Summary of Chapter 4 of God and Cosmos: “Moral Value,” Part I

In chapter 4, Baggett and Walls focus specifically on intrinsic human value. Historically, religious perspectives played a role in forming convictions about human rights. On the Judeo-Christian view, human beings are not only creatures of God, but are made in the image of God. Nicholas Wolterstorff claims that there is no plausible alternative to this religious framework to ground natural human rights. For example, some ground human rights in capacities like the power of reason, but this ends up excluding infants and those with mental disabilities who are often thought of as also having the same rights. Baggett and Walls do not want to say that respect-for-persons is supportable only on religious grounds. They make a more modest claim that respect-for-persons is best explained by theism compared to competing theories.

First they consider egoism. Kai Nielsen's proposal is that a respect-for-persons may be derivable from egoism (the view that one ought to act in one's own self-interest). Based on this, he thinks that one ought to treat others well in order to be treated well himself. The first problem is that this fails to account for the moral standing of others; it is just a strategy to be treated well. As Baggett and Walls put it, "What does my acting in my interest have to do with you possessing intrinsic worth?" A second problem is that this fails to account for cases where not respecting others does not affect one's self-interests. For example, one may be powerful and need not fear repercussions for treating people poorly. This results in having no reason for respecting others since it does not affect one's self-interests. Hence egoism by itself cannot account for intrinsic human value.

Next, they consider utilitarianism/consequentialism. On this view, one ought to maximize utility. For example, some utilitarians say that one ought to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Jeremy Bentham, a proponent of utilitarianism, infamously said that the notion of intrinsic natural rights is nonsensical. Rights exist based on what is advantageous to society. Whether rights are protected or not is determined by social utility.

John Stuart Mill, another proponent of utilitarianism, likewise thinks that the sole reason for according rights to people is based on social utility. As Mark Linville notes, there is no necessary connection between an action's maximizing utility and its being fair or just. On utilitarianism, in a case where someone is raped, the wrongness of rape is not because their right is violated, but is because of the generally injurious consequences for the community. So utilitarianism fails to safeguard individual human dignity and worth.

Utilitarians offer many responses. One reply is that we tend to be unreliable calculators of consequences, so it is better to always safeguard individual rights than not to. Still, the problem persists that no individual's rights or dignity is beyond sacrificing if, by doing so, utility is maximized. A rule-utilitarian may say that one should follow the rules which maximizes utility. But still, this is far from saying that certain acts are categorically wrong. All that can be said regarding an act is that it is at most merely consequentially wrong. Angus Menuge has said that on utilitarianism, if a tyrant was more effective in brainwashing people or slaughtering those who disagreed, genocide would have been right. Hence utilitarianism has problems accounting for human value.

Next, Baggett and Walls consider Philippa Foot's virtue ethics that is based on a natural law theory. Foot's book called Natural Goodness is an account of virtues based on how human beings are normatively structured, how we typically behave when it comes to those teleological aspects of our human functioning. Her book has three distinct parts. First is her argument against non-cognitivism (the view that moral statements do not express propositions that can be true or false). Second is her defense of naturalistic moral objectivity. Last, she handles objections from utilitarians and from Nietzschian nihilists.

Baggett and Walls focus on the second section. Foot argues that we make judgments of goodness and defect of living things by reference to a teleological account of the life form based on its species. Her account covers evaluative judgments of the characteristics and operations of other living things. What an animal should do depends on the kind of animal it is. Likewise, what we (humans) should do depends on our being humans. This means that moral defect is really just a form of natural defect. Vice is a form of natural defect while virtue is a form of natural goodness, rooted in patterns of natural normativity. Based on the kind of species one is, some behaviors simply conduce better to one's flourishing than others.

Take for example the virtue of promise keeping. In giving a promise one makes use of a special kind of tool invented by humans for the better conduct of their lives, creating an obligation that contains in its nature a prescription that harmlessness in neglecting does not annul. Some accuse her account of being utilitarian. She however says that utilitarianism (and other forms of consequentialism) has its foundation in a proposition linking goodness of action to the goodness of state of affairs. Her theory of natural normativity has no such foundational proposition.

While Baggett and Walls agree with many aspects of Foot's work, such as moral cognitivism and moral realism, they have some significant reservations with her main account. The most significant is that her account does not answer whether human flourishing is of intrinsic value. While she affirms it, her account does not provide a foundation for it. First, Foot has to account for differences between pestilential creatures, animals, and human beings. If she wants to say that biologically adaptive patterns of behavior in cancer cells or tigers do not entail objective moral facts, then how does she go from natural normativity to objective morality in the case of human beings?

Second, there is a problem of smart free riders. Why should one keep their promise if no damage is done? Foot says that there is still a moral duty to keep it to cultivate the sort of character of being trustworthy. But her reply still cannot account for a really smart promise breaker who is able and willing to get over her aversion to breaking promises when doing so is unlikely to detract from optimal species-flourishing.

Third is the problem of a deflationary analysis. Foot's account is characterized as neo-Aristotelian, but Aristotle's worldview was far from naturalistic. While Aristotle placed great emphasize on being human, his view wasn't content with our being merely human.

Fourth is a transition problem. While she affirms good and noble human characteristics, she departs from a naturalistic, biologically grounded account of moral virtues. Furthermore, by limiting her resources to human flourishing, it seems unlikely she will have enough for the sort of thick account that virtue approaches to ethics tend to have as their distinctive strength.

Fifth, Baggett and Walls raise a normativity challenge. While they agree she is right, in one sense, to say that morality depends on our natures, this still leaves out an analysis of what that nature is exactly. Talk of telos (purpose) and human nature in a Godless world is difficult to sustain. Foot thinks that the designs of a Divine Mind are irrelevant to the natural-teleological descriptions of human beings. But if we have been created by God in His image, with his intentions in mind, then this is a relevant consideration.

Sixth is an epistemic challenge. Foot's work does not address the contemporary challenge (in regards to moral knowledge) posed by evolutionary moral psychology.

John Hare’s God’s Command, 4.3, Prescriptivism

The third and fourth sections of this chapter are about a debate between RMH’s views about the objectivity of moral judgment and the contrasting attempt by Philippa Foot in Natural Goodness and Rosalind Hursthouse in On Virtue Ethics to deduce conclusions about moral goodness by what Foot called a “natural-history story” from the characteristic form of life of the human species. Foot scholars divide up her career, like Plato’s, into three periods: an early Foot, a middle Foot, and a late Foot. Natural Goodness was late Foot. Hursthouse has added significant structure to Foot’s account. There are some ways that late Foot is more like RMH than early or middle Foot. But there still differences, and one of them is that Foot affirmed and RMH denied the deducibility of conclusions about moral goodness from facts about human nature. Hare will argue that we should accept some of the positions of each side in this dispute, but that form-of-life deductivism should be rejected.

One theme in this discussion of Foot will be that we need to disentangle her deductivism from her attack on what she calls “subjectivism.” Hare will argue we can be opposed to both subjectivism of various kinds and to deductivism. What is subjectivism? RMH didn’t like being dubbed either a subjectivist or non-cognitivist, though Foot called him this. The central error she was concerned with was the error of thinking that value is desire-based, rather than being (“objectively”) there whether it is desired or not. But there are at least three things this might mean, and they can be distinguished under three headings: “motivation,” “moral properties,” and “ideals.” RMH’s views can be helpfully separated under these headings.

4.3.1 Motivation

RMH held that when we make a moral or evaluative judgment we are expressing a pro-attitude toward, or an endorsement of, some prescription. The position Foot was attacking was what we might call “judgment internalism,” the view that motivation is internal to moral and evaluative judgment. Why did RMH care about this? He thought it was a true analysis of the logic or grammar of evaluative language. But something else needs emphasis. RMH, through his life, was concerned for the possibility of communication about moral matters between different cultures and different generations within the same culture. He thought that his account of the difference between the meaning of evaluative terms such as “good” and “wrong” and the criteria for the use of such terms in evaluative and moral judgment was important for the preservation of this possibility. He thought we were more likely to be capable of genuine dialogue over moral issues if we shared the meaning of these basic terms, and could then talk together about what criteria to employ for their use.

What did he think was the difference between meaning and criteria? He thought that it was given in the meaning of evaluative terms that, when we use them sincerely in an evaluative judgment, we commit ourselves to an imperative. If the judgment is a moral judgment about action, the imperative is a command to act a certain way. For RMH, the criteria for an evaluative judgment were the descriptive facts about the world that we use in our evaluations. An endorsement of the goodness of something is called “a decision of principle.” The principle here is that, say, knives are good when they are sharp, and my decision is to endorse this principle in commending the knife.

Here is one place the early Foot and RMH disagreed. She held that we can’t simply decide what criteria to apply; some are internal to the moral point of view. RMH didn’t think a claim that it’s wrong to run around a tree right-handed was unintelligible (the way Foot did), but of course he did think it wrong. He agreed to this point: we have the pro-attitudes that we have, and therefore call the things good which we do call good, because of their relevance to certain ends which are sometimes called “fundamental human needs.” This passage is remarkable because of its similarity to many things in late Foot. The difference is just that these considerations about the human form of life and its evolutionary history were located by RMH as constraints on criteria, whereas Foot did not admit the meaning/criteria distinction.

There is a second, more significant, place that RMH and Foot disagreed, and this gives one reason for Foot’s rejection of judgment internalism. Foot referred to the category of shamelessness. She thought it showed that a person may make a full-fledged moral judgment without endorsing the norms he is referring to in the judgment. RMH’s response to this was that shamelessness is most probably a rejection of conventional morality, thinking there’s something nonstandard or defective about such a case.

We could put this in terms of a natural-history story. The human form of life needs not only norms—for example, norms of justice—to hold us together, but also ways to express to each other that we are committed to such norms. We need a form of expression that conveys, across a huge range of evaluations, “if I were you, I would.” We need this function because we can’t carry out our characteristic human projects without it. Being social animals is a feature of our thought life as much as our action. Moral language is plausibly construed as having this social function. But as with all functions, misuse or defective use is possible. It’s like not being able to use a chisel except as a screwdriver.

This point about the function of evaluative language is what is essentially right about judgment internalism. It’s true that each side in the dispute can explain the same phenomena. For Foot, shamelessness is making a full-fledged moral judgment but one that can’t be lived by; for RMH, it is not making a full-fledged, but rather a defective moral judgment. But the internalist account preserves one central contribution that evaluative language makes to our form of life. The key is the implication of this disagreement for deductivism. RMH thought that this internalism about judgment meant that no deduction of evaluative judgment from descriptive facts was legitimate. But surprisingly, even if they were to agree that a full-fledged evaluative judgment is an expression of some state of desire or emotion or will, they could still disagree about whether the state of the world being commended in such a judgment is a state of the world with natural properties and evaluative properties that have some kind of mutually implicative relation.

God and Cosmos Chapter 3: The Problem of Evil, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility

In this chapter, Baggett and Walls talk about the problem of evil. This is not the problem of evil as often heard in philosophy of religion (Why is there evil if a good and all-powerful God exists?). Instead, they refer to Susan Neiman who traced the problem of evil in modern thought. The problem of evil is that the world is not as it should be. There is a gap between how the world is, and how the world ought to be. Questions arise, for example, what reason do we have to think that some event ought not to happen? The answer is clear in Christian theology of course, that evil is at odds with God and His purposes. It is a problem that God Himself is working to overcome with His plan of salvation and redemption that will ultimately be fully accomplished.

