Robert Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, “Moral Faith,” Part IV: The Volitional Aspect of Moral Faith

Probably all belief involves the will. To have faith is always to be for what one has faith in. Moral faith involves being for something in a special way. Like religious faith, it involves commitment.

There is surely moral and religious belief that does not amount to faith and does not involve commitment. Simply believing what one was taught, or holding one’s beliefs too tentatively, for example. Holding one’s beliefs tentatively can be quite appropriate, but not all the time. “Probably it’s wrong to torture innocent children” is hardly recognizable as an expression of a moral stance.

Kierkegaard was a pioneer in exploring the aspect of faith that we touch here. Kierkegaard is as emphatic as Calvin that an opinion held as merely probable can’t constitute faith, but he does not speak of faith in terms of feelings of assurance. On the contrary, the faith that interests him is one that coexists with an acute awareness of the “risk” that it is wrong.

For most people in the modern world, a confidence amounting to subjective certainty seems neither possible nor desirable. We need to retain the attitude we might be wrong; on this issue about the nature of faith—moral as well as religious faith—Kierkegaard seems likelier than Calvin to speak to our condition.

How, then, can we be committed to an ethical or religious outlook and way of life? Kierkegaard sees commitment in terms of decisiveness, and while in some ways his view is probably too voluntaristic, I think his emphasis on decisiveness is more importantly right than wrong. The attitude of the will, broadly understood, is crucial to commitment. The possibility that one is wrong may be recognized, but at certain points it must be disregarded in one’s decisions and actions and way of life, and one’s “bets” must not be “hedged.” This is the heart of Kierkegaard’s account of faith.

While tentativeness seems quite appropriate in some ethical and theological opinions, a moral life, like a religious life, requires a core of commitment, and in relation to that core we are not prepared to accept attitudes toward probability and doubt that seem perfectly appropriate, or even praiseworthy, in relation to most other topics. It is not morally acceptable to “hedge one’s bet” on morality. A moral person will have a degree of commitment to some central ethical beliefs that is more than proportionate to the strength of the evidence or arguments supporting them. It does not follow that the beliefs to which a moral person is committed can’t all be favored by reason, in preference to alternatives. It is just that reason’s support for them is not likely to be as solid as morality’s.

Closely related to the central role of commitment in faith is the phenomenon of struggles of faith, or striving for faith. That we strive for faith is connected with an important point that Adams thinks American pragmatist philosophers got right, namely, that our cognitive project is one of developing a system of beliefs that can be integrated not only with experience but also with the living of the moral life, and more broadly a good life. The striving often takes the form of clinging to faith. A moral person has reason to cling to moral faith, with some tenacity, when it is tried by doubts.

If impartial desire to believe whatever is true is likelier to lead to true belief than the desire to cling to one’s present belief, then the influence of the latter sort of desire may well corrupt the reliability of one’s belief formation process. But is the impartial desire more likely to lead to truth than the desire that strives for faith? In ethics, Adams does not think we have truth-finding faculties independent of our desires. Whatever may be the nature of ethical truth, it is not plausible to suppose that those whose hearts are in the wrong place are as likely to find it as those whose hearts are in the right place. He doesn’t suppose his ability to grasp moral truth is independent of the way in which their content moves his feeling and his will; and to be moved in the relevant way is in part to want to hold the convictions; it is not independent of volitional commitment to them. To suppose that our thinking in such matters would be more reliable if we did not care which conclusion we come to, so long as it is the correct one, is to propose an implausibly coldhearted conception of what would constitute reliable thinking in ethics.

A humane and reasonable moral faith will include the belief that we all could be more enlightened ethically than we are, and will therefore demand an openness, as unprejudiced as we can manage, to certain revisions of our ethical opinions. But which revisions are those? Are some of our moral judgments of moral faith, to which we should cling, whereas others are mere moral opinions, to which we should try not to be attached? Or ought we to be as open as possible to revision of any of our beliefs about particular ethical issues? Surely not; there are some moral judgments that it would be a betrayal of morality, or of humanity, to think seriously about abandoning. If it seems to us that giving up a particular moral conviction would amount to an abandonment of other human beings, or of a significant part of the moral meaning of our lives, those are certainly reasons for regarding the matter as an issue of faith. The line between moral faith and moral opinion may fall in different places for different people with different histories.

A question Adams regularly addresses is whether moral faith is still a virtue when it is faith in the wrong cause. Adams thinks it can be, though not if the cause is too indefensible. Conflict is dehumanized when we lose the sense that our enemies can be admirable in opposing us, even though we think them wrong. It is a sort of self-righteousness to think that nothing matters by comparison with being on the right side. Epic poets and professional politicians have known that respecting one’s enemies is commonly of at least comparable importance. Recognizing and admiring in one’s antagonist such virtues as courage, loyalty, and faith is a major ingredient of that respect.

Like courage, like loyalty, faith is a dangerous virtue. We may rightly refuse to call them virtues at all where they are part of a pattern of moral depravity. But if we refuse them the title of virtue wherever they are implicated in understandable moral error and contribute to guilt or disaster, we deny appropriate recognition to the frail and fragmentary character of our grasp of moral and other truth.

Find the other chapter summaries here.

Image: "Kierkegaard 20090502-DSCF1492" by Arne List - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kierkegaard_20090502-DSCF1492.jpg#/media/File:Kierkegaard_20090502-DSCF1492.jpg

John Peckham, summary of Chapter 2, “Toward Addressing the Conflict: A Canonical Approach,” of The Love of God: A Canonical Model

Having delineated the disjunction and subsequent impasse between the transcendent-voluntarist and immanent-experientialist models of divine love in chapter one, Peckham continues his work by describing the means by which he has arrived at his canonical alternative. Instead of presupposing a robust ontology and moving toward an understanding of love, the author instead presupposes a sophisticated view of Scripture and then considers what it elucidates about divine love in light of Scripture’s principal character—Christ.

As in any argument, the canonical approach employed for understanding divine love (as endorsed by Peckham) is well within its epistemic rights to select its starting point a priori. Taking advantage of what is allowed on epistemic grounds, the canonical approach in this work endorses the following foundation: (1) a robust view of revelation, (2) a dual-authorship understanding of the produced text, and (3) a primarily grammatical-historical hermeneutic (although Peckham’s iteration of this concept is sympathetic to how any one text fits into the entire Canon). These endorsements reveal that the canonical approach promulgated in this work desires to uncover what about divine love is depicted in the text. Additionally, what is sought is not what any one passage has to offer on the matter, but what the Canon reveals as a whole.

This decision is in keeping with what is encouraged by many hermeneutical scholars who believe that much of what is reached on an interpretive level depends on context. Reaching a responsible understanding of a passage/topic requires an investigation of the immediate context (i.e. the passages that surround the verse/idea in question) for anything that might offer aid in interpretation. Better, continue the analysis by observing how the verse/topic fits into the argument of the book in which it is placed. What is even better is exploring how a verse or passage comports with other passages in the Canon that deal with the same concept or contain similar language. Investigating a topic as broad as the love of God merits (and even demands) an approach that extends this kind of contextual analysis Canon-wide because it is only in the purview of the entire Scriptural account that something as pervasive and significant as God’s affections can be properly informed and elucidated.

Peckham’s canonical approach assumes that in spite of its plurality of authors and contexts, Scripture was written in a single vein that informed, guided, and even corrected the human participants in the writing process.  In other words, the Canon itself has a direction and objectivity to it that is greater than the sum of all of its parts.

Additionally, Peckham’s program is sympathetic to hermeneutical critical realism (i.e. that meaning exists before interpretation). However, his hermeneutic pushes exegesis beyond any specific text and toward an interpretation of the entire Canon. Such an approach is able to appreciate both the rich nuance of any text along with its meaningful relationship to the rest of Scripture and its history. Put another way, the canonical approach described above is characteristic of both phenomenological exegesis (considering interpretations which mean something on both a specific and canonical level) and hermeneutical exegesis (considering the philological and historical dimensions of the exegetical method).

These commitments keep Peckham from missing the forest for the trees and losing the trees among the forest. As much as possible, Peckham is trying to understand love by means of applicable texts (bottom up), while simultaneously analyzing these texts alongside each other given their relationship to canonical and historical considerations (top-down).

Although while interpreting data exegetes and theologians are encouraged to cancel out all previously inherited theories and/or presuppositions that could in some way color the text, the canonical approach delineated here is honest about its commitment to an orthodox view of revelation, authorship, and a singularly focused canonical framework that is only fully appreciated when both phenomenological and hermeneutical investigations are allowed to transpire. Peckham chooses to presuppose this over and above a sophisticated ontology. Instead of beginning in the realm of systematic theology and understanding Scripture in light of well-organized systems, he chooses to begin with the raw data, correctly interpreted, and then proceeds to build a canonically sound view of divine love.

One of the concessions that Peckham makes before proceeding is that this work is not prepared to report an exhaustive analysis of every passage on divine love along with its meaning and relationship to the entire Canon. Therefore, the analysis will be in large part feature a report of the trends discovered following a more exhaustive exercise conducted before this work was produced. One of the means by which the raw data was limited for the purposes of this project involved delimiting God’s love to his concern for the world. This naturally establishes Jesus Christ as a special subject worth careful consideration as he is the very incarnation of God in general and God’s love in particular.

For Peckham, it is not just the Canon, but the Christ of the Canon that reveals God primarily and his love especially. Therefore, with the Canon as the body of data and Christ as the example par excellence discovered therein, this canonical approach is able to yield an understanding of the love of God that is more sophisticated than both the transcendental-voluntarist model and the immanent-experientialist model.

In a preview of coming attractions, Peckham concludes this chapter by outlining several specific attributes of God’s love resulting from the canonical approach described in this chapter: (1) volition, (2) evaluation, (3) emotion, (4) forecondition, and (5) reciprocity. These will be delineated in future summaries.

Image: By Carl Bloch - http://www.carlbloch.org/The-Last-Supper.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10115340

 

Summary of Robert Adams’ chapter on Moral Faith, Part III, from Finite and Infinite Goods: The Cognitive Aspect of Moral Faith

Is it really correct to speak of believing in these contexts, or is something less cognitive demanded in moral faith? Adams chooses to concentrate on some of the concrete features of moral faith that incline him to speak of “belief” here. For no theory on metaethical issues is likely to attain a very high degree of certainty. Moral faith is therefore a stance we will have to take, if we are reasonable, in the face of the recognition that any metaethical theory we may hold could rather easily be mistaken. So it would be good to have an understanding of the stance that does not presuppose very much metaethics.

Adams thinks both will and feeling are involved in moral faith, but he does not think that moral faith is merely will and feeling, or that believing another person’s life is worth living is merely caring about that life. It’s not just a volitional matter; an intention central to moral faith is an intention of respecting something more commanding, more external to the self than mere personal preference and feeling.

This is the most important reason for speaking of moral faith as a sort of “belief,” and it is connected with the possibility of error. Faith confronts a temptation to doubt precisely because such possibilities of error must be recognized, and in a way respected.

