The Possibility of Virtue in Christianity and Buddhism: The Victory of Christian Virtue (Part 5 of 5)

Chapter Three

The Victory of Christian Virtue

In Chapter One, it was argued that for a particular worldview to be compatible with virtue ethics, it has to meet two kinds of criteria. First, it must be able to account for teleology of persons and the world. Second, it must have a view of man that allows for the narrative unity of a single human life.  Chapter Three will demonstrate two claims. First that experience and reason confront the Buddhism with facts that are difficult to explain away; these same facts naturally flow from the Christian worldview. Therefore, Christianity provides a better explanation for the nature of reality and human persons than Buddhism. The second claim is that Christianity can accommodate a virtue view of ethics.

The Foundations of Christian Ethics

The Nature of God

Any account of Christian ethics must begin with God. In Christian thought, God is metaphysically necessary: “The existence of God is a first truth; in other words, the knowledge of God’s existence is rational intuition. Logically, it precedes and conditions all observation and reasoning.”[1] Further, he is the “infinite Spirit in whom all things have their source, support, and end.”[2] God is defined as the greatest conceivable or maximally great being. As such, he is said to possess all great making properties, like moral perfection and ultimate value.  By definition and ontological necessity, God constitutes the good of Christian ethics.

As a maximally great being, God exists with certain attributes. Strong divides the attributes of God into two categories: the absolute or immanent attributes and the relative or transitive attributes. The absolute attributes are those attributes that God possesses without reference to anything else. God possesses life, personality, aseity, unity, and moral perfection as ontologically necessary properties.  The life that God possesses is not biological life, but rather mental energy. He “lives” as a personal being, possessing “the power of self-consciousness and self-determination.”[3]  God, then, is fundamentally and necessarily a unified, conscious, and rational person who possesses libertarian free will. In addition, he constitutes the ultimate ground of all value and moral objectivity.

The Nature of Man

The imago Dei explained  

As a free being, complete within himself, God chose to create mankind in his image:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”[4]

While the Bible does not specifically explain the nature of the imago Dei, Erickson argues that there are at least six facts that can be inferred from what the Bible does say.  His first five facts explain that the image of God is something bestowed freely by God, without reference to any trait or merit within man, and that all humans possess the image equally. Each of these facts is vitally important to ethics, and the application of ethics in particular. However, his sixth point is especially important to demonstrating that Christianity meets the requirements of virtue:

“The image refers to the elements in the human makeup that enable the fulfillment of human destiny. The image is the powers of personality that make humans, like God, beings capable of interacting with other persons, thinking, and of willing freely.”[5] Essentially, possessing the imago Dei is what makes human beings persons; the absence of which makes animals merely animals.

J.P. Moreland has argued that as the imago Dei relates to persons, there are five principle parts: consciousness, free will, rationality, the soul, and objective moral values and the intrinsic value of a human being. If Christianity is true so that people are, in fact, created in the image of God, then there ought to be facts about human persons that are difficult for other worldviews to explain away. This provides an excellent opportunity to offer an apologetic toward Buddhism and a fuller explanation of what constitutes the imago Dei and how it is relevant to Christian ethics.

The recalcitrant imago Dei: human persons and the failure of Buddhism[6]

One of the criticisms made of the virtue view of Buddhism is that it is motivated for some reason other than obtaining an honest interpretation of the Buddha’s ethics. Some Buddhist virtue ethicists even openly admitted that they had ulterior motives.[7] It was suggested that Keown was a kind of “revisionist.” This raises an important question: Why would someone want to reinterpret the Buddha in favor of a virtue ethic? The answer seems to be that a theory of virtue ethics makes better sense out the world than the theories that the Buddha taught. While the insights of the Buddha are tremendous, they are nevertheless out of step with what human beings can know by experience and reason. In particular, Chapter Two pointed out that a virtue view of ethics was guilty of ignoring or distorting truths about the nature of a human person and the moral quality of reality. There are recalcitrant facts about the nature of man and morality for Keown and other Buddhist virtue ethicists. These are facts about the sort of world human beings find themselves in as well as the sort of lives they experience, facts about the apparent narrative unity of the human life and the teleology of the world in general. Specifically, the Buddhist will have trouble explaining the five parts of a person who possesses the imgao Dei.

Consciousness

Moreland argues that “mental states require a subjective ontology–namely that mental states are necessarily owned by the first person sentient subjects who have them.”[8] According to Moreland, there are five states of consciousness and each is expressed in terms of a subject/object relationship.  A sensation is a state of awareness. One might have the sensation of “seeing red,” or “feeling pain.” A thought is a “mental content that can be expressed in an entire sentence.” “All fire trucks are red,” is a thought and so is “My favorite fruit is apples.” A belief is a “person’s view, accepted to varying degrees of strength, of how things really are.” A desire is a “certain felt inclination to do, or experience certain things or avoid such.” And finally, an act of will is a “choice, an exercise of power. . . usually for the sake of some purpose.”[9] The states of consciousness do not constitute some conventional person nor are these states aggregates of a whole. Instead, the five states are all properties of a mind (mental states), which is a unified whole and indivisible. Moreland further suggests that there is an I that stands behind and above these various states so that they belong to a particular individual: “the first person perspective is not a property persons have, it is the thing that persons are – centers of a personal kind of consciousness.”[10] On this point, Moreland agrees with Strong:

Self-consciousness is more than consciousness. This last the brute may be supposed to possess, since the brute is not an automaton. Man is distinguished from the brute by his power to objectify self. Man is not only conscious of his own acts and states, but by abstraction and reflection he recognizes the self which is the subject of these acts and states.[11]

Moreland’s view of consciousness as mental states stands in contrast to the Buddha’s.

The Buddha believed that there are five aggregates that constitute a conventional person:  form

(rupa), sensation (vedana), perception (sanna), mental formation (sankhara), and awareness[12]

(vinnana).   The last four of these aggregates are mental states,[13] similar to the ones utilized by Moreland, although the Buddha is clear that these mental states do not belong to anyone. An unnamed monk, in a dialogue with the Buddha, argued that human persons mistakenly assume that one of the skandhas might be identified as the self.[14] Later in the discourse, the Buddha explains that each of these assumptions is unfounded. The Buddha asks the monk concerning each of the skandhas, “Is this what I am?” The monk responds, with Buddha’s approval, “No, lord.” There is no unified self; there is only an aggregate of parts with an illusion of self.

However, the idea that a person is merely a collection of parts does not solve the problem that Moreland raises. For example, the Buddha suggests that awareness or vinnana is the “awareness of sensory and mental objects.”[15] But awareness, as a mental state, requires necessarily a subject and an object. There must be a subject who experiences awareness of a particular object or state of affairs. The other aggregates (with the exception of form which merely describes the physical body) have the same requirement. Perceptions will require both a “perceiver” and an object to be perceived.  Formations (sankhara), which are “a range of mental responses to objects,” also require a subject/object relationship.[16] By formulating the aggregates, the Buddha has not solved the problem of the I standing over and above the aggregates. Instead, he has merely described the conscious states that an I possesses.  Further, it is not likely that the doctrine of “no-self” and a belief in the aggregates as mental states can be held simultaneously. The only option would be to either affirm that a conscious self exists over and above the aggregates or that the five aggregates are not describing mental states.  The juxtaposition of the “no-self” doctrine and the strong sense of the reality of self creates a tension within the Buddhist worldview to such a point that the language employed must be understood as either being only conventionally  true (there is a self) or ultimately true (there is no self).

Besides the subject/object problem implicit within the aggregates, there is a kind of cosmological problem. How could consciousness arise when reality is fundamentally empty, non-personal, and lacking any causal powers? A monk asked the Buddha this question directly:  "Lord, what is the cause, what the condition, for the delineation of the aggregate of form? What is the cause, what the condition, for the delineation of the aggregate of feeling... perception... fabrications... consciousness?"[17] The Buddha responded:

Monk, the four great existents (earth, water, fire, & wind) are the cause, the four great existents the condition, for the delineation of the aggregate of form. Contact is the cause, contact the condition, for the delineation of the aggregate of feeling. Contact is the cause, contact the condition, for the delineation of the aggregate of perception. Contact is the cause, contact the condition, for the delineation of the aggregate of fabrications. Name&-form is the cause, name-&-form the condition, for the delineation of the aggregate of consciousness.[18]

According to the Buddha, consciousness arises as result of a material cause (earth, water, fire, and wind) intersecting with particular conditions, the reality of dependent origination. While the

Buddha refrains from metaphysical speculation, there is nevertheless another tension in Buddhism at this point: how does consciousness arise out of reality as the Buddha understood it?

The answer is not clear. Consciousness, for Buddhism is a recalcitrant fact.

The unity of human life (the soul)

If mental states are something possessed so that there is an indivisible I over and above them, then another issue presents itself: the concept of a substantial soul.  Moreland argues against naturalism, but his point can easily be adapted to a Buddhist view:

I. I exist, as does a particular arrangement of skandhas associated with me.

II. I am not identical with the skandhas associated with me.

III. I am not identical with any single skandha (like vinnana, for example).

IV. I do not have any proper part which is not part of the skandhas

V. Therefore, I have no proper parts: I am altogether simple entity.

The Buddhist would likely find (III) and (IV) uncontroversial. There would be no ultimate I to be identical to a set of skandhas and whatever an I is, it would consist totally of the skandhas. Clearly, there would a problem with (I). But, if Moreland is right about mental states necessarily requiring a “subjective ontology,” then (I) should be acceptable even if there is protest. If (I) makes it through, then so do (II) and (III). If there is a “subjective ontology” that possesses the five skandhas, then it follows that a person is not identical to the skandhas.  The result is that the self is an “immaterial, non-extended substance”[19] that has no necessary relationship with the skandhas. This would explain why “we have very strong, deep intuitions that we are enduring continuants even though we undergo various changes and… experience part replacement.”[20]

The Buddhist faces a problem here: if there is a self that exists over and above the skandhas, that self would, presumably, not be conditioned by the laws of dependent origination or karma since it stands outside the space where those laws would have causal powers. The self would create a kind of dualism within Buddhism: there is what is unconditioned and without self (nirvana) and there is the unconditioned self. To explain these phenomena, Buddhism would need to develop a doctrine of the soul. The apparent necessity of an unconditioned self, enduring over time, and being metaphysically simple, the apparent necessity of the soul, creates another recalcitrant fact for Buddhists.

Free will

The concept of free will creates another tension in Buddhist thought. In one of the most important suttas, responding to the question, “What is dependent co-arising?” the Buddha said,

From birth as a requisite condition comes aging and death. Whether or not there is the arising of Tathagatas, this property stands — this regularity of the Dhamma, this orderliness of the Dhamma, this this/that conditionality. The Tathagata directly awakens to that, breaks through to that. Directly awakening & breaking through to that, he declares it, teaches it, describes it, sets it forth. He reveals it, explains it, makes it plain, & says, 'Look.' From birth as a requisite condition comes aging & death.[21]

From the dependent co-arising of things come “dependently co-arisen phenomena.” These phenomena are the complex conjunction of several “lines” of dependent co-arising and result in events like birth, becoming, craving, and so on. [22] The Buddha summarized his teaching on causality by saying that “Where this is present, that comes to be; from the arising of this, that arises. When this is absent, that does not come to be; on the cessation of this, that ceases.”[23] The Buddha extended this kind of causality uniformly to explain “the evolution and dissolution of the world process…plant life… and [even] to human personality.”[24] However, the Buddha is said to be able to break this chain of causation so that he is free from the cycle of rebirth. This assumes that the Buddha is able to enact “top-down” causation, and that he is significantly free from prior causes.  In short, the Buddha possesses a form of libertarian free will.[25]

Once again, there is tension within Buddhism.  The Buddha has explained the universe in fully deterministic terms so that every effect has, at least theoretically, a detectable cause. The Buddha also wants to maintain that he and others like him are sufficiently free to break the chain of causation. However, he provides no means by which this is possible. Persons, in particular, are not a good candidate for the sort of top-down causation that is required as persons are themselves an aggregate of parts reacting according to the laws of karma and dependent-origination. The apparent existence of free will establishes another recalcitrant fact for Buddhism.

Rationality

Buddhism faces a similar problem with the idea of rationality. The Buddha taught that the world was arranged in a rational way so that causes have predictable effects; he had a kind of process metaphysics. His teaching represents a “framework of thought that hinges on the ideas that sentient experience is dependently originated and that whatever is dependently originated is conditioned, impermanent, subject to change, and lacking independent selfhood.”[26] The Buddha consistently emphasizes that reality is a rational place in his teaching on Right View.  A disciple named Kaccayana Gotta asked the Buddha, “What is right view?” The Buddha said that

This world is supported by (takes as its object) a polarity, that of existence and nonexistence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, 'non-existence' with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, 'existence' with reference to the world does not occur to one.[27]

Clearly, there is a twofold assumption here: first that reality is a fundamentally rational place and second that human persons are rational themselves so that they are able, at least potentially, to apprehend reality as it is. However, the Buddha does not provide reasons as to why reality and human persons would be arranged in just this way. Thomas Nagel suggests that the fact that humans have the ability to reason is only possible under two sorts of circumstances: either “we can reason in these ways because it is a consequence of a more primitive capacity of belief formation that had survival value when the human brain was evolving” or “the universe is intelligible to us because it and our minds were made for each other.”[28] In Chapter Two, it was shown that the sort of teleology presupposed Nagel’s second option is unlikely on the Buddhist view. Presumably, then, the Buddhist would have to accept some sort of naturalistic (naturalistic in the sense that it would arise out of the impersonal laws of dependent co-arising and karma) mechanism as the origin of rationality. But Nagel says that this answer is “laughably inadequate” and it would still not explain why reality itself is a rational place. In addition, Alvin Plantinga argues that naturalistic accounts of rationality are self-defeating; it seems likely that his argument would stand against Buddhist forms of naturalism.[29] Thus, once again, the Buddhist faces a recalcitrant fact.

Objective moral value and intrinsic human value

One final area of tension in Buddhism concerns the nature of morality and the intrinsic value of human persons. The ethics of Buddhism are “thought to be objectively true and in accordance with the nature of things.”[30] The dharma defines good and evil so that

Of paths, the eightfold is best. Of truths, the four sayings. Of qualities, dispassion. Of two-footed beings, the one with the eyes to see.  Just this is the path — there is no other — to purify vision. Follow it, and that will be Mara's [the demon of corruption and desire]  bewilderment.[31]

This objectivity of ethics in Buddhism led Velez de Cea to conclude that Buddhism has characteristics of moral realism because “certain external actions are unwholesome or wholesome.”[32] As moral realists, Buddhists believe that “moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right.”[33] A statement like “murder is wrong” is objectively either true or false.

Karma serves as the foundation of moral value: “For the Buddha, the moral order of the universe is contained first and foremost in the doctrines of kamma and rebirth.”[34] Given its lack of belief in a personal God, it seems fair, then, to characterize Buddhism as “atheistic moral realists” who “affirm that objective moral values and duties do exist and are not dependent on evolution or human opinion, but they also insist that they are not grounded in God. Indeed, moral values have no further foundation. They just exist.”[35] The trouble here is that it is difficult to understand how moral values could exist independent of persons. Craig and Moreland suggest that the idea may be incoherent and that “Moral values seem to exist as properties of persons, not as mere abstractions.”[36]

If moral values can exist as an abstraction that only raises another question: how is it that an abstract moral foundation would have any relevance to human persons? Even if moral value could exist as an abstraction, it would not provide moral obligation. The only way persons could be morally obligated to a set of values is if those values were grounded in a person: “A duty is something that is owed… But something can be owed only to some person or persons. There can be no such thing as duty in isolation.”[37]

Related to the existence of objective moral value is the intrinsic worth of human beings.

The value of the human person is often taken to be self-evident in Buddhism. For example, the

Dalai Lama begins Ethics for the New Millennium by stating that the proper goal of ethics is the “great quest for happiness,” a fact that “needs no justification and is validated by the simple fact that we naturally and correctly want this.”[38] According to the Dalia Lama, the natural and correct desires of human beings define what is valuable. Such a view seems to presuppose that human beings are, in fact, incredibly valuable. Keown points out that “compassion (karuṇā) is a virtue that is of importance in all schools of Buddhism” and that the Buddha serves as a primary example of this when he decided to delay returning to nirvana in order to teach others the dharma.[39]However, if persons only exist in the conventional sense, it is difficult to see how some ultimately impersonal, dependently arising, arrangement of parts could be said to possess intrinsic value. Further, given the questionable nature of the Buddhist moral universe, conventional persons may not be able to be moral agents in the first place. Thus the existence of objective moral values and duties, as well the intrinsic value of human beings, is also a recalcitrant fact for Buddhism.

These facts, the nature of consciousness, the soul, rationality, free will, the existence of objective moral values and duties, and the intrinsic value of human persons, are features not easily explained within the Buddhist worldview. However, these truths are central and fundamental to the Christian worldview. Alvin Plantinga makes this very point:

What is it to be a person, what is it to be a human person, and how shall we think about personhood? …The first point to note is that on the Christian scheme of things, God is the premier person, the first and chief exemplar of personhood. God, furthermore, has created man in his own image; we men and women are image bearers of God, and the properties most important for an understanding of our personhood are properties we share with him. How we think about God, then, will have an immediate and direct bearing on how we think about humankind.[40]

God, as a unified, conscious, personal, rational, and ultimately valuable person, created man in his image. Man possesses these same traits, though to a different degree, because he is essentially made in the imago Dei. Given the Christian doctrines of God and man, it has been demonstrated that it can ably accommodate the necessary components of virtue: the narrative unity of a single human life and an explanation of teleology in man and the world.

Christ: The Ideal Man and Savior of Virtue

Aristotle argued that the good for man was to live a certain kind of life, a life characterized by the development and practice of the virtues. The driving question behind his ethic was, “What kind of person should I be?”  The ancient Israelites had an answer to this question: “Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy (Lev. 19:2).” Their “basic moral doctrine is the imitatio Dei, to be like God as much as is humanly possible.”[41] They were to do this by following God’s commandments. Primarily, the ethics of the Hebrew Bible were deontological. They were obligated to obey God in light of who God is and what he had done for them.  While the character of God provided the standard of right actions, it did not constitute the

good for man in the Aristotelian sense. However, with the incarnation of the Son of God, the ethics of the people of God shifted: “Christ is the Word made flesh, the perfect revelation of the Father, which means that, to the Christian, God is most perfectly revealed in a person, not a set of commandments or any written or spoken words, although Jesus says he comes to fulfill the law, not to destroy it.”[42] The absolute center of Christian ethics is the person and work of Jesus Christ.

One of the key texts on Christian ethics was written by Paul in his letter to the Ephesians.

Paul’s purpose in writing was to convey that God had begun “cosmic reconciliation” through his Son, Jesus Christ.[43] Given this wide scope, Ephesians is a good place to look for what is fundamental to Christian ethics. In the first three chapters, Paul explains the role that the individual, the church, and himself has within the plan of God for the world. In chapter two, Paul explains that the individual is “saved by grace, through faith.” Salvation is not given according to an individual’s actions, but because “we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”  Here Paul affirms that people have both intrinsic value and a teleogy. They are intrinsically valuable because they are “a product God’s making (αὐτοῦ γάρ ἐσμεν ποίημα).” They possess a telos because they were made with a purpose: “created in Christ Jesus for good works (κτισθέντες ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ ἐπὶ ἔργοις ἀγαθοῖς). On the basis of these realities, Paul formulates his Christian ethic throughout the rest of the book. But, Ephesians 4:22-24 is especially relevant: “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds;  and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.”

In these verses, Paul teaches that the Christian life is a process of putting aside sinful habits and attitudes, replacing them with habits and attitudes that are reflective of who God is. This dynamic component also corresponds to Aristotle’s ethic.[44] Aristotle taught that the moral life did not consist merely in performing right actions, but also in becoming a certain kind of person through the development of character. Through this development, one can reach his telos.

The process of sanctification in Christianity is similar: “sanctification is a teleological concept. More specifically, sanctification involves the growth and transformation of oneself and one's character toward a partially determinate picture of the human good or end.”[45] But what constitutes the telos of man in a Christian context? While not answering this question directly, Paul nevertheless provides the answer as he concludes his thought in 5:1-2: “Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

When Paul provides an example of the end goal of this process of sanctification, he says that Christians should “walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us.” According to Paul,

Christ is the moral exemplar, the ideal man, and Christians should model their lives on the life of

Christ. The Christian answer to the Aristotelian question, “What sort of person should I be?” is

“You should be like Christ.” The gospels provide the fullest picture of the mission and life of Jesus Christ. According to Hauerwas, the key ethical feature of the life of Jesus was that he “did not direct attention to himself, but through his teaching, healings, and miracles tried to indicate the nature and immediacy of God’s kingdom.”[46]

The Aristotelian virtues were realized largely within a political context. The virtues were those goods that enabled the ideal kind of society, and individuals within that society, to flourish. Both Aristotle and Christianity agree on the social nature of human beings and that “human wellbeing and flourishing occur in various relationships where life is shared and common goods are realized.”[47] Aristotle argued that only within relationships between people of a certain class, gender, and social status can one achieve eudaimonia. Virtue was attained through relationships with people like one’s self.  However, in the Christian context, the kinds of relationships that allow moral development are the kinds of relationships found within the kingdom of God – relationships between God, the individual, and the kingdom community.