Baggett and Walls review three influential modern thinkers. The first thinker is David Hume. Philo (a character in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion who is said to represent Hume) thinks that the designer of our world is neither good nor bad. This is because if the designer was good, he would will the happiness of his creatures. However, it is apparent that our world is not designed to achieve this end. Hume's argument for God's moral indifference dissolves the problem of evil. It explains why the natural world is indifferent to human happiness. Baggett and Walls note here that it is odd that an amoral God would give human beings the ability to make moral judgments.

The second thinker is Immanuel Kant. Kant thinks that the nature of the highest good includes both virtue and happiness. He thinks that happiness and virtue should be tightly connected. The problem then is that the natural order is not arranged such that happiness and virtue correspond. The world for him is no less hostile to morality than it is to human happiness.

The third thinker is Friedrich Nietzsche. His problem was that Christian morality was hostile to happiness, restraining us from expressing our instincts. For him, the real problem of evil is that we thought it was a problem. Without God and objective morality in his view, he thinks that we have no reason to think that the world should be good in the Christian sense of supporting either our happiness or moral virtue. Sigmund Freud seems to agree with Nietzsche's view. Freud argued that religious belief is an illusion fostered by childish needs for security in a frightening world. Instead, he thinks that evil is part of life to be expected and coped with. There is no reason to think that the world ought to promote human happiness. Hence Nietzsche dissolves the problem of evil.

Neiman thinks that the problem of evil gives us the choice to either give up making moral judgments, or to come to terms with the demoralizing reality that the gap between what is and what ought to be will never be closed. Neiman herself takes the latter option and argues that recognizing evil as a problem is essential to our humanity. Instead of denying the problem of evil, we should accept that there is a conflict that will never be resolved. Baggett and Walls agree with Neiman that evil is a problem to humanity, but they want to argue that there are options other than resigning oneself to accept a conflict that will never be resolved. On the Christian story, there is another option, namely, that the gap will one day be resolved.

The main point being driven here is that God's nature as the best explanation of moral good, and the fact that He created us in his image, constitute an excellent explanation both of why we cannot avoid making moral judgments about the world and of why we cannot escape seeing evil as a problem. We will constantly see a gap between the way the world is and the way it ought to be, as long as we live in a fallen world that is "groaning for redemption." Naturalism, on the other hand, has no reason to believe that there is a problem of evil. Consider Richard Dawkins who thinks that the ultimate reality is morally indifferent (similar to Nietzsche and Hume). Evil and suffering is not surprising. There is no gap between the way the world is and the way it ought to be.

Part 2

Having discussed the problem of evil, Baggett and Walls turn to discuss freedom and responsibility, by examining an exchange between three naturalist philosophers. This exchange started after Daniel Dennett reviewed Bruce Waller's Against Moral Responsibility. Most philosophers are compatibilists, who think that determinism (the view that every event and state of affairs is completely determined by antecedent states of affairs and the laws that govern the physical world) is compatible with both human freedom (defined as doing what one wants to do) and at least some measure of moral responsibility. Waller however argues that while determinism and naturalism are compatible with freedom, they are not compatible with moral responsibility. Waller defines moral responsibility in a strong sense that holds praise/blame and reward/punishment as justified because moral agents deserve so. It is intrinsically good for offenders to suffer. This is known as the retributivist view of moral dessert that rejects consequences as relevant for punishment or blame. Contra Waller, Dennett thinks that moral responsibility should not be understood in these terms. He adopts a consequentialist account of just desserts and punishments. Punishment is needed to keep civilization from disintegrating; it is a practical necessity. Dennett uses the example of promise making and making contracts. The threat of punishments deters one from breaking one's promises or contract. This threat is essential for the glue of civilization to hold.

Tom Clark, the organizer of the exchange, makes a few points. First, he says that Dennett should give up the language of "just desserts" which implies the retributivist view. Second, the traditional account of moral responsibility is strongly shaped by a long history of believing in libertarian freedom (a stronger view of freedom than determinism is generally thought to allow). Hence, many think that dropping the retributivist view of just desserts alters the concept of moral responsibility. Third, he thinks naturalists should focus on debunking libertarian freedom to undermine the appeal to such freedom to justify punishment. Fourth, compatibilists must change how they think of humankind. They have to be honest that in their view, no one has the unconditional ability to do otherwise. He accuses Dennett of suppressing his commitment to determinism in attempting to make moral sense of punishment, just desserts, and deterrence. Dennett responds by highlighting the practical necessity of punishment to protect society from criminals. We should use force to quarantine muggers, enroll them in rehabilitation programs, and warn society to avoid them. Dennett says that if Waller and Clark agree to this but say we should not blame the muggers, then they are simply engaging in a rhetorical dodge. Waller continues to press the point that the system of moral responsibility is unfair, even if he has no better alternative system to offer.

To give further insight to the discussion, consider Dennett's discussion of Bernie Madoff. Madoff is infamous for costing people millions of dollars lost in his fraudulent financial schemes. Surely in such a case, punishment is necessary. Dennett writes, "If somebody's unavoidable mistake led to similar financial loss, we wouldn't do that, would we? It's because we deem Madoff guilty that we consider that we have the right to rescind his rights (under the moral responsibility game) and do all these things to him that he doesn't want us to do, and which we couldn't justifiably do if he weren't guilty. That's punishment. Not retributive punishment, but punishment and blame, all the same." From this example, it is easy to see why Waller and Clark criticized Dennett for helping himself to the traditional view of moral responsibility and retributivist punishment. Dennett says that it is not fair to blame someone for something over which they had no control. But in Madoff's case, Madoff was determined to defraud each of his clients by casual factors prior to him, over which he had no control. There is no alternative possibility. Next, Dennett emphasizes that we are justified in punishing Madoff, because Madoff is found guilty. This seems to be the retributivist position that Madoff did something to deserve punishment.

Baggett and Walls think that this debate makes many points against naturalism. Both freedom and moral responsibility fit far more naturally in a theistic account of morality. The whole notion of promise keeping also better makes sense on libertarian terms than on compatibilist terms. Thomas Reid had observed that "when I plight my faith in any promise or contract, I must believe that I shall have power to perform what I promise. Without this persuasion, a promise would be a downright fraud." However, compatibilists believe that no one who fails to keep a promise had the ability to do otherwise (except in the counterfactual sense of being able to do otherwise if they’d wanted to). Whenever one makes a promise, it is possible that the natural order is arranged such that when the appointed time comes, one shall be determined to will not to keep one's promises. Hence this is at odds with making promises, since doing so assumes that we can both keep our promises or not, and it also assumes that we have control over our actions. The reality of conscious control over our actions make better sense on libertarian freedom than the view that our actions are determined by a causal chain that preceded our very existence, and over which we had no control. On compatibilism, the agent has no alternate possibilities, and the agent is not the ultimate originator or source of his actions, since there is a causal chain external and prior to them, that is sufficient to determine those exact outcomes.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 4, Section 4.2, “Consensus Deductivism”:

What about Adams’s claim that we can fix the reference of ‘good’ by the evaluations of most of the people most of the time? His analogy is water, which people refer to regularly; what constitutes water is something else, and on an imagined twin earth they do not have water at all, but something else, let’s assume, like XYZ. The structure of Adams’s account is that the meaning of ‘good’ does not give us the nature of ‘good’; what is given by the meaning is, instead, a role that the nature is to play. He limits the claim to the meaning of ‘good’ in certain contexts, those in which ‘goodness’ is naturally interpreted as meaning excellence.

Adams says that the role assigned by ordinary understanding to the good is that it is an object of pursuit. But here arises an objection: we don’t always pursue the good, and sometimes what we pursue is not good. Adams denies that this is a problem for his theory, because it’s not one of those theories that analyze the nature of the good as consisting in some fact about our desires. The role of our desires is only to help fix the signification of our value terminology to a property or object that has its own nature independent of our desires.

Hare asks whether the failure of our actual desires is a problem for Adams’s theory as well, even though Adams proposes that those desires only fix the reference of the good, rather than determining its nature. He is forced by his account to say that we can’t always or even usually be totally mistaken about goodness. Hare wishes to consider this claim. Surely it’s true that we can be and very often are deeply wrong about the good, but this is not quite the same as saying we are “usually totally mistaken.” But we are mistaken enough that we should be hesitant about our ability to fix the reference of ‘good’. Jesus overturns or “transvalues” (in Nietzsche’s term) our conception of the good, and Aristotle gives a more accurate picture of what we usually think of as “common sense.”

The chief contrast between Aristotle and Jesus has to do with what we might call “competitive goods.” A competitive good is one where, in order for one person to have it, another person has not to have it, or to have less of it. The chief good for Aristotle couldn’t be honor, because it would be to be honored by the best people. The chief good is activity in accordance with virtue. But being honored in this sense is a competitive good, and can be lost. Most of the time Aristotle seems to think the chief good for human beings usually requires wealth, power, and honor. To have the relevant virtue (like magnanimity) you have to be worthy of great honor and deem yourself worthy of it. What various passages indicate is that the chief good for a human being requires power over others. The claim is not simply that the competitive goods are good, but that they are necessary for a highly admirable life.

The Gospels portray Jesus as overturning this sort of view, and the rest of the NT follows suit. Aristotle says humility is the state in which persons are so low they should not even aspire to virtue; in the NT we are told in humility to consider others better than ourselves. Or consider the command to love your enemies. This overturning of the world’s values is a central Christian theme, and is abundantly discussed in the literature. There is an important and difficult question whether the difference of Christian virtue, as described in these texts, shows more continuity or discontinuity with pagan virtue. Can we know, by human reason, unaided by special revelation, what is the best human life? If we’re born under the evil maxim, we tend to prefer our happiness to our duty. It suffices for now to say that there is not enough truth in most people’s desires most of the time for those loves to fix the reference of the term ‘good’ and its related family.

This claim is not shown to be true just because Jesus disagreed with Aristotle. It’s possible general revelation is progressive, after all. It’s also true that the culture of large parts of the world has been shaped by the Abrahamic faiths. But there’s also been a return to Greek ethics in some. The central point is not about whether most people get most of their evaluations and preferences right most of the time. Even if they do, this is not the right way to fix the reference of ‘good’. As RMH pointed out years ago, this approach to fixing the reference by consensus is inherently relativistic. We end up saying that the reference of ‘good’ is fixed by whatever most people say it is. We ought to have a way of being able to say that most people most of the time are wrong, even if it is not the case that they are. If we take the consensus model, we lost such a way.

Adams is aware of a problem here, and wishes to maintain the “critical stance.” Thus he says the truth behind Moore’s Open Question argument is that for any natural empirical property or type of action that we or others may regard as good or bad, right or wrong, we are committed to leave it always open in principle to raise evaluative or normative questions by asking whether the property of action-type is really good or right, or to issue an evaluative or normative challenge by denying that it is really good or right. Hare, though, thinks this openness extends only to limited questions within what Adams takes to be the overall massively reliable field. Adams is not willing to concede that the framework as a whole might have been largely distorted.