Emotions too can be mistaken, but it’s far from clear that we can understand how an emotion of faith in the value of life can be inappropriately related to reality if we can’t understand how faith can be, or involve, a false belief that life is worth living. In any event, the possibility of an objectively appropriate or inappropriate relation to reality is precisely the aspect of moral belief most subject to metaethical doubts, and also the aspect that seems to Adams most important to the nonegocentric character of moral faith.

Connected with the possibility of error is the giving of reasons for and against beliefs. In thinking about items of moral faith one uses logic, one aims at consistency and at coherence with one’s beliefs on other subjects, and one is responsive to one’s sense of “plausibility,” as we sometimes put it. All of that provides grounds for classifying moral faith as a sort of belief.

Particular interest attaches to the question of responsiveness or unresponsiveness of moral faith to the evidence of experience. Our faith in the value of particular human lives, in the value and the possibility of a moral life, and in the possibility of a common good, can be put under strain by particular experiences. Indeed, adverse experience is precisely what gives rise, as Adams has argued, to a problem of evil for moral faith.

There is thus a considerable empirical element in faith in moral ends. But Adams does not believe that science, or social science, could devise a definitive empirical test of the truth of faith in any moral end. Objects of faith have vaguer contours that permit reformulation in the face of adverse experience, so we can’t identify experiences that are unequivocally predicted or excluded by such items of faith as that so-and-so’s life is worth living. So faith is not normally subject to definitive proof or refutation by any specifiable finite set of experiences. And from the perspective of moral faith, this is as it should be, for moral faith is supposed to be resistant to adverse evidence.

Empiricists may take offense at this feature of faith. Faith as such is indeed resistant to adverse experience, and is apt to revise itself before simply accepting refutation. Flew is right that faith is in danger of evacuating itself of content if its resistance is undiscriminating or absolutely unconditional. Nonetheless, Adams believes that resistance to adverse experience, and to refutation in general, is an appropriate feature of faith; and he will argue this with specific reference to moral faith.

Our interest in items of faith is importantly different from our interest in scientific hypotheses. Conclusive falsification of a hypothesis is progress in science. But falsification of an item of faith is not progress—at least not from the perspective within which it is an item of faith. To think that falsification of the belief in morality itself, or of the belief that a moral life is worth living, might be pure progress is already to hold an amoral view, a morally bad view. A loss of moral faith would be the loss of something precious.

When we resist refutation of an item of moral faith, we may, and should, be thinking of the danger of being misled into giving it up while it is true. From a moral point of view that would be a worse mistake to make than the mistake of clinging to moral faith while it is false. Even if an item of moral faith is false, moreover, we are not likely in abandoning it to attain anything corresponding to the moral value of believing it if it is true. This is an important asymmetry.

The balance of potential payoffs is much more equal when it is a question of revising moral faith, rather than abandoning it. We can hope that revision of moral faith will be progress from a moral point of view. This is a further reason for thinking it is good for moral faith to combine a variable, revisable form with a vaguer but more enduring core, so that self-critical growth and development may be combined with constancy of commitment.

Items of faith are not hypotheses to be tested by experience, though we may well want their formulations to be tested by experience. Items of faith may in fact be tested by experience, but we are not trying to refute them. We are trying to live by them. It’s not that moral faith is wholly unempirical, let alone noncognitive, but that it involves a different way of accommodating thought to experience.

Maybe this suggests too stark a contrast between morality and science. Notoriously, the reliability of induction and more broadly of empirical scientific methods has been doubted by reasonable persons and it may not be possible to set the doubts to rest in a completely satisfying way. Yet a refutation of the reliability of induction would not be scientific progress in the same way that a refutation of the meteorite explanation of the extinction of dinosaurs might be. So perhaps there is a place, or even a need, for faith in the highest level beliefs of science, but for now Adams is content to make a point just about moral faith.

 

Believing and Hoping

A Twilight Musing

Two related contrasts came up in my devotional times this week:

  1. the distinction between optimism and hope (particularly Christian hope); and
  2. the profound difference between the popular saying, “Seeing is believing,” and the reverse of that, “Believing is seeing.”

The first of each pair is an expression of a secular, humanistic interpretation of reality, and latter of each pair embodies reality seen through the eyes of faith.  I would like to expound a bit on both pairs.

Optimism and Hope

Both optimism and hope go beyond the visible facts of the situation to which they are applied, but whereas optimism is a chosen attitude, hope is the embracing of confidence in what somebody has said.  Optimism can be merely the expression of a sunny disposition, or perhaps of a kind of naiveté; but hope is the conviction, based on a reliable source, that things are being engineered in a certain direction.  We can choose to be optimistic that the stock market will go up and the economy will prosper, but we can have hope for these developments only if we have inside information that we trust.  Optimism is subjective, whereas hope is grounded in the assurance that a promise will be fulfilled.

When the Bible speaks of hope, it is always connected with faith, and it is never merely a subjective choice to see things in the most positive light.  The Psalms are full of references to hope based on trusting God.  (All biblical passages are from the NIV.)

  Ps 33:20-21
 We wait in hope for the Lord ;
he is our help and our shield.
 In him our hearts rejoice,
for we trust in his holy name.
Isa 40:31
 but those who hope in the Lord
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.

Rom. 4: 18-22 shows the extreme of hope that perseveres because of belief in God’s faithfulness and the surety of His promise:

 Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, "So shall your offspring be."  Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead — since he was about a hundred years old — and that Sarah's womb was also dead.  Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.

Heb. 6:17-19 makes clear that our hope in God’s promises is anchored in the Absolute Truth of Yahweh Himself:

Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath.  God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged.   We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.

Seeing is believing/Believing is seeing

All of us have encountered, at some time or another, the practical skepticism of someone who says, “Well, seeing is believing” (or some expression of that sentiment).  Applied to some situations, such as hearing the promises of someone who has proven himself to be untrustworthy, this response is appropriate and understandable.  But for some people, it becomes the expression of a materialistic epistemology, based on the assumption that the only questions worth asking (or answering) are those subject to rational, scientific investigation.

For a person of active faith, this aphorism has to be inverted: “Believing is seeing.”   The contrast between the two statements is very instructive about what is involved in living a life of faith.  At the center of this contrast is the implicit assertion in the first that only seeing can validate and inform believing, while the inverted statement affirms that believing is the foundation for truly seeing.  Augustine articulated the contrast by saying, “I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather, I believe in order that I may understand.”  Later, Anselm reinforced this idea with his maxim, “Credo ut intelligam,” which is a reflection of the scriptural statement that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7).  The core meaning of the biblical idea is that one must go beyond the narrow boundaries of what can be established merely by human observation and analysis and accept that the Source of all knowledge is the God Who gave us the power to think.  If we are to have a deep understanding of Truth, we must be grounded in a simple act of faith that accepts possibilities beyond what we can see.

As Paul says in Rom. 8:23-25, we “groan inwardly” in hope of “the redemption of our bodies.   For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?   But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”

Image: "Hope" by P. Herjolf. CC License. 

Elton Higgs

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

Summary of Chapter 1, “Conflicting Models of Divine Love,” of John Peckham’s The Love of God: A Canonical Model

 

While the concept of a loving God has been firmly established within the theistic community for centuries, delineating how God’s love is applied to mankind in general and the lost and saved in particular continues to generate discussion. Most recently, those joining this conversation on divine love have found themselves endorsing one of two general positions: a transcendent-voluntarist position (held by classical theism) and an immanent-experientialist model (representative of panentheism). In chapter 1 of The Love of God, Peckham provides a brief analysis of each position and a description of how they answer several significant questions. Ultimately, this first discussion will lay the groundwork for the discussions that will take place later in the work as it reveals an unfortunate dichotomy in need of a canonical rejoinder.

The strident differences between transcendent-voluntarism and immanent experientialism can be traced historically and understood as the result of an ever-evolving theology on the love of God. Peckham begins by tracing the evolution of transcendent-voluntarism.

Transcendent-Voluntarism

Augustine, perhaps the forefather of the classical theistic model of divine love, was the first to endorse something akin to the modern transcendent-voluntarist position. For Augustine (a pseudo-neoplatonist), God loves men as objects of use in a top-down program of unilateral beneficence. When man loves God in return, this is determined voluntarily by God who requires nothing (as he is already perfect) but wills everything (as he is totally sovereign). With Augustine, Thomas Aquinas conceded that God is, in fact, an immutable and passionless deity. However, Aquinas warmed the free will of God into a kind of divine friendship (again top down and requiring no reciprocity), believing that God chooses to befriend mankind in different ways for his own purposes. Martin Luther applied these foregoing concepts to his revitalization of the doctrine of grace and framed God’s love as actively and freely bestowed on men who are unable to truly love except as passive agents of divine love in them. It wasn’t until Anders Nygren that attention was given to different words for love (agape and eros especially). Though later his conclusions were largely refuted, Nygren believed that a strict dichotomy existed between eros and agape and only God was capable of agape love (sacrificial, sovereign, and gracious) while the love of men was predominately understood as eros (acquisitive, upward, contingent, and effort-based).

This brief survey highlights the major classical theistic players that eventually coalesced in the work of one recent figure—Carl Henry. Henry amalgamated many of these considerations and further nuanced them into what is understood as one the most robust delineations of the transcendental-voluntarist position. With Augustine, Henry believed that God lacks nothing and therefore requires nothing from his creation. With Aquinas, Henry asserted that God is totally free to show love in different ways to different people. With Luther, Henry recognized the gracious nature of divine love that exists solely for the benefit of the recipient. However, though like Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther, Henry confirmed God’s divine impassibility, and also affirmed God’s ability to feel—arguing that these feelings were, as all of God’s attributes, purely self-determined. Similarly, though Henry adopted his forefather’s confession of God’s transcendence above creation, he did not deny God’s pervasive immanence in creation as witnessed in his preserving it and working out his purposes in it.

Immanent-Experientialism

On the other side of the aisle, immanent-experientialism affirms that God, while dissimilar from the world, is essentially related to the world and thereby dependent on the world for his existence (see panentheism). This concept is largely constructed on the premise that the continual and temporal process of change is the basic form of reality. Therefore, all reality is indeterministic and interdependent—including the reality of God. Inasmuch as the world changes, as it is part of God, God changes with it. Hartshorne applies these concepts to love in the following ways. First, since God includes the world, he feels what the world feels and is therefore acutely sensitive to the world’s concerns. His subsequent love for the world and concern for it is therefore superior to the love of all others because he knows all that there is to know and feels all that there is to feel. However, though his love for the world is as perfect as it can be, it is incomplete as the world is in a constant state of flux.

Both of these positions hit an impasse when they confront several important questions in need of cogent answers.

Does God choose to fully love only some, or does he choose to love all, or is he essentially related to all such that he necessarily loves all?