While Aristotle required a group of like individuals for moral growth, Christian ethics emphasizes the difference between God and man.[48] Moral development occurs when a person exists in right relationships, not only with other human beings, but also with God himself (Matt. 22:36-40). Jesus demonstrates how these relationships should be worked out when he “comes to initiate and make present the kingdom of God through healing of those possessed by demons, by calling disciples, telling parables, teaching the law, challenging the authorities of his day, and by being crucified at the hands of Roman and Jewish elites and raised from the grave.”[49] Jesus demonstrated that the ideal life is characterized by obedience and love for God as well as sacrificial love for other human beings, especially human beings that are considered unworthy of that sacrifice. This is why Jesus is the human paradigm of virtue; “he realized our full human potential. He resisted selfish temptations, identified with the weak and oppressed, made love his motivation and guide, responded in love to both friends and enemies, was obedient to God (even to death), and found self-fulfillment in relationship with God rather than in autonomy.”[50]

Reuschling makes an excellent point here:

Jesus himself is the exemplar of the virtuous life. It might be easy to attribute the virtuous life to Jesus based on his divinity. Yet the virtues that Jesus taught were demonstrated in the life he lived through his humanity and in his social and personal interactions. It’s Jesus’ humanity that gives us the window through which to view the quality and shape of a life that pleases God. Jesus did not just teach about the virtue of mercy. Jesus was merciful. Humility was not an abstract idea in Jesus’ teaching. Jesus himself was the model of humility. Jesus did not present theories of justice. Jesus was reconciling, securing justice and righteousness as marks of shalom.[51]

Conclusion

A Christian ethic of virtue, then, is well founded and superior to a Buddhist virtue ethic. The Christian worldview provides the necessary foundations, an account of teleology and the narrative unity of human life, while Buddhism does not. Christianity does more than merely allow for a theory of virtue ethics. It provides a rich, substantive, and attractive theory of virtue. The Christian account affirms what we all we want to affirm and know intuitively: that human life is immensely valuable and that we were meant for some incredible good. Jesus Christ provides the fully realized example of the human telos that affirms these intuitions and calls humans to the good for which they were originally intended. By contrast, the Buddha asks men to deny a substantive good and even the commonsense understanding of themselves in order to achieve the extinguishing of life:

Delight is the root of suffering and stress, that from coming-into-being there is birth, and that for what has come into being there is aging and death. Therefore, with the total ending, fading away, cessation, letting go, relinquishment of craving, the Tathagata has totally awakened to the unexcelled right self-awakening, I tell you.[52]

In stark contrast, Jesus declares, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”[53] Jesus affirms what the Buddha denies, which is they very essentials of virtue. Therefore, I invite the Buddhist virtue ethicist, who correctly wants to affirm the goodness and value of human life, to identify with Christ, who, “in his full humanity and solidarity with us, became what we were created to be: the image of God.”[54] The good life does not consist in the extinguishing of it, but in entering into the Kingdom of God, conformed to the image of his Son.

[1] Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for

the Use of Theological Students (Philadelphia: Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907),  52.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 251.

[4] Gen 1:26

[5] 158  Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1983), 532.

[6] 159 This heading is adapted from Moreland’s The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure

of Naturalism

[7] 160  James Whitehill, “Buddhism and the Virtues,” in Contemporary Buddhist Ethics, ed. Damien Keown (Richmond: Surrey: Curzon, 2000), 17.

[8] James Porter Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (London: University of Nottingham, 2009), 20.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 133.

[11] 164  Strong, Systematic Theology, 252.

[12] 165  Typically, vinnana is translated as consciousness. However, this translation is not consistent with what is usually meant by consciousness, “the totality of conscious states of an individual.”

[13] 166 Peter Harvey, “Theravada Philosophy of Mind and the Person,” in Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings, ed. William Edelglass and Jay Garfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 265.

[14] 167  Maha-punnama Sutta: The Great Full-moon Night Discourse, trans. Thanissaro Bhikku,

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.109.than.html

[15] Harvey, “Theravada Philosophy,” 266.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Maha-punnama Sutta: The Great Full-moon Night Discourse

[18] Ibid.

[19] Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei, 120.

[20] Ibid., 115.

[21] Paccaya Sutta: Requisite Conditions, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn12/sn12.020.than.html.

[22] Kalupahana, Buddhism as Philosophy, 29.

[23] 176  Ibid., 66.

[24] Ibid., 30.

[25] 178  Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei, 50.

[26] Noa Ronkin, “Theravada Metaphysics and Ontology,” in Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings, ed. William Edelglass and Jay Garfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14.

[27] 180  Kaccayanagotta Sutta: To Kaccayana Gotta (on Right View), trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu,

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn12/sn12.015.than.html.

[28] 181  Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 75.

[29] See Plantinga’s “Naturalism Defeated,”

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/virtual_library/articles/plantinga_alvin/naturalism_defeated.pdf

[30] Keown, A Short Introduction, 25.

[31] Maggavagga: The Path, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.20.than.html

[32] Velez de Cea, “The Criteria of Goodness,” 134.

[33] 186  Geoff Sayre-McCord, “Moral Realism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford: Stanford University, 2007). Par 3.

[34] 187

Gowans, Buddhism, 29.

[35] 188  James Porter Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 492.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 83.

[38] The Dalia Lama, Ethics, 5.

[39] Keown, A Short Introduction, 30.

[40] Alvin Plantinga, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers (1984): 6.

[41] Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 316.

[42] Ibid., 316.

[43] D. A. Carson,  Ephesians: New Bible commentary : 21st century edition (4th ed.) (Downers Grove, Inter-Varsity, 1994), 134.

[44] Wyndy Corbin Reuschling, Reviving Evangelical Ethics: The Promises and Pitfalls of Classic Models of Morality (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2008), 117.

[45] 198  Joseph J. Kotva, The Christian Case for Virtue Ethics (Washington: Georgetown University, 1996), 72.

[46] 199

Stanley Hauweras, “Jesus and the Social Embodiment of the Peaceable Kingdom,” in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Durham: Duke University, 2001), 117.

[47] Reuschling, Reviving Evangelical Ethics, 116.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Hauerwas, “Jesus and the Social Embodiment of the Peaceable Kingdom,” 119,

[50] Kovak, The Christian Case, 80.

[51] Reuschling, Reviving Evangelical Ethics, 123.

[52] 205 Mulapariyaya Sutta: The Root Sequence, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu,

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.001.than.html

[53] John 10:10

[54] Kovak, The Christian Case, 80.

The Possibility of Virtue in Christianity and Buddhism: Interpretations of Buddhist Ethics (Part 4 of 5)

Interpretations of Buddhist Ethics

Utilitarian or Virtue Ethic

There are two primary interpretations of Buddhist ethics: utilitarian and virtue.[1] Keown is quick to point out that Buddhist ethics will not fit neatly into any one category in Western ethics. However, Buddhist scholars see many benefits to interpreting Buddhist ethics in Western categories. Western ethics provides a highly developed vocabulary and conceptual framework that was never developed in Buddhism. Because of this, there is a strong tendency to identify Buddhism in terms of Western ethical theories, even if there is not complete congruence.

It is relatively uncontroversial that Buddhist ethics is teleological, at least to a certain point. While scholars agree that Buddhist ethics is aimed at the goal of nirvana, what is controversial is whether the means to that goal are morally good. One of the key issues in this debate concerns the nature of nirvana. Those holding a utilitarian view understand nirvana in a straightforward way: it is the desired end in light of the circumstances. It is a place of peace and rest, an escape from suffering. Those holding the virtue view believe that nirvana is similar to the eudaimonia of Aristotle and that it constitutes the telos of man.

The Utilitarian Interpretation

The ethics of utilitarianism, broadly speaking, could be summed up like this: "Good actions are those actions that are instrumental to pleasure; evil actions are those actions that destroy pleasure." If the means to nirvana are merely instrumental, then Buddhist ethics is a kind of utilitarian ethic, where the “good exists in pleasure" and the means to that good are not important.[2] Only the consequences count in terms of moral evaluation. Good and evil only exist relative to the predefined goal. While utilitarian kinds of ethical systems are objective in the sense that they provide objective criteria for evaluating good and evil, these systems are not objective in the ultimate sense, meaning that utilitarian systems are not able to give an objective account of what is ultimately good or valuable. Generally, the end is decided based on what the community already counts as valuable or good in itself.[3] As such, utilitarian forms of ethics are, at some point, transcended. They require a prior account of what is valuable or morally praiseworthy so that the goal selected is not arbitrary. This is exactly the condition in which many scholars have found the teaching of the Buddha.

One proponent of this view was Winston L. King, who held that Buddhism "aims at goals which completely transcend the ethical and always places its ethics in that transcendent context."[4]  The Dali Lama himself seems to share the instrumental view. For example, he seems to suggest that an act like stealing is not wrong in itself, but wrong because of the resulting consequences: “As a result of stealing, one will lack material wealth.”[5] Those holding this view take the Buddha’s classifications of the criteria within the Path, wisdom (panna), the virtues (sila), and concentration (samadhi), in a straightforward way. The virtues of the Path (right speech, right action, and right livelihood) are said to be made possible with wisdom (right view and right intention). By having wisdom and virtue, the monk is able then participate in the

“higher” order goods of the Path, the development of concentration (right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration) that leads to nirvana.[6]

If ethical practice is merely the means by which one overcomes the suffering of this world, then, at the moment suffering is overcome, the practice of the virtues is obsolete.  In the sutta entitled “What is Purpose?” the Buddha explicitly addresses the reason for practicing the virtues:

Thus in this way, Ananda, skillful virtues have freedom from remorse as their purpose, freedom from remorse as their reward. Freedom from remorse has joy as its purpose, joy as its reward. Joy has rapture as its purpose, rapture as its reward. Rapture has serenity as its purpose, serenity as its reward. Serenity has pleasure as its purpose, pleasure as its reward. Pleasure has concentration as its purpose, concentration as its reward. Concentration has knowledge & vision of things as they actually are as its purpose, knowledge & vision of things as they actually are as its reward. Knowledge & vision of things as they actually are has disenchantment as its purpose, disenchantment as its reward. Disenchantment has dispassion as its purpose, dispassion as its reward. Dispassion has knowledge & vision of release as its purpose, knowledge & vision of release as its reward. In this way, Ananda, skillful virtues lead step-by-step to the consummation of arahantship.[7]

In this text, the Buddha never mentions that the purpose of practicing the virtues relates to an inherent value in doing so. Instead, the virtues are practiced because they “lead step-by-step to the consummation of arahantship,” which is nirvana. Once nirvana is achieved, then there would no longer be a purpose in practicing the virtues: "The highest life seems to be a complete escape from, or transcendence from, the ethical sphere."[8] Having achieved nirvana, terms like “moral” and “non-moral” no longer have any meaning.[9] The Reverend Saddhatissa also held this view, as he explained when outlining his two guidelines for understanding Buddhist ethics: “In the first place, according to Buddhist and other Indian thought, the highest state is one that lies beyond good and evil. In the second place, according to Buddhism there is no break between the moral teaching and that which pertains to the ideal state.”[10]

Given the instrumental nature of the virtues, they cannot be ultimately good: the “virtues are not sufficient in themselves. On the one hand, to be virtuous is not the ultimate goal of life… If there is any goal, it is freedom.”[11] They are described in a simile taught by the Buddha himself, like a raft that is to be abandoned once one has crossed the river:  “for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of grasping.”[12] They are only valuable insofar as they enable one to reach the goal of the ethical pursuit, nirvana.

The Virtue Interpretation

The outline of Buddhist virtue

Besides the utilitarian interpretation, the other major view is that “the virtue ethics tradition is the Western tradition most congenial to the assumptions and insights of Buddhist ethics.”[13]  Virtue ethics is also aimed at a goal, the good for man, which is objectively the best and most proper pursuit of mankind.  Good actions, or virtuous actions, are good because they correspond to and participate in the good for man.[14] Keown suggests that a utility view is a mere caricature and that a proper understanding of Buddhism will show that the Buddha has much more in common with Aristotle than John Stuart Mill.

While there are several scholars who interpret Buddhism as a virtue ethic, Damien Keown’s work is regarded as the most developed. Most other accounts of Buddhist virtue take him as foundational.[15] Keown suggests that there are four points of convergence between Buddhist ethics and Aristotelian virtue ethics: the goal of ethics, the general psychology of each system, the particular psychology of moral choices, and the desire for the good.[16] Essentially, Keown is making two kinds of claims: (1) reality has certain moral properties (2) human beings, as agents within a moral reality, possesses a certain moral psychology. Since Keown’s discussion of moral psychology is primarily concerned with categories unique to Aristotle that are not directly relevant to this thesis and given his own statement that “the discipline of ethics only requires that one individual can be distinguished from another… to pursue the issue of ultimate ontological constitution of individual natures in this context is to confuse ethics with metaphysics,” only his first contention will be examined here.[17]

Key to (1) is the claim that nirvana is intrinsically and essentially good so that it serves as the good for man in a way similar to eudaimonia in Aristotle’s thought:

Nirvana is the good, and rightness is predicated of acts and intentions to the extent which they participate in nirvanic goodness. The right and the good in Buddhism are inseparably intertwined. If an action does not display nirvanic qualities, then it cannot be right in terms of Buddhist ethics whatever other characteristics (such as consequences) it might have.[18]

Keown takes it as being self-evidently true that nirvana constitutes the good for man: “Whatever else nirvana is, it is indisputably the summum bonum of Buddhism.” [19] Keown strongly emphasizes the difference between nirvana in this life and nirvana after death and narrows his discussion to accommodate only nirvana in this life.[20] In general, those holding to a virtue view of Buddhism draw some important limitations to their interpretations.[21]

Another key feature of Buddhism as a virtue ethic is the relationship of nirvana to the practices that the Buddha taught. While other interpreters of Buddhism, like King and Saddhista, understand the Buddha as teaching that the Eightfold Path reveals a hierarchal structure of practices, with moral virtue as merely the first step and meant to be discarded once it is mastered, the proponent of the virtue view disagrees. Instead, all practices taught by the Buddha are meant to be understood as equally important. If moral virtue is placed first on the list, it is not because it is a  merely a stepping stone to more advanced practice, it is because moral virtue constitutes what is foundational for other practices so that to cease practicing the virtues is to fail at all other practices. Moral virtue is both a means to then end of Buddhist practice and the foundation of it.

Moral practice exists on the same continuum as nirvana so that nirvana is not a transcendent, amoral state, but moral practices participate in and constitute nirvana. As Keown says, "In both Aristotelian and Buddhist ethics, an action is right because it embodies a virtue which corresponds with and 'participates' in the goal of human perfection."[22] Even though he disagrees with the virtue interpretation, Kalupahana nevertheless agrees with Keown on this point: “Ultimate freedom [nirvana] is above the world, like the lotus that rises above the water without being severed from its root in the water.”[23] Moral practice is not merely a means because moral practice constitutes the good for man, nirvana. 

Further, the means of attaining nirvana is inherently good because “it is the only way to secure the utility sought. But for consequentialist views of morality like utilitarianism, no means can have inherent value.”[24]This is an important distinction because, according to virtue ethics for an act to be considered virtuous, it must both be good in itself, regardless of the consequences, and participate in the final good.

A Critique of Buddhist Virtue

The point of this critique will be to test for the criteria established for virtue in the first chapter: any worldview that wants to accommodate a virtue view of ethics must have an explanation of teleology in the world and the narrative unity of a human life.

The Problem of Teleology

G. E. Moore claimed that one cannot move from observations about the world to conclusions about what constitutes the good.[25] Empiricism cannot be the foundation of a moral theory. Those guilty of this have committed the naturalistic fallacy, which is to “conflate the ‘is’ and the ‘ought.’”[26] However, a virtue view of Buddhism seems to make precisely this move.

The Buddha was one the world’s finest empiricists. In fact the Buddha’s teachings are entirely based on his observations and experience. It was a result of his observations about reality that he formulated his Four Noble Truths–truths which were confirmed through his own experience and the experience of his disciples: “Monks, I have known two qualities through experience: discontent with regard to skillful qualities and unrelenting exertion. . . From this heedfulness of mine was attained Awakening. From this heedfulness of mine was attained the unexcelled freedom from bondage.[27]

The challenge that Keown and other virtue ethicists face here is the challenge of understanding the Buddha’s empiricism as teaching robust metaphysical concepts like eudaimonia and intrinsic goodness. In other words, they want to understand the Buddha as arriving at an “ought” from an “is.” Keown suggests that nirvana is sufficiently similar to Aristotle’s eudaimonia so that nirvana can be said to serve as the human good just as Aristotle’s eudaimonia does.[28] To make his point, he describes eudaimonia as being “desired for its own sake; everything else that is desired is desired for the sake of it; it is never chosen for the sake of anything else.”[29] He concludes that the same criteria can be applied to nirvana so that nirvana constitutes the good for man just as eudaimonia does. According to Keown, the fact that nirvana is desirable explains its role as the good for man.

However, the fact that eudaimonia is desirable is only part of the reason why Aristotle saw it as constituting the good for man. According to Aristotle, the first and most important claim about the good for man was not a claim about its desirability, but teleology: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit is thought to aim at some good.” Given this teleology, Aristotle continues his argument: “If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.”[30] Aristotle’s argument rests on a metaphysical reality: human beings, like all other things, have a particular end or function. There is, in fact, a telos for all things. Given this fact, Aristotle uses observation about desires and their objects to arrive at eudaimonia as the appropriate goal for man. Keown does not have a means of explaining a telos prior to defining nirvana as the good for man.  The result is that Keown works backward, making observations about reality and then formulating metaphysical truths. Sallie King explains the problem:

There seem to be two non-reducible foundations of morality: (1) natural law, the Dhamma (conditionality); and (2) an empathetic, caring, compassionate response to the suffering of sentient beings; empathy, caring, compassion, fully manifest in Buddhas, are implicit in the whole enterprise of Buddhism. The first foundation, the claim that conditionality and interdependence universally characterize samsara, Buddhist thought extensively strives to demonstrate (though, of course, whether or not it succeeds is a separate issue). The second, the perception that suffering is bad, Buddhism assumes, but few would probably want to challenge this assumption. It is the second foundation—the assumption that suffering is a problem and the caring response to that problem—that takes us from is to ought, from metaphysics to ethics.[31]

Aristotle is making a distinction between eudaimonia and what is ontologically good that Keown does not. While equating nirvana with eudaimonia Keown argues that “Nirvana is the good, and rightness is predicated of acts and intentions to the extent which they participate in nirvanic goodness. The right and the good in Buddhism are inseparably intertwined.”[32] However, “Aristotle identifies eudaimonia with the highest human good of human flourishing, but not with the moral domain of the good.”[33]  What Keown conflates, Aristotle keeps separate and by doing so, Aristotle avoids committing the naturalistic fallacy. What Keown needs to avoid this trap is to provide an explanation of nirvana as the good for man and the pursuit of nirvana as being morally his telos. He must provide a metaphysical account of both the existence of a moral domain and human teleology prior to formulating his ethical framework.

Another problem faced by a virtue view of Buddhism is an interpretive one. The Buddha described reality as it is and made recommendations about changing aspects of that reality in light of the circumstances. However, to understand the Buddha as introducing metaphysical concepts like “the good for man” in the Aristotelian sense seems to be more the result of idealization and eisegesis than an honest reading of his teachings. In one famous example, the Buddha is questioned by one of his disciples regarding the nature of the soul, the universe, and nirvana. The disciple wanted a statement by the Buddha on each of these subjects, but the Buddha responded by reminding his questioner that he has left such statements undeclared on purpose. They are undeclared because they “are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, Unbinding. That's why they are undeclared by me.[34]

The Buddha explains what he has declared and why:

And what is declared by me? 'This is stress,' is declared by me. 'This is the origination of stress,' is declared by me. 'This is the cessation of stress,' is declared by me. 'This is the path of practice leading to the cessation of stress,' is declared by me. And why are they declared by me? Because they are connected with the goal, are fundamental to the holy life. They lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, selfawakening, Unbinding. That's why they are declared by me.[35]

Given these statements by the Buddha, it seems like an anachronism to read concepts like teleology and “the good for man” into his teaching. However, Keown suggests this is not the case.

Providing man with a telos might solve the is/ought problem since possessing a telos means having a certain purpose, direction, and design. However, the telos brings up other difficult metaphysical questions. In particular, if a person has a function, design, or purpose, such a claim seems to presuppose a personal agent that can bestow such qualities. However, Buddhism does not allow for such an agent or any other means of accounting for teleology in human beings. Further, it seems completely foreign to Buddhism to suggest that there is a “good for man” in the Aristotelian sense. Without an adequate account of teleology present, the virtue view of Buddhism fails the first criterion established in chapter one. This leaves the criteria of the narrative unity of the human life.

The Problem of Unity

The concept of the self is critical to any account of ethics. This is a point that even Buddhist scholars appreciate. For example, Jones beings the New Social Face of Buddhism by asking, “What is the self?” and “Who am I?” to which he responds, “These are the questions around which the whole argument of this book revolves.”[36] In virtue ethics, the nature of the self is even more important since it is an agent centered ethic: “in any account of virtue ethics, the self must play a prominent role.”[37] However, Keown seems unwilling to define and engage the nature of the self in his argument for Buddhist virtue. He limits the scope of his argument to nirvana in this life[38] and then adds that “I do not address directly the problem of the apparent albescence of a moral subject in the light of the no-self (annata) doctrine. It seems to me that Buddhism provides sufficient criteria for personal identity to allow the identification of subjects within the moral nexus.”[39]

This seems like a strange omission give the importance of the conception of self to most other forms of ethics.  Why would Keown put such a crucial issue aside? One clue comes from the suggestion of Whitehill, who himself takes a virtue view of Buddhism. Whitehill calls Keown a “revisionist.”[40] Whitehill himself does not seem particularly interested in understanding historical Buddhism in its context, but rather as a means for expanding Western ethical “horizons.” [41] Perhaps Keown is motivated by reasons other than understanding the Buddha in his own context. Given the discussion of the no-self doctrine earlier, there is apparently no possibility for understanding a human life as a unified whole.  All language regarding the self is mere convention, not referring to any substantive “person.”

Buddhist scholars who are willing to comment on the nature of the self paint a picture that is not compatible with MacIntyre’s requirement of narrative unity. Persons are only “persons” in terms of convention and not substance. They are a collection of parts, loosely associated with previous arrangements of other parts. This leads Siderits to conclude that, in light of the Buddhist no-self doctrine, “I should continue to identify with the past and future stages of this causal series. But I should not do so as the hero of the story that is my life.”[42] But it is just such an identification that is necessary according to MacIntyre. As a result, Buddhism fails the second criteria for a virtue ethic: the narrative unity of a single human life.

Notes:

[1] Siderits, Philosophy, 77.

[2] Julia Driver, “The History of Utilitarianism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford: Stanford University), par 3.

[3] 114

Goodman, Consequences, 23.

[4] 115  King, In the Hope of Nibbana,  4.

[5] 116

Bstan-ʼdzin-rgya-mtsho and Donald S. Lopez, The Way to Freedom: Core Teachings of Tibetan Buddhism (India: Indus, 1996), 100.

[6] David J Kalupahana, Ethics in Early Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaiì Press, 1995), 93.

[7] Kimattha Sutta: What is the Purpose? trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an11/an11.001.than.html

[8] 119  King, In Hope of Nibbana, 30.

[9] Harvey, Introduction, 44.

[10] Saddhatissa, Buddhist Ethics, 4.

[11] Kalupahana, Ethics, 72.

[12] 123 The Middle Length Discourses, 229.