So how can we be constrained in what we take to be a divine command by our conception of the good, if not by consensus or actual belief and desire? Those within each religious tradition in which there might be a divine command have to use the resources of that tradition about what is good. The Abrahamic faiths share a commitment to the distinction between general and special revelation. This is one of the relevant conditions: a divine command theorist can say that what we take to be a new divine command has to be screened through both the general and the special revelation about the good that has already been given.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 4, Section 4.1.3, “The Social Character of Obligation”:

Hare now asks if we, by bringing in human nature in this way, have abandoned the distinctive mark of divine command theory, and simply turned it into a species of natural law theory. The argument has not been that the moral law is natural law strictly speaking, but that the content of at least two of the Ten Commandments has been turned into presumptions against taking God to be commanding us to act in a certain way, and these presumptions are taken from what fits human nature. For Scotus, the first table is natural law strictly speaking (except for the “seventh day” prescription). The command to love the neighbor would also be natural law strictly speaking, since we are necessarily commanded to love God, and to love the love of God, and therefore to love the neighbor’s love of God. But Scotus believes in the possibility of reprobation, so there is a restriction needed: we are commanded to love the love of God in the neighbor “at least by anyone whose friendship [God] is pleased to have.” We can and should have a defeasible presumption that we and the neighbor are not among the reprobate, because the judgment is God’s and not ours. Moreover, since we are necessarily commanded to love God, and since human nature is specified in terms of this end, we can say that God necessarily commands what fits human nature. But Scotus does not think that any of the specific commands in the second table can be deduced from this. There are two different possible kinds of deduction from what fits us. There is a deduction of a presumption in two cases, but in no case is there a deduction of an absolute prohibition.

A second point is more important. The argument so far doesn’t imply the moral law or moral obligation is deducible from human nature even in the case of the prohibitions on killing the innocent or on lying. There can be a presumption against doing something and still not an obligation not to do it. Here we return to Adams and Darwall and their notion of the social character of obligation, which we can accept with one qualification. The social character is that we are obligated to someone, or by someone. [Murphy objects that, whereas tort law always has a tortfeasor and a victim, and so has a “bipolar” structure, this is not true of criminal law, which can have a “monadic” structure in which there may be no victims at all (God and Moral Law, 126). If this is right, we should not say that obligation as such is bipolar. But there is good reason, Hare thinks, explored by Darwall in The Second-Person Standpoint, ch. 5, to think that moral obligation is more like tort law in this respect.] The opposite of “obligatory” is “forbidden.” It is not at all an easy matter to delineate this social character, but the general point seems right. The qualification is that we should not derive the agent’s obligation from the goodness to the agent of the relation that would be damaged by violating the obligation. That would be another form of eudaemonism. But that aside, suppose we start with the way Adams puts the basic idea, that, where there is a violation of an obligation, one “may appropriately have an adverse reaction to it.” The question is: Who is it whose appropriate reaction is here in question? Human beings have limited information, and limited sympathies. Even if we did know the preferences of others, we would tend to prefer the preferences of some people to the preferences of others in a way not countenanced by the moral law.

We might ask, why should we assume that the person to whom we are accountable in an obligation is the same as the person who generated the obligation in the first place? There is a tradition of argument, in Kant, for example, and also in Suarez, that God is legislator, executive ruler, and judge, and that moral law assumes that it is the same person who carries out all three functions. This tradition lay behind the discussion of God’s authority in Ch. 2. In Kant’s terms, the author of the law (which we repeat in our own wills) has to have a holy will, the administration of the law has to be by the “supersensible author nature,” and the judge has to be able to see into our hearts; and there is one person, and it is the same person, who does these three things. We might ask: “Why could it not be three different persons?” After all, in human societies it can be an advantage to have these functions divided. Hare is content to make this modest claim: If there is only one God, that one God is the most appropriate person for these three roles.

If this argument works, or something like it works, we can say that moral obligation requires not just a presumption against doing something but an obligator, and that deducibility from human nature and non-divine facts alone therefore has to be denied. Now we can return at last to Murphy’s dilemma. The first horn proposed that, if God is free to command what God wants, the non-moral and non-divine facts are inert. But if, as Hare has argued, God is constrained though not determined by facts about our nature, these facts will not be inert. The second horn of the dilemma proposed that it is odd to say that we are obligated not by the maximal set of non-moral, non-divine facts (where these include facts about our nature), but God is so constrained. The response is that this is not odd at all. We and God are different. Both God and we are constrained by non-moral and non-divine facts, and neither God nor we are obligated by those facts. But we are obligated by God’s commands. God does not require an obligator at all, but is the obligator. Even in those cases of moral law (if there are any) in which God’s command is constrained by the non-moral, non-divine facts, we are obligated not by those facts but by God’s command.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 4, “Can We Deduce Morality from Human Nature?” Section 4.1.2: The Fittingness of the Law to our Nature

Recall Adams’ answer to the famous arbitrariness objection to DCT: God’s command is not arbitrary in the contemporary pejorative sense because it commands what is good, but it has discretion over which good things to require. To make this picture work we need an account of goodness. Chapter 1 suggested that a person who says a thing is good expresses that she is drawn or attracted by it and says that it deserves to draw or attract her in that way. But now we need an account of the criteria for this deserving. Adams proposes a single criterion for when “good” means “excellent”: a thing is good to the extent that it resembles God. But while this fits many kinds of excellent things, it does not fit all. In particular it does not fit the goodness of natural kinds. Take two different species of plant that are different; there is resemblance to God in life, but also in such differences, but the differences aren’t differences in likeness to God. There’s a different goodness in the way a particular plant within a species differs from another. This is what follows from Scotus’s picture that we get more perfection as we move from genus to species, and then yet more as we move from species to each individual member, to the haecceity. Resemblance to God does not seem well equipped to explain all this difference in the good.

Here are four plausible ways of thinking of the relation of this difference to God. First, God created it. This suggests not simply that God is the source, but that God delights in the variety; perhaps this is one of the reasons for the “very good” in Genesis 1. Second, these various beauties draw us to God. Chapter 1 claimed that what finally draws us and deserves to draw us is God and what draws us to God. This makes the account dynamic rather than static, and that is an improvement, because it connects better with the account of the meaning of “good,” which is based on the idea of being drawn. But the goodness of the variety does not reside only in its drawing us to God. It also does not reside only in its having been created by God, which would make the value too transparent to God and insufficiently intrinsic. The third way of thinking is metaphysically the most ambitious. Perhaps we learn about God from the creation in the same sort of way we learn about an artist from his or her work. It’s not that the features resemble him, but the work is, nonetheless, utterly characteristic. It manifests his aesthetic preferences and aesthetic personality, which is in a sense present in the work. Two different plant species might manifest God in slightly different ways. This is close to Adams, but different. Manifestation and resemblance are not the same because of this sense of God’s presence in the manifestation. A fourth picture might be that each kind of flower species, indeed each plant, is a part of the biotic whole, which God loves. This is different from the previous picture because it makes the value of the parts derive from the value of the whole. We can add that God intends a whole new heaven and earth, not just new humans as co-lovers, but a new creation. Perhaps non-human species have goodness in their destination just as individual humans do, though there are large difficulties with this view, such as dinosaurs.

The moral law is good for humans because it fits human nature. Scotus says the precepts in the second table of the Ten Commandments are “exceedingly in harmony” with the first practical principles that are “known from their terms,” even though they do not follow from them necessarily. Scotus is saying that the second table fits our end, but is not deducible from it. He standardly describes this relation of “fit” in aesthetic terms. This account of goodness allows us to give some content to the way in which the good, at least the good for humans as humans, overridably constrains what we should take to be obligatory.

This suggestion is partly the same and partly different from the one Geach made in his famous article about the good. He distinguished “predicative” adjectives like “red” from “attributive” adjectives like “good,” on the grounds that the meaning of attributive adjectives can’t be detached from the meaning of the nouns to which they are applied. He held that “good” in phrases like “good human” is a purely descriptive term, and we know its meaning just by knowing the meaning of “human” and “human act” and so by knowing what humans and human acts are for.

Hare concedes that we do get a constraint on what we should take to be good for humans from knowing what humans are, and that this in turn constrains what we should take to be commanded by God. But Hare wants to make two points against Geach. First, the term “good” in “good human” and “good human act” has, in our ordinary language, more than a purely attributive use. For a Kantian a good human act is one that displays a good will, and this is defined in terms of the whole procedure of the Categorical Imperative. Hare thinks we should concede that “good” in “good person” is sometimes used attributively, and that in “good human being” it may be used both ways. Second, even the attributive use is more than merely descriptive. To ascribe a function to a chisel is normally to say how it is to be used, and to say that a chisel is to be used for cutting fine grooves in wood and is not to be used as a screwdriver is to make a prescription.

Adams’ DCT needs a constraint on what we should take to be commanded by God in order to overcome the objection from arbitrariness. If God’s command makes something obligatory, should we think that we might be commanded, and thus obliged, to fly a plane into a skyscraper? No, says Adams, for this could not be the command of a loving God. What counts as “loving” is settled by ordinary valuation, for Adams, but Hare thinks this seems wrong, for reasons he’ll give later. But a related idea seems right: we should probably not take something as commanded by God if it does not fit the characteristic kind of loving of God done by a rational animal. This would imply a presumption against taking an innocent human life, though it wouldn’t rule out such a command and at the same time God changing the circumstances. Also, recall various ways Abraham’s context is different from ours (no life of Christ to emulate, for example). At any rate, taking innocent life is inconsistent with the feature of our rational-animal agency that features each of us going through a particular trajectory.

This point comes helpfully into connection with the four Barthian constraints mentioned earlier. Our trajectories involve our being individual centers of agency, being in time, being free, and being language-users. This is often put in terms of our personal narratives. We don’t know in advance the good works God’s prepared for us, and God is free with respect to the route selected for each of us, and the duration of that route. God has discretion, but chooses in accordance with our good as pilgrims. But the question of what access we have to the nature of this good is a different one, though also an unavoidable one. It’s natural to assume the trajectory requires a full lifetime, so killing would be a premature termination, unless God were to indicate to the contrary.

This gives us one example of a constraint from our nature on what we count as good, if we are to be able to respond to the divine call to be co-lovers. There is a form of argument here that can be extended to other examples. The form of argument is transcendental in the Kantian sense; it argues from the conditions of possibility of some fact that is taken as basic. Thus the argument from providence is a transcendental argument from the “fact of reason,” that we humans (creatures of sense and creatures of need) are under the moral law. The present argument argues backwards from the fact that we are recipients of God’s call to conclusions about what we (and God) have to be like to make this possible. But then it reverses direction, and asks what constraints are placed on what we can take to be divine commands by the fact that we are this kind of people.

Now consider the proscription on bearing false witness. There is a plausible argument, this time from the last of the four Barthian constraints, that we are language-users. Our language is a system of external signs, used to communicate internal thoughts. But then we have to be able to assume that these signs are being used most of the time to communicate thoughts correctly. What is at issue here is not whether the thoughts communicated are true, but whether what is communicated corresponds to what is thought true. The plausible part of Kant’s argument is that the institution of language-using requires that we be able to trust that most of our fellow language-users are communicating what they believe to be the truth, or what they really want. So there is a presumption against telling a lie, because if anyone, anytime, with any degree of frequency, may lie, this undercuts the very institution of language, which is necessary for lying as well as for telling the truth.