For the classical transcendent-voluntary theist, God’s love originates in his divine decision to love all generally but only some unto salvation. However, Hartshorne and others believe that the determinism of the transcendent-voluntarist model is unacceptable because it denies meaningful creaturely freedom, thereby excluding true love. As an alternative, Hartshorne and others posit that God’s love is universal, sympathetic, and indetermininistic. However, Henry and other classical theists believe that this makes God’s love contingent, thereby diluting God’s magnificence.

Does God only bestow and/or create value, or might he also appraise, appreciate, and receive value?

Classical theists subscribing to transcendent-voluntarism believe that inasmuch as God is perfect and self-sufficient, he is only the benefactor and never the beneficiary in the exchange of love (he is unchanged by the world). Conversely, immanent-experientialism says that God feels everything and, as a result, benefits and suffers along with the world. Ultimately, while the former affirms God’s self-giving agape love (altruism), the latter believes that God loves in an effort to bring about his own fulfillment (egoism).

Does God’s love include affection and/or emotionality such that God is concerned for the world?

Henry and others who affirm the impassibility of God believe that while God has feelings, these feelings are self-determined (as is every one of God’s attributes). Hartshorne and others who affirm the passibility of God believe that God’s emotions are thrust upon him in a passive way as he sympathizes with what he observes in the world. While the former view is criticized for cheapening real emotions (as many argue that impassibility rules our genuine love in God), the latter avails itself of the idea of a needy and therefore deficient deity.

In what sense is divine love unconditional or conditional, ungrounded or grounded?

Both positions concede that divine love is unconditional; however, they affirm this in different ways. Henry argues that God does not need to love. Instead, he has determined himself to be a God of love and chooses to love as a result. Hartshorne, in contrast, believes that God’s love is unconditional because of his dependency on a world that manifests itself in sympathy for that world—sympathy that manifests in love that he cannot help but demonstrate. However, neither position seems to be able to explain instances in which conditions are assigned to love in things like covenant promises.

Can God and humans be involved in a reciprocal (and unequal) love relationship?

For the transcendental-voluntarist, only God can give love and does so in both general (common grace) and particular (salvific) ways. For the immanent-experientialist, God’s love is universal—i.e. given to all, not just a few, and at all times—and reciprocal. Henry and others wonder if this does not lead inexorably to a mutable being unworthy of worship. Still others along with Hartshorne decry Henry’s transcendent God, believing him to be cold and ultimately unrelated to humanity in any compelling way.

In lieu of these questions and others like them, many have begun to wonder if there is not an alternative to these mutually exclusive conceptions of divine love. Peckham believes that there is, and in the following chapters he will work toward a canonical rejoinder to these positions.

Find the other chapter summaries here as they come available.'

Image: "He loves you" by _mogi. CC License. 

His Truth Is Marching On: Selma’s Clarion Call

Editor's note: This article was originally published at Christ and Pop Culture. 

 

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

There’s a poignant scene towards the close of Ava DuVernay’s new film Selma, a scene made all the more compelling by its prescience. John Doar, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, warns Martin Luther King of credible threats against his life that await him in Montgomery, the destination of the Selma march protesting barriers to African American voter registration.

Doar implores King to drive—rather than walk—into the capital and to nix the planned speech, to minimize his exposure and prevent any possible harm. “Don’t you want to protect yourself?” Doar asks. King’s response here is telling, as it speaks of his convictions and highlights the worldview animating the film and, more importantly, the nonviolent resistance movement whose story it portrays.

I’m no different than anyone else. I want to live long and be happy, but I’ll not be focusing on what I want today. I’m focused on what God wants. We’re here for a reason, through many, many storms. But today the sun is shining, and I’m about to stand in its warmth alongside a lot of freedom-loving people who worked hard to get us here. I may not be here for all the sunny days to come, but as long as there’s light ahead for them, it’s worth it to me.

The specific threats of violence against King echo the egregious wrongs perpetrated throughout the film—the disenfranchisement of black citizens, the murders of innocent children and protesters, the brutality of local and state police against unarmed marchers. And yet the activists refused to be intimidated. “We go again,” Dr. King says after so-called Bloody Sunday—the brutal attacks by police and posse alike on the protesters during their first attempted march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

[su_dropcap]T[/su_dropcap]he injustice on display in Selma is heart-wrenching. Few will leave the theater dry-eyed after witnessing the powerful using their positions and privilege, their weapons and words, to dehumanize others. Again and again, the protesters are at the receiving end of such abuse. They suffer indignity after indignity in exercising basic human rights—registering to vote, checking in to a hotel, protesting peacefully.[su_pullquote]This process—resisting the impulse to respond to injustice in kind, to daily wait on the Lord to set wrongs right, to proclaim truth without fear, to stand in solidarity with the downtrodden—is hard. It is in fact beyond hard; it is impossible in our own strength.[/su_pullquote]

The scenes projected on the screen provoke outrage and disgust. And yet, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led by King rejected retaliation in kind, however tantalizing the temptation. After one particularly humiliating and damaging attack, several protesters plan to round up some guns, only to be reminded that the police and government force will always be much greater than theirs. “We have to win another way,” SCLC leader Andrew Young counsels.

Resisting the logic of lex talionis—an eye for an eye—seems counterintuive and countercultural at best, foolhardy at worst. Achieving victory by turning the other cheek seems impossible. Conceived in secular terms, victory over subjugation requires defeating one’s foes by force—be it legal, corporal, psychological, economic. But justice in Selma goes well beyond tactics; it points to a radical conception of reality itself.

[su_dropcap]J[/su_dropcap]ustice in the minds of the Selma freedom-fighters is a metaphysical fact, a real state of affairs promised and being worked out by a good God who is setting the world aright at the incalculable cost of his own son. And driven by their Christian convictions, the SCLC embraces the privilege and responsibility of participating in this process, of co-suffering with Christ.

While the scenes of outrageous abuse will infuriate viewers, the resolve of the protesters not to multiply evil through retaliation will inspire. What Marilyn Adams writes in a different context is attested to by the protesters’ courageous example: “To return horror for horror does not erase but doubles the individual’s participation in horrors—first as victim, then as the one whose injury occasions another’s prima facie ruin.”

Without granting its theological foundations, King’s campaign was worse than foolish. Knowingly placing himself at the mercy of those who would oppose with appalling force the truths he preached took courage, courage borne from the conviction that justice is the natural bent of the universe. The values of the kingdom of God turn those of this world on their head.

As Selma testifies, King understood that his real enemies weren’t government officials assassinating his character, racists and segregationists who thought themselves superior, nor even the man who would eventually kill him. No, he fought instead “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). And he knew that in the face of an all-powerful and all-loving God, these spiritual forces of darkness and entrenched systemic evils would not and could not stand.

[su_dropcap]S[/su_dropcap]elma gives us a glimpse into how this redemption works in our own lives here and now; it’s terrifying, convicting, and inspiring all at once. This process—resisting the impulse to respond to injustice in kind, to daily wait on the Lord to set wrongs right, to proclaim truth without fear, to stand in solidarity with the downtrodden—is hard. It is in fact beyond hard; it is impossible in our own strength. In our personal lives we all face indignities, abuses, and wrongs—all of which Selma magnifies in horrifying detail. We can thus sympathize with King’s weariness, his call for support, his pleas for divine intervention, his temptation to give in and give up.

In the crucible of this maelstrom, we see, too, the resurrection of hope, the power of community, the hardiness of righteousness, an enactment of the gospel. We see the church at work, Christ’s body setting the world to rights little by little, through the most powerful weapons there are, and the only truly efficacious ones—faith, hope, and love.

The saga of Selma echoes its clarion call to Christ’s body today to be faithful heralds of truth and justice, to live and labor in the hope of what we still can’t see except in fleeting glimpses and furtive glances. It is a glorious and sober reminder that if Christ be raised we have seen manifest the first-fruits of a coming victory so resounding, and a glory so amazing, that it will dwarf and eclipse any and all of this world’s sufferings. Like Dr. King, let this blessed assurance inspire us to proclaim truth with boldness, battle injustice with hope, and daily carry our cross with courage.

Creation and Re-creation

 

 

A Twilight Musing

1:1-18 is justly regarded as one of the foundational passages in the New Testament, since it could be called a hymn of praise summarizing the awesome picture of the eternal, ineffable God interacting with His physical and temporal creation.  There is a beautiful rhythm in the language of this passage, which manifests the economy and evocative imagery of poetic diction.  It begins by identifying the Creative Force in Genesis 1 and 2 as “the Word,” and ends with that Word becoming a part of the physical (and now darkened) world that He has created.  Just as “In the beginning was the Word,” so also in the end is the Word: the Alpha is also the Omega.  When the Creator became a part of His own creation, He reintroduced the original Light of creation, which operates to return the fallen earth to its pristine beginnings.

As I considered this way of seeing the Prologue to John’s Gospel, I began to wonder what it might look like to “translate” the embedded poetry of the passage into overt poetic form.  I present to you below my attempt to do just that, hoping that it provides a fresh approach to the text, while reflecting faithfully the essence of the Holy Spirit’s profoundly succinct theological summary given us through the Apostle John.

 

“The Alpha/Omega Word”

 

Beginning Word

Spoke Light to Chaos;

Light pushed Life from sod,

And God through Word

Made forms to walk on sod,

And finally man to trod

On finished earth.

 

But darkness pierced

The perfect pearl of Paradise:

The Word no longer heard,

Nor known the fellowship with Light.

 

In darkness, tyrannous Time was lord,

But Time was also womb of Light renewed.

Word of Light

Re-entered world He made,

Took on a mortal mould

That showed the face of God,

Unshadowed by shade.

 

Heralded by John He came,

Following in flesh

But eternally before;

Jordan-witnessed Lamb of God,

Light to be extinguished

So that Light could shine once more.

 

Time redeemed

Became a womb again:

Spirit spawned

Brothers of the Son,

Children owing naught to fallen flesh,

But reborn through God-in-Flesh,

The Light of Life.

 

New Covenant of Life,

Bought with blood,

Became God’s family,

Receiving grace and truth

Transcending Law of Death.

New breath breathed in

Through timeless Word,

 Beginning and also end.

 

                    --Elton D. Higgs

                       Jan. 12, 2016

Image: "The Creation of Adam" by Jessica Branstetter. CC License. 

 

 

Elton Higgs

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

Chapter 5, Part 2b, C. Stephen Evans’ God and Moral Obligations, “Constructivism”:

 

MORALITY AS AN IDEAL SOCIAL CONTRACT

Perhaps one might think the objectionable features of Harman’s view come from his decision to treat moral obligations as the outcome of relativistic social bargains that individuals freely enter into. It’s thus worth investigating whether moral obligations can be understood as the result of a social agreement that is ideal and perhaps for that reason universal.

Ronald Milo has proposed a view that he calls “contractarian constructivism.” It holds that moral truths are most plausibly construed as truths about an ideal social order. On this view, a certain kind of act is wrong just in case a social order prohibiting such acts would be chosen by rational contractors under suitably idealized conditions. This introduces a number of questions. For example, are the decisions based on making possible some good? And if so, isn’t this an abandonment of contractarianism, since it’s the good the guides the contractors’ decisions? Milo tries to avoid this by saying the practical reasoning of the contractors will be shaped by “means—end” reasoning as to how best to satisfy our desires. The aim is to improve the satisfactoriness of our lives. But Evans notes that this stance still involves a theory of the good, namely, a desire-fulfillment theory, and such an account of the good is as realistic as any other, since it seems committed to the claim that it is objectively good for humans to satisfy as many of their desires as possible. It’s also a controversial theory, but there is a more fundamental problem with the whole project.