[13] 124

James Whitehill, “Buddhism and the Virtues,” in Contemporary Buddhist Ethics, ed. Damien Keown (Richmond: Surrey: Curzon, 2000), 17.

[14] Rosalind Hursthouse, "Virtue Ethics," in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,  ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford: Stanford University, 2010), par. 6.

[15] Whitehill, “Buddhism,” 18.

[16] 127

Keown, Nature, 195-222.

[17] 128  Ibid., 19.

[18] Ibid., 177.

[19] Ibid.,199.

[20] Ibid., 19.

[21] For example, Whitehill limits his interpretation by suggesting that his virtue interpretation is only for the sake of building bridges between Eastern and Western ethics, and not necessarily an attempt to offer a straightforward rendering of Buddhist ethics.

[22] Keown, Nature, 50.

[23] Kalupahana, Ethics, 86.

[24] 135 Damien Keown, “Karma, Character, and Consequentialism,” Journal of Religious Ethics 24 (1996), 346.

[25] 136  Michael Ridge, “Moral Non-Naturalism,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,  ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford: Stanford University, 2010), par. 9.

[26] Christopher Ives, “Deploying the Dharma: Reflections on the Methodology of Constructive Buddhist Ethics.,” The Journal of Buddhist Ethics 15 (2008): 25.

[27] 138  Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta: The Shorter Instructions to Malunkya, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu,

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.063.than.html

[28] 139  Keown, Nature, 197.

[29] 140  Ibid.,199.

[30] Book I, Nichomachean Ethics.

[31] Sallie B. King, “From Is to Ought: Natural Law in in Buddhadasa Bhikkhu and Phra Prayudh Payutto,” Journal of Religious Ethics 30, no. 2 (2002): 284.

[32] 143  Keown, Nature, 199.

[33] 144 Abraham Velez de Cea, “The Criteria of Goodness in the Pali Nikayas and the Nature of Buddhist Ethics,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 11 (2004): 129.

[34] 145 Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ken Jones, The New Social Face of Buddhism: A Call to Action (Boston: Wisdom, 2003), 2.

[37] 148  R. Scott Smith, Virtue Ethics and  Moral Knowledge: Philosophy of Language after MacIntyre and Hauerwas (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003),  145. 

[38] 149  This move seems arbitrary and unsupported by the Buddha’s early teachings. The Buddha did not draw

a sharp distinction between nirvana in this life and nirvana without remainder. However, Keown’s distinction is so great that he divorces his ethic from the ultimate goal of Buddhism, nirvana without remainder. Why would he want to do this? The answer seems to be, as argued later, that Keown is revising Buddhist teaching to be compatible with a virtue ethic.

[39] 150  Keown, Nature, 19.

[40] Whitehill, “Buddhism,” 19.

[41] 152  Ibid., 17. “My purpose in this chapter is to speculate about the optimal, future development of Buddhism

in the West.”

[42] Siderits, Philosophy, 77.

Mailbag: A Moral Argument from Evil?

Question: Hi, MA team:

I've been working through an argument for God's existence which takes as its starting point a conception of evil as wrongdoing or injustice. In other words, when we think about great evils, whether moral or natural, we tend to think of certain states of affairs that *ought not* obtain, or which depart from the way things should be, or which are simply not owed to us. All of these different conceptions, it seems to me, essentially boil down to two elements: 1) we treat the existence of evil as being 'out of step' with the character of the world, that is, as having a certain normative pull; and 2) such normative character points to an understanding of evil as in relation to some end or perfection, some maximum.

The argument I have in mind, then, proceeds thus:

1. To the extent that we understand evil as a wrongdoing or injustice -- that is, as a departure from the way things should be, or as something not owed -- we understand evil in relation to some end or perfection, some maximum. 2. But, given atheism, no such perfection or maximum exists. 3. Therefore, plausibly, theism is true.

I would be very interested in your thoughts, please. One possible objection that has been marshalled against my argument is the following (and I wonder how you would address it, provided that you think the argument works):

"I think most moral philosophers think premise 2 is false. Aristotle argued there is a highest human end (without God), so injustices are departures from that. Similarly, Kant argued that his "categorical imperative" is objectively true, not dependent upon God. Finally, I argue...that (1) is false: that evil is not a departure from some objective "maximum," but rather deviations from a conception of fairness that is rational for human beings to adopt given human psychology."

Thank you very much for your time, Paulo Juarez

Reply: This is all very interesting stuff! Thanks for the query, and sorry for the delay getting back to you. This approach, to my thinking, has tremendous potential. The notion that the world is, in some very strong sense, not as it ought to be seems profoundly right, but also rather difficult to reconcile with naturalism. After all, in something like a fully determined world, why should anything be different from what it is? Evil in any robust sense makes more sense in a theistic world inhabited with creatures with meaningful agency who have used their agency wrongly. In God and Cosmos, Walls and I make the case that what’s worse even than the problem of evil is the inability of naturalism to account for the category of evil at all. When the problem of evil ceases being a problem for one’s worldview, so much the worse for one’s worldview.

You’re characterizing as an essential feature of evil a relation to some end or perfection or maximum. First a word on that. Personally I might disambiguate between these three notions. The second and third of them—perfection and maximum—seem to go well together in Anselmian theology. If the God of classical theism is construed along the lines of the greatest possible being, then his perfection is constituted by instantiating all the great-making properties to the maximally compossible degree. So, regarding goodness, God has as much goodness as is possible in light of his maximal power, knowledge, etc. Tom Morris and I did an article on this in the recent issue of the Christian Research Journal. I think that makes great sense.

When we speak of an “end” of something, however, I’m not as confident that we need speak of a perfection or maximum. Regarding human artifacts, for example, like a pencil, its end is to write well, or something like that. Or a car’s purpose or function is likely to transport us around. Aristotle thought teleology was shot through everything, but if it is, in lots of cases the telos in question has little to do with perfection or a maximum.

Now, if human beings in particular have a telos, and if Christianity is true, then you could more effectively argue that the goal, the purpose, the telos of human beings does involve perfection—at the culmination of the sanctification process when we’re entirely conformed to the image of Christ. That classical theism and orthodox Christianity feature the realistic hope of total moral transformation in this way enables the “performative” variant of moral apologetics that’s one of the four variants of the moral argument this website often discusses.

But you wish to characterize even natural evils as falling short of a perfection, which likely seems predicated on the idea that worlds admit of intrinsic maxima, and I rather doubt they do. Unlike the case of God, who does admit of intrinsic maxima, worlds likely don’t, which is related to why one of Guanilo’s criticisms of the ontological argument fails, since the criticism assumed that, say, islands admitted of intrinsic maxima when, in fact, they just don’t. How many palm trees are on the perfect island, for example? There’s no principled, nonarbitrary way to say.

So I’m of two minds about your argument. On the one hand, I think there’s something profoundly right about theism providing the best explanation of the category of evil—along with hope for its ultimate defeat (by relation with God, the ultimate Good, a good so incommensurably good that relation to him can make the sufferings of this world, however horrific, pale by comparison). On the other hand, characterization of evil as intrinsically connected to a maximum or perfection strains credulity a bit.

More plausible, I think, is the claim that evil, as an instance of the way the world shouldn’t be, reflects a missing of the mark (even if the mark isn’t best cast as a perfection). Not every imperfection is an instance of evil, but every evil does seem to be a radical missing of some normative state of affairs. So I’d likely be inclined to recast your argument more like this:

1. To the extent that we understand evil as a wrongdoing or injustice -- that is, as a departure from the way things should be, or as something not owed -- we understand evil in relation to some end or standard.

2. Theism provides the best explanation for such normatively binding ends.

3. Therefore, plausibly, theism is true.

This still remains too brief and needs more fleshing out, but it’s the direction I’d encourage. And maybe I’m wrong! Perhaps you can still convince me of the need and plausibility of those categories I excised. But for now, my suggestion, for whatever it’s worth, is this: Leave behind the ontologically heavy notions of perfections and maxima and just refer to the intuitively strong idea that evil reflects something that is not the way the world ought to be. Then make the case that classical theism and orthodox Christianity can provide the better explanation of such normatively binding ends that make sense of how the world, people, etc. “ought to be.” On naturalism, assuming determinism at the macro level, it’s awfully difficult to distinguish between the way the world is and how it ought to be. That’s a very high price to pay for the committed naturalist, involving an eschewal of deep moral intuitions.

As for the Kantian and Thomistic concerns, I don’t think you have as much to worry with there as some might say you do. In various places in Kant’s works, he gives a variant of a moral argument for God’s existence. It tends to be a version of either the performative or rational argument (as discussed on this site and in God and Cosmos), but it’s undoubtedly there. Just recently I’ve been reading his Lectures on Ethics (which students of his put together based on his lectures). Here’s a telling passage (one among many!): “The ideal of the Gospels is complete in every respect. Here we have the greatest purity and the greatest happiness. It sets out the principles of morality in all their holiness. It commands man to be holy, but as he is imperfect it gives him a prop, namely, divine aid.” Even the categorical imperative is, to Kant’s thinking, connected in various and powerful ways to God, not least in Kant’s insistence we should think of all moral duties as duties to God for the sake of grounding their rational stability.

Regarding Aristotle, you might wish to read John Hare’s chapter on him in God and Morality. Our highest telos, for Aristotle, is contemplating the divine. So it’s actually not the case that the highest human good, for Aristotle, was independent of God. Naturalists who try to adopt him to their cause are misguided, for a number of reasons. Here’s one: Aristotle’s focus on what’s natural was by way of contrast with the artificial, not the supernatural. At any rate, much more could be said there (and has been said elsewhere), but take a look at Hare if you get a chance.

Thanks so much for the chance to reflect on this, and feel free to stick to your guns and defend your approach. Keep up the great work! Blessings!

Dave Baggett

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 1, section 1.4: “God’s Command and the Scope of Obligation”

God’s command produces not only moral obligation, but obligations of other kinds, like ceremonial and dietary obligations in Judaism. But with moral obligation, we might say that God’s command not only lays the obligation on us, but also gives us the scope of the obligation. This needs more explanation.

Kantian morality requires that we give equal moral status, or dignity (as opposed to price), to all human beings. But it has proved hard to justify this status. Hare will try to show that divine prescription will not merely give us a justification for the claim that we are under obligation, but it will ground the particular kind of obligation that is peculiar to morality.

Kant says in the Groundwork, in the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative, that we are to treat humanity, whether in our own person or the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, and never merely as a means. Moreover, morality is the condition under which alone a rational being can be an end in itself, since only through this is it possible to be a lawgiving member in the kingdom of ends. Hence morality, and humanity insofar as it is capable of morality, is that which alone has dignity. But there are different schools of interpretation of this point. The inclusive interpretation says only persons have moral status, all human beings have moral status, and therefore all human beings are persons. But the problem is that Kant’s criterion for personality (“the susceptibility to respect for the moral law as of itself a sufficient incentive to the will”) seems to rule out some human beings, such as two-month-olds. A second group holds that, on Kant’s criterion for personhood, many human beings, including normal human infants but also adults with Alzheimer’s disease, must lack moral status. Kant, on this reading, ends up disallowing important subgroups of human beings from having moral status.

If we take Kant’s language about the predisposition to the good seriously, however, we have a partial answer to this difficulty. In his biological and psychological writing, Kant seems to privilege reference to belonging to the species of human beings. He treats children as entities to whom obligations are owed, and Kant thinks we have obligations only to persons. So he seems committed to the view of humans as persons from conception. What makes something a person, then, for him, is membership in a species in which some members have this kind of second potentiality for responding to the moral law.

This helps answer some concerns about children and Alzheimer’s victims, but a difficulty remains: it’s unclear why we should give status to members of a species who do not themselves have the relevant capacities (the second potentialities), for example, infants born with severe mental retardation, if it’s the existence of just those capacities in some of its members that is supposed to make the species valuable in the particular way that moral status implies.

Within the Abrahamic faiths we do have a way to do this, starting from the premise that humans are created in the image of God. Two ways of understanding this are not successful, but there is a third that works, and that takes us back to divine command.

The passages that mention the image of God tell us very little about what this image in a human being amounts to. Speculation has been continuous and manifold, referring to our rationality, or our freedom or our capacity for dominion or our capacity for relation. The problem with all these accounts is that they are based on the capacities we can exercise in this life. This is the first approach that is unsuccessful, because it is not clear how any such capacity-based account can cover all human beings and give them the same basic dignity.

One response to this point is to look for a theistic account of the basis of human dignity not in human capacities but in God’s activity of conferring or bestowing value. This is the second way that is unsuccessful. Wolterstorff takes this route, writing that being loved by God is such a relation; being loved by God gives a human being great worth. And if God loves equally and permanently each and every creature who bears the imago dei, then the relational property of being loved by God is what we have been looking for.

Hare is unconvinced. When God created human beings, God said it was “very good.” God is portrayed here not as reflecting on the divine attachment, but as seeing something good in the created order, and especially in the human life. The analysis of human value as imparted value makes this value too transparent, as though we see through it to God’s value without any value added. A successful theistic account of human value needs to accommodate both the relation to God, who is the ultimate source of all value, and the intrinsic value of what God creates.

Hare thinks there’s an account that can meet these conditions, traceable to Karl Barth. David Kelsey puts it like this: human beings’ inherent accountability for their response to God provides the theological basis on which the peculiar dignity of human creatures is to be understood. Dignity inheres in human creatures’ concrete actuality by virtue of the fact that the triune God has directly related to them as their creator. Human dignity is thus ex-centric, grounded and centered outside human creatures.

But if dignity is centered outside human creatures, how can it be intrinsic to the human creature? The justification for ascribing value to human beings is not from our capacities, but from God’s calling us to a certain vocation. This calling is particular, different for each concrete human person. In this way the ground is not something abstract or universal, like Kant’s ‘personality’.

There is a good reply here to the charge that locating the ground of human value in God’s attachment to us makes our value extrinsic. On the conception defended in the rest of Hare’s book, there is a call by God to each one of us, a call to love God in a particular and unique way. Rev. 2:17 refers to a unique name conferred on a person—and the name gives us insight into the nature into which we are being called (the way ‘Peter’ means ‘rock’). If we think of nature, as Scotus does, as a way of loving God, then we can think of the value of each of us as residing in us, in our particular relation to God. What we have here is an intrinsic good in a slightly odd sense; not that we have value, each of us, all by ourselves (which is one thing the phrase ‘intrinsic value’ might mean), since we have our value in relation. But the value is not reducible to the valuing by someone outside us, on this account, but resides in what each of us can uniquely be in relation to God.

Is dignity based on the call of God, or in the destination towards which God is calling us? Dignity in this discussion is incommensurable worth. This is how Kant distinguishes dignity from price, such as the price of a pen that can be exchanged for something else of commensurable or equivalent worth. If we grant that God has incommensurable worth, we should grant that the love by a particular person of God (which is her destination) shares in that worth, though it will not be of the same value. And what leads her to that love (namely, God’s call) will also have value. The idea that this love is of incommensurable value is suggested by texts like, “Or what will they give in return for their life?” To answer the earlier question, we should say that it is the destination that gives the final value, but it is the call that leads to the destination, and it’s the call that we already have; we are not yet there, even though it’s already our destination.

The beginning of Section 1.3 claimed that this theist reply to the request for a justification was an indirect use of Kant’s view that our dignity resides in our potential to respond to the moral law. What kind of use of Kant is this? Kant’s view throughout his published corpus is that we should recognize our duties as God’s commands. But in Religion he undertakes a translation project as a philosophical theologian, translating historical revelation into the revelation to reason, using moral concepts. Hare doesn’t read Kant as reducing historical revelation to the revelation of reason, but to leave what he calls “biblical theology” as it is. In the translation, he proposes to talk about the Trinity in relation to the problem of our falling short of the life we ought to lead, the problem of the moral gap.

With this in mind, we can see Kant’s language about our dignity residing in our potential to respond to the moral law as a translation of more traditional language about our potential to respond to God’s command or call. Kant does not have the idea of the particularity of the call. He does, though, have the idea that what gives us our dignity is our potential to respond, and not our actual response. As mentioned before, he ties this potential to our membership in the human species. The basic idea of locating our dignity in our potential to respond to God’s call is already in Kant, and is part of his inheritance from the Lutheran catechisms of his youth. We get valuable help in answering the normative question by returning to the pre-translated version that he does not discuss, but takes for granted.

To sum up the chapter, three arguments were distinguished for the dependence of morality on religion: the argument from providence, the argument from grace, and the argument from justification. The justification of obligation, that it is obedience to God’s commands, was shown, if Scotus is right, not to rely on a basic premise that itself requires justification. The justification also does not fall prey to the Euthyphro objection, if we make a separation between the good and the obligatory in the way suggested. Finally, this justification gives us a way to ground the basic Kantian morality (that gives the same dignity to every human being) in the notion of a unique call by God to each individual to love God in a unique way.

The Possibility of Virtue in Christianity and Buddhism (Part 3 of 5)

The Case for Buddhist Virtue

The first step in evaluating Buddhist ethics will be to understand the Buddhist worldview.

Ethical systems are always intimately tied to a worldview, but this is especially the case for Buddhism. The Buddha’s teaching was in response to an ethical problem, the problem of suffering. Through much effort and insight, the Buddha was able to perceive reality as it really is; he saw the Four Marks of reality. The solution the Buddha offered was also ethical: the solution to suffering is to live a certain kind of life, a life characterized by the virtues of the Eightfold Path.

The Buddha often spoke in parables. In one famous parable, he explained that a man struck with a poison arrow does not demand that someone explain the origin of the arrow to him before it is removed by a physician with the antidote.[1] Here the Buddha is represented by the physician; humankind is represented by the warrior so unfortunately wounded. According to the Buddha, it is not so important why humanity is in this injured state, as the fact that the Buddha has provided a solution - a solution that is entirely ethical.  Early Buddhism was an orthopraxy, not orthodoxy. But, practice is always related to belief. There is a fundamental relationship between reality as it is (Dharma) and ethics. The Buddha himself explained this using another parable:

Just, oh Gotama, as one might wash hand with hand, or foot with foot, just even so, oh Gotama, is wisdom purified by uprightness, and uprightness is purified by wisdom. Where there is uprightness, wisdom is there, and where there is wisdom, uprightness is there.[2]

In this context, the Buddha is equating wisdom with insight into the true nature of existence (Dharma). Thus, according the Buddha, living a moral, upright life is necessarily tied to understanding the universe as it really is. That being the case, understanding Buddhist ontology will be the first step in understanding Buddhist ethics.

The Four Marks of Reality

The Buddha taught that there are four essential properties of reality. One early sutra records the Buddha’s teaching: “Whatever is phenomenal is impermanent. Whatever is phenomenal is suffering. Whatever is phenomenal is devoid of self. Nirvana is eternally tranquil.”[3] Reality is, at its most basic level, characterized by impermanence, suffering, the absence of self, and the existence of nirvana.

Impermanence

The Buddha taught that "all things are transitory [anitya]."[4] This is a straightforward point that is apparently confirmed by everyday experience: every material thing human beings encounter will, soon or later, pass out of existence. People will eventually die, so will flowers. Even mountains will eventually be brought down. Some of the early discourses draw out the implications of the Buddha’s idea, suggesting that everything that exists is changing moment by moment so that, as Heraclitus suggested, one can never step in to the same river twice.[5] Even

something as apparently static as a rock changes from moment to moment so that it is not identical to the rock that existed a moment before and will be different from the rock that will exist in the next moment. One way of understanding this point is to think of the Buddha as denying the existence of something like the Platonic forms, which are permanent and unchanging.

Another implication of the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence is that all conditioned things are ultimately contingent, the result of an endless series of other causes. Whatever arises, arises co-dependently with a multitude of other causes and will pass from existence sooner or later. One of the most famous illustrations of this concept is the Wheel Dharma which shows how each effect is dependent on a previous cause, which itself is dependent on another cause. Each effect also serves as the cause for the other effects.[6]

Suffering

The second characteristic of reality is that "All created beings live in sorrow [duhkha]."[7] Usually, duhkha is translated as suffering. However, as many authors have pointed out, suffering is not an adequate translation. When the Buddha said that all things suffer, he did not mean that existence in the world would always be uncomfortable; rather, he meant that phenomelogical existence would always be conditioned by states of ignorance, greed, and hatred.[8] Reality that is conditioned is called "samsara."[9] Because people exist within samsara, they are never able to have their desire for what is ultimate or eternal satisfied. They will always be disappointed with the temporary, fleeting happiness derived from the phenomenal world and are destined to be continually reborn so that suffering will never cease.[10]

The ideal sort of existence is an existence that is completely unconditioned, free from the vicious cycle of dependent co-arising resulting from ignorance, greed, and hatred. People suffer “because we take too seriously the useful fiction of the person.”[11] When a person is ignorant of reality as it is characterized in the Four Marks, then suffering arises as a natural result. Life based on the assumption that the world is permanent and that selves exist causes clinging to the cycle of samsara and thus there is rebirth.[12] To cease suffering is to cease being conditioned by external factors; this is nirvana. The doctrine of dukha teaches, simply, that the kind of existence that human beings experience is not the ideal. [13]

No Self

The third and most controversial of the Four Marks is the doctrine of no-self. The Buddha taught that "all states are without self [anatman]."[14] In affirming this doctrine, the Buddha was denying that composite entities, like rocks, people, and animals, exist in the commonsense way they are normally understood to exist. Instead, objects and people only exist as collections of parts, aggregates of other, more basic elements.[15]  Persons, in particular, are composed of five

parts called the skandhas: form, feeling, perception, mental fabrications, and consciousness. As the Buddha taught, "The body is composed of the five skandhas, and produced from five elements. It is all empty and without soul."[16] However, the Buddha emphasized the importance of composite objects as they relate to themselves and to other objects. This tension in Buddhist discourse has resulted in a distinction between the conventional and ultimate existence of an object. A Buddhist might refer to an individual as a single, distinct person that exists through time; however, he does this only as a convention of language and not in reference to the person’s ultimate, ontological condition.[17]

“The Discourse of the Not-Self Characteristic” from the Pali Canon provides an excellent record of the Buddha’s argument against a persisting self. Within this narrative, the Buddha answers questions from five of his disciples. The Buddha explained that each of the five skandhas cannot be identified as the self. Each of the skandhas are subject to change, inconstant, and give rise to suffering. At the end of the analysis of each skandha the Buddha asks, “And is it fitting to regard what is inconstant, stressful, subject to change as: 'This is mine. This is my self. This is what I am'?"[18] The disciples responded, “No, lord.” In response to this the Buddha gave his approval. The discourse concludes with an explanation of how to achieve freedom from the suffering arising through the skandhas:

Seeing thus, the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones grows disenchanted with form, disenchanted with feeling, disenchanted with perception, disenchanted with fabrications, disenchanted with consciousness. Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is fully released. With full release, there is the knowledge, 'Fully released.' He discerns that 'Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.'[19]

The argument the Buddha makes here has at least two presuppositions: there is not an I that stands behinds the skandhas–the skandhas are all a person is–and if there were an ultimate self, it would be permanent.[20] From those two assumptions, he proves that since the skandhas are impermanent and cannot be identified with the self, then there is no ultimate self. The perception that a person possesses a substantive identity that endures over time is incorrect.