In the case of lying, as in the case of killing the innocent, we are left with an overridable constraint. Consider by contrast the exceptionless kind of constraint offered by the “new” natural law theory, which proposes eight basic goods, as Porter puts it, “elemental enough to be regarded plausibly as self-evident to all and yet provided with enough content to provide an immediate basis for practical reflection.” The dilemma that Porter poses for this kind of theory is that either the list is sufficiently general to be self-evident, but then it does not have enough content significantly to guide action in the exceptionless ways the theory proposes, or it is specific enough to guide action in this way, but then it is not self-evident to all. To pose this dilemma, however, is not to deny that goods such as life and truth pose some constraint on moral obligation.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 4, “Can We Deduce Morality from Human Nature?” Introduction & Section 4.1.1: The Non-Deducibility of the Law from our Nature:

Introduction: Hare has been arguing that eudaemonism (in the four forms discussed) does not have a proper place for what Scotus calls, following Anselm, the affection for justice. The present chapter is about a different dividing question in moral theory: can morality be deduced from “natural” facts, or from statements about the “natural” properties possessed by people and actions? The term “natural” here is problematic. The first section of the chapter discusses Scotus’s view that the moral law can’t be deduced from human nature, but is exceedingly fitting to it. In the second and fourth sections the denial of deducibility from “natural facts” will extend to a dispute with contemporary theorists. The third section examines RMH’s take on natural facts. The second section looks at Adams’ attempt to deduce a way to fix the reference of “good” from facts about what most humans most of the time think is good. Hare calls this “consensus deductivism.” The fourth section looks at the attempt by Foot and Hursthouse to deduce conclusions about moral goodness from facts about the characteristic human form of life. Hare calls this “form-of-life deductivism.” No entirely neat separation between these two kinds of view is possible.

4.1 SCOTUS.

4.1.1: The Non-Deducibility of the Law from our Nature

Scotus rightly denies that the moral law can be deduced from human nature. Note, first, it is deducibility that is denied, rather than some weaker relation such as fittingness. Scotus accepts that the moral law, such as the second table of the Ten Commandments, fits human nature exceedingly well, but he insists nonetheless that this is natural law only in an extended sense, not in the strict sense, because God is free to command creatures with human nature otherwise. Natural law in the strict sense is “known from its terms” or deducible from what is known in this way.

Second, it is moral law that is denied to be deducible from human nature, and not goodness. His examples of moral law are from the second table of the Ten Commandments, though we should not assume that he intends this list to be exhaustive. Third, the term from which deducibility is denied is human nature. But this has to be understood in a way that is not already conceptually subsumed under moral law. If we define “human being” as “a being under moral law,” or if we make being under moral law essential to the kind “human being” (as Kant does), then there will be a trivial deduction from the premise that a being is human to the conclusion that it’s under the moral law. On the other hand, if we deny that humans are by nature under the moral law, then we have simply denied deductivism from the beginning and begged the question.

Here’s a third alternative. We can grant that human beings are by nature such that they are fulfilled, or they reach their end, by loving God. Scotus says our end is to be condiligentes, co-lovers, which is to say that we enter into the love that is between the three persons of the Trinity. This human love of God, however, is distinct from the way angels love God or God loves Godself; humans love God as rational animals. We can ask whether we can deduce the moral law from our end specified as being condiligentes.

One prominent case Scotus gives is the commandment “You shall not steal.” Private property, he points out, is presupposed by the commandment but is not essential to human beings. There is no deduction of the proscription of theft just from human nature, and the divine command is to that extent contingent; there is no necessity here binding the divine will.

But stealing is not the most difficult case for someone who wants to maintain the contingency of the second table. What about killing? God could bring a killed person back to life, but perhaps more needs to be said. The question of whether the command not to kill is contingent tout court is not settled by the question of whether God could command otherwise given merely human nature. We can ask, “Could God command the killing of the innocent if not just human nature, but our circumstances stayed the same; in particular, if we stayed dead once killed?” In a later section Hare will take this up.

John Hare’s God’s Commands, Chapter 3, “Eudaemonism,” Section 3.3.2: The Second Defense: Stoic

We turn next to a different defense that the eudaemonist might make, one that derives from the Stoics. The idea is that the notion of reason brings impartiality with it, and so our good as rational beings requires that we follow the moral law. This is the sort of idea that says achieving the good of all, as you do if you act impartially, just is achieving your own good properly understood.

The key is “properly understood.” The good or “benefit” has to be distinguished from the merely “convenient.” Goods when properly understood are shared or common to the excellent. We have from the Stoics a “double-source” view of motivation. They distinguish motivation by self-concern and motivation by concern for others. Both of these develop. They have a technical term for this that we can translate “appropriation.” We can distinguish two kinds of appropriation: personal and social. The first is the development that takes us from self-preservation to valuing reasoning as a way to get the things that fit our nature, such as health and wealth, and then to valuing reason in its own right. The second is the development through progressively wider social groupings, until one cares for every human being.

This is a double-source theory in a sense, but not in the sense introduced earlier. This is because the Stoics were eudaemonists, and held that both forms of appropriation enable one to see better a single thing, one’s own chief good, which remains the source of all motivation. But here’s a problem: It’s true that if I already see my aunt, for example, as worth the same as my mother, then I will see that a benefit to my aunt is worth the same as a benefit to my mother. But if I don’t already see this, it is unclear how reason can require me to see it. What the argument needs to show is that it’s irrational to prefer benefiting those near to those far. Why should reason move to this? In fact, for that matter, why should reason prevent me preferring benefiting myself to benefiting someone else?

A contemporary philosopher who makes an argument rather similar to the Stoic one is Peter Singer. He thinks that we can get on an “escalator of reason,” and find ourselves moving toward the standpoint of the impartial spectator or ideal observer. From this standpoint, which Sidgwick calls the point of view of the universe, it makes no difference to the moral decision whether the interest being served is mine or someone else’s. But Singer also accepts from Sidgwick that reason allows me to get off the escalator at any point. He denies the argument he attributes to Kant that reason by its nature requires universalizing, or willing the maxims of our actions as universal laws. The point is that Singer acknowledges that we can’t get a convincing argument from the nature of reason itself for moving to the moral point of view. There is nothing irrational in itself, he says, about preferring oneself.

A number of other contemporary philosophers have tried a similar strategy. One is Korsgaard, whose conception of the “normative question” Hare’s been using all along. She thinks that Kant intended the formulation of the Categorical Imperative in terms of universal law to give us, all by itself, the moral law. But she thinks Kant failed to see that prescribing universal law does not yet settle the question of the domain over which the law of the free will must range. The domain could be the desires of the moment, for example, or of the agent’s whole life. She thinks she can provide an argument for extending the domain over every rational being. She starts from the observation that what separates humans from other animals is their ability to act on the basis of a self-conception, what she calls a “practical identity,” conceptions like “sister” or “philosopher.” She thinks practical identities create unconditional obligations, and this is one place where her view can be questioned.

Cohen raises the case of the idealized Mafioso. Not doing some horrible deed might result in his loss of identity, yet surely we are better off not having to say that the Mafioso has an obligation to do the horrible thing. Korsgaard qualifies her claim by adding that the Mafioso has a deeper obligation to give up his immoral role. This is because the activity of reflection has rules of its own, and one of them is the rule that we should never stop reflecting until we have reached a satisfactory answer, one that admits of no further questioning. Following this rule would lead the Mafioso to morality.

Hare thinks the argument breaks down here. There is nothing in the nature of reflection as such that requires giving priority to the way humans are the same (namely, that they have practical identities) over the ways they are different. Even if it’s true that valuing your practical identity implies valuing the human capacity to set a practical identity, you can still value your differences from other human beings more. So, alas, it’s possible to be a fully reflective Nazi. To be sure, we can always define “reflection” or “reason” in such a way that it brings morality with it. But there does not seem to be a morally neutral account of reason or reflection that allows us to deduce morality from it. The history of attempts to give such an argument is not encouraging. If, though, we accept that the moral law is God’s command, then we can see a way to argue for it from the premise that reason tells us that, if there is a God, God is to be loved and obeyed (a proposition, recall, Scotus argued, can be known from its terms).

Image: By Paolo Monti - Available in the BEIC digital library and uploaded in partnership with BEIC Foundation.The image comes from the Fondo Paolo Monti, owned by BEIC and located in the Civico Archivio Fotografico of Milan., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48067347

Learning from Broken Relationships”

A Twilight Musing

My wife suggested that I write a piece on ways that I have learned from my mistakes. That opens a broad field of possibilities, but probably the most fruitful area would be bungled relationships, particularly when close friendships have been injured, sometimes permanently. The bottom line of what I learned from these snafus is that confronting others to point out their mistakes requires not only courage, but also compassion and awareness of one’s own vulnerability. Gal. 6:1-2 presents the standards for correcting a brother or sister: “You who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” I would like to relate a couple of instances of my own mishandled confrontations and the painful lessons I learned from them, detailing how those mistakes could have been avoided had I fully understood the passage just quoted.

The most painful of these was the rupture between myself and an intimate friend who was one of my closest confidants. He was a minister and a psychological counselor of great ability with whom I shared many common perspectives and tastes. In fact, the combination of our both having some academic and religious standing and enjoying fairly frequent stimulating and satisfying conversations meant that the intensity of our mutual reinforcement weakened our ability to challenge one another when we needed to. For either of us to do that would have threatened the ego satisfaction we had from boosting and being boosted. So when I became aware that his messages had lost their freshness and that he had settled into being comfortable in his reputation, I felt I needed to confront him with this error, but I had had no experience in doing so constructively. More than that, I was not guided by the advice of Paul in the passage quoted above to be gentle, to be aware of my own moral vulnerability, and to share my brother’s burden. Also, I thought the relationship between us was so strong that it would survive my being bluntly frank with him. At the time I saw my actions as being morally courageous, but my friend felt they were brutal and out of character with what he thought me to be.

It took me many years to understand fully why my attempt to challenge my friend shattered our relationship (which, by the way, was mended on the surface but never recovered its previous intimacy). As the years went on, I realized how I should have done it, and my deepest regret is that after the alienation he never again trusted me in the deep way he had before, and I destroyed a relationship that could have been enriched by my handling the confrontation more sensitively. I realized too late that had I dealt with his fault with more humility, gentleness, and compassionate sharing of his burden, I could have been his partner in correction, rather than merely his accuser. Moreover, the way would have opened up for a mutually beneficial relationship in which our love and regard for one another didn’t depend on our each maintaining an unrealistic image of who we were. We needed to see and acknowledge each other’s flaws and to experience the richness of God’s and each other’s forgiveness.

The other example of how I brought about an estrangement and how I could have avoided doing so took place in my workplace, an academic institution. Although the split was not with a fellow Christian, in a way it was worse, because my actions turned out to compromise my Christian witness, even though I acted from a desire to stand up for Christian standards. This incident involved two of my colleagues with whom I had close ties because we were next-door neighbors and members of the same academic department. Part of the mistake I made was from naivete, since it took several years for me to realize that they were homosexual companions. Consequently, Laquita and I became friends with them and socialized with them with no self-consciousness about their relationship. They naturally assumed that we knew they were sexual partners, but had found a way to accept that fact in spite of our conservative Christian convictions. (In retrospect, what we were able to do in our ignorance might well have been possible merely on the basis of respectfully dealing with people where they are, not where we think they ought to be.) One summer in the late 70’s, when homosexual militancy was gaining ground but did not yet have the majority support it has now, a group of people on campus decided that there needed to be a homosexual support group. When I read about it in the student newspaper, I felt moved to write a letter to the paper about my reservations concerning the acceptance of homosexual practices as normal and morally neutral. When the letter was published, I was thoroughly excoriated by my colleagues, and my next-door neighbors exploded in both public and private indignation at my “intolerance” and “bigotry.” They felt betrayed and stabbed in the back and regarded me as a hypocrite.