What authority do the decisions of these hypothetical contractors have over actual individuals? Even if we decided that there are true counterfactuals of this type and that we could know what they are, why should the decisions of these non-actual people be binding on actual people? If I don’t accept their view of the good, then there is no reason to think I would agree with the views about right and wrong that they base on their theory of the good. One might try to avoid this by saying the contractors have no theory of the good at all, but this should only make us more suspicious.

The best attempt Evans knows to resolve this problem of authority is provided by David Gauthier in his Morals by Agreement. He tries to motivate a social contract approach to moral theory by seeing such an agreement as a way of trying to resolve “prisoner’s dilemma” situations. In these scenarios, two accused criminals—call them Ed and Fred—have the chance to confess to a more serious offense. The situation is stipulated such that it appears that whatever Fred does, Ed will be better off confessing. If Ed and Fred, though, could somehow count on each other not to confess, then each would get a small penalty. It looks like the best strategy for both of them would be to reach an agreement not to confess, but there is little reason for them to behave in this way without some assurance the other will keep the agreement.

Gauthier believes that such prisoner’s dilemma situations are not simply unusual possibilities, but capture many features of actual human social interaction. There are many situations in which, if every individual in a group pursues his or her self-interest, the outcome for everyone in the group will be much worse than would be the case if the individuals accept some restraints on their self-interest. Without an agreement regulating our behavior, in the actual world we are doomed to “non-optimal outcomes that, in ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma-type’ situations, may be little better than disastrous.” The solution is an agreement that creates duties that limit our quest for self-interest, though in the long run the agreement actually furthers our self-interest. Duty overrides advantage, but the acceptance of duty is truly advantageous. The authority of the agreement lies in the advantages the agreement makes possible, along with the fact that those who are party to the agreement will withdraw their cooperation towards those who fail to comply.

Is the agreement actual or hypothetical? Evans thinks Gauthier thinks that both can be true. The agreements may be implicit rather than explicit, but they are not a “mere fiction” since they give rise to new modes of interaction. Gauthier thinks that the authority of actual agreements depends on the degree to which they resemble an ideal agreement. He argues that ideal agreement is one that adheres to the “principle of minimax relative concession,” in which the maximum that each party is asked to concede is as small as possible, thus giving everyone reason to commit to the agreement.

Gauthier’s attempt to see morality as a solution to the disasters that stem from unfettered pursuit of self-interest is powerful, and it’s a creative effort to get beyond Harman’s relativism. But Evans thinks many of the same problems beset Gauthier’s solution. For example, it’s still not clear why an agreement that would be made by ideally rational agents under certain conditions (which in fact do not hold) is binding on actual individuals. It seems unlikely that the agreement that it would be reasonable for an individual to keep if other people could be counted on to behave morally is binding on actual individuals, who know that in the real world people frequently lie and cheat.

It’s true that those who are known to violate the agreement can be penalized by others who keep the rules, but this only gives a reason to keep the agreement when breaking it is likely to be detected and the offender is likely to face some serious sanction if it is detected. Gauthier admits he isn’t claiming it’s never rational for one person to take advantage of another, never rational to comply with unfair practices. But Evans points out that this is simply to abandon key elements of the Anscombe intuition, since on such a view moral obligations are not always overriding and do not apply with equal force to everyone.

Perhaps to solve such a problem Gauthier suggests another response to the problem of why individuals should keep their agreement to behave morally. Morality can’t really survive if we are purely self-interested individuals who behave like “economic man.” What must happen is that we must strive to be like the “just man,” whose feelings are engaged by morality and adheres not because of self-interest, but because he simply loves the ideals he is committed to. But this limits the authority of morality to those with the relevant feelings.

The last difficulty Evans raises with Gauthier’s theory concerns the scope of the moral obligations as these are understood. Evans has argued that moral obligations are universal in scope: applying to all humans, and at least some obligations extending to all humans. It’s hard to see how an agreement grounded in self-interest could be the basis for obligations of this type. Gauthier concedes that animals, the unborn, the congenitally handicapped and defectives fall beyond the pale of morality tied to mutuality.

Nor is it easy to see why people in one human society should have obligations towards people in some distant land, particularly if the people in the distant land are too poor and weak to threaten or benefit the people in the first society.

Gauthier imagines such cultural contact between privileged purple people and impoverished green people, and gives three reasons why the purples might decide to treat the greens in a moral way. First, it may in the purples’ self-interest. Second, the purples may have become the kind of people who are so disposed to kind and compassionate treatment that they literally have no choice but to treat the greens well. Evans says this would only be plausible if human nature were completely transformed.

Third, the purples may possess a certain measure of sympathy for all whom they consider human. Evans replies, though, by saying it’s hard to see how such feelings of sympathy by themselves could be the basis of real moral obligations. All of the considerations to which Gauthier appeals manifestly fail to provide a foundation for genuine moral obligations that are overriding, binary in character, motivating, and universal. The contrast between such a view and a divine command account of moral obligations is clear.

Find the other chapter summaries here. 

Image: "Construction Time Again" by Victory is Mine. CC license. 

 

Chapter 5, Part 2a, C. Stephen Evans’ God and Moral Obligations, “Constructivism”:

Evans takes constructivism to be a metaethical stance that tries to steer a middle course between realist, cognitivist accounts of the moral life and expressivist views. Like realists, constructivists want to argue that moral judgments have an objectivity such that they can be judged true or false, but they want to hold that such judgments gain that status because of our activities. They thus share the expressivist view that the moral world is a human creation. In this section of the chapter, Evans discusses three different versions of this project. Two of them see moral obligations as the result of a social contract or agreement, while the third is inspired by the Kantian-type view that morality is something that is created by the autonomous self. This post covers the first of these three accounts.

GILBERT HARMAN’S RELATIVISTIC SOCIAL CONTRACT ACCOUNT

One of the simplest and most natural ways of thinking of morality as a human construction is to see it as the result of a social agreement, for such an agreement would obviously be the result of human activity, yet if morality were grounded in such an agreement, it would appear to have a degree of objectivity. A key question that must be faced by social contract theories of morality concerns the nature of the agreement: Is the agreement supposed to be an actual agreement or is it merely a hypothetical ideal, an agreement that people would make if certain conditions were fulfilled, even if those conditions never in fact hold? The difficulty with a hypothetical agreement is understanding how it could be actually binding.

Both the strengths and weaknesses of the actual agreement model can be seen in the metaethical thought of Gilbert Harman, who’s a metaphysical naturalist. He’s skeptical that moral terms can be defined in terms of non-moral facts, so he instead envisions morality as the result of a human agreement, which can salvage a sort of objectivity. Harman wants to distinguish his own view, which he calls ethical relativism, from the view he terms ethical nihilism, which simply denies that ethical propositions have any truth at all. Moral nihilism would thus logically lead to the view that morality should be rejected altogether, and Harman does not wish to go that far.

Why does Harman commit to ethical relativism? Because actual human social agreements differ significantly. One might of course propose that there would be no relativity if the agreement is an ideal one, an agreement that all humans would agree to if they were fully rational and had the opportunity to make such an agreement. But Harman is skeptical this could be achieved and, even if it could, that it would be binding. Any moral obligations we have must then be grounded in actual agreements made by concrete social groups. Since many such groups exist, there could be many different moral frameworks.

This means, Harman says, that moral claims will be analogous to claims about motion that are made in the context of Einstein’s theory that space and time are relative. There are alternative spatio-temporal frameworks and any claim about whether an object is in motion (as well as how fast it is moving) are always  made relative to some particular spatio-temporal framework. When understood as relative to a particular framework, claims about motion can be true or false, but it makes no sense to see such claims as “absolute.” Similarly, no one moral framework can be correct in the sense of holding for everyone, even though such claims can be made relative to a particular framework. But Evans wants to raise questions about whether Harman’s relativism really differs significantly from nihilism.

Ultimately the problem with Harman’s view is similar to the problem that emerged with expressivism: the authority of morality is undermined. Remember such key features of moral obligation as objectivity and universality. Harman admits his view can’t accommodate universal moral obligations. But consider a Mafiaoso obligated to murder—Harman says it’s a misuse of language to say of the assassin that he ought not to kill, or that it would be wrong of him to do so.

But Evans replies that it’s hardly a misuse of ordinary moral language to say that this employee of Murder, Inc. ought not to kill. Morality has been emptied of its authority otherwise. In particular, our conviction that moral obligations are universal and apply to everyone has been undermined. To say that morality has authority is in part to say that such claims about what people ought to do can be true regardless of what people believe.

Consider too why people adhere to their agreements. If the motivation for the agreement is self-interest, as Harman says it is, it is not clear they it is not sometimes reasonable for a person to fail to keep their moral agreements. Why should a person agree to live by a set of moral rules and yet selectively disregard those rules when it is in the person’s interest? Why should the rules of morality be seen as possessing genuine authority? This is particularly a problem for Harman’s view that says what creates moral obligations is the individual’s decision to accept a particular moral agreement as binding. This means people can walk away when they choose.

Harman anticipates this objection about “free riders” by saying the agreement implies an intention to carry out one’s part of the agreement on the condition others do the same. But this will not do, Evans says, for if we admit that a moral agreement can be tacit and grounded in actions and intentions rather than an explicit promise, it still must involve an element of commitment over time. Harman sees moral obligations as grounded in relative agreements we can always opt out of, but it is easy to see that a moral skeptic might claim that the view that there are such obligations does not differ significantly from the moral nihilist claim that genuine moral obligations do not exist at all.

Harman’s account fails in another way. Since the individual can opt out of morality altogether, there is no reason to believe that all are subject to moral obligations, nor is there any reason to think that any of us has moral obligations that extend to all human persons. Nor does it seem we have any obligations to people in our own neighborhood we may come in contact with, if these are people who can’t benefit us or harm us. But it seems arguable, quite to the contrary, that some of our deepest and most serious moral obligations are precisely obligations towards people who may be in such categories; for example, those who may be senile or handicapped or unable to act towards us in ways that our self-interest should take into account.

 

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

A Reluctance for New Wine

A Twilight Musing

The first few days of a new year invite us to review the recent past, to let go of our baggage, and to pursue self-improvement.  However, Jesus gave advice about the danger of trying to embrace the new while holding tenaciously onto the old:  “Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved" (Matt. 9:17).

Both of the poems below deal with how our desire for the “new wine” of positively altered behavior is hindered by either our reluctance to break through the comfort boundaries of the familiar, or our substitution of face-saving guilt feelings for humble reform.  Our Adversary has no preference for either of the two, since they are equally effective in preventing the painful process of growth.  Happy New Year, folks.