Instead of “substance-selves,” the Buddha argues that people are “process-selves” that exist only momentarily and only “in a dependent sense.”[21] The "self" is dynamic so that a new self arises and departs each moment.[22] However, there is a causal connection between these moments, so there is a loose relationship between past, present, and future “selves” in a single collection of parts. This conclusion should be understood as a middle way between the sort of egoism taught in other Indian schools of thought and a complete denial of the existence of self in any sense.[23] Clearly, the Buddha wanted avoid the sort of clinging that results from egoism, but he also acknowledges that there is at least a conventional self even if there is no ultimate self. Sideritis sums up the matter: “The Buddhist view of non-self says that a person just consists in the occurrence of a complex causal series of impermanent, impersonal skandhas.”[24] “The person who lives at 9 a.m. this morning is the result of the person who lived at 7 a.m.”[25]

Nirvana

The final mark of reality is nirvana and it the most difficult of the Four Marks. The term nirvana literally means “‘extinguishing,” and in its broadest sense nirvana is the extinction of samsara: “This is the peaceful, this is the sublime, that is, the stilling of all formations, the relinquishing of all attachments, the destruction of craving, dispassion cessation, Nibbana.”[26] Nirvana is the cure for what ails humanity.[27] However, it is not merely the proper goal of all conditioned beings, it also the ultimate reality in Buddhism: "‘Nibbana is supreme,’ say the Buddhas.”[28] So in addition to being the foundation of reality, it is also the soteriological goal of Buddhism.

Buddhist doctrine teaches that the solution to suffering is the attainment of nirvana: “It signifies soteriologically the complete extinguishing of greed, hatred, and fundamentally delusion, the forces which power saṃsāra."[29]As the soteriological goal, there are two elements: “the Nibbana-element with residue left and the Nibbana-element with no residue left.”[30][31] The element with “residue left” refers to the kind of nirvana that was available to arahants[32] that still exist in their composite form. The Buddha described the arahant in this condition as a person who has

The holy life fulfilled, who has done what had to be done, laid down the burden, attained the goal, destroyed the fetters of being, completely released through final knowledge. However, his five sense faculties remain unimpaired, by which he still experiences what is agreeable and disagreeable and feels pleasure and pain. It is the extinction of attachment, hate, and delusion in him that is called the Nibbana-element with residue left.[33]

On the basis of this text and others, there are several conclusions that can be made about nirvana in this life. First, the Buddha takes it as self-evidently true that nirvana is the appropriate goal in light of impermanence, no self, and suffering. Second, it is clear that the arahant lives without ignorance concerning the way things really are. He lives in light of the fact that all is impermanent, there is no ultimate self, and that all conditioned states are full of suffering. He exists in contrast to the unenlightened who still suffer from greed, hatred, and ignorance. Whereas the unenlightened might despair over his home being destroyed in a flood, the arhant recognizes that the home destroyed is not his and that clinging to material possessions only results in more suffering. He is able to face such disaster with steadfastness and a kind of aloofness, not because he is apathetic, but because he views the disaster as if it happened to someone else far away. He feels concern that such destruction results in more suffering, but he is not overwhelmed and he does not experience it as a personal disaster.[34]

Some might object that this kind of existence would create a lack of empathy for others or even an unhealthy lack of concern for one’s self. The Buddha himself is said to have been living in a place called Atuma when “two people were killed, being struck by lightning, but the Buddha, who was seated under a tree close by, did not hear a sound.”[35] However, Buddhists argue apathy is not the result of attaining nirvana. Instead, it is the realization of what is actually important: the destruction of suffering which arises out of ignorance. The Buddha himself is the greatest example of a person who achieved nirvana in this life, and though he seemed aloof in the example of the lightning strike, he nevertheless reacted appropriately. Even though he was passive in this incident, there are other examples of the Buddha taking an active role in bringing about the cessation of suffering, the greatest example of course being his commitment to teach the dharma. So, Buddhists argue, while an arahant might have behavior that seems apathetic to the ignorant, his behavior is nevertheless justified in light of the dharma. They are illuminated so that they act appropriately in light of all the facts. The arhanant becomes liberated from selfishness and an unfounded concern for his own well-being to the freedom of experiencing “delight and enjoyment at whatever happens in the present moment.”[36] Only through this sort of liberation is one able to have peace.

The Buddha further taught that nirvana with remainder was not the ultimate goal of life. Nirvana without remainder, nirvana after this life, was the desired destination. The Buddha describes this element of nirvana: “Here a bhikkhu is an arahant. . . completely released through final knowledge. For him, here in this very life, all that is experienced, not being delighted in, will be extinguished. That, bhikkhus, is called the Nibbana-element with no residue left.”[37]

This aspect of nirvana is notoriously different to articulate. One of the reasons for this is that the concepts and definitions derived from conditioned reality do not apply to nirvana which is unconditioned. The Buddha illustrated this point in a conversation he had with a disciple named Vacchagotta. Vachhagotta asked whether an arahat would exist after death. In response, the Buddha asked Vachha whether, once a fire was extinguished, it made sense to ask, “to which direction did it go: to the east, the west, the north, or the south?”[38] The answer, of course, is that the question does not apply. In the same way, concluded the Buddha, the question of whether an arahat exists after death does not apply. In the Udāna, the Buddha gives his most complete teachings on nirvana.[39]At the end of his first teaching on the subject he says

There is, bhikkhus, that base [sphere of reality] where there is no earth, not water, no air; no base consisting of the infinity of space, no base consisting of the infinity of consciousness, no base consisting of nothingness, no base consisting of neither perception nor non-perception; neither this world nor another world nor both; neither sun nor moon. Here, bhikkus, I say there is no coming, no going, no deceasing, no uprising. Not fixed, not moving, it has no support. Just this is the end of suffering.[40]

The point is that the question of existence beyond the conditioned does not fall into easy to understand categories. Nirvana is both not static and not dynamic The arahat does not exist but he also does not cease to exist.  This is not a contradiction of logic, as some naïve interpreters have understood it to be. Strictly speaking, the Buddha does not teach something like “A and not A.” Such a claim would violate the law of non-contradiction. What he actually suggests is “Not A and not B,” while offering distinctions between what is, apparently, not distinct.[41] The Buddha is expressing that nirvana is not comprehensible while trapped in samsara and conditioned by ignorance. To achieve nirvana is to transcend conventional ways of understanding the world; it is to understand the world as it really is, without conditions. The extinguishing that takes place in nirvana is not the destruction of an individual; the individual never really existed anyway.

Instead, it is the extinction of all conditioned states. The illusion of self is destroyed.

Karma

Intimately related to the Four Marks is the law of karma since "in the moral order, Dharma is manifest in the law of Karma."[42]  Karma is the mechanism that allows present actions to have effects on future states of affairs.  In this way, karma is like the law of cause and effect.  Gowan suggests that karma "is an impersonal feature of the causal relationships in the world, and there is no prospect of deviation from the causal effects of kamma on the grounds of mercy."[43] According to Keown, "Karma is not a system of rewards and punishments meted out by God, but a kind of natural law akin to law of gravity."[44]  Karma is a moral arithmetic. Certain actions have certain effects.  Karmic actions are like a seed that will ripen into a specific fruit.[45] The Buddha explained it this way:

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draw the carriage. All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him.[46]

Thus, according the Buddha, karma has at least two important aspects. First, it is objective. It operates according to predefined, constant values. If one performs action X, it will have result Y. However, there is no set way that consequences are dispensed.[47] The consequences of a particular action may appear immediately, in the next life, or even several lives from now.[48] Second, while the law of karma cannot be changed to suit one's needs, it can be used to bring about desired consequences. The Buddha makes this clear when he says that by performing actions with "pure thought," one will, as a matter of fact, be rewarded with happiness. The Dali Lama states this rather explicitly: "To suppose that karma is some sort of independent energy which predestines the course of our lives is incorrect. Who creates karma? We ourselves. What we think, say, do, desire, and omit creates karma."[49] Therefore, as Harvey states, "Good actions are thus encouraged because, through their goodness, they lead to pleasant, uplifting effects for the doer."[50] Karma is the rudder that allows one to steer from suffering to liberation in nirvana.

Karma is typically understood as having a moral dimension. There are differing interpretations regarding just how karma is related to morality. There are proponents for understanding karma as a deontological moral law, although this view is not widely held.[51] There are others who suggest that karma is a means to a desired end, nirvana. Another option is to understand karma as rewarding actions that are good in themselves. Keown has proposed that at this point Buddhism faces its own version the Euthyphro dilemma:  Is an action good because it generates good karmic results or does an action produce good karmic results because it is good? If actions generate karma because they are good in themselves, like the virtues of Aristotle, then Buddhist ethics might be a kind of virtue ethic. If an action is good because it generates the desired consequence, then Buddhism is more similar to utilitarianism.[52] Which of these interpretations is most likely will be discussed later in this chapter.

The Four Noble Truths

The Four Marks represent that which is most fundamental to Buddhism, the Dharma.[53] When the Buddha received enlightenment, it is these Four Marks that he perceived. From these marks, he assembled his Four Noble Truths: (1) suffering arises, (2) the origin of suffering is desire, (3) suffering ceases when desire ceases, and (4) the Eightfold Noble Path is the way to bring desire to an end.[54] Many have pointed out that the Buddha's Four Noble Truths are like a doctor's diagnosis and prescription. In the first two truths, Buddha gives his diagnosis. In the third he provides the cure. In the fourth he gives a prescription.

The prescription suggested by the Buddha is the most critical part of his Four Noble Truths for ethics. One might rephrase the fourth truth like this: ethical practice is the way to reach nirvana. The Eightfold Path consists of eight criteria for reaching nirvana: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. One might further clarify the purpose of the Path as having the purpose of helping those who practice it to understand reality as it really is: "The principal cause that allows us to overcome our cyclic existence [samsara] and the basic misunderstanding that underlies it is familiarizing ourselves with the dependently existing nature of things."105 The way to escape suffering is to act appropriately in light of the true nature of reality (impermanence, not-self, and [55]suffering) both practically and intellectually. This moves one closer to achieving nirvana.  According to the Buddha, it is the Eightfold Path that "opens the eyes, and bestows understanding, which leads to peace of mind."[56]

Therefore, the Fourth Noble Truth should be understood as defining the goal of Buddhism: to extinguish the conception of self, to remove the clinging to this world that causes samsara in order to achieve liberation. Karmic merit, accumulated through adherence to the Eightfold Noble Path, is instrumental in achieving the liberation, nirvana, that the Buddha saw as the solution.[57] Indeed, all of Buddhist thought and practice is designed to aid in the obtaining of nirvana. It is because nirvana is described as the goal that it is sometimes as seen the telos and meaning of Buddhism. As Keown argues, "Nirvana is the perfection of these virtues [listed in the Eightfold Path]."[58] However, others are more reserved in ascribing a telos to Buddhism. For example, Siderits argues that “there is no one whose life either has or lacks meaning. There is just the life.”[59]

This Fourth Noble Truth reveals how ethics is related to ontology in Buddhism. The way a person ought to live is determined by the certain desired outcomes; in this sense, Buddhist ethics is teleological. Ethical practice in Buddhism is at least partially motivated out of soteriological goals. Harvey points out that "from the perspective of the Four Noble Truths, ethics is not for its own sake, but is an essential ingredient on the path to the final goal."[60] Keown agrees and says that "It is the purpose of the Eightfold Path to bring about the transition from saṃsāra to nirvana."[61] The question that remains for a virtue view of Buddhism is whether Buddhism is merely teleological. Is the Eightfold Path merely a means to an end or is it good in itself? Is Buddhism a utilitarian or a virtue ethic?

Notes:

[1] See the Majjhima Nikaya.

[2] "Sonadanda Sutta," in Dialogues of the Buddha , trans. T. W. Dīghanikāya, Rhys Davids, and Caroline A. F. Rhys Davids. Sacred books of the Buddhists (London: Luzac,1956.), 157.

[3] Ekottara-agama               

[4] Magandiya Sutta, in In the Buddha's Words, ed. Bhikkhu Bodhi (Somerville: Wisdom, 2005), 205.

[5] 56  David Kalupahana, Buddhist Philosophy  (University of Hawaii, 1984), 36.

[6] Tich Nhat Hahn, The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching (New York, Random House, 1999),  229.

[7] Magandiya Sutta, 206.

[8] 59  Paul Williams and Anthony Tribe, Buddhist Thought: A Complete Introduction to the Indian Tradition (London, Routledge, 2000), 42.

[9] 60  Ibid., 51.

[10] Kalupahana, Buddhist,  37.

[11] Mark Siderits, Buddhism As Philosophy: An Introduction (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007), 76.

[12] 63  H. Saddhatissa, Buddhist Ethic: Essence of Buddhism (New York: G. Braziller, 1971), 21.

[13] 64  Some, like Tich Naht Hahn , have suggested that second mark of existence is nirvana. In a sense, nirvana

and duhkha are, as Hahn suggests, two sides of the same coin. Nirvana is the state of being without duhkha and dukha is existence in anything but nirvana.

[14] Magandiya Sutta ,206.

[15] 66  Charles Goodman, Consequences of Compassion: An Interpretation and Defense of Buddhist Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 11.

[16] "The Skandhas and the Chain of Causation," in Anthology of Asian Scriptures, ed. Robert E. Van Voorst (Belmont: Wadsworth), 89.

[17] Siderits, Philosophy, 56.

[18] 69  Anatta-lakkhana Sutta: The Discourse on the Not-self Characteristic, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu,

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn22/sn22.059.than.html

[19] Anatta-lakkhana Sutta: The Discourse on the Not-self Characteristic.

[20] Siderits, Buddhism,  39.

[21] 72  Christopher W Gowans, Philosophy of the Buddha. (London: Routledge, 2003), 23.

[22] 73  Winston L King,. In the Hope of Nibbana; an Essay on Theravada Buddhist Ethics (LaSalle: Open Court, 1964), 15.

[23] 74  Kalupahana, Buddhism, 39.

[24] 75  Siderits, Buddhism, 69.

[25] 76  Gunapala Dharmasiri, Fundamentals of Buddhist Ethics (Antioch: Golden Leaves, 1989), 13.

[26] Bodhi Ñāṇamoli, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nik⁻Aya (Boston: Wisdom, 1995), 540.

[27] Gowans, Philosophy, 135.

[28] 79

Buddhavagga: The Buddha, trans. Acharya Buddharakkhita

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.14.budd.html

[29] 80 Williams and Tribe, Buddhist Thought, 49.

[30] 81  The Nibbana Element, trans. John D. Ireland, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/iti/iti.2.042-

[31] x.irel.html#iti-043

[32] An arahant is a person who has achieved nirvana.

[33] The Nibbana Element.

[34] Gowans, Philosophy,  144.

[35] Kalupahana , Buddhism, 76.

[36] Gowans, Philosophy, 142.

[37] The Nibbana Element, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/iti/iti.2.042-049x.irel.html#iti-043

[38] The Middle Length Discourses, 593.

[39] Gowans, Philopshy,148.

[40] Nibbana Sutta: Parinibbana, trans. John D. Ireland,

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.8.01.irel.html.

[41] Although, the Buddha is not really offering distinctions. He is pointing to the fact that distinctions made on the basis of conventional reality are not valid. In reality, the categories of “existence” and “non-existence” just do not apply.

[42] Damien Keown, Buddhist Ethics A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) Kindle Edition, location 294.

[43] 93 Gowans, Philosophy, 105.

[44] Keown, A Very Short Introduction, locations 308-19.

[45] Dale Stuart Wright, The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 53.

[46] "Wisdom of the Buddha," in Anthology of Asian Scriptures, ed. Robert E. Van Voorst (Belmont: Wadsworth), 98.

[47] Lynken Ghose, “Karma and the Possibility of Rebirth: An Ethical Analysis of the Doctrine of Karma in Buddhism,” Journal of Religious Ethics 35, no. 2 (2007): 286.

[48] Dharmasiri, Fundamentals, 37.

[49] Bstan-ʼdzin-rgya-mtsho, Ethics for the New Millennium (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 186.

[50] 100 Harvey, Introduction, 28.

[51] 101  Charles Goodman, Consequences of Compassion: An Interpretation and Defense of Buddhist Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 23.

[52] Keown, A Very Short Introduction, locations 652-63.

[53] 103  Williams and Tribe, Buddhist Thought, 7.

[54] 104 Ibid., 41-46.

[55] Sonam Rinchen, Ruth Sonam, Nāgārjuna, and Tsoṅ-kha-pa Blo-bzaṅ-grags-pa. How Karma Works: The Twelve Links of Dependent Arising : An Oral Teaching (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 2006), 27.

[56] "The Sermon on the Four Noble Truths," in Anthology of Asian Scriptures, ed. Robert E. Van Voorst (Belmont: Wadsworth), 88.

[57] 107 Tribe, Buddhist Thought, 47.

[58] Keown, Nature, 107.

[59] 109  Siderits, Philosophy, 77.

[60] Harvey, Introduction, 41.

[61] Keown, Nature, 107.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 1, Section 1.2, “The Argument from Grace”

The second way of establishing a dependence relation of morality on God is by means of the argument from grace, again an argument from Kant’s Religion. Kant saw revelation as two concentric circles, with historical revelation in the larger circle and in the smaller the revelation to reason. The project of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is then to determine whether doctrines in the outer circle can be translated into the language of the inner circle by means of the moral concepts. Kant attempts this translation with the four doctrines of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Second Coming, and this project dictates the structure of the work as a whole.

At the end of part one, the topic is “effects of grace.” Kant is here discussing a problem he refers to elsewhere as “Spener’s problem,” after the great Lutheran Pietist. We humans are born, Kant says, under the evil maxim, which subordinates duty to happiness. Evil doesn’t just come from our sensory inclinations, but is a choice in the will to rank happiness over duty. Kant agrees with Luther here, putting locus of evil in reason and will rather than the lower affections. Since we are born under this ranking of happiness over duty, we can’t reverse the ranking by our own devices, for this would require a choice that was already under the opposite ranking. Kant says the propensity to evil is not to be extirpated through human forces, for this could only happen through good maxims—something that can’t take place if the subjective supreme ground of all maxims is presupposed to be corrupted.

Hare has called this problem elsewhere the “moral gap,” a gap between how we ought to live and how we can live by our own devices. Ought implies can, but in this case we ought to give duty the priority ranking, yet we seem to have a radical incapacity to do so. To talk about a radical incapacity or about being “under the evil maxim” is not to say that we are fundamentally evil. We are born, Kant thinks, with both the predisposition to good and the propensity to evil, and of these two only the predisposition to good is essential to us. Nonetheless, it is natural to us, when forced to rank the two, to put our own happiness first and duty second. This means that legislators should try to set up laws so that we are forced to rank the two as seldom as possible.

By presenting the problem in terms of a ranking of incentives, Kant puts himself again in the tradition of Luther and Augustine. Augustine says that God bids us do what we cannot, in order that we might learn our dependence on God. In On Free Choice of the Will, Augustine says both that we have lost our freedom to choose to act rightly and that we do have the ability to ask God for assistance. (But this is an early text, and his later work is different on this topic. See Retractations: “And unless the divine grace by which the will is freed preceded the act of will, it would not be grace at all.”)

The key to a solution to the problem of the moral gap is to see that, while ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, ‘ought’ does not imply ‘can by our own devices’. There are things we can do, but only with assistance from outside. Kant thus appeals to God’s assistance in accomplishing what he calls a “revolution of the will,” by which the ranking of happiness over duty is reversed. This divine assistance is an effect of grace. Kant says we can admit an effect of grace as something incomprehensible, but can’t incorporate it into our maxims for either theoretical or practical use. We can’t make theoretical use of effects of grace because they go beyond the limits of our understanding, and Kant thinks we need to confine the theoretical use of reason within these limits. We can’t make practical use of effects of grace because they are things God does and not things we do. But still, the appeal to effects of grace is the solution to what would otherwise be a contradiction in practical reason: we both ought to and can’t live by the moral law.

Hare goes beyond Kant here by adding that one of the effects of grace that makes the moral life livable is that grace makes forgiveness possible, in cases where we can’t forgive ourselves for moral failure, because we don’t have the right moral status to do so. The view of the effects of grace that Hare defends is that God intervenes in our situation, and enables us to live by the high moral demand placed on us by divine command.

There’s a large theological problem here. Does not God put all human beings under the moral demand? But does not this mean that God gives all human beings the means to comply with it? It’s incoherent, after all, to put someone under a demand that she can’t reach. This is the meaning of ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. There is a tendency in this thought towards universalism, the view that all human beings are saved. Kant may have been a universalist. At least he thought that the doctrine of double election (of some to salvation and others to damnation) was the salto mortale (the death leap) of human reason. There is also a tendency in Barth towards universalism.

Hare writes that Christians may, in a weak sense, hope that all are saved. They should not, however, have hope in the strong sense of expectation that this is so, for two reasons. The first is that there are too many contrary texts in the Scriptures. There are passages (mainly from Paul) that suggest universalism, but the texts from the Gospels are predominantly opposed to it. The second reason is that Christians have the experience of people who die denying God, or at least their picture of God. The best conclusion is that God does make the moral demand of all human beings and God does offer assistance to all human beings to meet this demand. But this assistance, though sufficient for all, is not efficient for all; that is to say, it does not bear the fruit of obedience in every human life. The grace offered by God to meet the divine command is not irresistible. [To me, if I’m understanding Hare here, this sounds more Arminian than classically Calvinist.]