How could I have applied the principles of Gal. 6:1-3 to this secular situation? First of all, I could have put myself in their shoes and have anticipated how they would react to my suddenly, without any attempt to soften the blow for them, going public with remarks that they found personally insulting and disrespectful, seeming to reject out of hand a vital part of their identity. Had I gone to them privately and expressed my views, they would have been shocked and disappointed, but perhaps at least they would not have seen me as insensitive to the opprobrium and ill-treatment suffered by open or suspected homosexuals at the time. I could perhaps have stated my convictions with firmness but gentleness, not self-righteously minimizing my own vulnerability to sexual temptation, but showing a willingness to share the burden of our human condition. That could have opened the way for meaningful discussion that was not charged with the emotion of public argument. Once again, I was guilty of mistaking my boldness in confrontation as virtuous courage.

Unfortunately, there are several more instances I could cite, but even mea culpa can be overdone. I hope these examples are sufficient to deter others from the mistakes I made. If so, that is some compensation for the damage I did. I’m not sure that old age necessarily brings wisdom, but it certainly brings a deeper understanding of our experiences.

Reweaving (To an Estranged Brother)

When God has done, He has undone, too; The knots of will unraveled Await the Weaver's hand. Though that which bound our love Seemed closely knit, He knew that it required A purer bond to make us one. So, Lord, secure the cords again, And stay our fumbling hands, Lest we re-tie what you undid; In one deft stroke, Retwine our hearts in unity, For love alone, and not security.

--Elton D. Higgs (Oct. 29, 1982)

image: "Broken" by H. Olsen. CC License. 

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 3, “Eudaemonism,” Introduction and Section 3.1: Does Morality Make You Happy?

INTRODUCTION: Recall the argument from justification in ch. 1. If we ask the normative question “Why should I be moral?” or “Why should I take the moral demand as a valid demand on me?” one answer we might propose is “because it will make me happy.” Another answer is “because it will fulfill my nature as a human being.” These are related because one theory about happiness is that it resides in the fulfillment of our nature. If either theory is sufficient, a divine command theory will not be needed for answering the normative question. This chapter is about the first answer, and the next chapter about the proposed derivation of the moral law from human nature.

Hare’s claim is that the first answer fails for two reasons. First, it is not strictly true, at least in this life. Second, even if it is true, it gives the wrong kind of motivation. Questions of justification and questions of motivation are different but linked on a Kantian account of morality. If the terminus of a person’s motivation is her own happiness, she is not following the moral law for its own sake, and therefore “because it will make me happy” fails as a justification of this kind of moral obedience. The claim that such a pattern of motivation is unacceptably self-regarding is the central topic of this chapter.

3.1: It’s not strictly true to say that morality makes you happy in this life, or that, if you act well, things go well. There are two reasons for this. The first is that you can be morally good and still be miserable, because moral virtue does not have the right kind of leverage to secure happiness. Consider people striving to be virtuous but are clinically depressed. Or consider that a great deal of happiness is dependent on our relations with other people. We live in a world in which many of the people we know and love are not doing whatever they can to follow the moral law, and in this way we become sources of unhappiness for each other.

The second reason it is not strictly true to say that morality makes you happy in this life is that morality not merely fails to secure happiness; it can actually decrease it. Virtue can make unhappiness worse if we think we deserve to be happy if we’re virtuous. Denial of opportunities in accordance with virtue can be very frustrating. Moreover, the more virtuous you are, the more acutely you will feel the sufferings of those around you and hate the injustice that causes it. Even more straightforwardly, morality may require a genuine sacrifice of this-worldly happiness. The key question is one of motivation and ranking. How do we negotiate the continual dilemmas in which one or the other seems to have to give way?

To say there is regularly tension between the two goals is consistent with saying, with RMH, that, if we were bringing up a child purely in his own interest, we should try to inculcate in him some reasonably demanding moral principle with the attendant moral feelings. His view was that virtue was necessary but not sufficient for a good human life. He thought an empirical judgment is that those committed to a life of virtue are generally happier than those who aren’t thus committed, but he conceded that occasions will arise in which the saints’ or heroes’ principles will require them to make very great sacrifices. So, if parents educate their children to admire and practice virtue, they may be bringing it about that in some unlikely contingencies their children have to pay a very high price. Even so, he thought, the parents should bring up their children that way, because it is usually the case that people who are so brought up are happier.

Recall in this context that the demand of Kantian morality is very high. We are to love enemies with what Kant calls “practical love,” for example, sharing their ends, as long as these ends are themselves morally permissible. Also, we have to share the ends of the poor in the rest of the world who could be helped by our lowering our standard of living and sending out the proceeds. This doesn’t mean we have to reduce ourselves to abject poverty; but, even though it is a complex question just how much to reduce, it is very likely that most of us in the developed world live too richly.

Even if it’s strictly true, however, that morality leads to happiness, perhaps mediated by the supersensible author of nature, this answer to the normative question would not give us the right kind of motivation for a justification. “Eudaemonist” is Kant’s term for someone who says that “happiness is really his motive for acting virtuously.” This is a single-source view of motivation; all our motivation derives finally and properly from our own happiness. Hare claims that this is unacceptably self-regarding. He looks at four proposed defenses of eudaemonism against this claim, and replies to each of them. The first three will end up compromising on the moral demand, and the fourth will compromise on the aspiration for happiness.

Some criticize Kant’s argument from providence by saying Kant defines happiness and morality too narrowly, the former as the sum of pleasures and the latter as the sense of duty requiring elimination of all singular reference. Hare replies that the argument from providence doesn’t in fact need these defective features of Kant’s account. All the argument needs is that happiness is essentially self-indexed, and that morality is essentially not self-indexed. If we want to hold that we are properly motivated by what is good in itself, independently of its relation to us, this requires a double-source view of motivation: We are motivated both by our own happiness and by what is good in itself independently of our happiness. Once we concede that point, we will see that there is no necessary coincidence between morality and happiness, and that assurance of consistency between the two requires a view about the governance of the universe as a whole.

The substance of this chapter will be an examination of four defenses of eudaemonism. The first is from the Epicureans. It starts from the pleasure we get in the pleasure of others, what Sidgwick calls “sympathetic pleasure,” and argues that there is a good sense of “for its own sake” where what is meant is “for the sake of the agent’s pleasure internal to it.” The second is from the Stoics. It’s the notion of reason that brings impartiality with it, and so our good as rational beings requires that we follow the moral law. The third is from a character Hare calls Aquinas-Porter, to whom is attributed an interpretation of Aquinas by Porter. On this representation, Aquinas has a way to reconcile Aristotle’s eudaemonism with the view that the distinctive mark of charity is loving God for God’s own sake and promoting the good of the neighbor for the neighbor’s sake and not our own. The key to reconciliation is to postulate a nested series of interests that’s necessarily harmonious and includes the agent’s own happiness within it. The fourth defense revises the third by dropping the nested series, and it proposes instead that an agent perfects herself by union with God, who is self-transcending. These four proposed defenses are not an exhaustive list, but they are among the most important.

Image: By Phillip Medhurst (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 2: “The Case for Abduction” of God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning

In this chapter, Baggett and Walls motivate using an abductive moral argument over a deductive moral argument. They first review what they call the Anti-Platonist Moral Argument (APMA), such as the one proposed by William Lane Craig:

P1. If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist. P2. Objective moral values and duties do exist. C3. Therefore, God exists

To prevent ruling out theistic ethics, Baggett and Walls take Craig's definition of objective moral (deontic) truths to be facts according to which some actions and motivations are right or wrong independently of whether any human mind believes it to be so.

As previously mentioned in Good God, some theists have reservations about the argument. C. Stephen Layman, a theist himself, rejects APMA because of P1 which he thinks is unappealing to nonbelievers, especially Platonists. If Platonism is true, then P1 is false, because one can appeal to a possible world where God does not exist but objective moral value and duties do (since moral values and duties exist necessarily on their view). One may counter that God’s existence is necessary, so there is no such world and Platonism is false. However to do so would be to appeal to C3 which would be circular. Hence, Layman thinks that P1 lacks non-circular justification, wide enough support, adequate intuitive force, and sufficient obviousness.

John Milliken, another theist, similarly rejects P1. He imagines a world such us ours without God. He thinks intuitively that, in such a world, morality still holds. In more philosophical terms, he takes P1 to be a nontrivially false counterpossible (since he is committed to Divine necessity).

In Good God, Baggett and Walls have also previously offered their criticisms, and in John Hare's (another theist) review of Good God, Hare says that Baggett and Walls have argued convincingly that Craig's view that atheism leads to moral nihilism is unlikely to be persuasive. Note that Baggett and Walls do not think Craig's argument is bad or unsound, rather that it is relatively unpersuasive to many atheists for a few reasons. Hence they propose one should adopt their abductive moral argument instead.

God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning

By David Baggett, Jerry L. Walls

For the classical theist, a world such as ours could not even exist without God, while for the atheist, the world is possible without God. Hence a world such as ours, with at least the appearance of love, relationships, satisfactions of morality, social harmony, clear moral apprehensions, etc., is possible without God for the atheist. Baggett and Walls think that it is better to approach atheists by affirming their common convictions about moral truth and then asking what better explains such facts, rather than encouraging them to assume such a world like the actual world is consistent with atheism, providing them a lot of theoretical resources to use, and inviting them to construct a secular moral theory. It would be strange if atheists could not come up with a substantive moral theory using the rich resources of a world like ours, which is only here (if theists are right) because God created it with such features. This allows atheists to travel some distance down the road in building an ethical theory. Hence Baggett and Walls prefer an abductive moral argument that does not rely on P1.

Craig however thinks that his formulation has the advantage of meeting the atheist in the world as he conceives it to be and asking whether morality would be objective without God. The problem however is that while one allows such a world with such rich resources to be consistent with atheism, one (potentially anyway) dismisses too hastily the atheists' serious efforts to build a secular ethic. This explains why so many secular theories have emerged and sport considerable merit. It is not as if secular theories fail altogether to explain anything morally. They can get somewhere given the resources of the world. Baggett and Walls think however that this world conjoined with God provides a better explanation of the full range of moral facts.

Other theistic ethicists seem to recognize this. Robert Adams, for example, thought social requirement theory had its strengths in explaining the idea that obligations are owed to persons. Human social requirement theory is not without resources to make sense of this, but adding God is crucial to complete the theory. Another example is Linda Zagzebski who grounds morality in motivations and admits that the first half of her theory can be constructed without reference to God at all. She then completes her theory by bringing God in.

Craig however thinks that when it gets down to showing that the best explanation of objective moral values and duties is God, one will slip into arguing that, given atheism, objective moral values and duties would not exist. So the abductive argument still ends up doing the same thing as the deductive argument. Contra Craig, Baggett and Walls think that they are doing something different. The deductive argument says, "Imagine the world is atheistic, now try to make sense of morality, you can't." The abductive argument instead says, "Suspend belief on whether the world is atheistic or theistic, try to make sense of morality. Given its features, you can make some progress. But what better explains the fuller range of moral facts in need of explanation, the world alone or the world and God?”

In short, they list five main problems in total with the deductive argument (TDA). In a footnote, they construct an Acrostic called CARBS:

1. Counterpossibles. Counterpossibles are counterfactuals with an impossible antecedent. For example, "If a necessarily good and loving God commanded murder and torture for fun, it would be right to do so," or "If there were a square circle, mathematicians would be puzzled." For the classical theist, if God exists necessarily, then "God does not exist" would be impossible. Hence P1 is a counterpossible (according to classical theists), and a particularly intractable counterpossible—one in which the being presumed to be the very ground of being doesn’t exist. Presuming to know the features of such an intractably impossible world strains credulity. (Note that “If God doesn’t exist, then God didn’t create the world,” doesn’t seem particularly problematic, but it’s also analytic.)