 

A Reluctance for New Wine

 

The fabric of threadbare hope

Stretches toward year's end.

Pieces of frayed ambition extend

To cover the old wineskins

That many disclaim

But few set aside.

Like children clutching tattered dolls,

We hug in vain security

The rags of the past,

Because in some degree

They are accommodated to our wills.

 

The outworn selves we cling to

Can be our own

The more as time goes by:

We patch and mend

In order to possess.

 

The New

Stirs something deep within—

But I would not willingly admit it.

 

                                                            --Elton D. Higgs (Dec. 31, 1977)

 

A Prayer for Exorcism

 

Lord, spare me from the ghosts

Of work undone;

The year has run its course,

And once again I find

Unfinished what I had designed.

No doubt You hoped for more as well;

But, truth to tell,

I doubt my sense of falling short

Arises from the faults You see.

I prefer those sins whose guilty shades

Are quite definable,

And limit my lament

To my own thwarted ends.

Your design transcends my pride;

I cannot hide beneath the guilt

That comes from You,

For it speaks of new beginnings,

And brooks no misty sentiment

For what I've failed to do.

 

                                 --Elton D. Higgs  (12/30/78)

 

Image: "Growing" by A Tipton. CC license. 

Elton Higgs

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

Summary of Chapter 4 of God and Morality: Four Views, edited by R. Keith Loftin

 God and Morality

In the final chapter of God and Morality, Mark Linville argues for a view in which morality is objective and depends on God. He does not argue that moral realism is true, but assumes as much and then offers a model for understanding how objective moral truths depend on God, which he calls “moral particularism”.

Linville begins the chapter by offering a critique of a view he rejects, in which morality is made true by divine fiat. On this view, the claim that adultery is wrong is true only in a relational and contingent manner. Adultery is immoral because God has prohibited it. There is nothing inherently wrong with the act itself. One problem for this view, however, is that things really could go either way, i.e. God could have commanded adultery, and it would have been good. Or consider the following options: (i) God creates Adam, grants eternal friendship to him, and provides him with what he needs to flourish; or (ii) God creates Adam and allows him to experience nothing but eternal pain, grief, and torment. If morality is true merely by divine fiat, then God is good regardless of the option he actualizes. Both (i) and (ii) are consistent with God’s goodness. But as Linville points out, the term “good” appears to no longer have any real meaning here, because it fails to pick out any feature or property in a distinctive manner.

Fortunately, there are other options available for those who think that morality in some sense depends on God. Aquinas, for example, holds that God is himself the good. The good is not identical to God’s commands, but rather God is the criterion of goodness. As William Alston states it, God is himself the ultimate criterion of value. Alston calls this view value particularism, because “the criterion of value is a particular being rather than a principle or abstract idea” (p. 143). Linville agrees with this. However, Alston goes on to argue that moral obligation depends on God’s commands. Linville disagrees with this latter claim.

The view favored by Linville is moral particularism. This is the view that God’s nature is the standard for both the right and the good. On this view, the ultimate explanation of the significance and value of love is the loving nature of God. That is, loving others is commanded because it is obligatory. It is not obligatory because it is commanded. God is the ultimate ground of the requirement that we love others, because God is himself love (1 John 4:8). The command, “Be holy, because I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16) reflects this reasoning as well. God’s nature yields the obligation, ultimately.

When we reflect upon the obligation of loving others, it is also important to point out, as Linville does, the Christian doctrine of imago Dei. It is crucial that human persons are made in the image and likeness of God. This is the ground of our value. This fits nicely with the above. It is quite plausible to think that personhood has value because God is a person, just as love has value because God is love. We owe others love, justice, and mercy because they are persons, made in God’s image. God, a Person, “is both metaphysically and axiologically ultimate” (p. 158).

For those engaging in moral apologetics, there are many other issues in this chapter worth considering. One is a response that is often given to the claim that morality depends on God, namely, that there are plenty of atheists who still know particular moral facts and seek to apply them to their lives. I will focus here on the former claim concerning knowledge of moral facts. Consider the following moral fact, offered by Linville:

“Recreational baby-stomping is wrong.”

If we understand this claim, and our moral faculties are functioning properly, we should just see that it is true. One can know that recreational baby stomping is wrong, without any knowledge of theology or God. God can set up our world so that we can form such value judgments that do not depend on understanding their grounding in Him. This belief can have warrant, whether or not one believes in God. This is important because the claim that is relevant to moral apologetics here is not that one must believe in God to have properly functioning faculties. Rather, the claim that is relevant is that the theist can offer a better explanation for why human beings have faculties that reliably track moral truth—those faculties were specifically designed for the task.

I would add that theists have another and in my view stronger claim to make. On theism, there is an explanation for the very existence of such moral truths. There is a personal and morally perfect being whose nature grounds them. It is difficult to see how such truths are metaphysically grounded, on naturalism. In his reply, Evan Fales argues that there is no need to bring God into the explanation. Instead, we can simply say that the moral law is ultimate. The problem here, however, is explaining the existence of the moral law, with its self-evident moral truths, in a purely natural world. Did the moral law arise from the Big Bang? How would that work? Moral truths don’t seem natural. They don’t have weight, spatial location, and so on. The theist has a ready explanation for the existence of such truths, as we’ve seen, whereas the naturalist does not. A moral law fits well within a theistic framework, but not a naturalistic one. This is a key piece of evidence in favor of theism.

 

 

Post-Christmas Limbo

The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is often a bit of a let-down, a limbo that has a diminished glow of the Christmas celebrations, but is not yet the full resumption of everyday duties that will begin in earnest after New Year’s.  This is more particularly true if we have had a deep spiritual experience in revisiting the meaning of the birth of Christ, or even a rich re-connection with our families.  The aftermath is an anti-climax.  

As I thought about this, I tried to imagine what it was like for the shepherds after the first flush of the Nativity Night, when they were chosen to be the first witnesses of the Incarnation.  The days immediately afterward must have been full of the telling of what had happened to them, but I can imagine that as time went on, they needed something more than the thrill of relating those spectacular events.  It’s that maturing of realization that I wanted to depict in the following poem.

After Immersion in Glory

First flush of Glory faded now,

How shall we return to our flocks?

Having eagerly reflected the Light received,

Having believed the angel’s words

And seen the unlikely Babe

Born in a barn,

 

How now to fit that flash

With tedious tasks resumed

In nights as dark as ever?

The word we heard

Burst in on reality,

A pregnant pause in vacuous vigils,

Now duller made

By memory of angels’ song.

 

And yet a remnant of light is left,

No more in arching, starry sky,

But seeded in ourselves.

How now to deal with Word

Not merely heard and told,

But planted?

 

Time suspended transmutes

To time extended;

Shadowed Glory puts out shoots

From roots of all that we have seen.

The fields about are still the same,

But we are fertile soil

To grow the Glory

That will not fade.

 

--Elton D. Higgs

  Dec. 29, 2015

 

Elton Higgs

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

Summary of Part 2 of Robert Adams’ “Moral Faith” chapter of Finite and Infinite Goods: Faith in Moral Ends.

Finite and Infinite Goods

The second kind of moral faith we need pertains to the value and attainability of what we might call “moral ends.” Kant saw that moral commitment must set itself a certain end for whose attainment it aspires or hopes, yet that this end is only to a very limited extent within our power, so the possibility of the result for which the moral agent must hope depends on there being a moral order in the universe, which can only be reasonably supposed to exist through the action of a God, in whom we are therefore rationally obliged to believe, if we seriously aim at the end that morality sets as the comprehensive goal of our striving.

One place to begin thinking about faith in moral ends is with the question of whether human life is worth living. Whether your life is worth living. It’s morally important for morality to believe that other people’s lives are worth living. If your friends are going through hard times, they may or may not be tempted to despair. Either way it’s likely to be important to them to have your support as a person who believes in them and in the value of their lives. Having that faith might be essential to being a good friend, and not having it might be letting the other person down in a particularly hurtful way.

What does it take to have faith that a friend’s life, or one’s own, is worth living? It’s closely connected with caring about the person’s good, the friend’s or one’s own. It’s caring the person should be spared suffering pain. Caring more constructively about a person’s good involves taking that person’s life as a project that one prizes. If I care about your good, I add myself as a sponsor of the project. And this I can hardly do without believing that your life is worth living. To have faith that a person’s life is worth living will involve a certain resistance to reasons for doubting the value of that person’s life. Few judgments are more dangerous morally than the judgment that another person’s life is not worth living, or not worth living any more.

It’s also important to believe that distant lives, such as those that are lost to famine in Somalia, or to genocide in Bosnia, are worth living, or would be if they could be preserved.

Other instances of a need for faith in moral ends may be sought in connection with the question of whether the moral life is worth living. It’s hard to deny the moral importance of believing that the moral life will be good, or is apt to be good, for other people. For it is part of moral virtue to care both about the other person’s good and about the other person’s virtue. Morality requires that we encourage each other to live morally. But while few doubt that it is generally advantageous to have the rudiments of honesty and neighborliness, it is notoriously easier to doubt that some of the finer fruits of morality are good for their possessors, when all the consequences they may have are taken into account.

Another question about the value of the moral life is whether it is better for the world, or at least not bad for the world, and not too irrelevant to be worth living—that devotion to justice won’t result in futility. This trust is severely tested by both the failures and unforeseen consequences of moral efforts. Yet it does seem important for morality to believe that living morally is good for the world, or if not, then to believe that the moral life is of such intrinsic value that it is worth living for its own sake.

In these questions Adams has assumed that we can at least live moral lives. But that too can be doubted. Who, after all, emerges unscathed from a morally rigorous examination of conscience? We all have real moral faults, and yet it’s crucial for morality that we believe that moral effort can be successful enough to be worth making. For one can’t live morally without intending to do so, and one can’t exactly intend to do what one believes is totally impossible. Moral philosophers, with the notable exception of Kant, have paid less attention to this problem than they ought.

Adams mentions one more item of faith in a moral end. We might call it faith in the common good. It’s a matter of believing that the good of different persons is not so irreconcilably competitive as to make it incoherent to have the good of all persons as an end. If we can manage to view the problems of fairness and conflicting interests within the framework of a conception of human good that is predominantly cooperative, then we may still be able to take a stance that is fundamentally for everyone and against no one. What we must resist most strongly here is an ultracompetitive view of the pursuit of human good as a sort of zero-sum game, in which every good that anyone enjoys must be taken away from someone else. With such a view it would be impossible to include the good of all persons among one’s ends. It’s probably more tempting to endorse such a view more with nations or groups than with individuals.

Much of the temptation to doubt or abandon our beliefs in moral ends arises from the fact that these beliefs are concerned not only with ideals but also with the relation of ideals to actuality, the possibility of finding sufficient value in the lives of such finite, needy, suffering, ignorant, motivationally complex, and even guilty creatures as we are. Even if there’s a good philosophical answer to evil, it’s unlikely to silence the doubts.