A moral gap was recognized before Kant by Augustine, Luther, Aristotle, and the Neo-Confucian Chu His. But some Kantian details in fleshing it out are peculiar to him. He thought he’d identified the supreme principle of morality, which he called the “Categorical Imperative,” and he thought that this imperative was part of the content of the religion of reason, the inner circle. He sometimes suggested that this conception of the moral demand is present to all human beings at all times and places. Hare thought this was wrong, though empirical evidence does, Hare notes, suggest that at the beginning of human society hunter-gatherer groups had some sense of fairness, and this topic will return in a later chapter (8).

A tendency to repudiate is to reduce God’s grace to help in meeting the demands of the moral law. Kant is occasionally guilty of this (though it’s important to note where he is in his translation project), but he does make morality too important a part of the godly life, Hare thinks. In the next life, contrary to Kant, the moral law will probably not be relevant any longer. We’ll no longer be under the constraint of proscriptions; even the command to love our brothers and sisters will not have any longer the character of obligation. Even in the present life, there’s something unwholesome about the focus on the moral gap.

Here Hare echoes a theme in a similar way as does Jerry Walls at the end Jerry’s chapter in his recent book on heaven, hell, and purgatory; but I think, though there’s some insight in what they’re saying, they make the same mistake of failing to see that heavenly living isn’t so much leaving morality behind as the achievement of its ultimate purpose. That obligations are to be left behind for gift and sacrifice is not to say morality per se is left behind, unless we buy into Kant’s characterization of its sum and substance as bound up in duty, but that seems to be a huge mistake. Is not a selfless life of love in which motivation by duty has become a rarity a deeply moral life? Is not to be entirely conformed to the image of Christ the ultimate and appropriate limiting case of the holy life for which we were made?

Hare concludes this section by admitting that one might evade the argument by reducing the moral demand. One way to reduce the demand is to say that, unlike the Good Samaritan in Jesus’s parable, we should consider that we have obligations only to the people we know, who are related to us in special relations of family or friendship or community. But this is unacceptably parochial. (See the article on this site called Interstellar and Partiality for more reflection on this issue.)

Christianity does not require Kantian morality, and this is true also of the Abrahamic faiths as a whole. But there is, nonetheless, a congruity between Kant’s formulation and the Lutheran pietism in which he was raised. To the extent we lower the demand, we also lower the need for grace.

Debate: Ron Smith and Matthew Flannagan "Morality Does Not Need God"

Matthew Flannagan, co-author of Did God Really Command Genocide? and atheist moral philosopher Ron Smith, engage in a lively and thoughtful debate concerning theistic morality. Dr. Smith argues that theism is not necessary for morality; that it is incoherent and leads to atrocities. Dr. Flannagan defends divine command theory.  The debate took place at The Lady Goodfellow Chapel, Waikato University on 11 May 2016.

Image: "Christ Gives the Law" by Lawrence OP. CC License. 

The Possibility of Virtue in Christianity and Buddhism (Part 2 of 5)

The Foundations of Virtue

Given the goals of this thesis, the first and most important task is to establish just what virtue ethics is and what it entails. A survey of the literature will show that the field of virtue ethics is both broad and deep. Its history extends back to the Homeric epics and into current, cutting-edge moral philosophy. There is also a wide variety of virtue ethics. There are Aristotelian, feminist, and “agent-based” virtue ethics, among many others.[1] Each of these accounts of virtue has slightly different and often apparently contradictory conceptions of what virtue is. So while the amount of information about virtue ethics is not lacking, the vast number of voices in the field does create another problem: discovering what is universally true, if anything, about virtue ethics.

Contemporary virtue ethicists are quick to give broad definitions of virtue ethics. For example, Hursthouse says that

Virtue ethics has been characterized in a number of ways. It is described (1) as an ethics which is ‘agent-centered’ rather than ‘act-centered’; (2) as concerned with Being rather than Doing; (3) as addressing itself to the question, ‘What sort of person should I be?’ rather than to the question, ‘What sorts of action should I do?’; (4) as taking certain areteic concepts (good, excellence, virtue) as basic rather than deontic ones (right, duty, obligation); (5) as rejecting the idea that ethics is codifiable in rules or principles that can provide specific action guidance.[2]

Schneewind adds that virtue ethics is a theory of ethics that “requires an acceptable view of the human good which will enable us to show how morality can be explicated in terms of character traits that are indispensable or useful for the attainment of that good.”[3] Unfortunately, these definitions are too broad for the purpose of this thesis. The terms they use are largely, often intentionally, undefined. Schneewind’s definition only raises the question, “Acceptable to whom and under what criteria?” while Hursthouse’s definitions highlight just how important the construal of “agent” or personhood (and the ideas presupposed by the concepts) will be to a virtue ethic. While these broad definitions help to give the contours of virtue ethics, in order to test both Buddhism and Christianity for their compatibility to a virtue view, what is essential to virtue must first be drawn out. In order to get a first approximation of the core of virtue ethics, it makes sense to start with Aristotle, who was one of the first virtue ethicists and still widely considered “its finest exponent.”[4]

Aristotle’s Virtue Ethic

Examining Aristotle’s writing on the virtues, and in particular the Nichomachean Ethics

(NE), it is clear that he had at least three key concepts in his ethic: virtue (ἀρετή), moral wisdom (φρόνησις), and eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία).[5]  Aristotle begins the NE with a discussion of teleology. He argues that “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.”[6] He takes this same line of reasoning and applies it to man, saying that just as all things aim at some good, so does the life of man. The aim of man’s life is to achieve and maintain eudaimonia. Thus the telos of man is eudaimonia. 

Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia is often translated as “happiness,” which is unfortunate because that only confuses his meaning. In contemporary culture “happiness” is something subjective, totally dependent on the state of mind a person at a given time. However, Aristotle’s eudaimonia, is not a subjective state, but an objective one with clearly defined criteria.  To possess eudaimonia is to be a certain kind of person and living within a certain kind of society.[7] A person who possesses eudaimonia is a person who embodies the virtues “throughout an entire lifetime.[8]”  The telos of man for Aristotle was not an end of man, in the sense that the life of man ended when he achieved eudaimonia. Instead, it was the goal and purpose (the aim) of man. Eudaimonia is an active and continuous state where man continues his life, but fulfilling his telos. Further, for the state of eudaimonia to be complete, this person must live within a society of people who are also practicing the virtues and who are also moving toward their telos.

Virtue, for Aristotle, is bound up in his teleology. He views “the acquisition and exercise of the virtues as means to an end,” but, the virtues are not merely a means.[9] Eudaimonia itself is a continuation and perfection of the virtues so that when one practices a virtue, he is not only brining about a desired end, but also participating in the good in a more immediate sense. If Aristotle is right and there is some “chief good” at which all things aim, then he must also be right that an act is good in itself whenever it corresponds to that chief good. For example, when a solider practices the virtue of courage, his action corresponds to the chief good so that in the moment he is courageous, he participates in the good and also helps to bring about a state of eudaimonia for himself and the society he lives in. In this way, the virtues are both a means to an end and good in themselves.

Another implication of the relationship of eudaimonia and virtue in Aristotle’s system is that in order for a person to achieve eudaimonia, he must actually possess the virtues as states of his character, “The virtue of man also will be the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well.”[10] This means that he must have a certain kind of character, a character that has been transformed by the practice of the virtues to the point that he is spontaneously generous or courageous.

The final element of Aristotle’s virtue ethic is moral wisdom (φρόνησις). Moral wisdom has two aspects: “the rational choice (prohairesis) on which a person acts, and the process of

deliberation or reflection by which a rational choice is formed.” [11] Essentially, moral wisdom is the ability to choose the best action in light of the circumstances by drawing on one’s experience. For example, a person might have the virtue of generosity, but lack moral wisdom. Such a person might give his fortune away to an unworthy cause, like a fraudulent TV preacher for example. If a person possesses both moral wisdom and generosity, then he will take into account that TV preachers are often frauds, and even though they have apparently good intentions it would be best to give his money to some other cause that has a proven record of integrity and effectiveness. Hutchinson provides an excellent summary here: “All in all, practical wisdom is an appreciation of what is good and bad for us at the highest level, together with a correct apprehension of the facts of experience, together with the skill to make the correct inferences about how to apply our general moral knowledge to our particular situation.”[12]

Given this brief sketch, it is clear that there are already certain assumptions lurking in the background of Aristotle’s thought. For example, Aristotle’s account of eudaimonia presupposes that there is, in fact, a chief good for man, that man has a particular function or purpose. Man has a certain function (ergon) that he is meant, in some sense, to fulfill and this function is morally good so that it grounds the virtues. How eudaimonia itself is good is an important question and part of the solution for Aristotle seems to be that “the supremely happy life is the life which most closely imitates God’s life.”[13]  Aristotle’s conception of the virtues further presupposes a certain view of man, namely that individuals exist as unified persons over at least the period of their lifetime. In fact, Aristotle thought that “a man who made no effort to make a unity of his life, being free, was very foolish.” [14] Moral wisdom also presupposes that humans are certain kinds of moral agents. It supposes, for example, that a person has access to past experiences in order to make the best decisions.  In short, Aristotle’s virtue ethic is deeply imbedded within his own worldview.

A Universal Account of Virtue

Given all the presuppositions mentioned here, as well as others that are not (like

Aristotle’s metaphysical biology) it is clear that his account of virtue will not translate easily into other cultures or worldviews. On the surface, Aristotelian virtue ethics and Buddhism appear to be irreconcilable because Buddhism strongly denies the commonsense understanding of a self, something critical to Aristotle’s system.  But it is not fair to discount Buddhist virtue ethics at this point because there might be ways of understanding virtue ethics that are compatible with Buddhism. Besides, many modern accounts of virtue ethics try to avoid making the kinds of assumptions Aristotle does. Slote, for example, specifically states that he wants a virtue ethic distinct from Aristotle’s, an ethic that is totally agent-based and avoids some of the Aristotelian ontology.[15] Such a move brings up an important question: is a virtue ethic only possible within an Aristotelian framework? Clearly, philosophers have answered this question negatively, but if the Aristotelian framework is not necessary to virtue ethics then the next step is to discover just what is necessary. What is needed is to separate virtue ethics, as much as it possible, from the components that are only cultural artifacts or only contingent to virtue and find out what is necessary for a successful account of virtue. In order to test different worldviews for their compatibility with virtue ethics, there must first be a way to understand virtue ethics that can be more universally applied.

Fortunately, MacIntyre tackles this precise problem in After Virtue. He examines a wide array of different accounts of virtue ethics, from those of Homer to Benjamin Franklin. Each of these accounts is just as embedded within a culture or worldview as Aristotle’s. MacIntyre points out that at first glance each account of the virtues is contradictory to the next. After his initial survey of these many systems, he asks, “Are we or are we not able to disentangle from these rival and various claims a unitary core concept of the virtues of which we can give a more compelling account than another of the other accounts so far?”[16] MacIntyre responds: “I am going to argue that we can in fact discover such a core concept.”[17]

MacIntyre suggests that in order to understand the virtue ethic of a particular culture or worldview, it must be examined against three background factors: the concept of a practice, the concept of the narrative order of a human life, and the concept of a moral tradition.[18] Each of these factors is related to and dependent upon the previous factor so that MacIntyre’s conception of a “practice” becomes foundational to his account of virtue. Of course, by “practice” MacIntyre means something largely different than its common meaning:

By a 'practice' I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. [19]

Key to understanding this definition is the concept of “internal goods.” MacIntyre uses the practice of chess playing as an example. Goods external to playing chess might be a monetary reward earned in a tournament or the notoriety gained from being an exceptionally good chess player. These goods are contingently related to playing chess and could be achieved by other means. Goods internal to chess are “the achievement of a certain highly particular kind of analytical skill, strategic imagination and competitive intensity.”[20] These are the sorts of goods that can only be achieved by playing the game of chess or some other game that is sufficiently similar. Further, these goods are both utilitarian and teleological. They are utilitarian in the sense that possessing these goods will help one to excel at the practice. They are teleological in the sense that possessing these goods constitutes what it means to be excellent at chess. In this way, goods internal to a practice both help to achieve the aims of that practice and constitute excellence within the practice.

The other key component of MacIntyre’s definition of a practice is his contention that a practice must be a “socially established cooperative human activity.”  By this, MacIntyre means that to enter into a practice is to enter into a community with established rules and standards of excellence.[21] For example, a painter will be subject to the standards and rules of excellence within the artistic community. Being an excellent painter will mean meeting the expectations and standards of the artistic community.

The second background issue for MacIntyre is the narrative order of a human life. MacIntyre suggests that it is only when a particular action is understood within the context of a single, unified human life that the action becomes intelligible. An agent’s actions are understood only when the reasons for his actions are understood.[22] Simply describing an agent’s actions is not sufficient for understanding her behavior.  MacIntyre argues that “behavior is only characterized adequately when we know what the longer and longest-term intentions invoked are and how the shorter-term intensions are related to the longer.”[23] An accountant entering information into a spreadsheet may, in the short term, only be trying to finish his current project. In the longer term, he may be trying to get a promotion. In the longest term, he is trying to make sure his family is well provided for. The only way to make sense of his action is to examine it within the narrative order of his life. Further, the narrative of human life has an ideal “genre:” the quest. According to MacIntyre, the good for man, the teleology, is to live his life as quest for the good.

The last piece of background information MacIntyre says is needed is an account of a moral tradition. Unless there is a kind of telos that “transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately.”[24]In a sense, what MacInytre means by a moral tradition is simply an extension of what he means by the narrative order of a single human life. A moral tradition is the context within which the good for a human life must be understood: “Within a tradition, the pursuit of goods extends through generations, sometimes through many generations. Hence the individual’s search for his or her good is generally and characteristically conducted within a context defined by those traditions of which the individual’s life is a part.”[25] What this suggests is that, as the individual has a telos, so does society itself. It is in society’s moving towards its telos through traditions that the good for man is to be found.  It is only within a society aimed at its telos that “the virtues matter.”[26]

With these background features explained, MacIntyre’s preliminary definition of virtue makes sense: “A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.”[27] However, he argues that such a definition introduces too much arbitrariness and that the foundation of virtue must extend beyond mere practices. A full definition of virtue must account for all three of the background factors: an account of practice, the narrative unity of a human life, and an account of moral tradition. When such factors are considered, MacIntyre’s definition of virtue becomes much more nuanced. A virtue is more than a human possession enabling one to achieve goods internal to practice; virtue is the both the means and the end to the good for man and for society as a whole.  Further, when

one practices the virtues, he is participating in not only the narrative of his own life, but the narrative of his tradition. By practicing the virtues, one both participates in the telos for himself and society as a whole; he helps to bring about the good.

The goal so far has been to arrive at conception of virtue ethics that goes beyond the broad, vaguer definitions of virtue ethics.  The account that MacIntyre offers is unique in that it provides a substantive way of understanding virtue ethics that is not bound to a particular culture or worldview. Such an account is exactly what is needed to allow for fair analysis between Buddhist and Christian conceptions of virtue. However, before moving into that analysis, what this account presupposes in terms of a worldview ought to be drawn out. There are at least two presuppositions underlying this account of virtue: a particular view of man and a particular view of the world.

Virtue ethics is an agent centered ethic. The result is that, as Smith points out, “in any account of virtue ethics, the self must play a prominent role.”[28] Further, any account of virtue ethics will require a certain kind of self, a conception of self that has several minimum criteria. MacIntyre’s account requires that the self must be able to “learn, acquire knowledge, be rational or irrational, understand concepts… and even co-author their own narratives.”[29] If there is a self with these abilities, that self must further be able to “maintain their personal identity through time and change, since they, and not someone else are the subjects of their own ongoing narratives.”[30] This unity of a single human life is critically important to a theory of virtue ethics. MacIntyre argues that apart from this unity, the actions of a moral agent become utterly meaningless.

In MacIntyre’s account, the narrative unity of a person’s life allows the agent to ask,

“How ought my story to turn out?”[31] Essentially, this is the same question Aristotle asked, “What is the good for man?” [32] only framed slightly differently. The unity of a human life allows for the actions within that life to have significance and to be directed to a certain teleological end. On this point, he remains compatible with Aristotle. Aristotle strongly emphasized that the good for man, eudaimonia, was something that must persist throughout an entire lifetime.[33] Aristotle further thought that “a man who made no effort to make a unity of his life, being free, was very foolish.” [34] Both MacIntyre and Aristotle believe that for virtue ethics to succeed, a human life must be understood as a whole and aimed at particular end. This confirms that a substantive account of self will be required of any worldview that wants to accommodate a virtue ethic.

The telos for man also presupposes that man has certain ontological features. In particular, it presupposes that he actually does have a particular function or purpose. Man is meant for something. While Aristotle argues that the telos or purpose is eudaimonia, MacIntyre suggests the good for man is to participate in a certain kind of quest, a quest for the good.  He argues that “the good life for man is spent in seeking the good life for man.”[35] This is not in contradiction to Aristotle, who saw eudaimonia as a state of affairs, that even when attained must be continually pursued. Both MacIntyre and Aristotle agree that the good for man is not a static end of virtue, but the continuation and perfection of virtue.  The significance here is that man’s telos does not constitute a fundamental change in the nature of man, but rather the ideal realization of it. Therefore, the telos of man in any account of virtue should preserve man as he essentially is, only in a perfected or ideal state.[36] Such a conclusion is in line with the criteria Devettere gave for the end of man:

We can note that virtue ethicists emphasize three major defining characteristics of happiness: (1) happiness in life is mostly, perhaps totally, a result of our choices, (2) happiness thus requires deliberation and reasoning so we can make good choices, and (3) happiness also requires good character because only people of good character are able to reason well and make good choices.[37]

If moral value is essential to human nature, the telos ought to be a context where man, as essentially man, continues and perfects his moral nature so that the virtues are practiced in their most excellent form once telos is attained.  Further, this kind of good for man that is presupposed by MacIntyre and Aristotle must possess intrinsic value so that it is worth pursuing for its own sake; it must serve as a kind of ground for moral value. It must also exist in an objective way, that is, it cannot be something subjective–it must actually exist. Thus any worldview that wants to accommodate a virtue ethic must have the sort of metaphysics that allow for concepts like objectivity, intrinsic goodness, and ultimate value.

Another way that the unity of a human life is important is in how it incorporates Aristotle’s concept of phronesis or moral wisdom.  For Aristotle, moral wisdom “is an appreciation of what is good and bad for us at the highest level, together with a correct apprehension of the facts of experience, together with the skill to make the correct inferences about how to apply our general moral knowledge to our particular situation.”48 With his concept of narrative unity, MacIntyre introduces the same idea. A person should act in light of the [38]narrative of her life. Doing so, a person will take into account her past experiences (her narrative past) as well as the possible future outcomes (her narrative future).

Even the concept of character, a key element in virtue ethics, presupposes the unity of a human life. The virtues are understood as human possessions or qualities that modify or develop one’s character towards it telos.[39] The only way it makes sense to talk about “development of character” is if the character of an individual is identical (in the strict, logical sense) to the character possessed in the past and will be identical in the future. If there is no unity of human life, then it remains to be seen how the virtues can be intelligibly practiced.

In addition to the unity of a human life, MacIntyre’s account further presupposes a certain kind of a world: a world that contains multiple, distinct selves that relate to each other in meaningful ways and that itself possesses a telos. MacIntyre constructs his account of virtue ethics in three stages. The first stage concerns the role of activities within the life of a person. The second stage concerns the relationship of a person’s actions within the whole of that person’s life. The final stage explains the relationship between a person’s life and a historical community.[40] It is only when the individual human life is placed within the larger context of a society that a human life becomes intelligible.  MacIntyre further argues that the virtues themselves will depend on society: “One of the features of the concept of a virtue which has emerged with some clarity from the argument so far is that it always requires for its application the acceptance of some prior account of certain features of social and moral life in terms of which it has to be defined and explained.”[41]

In light of all of this, there are at least two sorts of criteria for any possible account of virtue ethics. First, the account itself ought to conform to the expression of virtue that MacIntyre has developed. That is, it should be able to be expressed in terms of practices, narratives, and moral tradition. If it cannot be expressed in these terms, then there ought to a reason why other accounts of virtue, whether Aristotle’s, Homer’s, or Eyre’s, fit MacIntyre’s account but not this particular account. Second, the worldview assumed in the account should be able to accommodate the presuppositions about man and the world he inhabits. If the account of virtue fails either of these criteria, it is not an adequate account of virtue.

 Notes:

[1] Rosalind Hursthouse, “Virtue Ethics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford : Stanford University, 2007). Par 3.

[2] 12  Rosalind Husrthouse, On Virtue Ethics, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 26.

[3] 13  J.B, Schneewind, “Virtue, Narrative, and Community: MacIntyre and Morality” Journal of Philosophy 79, no. 11,  653.

[4] Peter Simpson, “Contemporary Virtue Ethics and Aristotle,” in Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader, ed. Daniel Statman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997),  245.

[5] Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, 27.

[6] Book I, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. W.D. Ross.

[7] Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, 9.

[8] D.S. Hutchinson, “Ethics,” in the Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 203.

[9] Alasdair MacIntryre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2007) 147.

[10] Book II, Nichomachean Ethics

[11] 21  Sarah Broadie Ethics with Aristotle (Oxford University Press, New York, 1991), 179.

[12] 22  Hutchinson, “Ethics,” 207.

[13] Howard Curzer, “The Supremely Happy Life in Aristotle’s Ethics,” Aperion 24 (1991), 51.

[14] Stephen Clark, Aristotle’s Man: Speculations upon Aristotelian Anthropology (Toronto: Clarendon, 1983),  26.

[15] Michael Slote, "Agent-Based Virtue Ethics," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 20 (1995): 20.

[16] 26  Macintyre, After Virtue, 149.

[17] 27  Ibid.

[18] 28  Ibid., 178.

[19] Ibid., 187.

[20] Ibid., 179.

[21] Ibid., 180.

[22] 32  Schneedwind, “Virtue,” 656.

[23] MacIntyre, After Virtue,  192-3.

[24] Ibid., 203.

[25] 35  Ibid., 222.

[26] 36  Greg Pence, “Virtue Theory,” in A Companion to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 251.

[27] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 221.

[28] R. Scott Smith, Virtue Ethics and  Moral Knowledge: Philosophy of Language after MacIntyre and Hauerwas (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003),  145. 

[29] Smith, Virtue, 148.

[30] 40  Ibid., 148.

[31] Shneedwind, “Virtue,” 657.

[32] 42  Richard Kraut, “Aristotle’s Ethics” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford : Stanford University, 2007). Par 6.

[33] 43  Hutchinson, “Ethics,” 203.

[34] 44  Clark, Aristotle,  26.

[35] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 219.