2. Acknowledging the rich features of a world like this if it could exist without God. The deductive method doesn't allow enough room to acknowledge what would be the simply amazing features of a world like this if it could exist without God, whereas the abductive approach allows the world without God to explain some of morality, while providing the explanation for why it can.

3. Rejecting realism instead of naturalism. By allowing the atheist to think this world with its features is compatible with atheism, it is easy for them to reject moral realism instead of naturalism, contributing to the escalation of nihilism Nietzsche predicted would ensue from the “death of God.” The abductive method instead keeps the moral facts in question front and center as the starting data in need of explanation.

4. Bridge-breaking. The deductive version can sever the bridge with naturalists by focusing on differences rather than similarities. The abductive argument agrees that the world can account for some of the moral data to a certain extent, and then shows how adding God to the picture offers a considerably more robust explanation.

5. Saying uncomfortable things. The deductive version makes us say very uncomfortable, unintuitive, and unnecessary things like "If God does not exist, then rape is not wrong." The abductive version avoids this.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.2, Divine Authority:

To understand God’s authority, we have to proceed by analogy, recognizing limitations in the application of accounts of human authority. The term “authority” in its use within human life is a “thick” value term, like “polite.” Thick value terms take up the criteria for their application into their meaning, and combine them unstably with the evaluation, and the result is that with most such terms it is possible to find cases where the criteria are approximately met, but the evaluation is the opposite of the usual. To say that a person has authority is usually to express approval of the way she exercises power. But it is also possible to say that a person has wrongful or too much authority. What, then, is rightful authority?

As with most value terms, we need to distinguish objective and subjective uses of the term “authority.” In the subjective use of “value,” I can’t sincerely say that something is a value for me unless I value it. But in the objective use of “value,” there can be values relevant to my choices that I don’t acknowledge. Two qualifications are needed here, before we apply it to the case of “authority.” The first qualification is that objectivity does not require independence of human beings as a whole; it requires independence of the preferences of the person to whom the value applies. A medical treatment can be good for a person whether he recognizes it or not. John McDowell has argued convincingly that most of the values we operate with are relative to human dispositions in general, and that this does not mean they are not objective. The second qualification is that, according to the “prescriptive realism” outlined in Ch. 1, the full-orbed value judgment using the term will always express a subjective state, though this does not impugn the objective reality of the value properties picked out in the judgment. The consequence is that, when a person makes this kind of value judgment, there will be a “value” in the subjective sense, an acknowledged pull towards some good or away from some evil together with an endorsement of that pull, but the objective value can be there whether it’s acknowledged in such a judgment or not.

“Authority” has been distinguished from mere “power” by the fact that a person or thing that has authority properly influences me, whereas a person or thing that has power merely influences me. This distinction comes from Butler, but it isn’t yet adequate. Not all properly exercised influence is authority, because influence can be merely causal, and not all authority is properly exercised. We need a distinction between power and authority that appeals to the idea that the person with authority gives (by commanding) reasons of a certain kind for compliance to the person over whom she has the authority. But the term “reasons for action” is itself value-laden, and this can again give rise to confusion. We can’t simply define “authority” in terms that make it always by definition true that the person who exercises it does so legitimately.

In the tradition of all three Abrahamic faiths, God has authority as sovereign. But now we need to make the distinction between “objective authority” and “subjective authority.” God is sovereign, and in this sovereignty God has both of these kinds of authority. God has objective authority for everyone, whether they acknowledge it or not. But subjective authority is what the subject acknowledges as authoritative, and so God has subjective authority only for those who acknowledge it or consent to it. We can further distinguish God’s sovereignty by functions, by analogy with human sovereignty, like the distinction into legislative, executive, and judicial functions. God makes the law by commanding it, and runs the kingdom in accordance with that law, and judges all human beings, whether they have acknowledged God’s authority or not, by their compliance to that law. In all three cases, God has objective authority but may not have subjective authority. There is circularity here. God has rightful authority because God’s commands give us the reasons that we ought to have, and we ought to have them because God’s commands have authority. But the circularity is not vicious, because the chain of justification terminates in the principle known from its terms that God is to be loved and hence God is to be obeyed.

We can say that, when God commands something by legislative authority, implemented in God’s executive and judicial authority, there is an objective reason for obedience from the union of wills (divine and human) that is both expressed in such obedience, and that is good in itself. In terms of God’s executive authority, in Kant’s language God is the sovereign of the kingdom of ends, of which we are mere members. The sovereign is a completely independent being, without needs and with unlimited resources adequate to his will. An example of what this means is that God can put us next to the people God wants us to help. We can call this the “principle of providential proximity,” which can be helpful in overcoming the despair that comes from seeing the scale of the world’s need as compared with my own pitiful resources. It’s not always obvious whom one has been placed next to; it might not be simply geographical. And it’s not simply that God sees better than we do what the reasons are, and transmits them to us; rather, God’s choices actually create or produce the reasons. God puts me next to the person I am supposed to help, and I am to see being placed next to her as preparing me for a divine command to pay special concern to her interests.

God’s judicial authority gives me a reason because I am accountable to God. This is true independently of whether I acknowledge this authority. A rival view is Murphy’s position that God does not have this objective authority over those who have not acknowledged it, but that one is required in reason to subject oneself to God’s rule, because there is decisive reason so to do; to fail to subject oneself is to be guilty of practical irrationality. But Hare thinks such an account can’t accommodate the traditional view of all three Abrahamic faiths about God’s judicial authority even over the non-believer. Dodsworth makes this point well, relying on Darwall.  Being given practical reasons to perform actions constitutes neither authority nor accountability. An account of God’s authority needs to make reference to the fact that, when we fail to obey God’s commands, this makes us rightly liable to God’s rebuke and punishment, as in the first Psalm. This is true for believers and unbelievers alike.

When God makes a promise to us or makes a covenant with us, is God obligated to comply with it? Scotus is useful here. He makes a distinction between God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power (which God exercises within an ordinance divinely established). An agent can act in conformity with some right and just law in accordance with his or her ordained power. When that upright law—according to which an agent must act in order to act ordinately—is not in the power of that agent, then its absolute power can’t exceed its ordained power in regards to any object without its acting disorderly or inordinately. But God can’t act otherwise, so that he establishes another upright law, which would be right, because no law is right except insofar as the divine will accepts it as established. So God is acting within the divine ordained power by keeping promises, but it’s always possible for God by the absolute divine power to establish a different upright order. God’s obligation thus does not, we might say, go all the way down. God is unlike us in this respect.

Introduction and Summary of David Baggett’s and Jerry Walls’ God and Cosmos: Chapter 1, “Alone in the Cosmos”

In their previous book, Good God, David Baggett and Jerry Walls defended their theory of theistic ethics. Their theory grounds rightness in Divine commands and goodness in the Divine nature. In this second book, God and Cosmos, they aim to address competing secular ethical theories and show that they ultimately fail to provide an adequate account of the full range of moral phenomena in need of explanation. Instead, God and cosmos together best explain the moral phenomena (hence the title). Their methodology is to begin with various moral data, and then look at the explanations to see which best explains the various data. In short, they advance a cumulative abductive moral argument for God. In doing so, they assume moral realism, the view that objective morality exists. Whether moral realism is true will be addressed in another book to be published. God and Cosmos is rich in philosophy and many philosophical terms; in my summary, I will try to simplify it to be more accessible to the lay reader and highlight the main points.

Chapter 1: Alone in the Cosmos

Naturalism or materialism is the idea that the physical world exhausts reality. This view is held by many intellectuals. In this chapter, Baggett and Walls discuss naturalism and its history. They start a historical sketch all the way from the ancient philosopher Thales. Their brief sketch is meant to make three points.

The first point is what they call the deflationary fallacy. This fallacy is when one attempts to co-opt and appropriate a thinker (or insight) to the cause of one's worldview, despite compelling counter evidence. For example, some might cast the stoic philosophers as allies of naturalism. But this is difficult because their ethical thought was bound up in their theology as seen in many of their writings.

The second point is to highlight the diversity among secular thinkers. While Baggett and Walls generally use words like "atheistic," "secular," and "naturalistic" interchangeably, they note that there is a need to disambiguate at certain points. For example, an ethical realist who believes that there is no God may believe that moral facts are not reducible to natural facts. He is an atheist and secularist, but not a naturalist. This is an example of the diversity among secular thinkers. One significant set of atheists, who stand in the tradition of Friedrich Nietzsche, thinks that the death of God results in having no objective morality. The result is moral nihilism where there is no God and no objective morality. Another significant set of atheists think instead that without God, nothing much changes at all. On such a view, objective morality still exists. They however disagree upon which secular ethical theory is correct. Various secular theories need to be addressed differently. In this book, Baggett and Walls aim to address a range of different theories which affirm objective morality (and, again, will address those who deny objective morality in a later book).

The third point they wish to bring out is a third option beyond theism and naturalism. Their salient example is Thomas Nagel's account. Nagel thinks that naturalism is bound up with problems, yet he remains an atheist, resisting theism, by offering another alternative. In his book, Mind and Cosmos, Nagel argues that various features of the human condition - value, meaning, cognition, consciousness, agency - are beyond the ability of naturalism to account for. In finding an adequate explanation of value, Nagel divides the question into the constitutive issue concerning what value is all about and the historical question of how it could come about that we could recognize objective value and be motivated by it. Nagel opts for a nonintentional teleological (purposive) explanation. He writes that "these things may be determined not merely by value-free chemistry and physics but also by something else, namely a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them." So Nagel thinks objective morality exists, yet naturalism cannot ground it, and yet he resists resorting to theistic foundations.

Nagel's recurring theme is also that the mind must be central to the story of reality, something that somehow guided the process form the start. However, Nagel is skeptical about theism for a few reasons. First, Nagel rejects theism because it does not seem to be a live option for him. He says while others may find it so, he has not been blessed with the sensus divinitatis (a sense of the Divine). Second, in finding an adequate explanation, he is committed to antireductionism and that certain things cannot be explained as merely accidental. The most important is "the ideal of discovering a single natural order that unified everything on the basis of a set of common elements and principles." Nagel thinks that accepting the Divine mind as the stopping point leaves the explanation incomplete. Theism on his view "amounts to the hypothesis that the highest-order explanation of how things hang together is of a certain type, namely intentional or purposive, without having anything more to say about how that intention operates, except what is found in the results to be explained." He further thinks theism and Cartesian dualism (the view that there exists a non-physical mind and physical body) fail to achieve a single natural order. For example, by appealing to miracles, one attempts to explain features of the world by appealing beyond the world. Hence he thinks that theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world and fails to explain intelligibility from within the world. The only kind of theism that Nagel may accept is a non-interventionist one, where God created the world in such a way that it was henceforth self-sustaining and self-regulating.