This is the point at which Kant connected morality with religious belief. A belief in a moral order helps, but Adams rests content to have argued just that we have a moral need to believe in more particular possibilities of moral ends, as proximate objects of moral faith.

Adams then mentions a few objections to his argument, just one of which I’ll summarize here. It’s this: that the beliefs Adams demands are more high-flown than morality needs. It may be suggested that our beliefs about actuality will provide sufficient support for morality as long as we believe we’re doing pretty well within the moral system, that honesty is the best policy, that laws will be enforced against us, and so forth.

Adams responds like this: such low-flown beliefs may sustain minimal moral compliance, but won’t sustain moral virtue. Adams’ concern is with moral faith as a part of moral virtue. The attitudes of mind that morality demands are surely not limited to those involved in minimal moral compliance. Morality could hardly exist, indeed, if all or most people had no more than the attitudes of minimal moral compliance. There must be many people who have more virtue than that, for the morality of the merely compliant is largely responsive to the more deeply rooted morality of others. True virtue requires resources that will sustain it when society is supporting evil rather than good, and when there is considerable reason to doubt that honesty is the best policy from a self-interested point of view. Thus virtue requires more moral faith than mere compliance may.

 

Image: The Portals of Paradise by L. OP. CC License. 

Chapter 5, Part I, C. Stephen Evans’ God and Moral Obligations, “Alternatives to Divine Command Theory”:

God and Moral Obligation by C. Stephen Evans

In this chapter Evans looks at metaethical views that some will see as a rival to a divine command theory (DCT) to see what strengths and weaknesses they have. Some aren’t really competitors, and for those that are Evans will try to show that they face serious objections that a DCT does not face. He will try to select examples of each view that are prominent and representative, without claiming that such views exhaust the territory.

ERROR THEORY

J. L. Mackie was well known for his moral skepticism and “error theory” in ethics. Ordinary morality, he thought, is best thought of as a kind of “folk theory” that turns out to be false. Mackie presents a number of arguments for this view. First, he thought a subjective account of morality accounts for the relativity and variability in moral beliefs and practices. Second, objective moral value would be “queer” in the sense of being peculiar; they have no foundation in the world as described by science. Third, it’s hard to see why moral values should supervene as they do on natural features of the world. Fourth, it’s hard to see how such objective values could be known even if they are real. Finally, a reductive explanation of beliefs about values undermines any claim to objectivity.

How should a DCT’ist respond? Well, she can join her voice with various other ethicists (Kantians, natural law theorists, utilitarians, and the like) to argue for the objectivity of ethics. Beyond that, though, she can show that several of Mackie’s arguments work well against naturalistic theories. Values and other moral properties are indeed queer in a naturalistic world, but not a theistic one. Likewise it would be strange in a naturalistic world that humans have cognitive capacities that give them understanding of the good and the bad, of right and wrong, but not in a theistic one. Interestingly, Mackie himself imagined how God could play a role in ethics much as Evans envisions. Mackie didn’t subscribe to the view, but he thought it coherent and could see how it could defuse the Euthyphro objection.

Nietzsche, another atheist, similarly saw ethics as connected with God. His scathing critique of secular ethics was based on the way it tended to assume objective morality is possible without God, which he thought ludicrous. In this way he offered the testimony of an “unfriendly witness” that objective moral obligations require God and make sense only, or at least the most sense, if God exists.

EXPRESSIVISM

Expressivism as a metaethical theory comes in a variety of forms, from the emotivism of Ayer to the sophisticated quasi-realism of Blackburn. What they hold in common is “non-cognitivism” or “anti-realism”: the rejection of the idea that moral propositions express objective truths. Instead moral statements express emotions (Ayer), attitudes (Stevenson), prescriptions as to how one should behave (Hare), plans to which one is committed (Gibbard), or perhaps a complex mix of such subjective states (Blackburn).

The strength of the expressivist view is that it appears to account for why morality matters, and why moral claims can motivate as they do. It links to our actions. But Evans wants to raise a question about whether it links morality to behavior in the right way. The question he wants to raise is not whether moral judgments can motivate, but whether on expressivist views such judgments can have the kind of authority morality ought to have.

Many early criticisms of the view were based on the claim that such views do not seem to do justice to moral disagreements and arguments. Relatedly, Geach said it couldn’t make sense of moral propositions figuring in logically valid arguments. This led to more sophisticated accounts. At the heart of such views lies the idea that even though moral statements do not express propositions with genuinely objective truth values, there is a natural human tendency to “project” our emotions, attitudes, prescriptions, plans, etc. onto the objective world. This projective theory gives a reductive explanation of why moral language has the features it does that enable moral statements to mimic propositions that have genuine representational content. Blackburn and others have in turn developed accounts of the “logic” of moral statements that explain how it can be that these statements mimic the properties of genuinely representational propositions, even though they actually don’t refer to anything.

Evans thinks the real difficulty with the view lies with the way that expressivism, even in its projectivist, quasi-realist form, undermines the authority of moral judgments, especially judgments about moral obligations. Take emotivism, for example. Why should Mary care about the approval of James? One might think the problem is that the James doesn’t mean enough to Mary, but that’s not really the point. The challenge is to account for moral authority. The more sophisticated quasi-realism of Blackburn may appear to help with this problem, but the help is illusory. For in the end moral judgments merely mimic statements that can be true or false independently of the stance of the person making the judgment.

Blackburn doesn’t think his view makes truth relative, because if we “step back into the boat,” as it were, and put back the lens of a sensibility, there’s nothing relativistic left to say. Evans replies, though, that for the person who has awakened to the truth of projectivism, even this will be difficult to do or even impossible for some. How can we get back into one particular boat and believe that it’s the “right” boat, when we know there’s no such thing as the right boat?

If we could segregate our beliefs about normative ethics from our metaethical beliefs, perhaps Blackburn’s view would work, but it is not easy to wall off our beliefs about morality from our actual moral convictions. In the end, quasi-realism is a form of moral skepticism, only Mackie’s theory is transparent and honest, while the skepticism on Blackburn’s part is disguised by the fact that he continues voicing some elements of his own moral stance as if they were objectively true judgments. But the truth on offer seems a pseudo-truth, a “semantic shadow” of the attitudes and stances taken by ordinary people.

 

 

Summary of Chapter Three of God and Morality: Four Views, edited by R. Keith Loftin.

Summary by Michael W. Austin [su_dropcap]I[/su_dropcap]n the third essay in God and Morality, theistic philosopher Keith Yandell engages in a discussion of a variety of topics in metaethics, including ethical relativism, divine command theory, and the Euthyphro dilemma. The breadth, concise nature, and complexity of the chapter make a comprehensive summary difficult. The view that Yandell seems to hold is moral essentialism. This will be the focus of my summary.

A moral essentialist believes that moral truths are necessarily true. A necessary truth is not merely true; it is also impossible for it to be false. To put it differently, a necessary truth is true across all possible worlds. In the non-moral realm, one example of a necessary truth is the claim that two logically contradictory statements cannot both be true. “X is y” and “X is not y” cannot both be true. Many philosophers argue that there are necessary moral truths. For example, if I claim “Torturing infants for fun is wrong” or “Humility is a virtue” I am making a claim involving a necessary moral truth. Yandell claims that it is the fundamental principles of ethics that are necessarily true, such as the claim that we ought to respect persons (unless they’ve forfeited that right).

Both theists and non-theists can hold to some type of moral essentialism. Both might adopt some form of Platonism, in which necessary moral truths are necessarily existing abstract objects of some sort. Platonism is not merely a view of moral truths, but also of other types of truths. On a non-theistic Platonic view,“2 + 2 = 4” is true whether or not there is a God. This necessary mathematical truth is simply a part of the furniture of the universe. Similarly, a necessary moral truth does not depend on God in some ontological sense, but rather it is true whether or not God exists. On such a view, “Torturing infants for fun is wrong” is also a part of the universe’s furniture, whether or not God exists.

Alternatively, a theist may conceive of such truths as “the propositional contents of thoughts that a necessarily existing Mind necessarily has” (p. 103). On this view, Yandell points out that “If ethical principles are made true by divine command or nature, and these principles are necessarily true, God must exist necessarily and necessarily command as God does” (p. 113).

Mark Linville’s reply to Yandell is helpful in further clarifying some of these issues. On Linville’s interpretation, Yandell holds that God is an exemplar of the good. God exists, as do the relevant abstracta, and God exemplifies those abstracta. For Linville, God is himself the good. That is, God’s character, his nature, are identical to the good. If Linville is right, and the good is in fact identical with God, then we have grounds for a distinct moral argument in support not only of God’s existence, but of the necessity of God’s existence. If such an argument is sound, it is difficult to imagine a more powerful case for the existence of God.

 

 

 

Chapter 4, Part II, of C. Stephen Evans’ God and Moral Obligations: “Objections to Divine Command Theory”:

In this chapter Evans raises and attempts to answer several common objections to Divine Command Theory. This post will cover the last four objections discussed.

The Prior Obligations Objection

Wainwright calls this objection the Cudworth objection, since it can be found in the writings of Ralph Cudworth. It’s rooted in the worry that DCT is too narrow and does not account for all genuine moral obligations. A full-fledged DCT holds that all moral obligations are divine commands. The prior obligations objection argues that there must be some moral obligations that are not grounded in divine commands because they hold antecedently to or independently of divine commands. Specifically, the claim is that humans have a moral obligation to obey God. This obligation is not itself grounded in God’s commands. There’s a prior obligation to obey God that explains why God’s commands can create new obligations. So there must be some moral obligations other than those that are created by God’s commands.

Defenders of DCT could say that these “prior obligations” to obey God are not actual obligations but just hypothetical ones: To say that we have a prior obligation to obey God is just another way of saying that we are obligated to obey God if God issues commands, but there is no actual obligation until a command is issued. The conditional proposition itself can be understood as simply spelling out the meaning of the claim that God has moral authority. To say that God has moral authority is just to say that he has the right to issue commands that ought to be obeyed. The sense of prior oughtness should not cause the DCT’ist worry, Evans thinks.

Notice, too, that this objection could apply to any moral theory, but such objections are wrongheaded. But the critic might object and suggest there is nothing hypothetical about the fact that we ought to obey God. It’s a standing obligation, not a hypothetical one. But to this Evans replies by reminding readers of his earlier distinction between sorts of ought statements—not all of them are moral obligations. We may even have moral reasons to obey God without those reasons constituting moral obligations.

One final reply Evans offers is this, which can supplement what’s already been said: perhaps, since the Bible does command us to obey God, God can convert the antecedent fact that humans ought to obey God’s commands into an actual moral duty, in what Evans calls a “bootstrapping” manner. On this view it is both true independently of God’s commands that one ought to obey God, but also true that “one ought to obey God” is in fact a moral obligation, because God has commanded us to keep his commands.

At worst, the objection would show that some obligations aren’t rooted in God’s commands, whereas others may be.