[36] There could be an objection here that man, in his current state, finds himself in a state where he is estranged from who he essentially is. However, it is rather inelegant to suggest that at any point man could be separated from what is essential to man. To make such a separation would be the end of man.

[37] Raymond Devettere, Introduction to Virtue Ethics: Insights of the Ancient Greeks (Washington, Georgetown University, 2002) 53.

[38] Hutchinson, “Ethics,” 207.

[39] Hursthouse, “Virtue,” par 3.

[40] Schneewind, “Virtue,” 655.

[41] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 179.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 1, section 1.3, “The Argument from Justification”

The third way of establishing a dependence relation of morality on God is by means of the argument from justification. What Korsgaard calls the “normative question” is the issue here: Why should I be moral? Or, why should I accept morality as a proper demand on me? By the second Critique, Kant didn’t think he could give a justification of the moral demand. Earlier, in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he attempted a proof of freedom. But he seemed to come to think such efforts suffered from circularity. Hare thinks the argument from justification is weaker than the first two arguments because it would take a lot of work to show the DCT answer to the normative question is the only or best answer. (Hare does some of that work in chapters 6-9 of Why Bother Being Good? as does C. Stephen Evans in ch. 4 of God and Moral Obligations.)

A DCT answer to the normative question is that one should accept morality as a proper demand because it’s God who places this demand. A justification of a normative claim can’t be derived from a factual claim alone. To say that I ought to live a certain way because God tells me to do so requires, for completeness, the claim that I ought to do what God tells me to do. This has led some to accuse DCT of begging the question. Why should we do what God tells us to do?

If obedience to God is itself a moral obligation, then to justify moral obligation by appealing to it is viciously circular, but if it’s not a moral obligation, then it seems no justification is available by this route. If we consider Socrates’ attempt to show Crito there’s an obligation to obey the laws of the city, all of his various arguments have the form of deriving a justification of a claim that we have an obligation of a certain kind by deriving it from a higher obligation. But then the project of justifying our moral obligations as a whole seems hopeless.

Hare thinks there’s a reply to this difficulty, though. He uses the distinction Scotus draws between natural law strictly speaking and natural law in an extended sense. Scotus thinks the command to love God given in the first table of the Ten Commandments is natural law strictly speaking, known to be true just by knowing its terms. But he thinks the second table, which concerns our various duties to the neighbor, is natural law only in an extended sense. It’s contingently true, whereas it’s necessarily true that God is to be loved, because we know that, if God exists, God is supremely good, and we know that what is supremely good is to be loved. It’s also true we know that to love God is at least to obey God. There’s scriptural warrant for this, but in addition, it’s plausible to say that to love God is at least to will what God wills for us to will. God is not “another self,” as there’s an obvious disproportion between us and God, and there are some things God wills that God does not will for us to will. So what we repeat in our wills is God’s will for our willing. But willing what God wills for our willing is obedience. So it is necessarily true not just that God is to be loved, but that God is to be obeyed. The appeal to God’s command as authoritative thus doesn’t require justification (except in so far as we have to justify the claim that God exists), so this means that divine commands do not generate all our obligations, because there is one important exception, namely, the very obligation to obey divine commands. But this is not a troubling exception once one accepts the necessary truths (if God exists) that God is to be loved and that God is to be obeyed.

Now, what is the relation between the divine command and the obligation? Quinn offers a causal account, whereas Adams offers a constitution account. Hare thinks a causal account is wrong because it suggests two different events, in logic separable. And constitution seems wrong because obligation is not a natural kind like water.

Hare instead notes the way a king makes a law by declaring: “The king wills it.” This is an “explicit performative,” in Austin’s terminology, like “I promise.” Searle claimed that the case of promising shows that it’s possible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. But we don’t have a case in promising of a prescription following from a description without any intervening prescriptive premises. There’s an endorsement of the institution of promising, which is itself a kind of prescription.

Now consider the case ‘God commanded Jones to pay Smith five dollars’. If DCT is true, it follows that Jones ought to pay Smith five dollars. Is this deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’? No, because the truth that God is to be obeyed plays the same role in the argument as the institution of promising did in the earlier one. If I affirm that God is to be obeyed, I am prescribing obedience, and so prescribing that, if God commands Jones, Jones ought to do what God commands. Different from causation or constitution, it’s better to see the relation as resembling that of performative acts like a priest’s baptizing, or a president’s signing a bill. In all these cases, there is an internal conceptual connection between the ‘producing’ and what is ‘produced’, but making the inference requires the endorsement of an institution or a necessary truth.

There’s a reply here to an objection to DCT by Wolterstorff, who denies that all moral obligations are generated by God’s commands, since some are generated by human commands, such a parent’s command to a child to clean up his room. Hare thinks Adams’ answer that these are merely pre-moral obligations is wrongheaded. Hare instead agrees that sometimes human commands generate obligations, but he says we should see DCT as operating in answer to the normative question why we should hold ourselves under those obligations. For why should we keep our promises? To draw the implication from my having said ‘I promise’ to my obligation, I need to endorse the institution of promising, and the fact that God requires this faithfulness of me gives me a reason for this endorsement. [My question: who’s drawing the implication here? Me? If I don’t happen to endorse the institution of promising, that doesn’t vitiate the obligation for me, just because I don’t see myself as having an obligation.]

Such a view answers the normative question by referring back to something that is good in itself. More now needs to be said about goodness. Relying on Stump’s take on Aquinas, ‘being’ and ‘goodness’ are the same in reference and differ in sense, and the sense of the good is that what is good is desirable. Goodness supervenes on the natural property of the actualization of a specifying potentiality. This means that a human being is good to the extent that the human is rational (if we take rationality to be the specifying potentiality of human beings, that is, the potentiality that makes something belong to the species ‘human’). Hare makes a few qualifiers at this point: That’s probably not a good way to specify what makes something human, because it leaves too many people out, and also probably goodness is not to be confined in its reference to degrees of natural-kind actualization. Pleasure is good, for example, and so is aesthetic beauty, but neither of these forms of goodness is amenable to this kind of analysis.

Aquinas’s account of the sense of ‘good’ is separable from this account of its reference, though. ‘Desirable’ is a term of notorious difficulty: able to be desire, tends to be desired, or worthy to be desired? From the fact that all people desire something, it does not follow that it is desirable in that last sense. On the other hand, to say that something is good is not simply to say that it is worthy to be desired or loved, but also to express one’s desire or love for it. There is something odd about the combination of saying sincerely of a thing that it’s good and being indifferent to it.

At any rate, the good is the desirable in the following sense: If I say something is good, I express the fact that I desire or love it, and I claim that it merits such desire or love. To say sincerely that something is good is to express that one is drawn to it, and to endorse the claim that it deserves to draw one in that way. This offers an account of the supervenience of goodness on being: To say something, like a strawberry, is good is to say it’s good because of its natural properties, but this description is not entailed by the evaluation that the strawberry is good, without the prior endorsement of a set of descriptive criteria. Hare admits Stump’s is the more plausibly Thomist account, but her view seems to Hare too narrow an account of the criteria for goodness as a whole.

Now we can return to the divine command answer to the normative question, that the demand of morality is a proper demand on me because it is God who makes the demand. When I say that something is good, I am expressing my desire or love for it and I am claiming that it is worthy to be desired or loved. This account escapes Moore’s objection (in the ‘open question’ argument) to accounts of evaluative terms that attempt to reduce them to descriptions. The theist claims that what is worthy and deserves our love is, supremely, God, and in saying God is good she expresses that love. She may add, secondarily, what is worthy of love is her own love of God, and others’ love of God. Scotus suggests that loving God is itself not only good but our destination as final end. Thirdly, the theist may say that what promotes the love of God or draws us toward it is good. These references are not part of the meaning of ‘good’, but are claims about what satisfies the criteria for worthiness to be desired or loved.

On this account, there can be two seemingly opposite priority relations between what’s obligatory and what’s good. On the one hand, the good has priority over the obligatory, because the justification relation is as just explained: I should try to meet my moral obligations because God gives them to me, and I prescribe that God is to be obeyed because God is to be loved as the supreme good. (Also, the commands God gives are to do good things, and their goodness gives me a reason for doing them. [A thought: when God tells us to do the lesser of two evils, the goodness of the action doesn’t apply, but the first condition still would, so perhaps there’s an advantage to Hare giving pride of place to the first condition.]) On the other hand, the obligatory has priority over the good, because there is an enormous number of good things possible for me to do, and God, in prescribing some obligation, selects some of these goods and neglects others. Only the ones God selects for prescription are obligatory. The two priority relations are the opposite way round, but there is nothing contradictory in this, because we have two different kinds of priority. The first kind of priority is what Aristotle calls priority ‘in account’, and the second is something more like ‘veto’ or ‘overridingness’. The good has priority to the right because everything that is right is good, though not vice versa. [Note: not sure about that: again, what of the duty to do the lesser of two evils?] The right has priority to the good because the goods that God selects as mandatory for us are, so to speak, trumps.

This helps us answer the claim that DCT makes morality arbitrary (see note below). This is often traced to the Euthyphro, but Hare has argued elsewhere that the dialogue is weak support for the opponent of DCT, because the opponent needs an explicit argument that the gods love the holy because it is holy, and the dialogue does not in fact provide one. But Socrates speaks a truth here, Hare thinks, but one consistent with DCT. We know that God’s commands are not arbitrary, because we know that what God commands is good, and the goodness is not produced by the command. This does not, however, make God’s command redundant, because only those good things that are commanded are obligatory.

*Note: The term ‘arbitrary’ has different senses. It can have a negative evaluative force, meaning that a decision ignores some relevant consideration, and this is how the term is used in the objection from arbitrariness to DT. But it can also mean that a decision is within the agent’s arbitrium or discretion, and in that sense Hare wants to agree that God’s commands are arbitrary.

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The Possibility of Virtue in Christianity and Buddhism (Part 1 of 5)

Introduction

Aristotle, the great teacher of Greece, once asked, “What is the good for man?” This is a question that every worldview seeks to answer. The Israelites said that good for man consisted in living a life of holiness to God, as a separate and distinct people. The Greeks said that man was meant for the polis.[1] Christ taught men were for his kingdom. The Buddha held his own view.

The heart of Buddhism is ethics.[2] This is evident even in the legendary accounts of the Buddha’s life. The Buddha first encountered the problem of suffering after he finally escaped the isolation of the palace he had grown up in. His father, a powerful ruler, wanted to force his son into a life of politics and war. He had been warned that if his son was exposed to the kind of life people experience every day, a life marked by suffering, that his son would likely become a great teacher instead of a ruler. However, despite his father’s best efforts, the Buddha eventually ventured outside the palace walls. There he was faced with illness, old age, and death. As a result, the Buddha became a renunciate; he gave up his royal lifestyle and began searching for a way to bring an end to suffering. In his search, the Buddha tried all the available philosophies and religions; whether they be hedonistic or ascetic. Whatever he tried, the Buddha excelled beyond his teachers, but in each case, he found that suffering still remained. Eventually, while under the Bodhi tree, and after much effort, the Buddha attained enlightenment. He saw reality as it really is and was able to formulate a solution.

The solution he came up with was an entirely practical one: cultivate happiness.[3] This was to be achieved by taking “the appropriate action: seeking nirvana.”4   This emphasis on action means that Buddhism is primarily an orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy.[4][5] What is important is “the harmony of behavior, not harmony of doctrines.”[6]

What this means is that Buddhism as a worldview is in a unique position. Since it is primarily a particular set of practices, essentially an ethic, the validity of the Buddhist worldview rises and falls on whether or not Buddhism succeeds as an ethical system.  This provides an opportunity to test Buddhism to see whether it is a coherent worldview.

Statement of the Problem

There are two leading interpretations of Buddhist ethics. The first and most popular interpretation understands Buddhism as a kind of utilitarianism. Proponents of this view argue that Buddhist ethics are merely provisional and ought to be disregarded once nirvana is attained.

The well respected Saddhatissa takes a utilitarian view and argues that the moral teachings of the Buddha "were never ends in themselves, confined to a mundane life, but were the essential preliminaries, and the permanent accompaniments, to attaining the highest state."[7]  However, a system that is merely provisional will not do if it is agreed that ethics must account for what is ultimately good or valuable. But there is another interpretation. Damien Keown, as well as several others, suggests that Buddhism is a kind of virtue ethic, very much similar to the kind taught by Aristotle.[8] A Buddhist version of virtue ethics offers the possibility of a complete, substantive account of ethics. Whether or not virtue ethics can be meaningfully understood in a

Buddhist context is the first problem that thesis will seek to solve.

The second problem concerns whether a Christian worldview might accommodate a virtue view of ethics better than a Buddhist one. Increasingly, Christians are adopting a blended approach to ethics, usually holding to a combination of deontological and virtue ethics.[9]  This thesis will put the possibility of a Christian virtue ethic to the test. If it turns out that Christianity can, in fact, provide a more robust context for a virtue ethic, then in order to be a fulfilled virtue ethicist, one ought to abandon the Buddhist worldview and adopt a Christian one.

Statement of the Importance of the Problem

A prima facie look at this thesis might cause some readers to think it is relevant only to Buddhists who hold to a virtue view of ethics–the subject matter here ought not concern the average Buddhist, much less anyone else. However, this is not the case. To understand the importance of this thesis, one must first understand just how the topic falls within contemporary scholarship. First, there is the current state of Buddhist ethics as a scholarly discipline. Many writers on the subject have been quick to point out that serious study of Buddhist ethics from a theoretical standpoint is a rather new phenomenon.

So far, there have been primarily only two theoretical accounts of Buddhist ethics offered: utility and virtue. If one agrees that a utility view is not a satisfactory account of ethics, then there is only one other viable option: the virtue view. Of course, there can also be new interpretations and revisions to old ones, but that is why this thesis is significant: the best contemporary interpretations of Buddhist ethics may need to be adjusted.  Second, since Buddhism is primarily a system of ethics, then whether or not it succeeds as an ethical system is vitally important to the entire worldview. If the Buddhist worldview does not succeed as an ethic, it does not succeed at all.

Foundational questions of worldviews are always weighty, so it is hard to overestimate the importance of engaging the foundations of a religion, especially a religion as influential as Buddhism. While it has been shown that the discussion in this thesis will be relevant for more than just a few, it also needs to be understood that a goal of this thesis is to be part of a wider conversation about the nature of Buddhist and Christian ethics and not the final word. The topics discussed are immensely important; the thesis itself is only part of that vital conversation.

Hopefully, it will contribute to a greater understanding of both systems.

Statement of Position on the Problem

As stated above, this thesis seeks to discover whether a virtue ethic interpretation of

Buddhist ethics is viable. This thesis addresses the question both negatively and positively. Negatively, the position taken on this problem is that a virtue view is inadequate for multiple reasons. Positively, this thesis holds that a Christian view of virtue ethics succeeds and is superior to the Buddhist view. Consequently, if one wants to be a satisfied virtue ethicist, one ought to abandon the Buddhist worldview and become a Christian.

Limitations

Since the label “Buddhism” covers a wide array of beliefs and practices, this thesis will be limited specifically to early Buddhism. All Buddhist scriptures are taken from the Pali Canon, a set of scriptures considered authoritative by nearly all Buddhists.  Further, the clarification needs to be made that Buddhist cosmology or metaphysics itself is not under scrutiny. It is specifically the relationship between worldview and ethics that is being examined. This means that questions like, "How can it be the case that these are the four marks of existence and not three others?" will not be addressed. Also, this thesis will be limited to metaethical concerns.

Issues of practice will not be discussed. Primarily, the goal will be show that foundational issues in early Buddhism prevent Buddhist ethical practices from being applied in a way consistent with a virtue view of ethics.

Methodology

Comparative ethics can be a difficult endeavor. There are two primary pitfalls. The first is to presume the truthfulness of one view at the start. The result is that opposing viewpoints are inadequate due to mere definition and no understanding is gained. A Buddhist, presuming Buddhism to be correct, might say that Christianity is inadequate simply because it does not further progress toward nirvana. The other danger is to assume that there can be no conclusions. Systems may be compared, but each one is right in its own context. The best we can hope for is greater understanding. This produces unsatisfactory results as well. There ought to be resolution: one view demonstrated to be superior to another. To avoid these dangers, a neutral framework is needed. The first component of this framework is a shared assumption: the fundamental relationship between ethics and reality. This is the same assumption as made by Geertz:

It is the conviction that the values one holds are grounded in the inherent structure of reality, that between the way one ought to live and the way things really are there is an unbreakable inner connection. What sacred symbols do for those to whom they are sacred is to formulate an image of the world’s construction and a program for human conduct that are mere reflexes of one another.[10]

The second component needed is an account of virtue ethics that is neutral to both Christianity and Buddhism. Alasdair MacInytre has established such a view of virtue ethics. His view presupposes at least two features that are required of a worldview in order to accommodate a virtue ethic: an account of teleology and the narrative unity of a single human life.

The next step will be to take these criteria and their necessary conditions and apply them to Keown’s interpretation of Buddhist ethics. If it turns out that Keown has adequately accounted for these in his system, then perhaps it is correct to characterize Buddhism as a kind of virtue ethic. However, if Keown does not succeed, then he has not saved Buddhist ethics from the other primary interpretation: Buddhist ethics is merely utilitarian. The final step will be to apply the criteria to the Christian worldview in order to determine whether the Christian worldview provides a superior account of virtue.

Notes:

[1] Rosalind Hursthouse, “Virtue Ethics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford : Stanford University, 2007). Par 6.

[2] 2

Damien Keown, Buddhism A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1.

[3] 3  Christopher W Gowans.  Philosophy of the Buddha (London: Routledge, 2003), 25.

[4] Mark Siderits, Buddhism As Philosophy: An Introduction (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007), 22.

[5] Keown, Buddhism, 3.

[6] 6 Paul Williams and Anthony Tribe, Buddhist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000),  99.

[7] 7  H.  Saddhatissa, Buddhist Ethics: Essence of Buddhism ( New York: G. Braziller, 1971), 81.

[8] 8 Keown, Buddhism, 33.

[9] This is the position of Reuschling, Moreland, and Craig .

[10] Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia(Chicago: University

of Chicago Press), 97.

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John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 1, “Morality and Religion,” section 1.1: The Argument from Providence

The first argument by which to establish a dependence relation of morality on religion is that morality becomes rationally unstable if we do not have a way to assure ourselves that morality and happiness are consistent so that we do not have to do what is morally wrong in order to be happy; it concludes that we need belief in God to give us this assurance.

Kant is arguing not that a life committed to meeting the moral demand is impossible without belief in God, but that there is a certain kind of rational instability in such a combination—betraying a lack of rational fit.

What is the moral demand? What is moral obligation? Kant gives us, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, various formulations of what he takes to be the supreme principle of morality, namely the Categorical Imperative. Here are two of these formulations or formulas. The first states: “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” A maxim prescribes an action together with the reasons for, or the end to be produced by, that action.

Kant gives an alternative version of the first formula to make this point clearer: “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.” Not a law of physical nature entailing loss of freedom—but nature has one feature that makes the analogy useful: nature is a system in which the same kind of cause produces the same kind of effect in a lawful way wherever and whenever it occurs. We can call any obligation that passes this universalizing test a “universal obligation.”

The second formula of the Categorical Imperative is the formula of the end-in-itself: “So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means.” Humanity should never be treated as a mere means. Kant is not forbidding using people, but we must never merely use. To treat another person as an end in herself is to share as far as possible her ends.

There is something common to the positions on the moral demand held by the Kantian, the Consequentialist, and any Virtue Theorist who takes impartial benevolence to be a virtue. The moral demand is that we treat each person as one, and no person as more than one, and we try to make the other’s purposes our purposes as far as we can, namely as far as the moral law itself allows. This account itself includes reference to the moral law in its final clause, and therefore does not explain the moral demand in a non-circular way.

Sometimes people who know Kant’s moral theory but do not know his moral theology wonder why he would bring in happiness at all, as the argument from providence requires. Doesn’t requiring a connection with happiness constitute a pollution of moral purity?

To reply to this worry, it’s helpful to see how Kant distinguishes his position from the views he attributes to the Stoics and Epicureans. The Stoics reduced happiness to virtue. The Epicureans held that virtue is simply what leads to happiness, and so in effect also reduced virtue to happiness. Kant objected to both, because we are not merely rational, but also creatures of sense and creatures of need. Our highest good is a union of virtue and happiness, which are two different things. Virtue is the disposition to live by duty or the moral law, and happiness is the satisfaction of our inclinations as a sum, or where everything goes the way we would like it to. (The Epicureans, in a real sense, fail to give us morality at all.)

Consider a case of conflict. Suppose I have an obligation to care for an aged parent even though I recognize it will detract from my happiness. Hare will argue later that not all the components of happiness are satisfactions of what Kant calls “inclinations,” and they are not all properly classified under the general heading of “pleasure.” So the difference between duty and happiness is not as stark as Kant pretends, but Hare will try to show that there are still basically two kinds of motivation for action, and not (as the Aristotelian proposes) finally only one.

Since we are both rational beings and creatures of sense and of need, our highest good, Kant says, requires a union of virtue and happiness. Since our morality gives us this end, the highest good, we must, if we are to pursue the morally good life in a way that is rationally stable, believe that this highest good is really (and not merely logically) possible. But we don’t see that we have the capacity to bring this highest good about. Nature, Kant says, is indifferent to our moral purposes, as far as we can tell from our sense experience. In order to sustain our belief in the real possibility of the highest good, we therefore have to postulate the existence of a “supersensible author of nature,” who can bring about the conjunction of happiness and virtue, and thus “morality inevitably leads to religion.”

Though Kant was not a divine command theorist, he did say throughout the corpus that we have to recognize our duties as God’s commands, because it is only if they are God’s commands that we can rationally believe in the moral possibility of the highest good, which is the end that morality itself gives to us.

Kant thus subscribes to the scholastic picture of the three roles of God as sovereign, distinguishing God’s legislative, executive, and judicial authority. On this picture God promulgates the law by command, runs the universe in accordance with this law, and then judges our success in keeping this law.

Not only Kant, but also the classical authors of the utilitarian tradition, have endorsed a version of the argument from providence. Mill said we need hope with respect to the government of the universe, if we are to sustain the moral life. Sidgwick recognized that the only way to reconcile enlightened self-interest with aiming at the maximum balance of happiness for all sentient beings present and future, whatever the cost to oneself, was to bring in a god who desires the greatest total good of all living things and will reward and punish in accordance with this desire. Belief in such a god is necessary, though he didn’t say this was sufficient reason to believe. He did recognize, though, that incorporating this belief would be a return to Paley’s utilitarianism (which preceded Bentham’s).