Baggett and Walls offer a few replies. First, the fact that Nagel himself does not personally have a sense of the Divine is no evidence against theism. There is still the question of whether the arguments for theism are good ones. Second, Baggett and Walls argue that theism can meet Nagel's aesthetic bias in favor of an integrated worldview. They note that C. S. Lewis himself seemed to have anticipated such an objection, where people find miracles intolerable. The reason why they find it intolerable is because "they start by taking Nature to be the whole of reality. And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent." Lewis agrees with the aesthetic constraint for an integrated worldview but points out that the problem is taking nature to be the whole of reality. If God is real, then miracles still fulfill the aesthetic constraint. Lewis also addresses the concern that miracles are irregularities or arbitrary interventions. He says that if miracles have occurred, it is because they are the very thing this universal story is about; it is where the plot turns. Atoms, time, and space are not the main plot of the story. So miracles are not arbitrary or ad hoc interruptions. Lastly, Lewis also argued that if naturalism is true, we have no reason to trust our convictions that nature is uniform. But if theism is true, then it is plausible that our convictions are generally reliable, yet it also entails that miracles are plausible and are part of our world alongside the uniformity of majority of events. So theism can meet Nagel’s aesthetic constraint for an integrated worldview, and Nagel’s rejection of it is premature.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.1.6: Directly Effective Commands

The final item on the list of five types of prescription is “directly effective commands.” These are still a species of divine prescription, a species of revealed will and not yet disposing will. But unlike the species we’ve considered so far, they do not need to have any language-using human recipient. God says, “Let there be light,” and there is light. It’s tempting to say it’s not a command at all, but that’s too fast. The importance of the Genesis account here is that we are told that God accomplished creation through speech, in Greek logos. For Christians this suggests the role of the Second Person of the Trinity in creation, and John 1:1-3 takes up this suggestion, with explicit reference back to the first chapter of Genesis.

The idea of effecting something directly by commanding it may seem strange. But it’s not unique to the original creation. When the Psalmist says (Psalm 85:8), “Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his faithful,” he is imagining God saying “Shalom,” “Peace be to you,” as the Lord says, for example, to Gideon in Judges 6:23. When God pronounces peace on us, that is a directly effective command, and a work of the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps the sense in which creation by directly effective command is a “communicative act” is attenuated. It might be a communication either within the Trinity, or to angelic beings, or to potential (but not yet actual) human recipients, or perhaps the implication of the doctrine of creation by speech is just that the creation is in principle intelligible. In any case, there is still the significant distinction to be made that this last kind of command, unlike precept and prohibition, does not presuppose the existence of human recipients and does not imply sanction or punishment for failure to comply. It’s important to see that this category of prescription nonetheless places creation in the category of something commanded. The claim of Ch. 4 is that God’s commands that produce our obligations are themselves constrained by the human nature that God created, but that this does not take us outside God’s commands to something else constraining God. Rather, God creates by command and sustains creation by command, and then commands us with one of the other types of divine prescription in a way that is consistent with that creative command.

We can now collect together these results and say that a divine command that generates obligation is a prescription with which the person commanded is not permitted not to comply, and a prescription in which there is an internal reference, by the meaning of this kind of speech act, to the authority of the speaker, and to some kind of condemnation if the command is not carried out.

Image: By Chris Light - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59628755

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.1.5: Counsels

Another speech act on the scholastic list is “counsel.” God can use imperative sentences to give us advice, instruction, or invitation. What is the difference between command in the narrow sense and these other speech acts? The most salient point of difference is that commands generate obligation, and there is standardly some expectation of condemnation if the command is not carried out. With advice, this is not so, though there may be an expectation of adverse consequences. This is a point emphasized by Stephen Darwall, who talks about the accountability internally contained within a second-person demand, and we’ll return to this shortly.

Traditionally Roman Catholic moral theology teaches that there are three “evangelical counsels,” or “counsels of perfection”: poverty, chastity, and obedience. The idea of counsels as a separate category of divine prescription seems right. Jesus tells us to be perfect as our Father in heaven in perfect. If this is a command, does it not follow that, when Jesus says to the rich young man, “If you wish to be perfect, go sell,” this is also a command, a command to carry out the means to the commanded end? Here Hare makes some distinctions. First, the difference between perfect (confusingly) and imperfect duties is helpful in seeing that the command to be perfect is in a certain way indeterminate.

Consider Kant’s examples in the Groundwork, where the duties not to lie and not to commit suicide are perfect, and the duties to help others and develop one’s talents are imperfect. The difference is that in the first case you are in a bad situation, you have an inclination to do some act to get out of it, and the perfect duty intervenes to stop that particular act. In the second case you are in a good situation, you have an inclination not to do anything to remove yourself from it, and the imperfect duty intervenes to tell you to do something, although it does not tell you what in particular to do. But, while this distinction goes some way toward explaining the imperative “Be perfect,” it is not enough. It captures the indeterminacy of how the imperative is to be carried out, but it doesn’t explain the way in which “Be perfect” gives us an ideal. The word “ideal” here does not imply that we are given merely an ideal, in the sense that the prescription is to be regarded as itself unattainable, and the realistic goal is not attainment but merely trying to be more like what is prescribed. Christian doctrine standardly sees Jesus as giving us in his own life a model for what perfection would be like. This has to be qualified by what Ch. 1 said about the uniqueness of each person’s perfection. But the Name into which we’re called to live is not merely what we should try to reach, or get closer to reaching; it is our destination. Imperfect duties do not all give us ideals in this way, though they give us indeterminacy about how they are to be realized. Thus “Eat more spinach” would meet the criterion for the prescription of an imperfect duty, but it does not give us an ideal.

What more do we need to say in order to capture the special nature of the prescription to be perfect? One point is that the calling towards our own perfection, which is itself a perfection of the common nature “humanity,” is continued in the next life. But obligations do not continue in the next life. Why is this, and what does it tell us about the nature of obligation? Here again Kant is useful to the extent that he sees that God does not have obligations, since God does not have any contrary inclinations that have to be disciplined, and the same is true of finite holy beings. In the case of both perfect and imperfect duties, the prescription is most often to do something other than what inclination is prompting one to do. But the process of sanctification and then glorification is one in which the inclinations come to be more and more in line with duty, so that there is less and less disciplining to be done. Kant did not think that we humans can ever be holy, but he did not give good justification for this claim within either the theoretical or the practical use of reason. It is better to say that there is a call to be holy, and that in this state we would no longer be under obligation. This suggests that even in this life, where there are competing inclinations, the call is to become somebody who does not feel resistance that has to be overcome. This makes the term “obligation” inadequate for what the call (unlike the command) creates.

There is another feature of obligation that will be more central when we discuss the nature of authority in the next section. Obligation is accountability to someone. But there are different types of accountability. Accountability brings with it the envisaging of a sanction of some kind for non-compliance, even if it is only the sanction of blame. Darwall puts the point by saying that accountability makes blame for non-compliance “appropriate,” and quotes Pufendorf, who says, “An obligation forces a man to acknowledge of himself that the evil, which has been pointed out to the person who deviates from an announced rule, falls upon him justly.” But, for calls and counsels, there is not the conceptually implied envisioning of condemnation and punishment. We can still be answerable, but not accountable in the sense that there’s a sanction in the offing. We are supposed to move from the fearful whip to a relationship of love and generosity in our relation with God.

So how should we understand the rich young man passage? One possibility is as a singular precept, according to which he had to give up his wealth. But another possibility is that Jesus is showing him that there is much more than the commands of the second table of the Ten Commandments, or than any commands in the narrow sense of “command.” There is a call to a destination beyond this life, treasure in heaven.

Here’s an example of a divine counsel. A person with tenure at a secular university is asked to consider leaving tenure to teach at a religious college. He considers there is an invitation here, a call that will in God’s providence bring blessing, even though it is hard to justify compliance from a common-sense point of view. He senses that for him to offer his heart to the Lord means to accept this invitation. On the other hand, he does not have the sense that there is something wrong with his current place of employment, or that he has some kind of obligation to go.

God’s prescriptions to us are often counsel of this kind. If we were to attribute emotions to God, we would say God was disappointed when we decline, or not as happy as God could have been, and not that God was angry. But this is anthropomorphic language. Perhaps an ingredient in the picture is that a call is often accompanied by a gift. The refusal of the call is in such a case the refusal of the gift, and an appropriate human response to the refusal of a gift is disappointment.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.1.4: Permissions

Another kind of speech act that characteristically uses an imperative tropic is “permission.” A permission is not a command because, if a person is commanded, he is permitted to comply but he is not permitted not to comply. If a person is permitted, he is permitted both to do the thing and not to do it. An illuminating comparison is with necessity and possibility. God permits me if God does not command me not to, in the same way that what is possible is what is not necessarily not the case. But the comparison is not exact. In the cases we’re interested in, permission is not simply the absence of a prohibition, or negative command. When God permits Adams to eat of the fruit of all of the other trees in the garden, God expresses consent to this eating.

In the cases we’re interested in, there needs to be a mental act of permitting, not just the absence of the mental act of prohibiting, and there needs to be a speech act. God’s speech acts of permission express a divine mental act, but to explain what mental act, we need to return to the scholastic distinction between God’s revealed and God’s disposing will. The revealed will is a type of antecedent will (a divine will antecedent to our willing), and the disposing will is a type of consequent will. Regarding the consequent will, Ockham says that it is that by which God wills efficaciously in positing something in being, but in antecedently willing from eternity that a given created will should act in a certain way God does not determine the created will to act in that way. So, even though everything that happens is in accordance with God’s consequent permissive will, it is not necessarily in accordance with God’s antecedent will. Most of the divine prescriptions we have been considering should be taken as expressions of God’s antecedent will.

But now we need to make another distinction, within the antecedent divine will. Consider tragic cases in which there does not seem to be anything good to do. The classic case is hiding a Jew in the Second World War and lying to the Nazi officer at the door. Rather than saying it’s never right to lie, Hare says it’s better to say that lying in such a case can be the least bad thing to do. But does this mean that God permits it? If so, divine permission seems to be different from divine command, where God’s command is said to select which good things to require. If we allow the existence of tragic cases (as experience seems to compel), we should say that God may command saving a life in a case where this requires and God permits a lie. We should then distinguish the antecedent revealed will in the Ten Commandments, which give prohibitions (and thus negative obligations) that are not absolute, from the antecedent divine permission that may be revealed to a particular person in a tragic situation. It’s better to call this prescription “permission” than “command,” because it may still be necessary to repent of the lie, even though it was the least bad thing to do.

Hare finishes this section with a more ordinary example of a divine permission. A person has been going to a church for eight years, and has been happy there, though recognizing that the congregation is not well integrated racially. Then one day he takes an African-American friend to church, and realizes that she is the only black person in the room, and he starts to hear the whole service with different ears. After the friend has left, he is overcome with a sense of grief while driving on the highway, to the point that he is unable to drive and pulls over to the side. Then he hears as it were a voice in his head telling him that it’s all right for now to go on worshiping in that place, with those people he is fond of; but that there are some changes there that need to be made. This he interprets as a divine permission. Divine permissions are very often in situations where human defect has made a mess of things, but obedience is still possible even though purity is not.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.1.3: Prohibitions:

A prohibition is a command not to do something. Neither prohibitions nor precepts need to have imperative sentences for their expression. Grammatically indicative sentences can communicate prohibitions (“Spitting is forbidden.”) Imperatives are, however, a typical form of expression for both. We can issue a warning and in a broad sense a prohibition (“Don’t go too close to the edge.”) There’s a narrow sense in which warning and prohibiting are different, though, and Hare suggests the difference resides in the presence (in prohibiting) or absence (in warning) of an internal reference in the nature of the speech act to the authority of the speaker, and to some form of condemnation envisaged for failing to comply.

Examples of prohibitive commands will be like examples of preceptive commands, except in the negative. But there will often be a positive command going along with the prohibition. In experience, sometimes the negative has the focus, sometimes the positive; perhaps with God’s commands it’s more often the negative. Socrates reported that his voice only told him what not to do. But there may be positive implications of prohibitions. The Heidelberg Catechism, to take just one example, acknowledges that the second table of the Ten Commandments consists almost entirely of prohibitions, but it insists that there are positive correlates to all the negatives, and that they are equally enjoined.