The Supervenience Objection

Murphy offers a version of this objection. It’s directed against an identity version of DCT, according to which God’s commands just are moral obligations. God’s prerogative in issuing commands, combined with an identity version of DCT, Murphy argues, entails the falsehood of the supervenience of the moral on the nonmoral. The idea behind this notion of supervenience is that the moral properties of things are supposed to be fixed by their non-moral properties. Moral properties, such as being obligatory, do not “float free of their other properties. So it can’t be the case that two actions are exactly alike except that one of the acts is morally obligatory and the other is not obligatory. Evans agrees with Murphy on this, and that if DCT entailed the falsehood of supervenience, that would be a problem for DCT.

Now, why does supervenience appear to be threatened? Because if God has discretion in his commands, then there could be two possible worlds exactly alike in their natural features, but in which God gives different commands. If moral obligations are determined by God commands, then it follows that actions in one of those worlds will be exactly like those in the other except for being morally obligatory. But this violates the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral.

It is true there’s a difference in the two situations: in one world God issues one command, and in the other a different command. But if God’s commands are moral obligations (on the identity thesis), the difference is a moral difference, but there’s no difference in nonmoral or natural properties, and thus a violation of supervenience.

Now, one response might be to reject divine discretion here, but Evans isn’t willing to do that. A second possible reply is to appeal to weak supervenience rather than strong supervenience. According to strong supervenience, “property x supervenes on property y” = a claim that in any possible world whatever has property y will also have property x. On weak supervenience, instead, “property x supervenes on property y” = it is necessarily the case that anything that has property y in some particular world will also have property x in that world. Since weak supervenience confines its requirement to a single possible world, Murphy’s transworld constraint is removed and supervenience is easier to satisfy. But Evans doesn’t go that route, opting instead for a way to satisfy both strong and weak supervenience.

To do so, Evans points out the distinction between non-moral properties and natural properties. There may be non-moral but supernatural properties: such as the property of being pleasing to God—in each situation, what it pleases God to do might be different. So there might be a difference in nonmoral properties after all, and supervenience is thereby preserved.

Consider two situations identical in all their natural properties, but God commands X in one of them but not the other (either in different worlds or in the same world). The command/noncommand is a moral property, but other supernatural properties are non-moral, such as: “being pleasing to God” or “being preferred by God.” This preserves the supervenience intuition: “no difference in moral properties without some difference in non-moral properties.”

Mysterious Relationship Objection

What is relation between divine commands and moral obligation? Three possibilities are:

  1. God’s commands are the cause of moral obligations.
  2. Moral obligations supervene on God’s commands.
  3. God’s commands are identical to moral obligations.

Having discussed identity and supervenience variants of DCT, Evans considers a causal version. Murphy argues that the problem with a causal version of DCT is that such a view does not allow for God’s commands to be at least partially constitutive of one’s reasons for actions. It’s true that if God commands us to do X, then we are obligated to do X, and thus have reason to do it. But it’s not God’s command that gives us that reason. A bully who threatens to beat you up unless you do X gives you a reason to do X, but the bully doesn’t have moral authority over you.

In reply, Evans suggests that the proponent of a causal version of DCT should say that it is the fact that God has the requisite authority that gives him the causal power to establish moral obligations. The special sort of causation at play is the authority of God that makes God different from the bully.

Promulgation Objection

Recipients of God’s commands, according to some critics, must know that the commands come from God; otherwise no obligation is generated. I may be obliged to loan a car to my friend to whom I owe a favor, but an anonymous note saying to leave my car with its keys available produces no duty to do so. Likewise with God’s commands if we don’t know where they came from.

How does Evans reply? He rejects the idea that for God to successfully communicate a command to humans, he must communicate the command in such a way that it is obvious that the command comes from God. Two helpful distinctions can be brought to bear here: (1) We must distinguish between the recognition of a moral obligation and the recognition of the moral obligation as a divine command; and (2) one must distinguish a recognition of a moral obligation from an explanation of the existence of a moral obligation.

Believers and unbelievers alike can recognize various moral obligations. It might be a function of God’s grace for God to conceal that he’s behind obligations initially in order to mitigate judgment on those who disregard them.

Image: "Inside Pieterskerk, Leiden" by Canadian Pacific. CC License. 

 

Robert Adams on “Moral Faith”: Chapter 16 Finite and Infinite Goods: Part I

Finite and Infinite Goods

Immanuel Kant is perhaps the best known among those who speak of the need for “moral faith,” and his particular emphasis in this regard pertained to whether the moral life is possible and whether there’s correspondence between happiness and virtue. More recently Robert Adams has also spoken of the need for moral faith, and he identifies no less than five ways in which it is needed. For Adams the virtue of faith involves holding to a mean between vices of credulity and incredulity. In a provisional way, he puts it like this: Talk about faith is normally concerned with problems that arise from rational possibilities of doubting or disbelieving something that seems important to believe. For lack of complete evidence, or for the ability to doubt, or for resistance to belief, there’s room for doubting something that intuitively seems important to believe in, like morality; moral faith, then, helps bolster morality on those (perfectly legitimate) occasions of doubt. The five types of moral faith he discusses are (1) faith in morality; (2) faith in moral ends; (3) the cognitive aspect of moral faith; (4) the volitional aspect of moral faith; and (5) the emotional aspect of moral faith. In this post and four subsequent ones each Wednesday, we will briefly consider each in turn, starting today with faith in morality.

Adams says the first and most obvious object of moral faith is morality itself, or one’s own morality, the morality to which one adheres. When considering why be moral, or questions about the meaning of moral terms, or encountering Marxian thought or various “hermeneutics of suspicion,” we may well accept philosophical answers to such questions but remain uncomfortable about the extent to which the answers still seem debatable. These, Adams says, are among the ways in which a rational person might be seriously tempted to doubt the validity of morality in general, or of the morality that she herself nonetheless professes. Such questions about the validity of morality are all serious questions that are unlikely to be permanently cleared off the philosophical agenda.

One reason for this, he thinks, is that in responding to such fundamental philosophical issues it is often impossible to avoid a kind of circularity—by “some essential reliance on our ethical doxastic stance.” Of course, he adds, it doesn’t follow that we should not rely on the practice; indeed, he thinks we should, but that a certain level of rational discomfort with the situation seems appropriate.

Regarding our own particular morality, we are inevitably conscious in our pluralistic cultural situation of the many ways admirable people disagree with us on smaller and larger issues about ethics. Adams thinks this means that our ethical beliefs must be held together with the knowledge that there is a sense in which “we could be wrong.” Some moral convictions are nonnegotiable, certainly, but there remain many ways of looking at moral matters available to reasonable people. Yet surely it’s essential to a moral life to hold some strong beliefs about good and evil, right and wrong. Given the exposure of moral beliefs to possibilities of rational doubt, it appears that moral convictions will have to involve faith, in Adams’ sense of holding to a mean between vices of credulity and incredulity.

Image: "The faith series #1" by Daniel Horacio Agostini. CC license. 

Chapter 4, Part I, of C. Stephen Evans’ God and Moral Obligation: “Objections to Divine Command Theory”

In this chapter Evans raises and attempts to answer several common objections to Divine Command Theory. This post will cover the first three objections discussed; following posts in the series will cover the last four objections.

The Euthyphro Problem

From an early Socratic dialogue the question came, “Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?” Either way we seem to have a problem: either the gods are arbitrary or holiness is independent of the gods. We can extend the dilemma to morality and ask if God approves what’s moral because it’s moral or if something is moral because God approves it. If the latter, this leads to two undesirable results: it looks as if things like hatred and cruelty would be good if God approved of them, and it looks as if it will be impossible meaningfully to praise God as good, since goodness is whatever God says it is.

Evans thinks the Dilemma poses a problem for a universal voluntaristic ethical theory that tries to base all ethical properties in God’s commands or will, but not his theory that delimits DCT to moral duties based on some theory of the good, in his case a natural law conception. For then God’s commands aren’t arbitrary, and God can be rightly praised for his goodness.

Since Evans opts for the divine discretion thesis, he thinks God has some latitude in the commands he issues. Does this reintroduce arbitrariness? Evans doesn’t think so, since the commands would provide a special test of devotion to God, and perhaps be especially conducive to practices that would nourish such devotion.

Evans concludes that the Euthyphro problem is not a problem for a DCT of his type.

The Horrible Acts Objection

Another objection is that DCT violates deep moral intuitions about what’s morally right. If God had commanded us to torture innocent children, then it would have been morally right to do so, for example. The standard response to this charge is that God is necessarily good. It follows from this that God could not possibly give commands to do what is morally horrible because of the intrinsic badness of such acts. Louise Antony is mistaken in claiming that this move abandons DCT.

Recently some critics have extended the argument by saying that if, counterfactually, God were to issue such horrible commands (even if he never actually would or could), DCT would entail our obligation to engage in such horrible acts. Such critics provide no logical semantical theory to explain and justify these claims, but rather seem to rely on intuitions. But Evans plays along and says there’s no problem here, because (following Pruss on this score) such an argument would apply to any and every moral theory. For example, if the categorical imperative required us to torture innocents, it would be morally obligatory to torture innocents (on that theory). Someone might say the categorical imperative never would or could require us to do any such thing, but of course the DCT’ist says the same of DCT. Perhaps in fact the impossibility of God making such a command would be even more intuitively obvious than the impossibility of deriving an obligation to torture innocents from the categorical imperative.

The Autonomy Objection

Other critics object that a DCT of moral obligations is objectionable because it undermines the autonomy of humans as moral agents, and they believe that such autonomy is essential to morality. In one form, the charge is that morality, to be recognized as morality at all, must be based on reasons or arguments that humans can recognize for themselves. James Rachels argues this. For him DCT doesn’t even qualify as a moral theory. Other critics admit DCT is a moral theory, but argue it’s a bad one, because it infantilizes humans, conceiving of us as childlike creatures incapable of deciding important matters for ourselves, needing to be told what to do.

Let’s start with the claim that DCT does not even count as a moral theory because a genuine moral theory must ground morality in principles and/or arguments that an agent can recognize as true and/or sound for herself. Evans’ first point is that his DCT does not have to recognize a moral obligation as a divine command in order to have knowledge or at least justified belief that he or she has the obligation. Such people recognize their moral obligations, presumably in the same ways as other people, and it is hard to see how the fact that those obligations are really divine commands could undermine their autonomy, since they are ignorant of that fact.

So Rachels’ argument must be intended to show that it is coming to believe that one’s moral obligations are divine commands that undermines authority. But why should this follow? If one supposes that an individual has come to accept a DCT on the basis of a philosophical argument, then it is hard to see how this could undermine the moral agent’s autonomy. Rachels’ requirement that the individual form moral beliefs on the basis of reason and/or arguments that the individual has considered for herself would seem to be met.

Maybe Rachels or someone else could push the point by insisting that following the dictates of another person would not count as following moral principles at all. But sometimes following the dictates of human persons does result in moral obligations (think of an air raid warden during wartime). In God’s case, Evans has argued that he has genuine moral authority which enables his commands to create moral obligations. This is perfectly consistent with autonomy in Rachels’ sense.