We could escape the force of the argument by thinking morality absurd, but if so it would be hard to sustain our attempt to live morally. Evil might lead one to think the world absurd in this way. Kant’s “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” condensed his thoughts on the problem of evil into this short monograph about Job.

We need to persevere past the negative to the positive content in this volume (like the 1stCritique). Kant offers a kind of “transcendental theodicy.” Kant’s objective is to “deny knowledge so as to make room for faith.” The faith he wants to make room for is faith in God as legislator, ruler, and judge. The problem of evil is a problem for the claim that there is a God like this. Kant goes through three traditional theodicies ‘proper’ for each of these three roles, and shows that all nine fail. (This resembles the way he dismantled the ontological and cosmological and physico-teleological proofs for the existence of God). But then Kant says not only do we have no proof within the limits of the three roles, we also have no disproof. To attempt a disproof would transgress the limits of our insight just as much as the attempted proofs. But if there is no disproof within theoretical reason, the need of practical reason for the postulation of the divine wisdom prevails. This brings us to Job.

Job’s friends speak as though they were ingratiating themselves with God. Job alone is frank and sincere. He does not hide his doubts, but he also does not deceive himself about his own guilt. What God does in the story is to reveal (out of the whirlwind) the wisdom of the creation, and especially its inscrutability. God shows to Job the beautiful side of creation, but also its fearsomeness. Job founded his faith on his commitment to the moral life, Kant argued. If we are sure that we are under the moral law, then we are entitled to believe in the existence of a ruler of the world who makes the evil in the world (which we can’t deny) subordinate to the good.

The Third Option to the Euthyphro Dilemma

In general, Divine Command Theory (DCT) says that “If God commands X, then X is a moral obligation for us.” I will limit my discussion of DCT to moral obligations and prohibitions, which are used synonymously with rightness and wrongness. These are deontic properties which is distinct from goodness, which is axiological. For example, something can be good to do, such as becoming a lifeguard to save lives, but we do not have a moral obligation to do so. So I will use DCT as a theory of rightness that presupposes a theory of the good.

The Euthyphro Dilemma (ED) is often raised against DCT. For example, in the case of rape Walter Sinnott-Armstrong asks, “Did God have any reason to command this? If not, his command was arbitrary, and then it can’t make anything morally wrong. On the other hand, if God did have a reason to command us not to rape, then that reason is what makes rape morally wrong. The command itself is superfluous. Either way, morality cannot depend on God’s commands.” In short, the ED says:

Either

(1) God has no reasons for His commands,

or

(2) God has reasons for His commands but these reasons are sufficient by themselves in explaining moral obligations.

Embracing (1) leads to objections such as God’s commands being arbitrary which makes morality arbitrary. Furthermore, this means that God’s commands could possibly be what we consider abhorrent, such as commanding that we ought to torture babies solely for fun resulting in a moral obligation to do so. Any objection to this that says God has reasons is a move away from (1).

Embracing (2), shows that actions are morally obligatory prior to and independent of God’s commands, making God at most an epistemic authority who is just conveying His perfect moral knowledge to us. However DCT proponents want God’s commands to explain moral obligations instead.

From the ED, I think a third option is clear, which DCT proponents can well affirm:

(3) God has reasons for His commands but these reasons are not sufficient by themselves in explaining moral obligations without God’s commands.

God just needs good reasons to make an act morally obligatory. An act itself does not have the property of being morally obligatory prior to God’s command, but can have other relevant properties, such as being morally good or even “non-moral considerations ultimately based in God’s nature.” God’s commanding however adds certain properties that make the act obligatory. To use an analogy, let us think of other obligations. Consider a legal obligation not to smoke in a certain area when implemented by law. For the obligation to arise, there must be good reasons behind why it is implemented by law. Yet those reasons by themselves are not sufficient to give us legal obligations unless it is actually implemented by law. Hence a legal obligation arises because it is implemented by the law and there are good reasons for it being implemented. Likewise, DCT proponents say that a moral obligation arises because it is commanded by God and God has good reasons to command it.

One objection to (3) is based on a principle that moral properties strongly supervene on non-moral properties necessarily. Matthew Jordan says, “The doctrine of global moral supervenience, the uncontroversial thesis that any two possible worlds that are identical in all non-moral respects must be identical in all moral respects, implies that moral truths – at least the most fundamental ones – are metaphysically necessary.” So moral obligations are in some way determined and fixed by their non-moral properties. How exactly does moral supervenience amount to an objection to (3) exactly?

In “An Essay on Divine Authority”, Mark C. Murphy argues that DCT “must be false, for it, in conjunction with a very weak and plausible claim about God's freedom in commanding, entails that the moral does not supervene on the non-moral.” To show this, he argues that according to voluntaristic versions of DCT, where God is free to choose what to command, there can be two possible worlds exactly the same in their natural features, but God gives different commands and thus we have different moral obligations in two possible worlds that have the same natural features. This seems to violate the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral, since two worlds with the same natural features should have the same moral obligations.

How may a proponent of a voluntaristic version of DCT reply? C. Stephen Evans points out that for the theist, non-moral properties can include both natural and supernatural properties. Supernatural properties are “properties possessed because what has the properties has a certain kind of relation to God,” such as “being commanded by God”, “being preferred by God,” or “being pleasing to God” or “being conducive to a better relation to God.” If an act is commanded by God, then it will have the further properties mentioned, such as “being conducive to a better relation to God” which is a non-moral property. These non-moral properties may even be linked to natural properties such as “being conducive to the agent’s happiness.” If a relationship with God is conducive to our happiness, and such a relationship requires that we follow what He commands, then the property of “being commanded by God” would be one that could alter the moral status of an act, especially for those who think that the moral status of an act is linked to whether the act is conducive to an agent’s happiness. Hence on DCT, it is both natural and supernatural properties that make up non-moral properties which moral properties supervene on. If so, then there can be two worlds alike in all their natural properties but differ in their supernatural properties, and hence moral properties can be different as it supervenes on both. So moral supervenience along with God’s freedom does not amount to an objection against (3).

---

Bibliography

Evans, C. Stephen. God and Moral Obligation. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Jordan, Matthew Carey. "“Theism, Naturalism, and Meta-Ethics”." Philosophy Compass 8, 2013, 373-380.

Miller, Christian B. “Euthyphro Dilemma.” In Blackwell International Encyclopedia of Ethics, edited by Hugh LaFollette. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013

Murphy, Mark C. An Essay on Divine Authority. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, “Why Traditional Theism Cannot Provide an Adequate Foundation for Morality”, in Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics, edited by Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King, 101-115. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008.

Smith, Michael. The Moral Problem. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

The Appropriate Authority of Morality

The moral argument tries to argue from morality to God. In this short article, I will work on what the source of moral obligations should be based on some features of obligations and of moral obligations.

To start off, we must distinguish between moral obligations and moral values. Moral obligations are deontological, having to do with whether something is required to do (or not to do). The terms typically used are “right” and “wrong”. This is distinct from values which are axiological, having to do with the moral worth of a person, action, or some state of affairs. The terms typically used are “good” and “bad”. Something may be good such as donating one’s kidneys or being a lifeguard to save lives, however one is not morally obligated to do so. Moral obligations have a reason-giving force for all to act, regardless of one’s goals or desires or interests, and even always trump non-moral reasons. It is an imperative with great force and not just a suggestion or preference. In other words, it is an unconditional “ought”.

What then would be an appropriate authority and source of moral obligations? First, we know that obligations come from another person or a group of persons. Some examples are familial obligations, legal obligations, obligations to one’s country, obligations to one’s company, etc. In the case of moral obligations, its source also has to come from another mind(s). It is difficult to see how we are required to do something if no other mind requires it of us.

Second, obligations only arise if the source stands as an authority over those who are being obligated. It would be pointless for some random person to demand to bring you to the police station for questioning unless that person is a police officer who has jurisdiction. In the army, a soldier of a lower rank and without being given authority cannot issue commands to one who is of higher rank. In the case of morality, since moral obligations apply to all human beings across all places and times, the source must transcend human persons and societies and stand as an authority over all human persons.

Third, when different obligations conflict, one obligation trumps the other based on which social relationship is greater or which authority is greater. In the case of moral obligations, since it trumps all other obligations, either the source has a social relationship with humans which is more important than any other social relation, or the source must possess more authority than any other human. Fourth, obligations arise not by might, or by dealing out rewards and punishments. For example, a thief does not exercise authority over me by robbing me at gunpoint. Neither do evil dictators have the appropriate authority. If the law stated that no one could go to the toilet for a hundred days for no good reasons or that we should torture children for fun, then it does not generate an appropriate legal obligation to follow. For obligations to arise, they must be grounded based upon good reasons. So for moral obligations to always be appropriate to follow, the source must be reasonable and perfectly good.

Fifth, the source of obligations must be in a good epistemic position to know relevant considerations. If one is perfectly good and yet cannot know the relevant considerations in a situation and evaluate it properly, then there is no obligation generated. For morality, the source must be able to see all relevant considerations, including really difficult things like predicting the consequences of an action. Hence the source must be wise and intelligent.

Sixth, for obligations to be followed, they must be made known by the source in some way. Since moral obligations are to be followed, the source must either be able to communicate to us or give us faculties that can come to know these moral obligations. Lastly many agree that at least some moral obligations exists necessarily in all possible worlds. For example, it is not possible that the world turned out such that it is right to torture babies for fun. Since there are some necessary moral obligations such as not to murder, the explanation for moral obligations must also be necessary. In the care of moral obligations, the source necessarily requires some actions to be done (or not to be done). If so, it follows that the source must also exist necessarily in order to do so. Note that this does not undermine the source’s freedom if nothing external to Him determines that He requires so.

To sum up, an appropriate source of morality must be from a person or persons, must be an authority above all human persons, either have a social relationship with humans which is greater than any other social relation or possess more authority than any other human, be reasonable and perfectly good, be wise and intelligent, be able to communicate to us or give us faculties that can come to know these moral obligations, and exists necessarily. Hence for theists, one can argue from moral obligations to such a source of morality which they may call God.

Image: CC License. "Authority" by M. Coghlan

How Kantian Ethics Helps to Demonstrate the Attractiveness of Biblical Ethics: Part II

BIBLICAL ETHICS SUCCEEDS WHERE KANT FALLS SHORT

In comparing the three proposed biblical principles of ethics with Kantian ethics, it is evident that both Kant and the biblical principles attempt to achieve many of the same objectives despite having different foundations to ground morality. Kant’s ethic, however, proves to be less plausible when his justification for objective morality, his requirements for moral worth, and his argument that humans possess inherent value are compared with a biblical view of ethics.

Kant departs from the first biblical principle by grounding objective morality in the “good will” that is produced by reason in every rational creature. In accord with the Enlightenment ideals of human autonomy and reason, humans can legislate morality apart from God. Assessing the philosophical merit of Kantian ethics versus the biblical ethic on this point deserves careful attention because both views stand or fall with the ability that their intrinsic “good” has to ground objective morality.

The classic problem that confronts any moral system that claims some absolute standard as the ground of objective morality is the Euthyphro dilemma. This dilemma, which goes back to the time of Plato, questions whether God’s commands could really determine what is good (or “pious”). The dilemma is stated: “Is the pious being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?”[1]

Both horns of the dilemma are a challenge to any proposed absolute standard of goodness. For any purported standard of objective morality, one can ask whether that standard merely recognizes goodness (i.e., goodness is external to the standard) or whether that standard determines goodness arbitrarily. Consider first whether the biblical ethic is able to defend that the Christian God is plausibly the ground of objective morality in the face of this challenge. It will not do for objective morality to be arbitrary (if good is merely what God says), and God cannot ground objective morality if there is a standard of morality outside of God (if God simply affirms what is independently good). Fortunately for biblical ethics, there is a third alternative—God Himself is the “Good.” The third alternative is that “God’s own holy and perfectly good nature supplies the absolute standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. God’s moral nature is what Plato called the ‘Good.’ He is the locus and source of moral value.”[2] So God is the Good. God’s will and essentially holy nature are fused such that God only wills that which consistently flows from His nature. God is not an arbitrary “stopping point” for morality’s foundation, as there are “principled reasons to think that God’s existence is necessary and that God functions as the very ground of being.” If God is the “primordial good of unsurpassable value,” then goodness is anchored in an unchanging, personal, and necessarily perfect source.[3] It is reasonable that the ground of objective morality would have these properties; morality seems to be essentially bound up with personhood, and anything that would ground objective morality would have to be unchanging and beyond human opinion.

Although the biblical grounding of objective morality in God’s holy nature appears to survive the Euthyphro dilemma, Kant’s “good will” does not fare as well. Kant may seem to split the horns of the dilemma by claiming that the good will is intrinsically and necessarily good. The problem, however, is that there is no reason why the good will must be good “without qualification” in the way Kant says it is. Louis Pojman raises the problem that the good will itself—the rational faculty that recognizes the CI as the supreme moral principle—could potentially be “put to bad uses.” Although the good will seems to be a good, Pojman insightfully recognizes that it is “not obvious” that the good will is necessarily good or that it is “the only inherently good thing” since a “misguided do-gooder” could act in accordance with what he believes is good and yet carry out what most of us regard as bad actions. Perhaps the good will is a “necessary condition to any morally good action,” but it does not seem to be sufficient.[4]

Ultimately, for Kant, the good will is intimately tied to the principle that it produces—the CI and its requirement of universalizability. The problem is that universalizability is unable to stand as the ultimate moral criterion. For one thing, Kant does not adequately specify parameters for the characteristics of a maxim that is appropriate to universalize as moral law. Aside from the limitation that a maxim must not violate the Principle of Ends, Kant “provides no guide for determining what features must be included in the maxim.” This leaves open the door for morally problematic actions “to be based on a maxim that a person would universalize.”[5] Also, it is highly dubious that reason necessarily produces the same conclusions in all rational beings. For example, one could justifiably will to universalize the maxim that “one should always tell the truth no matter what consequence might come about as a result.” Indeed, Kant believed that reason demands the acceptance of this maxim. Yet many would argue that reason demands the acceptance of the maxim that “one should tell the truth unless doing so would harm others.” It is unclear which maxim is necessitated by reason, and both positions have defenders. This example also highlights the difficulty the CI has in handling moral conflicts.[6]

If, however, God’s unchanging and necessarily good character is the intrinsic “Good,” then there is no concern about disagreements among rational human persons as to what should be universalized—that is, what is good. Only God, out of His necessarily holy nature, stands as the ontological ground of goodness, and conflicting human beliefs are irrelevant to the existence of objective morality. With biblical ethics, the existence of moral values and duties (moral ontology) does not depend upon the conclusions we reach as we try to know what these moral values and duties are (moral epistemology). What happens when two maxims that appear to be legitimately justifiable according to our best human reason disagree with each other? If objective morality is rooted in God, then such a situation is irrelevant to moral ontology.

In addition to providing a better foundation for objective moral values, having a biblical ground of ethics can adequately justify moral duties while the Kantian ground of ethics cannot. Since biblical ethics grounds objective morality in God, God’s commands are justifiably our moral duties because they are derived from His essentially holy nature.[7] Biblical ethics is able to sustain itself as a truly deontological ethical system. On the other hand, although Kant would deny it, significant voices have charged that Kant’s good will is unable to produce true moral duties without appealing to a more subjective consequentialist justification for them. The famous utilitarian ethicist John Stuart Mill, for example, claims that the CI does not avoid seemingly “immoral” actions on purely logical grounds; rather, he says Kant merely shows “that the consequences of their universal adoption would be such as no one would choose to incur.”[8] Mill has a valid point. Some seemingly immoral maxims do not lead to any obvious contradiction if universalized, though we can see that the consequences of universalizing it would be morally bad and may produce a negative result. For example, consider the maxim that “two consenting adults who are not already in a committed relationship should always have sex with each other if they desire to do so.” The universal acceptance of this maxim would not in any way lead to a logical contradiction that would undermine the very practice of the maxim, and it is not obvious that the Principle of Ends is being violated since both individuals are consenting and may well have a legitimate interest in the wellbeing of the other person; however, one can reasonably will that this maxim should not be universalized because of the consequences it would have. Such promiscuity is known to carry a heavy emotional weight for those who engage in it, and it also raises the likelihood of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Such behavior also makes it more difficult to form meaningful committed relationships, which one can reasonably argue have significant value. In fact, there are actually “Kantian consequentialists,” such as R. M. Hare[9] and David Cummiskey. Cummiskey argues that Kant’s ethical system “is consistent with and supports a consequentialist normative principle” even though Kant sought a fully deontological ethic.[10] If that is the case, then it is hard to see how Kant’s good will allows for objective moral duties; however, because God Himself is the necessary “Good” and His nature produces moral truth that is essential and binding upon us, moral duties transcend humans, and their existence does not depend upon our own assessment of what actions will probably produce “good” consequences. It is not clear that Kant’s CI is able to account for the full range of objective duties that are binding on us and that it can do this without recourse to subjective human considerations of consequences.

Moreover, the authority and bindingness of moral duties seems to be much stronger and more plausible if the source of these duties is a person rather than something impersonal, such as “reason.” Merely “acting and thinking rationally does not constitute a full explanation of moral belief and practice. Moral obligation carries extra clout and punch, which needs accounting for.”[11] When we fall short of our moral duties, we sense that we are guilty in a sense that goes beyond simply violating a principle of reason. Locating the source of moral authority in an essentially holy personal God better explains the objective guilt that seems to accompany violating one’s moral duty. In view of all these considerations, the biblical ethical principle that the standard and basis of all goodness is found in God is quite plausible, and this fact is highlighted by the apparent problems that Kant’s system has in establishing the good will as the one intrinsic good that grounds objective morality.

Moving to the second principle of biblical ethics, Kant’s insight in agreeing with the biblical principle that moral worth depends on our motives as well as our actions has been noted; however, Kant’s view of moral worth proves to be too narrow when compared to the biblical assessment of moral worth. As Joseph Kotva points out, Kantian ethics and all ethical theories that are based strictly upon “rules or duty” are at a disadvantage in accounting for the biblical recognition that the moral life is more than rules. Kant fails to see that life is a “race” that requires ongoing character development. While Scripture goes beyond virtue ethics, it captures its insights. We are constantly to “run with perseverance the race marked out for us” as we model ourselves after Jesus (Heb 12:1-2). Paul emphasizes the need to develop such virtues as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal 5:22-23), and he exhorts others to grow in character by following his example as he follows Christ (1 Cor 11:1). While Christian ethics certainly has a strong deontological component, Kotva rightly points out the biblical emphasis on developing virtues and constantly struggling for moral growth in order to become a person of greater character.[12]

The key shortfall of Kant’s view of moral worth is that he does not credit moral worth to a person who grows in character such that she no longer does an action out of rational duty but out of modified and improved inclination. We have seen that Kant is clear that there can be no moral worth involved when an agent is “so sympathetically constituted” that she performs kind acts out of the pure joy of doing them rather than a sense of duty.[13] While biblical ethics would applaud someone of such character who enjoys doing virtuous things, Kant does not recognize such a person as morally praiseworthy. He thus fails to capture the value of moral growth and the fact that one should strive both to “will and act” according to what is good (Phil 2:13). While feeling joy from doing what is good should not be our sole moral motivation, “normal healthy human considerations of self-interest are a perfectly legitimate part of moral motivation.”[14]

Therefore, although Kant is certainly right that duties such as the command to love others should be done regardless of inclination, loving others is something that we ought to work towards wanting to do so that the duty does not have to be against inclination. Finding joy in doing what is good is a mark of moral development and personal character, and the Bible more completely captures this. Such character is exemplified in Jesus, who, though He dreaded it, even found joy in sacrificing Himself on the cross for others (Heb 12:2).

Finally, Kant’s ethic falls short of the third biblical ethical principle in terms of justifying the idea that humans possess value. We have seen that Kant attempts to ground the intrinsic value of humanity in our rationality. Kant argues that pure reason forces us to the conclusion that humans must have value because nothing can be valued without rational beings to do the valuing. In contrast, biblical ethics holds that humans have value in virtue of being made in the “image of God” (Gen. 1:26-27). Human value is based on “the relationship for which we were created” rather than because of any “distinguishing characteristic” that is found in human capabilities.[15] This is attractive; for if human value is rooted in a capacity like reason or rationality, then how can the value of babies or the brain damaged be upheld?[16] The reason that the biblical justification for the value of humans is superior to Kant’s follows from the earlier point that God is a far more credible “stopping point” for objective morality than the good will.

If God truly is the ultimate “Good,” then perhaps human rationality is an instrumental good rather than an intrinsic good. Rather than agreeing with Kant that the “rational nature” of humans is itself sufficient for regarding humans as “ends in themselves,”[17] it may be that rationality functions as an instrumental good in so far as it allows us to have a relationship with the one true source of ultimate value—God Himself. If that is the case, then Kant is correct in valuing rationality but wrong in thinking that it has intrinsic value.

Beyond the automatic implications that locating objective morality in God has for human value, careful consideration of the question of human value by itself reveals that humans, if they are to justify having truly objective value, must justify their value by appealing to something outside of themselves. If humans consider themselves intrinsically valuable merely because they value themselves, then how can David Hume’s is-ought problem be avoided? Just because it is the case that humans tend to ascribe value to their own lives and the lives of other people does not mean that we necessarily ought to do so.

Finally, there is a sort of argument from contingency that points to God as the proper justification for human value and dignity. Kant and many others have claimed that we are the sort of beings who have intrinsic value.[18] But even if Kant were right that our rationality provides a basis for intrinsic human value, this would not negate the fact that God is necessary for us to have value because “relationality and intrinsicality are neither at odds nor mutually exclusive.”[19] If there is no possible world in which beings like us could exist apart from God, then there is no reason in principle why our value could not come from both our relationship to God as well the intrinsic qualities God has given us. Paul Copan argues that morality and value are “necessarily connected” with personhood. Since an essential attribute of God is that He exists necessarily and is the ontological ground of all other persons, morality and value would be impossible without God.[20] Using this logic, it is plausible that the source of intrinsic value can only be found in a necessarily existing person. Thus, in response to Kant’s view that the mere possession of rationality endows all rational creatures with intrinsic value, one must ask on what basis humans persons exist to have rationality. God, if He does exist as Kant himself believed, is the only reason that there is rationality. Even if it were true, as Kant claims, that rationality brings about value, God is the source of rationality. Ultimately, in view of these considerations, the biblical justification for human value appears more plausible and legitimate than Kant’s justification.