Examples of prohibition are easy to find, but the attribution to a divine source will often seem indicated only when the prohibition is unexpected or unusually vivid. The restriction comes from our own natural caution, not wanting to ascribe to God what could be just our own mental processing. But as with precepts, there’s no need to posit that we always perceive the divine source, or that God always uses extraordinary means of revelation, so that God’s prohibitions may in fact be much more frequent than we are inclined to credit.

Here is an example of a prohibition. A person has found his sibling difficult, and decides finally to send her a book, which he thinks will do her good. At the time of sending it, he hears a still small voice in his head telling him that this is a bad idea. But he ignores it, and puts the book in the mail. Somehow, the book gets lost and is never delivered. At this point, the voice in his head gets more insistent, telling him to leave well enough alone. But he’s stubborn, and buys another copy of the book, and sends it off. This time, the book is delivered, and it’s a disaster. He and his sibling have a row, after she has read the book, which very nearly destroys their relationship. He realizes that he had in fact known all along that God was telling him not to send it.

Image: By Fritz von Uhde - http://www.neumeister.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47654827

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.1.2: Precepts

The first of five scholastic distinctions when it comes to forms of God’s revealed will was precepts, which, in a broad sense, tell people to do something. Precepts can include warning, admonishment, and exhortation. For present purposes we can focus on just one kind of precept: commands that generate obligation. Roman Catholic theology teaches that a precept is universal and necessary for all to obey under threat of eternal damnation for disobedience. Hare prefers to say divine commands that generate obligation can be singular, and although they contain internal references to God’s authority and some kind of divine condemnation or chastening for disobedience, this is not necessarily eternal damnation.

Let’s start with some examples of speech acts using imperatives that are precepts in the broad sense, but not commands that generate obligation. 2 Thess. 3:15 says, “Count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.” Brothers don’t have authority over each other simply as brothers. This is true also of warning, which is another way to translate the same text. Someone can warn me of a danger without having any authority over me. In some cases of admonishing and warning, there is authority presupposed, and in some cases not. The same is true with exhorting. It is false that all uses of the imperative to tell someone to do something (precepts in the broad sense) have internal reference to the authority of the speaker. Consider Psalm 84:8: “O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer: give ear, O God of Jacob.” These are imperatives used for the “precative” speech act of entreating. We obviously do not have authority over God.

When God admonishes or warns or exhorts, it might seem that there must be an internal reference to God’s authority in the meaning of the speech acts, but this is not the case. Consider the remarkable passage (Deut. 29-30) in which Moses gives his last address to the people of Israel, including the divine exhortations that the author calls “the words of the covenant,” which culminate in the prescription, “Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live” (Deut. 30:19). Is this prescription a command? Hare thinks the passages suggests not. God is, properly speaking, exhorting them; setting before them two options, and urging one of the two. The relation in which they hear the command and obey is the goal they will obtain through this choice.

To explain this further, we need to see more clearly the relation between command and covenant. Deut. 28-31 is a form of covenant that is reciprocal, in the sense that it involves both God’s promise of life and the people’s required obedience, and it mentions punishment by God for disobedience. Not all divine covenants are like that. The covenant after the flood is self-imposed by the deity; the covenant with Noah and his sons is also a covenant with every living creature, and doesn’t seem conditional on the living creatures endorsing it somehow; the covenant with David seems to be promissory rather than reciprocal. In the case of the words of the covenant in Deuteronomy, the commands (in chapter 12-26) precede the promise of life, but that doesn’t mean that obedience to them precedes the making of the covenant. As Scotus says, to love God requires us to repeat in our wills God’s will for our willing, and such a repetition is obedience. In the same way, entering the covenant is entering into a relation that is expressed, on our side, by obedience. God becomes our God and we become God’s people. If this is right, it means that the divine commands that have internal reference by the meaning of the speech act to God’s authority may be within a covenant, but they also may not be. Covenants with a particular people are not the only way that God’s commands generate obligation.

There are other imperative sentences, ascribed to Jesus, that are not commands generating obligation. Jesus says in Matt. 11:28 “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Surely this is more like an invitation than a command. The same is true of much of the biblical language of “call,” which belongs to counsel rather than command. The connection between command and call is important; as Hare puts it, following Barth, the call is the point starting from which we are obedient. The command is to lead a life worthy of the calling (Ephesians 4:1), but the calling itself is not exactly a command; it is, when answered, the context of the command. Hare proposes that we say that “command” (in the narrow sense) has internal reference to authority as part of the meaning of the speech act, with some kind of condemnation envisaged for failure. When God calls and invites, the speech act is not itself, by its meaning, tied to authority or condemnation for failure (though Hare isn’t denying that the God who calls and invites us is also authoritative).

To make the discussion less abstract, Hare wants to give an “inner prompting” concrete example of a prescription. He notes, first, that Evans makes a list of nine ways God can communicate prescriptions to us: scripture, natural law, the magisterium of an ecclesiastical body, specific commands of God to an individual, examining our natural inclinations, listening to our conscience, teaching from other humans as God’s requirements, teaching from other humans who do not recognize them as God’s requirements, and human social requirements such as legal obligations, family obligations, and obligations of other socially defined roles.

The example Hare gives is of a graduate student who feels prompted late at night to go visit a nearby friend. Suppose he does, and his friend is horribly depressed and desperately needs encouragement. Why take the voice or prompting as a divine voice prior to obeying it? Hare offers some pointers: the voice didn’t present itself as a construction of his own imagination. He recognized the voice as one he had followed in the past, and it had told him the truth. The voice was unshakeable, silencing objections. Following it yielded peace. Afterwards, he had the additional reason that he discovered the voice was telling him to do something unexpected that turned out to be good. None of this, of course, is a final demonstration of the claim that it was God’s command; mental hospitals are full of people who could say these sorts of things about inner voices. But this is at least a brief account of the phenomenology involved.

Debate: "Morality Does not Need God"

On Wednesday, May 21, at the University of Waikato, Dr. Ron Smith and Dr. Matthew Flannagan debated the resolution, “Morality does not need God.” Flannagan is the co-author of Did God Really Command Genocide. You can find the video of the debate here.   

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2: What is a Divine Command? Introduction and Section 2.1.1: “Prescription in General”

“Divine command” is the standard term in the literature, but God addresses us in all sorts of ways that are, in a broad sense, prescriptive, but are not, in a narrow sense, commands. A mnemonic device was used by scholastics for remembering the varieties of God’s revealed will. The revealed will is, first, distinguished from the disposing will, which is what God actually brings about. Here are the components of the scholastic learning device: “gives precepts to,” “prohibits,” “permits,” “counsels,” “fulfills.” We can call these five types of prescriptions “precepts,” “prohibitions,” “permissions,” “counsels,” and “directly effective commands.”

Let’s start with prescription as a genus, in contrast with a description. Anscombe noted that desire is satisfied when the world comes to be in conformity to it, whereas a belief is true when it is in conformity to the world. The same distinction can be made between prescriptions and descriptions. A prescription is satisfied when what is prescribed occurs, while a description is true when what is described obtains. If the fit fails, we might say, in the case of prescription or desire, it is a problem for the world; in the case of description, it is a problem for the mental act or belief.

It’s no accident that this difference between prescription and description mirrors that of desire and belief. We have prescriptions in our language as a family of speech acts because we want to be able to express desires or will in a certain way. (This is different from how Aquinas thought commanding is an act of reason but not of the will, though the will can receive the command.) Writers after Aquinas, such as Scotus, often use a more robust notion of the will, and it became more natural to think of the will being the locus of commanding. In Scotus, the will already contains a ranking of the affection for justice and the affection for advantage, where the affection for advantage is an inclination towards one’s own happiness and perfection, and the affection for justice is an inclination towards what is good in itself, independently of any relation to oneself. A more robust conception of the will can be found even in later Thomists like Suarez.

We have imperatives because we want to be able to express our desires. We want to be able to effect change in the world, to make it fit our desire, by communicating the desire. This isn’t quite what John Austin called the “perlocutionary force” of an utterance, namely, what the speaker is intending to bring about through speaking. For God commanded Abraham to kill his son without intending to bring it about that Abraham obey the command. So it is not necessary, in order to have a fully functioning command, that the person giving the command intend that the addressee carry it out. This is an outlier, though, and generally we have imperatives as a grammatical form in our language because we want to be able to effect changes in the world through the communication of our desires.

Imperative sentences can have four different positions within it: the positions of (a) addressee, (b) subject, (c) action, and (d) recipient. A singular imperative sentence is one in which the term in at least one of the positions is singular. A universal imperative sentence is one in which the terms in all the positions, including the subject position, are universal. Proverbs are often like this, but they leave the term in the subject position unspecified. (a) The addressee is the person to whom the imperative is addressed. (b) The subject is the person commanded to do the action (which may not be the addressee, as in “John, Andrew is to take the package tomorrow to Marybeth,” a third-person imperative). In second-person cases, the addressee and subject are the same. Another example of a third-person imperative is God’s command at the beginning of Genesis: “Let there be light.” This is what Hare calls a “directly effective command,” where God effects the result just by commanding it. It is a prescription in the broad sense, but not a command in the narrow sense in which commands generate obligations. (c) The action is what is commanded (and there may be multiple sub-positions within the action position). (d) The recipient is the person or object to whom the action is commanded to be done (and there may be both a direct and indirect object).

The example of the Ten Commandments raises a complex exegetical and theological question about whether the prescriptions to “you” are just to the people of Israel, or to all human beings. Perhaps the right thing to say is that they are initially given to the people of Israel (both in addressee position and in subject position), as part of the covenant (see Deut. 9:4-6, Exod. 34:28), but that they are eventually intended by God to be commandments given to all human beings. If this is right, we have an example of what was a singular imperative becoming a universal imperative. (“The people of Israel,” despite containing many persons, functions as a singular term because it makes reference to a particular region of space and time.) Later in the book Hare will argue that, for a command to produce a moral obligation, it is necessary that at least the term in the action position be universalizable, but that this is not necessary for the terms in the other positions.

Ordinary logical relations such as entailment and negation apply to prescriptions as much as descriptions. R. M. Hare (John Hare’s father) tried showing this by making another distinction, between what he called “phrastic,” “tropic,” and “neustic.” The phrastic is the content common to a command like “Andrew is to take the package tomorrow to Marybeth” and the prediction “Andrew will take the package tomorrow to Marybeth.” We can say that this content is the state of affairs of Andrew’s taking the package tomorrow to Marybeth. The tropic is the mood indicator, distinguishing indicative (or declarative) from imperative and thus distinguishing statement from prescription. We’ve been discussing speech acts having the imperative tropic. The neustic is the sign of assent to the combination of phrastic and tropic. When the teacher says in a class, as a philosophical example, “The cat is on the mat,” she withholds the neustic. Using this new vocabulary, we can say that the phrastic can be the bearer of the same logical relations in both imperative and indicative sentences, and we can talk about “satisfaction conditions” for imperatives in the same way we talk about “truth conditions” for indicatives.

The example of a command is only one kind of use of an imperative. Sometimes “command” is taken for the sake of convenience to cover a whole family of speech acts, but this chapter uses “prescription” as the name for the family, and reserves “command” for the narrower sense in which commands generate obligation (and, by extension, “directly effective commands”). Some of the other members of the family of prescription are admonitions, exhortations, warnings, invitations, and calls. There is no need for present purposes to divide the whole family into species by genus and difference. But it is important to distinguish certain members of the family from each other, since God can do many of them, and what God is doing in one case is different from what God is doing in another. In all of them, though, the use of the imperative suggests that God wants to effect change in the world by the communication of the divine will.