Now consider the second version of the autonomy objection, which does not claim that divine commands are incompatible with the kind of autonomy a moral agent must have, but rather that following divine commands would be a kind of childish version of morality. Evans admits that even if God gives us commands, by giving us freedom to obey or disobey his commands he treats us as moral beings who have the opportunity freely to follow his principles.

Beyond that, though, Evans thinks it’s easy to show that God does not necessarily infantilize humans by giving them commands as to how they should live. Whether something like that is true would depend on the nature of the commands God gives. Perhaps if God gave humans detailed instructions on a minute by minute basis for every detail of their lives then this criticism would have weight. For in that case human persons would not need to use their rational faculties or develop them in order to know how to live. The task would simply be to listen to God’s continuing instructions and follow them. But if we assume that God does not give such commands, but rather gives humans commands that are at least somewhat general in nature, this would not follow. God’s commands need to be interpreted and applied, and their implications thought through. God might well decide to give commands of just this nature so as to require humans to develop the capacities he has given them.

 

 

Summary of Chapter Two of God and Morality: Four Views, edited by R. Keith Loftin.

In the second chapter of Keith Loftin’s God and Morality: Four Views, philosopher Michael Ruse presents a case for what he calls naturalist moral nonrealism. This is a metaethical view that combines atheism with a form of moral subjectivism. On this view, all facts are natural facts, there is no supernatural reality, and moral principles depend on what people believe.

Ruse first argues that there are connections between natural selection and altruism. Our brains are subject to genetically determined rules. Related to this, we are social beings who must get along with one another in order to survive. As Ruse puts it,

“What evolutionary biologists believe, therefore, is that nature has given our brains certain genetically determined, strategic rules or directives, which we bring into play when dealing with new awkward situations. Rather like a self-correcting machine…we humans can adjust and go in different directions when faced with obstacles to our well-being. The rules are fixed, but how we use the rules is not” (p. 60).

This leads to a discussion of the origin of morality. Some of the rules that we’ve inherited from our ancestors are moral rules. We take them to be moral norms. For example, the belief that we ought to help one another is such a rule, and is genetically determined. Substantive moral beliefs, then, are adaptations. Non-human animals have similar adaptations, insofar as they exhibit altruistic behavior related to kin selection. An animal’s relatives share the same genes. Given this, altruism serves as reproduction by proxy. There is also “reciprocal altruism,” where help is given in expectation that it will be returned.  And these mechanisms are also at work in humans.

Ruse, then, is an advocate of evolutionary ethics, but rejects the traditional view that includes belief in the progressive nature of evolution. He accepts ethical skepticism, which is the view that there is no justification for our moral beliefs. Such beliefs are merely “psychological beliefs put in place by natural selection in order to maintain and improve our reproductive fitness” (p. 65). He contends that this follows from his views about evolution. We could have evolved a very different set of moral beliefs, and for him this is a challenge to those who argue for objective morality.

The upshot is that morality can be explained, but it cannot be justified. Yet morality is such a strong impulse in human beings, and is very difficult to ignore. We think that morality has an objective basis because this is evolutionarily advantageous, but it is still not true. It seems to be objective, but it simply is not. Interestingly, Ruse states that like Hume, he will forget about his skepticism when he goes back into the real world.

Ruse also argues that Christians must be careful when appealing to God as a justification for their metaethical views, because of the well-known Euthyphro problem. He does discuss a natural law reply to Euthyphro, stating that

“The Christian says that loving your neighbor as yourself is right because the feeling that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself is something built into human nature by God…The Darwinian says loving your neighbor as yourself is right because the feeling that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself is something built into human nature by natural selection” (p. 73).

There are several criticism worth considering related to evolutionary ethical skepticism. First, it is unclear to me how “reciprocal altruism” is genuine altruism, given that it is given in order to get something in return.

Second, there is a vast discussion of the Euthyphro dilemma, with many options on offer for Christian theists that are intended to resolve it. I take the natural law response as described by Ruse to be one of the weaker theistic replies. The replies given by William Alston and Robert Adams, for example, are much stronger.[1]

Third, moral realists, naturalistic or theistic, will be dissatisfied with the views espoused by Ruse in this chapter. They will agree that for Ruse, as Keith Yandell puts it, “[t]here are no obligations, only feelings of obligation. Such feelings have no more relation to reality than a strong sense of being surrounded by unicorns” (p. 82). There is no correspondence to reality here, only groundless moral feeling that is selected for via Darwinian processes. Morality is merely an adaptive feature of our evolutionary history.

This leads to a serious problem. Yandell points out that on this view, no set of morals is better than any other:

Better and worse, insofar as they have any sense, are relative to the propensities built into the survivors. If the propensities lead to murder and rape, then our mores will come to favor these, and in no objective sense will this be any worse than if the propensities led to love and peace” (p. 85).

Finally, Mark Linville points out in his reply that Ruse ends up saying that he believes something (morality) that he knows is not true. Once you know that morality is not true in any objective sense, why continue to follow it, especially when it frustrates other desires you possess? There are reasons, good reasons, to be moral. But Ruse’s view does not possess the resources to ground a robust form of moral motivation. This is one of the many serious flaws it contains.

 

[1] See my “Divine Command Theory” at http://www.iep.utm.edu/divine-c/.

 

Image: "Evolved" by thezombiesaid. CC License. 

Summary of Second Half of Chapter 3, C. Stephen Evans’ God and Moral Obligations

In the latter half of this chapter, Evans explores whether divine command theories of obligation are consistent with virtue ethics. Virtue ethics (or theory—thus VT), understood broadly, is an ethical theory that emphasizes the central role played in ethics by long-term dispositional states of character of moral agents. Evans points out that it’s easy to answer the question of consistency if he’s right to have argued that DCT is consistent with a natural law ethic, since the greatest natural law theorist, Thomas Aquinas, was himself also a virtue ethicist. If A is consistent with B, and A entails C, then B must also be consistent with C. If a natural law ethic is consistent with a DCT, and a natural law ethic logically requires a virtue ethic, then DCT is consistent with virtue theory.

Of course there are some versions of VT that clash with DCT. Hursthouse, for example, describes VT as an alternative to ethical theories that emphasize moral rules or principles and ones that emphasize consequences. In some cases it’s not clear whether a particular thinker sees VT as an alternative to an ethic of duty—like Stanley Hauerwas. Arguably, though Hauerwas has focused almost exclusively on issues of character, his target is not the existence of moral obligations, but the claim that an ethic of obligation by itself captures all that is important in the ethical life.

What kind of VT constitutes a genuine alternative to the kind of DCT Evans is defending? One such variant of VT would deny the importance of moral duties, as prescribing or forbidding types of actions, altogether. Such a view is linked to some versions of “moral particularism.” Moral particularism emphasizes the idea that moral judgments are a response to the particular features of a situation, rather than being derived from general principles, and it comes in different forms. A strong form of moral particularism would be one that claims that there are no true moral duties that are general in form; at best a principle that we regard as expressing our moral duty gives us only a general guide or rule of thumb. But we can never deduce what we should do in an actual situation from such a general rule. This comports well with VT idea that correct moral judgments will be those made by virtuous people, people who possess “practical wisdom.”

Evans thinks this view is mistaken. It’s one thing to maintain that good judgment is required to apply moral principles correctly; quite another to assert that moral judgments do not rely on principles at all.

But there are weaker versions of moral particularism that are much more plausible. For example, one might suggest there are some moral situations in which moral principles do not determine any unique right answer, and there are some moral situations in which it may be unclear how to apply our moral principles and thus difficult to apply them. Both situations would imply that there are some particular judgments that can’t simply be deduced from general principles. DCT can admit this. Some situations do fall outside the scope of the principles of duty, and sometimes moral principles are hard to interpret and apply. In any case, VT need not be committed to the strong version of moral particularism. Aquinas, for example, doesn’t seem to have been committed to it. Only the strong version conflicts with DCT.

The second way a virtue ethic could come into conflict with DCT is by claiming that moral obligations can be adequately explained in terms of the virtues, thus making any appeal to God’s commands unnecessary. Michael Slote, for example, has defended a VT that he calls “agent-based,” as opposed to being simply “agent-focused,” which is the kind of view associated with Aristotelian-type virtue ethics. According to an “agent-based” ethic, it is the fact that a virtuous agent would act in a particular way x that makes it true that x is actually the correct way to behave. Slote pretty  much leaves reference to moral duties out of his theory altogether, preferring talk of “caring” instead.

Linda Zagzebski appears to argue that our moral duties are simply those types of acts which a virtuous agent would feel guilt or shame for not doing. The type of VT that Slote and Zagzebski defend is one in which the virtuous agent is the “truth-maker” for normative truths. Evans thinks this inverts the way things actually are. We don’t regard courage as a good thing because it is the kind of trait we find in virtuous people. Rather, we believe courage is a good thing, and so when we find someone who is courageous we have a reason to think that this person is virtuous, at least in that respect.

Another possible version of VT offers an epistemic relation between duties and virtuous persons. On this view, it’s by looking to exemplars that we come to know what our duties are—epistemically speaking. So far as Evans sees it, though, a proponent of DCT could affirm this.

So, on Evans’ view, giving an account of moral duties and giving an account of the characteristics of virtuous people are both important but they are answering different questions about different aspects of our ethical lives. Yet there remain vital links between them. First, our moral duties may include duties to cultivate various virtues. Many of God’s commands are commands to acquire or cultivate particular virtues, such as the command to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Indeed, it is arguable that the fundamental commands of God are, at least in part, commands to acquire virtues—loving God with all our hearts, souls, mind, and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves. From the other side, an account of the virtues may be valuable in giving us an understanding of what motivates moral agents to live in accordance with their duties. If DCT is right, fulfilling our moral duties can be at the same time an expression of devotion to God, thus linking the life of duty to such “theological virtues” as hope and faith. To live morally is not to be done with gritting of teeth, but joyously. This is a recurring biblical theme—and tied to the recurring biblical motif of blessings that accompany loving God.

Finally, the deepest link between virtues and duty requires us to reflect on the telos of duty. Kant thought that duties apply to human beings but not God, because God has a “holy will,” and thus there’s no possibility that God will ever follow any principles that are wrong. But Evans pushes this point to suggest that the more perfected a saint becomes, the smaller a role duties play. Moral duties might have as part of their function the goal of assisting us to become such persons, or at least to move in this direction. Kierkegaard seems to suggest this in his Works of Love. After spending a lot of his time focusing on the moral law rooted in God’s authority, he discusses the command to love, nothing that eventually it’s the sort of thing that shouldn’t need to be commanded, once someone becomes at one with the commandment. Love is the fulfillment of the law—which is far beyond doing duty for duty’s sake. It is radical transformation—the goal of the moral life. So Slote’s right in a sense—there is a life that goes beyond duty. But he’s wrong to think we can go straight there without a process of transformation first, that may well require obedience to duty. Kierkegaard saw duty as a “schoolmaster” helping us to be changed and transformed. But we’re still in need of this transformation at this point, rendering leaving duties behind too quickly a mistake.