.

Notes 

[1] Richard Joyce, “Moral Anti-Realism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism, accessed March 21, 2013.

[2] E.g., see his Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Spreading the Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

[3] Richard Joyce, “Projectivism and quasi-realism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism, accessed March 21, 2013 (emphasis in original).

[4] Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 49.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Michael Ruse, “Evolution and Ethics: The Sociobiological Approach,” in Ethical Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Louis Pojman, 4th ed. (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2002), 661.

[7] Ibid.

[8] J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 36.

[9] John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995).

[10] Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind (Cambridge, MA.: Bradford Books, 1995).

[11] For Papineau, see his Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), and Thinking about Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). See also Dretske’s Naturalizing the Mind: The 1994 Jean Nicod Lectures (Cambridge, MA.: Bradford Books, 1995). For Lycan, see Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA.: Bradford Books, 1996).

[12] These attributions “are interpretations of the phenomena,” and they serve as a “heuristic overlay.” See his Daniel C. Dennett, “Dennett, Daniel C.,” A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind: Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, ed. Samuel Guttenplan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 239.

[13] Star Trek and related marks are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc.

[14] See Dennett, “Dennett, Daniel C.,” 239.

[15] Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 3rd printing (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1990), 233-34. Even in a “golden age” of neuroscience, we still will need the language of folk psychology.

[16] Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 40 (emphasis in original).

[17] Quine explains: “To expect a distinctive physical mechanism behind every genuinely distinct mental state is one thing; to expect a distinctive mechanism for every purported distinction that can be phrased in traditional mentalistic language is another. The question whether … the foreigner really believes A or believes rather B, is a question whose very significance I would put in doubt. This is what I am getting at in arguing for the indeterminacy of translation.” See his “On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation,” Journal of Philosophy LXVII (1970), 180-81, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 40.

 [18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid. (emphasis in original).

[20] Donald Davidson, “Belief and the Basis of Meaning,” Synthese Vol. 27 (1974): 322, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 41(bracketed insert mine).

[21] Ibid., 319, note 8 (emphasis mine).

[22] The prime directive is Starfleet’s order to not interfere with the internal development of an alien planet’s culture. Often, it is treated as absolute, yet episodes explore if it could be overridden in certain cases.

[23] For example, see W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1960), 221, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 342.

[24] Samuel C. Wheeler III, “Indeterminacy of French Interpretation: Derrida and Davidson,” in E. Lepore, ed., Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 477, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 40, note 2.

[25] Wheeler, 492, quoted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 40, note 2.

[26] Compare Dallas Willard, “Knowledge and naturalism,” in Naturalism: A Critical Analysis, ed. J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig (New York: Routledge, 1999), 40.

[27] Ibid., 41.

Photo: "Brown Skua flies over wary Gentoo Penguins" by L. Quinn. CC License. 

Podcast: David Baggett on Hell and the Moral Argument

On this week's episode, we return to the topic of hell. If you haven't had the chance yet, check out Dr. Leo Percer's episode on a similar subject. This time, we hear some great insights from Dr. David Baggett and how to respond to objections raised to the moral argument in light of the doctrine of hell.