CONCLUSION

The three biblical principles of ethics proposed in this paper appear to be eminently plausible when held up to philosophical scrutiny. Because Kant, without grounding morality in God, sought to achieve many of the same goals that these biblical principles accomplish, Kantian ethics serves as an instructive litmus test of the plausibility of biblical ethics. Morality must be objective and universal if it is to avoid the total collapse that relativism ensures. Kant is undoubtedly correct in recognizing this. Furthermore, we have seen that objective morality—to be truly objective—must have a plausible absolute standard of intrinsic value and goodness that grounds it. Biblical ethics provides a philosophically justifiable basis for accomplishing this by identifying God as that source. In contrast, Kant is unable to legitimize the “good will” as being “good without qualification” and able to produce moral principles and binding duties that are defensibly objective and have an ontological basis that is fully independent of humanity. Biblical ethics also legitimizes the attractive conviction that humans really do have intrinsic value. Kant is right to recognize the truth that humans are “objects of respect” and should be “treated as ends,” but he is unable to objectively ground this apparent truth in a justifiable source. God Himself is the ultimate standard of goodness and value, and it is only by way of our relationship with God that we, as creatures made in God’s image, can have intimate connection to the ultimate source of value and can ourselves be endowed with objective value.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources Cited:

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

Copan, Paul.  “A Moral Argument.”  In To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview.  Edited by Francis Beckwith, William Lane Craig, and James Porter Moreland.  Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004.

Craig, William Lane.  Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics.  3rd ed.  Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008.

Cummiskey, David.  Kantian Consequentialism.  New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Driver, Julia.  Ethics: The Fundamentals.  Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

Gert, Bernard.  Morality: Its Nature and Justification.  New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Grenz, Stanley.  The Moral Quest.  Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998.

Hare, John E.  The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Kant, Immanuel.  Critique of Pure Reason.  In Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: In Commemoration of the Centenary of its First Publication.  2nd ed.  Translated by F. Max Müller.  London: Macmillan, 1907.

--------.  Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.  In Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What is Enlightenment?  Translated by Lewis White Beck.  Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959.

--------.  “What is Enlightenment?”  In Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What is Enlightenment?  Translated by Lewis White Beck.  Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959.

Kotva, Joseph J.  The Christian Case for Virtue Ethics.  Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996.

Lewis, C. S.  Mere Christianity.  San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 2001.

Mill, John Stuart.  Utilitarianism.  Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1906.

Moreland, J. P., and William Lane Craig.  Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2003.

Plato.  “Euthyphro.”  In The Trial and Death of Socrates.  3rd ed.  Translated by George Maximilian Anthony Grube and John M. Cooper.  Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000.

--------.  Plato’s Republic.  Translated by George Maximilian Anthony Grube and C. D. C. Reeve.  Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992.

Pojman, Louis.  Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong.  6th ed.  Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2009.

Porter, Burton Frederick.  The Good Life: Alternatives in Ethics.  3rd ed.  Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001.

Smith, R. Scott.  In Search of Moral Knowledge: Overcoming the Fact-Value Dichotomy.  Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014.

Tiffany, Evan.  “How Kantian Must Kantian Constructivists Be?”  Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 49, no. 6 (December 2006): 524-546.

Wielenberg, Erik.  Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Additional Sources:

Craig, William Lane.  “The Indispensability of Theological Meta-ethical Foundations for Morality.”  Foundations 5 (1997): 9-12.  http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5175 (accessed February 12, 2016).

Kant, Immanuel.  “Critique of Practical Reason.”  In Great Books of the Western World.  Vol. 42.  Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott.  Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952.

McElreath, Scott.  “The Inadequacy of Kant’s View of Moral Worth.”  Philosophical Writings, 19-20 (Spring/Summer 2002): 23-42.

Ritchie, Angus.  From Morality to Metaphysics: The Theistic Implications of Our Ethical Commitments.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Notes:

1. Plato, “Euthyphro,” in The Trial and Death of Socrates, 3rd ed., trans. George Maximilian Anthony Grube and John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000), 11.

1. J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2003), 491.

1. Baggett and Walls, God and Cosmos, 286.

1. Pojman, Discovering Right and Wrong, 127.

1. Bernard Gert, Morality: Its Nature and Justification (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 306.

1. Baggett and Walls, God and Cosmos, 167.

1. William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008), 182.

1. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1906), 5.

2. John E. Hare, The Moral Gap, 18-19. Hare notes that R. M. Hare is a Kantian who believes he is consistent with Kant in applying act-utilitarianism to Kant’s CI to determine whether an act should be universalized.

1. David Cummiskey, Kantian Consequentialism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), 9.

1. Baggett and Walls, God and Cosmos, 176. This quote is in the context of showing a limitation of Erik Wielenberg’s secular approach to ethics, but this particular criticism applies to Kantian ethics as well.

2. Joseph J. Kotva, The Christian Case for Virtue Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996), 156.

1. Kant, Foundations, 14. Kant believed happiness must result from moral living for us to press on in the moral life, but our motivation to be moral must be duty and not happiness. See Hare, The Moral Gap, 76-78.

1. Baggett and Walls, God and Cosmos, 266.

1. Stanley Grenz, The Moral Quest (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 217.

1. Baggett and Walls, God and Cosmos, 117.

1. Kant, Foundations, 46.

1. Erik Wielenberg, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 83-84. Wielenberg, a secular moral realist, contends that rooting human value in God devalues the intrinsic human value that common sense tells us we have.

1. Baggett and Walls, God and Cosmos, 286.

1. Paul Copan, “A Moral Argument,” in To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview, ed. Francis Beckwith, William Lane Craig, and James Porter Moreland (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 113.

God’s Generous ‘More'

 I’d like to present this week another theme associated with the word and the concept of “more” in Scripture: the way God regards people and the lives they live.  This theme comes through especially strong in the words of Jesus in the Gospels (especially the Sermon on the Mount), which often show God’s use of comparatives and superlatives in what are to human thinking counterintuitive or even paradoxical ways. Early in His ministry, Jesus challenged ordinary human opinions about the value of material comforts.

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?  (Matt. 6:25, ESV, emphasis mine, here and in all other quotations)

Jesus poses these as rhetorical questions, inviting agreement, but they challenge the anxiety manifested by most humans in seeking to feed and clothe themselves.  Fallen people look not to have “more” with the peace of mind that Jesus points to, but strive for the “more” of accumulating goods so that they can feel secure by their own efforts.  Jesus seems to be saying that until we accept the sufficiency of what God gives us apart from our merits, our material resources will be a worrisome snare to us, rather than a blessing that brings contentment.

Jesus goes on to argue that if God feeds the birds of the air and clothes the flowers of the field with complete sufficiency and even beauty, “Will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?” (Matt. 6:30).  He concludes this instruction by admonishing His hearers to “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (v. 33).  In our human pursuit of enough, we feel it necessary to add ceaselessly to what we already have; but in God’s economy, only those who seek first the things of His kingdom can experience the security of having all we need added to us through God’s generosity.

Jesus takes this line of teaching a step further later in the Sermon on the Mount:

9  Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?  10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?  11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!  (Matt 7:9-11)

If earthly, flawed fathers can be counted on, normally, to respond to the requests of their children with true concern for their welfare, cannot God be counted on, in all His wisdom and power and love, to respond to our requests with what is truly good for us?  Once again, our experiencing the blessing of God’s sufficiency depends on our perceiving and trusting the goodness of His gifts to us.  Although it is not a part of Jesus’ point here, a corollary of this teaching is that just as a human parent will sometimes give his child what he or she really needs, rather than what the child has asked for, so our submission to God in offering our requests to Him includes our acceptance that what He chooses to give us is appropriate to our need, whether or not we understand it to be so at the time.

There is much else that can be said about Jesus’ use of “more,” but I want to conclude this session with a reference to His parable of the workers in the vineyard, for it illustrates perfectly the difference between the human understanding of “more” and God’s.  You will remember the story in Matt. 20 about a landlord who recruited workers for his vineyard several times at different hours of the day, from early morning to the last hour before sunset.  He contracted with the first group to pay them what was the going rate for a day’s work, a denarius.  With subsequent groups he merely promised them “whatever is right” (Matt. 20:4).  So when the end of the day came, the foreman was instructed to pay first the workers who had been hired last, and each one received a denarius.  When down the line the same amount was given to every other worker, quite naturally,

when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received a denarius.  11 And on receiving it they grumbled at the master of the house, 12 saying, 'These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.'  13 But he replied to one of them, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius?  14 Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you.  15 Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?”  16 So the last will be first, and the first last.  (Matt. 20:10-16)

The contrast here is of course between what the workers believe they deserve, based on their comparative efforts and merits, and the leveling effects of the vineyard owner’s indiscriminate generosity.  As an allegorical equivalent to God, the vineyard owner is showing the quality of generous grace, which takes no account of what people deserve.  Even on the human level, the vineyard owner tells the disgruntled workers that he has fulfilled his promise to them and has paid them what was agreed on, which they evidently had no problem with at the time he took them on. “I am doing you no wrong,” he continues; “Do you begrudge my generosity?”  And then, Jesus makes the amazing counterintuitive application: “The last will be first, and the first last.

Jesus’ central point is that the human connection of reward with work and merit is set aside by God’s grace.  Human effort cannot provide the “more” that we truly need, but our loving heavenly Father knows how to give us good things beyond what we deserve.  So it behooves us to cease our worry and rejoice in His generosity!

Image:By Andrey Mironov 777 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24843092

Summary of John Hare’s God’s Command: Chapter 1, Introduction

This new book by Yale philosopher John Hare defends the thesis that what makes something morally obligatory is that God commands it, and what makes something morally wrong is that God commands us not to do it. (Hare writes in a footnote that, strictly speaking, there is an exception to this principle, namely God does not make it obligatory, by commanding it, to obey God’s command, but this is because the principle that God is to be loved, and  so to be obeyed, is “known from its terms.” He takes this issue up again later.) The Abrahamic faiths have made the connection between religion and the foundations of morality through the idea of God’s command. They have had to integrate two kinds of experience: The first is that God tells us to do something, or not to do something, and the second is that we have to work out for ourselves what to do and what not to do. None of these faiths have been able to dispense with either claim.

The difficulty has come in reconciling them. The concern of this book is that we remember to love God’s law and God’s command. Christians, in particular, must recall that the law and the command are the groundwork for the rest of the narrative of redemption. Psalm 119 is an extended expression of the gratitude of a people who would otherwise, without heeding God’s revelation, go astray like lost sheep. The relationship between this revelation of the law and command and our human nature is not that we should deduce how we ought to live from how we are by nature inclined to act, for our natural inclinations are a thorough mixture of what we should follow and what we should not. But God’s command to us fits our nature very well in the sense that it guides us in discerning which of these inclinations found in our nature we should embrace and which we should not. We also need discernment about what to take as a divine command. This book will tackle such issues by looking first not at abstract principles independent of religion, but at the narratives internal to the three Abrahamic faiths about what God and humans are like.

In Christian reflection on this, two main traditions have emerged: divine command theory and natural law theory. The book will, for the most part, conduct its argument in reference to the theories of particular philosophers and theologians rather than using those general terms like “divine command theory.” It’s not clear what we would be accountable to if we were discussing “divine command theory” unless by stipulation. There is no canonical text for the theory. It is better to be content with building up an understanding of how the various thinkers in these two traditions have held views partly similar to each other and partly different.

The first chapter proceeds by identifying three arguments by which we can establish various kinds of dependence relation of morality upon religion. They’re not original, and versions of them are pervasive in the literature. The first chapter takes versions directly or indirectly from Kant. The second chapter discusses what kind of thing a divine command is, and what its species are. The third chapter is about one typical disagreement between divine command theorists and natural law theorists. This is a disagreement about eudaemonism, the view that all our choices and actions are properly aimed at our own happiness. This is relevant for divine command theory because, if we make our moral choices for the sake of happiness, we do not need divine command as an answer to the question why we should choose what is morally right; we should do so in order to be happy. The fourth chapter is what Hare calls “deductivism,” the view that we can deduce our moral obligations from facts about human nature. This is relevant to divine command theory because, if we can deduce our moral obligations from facts about human nature, we do not need divine command to give us the content of the moral law. The fourth chapter has three sections: one on Scotus and his rejection of deductivism, a second on rejection of a form of deductivism in Robert Adams, and the third on the dispute about deductivism between R. M. Hare and Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse. In sum, the first half of the book is largely concerned with laying out a version of divine command theory and defending it against alternative theories.

The second half of the book relates the theory outlined in the first half to four new areas, the first three to theological accounts in the three main Abrahamic faiths. Chapter 5 is on Karl Barth, focusing on three themes: his particularism (his view that the paradigmatic divine commands are to particular people at particular times and places), his account of human freedom, and his discussion of how we know what divine command is being addressed to us. Chapter 6 is on DCT in Islam, Chapter 7 on DCT in Judaism, and Chapter 8 on evolutionary psychology, defending the claim that thinking of our moral obligations as produced by divine command helps us see how a moral conscience could develop in a way that is evolutionarily stable.

What ties this wide discussion together is the notion of God’s command. What emerges is that DCT and natural law are closer than one might expect. There remain differences between them, but the two are in many respects complementary. There is nothing incongruous in a divine command theorist saying that God’s commands fit human nature, or in a natural law theorist saying that God’s commanding is a necessary condition for a moral obligation. Nonetheless, the form of DCT defended in this book remains different in some key respects from the most familiar forms of natural law theory in the literature.

The first topic, then, is three arguments by which we can establish that morality depends on religion. Hare calls them the argument from providence, the argument from grace, and the argument from justification. The first two come directly from Kant, and the third only indirectly from Kant, but Hare’s argument is independent of him. Kant is not a major topic in remaining chapters, but his arguments are often good ones and he remains a key figure in moral philosophy.

A Critical Review of Is Goodness without God Good Enough? Chapter 2

Summary by Robert Sloan Lee

 Is Goodness without God Good Enough?

Chapter Two: C. Stephen Layman, “A Moral Argument for the Existence of God”

In this chapter, Layman unfortunately ignores most of the debate between William Lane Craig and Paul Kurtz, but he does present an interesting argument for the existence of God (or an afterlife in which virtue is rewarded) based on the idea that there are necessary moral truths which serve as reasons for our actions.  However, his moral argument addresses the issue from a different angle.  Specifically, while Layman argues that the existence of morality requires the existence of God or a certain sort of afterlife, he judiciously clarifies that he is not arguing that this is the case simply because morality is somehow dependent on God (even if that turns out to be the case).

Layman’s Overriding Reasons Argument

To motivate his argument, Layman makes two points concerning our reasons for doing or not doing something.

First, Layman observes that many moral philosophers hold that the strongest reasons that a person can have for doing something (whether or not such a person acts accordingly) are always the moral reasons for doing that thing – and that that these reasons are more important than the non-moral reasons that a person may have for not doing that thing (where, for instance, those non-moral reasons are reasons of inconvenience or self-interest).  In short, moral reasons always override non-moral reasons.  For example, suppose one had promised to meet one’s friends at a specific time and was late for no good reason.  One has a moral obligation to be honest as to why one is late, and this obligation overrides the embarrassment that one might feel in admitting to one’s friends that there was no good reason for being late, even if lying would allow one to avoid the embarrassment.

Second, Layman introduces the claim that if there is no God and no life after death, then it is not true thatthe strongest reasons that a person can have for doing something are always the moral reasons for doing that thing.  In other words, if it is in one’s self-interest to do something immoral (and there is little chance of getting caught or little chance of greatly harming others in doing it), then the non-moral reasons for doing something wrong can override the moral reasons for not doing it – at least if there is no God and no afterlife.  However, that would mean that it is false to say that we always have overriding reasons for doing the right thing rather than doing the wrong thing.  The insight and force of Layman’s argument resides in pitting concerns about self-interests against concerns about morality.  If God does not exist and if there is no afterlife, then we face the possibility that “humans have overriding reasons to behave immorally.”  This is a suggestion that “people who take morality seriously” find “profoundly disturbing,” because it means that there can be cases in which “doing one’s duty would (at least sometimes) be irrational in the sense that it would involve acting on” what we normally take to be “the weaker reasons” – and this is supposed to be seriously problematic even if those cases are relatively rare.

The example that he gives to illustrate his argument involve a Ms. Poore who has lived many years in restrictive (but not life-threatening or health-threatening) poverty.  She has an opportunity to steal a large sum of money (without getting caught) that would permanently deliver her from poverty – and she knows that the persons from whom the money is stolen are wealthy enough that they will not be greatly harmed by the theft.  Further, if she does not steal the money she has reason to believe that she will remain in poverty for the rest of her life.  Layman says that stealing might not be wrong in every case, but if there is neither a God nor an afterlife, then Ms. Poore has stronger reasons for stealing the money than she does for doing the right (or moral) thing – and then it follows that moral reasons are not always overriding reasons that trump reasons of self-interest.

Further Considerations

Layman says that it is hard to see how we know that it is true that the strongest reasons that a person can have for doing something (whether or not such a person acts accordingly) are always the moral reasons for doing that thing – he calls this the “overriding reasons thesis” or ORT.  However, he indicates that it is at least as reasonable to believe this claim as it is to believe other claims that we commonly accept (though we do not seem to know how it is that these others are true) – specifically:

(a)  The future will be like the past.

(b)  It is rational to trust one’s sense experience unless one has special circumstances showing them to be unreliable.

In the case of (a), any attempt to justify (a) by appealing to past experience to certify what our future experience will be like the past will simply assume the truth of (a) rather than proving it.  Again, with (b), any appeal to sensory experience to certify that (b) is true will just end up assuming the truth of (b) rather than demonstrating the truth of (b).  Most philosophers simply accept the truth of (a) and (b), and Layman thinks that something similar can be said about the principle of overriding reasons (or ORT).

To state Layman’s argument precisely, we get the following:

1. If God does not exist and there is no afterlife in which virtue is rewarded, then it will not always be true that the strongest reasons that a person can have for doing something are the moral reasons for doing that thing.

2. It is always true that the strongest reasons that a person can have for doing something are the moral reasons for doing that thing. (ORT)

3. Therefore, either God does exist or there is an afterlife in which virtue is rewarded – or both. (from 1 and 2 by modus tollens and DeMorgan’s Law)

An Objection to Layman’s Argument

Layman then goes on to consider some objections to his argument and how he would reply to those objections.  One objection (and perhaps the most interesting objection) is that the argument does not establish that morality is dependent on God.  In this respect, it would seem that Layman’s conclusion may be more in line with Kurtz’s views than Craig’s (despite the former being an atheist and the latter being a theist).  Layman responds to this objection by agreeing that morality may not be dependent on God.  He writes:

I’ve not suggested that God by fiat (or otherwise) lends moral reasons their force.  Let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that moral reasons have whatever force they have independent of God.  Nevertheless, what a good God can do is guarantee that moral reasons (requirements) are never trumped by other sorts of reasons.  Unfortunately, moral reasons can be trumped assuming naturalism is true.  [emphasis mine]

However, since Layman thinks that moral reasons can never be trumped by non-moral reasons, he believes that naturalism is false, and this leads to his conclusion that either God exists (in such a way as to connect self-interest and morality) or that there is some other sort of afterlife in which virtue is always rewarded.  So, whether or not morality can be grounded in God’s commands or God’s nature, the fact that there are necessary moral truths should (according to Layman) have certain consequences for what we believe about the existence of God or the afterlife.

Parting Thoughts

One aspect of moral truths that sometimes goes unmentioned is that such truths are necessary (if true at all), and one can appreciate that Layman does not overlook this intriguing feature of moral truths.  Given this, explanations of morality that appeal solely to contingent features of the world – features that could have been otherwise (such as our evolutionary history, our environment and education, or our genetic predispositions) – simply do not appear adequate to the task.  Further, if these necessary moral truths can exist independently of God (a possibility which Layman concedes – at least for the sake of argument), this would appear to run counter to Craig’s position that an objective morality must be dependent on God.  One hopes that Craig would address this issue in his response to these essays (as it constitutes a particularly interesting point on the relationship between the ontology of theism and the ontology of ethics).  So, while Layman does not analyze the debate between Craig and Kurtz, some of the issues he raises are pertinent to it, and his own variant of the moral argument is an intriguing one.

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

Finite and Infinite Goods

A voluntary decision to commit yourself to a proposition does not, by itself, amount to faith. Even the decision plus a bunch of good reasons for your decision still are not sufficient for a sincere belief, let alone a conviction. Faith as Adams conceives it moves in a space bounded on the one side by subjective certainty (which Calvin ascribed to faith, but Adams does not) and on the other side by the subjectively incredible. Within that space it is often hard to tell, subjectively, how far one’s faith is supported by one’s sense of what is more plausible, and how far by willpower. But both, Adams thinks, are normally involved.

It’s also not easy to specify what more is required beyond willpower. As a first approximation we might try to identify the requisite feeling as at least a minimal degree of confidence in the view that you hold. This is not adequate as it stands, however. If you are depressed, you may doubt that your life is worth living. Yet in precisely this sort of case it is very likely both possible and right for you to cling to faith that your life is worth living.

Is it sheer willpower if you do cling to it? Surely not. Willpower can’t give you a belief in a hypothesis that is not “live” for you, as William James put it. Probably no amount of willpower could give you the belief that 2+2=5, or even that you will never die. Nor could sheer willpower give you the belief that the number of bald eagles that laid eggs in 1993 was even rather than odd. If you succeed, against emotional appearances, in clinging to the faith that your life is worth living, the clinging must feel different from trying to believe one of those patently false or humanly undecidable propositions. Perhaps you feel some level of trust in some reasons for clinging to faith, or perhaps giving up faith “feels wrong” for you.

But “confidence” is hardly the right word here. It suggests a state of feeling that is much less troubled than faith has often to endure. In some ways Adams prefers the word “courage,” provided he can make clear that he does not mean courage as a mainly voluntary virtue. He means courage in a sense in which it is felt more than chosen, the sense in which it might be a direct product of being “encouraged.” In Greek it would be tharsos rather than andreia; in German it would be Mut rather than Tapferkeit. The courage of which Adams would speak is not sheer willpower or voluntary determination. We may hope that such emotions are responsive to reality. They must be, if we are to have much chance of living a life both good and grounded in reality. In a sense indicated by Adams’ argument (not to mention other senses), “the just shall live by faith.”

Find the other chapter summaries here.

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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.